Green Anarchist Journal

The Issues Order

Including notes on some of the changes in editorial staff.

• GA UK #1 Jul-Aug 1984 - Richard Hunt, Alan Albon and Marcus Christo found the paper.

• GA UK #2 Sep-Aug 1984

• GA UK #3 Nov-Dec 1984

• GA UK #4 Jan-Feb 1985

• GA UK #5 Mar-Apr 1985

• GA UK #6 May-Jun 1985

• GA UK #7 Jul-Aug 1985

• GA UK #8 Sep-Oct 1985

• GA UK #9 Nov 1985-Jan 1986

• GA UK #10 Feb-Mar 1986 - Alan Albon and Marcus Christo leave around here.

• GA UK #11 Apr-May 1986

• GA UK #12 Jun-Jul 1986

• GA UK #13 Aug-Sep 1986

• GA UK #14 Oct-Nov 1986

• GA UK #15 Late Winter 1987

• GA UK #16 Apr 1987

• GA UK #17 Oct 1987

• GA UK #18 Apr 1988

• GA UK #19 May 1988

• GA UK #20 Jun 1988

• GA UK #21 Mar 1989

• GA UK #22 Apr 1989

• GA UK #23 May 1989

• GA UK #24 Jun 1989

• GA UK #25 Sep 1990

• GA UK #26 Mar 1991

• GA UK #27 Jun 1991

• GA UK #28 Sep 1991 - Richard Hunt leaves after this printing.

• GA UK #29 Dec 1991 - Paul Rogers, Steve Booth, Saxon Wood and Noel Molland are the new and old editors running the show from here.

• GA UK #30 Jun 1992

• GA UK #31 Sep 1992

• GA UK #32 Jun 1993

• GA UK #33 Dec 1993

• GA UK #34 Mar 1994

• GA UK #35 Jun 1994

• GA UK #36 Dec 1994

• GA UK #37 Mar 1995

• GA UK #38 Jun 1995

• GA UK #39 Sep 1995

• GA UK #40-41 Mar 1996

• GA UK #42 Jun 1996

• GA UK #43-44 Sep 1996

• GA UK #45-46 Mar 1997

• GA UK #47-48 Jun 1997

• GA UK #49-50 Sep 1997 - Steve Booth, Saxon Wood and Noel Molland are briefly jailed.

• GA UK #51 Mar 1998

• GA UK #52 Jun 1998

• GA UK #53 Sep 1998

• GA UK #54-55 Mar 1999

• GA UK #56 Jun 1999

• GA UK #57-58 Sep 1999 - Saxon Wood and Noel Molland leave at some point around here.

• GA UK #59 Mar 2000

• GA UK #60-61 Jun 2000 - Steve Booth splits after this issue and produces a paper with the same name, but a smaller distribution.

Post-Split

Paul Rogers and John Connor Faction

• GA UK #64-65 Jun 2001 - Paul Rogers and 'John Connor' produce a paper with the same name, jumped forward two numbered issues, calling the two recent issues by Steve a 'hijacking'.

• GA UK #66 Mar 2002

• GA UK #67 Sep 2002

• GA UK #68/9 Jun 2003

• GA UK #70 Sep 2003

• GA UK #71-72 Mar 2004

• GA UK #73-74 Sep 2004

Steve Booth Faction

• GA UK SB #62 Mar 2001

• GA UK SB #63 Jun 2001

• GA UK SB #64 Dec 2001

• GA UK SB #65 Unknown Date

• GA UK SB #66 2004

Sources

• The Sparrows Nest

• greenanarchist.org/issues

• greenanarchist.org/forum

An Introduction & a Critique

Wikipedia

Established in Oxford, UK.

Early years

Founded after the 1984 Stop the City protests, the magazine was launched in the summer of that year by an editorial collective consisting of Alan Albon, Richard Hunt and Marcus Christo. Albon had been an editor of Freedom whilst Hunt had become frustrated with the more mainstream green magazine Green Line for which he had been writing. The younger Christo had come from a more anarcho-punk background – he was also a member of Green CND, and had been involved in the blockade of Ronald Reagan's car at the 1984 Lancaster House summit meeting.

Early issues featured a range of broadly anarchist and ecological ideas, bringing together groups and individuals as varied as Class War, veteran anarchist writer Colin Ward, anarcho-punk band Crass, as well as the Peace Convoy, anti-nuclear campaigners, animal rights activists and so on. However the diversity that many saw as the publication's greatest strength quickly led to irreconcilable arguments between the essentially pacifist approach of Albon and Christo, and the advocacy of violent confrontation with the State favoured by Hunt.

Albon and Christo left Green Anarchist shortly afterwards, and the magazine saw a succession of editorial collectives, although Hunt remained in overall control. During this period he published articles which were increasingly alienating much of the magazine's readership. Matters came to a head after Hunt wrote an editorial which expressed support for British troops in the Gulf War and extolled the virtues of patriotism. Hunt has stated that the rest of the editorial collective wished to bring to Green Anarchist a more left-wing political approach, while Hunt wanted it to remain non-aligned.[1] Shortly afterwards he left to start another magazine Alternative Green, which continued to promote his own particular view of green anarchism, and eventually became closely linked to the National-Anarchist movement from the mid-90s onwards.

The Nineties

During the 1990s Green Anarchist came under the helm of an editorial collective that included Paul Rogers, Steve Booth and others, during which period the publication became increasingly aligned with primitivism, an anti-civilization philosophy advocated by writers such as John Zerzan, Bob Black and Fredy Perlman.

During this period the magazine expressed sympathy for the criminal activities of Ted Kaczynski and published a notorious article entitled "The Irrationalists" that supported actions like the Oklahoma City bombing and the sarin gas attacks carried out by the Tokyo based Aum cult. This once again alienated much of the UK anarchist movement, and led to strong criticism of the magazine by Stewart Home, Counter Information,[2] the Anarchist Communist Federation[3][4][5] and others. Steven Booth, the writer of the article, has since renounced the views expressed in it, as well as the primitivist movement altogether.

The GANDALF trial

Starting in 1995, Hampshire Police began a series of at least 56 raids, code named 'Operation Washington', that eventually resulted in the August to November 1997 Portsmouth trial of Green Anarchist editors Booth, Saxon Wood, Noel Molland and Paul Rogers, as well as Animal Liberation Front (ALF) Press Officer Robin Webb and Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group (ALFSG) newsletter editor Simon Russell. The defendants organised the GANDALF Defence campaign. Three of the editors of Green Anarchist, Noel Molland, Saxon Wood and Booth were jailed for 'conspiracy to incite'. However, all three were shortly afterwards released on appeal.

Booth and Rogers' Green Anarchists

In the late 1990s there was a further split amongst the GA collective, leading to the existence of two entirely separate magazines using the Green Anarchist title. These are respectively published by an editorial team that includes Paul Rogers and 'John Connor' (who subtitle their version of the paper as the original and best), and Steve Booth, who has publicly renounced some of his earlier published views and expressed a wish to 'return to the magazine's roots'.

The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left

March 29, 2017

A few months ago, the radical publication, Fifth Estate, solicited

an article from me discussing the rise of fascism in recent years. Following their decision to withdraw the piece, I accepted the invitation of Anti-Fascist News to publish an expanded version here, with some changes, at the urging of friends and fellow writers.

In Solidarity, ARR

Chapter 1: The Early Composition of Fascist Individualism

A friendly editor recently told me via email, “if anti-capitalism and pro individual liberty [sic] are clearly stated in the books or articles, they won’t be used by those on the right.” If this were true, fascism simply would vanish from the earth. Fascism comes from a mixture of left and right-wing positions, and some on the left pursue aspects of collectivism, syndicalism, ecology, and authoritarianism that intersect with fascist enterprises. Partially in response to the tendencies of left authoritarianism, a distinct antifascist movement emerged in the 1970s to create what has became known as “post-left” thought. Yet in imagining that anti-capitalism and “individual liberty” maintain ideological purity, radicals such as my own dear editor tend to ignore critical convergences with and vulnerabilities to fascist ideology.

The post-left developed largely out of a tendency to favor individual freedom autonomous from political ideology of left and right while retaining some elements of leftism. Although it is a rich milieu with many contrasting positions, post-leftists often trace their roots to individualist Max Stirner, whose belief in the supremacy of the European individual over and against nation, class, and creed was heavily influenced by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. After Stirner’s death in 1856, the popularity of collectivism and neo-Kantianism obscured his individualist philosophy until Friedrich Nietzsche raised its profile again during the later part of the century. Influenced by Stirner, Nietzsche argued for the overcoming of socialism and the “modern world” by the iconoclastic, aristocratic philosopher known as the “Superman” or “übermensch.”

During the late-19th Century, Stirnerists conflated the “Superman” with the assumed responsibility of women to bear a superior European race—a “New Man” to produce, and be produced by, a “New Age.” Similarly, right-wing aristocrats who loathed the notions of liberty and equality turned to Nietzsche and Stirner to support their sense of elitism and hatred of left-wing populism and mass-based civilization. Some anarchists and individualists influenced by Stirner and Nietzsche looked to right-wing figures like Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who developed the idea of a “conservative revolution” that would upend the spiritual crises of the modern world and the age of the masses. In the words of anarchist, Victor Serge, “Dostoevsky: the best and the worst, inseparable. He really looks for the truth and fears to find it; he often finds it all the same and then he is terrified… a poor great man…”

History’s “great man” or “New Man” was neither left nor right; he strove to destroy the modern world and replace it with his own ever-improving image—but what form would that image take? In Italy, reactionaries associated with the Futurist movement and various romantic nationalist strains expressed affinity with the individualist current identified with Nietzsche and Stirner. Anticipating tremendous catastrophes that would bring the modern world to its knees and install the New Age of the New Man, the Futurists sought to fuse the “destructive gesture of the anarchists” with the bombast of empire.

A hugely popular figure among these tendencies of individualism and “conservative revolution,” the Italian aesthete Gabrielle D’Annunzio summoned 2,600 soldiers in a daring 1919 attack on the port city of Fiume to reclaim it for Italy after World War I. During their exploit, the occupying force hoisted the black flag emblazoned by skull and crossbones and sang songs of national unity. Italy disavowed the imperial occupation, leaving the City-State in the hands of its romantic nationalist leadership. A constitution, drawn up by national syndicalist, Alceste De Ambris, provided the basis for national solidarity around a corporative economy mediated through collaborating syndicates. D’Annunzio was prophetic and eschatological, presenting poetry during convocations from the balcony. He was masculine. He was Imperial and majestic, yet radical and rooted in fraternal affection. He called forth sacrifice and love of the nation.

When he returned to Italy after the military uprooted his enclave in Fiume, ultranationalists, Futurists, artists, and intellectuals greeted D’Annunzio as a leader of the growing Fascist movement. The aesthetic ceremonies and radical violence contributed to a sacralization of politics invoked by the spirit of Fascism. Though Mussolini likely saw himself as a competitor to D’Annunzio for the role of supreme leader, he could not deny the style and mood, the high aesthetic appeal that reached so many through the Fiume misadventure. Fascism, Mussolini insisted, was an anti-party, a movement. The Fascist Blackshirts, or squadristi, adopted D’Annunzio’s flare, the black uniforms, the skull and crossbones, the dagger at the hip, the “devil may care” attitude expressed by the anthem, “Me ne frego” or “I don’t give a damn.” Some of those who participated in the Fiume exploit abandoned D’Annunzio as he joined the Fascist movement, drifting to the Arditi del Popolo to fight the Fascist menace. Others would join the ranks of the Blackshirts.

Originally a man of the left, Mussolini had no difficulty joining the symbolism of revolution with ultranationalist rebirth. “Down with the state in all its species and incarnations,” he declared in a 1920 speech. “The state of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. The bourgeois state and the socialist. For those of us, the doomed (morituri) of individualism, through the darkness of the present and the gloom of tomorrow, all that remains is the by-now-absurd, but ever consoling, religion of anarchy!” In another statement, he asked, “why should Stirner not have a comeback?”

Mussolini’s concept of anarchism was critical, because he saw anarchism as prefiguring fascism. “If anarchist authors have discovered the importance of the mythical from an opposition to authority and unity,” declared Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, drawing on Mussolini’s concept of myth, “then they have also cooperated in establishing the foundation of another authority, however unwillingly, an authority based on the new feeling for order, discipline, and hierarchy.” The dialectics of fascism here are two-fold: only the anarchist destruction of the modern world in every milieu would open the potential for Fascism, but the mythic stateless society of anarchism, for Mussolini, could only emerge, paradoxically, from a self-disciplining state of total order.

Antifascist anarchist individualists and nihilists like Renzo Novatore represented for Mussolini a kind of “passive nihilism,” which Nietzsche understood as the decadence and weakness of modernity. The veterans that would fight for Mussolini rejected the suppression of individualism under the Bolsheviks and favored “an anti-party of fighters,” according to historian Emilio Gentile. Fascism would exploit the rampant misogyny of men like Novatore while turning the “passive nihilism” of their vision of total collapse toward “active nihilism” through a rebirth of the New Age at the hands of the New Man.

The “drift” toward fascism that took place throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s was not restricted to the collectivist left of former Communists, Syndicalists, and Socialists; it also included the more ambiguous politics of the European avant-garde and intellectual elites. In France, literary figures like Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud began experimenting with fascist aesthetics of cruelty, irrationalism, and elitism. In 1934, Bataille declared his hope to usher in “room for great fascist societies,” which he believed inhabited the world of “higher forms” and “makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble.” Bataille’s admiration for Stirner did not prevent him from developing what he described decades later as a “paradoxical fascist tendency.” Other libertarian celebrities like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Maurice Blanchot also embraced fascist themes—particularly virulent anti-Semitism.

Like Blanchot, the Nazi-supporting Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn called on an anti-humanist language of suffering and nihilism that looked inward, finding only animal impulses and irrational drives. Existentialist philosopher and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, played on Nietzschean themes of nihilism and aesthetics in his phenomenology, placing angst at the core of modern life and seeking existential release through a destructive process that he saw as implicit in the production of an authentic work of art. Literary figure Ernst Jünger, who cheered on Hitler’s rise, summoned the force of “active nihilism,” seeking the collapse of the civilization through a “magic zero” that would bring about a New Age of ultra-individualist actors that he later called “Anarchs.” The influence of Stirner was as present in Jünger as it was in Mussolini’s early fascist years, and carried over to other members of the fascist movement like Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola.

Evola was perhaps the most important of those seeking the collapse of civilization and the New Age’s spiritual awakening of the “universal individual,” sacrificial dedication, and male supremacy. A dedicated fascist and individualist, Evola devoted himself to the purity of sacred violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and the occult. Asserting a doctrine of the “political soldier,” Evola regarded violence as necessary in establishing a kind of natural hierarchy that promoted the supreme individual over the multitudes. Occult practice distilled into an overall aristocracy of the spirit, Evola believed, which could only find expression through sacrifice and a Samurai-like code of honor. Evola shared these ideals of conquest, elitism, sacrificial pleasure with the SS, who invited the Italian esotericist to Vienna to indulge his thirst for knowledge. Following World War II, Evola’s spiritual fascism found parallels in the writings of Savitri Devi, a French esotericist of Greek descent who developed an anti-humanist practice of Nazi nature worship not unlike today’s Deep Ecology. In her rejection of human rights, Devi insisted that the world manifests a totality of interlocking life forces, none of which enjoys a particular moral prerogative over the other.

Chapter 2: The Creation of the Post-Left

It has been shown by now that fascism, in its inter-war period, attracted numerous anti-capitalists and individualists, largely through elitism, the aestheticization of politics, and the nihilist’s desire for the destruction of the modern world. After the fall of the Reich, fascists attempted to rekindle the embers of their movement by intriguing within both the state and social movements. It became popular among fascists to reject Hitler to some degree and call for a return to the original “national syndicalist” ideas mixed with the elitism of the “New Man” and the destruction of civilization. Fascists demanded “national liberation” for European ethnicities against NATO and multicultural liberalism, while the occultism of Evola and Devi began to fuse with Satanism to form new fascist hybrids. With ecology and anti-authoritarianism, such sacralization of political opposition through the occult would prove among the most intriguing conduits for fascist insinuation into subcultures after the war.

In the ’60s, left-communist groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie, Pouvoir ouvrier, and the Situationists gathered at places like bookstore-cum-publishing house, La Vielle Taupe (The Old Mole), critiquing everyday life in industrial civilization through art and transformative practices. According to Gilles Dauvé, one of the participants in this movement, “the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe” developed the idea of “communisation,” or the revolutionary transformation of all social relations. This new movement of “ultra-leftists” helped inspire the aesthetics of a young, intellectual rebellion that culminated in a large uprising of students and workers in Paris during May 1968.

The strong anti-authoritarian current of the ultra-left and the broader uprising of May ’68 contributed to similar movements elsewhere in Europe, like the Italian Autonomia movement, which spread from a wildcat strike against the car manufacturer, Fiat, to generalized upheaval involving rent strikes, building occupations, and mass street demonstrations. While most of Autonomia remained left-wing, its participants were intensely critical of the established left, and autonomists often objected to the ham-fisted strategy of urban guerrillas. In 1977, individualist anarchist, Alfredo Bonanno, penned the text, “Armed Joy,” exhorting Italian leftists to drop patriarchal pretensions to guerrilla warfare and join popular insurrectionary struggle. The conversion of Marxist theorist, Jacques Camatte, to the pessimistic rejection of leftism and embrace of simpler life tied to nature furthered contradictions within the Italian left.

With anti-authoritarianism, ecologically-oriented critiques of civilization emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s as significant strains of a new identity that rejected both left and right. Adapting to these currents of popular social movements and exploiting blurred ideological lines between left and right, fascist ideologues developed the framework of “ethno-pluralism.” Couching their rhetoric in “the right to difference” (ethnic separatism), fascists masked themselves with labels like the “European New Right,” “national revolutionaries,” and “revolutionary traditionalists.” The “European New Right” took the rejection of the modern world advocated by the ultra-left as a proclamation of the indigeneity of Europeans and their pagan roots in the land. Fascists further produced spiritual ideas derived from a sense of rootedness in one’s native land, evoking the old “blood and soil” ecology of the German völkische movement and Nazi Party.

In Italy, this movement produced the “Hobbit Camp,” an eco-festival organized by European New Right figure Marco Tarchi and marketed to disillusioned youth via Situationist-style posters and flyers. When Italian “national revolutionary,” Roberto Fiore, fled charges of participating in a massive bombing of a train station in Bologna, he found shelter in the London apartment of Tarchi’s European New Right colleague, Michael Walker. This new location would prove transformative, as Fiore, Walker, and a group of fascist militants created a political faction called the Official National Front in 1980. This group would help promote and would benefit from a more avant-garde fascist aesthetic, bringing forward neo-folk, noise, and other experimental music genres.

While fascists entered the green movement and exploited openings in left anti-authoritarian thought, Situationism began to transform. In the early 1970s, post-Situationism emerged through US collectives that combined Stirnerist egoism with collectivist thought. In 1974, the For Ourselves group published The Right to Be Greedy, inveighing against altruism while linking egoist greed to the synthesis of social identity and welfare—in short, to surplus. The text was reprinted in 1983 by libertarian group, Loompanics Unlimited, with a preface from a little-known writer named Bob Black.

While post-Situationism turned toward individualism, a number of European ultra-leftists moved toward the right. In Paris, La Vieille Taupe went from controversial views rejecting the necessity of specialized antifascism to presenting the Holocaust as a lie necessary to maintain the capitalist order. In 1980, La Vielle Taupe published the notorious Mémoire en Défense centre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire by Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Though La Vielle Taupe and founder, Pierre Guillaume, received international condemnation, they gained a controversial defense from left-wing professor, Noam Chomsky. Even if they have for the most part denounced Guillaume and his entourage, the ultra-leftist rejection of specialized antifascism has remained somewhat popular—particularly as expounded by Dauvé, who insisted in the early 1980s that “fascism as a specific movement has disappeared.”

The idea that fascism had become a historical artifact only helped the creep of fascism to persist undetected, while Faurisson and Guillaume became celebrities on the far-right. As the twist toward Holocaust denial would suggest, ultra-left theory was not immune from translation into ethnic terms—a reality that formed the basis of the work of Official National Front officer, Troy Southgate. Though influenced by the Situationists, along with a scramble of other left and right-wing figures, Southgate focused particularly on the ecological strain of radical politics associated with the punk-oriented journal, Green Anarchist, which called for a return to “primitive” livelihoods and the destruction of modern civilization. In 1991, the editors of Green Anarchist pushed out their co-editor, Richard Hunt, for his patriotic militarism, and Hunt’s new publication, Green Alternative, soon became associated with Southgate. Two years later, Southgate would join allied fascists like Jean-François Thiriart and Christian Bouchet to create the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism.

In the US, the “anarcho-primitivist” or “Green Anarchist” tendency had been taken up by former ultra-leftist, John Zerzan. Identifying civilization as an enemy of the earth, Zerzan called for a return to sustainable livelihoods that rejected modernity. Zerzan rejected racism but relied in no small part on the thought of Martin Heidegger, seeking a return authentic relations between humans and the world unmediated by symbolic thought. This desired return, some have pointed out, would require a collapse of civilization so profound that millions, if not billions, would likely perish. Zerzan, himself, seems somewhat ambiguous with regards to the potential death toll, regardless of his support for the unibomber, Ted Kaczynsky.

Joining with Zerzan to confront authoritarianism and return to a more tribal, hunter-gatherer social organization, an occultist named Hakim Bey developed the idea of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ). For Bey, a TAZ would actualize a liberated and erotic space of orgiastic, revolutionary poesis. Yet within his 1991 text, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey included extensive praise for D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist occupation of Fiume, revealing the disturbing historical trends of attempts to transcend right and left.

Along with Zerzan and Bey, Bob Black would prove instrumental to the foundation of what is today called the “post-left.” In his 1997 text, Anarchy After Leftism, Black responded to left-wing anarchist Murray Bookchin, who accused individualists of “lifestyle anarchism.” Drawing from Zerzan’s critique of civilization as well as from Stirner and Nietzsche, Black presented his rejection of work as a nostrum for authoritarian left tendencies that he identified with Bookchin (apparently Jew-baiting Bookchin in the process).[6]

Thus, the post-left began to assemble through the writings of ultra-leftists, green anarchists, spiritualists, and egoists published in zines, books, and journals like Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed and Fifth Estate. Although these thinkers and publications differ in many ways, key tenets of the post-left included an eschatological anticipation of the collapse of civilization accompanied by a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that rejected left, right, and center in favor of a deep connection with the earth and more organic, tribal communities as opposed to humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy. That post-left texts included copious references to Stirner, Nietzsche, Jünger, Heidegger, Artaud, and Bataille suggests that they form a syncretic intellectual tendency that unites left and right, individualism and “conservative revolution.” As we will see, this situation has provided ample space for the fascist creep.

Chapter 3: The Fascist Creep

During the 1990s, the “national revolutionary” network of Southgate, Thiriart, and Bouchet, later renamed the European Liberation Front, linked up with the American Front, a San Francisco skinhead group exploring connections between counterculture and the avant-garde. Like prior efforts to develop a Satanic Nazism, American Front leader Bob Heick supported a mix of Satanism, occultism, and paganism, making friends with fascist musician Boyd Rice. A noise musician and avant-gardist, Rice developed a “fascist think tank” called the Abraxas Foundation, which echoed the fusion of the cult ideas of Charles Manson, fascism, and Satanism brought together by 1970s fascist militant James Mason. Rice’s protégé and fellow Abraxas member, Michael Moynihan, joined the radical publishing company, Feral House, which publishes texts along the lines of Abraxas, covering a range of themes from Charles Manson Scandinavian black metal, and militant Islam to books by Evola, James Mason, Bob Black, and John Zerzan.

In similar efforts, Southgate’s French ally, Christian Bouchet, generated distribution networks and magazines dedicated to supporting a miniature industry growing around neo-folk and the new, ”anarchic” Scandinavian black metal scene. Further, national anarchists attempted to set up and/or infiltrate e-groups devoted to green anarchism. As Southgate and Bouchet’s network spread to Russia, notorious Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, emerged as another leading ideologue who admired Zerzan’s work.

Post-leftists were somewhat knowledgable about these developments. In a 1999 post-script to one of Bob Black’s works, co-editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Lawrence Jarach, cautioned against the rise of “national anarchism.” In 2005, Zerzan’s journal, Green Anarchy, published a longer critique of Southgate’s “national anarchism.” These warnings were significant, considering that they came in the context of active direct action movements and groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a green anarchist group dedicated to large-scale acts of sabotage and property destruction with the intention of bringing about the ultimate collapse of industrial civilization.

As their ELF group executed arsons during the late-1990s and early-2000s, a former ELF member told me that two comrades, Nathan “Exile” Block and Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher, shared an unusual love of Scandinavian black metal, made disturbing references to Charles Manson, and promoted an elitist, anti-left mentality. While their obscure references evoked Abraxas, Feral House, and Bouchet’s distribution networks, their politics could not be recognized within the milieu of fascism at the time. However, their general ideas became clearer, the former ELF member told me, when antifascist researchers later discovered that a Tumblr account run by Block contained numerous occult fascist references, including national anarchist symbology, swastikas, and quotes from Evola and Jünger. These were only two members of a larger group, but their presence serves as food for thought regarding important radical cross-over points and how to approach them.

To wit, the decisions of John Zerzan and Bob Black to publish books with Feral House, seem peculiar—especially in light of the fact that two of the four books Zerzan has published there came out in 2005, the same year as Green Anarchy’s noteworthy warning against national anarchism. It would appear that, although in some cases prescient about the subcultural cross-overs between fascism and the post-left, post-leftists have, on a number of occasions, engaged in collaborative relationships.

As Green Anarchy cautioned against entryism and Zerzan simultaneously published with Feral House, controversy descended on an online forum known as the Anti-Politics Board. An outgrowth of the insurrectionist publication Killing King Abacus, the Anti-Politics Board was used by over 1,000 registered members and had dozens of regular contributors. The online platform presented a flourishing site of debate for post-leftists, yet discussions over insurrectionism, communisation, green anarchy, and egoism often produced a strangely competitive iconoclastism. Attempts to produce the edgiest take often led to the popularization of topics like “‘anti-sexism’ as collectivist moralism” and “critique of autonomous anti-fascism.” Attacks on morality and moralism tended to encourage radicals to abandon the “identity politics” and “white guilt” often associated with left-wing anti-racism.

Amid these discussions, a young radical named Andrew Yeoman began to post national anarchist positions. When asked repeatedly to remove Yeoman from the forum, a site administrator refused, insisting that removing the white nationalist would have meant behaving like leftists. They needed to try something else. Whatever they tried, however, it didn’t work, and Yeoman later became notorious for forming a group called the Bay Area National Anarchists, showing up to anarchist events like book fairs, and promoting anarchist collaboration with the Minutemen and American Front.

An important aspect of the Anti-Politics Board was the articulation of nihilist and insurrectionary theories, both of which gained popularity after the 2008 financial crisis. In an article titled, “The New Nihilism,” Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) pointed out that the rising wave of nihilism that emerged during the late 2000s and into the second decade could not immediately be distinguished from the far right, due to myriad cross-over points. Indeed, Stormfront is riddled with users like “TAZriot” and “whitepunx” who promote the basic, individualist tenets of post-leftism from the original, racist position of Stirnerism. Rejecting “political correctness” and “white guilt,” these post-left racists desire separate, radical spaces and autonomous zones for whites.

Through dogged research, Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, discovered whitepunx’s identity: “Trigger” Tom Christensen, a known member of the local punk scene. “I was never an anti [antifascist] but I’ve hung out with a few of them,” Christensen wrote on Stormfront. “I used to be a big punk rocker in the music scene and there were some antis that ran around in the same scene. I was friends with a few. They weren’t trying to recruit me, or anybody really. They did not, however, know I was a WN [white nationalist]. I kept my beliefs to myself and would shut down any opinions the[y] expressed that seemed to have holes in them. It’s been fairly useful to know some of these people. I now know who all the major players are in the anti and SHARP [Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice] scene.”

For a time, Christensen says he hung out with post-leftists and debated them like Yeoman had done. Less than a year later, however, Christensen followed up in a chilling post titled, “Do You Think It Would Be Acceptable To Be A ‘Rat’ If It Was Against Our Enemies.” He wrote, “I had an interesting thought the other day and wanted peoples opinions. If you were asked by the Police to provide or find evidence that would incriminate people who are enemy’s [sic] of the movement, i.e. Leftists, reds, anarchists. Would you do it? Would you ‘rat’ or ‘narc’ on the Left side?” Twenty one responses came beckoning from the recesses of the white nationalist world. While some encouraged Christensen to snitch, others insisted that he keep gang loyalty. It is uncertain as to whether or not he went to the police, but the May 2013 discovery of his Stormfront activity took place shortly before a grand jury subpoenaed four anarchists who were subsequently arrested and held for contempt of court.

In another unsettling example of crossover between post-leftists and fascists, radicals associated with a nihilist group named Ultra harshly rebuked Rose City Antifa of Portland, Oregon, for releasing an exposé about Jack Donovan. An open member of the violent white nationalist group, Wolves of Vinland, Donovan also runs a gym called the Kabuki Strength Lab, which produces “manosphere” videos. As of November 2016, when the exposé was published, one member of Ultra was a member of the Kabuki Strength Lab. Although Donovan runs a tattoo shop out of the gym and gave Libertarian Party fascist Augustus Sol Invictus a tattoo of the fasces there, a fellow gym member wrote, “Obviously Jack has very controversial beliefs and practices that most disagree with; but I don’t believe it affects his behavior in the gym.” Donovan, who has publicly parroted “race realist” statistics at white nationalist gatherings like the National Policy Institute and the Pressure Project podcast, also embraces bioregionalism and the anticipation of a collapse of civilization that will lead to a reversion of identity-bound tribal structures at war with one another and reliant on natural hierarchies—an ideology that resonates with Ultra and some members of the broader post-left milieu.

It stands to reason that defending fascists and collaborating with them are not the same, and they are both separate from having incidental ideological cross-over points. However the cross-over points, when unchecked, frequently indicate a tendency to ignore, defend, or collaborate. Defense and collaboration can, and do, also converge. For instance, also in Portland, Oregon, the founder of a UK ultra-leftist splinter group called Wildcat began to participate in a reading group involving prominent post-leftists before sliding toward anti-Semitism. Soon he was participating in the former-leftist-turned-fascist Pacifica Forum in Eugene, Oregon, and defending anti-Semitic co-op leader, Tim Calvert. He was last seen by antifas creeping into an event for Holocaust denier, David Irving.

Perhaps the most troubling instance of collaboration, or rather synthesis, of post-left nihilism and the far right is taking place currently in the alt-right. Donovan is considered a member of the alt-right, while Christensen’s latest visible Facebook post hails from the misogynistic Proud Boys group. These groups and individuals connected to the alt-right are described as having been “red-pilled,” a term taken from the movie, The Matrix, in which the protagonist is awakened to a dystopian reality after choosing to take a red pill. For the alt-right, being “red-pilled” means waking up to the “reality” offered by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, and white nationalism—usually through online forums where the competitive iconoclasm of “edge-lords” mutates into ironic anti-Semitism and hatred. Among the most extreme forms of this phenomenon occurring in recent years is the so-called “black pill”—red-pillers who have turning toward the celebration of indiscriminate violence via the same trends of individualism and nihilism outlined above.

“Black-pillers” claim to have shed their attachments to all theories entirely. This tendency evokes the attitude of militant anti-civilization group, Individuals Tending to the Wild, which is popular among some post-leftist groups and advocates indiscriminate violence against any targets manifesting the modern world. Another influence for “black-pillers” is Adam Lanza, the infamous mass shooter who phoned John Zerzan a year before murdering his mother, 20 children, and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Zerzan has condemned Individuals Tending Toward the Wild, and months after Lanza’s horrifying actions, he penned a piece imploring post-left nihilists to find hope: “Egoism and nihilism are evidently in vogue among anarchists and I’m hoping that those who so identify are not without hope. Illusions no, hope yes.” Unfortunately, Zerzan developed his short communiqué into a book published by Feral House on November 10, 2015—the day after Feral House published The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement co-authored by Eddie Stampton, a Nazi skinhead.

Conclusion

In light of these cross-overs, many individualist anarchists, post-leftists, and nihilists tend not to deny that they share nodal networks with fascists. In many cases, they seek to struggle against them and reclaim their movement. Yet, there tends to be another permissive sense that anarchists bear no responsibility for distinguishing themselves from fascists. If there are numerous points in which radical milieus become a blur of fascists, anarchists, and romantics, some claim that throwing shade on such associations only propagates fallacious thinking, or “guilt by association.”

However, recalling the information in this essay, we might note that complex cross-overs seem to include, in particular, aspects of egoism and radical green theory. Derived from Stirnerism and Nietzschean philosophy, egoism can reify the social alienation felt by an individual, leading to an elitist sense of self-empowerment and delusions of grandeur. When mixed with insurrectionism and radical green thought, egoism can translate into “hunter versus prey” or “wolves versus sheep” elitism, in which compassion for others is rejected as moralistic. This kind of alienated elitism can also develop estranged aesthetic and affective positions tied to cruelty, vengeance, and hatred.

Emerging out of a rejection of humanism and urban modernism, the particular form of radical green theory often embraced by the post-left can relativize human losses by looking at the larger waves of mass extinctions. By doing this, radical greens anticipate a collapse that would “cull the herd” or cause a mass human die off of millions, if not billions, of people throughout the world. This aspect of radical green theory comes very close to, and sometimes intertwines with, ideas about over-population compiled and produced by white nationalists and anti-immigration activists tied to the infamous Tanton Network. Some radical green egoists (or nihilists) insist that their role should be to provoke such a collapse, through anti-moralist strikes against civilization.

As examples like Hakim Bey’s TAZ and the lionization of the Fiume misadventure, Zerzan and Black’s publishing with Feral House, and Ultra’s defense of Donovan indicate, the post-left’s relation to white nationalism is sometimes ambiguous and occasionally even collaborative. Other examples, like those of Yeoman and Christensen, indicate that the tolerance for fascist ideas on the post-left can result in unwittingly accepting them, providing a platform for white nationalism, and increasing vulnerability to entryism. Specific ideas that are sometimes tolerated under the rubric of the “critique of the left” include the approval of “natural hierarchies,” ultranationalism understood as ethno-biological and spiritual ties to homeland and ancestry, rejection of feminism and antifascism, and the fetishization of violence and cruelty.

It is more important today than ever before to recognize how radical movements develop intersections with fascists if we are to discover how to expose creeping fascism and develop stronger, more direct networks. Anarchists must abandon the equivocations that invite the fascist creep and reclaim anarchy as the integral struggle for freedom and equality. Sectarian polemics are the result of extensive learning processes, but are less important than engaging in solidarity to struggle against fascism in all its forms and various disguises.

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https://twitter.com/areidross is a former co-editor of the Earth First! Journal and the author of Against the Fascist Creep. He teaches in the Geography Department at Portland State University and can be reached at aross@pdx.edu.

Issue 1

Cover: Picture of punk man and woman about to shake hands with hippy man and woman.

Subtitle: 'The Enemies of the People are those who know what people need'

Date: Jul-Aug 1984

Price: 30p

Keywords: Greenpeace; Poison Girls; Colin Ward.

Read here

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Statement [on how the editors define Green Anarchism]

Green Anarchism is a synthesis of two political traditions, both as old as history. Indeed that whole history could be interpreted as the theft of the land from the people and the theft of their freedom, the suppression of the greens and the suppression of the anarchists.

Today on the streets of the City the two traditions, the punks and the hippies came together to confront authority. At Stonehenge together, they are fighting the same battle. Greenpeace, the Peace Convoy, Animal Lib, Third World groups, radical greens are beginning to coalesce into a movement that will change the world.

We hope that 'Green Anarchist' will bring together people who see that the exploitative society results in the decimation of natural resources as well as the exploitation of people. Anarchist thought has a long history of concerns that the green movement is interested in. Kropotkin's Field, Factories and Workshop', 'The Conquest of Bread' and 'Mutual Aid' all express concern for the natural environment as part of the liberation process.

There are, equally, many people in the green movement who are dissatisfied with the various political parties who, tied to the very institutions that have ravaged the natural world, set peoples against people and developed the techniques of killing to the stage where total destruction is possible.

Anarchists believe that institutionalised power in the form of the state, and peoples obedience to that power, has resulted in the situation that humanity finds itself. The early powerful states of the Mediterranean with their pressures on the surrounding countryside and exploitative agriculture resulted in rapid extension of desert areas. Now the exploitation is world wide, modern techniques can cause a havoc that a man with a machete was never able to do.

Yet if the possibilities of self-destruction are immense, so are the possibilities of creating a satisfying, free and reasonably fed world. A rational approach to agriculture, transport and production is only inhibited by a power based financial and political system in which people are deprived of any control over the forces which govern their lives. There is no doubt that people are capable of such self government, they did it in Spain in 1936 in the most difficult circumstances.

In a situation that appears to be increasingly hostile, we hope to create a magazine that encourages co-operative effort; that highlights the sort of direct action that Greenpeace has been initiating; that encourages the anti-nuclear movement into forms of direct action as not only a means of defying the nuclear state, but also as a means of discouraging unthinking obedience; to engage in self managing actions leading to thinking about a self managed society.

The News

The Lancaster House Demo, by Nicholas Walter, Alan Albon and Marcus Christo

Reagan held up and re-routed by Summit 84.

In mid afternoon on Saturday, June 9th, the first limousine from Lancaster House had got through. The second, carrying Nagasone, the Japanese Prime Minister, was stopped by a few demonstrators dashing out in front of it and sitting down. They were dragged away by the apoplectic police. But demonstrators in the Mall saw police and security men hurriedly close ranks inside Lancaster House. Reagan's limo was stopped and finally rerouted. The Summit was blockaded.

Nicolas Walter writes:

The first two days of the Economic Summit were marked by small but effective actions by Christian CND and Green CND. The last day began slowly. It steadily improved. The CND march and rally was as large as usual. The CND demo around Grosvenor Square involved about 2, 000 people blockading the area for three hours. The Summit 84 demo involved about 4,000 people blockading the area for five hours. At the time it was impossible for anyone to know what was happening in dozens of places in Central London, but after gathering reports from the police, the media and the demonstrators, it is clear that the Summit 84 action was a complete success.

There were about a dozen sit-downs extending from the front entrance of Lancaster House in the Mall, around St James's Park to Green Park to several road junctions in St Jame's. The largest security presence was in the Mall, where the first sit-down was cleared by arrests soon after 1.00, and where several hundred demonstrators remained until evening.

It was they who saw the effects of the lightning sit-down in Picadilly.

Alan A Ibon writes:

The first limousine, carrying Trudeau swept past us in Picadilly where the were no barriers and few policemen. Then the Japanese limo approached flanked by an outrider. Somebody ran out and halted the outrider. The limo slowed down so we rushed in front and stopped it. I held my hand up in a halt sign then slid swiftly to the ground to join my son and his girl friend. Then we were dragged away, about ten of us.

***

Earlier the police had been bussing out demonstrators. Marcus writes:

In Picadilly outside the Ritz the police had done a wonderful job blocking off exits and entrances with policemen, policewomen and barriers. So we added added to this blockade by sitting down in the road and every now and then we would be dragged out of the way to allow a car through. We then sat back down.

This game continued until more police arrived with large green buses and it was then that our blockade down by at least 500 people who were taken away in the buses. It left us looking pathetic and helpless as we could no longer block the road. We were outnumbered by the police, who formed a horse shoe in the road allowing out the traffic from the Summit. Further along the same thing had happened Those who had been arrested were given a good roasting off and released with no charge.

Throughout the day there were sightings of the anarchists. At one point they were seen running down Oxford St, black banners aloft, chased by more apoplectic policemen. Great.

***

N.W. continues:

And Reagan hadn't seen the last of the demonstrators. That evening the convoy of conference delegates was stopped on the way to the banquet at Buckingham Palace, and Reagan's car was held up at last.

Run -up to the Action

During 1983 there was growing support for non-violent direct action in the nuclear disarmament movement, but in January 1984 the CND National Council decided to organise no demonstrations of non-violent direct action this year and no demonstrations at all during Easter or the Economic Summit.

Activists in the radical wing of the movement replied by circulating proposals challenging both decisions through the Action 84 process. The general proposal for a national demonstration of NVDA as soon as possible won general agreement, and the specific proposal for a mass blockade of the final session of the Economic Summit won most support. In .April these two proposals were discussed by the CND National Council, which decided to compromise by organising a symbolic demonstration of civil disobedience at the American Embassy, at the same time as a conventional march from Hyde Park to a rally in Trafalgar Square.

Some of the people involved in Action 84 accepted the CND decision, but many others decided to ignore it and continue with the original proposal, presenting the movement with a choice of three demonstrations at the same time on Saturday, June 9th. This group adopted the name Summit 84 and formed a working group to coordinate final plans, circulate information, and obtain publicity. The agreed plan was for a non-violent blockade of the Lancaster House area from 12.30 until the conference delegates left; the material circulated included a propaganda leaflet for the movement, a detailed briefing document for the demonstrators, and a manifesto for the day; the publicity was the biggest problem, the national media being indifferent until the last moment, and the movement’s press being generally hostile - with the exception of 'Freedom' and 'Greenline'.

But despite our great difficulties- and small numbers, we achieved our main objectives. We maintained complete non-violence at times. We maintained spontaneous flexibility in the face of changing circumstances and took intelligent initiatives at appropriate times and places. We paralysed central London for the whole afternoon, we delayed the departure of the conference delegates and we obstructed several of their individual cars.

We did our best to bring home to our rulers and to our fellow humans throughout the country and the rest of the world. Now we must learn our lessons from our experience and think of the next step.

***

There is a public meeting of Summit 84 at County Hall, London SEI, on Sunday, July 8th. from 2.00 to 6.00.

Square Sit-Down

Having assembled at Hyde Park with Green CND we set off for the sit-down in Grosvenor Square. Looking around, the police had done a nice job of blocking off every entrance and exit so at these points loads of people sat down in the roads singing peace songs.

Here, the police had no intention. A11 was peaceful. So, having spoken to Tokyo TV, we moved on to Lancaster House.

Later on in the day the remaining Grosvenor Square protestors who tried to get down to Lancaster House found their way blocked by barriers and police.

"But officer it was such a lovely day and my feet were killing me."

Greenpeace UK Big Ben Banner

Greenpeace UK (not to be confused with Greenpeace London) brought their message closer to home, spectacularly. They draped it across the face of Big Ben. A previous action had been aborted by the police, acting, probably, on a phone tap. Greenpeace learnt their lesson. We're all learning it.

Green CND Action

"Cows, not Cruise’, "Bread, not Bombs’. On Friday, June 8th, Green CND tried to link the Summit with the alternative Summit but did not quite succeed. There weren't enough people. But a symbolic action took place. Everyone linked hands up to the Alternative Summit, then pictures of drugs, arms and food were passed up and down the chain. After which the Greens went to gather in Hyde Park. Here they finished the action holding hands in a large circle.

Essays

The Root of the Problem; against the Cold War. Green CND leaflet.

The Cold War is the vital excuse to arm Third World governments to suppress their peoples and take their crops to sell

78% of Guinea Bissau is growing peanuts for export. They had famine in ’69, ’70, ’71 and ’79. In 1972 for every ton of famine relief, Mali exported 4 tons of crops including cotton. Their land is used to grow crops for us and not food for themselves. We wear cotton jeans therefore they starve. It's that simple.

The Superpowers have invented the Cold War to justify the arms sales and repressive regimes that stifle protest and maintain exports.

"Pershing 2 has less to do with our security than with bolstering American American policies in the Third World, which is in the process of being recolonised." (Eppler)

CROPS

To maintain the export of these crops, profitable to both the Third World elites and the multinationals, any local protest must be suppressed, by our guns. To excuse these arms sales our governments have to invent the bogey of communism. 'We have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to a wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without." (John Foster Dulles) All local protest can the be labelled communist and stamped out.

Likewise Russia, to hold on to its satellite puppets, has to foster the American bogey. Then it can keep its tanks in Hungary and its clients in power.

But having invented the Cold War to hold on to their economic empires, they have to continue the pretence by spending enormous sums on arms to the terrible extent of the bomb. The exploitation of the Third World leads to to the Cold War. The Cold War leads to nuclear annihilation.

EXPORT

The Philippines example

In the Philippines R€agan arms tyrant Marcos to the Teeth on the pre!ext of defending the world against communism. Marcos uses his troops to drive Filipinos off their tribal homeland. He can then sell off (ai great personal profit) the logging concessions to his buddies and their American multi¬national associates. That’s the quid pro quo for the American arms. So the country is being stripped of its trees waich mane our oxygen. With no trees the rainfall decreases. What rain there is erodes the uncovered soil.

Finally the land, now privately owned, is put down to monocultural crops for export. Marcos, his buddies and the multinationals are delighted at this economic growth. The tribes are destitute.

Aid as an "unfriendly act”

We sell arms to Marcos too. So our Commonewalth Development Corporation is able to invest £6m (it’s called development aid) in a 4000 hectare palm oil concession, after first driving off the original inhabitants. Very profitable. No wonder Tanada, a Filipino oppostion politician,has said, "Aid will be considered as an unfriendly act."

The global problem is the guns which support economic imperialism which exploits the Third World.

And what are the Summit leaders talking about?

More arms, more Cold Wai*. More international trade, more Western goods m exchange for more Third World crops, more starvation. It’s called Economic Growth. They want to solve unemployment in the West by sending more goods to the Third World in exchange for their crops. Sc those crops can’t be used to create their own employment. The Summit leaders want to export our unemplome.ui unemployment to the Third World. They want more ’Liberalisation of Trade’ so that we can destroy their indigenous industries with our mass-produced goods.

They are also talking about interest rates, straght talking. Reagan has cut taxes on the rich so he’s got less funds for his increased arms production. He has to borrow, which puts up interest rates in America,. Because we have abolished exchange controls, we are lending him. our money for the nice high interest rates (so our money is creating employment in America instead cf in Britain). That’s the reason for the American boom. But the Third World is having to pay out as well, is also having to pay these high interest rates on its extravagant debts.

For every 1% increase in interest rates the Third World is having to fork out another billion dollar's.

The world's poorest are being starved because of America's increased defence spending fora fraudulent Cold War.

What should be done?

1. End arms sales to Third World governments.

2. Cut American defence spending.

3. Stop all government aid.

4. Solve Western unemployment by Land Reform.

5. (To make small farms economic, cut (indirect) taxes on the pool* to reduce the cost of living.)

6. This was the leaflet that Green CND distributed at their action on June 8th. Thanks, Green CND for letting us print it.

CROPS fOR EXPORT

large source of uranium that can be conditions which, heavily

Namibia F***ed; Against the Botha visit.

WHY did Botha come to Britain. And Why did Thatcher allow it? Their major common interest is Namibia and how to install a compliant government there which will continue the theft of Namibia's mineral resources, to say nothing of her crops. Namibia is the only used in nuclear weapons. So Britain uses Canadian and Australian uranium for the power stations that will weaken the coal miners power and has come to a. cosy arrangement with Rio Tinto Zinc for Namibian uranium for its

disguised, will allow the capitalist exploitation. If the Gang of Five is in apparent control, then independence negotiations, with a gloss of respectability, can impose Free Trade with South Africa, the use of the South African rand as

bombs. It needs a government that will continue that cosy arrangement

Botha needs to pay back the mining multinationals whose political contributions keep him in power. They support him as long as he makes it easy for them to milk Namibia. So he needs a government in Namibia which will continue the headlong depletion of its mineral resources.

That sort of government will not be popular and will need to be kept in power by heavy sales of arms. The excuse for that will be some external 'communist' threat; it always is. The Cold War is essential for capitalism.

At the moment independence negotiations have stalled, again, because some of Botha's tame Multi-party Conference have switched sides to join SWAPO. Having failed to install its own Turnhalle Alliance as a puppet government, and now failing with the more broad-based Multi-party conference, Botha is touring Europe, trying to get Britain, France, Germany, (with Canada and USA, the infamous Gang of Five) to take over during the negotiations for 'independence'.

He has probably now accepted that he can't stop SWAPO and wants to make sure that SWAPO accepts currency and the other essentials for neo-colonialism, in exchange for aid and arms sales. Namibia will be tied into South Africa’s economic empire.

But however much the Gang of Five might approve of Botha's neo¬colonialism, because of South A frica's terrible reputation they can't be «*een to be getting into bed 'with hin ?o eagerly. They are

hoist with their own hypocritical morality.

America has joined in by demanding that Cuban troops leave Angola as a condition for Namibian 'independence'. Europe, embarrassed, has rejected this 'linkage'.

Meanwhile, hidden by South Africa's media blackout, the vital battle is being fought by SWAPO's soldiers. As they get stronger, the repression increases. It is not succeeding.

But the final battle against poverty will not be fought by the soldiers, but by the negotiators. The battle will be won or lost in the economic footnotes of the independence declaration.

Richard Hunt

Thanks to the Namibian Support Committee for the information on which this article is based.

Contact: CANUC, c/o 53, Leverton St, London. NW5.

Riff Raff Chit Chat by Dennis Gould.

Fields and Factories by Colin Ward.

Article about Morris, Kropotkin, Howard etc.

In the Sticks

[article about the Convoy]

In The Smoke by Dave of London Greenpeace.

By Dave of London Greenpeace

There's a war on, a war between humanity all over the globe, and the Systems which control and destroy our lives, our environment and the natural world.

They exploit everything under the sun (literally) - all materials and resources on this beautiful and bountiful planet, all the food, all the nature. They rip up the earth, destroy forests, pollute our seas and dominate the land everywhere.

They exploit every person - build factories, offices and plantations all over and force people to work in them or go hungry. They reduce human communities to economic slaves, numbers to be stuck on graphs in their profit and loss accounts, who must obey and labour for them.

Fighting amongst themselves for influence, land and resources, these institutions fuel (and of course profit from) barbaric wars, causing fear, suffering and death to hundreds of millions of people, trapped in the zones of the Generals. Meanwhile as people's land and food is stolen and resources squandered, millions of others starve.

They don't give a shit about anyone, any of us. We are NOTHING to them. They don't give a fuck for the peoples of the world - never did and never will. So this is a picture without illusions.

The financial and industrial institutions which exploit us and the earth are complemented by those which defend, conquer and expand power blocs (the military) which control people (authorities of all kinds, police and armies) those which service us and make us dependent (shops, the traffic system, the welfare state), which mould people into obedient citizens (schools, media) as well as institutions which integrate us and neutralise our concerns, questioning and resistance (churches, charities, unions, political parties and parliament etc.)

In the past when people have rebelled, they have usually explained their struggle as a class struggle to make improvements in the System, or to seize control of it (the land, workplace and towns) from those who at present have power.

In the second case, by establishing worker councils (Russia 1905, 1917, Germany 1919, Italy 1920, Hungary 1956 ...) and town communes (Spain 1936...) they would be able to shape and exercise power themselves and so end oppression. However, most rebellions and revolutions have been diverted by political parties into struggles to establish a new kind of state control over industry and society generally.

As revolution and class struggle have been turned into problems of who should manage the system, so most working class people have turned away from, and in fact have been pushed out of politics. However, the struggle to protect our humanity, and the conditions and quality of our lives has continued daily.

By the 1960s, movements out of control of political parties began to develop - involving fresh ideas and forms of organisation and activity. Independent movements grew up against nuclear weapons, for women's liberation, wildcat strikes, occupations of housing and workplaces (especially in the 1968 uprising and general strike in France), for non-authoritarian relationships and lifestyle, and against ecological destruction etc. It was within this atmosphere of questioning and self organisation that the group I eventually joined, the London Greenpeace Group, was founded (along with other such groups) in 1970. Primarily to campaign against nuclear bomb testing it gradually broadened out to question this whole society and our personal responsibility to act in our everyday lives to change things.

In 1977, with all political parties and unions defending nuclear energy, a large movement of independent local groups, protest and direct actions (occupations and blockades of sites etc) grew up all over Europe and America to close down all nuclear installations. One of the few independent groups in England to be active during this whole decade, London Greenpeace was able to spread valuable information and contribute practical and theoretical ideas to the anti-nuclear movement. This was especially helpful in the formation of regional, or issue based action networks and federations based on autonomous collectives and groups. Members took part in site occupations and blockades, and blocking nuclear waste transport. There was a great awareness that it was the whole, centralised, destructive system which was being challenged, and that there were radical alternatives which it was up to ourselves to create At the same time there was the resurgence of a wide range of movements for change, including large, anarchistic youth revolts.

By 1980, the anti nuclear struggle had begun to come up against heavy police opposition on one hand, and on the other hand the now familiar attempts by Left groups to co-opt it. At the same time the threat of nuclear war stimulated the rebirth of massive 'anti bomb' protests. Whilst most of these seemed to be channeled into futile appeals to politicians, and into joining single issue hierarchical organisations, there were many involved who knew something more fundamental was needed. In England, this peace movement totally failed to oppose the war in the Falklands. I joined London Greenpeace at this time as one of the very few groups (mostly pacifist and anarchist groups) active in some way against that war. later peace camps began to spring up outside military bases everywhere, and a radical anti war movement began to grow. This inspired us, especially with the large scale blockades to try to close bases. It seemed that people were drawing on the experiences and strengths of the earlier anti nuclear power activities.

It was then that some of us felt the time could be right for significant opposition to the war machine in our towns as well. With our hearts in our mouths we called for an occupation to Stop The City of London, the centre of finance for the arms trade, on 29th September 1983. After 1500 people took part in that encouraging action, a movement developed which decided to re occupy the 'City' in March this year. This time 3000 people from different movements came together for an amazing and determined protest against the profit system itself. Let's hope these actions continue to grow and spread to other towns.

All this time, we in the group felt that mass protests should complement and not detract from the opposition that's needed to everyday oppression all around us. Whilst protest movements give confidence and a focus to discontented minorities and sub cultures, the majority of people face a daily struggle for survival and self respect, to overcome isolation and constant hassles by the Authorities. This daily struggle throughout our society carries the seeds of widespread opposition and community solidarity.

Yet the system is maintained by their authoritarian culture. To encourage each other to question and undermine that culture helps us all to increase our confidence to oppose the controls forced on us. Hence, for us in London Greenpeace, it is vital that we relate our ideas to peoples' everyday lives and struggles.

It's important to actively criticise and oppose the use of money, in favour of sharing to support opposition to the power and violence of the traffic system (probably more effective than the police in ensuring social control);

to encourage respect and defence of animals and the natural world, and for people to stop eating and exploiting animals;

to try to involve children in what we do, and support their struggles, as well as support parents with their responsibilities and hassles;

to encourage people to reject materialism, all the useless junk we are expected to buy and consume, especially junk food;

to explain the way the system buys us off with luxury imports (coffee, sugar, minerals, tropical fruit etc) and the effects this has on people in third world regions;

to encourage opposition to sexist attitudes, and active support for women's struggles;

to oppose the ever increasing dependence of people on drugs of all kinds - tobacco, alcohol, coffee, dope, TV, sugar, vallium etc;

to criticise the idea that 'experts', 'leaders' and Authorities of any kind know what's best for us, or should have any power over us;

to support people creating their own entertainment, developing craft skills and educating each other;

to encourage mutual aid and solidarity in our neighbourhoods, and support all self organisation and resistance to the various Authorities - tenants' groups, workplace organisations, parent and toddler groups, and associations of every kind where people create and participate in to fulfil a need.

To achieve this will be a process of ecological and social revolution, in which we abolish all the structures of the present system and create a world based on our humanity and common sense.

A personal view by Dave (London Greenpeace).

Economics of Affluence, by Alan Albon.

Misc.

Book Review - Cured to Death

'A Great Gig' review of Poison Girls benefit gig by Marcus.

'The Honourable Potato'

'Cycle For Freedom'

Recipe by Marcus.

Actions

Chilwell, Porton Down, CND fund raising, Harvest For The Hungry

Events

...

Back Cover

68a Cassiobury Park Avenue, Watford, Herts WD1 7LE.

Issue 2

Cover: 'Enough is Enough'

Date: Sep-Aug 1984

Keywords: Stop the City Plans; Martial Arts; Punk.

Read here

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Editorial: Enough is Enough

More and more people are objecting to being pushed about like pawns in a gigantic game of chess called International Finance. There are various, and growing, pockets of resistance, the largest being the miners' strike and many more people are beginning to see this as a struggle in a game against being mere cyphers in a game where people dispose of the many as they see fit.

The judiciary is now openly in cahoots with the Establishment who take actions in secret that effect the lives of a whole population.

As well as the miners in the field of employment, residents in the field of housing in Liverpool, in Glasgow, are beginning to insist on determining how their own environment is to be planned.

Greenpeace is carrying out of direct action all over the world. Actions in the centres of the great Financial Farce in the City are now being subjected to demonstrations to object to decisions being taken in centres remote from peoples' lives.

Commerce is now being exposed, not as a means of communal enterprise and life, but a way a small number of people, for their own ends can blight the lives of millions, at home and abroad.

In every field of human activity we, the people, must call the tune, and not follow the political and financial Pied Piers who are engaged in creating a wasteland on a potentially productive and beautiful planet.

There are people all over the place saying 'Enough is enough' about so many things, womens' lib, animal lib, Greenpeace, environmentalists, inner city people, housing, people. Anarchism brings it all together; property and the State.

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake you chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you.

Ye are many - they are few.

Shelley, 'The Mask of Anarchy'

Leeds Stop The City

Hundreds of demonstrators, mostly punk, converged on Leeds and left their calling cards.

The Leeds 'Stop the City' demo in Leeds on August 9th attracted several hundred people, mostly punks, from all around the country. About 10:30 am the first mass walkabout started into the city from the art gallery assembly point - but with the police around nothing much happened. We went past a Barclays Bank which had been paint bombed - their dragon thing symbol on the wall was covered and dripping red paint - it looked like blood - symbolic and appropriate.

The first march disintegrated throughout the town until everyone was wandering around the streets looking for the action. Later there were scuffles with the police on the Headrow after one pig went into a crowd of us after a bloke and others prevented him from being arrested. This was the signal for other pigs to charge in with boots flying.

There was a sit down at the cross roads by the gallery which was immediately broken up by the pigs - and people arrested after more scuffles. Those sinister pig vans with the blacked out windows (so they can do people over without anyone seeing on the way to the station) were always quick on the scene of anything happening.

The police adopted the tactics of breaking a group up into smaller groups and making them go back to the art gallery assembly point. Individuals were arrested for refusing and / or heading off in a different direction or for looking as if you were co-ordinating any action or movement of a group.

Altogether 70 odd people were arrested over the day. However, Stop The City 'calling cards' (bricks, paint, glue) were left at a number of financial and other relevant institutions.

Finally thanks to those concerned in 'organising' the event, giving people somewhere to doss the night and producing the excellent leaflet with the map of Leeds city centre on the back, amongst many others handed out on the day.

An observation: Mostly the police were quick to react to any large group forming and heading into the centre OR more to the point WE WERE SLOW TO ACT with most people just crawling along and the police eventually dispersing them. The only way to get one over the police and the city is to act quickly in as large a group as possible keeping together and moving along the streets fats.

Contact your local 'Joggers against the City' group and get fit, cos London Sept 27th, here we come!

Glastonbury, Demo at Porton Down

27th September Stop the City meeting

Silver Moon gathering, Cumbria

Doctors, henchmen of Tyranny

Cooking isn't good for you

No dollars at Molesworth, Shelter housing conference at Nottingham University.

Downside Demo, Australia, news from New Zealand, East Germany weighs the odds, Trade War, Season of Summits.

Punk Rools OK by Graeme Hall.

An anarcho-punk's personal view.

WHAT IS PUNK?

IS PUNK just a categorization of a style of music coupled with a way of looking, or is it a way of thinking - an attitude? Punk started out as a rebellion against all the previous conventions of accepted music and dress, to shock people; but wasn't the underlying factor the attitude - the rejection of being controlled by others, of authority - and through the rejection of authority the struggle for real freedom. If punk does not include the attitude then PUNK IS DEAD, just another trend taken over by the media and commercialism which is squeezed dry and eventually dumped. Thankfully, there are those who have seen through the bullshit, media created, caricatures of punk and have developed their way of thinking to what punk was, is and always should be about:

NO SELL OUT!

No compromise to rejecting outside control. The punks to run the punk scene. Participation of all to make it work. We must all be activists! Go in numbers to any demonstrations like 'Stop The City', getting the word spread around for demos and gigs with leaflets, flyposting, graffiting, fanzines and talking to each other. Putting on our own gigs, as cheaply as is possible and as benefits for causes we associate with - and with YOU supporting these gigs by going to them. All the bands should be cooperating with each other NOT competing. THERE SHOULD BE NO ROCK STARS IN OUR SCENE!

To distinguish myself from the 'moral majority' of the punk 'movement' I call myself an 'anarcho-punk' I have no reservations about being called an anarchist. To me Anarchism incorporates every struggle worth fighting for in this sick world. 'You are free to do what you want but your freedom cannot impose or be at the expense of anyone else's freedom, and vice-versa' - you can either agree or disagree with that statement, if you agree it means you reject the concept of people having power / authority over others. This also means that you reject all forms of racism / sexism / Nationalism / exploitation etc ..... then you are an Anarchist (in theory anyway).

Other types of 'punks' I can think of are: the trendy 'my mohicans bigger than yours' unthinking poseurs, the 'macho-men', the 'punks' who have found the other definition of anarchy in the dictionary and put mindless violence and chaos into practice - this includes those racists / fascists that have crawled their way into the scene. In the unlikely event that any of the above mentioned 'punks' read this - then please THINK, realise that you're just a manipulated media caricature and change OR FUCK OFF and go drown in your own shit !!!!

I have one criticism - or rather an observation to make about the scene. Why aren't more wimmin actively involved (and in anarchism for that matter). To me being non-sexist is part of anarchism, and if the reason for the lack of wimmin who would get involved is that many men are still imposing / taking control / pushing wimmin into the background at any discussions etc ... then this should be exposed - because these men are either totally unaware that they are doing it OR they are not Anarchists!

If you are interested in the punk scene on an international scale then get 'Maximum Rock and Roll' produced monthly from the USA - this publication is great and should be supported. It deals with all punk, with the emphasis on the active political (Anarchist) punks and discusses related issues (racism / sexism / squatting etc....) It has reports on what punks are getting up to from countries all around the World. Available over here through Rough Trade.

Graeme Hall

Where We Stand

[Setting out of initial green anarchist position, elaboration of the editorial in issue 1]

Richard Hunt and Alan Albon

We need 50 million leaders and none led

Act - Don't Wait

Take the Plunge

Poison Girls.

The Green Collective

[Bruce Garrard watched and joined as the collective grew out of the gathering.]

The Warriors Path of Energy by Mark Newns

Anarchic Self Sufficency

Winstanley and Kropotkin, by KS of Canterbury.

Did the Quakers become pacifists to save their skins? by Dave Brooks.

Letters

***

Yours pissed off, by Lee

Biased article on convoy complaint by J Pendragon

Lancaster House by Jay

Violence of Football by N Strutt

'Do It!' by Punk of Clydeside.

Oxford Actions, by Paul Mapes

Southend Anarchist Group.

Housing is Theft / Housing is Freedom by Colin Ward.

The Roots of NVDA' by Peter Cadogan.

Laws to torture, Gardens, Recipe.

Back Page

Events, action, report of Crickhowell green weekend.

Issue 3

Cover: A fist of defiance surrounded by police with clubs. 'Police versus Miners'

Date: Nov-Dec 1984

Keywords: Molesworth; Miners' Strike; Stop the City; Stop the Cities; Venice Anarchist Conference; Max Stirner; Squatting.

Read here

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Editorial: Terrorism - Government

Politicians often shake hands with those whom they once condemned as terrorists. Just as those who blew up the King David Hotel in what was then Palestine, and later successfully became the members of the Israeli Government, were able to cloak their terrorism in legality. The hypocritical condemnation of violence by those who have rejoiced at the recent use of it to achieve political ends, comes when that violence comes home to roost.

There were no howls of anguish at the two miners that died in a conflict in which imported Pinkerton type tactics are employed to impose the government's will. Yet state violence, physical and economic, is the most well equipped and potent source of violence in the world today. In Britain the legal sanctions that are used against any group that obstructs the imposition of the market economy are also backed by state violence. It is also proposed to reduce the legal protection that those in employment have, thus increasing the power of those who control society economically. Economic injustice is also terrorism; it kills people in the Third World just as surely by starvation as with a bomb, and in our own country by saying we do not need you for our free market economy.

A society divided by economic inequality and injustice will always be a violent society, but this lesson will not be learnt by those who experienced the bombing in Brighton; they will add to the great divide, and through their control of the media and its emotional unthinking waffle, will persuade people to add their crosses to enable politicians to add more crosses in the military cemetaries that lie all over the world.

We in this magazine are striving for a world that does not rely on violence to govern human relationships, but to create a society of free and equal people, with different talents, to co-operate to end exploitation of people, and use the world resources sensibly, and end the commercial market place, wanton and wasteful.

Essays

Miners Versus Police by Tarquin.

The Miners' strike is important to us

If they lose, a dangerously reactionary government will have defeated a major obstacle between them and rampant control and exploitation: the power of the organised working classes. A little time to let the dust settle, and then we will all have to watch out.

Whatever doubts many of us have about the Trade Unions, or Marxist theories of class, Tories understand. So whatever the short term financial cost, they are now determined to break the unions, potentially the direct political expression of the working classes. They are the people whose subjugation the Tories need: they are the ones who actually produce the wealth that the capitalists play with.

Many anarchists fail to recognise how important class awareness can be. Many of us are of the middle classes, heavily polluted with bourgeois values. Many of us are from the working classes, but have arrived at anarchism through our individual personal development, forgetting or ignoring that there is an oppressed class behind up. A deep, enduring, inevitable conflict goes on between the working classes and those who exploit them, however much it is denied by the many people who think they can sidestep out of this class struggle.

People are dying because of capitalism. (Although the worst suffering is hid out of sight by national boundaries.) People endure a semi-existence (often not even realising how much life they miss out on) because of modern capitalism. There is only one side that anyone concerned about our world can reasonably choose in the frequently ignored class war. The sooner we all recognise this and do something about it, the better. It is so easy to criticise 'Socialism', 'the unions', 'the Left', that we can lose sight of the greater damage being done now by the Right, by capitalism, by the passivity of so many blinkered 'moderates' throughout our society.

The day government or capitalists willingly support any 'green' venture is the day to be wary: beware whenever capitalism finds a way of incorporating attractive ideas - of taking them from us, making them safe and sterile, and then selling them back to us at twice the price. Fanciful thoughts of a 'Third Way' between the Left and the Right must not blind us to the history of challenges to government and authority, to Commerce and Property, and how these challenges have been overcome in this country.

One feature of capitalism is how successful it is at incorporating and corrupting any hopeful ideas, each time stealing a fresh initiative to buy for itself a new lease of life.

Complete revolution, pushed forward beyond our wildest dreams - that's where hope lies. And there is no better self preparation for revolution than to strike - to refuse absolutely to co-operate for a while with their system of wage slavery - and to do so collectively, not for more money, but as an attack upon the very control the 'bosses' have over our lives.

There are obvious links between the nuclear power programme and the run down of the coal mines. There are grave doubts about the desirability of coal as an energy source. There are criticisms of the insensitivity of some miners to racist and sexist oppression. But these facts pale into insignificance beside the central point: miners and their communities are collectively resisting the destructive control the NCB and the government wish to exercise over their whole way of life. They are fighting for a bit of freedom, defending the things they value. We should stand humbly with them, offering our support.

Tarquin

Molesworth occupied

It's now a growing village called Rainbow Field

2500 people trespassed onto Molesworth airfield and occupied it on the August Bank Holiday. The MoD did nothing, nor did the local police. (Molesworth is due to receive 64 cruise missiles by the end of 1986.)

70 people are now living there, setting up a Green Village. They've ploughed up 10 acres for winter wheat to send to Eritrea. They've built a community kitchen and are organising the education of about 20 children on the site. They've nearly finished the Chapel, which was consecrated by the Bishop of Huntingdon. Now they need cash for roof tiles. And they need cash for lots of other projects.

The number of Greens at Molesworth seems to be increasing all the time. They're hoping that many more will come to celebrate the Winter Solstice on December 21st.

London Stop The City

Demo spreads from the City to the West End

On Sept 27th, an unguessable number of people came to the 'Stop The City' in London. 470 were arrested, in many cases for doing fuck all.

Was the London STC as big a flop as the media made it out to be? Events taking place in the Bank and St Pauls 'City' area were certainly limited and their methods prevented any congregating of people. There was one small rampage not far from the Stock Exchange where windows were smashed and cars jumped on and later a Barclays Bank off Cheapside had windows broken. There was graffiti sprayed all over the place.

However, it was a disaster for the communicators who had all leaflets confiscated and were unable to talk to people, with the police continually moving them on.

There were city workers who entered into the spirit of the occasion by wearing stickers proclaiming 'aggravate an anarchist - support the City'. (!*?)

By the afternoon many people, pissed off by police harassment, started heading out into other parts of the city - where some successful 'hit and run' raids took place. In Soho sex shops were damaged. Saatchi and Saatchi offices were 'trashed' - smoke bombs and thunderflashes let off inside and the windows smashed. Picadilly Circus - windows in the area smashed and building materials thrown into the road. Trafalgar Square's fountains were dyed red. Also reported, attacks on Debenhams and some butchers' shops. A Rolls Royce was damaged and car tyres were let down. A copper or two were reported in the media receiving 'neck injuries and a broken arm'.

Of the 470 arrested most were for 'obstruction' while sitting on a park bench. Most cases of obstruction were released without charge late evening or early morning - they make out that you should be grateful that they're not charging you when you didn't do anything in the first place! One person arrested for obstruction had nothing to do with the demo and was walking home from work at the time!

Camera film was taken out at the station (after possessions had been sealed and taken away .... Is this legal, you may well ask?!!) There were cases of people being beaten up by the police while in custody, and how many cases have been totally fabricated - like ABH on a copper?

When we were getting our possessions back and being released a copper said 'I suppose we'll see you in six months again, lads'. Will he? Did the police tactics deter you or strengthen your resolve? We will see...

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What would be a SUCCESSFUL 'Stop The City'? Is it windows smashed in the thousands, Rolls Royces damaged etc .....? Write in what we should do tacticswise if there's another STC in London or elsewhere.

News

41 charged with criminal damage at research centre

Animal Liberation League protest at Colworth House, Unilever research centre, Bedfordshire, by Dr Rat.

Birmingham STC

Winfrith Leukaemias by Sue Puttock.

Convoy arrested

Police trash buses

Uranium Hexafluoride

It's not nuclear waste. Is there a conspiracy to conceal the dangers?

Essays

A NEW ANARCHISM

The Venice Gathering was heartening, optimistic .... and green

Murray Bookchin at the microphone, saying:

Radical social ecology provides an important, unifying and cohering perspective towards the crucial issues of humanity's relationship with nature and the reconstruction of a future libertarian society .... It calls for a basic change in this image of a biological 'other' to which humanity traditionally opposed itself, and it emphasises the creative, fecund, mutualistic and holistic side of nature as a grounding for a libertarian ethics. As William Trager, a distinguished American biologist observes: 'The conflict in nature between different kinds of organisms has been popularly expressed in phrases like 'the struggle for existence' and 'the survival of the fittest'. Yet few people realise that mutual cooperation between different organisms -- symbiosis -- is just as important, and the 'fittest' may be the one that most helps another to survive.' This conclusion could be easily taken from Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, and adds a vitally new dimension to anarchist theory at a time when ecological breakdown has become one of the greatest problems confronting us in the years ahead.

Murray Bookchin

CONFERENCE REPORT

It was a stroke of genius to call an international anarchist gathering in 1984 -- the year when we are supposed to be cowering under the glare of Big Brother.

There was no cowering in Venice during the last week of September, when about 2,000 anarchists from practically all over the world -- from America north and south, Australia and the Far East and of course all of Europe were welcomed by our Italian hosts and hostesses (if you see what I mean) who had performed a miracle of organisation. For although the gathering had been planned by comrades centred in Milan for over a year, it was not until three days before the gathering date that the Communists -- majority on the communal council of Venice -- yielded to the Socialist mayor's decision and agreed to let the anarchists have their way.

By the time we arrived, however, a huge marquee had been erected, blown down by a freak storm and re-erected in the Campo S Polo, while in the main centre of operations, Campo Santa Marherita, two large shelters for tables and seating, a kitchen and wine bar, a book stall, an information centre and a stage for music and play acting had been built -- while at another venue the Faculty of Architecture, everything had been organised for large meetings with simultaneous translations and, in three other rooms, smaller discussion meetings and an overflow from the main lecture hall.

A wide selection of subjects on 'Anarchism and ....' were presented, starting predictably with considerations of Orwell's 1984 and the real 1984 that we now live in -- and leading through the days, to feminism, syndicalism, urban struggle, state communism, self-management, cultural imperialism, social ecology and other subjects.

It was impossible for one person to cover all the meetings, which went on simultaneously -- but those I did cover all had one heartening characteristic, they all approached their subjects with the attitude of 'Where do we go from here?' Older, middle aged or younger, all the speakers -- and the contributors from the floor -- addressed themselves to the future. Those who looked back to the past did so only to learn lessons for the future as well as the present.

This did not make for dullness. Only those who demand nothing more than calls 'To the barricades!' squeaked from the comfort of a Gondola, could have failed to find the real comfort in this gathering; that the anarchist movement in 1984 is addressing itself to 1984 and not to 1848.

The issues of feminism and ecology were strongly represented, showing the recognition that ruthless exploitation of each other and of the planet are as much a menace to all our futures as the power of the state and are strongly interlined.

This event was called a 'gathering' and that is what it was; people gathering together and talking to each other, formally and informally. I'd like to think I have made some new friends from faraway places -- and I would like to thank our Italian comrades who worked so hard and organised so brilliantly -- freely and voluntarily and anarchistically.

Philip Sansom.

Berlin Squatting by Paul Ransom

Spanish Journey by Alan Albon

Back to South America

Liberation Theology worries Pope Paul

Running out of patience' by Heff

Person and the Planet by Paul Gravett

Are we right to think that this article comes closes to reflecting the views of green anarchists?

THE EARTH is facing a great crisis. We (by which I mean all life on earth) are falling into an abyss that can only end in ecological catastrophe. The most obvious threat is that of nuclear war, but there are many other dangers which receive far less attention. For example, if the present use of artificial fertilisers continues, then within about 30 years the world's top soil will have become so poisoned that a third of it will be infertile. Just imagine the famine that would result from that.

So we are faced with a personal choice - either contribute to the immanent armageddon or in some way resist it. Even non-action - that's what most people prefer - means we are indirectly participating in the road to ruin. Apathy will lead to enslavement and ultimately destruction - look where it's brought us to now.

Unfortunately our society encourages apathy and resignation. The majority of people are opposed to poverty, environmental destruction and abuse of animals, but they feel powerless to change the situation. Likewise, everyone is afraid of nuclear war but most believe in enjoying ourselves before we all go up. The horrible irony is that it is precisely this attitude that will lead us to disaster. Only by taking action individually and collectively will tomorrow be secure..

But what kind of tomorrow? Are the powers that be - the establishment - going to do nothing while the earth is slowly destroyed? some anarchists would reply that they are either ignorant or just do not care and they would do nothing. However, bearing in mind that nobody fancies the prospect of global disaster - nuclear or ecological - particularly the rich and powerful who have much to lose by it, I would have thought there is at least a good chance that they would act to prevent it.

But their way would be very different from ours and in direct contravention to everything that we, as libertarians, believe in. Ivan Illich, one of the world's most perceptive social thinkers, reckons there are two possible future scenarios: either society is planned by ecological engineers and controlled by centralised hierarchical institutions - this he calls the techno-fascist path - or autonomous groups and individuals take control of their own lives to maintain the ecological balances necessary to life - the 'Convivial' Society.

Illich believes we are already half way down the road to techno-fascism, but there's still time to turn back. The only answer is for us all to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives; not to leave our destinies in the hands of others - the authorities, be they the state, corporations, churches, schools etc. The true revolutionaries are those who've said 'enough is enough' and are fighting back. The Greenham Common wimmin and the animal Liberation Front, they are spearheads of a new radicalism, one that works outside all hitherto existing institutions and adopts values concomitant to the new situation. In their resistance they are actually building the framework of a new society, giving us an inviting glimpse of a possible alternative future.

This is where anarchism and the green movement converge. traditionally only anarchists have accorded ordinary people enough common sense and what Orwell called 'common decency' to run their own lives without being told what to do by an elite - be it bourgeois or Marxist - of decision makers. The more power we allow these experts to have, the less control we have over our existence, until every aspect of our lives will be managed for us. Faced with ecological crisis and growing techno-fascism the need for personal responsibility is more vital than ever before. Only the liberatrian creed of anarchism can provide the philosophical framework within which such responsibility can germinate.

The rise of the peace, ecology, animal rights movement is the best [route] so far of avoiding ecological ruin. But while the triad is divided, isolated, it will remain relatively weak and insecure. We need to merge the three prongs of attack into one cohesive coalition for change while fighting individual forms of oppression. We must realise that they are not only the symptoms of a deeper malaise. It is our sick society we must alter and this can only be achieved through non violent revolution.

Paul Gravett

What is Green?

There are many in the green movement who think that revolution must be preceded by self-change. By Marcus.

Squatting

Advisory Service For Squatters

Proudhon or Marx? By Adam Stout.

Stirner By Donald Rooum

Stirner is not an excuse for individualism. Co-operation is in everyone's self interest

Family of Love by Peter Cadogan

Anarchism traces an unbroken line back to the 16th Century

Beware the Hunger Project by Richard Hunt

Letters Page

Anarcho-Syndicalist objections by Keith Campbell, Bradford

Come the Revolution by Dave of Stratford on Avon

Talking to Themselves by Geoff of Thornaby

On Shamens by Dice George.

On 'poser punks' by Krusty Kris of Houghton Regis

White Male Head Trip by Jean Freer

Life Force by Mark Bradley, Belfast.

Misc.

Gardens re - compost heap

Recipe for Sunflower cafe sultana cake by Anne Waterhouse

Light blue touch paper by Dave.

Events: Upper Heyford trespass

Actions

Anarchist bus

Reports, Clydeside Anarchists

Issue 4

Date: Jan-Feb 1985

Cover: by Dave. 'Where there is no vision the people perish.

This was probably the very best GA cover ever, the most complete expression of everything the magazine has been in the past and could be in the future. It shows a giant A in a circle, with badger, humming bird, cat, hedgehog, flowers, corn. A country scene inside the circle, man, woman silhouette, child with balloon, spade, fork, fields. In the circle it says (starting top right going clockwise): Struggle to stop war and the destruction of the earth. Root out the ways of thinking and acting that can allow war and destruction to happen. Realize that you have been repressed and indoctrinated by upbringing, schools, patriarchy, jobs, consumerism, apathy, misinformation, media... Break the state by struggling now for hope, love, peace and freedom,. Nuclear war, pollution and government destroy the earth. Can't make a compassionate society on a barren earth.

Price: 40p

Notes: From the collection of Chris Cook Cann.

Read here

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Editorial: Individual and the State by Alan Albon.

News

Stop This Fence

Molesworth numbers are growing to stop the missile base construction

Xmas is turning point for miners

Alconbury blockade and break in to support the Alconbury 9

Drug books pulped in Reading

CND demos, a trend is developing

Stanstead

Gays the Word censorship case

Ethiopia, the famine is caused by government

Industrial pollution in the Adriatic

Essays

Class War by a member of the Class War newspaper collective

Class room revolutionaries

Passing notes between desks takes on a new meaning.

Educate Your Desire

Cliff Harper is the leading designer of the Alternative movement

**The Education of Desire. The anarchist graphics of Clifford Harper. Anarres Co-operative, 10 Bradbury Street, London N16, £4:95p*

Nobody who has been in or around libertarian or anarchist circles over the last decade can be unaware of the work of Cliff Harper. I first became aware of it almost exactly ten years ago following his production in 1974 or a series of seven drawings giving his vision of a self-supporting communalised urban utopia. Sadly this set of drawings has long been out of print, but two are reproduced in this present volume to remind us of how good they were - especially as they were among the first works of a self-taught artist.

These are followed by three drawings of communal workshops, and it was looking at them all together that I realised that in all these work scenes everything was being done by women, not a man in sight.

Does this mean I asked myself, that, come the revolution women will do all the work? Or that there will be no revolution until all the men have been eliminated? Turning to the text I discovered the answer to be more simple: Cliff was going through a very strong pro-Feminist period and it transpires that in this Utopian Time he took a conscious decision not to draw any men at all. Unconsciously, it could have been because his companion Ame was working straight jobs and bringing in some money, while Cliff was developing his art.

The text consists of the gist of a tape recorded talk between Cliff and Adam Cornford which started out as an interview, but developed into a discussion with the interviewer contributing, as he admits, a good deal more than is customary. This has worked admirably and we can be sure that this is a much more fruitful text than if it were simply a question and answer session.

In it we get an insight into what you can expect if you determine not to compromise with the system and set out to teach yourself how to fight it on your own terms through learning the disciplines of drawing and designing and putting the resultant skills at the service of the social revolution. This was after some hard, but obviously for a time at least, enjoyable, experiences in living anarchistically, first in Cumberland (hard) and then on an island in the Thames. It was called Eel-Pie Island Commune. It had 25 bedrooms and at one point we had 100 people from all over the world living there. It was anarchy, and I've lived in an anarchistic way for two years now.

This particular hotel, empty when Cliff and his group squatted it in the sixties, has quite a history - for ten years George Melly with Mick Mulligan and his Magnolia Jazz Band, had raised the roof on Saturday nights through the fifties. The anarchist commune, however, finished off the place, for after the gas and electricity was cut off, the wooden building itself became the only source of heating. Before the end, Cliff experienced the weird circumstances of enjoying more financial prosperity than ever before, while at the same time contracting tuberculosis which neglected nearly killed him. Cliff's life shows a certain perversity. While TB is traditionally a disease the suffering artist contracts through neglect, Cliff's case was the other way round. Art was the disease he contracted after losing Eel Pie Island - nearly dying - going through a series of unsatisfactory squats, settling down with Ame and for the first time finding the tranquility to work. Personally I would not describe finding the stability in the love of a woman as a defeat ... but that's how Cliff saw it at the time, for he has, he says ... always regarded my art as the result of a defeat. I've never felt very happy about it.

Very odd that, for later in the book, he clearly shows some pride in the popularity of his work and is one of the hardest workers I now. The defeat he refers to of course, is the feeling that he had given up revolutionary living, settled for rented premises and started work, which he never wanted to do. The fact that he works entirely on his own (that is, until the drawing is done and it's time to cooperate with the printers) and is free to choose what he does more than most workers, must cushion the blow a bit.

I can't hold off any more from discussing the work. I have to admit that I have never warmed to Cliff's drawings more than in admiration for their skill and attention to detail (hence my regard for the Utopian scenes mentioned earlier) for I find them rather static. I realise that this is deliberate (I think) and it certainly gives them a certain power. But then I am always uneasy in considering Art as propaganda. For myself, I have always regarded my own work as a cartoonist as propaganda, not art .... a distinction as clear as that between doggeral and poetry, propaganda tends to be temporary and ephemeral. But Cliff's work has a permanent quality and seen here in mass very impressive. And in spite of different styles from time to time you can tell a Harper a mile off. He is an artist, not a cartoonist, still less a caricaturist ... clearly shown when, in Black Freighter, a song by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill (Nina Simone does a lovely version) Cliff does a blanket steal from George Grosz's Das Gesicht der Herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class) and well, why not? Black Freighter is a story from 1930s Germany about a cleaning woman in a sleazy dock side hotel, who gets her revenge on her bosses, with a little help from a passing pirate ship. Who better to borrow from than Georg Grosz? There is an element ... deliberate in most cases ... of the sinister in Cliff's work, especially in the recent use of heavy blacks and in these undoubtedly the very stillness reinforces the menace. One unhappy strip, I thought, was the one which deliberately set out to be happy or at least funny in its treatment of Richard Carlisle and his family's struggle for free speech in the 1820s .... but I suppose the technique may be justified if the result is as the last frame: the story being read by Comix readers who wouldn't read a book. Many fascinating points to be got out of this statement. Read the text and enjoy the drawings ... and be sharp eyed about it. For instance, look at the two end papers front and back, consisting of two page spreads of a drawing repeated over and over again. Or is it? Look at the bottom right hand corner of each spread...

Finally one must praise the production. Well laid out and beautifully printed ... no doubt very much due to the process camera operator.

Philip Sansom

Page 10. 'As a pacifist will I be prepared to passively stand by and watch our long struggle destroyed by the uncaring cynicism of the state?' Typewritten rant by Crass.

Page 12. Division of Labour by Kundip Dhoot.

Page 14 Anarchic Self-Sufficiency

I recently talked to a successful 'High Technologist'. He said 'I'm proud of serving mankind. I love to make breakthroughs - to help our economy and my fellow men'. [sic] He worked on armaments. It was computer control for missiles, I believe......

In effect, this technologist was craving for status and power (over people and things) ... and above all - like nearly all of us, for money. I find it extraordinarily difficult to get any 'high flyer' technologist to come along, say, and give an elementary talk or contribution to a group of working class young people in what I have called a 'vernacular technical club'. That these privileged people, in fact all of us, should do this in a convivial society ought, I would have thought, to go without question. But we do not have a convivial society and alienation between have and have nots runs very deep....

Where did the driving force for the dizzying spiral of technological 'advance' with all its status grubbing come from?

The scientific revolution - or what was once called the New Philosophy, is often linked with the remarkable schemes and prophecies of Francis Bacon. He wrote the 'Novum Organum' and The New Atlantis' in the early 1600s. There is much evidence that the Royal Society was founded on the inspiration of 'our Lord Bacon' to quote Thomas Spratt, an officer of the Royal Society at the time. The expansive pattern of what was to follow - and the industrial revolution started shortly after all this, and in Britain - is seen as Bacon's description of his scientific research establishment as written in his science fiction story 'The New Atlantis.' 'The end of our Foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.' This famous aphorism gives the basis of a breathtaking vision virtually involving the idea of unlimited progress.

This vision, and the dominant forms of the Protestant wing of Christianity after the Reformation, gave the West the go-ahead for this idea of 'progress', and the Puritan work ethic required for its exploitation. The religion had a 'sky Father Figure' and was totally male dominated and hierarchical in nearly all other ways. It was the ideal breeding ground for the rise of capitalism and resource exploitation.. At this point I wish to make clear that in no way do I want to tread on anyone's religious sensibilities. Nevertheless, the libertarian critique that sharply attacks dominating hierarchical religious forms is on firm ground here. In no way can these forms be seen by radical workers as anything but evil. The basis of this interesting line - together with the demonstration that Marxism is an apostate form of this Western religious ideology, is discussed by Professor Lynn White in 'Notes For the Future' [Robin Clarke ed] Not all that is linked with Christianity is hierarchical and rapacious. I met a Quaker last year and when in discussion I said (feeling a little provocative....) 'Quakers are really the Anarchists of the Christian religion, aren't they?' The immediate reply was 'Yes, that's right....' Whether all Quakers would see this point or not I don't know. But Quakerism is a fringe in religion - just as Anarchism is a fringe in socio-political life..... ?

I have contributed this unlikely area of discussion in a piece about technology and ecology because it is profoundly at the base of much of our 'other-worldliness' our disrespect for the Earth and its resources - and our rapaciousness. It helps to account for the social and technological crises which are striking at our existence even more violently. It also accounts with some subtlety for our attitudes towards women and for racism.

WE CAN'T ABANDON TECHNOLOGY

Whatever the original drive to master the world and therefore to master people also, we still have to live with it. As I mentioned earlier, there is no way we can abandon technology and technique. This point applies to both the argument to convince 'society' or 'the state' or those with manipulative power over technical means to give them up (they won't...) and also to those individuals who wish to escape to some nether region away from technology (there's nowhere to run). Nevertheless radical action is called for to take over control and uses of technical means. This is where Alternative Technology and Self Sufficiency (AT&SS) are educative. We may be approaching the so called Post industrial period, but it will certainly not be a post technical age - unless we blast the Earth in a nuclear holocaust. Arguments can be advanced that although Britain was the first to enter the enter the industrial revolution, such change was actually not thorough going here. We may be placed in a good position to pass on to this next phase (post industrial) because we never quite left the pre industrial one.

You should study technology and its effects from a Libertarian point of view, because who controls these, controls people and resources.

technical means tend to normalise language, attitudes and options. There appears to be a vast choice, but in practice there is a high degree of uniformity. Units of measurement are a case on point. Unless you use the S.I. system (metrication) you tend either to be ostracised, or excluded. Again in practice, technical elitism shuffles and grades knowledge so that what was up to the minute, high value knowledge yesterday, becomes old hat today.

This is independent of 'use value' and is a kind of (as I say elitist) ''exchange value' of scarce know how. And such know-how must be a kind of highly objective esoteric knowledge - craft skills or tacit knowledge doesn't count. A good discussion of this point is given in 'Architect or Bee' by Mike Cooley. Actually we as Anarchists know this and we don't require some Marxist analysis to point it out. But everyone else also knows it and jokes about 'knowledge obsolescence' and how Old Jack - aged 40 - 'learned his stuff in the Ark and should be pensioned off'. The majority of people do nothing about such myths because most are totally unradicalised. There is an absence of such attitudes in the radical AT&SS movement because it is 'use value' which counts. But such Libertarian movements remain very small....?

TECHNOLOGY EXPROPRIATES SKILLS

Connected with the last observations regarding knowledge obsolescence is the emphasis on labour elimination by 'robots' or 'automaton', 'computer control' - call it what you will. There is certainly technical means to [automate] job tasks in production and distribution so that simple involvement of workers in these are eliminated. We are treated to a barrage of 'this will eliminate drudgery in repetitive tasks'' by expert pundits - and indeed this may be so, especially if there is a real use value production attached to durable artifacts instead of the highly technical 'planned obsolescence' throwaway attitudes consumption capitalism engenders.. (which it must if you think about it). The problem is that the highly automated throwaway ethos de skills many of us. A most radical part of the AT&SS movement is to rescue these skills and develop them. The capitalist outlook is expropriating skills as it once did property and wealth, therefore anarchic direct action in the AT&SS area is subversive.

this aspect is certainly true if the division between hand and brain work is considered. This elitist barrier between practical skills and theoretical ability clings amazingly and therefore must serve a valuable purpose in maintaining the class / hierarchical structure. In spite of Kropotkin's critique of this artificial barrier continues. But there is a rejection of this division in the Alternative movements.

There is an accompanying problem that could have serious implications for us by reducing the freedom of access and choice. This reduction is achieved by technical means. The State and powerful interest groups can use these means to control populations and individuals. I am not just indicating computer data banks - with limited access to weaker brethren, or the use of powerful drugs developed by chemical technologists to control mood, docility and obedience in children and adults. Nor am I commenting specifically on, say, such problems as the utter domination of the transport system by cars -with their ridiculous inefficiency both thermally and in materials use. All these are problems enough, which we are promised will be overcome by more technical research. (this the famous 'Technical Fix' syndrome - even in conservative circles it is wearing a bit thin.) But without being paranoiac, the comment 'the Technically Strong State' is the one to watch.

TECHNOLOGY FOR SUPPRESSION

Gradually as violence, racism, nationalism, and dissent in general worsens, crowd control, surveillance, physical / technical means of suppression (plastic bullets - water cannon...) and other sophisticated strong arm methods will have to be deployed by the State. Also the technical means of (possible) survival by an elite few in the event of a nuclear conflict requires urgent attention. All these developments, from phone tapping, bugging, TV camera surveillance techniques, to techniques of psychological torture (as used in Northern Ireland) and drug treatment (as used in American prisons - and it is said here also), are already deployed. Discussions of these developments have appeared in great detail by investigative journalists and writers, often from a Libertarian perspective. The 'Spies For Peace' revelations about the secret nuclear shelters that appeared in the 1960s was an excellent example of what can be done.

Thus technology needs its critical edge. This itself must be technically effective but also ecological and people based. I have not found any movement capable of carrying this responsibility except the radical AT&SS movement, based on anarchist principles of networking and Mutual Aid. such action operates mainly in the informal economy, which is an important area of action of the 'voting with your feet' kind. This ignores state controls and the bureaucracy as much as possible. Another branch of this kind of action could be said to include the squatting movement and the freeschoolers / deschoolers at least some (of them) not coopted in education.

Anyone inclined to enter the AT&SS direct action movements should become aware of what is involved. It is certainly not a soft option - a kind of arcadian dream of peaceful workshops, lovely fields, hand-crafter artifacts (only), but involves alternative computer programs, anti surveillance activities, technical investigations into what powerful people are doing with nuclear systems, military technology and other extremely anti human misappropriations of resources.

Ken Smith

Page 15. Make the Third World Connection by Bryn Clark, Dan Coughlin, David Riker.

Page 16 'Meat Means Murder' by Andrea

Page 17. Letters

Violence and Anarchy by Cathy Ashley, Birmingham STC demo criticism answer, Birmingham defendants

On Stirner by S E Parker

On Stirner by Brian Morris

Donald Rooum author of the original piece replies.

Page 18. Uprooting War book reviewed by Alan Albon

E for additives by Marcus

'At Least Cruise is Clean;' Newbury Rotarian business guide re Greenham Common

Green Bikers' Group.

Page 20 Record reviews, film review, Gardens, Recipe by Caroline Bradbury.

Issue 5

Cover: Molesworth: What Now?

Date: Mar-Apr 1985

Keywords: Molesworth; Anti Car.

Read here

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Editorial: Uniformity and the state

News

Invasion of Molesworth

In the depths of a February night, after 5 months of detailed organisation and training, Field Marshal Heseltine led 3000 troops and police in the successful re-occupation of Molesworth, putting to flight the combined resistance of a hundred peace campers, two goats and a horse. Heseltine's intelligence, which reported that the campers were armed and aggressive, perhaps needs improving. Nevertheless a great victory.

Ponting acquitted!

Stonehenge threatened

Crackdown on Alternatives

Is there an orchestrated action against the dissidents?

Is there a government inspired conspiracy in operation to stamp out 'alternative' lifestyle communities? The straws in the wind could easily lead people to conclude that there is.

The police trashing of the Convoy at Wakefield last August was an outrageous incident (see GA No 3) but it is now looking like part of a pattern. In Wales two 'alternative' communities, the Tipi village at Talley in Dyfed, and Llwyn Piod near Rhaeader in Powys have both been issued with enforcement notices by their respective district councils. These notices allege that these communities - both established over eight years on land owned by the residents themselves - are in breach of the planning laws (ie an unauthorised change of use of agricultural land) and require that everyone should disappear by March. Both communities intend to appeal, and Talley folk are determined to go as far as the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. Support the Tipis Appeal, Wernlas, Cwmdu, talley, Llandeilo, Dyfed (eviction date 14th March 1985)

In Norwich, Argyl Street, one of the largest squats in Britain is scheduled for eviction in February. Residents are resigned to this eviction taking place, but squatters in future are likely to be in an even worse position because of.......

The Criminal Tresspass Bill, announced in the Queen's Speech, which is part of the government's 1985 programme. This is likely to be aimed at not only squatters, but anyone tresspassing anywhere (eg peace campers, free festivals etc) when (or if?) this becomes law, it is likely that eviction orders will become unnecessary and such tresspassers will be liable to immediate arrest.

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YTS OR STARVE

The Government is planning big Social Security cuts

The government plans to keep us all under control through the Social Security system have taken another step in the decision to exclude 16 - 18 year olds from their right to supplementary benefit. This will effectively mean that either under 18s will have to live at home supported by their parents or accept a place on the Youth Training Scheme (YTS). If they do not do either they will simply starve. Furthermore the government plans to cut out all extra payments for special diets, extra heating costs, etc, and all single payments for essential items . The long term rate of benefit will be abolished and students will no longer be entitled to housing benefits and supplementary benefits.

***************************

The Argyle St. squat in Norwich has now been evicted and the houses bulldozed to make way for new houses for those better off than the squatters.

Hunt sabs

Hot Spot getting hotter

The South Pacific is heading towards turmoil.

European Guerillas

Bombing and shooting is on the increase.

Essays

Hope for Palestine by a supporter of Abu Jihad

Alternative Economy by Rupert Hughes

How we get from here to there

More Motorways by the Archway Group.

Car Free World by Martin Low

Harder work for all by Richard Hunt.

What Now Molesworth? by Brig Oubridge

Cruisewatch in East Anglia had already noticed the military convoys, and activists helping the occupation had phoned in a warning. This turned out to be a sort of false alarm. It was just a fortnight too early.

'It was about midnight. We just came out of the sweat lodge and we were standing naked round the fire. Then we saw moving lines of headlights in the dark, the convoys of soldiers and police.

They put a cordon round the Rainbow Village and said 'We want you to move within the hour and if you don't we have the the men and machinery to do it for you'.

It took Jules and her husband Sid Rawl 17 hours to take down their Tipi and bender. And Jules was eight and a half months pregnant. (Jules has now given birth, at Grafham Water. Mother and daughter are doing nicely).

At the Peace Camp, with a black flag and anarchist symbols, Nick said: 'We saw the convoys of lights coming. It was very frightening. I went up to Clopton and stayed there all night and into the morning, phoning all the pledge groups. The police stopped all access to pledgers and press.'

The peace camp is being harrassed by both Health and Planning, and four of the 'permanent' campers are being taken to court for eviction. But they think they were getting too comfortable anyway. So they'll get into tents and benders and be more active.

The Rainbow Village is being evicted from Grafham Water. Some are going to a site at Corby about 17 miles away. Others aren't going so far. They don't think their vehicles will make it.

The best turnout so far was when (February 19th?) about 300 from the Nottingham area arrived. Many groups went over the fence and were held in detention portakabins. Five (it is thought) were held and charged with criminal damage.

Brig Oubridge writes: -

In the first few days there was a constant stream of pledgers in and out of the Molesworth area, despite the thick snow and police harassment. A CND information unit was set up (with police blessing) on the A 604, and as well as the constant vigils at Peace Corner there have been people getting into the base every day, and many others simply keeping lots of MoD police occupied in watching them walk round the outside or escorting them up and down the bridle path from Peace Corner to Cockbrook Lane. (this path is officially still open and if you are lucky you will be allowed to pass along it provided you are escorted all the way and do not stop).

The vital task now is to keep up the pressure so that the MOD's 'vast reinforcements' do not become a fast fading nine day wonder, and so that the authorities have to maintain their police state and pay the full price in both financial and political terms for guarding their seven miles of barbed wire.

Having started in the worst possible weather and in a worse state of preparedness than we might have hoped for, things can only get easier and better organised from now on.

A group of people here want to suggest that we start now to retake the initiative lost at Molesworth in the last few weeks, since the fence went up, people have quite rightly felt that they must visit the place on the strength of their outrage and anger.

As the edge goes off these emotions, we need to develop a campaign that builds on this scattering of individuals. We hope that other people will push for a week long action, with days shared out along the lines of the pledge in three or four months' time. Of course this will give everyone something to look forward to after Easter. The most successful perhaps, of this type was the Upper Heyford action of June '83. Perhaps the end of June or the beginning of July (before holidays) would be best.

Whaddya think?

United We Win

Divided, we remain dreamers

Anarchist Festival by Jon Preston

I won't model for men

I started modelling at an art college about nine months ago. I had thought about it beforehand and decided that modelling was a way of shattering the stereotyped images that are held of women. In simplistic terms women do have body hair, they don't have inverted stomachs and they are people, not merely sex objects.

Most of the time I found myself working with women. I found the atmosphere calm and relaxing. We spent hours talking about the work they were doing, they all became quite concerned about the female images they were presenting and started thinking a lot about how they themselves were presented in art.

As time went by, I became more and more uncomfortable every time a man came into the room. On one occasion a tutor came into the room. I felt so ill at ease with him being there that I just had to leave, making the excuse that I needed the loo. I could not go back until he had left.

in this situation, I felt totally weak and helpless. I knew with all my heart that I did not want him there, but could find no justification for asking him to leave. After all, he was doing his job. I feel this illustration is a situation every woman has found herself in throughout her whole life. A woman finds herself in a situation she cannot reasonably escape from, 'reasonably' being the operative word. In a society like ours, logic and reasons are the only acceptable terms on which someone is allowed to express themselves.

On another occasion a male student asked if he could use me. I was waiting for someone else. A few moments later someone gave him a cassette. He was overjoyed and said 'Cor, isn't that a really sexy woman?' His comment shocked me. How on earth could he expect me to model for him if I knew that he could describe another woman like that. How could I be sure that he wasn't going to mentally rape me too? I couldn't. The other woman artist didn't need me so I left.

It was then that I realised that I could never model for another man again. I was naive to think that male artists were anything more than normal men, unable to dissociate themselves from the stereotyped image that they have of women and from what they consider the right to debase a woman any way they like.

The next afternoon another tutor came in requiring my services. I told him I would not model for his class. He seemed a bit confused and asked me why. I told him I did not like the way the students portrayed my body. The week before I had done the same class. They were supposed to be working with the body mass using clay. I couldn't quite understand why one male student had spent the entire lesson modelling my breasts. He asked me who the hell I was to make such subjective criticism. After all it was only my body! He then said I'd done it once before. He couldn't understand why I couldn't do it one more time. I still ask myself whether he's one of those men among many who believes any woman who is not a virgin can be raped, after all if she's been fucked once, it's not going to hurt her to be fucked again. Her feelings are irrelevant. What she wants to do is irrelevant, and anyway with a bit of persuasion a woman will change her mind.

By this time he was screaming at me. He told me I was getting paid for it and in not so many words informed me that during that time my mind and body were not my own.

Don't assume that this situation is by any means unique. this situation just sums up very well men's general behaviour to women. A woman's body is not her own. It has the right to be stared at, whistled at, hooted at, at any time no matter how she may feel about it. I left.

Children and revolution by Simon Smith.

How We Get From Here to There

Anarchy is here and now

Don't wait for the revolution. We can be anarchists today...

'THE ANARCHISTS ARE RIGHT IN EVERYTHING, in negation of existing order and in the assertion that without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a (violent) revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not ask governmental power for protection, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power ....

To use violence is impossible - one would only become its instrument. One course therefore remains - to fight the government by means of thought, speech, actions, life, neither yielding to government nor joining its ranks and thereby increasing its power.'

This passage by Tolstoy, written 85 years ago, is a valuable contribution that has arisen in (and thanks to) Green Anarchist on the question of Utopia and how to reach it. Just as the labels are confusing (gradualist / quietist / evolutionary / non-violent revolutionary) so too is this Utopia being discussed. The confusion arises not in the features this Utopia has - absence of authority, violence and capital - but in peoples' understanding of its nature: people persist in thinking of anarchy as a cloud cuckoo land that will arrive, no one quite knows how, at some time in the distant future. But anarchy is not some future Eden, anarchy is here and now. Anarchy has existed alongside the state since the beginning of history. Just as in every individual there are authoritarian and libertarian character traits, so in society there are - and always have been - authoritarian and libertarian situations.

'Throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposing tendencies, have been in conflict; the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the Imperial tradition and the Federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.' [Kropotkin]

Anarchy exists whenever people regularise their lives and solve their disputes without reference to authority; the Utopia anarchists imagine is simply when the libertarian tendency is more widespread than the authoritarian tradition. This interpretation of anarchy places emphasis on people putting their anarchist ideals into practice in their daily lives and trying to overcome their authoritarian character traits.

'The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.' [Gustav Landauer]

Anarchy can only stem from peoples' consciousness - it cannot be imposed by legislation or violence. If the people will not make their revolution, it cannot be made for them by anarchist MPs (a contradiction in terms and a monstrosity which should be banished from the pages of GA and every other anarchist paper) or by anarchist insurrectionaries. Consciousness is the key.

Non-violent revolution supposes a plan for action on three levels:

(1) Personal revolution - people ridding themselves of their authoritarian behaviour patterns and excluding the state from their lives (non co-operation, non payment of taxes, consumer boycotts, using alternative structures) living anarchy through your lifestyle. (2) Creation of alternative structures - whether this be wholefood co-ops, free schools, anti authoritarian alternatives to the state organs for welfare, child care, counselling, housing etc. (3) Non-violent resistance to the state - publicising and seeking to obstruct the state's plans both as individuals and in groups, using symbolic and direct action.

By becoming anarchists in our emotions as well as in our intellect, we will not alienate people from anarchism. Those who advocate revolutionary violence do. By offering an alternative to the authoritarian way of doing things, we can show people that anarchism really can work, that it is not utopian.

Wake up Mate, stop looking for Utopia. Anarchy is Here and Now!

by David Stephens

Cut the State's Lifeblood by David Brooks.

Revolution, reform by Brian Moseley

Stop Militarism by Dennis Gould.

Letters

Rainbow village signed Andy Fennel, Anne, Liz, Monica and Tony from Cloptpn near Kettering

On Pacifism, Jane of Emerald Gate, Greenham Common

Don't wait for the revolution, mark Kinzley, Ilford

Two questions by Senake Attygalle, Coventry

On Plastic Punks by Kris

Misc.

Potassium is good for you

Review: Tears in the Fence

Recipe: Roz's leek and onion flan, by Caroline Bradbury

Poem by Dennis Gould.

Cruise Watch

Snowball, Ride for cycle protest

May 30th Brighton 'Stop The City'.

Issue 6

Cover: Take Back The Land.

Date: May-Jun 1985

Read here

Editorial: Green Anarchism by Alan Albon.

UK News

Liberate Stonehenge

Burned-out: Some of the wrecked and abandoned vehicles left at the site after last summer’s festival at Stonehenge. Clearing us cost some £120,000

THE NATIONAL TRUST, English Heritage and Wiltshire County Council are still trying to prevent Stone-henge Free Festival. The Druids have been told they can’t have their ceremonies at the Stones at the dawn of the solstice. 50 hippies have been named in a precautionary injunction to keep them away.

Bunker Trashed

’a relic of outdated war games.’

The Budget

Non event at Molesworth?

What do mass demonstrations achieve?

20,000 people waded through the mud once round the empty airfield, got back into their buses and went home. Did we achieve anything? Class War got up everyone's noses but managed to throw mud onto Joan Ruddock, live on telly. Right on! At this point all publicity is good publicity.

Dennis Gould writes: CND's day out at Molesworth was an exercise for the police force co-ordination committees. Instead of being a four day camp site and four day march on Molesworth, it was a triumph for police crowd control.

Anyway, Molesworth For Life raised £6,000 for wheat to Eritrea, plus donations of wheat brought by coach and van from all over the country.

The Rainbow Village held a festival at Polebrook, not far from Oundle and Molesworth and sold copies of the 'Molesworth Bulletin' put together largely by Brig's efforts, with a lot of volunteers. The Peoples' Peace Camp survived Easter and took part in a vigil at 'Fire Gate' - the opposite end of Cockbrook Lane from Peace Corner.

The Peace Corner vigil attracted many more people and the Quaker Peace Caravan gave out lots of information and collected donations for the Wheat to Eritrea fund. And a lot of people found out what security and surveillance was really like!

World News

Aussie scene by Alan Albon

Grain fails to help Sudan Puppet.

We are their problem. It's not the drought, It's our arms, by David Brooks.

Essays

Take back the Land. The land is the source of all wealth... Mass Land Squat by Pete Brown.

Creative Action, by Tristan.

Letter to the state by Peanut

Every Six Seconds A Butcher is Bricked by Ian

Direct Action is what has made animal lib successful

Fable for the future by Ken.

Jackie Berkley accused the police of rape by Joanna

On April 19th 1984 Jackie Berkley was arrested for an alleged street disturbance in Manchester; she was thrown into a police van and taken, along with three other women, to Moss Side police station.

Between 7.00 and 7.30 that evening, Jackie was raped by two policemen, while being held down by two police women. Later in the evening she was beaten and throughout Jackie and the two other women were racially abused..

I went for several days to the trial in Manchester Magistrates Court. These are just a few thoughts and feelings I wrote down while in court.

Thursday March 7th. These men surround us and they say women are lying; they rape us and infiltrate our bodies and our minds and then they say we lie when we fight back.

A woman from Rape Crisis in London is giving evidence for the defence on the reactions of women after rape and often the delay in reporting the rape. She says it is no wonder women don't report rapes because they have to convince men and the law that they have been raped. Why should women have to put yet more energy into the male system - and yet if they don't the rapist goes free. Jackie is supposed to have made a false allegation of rape: how can they believe that she is going to put herself through this hell again and again - surrounded by men, surrounded by men in uniforms.

It makes me want to hit out, to hurt those men surrounding Jackie; how dare they treat women like this? Jackie is on trial for being raped; I feel so helpless; how can it be like this?

The prosecution is trying its best to discount the evidence from Rape Crisis because she hasn't got a medical degree, so she isn't qualified, and yet she dealt with hundreds of rape victims. They are making an issue in Jackie's case about the fact that she didn't tell anyone of the rape until 5 days after it happened and yet 75.5% of rape cases never go to court. Often women only tell people years later; they are afraid to talk, ashamed. For Jackie, she found it much easier to write things than talk about what happened. rape destroys many womens' lives, and still men argue against us. Facts, it's all based on facts, not feelings, and they distort the facts to suit them. In the eyes of the law you are only a genuine rape victim if you go to court and the rapist is convicted.

Thursday 14th March. Jackie was found guilty of wasting police time; the magistrate said 'There is no evidence at all supporting what she says in any way. I am satisfied the defendant knows she was not raped.' She was also found guilty of assaulting three policewomen, using threatening behaviour and damaging two policewomens' uniforms.

Jackie suffered the ultimate violation of self, apart from murder, and yet she is to be prosecuted. There is so much anger inside myself and other women against such a system.

At the end of it, it all come down to Jackie being Black and a woman - what chance has she, and what must she feel now, and for the rest of her life?

Joanna

Anarchy, tax cuts and the poor by Tim Eiloart.

Lao Tzu by Brian Morris

The first of a series on anarchist classics

It is difficult to describe what anarchism is. It is a kind of political philosophy. But it has no founder, no standard texts, no political party associated with it. And it is hardly ever discussed by philosophers themselves. As a political movement it is seen by historians as primarily a radical response to industrial capitalism, which developed in Europe towards the middle of the last century. Yet as a social perspective anarchism has a much longer history. Kenneth Rexroth, for example, in his book 'Communalism' traces the history and development of the many attempts that have been made throughout recorded history to establish an organic community based on non-coercive relationships. For that is what is meant by anarchy, not chaos or disorder. The aims and ideas behind these attempts - like that of the Digger movement - were always expressed through published writings - sermons, analects, dialogues, political tracts, mystical writings and the like. These writings of course have historical interest; but they are also important to us in helping us to formulate alternatives to the ideologies of contemporary capitalism - whether of the liberal or statist kind.

One of the earliest of such writings is the short mystical tract entitled 'Tao Te Ching'. It was written by a Chinese sage called Lao Tzu (the 'old philosopher') who is alleged to have lived around 500 BC and to have worked as an archivist. It is one of the earliest books ever written and you can find many translations of it in bookshops. It is considered by everyone to be a religious classic - a book on par with the Vedic scriptures or the Bible. It is described as one of the 'sacred books' of the world. Yet although its ideas are expressed in mystical, even poetic aphorisms it is not really a religious text at all: It is a political tract .... though no political scientist, as far as I am aware, has ever directly faced the issues that Lao Tzu poses. For 'Tao Te Ching' is essentially a text by a scholar giving advice to an imaginary ruler on how best to govern and keep order within the kingdom. And the advice that Lao Tzu gives the ruler is paradoxically that the best form of government is NO government, that the best form of rule is one that leaves the people to order their own lives spontaneously. 'Without law or compulsion', Lao Tzu says, 'people would dwell in harmony.'

'Tao Te Ching' is undoubtedly a classic; but it also happens to be the oldest and most easily available text on anarchism. It is well worth reading. For in memorable phrases it cogently outlines the basic premises of the libertarian tradition.

It advocates an ecological attitude towards nature, suggesting that humans should order their lives so as to be in harmony with the underlying processes of the living world (Tao); it expresses an antipathy towards moralizing, towards ritual observances and piety, and towards the stress on hierarchy that was so much a part of the Confucian ethic - an ethic that was supportive of ancient feudalism: It suggests an attitude towards the world that is both naturalistic and life affirming, and it is unique among religious texts in lacking any reference to a divinity or a set of rules to follow, or to rituals to perform, and finally it offers a consistent critique of militarism, unnecessary wealth, acquisitiveness, prisons, capital punishment, laws and coercive government. The philosophy it expresses is social anarchism; the ideal it propounds is that of an ecological, decentralized community. But in no sense was Lao Tzu an ascetic, or a scholarly recluse, or someone who advocated inertia, laissez-faire or mere passivity.

There is an interesting story about the founders of the three religions of China. One day they stood around a jar of vinegar. In turn they tested it. Confucius, it is said, pronounced it sour. Buddha found it bitter, but Lao Tzu, as a Taoist, declared it sweet. Life was sweet to Lao Tzu, but only if lived in harmony with nature, spontaneously, and without laws and coercive constraints.

Bertrand Russell's interesting book, 'Roads to Freedom' has a quotation from Lao Tzu as a preface. Better than anything else, it sums up the philosophy of 'Tao Te Ching', and so may serve to conclude this piece.

Brian Morris

NHS Cold Turkey. Doctors ignore the addictive effects of tranquillisers, by Pat Britten.

Letters

Re Greenham Common and the psychiatrisation of dissent by Jim

Solidarity from America by Johnny Cook.

Misc.

Page 19. Record review Akimbo

Book review, Easy Vegan Cooking

New Mags: Black Beast, Here and Now, The Mole

Film review: A Private Function

Gardens: Allotments

Vegan Bread recipe by Caroline Bradbury

Migraine cure

Camden Peace Centre announcement.

Events

Festivals 1985, Green roadshow

Ad for poster. 'Fraudulent Cold War!'

Issue 7

Cover: The collusion of state and industry.

Date: Jul-Aug 1985

Keywords: Stonehenge; Henley; radioactivity; nuclear power; industrialism; education; Diggers; Winstanley.

Read here

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Editorial: The Real Hooligans, editorial by Alan Albon

Last week we buried Dick in the only space he could call his own. After being made redundant from a naval dockyard, he was found collapsed in the street. Housed by a charity, he lived for some years in relative comfort. Then he caught pneumonia. He could not be treated as his lungs were so scarred by asbestos from his years of faithful service.

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We feature an important book in this issue, [Rosalie Bertell, 'No Immediate Danger'] an unanswerable case against the nuclear state as each day adds to the danger of the human race of gradually increasing background radiation. There is no doubt that legal violence in the modern world makes all other sources of violence pale into insignificance. It is evident that the State with its well-paid blue mercenaries is prepared to go to any lengths to stamp out opposition expressed as wanting to live in a different way from the flawed values of the monetary society, or opposition to the finality of nuclear war.

It is time that the frustration and alienation that is expressed in acts of violence against our fellows is redirected against the real hooligans like Rio Tinto Zinc, multinationals raping other peoples' land for raw materials in the first link in the nuclear chain.

We have paramilitary police thugs who have no sense of social responsibility, little understanding of the paramount social issues of the day and will do exactly what those that direct them say.

Hitler had his legal thugs to enforce his deplorable policies. A similar force is being created here. Humbug and Hypocrisy are the two most prevalent features of British politics, like those who preside over our courts, those bewigged buffoons, who protect the powerful and wealthy and perpetuate a state of robbery with legalised violence.

Alan Albon

The State's Brute Violence

Rerun of Issue 6 Essay.

Class War 'bash the rich' march

Rabid dogs liberated

Eccleshill 13, Molesworth.

Page 5 Picnic. Menwith, Swindon, Mayor of Bedford 'shot'.

Page 6 Australia, Germany, Antarctic, billboard detournement

Even the animals know about Mutual Aid.

Page 7. Free theatre in India by Barlal Sircar

Military grip in Indonesia, by Jon Englart.

Page 8 Grasping life. Anarchy Now!

Page 9. Football clubbed by Dennis Gould

Way Behind, report of BASF sponsored symposium on food.

Page 10 Poison in Bhopal. Lifted Fifth Estate article.

Page 11. Cover up on Union Carbide, by Tomas MacSheoin.

Page 12 Radiation Poison. The Nuclear Industry is Poisoning the World. Review of Rosalie Bertell book, by Norman Albon.

Page 13 Cover Up. The Government is suppressing the facts, by Norman Albon.

Page 14 Better School, (on A S Neil, Summerhill) by David Stephens.

Page 15 Or No Schools? Patrick Holdsworth.

Are We Socialists? by Richard Hunt

Page 16. Winstanley, by Brian Morris.

Page 17. Letters Cutting Taxes by Chris from Streatham

Actions in Basingstoke by Carlton

Gradualism and a broad range of opinion by Graham of Southend

Help with fines, bust fund

BLBF of Chesterfield.

Page 18. Info for gigs

Reviews

Venezia by David Koven

Blythe Power

Conflict

Flux, Danbert Nobacon

Autumn Poison Reviewed by Marcus

'When we Build Again' by Colin Ward, reviewed by Tristan

Vegan Custard recipe by Caroline Bradbury

Cheltenham group formed.

Page 20 Henley Regatta

'Revenge the Henge, Bash The Rich' demo.

Revenge the Henge - Bash The Rich Demo

Very little bashing went on. There were loads of people dressed straight so it was hard to tell the numbers exactly. The police had reacted 'Stop The City' style with 2000 of them on duty with a very high profile, riot vans lined up down the main road, though they were pretty tame (too public, I suppose for the Henge-type 'community policing')

Some actions I heard about: Some punks stole a yacht anchor, a biker laid into a Henry on the bridge, a big chant session near the bridge, police lining the road, shoulder to shoulder for 200 yards, definitely a new spectacle for Henley, graffitying of posh places by well dressed anarchs, general hassling of the rich.

Some were disappointed at the lack of violence, but apart from other reasons, the chance of escape from Henley for punks after any riots would have been nil.

Whether it was a success or not depends on what you think the point was. To me it is enough to attack the rich for being rich while this country is in a terrible recession, especially as it is largely the fault of these people in the first place. A second reason though, would be propaganda by the deed, trying to make people see the connection between recession and the class control of the economy, rather than blaming it on unions, blacks, communists, video nasties etc.

If it failed anywhere it was in the lack of communication between us and the ordinary people who were there. A lot of them must have come away thinking pretty badly of us because we didn't explain ourselves better . at all.

An old quote: 'The worst recessions never enter the best restaurants.'

Well, they do now!

Festivals, events.

Issue 8

Cover: Black flag of anarchism. Simple, stark illustration.

Date: Sep-Oct 1985

Keywords: Repression; Italian Punk; Handsworth.

Read here

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Editorial: :: The indivisible war.

Page 3. Handsworth burns

Euro green gathering

Brambles, Raid Aid.

A nation's economic power is not its supply of natural resources but its CHEAP supply of natural resources, on which it can make its profit, the surplus value, to make individuals rich, or to build libraries or prisons. The natural resources are burnt (fuel) turned into sewage (food), turned into rags (cloth) or turned into scrap. They create no wealth. The economic power lies only in the difference between the buying price to the producer and the selling price to the consumer.

Page 4 South Africa in Revolt

US bank leaves South America

Oil War

Norwegian secrets trial.

Page 5 Government Terrorism

French agents sink 'Rainbow Warrior'

Tahitian jailed

Nuclear Free South Pacific, Farm War

Canadian spent fuel to US

Berlin fun parade, Copenhagen anti police state camp, news.

French Agents sink 'Rainbow Warrior'

To a chorus of hilarious disbelief, a French government inquiry has announced that the French secret service (DGSE) did not sink 'Rainbow Warrior'.

'Rainbow Warrior' was waiting in New Zealand to lead and act as a supply ship for a flotilla of smaller boats going to Mururoa Atoll to protest at French nuclear testing. It was sunk in Auckland harbour by two limpet mines, killing one of the crew.

Two French agents are now in custody in New Zealand. Three others left New Zealand for Konakry (New Caledonia) where they had hired their boat, but never arrived. They have since turned up in France having scuttled the boat.

The French government carried out this bombing to try to prevent the anti-nuclear demo at Muroroa Atoll. Another boat is on its way to replace 'Rainbow Warrior'.

Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaine are now both saying that it is an open secret that two French army swimmers attached the mines. Mitterand has been caught covering up.

Page 6 Techniques of Repression. For 17 years now, Northern Ireland has been the training ground for the British state's counter insurgency techniques, by Class War.

For 17 years now Northern Ireland has been the training ground for the British State's counter insurgency techniques.

On a recent visit to Ireland Arthur Scargill told an audience of Irish people that the miners' strike of 1984 had shown Britain for what it really is, a vicious police state. Roars of laughter greeted the spectacle of an English person coming to Ireland to tell the Irish that they live in a police state. For 17 years now Northern Ireland has been the training ground and the Irish working class the guinea pigs for the British state's counter insurgency techniques.

.... Since 1972 the British state has been able to erect the full apparatus of a totalitarian state here in Northern Ireland in the name of 'a war against terrorism', ie a war against the catholic working class. 'Totalitarian' is no exaggeration. The typical catholic housing estate here has an army barracks / fortress in the middle of it, keeping a close surveillance of everyone on the estate with close circuit TV cameras, infra red cameras for night vision and a radar system which can detect anyone moving out of sight of electronic eyes in cameras. Helicopters hover overhead for most of the day with zoom in cameras, and telephone of anyone 'discontented' is tapped and their mail opened.

Now working class housing estates are built according to a British army architect's specification. They are designed to give minimum room for civil disobedience and maximum room for the British army to step in to crush any outbreaks. Housing estates are built with only one exit / entrance so anyone causing trouble can be easily trapped inside; each block is a different colour or shade, and army helicopters have a special colour code of the estate so that any block or single house can be quickly and easily pin pointed from the air. The pavements of the new estates are tarmac so they can't be ripped up for bricks for a riot; the roads leading into the estates are specially reinforced (some are fly-overs) to take large convoys of armoured cars and Saracens moving into the estate at first signs of a disturbance. This is not paranoia. This is fact - this housing policy has been part of British colonial rule for decades. Estates on the mainland may even now be designed in this way in case of future unrest.

Daily, the estates old and new are patrolled by British soldiers and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But more threatening than that, the undercover SAS, totally ruthless legal assassins walk our streets. They strike the most fear into people here. They work alongside the loyalist Protestant paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, to assassinate suspects, mainly at sight. By day they walk catholic estates, dressed like ordinary working class Catholics speaking with a N. I. accent. I have had several SAS men pointed out to me, otherwise I wouldn't have known. They look just like us and speak just like us. The one difference is that they are primed to blow our heads off if we do anything suspicious. people have been shot dead here for painting graffiti on a wall. A lot of the police and local army here are part-timers and in their other jobs as milkmen, breadmen and insurance men etc they keep close watch on the housing estates and note down everything they see.

Once we move out of our estates, we are still under heavy surveillance for the biggest computer system in Western Europe is here in Northern Ireland and can keep track of the daily movements of almost every car in N.I. and carry detailed information on almost every citizen (right down to colour and design of wall paper). There is a special driving licence which is more or less an identity card.

....The law here is (in the words of Britain's leading expert on counter insurgency himself), 'little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public'. Permanent emergency laws have been the norm here since 1922, giving the police unlimited powers of arrest and detention, and like everything else, laws have been used indiscriminately to intimidate and frighten anyone engaged in any form of protest. The courts in N.I. are jury less, with one judge who can pass sentence on the word of a cop alone, or a confession that was beaten out of you, or on the word of a highly paid informer who is schooled by the police with all the information they have in their computers.

The army barracks and police stations here are modern torture chambers where every form of torture has been used to get confessions and produce informers (informers are deadly to any cause) In 1971 an experiment was carried out here on twelve men to see how quickly a man can be broken psychologically. Hoods were placed over their heads by the British army. They were dressed in boiler suits and made to stand spread eagled against a wall balancing on their fingertips till they collapsed from exhaustion (to be repeated again as soon as they recovered). While they stood in this position for hours, they were bombarded with white noise and beaten and kicked if they moved at all. This went on for 4 or 5 days. The human guinea pigs weren't given any food or drink or allowed to go to the bog. At intervals they were taken up in a helicopter and told they were going to be chucked out hundreds of feet up. They were thrown out, but only when the helicopter was a few feet off the ground (but with hoods on they weren't to know this). After 5 days of this barbarity most of the 12 were psychologically destroyed for life, made into nervous wrecks. In less than a week. The 12 were not IRA men. They were randomly chosen by the British government for this experiment in what is known as 'sensory deprivation', a modern torture which leaves not physical but mental scars.

.....The prototype English Bobby has never been seen here. The RUC has been a military style colonial police force since NI was set up in 1921. They have been driving round in armoured cars, armed to the teeth with the latest machine guns and other weaponry since that date. Since 1969 the RUC have been ruling NI in a joint military dictatorship with the British army. The only thing that tells them apart is the uniform, for the RUC is trained by the British army, have their own SAS style killer squads, and now work with the SAS independent of the army. If the police thuggery during the miners' strike looked menacing, then be prepared for more of the same in larger amounts, for the RUC are training your British police - every superintendent has to do a tour of duty here with the RUC.....

The cleverest weapon of all though, in the armoury of the British state is not the massive repressive power of the army, the SAS and computer technology, but the most subtle form of repression that exists - media brainwashing. If you thought that media distortion during the miners' strike was powerful, then you have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

There is strict censorship in the media on Ireland, it must present the British state's version of the war here or else. Just a few of the myths that the British media daily regurgitates about Ireland is that there isn't a war going on here at all, it's an age old religious feud between rival religious maniacs ('The Troubles'); the army are here doing the best job they can keeping the peace and preventing a bloodbath, and the IRA are a relatively small gang of pathological killers and mafia godfathers holding a whole society in a vice grip of terror. All of these myths are total rubbish but are widely believed on the mainland (and therefore responsible for most of the deaths here). The truth can't get through because the media gives very little space to Ireland, the only news it will report is the same daily catalogue of shootings and bombings. It deliberately does not report the reasons for or background to each incident and avoids giving any historical information on Ireland.

I hope then, that we have given you some warning of what the British state will throw at you if you succeed in creating a mass movement of civil disobedience like the one here. It should be clear now that during the miners' strike, the British state only revealed a little of its hand. Maybe you know this already ... If however, after all this you still think that the British state will never turn its guns on you as it did (and is still doing) on us, then you are truly fucked. For the British army will have to leave, or be driven out of here some day, and guess where the next stop is?

This is a shortened version of a paper presented to the 'Class War' rally in London, in July 1985

Page 7. The Class Struggle

Theory and Tactics

The British working class, without land, depends for its necessities of life on the exploitation of the peasants of the Third World, who are dying of starvation because their land is being used to grow crops for the workers of the industrial countries,. (Cotton, one fifth of the world's entire farm land, jute, rubber, vegetable oil, fruit, beans, soya, meat etc.)

While the bosses have always exploited the urban artisans, those artisans have always been dependent on the exploitation of the peasants of the city's hinterland. Today, our hinterland is the Third World.

To recognise that the artisan exploits the peasant is to undermine the whole theory and strategy of those who concentrate on 'The Class Struggle'. Since the exploited British working class is also the exploitation of the Third World, it is unlikely that the working class will take any revolutionary initiative. Theoretically we must expect and support, Third World revolution before a British revolution...

Tactically it is a mistake to try to find revolutionaries in the British working class. Any revolutionaries will be found amongst the unemployed, not at the work place.

Because it disproves the conventional 'Class Struggle' theories and strategies every effort is made to marginalise Green Anarchism by harping on about our odd aspects like hair dos and brown rice and our unsounder, holier than thou aspects like 'lifestyle'.. For the same reasons they underplay world pollution and resource depletion which also falsify their theories of industrialism. They'll try to ignore the awkward basic issues. It's up to you to bring them to their attention.

Green Anarchist

Page 8. Fuck art, let's dance.

Page 9 Italian punk, by Giacomo Oliva.

pages 10 - 11 Triangle of Corruption poster.

Page 12. Death in the Countryside, by Arabella Melville and Colin Johnson.

Page 12. American plans for domination.

Page 14 Anarcho-Syndicalism.

Page 15. Godwin. One of the first writers to offer a consistent outline of anarchist thought, by Brian Morris.

One of the first writers to offer a consistent outline of anarchist thought.

'Hidden away in some old library', writes one biographer of William Godwin, you might one day come across the weighty volumes of 'Political Justice', a work as obscure now as its author.' But there was a time, he continues, when Godwin was the most famous and notorious writer in the land. Times change: yet Godwin in spite of his obscurity is still not forgotten.

Godwin was born in 1756 near Kings Lynn. Early on he became a non-conformist minister like his father. But he soon abandoned the Church, adopted atheism, and after trying his hand as a tutor, eventually became a freelance journalist. His main interests were education and politics. In 1789 came the outbreak of the French revolution, an event that was to change the face of Europe. Godwin sympathised with the aims of the revolution, though he recoiled from the violence of the subsequent 'terror' for he was always to argue against the violent overthrow of governments. But while political reaction set in all over Europe, Godwin always remained true to the radical spirit of the revolution, to its cry for liberty, equality and fraternity.

It was during the tense atmosphere of this revolution that Godwin wrote his philosophical treatise on 'Political Justice'. It was published in 1793. Its message was even more radical than Tom Paine's famous 'Rights of Man' published two years earlier. It is said that the Cabinet considered prosecution, but the Prime Minister William Pitt declared that as it cost 3 guineas it was hardly likely to reach the labouring classes and thus foment revolution. Nevertheless Godwin's study was widely read and discussed, and his outspoken enthusiasm for truth and liberty made him famous, or rather infamous. Many attempts were made to ridicule the study, or as Godwin put it, 'bring into disrepute the truths I have endeavoured to propagate.'

Godwin's 'Enquiry Concerning Political Justice' is a complex book. In his excellent study of its underlying philosophy John Clark describes Godwin as a consistent exponent of 'hedonistic utilitarianism'. This means that Godwin set himself the problem of trying to determine by rational argument what kind of society was most useful and most conducive to the promotion of human pleasure and happiness. He was no dreamer, and was well aware of the fact that history was little more than a 'record of crimes'. He argued in the book five essential themes:

(1) That human beings are not by nature either good or bad. There is no 'original sin' in us. We are what we are largely because of our circumstances.

(2) To attain a happy and free life we must be honest and truthful. How do we know what is true? By following the dictates of reason which is common to all people. This means discussion; relying on proof not on power, on argument not on authority, on openness not on deception.

(3) In a world where reason prevailed Godwin felt that justice too would be promoted. Justice was not just a matter of equity or fairness but the attainment of an ethical society in which disinterested benevolence was widely practiced. If you followed reason, Godwin argued, you would do good to all people equally, as befits their needs, aspirations and abilities.

(4) These premises led Godwin to argue that in a society private property will no longer exist, nor wealth for these only foster vice, envy, robbery and war. Nor will there be any coercive government, along with their laws, courts and prisons - for all these are contrary to justice. He makes a critique of all existing forms of government, as well as the bases of political authority - whether it be sheer force, social contract or divine right. All governments, he wrote, correspond in some degree to what the Greeks called 'tyranny'. Thus the only rational form of government for Godwin was no government at all -- ANARCHY.

(5) Godwin argues that just as there had been progress in scientific understanding so their could be improvement in human society, and in the moral status of individuals. But true progress would come about in the moral status of individuals. But true progress would come about not by violent means but only through education - moral persuasion and political reforms. Godwin rejected the use of force and violence, rather than promoting progress, he said, they actually hindered it.

Reason, truth, liberty, justice, progress, happiness - all these are intimately connected in Godwin's thought. many have described his philosophy as 'utopian' and Godwin has been labelled an 'armchair anarchist' whose 'political justice', while providing a blueprint of an ideal society, offers no viable political strategy. There is no doubt some truth in these criticisms. But importantly, though Godwin never called himself an anarchist, he was one of the first writers to offer a consistent outline of anarchist though, to argue through the need for a decentralised, libertarian society. This vision still has contemporary relevance and it was a vision taken up by later anarchists who as George Woodcock wrote, added the dimension of action' to his philosophical arguments.

Brian Morris

Page 16. Book reviews

The art of aromatherapy, Robert Tisserand, C W Daniel

Hay Fever, Colin Johnson and Dr Arabella Melville

The Slow Burning Fuse by John Quail

The lost history of British Anarchists, by John Quail. Paladin / Granada

**[Review published in Green Anarchist, issue 8, September October 1985, page 16]*

There comes a time for every anarchist when the idea of engaging in a full and frank discussion with the entire Tory Cabinet assisted only by a loaded Kalashnikov AV-45 and two spare grenades is not without appeal. Similar ideas have also occurred to anarchists in the past, but reading this excellent book, a history of the anarchist movement from 1880 - 1930, has convinced me of the basic uselessness of violence as a tactic in Britain.

'The only way to contemplate the future is to have constantly before you the examples of the past.'

TACTICS: These seem to have changed little over the past 100 years and with the exclusion of most radical ideas from media overkill, it looks like staying that way for the next 100. Pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, conferences, riots, mass rallies, picnics, squatting, meetings, even 'Stop the City' demos have their ancestors in the West End riots during the winter of 1885 / 6. There are differences though; street speaking has died away to be replaced by the political busker and street theatre (I feel that street theatre must go beyond mere spectacle to the point where a stage performance on the street becomes indistinguishable, for the onlooker, from a real spontaneous 'happening'). Flyposting has become more radical too; where it used only to advertise meetings and events, today it states its message first, often combined with striking visuals, and advertises meetings etc, second. In reaction to the colonising of our streets by the advertisers, graffiti has come into its own.

Where in the 1880s it was possible to directly heckle politicians ....

'If you want to know what the Conservative Party has done for the working man look -''

'...inside the workhouse!'

'British working men are being thrown out of jobs by foreign dumping. If we tax those imports the workers will -'

'....pay!'

Now politicians have become so remote and well defended, that for the average anarchist without access to Spitting Image type media, the aerosol spray paint can is one of the most effective ways to subvert the media voice of the state. It's not vandalism, it's reclaiming our streets and access to media all rolled into one.

SIMILARITIES: While reading this book, I kept coming across passages like this ...

'A dispute involving seventy men in a seam in one pit spread like wild fire through the whole Combine, involving 12,000 miners. However, the engine men below and the winding men on the surface (in unions separate from the South Wales Miners Federation) stayed at work and the employers as a result attempted to continue to run the mines ... and the direct outcome of that was the police being sent there and later the military - result: riots, trouble of considerable character, the fight still on because of the incompleteness of the fight on the men's side, consequent on sectional unionism' - so said Tom Mann at the time. Miners were fired on at Tonypandy by the troops and many clashes took place. It was not until August 1911 that the men were starved into submission.

1886 or 1961, 1911, or 1985? The past has interesting things to say to the present.

EARLY WOMENS' MOVEMENT: It seems to me that very little effort was made by anarchists to work with the Suffragettes and other womens' groups in an attempt to show them the folly of 'parliamentary action' (though perhaps this would have been the wrong thing to do at the time) But even if the anarchists had wanted to do that, they would have found it difficult. Then, as now, most seemed to be men with a vision of white, male, working class as the creators and holders of revolution.

This book made me aware of the split in Socialism and Anarchism circa 1850. It seems that before then they were pretty much the same thing. [See Christopher Hampton, 'A Radical Reader - The Struggle for change in England, 1381 - 1914, but don't trust him after 1850 as he only follows the Socialist struggle and disregards the Anarchists from then on].

Any history book has its defects, it cannot give the feeling of being swept along by events, or tell how demoralised and frustrated anarchists must have felt during the long quiet years. But even so, it's a good book. Read it!

Dave, Stratford on Avon.

The allergy of diet Records: Hagar the Womb, The Mekons, Ring

New mags: Clydesider, All Systems Go! Tribal Messenger

Recipe: Vegan pizza by Caroline Bradbury.

Page 18. Letters

Leave them alone! against patronising attitudes towards the Third World by Alistair Danter, Swaziland

Letter against violence and Class War by Malc of Derby GA's

Support Gus by Clydeside Anarchists

On Eskimoes eating meat by Sekemarma of Sheffield

Against Speciesism by Ms Paddy Broughton of North Harrow

US Soya beans by Jennifer Wallace, Totnes

Letter against Jailing peace protesters, Kris Dunstable.

Page 19 Coming up festivals and demos

SCAR - Student Campaign for Animal Rights.

Page 20 Molesworth

'Justice is not interested in a little thing like evidence' No water cannons

Hiroshima Day, Snowball trial, Sizewell

CALL raid, Liverpool LDAG

Issue 9. November, December 1985, January 1986.

Cover: 'A' in a circle.

Date: Nov 1985-Jan 1986

Keywords: Stonehenge; heroin; drugs; cannabis; Proudhon.

Read here

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Editorial: 'Individualism or mutualism?' editorial by Alan Albon.

News

Stonhenge, public order bill

Forced confessions

Deer cull

Tree deaths, green gathering.

Page 4 Indian women replant trees

Geneva

Nicaragua on the turn

Bhopal

Nimbin Hippie Town.

Page 5 Athens anarchist demo

US needs raw materials

Paris

Tanzania, Aborigine Women.

Page 6 Police harassment of the anti apartheid rally in London, by Ann Archy of Colchester.

Page 7 Don't Let Greenham Die by Jill Robson.

Page 8 How the Stonehenge Free Festival Grew, by Mike Stand

Smack and dope, article against heroin by Dice George.

Page 10 - 11. 'The Biggest Bastard in the Universe' poster by Richard Hunt.

Page 12 Proudhon by Brian Morris.

Page 13 Rip Off by Richard Hunt.

Page 14 Grain and Energy by Krozz

Travellers by Mr O' Smith.

Page 15. Music

The Pogues. songs of Praise, the Poison Girls

So Long Trouble, Akimbo

Do Not Go, Jane Gregory

Act of Love, Eve Libertine

Defenders of the Lie, Slave Dance

Conflict 'The Battle Continues', Chumbawumba 'Revolution', Blythe Power Chevy Chase

Reviews by Nik and Marcus.

Page 16 Book reviews

Vegan Cookery by Eva Batt

Stonehenge by John Mitchell, Riff Raff Poets

The Brotherhood book on Freemasonry by Stephen Knight

The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin reviewed by Alan Albon

Recipes: Hazelnut Pie, Festive Cake, Mince Pies, by Caroline Bradbury.

**Murray Bookchin, Cheshire Books, £6:95p*

For those of us committed anarchists who have rejected the simplistic Marxist bias of much anarchist thinking, this book is a major contribution to anarchist thought. The same attitudes that have supported the domination of human by human include also the domination of nature.

Bookchin, with great clarity traces the history of human behaviour and why the domination of one section of humanity by another has arisen. The dangers that increased technical power have put into that hands of hierarchical society is the rape of the natural world has sounded alarm bells far beyond the anarchist movement. It is for anarchists to point out that these problems are inherent in the nature of our society.

Bookchin points out that the idea that man (the male has always been the main motivation in this idea) is by destiny there to dominate nature has only b recently been a widespread feature of human society. To pre-literate and primitive cultures this idea is alien even still in those that have escaped the march of so-called civilised society.

The mutuality and communalism that Kropotkin proposed in the face of Victorian use of Darwinian theories in order to back up the existing social order ... it is the development of these ideas and concern about the living world that Bookchin does so well in this book.

It is a large and complex work, but, being comprehensive, it requires close reading in order to give the book its stature in the annals of modern anarchist literature. No doubt many will say that it is too intellectual, but we have to understand where we are and, more important, where other people are in order to get our ideas across.

As a person Bookchin is a propagandist par excellence in the ability to meet people and reach some understanding. There are many who are beginning to question the nature of our society. There are all too many who accept their role in society and have been thoroughly socialised in that role.

He points out that the gerontocracy in which old men sit on top of a caste system having lost the powers of youth and gained the cunning of age, a caste system in which women have been a lower class in the lower classes. The patriarchal family which affirms the social base of hierarchic society has replaced the communalised structure of pre-literate societies.

In the book the notable eruptions against growing domination are recalled. The book ends: 'Civilisation as we know it today is more mute than the nature for which it professes to speak and more blind than the elemental forces it professes to control. Indeed 'civilisation' lives in hatred of the world around it and in grim hatred of itself. Its gutted cities, wasted lands,, poisoned air and water, and mean spirited greed constitute a daily indictment of its odious morality. A world so demeaned may well be beyond redemption, at least within the terms of its own institutional and ethical framework. The flames of Ragnarok purified the world of the Norsemen. The flames that threaten to engulf our planet may leave it hopelessly hostile to life - a dead witness to cosmic failure. If only because this planet's history, including its human history, has been so full of promise, hope and creativity, it deserves a better fate than what seems to confront it in the years ahead.' [Murray Bookchin, page 366]

Alan Albon

Letters

On Class Struggle by A Revolutionary Anarchist

TVAM, Manchester

D Dane, London

On the Third World by Dave of Stratford on Avon.

Letters praising GA by Laura Biding of Nottingham

Mark Clifton of Rugeley

Misc.

On Greenham, Liz of Crickhowell, Powys Coming up events.

News

Faslane, Nuclear Free Pacific, green top milk, Norwich Aftermath, Birmingham 8 Conspiracy Charges, Kuldip Dhoot, founder member of the Oxford Green Anarchist group jailed

Issue 10

Cover: Young Latin American man with gun in waist belt.

Date: Feb-Mar 1986

Keywords: violence; Travellers; Spain 1918; South Africa; Thoreau.

Read here

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Editorial: Pieces of Silver by Alan Albon

The 'Pieces of Silver' editorial, Green Anarchist issue 10, Spring 1987, page 2, marked a decline in the magazine. It was an attack on the print workers, who were at that time engaged in a long-running and vicious dispute with Rupert Murdoch at Fortress Wapping. This editorial created a sectarian gulf between GA and class struggle anarchists.

[The editorial, signed Alan Albon, is reproduced on page 72 of 'Into the 1990s With Green Anarchist' - ISBN 0-9521226-4-2, Oxford, 1996]

THE PIECES OF SILVER

The printers who are accusing the people who are working in Murdoch's concentration camp to print the rubbish they have been printing for years, of accepting Judas thirty pieces, should consider their own responsibilities.

The popular press can hardly be said to have contributed to a balanced discussion of the problems that humanity has to face. Indeed it could be said that the media and the popular press have contributed to the situation in which these printers find themselves in which a pirate like Murdoch and his ilk are able to rape the world. Is it necessary to destroy forests to print this crap? I believe that Odhams Press at one time had a large trade union share in it, and one time was in a position to produce a paper that could discuss serious issues. 'Freedom' our contemporary, was at one time printed by an ordinary printer, but owing to the fact that they could only afford to do the artwork voluntarily, the printers refused to print it. So they lost the printing work. The alternative press not only has to deal with the censorship imposed by the distribution magnates but also the print workers.

Advocates of real change suffer from the biased popular press that our printers have been content to print for years, which contributed to the type of attitudes of "I'm alright, Jack" that have made racism, destruction of the environment, starvation in the Third World more difficult to solve.

I was told the other day by an SWP supporter of the printers that they had no responsibility for what is printed in the papers. This is an attitude that has landed the world on the brink of ecological disaster or nuclear holocaust.

Alan Albon

News

Anti Police demo, Stoke Newington

Police versus Army

Stonehenge by Richie Cotterill.

Zapping at Greenham Common

Strong signals of up to one hundred times the normal background level of electro-magnetic radiations have been detected on a number of occasions. They are almost certainly capable of producing harmful effects on human beings.

Although high signal levels are to be expected near a military base, the highest signals found are some ten times above anything we have recorded on the same instruments at other sites.

We have also found that the strongest signals generally appear at those places where the women say they have suffered ill effects, and they followed a well defined path. Strong signals recorded on one occasion near the green gate were found to cover the womens' encampment but stop abruptly at the edge of the road leading up to the gate. The signals were also absent in the area around the nearby house.

The strength of the signals has also been found on occasion to reflect the activity of the women. Signals at scarcely more than the background level have been found to increase rapidly when the women start a demonstration.

Electronics For Peace

Westland

Sellafield union warfare? Class War split.

Marcos clings on

Uganda, Haiti, Multi fibre agreement, Spain and NATI

Anarchism in France.

Page 6 Germany

Vanishing greens by Gernot Lennert

South Africa's revolt is growing.

Page 7. On violence

Why are you reading this? by Richard Benson?

Page 8. Spreading the Word in Andalucia in 1918. J Diaz del l Moral.

Page 9 Anarcho-Syndicalism

Direct Action movement by George. Should we join?

Page 10. New Age gypsies

The Travellers Skool

In 1983 both Festival Welfare Services (FWS) and the Green Collective were concerned for the welfare of the growing numbers of young children at festivals. Both attempted to encourage safe and stimulating play spaces to cater for their needs. FWS helped to establish a 'Play Project' for Stonehenge '84, and in the same year the Green Roadshow took creative workshops to some 20 events and has continued its work since then. Many of the more commercial and established festivals now provide facilities for children; some have permanent play sites and have an appropriate budget. But with 'free' and 'low budget' festivals where there is often no provision at all, the situation has become more extreme.

In 1983 the concern was, as FSW put it 'not only for the large numbers of children of young unemployed families from inner cities, but particularly for the children of a group of about 350 people who spend their summer travelling from festival to festival.' Since then, this number has doubled each year. As time passes, so the children of the festivals grow older and the need for play provision has to extend to more educational and stimulating activities.

DOWN WITH SKOOL

Within the travelling community there are a number of children who do not take part in state education at all. This is as much due to the transient nature of their life style as to their parents' view of state education, which is generally seen as inappropriate to the needs of their children growing up in a world in crisis (under the present system of economic priorities state education is as doomed as the starving in the Third World). Schools are not seen as responding fast enough to the increasing speed of change of the world into which they are educating their pupils to go.

Life 'on the road' for many children is both fascinating and hard, making immediate demands on their resourcefulness; they learn by experience to deal with a wide variety of people and situations. At each new site there is a different environment to explore, offering endless educational possibilities in terms of ecology, geography, history, science, technology and sociology. Within the travelling community (and especially at festivals) there are people with a wide range of skills, knowledge and enthusiasms which they would be more than willing to share; but these potentials for more formal (conceptual) learning are rarely realised. Mostly this is due to lack of resources, energy and continuity caused by the pressures of travelling, poverty and harassment. What is needed is a communal space into which activities can be focused.

A MOBILE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE

At a meeting of concerned travellers and welfare groups at the Festival Forum for a Future in September last year, the Travellers' Skool Bus was conceived as a vehicle for appropriate education, adapting to the variety of situations in which it may be asked to function. We were all agreed on the nature of true education - flexible and child-centred - and the need to build an individually based system to reflect the multicultural society in which we now live.

We have found there to be a majority of travellers in support of this idea, and many parents and young volunteers would be keen to help get the project going and to be involved in the day to day running of the skool: that is so long as it is in keeping with their needs and was run by people who they trust. It would be possible to obtain some payment for expenses from festival organisers at commercial events, but at free / low budget events and winter sites, cash earnings would be limited to donations from people on site.

At a festival proper there is so much to see and do that the skool would almost certainly suspend regular activities for the duration.. In such an event the space could be used (along with an airy awning in front of the bus) as a safe play area, and as a place where visiting children and parents could see the work being done by the travelling children in arts, crafts, writing and even shows (as their parents do with their stalls, shows and life style). The period before and after the events are likely to be the times of least distraction, usually a week or so at either end, and it would be then that the children would be more open to skool work.

NEED FOR SUPPORT

Eventually we would hope to find permanent funding from the government education department, but at present there is not a category into which such an educational facility easily fits, as it crosses so many county and cultural boundaries. The closest links are with gipsy education, but this is a new idea, and would need to be founded on a broad base of support.

We would like your help in establishing such a school for the travellers' children, fitted out with work tops, cupboards, display space and equipment, to travel to appropriate festivals over the summer, and either tour the sites, or stay with one large settlement in the winter. It would be the responsibility of driver teachers to help to co-ordinate activities and focus project work, incorporating the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and communication, in order that the children can understand and express their discoveries.

Obviously, to establish such a project, we would need funds in order to purchase and equip the vehicle, as well as pay the wages of the teachers (I envisage we would need at least two). Before we can seek such funds I feel there needs to be a committee formed to establish the basic outline of the project, giving a broad base of support to apply for funding and to oversee / manage its running.

Initial support for this project is coming from the Green Collective, the Green Roadshow and Festival Welfare Services. I would be pleased to receive correspondence on this matter and meet with interested parties.

Richie Cotterill.

Waterleat, Ashburton, Newton Abbott, South Devon.

Page 12. Addicted to Authority by Tristan

How to create a world without government where everybody eats?

Page 13. Rip Off

The object of money is to take from the poor.

Once an elite has persuaded the people to obey their laws, either by naked violence or the threat of eternal retribution in some mythical after life, the people can be taken to the cleaners. The people can be forced to use money.

Herodotus says that coinage was first introduced in the 7th Century BC by the King of Lydia. Now why should the King of Lydia do a thing like that? No doubt he quoted Keynes about transactions, contingencies and speculation, and was very virtuous about the whole thing. But Kings are not altruistic.

A government makes laws to give the monarch sole rights to all gold mined 'Regalian Rights': it forbids anyone else to mint coinage: it forbids any other coinage to be used as legal tender, and then it forces taxes to be paid in its coinage. So to obtain the coins to pay the taxes forced on them, the people must work for the elite, the only source of the coins. Or they must give their crops to the elite in exchange for the coins which they then give back as taxes.

It's a neat trick. The people are forced to produce natural resources for cash: they are forced into growing crops for cash, the Formal Economy. They are forced to work for the elite, their henchmen and their hangers on, the Establishment who are given the coinage in return for their support or their work.

For example in Africa, 'a Cape Colony Act of 1894 imposed a tax in cash on fit adult males so that, as Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes blandly explained, rural producers might be removed from their life of sloth and idleness and made to give some return for 'our wise and good government.' The idea took on fast. To pay cash taxes the African would have to earn cash and almost invariably in that period that meant leaving the village for European employment. If they faulted to pay they must naturally be punished and would work as prison labourers instead.' [Davidson] And that was the way they forced the African down the mines, with cash taxes.

The King of Lydia introduced coinage in the 7th cent BC. Within a hundred years the King of Lydia was Croesus, the richest man in the world. There were no flies on the Kings of Lydia. Once you've imposed money you can introduce indirect taxation, taxation on trade. That way, people don't realise how much they're being fleeced. And the traders become tax collectors. To maximise the take it is necessary to force all trade into a market where it can be watched, and taxed. A charter to hold a market means that no other market or trade can take place in the area.

Certainly money has its uses in transactions etc, and if the production of a goldmine in the form of coinage was distributed freely and equally, there would be no problem (except for inflation), no unequal distribution. But Establishments make sure that the people always have to work for the money, work for them.

If all the money in a country vanished would that country be any poorer? All the things that had been desireable and obtainable would still be there, still be available. It would mean only that those who manufactured the money, gold, bank note or credit card could no longer remove the desirable objects with their legal enforced tender. Gold or any kind of money is not the desireable object in itself but only the means to acquire it. Money is not wealth. It is simply an I.O.U. When a king gives out gold coins, it is understood that the gold will acquire a certain volume of goods (or services) When he gives a gold coin for support given or work done, that coin is an IOU for food and raw materials, goods and services. The king or government prints the money, his IOUs and buys his food, baubles and soldiery with them. IOUs are redeemable, but coinage is never redeemed.

The peasants are forced to exchange their wheat for cash. The king who printed the money now has the wheat, the desireable object. Until the peasant can get rid of the cash to some other sucker in exchange for other natural resources, the king is richer, the peasant is poorer. Money is a means of taking wealth from the periphery and giving it to the core, taking it from the poor and giving it to the rich.

in the same way, if a country sells its crops for cash, who is richer, the buyer or the seller? While one country is holding another country's cash, it is poorer. Liberia has no currency of its own, it was set up by America and uses American dollars. So America can print dollars and remove Liberian crops.

America quite understands the value of imposing its currency on other countries. After the last war [ie WW2] 'The Americans, anxious for the restoration of the international economy and resentful of the discrimination against the dollar that the machinery of the Sterling area made possible through the close control of the sterling / dollar exchange transaction, agreed to make Britain a loan on the condition that sterling was made convertible within a year. [Harrison]

Money was invented and imposed by governments to enable indirect taxation to fleece the peasants, to con them into producing cash crops, to con them into working without the violence of the sword. In an anarchist society there can be no money for there would be no government to print or enforce it. But how can you trade without money? How can you exchange 2000 doorknobs for a bushel of wheat. You can't. There would be very little trade in an anarchist society.

Page 14. Thoreau by Brian Morris.

Page 15 Reviews

Music

Political Asylum live

The Price of Grain and the Price of Blood poison Girls

Shine On compilation

Smash the Spectacle by the Apostles

Our Voice is Tomorow's Hope Liberty

Tough, Big Flame EP

Page 18. Letters

Criticism of article against drugs by 'Scunge the Acid god'

Stonehenge by Pablo

Against the Biggest Bastard poster from Stephen of Peace Corner Molesworth

Against the Biggest Bastard poster by Robert Saunders of Hadley near Telford

Against the Biggest Bastard poster by O M Shanti of Sevenoaks.

Page 19. Against the Biggest Bastard poster by 'Jesmond pp God' Coming up, March May

Green network meeting Glastonbury.

Page 20 News

Leeds ALF, Huddersfield, Leamington

Animal Rights Militia Croydon and Sheffield

Riots in Southport and Bristol.

Issue 11

Date: Apr-May 1986

Keywords: Housing; Sellafield; Nuclear Power.

Read here

Issue 12

Date: Jun-Jul 1986

Keywords: Class Struggle; Non Violence; Non-Violence; Nationalism; Public Order Bill.

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Issue 13

Date: Aug-Sep 1986

Keywords: Stonehenge; Kropotkin; medical research; Glastonbury.

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Issue 14

Date: Oct-Nov 1986

Keywords: rape; peace camp; medical research; Malatesta.

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Issue 15

Date: Late Winter 1987

Keywords: Stonehenge; Battle of the Bean Field; Public Order Act; Meat; Garments; Clothing.

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Issue 16

Date: Apr 1987

Keywords: Paganism; Pirate Radio; Stonehenge.

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Issue 17

Date: Oct 1987

Issue 18

Date: Apr 1988

Keywords: Industry; Spy; Spies; Bakunin; Anti-Paganism; Homoepathy.

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Issue 19

Date: May 1988

Keywords: Stonehenge; Housing Bill; Festivals; Emma Goldman; Co-Ops; Co-Operatives.

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Issue 20

Date: Jun 1988

Keywords: core/periphery; Paganism; Native Americans.

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Issue 21

Date: Mar 1989

Issue 22

Date: Apr 1989

Keywords: Stonehenge; McDonalds; Green Consumerism; poster.

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Issue 23

Date: May 1989

Keywords: Stonehenge; Eastern Europe; motorbikes.

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Issue 24

Date: Jun 1989

Keywords: Stonehenge; festivals; Chumba Wumba; Poll Tax; riots; sexuality; celibacy; Animal Liberation.

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Issue 25

Date: Sep 1990

Keywords: Development; Developers; Stonehenge; Iraq; Gulf War; Poll Tax; Animal Liberation; marriage.

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Issue 26

Date: Mar 1991

Keywords: science; direct action; guns; Stonehenge; Iraqu; Gulf War.

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Issue 27

Date: Jun 1991

Keywords: Green Party; Bookchin; Animal Liberation; Stonehenge; festivals.

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Issue 28

Date: Sep 1991

Keywords: festivals; Green Party; Animal Liberation; Iraq; Gulf War; nuclear weapons; Chomsky; pollution.

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Issue 29

Date: Dec 1991

Keywords: eco-fascism; Animal Liberation; riots; squatting.

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Issue 30

Date: Jun 1992

Keywords: squatting; anti-fascism; Earth First; Animal Liberation; cities; festivals.

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Issue 31

Date: Sep 1992

Issue 32

Date: Jun 1993

Keywords: Anti-Fascism; Animal Liberation; Anti-Nuclear; Twyford; festivals.

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Issue 33

Date: Dec 1993

Keywords: Searchlight.

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Issue 34

Date: Mar 1994

Keywords: Zapatista.

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Issue 35

Date: Jun 1994

Keywords: Criminal Justice Bill.

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Issue 36

Date: Dec 1994

Keywords: Media; Animal Liberation.

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Issue 37

Date: Mar 1995

Keywords: Surveillance; Criminal Justice Act; Pornography; Pollution.

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News

Claremont Clearances

Earth Night

A30 Extension

Pollok Estate

Quarrying in the Pyranees

Trash in the Mac

Resisting The Criminal Injustice Act

Genetix Demo

Body Shop Stinks

Veal War

S.G. Robbed

Terrorist Attack

Activist Killed

Prawa Zwierzat

Keith Mann

Robin Webb

Diary of Community Resistance

Diary of Animal Liberation

Prisoners of War

Prisoners Update

Pornography

Events Coming Up

The Guilty Men

Directory of Scum

Down with Big Brother!

Down with Big Brother!

Combat 18: Creation of a Pseudo-Gang

Asset Exposed

Their Worst Nightmares Realised

Living Under Surveillance

Articles

We Have To Dismantle All This

The Pollution File

Non-Monogamy

Local Exchange

Letters

Science: Reply to a reply

Reply to Marky Mark

Pretentious

Counter-Culture

Books

Pamphlets

New Zines

Music

Projects

Survival

G.A.: The Zine

The Editorial

MEDIA ATTEMPTS to trash Anarchy In The UK ’94 culminated in the Met’s weeding of the CND march of anarchists. Where was Stewart Home during this? Struggling anarchists at the Independent! This notorious self-publicist says he wasn’t doing this to “earn … brownie points from the media” but because he “is more interested in scission and radical separation”. Given the Independent employs David Rose – who smeared Class War for Searchlight in 1985 – we weren’t surprised to see them print Home’s insinuation that GA is still associated with Rihard Hunt but refused us a right to reply to his libel. …

The Next Issue

THE PRIMITIVIST ISSUE: Anti-nuclear campaigns, those against industrial farming …

The Small Print

Articles

If you’ve got any opinions you want to share, send ‘em in to GA via Oxford Green Anarchists, …

G.A.: The Network

This is Green Anarchism

G.A. Contacts List

G.A. Mail Order

Books

Pamphlets

….

Issue 38

Date: Jun 1995

Keywords: Primitivism; Primitivist; Mumia Abu-Jamal; AIDS.

Read here

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38

Comin’ Home: Defining Anarcho-primitivism

At the opening of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, perhaps the premier anarcho-primitivist text, Fredy Perlman remarks: “This is the place to jump, the place to dance! This is the wilderness! Was there ever any other?” This seemingly innocuous point encapsulates a key aspect of anarcho-primitivism: the sense that the primitive is here and now, rather than far away and long ago. Perlman suggests that his notion is “the big public secret” in civilization: “It remains a secret. It is publicly known but not avowed. Publicly the wilderness is elsewhere, barbarism is abroad, savagery is on the face of the other.” But Perlman knows better than this and, perhaps as a result of his insight, so do we. And this knowledge is crucial. For in asserting the presence of the primitive, even in the midst of the megamachine, Perlman is marking the difference between anarcho-primitivism and other forms of primitivism in the West. And, furthermore, he is reclaiming a primitive identity for those trapped inside Leviathan. This is a crucial activity.

In Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, a survey of twentieth century Western appropriations of the primitive, Marianna Torgovnick writes:

“The metaphor of finding a home or being at home recurs over and over as a structuring pattern within Western primitivism. Going primitive is trying to ‘go home’ to a place that feels comfortable and balanced, where full acceptance comes freely and easily ... Whatever form the primitive’s hominess takes, its strangeness salves our estrangement from ourselves and our culture” (p.185).

Superficially, this seems an attractive idea and one conducive to anarcho-primitivism. A linkage of the primitive with origins seems a logical one in the West. Living lives of profound alienation in civilization as we do, the idea of going home, going primitive, seems appealing. This notion of a journey back to the primitive as a passage back to origins is echoed in the title of a recent volume edited by Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline: Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture. As the book’s opening page explains, “The first “drop-outs” from English colonization in North America left the ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke and went to join the natives at Croatan.” However, in making this linkage, radicals such as Sakolsky and Koehnline are unwittingly aligning themselves with notions of the primitive that are endemic in the West — notions that are used to underpin racism and imperialism.

The idea the West can discover its origins through a journey into the primitive contains a number of reactionary connotations. For example, one notion underlying such a belief is that primitives inhabit a world that is timeless and unchanging. Perlman has correctly identified history as His-Story, the story of dominance and control that is the narrative of history. Clearly, lacking Leviathanic structures, primitives do not inhabit this kind of chronology. But on the other hand the notion that primitives live in a timeless vacuum, a perpetual state of changelessness, denies them the ability to develop. And this notion has historically been used to characterize primitives as eternally backward and hence in need of Western intervention to progress. So notions of the primitive as timeless have been and are used as a justification for imperialism and the eradication of the primitive.

Moreover, another implication of this conception of the primitive is that history is linear and that no other ways of conceptualizing or experiencing time are legitimate. And thus the whole ideology of progress is also latent within conceptualizations of the primitive as source and origin. Furthermore, the Western notion of the primitive as origin, and the resulting desire to journey ‘back’ to the primitive, is based on an idyllic image of the primitive as a site characterized by simplicity and freedom from troubling differences. Torgovnick states this well when she notes:

“The primitive’s magical ability to dissolve differences depends on an illusion of time and sense in which the primitive is both eternally past and eternally present. For the charm to work, the primitive must represent a common past — our past, a Euro-American past so long gone that we can find no traces of it in Western spaces. But the primitive must be eternally present in other spaces — the spaces of primitive peoples. Otherwise we cannot get to it, cannot find the magical spot where differences dissolve and harmony and rest prevail. The illusion depends on denying primitive societies ‘pasts’ of their own, their own original states and development (perhaps wholly different from ours) ... If we imagine primitive societies as occupying linear time with us, but as developing in ways of their own to their present state, then they could not be our origin; there would be no time and place for us to ‘go home’ to.” (p. 187)

Conventional Western primitivism always draws the distinction between self and other, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ And in this schema, the primitive is always other, always ‘them.’ The primitive must always be long ago or far away, not right here and right now. Time must render ‘our’ primitive past inaccessible, while space must make ‘their’ primitive present distant but accessible — journeyable — so that we can find the path back to ‘our’ lost origins. In the process, of course, ‘their’ specificity is lost, merely becoming an image of the idyll that ‘we’ have tragically lost, or of the horrible savagery ‘we’ have thankfully overcome. Such primitivism is all about ‘us’ and serves to efface the primitive in ways that are quite compatible with civilization’s eradication of primitive peoples and lifeways. So the notion of the primitive as origin and source needs to be rejected by a primitivism that aims for a radical departure from the Western megamachine.

“To discard the idea of the primitive as ‘origin’ requires radical measures,” Torgovnick says. (p. 186) And it is these radical measures that anarcho-primitivism is prepared to make. Indeed, the readiness to take these measures constitutes one — but only one — of the many features which distinguish anarcho-primitivism from other forms of Western primitivism. Hence, Perlman’s prioritization of affirming the primitive as part of the here and now. For Perlman. as for other mainstream primitivists, civilization is just a veneer that is thinly spread over the surface of the civilized individual. But whereas reactionary primitivists regard the primitive as being characterized by savagery, Perlman sees it as characterized by abundance and possession — and not least by possession of a rich inner life and sense of being. So for him the primitive, in civilized conditions, is always a potential — a potential whose bursting out is always a promise of joy and freedom. The primitive, in such a context, is encased — bound and shackled — but always capable of breaking out. And so the primitive, rather than something that has to be journeyed to, emerges as something that one has to come back to. Something that is rediscovered, rather than discovered. This is an insight that Ursula Le Guin comes to in an essentially anarcho-primitivist fiction when which she entitles, not ‘going primitive’ or ‘going home,’ but Always Coming Home. The primitive, for those trapped in civilization, is a process, a process of renewal and return. A return to roots, but ‘our’ roots as they are now, in all their presence and sense of possibility, rather than some impossible search for origins.

In this sense too, anarcho-primitivism differs radically from other forms of Western primitivism. In a 1986 position paper entitled “Renew the Earthly Paradise,” the participants of the Fifth Estate project outlined their ideological trajectory:

“The evolution of the FE has been characterized by a willingness to re-examine all the assumptions of radical criticism, which has led it away from its earlier libertarian communist perspective toward a more critical analysis of the technological structure of western civilization, combined with a reappraisal of the indigenous world and the character of primitive and original communities. In this sense we are primitivists ...”

The two-fold nature of the project outlined here remains crucial. Anarcho-primitivism crucially combines critical analysis of civilization with a reappraisal of the primitive. These two reciprocally related aspects of anarcho-primitivism are essential. One without the other remains disastrous. For anarcho-primitivism does not seek to replicate primitive lifeways. It reappraises the primitive and seeks to draw inspiration from it, but only insofar as it does not contradict the most far-reaching anarchist analysis — analyses which seek an exponential exposure of power relations in whatever form they take.

Pointing to ‘an emerging synthesis of postmodern anarchy and the primitive (in the sense of the original), Earth-based ecstatic vision,’ the Fifth Estate circle indicate:

“We are not anarchists per se, but pro-anarchy, which is for us a living, integral experience, incommensurate with Power and resisting all ideology ... Our work on the FE as a project explores possibilities for our own participation in this movement, but also works to rediscover the primitive roots of anarchy as well as to document its current expression. Simultaneously, we examine the evolution of Power in our midst in order to suggest new terrains for contestations and critique in order to undermine the present tyranny of modern totalitarian discourse — that hyperreality that destroys human meaning, and hence solidarity, by simulating it with technology. Underlying all struggles for freedom is this central necessity: to regain a truly human discourse grounded in autonomous, intersubjective mutuality and closely associated with the natural world.”

Reconnecting the roots of anarchy and its present expression, always from a perspective sensitive to issues of power, remains at the heart of the anarcho-primitivist project. For, in attempting a provisional definition of anarcho-primitivism, it is always necessary to contrast it with what it is not, and in particular against the backdrop of other forms of Western primitivism. These latter may desire a sentimental return to nature or a going ‘back,’ but this is not the case with anarcho-primitivism, as Fifth Estate indicated in 1979:

“Let us anticipate the critics who would accuse us of wanting to go ‘back to the caves’ or of mere posturing in our part — i.e., enjoying the comforts of civilization all the while being its hardiest critics. We are not posing the Stone Age a model for our Utopia, nor are we suggesting a return to gathering and hunting as a means for our livelihood. Rather, our investigation into pre-civilized modes combats the notion that humans have always lived with alarm clocks and factories. It assails the prevalent amnesia which the species exhibits as to its origins and the varieties of social association which existed for tens of thousands of years before the rise of the state. It announces that work has not always been the touchstone of human existence, and that cities and factories did not always blight the terrain. It asserts that there was a time when people lived in harmony with each other and with their natural surroundings, both of which they knew intimately ... Reduced to its most basic elements, discussion about the future sensibly should be predicated on what we desire socially and from that determine what technology is possible. All of us desire central heating, flush toilets, and electric lighting, but not at the expense of our humanity. Maybe they are possible together, but maybe not.”

Anarcho-primitivism is a label and an inadequate label at that. It is more easily described than appropriately named. It includes a refusal of ideology and the racket of politics with all its power-seeking strategies. It is a process, a process of renewal and recovery. It is a mode of thought and action, a world-view, a mode of being in the sense that Hakim Bey has defined ontological anarchy. It is a refusal to go primitive, but an affirmation of the need to become primitive again.

References

• Anon. “Renew the Earthly Paradise.” Fifth Estate #322 (Winter/Spring 1986).

• Anon. “Searching for the culprit: Introduction to Marshall Sahlin’s The Original Affluent Society.” Fifth Estate #298 (June 1979).

• Le Guin, Ursula. Always Coming Home (London, 1986).

• Perlman, Fredy. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!: An Essay. (Detroit, 1983).

• Sakolsky, Ron, & James Koehnline. Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993).

• Torgovnick, M. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. (Chicago, 1990).

Primitivism: Back to Basics?

Civilisation is backwards, Primitive societies are advanced!

When we say we want green anarchy, a stateless society, free and in harmony with Nature, people tell us that it’s “a nice dream but it’ll never happen” as “it’s against human nature”. The point is that is has happened — green anarchy was how all people lived for a good 90% of history, how they lived before they were even Homo sapiens, how some still live better than we do today. When we point this out, people start pissing and whining about “going back to the caves” and getting protective about their TVs, cars and other fruits of “Progress”, particularly Lefties and “anarchists” who don’t know the difference and who think “Progress” is some inevitable law of Nature and not part and parcel of State society and the self-serving elites ruling it. We’ll demolish those myths in a future issue — in this we’re looking at why people living in green anarchy are more advanced than those in this sort of society.

A key problem with this society, as any Marxist will tell you, is alienation. They mean alienation from product — that is, the boss takes what you make to sell back to you, it’s not yours — but the intense division of labour that guarantees the commodities that people get so protective about also means we’re separated from each other and the Earth. Never mind not affording all those commodities, they’re no compensation for the lonely crowds, the powerlessness of being pushed around by bosses, the dependence on specialists who screw us over our basics of life, the meaninglessness of a life ruled by events beyond our own control. This isn’t about “capitalism” per se — any mega-machine society based on intense division of labour’s going to run the same, whatever rhetoric power / management specialists and co-ordinators use to mystify their rule.

Marxists look forward to communism, when the material abundance of capitalism is for all — but turn their back on what they call “primitive” communism where people were already equal and had all they wanted in life [7]. We’ve seen why this latter-day “communism” won’t work already and note that Marxists reject the version that did work as 19^th Century racist anthropologist and “Progress” proponent Henry Lewis Morgan argued Civilised men (sic) more “advanced” than pre-industrialised people [8].

The Industrial Revolution certainly warped the dreams of the people. Before it, when people envisaged a better world, it was Eden or its variants — from the medieval Land of Cockayne to the early-20^th century Big Rock Candy Mountain — where the abundance of arcadia lifted the yoke of work and duty from their shoulders [9]. Fantasy met reality in the Age of Discovery, the communism of the North American Indians and South Sea Islanders being oft-quoted as alternatives to European society — some even defected. Others attempted to turn their dreams into reality by establishing communities “like the early Christians” and, ironically, the push to colonise the New World was as much about returning the poor to their own little subsistence “Edens” as the rich plundering its resources. The main current post-Industrial revolution is a faith in “Progress”, a new world through technology not community.

Fantasies have been projected on stateless society because State society is so bad. And the substance? That depends on the society — some are real snakepits — arbitrary rule by tyrants, societies like this one in minature [10]. If there’s one society that isn’t like that — and there are many, particularly those based on hunter-gatherer bands free of shamans — then there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t live their better way.

In such societies, community practice goes way beyond that envisaged by orthodox revolutionaries [11]. As there is no significant division of labour, specialist tyranny is no threat and there is a strong communal bond of common experience. Instead of alienation, there is particularisation, each person, animal and element of the environment dealt with individually, some societies even lacking collective nouns [12]. Individual/society, society/Nature and other classic polarities are dissolved in this particularism and it also ensures specific consideration of cases rather than appeals to abstract customs (which later become hierarchically-enforced/imposed laws) and thus a surprising toleration of diversity given conventional stereotypes of tribal societies. Attitudes to property also impress — rather than nit-picking over who should own what as orthodox revolutionaries do, primal people practice usufruct, something is someone’s while their using it and everyone else’s to use when not. A lot of shite is talked by precious artsy types about how Civilisation is culturally superior to the rest of the world — so show me the machine that can simulate the Baka’s communal harmonic singing. Culture is not a separated activity for primal people, so they’re better-developed culturally as well as socially.

We’re not saying future society should be like any pre-existing society, just that we can learn from the ones that work and pick’n’mix accordingly. Culture is something we choose to do, to create, not some biological inheritance or unchangeable given. We should get informed and make the best of ourselves.

Issue 39

Date: Sep 1995

Keywords: Zero-Work; Earth First!; Pornography.

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The Unabombings: Communique #1

This is a message from the terrorist group FC.

We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a Burston-Marsteller executive. Among other misdeeds, Burston-Marsteller [sic.] helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdes incident. But we attacked Burston-Marsteller less for its specific misdeed than on general principles. Burston-Marsteller is about the biggest organization in the public relations field. This means that its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people’s attitudes. It was for this more than for its actions in specific cases that we sent a bomb to an executive of this company.

Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the [crossed out] Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won’t say how or why it was botched because we don’t want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.

In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since “anarchist” is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don’t see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.

The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut. We won’t waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts, but we certainly are not isolated. For security reasons we won’t reveal the number of members of our group, but anyone who will read the anarchist and radical environmentalist journals will see that opposition to the industrial-technological system is widespread and growing.

Why do we announce our [crossed out] goals only now, through we made our first bomb some seventeen years ago? Our early bombs were too ineffectual to attract much public attention or give encouragement to those who hate the system. We found by experience that gunpowder bombs, if small enough to be carried inconspicuously, were too feeble to do much damage, so we took a couple of years off to do some experimenting. We learned how to make pipe bombs that were powerful enough, and we used these in a couple of successful bombings as well as in some unsuccessful ones. Unfortunately we discovered that these bombs would not detonate consistently when made with three-quarter inch steel water pipe. They did seem to detonate consistently when made with massively reinforced one inch steel water pipe, but a bomb of this type made a long, heavy package, too conspicuous and suspicious looking for our liking.

So we went back to work, and after a long period of experimentation we developed a type of bomb that does not require a pipe, but is set off by a detonating cap that consists of chlorate explosive packed into a piece of small diameter copper tubing. (The detonating cap is a miniature pipe bomb.) We used bombs of this type to blow up the genetic engineer Charles Epstein and the computer specialist David Gelernter. We did use a chlorate pipe bomb to blow up Thomas Mosser because we happened to have a piece of light-weight aluminum pipe that was just right for the job. The Gelernter and Epstein bombings were not fatal, but the Mosser bombing was fatal even though a smaller amount of explosive was used. We think this was because the type of fragmentation material that we used in the Mosser bombing is more effective [crossed out] than what we’ve used previously.

Since we no longer have to confine the explosive in a pipe, we are now free of limitations on the size and shape of our bombs. We are pretty sure we know how to increase the power of our explosives and reduce the number of batteries needed to set them off. And, as we’ve just indicated, we think we now have more effective fragmentation material. So we expect to be able to pack deadly bombs into ever smaller, lighter and more harmless looking packages. On the other hand, we believe we will be able to make bombs much bigger than any we’ve made before. With a briefcase-full or a suitcase-full of explosives we should be able to blow out the walls of substantial buildings.

Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn’t appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke.

The people who are pushing all this growth and progress garbage deserve to be severely punished. But our goal is less to punish them than to propagate ideas. Anyhow we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.

We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want to have published. If you can get it published according to our requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities. It must be published in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, or in some other widely read, nationally distributed periodical. Because of its length we suppose it will have to be serialized. Alternatively, it can be published as a small book, but the book must be well publicized and made available at a moderate price in bookstores nationwide and in at least some places abroad. Whoever agrees to publish the material will have exclusive rights to reproduce it for a period of six months and will be welcome to any profits they may make from it. After six months from the first appearance of the article or book it must become public property, so that anyone can reproduce or publish it. (If material is serialized, first instalment becomes public property six months after appearance of first instalment, second instalment, etc.) We must have the right to publish in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, each year for three years after the appearance of our article or book, three thousand words expanding or clarifying our material or rebutting criticisms of it.

The article will [crossed out] not explicitly advocate violence. There will be an unavoidable implication that we favor violence to the extent that it may be necessary, since we advocate eliminating industrial society and we ourselves have been using violence to that end. But the article will not advocate violence explicitly, nor will it propose the overthrow of the United States Government, nor will it contain obscenity or anything else that you would be likely to regard as unacceptable for publication.

How do you know that we will keep our promise to desist from terrorism if our conditions are met? It will be to our [crossed out] advantage to keep our promise. We want to win acceptance for certain ideas. If we break our promise people will lose respect for us and so will be less likely to accept the ideas.

Our offer to desist from terrorism is subject to three qualifications. First: Our promise to desist will not take effect until all parts of our article or book have appeared in print. Second: If the authorities should succeed in tracking us down and an attempt is made to arrest any of us, or even to question us in connection with the bombings, we reserve the right to use violence. Third: We distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. By terrorism we mean actions motivated by a desire to influence the development of a society and intended to cause injury or death to human beings. By sabotage we mean similarly motivated actions intended to destroy property without injuring human beings. The promise we offer is to desist from terrorism. We reserve the right to engage in sabotage.

It may be just as well that failure of our early bombs discouraged us from making any public statements at that time. We were very young then and our thinking was crude. Over the years we have given as much attention to the development of our ideas as to the development of bombs, and we now have something serious to say. And we feel that just now the time is ripe for the presentation of anti-industrial ideas.

Please see to it that the answer to our offer is well publicized in the media so that we won’t miss it. Be sure to tell us where and how our material will be published and how long it will take to appear in print once we have sent in the manuscript. If the answer is satisfactory, we will finish typing the manuscript and send it to you. If the answer is unsatisfactory, we will start building our next bomb.

Earth First! is Dead — Long Live the Earth Liberation Front!

As we all expected, it’s finally happened. Earth First! has officially joined the ranks of the mainstream groups and have thrown their lot in with the hierarchical committees and executives of FoE and Greenpeace. The recent EF! Action Updates report with glee that a top-level meeting was held in July between “leading” (i.e. careerist) Earth First!ers, Road Alert and Reclaim The Streets, with representives of FoE etc, The purpose of the meeting was on how NGO and grassroots groups can best cooperate. It was decided that all grouos would not brand their names in future, but rather work towards one movement. Now this all sounds very nice in theory — we need a strong movement to resist ecological destruction — but what it hides is a move by, some individuals to push their own agenda and tactics for EF! and the direct action movement without really consulting those grassroots and, if anything, acting in the same manner as the larger mainstream groups have done before them.

Before readers start getting upset and accusing me of criticizing EF! for the sake of it or because I might have a grudge to bear, then let’s look at the facts. Since its inception, there has been a drive to pacify and deradicalise EF! and give it a more acceptable face. This began in the early years with ecocrats such as George Marshall of the Rainforest Action Group/Lea Valley EF! who wanted proper membership lists and “central command” to many others who have managed to ride the wind of media attention over Timbmet and Twyford Down and who have now entered careers in Road Alert, Women’s — Environmental Network etc but have stepped down from their fiery words of direct action to much more conciliatory methods. This has been combined with an almost dictatorial control over actions, a fanatic position over nonviolence isolating and stopping those who want to get involved but refuse to be beaten up without trying to defend themselves, especially people from the local community. Fluffies have dropped to even lower depths when they promised to point out ‘disrupters’ to cops. These tactics ensure any ‘militant’ endeavour is greatly curtailed. They fail to acknowledge that in many countries, nonviolent and more forceful protest regularly go hand in hand on the same demo — it’s a matter of live and let live, unifying rather than dividing a movement.

We’ve come back to where we started, falling in with the mainstream. For those of us who have memories remember FoE central office’s attempt to prevent their local groups working with us, sending around a warning letter spreading disinformation about EF! It is not a matter of working or not cooperating with them, it is the whole issue of what their aims are and how they’re structured. Their main goal is environmental protection, not ecological and social revolution that EF! in UK originally sought. Their idea of direct action falls very short of ours, very much within the law, restricted to hand-picked ‘stunt men’ and for media purposes only — such as FoE’s pathetic performance at Twyford where Johnny Porrit chained himself to a fence and left with the cameras. Yes, work with local members as they’re usually fed up with their own organisation’s centralisation and are far more radical than their office counterparts.

This pacification has spread and infiltrated deep into the EF! network, now succumbing to the same middle class values and ethics they wanted to break free from. The movement is now dominated by student groups — the strongest centres anyway — while the other contacts are tiny, constitute in name only. Those inspired by the early actions have gone away, setting up their own camps, becoming totally autonomous and community centred, though carrying out the aims of eco-direct action. no doubt sick of EF!s capitulation.

What scares these new EF! ecocrats is change. They’re terrified that things will happen without them having any control, very much like their counterparts in FoE back in 1991. These ‘activists’ — whose faces and numbers change but whose intentions are basically the same — have failed to realise that the authorities have evolved, have learned how to deal with D-locks and chains, office occupations etc though the movement have failed to do the same. Yes, it may have involved more people and had a nice few protests and day-long blockades but where are the victories? How many road schemes have we stopped in early construction — not those affected by government turnarounds? How many woods have we stopped from destruction? What are the signs the government have given up car culture, where’s the integrated transport system? No — the fact is that Twyford is built, M11 has fallen, Solsbury Hill is under concrete, Wells Relief road has sunk its foundations, Pollok has rerouted but is still built and Skye Bridge spans Midge’s hunting ground. Will there be a 3^rd battle of Newbury or — like everywhere else — just another Road Alert! controlled picnic with imported bored middle class zippies taking control and dictating everything... The list is endless and why? All because we have failed to keep our promise to defend our Earth to the end and have isolated those from working class communities getting fully active in our campaigns. It is these people who usually get the brunt of a road scheme, toxic waste plant etc. We have failed to tap their anger because EF! does not know how to communicate with these people.

EF! has failed to respond to this and continues to pursue the lobbyist methods of other groups while trying to fool people by merchandising the monkeywrench and and words of no compromise. All sorts of trinkets are sold that have no relation to what is professed. EF! forgets its Brighton 1992 agreement to accept and publicise the Earth Liberation Front as its underground wing, instead using every means possible to avoid acknowledging its existence. Actions that put ecoteurs liberty in jeopardy are usually shoved down into some dark column of the Action Update if they’re published at all. They’ve stooped so low as to take ELF’s name off Earth Night circulars and some have even publically declared it “does not exist”, such as Roger Gegen of Reclaim The Streets in a press release defending the Freedom Network from MI5 defamations printed in the Sun by distancing it from the ‘violent’ ALF, ELF, GA etc. No doubt he’s worried about a brake on fundraising and attracting the ‘wrong sort of people’ — the smell of elitist nest feathering and a fear that EF! may get a bad reputation. Are we seeing another Greenpeace in infancy (Paul Watson certainly saw that sellout) with its own set of media presentable leaders such as self-styled EF! spokesperson George Monbiot, who cries for land reform but never takes any back? We remember his past dismay and criticism at criminal damage and direct action at Timbmet, even at EF! itself. Like so many of his kind, he is nothing but a bangwagoner whose circle of friends include the hierarchy of FoE and Guardian Green news pimp and Small World partner John Vidal, and whose credentials and class fit perfectly with his own.

Sucking up to the likes of FoE and Greenpeace will only further restrict imaginative actions. EF! will be reliant and dependent on these large organizations for funding and the legal restrictions that go along with them. They are not about to risk their respectibility, the fear of losing all those membership funds is too much to bear. For this reason, it is now to call it quits. We have had enough of this sell out. It is time for EF! to dissolve and those who still want to defend the planet to go their own way and give substance to their rhetoric. Realise it’s time to take on new tactics, involve those who the careerist deem too violent or militant to be associated with, a movement with closer links with animal liberation, anti-fascists, and is prepared to use the same means to achieve their ends. Let us support ELF actions, not ignore them. We need an underground as much as a surface movement. If careerist fools awant to join the mainstream, let them do it — but damn them if they’re going to drag the rest of us down with them. Let’s stop bickering about Deep and Social ecology, stick together and produce a solid Revolutionary Ecology movement that refuses to surrender its goals and can effectively take the State on.

Issue 40-41

Date: Mar 1996

Keywords: cities; unabomber; Newbury; Earth First.

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Front Matter

Double Issue First Cover

Green Anarchism

Mo. 40/41 SPRNG ‘96 ■ FREE TO PRISONERS

For the destruction of Civilisation

THE ANTI-CITIES ISSUE. UNABOMBER. MOVE. NEWBURY. LEEDS LATEST. EARTH FIRST! IS STILL DEAD.

Double Issue Second Cover

Green
Anarchist

40/41 SPRNG '96 £1
FREE TO PRISONERS

For the destruction of Civilisation

THE ANTI-CITIES ISSUE. UNABOMBER. MOVE NEWBURY LEEDS LATEST. EARTH FIRST! IS STILL DEAD.

News

BATTLE OF NEWBURY

SURROUNDED: An early attempt to trash Penn Wood ends in farce.

The battle of Newbury bypass began on 9th January with tripods around Abbey Farm, making it impossible for security to leave. Work was abandoned that day. The day after saw Horseman Coaches blockaded and forced to cancel their cdntract with Reliant. ~100 security arrived by landie and hired minibuses but the digger was stopped in Penn Wood in an hour. By Friday, the cops abandoned their neutral role and made the first 38 arrests. Contractors stopped bringing up heavy, indefensible plant and made lightening raids against unguarded woods using tree surgeons surrounded by tight cordons. Demonstrators responded by occupying trees and locking on to vehicles to stop the contractors moving on. So far 500+ have been arrested under the CJA.

Week 2 started with Reliant leaving Abbey Farm for an ex-MoD buffer at Steventon, near Harwell, Oxfordshire. Despite 100+ coming down with food poisoning, Vale of the White . Horse council couldn't shut it down as the buffer has Crown immunity, despite sordid conditions, freezing weather and John Vidal's expose, Reliant recruited 600+ new guards in the next fortnight to swarm protest by sheer weight of numbers and cordon off large area / make diversions. This, daily mass arrests by cops with all but campers bailed offsite, and declining media interest means numbers are falling at Newbury.

Week 3 saw the first eviction notices being awarded against four of the 20+ camps along the route. Campers are still on the offensive and the treehouses and Cu Chi-style tunnels at the better established ones means physically evicting each will take days. This is likely to happen last, after campers are forced onto the defensive and the rest of the route is cleared.

WHAT TO DO:

• Contact Third Battle of Newbury, PO Box 5520, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 7YW (8 01635 45544) and form your local group

• Come down one day a week every week to ensure regular numbers. Go for ‘choke points' like the entrance to Steventon depot or equipment compounds, security’s coaches &c where a few people can make a lot of difference.

• If living too far away or not on your ‘day on', hit Costain, Blackwells, Reliant or subbie targets in your area. The Berkshire Wood Elves booklet says where. Security' transport -- Ajax of Hornchurch and S & P of Sittingboume — need particular attention!

• If bailed off or not physically fit. fundraise and recruit others in your area from street stalls &c.

GAIA JOINS ELF

Jack the Roadbreaker reports: Cross head beams on the raised viaduct sections of the M4 in London are suffering from chronic corrosion. Built in the early-l970’s, salt water from the road seeps through the roadway expansion joints and into the concrete through failed neoprene seals. The concrete breaks away, revealing the structural steelwork. The extent of the damage isn't clear yet, a lot of it is internal, and they can’t even get a look at it with fibre optics. They are going to dismantle a complete support to see how far it’s gone. Just imagine all the roadworks, traffic cones and contraflows this one’s going to generate. Ha ha ha!

INTERNATIONAL EARTH NIGHTS

APRIL 1ST - 7TH 1996

"APRIL FOOLS DAY BASH"

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) yet again calls for its annual April Fools day bash, the nights when all those who want to defend the earth come out and do their work. The "Fools" as we are termed are given a chance to seek our revenge on those who are destroying the earth and those who inhabit it. We call on a broad alliance of Animal. Earth and Human liberation, women's. anti-fascist, union/worker, revolutionary, groups. No matter what the targets, be it vivisection labs, MacDonalds, road destruction, Forest issues, live exports, habitat destruction, Fascist groups, multi-nationals anti-union bosses - let all unite as one,,, and do your worst! Let April fools be the night that the "abusers" will never forget.

The ELF calls on no injury to life, only to profit and property.

Thanet Way

Protestors are now at the last remaining defensible site. Chestfield woods.

In June 1995 the Highpoint squat fell and a WW2 bunker in August 1995. On 19th September 1995, 300 security and cops took seven cops took seven hours to remove 18 people from lock ons and tree houses.

Activists have pow retreated to Convicts Wood, just off site. Work is 11 weeks behind despite the police’s Operation Ecowarrior and 70+ arrests under the CJA. Security costs are now £4m.

Contact the Flat Oak Society 9 01227 463368

ECODEFENCE DIARY

Send your cuttings to Ecodefence, BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX.

JUNE

NEW ZEALAND: DUNEDIN - Ecoteur smashes McDonalds window, $1,300 damage.

AUGUST

DEVON — South West Greens picket supermarkwets in both Exeter and Plymouth urging people to boycott French produce in protest against French nuclear tests. .. ' *?

FINLAND, TURKU - ELF trash dozer at roasd construction site and paint abnti-car slogans.

SEPTEMBER

SPAIN — Spanish activist hijacks

French airliner and forces it Switzerland, in nuclear tests.

BANBURY -

in Parma de Mallorca to fly to Geneva, protest against French

Anti-open cast mine

protest occupation in Michael Heseltine's garden.

GUIDE — M65 protestors leave Croxter Hill farm near Blackbum.

CELTIC ENERGY — Protests at public enquiry into open cast mine.

EARL’S COURT - 150 arrests at Reclaim The Streets mass demo against Motor Show.

CHEQUERS — Protestors unfurl huge banner against Chirac’s nuke tests during visit.

NOVEMBER

Dol' — 300 road schemes axed due to tax cuts.

NEW ZEALAND — Demonstrations against UK support for French nuclear tests; Shell stations trashed over MOSOP 9; a hunterfconservationist hijacks a Department of Consevation helicopter at gunpoint and forces flight to the mountains to protest DoC programme of dropping 1080 possumpoisoning pellets.

LONDON — Security forces on red alert over threat of environmental protests against French warships visit.

BURY — M62 relief road scrapped due to weight of local protests.

LANCASTER — Critical Mass cyclists

block city centre during rush hour.

FINLAND. KUOPIO - EVR (Finnish ALF) paintbomb Shell billboard for Earth Night. Elsewhere posh cars trashed; Shell station sloganised the day after MOSOP 9 executions.

ANGLESEY -- Environmental protests at public enquiry into A55 dual carriageway.

WALES: - Open cast protestors send earth to Welsh Office and Gummer.

OCTOBER

USA: OREGON COASTAL RANGE - Ecoteurs pour “abrasive foreign substance’’ into crankcases, radiators, fuel tanks and hydraulics of excavator, dozer, compactor, grader and water truck. All owned by Hull Oakes Logging C°.$ 150,000+damage.

GWENT — Blaneau residents object to health problem causing iron foundry.

PEMBROKE — Protests to HMIP over onmulsion bum. . ’ g

GLASGOW — Angry protestors at M74 planning meeting.

SKYE, — Newly opened bridge blockaded by locals, cars and pipers, pissed off at £4.50 toll.

BRYNHENGLWYS - Four day siege as bailiffs evict open cast tree houses. CONNAH’S QUAY - Hundreds protest at link road planning meeting.

WELSH OFFICE — Protests against Rhymney Valley development site.

ENGLAND — Greenpeace and FoE picket Shell over killing of Ken Saro- Wiwa and other MOSOP activists.

DECEMBER

WHATLEY QUARRY, SOMERSET - EF? attack ARC quarry. £100,000+ damage caused shutting it for a week. Control centre, crane, railway line and conveyer belts trashed. 50 arrests. More protests due.

BERKSHIRE: NEWBURY - Start of work on bypass delayed four days by blockaders. Surveying equipment trashed

FINLAND HELSINKI - Shell vehicle trashed and Shell station sloganised: “Earth Liberation “ Go Shell, Go Hell”; ELF redesign two car ads.

GERMANY - Shell petrol station

M66 GOES ON

Campaigners have now' musdtered to stop the next phase of the schem.e, the destruction of Daisy Nook. “

On 27th November, contractors attempted to set up a Portacabin and were met by nearly 20 people (mostly । locals) who set about obstructing work. The action continued over two days, with all access points blocked by tripods. The Portacabin was eventually smuggled in at midnight.

Activists have organised a camp at Daisy Nook. This country park'and Audershaw reservoir are both at*risk. Two of the remaining four contracts have been taken in the first phase in the Outer Manchester motorway ring. The . existing M66 from M62 and Middleton is also to be widened from four to six lanes. The companies bidding for the other two contracts are Laing, Balfour Beatty, I rafalgar House, Tarmac and Amec McAlpine.

There are actions every Friday and info stalls at Manchester, Ashton and Oldham. Camp numbers have dwindled so fresh faces are desperately needed. '

Contact 14 Eton Avenue, Oldham OL8 4HR(8 0161 627 4862)

CAR CULT

STAMP OUT MAD

RING ROAD DISEASE

The government has OKed the next £ J 7.9m section of Avon ring road which will cut through Biston Common and bulldoze along the Bristol and Bath railway path. If completed the ring road will become Bristol’s M25, causing more traffic, pollution, urban sprawl - and less public transport.

Siston Common Railway Path Public Information learn (SCRAPPIT), has published BETTAR, an 'alternative transport plan based on new bus schemes, park *n' rides, rail and cycling. It’s commissioned a recalculation of the Cost Benefit Analysis of the ring road and supports a legal challenge to it.

Contact SCRAPPIT (XC) c/o 84 Colston Street, Bristol BS1 45BB.

NUKE TESTS GO ON UNABATED

On 27th December 1995, Chirac ordered a fifth 30 kt nuke blast at Muroroa. ignoring a UN resolution demanding testing stop. How much more will the reef take? Geologists warn it’s close to cracking. Even though the French boycott is now international with wine merchants losing millions, Chirac promises more tests for February 1996.

On 17th August 1995, two days after two Greenpeace activists were detained for holding up an anti-nuke banner in Tianamen Square, Beijing, China detonated a 20 kt nuke, the second test since the signing of the Non- Proliferartion Treaty in May 1995. I his may wreck a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty currently being negotiated. China plans 4 more tests in 1996. These are for two new missiles, one for deployment in the late-1990s and the other by 2010. France has similar ideas, admitting its tests are for developing new weapons.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE ARMS TRADE

On 11 th November 1995, the 4th anniversary of the .Dili massacre of East Timorese by genocidal Indonesian invaders, twelve British Aerospace factories were occupied and bosses there citizens arrested for supplying the arms responsible. An enforcement visit arrested for trashing BAe Hawk ground attack aircraft bound for East Timor.

HELP GREENLINE

After asking readers to write letters of complaint to Ascot for hosting the MoD’s COMEX torture equipment fair, Greenline are being sued.

DONATIONS TO: Greenline, PO Box

followed , tjiis Janytoy, ₍three .women 5, Lostvyithiel, (_;orpwa(l ^22,9^,T.

Thumbs up to A30 camper Angel Koyanti who got her kit off last 17th January to protest the worship of a car at Coventry Cathedral. The Church was commemorating 100 years of the car. Angel the 14 million it’s killed since then, including her mother.

NEW ROAD WARS FOR SCOTLAND

Even though Pollok's over, opposition is still continuing over the M77 from Glasgow to Ayre — 9 0141 226 5066.

In the south of the city, Strathclyde Regional Council proposes a £200m extension of the M74 which will expose toxic land. Like Pollok, opposition seems set to be huge and heavy. 80141 424 1797. Further up the M74, Borders Upgrade were firied. £40,000 for polluting local rivers.

DIARY OF COMMUNITY RESISTANCE

SEPTEMBER

9: FRIARTON PRISON - Three escape from Scottish jail. Prison screws' suicides rising: Il in 1994.

9: KNIGHTSBRIDGE — CND protests outside French Embassy over nuke tests.

II: PAISLEY — Mad axe-Tory Allan Stewart fined a derisory £100.

11: LONDON — Stephen Lawrence private murder prosecution brought. Racist Crown Prosecution Service bitterly criticised by family.

13: BOWLAND - Ramblers protest access restrictions.

13: ROCHDALE - Villagers block entrance at reopening of Lane Head quarry. 3 arrests.

16: NEWBRIDGE - Pharmacist Alan Sharpe fined £550 for undercutting NHS prescription charges.

18: KINGS LYNN - Home Office tagging trial fails when victim jailed for breaking curfew.

19: USA: Unabomber manifesto published in Washington Post.

oppressive.

4: ISRAEL — Mordecai Vanunu on hunger strike after 9 years solitary confinement.

6: BRIGHTLINGSEA - Two cops injured during ruck with protestors. Missiles thrown and booby trapped barricades block road.

7: KIRKDALE — Huge gasmain explosion during 8th week of Liverpool firefighters strike.

8: STRATFORD ON AVON - Tory turncoat joins the Tonys. Alan Howarth MP defects to Labour, pissing-off Tories on eve of party conference.

9: LONDON — Protests outside UAE embassy over Sarah Ballabagan execution threat.

10: ARIZONA — Train derailed by terrorists.

11: LIVERPOOL — Sacked dockers picket at dock gates.

12: FRANCE — 5 million public sector workers on one-day general strike against cuts.

13: BURNLEY - TUC ‘Peoples March’ in favour of welfare state, destination eviction. 200 protestors see off bailiffs.

18: ABERDARE — Residents protest against Tescos hypermarket development.

19: OFFSMEG issues ritual

denunciation of smug, greedy, rich bastard water companies while Yorkshire Water (even less popular than BN FL!) extends water ban to Leeds.

20: SRI LANKA - Tamil Tigers blow up oil refineries. Hundreds injured, thousands evacuated. BBC correspondant shot in fighting.

21: NOTTINGHAM - Armed police fired on during security van robbery. 3 arrests.

22: LONDON — Jewish women picket chief rabbi over draconian divorce laws.

22: LONDON — Kingsley Amis, misogynist blimp author, croaks.

22: CHORLEY — Protest march and rally against education cuts.

23: MILTON KEYNES - 4 prisoners in HMP Woodhill siege.

24: LONDON — RMT strike vote. Underground workers sure to be sold out by union bureaucrats (yet again).

tactics mean agency running costs are eight times amount it collects.

2: NEW ZEALAND — Liz Windsor jeered.

3: PETERBOROUGH - Cop suffers whiplash injuries when rammed during car chase.

4: MERSEYSIDE — Firefighters strike on Bonfire Night!

5: ISRAEL — PM Itzak Rabin assassinated by fundie settler.

5: CANADA -- knifeman breaks into EM’s house.

6: WALES — Carry On Fiddling! White collar fraud said to cost Welsh business £40m/year.

6: HEATHROW — Luggage handlers strike hits flights.

7: FRANCE -- Cabinet resign in ongoing French political meltdown

8: LIVERPOOL -- Port entrance blocked by sacked dockers.

10: HASTINGS — 16 newly privatised railway carriages vandalised causing rail chaos.

11: HARARE — Riots .over police shooting of human rights activists.

Send your cuttings to Lancaster Bomber c/o BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX

12: SHROPSHIRE -- Hostage crisis as Bridges Centre bail hostel besieged by armed police.

13: WOLVERHAMPTON - Fans protest against football defeats.

14: DEWSBURY -- protests at start of Yorkshire Water’s drought order enquiry. MPs call for State of Emergency.

15: USA -- Federal government officials sent home due to overspend, but world goes on without them. Did anybody notice they weren't there?

16: LIVERPOOL - Yet another firefighters strike.

17: FORD — unions turn down 4% pay offer demanding two hour working week reduction. Strike spreads.

18: BRADFORD - whole block ot buildings torched in firebomb attack.

19: FULL SUTTON — prison riot.

18: ATHENS - Five days of prison

21: STRATHCLYDE — Asian stuident caught flyposting and viciously assaulted by cops awarded £4,000 damages after suing racist Strathclyde police.

22: HIGH COURT — Live exporter Roger Mills fails to ban 14 protestors from Brightlingsea.

23: PRESTON — Anti-landmine protest.

24: NATIONWIDE - 100 protests on Open Britain Day as ramblers take to restricted footpaths.

26: LONDON — Protest outside Department of Health over Berkshire health rationing.

29: LIVERPOOL - Docker's strike escalates due to management dirty tricks.

30: FALKIRK - College lecturers protest against redundancies.

30: FRANCE - Thousands demonstrate against nuke tests in Paris and Toulouse.

30: BREMEN - Dounreay-bound nuke waste lock-on protest.

OCTOBER

2: BRIGHTON - anti-JSA kick off at job centres, trainings school and Labour conference hotel. 31 arrests. Sanitized live Labour conference Newsnight discussion later disrupted.

3: GWENT - Blaenau residents object to health hazard irron foundry.

4: HIGH COURT - Stonehenge trespass woman doctor refuses to pay CJAfine as

Blackpool Tory Conference.

11: BLACKPOOL - teachers lobby Tory conference over funding.

12: SYDNEY - Rupert Turdoch HQ bums.

13: FLEET WOOD - Fishermen protest at Tory Euroshite.

14: BLACKPOOL - Wave of abuse and derision launched outside Tory conference hotels.

15: SWEDEN - Joe Rottblat, UK antinuke canmpaigner, wins Nobel Peace Prize.

16: BIRMINGHAM - Disabled @ction Network blocks up city centre rush hour. Traffic brought to standstill. Protests also held on rail network.

13: MANCHESTER - D@N holds public transport protest.

14: BIRMINGHAM - D@N lock on to public transport. Third in series of actions.

15: NEW YORK - US government weather equipment at La Guardia airport blown up in protest at Waco atrocity.

16: CARDIFF — Fire crews attacked by 100+ youths on Lansbury Park Estate.

17: RIPON — Stuff your tests! School headmaster sends back every 14 year old’s English test after 76% were marked incorrectly.

18: LIVERPOOL - 24 hour fire fighters strike over sackings and holiday restrictions.

25: CSA -- 55% assessments wrong says government report.

26: FORD - Workers demand 10% pay increase plus two hour working week reduction. Vauxhall also balloted.

26: LIVERPOOL - Scab workers houses daubed and smashed, unions

threat to grass.

26: PRISONS

Tumin condemns

Learmont enquiry as ‘the road to concentration camps”.

riots, four deaths.

19: WEM, SHROPSHIRE - Town hall torched. Building and mayor gutted.

20: MERSEYSIDE - More firefighters' strikes announced.

20. VAUXHALL - 4:1 majority vote for strike action turning down 3.5% pay offer

22: HOLTSFIELD - resists bailiff eviction with follow-up protests outside

Elitestone offices.

22: SCOTLAND - Postal strike in

28: QUEBEC/LONDRES - DJ makes spoof phone call to Liz Windsor in pisstake run-up to Quebec seperatist referendum. “One is not amused...” ' . ....

28: LIVERPOOL - TUC rally in ^24: FRANCE - Public sector strike with support of dockers. Meanwhile stacked ^,ndrc^^{es an}^ protests

24: SCOTLAND — Postal sector strike

Edinburgh and Glasgow. 3 million letters pile up.

23: LONDON - Student grants protest.

containers used as 25' tall shield to prevent ‘missiles’ raining down on scab port workers.

28: MANCHESTER - 7,000 attend TUC anti-racism rally.

30: PRESTON - Prison hostage crisis.

31: CANADA - Separation fails by 0.4% of vote. Canadian flag burned and ‘No’ campaign HQ torched.

stalled. Postal workers attack scabs in Edinburgh. 12 million letters now piled up.

ARGENTINA

Di Windsor

heckled during state visit.

24: NOTTINGHAM - 3,000 protest education cuts and 900 teacher sackings.

LIVERPOOL

Yet another

NOVEMBER

I: LIVERPOOL - Another firefighter’s strike.

I: DOVER — Publicans demo against Euro-booze undercutting.

18: GOWER - Holtsfield protsts against I: CSA

protests and obstruction

firefighters' strike

25: ABERDEEN — Scottish postal strike spreads northwards.

25: STOKE ON TRENT - Children In Need pub spectacular charity event fumigated with CS

25; WEST BRIDGEFORD - More education protests by 1,500 head teachers at Fatty Clarke's constituency office.

25: FRANCE — Railstrike over welfare cuts hits Eurostar trains.

25: DOVER — 4 arested during live exports protest.

26: GREAT YARMOUTH - 86 arrested in CJA rave suppression after Leah Betts death. State reveals the skull behind the mask yet again.

26: NIAROBI —Brit diplomat shot.

26: NOTTINGHAM — More education protests.

26: LIVERPOOL - Yet another fire strike

27: YEOVIL - Paddy Ashdown threatened by drunk with knife. Unfortunately unharmed.

28: BRYN MAWR - Thosands cut off as phone exchange torched.

29: FRANCE — More transport chaos and public sector strikes. - .

30: RHYLL —. armed cops surround suicide bomb threat man.

31: DSS - Job Centre staff strike...

DECEMBER

1: TOWN HALLS — public sector workers demand £4.15/hour minimum wage while Tories wheedle through workfair plans . ’

2: FRANCE — Rail and public sector strikes against ‘Thatcherite' welfare policies. Commuters protest, government in crisis.

5: SKELMERSDALE - delph Side, fifth school torched

5: FRANCE — ■ More strikes and protests. 160,000 demonstrate in Paris.

6: VAUXHAUL — workers start

mass default on repayments.

14: FRANCE — Strike completely shuts down centre of Paris’

15: RAILWAYS - Privatisation thrown into legal disarray over challenge in court by Save Our Railways. .

16: FRANCE - Yet another firefighters' strike while Manchester ambulance crews threaten walkout.

17: BARLEY - Methodist church protests against homelessness.

18: MID-GLAMORGAN - 40,000 homes suffer electricity cut-off after insulators sabotaged.

19: LEEDS — Reclaim the streets demo.

16: FRANCE - Eurostar trains blocked by strikers.

16: GLASGOW — Burger King forced to pay £ 100m compensation to underpaid employees.

16: USA — Yet another Federal government shut-down. 250,000 workers sent home by budget deadlock.

19: FRANCE -- more mass action protests.

20: BELGIUM - Rail and airline strikes. -

21: MIDDLESBOROUGH - Capitalist front man and Rotary Club santa Clause attacked with bricks and bottles.

22: SHEFFIELD - Three week long library cuts protest occupation by pensioners eviction notice served by court.

23: BLACKPOOL - Cop rapist jailed for a year.

24: MANCHESTER - Low pay unit targets scrooge bosses after Darwen company Starlight Garments exposed for paying 62p an hour.

Oklahoma-style office bomb attempt fails to detonate.

29: DEVON — Emma Nicholson, Tory MP, defects to Liberals in ongoing Tory political meltdown.

JANUARY

3: KINGS HEATH -- Gang smashes two Birmingham cops with iron bars and sledge hammers.

4: BEXLEYHEATH- 5 injured by multiple stabbings in Job Centre

5: ELLESMERE PORT — Vauxhaul workers ballot rejects 4% pay offer plus one hour reduction in week — sending Bank of England supremo “Steady Eddie' into a flap.

6: WEST LONDON - Rocklet launchers, explosives and guns found during police raid

7: GLASGOW — Royal Geographical Society meeting with Shell Nigeria could lead to ballot of 13,000 worldwide members

6: BRADFORD — Cops get armoured vests after Lisa Sharpe WPc stabbed in face during incident

8: KEIGHLEY — Tribunal declares allwomen Labour Party shortlists illegal in setback to equal opportunities.

11: LIVERPOOL — Princess Anne stalker arrested -

12: LLANDEILO — Tipi residents defy council eviction notices

12: NEWCASTLE - Pat Fisher of Newcastle women's refuge objects to Yellow M rape’ anti-smoking cinema ad campaign

KEN SARO-WIWA KILLED

On 10th November, Ken Saro-Wiwa and

I eight fellow Ogoni environmental I I human rights activists colleagues were ‘hanged by the Abacha regime with at least the tacit consent of Shell oil. Ail nine had been tortured and starved for days prior to their murder and because of faulty equipment, it took five attempts to finally hang Saro-Wiwa.

In brave defiance of the regime's riot troops and death squads, thousands of Ogoni openly wept and protested Ken Saro-Wiwa's death as his body was unceremoniously dumped in a Port Harcourt cemetary. Troops now occupy his native Ogoniland. 17 other activists await execution for being part of MOSOP, the grassrots democratic move-ment against corporate greed and state terror in Nigeria.

Shell Oil is one of the most bloated business behemoths in the world. Since 1958, Shell has pumped nearly £30 billion worth of crude oil from out of a tiny 400 square mile region of southeastern Nigeria inhabited by 500,000 Ogoni people. Though it formaly left Ogoniland in 1993; Shell remains Nigeria’s largest foreign investor, splitting its million barrels a day output with state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum. The hard currency earned through oil exports goes into Abacha’s warchest.

The Ogoni people have had to endure an industrial action. Talks stalled. :

7: ORLY — riots by airline workers as

French strike spreads. More unrest in eastern France as miners riot.

8: DJAKARTA — Embassy protests on 20th anniversary of genocidal invasion of East Timor.

8. ELLESMERE PORT - Vauxhaul strike.

8: CHANNEL TUNNEL - Traffic disrupted by French strikes, thousands of cars held up.

8: YORK — OutRage protests against Archbishop of York ’s enthronement.

8: WELSH OFFICE - 600 bureaucrats laid off from occupation government offices

9: LIVERPOOL - 35% funding cuts announced Firefighters’ strike.

10: BORDEAUX - 60,000 protest as part of ongoing strike.

11: MANCHESTER - Ambulance union bureaucraps repudiate strike ballot

11: HINKLEY/SIZEWELL - Nuke power stations cancelled.

12: FORD - ballot rejects 4% pay offer.

13: CHANNEL TUNNEL - Blocked by French strikers on best day of strife yet.

14: CARDIFF - Parents and teachers protest opposition to Tory David Lightbum’s nursery school vouchers wheeze...

15: BRIXTON — Demo against Wayne Douglas’s death in police custody. Shops looted, cars burned, at leasdt ten cops and rioters hospitalised. Shots fired at police station &c

16: LONDON — Teacher unions protest school insecurity after fatal stabbing of Maida Vale headmaster Phillip Lawrence. '

14: BANKS — No bank willing to take

21. GERMANY — Protests and vigil against repatriation of Bosnian refugees. 22: CORNWALL - Fishermen vow to cheat Euroquota. '

22. MANCHESTER / HULL - Railway staff take industrial action.

22: GLAMORGAN -- Ammo heist from Tufnells Parcel van

22: KNIFE AMNESTY - one blunt penknife and rustuy WWI bayonet handed in.

23: POLAND - demo against new communist prime minister.

24: YORKSHIRE WATER - Top level

DEATHWISH LAWYER

purges as Water chairman takes Obvious masons Hanslip Ward & Co. of retirement. Company now even less Hill Crest, 193 Main Road, Do vercourt, popular than BNFL. Harwich. Essex CO12 3PQ (8 01233

26: AUSTRALIA — Bondi Beach: 508745) are sending unilluminating 30,000 rioters pelt cops with bottles and threats to Open Eye ordering them to stones. apologise for blowing the whistle on

29: NEVADA — Two charged after turquoise eco-fascist David Icke

RETURN TO THE 1970’S?

Rudolf Docker reports: There’s been a rise in union militancy with both Ford and Vauxhall workers rejecting pay offers and calling for working week reductions. Liverpool’s also been hit with a firefighters strike. In some ways all this sounds like a return to the 1970’s, but one particular dispute, the Liverpool Dock strike has been characterised by loadsa New Realism as workers with their backs to the wall are starting to fight back.

In September the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board tried to casualise dock wooers and reduct wages. 500 dockers struck and then were sacked by the board. Their jobs were advertised but only around a thousand potential scabs applied (only two per job) in a city where each job vacancy normally attracts hundreds of applicants.

At the end of September, the strike escalated when scabs started to be bussed in from outside. Scabs living inside the ‘pool have had to watch their backs with paint daubmgs, bricks thrown through their windows and cars torched A barrier of containers has had to be set up to prevent “missiles” being thrown into the ship unloading area. Then in early Jabnuaty a sniper fired at scabs.

Naturally the trade unions have condemned the violence and threatened to shop th we nasty extremists, but the workers themselves know how every time they have been sold out by Trade Union bureaucrats, and know that only New Realism can offer them any chance of winning this dispute.

up privatised student loans scheme in face of threairned student boycott and

endless nightmare of petroleum contamination and State persecution. From 1982-92, Shell Oil spilled over 1.6m gallons of oil from its Nigerian operations, polluting crops and rivers. Gas flares are everywhere, belching fumes that sicken people and exterminate wildlife. Toxic waste pits and sludge ponds strewn across the delta have poisoned coastal mangroves and jeopardised the livelihood of subsistance fishing communities. Some observers have ironically dubbed Ogoniland the Drilling Fields.

Popular resistance began to grow. By January 1993, 300,000+ people attended a nonviolent demo organised by Saro- Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) against Shell's deadly presence. On 30th April 1993, when - 10,000 villagers gathered to protest laying of more pipelines across newly planted fields, Nigerin troops opened fire and killed 10 people. A subsequent slash and bum by the Abacha regime’s death squads left 30 villages destroyed and hundreds of people dead.

In a 1993 interview to the Wall Street Journal,: Shell attempted to rationalise the violence by saying that “on occassions we’ve been compelled to ask for assistance from the government’’. A far less .subtle 12th May 1994 internal Nigerian military memo states:

Shell operation still

ssiblc

unless

ruthless military operations are undertaken

for smooth economic activities to commence

.... (we recommend] wasting operations against vocal individuals

Ken Saro-Wiwa was subsequently arrested along with others on charges of. murdennmg four pro-regime Ogoni leaders, despite being nowhere near the scene of the crime. Sentence of death you have io be sure that knee-jerk reaction fact. The international environmental

before a military tribunal was almost a won t do more harm than good and human rights community will not

foregone conclusion. As _an apparent reward to the Abacha forget and, if anything, will be out for

Not surprisingly, the heartless oil giant refused to speak on Ken’s behalf stating

that

it is not tor a commercial organisation dike Shell Oil to interfere in the legal processes of a sovereign state such as Nigeria .

In a recent ad, Sheil even argued:

. h’s easy enough to sit in our cmfortablc homes in the West, calling for sanctions and boycotts against a developing country but

SENO SHELL TO HELL MAY 1ST 1996

The Send Shell to Hell Alliance has called for an international day of action aimed at Shell. The Alliance has decided to take this action, since the Death of Ken Saro Wiwa, by the hands of the Nigerian government. Ken a committed environmentalist and human rights activist opposed the exploitation of his region, Ogoniland, by Shell, for its oil, and the repressive Nigerian Government, who tried to protects Shells interests and its own. We now call upon all ELF, Eco-terra-ist, Autonomist, and revolutionary groups to target Shell on May the 1st, doing as much damage as possible, with the aim of forcing it to shut down its operations in Ogomland, and Nigerian itself. We are fighting all multi-nationals, so lets start knocking them down one by one. NO matter if its petrol stations, Shell offices or bill-boards, lets put shell out of business.

The SSHA calls for no injury to life only loss of profits

regime for a ‘job well done’, Shell has since annunced it will be going ahead with plans for a $3.8 billion liquified natural gas operation in the Nigerian delta.

What the Nigerian government — and more so Shell - must remember is that many people have long memories and that the “harm” has been done, the a -

minute Shell walked into Ogoniland, in revenge. This retribution has already begun with Shell stations and offices occupied all over the world. ELF in Finland sabotaged a spate of Shell faclities during Earth Night and now, with the announcement from the Send Shell To Hell Alliance, this sabotage is due to reach profit-threatening proportions. Kill Shell — save the Earth!

PRISONERS OF WAR

A number of eco-warriors have been jailed for their beliefs. Prisoner details - I change rapidly and may be out of date by the time you read GA.

If you'd like a prisoners list, send 50p + SAE to Earth Liberation Prisoners, Box 23, 5 High Street, Glastonbury, Somerset.

PRISONER UPDATES

EARTH LIBERATION:

Bosco Boscovich (Australia)
Helen Woodson (USA)
Jim Chambers (UK)
Maija Catts (Australia)
Milton Bom With A Tooth (Canada)
Paul S (Holland)
Stuart Edwards (UK)

MOVE:

Charles Simms Africa (USA)
Debbie Simms Africa (USA)
Delbert Orr Africa (USA)
Edward Goodman Africa (USA)
Janet Holloway Africa (USA)
Janine Phillips Africa (USA)
Merle Austin Africa (USA)
Michael Davis Africa (USA)
Mumia Abu Jamal (USA)
William Phillips Africa (USA)

LAND RIGHTS

David Penu (Canada)
James Pitawakwat (Canada)
Joseph Ignace (Canada)
Leonard Peltier (USA)
Randy Sam (Canada)
William Ignace (Canada)

ANIMAL LIBERATION:

Angie Hamp (UK)
Barb Trenholm (UK)
Charles Skinner (UK)
Darren Cole (UK)
Dave Callender (UK)
Dominic Peaty (UK)
Gaynor Ford (UK)
Geoff Sheppard (UK)
Gilly Peachy (UK)
Greg Avery (UK)
Gurj Ailja (UK)
Keith Mann (UK)
Erin Sieber (USA)
Michele Naar-Obed (USA)
Mordechai Vananu (Israel)
Rick Sieber (USA)
Steve Kelly (USA)
Susan Crane (USA)

ANTI-FASCIST:

Abidin Eraslan (Germany)
Charles Ryder (UK)
Fatama Balamir (Germany)
John McFeely (UK)
Karl Anacoura (UK)
Mark Gay (UK)
Memhet Ramme (Germany)
Paul Gay (UK)
Russell Wild (UK)
Sanjiv Karla (UK)
Satpal Ram (UK)
Steven Kelly (UK)

ANTI-SEXUAL ABUSE:

Carl Robinson (UK)
Gay Oakes (New Zealand)
Garfield Gabbard (UK)

ANTI-CJA RIOT:

Mark Skelly (UK)
Trefor Harris (UK)
Kirsi Kultalahti (Finland)
Neil Hansen (UK)
Mia Salli (Finland)
Michael Green (UK)
Mike Roberts (UK)
Minna Salonen (Finland)
Mel Arnold (UK)
Rod Coronado (USA)

ANTI-MILITARY:

Amy Moose (USA)
Carl Kabat (USA)

Prisoner Updates

JUNE

New Zealand ecodefender Trevor Heyes was arrested for smashing a McDonalds window. At his trial Terevor said he did it because of McDonalds' “environmental crimes”. He was fined the cost of the window.

August

Nigerian environmentalist / MOSOP activist Clement Tusima dies in custody. Erika Schriever-Abeln is sentenced rto three months inside and two years probation for two meat truck arsons in Sweden. Djurens Hamnare said the case was “a victory for direct action”.

SEPTEMBER

Unnamed Spanish anti-nuclear activist arrested after skyjacking French airliner and redirecting it to Geneva. Animal libber GeofT Sheppard given seven years for possessing a shotgun and ALF incenduary materials. Mike Roberts of anti-fascists jailed for taking part in the October 1993 anti-BNPriot in Welling. Six Native American land rights activists jailed.

OCTOBER

Anti-roads activist ‘Iggy' (Dave Hilton) temporarily remanded. Animal libber Gilly Peachy given suspended sentence and ordered to pay costs for leaving hoax device in pro-hunt hotel. Antifascist Phil de Souza and animal libbers Michelle Ratcliffe, Lise Olsen, Duncan George, Kevin Chapman and Justin Wright all released. Animal libber Laura Nicol jailed for nonpayment of fines. Mark Skelly and Trevor Harris jailed for 1994 Hyde Park anti-CJA riot.

NOVEMBER

Environmental/MOSOP activists Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barinem Kiobel, Saturday Dobee, Paul Levura, Nordu Eawo, Fwelix Nuate, Dan Gbokko, John Kpinen- and Baribor Bera judicially murdered by Abachu military dictatorship, Nigeria. Three Finnish animal libbers fined for smashing butcher s window in May. One also fined $ 1,000 for trashing furstore. Coke signs and Shell station last winter. Animal libber Darren Cole remanded for torching two live export bams. Three Swedish animal libbers arrested for torching Umea hot dog bar. Twelve WoMenwith Hill Peace Campers got off after appearing in court for obstructing a road last May. Gurj Ailja got six years after admiiting sending six JD letter bombs. Keith Mann got his 14 yeasr sentence reduced by three years. Five Oulu, Finland, animal libbers arrested for EVR activity. New Zealand hunter I conservationist nicked for anti-DoC possum poisoning hijack.

DECEMBER

Mia Salli, Minna Salonen and Kirsi Kultalahti tried in Finland for freeing 650 foxes from fur farms. ALF press officer Robin Webb tried for passing press release to media -- trial collapses’ Dominic Peaty remanded for trashing MAFF badger murderer's property. Animal libber Alan Barnard jailed for non-payment of fines. Maija Catts sentenced for PPF firebombing of French Embassy in Perth, Australia. Animal libbwers Gilly Peachy and Gaynor Ford remanded for arson — Sandra White bailed.

HELEN JOHN JAILED AGAIN

Anti-nuclear Helen John was sent down for three months last 17th October 1995 on three counts of criminal damage and thieving a hammer.

This related to the damage she did to Nirex subcontractors digging test holes near Wastwater. She and three colleagues visited the Nirex site last summer to wam workers about the high radiation levels they were dealing with. Helen found time to hammer in headlights and windows of some test equipment.

[Source. WoMen with Hill Women's Peace Camp Newsletter]

HELEN WOODSON

A former US Ploughshare doing 164 years for controversial actions in 1993 against mone, corporate greed and the destruction of the environment. Contact

Diary of Animal Liberation

January

BELGIUM — Mass demo against live exports broken up by riot cops.

DENMARK: COPENHAGEN

Anarchists trash McDonalds

SWEDEN: JONKOPING -- Fur shop torched

SWEDEN: GOTHENBURG - Militant Vegans (MV) attempt arson on meat and fish vehicles; animal libbers open acetylene cylinders in slaughterhouse;

10 foxes. 2 wolves. 13 lynx and some owls freed from Froso zoo.

USA: HENRIETTA - ALF Rochester Cell torch two Conti (meat) Packing Plant trucks, one painted “We’re just getting warmed up”.

USA? SAN FRANCISCO - ALF Stockton Unit glue Home Fine Sausages US: SYRACUSE — ALF sioganise NY Eastern Milk Producers; Georgio s Furs paint-bombed and Mazzye’s Meats smashed.

US: VIRGINIA BEACH - ALF cause $4,000 damasge smashing vehicle fur store; smash windows of fur store and McDonalds; break two windows at fur store; smash and sloganise fur store and butchers; glue, sioganise and smash two windows of .hunting shop and spraypaint fur store; and glue five fur stores, paintbomb a sixth, paintbomb a seventh s sign, and glue, paintbomb and smash windows of three more, redesign fur factory sign, glue L’Oreal and paint anti-y iv slogans on studio, and glue and sloganise hunting shop.

FINLAND: KUOPIO - EVR glue, smash and sloganise four fur stores and meat factory — ‘EVR . ‘Mortuary ’, ‘Fur Is Dead’. Fast food outlet sloganised and hunting shop glued; smash five windows at university' leaving ‘stop the torture’ and ‘EVR* slogans behind; then smash uni windows again, leaving ‘Sadists* and ‘EVR* slogans.

FINLAND: MIKKELI - EVR sloganise and glue leather shop; and later glue and sloganise butchers and redesign fur store ad" |

SPAIN: TENERIFE - Bom Free Foundation rescue two lions from pub

Greenayvay MP calls for JD to be outlayved under the Prevention of Teirorism Act. * " ⁷

SUSSEX: BRIGHTON - Two McDonalds and tyvo shops sponsoring animal abuse fair glued.

FINLAND: HELSINKI - EVR redesign McDonalds sign, smash sign and ten yvindows at tyvo others, and smash windows of three fur stores and a butchers; later ten fur stores smashed and another McDonalds trashed; later butchers spraypainted and Valios | (biggest Finnish milk producer) discovers vegan slogans all over its icecream bars FINLAND: KUOPIO - EVR smash windows of four fur stores and a meat factory, slaughterhouse sloganised and its vehicles trashed, and a milk truck has its refrigeration un it turned off; later EVR glue butchers and smash five window's and a photocopier. Three arrests.

FINLAND: VAASA COUNTY - 650 . foxes freed from four fur farms in a two- night period. Three young women from Webbs Poultry Products; hoax bomb left under vehicle of Paul Doyvsett. Garetmar Kennels oyvner; Wickham Lab’s owner, William Cartmell’s car bloyvn up in its garage. ALF paint-strippered it three times in as many months before its explosive demise; ALF torch empty' stable at Torbay Farm lab animal suppliers; tyveseldown Point to Point horse race targeted.

KENT — Three hoax letter bombs sent to John Carter in two dats.

LONDON — Activists disrupt filming of McDonalds commercial; Sea Sabs chain themselves to Norwegian Embassy against whale slaughter

MEON VALLEY — Hoax bomb in Bucks Head, blood junky pub.

SOMERSET — Justice Department (JD) send letterbomb to William Waldergrave, MAFF minister and live exports farmer. - - -

WALSALL — Ex-slaughterman Victor Golding and colleagues free 15 cows from Harlescott abattoir. When arrested. Golding said he was ALF but was

windows, slashing tyres, sloganising and destroying central cooling system at Central Meats & Packing.

FEBRUARY

NORTHAMPTON — Arson attempt at Padbury’s haulage. Great Billig. Padbury involved in live exports.

MORI — ⁷0% in UK oppose hunting.

SWEDEN: STOCKHOLM - Djurens Hamnare (DH) sloganise and etch three fur shops, two meat shops and a hot dog bar in memory of Gill Phipps. Ad banner alscf destroyed; DH sloganise -Burger King with red paint.

US: SAN FRANCISCO - ALF Stockton Unit etch glass doors of Robert's Furs for third time.

US: SYRACUSE — ALF sloganise and paint bomb Georgio s Furs.

March

LONDON — Sir Stephen Mitchell, the

High Court judge who sentenced Keith Mann, recieves death threats:

It is ironic in a country which has abolished the death penalty that you have effectively signed your own death warrant

FINLAND: MIKKELI - Elianten Vapautus Rintama (EVR) smash two windows of fur store. 2nd fur store had windows spraypainted

FINLAND KUOPIO - EVR glue two fur stores. . k J ■ >; <

FINLAND: HELSINKI - EVR glue and utchers

SWEDEN: STOCKHOLM - DH sloganist and etch Skansen zoo.

SWEDEN: UMEA — Animal libbers trash and smash hot dog bar and leather store.

April

DEVON - Wildlife & Wetlands Trust ban Tiverton Staghounds from Kings Nympton Park.

LYNDHURST, HAMPSHIRE - Sabs occupy roof of Forestry Commission HQ. 4 arrested for criminal damage to it. FINLAND JOENSUU - EVR block toilets and trash McDonalds; and later slogamse, glue and -smash windows of fur store * k

FINLAND HELSINKI - EVR glue four fur stores; smash eight windows ot

DIARY OF ANIMAL LIBERATION

Dedicated to Mia & Minna in Finland

Send your cuttings to BM-HEAL, London WC1N 3XX.

For further information: ALF Supporters Group, BM Box 1160, London WCIN 3XX: Arkangel.

BM Box 9240, London …

SWEDEN: STOCKHOLM - DH torch Soina Korv meat truck; Djurens Befrielse Front (DBF) spraypainrt meat shop

SWEDEN: GOTHENBURG - Animal libbers blow up hot dog bar.

US: MINNEAPOLIS - ALF paintbomb Crown fur ranch suppliers and glue and sloganise Brotherson’s Meats, Johnson Meat Company, Finer Meat and Ribnick Furs.

US: -SYRACUSE - ALF incenduary causes $6,000 damage at Oneanta Beef Company

May

CHINA: HAINAN ISLAND - Food stall owner fatally bitten by-two snakes he was beheading.

CZECH REPUBLIC: PRAGUE - 200 not against McDonalds. It suffers £7,500 damage

ESSEX - Live exporter Roger Mills’s landrover trasged a third time.

KENT, DOVER — Animal libbers storm resturant serving veal, ALF daubed another hours earlier

LONDON, BUCKINGHAM PALACE - - JD send razor to blood junky and all- round posh prat Charles Wjndsur .

LONDON, PARLIAMENT -

arrested. Kirsi Kuhalahti grassing up the other two to get her own charges dropped.

FINLAND: LAHTI - EVR smash three window's of a McDonalds and paint ‘EVR’on its wall.

EDINBURGH - Stasff at Roslin Institute (Government genetix lab) warned against ALF and JD

SWEDEN: UMEA - 20 hunting platforms trashed and sloganised; vivisector’s home windows smashed; two hot dog bars smashed; leather furniture store smashed, van destroyed and slogans painted; two leather shops and hot dog bar smashed.

US; SYRACUSE - ALF smash and sloganise Liehs <fc Steigerwald Meats, Honey baked Hams and, Eastern Milk Producers, the latter also having its air

conditioning sabotaged.

June

BEDFORDSHIRE - Sonya Egan, landlady of the Cock, Broom, stops serving crocodile after ALF warning. Tim Webb oi Jontis Brasserie, Ampthill, warned not to serve ostrich.

DEV EON - Live export tanner Wilf Walters has farm decked in ribbons and released without charge as cops didn’t belie

sloganised. BEDFORDSHIRE - Because Tim

John * HAMPSHIRE 7- ALF free five chickens Webb vvouldn’t (ajte th? ALf ’s warning

FINLAND: HELSINKI - Fur store glued, another has windows broken; later EVR paint appropriate slogans on butchers and ice-cream stand. This latter aertion in solidarioty with the May arrestees. .

FINLAND: KUOPIO - EVER paint meat office and fur store.

FINLAND: HAME COUNTY - EVR trash seven hunting platforms.

FINLAND: OULU — EVR suspected of freeing fur farm animals.

NEW ZEALAND: DUNEDIN - 50 animal libbers storm McDonalds; later, one arrested for $1,300 damage to McDonalds window.

NEW ZEALAND: LEVIN - ALF smash KFC windows and leave ‘Kentucky Fried Corpse and ‘Smash Factory Farming slogans.

NEW ZEALAND: PALMERSTON NORTH — ‘McShit painted on three McDonalds signs.

SWEDEN: UPPSALA - Meat vehicle torched — slogans; Murderers’, ‘Meat is Murder’, Nazi’.

not to serve ostrich, Jontis Bistro suffered £1,000 damage.

sm«.

BERKSHIRE - JD send razor to Thames Valley Eggs.

CAMBRIDGE — JD send razor to V Harrison, Interfauna.

CORNWALL — JD send razor to Ian Hodge, bloodsports equipment supplier. DEVON -- JD send razor to Jeran Indian, calf exporter and Waterloo Cup sponsor..-

GOSPORT — Fish & chip shop, Littlewoods and two cancer fraud shops smashed. .

HAMPSHIRE -- Windows broken at homes of David Walker and Paddy Edwards, Wickham Lab scum; later JD send razors to Peter Lloyd MP (hunter), William Cartmell. Paddy Edwartds and Chris Bishop (all of Wickham labs), Croften Manor Farm (allow circuses on their land), Froxfield Farms (lab animal supplier), Paul and Deborah Dowsett and Nicola Scarr (all Garetmar Kennels), Stonegate Farm Eggs, Peter and Caroline Humphries, and Curtis Thompson (all of H&H hunt), Kevin Coker (hunt terrier thug) and Chitty Group slaughterhouse.

HULL -- JD send razors to C Smales, Farose supplier.

HUNTINGDON — JD send razor to Campbell Farms Ltd., part of Interfauna. IPSWICH — JD send razor to David Barnes, blood-junky solicitor.

KENT — JD send razor to Knights, another blood junky solicitors.

KETTERING -- JD send razor to Richard Otley, live exporter. .

LANCASHIRE — JD send razor to Clin Sheddon, BASC

LONDON - JD send razors to Countryside Business (bloodsport sponsors), J Taylor of Bookers (Farose outlet) and Lord Donahue (Labour blood junky); ALF shoot out windows of Imperial Cancer Research shops in Richmond and Twickenham. ICR shops in Barnes and Chiswick also glued and smashed.

OXFORD - JD send razors to David Muir (live exporter). Prof P J Morris (viv) and Penny Mortimer (Leave Country Sports Alone)

SOMERSET - JD send razor to Richard Coates (live exporter), John Dryden (BASC) and Willie Walderegrave (see above). -

SUSSEX — JD send razors to Don Barrett (Wyerh lab), Alan Revell (live exports agent), N Fawcett (hunter) and Philip Lacey (Shoreham port manager).

SUSSEX, BRIGHTON - ALF paintstripper five Brightobn Uni minibuses (twice!) to protest vivisection there; butchers van paintstrippered and nine animal abuse shops glued; four nights later, two more vans paintstrippered; next night, butchers glued

SUSSEX — Small terrier bitch used for breeding freed from Hursley & Hambledon hunt kennels.

YORKSHIRE - JD send razor to Geoffrey Ball, live exporter

WARWICKSHIRE - JD send razor to Christopher Barrett-Jolly, ex-live exporter responsible for Jill Phipp s death.

WILTSHIRE, NEWTON TONY - Foxhound pups rescued from hunt kennel. Cops arrest one rehomer.

WOODRIDGE - JD send razor to Roger Mills, live exporter.

FINLAND: TURKU - EVR sloganise - viv lab and glue four fur stores.

FINLAND: HELSINKI - Fur store’s window smashed.

FRANCE: St GERMAIN - JD send razor to Joy Jackson, Interfauna SARL. IRELAND — JD send razor to G Desmond, general secretary of World Greyhound Racing Federation.

NEW ZEALAND: AUCKLAND - ALF glue butchers and fishmongers on ponsonby Road.

NEW ZEALAND: DUNEDIN - ALF trash butchers .

NEW ZEALAND: WELLINGTON - ALF glue and paintbomb KFC on Cambridge Terrace; later smash front window of Charcoal Chicken, Cuba Street.

NORTHERN IRELAND - JD send razor to Michael McKeekin, BASC; hoax bomb sent to Crossgar live export farmer Sam Smith.

POLAND: BIALYSTOCK - AntiMcDonalds posters across city. Mass demo against circus.

POLAND: HAJOWKA - punks throwing stones and mollies attack circus.

POLAND: POZNAN - McDonalds styinkbombed.

SCOTLAND: MUSSELBURGH - JD send razor to Inversek Research.

SPAIN — Bull gores four during ‘bull run' festival.

SWEDEN: UMEA - Junk food bar smashed three times. Leather sop smashed twice.

August

CANADA:BURLINGTON - Two animal lib women trick their way into house and rescue two animals being tortured inside.

CANADA: VANCOUVER - ALF smash six Starbucks coffee shops.

CANADA: VICTORIA - ALF smash and sloganise Starbuck coffee shop: “Stop supporting the death of animals or it will get worse!”

BOLTON — ALF redesign McDonalds sign.

HAMPSHIRE: Wickham Labs’ Paddv Edwards pelted with water and bottle;. Garetmar Kennel’s Paul Dowsett subject of flyposted hate campaign; windows broken at Torbay Farm and Gartetmar Kennels; Torbay Farms ad sign destroyed during candlelit vigil; ALF redesign Marwell Zoo signs; lab animal supplier David Walker has his home’s windows smashed as he cowered in back garden; two arrested for £2,000 damage to Wickham Labs including sloganising, gluing locks, damaging signs and vehicles and overturning a wheelie bin. HMP LINCOLN — JD prisoner Guri Aujla organises campaign in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal in prison.

HMP HOLLOWAY - 300 cons sign animal lib prisoner Barbara Threnholm's petition for Mumia.

SUSSEX — ALF liberate four-month old Jack Russell terrier from home of joint master of East Sussex & Romney Marsh foxhunt. .

CHANNEL 4 - Pro-ALF Angels of Mercy documentry about Keith Mann shown.

FINLAND: HAMEENLINNA - EVR etch and glue fur store.

FINLAND: TURKU - EVR spraypaint fur store

FINLAND: OULO — Fur srtores" windows smashed. ,

FrNLAND! HELSINKI - EVR/smash.

paint and glue fur stores; ten more fur roof torched.

750,000 Krona

stores glued and an 11 th loses two windows; lastl;y, EVR smash two windows of another fur store.

NEW ZEALAND: WELLINGTON - ALF glue town, hall where viv conference was to be held; later 15 masked animal libbers gatecrashed viv’s dinner at Skyline resturant.

NEW ZEALAND: CHRISTCHURCH - Two National Banks on Columbo Street closed through Daffodil Day (Cancer Society flag day) bomb hoaxes; two McDonalds sloganised..

NEW ZEALAND: AUCKLAND - ALF paint zoo; viv has home painted (‘Bruce Baguley butchers babies') and Cancer . -Society banner detoumed on Daffodil

Day; and Cancer Society offices and med school sloganised (‘viviSICKtion", ‘ALF’).

SLOVAKIA: BRATISLAVA - Six HYKO (turkey producers) ad signs trashed. Liska furshop sloganised. Two butchers glued.

SWEDEN: UMEA - Burger bar smashed and torched for third time.

SEPTEMBER

CANADA: ONTARIO - ALF sloganise Sutton Arena just before furriers conference

DEVON -- MAFF live exports vet harassed by anonymous calls.

EAST ANGLIA, REDD1TCH - Youths

torch joyrided car, taking Clarkes fishing tackle distributor with them.

HAMPSHIRE — ALF glue and paint Wickham labs; bomb hoax at Garetmar ends in controlled explosion; nonelectrical incenduary involving candle, meths and fire lighters found at home of New Forest Foxhounds' Peter Barfott. HMP NEW HALL - ALF prisoner Angie Hamp and lifers save budgie and cockertiel from negligent con. Cockertiel has died but Tinkerbell the budgie is recovering.

THE SOUTH — Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS) trashes inside pages of hunt zines in shops.

FINLAND — EVR frees pheasants from bloodsports farm.

FINLAND: HELSINKI - EVR trash fur stores (“major vandalism attack "); on International Anti-Gillette Day. EVR sloganise Gillette HQ and subsiduaries, Braun and- Oreal-B: “Vivisection is Murder ", “Elainten Vapauus Rintama fights ", “Gillette has blood on its hands'" and “Boycott Gillette”.

three fur styores" windows and glue truck and hot dog bar torched and meat company office. sloganised.

FINLAND: PORVOO - EVR free 80■

fur farm foxes.

NOVEMBER

FINLAND: RIIHIMAKI - EVR trash। -

FINLAND: KUPIO - EVR smasdh leather factory; smash hunt HQ windows; trash sign of tur wholesaler Hameenunna.

NEW ZEALAND: AUCKLAND - ALF sloganise medical school; sloganise and daub McDonalds toilet.

NEW ZEALAND: WELLINGTON - ALF slash tvres of two meat trucks at Prestons Meat, Hopper Street.

SLOVALIA: BRATISLAVA - Fur shop sloganised and windows smashed. I hree others daubed Billboard outside Slovak Hunting Association HQ trashe. Four hunt platforms trashed.

SPAIN: Bullrings sloganised

SWEDEN: UMEA — I wo fish company offices torched?Burger bar smashed¹ and

Dairy truck torched, damage. Leather shop

October

CANADA: CHILLIWACK, BC - ALF free 2,500 mink from Reg & Lydia Dargartz's’ fur farm asnd destroy all breeding records .

CORNWALL — Clumsy farmer contaminates thousands of pints of milk with cleaning product.

DEV.ON — Fur coat wearer in Exter slagged in street; animal libbers torched two bams at Choakford Farm. Smithaleigh (live exports); GA contact saves frogs from speeding traffic.

ESSEX/BRINGHTLINGSEA -Lorrv

J windscreen smashed during live exports mass demo

HAMPSHIRE: Jeanette McClunah of 4, the Butts. Wamford Road, Corhampton SO32 3ND 01489 877807) exposed as grass. -

NORTHAMPTON - ALF torch Genus Breeding company building, Moulton.

FINLAND: HELSINKI - Oikeuttn Elaimille stage mass demos against vivisection and fur farming; EVR break same furrier s windows three times in a week.

FINLAND: KUOPIO - On Earth Night, EVR paintbomb, sloganise and smash two fur stores (‘War continues', ‘Death store).

NEW ZEALAND. AUCKLAND - McDonalds closed on anti-McDonalds Day; ALF sloganise zoo and trash its publicity six times; trucks trashed and sloganised by ALF at Tegel chicken oplant; Inghams chicken plant sloganised; butchers bricked.

NEW ZEALAND: CHRISTCHURCH - ALF catapult three butchers.

NEW ZEALAND: DUNEDIN - McDonalds picketed

NEW ZEALAND: WELLINGTON - Prestons Meat trucks slashed; ALF later catapult them in their depot; Charcoal Chicken resturant catapulted.

SLOVAKIA: BRATISLAVA - Slovak Hunting Association HQ daubed, its bells, mail box and billboard destroyed; three fur shops sloganised; Slovak Hunting Association lose their mailbox again; Zverex (hunt company) glued and sloganised; and fur shop sloganised and 40 Arles Circus ads destroyed.

SWEDEN: STOCKHOLM - Pais- Bruno (big fur store) shut by bomb hoax - coaches full of shoppers turned away. SWEDEN:' VANERSBORG - Meat

AUSTRALIA: MELBOURNE - ALF brick and sloganise three butchers: “Meat Is Murder ”, “This Is The ALF”. $6,100 damage.

CANADA: ALDERGROVE, BC - ALF free 5,000 mink from Rippen’s tur farm and destroy 70 years worth of breeding documents.

CANADA: LANGLEY, BC - ALF free 3,000 mink from fur farm a fortnight before they were to be killed

UK: Cartons of Ribena and press release recieved: “ -

The enclosed carton of RIBENA ha> been contaminated with 20 mis of Surgical Spirit .Hundreds qf, simile cartoiys.qf glBF^l^,

BR1GHTLINGSEA

The official report says cops wearing balaclavas and body armour, wielding long batons were “over-zealous” in torturing and hospitalising protesters.

No cops will be disciplined because it's “not possible Io identify the officers concerned” [Guardian, 26/9/95).

Besr this in mind next time you’re in touch with wharf owners Earnest and Jill Oliver of Shairwood, Colchester Road, Trendring, Clacton-on-Sea CO 16 9AA (S Weeley 830717), Gail Oliver of 15 Farmleigh Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea COI5 4QB (» Weeley 435158), Wendy Sawyer of Poplars Chase Farm, Station Road, Thorrington, Colchester CO7 8HZ (» Great Bentley 251754), and Jane Fish of Chiitem Farm, Crown Lane, Tendring, Clacton-on-Sea CO 16 OBH (S Weeley 830793).

JOYRIDERS

SCHOOL TIME EGGS RAID, SISTON, DECEMBER 1995: ALF liberate sixty battery hens from their existence as egg producing machines

which have been contaminated in the same way. have been placed onto the shelves of ALL major supermarkets in England, from Friday 3rd November.

These outlets consist of: Safeway.

Sainsburys. Tesco. CO-OP. AS DA and smaller stores such as community shops and peuol garages

This press release only relates to the small 250 mis size cartons in the following flavours Blackcurrent, Blackcurrant Light. Apple. Orange & Apricot, Strawberry , Mixed Fruits. Raspberry.

Although this product is not tested on animals, jt is produced by SmithKIme Beecham, one of the biggest animal exploiters both in this country and abroad.

People who buy RIBENA are directly funding the un-necessary infliction of pam. suffering, torture and ulumate death of

freeing 650 foxes from four fur farms in

May. . _

NEW ZEALAND: DUNEDIN - ALF sloganise ten animal abuse premises.

USA: THURSTON COUNTY,

Divided, closing the Tate for two hours. SUSSEX -- Hunt Retribution Squad (HRS) drop rock on Crawley & Horsham huntsman's head and trash hunt vehicles; then HRS attack Barry

A car belonging to an Isle of Wight blood junky was broken into, joyridden and then torched. Hunters blame animal libbers.

[Source: Liberator] ’

WASHINGTON - ALF free 400 mink Turner of Chiddingfold Hunt and his

from ftir farm.

SCANDANAVIA

Scandanavian

millions of animals, none of this testing will ever benefit anyone, so why do it?

Bugger Up All Vivisection (BUAV)

DEVON: GA contact stops traffic save eating owl from being run over

Airlines ban shipments of live animals for vivisection for fear of sabotage by UK animal libbers

SINGAPORE — Animal libbers trash McDonalds

SWEDEN: UMEA - Hot dog bar torched, three arrests; two Scan (meat company) offices torched and others smoke-damaged, anti-meat flyposting near home of Scan employee.

vehicle:

The Hunt Retribution Squad has a philosophy: For every wild animal killed by a hunt on a chosen day. a hunt rider will be dealt with and/or a vehicle trashed This philosophy has been used on several occassions with satisfying results It need not be implemented on all occassions but every hunt should be targetted from time to time just to let them know that “The time for peaceful reasoning is over” — Its now Animal Liberation by any means necessary¹

GUN ATTACK

In May, Englisdh animal libber Vicky Fitch was shot in the back with an air rifle while she handed out leaflets against Circus King. A clown was arrested bu released due to “insufficient evidence”

[Source: Recorder, 24/5/95]

to

HMP EXETER - Darren Cole, ALF remand prisoner, banged up for refusing to wear prison-issue leather shoes HAMPSHIRE. CHURCH COOKHAM - - Houses built - over badget sett sloganised

SOMERSET, YEOVIL - Residents

who hired badgers to threats.

SUSSEX,

badger trapper to sell local MAFF viv lab receive death

CHICHESTER

Arson

attack on Webbs Country Foods FINLAND: KAUHAVA - Oikeutte Emaimille demonstrate outside court trying three women accused of freeing 650 foxes from four fur farms in May. FINLAND: HELSINKI - 80 Oikeuttta Elaimille activists blockade Fur Centre; EVR brick Tuganay and Saukko fur stores:

Our EVR cell has been targeting fur stores in Helsinki In this year at least five fur stores have closed in Helsinki. We re going to get them all¹ ' - ¹

FINLAND: THE EAST ~ $150,000 damage as two fur trade-related buildings torched. Communique threatens the furriers ‘worst nightmare”. GERMANY: BERLIN - Animal lib demo outside Finnish Embassy in

FINLAND

EVR sloganise

DECEMBER

McDonalds and brick another on Night.

FINLAND: HELSINKI -

one

Earth

More

CANADA: TORONTO - ARK2 demo outside Finnish Embassy in solidarity with three activists ibn Finland accused of freeing 650 foxes from four fur farms in May.

AVON, SISTON - ALF free 60 hens from School Time Eggs, Myrtle Farm:

Most of the hens were severely defeathcred, a typical sign of a lifetime in a cage that is so small that they can not even spread their wings Their feet were swollen and sore from never being able to perch -- constantly on a wire mesh floor, and their beaks were semiamputated in order to prevent them causing any serious damage to their fellow inmates in fights, which break out regularly due to stress

Those removed arc now all living comfortably in their new homes They arc able to scratch earth, dust bathe, breathe fresh air, experience daylight and make a nest Their feathers will grow back, wounds will heal within time and they arc no longer regarded as just an egg producing machine

HMP THE MOUNT, BOVINGDON - Animal Rights Militia (ARM) prisoner Niel Hansen rescues his 3rd cockatiel whilst in prison. Three quarters of this 8 week old bird s wings had been cut off with scissors. Although it can’t fly, the bird s wings are now growing back.

LONDON - 100+ anti-live exports activists leave sit-down outside Parliament to protest Damien Hirst’s

Oikeuttn Elainille mass anti-fur demos;

NICE SHOOTING

A German blood-junky was murdered whilst out terrorising wildlife. Hunters blame animal libbers for the killing.

Fur Centre sloganised by EVR as fur [Source: A TA Newsletter, October 1995]

conference was going on inside; two fur stores bricked; furrier's home, caravan and shed daubed by EVR; Ees-turkis and five other fur stores bricked or glued by EVR; on Fur Free Friday (25/11/95), 16 Oikeutta Elaimille activists chain themselves to Finland’s biggest depart

ment store, Stockmann

FINLAND: KUOPIO

For Earth

support of the three women accused of animal corpse sculpture, Mother & Calf

Night, EVR breaks three milk trucks' windows and paint slogans; fur store attacked again.

FINLAND: VANTAA - 40 Oikeutta Elaimille activists picket Fur Centre auction.

NEW ZEALAND: AUCKLAND - ALF smash and sloganise six butchers, Pork market shop, Ingham chicken -plant, home of Lois Armiger (viv), house and car of Laura Mumaw (zoo director), Cancer Society HQ and Dunningham's meat suppliers.

NEW ZEALAND. CHRISTCHURCH - On World Vegan Day, ALF catapult butchers and sloganise Sydenam KFC and Linwood McDonalds; on Earth Night, ALF catapult Charcoal Chicken, butchers and Richmond Shopping Centre and sloganise KFC and Meri vale McDonalds.; local paper, The Press, claims ALF catapult attacks have caused

a total of $25,000 damage

In Ljungby, Sweden, blood-junkies ‘bagged’ two other hunters they mistook for roe deer. Sadly the two injured, blood-junkies will live.

[Source: Djurens Hamnare]

SMASHING!

Finnisgh police estimate one fur store window is broken every' week in Finland. Locks are glued “more often”.

In 1993 there were 25 EVR (ALF) actions in Finland In 1994, there were 175. Last year, over 300.

(Source: EVR]

FINNISHED

I he ALF SG in Finland has closed down due to police raids, mail monitoring &c.

[Source: Finland ALF SG]

Page 9 - NEWS

FACTFILE: GENETICS

Cellmark Diagnostics, Blacklands Way, Abingdon Business Park OX 14 I DY — US owned company, market leader in genetic fingerprinting.

CELLTECH, SLOUGH - Celltech Group plc, 216 Bath Road, Slogh, Berkshire SLl 4EN -- AIDS research, biotech cultures, 374 employees.

The Lancaster Bomber’s Guide to British Biotech, from Addenbrookes to Zeneca

A lot of folks are wound up about genetics, with good reason. The more you find out, the angrier you'll be. Genetic fingerprinting is one area but here we want to focus on the dangerous way its used to alter animals and plants, food and products like rape seed oil. Not for the weak of stomuch is the secretive IMUTRAN of Cambridge. They genetically engineer pigs weith human hearts — eventually for spare parts surgery. Kidneys and liver transplants will be next, a proper little production line to beat the organ donor shortage. Similar is Tracey the Transgenic sheep, bred by PPL near Edinburgh who splice sheep embryos with human genes to make drugs.

GENETIC CHERNOBYL

Nobody knows what will happen when altered genes get out. We've already had two scares: In February 1994, the University of Birmingham did biohazard level 3 cancer gene experiments in open fronted glass cabinets just down the corridor from department offices, in July 1994 at Wytham Field Station, Oxford, scorpion venom genetic insecticide was used on cabbages. People protested, afraid the venom could escape to attack rare butterflies in a nearby nature reserve. Without a limiter, it could have gone on from there to wipe out 64 different moth and butterfly species. Genetics is like taking rabbits to Australia, but molecular — playing about with the basic building blocks of life. It's only a matter of time before we get a genetic Chernobyl. ‘

ALTERED CROPS

AND ALTERED ANIMALS

You never know what you could be eating — human genes spliced into vegetables sounds too much like cannibalism. The Calgene ‘Flavr Savr' (UGH!) is a US tomato with antibiotic

GENETIC ENGINEERING? JUST SAY NO!

A

ADDENBROOKES - Addenbrookes Hospital, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2QQ.

B

BRITISH BIOTECH OXFORD -- British Biotechnology Ltd., Ihamers Court, Wallington Road, Cowley, Oxford and British Biotech Products Ltd., The Qudrant, Barton Lane, A t - J I ’w - - - i - W - I A < -

Abingdon.

BIRMINGHAM - Site of Home Office resistant genes - used in tomato purees sold in the UK but don't expect them to tell you on the label. BST uis a growth hormone used on US cows. As yet it’s banned in Europe but for how much longer? Or take the Beltsville pig - stuffed with human growth hormones and so grossly overweight that the poor animal can't move. We re well into dr Mengele territory here but it's big business patenting genes and selling this stuff to unsuspecting’ supermarket customers....

WHAT TO DO?

First we need more information. W'ho is doing what and where? What are the side-effects? They can only do this because it is secret — nobody in their right mind would choose these. So start by finding out what is going on and publicise it. Write letters to the Health & Safety Executive and public health, demand to know. Get people involved. Distribute leaflets telling people. Organize protests outside the shiney new science parks and research labs. Picket supermarkets. Do it now, tomorrow will be too late ... -

DNA database opened IOth April 1995. Precise location unconfirmed.

BIRMINGHAM UNIV - Site of February 1994 cancer gene scare.

BOURN HALL - IO miles west of Cambridge. IVF and embryo research BROMPTON - Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street, London SW3 6NP — working on Cvstic Fibrosis.

C

CAMBRIDGE ANTIBODY

Cambridge Antibody Technology (CA I) Ltd., The Science Park, Melbourne,. Cambridge-shire SG8 6EJ — monoclonal antibodies. * ‘ *o Ltjoi ^r»

CELLMARK ABINGDON

EDINBURGH — Edinburgh University, working on human ovaries -- Artificial intelligence Unit, working on genetic’ programmes and computer simulations -- Edinburgh Hospital, doing cystuic fibrosis trials.

G

M

GALTON LAB - Galton Laboratory, University College London, Wolfson House, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1.

GENETIX — Christchurch, Dorset — computer company building DNA analysis computers.

GLASGOW UNIV -- Legal Department, University of Glasgow —

working on a modified form of patents Genetics systems to cover genetics.

H

HENDON — Metropolitan Police Laboratories — genetic fingerprinting.

HERIOT WATT UNIV -- Ricarton, Edinburgh EH14 4AS.

HINXTON HALL -- see Sanger Centre, the Human Genome Project HQ. HUGO -- Hugo (Human Genome Organization) Europe, I Park Square West, London NW I 4LT -- European organization concerned with ethics.

I

IMPERIAL BIOTECH -- Imperial College Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2BT.

IMPERIAL CANCER Imperial Cancer Research Foundation (ICRF), 44 Lincolns Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PX. It s chair, Walter Bodmer, was also chair of HUGO.

IMPERIAL COLLEGE - London IMUTRAN — office at 18 Trumpington Road, Cambridge. Secretive research station located in the Cambridge I Newmarket area that genetically engineers pigs with human hearts.

IVEM — Institute of Virolosv and Environmental Microbiology, Oxford. Scorpion venom gene on cabbages experiment carried out by its exprofessor David Bishop at Wytham Field Station.

K

KINGS - Cell Biophysics Unit. Kings College London, 26-29 Druiy Lane, London WC2.

L

LEICESTER UNIV -- Department of Biochemistry, Leicester University, Adrian Building, University Road, Leicester LEI 7RH. Alec Jeffreys invented genetic fingerprinting here in the late-1970’s. Leicster runs an Msc course in molecular genetics.

LINEAR DRIVES - Linear Technology, Unit 2, 18 Sirdar Road. Weir Industrial Estate, Rayleigh, Essex. Builds robots used in genetic testing.

LISTER -- Lister Hospital, London.

IVF and embryo research.

LONDON UNIV — Department of Biology, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London WdF 7HT

MAMMALIAN — Mammalian Genome Unit, Department of Zoology, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JT.

MICROBIX. — Water toxicity treatments. No precise trace.

MRC CAMBRIDGE -- MRC Centre, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 2QH -- laboratory studying nematode worm genome, 234 scientists.

MRC EDINBURGH - Human

Unit, Werstem General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU — 147 working on cystic fibrosis. Clinical and Population- Cytogenetics Unit at same address.

MRC HARROW - MRC Clinical Research Centre. Watford Road, Harrow, Middlesex HAI 3UJ — 424 scientists.

N

NEWCASTLE UNIV -- Newcastle Upon Tyne University, NE1 7RN — implicated in BNFL Sellafield monitoring project. Mapping of X chromosone, cancer research, muscular dystrophy.

NORTHWICK PARK - 8th Floor, Clinical Research Centre building. Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex — early HQ of UK Human Genome project and computer database. Relocation die to Hinxton, Cambridge at end of 1995.

NOTTINGHAM UNIV - Nottingham University Medical School working on embryology.

O

OXFORD - Oxford University - various projects including computer simulations and the Oxford Cente for Molecular Sciences. Also home of IVEM.

P

PARYSTECH - Southampton German supercomputers.

PEPTIDE — Peptide Mimetics Ltd., 321 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge CB4 4NG - firm working on genetic cure for hay fever.

PORTON DOWN - Cente for Applied Microbiological Research. Porton

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Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP4 OJG -- MoD centre for genetic warfare?

PPL — Roslin, Midlothian, Scotland EH25 9PP and 6 Grain House Mill Court, Great Shelford, Cambridge - responsible for Tracey the transgenic sheep,

tt

QUEENS - Queens College, Cambridge University

QUEEN MARY - Queen Mary and Westfield College, London - workingn on mathematical models of genetics.

K

RHONE POULENCE RORER - Ramham Road South, Dagenham, Essex RM 10 7XS — heart disease

ROYAL - Royal Vetinary College, London — muscular distrophy

READING - Institute of Food Research, Reading - genetically engineered foods such as Calgene Flavr Savr.

S

WEST

LAKES INST

TEPNEL KNUTSFORD

BIRMINGHAM POLICE DATABASE

UCL LONDON

PORTON DOWN

CELLMARK ABINGDON

MRC CAMBRIDGE ADDENBROOKES ! HINXTONHALL

TEPNEL — Tepnel Life Sciences plc., Toft Hall, Knutsford, Cheshire WAI6 9PD — also HQ for NorWest Holst roadbuilders’

TERATOLOGY - St George’s Hospital School, London SWI7 ORE -

25 scientists.

U

UCL LONDON -- University College London, Gowerr Street, London WCIE 6BT — working on Y chromosone and chromosone 9, biochemical genetrics unit and human blood groups. Mouse chromosone 2.

V

VANGUARD — Vanguard Medica, 18 Frederick Sanger Road, Surrey Research Park, Guildford GU2 5YD.

WASHINGTON - Washington Hospital, Tyne and Wear -- IVF and embryo research.

WEST LAKES — West Lakes Research Institute, Moor Row, Whitehaven, Cumbria - BNFL Cumbrian children cancer study and cover-uo.

St GEORGE'S — St George's Hospital, Bfackshaw Eroad, London SW17 OQT — MRC Experimental Embryology and Tetrology Unit is located at St George’s Hospital School, Cramner Terrace, London SW17 0RE.

St MARY’S — St Mary s Hospital Medical School.

SANGER CENTRE - Sanger Centre, Hinxton Hall, Cambridge — major UK centre for the Human Genome Project, also Human Genome Mapping Resource

Centre top be relocated from Harrow at the end of 1995 and European Bioinformatics Institute.

Z

ZENECA - Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Mereside, Alderley Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SKI0 4TG.

PRIMITIVISM: AGAINST CIVILISATION

AGAINST CIVILISATION

As cities cannot be reformed, they must be abolished

‘Civilisation’ means ‘the culture of cities’. Civilisation is traditionaly opposed to barbarism but my dictionary defines barbarism as “savage, brutal" and there is no apter description for the origin and history of civilisation, the beating heart of the global Leviathan.

Some reconstructed fascists glorify Barbarism, their Golden Age of fuhrerprinzip, and call for cities to be smashed, but they see them as sinks of cosmopolitanism, blaming crime and loss of community identity on ethnic minorities. In fact, newly immigrated ethnic minorities and ‘urban villages’, self-contained communities newly swallowed by urban sprawl, have the strongest sense of community for the few generations it takes them to be fully assimilated into city life.

We take issue with city wealth, its raison d’etre, not poverty. City crime is down to city scale, not ‘race*. The city is big enough to hide in, big enough for the criminal not to care for his victims -- and poverty is so much harder to endure when riches are flaunted before you, even if this relative poverty of the cities is dwarfed by the absolute poverty beyond .them. People in the Third World fleeing rural destitution for ‘city streets paved with gold’ are the biggest contributors to relative population growth currently.

They ’re just going where the money is. CITY-BIRTH

In The City In History, Lewis Mumford argued villages were created by women, such settlements marking the dawn of agriculture and women’s role in it (Morgan’s Falling Apart, p. 66).

This may be so but the first cities were certainly the product of men, bloody tyrants al that. Pre-civilised people don’t work harder than they need to meet their subsistance needs. Primitive society divided between ruler and ruled when some lazy sods conned the others into working for them while they stood around telling them what to do. Scale probably had much to do with iL When a group gets too big for everyone to participate in decision-making,

‘ represen titives’ may make decisions for everyone else. In time they get tilings running their way and then get in heavies to secure their privileges. This is the ‘Golden Age’ of the European New Right, wjjh 4’« ‘heroic *

»* I LI OLLt# $ -L > - - L >

. ... 4 I

chieftains and warriors, actually gangsters and slave-drivers.

When a chieftain’s got a big enough retinue, it’s war. Neighbours are

raided for slaves or forced to pay

ransoms (‘tri

te’r Danegelt) to be

spared such treatment In India, ‘caste’ means ‘colour’, lower castes once

being of a different ethnic group to the ‘heroes’ that imposed on them. Slaves and booty have to go somewhere and that somewhere is the chieftain’s hall.

In time, enough have been robbed of the means of subsislance to force them into specialist trades, trinket-makers to the king’s household. This is ‘culture’, pleasuring Power. They can’t feed themselves as by this lime the king’s gathered everything into the royal granaries or is even minting coin in the royal treasury. By living near the king, the source of all plundered largesse, the craftsmen create city life.

The king’s rule is legitimised — cities became stales. ‘Civil’ actually means ‘relating to [the] ... State' and to talk of civilising someone is to talk of domesticating them in Cametle’s sense of the term, breaking and dehumanising them, making them accept rule. This is inherent to orderly city life and, incredibly, social ecologists see such creation of ‘model citizens’ as a revolutionary goal.

Some city-states grew into great empires. Cities like Rome bloated on the fat of empire until they collapsed from excess taxation, decadence and lead poisoning. Our ancestors thought .imperialism groovy, imagining themselves the Alexanders or Caesers of future history, but Perlman’s Against His-Slory, Against Leviathan tells the majorities story. On their slave-built edifices, pharoahs boasted of their genocides and of lands laid waste. The Aztecs demanded fellow human beings for bloody sacrifice as tribute from their vassals, a practice almost universal in early civilisation. Even the Greeks, authors of ‘Western civilisation’, sterilised their native soil with olive groves and then took to war.

INDUSTRIALISM

It’s no coincidence that the megapolis and industrialism rose together.

Before the Industrial Revolution, there was an agrarian one. By the 18th century, the long process of driving the peasants off the land and concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands was climaxing in England (the Clearances did for Scotland a century later, as did the Potato Famine in Ireland). The slave trade financed these monopolistic acquisitions. The Medieval system of strip agriculture, egalitarian and highly efficient in terms of yield/man-acre, was replaced by Model farms with crop rotation in big fields. New ploughs, threshing machines, you name it came in from the engineer’s hells kitchen. In events forshadowing the Green Revolution of the 1970’s, higher yielding crops and animals were bred, all beyond the means of smallholders.

Progress? Not for the millions driven off the land as surplus to the requirements of this new, more labour- efficient agriculture. There was now the surplus food available to feed a landless; newly urbanised proletariat, themselves needed by industry as factory fodder.

People used to fresh air and sun didn’t want to go into the new ‘manufactories’ to be yoked to machines, driven by steam. Hunger forced them in, first widows and orphans, then all, bound by the same chains of dependancy as the artisans of old. They were engineered like the machines they had to serve. Military discipline was used to organise them en masse, to rob them of their humanity and ability to rebel, and this model was applied to schools, prisons, everywhere mass must reign.

As well as workshop of the world, England became its marketplace, trade imposed by gunboats. When the East India Company opened markets in China, the first product they offered was opium. When the Chinese rejected this imperialist poison, millions were slaughtered and ‘reparations’ (tribute) imposed for the relative handful of Europeans killed in the Opium War. China was plundered, its people made coolies and junkies. London prospered.

The steam engine meant that people could be moved en masse as well as plunder. Once cities had been restricted in radius to the distance a horse could tow a cart to market and back in a day. Engines covered the same ground in an hour so cities mushroomed. City dwellers could live and die in an urban environment never having seen a green field or breathed untainted air.

Freed from patronage, artists could afford to be sensitive to the environmental squallor produced by industrial-ism but by the end of the 19th century, they started to paint some-thing else around them -- alienation from themselves as well as from Nature, the loss of personal authenticity inherent in city living.

AND NOW?

The sacrifices made to the patron gods of cities aren’t acknowledged now - the victims of road accidents or poor air quality, the sucides and outcasts — but nothing’s changed. A price worth paying when tribute’s still coming in? Now city dwellers don’t see things for what they are. Now it’s called debt interest repayments, ‘free trade’ where rich and powerful States fix all prices and terms, or ‘development’ where developed countries get the food and raw materials their cities need to

survive in ‘exchange’ for city- produced stuff Third World countries don’t Human sacrifices there too, to restructuring and austerity (hunger, disease and want).

City dwellers claim to enjoy consuming the booty from across the planet but in their hearts they know cities are incomputable with life, that they’re an intolerable oppression. The cities are hollowing and villages filling with suburbanite escapees to the point that they’re destroying the relatvely sociable communities they’ve moved in on. They’re still to learn you must live with a community, not just in it.

As always, ‘revolutionaries’ lag behind the People. Despite being examples of exploitation I alienation fifty miles wide, cities are a non-issue for most ‘revolutinaries’. Most are city dwellers themselves or don’t want to offend the majority who are. Vulgar Marxists who see urbanisation / proletarianisation as “a necessary historical stage” in bringing about communist utopia see opposition to cities as a reactionary attempt to ‘‘roll back the wheel of History” or even fascism. Like the factories and the rest of the apparatus of production, the city is something to be siezed, not destroyed. We have now seen the history of the city and the alienation inherent in it. They mean to sow their seed in a poison field. We know what cannot be reformed must be destroyed.

THE CITY DWELLERS; The price of privilege: urban life as alienation

It is certainly true that the fulfillment of individuality and intellect was the historical privilege of the urban dweller or of individuals influenced by urban life. Indeed, some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny. Only in a complete urban environment can there be complete people: only in a rational urban situation can the human spirit advance its most vital cultural and social traditions.

Bookchin’s Limits of the City, pp. 1-2

Aside from his imperialist rhetoric (“destiny”) and flaunting the fruits of its expropriations (“culture”), Bookchin’s assertion that city dwellers are “complete people” is absurd. They’re fucked up by massification and intense division of labour in cities. Cities themselves are civilisation, prime focuses of alienation, not least from the land they parasitise. Bookchin’s ridicu-lous attempt to contrast the urban (his ideal) with cities (the reality) makes not a jot of difference to such alienation and his failure to cope with the lived realities of city life just illustrate his.

Bookchin secs a bright future where people are freed from traditional constraint to become good citizens - as in civ it as, root of ‘city’ and ‘civilisal-ion’. The restraints he talks of aren’t legal I institutional - he idolises the Greek polis, archaic model

of ‘Western democracy’ — but communal.

He claims Medieval serfs fleeing their feudal obligations said “city air makes free” but they had to flee, forced off the land by the wool trade enclosures. These Masterless Men were free only to be atomised individuals without * community or consequence, proletar- ianised forerunners of capitalism’s homo economicus. They died like flies not because the city fathers didn’t know about sanitation - Latin for lead is plumbum as the Romans used it for their waler pipes, hence plumbing - but because they didn’t care for feudal obligation either, just profit and power.

The ‘tolerance’ of big city life is but a continuation of this indifference. When city dwellers aren’t harassing ethnic or sexual minorities, it’s not because they're positively embracing their lifestyles — rather that they’re blanking them as invisible and not bearing thinking about, just as hundreds will turn a blind eye to a rape going on under their noses on the Underground or by a busy road. If you doubt this, note the hysterical reactions next lime the tabloids whip up a campaign against minorities (‘asylum seekers on the dole’, ‘nursery teacher was lesbian’ &c) powerful enough to crack the shell of city dweller indifference and release the prejudice beneath.

Why this indifference? City dwellers are so overloaded with what’s happening around them - by the city’s mass — that they’d collapse under the stress of coping with it all if they didn’t blank 90% of it out You know the way they stare through you on the Tube or if you ask them the time of day on the street You have to physically block their way to get any reaction. You’ve got to be pretty alienated not to register the evidence of your own senses.

This selective perception means that city dwellers are easily manipulated. They spend most of thair lives working on rules of thumb’ and taken-for- granted assumptions, judging the worth of things by superficialities like price and appearance programmed into them by advertising, the media and the gossip of their peers. They think sad style I consumer crap like Peter Yorke’s The Eighties is brimming with important insights. They’re most likely to make their careers their lives and judge others by their income and things they own.

We’ve found city dwellers will believe anything they're told as long as it conforms to their prejudices and is told them with a straight face. They’re prey to every trend and rumour as their dependency and info overload means they’ve no thoughts of origins and their idea of self is an external constructed from such ephemora. They bullshit, hype and project image as they’re unlikely to meet the same person twice and don’t have to depend on each other anyway. They can always move on to another circle and be someone else somewhere else.

Instead of completeness, we see fragmentation and emptiness. This isn’t humanity’s "destiny”, it’s a purgatory which will end when the cities fall.

The City is Finished

All the world connects up into a global city, but its world is imprisoned in money and can't move across into the gift economy. The city is doomed, writes City-Death author Steve Booth. Green Anarchism will replace it because the city just can't deliver...

WHERE THE CITY IS NOW

It started with the basic fact that people tend to co-operae. People discovered some are better than others at certain tasks so specialisation and different trades began. People shared things and the community

became more sophisticated. They thought specialisation was more effective — not every body could be a metal worker or weaver without the same access to raw materials. Then trade brught a wider variety of things into town and development came to be seen as desirable in itself.

scratch your skin and catch on your designer jacket. One of the funniest examples of this school of thought is that of the archetypal neurotic New Yorker, Woody Allen, who had to fail in a lake in one of his films but was so terrified of contamination by bugs and things living in there he faked the shot and fell into a water tank filled with Evian mineral water instead

Londonocentrism is the doctrine that alarms; the streets, motorways and shopping malls must be overlooked by TV cameras. The rich must hide behind their fenced-off security patrolled compounds.

But it gets worse. They are putting the cameras inside their heads now. Neighbourhood Watch with a vengeance. Milkmen are given police radios. Social workers, doctors, teachers and lollipop ladies are asked to report

Because transport was hazardous, manufacturing tended to go underr one roof or in one street. Markets, towns and cities grew together where trade routes crossed. Raw materials like tin brought the Phoenicians to Cornwall or the spice caravans to Samarkand. As trading centres grew, so came civic priode, water supplies, aqueducts. taxes.

cioaiescing into a single, monolithic, but identifiable global culture.* It all connects up into one global city which imposes its homogeneity from London to Leningrad, Tokyo to Trieste — USA symbols. McDonalds, EuroDisney....

THE DREAM OF THE CITY

Why would anybody want to live in a

has anything suspicious. Paranoia is turning them into a nation of grasses. Then thereis talk about ID cards. It is all turning ingto an authoritarian nightmare, something like East Germany but worsde, more hi-tech. What do you think all these Special Branch raids are about? Their world becomes more and more restricted.

nothing outside the M25 ring validity, ansd his same cultural

chauvinism runs through most of the city type of thinking. The appointed right to strip resources from outside and impose its plastic burger carton culture, its motorways, land-fill sites and toxic waste incinerators. It is always a one way street with the city — the sewage

sewerage. People living in close proximity had to be organised. Barter became trade using currency, political and economic relations formalized into masters and slaves; with this mental work became more highly prized than physical work, gold and then paper substituted for value.

Machines enabled people to repeat operations and reproduce artefacts - again and again and again to a standard pattern. In step with industrialisation, canals, railways and steamships brought raw materials like cotton to the new industrial centres and opened up the whole world to exploitation. The reverse side of the industrialisation coin is colonialism. The value of people and physical work reduces almost to zero, people become commodities, while the value of culture, mental work and notional paper currencies is elevated almost to infinity.

THE GLOBAL CITY

At the same time as the cities became organised, concentrated and heirarchical, they began to compete Each city had a distinctive political -culture which imposed itself over the identitties of its individuals - the Citizenbs. We have gone beyond this now, Presently, the political cultures are city? Mostly because they know no different. Did they have any choice? Perhaps their ancestors were coerced into cities by the enclosures. If s just the way they have always lived. Alongside this, there is the myth, the present day equivalent of the streets of London being paved with gold, and this runs something like this:

Look at all the shops - you can buy anything you want all round the clock Chinese resturants. Indian takeaways, off licences ..

!>ook at the bright lights, the traffic. Canary Wharf, buildings made of steel, glass and concrete Portable phones. computer terminals, fax machines, satellite links - at , my terminal I have the whole world at my

' fingertips...

In the city you can be who you like. Look at all that culture — opera houses, concert halls, an galleries Dillons bookstore Fashion clothes, travel agents, nightclubs ..

Cities arc always vibrant, scientific, businesslike, fast living, exhilarating .....

Coupled with this dream (the carrot) we have the stick; fear of the outside, fear of the unknown, fear of Nature ‘read in tooth and claw’. This was shown up in the TV series Heaven, Hell and Suburbia² by Jonathan Glancey, the architecture critic of the Independent. The countryside was shown as somewhere alien, unpleasant and threatening- Hedges have thorns in that barges making the trip out of the Thames estuary and emblematic of its wider attitude.

ji'j Fbiumab urfj 01 afltfwfe as//

WHERE THE CITY IS GOING

So much for the dream behind the city. The plain fact is the city is turning into a nightmare as its social problems compound Glancey wouldn’t be making his paean of praise to the city if it wasn’t under attack. After the October 1987 stock market crash, the housing maerket, the recession, down-sizing, out-sourcing, "rationalisation’, short term contracts, their confidence has taken a battering. The perception the city isn’t working is spreading. The visibility of poverty and decay keeps the threat of the inner city high in their minds. The middle classes with money esdeape to the suburbs and beyond, meanwhile the former workers starve on income support in the high rise estates.

The city has failed in its peromise to enhance the living standards of all; or to share its products equitably . So we have crime, we have vandalism, drug taking. Shops must have metal grilles over their windows to stop ram raiders. I he chain stores cluster together in the collective security of their glass and plastic shopping malls. I he BMW’s and Porsches have to be fitted with car

The city has failed to carry everyone with it, and so is broken -- divided against itself. We can see the future of this concrete wasteland — conformist, robotic, corrupt, vicious, vindictive and unquestioning. A place where beggars are kicked off the streets, rounded up and recycled as dog food. 1 he world of the city is intrinsically fascistic.

WHERE THE CITY COULD GO

In News From Nowhere (1890), William Morris had a vision of a future full of plenty, where money had been abolished. The gift economy. Even at the time he wrote, the vision was realizable, yet except for a few visionaries, few took any notice. A hundred and five years later, the world is stuffed full of uigliness, even so, Morris’s vision could be brought up to date.

As it is, the city is without vision, without unity and social cohesion. The city has failed to carry everyone with it and so is broken. It is not moving forward but stagnating. As William Morris saw, and others have seen,’ the fact is that since about 1870, automation has enabled production to outstrip demand. The factories could easily fill all our needs, if supply could be matched to demand and if money could

Page 13

is that ever since 1870 we have been in permanent recession -- recession and capitalism are linked. Only the two world wars have been able to break the log jam and the effects of these soon turned from boom to bust.

We want the ‘gift' economy. Instead of fighting, humanity could decide to wage war on want, crime,, poverty, disease, famine and ignorance. The productive capacities of the so-called developed world ought to be thrown into it — feeding the hungry. The sad thing is that it will not be, and that is why the city is finished.

DEVELOPMENT AS AN END IN ITSELF

A major fault in the city mindset is this assumption that development is a good thing. Politicians like Kenneth Clarke always talk about ‘growth*. To the ecological balance of the planet, this ‘growth* is the same thing as cancer. Look at somewherre like Manchester, once described as the cradle of industry*, the birthplace of the industrial revolution* and so on. Manchester has had 200 years to get it right. If development is in itself good, why is Manchester full of dereliction and decay? Closed factories, run down industrial estates. Places like Moss Side and Hulme where crack dealers fight it out with uzis. This is their world.

Development for the sake of development is stupid. Yet a major goal of the global city is to spread itself across the planet, to make India the same as Manchester, with just the same [power stations and chemical plants. What's the point? When they are up and running they will either be in competition with others or absorbed by the global corporations. And yet the Bretton Woods institutions go on lending development money for more dams, hydro-electric schemes, mines, factories... Why? Development is a binding to nothing, an empty objective. Why do they want to make the whole world the same?

COMPETITION

Duplication and competition is wasteful. I he. city needs to find how to increase co-operation. But if Arthur Daley is always ripping you off, co-operation is never on the agenda. In the present, so- called ‘Capitalist system, predator companies carve up the markets and then run the scene for what they can get out of it. Wages and working conditions are kept at minimal levels, prices are way way high, the goods themselves fall apart or wear out as quickly as possible to keep turnover up.

FETISH OF CONSUMPTION

How much of the modern world is built round consumption? Advertising stimulates demand, fashion brainwashes people, plastic packaging entices. Buy, eat, pssess, discard - think of the industrial effort expended in making it, the energy wasted in delivering it; and how much of it ends up in the landfill site on the edge of town?

Materialism is a dead end. Tacky consumer goods are no consolation. Even that great touchstone of Thatcherite materialism, home ownership, has been blighted by the decline in the housing market, negative ‘ equity ?md job Uncertainty A

demographic time bomb has been lit under all the world cruises and tourist industries. (What sort of private pensions package will the Generation X kids in backwards turned baseball caps and naff jackets be paying into?)

Ostentation becomes a big minus, a provocation, when “the poor man at the gate” comes calling to take out revenge for his exclusion:

I know what is going on is really bad. but I . want a Mercedes 450 SL someday and all the designer clothes I can afford I have the uneasy feeling that if there is too much justice and equality in the world, the good life won t be there for me in the future ..

Anonymous US student

How could what is happening be offset by owning a Mercedes? In what way could such a life be said to be ‘good’, grounded as it is in total injustice? The lifestyler is bought off and so reveals his / her radical worthlessness. The possessions themselves become symbols of injustice..

Consumption is the downside of development. If development for its own sake is futile, consumption for its own sake is also stupid ansd empty, a waste of the Earth’s natural resources and potential.

TOWARDS THE GIFT ECONOMY

Suppose we could get away from this and get a vision, draw people together. Suppose we used the awesome

The city is a parasite, all take, giving nothing. Decaying, contracting, free-

wheeling down into the abyss. Look round yourself. How often do you hear the sirens? Ask yourself if it isn't so.

productive capacity of the developed world to benefit all? First we must get past our basic needs; water, food, clothing, shelter, medical care. But how would this be paid for? Supposwed we agreed to scrap the idea of paying for things with money?

SUPPOSE

/11

Imagine .a world where robots and machines did all the work. If nobody worked, how would anybody pay for the things? What would happen is that people would do things they wanted to do, work and leisure would be equally spread out. Freed from the need to work to survive, people would do things for the love of them, and not for the love of money or of power. Once we had provided for the basic things, we could have peoples' workshops where almost anything coyld be made, quickly, easily, without any fuss. In this world people would take pride in the things they created - there'd be no alienation Nothing would be badly made, the designer would feel a deep sense of shame were it to break down, fall apart or not be suited to its purpose.

PEOPLES WORKSHOPS

Suppose people in South America could design things with computers to be made in Russia and then delivered? Suppose this global city could use computer links to co-ordinate mining, farming and precisely matched to supply? Suppose they did distribute work and leisure time fairly and evenly between all people? No more unemployment. Such a world would eliminate useless and inert bureau-cracies, corruption, morning and evening rush hours. People would work in or near their homes. For uch a world to come into being, useless rivalries and selfishness would have to go. Ther global city would have to get a truly global perspective on things, and that is where the vision fails.

manufacturing so that demand was starting to see the demands the city Margaret Thatcher.

The vision fails because in the city it is either do down the other guy, or be done down. The EC asset stripping of British' businesses and Michael Portillo’s xenophobia in the Tory Conference are all of a piece. In a world where the corporations strive to overcome and assimilate each other, true co-operation can ' never happen. I he Enterprise Culture means we can all sell the Big Issue to each other, can can all work down McDonalds for £1.72 an hour. Say it with lead -- as any Toxteth crack dealer could tell you, the city is a battleground.

WHY THE GREEN ANARCHIST VISION WILL PREVAIL

What other alterbnatives are there? What other choices exist, which do not include the city? The gift economy offers the only way forwards for it. The dream of the city could be restated, instead of the streets being paved with gold, some sort of global humanitarian vision like the one outlined above could be adopted. The News From Everywhere programme might begin with just one thing , perhaps by putting into praxctice the principle.that all people in the world have the right to free access to a clean and pure water supply. If the gift economy were to be adopted, then the city would win. Such a proposal could easily be put into place, it is quite a modest project compared with the space race or the nuclear weapons project. There is nothing in this that is not physically achievable. The only thing lacking is the political will to do it. It isn't going to happen folks. Why not? No political party or group would even d^re to frame such a radical programme.

In the water example above - just think. All people have a right to free.... No more privatised water companies, £200 water bills. No more Sir Dennis Pitcher, no more telephone figure salaries. And so, for the sake of their institutionalised selfishness and greed it continues. Instead of giving away pipes, taps, water pumps and purifiers, they would far rather sell them automatic rifles and land mines⁰. They have no vision.

In the absence of the News From Everywhere programme (the only way the glbal city will survive), people are makes on them have no legitimacy. It’s all breaking apart. ‘Revolution on the Periphery* is moving forwards; most recently, rebels in Sierra Leone have siezed the Bauxite mines. The city is not going to provide for our needs, we ourselves are.

Have you ever looked at cars in the rush hour? Thousands of cars on the motorway, all of them stopped or moving at just 10 mph. Eventually, you get to the front of the queue and find the reason for the hold up. Two streams of traffic are trying to merge, each equally trying to push forwards, each refusing to let the other stream in, both of them stopped.

The way the traffic jams up is a microcosm of society - and the way it doesn't work⁷. Of course, we can all be grasping Thatcherite sods, selfishly trying to forge ahead in our BMW’s but going nowhere. And that is how it is with the city. Can't you just see it? The city is a parasite, all take, giving nothing. Decaying, contracting, freewheeling down intop the abyss. Look round yourself. How often do you hear the sirens? Ask yoursef if it isn't so.

In talking about the global economy, one of the buzz words is ‘interdependence’, which a cynical observer of the EC defined as having to rely on people you can't rely on ". How much longer do you have to be stuck in the motorway traffic before you realise that it is quicker to get out of the car and walk?

REFERENCES ¹ Plato’s Republic, section 373 (Penguin translation, pp. 122-123). See City- Death, p. 203. Plato was dismissive of the frugal society, calling it ‘the community of pigs' and saying:

Such a society will not be satisfied it will want couches and tables and other furniture and a variety of delicacies, scents, perfumes, call girls and confectionary. And we must no longer confine ourselves to the bare necessities of our earlier description, houses, clothing and shoes, but must add the fine arts of painting and embroidery, and introduce materials like gold and ivory

‘ Heaven. Hell and Suburbia, Channel 4 TV series broadcast during late-April 1994, ’ - .

³ Francis Fukuvama, author of The End of History has written a book. Trust. which argues that:

only those socicics that enjoy trust to a high degree are able to create the flexible large scale business organisations needed for success in the global economy

⁴ William Morris News From Nowhere (1890), Peter Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) and Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity' Anarchism (1971).

Capitalism I m reluctant to use the teerm capitalism because it is linked to Marxism. The system, the thing we object to and oppose is not just about money (capital) but it is about power, about stanmping its plastic image onto everything. We need better terminology. We could talk about McDonaldsisation, Disneyland, often I wrtite about ‘The Machine...

Land Mines. A hundred million landmines are estimated to have been planted in sixty countries. One million more are placed each year.

“There is no such thing as society ",

A typical national grid transformer switching centre.

Thirlmere aqueduct crossing the river Brook

Stroke!

How much longer before the city has a stroke in some major part of it?

M25

ENFIELD LOCK

SCRATCHWOOD

ROOKERY

REDBRIDGE

HARROW

FARM

LEA BRIDGE

BLACKWALL

CREEKMOUTH

BULLS BRIDGE

THURROCK

ERITH

TILBURY

GREATER LONDON

MOUNT MASCAL

ASHFORD

MALDEN

NEW HAW

BEDDINGTON

KNOCKHOLT

WEST BYFLEET

LONDON, THE CIRCUfT DIGRAM: There is one interesting point on it - from researching this I found out there was a power station at Bullis Bridge neasr M4 junction 3, but it doesn't seem to be connected to the rest of it. Could be underground cables, of course, but what is in that are that they dn't want to run out of lecky and has its .own little power station? Answers on a post card...______ ___________________________________

A stroke happens when the blood supply to part of the brain is blocked by a clot. Deprived of oxygen, the affected brain cells stop working. It could be just a few cells, or a whole area that are affected. The bigger the area — the more functions that are lost. It could be speech or elsde something else vital, and then the victim dies.

Cities are like the brain. It is obvious that small parts of it are not working. But when you think about this across the whole picture it stsrts to add up. One particular part may only be 5% down on its specification, but suppose this is an important part that radically affects the rest of it? Over all the city that 5% could become 25%. Now what happens if we increase it to 7% ? 9%? Does it become 30%, 50% or what? And what about all the other parts of it that are also falling down?

ELECTRIC

Nearly everything else depends on elecincity - street lights, telecom,

emputers, frozen food industry Deprived-of electricity, the city will quickly die.

Electricity is mostly generated outside the city and brought into it using pylons. Generators depend on coal, oil, hydro-electric and nukles. Sme British power stations like Ferrybridge near Doncaster are among the top polluters in Europe.

WATER

The city takes waler from deep underneath it (aquifers) and from areas around it using reservoirs and pipelines. The london Ring Main has recently

been completed, this water works version of the M25 enables supplies to go direct to places of greatest demand inside the capital. What happens when the ‘provinces’ run out of waler?

FOOD

Food is grown outside the city, or abroad, and shipped to warehouses and supermarket distribution centres. With centralized production if just one part has a problem the whole of it falls down — the rubber pipe that caused a contamination scare with Perrier mineral water a few years back; or a salmonella outbreak at amilk plabnt the public health managed to cover up for three weeks last November...

SEWAGE

Cities produce tons of sewage, which mostly goes into rivwers, the same place they get some of their waler from. With the drought, its only a matter of time before short cuts are taken and public health is comproised. Sewage is a Trojan Turd, a major revolutionary

force against the city.

RUBBISH

. Outside towns everywhere there are landfill sites. Cities slowly crunch up under piles of packaging, plastic and broken consumer goods. Maybe all the crud should be put through the shredder and used to pack up the coadt defences before the sea rises. Will they think of tis before they drown? 1 doubt it.

VIRTUAL REALTY

/

Telecoms use TV transmitters, mobile phone networks and micro wave links. Even satellites now to join from point to point. TV signals, burglar alarm codes, computers controlling gas pipelines, financial sector, news agenciers — everything uses telecoms.

Political systems depend on bureaucracies which use paperwork forms and computer networks. Under the Next Steps diversification scheme, civil service departments moved out of London to places like Leeds (DSS) and Notungham (Inland Revenue).

A bit of fog and

perhaps some snow and it all stiops.

Motorways are the most visible sign of it all cracking up.

Pylons generally run in two sets between power stations and urban switching centres. Often the parallel runs are miles Cellular phone towers tend to have a triangular system of apart but here are both together taking power from SizeweH vertical aerials on top. They cmmunicate with other towers towards London, in the system and conventional telephone exchanges through, microwave links, usually larger versions of TV satellite dishes mounted lower down the tower.

Power for InterCity trains comes through the national grid via tranuformers and switchgear like this, wherever pylons cross the main line.

Microwave link towers

City Limits

Leigh Starcross on Power, Resistance and Global Urbanism

Remember the Thief s city of Baghdad? While the palace guards sought him through labyrinthine streets, there were seemingly innumerable doors behind which to hide, teeming marketplaces in which to become lost, ready disguises with which to evade capture. And. of course, there still existed a wilderness outside the city walls into which one could effectively disappear. Even though we understand that the despotic Caliph's palace contains a rather unpleasant gaol where even more unpleasant physical punishments are meted out to those elements who dare to thwart power, we can at the same time be certain that escape is relatively easy. Doltish guards can be hoodwinked, keys stolen, obstacles overcome. And cries of “ Stop that one in the robes and turban!’’ aren't much of a threat in a city thronging with thousands of similarly garbed, anonymous persons. In fact, in such a context, ultimate detection and capture are only really possible when those in authority rely upon informers and spies.

Virilio's assertion that the city is the generalized paradigm upon which civilization's specific exercises of power are based. In fact, Virilio insists that the political economy from which the city derives is not that of commerce as is commonly purported—“Commerce

doesn't need a city'' (Virilio, p. 5)--but rather an economy of “ pure and total war". Such an economy in Virilio's estimation is dependent upon the technological domination of time and space through speed: ‘‘speed as the essence of war; technology as the producer of speed; war as logistics ..' endocolonization; deterrence ... Pure War" (Virilio, p. 35). Accordingly, the power inherent in cities and thus within civilization itself is reliant upon the

Perlman's conception of Leviathan concurs, “a will to reduce the world to a single place, a single identity'' (Virilio, p. 66). The result is a global city without walls, a space of consensual hallucination, which has achieved exocolonization, eradicated all wildernesses, and is now concerned rather with endocolonization.

By a wicked irony, the inhabitants of this totalizing civilization are not simply reduced to prisoners in a concentration camp writ large, but more particularly they have also become its guards: “All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it ... People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness” (Virilio, p. !8).Thus, we are all made to collude,

Such a scenario is that of a totalitarian

directly or indirectly, intentionally or

regime in which power is openly coercive and its violent nature entirely evident. Those subject to such an overt exercise of power perpetually tremble in fear, but they do so in the full awareness that they suffer a terrible oppression. Compliance with this state of affairs is only tolerable when rewarded by the availability of goods, protection and way of life that the city makes possible. Should it prove intolerable, there is always the way of the thief or the renegade.

However, the recourses available to the inhabitants of the Thief s Baghdad are not those possible for present day criminals or political insurgents— inseparable categories since at least the nineteenth century. The contemporary western city's public spaces are subject to the tireless gaze of a power that records all that it sees, a more effective technique of control in that it dispenses with the physical presence of unreliable, limited armed patrols of enforcers. A more direct method of coercive presence is reverted to only when more covert measures of power become less effective for whatever reasons. But usually, force only exists as an adjunct to covert measures of control of which surveillance is only one example. And, even if the eye of Leviathan cannot literally see all of the people all of the time, civilization s inhabitant's must be made to believe that it will detect all eventually. In the meantime, the citizen’s who live under the threat of it’s

otherw ise, in this enterprise of furthering global violent hierarchies.

The watched are also watchers, and the watchers are being watched. Even when an inhabitant of this culture knows him/herself to be entirely alone, s/he will continue to behave in many ways as if s/he were yet subject to the compelling gaze of power. The hegemonic ideology would have us believe that in western cultures, where overt display of power and force has been dispensed with as inefficient and wasteful, that ‘the price of ‘freedom’ is eternal vigilance”. And even if we understand that eternal vigilance is an ideal rather than an existing practicality, still, as in the panopticon scenario, we can never know at any given moment whether we are in actuality subject to surveillance or not. The fact that we will yet act as if we are makes this immaterial. Our collusion with power consists to a large extent in both policing others and policing ourselves.

As Ellul points out in The Technological Society, such a strategy makes for a more efficient technique of control than does mere brutal coercion Under inquisitorial and openly violent regimes, the police operate at will and seemingly arbitrarily. No citizen has any peace of mind,;and everyone is aware that they are subject to an intolerable oppression. It is a world where anyone may be whisked off in the night to a prison camp or insane asylum, or be summarily executed, a world, of desaparecidos,

gaze are to be kept in a permanent state PRISONERS OF THE PANOPTICAN: “the citizens who live under the pogroms and purges. In a culture such as

of awareness that, despite the lack of an

threat of its gaze are to be kept in a permenant state of awareness ^ours» however, the oppression of power

immediate presence of naked power, one that, despite the lack of an immediate presence of naked power, one

could at any given moment be subject to could at any given moment be subject to detection”

detection. _

Relevant to a rigorous, politically Pure War of the city’s martial nature, violence afforded not only by wealth but inorrned critique of the modern city, Foucault’s theory, that Bentham’s also by speed: the speed of automobiles an y extension of civilization itself, is panopticon is the multipurpose paradigm and jet planes, telecommunication, oucau t s conception of the panopticon upon which western civilization has computer networks and television,which outlined in D/sc/pl/ne and Pun/sh, in modelled its techniques of bio-power mobilizes goods, information and conjunction^ writer the cnl ighte nmebCfjJrtflerejj^Jjty peqpl^. Behip^ al| _t -thi*>_# ,^ie^ .and

permeates all of life just as much only it obfuscates its violent nature by assuming a facade of bland ^reasonableness which

is capable of seduction rather than mere repression. This proves a more successful strategy as it allows those

upon whom it operates to cooperate with and like it better. In this improved version ( Ellul, p. 413):

Page 17

citizens"... and there is nothing mysterious about them; therefore they arc not felt to be oppressive. Police work has become “scientific". Their files contain dossiers on every citizen The police arc in a position to

. lay hands on any one “wanted at any moment, and this obviates to a great degree the necessity of doing so. No-one can evade the police or disappear. But. then, no-one wants to.

This represents the kind of mindset that refuses to see Neighborhood Watch schemes and public surveillance cameras as an imposition. After all, if you're not a criminal then you don't have anything to fear or hide, right? Unfortunately, the criteria used to determine just who is a criminal are subject to continual change and reinterpretation. In fact, there are now more ways of engaging in acts defined as “criminal" than there ever have been before. As Foucaulf has shown, categories of the criminal have undergone a process of refinement and proliferation in western cultures, beginning in the enlightenment and increasing in intensity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process of course continues at present, the recently instigated CJA being only one of many interrelated examples.

The strategy of identifying and further defining what Foucault refers to as “the dangerous individual" has tended to focus historically on urban areas where social conflicts, class struggles, political confrontations and armed revolts have been taken by hegemonic powers historically to be representative of

OBSCENIC VIEW

CONGRETINIZATION

threats to the general social order. For oppositional contact between the forces

example, I oucault points out that the of power and elements of resistance

"psychiatrization of crime” instituted in

the nineteenth century (Foucault, 125):

Emphasized the character of the criminal rather than the crime in which he had participated This phenomenon demanded that the judicial -system focus on the criminal s potential danger to society instead of on his particular crime. Psychiatry became important in the nineteenth century because it instituted a new ... means to enable the judicial machine to police public hygiene. The "juridico-moral’ concept of the dangerous individual threatens us because it gives society the right to censure based on what the individual is.

Foucault goes on to identify a key fingerprinting. Early this century, the nineteenth century innovation in civic criminal investigation of Sacco and social control which enabled city streets Vanzetti, despite whether or not they to be "cleansed” of “criminally insane’’, were actually innocent of armed “socially dangerous” elements-e.g. “expropriation” and murder, allowed thieves, murderers, sexual perverts, important innovations in the then

revolutionaries-in the supposed interest fledgling science of ballistics (see of “public hygiene” (Foucault, p. 142): Laqueur). Whereas, the related series of

crimes in early twentieth century London undertaken by Latvian and Russian revolutionaries (at least two of whom were self-proclaimed anarchists).

J he intensive development of the police network, which led to a new mapping and closer surveillance of urban space and also to a much more efficient prosecution of minor delinquency ... |and| it must be added that... the machine smashers of the beginning of the century, the anarchists of the last few years of the century, including the violent strikes, the revolutions of 1X48 and the commune of 1870, prompted those in power to treat political misdemeanors in the same way as ordinary crimes in order to discredit them Little by little an image was built up of an enemy who can equally well be a revolutionary or a murderer, since after all revolutionaries do sometimes kill.

I he concept of revolutionary-as- criminal and the presence of such undesirables in urban areas as a perceived threat to socnU order seemed further reinforced by the attentats, "expropriations" and various instances of "propaganda by the deed” undertaken from the nineteenth to the early twentieth cehtury Repeated

provided

information

gathering

p. opportunities and chances for technical

experimentation, allowing innovations in and augmentations of strategies of social control. For example, the late nineteenth century French anarchist/ thief/(and murderer?), Ravachol was identified definitively by the use of Bertillonage. This represented a momentary victory for a systematic method of criminal detection and record keeping based upon physical measurements and photography, although it would later be superseded known as I he Tottenham Outrage, The Houndsditch Murders and The Siege of Sidney Street, furthered public and official suspicions concerning the combined issues of foreign immigration, urban criminality and political agitation (see Rumbelow).

However, let it be said that although the forces of power may continually augment and refine techniques of control, this provides no argument for defeatism. Wherever there is power so there is also resistance. And while areas of the countryside and natural environment may now represent legitimate sites of conflict, cities will also continue to constitute major areas of contestation. The existence of a global Leviathan ensures that both rural and urban cites of opposition are ultimately implicated in the same insurrectionary undertaking-the overthrow of civilization itself.

And of what should this insurrectionary project consist? If, as Virilio asserts, that the city is characterized by the organization of speed in time rather than in space, then all current technologies which likewise “reduce expanse to nothing”(Virilio, p. 69), e.g. the car, airplane, computer, telephone, are also involved in what he terms a "dictatorship or tyranny of movement" (Virilio, p. 65). The danger in this consists in the fact that(Virilio, p. 69):

The field of freedom shrinks with speed And freedom needs a field When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close...there will be nothing left but absolute control, an immediacy which will be the worst kind of concentration

Therefore, opposition would be situated in terms of what Virilio designates “chrono-politics” (Virilio, pl 16): insurrection in time rather than space. This would consist of ruptures, breaks in the intended smooth flow of the economy of speed, of the cultivation of interfaces and multiplication of fragments which challenge the monolithic, totalizing nature of power. In fact, operations very much like these can be found for example in the actions of the anti-roads movement, in the use of critical masses and the formation of TAZs. Should the fragments and ruptures be multiplied further and further, with commitment and imaginative ingenuity, then the field of freedom will expand in reverse proportion to the destabilization of power and its operations.

PR1MITIV1ST NETWORK, P O BOX 252. AMPTHILL MK45

The Pnmilivist Network promotes networking among anarcho-primitivists and anti-civilization registers. IJie Network is not an organisation and has no fixed id

1

logical line. It is designed to act merely as a means of fostenng contact between like-minded people v^lh the aim of generating anarcho-prunitivut projects

It’s objective is the development of anarcho-primitivist analysis and action. It’s goal is the creation of a world free of all forms of coercion, governance and domination.

Send two postage stamps (p^ an IR(?) to be entered on and receive a copy of the current network hsl Abbreviat'd liitingi available

Page 18

COMMENTARY ON THE ANARCHO-FUTURIST MANIFESTO

John Moore on the Futurist roots of Primitivism

INTRODUCTION -

I don't like the term ‘primitivist' as in 'anarcho-primitivist'. Historically, it is a term that has been attached to those anti- civilisation resisters who have engaged in a reappraisal ol the primitive as part of a search for radical alternatives to the global megamachine. But the term isn't a useful one because it carries with it an accumilated baggage of associations that seem impossible to slough off. despite essays like my Comin Home: Defining AnarchoPrimitivism (GA38. pp. 7-8), which explode notions that primitivism entails atavism and regression. I constantly encounter accusations of retrogression and find myself asserting almost ad infinitum that primitivism does not mean going back to nature or back to the caves.

The term primitivist' has to carry much have little chance of overcoming its of the blame for these problems. It's true istakes and establishing yourself as a

that unbridled ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism is rife in anarchist and other supposedly radical circles. But the word ‘rimitivist’ all too often elicits a knee-jerk response in people who really should know' better. And although I have no intention of backing down in the face of ignorancde and prejudice, a certain shift in terminology, which in actuality concedes no ground whatsoever, might be tactically beneficial, that is to say, it might open up lines of communication that otherwise might remain clogged.

Part of the problem resides in the fact that Western conceptions of time are so resolutely linear. There's the past, the present, and the future, and because of the ingrained Western notion of history as progress, any current that terms itself primitivist will unthinkingly be consired retrograde. And although notions of time as linear and of history as progress need to be challenged. If the word ‘primitivist' is such a sticking point that one can't even get past first base because of it, then it seems to me to be counter-productive to insist upon it.

The term ‘anti-civilisation current' has been used as - an alternative to ■primitivism', but the emphasis in this term remains squarely on what is opposed, rather than on posing an alternative. Given dominant notions of linear history, the term ‘post-civilisation' seems preferable as it at least gives a sense of envisaging something beyond civilisation. However, in this world of post-modernism, post-structuralism and

presence for resistance in the here and now.

Of course there are other issues to consider apart from terminology. But the ‘primitivist' terminology is one that is not only obstructive; it is also a terminology that has a very limited geneology for most people. Primitivism, even for those ‘in the know’, merely denotes an American import — Perlman, Zerzan, Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. And any form of primitivism located elsewhere is consequently seen as merely derivitive, an inappropriate offshoot, particularly in Europe, with its long-established civilisation and urban spaces.

But the fact is that the anti-civilisation current has other sources, some of which are located in the anarchist tradition, and even in the European anarchist tradition. And this current, as the AnarchoFuturist Manifesto indicates, has in the past been neither marginalised nor couched in primitivist terms. This essay, by contextualising and examining the Manifesto, will indicate some ways in which anti-civilisation currents, resolutely anti-urbanist ’ and anti- technological in character, might proceed beyonmd the primitivist’ impasse, might even (dare I say it?) pose their current in terms of the future.

POLITICS

According to Paul Avrich in his introductory remarks to the Manifesto,

Italian futurists on the one hand and the Russian anarcho-futurists on the other, this obscures the fact that the ideology' of the two groups is diametrically opposite. The Italian futurists are notorious for their advocacy of fascism and their support of Mussolini. By stressing the similarity of their style, Avrich clearly wants to imply a shared ideology. In short, he wants to remove the “anarcho-” from their name, and recast them as fascists.

This, then, is part of a smear campaign directed at the anarcho-ftiturists by the eminent American anarchist historian, and is taken up in his only referenfe to the group in his study The Russian Anarchists (Avrich, 1969, p. 186):

One fanatical circle in Kharkov, known as the Anarcho-Futunsts, conjured up the ghosts of Bidbei and Rostoutsev by proclaiming Death to world civilisation!’' and urging the dark masses to take up their axes and destroy everything in sight

Earlier, Bidbei' and Rostoutsev are characterised as advocates of terror, direct action and violent conflict, as fanatics who have “horrendous visions of the revolution (Avrich, 1967, p. 51). Neither, however, on the basis of Avrich's presentation, seem to have envisioned, let alone advocated, an end to world civilisation. Rather, ideologically, they seem merely extreme proponents of anarcho-communism. So Avrich, in his attempt to discredit the anarcho-futurists through smear tactics, isn't even prepared to grant their status as historical innovators of the anticivilisation current. The anarcho- futurists emerge in his account merely as extremists, as proponents of terror, violence and fanaticism, and therefore, like the Italian futurists, they must be fascists. -

But the fact is that despite similarities in language use, the ideologoes inherent in Italian futurism and Russian anarchofuturism are entirely antagonistic. And this is particularly the case in terms of the two groups' attitudes toward** the city and technology. Consider this passage from Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), the document to which Avrich referred earlier:

by the anarcho-futurists. Despite Marinetti's references to pleasure, riot anmd revolution, this is not - an insurrectionist manifesto. Pleasure, riot and revolution are just part of the excitements of the modem city, not challenges to it, and the scale and dynamic of the city dwarfs and supercedes both the human and nature. Individuals are subsumed in the faceless masses of “crowds” who are “excited” by the work that makes the city function. But even these crowds are dehumanised: the use of personification to characterise the industries and technologies of the city transfers the humanity of the urban inhabitants to the industrial processes themselves. But rather than regarded as a source of alienation, this forcible transference is celebrated. Nature has been supplanted by the synthetic environment of the urban space, but as with contemporary advocates of cyberspace, this is seen as liberatory and a cause for joy.

This passage articulates the major themes of Italian Futurism: the glorification of urban life, technology, speed, and the dominance of the machine. In short, all those responses to modernity, that render Italian futurism compatable with fascism. The contrast with the Anarcho-Futurist Manifesto could not be more complete.

The city street is the site of action for the anarcho-futurists, but the people in those streets are not the faceless, deindividuated crowd of Marinetti’s urban space. Rather, the call goes out to “all who are still fresh and young and not dehumanised — to the streets!” The emphasis explicitly falls on those who have eluded rthe routinisation of daily life in the modem city. Such people are not the deracinated, thrill-seeking envisaged by Marinetti, but “the Children of Nature”, ie. precisely those who have retained their links with the natural world. The anarcho-futurists share with the Italian Futurists a common desire to extirpate the dull, stuffy and repressive apparatus of the Victorian age, but how they aim to do this and what they propose to replace it with are miles apart.

post-feminism, the use of the prefix post-’ is tantamount to launching a new marketing strategy.

Some readers might find this concern with terminology unnecessary or even irrelevant. But language fc never innocent, never free of ideological connotations, and needs to be used with as much precision as possible. As women and gays have discovered, if you can't name yourself, you don’t have an identify, and if you don’t have an identity, then in a mass-mediated world you might as well not exist - and may not for much longer, as it is all too easy to suppress and efface the nameless. Without a name you have no history, and withoUl a sense of your past, you

the Group of Anarcho-Futurists (Avrich, 1973, p 52):

in their contempt for the old and exaltation of the new. their deliberate effort to shock and outrage, and their call for the wholesale destruction of art and culture, echoed the celebrated f uturist Manifesto published in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti At times, indeed, their language is nearly identical with that of Marinetti, with its unrestrained imagery and cascading metaphors

Avrich then proceeds to give an example of Marinetti’s rhetoric which superficially resembles the style of the A narc ho-futurist Manifesto.

There is a hidden agenda, however, in Avrich’s comment. First, while there may be certain similarities between the language used by Marinetti! ’and' die

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot, we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic Udes of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant mighty fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents, factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke, bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with the glitter of knives, adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like' hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing, and the sleek flight of planes whose propellors chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

I he attitude to the city in particular, and modernity in general, in this passage is very different from the one articulated S »7 ;> - Ml lit* 1 I ' » | I »

Marinetti develops a techno-politics in his manifesto. The futurist is someone who rides the wave of urban, technological development.

Sociopolitical conflict remains secondary to the promotion of the technological society and the city, its privileged space. For Marinetti, technology is the motor of social change; politiocal struggle merely aims to create the context in which the unfettered development of technology can occur. Fascism, as the ultimate authoritarian ideology, thus becomes the most appropriate political form for suppressing those who would hinder the technologisation of the human and natural*worlds. 'I he control structures of >'»

Page 19

ANARCHO-FUTURIST MANIFESTO

Ah-ah-ah. ha-ha. ho-ho!

Fly into the streets! All who are still fresh and young and not dehumanisaed — to the streets! The pot-bellied mortar of laughter stands in a square drunk with joy. Laughter and Love, copulating with Melancholy and Hate, pressed together in the mighty, convulsive passion of bestial lust. Long live the psychology of contrasts! Intoxicated, burning spirits have raised the flaming banner of intellectual revolution. Death to the creatures of routine, the philistines, the sufferers from gout! Smash with a deafening noise the cup of vengeful storms! Tear down the churches and their allies the museums! Blast to smithereens the fragile idols of Civilisation! Hey, you decadent architects of the sdarcophagi of thought, you watchmen of the universal cemetery of books -- stand aside! We have come to remove you! The okld must be buried, the dusty archive burned by the Vulcan's torch of creative genius. Past the flaky ashes of worldwide devastation, past the charred canvases of bulky paintings, past the burned, fat, pot-bellied volumes of classics we march, we Anarcho-Futurists! Above the vast expanse of devastation covering our land the banner of anarchy will be proudly unfurled! Writing has no value! There is no market for literature! There are no prisons, no limits for subjective creativity! Everything is permitted! Everything is unrestricted!

The Children of Nature receive in joyous ecstacy the chivalrous golden kiss of the Sun and the lascivious, naked, fat belly of the Earth. The Children of Nature springing from the black soil kindle the passions of naked, lustful bodies. They press them all in one spawning, pregnant cup! Thousands of arms and legs are welded into a single suffocating exhausted heap! The skin is inflamed by hot, insatiable, gnawing caresses. Teeth sink with hatred into warm succulent lovers’ flesh! Wide, staring eyes follow the pregnant, burning dance of lust! Everything is strange, uninhibited, elemental. Convulsions - flesh - life - death - everything! . .

Such is the poetry of our love! Powerful, immortal, and terrible are we in our love! The north wind rages in the heads of the Children of Nature. Somwething frightful has appeared — some vampire of melancholy! Perdition -- the world is dying! Catch it! Kill it! No, wait! Frenzied, penetrating cries pierce the air. Wait! Melancholy! Black yawning ulcers of agony cover the pale, terror-stricken face of heaven. The earth trembles with fear beneath the mighty, wrathful blows of its Children! Oh, you cursed, loathsome things! They tear at its fat, tender flesh and bur}' their withered, starving melancholy in the flowing blood and resh wounds of its body. The world is dying! Ah! Ah! Ah! cry millions of tocsins. Ah! Ah! Ah! roar the giant cannon of alarm. Destruction! Chaos! Melancholy! the world is dying!

Such is the poetry of our melancholy! We are uninhibited! Not for us the wailing sentimentality of the humanists. Rather, we shall create the triuphant intellectual brotherhood of peoples, forged with the iron logic of contradictions, of Love and Hate. With bared teeth we shall protect our free union, from Africa to the two poles, against any sentimental level of friendship. Everything is ours! Outside us is only death! Raising the black flag of rebellion, we summon all living men who have not been dehimanised, who havbe not been benumbed by the poisonous breath of Civilisation! All to the streets! Forward! Destroy! Kill! Only death admits no return! Extinguish the old! Thunder, lightning, the elements - all are ours! Forward!

Long live the international intellectual revolution!

An open road for the Anarcho-Futurists, Anarcho-Hyperboreans, and Neo-Nihilists!

Death to world Civilisation!

• ' ’ Group of Anarcho-Futurists

K Svetu s Shturmovol, opustoshalushchii manifest anakho-futuristov (Kharkhov, 14/3/1919) from Paul Avrich’s The Anarchists in the Ruissian Revolution (London: Thames.& Hudson, 1973).

The city, power node of civilization, must be reduced to a state of the most profound rupture: ruins. And, like the Spanish civil war anarchist, Durruti, we too must affirm that “ We are not afraid of ruins ... we carry a new world in our hearts" (Mitchell, pp. 126-127).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellul, Jacques. (1964) The Technological Society trans. John Wilkinson, New York: Vintage.

Foucault, Michel. (1988) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,

C 'ullure: Interviews and Other

Writings, 1977-1984 ed. Laurence D.

Kritzman, London: Routledge.

Laqueur, Walter. (1987) The 4ge of Terrorism London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Mitchell, David. (1982) The Spanish Civil War London: Granada.

Rumbelow, Donald. (1988) The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street London: Penguin.

Virilio, Paul & Lotringer, Sylvere.

(1983) Pure Bar New York: Semiotext(e).

fascism and the social controls of technology intersect perfectly to produce a technological totalitarian society. Or so Marinetti thought...

The anarcho-futurists, however, are not in the least interested in techno-politics. The aspects of the city stressed in their manifesto are the ones customarily attacked by the Italian futurists: churches, museums, libraries, art galleries, the cultural marketplace. Like the Italians, they are concerned with the cultural institutions that maintain the

The skin is. inflamed by hot. insatiable, gnawing caresses Teeth sink with hatred into warm succulent lovers flesh

Indeed, for the anarcho-futurists, the proposed psychology of opposites acts as an explanation of the necessity for insurrection. Apart from the fdead hand of dominant but moribund authority, the anarcho-futurists also respond to ecocological decimation.' While the Italian Futurists celebrated the triumph of the synthetic environment, the Russians protested against industrial equilibration between opposites. Melancholy, despair, weltschmerz, lifedenial -- these are the states of mind that for the anarcho-futurists, following Nietzsche, are at the basis of power and exploitation. It is thus as a way of preventing the death of the world that anarcho-futurism proposes the death of world civilisation. Civilisation means ultimately the death of ail, so civilisation itself must be put to death if life is to continue.

Even as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, then, in confrontation with the emergence of modernity, radical antircivilisation resisters recognized the inadequacy of political discourse as a way of talking about their concerns and effecting a shift beyond civilisation. And it is from this project that we, facing the even worse horrors of postmodemity, can perhaps learn most from the anarcho-futurists. Fredy Perlman, with his shift toward fictional and poetic discourse in his later work.

status quo, the hegemony of the ruling elites. But for the Russians, this concern with destroying the stranglehold of the dead hand of the past on the present (and thus preventing the birth of a liberated furture), is recast in a more radical form. It is not merely the case that the stranglehold of authority and tradition must be removed; rather, it is civilisation itself — the ultimate source and context of authority — that must be destroyed.

Italian futurists propose to shatter traditional political and cultural authority through the imposition of a new, ultra-authoritarian force: technofascism. The anarcho-futurists, however, propose the destruction of civilisation itself, the abolition of power and authority, through insurrectionary antiauthoritarian upheaval: anarcho- futurism.

At the heart of anarcho-futurism lies the proposed “psychology of opposites". Like Blake’s philosophy of contraries, this comprises a dynamic balance between opposing forces. Hence, the cityscape of the manifesto is filled, not with faceless crowds, but with gigantic anthropomorphic figures, the grand guignol, humanity writ large:

Laughter and Love, copulating with Melancholy and Hate, pressed together in the mighty, compulsive passion of bestial lust

Against the disembodied and lifedenying forces of politico-cultural hegemony, the anarcho-futurists pose, not the abstractions of the machine, but the life-affirming energies of the body, sexuality and nature.

The Children of Nature receive in joyous ccstacy the chivalrous golden kiss of the Sun and the lascivious, naked fat belly of the Earth The Children of Nature springing from the black soil kindle the passions of naked, lustful bodies They press them all in one spawning, pregnant cup’ Thousands of arms and legs arc welded into a single suffocating exhausted heap¹

The anarcho-ftiturists reaffirm the Romantic notion of the creative genius, - but generalise this to all who participae in the insurrection. But cdreativity, in a life-affirming worldview, must be complemented by destruction. Bakunin had announced that "the passion to destroy is a creative passion and Nietzsche had indicated that "he who has to be a creator always had to destroy”, and the ideas of both thinkers are perceptible in the manifesto. The words of Nietzsche’s Z|arathustra are echoed in the anarcho-futprist’s assertion that “Everything is permiotted! Everything is unrestricted!’’, and Nietzsche’s life-affirmative philosophy is perceptible in the manifesto’s affirmation of “Convulsions - flesh - life - death - everything! Everything!" But such life-affirmation entails the affirmation of opposites, and this iemerges in thci manifesto even .amidst the orgiastic insurrection:

assaults on nature:

Black yawning ulcers of agony cover the pale, terror-stricken face of heaven The earth trembles with fear beneath the mighty wrathful blows of its Children! Oh. you cursed, loathsome things! they tear at its tat, tender flesh and bury their withered, starving melancholy in the Bowing blood and fresh wounds of its body I he world is dying¹

The key word in this passage is “melancholy”. While the opening of the manifesto celebrates the copulation ol laughter and love with melancholy and hate, seeing this act as a perfect example of the dynamic balance generated by the psychology of opposites, thjs later passage indicates that imbalance — the dominance of melancholy over other Rainies is_t tye,., root cause of oppression. Hence the need of a re-

LANGUAGE

One of the few positive points Avrich makes about the Manifesto is that (Avrich, 1973, p. 52)

the Anarcho-Fulurists invented a new vocabulary to suit the new post-bourgeois era in the making

Indeed, it could be said that the anarcho- futurists invented a new vocabulary to suit a post-civilised era. At the same time that Dada was assaulting language and attempting to shatter meaning so that new perceptions could develop, the anarcho-futurists, amidst the turbulent conditions of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary Russia, were trying to forge a language commensurate to postfollowed a similar route away from political discourse in our own times. But maybe the anarcho-futurists have their own distinctive lesson to teach us.

The anarcho-futurists did not emerge in a vacuum. Apart from influences already noted such as Bakunin and Nietzsche, the anarcho-futurists were also inevitably influenced by their contemporaries and in particular by the activities of Russian literary and artistic futurists. Once the anarcho-futurists are sirtuated in this context, any lingering doubts about affiliations with Italian futurist fascism are completely extinguished.

Critics of Russian cultural futurism are _t (orthpght _M (n ^eir rejectipp ;.of any

Page 20

connexions between Italian and Russian futurism. Talking of literary' futurism, Vladimir Markov suggests that “in-" its origins the Russian group was quite independent of the Italians" (Markov, 1969, p. 26). He indicates that some

Russian literary futurists ‘deliberately distanced themselves from the Italians: “any connections between the Italian and Russian varieties, except the name, were refuted" (Markov, 1969, p. 151); and goes on to suggest that even the choice of name was accidental. Similarly, writing on Russian artistic futurism, Marion Burleigh-Motley writes that (Burleigh-Motley, 1986, p. 94)

The name ‘futurism is almost all that unites the Russian and the Italian movements

In this context, Avrich's insinuations about anarcho-futurism lose all credence.

Literary futurism, rather than artistic futurism, is likely to have played the more influential role over the anarcho- futurists. if only because the medium they chose for their manifesto was written language. Markov suggests, however, that any generalisations about literary futurism in Russia are difficult to substantiate (Markov, 1969, p. 269):

Russian futurism ... was flexible, varied, and contradictory, and any effort to reduce it to

the aspirations and achievements of only one group or of a single person are bound to end in the worst possible simplifications and distortions ;

And even the most cursory examination of the evidence suggests that Markov is correct.

Clearly there was room for diversity in literary terms. Vladimir Mayakovsky, the most famous of the Russian futurists, was certainlyy able to articulate an ideology that in many respects is compatible with that of Marinetti. In 1913, for ' example, Mayakovsky declared in a lecture that (Markov, 1969, p. 1235)

the poetry of futurism was the poetry of the

modem city He said that the modem city

had enriched the human soul with new

emotions and impressions, unknown to the poets of the past Ail the world was becoming one huge city and nature would soon be obsolete too

Given this intoxication with modernity, it is understandable that after the Bolshevik counter-revolution,

Mayakovsky became for a while the

darling of the communist totalitarian regime, with its Leninist mathematical equation: soviets + electricity = communism. In contrast, the fate of the anarcho-futurists can only be conjectured, but one fears the worst.

Nevertheless, other tendencies within literary futyurism were perceptible. One tendency, which played an important role in the movement, was the Stimer- influenced ego-futurists (Markov, 1969, p. 61):

The very fact that the ego-futurists brought the word “futurism" to Russian literature was full of consequences ... Historically, it is also important to remember that for ' contemporaries futurism meant, for a considerable time, ego-futurism ... The majority of provincial limitations of the eventually fashionable futurism were written in te ego-futurist vein

Moreover, while ego-futurism originated in St Petersburg, Markov points to the presence of ego-futurist activity in Kharkov, home of the anaercho- futurists, from 1914 onward, so there may be a direct link and perhaps even ineraction between the two groups. Certainly, however, in some respects the ego-futurists can be seen to have provided a context for the development of anarcho-futurist ideas (Markov, 1969, P-78):

A real change in ego-futurist orientation became noticeable in the group's fifth miscellany [in 1913] .. The central work in the book is an ambitious, though poorly written, critical essay by Ignatyev (a prominent ego-futurist poet], “Ego- Futurism", in which he attempts a new formulation of the movement's philosophy. Civilization is declared a mortal enemy of self, erasing its immortal element ... Finally, Ignatyev comes to the conclusion that, as - Christianity was a religion of slaves, and socialism is a religion of labor, so egoism is a religion of “spiritual serfs ’, slaves of civilization and the city. The fact that he undermines urbanism, an important aspect of ego-futurist aesthetics, does not dismay Ignatyev...

Clearly, even from this sketchy account, Ignatyev tried to move ego-futurism beyond its Stimerrite ideology, by using a Nietzschean perspective on the geneology of power. Moreover, he challenged the ego-ftiturist urbanist orientation by proposing the city as a site of enslavement and by extension civilisation as the locus of control. From this perspective, it is a relatively short step to the anarcho-futurist position of

not merely attacking civilisation and the city in words, but in action too.

However, questions of ideational influence aside, there are also important issues concerning the common use of style and language. Burleigh-Motley (1986, p. 108) suggests that the

use of epithet, street language, out of context and tumbled words, or erotixcism and infantile language, of archaic language and breaking down words until nothing is left but sound — all these devices were typical of the Russian futurist poets.

It is difficult to know whether the language of the Anarcho-Futurist Manifesto has been toned down in any way in Avrich's translation.

_ -

Nevertheless, the translation shows evidence of many of these devices. Epithets abound throughout the text. Street language, like archaic language, is difficult to spot, but may be present. Incongruous imagery is perceptible in images such as “the pot-bellied mortar of laughter". Eroticism is pervasive in the first half of the manifesto. And there are certain tendencies toward pure sound — such as the opening line “ah-ah-ah, ha- ha, ho-ho". 'Undeniably, some techniques used by futurist writers are present, and certainly enough to indicate a shared concern.

CONCLUSION

Before the prefix ‘anarcho-’ was ever conjoined with the term primitivism’, it was linked with the wiord ‘futurism’. And yetin some ways, though the terms seem so far apart, anarcho-primitivism and anarcho-futurism. are quite compatable. Certainly, theorising has moved on, and it could be argued — another paradox -- that anarcho- primitivist thinking is more developed and more sophisticated than anarcho- futurist thought (at least on the basis of the Manifesto). And yet, as indicated earlierr, the term ‘primitivist’ remains problematic. I am not suggesting that pnmitivists should all adopt the title of anarcho-fiiturists. But I am suggesting that primitivists, if they want to transform the lable into something that isn’t an obstacle to communication, should fill it with a new meaning, or perhaps just with a greatly expanded meaning.

And this is where the anarcho-futurists come in. The important American

anarchist journal Drunken Boat has begun the process of excavating the lost or hidden links between culture and anarchy. In an essay entitled Culture and Anarchy, Richard D Sonn provides an overview of the links between anarchy and avant-garde arrtists in Europe and America from the 1860s to the present, and concludes (Sonn 1994, p. 27):

No one style, but rather the avant-garde demand for destruction of the old and continual renewal, for unbridled creativity, autonomy, and freedom, became the link between art and anarchism This link was far more profound than historians and art historians have imagined until very' recently.

Clearly, to some extent or other, it is this context that anarcbo-fiiturism arose and mjade its quantum leap. But the context may well be the important element here. The fact is that as anti-civilisation resisters, we talk? about communities of resistance and quite rightly point to autonomous zones, affinity ghroups, direct action, and other shared projects. But surely part of the communities of resistance project must be the development of an anarchist cultural politics, an anarchist cultural insurgency, a culture that is vibrant, politicised and innovative. Part of this is emerging right now through DIY culture. But the anarcho-futurists have a thing or two to

teach us in terms of language. The conceptual and cultural breakthrough made by the anarcho-futurists consisted of developing a language, a mode of expression, appropriate to their anticivilisation aims. It s that challenge, I believe, that we now have to pick up.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Avrich's The Anarchists in the

Russian Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973)

and The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)

Marion Burleigh-Motley’s The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986)

Vladimir Markov’s Russian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee. 1969)

Richard D Sonn’s Culture and Anarchy in Drunken Boat 2 (New York: Autonomedia/Left Bank Books, 1994)

CITIES - AS THEY CANNOT BE REFORMED
ALL THAT REMAINS IS TO ABOLISH THEM

Articles

Whose Unabomber?

Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous review reactions to FC

Technogogues and technopaths we have had with us for some time. The Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, for instance, was well-known in the early 1980's for his description of the human brain as "a 3 pound computer made of meat." He was featured in the December 1983 issue of Psychology Today, occasioning the following letter:

Marvin Minsky: With the wholly uncritical treatment -- nay, giddy embrace -- of high technology, even to such excrescences as machine "emotions" which you develop and promote, Psychology Today has at least made it publicly plain what's intended for social life. Your dehumanizing work is a prime contribution to high tech's accelerating motion toward an ever more artificial, de-individuated, empty landscape. I believe I am not alone in the opinion that vermin such as you will one day be considered among the worst criminals this century has produced.

(Signed) In Revulsion,
John Zerzan

A dozen years later the number of those actively engaged in the desolation of the soul and the murder of nature has probably risen; but support for the entire framework of such activity has undoubtedly eroded.

Enter the Unabomber (he/she/they) with a critique, in acts as well as words, of our sad, perverse, and increasingly bereft technological existence. Unabomber calls for a return to "wild nature" via "the complete and permanent destruction of modern industrial society in every part of the world," and the replacement of that impersonal, unfree, and alienated society by that of small, face-to-face social groupings. He has killed three and wounded 23 in the service of this profoundly radical vision.

There are two somewhat obvious objections to this theory and practice. For one thing, a return to undomesticated autonomous ways of living would not be achieved by the removal of industrialism alone. Such removal would still leave the domination of nature, subjugation of women, war, religion, the state, and division of labor, to cite some basic social pathologies. It is civilization itself that must be undone to go where Unabomber wants to go. In other words, the wrong turn for humanity was the Agricultural Revolution, much more fundamentally than the Industrial Revolution.

In terms of practice, the mailing of explosive devices intended for the agents who are engineering the present catastrophe is too random. Children, mail carriers and others could easily be killed. Even if one granted the legitimacy of striking at the high-tech horror show by terrorizing its indispensable architects, collateral harm is not justifiable.

Meanwhile, Unabomber operates in a context of massive psychic immiseration and loss of faith in all of the system's institutions. How many moviegoers, to be more specific, took issue with Terminator 2 and its equating of science and technology with death and destruction? Keay Davidson's "A Rage Against Science" (San Francisco Examiner, 4/30/95) observed that Unabomber's "avowed hatred of science and technological trends reflects growing popular disillusionment with science."

A noteworthy example of the resonance that his sweeping critique of the modern world enjoys is "The Evolution of Despair" by Robert Wright, cover story of Time for August 28. The long article discusses the Unabomber's indictment soberly and sympathetically in an effort to plumb "the source of our pervasive sense of discontent."

At the same time, not surprisingly, other commentators have sought to minimize the possible impact of such ideas. "Unabomber Manifesto Not Particularly Unique" is the dismissive summary John Schwartz provided for the August 20 Washington Post. Schwartz found professors who would loftily attest to the unoriginality of fundamental questioning of society, as if anything like that goes on in classrooms. Ellul, Juenger and others with a negative view of technology are far from old hat; they are unknown, not part of accepted, respectable discourse. The cowardice and dishonesty typical of professors and journalists could hardly be more clearly represented.

Also easily predictable has been the antipathy to Unabomber-type ideas from the liberal-left. "Unabummer" was Alexander Cockburn's near-hysterical denunciation in The Nation, August 28/September 4. This pseudo-critic of U.S. capitalism rants about the Unabomber's "homicidal political nuttiness," the fruit of an "irrational" American Anarchist tradition. Cockburn says that Unabomber represents a "rotted-out romanticism of the individual and of nature," that nature is gone forever and we'd better accept its extinction. In reply to this effort to vilify and marginalize both Unabomber and anarchism, Bob Black points out (unpublished letter to the editor) the worldwide resurgence of anarchism and finds Unabomber expressing "the best and the predominant thinking in contemporary North American anarchism, which has mostly gotten over the workerism and productivism which it too often used to share with Marxism."

In Spring '95 Earth First! spokesperson Judy Bari labeled Unabomber "a sociopath," going on to declare, definitively but mistakenly, that "there is no one in the radical environmental movement who is calling for violence." This is not the place to adequately discuss the politics of radical environmentalism, but Bari's pontificating sounds like the voice of the many anarcho-liberals and anarcho-pacifists who wish to go no further in defense of the wild than tired, ineffective civil disobedience, and who brandish such timid and compromised slogans as "no deforestation without representation."

The Summer '95 issue of Slingshot, tabloid of politically correct Berkeley militants, contained a brief editorial trashing the Unabomber for creating "the real danger of government repression" of the radical milieu. The fear that misplaces blame on Unabomber overlooks the simple fact that any real blows against the Megamachine will invite responses from our enemies. The specter of repression is most effectively banished by doing nothing.

For their part, the "anarchists" of Love and Rage (August/September) have also joined the anti-Unabomber leftist chorus. Wayne Price's "Is the Unabomber an Anarchist?" concedes, with Bob Black, that "most anarchists today do not regard the current development of industrial technology as 'progressive' or even 'neutral,' as do Marxists and liberals." But after giving this guarded lip-service to the ascendancy of Unabomber-like ideas, Price virulently decries Unabomber as "a murderer dragging noble ideas

The Unabomber’s manifesto, Industrial Society & Its Future, is available only from Green Anarchist Mail Order, PO Box 407, Camberley GU15 3FL, £1.50.

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE

The Unabomber's Manifesto

as published in the Washington Post, Tuesday, September 19,1995

Page 22

through the mud" and withholds even such political and legal support that he would accord authoritarian leftists targeted by the state. Love and Rage is defined by a heavy-handed manipulative organize-the-masses ideology; approaches that are more honest and more radical are either ignored or condemned by these politicians.

But this selective mini-survey of opposition to Unabomber does not by any means exhaust the range of responses. There are other perspectives, which have mainly, for obvious reasons, been expressed only privately. Some of us, for one thing, have found a glint of hope in the public appearance, at last, of a challenge to the fundamentals of a depraved landscape. In distinction to the widespread feeling that everything outside of the self is beyond our control, the monopoly of lies has been broken. It might be said that Unabomber's (media) impact is here today, only to be forgotten tomorrow. But at least a few will have been able to understand and remember. The irony, of course, is that lethal bombings were necessary for an alternative to planetary and individual destruction to be allowed to be heard.

The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account? Where is any elementary personal responsibility when the planners of our daily and global death march act with complete impunity?

The ruling order rewards such destroyers and tries to polish their image. The May 21 New York Times Magazine's "Unabomber and David Gelernter" humanizes the latter, injured by a Unabomber bomb at Yale, as a likable computer visionary preparing a "Renaissance of the human spirit." From no other source than the article itself, however, it is clear that Gelernter is helping to usher in an authoritarian dystopia based on all the latest high-tech vistas, like genetic engineering.

Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life? Or is it unethical to just accept our passive roles in the current zeitgeist of postmodern cynicism and know-nothingism? As a friend in California put it recently, when justice is against the law, only outlaws can effect justice.

The lengthy Unabomber manuscript will go undiscussed here; its strengths and weaknesses deserve separate scrutiny. These remarks mainly shed light on some of the various, mostly negative commentary rather than directly on their object. It is often the case that one can most readily learn about society by watching its reactions, across the spectrum, to those who would challenge it.

"Well, I believe in FC/Unabomber -- it's all over the country...his ideas are, as the situationists said, 'in everyone's heads'; it's just a matter of listening to yer own rage," from a Midwesterner in the know. Or as Anne Eisenberg, from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, admitted, "Scratch most people and you'll get a Luddite."

And from the Boulder Weekly, Robert Perkinson's July 6, '95 column sagely concluded: "Amidst the overwhelming madness of unbridled economic growth and postmodern disintegration, is such nostalgia, or even such rage, really crazy? For many, especially those who scrape by in unfulfilling jobs and peer longing toward stars obscured by beaming street lights, the answer is probably no. And for them, the Unabomber may not be a psychopathic demon. They may wish FC the best of luck."

Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous, PO Box 11331, Eugene, Oregon 97440, USA.

The MOVE Organization

MOVE prisoner Merle Africa on its philosophy and the 11^th anniversary of the Philadelphia Massacre

Since the May 13th bombing of our MOVE family in Phila., there has been a lot of questions in peoples' heads about THE MOVE ORGANIZATION and MOVE’S position on May 13th, these questyions are the result of the misinformation and lies that the city officials and news media have been printing about THE MOVE ORGANIZATION and the May 13, 1985 massacre of innocent MOVE children, women, men and animals. The following are some of the questions people have been asking and MOVE'S answer to those questions:

1. WELL WHAT DOES MOVE BELIEVE IN ANYWAY:

MOVE s Belief is Life, Natural Law, we don’t believe in man’s reform world system. Life, Natural Law which is synonymous with GOD. made pure air, clean water, fertile soil, made babies healthy and made the principle of freedom, equality for all Life to enjoy without prejudice of superior, inferior. This is the law MOVE believe in and obey, not mans’ so called laws, it is mans’ law that has created and sanctioned industry that is polluting the air, poisoning the water, the soil ansd causing the retarded babies, deformed, diseased adults from the poison industry, man created and lying to people to cover up their filth. MOVE’S work is to expose this filth, confront and expose it with the truth, JOHN AFRICA’S teaching, which is why this system havp.^qen beating, jailing, killing MOVE

people, killing MOVE babies, persecuting THE MOVE ORGANIZATION for 20 years to try to stop us from telling the truth about this system, this is the real reason behind May 13. This system is persecuting, attempting to exterminate MOVE because we tell the truth and they don t want their Lies exposed, this system knows MOVE Belief, knows our fight to protect Life is right, is the truth and this system don t intend to embrace the truth, be right, don t intend to protect nothing but their money interests whether it be at the expense of your life, all Life. 1 he people running this system know MOVE s purpose is to stop them from imposing on Life, and they don’t want to stop, so theyjntend to try to stop MOVE by any Wans they got, and they saw May 13th as just such an opportunity. This system had no intentions *» Of /, avoiding' f < that confrontation, they had every

intention to kill MOVE, they sent their cops out to MOVE'S house May 13th with specific orders from high up in government to kill MOVE to shut us up from telling the truth.

2. WHAT IS MOVE REALLY ABOUT:

MOVE’S work, JOHN AFRICA’S revolution, is to stop man s system fropm imposing on Life, MOVE’S work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water,’the soil and to put an end to the enslavement of Life — people, animals, any form of Life. The purpose of JOHN AFRICA's revolution, MOVE’S work, is to show people how corrupt, rotten, criminally enslaving this system is, show people through JOHN AFRICA s teaching, the truth, that this system is the cause of al! their problems (alcoholism, drug addiction, war, disease, murder, rape, all crimes; unemployment, wife, child avbuse, woman, child pornography, every problem existing in the world) and to set the example of revolution for people to follow when they realize how they’ve been oppressed, repressed, duped, tricked by this system, this government and sec MOVE are revolutionmaries, we are the vanguard, the spearhead of JOHN AFRICA's revolution, our work is. to confront this system up , front, to show people wit .ohiy । that they can fight this system and win,

but to show them the urgent need to fight. People are confronted daily with the threat of industrial poison, police brutality, corrupt government, politicians, judges, unjust jail terms and things ain t getting better it’s getting worse, while the lies to cover this filth is getting even more silky smooth, devious. MOVE ain’t talking about changing governments, replacing one corrupt dictator, enslaver for another, MOVE is talking about the government of self, true freedom, the natural right of all Life to be free, MOVE ain’t talking about making jail so called better, MOYS' is fighting to do away with prisons and the mentality of enslavement that allows prisons to even exist when freedom should be the only force realized This system kows THE MOVE ORGANIZAHON is committed to stopping them, their crimes against Life, they know JOHN AFRICA, MOVE’S COORDINATOR, is the master strategist behind MOVE, they know JOHN AFRICA got the power, the wisdom to stop them, that’s why they dropped that bomb on our house May 13; this system thinks that murdering our family will stop HIE MOVE ORGANIZATION JOHN AFRICA, JOHN AFRICA’S revolution, nothing this system does will Stop K)HN AIRKA. THE MOVE OrtOANlZATldN, anything

Page 23

Merle Africa (#00-6306, PO Box 180, Muncy, PA 17756, USA) being escorted away from MOVE’S besieged Powelton Avenue commune by Philly pigs, May 1978. She and eight other MOVE family members are still inside today for murdering James Ramp, a cop actually shot in the back by his own colleagues at the culmination of the siege.

they do to us only makes us come back at them that much more harder, stronger, because MOVE got the power of Life, MOM NATURE, the power of true GOD as our ally and no man can stand up against this power long and win! LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA! -

3. WHAT DO MOVE BELIEVE IN WHEN IT COMES TO LIFE AND WHEN IT COMES TO THE SYSTEM:

MOVE Belief is that Life NATURE GOD is the same, we are taught by JOHN AFRICA to love Life, revere it, move in harmony with it, not go against Life as this system is doing. This system don't believe in Life, they claim their belief is in GOD (which is the same as Life) but we know their belief is in money not GOD and they prove it by the way they mistreat GOD's Life for the sake of money. This system have historically abused, raped, bartered Life (including people) for the sake of money. This system's rulers, its policy makers want money and don't care who they kill, enslave, cripple, make sick to get it. To quote JOHN AFRICA'.

INDUSTRY IS AN EXCESS OF LIFE, AN ADDITION TO GODS LAW, THAT HAS CAUSED AIL DISORDERS, MURDER. RAPE, THEFT. SLAVERY, WAR. GUNS. BOMBS. CRIPPLES. INDUSTRY HAS HEART DISORDER. HEAD DISORDER. LUNG DISORDER. TEETH DISORDER. IT HAS CAUSED WIVES TO HAVE DISORDERS FROM HUSBANDS. HUS BANDS TO HAVE DISORDERS FROM THEIR JOBS AND CHILDREN TO HAVE DISORDERS FROM THEIR MOTHERS THEIR FATHERS AND

THEIR JOBS. INDUSTRY HAVE ( AUSI D 11 IF DIS-ORDER Ol SMOKING, THE DISORDER OF DRINKING, THE DISORDER OF PILLS AND THE PROBLEMS THAT COME AFTER, INDUSTRY HAS CAUSED BIRIH PROBLEMS DEATH PROBLEMS AND ALL OF THE BILLIONS OF PROBLEMS IN BETWEEN, INDUSTRY HAVE TWISTED PEOPLE AROUND SO BAD THAI PEOPLE WILL COM- ........ ^pMJ.>l₍AIR.FpR_lAIKI*O|.L|J/iqN.

WATER FOR WATER POLLUTION. SOIL FOR SOIL PLLUTION FOR A PAY CHECK FROM INDUSTRY. CAUSING PEOPLE TO PUT A PRIORITY ON POLLUTION FOR THE SAKE OF MONEY AND FORSAKE THE HEALTH THAT GOD INTENDED. FOR POLLUT-ION IN THE AIR IS INDUSTRY AND* INDUSTRY IS MONEY. POLLUTION OF THE WATER IS BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN BUSINESS. POLLUTION OF THE SOIL IS ACCEPTED AS A SO CALL WAY OF LIFE. ANY SYSTEM THAT SELLS THE AIR. BARTERS THE WATER. PUTS A MONETARY PRICE ON SOIL. MARKETS THE HEALTH. THE WORTH. THE FREEDOM OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE FOR A GODDAMNING DOLLAR IS .TO BE EXPOSED. CONDEMNED. CUT DOWN FOR GOOD, CUT DOWN FOR THE GOOD OF LIFE, THE GOOD OF LOVE. THE GOOD OF FREEDOM. THE NECESSITY OF HEALTH. CUT DOWN FOR THE GOOD OF GOD. THE LAW OF AIR. THE LAW OF SOIL. THE LAW OF WATER .

JOHN AFRICA

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA!

4. HOW DOES MOVE EXPLAIN

THE SYSTEM:

This system is mans' invention, his idea, it ain't got nothing to do with GOD, GOD's law is love, peace, freedom, sanity, health, security, mans' idea of law, his system is designed to be his way, which is in opposition to Life, GOD and is seen in the examples that follows, in the jails that are designed to enslave when GOD dictate freedom, in the industry that is designed to make money although it is poisdoning, crippling, deforming Life when GOD dictate Life to be healthy, free of sickness, and much more. This system ain't about correcting nobody. JOHN AFRICA teach that jail is a money making industry just l;ike zoos where animals are enslaved are money making industries. The people that control these jails ain’t about to try to correct nobody 'cause if people are correct then they won't be going to jail and that means that this system . »wi If dose mioney. They tgoltaj ktJep - J . . , r >. 4 . - ’ * I A , . .4

liv .1 A « { - 4 - f i >4 \ A ,

people filling these prisons cause without prisons cops would be out of a job, judges would be out of a job, sheriffs, superintendents, wardens, matrons and guards would be out of jobs, and politicians would be out of the thousands of dollars they pocket from the industry of prisons. This system didn't build prisonms with correction in mind, they built prisons with slavery and the money to be had from enslaving the mind. JOHN AFRICA teach that prison wouldn't exist without slavery, prisons ain’t nothing but slave compounds, but unlike the slavery of the southern plantations, prison is acceptable in Today's society, it is acceptable systematic slavery and all for the sake of money at the expense of peoples; lives. This system don't care nothing for Life, this system is the inventor, the innovator, the author of problems, it is the peddler of cigarettes, alcohol. drugs, prostitution, woman, child pornography and all for the sake of a dollar. Cigarettes cause cancer, alcohol causes alcoholism, drugs cause sickness and death, and all three are addicting yet this system «

deliberately, calculatingly push.these killing addictions on people to weaken 'em, take the strentth, the fight out of 'em so they become weak, submissive to the rule of government- and will punish the victims after victimizing them, locking up drug users when this system’s scientists are the ones who are making drugs and influencing drug use. Locking up the prostitute and keeping the inventor of prostitution, the inequality of this system, flourishing. This system gone keep making cigarettes, alcohol and drugs no matter how many people it kills cause they are all big money making industries, this system ain't gone stop the rape of women, child pornography cause that's big money and women nor children ain't important to this system, money is, women, children

and five children died, and 100* neighbouring houses were (destroyed as the fire raged out of control. , _t

Aftermath of the 13th May 1985 siege of MOVE'S Osage Avenue commune, during which Philly cops dropped a thermite bomb on the roof from a helicopter and then fired with machine guns at women aiW children to stop them escaping the inferno. Only one adult, Ramona Africa, and one child, Birdy, made it out. Six adults

are of GOD, as is all Life, but in this system GOD is just a word, a utterance with no meaning to man as is seen in the rape of GOD's subjects ' by man. Money is the GOD of this system but Life is MOVE'S Belief. MOVE'S GOD\ Prisons are money so they re gonna be kept going, but not only are prisons money-making institutions, this system uses prisons as a form of intimidation to kep people from fighting against the oppression of the government. This is what they're trying to do to MOVE but it ain't working. MOVE people have been in jail since 1978 for a crime we did not commit, we re innocent and this system knows MOVE is innocent but they put us in jail despite our innocence to try to shut MOVE up from telling the truth. Our family took the stand they took May 13 because they wanted innocent MOVE people out of jail, our family took the strong stand they did cause family is MOVE’S Belief, we don't put nothing before family.

This system is trying to make people think MOVE is wrong for being family, when the principle of family comes from GOD, the law of Life, 4»

and everybody wants, needs the principle of family. JOHN AFRICA told us that the one thing people who criticize MOVE'S position cannot get around is that if they were innocent and in prison they would want their family to fight for them like our family fights for us, they would not want their family to take the compromising position they are telling MOVE we should take if they were innocent and ip prison. But instead of people criticizing this government for jailing, murdering MOVE unjustly, people criticize MOVE for fighting against this corrupt government, the very' same government they' complain about everyday when they voice dissatisfaction with this system. JOHN AFRICA explain that these people who criticize MOVE for our uncompromising fight with this

Page 24

system will support the black South Africans who are fighting the corrupt government in South Africa, blacks and whites will support the fight against apartheid, the corrupt government of South Africa no matter how manv blacks or whites *

are killed and thev don t never blame those fighting apartheid for getting themselves killed, thev blame the corrupt government for killing those fighting apartheid. But when MOVE fight this corrupt government people want to blame MOVE and support the government JOHN AFRICA wisely pointed out that those fighting apartheid in South Africa would welcome MOVE cause were fighters, we fight this system but those fighting apartheid would kill those who criticize MOVE and support this government if the people who criticize MOVE were in South Africa the black - South Africans would kill them.

5. PEOPLE ASK WHY DIDN'T MOVE GET THE CHILDREN OUT THE HOUSE MAY 13:

MOVE people that were in the house on Osage Avenue May 13, did try to get the childen out the house. They were calling over the loud speaker for over an hour telling the cops there were children in the house and to let the children out but the cops ignored them: when the MOVE people saw the cops weren't gone let the children out, they started coming out carrying the children and the cops shot them all back into the house while it was burning up with fire ‘cause the cops. the government's aim was to kill all MOVE people in that house including the children. The city deliberately ordered the cops to surround and attack the house at a time when they knew everybody would be in the house but a few days before May 13, a court order was issued to bring MOVE children in and place them in protective custody,

released from prison. For seven years our family exhaused every legal channel to obtain our release, all to no avail, even though this entire government knows MOVE is innocent and don't belong in jail, and instead of this government Mayor Goode doing right by MOVE b) investigating our families charges MOVE members are being jailed unjustly , this government and Goode bombed our families house, know ing MOVE'S position was that if just one official had said they would honestly investigate the situation. the maniacs out tohurt people which is a lie: JOHN AFRICA teach MOVE sensitivity', love, not hate or violence. People familiar with MOVE know this but those who don't know MOVE will believe the news media, the government cause they trust these people, they respect ‘em and they'll believe MOVE is getting what we deserve cause we're suipposed to be crazv maniacs which is just how the government wants people to think so this government can do what they want to MOVE without public opinion against them.

Despite judge Sabo’s stay of execution, MOVE supporter Mumia Abu-Jamal is still on Death Row for a 1981 cop killing he didn’t do. Support him by writing to Pennsylvania's suprem court demanding a prompt and fair retrial:

Justice Robert NC Nix, Suite 500, Widener Building, One South Penn Square, Philadelphia PA 19107, USA

Justice Ralph J Cappy, 3130 One Oxford Court, Pittsburgh PA 15219, USA. -

It should be clear at this point to all fair-minded folks, that MOVE people are not violent or killers, we ain't never killed nobody. All MOVE have ever done is protect, defend our family, our Belief against the murderous intent odf the system. To give you an example: When a man leaves his environment, his place of security ands goes into a lions den, he violates, thrweatens the lions place of security' and when the lion defends his home, his security, instinctively by fighting off this threat and eliminates the man. the lion ain't wrong cause the lion is defending himself and seif defense is right. The man- is wrong for intruding where he don t belong, imposing on that lion, his family. All animals will defend their home, their family when threatened just} as MOVE will defend ours when threatened and this is right cause self-defense is right, it is the GOD given right of all Life. On August 8, 19*78 and May 13. 1985. the cops came to MOVE'S home, surrounded our house with machine guns, rifles, grenades, deluge guns and bombs, they' attacked MOVE, they bombed MOVE for defending ourselves against the unjust imprisonment of our family, but this system is labeling MOVE as the criminals, calling MOVE violent killers, but MOVE ain't surround ex-Phila. Mayor Wilson Goode’s house with machine guns, grenades, deluge guns and bombs, MOVE didn't bomb Goodes family and shoot his children back into a burning building, Goode, this government did that tp MOVE.

Despite all of the physical and mental torture we've been subjected to by this system, we am t slowing down, ain t backing down from this system. We've had a bomb dropped on our family in Phila. and although we feel this deeply, and are greatly hurt by it because of the love, the ' family JOHN AFRICA have instilled

but that order was ignored. The house was under a 24 hour police surveillance for over a year and the

cops knew that every morning all the children left the house to go to the

pie have a pattern of doing things -and anybody observing MOVE knows this. The

cops, the city of Phila. officials knew when the children would be out the house and knew when they would be in the house. They wanted to kill our children, along with the adult MOVE members, that's why' they attacked the house at a time when they knew our children would be in there

This government, ex-Phila. Mayor Wilson Goode could have avoided May 13th if that’s what they wanted to do because our family made it clear to Phila. city officials that they would stop the confrontation at any time if the city would make an honest effort to investigate the unjust jailing of MOVE people on August 8, 1978 murder charges Our family talked to Mayor Goode, to judges, to politicians, told them all the reason for the confrontation was because innocent MOVE people were in jail

think we re getting what we deserve, want people to think the government is justified in what they’re doing to us based on how we’ve been and MOVE members wanted their portrar₇ed to the public by the me^ia

innocent sisters and brothers¹ as a bunch of sick, crazy, violent

To support Mumia and the MOVE prisoners, write to:

MOVE, PO Box 19709, Philadelphia 19113, USA

confrontation would have been stopped

6. PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW' WHY THE NEWS MEDIA HAS

PLAYED MOVE UP TO BE VIOLENT, CRAZY

MURDERERS W'HO HAVE NO BELIEF:

This system have deliberately, calculating!} portrayed MOVE as violent, crazy, as having no Belief and other lies to the public so people will be scared of us, hate us, be prejudiced against us so when this government does things to MOVE like giving us outrageous sentencdes of 100 years each in jail for 3rd degree murder for a crime we didn't Commit, or when they drop a bomb on our home buring our family alive for protesting our unjust imprisonment, they want people to

People must understand that the work MOVE is doing ain't just for MOVE, it is for all Life, including people. We ain't interested in

dealing with a part of this thing but the whole thing, because as JOHN AFRICA teach, when you got a problem you got to get rid of the whole thing if you expect to get rid of the problem, you can’t just deal with a part of the problem and expect it to be solvedc, MOVE is talking about solution to the problem of man's imposition on Life, we'rwe talking about cleaning up man’s poison in the air, the water, soil so health can be realized. We’re talking about doing away with jail, enslavement so that freedom can be realized truly, not just the illusion of freedom represented by the streets. The work we re doing will benefit all Life not just MOVE, when the air is clean you benefit from breathing it just as MOVE, when jails are done away with you ain’t no longer threatened by this environment as

^wellasMOVE ^A

in us, we still will not stop, cannot stop fighting this rottem ass system, for to give into this system would be to give into the very people that drpped a bomb on our family. Despite our family being mass murdered, desite the fact that we’ve been in jail for 14 years for a crime we did not commit, we are getting stronger, more committed, loyal to our Belief, thanks to JOHN AFRICA This system resents it cause they can t accomplish what they set out to do, can Vbreak us, can’t stop us. JOHN AFRICAN revolution ain’t stopped and ain’t never gone be stopped! LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA THE COORD!NA TOR OF MOVE FOREVER’!!

IN MOVE LAW WE TRUST?

ALL PRAISES TO THE ORDER OF LIFE!

THE POWER OF TRUTH IS FINAL!

LONG LIVE MOVE!

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA’S

REVOLUTION!

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA'.

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA'.

LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA THE COORDIN A TOR FOREVER

Page 25

A BOSNIA OF CONSEQUENCE

The truth about Leeds, Paul Bowman and Tony White

The only solid manifestation of the fog of disinformation around the Tony White affair rolling out of Leeds is a leaflet circulated at the October 1995 Anarchist Bookfair, A Bosnia of Trivia, stating “The allegation [that Leeds AFA have a ‘state asset’ in them] is out in the open now, surely the evidence should be too?” Despite a systematic campaign of lies and intimidation by the fan club surrounding Paul Bowman of Leeds AFA to make damn sure the evidence that follows is never debated, we ll take the leaflet’s author, “a concerned person in Leeds” at his word.

SEARCHLIGHT'S STRAW MAN

A Bosnia of Trivia lies that Larry O’ Hara says “a member of Leeds AFA is an MI5 agent" and got this from Leeds BNP’s White Lies. O’ Hara first analysed Leeds in Turning Up The Heat, published in October 1994, six months before the BNP pamphlet, and he’s never said Bowman is an MI5 agent. Even Searchlight’s Gerry Gable isn’t an M15 “agent” — he’s their asset. The leaflet’s setting up a ‘straw man’ to knock O’ Hara down. All O’ Hara has ever said of Bowman is that he’s a Searchlight asset, which Bowman himself admitted to London Class War last autumn.

He had to admit it, given his reaction to A Lie Too Far (ALTF), O' Hara’s expose of Searchlight's Tim Hepple and his attempts to provoke conflict between GA, Class War and C18 by passing hit lists between them. Instead of seeing its relevance to Leeds, Bowman had a hostile review of ALTF published in Class War, dismissing it by claiming to know already how dodgy Searchlight was. Given the vicious smear campaign Searchlight have directed against CW since 1985, the one thing more surprising than anyone in CW not knowing Searchlight were dodgy was anyone in it prepared to work with this M15 front, which Bowman admits he did.

The June issue of Searchlight implies that 1 AFA activist in the north of England is not to be trusted. Nobody in the north has any doubt in him as an anti-fascist and we wil all continue to work with him. No evidence has been presented to AFA to suggest any different and we trust that Searchlight's criticism wiO be substantiated or withdrawn

AFA has always said that we must be on our guard against potential infiltration by the fascists and the state However, many of the accusations recently made by Searchlight about individuals such as Scargill and O'Hara are as yet unproven. We beheve these people should be treated with caution It is worth pointing out however that neither of these individuals are involved in the anti-fascist movement and have made hvstencai and unfounded accusations of their own They have offered no useful assistance to the movement to date and try to prove their 'mnocenie^- with documents rather than furtnenng the anti-fascist cause. Around the question of 7argetters Targetted lists and 'Wombat 92'. someone is deliberately attempting to cause division and confusion within the anti-fascist movement proper. It is easy to be drawn into these games but we prefer to concentrate our efforts on the practical anti-fascist work that we do

The June 1993 'Security AJert'

Bowman also used his Anti-Fascist Infos io circulate a Europe-wide attack on O’ Hara and Tim Scargill, implying the Searchlight smears rebutted in ALTF were true. Most outrageously, both Scargill and O’ Hara were “involved in the anti-fascist movement” — Scargill was smeared by Gable for founding Surrey AFA, and the small matter opf him being CW-’s national organiser at the time, and O’ Hara was later expelled in absentia from TWAFA because of Bowman’s Searchlight-serving ‘security alert’ saying he wasn’t involved in AFA! Anyone spot that kangeroo? Bowman did, however, have AFA back Nick Astells, now a big fan of his - Searchlight had dredged his fascist past to coerce co-operation from him.

You could believe Astells that working with Searchlight as ‘their politics 'is dodgy but they’ve got good information’ - - an excuse acceptable in some anti-fascist circles pre-1993 - was a past mistake- if Bowman hadn’t persisted in it. In December 1994, he was still pushing Searchlight/MlS bullshit that O’ Hara’s a fascist collaborating with Pat Harrington, Steve Brady and C18 in CW’s 1994 IB. The Brady reference is the giveaway - Gable’s obsessed with him as he had his wife when she was infiltrating the League of St George and still plain Sonia Hockfelder.

Maybe Bowman’s the only Searchlight asset in Leeds AFA — unless their zinc. Attitude, is edited by someone else. Il’s packed with Searchlight sourcing and even the odd word from Gerry Gable and he’s as keen io plug them in his own publication (Searchlight, April 1994, p. 3, well illustrates this chummy relationship).

JUST ONE OF THE FASCISTS

A Bosnia of Trivia says Tony White is just “One of the fascists (who) grassed up all his males" and Bowman’s fan club preiend he’s jusi “a Waller Mitty character”. They cope with While’s own handwritten admission he had an “AFA contact” by claiming the documents in White Lies are “forgeries”. Handwriting is easily ^v * indepcndantly verified

December 1995’s Searchlight admits the White Tapes - in which he covers pretty much the same grounds but makes even worse admissions - are “genuine”.

Bowman let the side down again at the 1995 Bookfair. Pressed by a London CWer whether White had passed hit lists to both fascists and anti-fascists and informed to Special Branch and Leeds AFA, Bowman replied “Yeah - we’ll take information from anyone”. This one admission makes O’ Hara’s case,and all the fuss about White Lies irrelevant.

In Spring last year, nazi activist Tony White went into the 'Northern Star' offices and stole the address book belonging to the editor

Attitude on White, Spring 1994

White’s theft of the Northern Star address book is unmentioned in A Bosnia of Trivia or Here &. Now’s cowardly regurgitation of the Paul Bowman fan club’s version, What A Tangled Web We Weave. When Searchlight and Attitude were hyping White as Leeds C18 last spring 1994, it was another matter. Now the street war White started with this theft and then filling his “AFA contact” in on where to ‘get the fascists’ in classic provocateur style is quiet, we can see the Northern Star adress book’s broader significance. He got it published in C18, Labour MPs named in the C18 hitlist and Searchlight pressed MI5 to investigate C18 (Yorkshire Evening Post, 14th February 1994), and next thing you know revolutionary action just gets so much harder... Those without tunnel vision can see this as a tad more important than whether Leeds AFA occassionally get to “kick fuck out of Leeds fascists" on While’s info. Gable even gets Dispatches along to film it - money in his pocket and good job-creating hype for MI5.

Those doubting collaboration between elements of Leeds AFA and cops need only hear Astell’s admission io us at the 1995 Bookfair that this was “a matter of expediency” and Search-light’s comments that there was a good “working relationship" between Leeds AFA (not just ANL!) and cops. Why Bowman gets so heated about this when he's admitted collaborating with an M15 front beats us!

Those still doubling White (hyped by Searchlight and Attitude as Leeds Cl8, remember?) was a State provocateur are referred to his own father’s admission that he was an agent before he even approached Leeds BNP. The old man also notes White featured prominently in Dispatches footage of Leeds city centre bui wasn’t named. Why do you think Gaty$'4idn*t poirit him but — his job as

h1.»|A \ l» otic the programme’s credited researcher?

Another “Waller Mitly”? The White Tapes show a year after White met his “AFA contact”, he was still trying to supply CS, thunderflashes and machetes to fascists and footie crews for use

“Reds”, “jews” &c.

MINOR CHARACTERS

Before concluding, we’ll show up some less well-known Bowman fans.

One of the slimy editors of Leeds-based Here & Now wrote to O’ Hara hiding behind the name Stephen Dobson trying to compromise the CW enquiry into Bowman then ongoing.

At the 1995 Bookfair AK Press’s Rc

Ilf

say

Kavagh claimed O’ Hara wildly accused

Russ Bradshaw, author of Germany

Calling, of being a Searchlight agent When challenged to produce O’ Hara’s accusing letters, AK’s Dean Plant admitted Bradshaw had spun this line to AK al their stall on the day of the Bookfair and Kavagn mouthed off without proof. O’ Hara keeps copies of all his letters — he’d actually written to Bradshaw to ask him to join an independant anti-fascist research effort alternative to Searchlight¹. Note, however, that Germany Calling is introduced by Michael Bi ling, a Searchlight team member, uses their figures and Plant said

Bradshaw was much involved in a

Searchlight-dominated 1993 campaign in the Notts area.

AK lied to cover Bowman’s arse as

Plant’s heavily involved in Bowman’s Anti-Fascist Aid for Bosnia and thought O’ Hara might accuse them of being State assets because they’re so useless at selling his stuff. Just business, then.

Black Flag's last issue supported us over Hepplegaie but this slates O’ Hara’s Turning Up The Heat without once engaging with its content Why? AK’s money keeps Black Flag going. Surely enough to make longtime Searchlight adversary and ex-Black Flag editor Stuan Christie weep.

SO WHAT?

AFA’s supposed to be independant from the State as it uses fascists and may even become fascist in crisis.

Anti-fascists working with an M15 front, cops and a Branch provocateur aren’t independam. At best they were naive lapping up While’s info — maybe its called Leeds as these good anarchists were so easily led — al worst some were provoking a street war to promote Searchlight, M15 and State interests. Blackpool AFA was suspended for less — Branch photos of Cl8 in Searchlight — so why’s AFA’s Leeds branch suddenly so Rangely .ftep fi^m a^ism

Page 26

’

FLUFFIES GET THE HUMP

Twinkletoes the Tooth Fairy of the Thornmoor Mud Imps on the recuperation of Earth First!

Snorky got a bit of an ear bashing from some quarters and I presume he never thought his little article would have such a controversial impact. Everyone is either gunning for him or wants to shake him by the hand. A friend sent a message to say that they even had a visitor over the Xmas holidays who complained about how such an article would only divide the movement and turn all these middle class activists away from joining. Possibly what the article reinforced was how divided the movement is already, and that these divisions have been there since the beginning.

An old activist once told me that you always knw when you've struck a raw nerve, one that has some truth, that ios when people try to pick you up on specifics, totally ignoring what you were actually aiming at in the first place. In this case. Do Or Die and other EF’ers have been highlghting the fact that the Earth First gathering did show some opposition to FoE and Paul DeLuce’s proposal and that they were divided on the issue &c. Also they're saying that many FoE activists are radical and have mucked in on actions. This kind of nit-picking could go on for years. The fact is that FoE was invited to the Gathering and that there are a great many who are satisfied with this arrangement. I have nothing against local activists, as some can remember Hampshire FoE members reversing their shirts and geeting stuck in breaking open the dammed Itchen river. It's te leadership one needs to be careful of, even though they now present themselves as radicals and have apologised for their anti-EF! stance during the early- 1990’s. Like any other centralised and mainstram organisaton, they will only take so

much radicalism and militancy and then they will draw back through worries over their reputation, assets, and the concerns of their directors. FoE and Greenpeace are not - revolutionary movements and were J

never designed to be. They work within the existing system, not to dismantle it. By aligning itself with such . organisations, taking their funding and info &c, joining their discussion groups, EF! will find itself (even unconsciously) losing its real identity, even though that is one mirroring an American image.

A classic exanmple of this was Oxford in 1992 when many tried to gather support for mahogany protests and tropical import blockades. Members of Oxford EF! began to get invited onto broad alliance committees, sending (often selfappointed) delegates, working with all the big grouos like FoE, WWF &c. In the end, these individuals' agenda began to water itself down, they turned away from linkuing up with community groups, worried that they might upset their relationship with these international organisations. They even set about renting an office, making up a national contact point for (EF’HQ,

some called it) which offered itself as a resource centre for eco and community groups but in reality only pursuing their own agenda which alienated community groups and gave some individuals the presige of being “environmentalists" and te opportunity' of increasing their own careerist dreams.

Defenders of EF! give Whatley Quarry' as an example of a w onderful action with much done and which FoE mucked in with. I'm not disputing this but the reality is that it may be a one-off. It will naturally upset those within - EF! who are concerned about its image and it will upset the higher echelons of FoE. As seen at Twyford. criminal damage and even forceful direct action were frowned on and denounced in the end. Once a movement becomes settled and tries to reach a broad spectrum of the population, it will compromise its credentials. This happened with Green-peace and it's certainly happened with EF!

What all this “ranting” does is show what many in the ELF and GA have said before -- that EF! has failed to evolve. Because it does not have a real cultural base for its actvists. Most members have never heard of biocentrism or deep I social / revolutionary' ecology. EF! is rooted in an exported philosophy that is based on evil disobedience not confrontation, on wilder-ness not urban sprawl or countryside, on American values and pioneer protection-ism not internationalism. EF! in Britain advocated sabotage but never realised the potential of what they were creating and when groups did begin to do things, they

distanced themselves and dismissed it through the media. As Snorky said before, it's all very nice to wear a jersey with a monkey wrench on it but what’s the point when what lies behind it is just hot air. The new hooded versin with the bomb thrower is a prime example. “Fuck civil -- let's get disobedient” it says, but when have we seen anyone on mainland Britain chuck one at a police line, eh? Some brave EF’ers praise the American First Nations and wear a feather in their ear but how many would raise a rifle and put their lives on the line to prevent machines from entering a site like the Mohawks, did back in the early- 1990's and others have done since? We may have a laugh about a pensioner who refuses to have his house levelled for a development and threatens the bailiff with a shotgun but he’s defending all of what he regards as precious and sacred in his life. If we re really sincere about defending the Earth, then it's about time we do it properly. We don't have the time to play semantics and trendy popular merchandising.

In my eyes, Earth First! in Britain is dead. The ELF has its origins in thv GA (which long predated EF!UK> and the animal liberation and autonomous tradition. Let’s see a real eco-guerilla movement and forget the D-locks and the like, that's in the past. It s now time to go into the loft or garden shed and dig around for something better. Otherwise you'd just as well kiss your Mother goodbye now.

Earth, Animal and Wimmins

F -

liberation!

NEITHER LEFT NOR RIGHT BUT FORWARDS

The Shadow Fox thinks Green should reject class war

I recognise this to be a gross over-generalisation, but many people in the radical green movement are influenced by either Social Ecology or Deep Ecology.

As we all know, purist advocates of Social Ecology argue relentlessly with. purist advocates of Deep Ecology. I do not wish to dredge up these arguments here, instead I would like to look at what these ideologies have in common.

One of the first things to strike you, that they have in common, is both ideologies support direct action

Both Social Ecologists and Deep Ecologists engage in civil disobedience in order to draw public attention to a particular issue.

Another thing both Social Ecology and Deep. Ecology have in common is a rejection of ‘class conflict'. Social Ecologists, such as the eco- libertarian, Murray Bookchin, argue fur 'a ^c ftiture* ' soerety ^v wrthout heirarchy, with out class, that will benefit all the members of that society regardless of their former ‘class’ status.

Deep Ecology is much less well- defined in its social goals, however the advocates of Deep Ecology, such as the ex-monkeywrencher Dave Foreman, again argue against class based politics. In his book - Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Crown Trade, 1991, pp. 30-32), Foreman states that Deep Ecogists have

An unwillingness to set any ethical, class, or political group of humans on a pedestal and make them immune from questioning Its easy, of course, to recognise that white males from North America and Europe (as well as Japanese males) hold disproportionate share of responsibility for the mess we’re in; that upper- and middle-class consumers from the first World take an excessive portion of the world s “resources’ and therefore cause greater per capita destruction than do other peoples But it docs not follow that everyone else is blameless

The Earth First! movement has great affinity will) aborigional groups througjioul ’Jie world They arc clearly m

Page 27

the most direct and respectful relationships with the natural world Earth First’ should back such tribes in the common struggle whenever possible without compromising our ideals For example, wc arc supportive of the Dine (Navajo) x>f Big Mountain against .relocation, buit this does not mean we overlook the severe overgrazing by domestic sheep on the Navajo Reservation, wc may be supportive of subsistence life-styles by natives in Alaska, but wc. should not be silent about cicarcutting old-growth forest in southeast Alaska by native corporations, or about the Eskimo Doyon Corporation's push for oil exploration and development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.¹ It is racist to cither condemn or pardon someone based on their ethnic background.

Similarly, wc are inconsistent when wc ' castigate Charles Hurwitz for destroying the last wilderness redwood forest, yet feel, sympathy for the loggers working for him Industrial workers, by and large, share the blame for the destruction of the natural world They may be yoked by the bog-moncy boys, but they arc generally willing serrvants who share the worldview of their bosses that Earth is a smorgasbord of resources for the taking Sometimes, in fact, it is the sturdy yeoman from the bumpkin proletariat who hold the most violent and dcastructive attitudes towards the natural world (and towards those who defend it). Workers arwe victims of an unjust economic system, but that does not absolve them from what they do. This does not deny that some woods workers oppose the destruction of ancient foresdts, that some may even be Earth Firstlcrs, but merely that it is inappropriate to overlook abuse of the natural world simply because of the rung the perpetrators occupy on the economic ladder, .

Some argue that workers are merely struggling to feed their families and are not delighting in destroying the natural world, they say that unless you deal w ith the needs of loggers to make a living, you can t save the forest They also claim that loggers arc manipulated by their bosses to express anti-wilderness viewpoints. I find this argumemt to be patronizing to loggers and other workers. When I read comments from timbger fellers expressing hatred towards pristine forests and towards conservationists, it is obvious that they will willingly buy into the worldview of the lumber barons. San Francisco's Image Magazine reports on a letter to the editor written by one logger: "Working people trying to teed families have littler time to be out in the woods acting like children and making things harder for other working people .. Anyone out there have a recipe for spotted owl? Food stamps won't go far. I'm afraid And since they're always . being shoved down my thrpat, I thought

I d like mine fried *. Bumper stickers proclaimed "Kill an owl. Save a logger arc ride in the Northwest I at least respect the logger who glories in felling a giant tree and who hunts Spotted Owels enough to grant him the mental ability to have his own opinions instead of pretending he is a s'.up.d oaf. manipulated by his bosses and unable to think for himself.

Of course the big timber companies do manipulate their workers with scare tactics about mill closings and wilderness lockups, but many loggers (or cat-skinners, oilfield workers, miners and the like) simply hate the wild and delight in “civilizing" it Even educating workers about ecological principles will not necessarily change the attitude of many; there arc basic differences of opinon and valyues Conservationists should try to find common ground ^with loggers and other workers whenever possible, but the sooner we get rid of Marxist views about the noble proletariat, the better

Over the past few years Green Anarchist magazine has seemingly been moving towards a class conflict ideology. I feel such a shift will be to the detriment of GA magazine as it will alienate the many militant greens who do not come from traditional working class backgrounds. ’

Class conflict argues that because white middle class males hold certain privileges within our current society this is justification for creating hatred of white middle class males. Regardless of whar that person is like as an individual. Regardless of what views or opinions that person holds. Regardless of that persons actions. That individual is an ‘enemy* because they are a white middle class male.

Under this logic we can justify any prejudice we want. British people of African and Asian cultures can rightly say that ‘White* people in Britain are privileged and have certain advantages. Therefore are class conflict advocates in favour of race conflict?

Men generally have more advantages . than women in our patriarchal society. Are the class conflict people in favour of the Radical Feminist idea that all men oppress and desire to rape women?

Diasabled people are less privileged in our society than able-bodied people. How many able-bodied people have been told they can’t go

DS4A

BOOKS FOR

MAGAZINES, MUSIC

CATALOGUE SEND

DS4A, BOX

82 COLSTON

to the cinema because they are a ‘fire hazard’. How mant able-bodied people have been denied access to public transport because there isn’t the appropriate seating? Should we advocate conflict between the- disSbled and able-bodied people because of this difference in privilege? - - -

1 could quite easily continue with my examples, but I hope people are realising my point. Yes our Capirtalist society does favour White, Christian, heterosexual, ablebodied, middle-aged, middle-class men/ And yes these people do generally have certain advantages. But that is no reason to condemn the individual as a “rich bastard". You should seek alliances with people who share your views and people who will fight your fight. Don't condemn people because they come from a different family background as yourself, or seek false allegiance with those who do not share your

DISTRIBUTION WITH ATTITUDE

AND MUCH SAE TO . BRISTOL, BSI

MORE

5BB

views but happen to be of the same class as yourself.

There is nothing inherent in Anarchism that automatically leads to class conflict. The word anarchy comes from the Greek word anarchos which means “without a ruler”. Some of the most famous Anarchists have been middle or upper class, including Tolstoy and Kropotkin (both of whom were Russian Aristocrats. Just like Barunin [s/c] and Herzen).

In his/her/their recently published manifesto the Unabomber/Freedom Club argues that militant greens/primitivists should actively distance themselves from ‘Leftist’ ideologues. This inevitaqbly will include the dinosaur ideolgy of class conflict. As a Social Ecologist friend once said - . *

It's not about advantaging the Working Class at the expense of the Middle Class It is about building a better, more holistic, biocentric, naturalistic society that will benefit evervone w

Greens, Get Real

Class is a reality that must be acknowledged and superceded

As Derek Wall showed in his GJ28 article, Eco-Fascism. the slogan “neither Left or Right but forwards” was first coined by die Grunen’s Herbert Gruhl, who later went on to form an extreme conservative split with neo-Nazi links! 1 hat Shadow Fox adopts this slogan reveals the same sort of ignorance

Green ideas as maintaining they are either “Social Ecology of or Deep Ecology”.

A specific problem with deep ecology is (hat it poses a culture / nature duality, as it it doesn’t recognise that Nature is a cultural construct — or the existence of any other cultural constructs either, such as heirarchy. Most ironically, though, this duality excludes humans from the natural world, making deep ecology a self-defeating and logically absurd philosophy.

An ex-Goldwater Republican, Dave ‘Ego-warrior’ Foreman’s opinions on class aren’t worth hearing. They retlect exactly the sort of bankruptcy of deep ecology already mentioned and refer specifically to the 1990 dispute with revolutionary ecologists like Judy Bari in EF’US that Foreman lost because he couldn t take on class issues and they did.

Remaining Foremanistas gathered round the journal, Wilci Earth, which elevates scientistic pronounciations about ecology over the practical community organising ot the Bari faction. The group closest to Earth’s thinking in UK is the Conservers, ex-Green 2000 types actively hostile tQ direct action who go on endlessly about overpopulation* and Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethic’, indiscriminately blaming the entire human race for the current

Page 28

ecocide instead of seeing some people as more responsible for it than-others. Such Ideas and those advanced by Chris ‘Miss Anthropy'

Recently we learnt that Ken Loach had done some film work for McDonalds, but he didn't want anyone to know about it. He was worried about his radical image. From Lenin to McDonalds, a real animal farm!

Manes have been broadly described as eco-fascist and provoked the 1990 split in EF’.US in the first place!

It's a blatant misrepresentation of Rnnkrhin to claim social ecologists

“reject class conflict' when he sees heirarchy as the central problem of relationships within human society and beyond it to human beings relationship with Nature. The guy's an ex-Marxist, for Gaiasakes!

As anarcho-primitivists, were particularly pissed off that Shadow Fox ignored our current entirely, except for a crap little aside about FC wholly void of understanding. In Industrial Society & Its Future, class, race, gender and other oppressions are recognised, even if as only subsiduary to technocratic oppression -- FC takes issue with ideological Leftists that make a ‘cause of others oppression. Perlman's Against History’. Against Leviathan opens with a description of the formation of class society in ancient Mesapotamia. formed from the heirarchy-free ‘primitive communist' societies that preceded it. One primitivist contention with social ecology is that they kudicruously believe pressing on to create a societv based on a new ethic of citizenship and civil virtue will abolish heirarchy when this represents one step further from the primitive “free society in harmony with Nature" he so glowingly opens The Ecology' of Freedom with.

What we think Shadow Fox is actually driving at is not a class analysis of this society per se but a reductive one that oresents it rhe

only explanation of social reality to the exclusion of eco/animal lib/&c and a seperatist one that refuses the participation of those not defined — usually by some self-selecting ‘in' group — as working class. Rich people are obviously bastards — they're .rich because they exploited others, profiting from their needs.

Instead of Shadow Fox making a damn fool of him/herself by way of equal and opposite reaction' to class reductionists, s/he should consider why they take the line they do.

The main reason is that most middleclass people -- presumably defined by origin/parent's profession &c as woe betides any ‘full-time activist' with a job! - don't ‘leave their past behind them'. They go round behaving in such MC ways as:

• Appointing themselves as organisers, keeping the paperwork to themselves and ordering this privileged position to order everyone else about.

• Having a profound contempt for internal democracy, always preferring to sort.things covertly amongst their own clique — crippling broad recruitment drives

• Thinking, whatever their public rhetoric, that they can ‘use the system to get things done’, turning political activity into media spectacles -- with them as spokespersons - and ‘lobbying with their arses’

• Constantly appealing to ‘morality and irritatingly asserting their self- proclaimed ‘moral superiority over ‘lower class others

• Harping on about nonviolence — usually putting that before their actual goal — and being badly unrealistic about authorities like cops and courts.

• Playing ‘professional victim — usually after provoking violence -- and generally opting for passsive. masochistic tactics

• Being oh so serious about the (usually single-issue) Cause (“the struggle is my life, slackers!' ) for a couple of years before sloping off back to their career as bosses

Class struggle activists won't enter into cross-class alliances if their allies act like the new boss class.

GA is undecided whether seperatist politics is important in factioning and destroying organised society -- hardly the class reductionists massifying (eg. ‘One Big Union ) intent — or whether the surrender of individuality to ideology involved in it is too high a price to pay. It's certainly the case that heirarchy in all its forms needs to be recognised, tackled in our own heads as well as the world, and then superceded for the alienation it is.

Page 29

[censored by the source]

Letters

Send your letters to Oxford Green Anarchists, BCM 1715, London WCIN 3XX, but remember:-

• We print all letters recieved on a ‘no censorship, no endorsement basis. Your letters are your responsibility, not ours. We think readers are grown up enough to think for themselves, so won't usually comment on lettrers we print — even those we don t agree with — unless asked. The only exception to this are letters from fascists and other such bigots and piss-takers. These will be binned, though we will note their arrival.

• We will ruthlessly edit all letters we think too long or boring. So keep ‘em short so everyone can have their say too. Cut letters are marked with a ( ] w ith the original number of words inside the bracket.

• If you don't want your letter, your name or your address printed, make sure we know. - .

INDIFFERENCE TO ICKE

Dear GA,

GA38 Letters (about Justice?'s indifference to David Icke in 1994) mentions the Brighton Unversity Students’ Union. As the encloswed leaflet shows, despite having equal opportuities and anti-racist/fascist policy, the union were unconcerned about the threat to Black, jewish & gay students. Indeed the Union were founder sponsors of ANL — and despite claiming a jewish president. Matt Dauncey, the ANL's first Brighton action was to demonstrate over a non-existant jewish cemetry desecration, so causing untiold heartache for relatives. They later w'ould love to see an anarchist viewpoint on it but supporting a lynch mob mentality is surely not the way to go. ♦

13. Why the fuck do you give Stewart Home all that free publicity? besides a handful of sad art students who hang round the ICA. nobody else has ever heard of him. 1 am sure that giving him a whole half page plus photo is very gratifying to his sense of self importance but lets face it NOBODY FUCKING CARES’ He is irrelevant so lets forget him and get on with the important stuff.

4. Your answer to Anonymous of Southampton appeared to miss most of the point that I felt they were trying to raise. The logical-positivist approach to health and medicene does have application in a logical-positivist world. Only Hi-Tech surgery and X-rays can dogmatic anti-scientism. Before making moral judgements on ‘anti-human’ science, scientists or anyone else you might take a look at yourselves.

For instance, just what the fuck did the Paris Metro bombing have to do with ‘community resistance ? The people who did that are just murdering scum and if you applaud from the sidelines, you are no better. -

What do you think the effect of your support for that kind of thing would be on the average tube commuter? I'd guess they'd be glad there's such a thing as the Special Branch to keep an eye on people like you. If this is the type of morality ‘subjectivist’ thinking produces you can stuff it. It's not an isolated example eg. the ‘communique’ from another set of heroes the so-called ‘anarchists' of the FC. ‘Do anything we disapprove of and we ll kill you'. Very libertarian 1 don’t think.*

■J

You should take time out from Dr Kuhn's vague speculations about ‘paradigms' and learn some basic physics. Solar cells do not ‘generate' ie. produce any energy at all. They convert the incoming energy of sunlight into another form, electricity. However this energy is used it cannot affect the Earth s overall heat balance. Since, unlike fossil fuels, they produce no Greenhouse gases or other pollutants, solar cells are a feasible techno-fix for needed are hard scientific arguments, not wild Daily Sport-style sensationalism. That fools nobody anymore.

I don’t think the mind of a scientist is necessarily any more objective than anyone elses. But science starts from the assumption, the only dogma essential to it, that there is a separate, objective reality ‘out there' apart from the mind of the observer. That's the only rigid certainty' involved. It's much easier to swallow than all the trendy ‘subjectivist’ crap about all ideas being equally true, reality being what goes on in their own heads etc. If there’s no such thing as reality, there’s no such thing as pollution, poverty, oppression is there? Now just whose interest does that line serve?

There is a separate reality out there, it’s called Nature. If we want to live in harmony with it we’ll have to understand it. The best methods for doing that are scientific methods, not religious ones. It’s no use substituting Nature for God. If we're plugging books at each other, read Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker or River Out Of Eden. You might learn that the real Nature is not a loving Mother goddess but a blind evolutionary process callously indifferent to the sufferings of individual creatures or even species.

But Dawkins is a middle class scientist so his ideas must be lies? In the 30's the

condemned a jewish activist I know for removing 100s of bits of racist/fasciast grafitti when they only removed one. 1

deal with the sort of injuries produced by the by-products of mass industrialisation and those by-products will not

know the SU I SWP I ANL have remorse over this. -

What kind of people are they?:

Yours

no_: disappear overnight, no matter how hard

A FEW POINTS

Suzin, Mark + Arran of Brighton.

Dear GA, ■

Glad to see that you are still going despite the attention of the stasi. I doubt if you ve seen the last of them though so I hope that you have sorted out your security and are better prepared for the next demonstration of policing in a democracy

A few points about issue 39 I d like to get off my chest.

1. In Diary of Community Resistance you mention the alleged stabbing of a copper at Brightlingsea during a live export protest. According to what I have heard, the copper fell off a lorry and impaled himself on a piece of jagged metal (Aw diddums’). The police response to that was to nick the only black person there and release them without charge a few hours later. I don't have problem with coppers being I stabbed but don’t see why we should I take the credit when they manage to stab I themselves. I

2. In the same diary, you also mention ¹ the arson attack on the home of the alleged killer of Sophie Hook and comment “pity he wasn't inside it”. How do you know he is guilty? You got access to inside info not available to the rest of us? or have you decided that everything you read in the papers must be true? The issue of what to do with the sick bastards who commit these sort of acts is one that needs discussing and I

we all try. If you are ever smeared along a road by one of Henry Ford's little planet killers, 1 bet you won’t be fighting off the ambulance crew and insisting on being treated by a herbalist.

5. How did the stasi get the name and address of your GAMO customer? Surely you lose that sort of info as soon as the order has been sent, don’t you? I think we should be told if only for our own security. Record keeping gets people caught. Don’t do it! -

Love, peace and freedom.

Technowob of Hope, The Bottom, Tory Britain. .’

• GA replies: On your last question, GAMO doesn't keep customer records. The customer s name and address is cut from their order and stuck to GAMO’s outgoing parcel. Maybe the Branch got to this particular customer’s order before GAMO could collect it from the PO box or maybe from more conventional mail interception. There s only so much we can do to protect you — ultimately you’re responsible for your own security and that means using an alias and a drop in communication with us.

global warming, acid rain and other problems. Far more feasible than primitivist fantasies about huntergathering. Maybe that was an idyllic way of life when the human population was 10 million. But when its 6 billion and rising paradise is the last thing it would

be. I suppose we cannibalism, get the real fast that way.

Techno-fixes like

could take up population down

solar cells are

fantasies as long as we live in a capitalist society where their introduction threatens established vested interests. This is one of the best arguments against

Nazis rejected relativity as ‘Jewish science'. Your scapegoating of science as a whole for the evils of capitalism is akin to the Nazis scapegoating the jews. A tendency to substitute scaremongering propaganda for hard arguments, a taste for terrorism, a superstitious glorification of Nature in place of the Nazi glorification of race. It couldn't be that Stewart Home, whatever his faults, has a point about you lot after all, could it?

Anon (never been to Southampton in my life)

the system and why primitivism

techno-phobia on the revolutionaries can only enemy. -

I’ve no strong feelings farming as such. I'm not

part serve

and of

the

on organic conviced it

• GA replies: ‘“objectivity” here — understanding.

If you knew your you’d know your

Precious little or even scientific

thermodynamics, solar * cells will

SCIENTISTS

would be productive enough especially for crowded islands like these. What I was attacking was the capitalist racketeering that goes on in the health

food business. That isn't

a valid

argument against organic farming any more than the capitalist misuses of science and technology are an argument for technophobia.

No apologies for ‘trumpeting’ x-rays. When you re facing the big D you won't give a shit about trivialities like a little

ultimately convert solar to heat energy — they “generate” heat as it will exist where previously it didn’t. Unless something’s done to clear Greenhouse gases (eg. grow more trees), that’ll just add to global warming. And this is your “best argument against the system”? Not a thirst for liberty, just a gadget.

As your failure to take on Bertell’s critique of the irradiation of our environment (“a little low level radioactive waste” — grow up!) shows, you haven’t bothered to read the books referred to in

our last reply as you don’t want to know, low level radioactive waste. Yes, 1 was _fYou exhibit the classic signs of the hit by a car, so what? I suppose in the

scientistic

ideologue,

Al IP ^AVini IR^ l^{good old pnmi,}'^{visl days nobody ever}'locating what you don't Qnvivunu [cracked any bones at all. So far as cars - ■ ■ ■ - ■

So Auschwitz and Hiroshima were products of ‘scientific thinking ? I always thought capitalism and authoritarianism had something to do with them.

Hitler was a vegetarian and heavily into astrology. Iherefo/e all vegetarians and astrologers are Nazis and should be shot.

Daft? Yes, but no more so than your

go, I’d be happy to see the bloody lot scrapped, but in a society where the majority drives or has access to a car we’ve got a hell of a job of education and persuasion to do first. You don’t help by blowing up every problem into a doomsday scenario. People have heard it all before. Remember heterosexual AIDS? We re all supposed to be dead by now, according to the hype a few years ago. You can cry wolf too often. What ’s

aggressively

even

understand and closing your mind to all

that might contradict your simple faith.

Kuhn doesn't say there’s no such thing as reality, just that scientists pick and choose from it to serve their prejudices just like the rest of us. We’re all stuck behind that veil, lad, so start living with it. To qpote Dawkins, of all people, as some objective revelator of Nature shows how sick with the pop science bug you are. I ve read his Selfish Gene

Page 31

but also David Rose’s critique in New Scientist. Rose is a scientist too, yea a vivisector, but rightly points out Dawkins' grotesque, reductive sociobiology is just warmed-over Huxleyite social Darwinism, the ‘objective’ scientific justification for laissez faire capitalism's excesses in the Victorian era and even eugenics under the Nazis. Next you’ll quote us Eysenck’s ‘scientific proof Blacks are thicker that Whites!

Face it, science is ideological, the third leg of the same tripod of domination as capitalism and authoritarianism. The A- bomb was nothing to do with science? More than to do with vegetarianism, I’d suggest. You look at Auschwitz, the ‘factory of death ", and can’t see the logical end-product of Taylorism, the “scientific management'' that’s made the modem world the hell it is today?

You call us “scaremongering’’ when the

AIDS panic was manufactured by the likes of Wellcome to peddle AZT, as GA31 made clear.’No crisis though? Just breathe the air, chum!

There aren’t only two ways of thinking, scientific and religious. Following Zerzan, GA explicitly rejects religious mystification as a prime source of alienation -- but then so is scientific objectification. Plain common sense was around a good while before science and they’re pretty distant cousins. Rainforest people knew their world well enough to each be able to name and use - 1,000+ plant species millenia before any scientist came along to patent them. Against this, we have those wi$e words' of Claude Bernard: “Why think when you can vivisect?”

Maybe Bernard was a ‘bad' scientist, like the defining horrors of the 20th century were ‘bad' science, but these days his followers are a multitude and

they’re in society’s driving seat. Science doesn’t just serve power, it is power, technocrats are a power unto themselves. They shape all our futures in their “objective ”, morality-free way and we have to cope with the consequences!

All this about the Paris Metro attack is just beating around the bush on the way to what you really can't take. FC’s actions name the enemy Ind you can't bear being on the wrong side. It’s their targets you don't approve of, not their- tactics. Presumably you’d cheer violence against capitalists and authoritarians other than scientists — or do you repudiate centuries-old anarchist (not “Nazi”) traditions?

Techno-fixes have always made things worse in the past and will in future — what are they but reformism and in the hands of a small, technical elite at th&t? Instead of complexifying the system still further, simplify it — sweep away the sources of our alienation, don’t add to them. Hunter-gathering may not be a majority option but there’s more than enough land for everyone to live self- sufficiently, independantly and most certainly organically, even in a country with a population density as great as UK, and that means it’s only force and ignorance that keeps State society going Your cult of science, technology and progress is part of that ignorance, an ideology maintaining people’s faith in and dependance on State society.

A final - footnote: the Diary of Community Resistance lists examples of community breakdown alongside those of its recreation. It amuses us to leave it to readers to sort the two out.

COUNTER-CULTURE

• Send books, pamphlets and new zines for review to Oxford Green Anarchists, BCM 1715, London WC'IN 3XX. Reviews from readers, projects and survival tips also welcomed but keep 'em short and send us a photocopy of the cover of what you’re reviewing.

• Send records, tapes and music zines and reviews to Alder Valley Anarchists c/o PO Box 407, Camberley GUI5 3FL. AVA can also do distribution through GA Mail Order.

BOOKS

BOLO’BOLO BY PM. PRICE

FROM SEMIOTEXT(E), 522 PHILOSOHY HALL, NEW YORK, NY 10027, USA.

The second edition of the original 1983 German text, complete with a prefaced authorial ‘apology’ attempting to explain why the Planetary Work Machine hasn’t yet been abolished and all nation-states not replaced by bolos (small-scale communes).

holo 'bolo starts with the original affluent society but - for all its gloss - ends with de facto world government, distribution and supply, and half the human race still stuck in cities. It s methods for achieving this utopian state reflects the mood of it’s early- 1980’s origins, the usual peacenik trip of the System falling through mass nonviolent non-cooperation and building a new economy in the shell of the old. You know, Crass’s ‘destroy power, not people' (‘the System’s your enemy, not any individual responsible for it’) stuff. Frankly, we can't see computer-

yuppies and technocrat scum (bolo bolos A deal' types) wanting to destroy a system that they do nicely out of -- however empty and boring they may privately find it - and Zerzan’s nailed the myth of the ‘revolutionary potential' of organized industrial workers (the B deal’).

Bolo'bolo's main strength is in it's detailed visualisation of a commutarian future, much like Callenbach’s Ecotopia. in the 1995 preface, PM insists bolos should be around 500 strong (“the size of the traditional tribe") but ridicules those readers that have slavishly tried to recreate other elements of the bo/o-future using the book as a-blueprint. There also seems to be the traditional confusion between creating the bolo revolution here and now (‘elistist islands') and somehow making it globally and simultaneously.

bolo'bolo contains a lot of useful insights and iminable nuggets despite these reservations. It's a considerable improvement on a lot of more recent and conventional ‘alternatives' around.

TWYFORD DOWN BY BARBARA BRYANT. £12.99 FROM E & FN . SPON.

Barbara Bryant was a lory councillor in Winchester and she’s joined in this book by eco-bore Johnnie Porritt, the editor of Construction News and some law professor. So, no, it’s not the story of the 1992-4 direct action campaign to save Twyford.

Before booing and hissing, see the book for what it is. Bryant put half a decade of her life into the light to save Twyford - as did all the key I wyford Down Association people - and

165/ V/t I I 5 1711 5ill 01 lilt! Ki \f'< f

» tnilW ijfo no¹ Ho* nt" i i ' t

campaigned against her own part)', almost splitting it. You have to acknowledge this commitment. Here, in the greatest detail, is the 1 DA’s battle against the odds, the rigged game of the planning process and a juggernaut-1 ike road lobby careering out of control. You know the poor woman hasn't a hope but it's a magnificent spectacle.

Prof. Kunzlik’s section on Ripa di Meana's clash with Major over EC law and subsiduarity is no doubt historically important but we tound it so dense with legalese that it was unreadable.

Less well-intentioned and welcome was Porritt’s contribution, highlighting potential revisionist uses for this text. It's bad enough Bryant pretends June 1992 was the last anyone protested Twyford’s destruction and hails the reactionary control freak Andrew Lees. Despite FoE’s post-Lees change of line, Porritt consistently presents EF!s involvement as futile, unpopular and mediapathic and in doing so dismisses what distinguished Iwytord from all previous road campaigns — popular direct action being taken to stop it, not the futile lobbying and legalism that forms the bulk of Bryant's book. 1 remember seeing the FDA's David Croker thrown off the diggers by security time and again and in the end he almost lost his home over it. 1 here

was a local with bottle, a man that didn't throw in the towel and who knew what it takes to beat the land-rapers. He wasn't the only local like that. Against this you have a tosser like Porritt who couldn't bear to return to Twyford after some pathetic photo-opportunity symbolically chained to a meaningless fence. The CPRE and other mainstream conservation bodies are indicted here for failing Twyford Down but FoE failed there too and what Porritt really can’t face is that EF! then stepped in to prove real change doesn't come from Establishment chaps like him doing backroom deals with the rich and infamous. That Porritt refers to the December 1994 meeting between EF! and FoE as “promising” is exactly what you'd expect from an old Etonian advising Prince Charles.

The need for a balancing book on the direct action struggle at I wyford is now urgent. It would be disgraceful and tragic if only the opinions of those viscerally hostile to direct action were to dominate the history of this pivotal campaign. - . '

THE BATTLE FOR LANCASHIRE'S

FUTURE BY SIMON JONES. PALANT1NE BOOKS, ISBN 1- 874182-04-7.

This is the story of your typical flufty sensible middle class residents against the nasty motorway pressure group. In

Page 32

this case the motorway was the M65, the time 1989-1992.

Simon Jones is a Chorley Liberal councillor, and together with others set up SHOL (Save the Heart Of Lancashire) — a wholesome sounding campaign group to voice opposition to the M65 at the public enquiry. They didn't just oppose the motorway that devoured Cuerden, Earcroft and Stanworth, but also a planned south west ring road around Preston.

The book scores one or two hits, particularly the trashing of pro-M65 Jack Straw (Later Shadow Environment spokesman), p. 31:

JONES Have you studied the country-side'’ (Holds up several poster sized photos of Brindle and Pippin Street)

STRAW A lot of rather nice countryside will be disrupted. 1 could not identify the precise areas and am not intimate with them ...

Mostly though, it is a practical demonstration of the futility’ of the protest group approach. They may well win the arguments in the public enquiry , but the eroad still goes ahead. By the end. Jones is half w aking up to the corruption of the system. He tells us of a certain Mr Leakey, campaigning against corrupt planning who tried to expose the M65 as part of the “Secret motorway across the dales”. Few took him seriously but “paradoxically, it seems much of what he said that day is now being proved right” (p. 30).

Jones finds out about dodgy land deals behind closed doors — the Bolton Green business park; 188 acre Cuerden Business Park at Lindle Lane; Riley Green, set to become the M65 motorway services; and the Zeri theme park at Huncoat. “The British system seems to be paralysed” Jones discovered by p. 58. He seems sympathetic to the Green Party (remember the events described here are contemporary with the Greens scoring 15% in the Euro-elect ions) but even so slates them for their antiEurope “Romantic self-sufficiency theory” (p. 43). His only defence against the road is to appeal to Berussels and Euro-Directive 85/337. Some hope!

OUR GLOBAL NEIGHBOURHOOD BY THE COMMISSION ON GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. £6.99 FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

It started with the Brandt Commission (1977-80) who produced North-South:

A Programme for Survival. This drew attention to the economic disparity between rich countries and the Third World. Times have changed since 1980 -- the Cold War ended, economic and social decline have set in. The world is full of problems; Bosnia, Chiapas, Chechnya, drugs, pollution, violence. It spills out into newspapers and onto TV screens, again and again showing the ‘Global Community' in its impotence.

Despite this, the new' Commission follows a similar track as before — the Palme Commission, Brundtland Commission, Julius Nyerere s South Commission. A few' personnel are the same as Brandt, this latest group also includes people like Allan Boesak and Jacques Delors. There are favourable comments on the book cover from Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandeia. They believe the answer lies in strengthening the classic intergovernmental agencies: the United Nations, World Trade Organisation, IMF. They call dfor strengthening the rule of law, an international criminal court to rule on, for example, thje extradition of the Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing; they call for an Economic Security Council; perhaps their worst proposal is that the UN establishes a 10,000 strong elite military force, paid for by member states. Thus their model includes all the features of a world state

Naturally, the Commission denies it is trying to create global government. Instead they write about “governance*’ which is defined as “the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions manage their common affairs ’. This is just a semantic subterfuge.

The tone of this book is that of Joyce Grenfell’s 1950’s school teacher, determined, no matter what crisis strikes her, to put a positive gloss on everything:

No George I really don t think it is a good idea to try to bum down the school.. - George* Put down those matches*

In the present historical context, the effect of this sustained, rose-tinted false optimism is sick-making. The book is surreal, quite divorced from reality. A chart shows 14 UN operations between the 1940’s and 1980’s (p. 103) and 20 in the five years since 1990. Despite this collosal expansion they say “There is less ideolgical contention and less global confrontation in the world of the 1990’s!” (p 45). We see in this the authentic voice of the New World Dis/Order — bland as in Tony Bland, as disconnected from the truth as the unemployment statistics. Because we do not have justice, equality, liberty etc (their so-called ‘core values) the virus compels bureaucrats' and their word processors to spool out more and more documents asserting our rights to these mythological attributes.

In asserting Euro-Con buzz words and phrases — ‘Neighbourhood Values’, ‘Interdependence , ‘subsiduarity’, ‘regionalism , ‘Multilateralism -- the Commission commits the Yugoslavian Fallacy (asserting the unity of that which has no unity) on a grand and global scale.

Like the ickie-yuckie Joyce Grenfell schooln)j>trp{>s, they are too nice to ever condemn. The result is a book of

pious platitudes. The road to Eurogeddon is paved with waffly good intentions. On arms deals: “We propose all arms exporters exercise restraint” (p. 126). Wow ! They refuse to state the obvious truth: “The failure of the Rio Conference to agree on an Earth Charter was a setback” (p. 216). More charter-itis, but the Rio Summit was an exercise in futility.

With its calls for more law, global taxation, more government, more leadershhip, more international bodies - - we can see where all this is leading. On p. 298 we leam the whole UN costs SI0.5 billion in 1992. The UK spends three and a half times that amount on alcohol. Yes, but at least the alcohol has some effect. The whole book is shot through with delusions -- the delusion that governments are accountable, that they rerspond to peoples wishes, that development is of itself a good thing, naive faith in the merely moral authority of toothless watchdogs, the looking glass delusion that talking shops are important, he myth that more government makes people better. Centralised top-down systyems like the USSR and Yugoslavia have failed -- or like General Motors etc are in deep deep doo doo, so let s have more of the same....

So who is this waffle aimed at? Perhaps middle class Westerners who think ‘something should be done about global poverty'. This book is the voice of the softer, gentler, caring cocacolonialism of the next century. “The world needs credible and sustained leadership”. Like it needs Windows 95, no doubt. The world needs more and more talking shops in exotic locations, more bureaucrats and platitudinous verbiage. This is a book of naive selfdeception.

GANGLAND BRITAIN BY TONY THOMPSON. HODDER & STOUGH-TON (ISBN 0 340 60824 2)

A London hitman called Max (p. 16):

You're better off doing a couple of body shots, then a couple to the head. There s no way anyone s going to walk away from that .

Do you check them to make sure they re dead⁹ .

Oh no. they re dead No doubt As soon as someone dies from a gunshot they instantly piss and shit themselves You know what you vedone..

Now the Soviet Menace has evaporated, the spooks are looking for new groups to demonize. This book takes an Eley N° 5 approach and spatters everybody in sight Londoners, Jamaicans, Asians, Hells Angels, Japanese, Colombians, Russians, Chinese, Italians and I urkish people. All of these have their own version of the Mafia, sinister organized criminals shooting their way into the British scene.

Gangland Britain is a tabloid-style shock horror job. It’s a hysterical stampede to condemn the gangs. Ihompson doesn’t stop to consider there are positive aspects too — the sense of identity, the sense of belonging the gangs give their members.

ife was a good man ... he built me a house

and he has never even met me

an old woman at the funeral of Medellin drug cartel boss Pablo Escobar

Sure, there are a lot of bad aspects to the gangs, a lot of stupid things going on, but if the good aspects are mentioned at all they are cynically dismissed. In this book it's all bad, so hold up your hands in horror.

Tony Thompson writes for Time Out, GQ, Independent and the Guardian. Throughout the book, the story is basically the same. Typically: Long ago and under threat, each ethnic group started a protection squad. At first traders willingly pay up and the squads make the threat diminish. The traders still pay them, and the gang becomes a protection racket. They move into prostitution and other Arthur Daley antics. Then they discover drugs and with that comes violence and guns. Relay teams of confused men take carrier bags of used £10 notes into banks. It all becomes more businesslike, with dummy companies, faxes, telexes, letters of credit, trucks, couriers and ships importing Columbian cocaine or heroin from the Golden Crescent. Overloaded with the profits, the big men move over into property and “legitimate” business. It's more of a way of mind than a conspiracy. The police are up against it, folks: “Confronted with this wall of silence, we are powerless to act” says Inspector Derek Himmler' Grudgington of the Yard as he shrugs his shoulders, pockets the plain brown envelope and walks off into the mist.

In turn, each ethnic group thus smeared is hyped as the biggest threat since the Four Horsemen rode into town. 75% of high value armed robberies ae commited by Londoners. 50-90% of the crack trade is down to Yardies. Hells Angels do more killings and woundings than all other organized crinme gangs in Britain put together. The Yakuza are eight times bigger than Toyota. One family in Columbia control 80% of the world s cocaine trade. The Russian Mafia is 40% of their GDP. And so it goes on. You get the sense you ought to panic at this rising tide of hype but the figures don t add up. In the I riad chapter (p. 249) more than half the European heroin market is controlled from South East Asia. Relying on our short term memory span, he later tells us more than half the European heroin market is controlled from Turkey (p. 318). Neither is it very easy to take a book seriously when the author thinks Derby is in the north of England (p. 149) or that Wolverhampton is in the North West (p. 150).

The gang problem is so big, the Cops try to staunch it with corny stings like - Operation Lucy, Operation Enmesh (bikies) and Operation Takeaway (Triads) but it’s “Like fighting a plague of ants”.

On gang shootouts (p. 58):

in London, Birmingham and Manchester, the police now tell the public not to bother handing in used shell cases ... there arc simply too many

On Russian vice rings (p. 214):

In March 1995, the year long Project Ivan > (NCIS, Met, MIS, MI6, Customs and Immigration Service) failed to find a single Russian prostitute..

On an Italian Mafia fugitive who was exposed in the Sunday Times (p. 264):

Thanks to a spiral of phenomenal incompetence. Mr D became the least pursued mafia fugitive the world has ever known...' Life for Di Carlo continued exactly as before.

We are left with the impression the cops aren't even trying. (Rustle of plain brown envelopes?) That's no surprise because it's just so fuckin' obvious how this book works and which agenda it serves. The MFI job created scam. With all these terrors lapping at English shores (not forgetting the Mafia s links with terrorist groups) and MFI wanted to move over into organized crime, talk of Europol and a new' centralized FBI sty le law enforcement agency, every one wants a piece of the action. We can expect many more books like this, all of them playing their part in creating the appearance of a climate of opinion, the illusion of consensus....

A SMALL CITY IN FRANCE BY FRANCOISE GASPARD.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, £9.95.

The ‘small city’ is Dreux, 60 miles west of Paris, and the question this book asks is ‘How could the French National Front of Jean Marie Le Pen capture 61⁶/o of the Dreux vote in 1989?’

Francoise Gaspard was once the Socialist mayor of Dreux, and brings her knowledge of local demographics and history to bearon the question. Up until the early-1950’s Dreux was a small rural town of 16,000. During the next two decades, its population doubled. Large engineering, electronics and pharma-ceutical factories were built. To house the workers, cheaply built estastes mushroomed in the fields around the old town. At first, unskilled workers from Brittany, Italians, Hungarians and Spanish workers manned the prduction lines. Then in 1962, after a bloody war of independence, the French quit Algeria. Many North Africans migrated to France and came to Dreux for work in the factories.

Prosperity ended in the early- 1970’s, stagnation and recession set in. Factories closed, the estate car parks filled up with North African youths with nothihg to do and nowhere to go. 1 he tacky estates started to crack up.

H II t I i ll I ( । J li 4 i 4 - - I UL * I* । - I

At this point, the Nationa Front entered the scene. From its groundbase of exVichyites, extreme Guallists and OAS supporters (militant pro-colonialists opposed to withdrawl from Algeria) the NF capitalized on Left weakness and Right divisuions to force its way inrto electoral politics. A local NF politician, Jean Pierre Stirbois, formed an electoral pact with the CDS, a Right wing party. This was a shrewd political move giving him the electoral leverage to get mto the local council chambers. The elections were characterized by dirty tricks like the ‘Dear Mustapha’ letter intended to whip up racial hatred and fake posters suggesting central gvemment were about to settle thousands of foreign workers in the empty estate flats.

From the beginning in 1979, the NF moved up from 303 votes to 4,716 eleven years nine months later, (from 2.5 to 61% of the votes cast) while at the same time - voter apathy and disillusion with the mainstream political parties ensured a low election tum-ourt. What solutions does Francoise Gaspard offer⁹ -- Not much. The militant anti-fascist Left has been “unable to mobilize anyone but themselves” (p. 115) The intellectuals have been silent or ineffectual. The Right has actively collaborated with the fascists and (as with the Tories in Britain) taken onboard their xenophobic rhetoric. Central government allowed the situation to continue as a demographic callibration exercise, the so-called ‘Matignon Experiment' ... About the only ray of hope on the horizon were the ordinary people who went round the high rise estates recounting their experiences of the Vichy era and the mass deportations (p. 163). Aside from that, Gaspard offers no real answers, just the bog standard rhetoric about rediscovering the citizen', the need for the political parties to make links with the voters, and so on. As such, this well-meaning book is a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the liberal paradigm.

THE PHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL & SPIRITUAL BENEFITS OF MARIJUANA BY JOAN BELOS.

$12.95 + $2 POSTAGE FROM RD#3, BOX 476, SUSQ. PA 18847, USA.

1 here’s a war going on in Amerika between Drug Enforcement Agency - .t4»cri l .*<? JlitH - -

stormtroopers and marijuana activists, a struggle as significant as that between Clinton and the ATF with the Right over gun control.

Mrs Belos’s book is therefore very important in attacking the DEA’s justification for their gross violation of civil liberties, that marijuana is harmful. For 60+ pages she brings to light the latest medical evidence that marijuana is quite the opposite, in fact alleviating human suffering across a broad range of ailments. As a reference work, it will no doubt rank alongside Jack Herer’s Emporer's New Clothes.

The problem with this approach is that marijuana's enemies -- as some of its advocates — aren't interested in the facts, just its bohemian image. Prove it makes people work harder and shine their shoes and drug companies will all be prescribing it tomorrow....

WHIP ANGELS BY ANONYMOUS. £4.95 FROM VELVET.

A beautifully produced book that is perfect to read alone or with a friend. Each page recounts the darkest secrets of Victoria as she is introduced into the underground world of sexual submission and dominance. There is no denying that there is more sex than story in this book but it is one of the most beautifully written pieces of pornographic fantasdy you’ll read for a long time. It’s not something I'd reconimend for Dworkin or McKinnon but is definitely worth a nose through if you fancy your juices going.

PAMPHLETS

THE GEMSTONE FILE BY BRUCE ROBERTS. £1.50 FROM X-RAY PRESS c/o BM CHRONOS, LONDON WCIN 3XX

More folder than pamphlet, the 30+ pages available here are the skeleton key to 1,000+ pages of documentation about the Kennedy conspiracy accumilated by Roberts since I960. It’s prefaced by grim warnings about how “it is dangerous to transmit or even possess this information” and the key concludes by listing all the Kennedy- connected people who’ve come to a nasty end in consequence.

I960⁹ But JFK was hit in 1963, so how come? Well, that's when mystery' millionaire Howard Hughes crossed him over a process to synthesise rubies. Roberts claims the JFK conspiracy’s l < If if

On the assassination of JFK Key tacts disclosed Names revealed only a part of a bigger one that started in 1932 when JFK’s old man. Joseph, went into the bootlegging business with Ari Onassis and organised crime. It's really more an Onassis conspiracy than a Kennedy one really, him calling the shots, kidnapping Howard Hughes, buying Nixon &c. The brothers Kennedy were apparently knocked off for welching on deals with Onassis-run Mafiosi, then the ‘invisible government' of the US.

Some of Gemstone is proven — the CIA-Mob alliance to unseat Castro, for example — but some is outlandish. Hughes as some zombie-puppet of Onassis, 15+ assassins and back-ups all over Dealy Plaza — almost as.unlikely as the Warren Commission's “lone assassin ’. The Pentagon Papers forged to divert attention from the Kennedy conspiracy. The SLA a psy-op to incite state repression - Zebra too. Wierd shit about whether Jesus was an Arab and Vatican conspiracies around this question.

Gemstone has endured as much of it is unprovable and, like classic conspiracy theory, it has the Mob as a “them’’ secrefly controlling everything, explaining why facts are not forthcoming. We're not saying the Mob aren't a force in Amerikan society or that they like people pointing fingers at them, nor are we saying that Gemstone be dismissed entirely because of its anomalous elements. Rather read it with care, sifting genuine gems from dross.

REASON IS THE CAUSE BY E EDWARDS. PRICE FROM GORDON HOUSE, UNION ROAD, CREDITON.

A 48 page tale of derring-do from the author ot Cement Cross, the animal liberation epic, and - not wishing to blow the ending or anything — quite the most blatant plug for it I've yet seen!

All of Edwards' themes are here - the upstanding and muscular vegetarian hero, in this case one Arthur ‘The Fox' Maynard, the heroe s surprise stand and the preachy courtroom bit on animal liberation. Arthur's case is well-made in the end — it has surprising persuasive force if you haven't guessed the novelette's punchline.

Page 34

SHORT STORIES

SHORT STORIES BY E EDWARDS.

95p + SASE FROM HOUSE, UNION CRED1TON.

GORDON ROAD,

All supposed to be “based on FACT', there s a recognisable world here of country cottages and odd job men, boldly drawn in surprising incident and character. Believe us, in this small world, anything can happen — The Doll *

. In The Alfie and Sunbathing Can Damage Your Health were particularly striking. A couple of stories. The Day 13 Has Unlucky and The Coming* make the most commonplace seem alien, even if last line revelations have been done to death.

We had trouble believing the last and longest story in this collection, Dead Liberty'* was very closely '‘based on FACT as it recapitulates so many of Edwards familiar themes — but it was well-drawn enough to have us rooting for veggie hero Big Joe Downs and not being too disappointed by the excesses of it 's last page.

CA RI BEA N COOKER Y FOR VEGANS. £3 FROM PETER MASON, 30 WYNTER STREET, LONDON SW11 2TZ.

I must admit I’ve .never actually considered Caribean cooking to be vegan. I don't know what I expected it to be, but not vegan. Therefore I was in for a delicious surprise!!’

Peter Mason's book is packed full of exotic recipes that come with very easy to follow instructions.

If you’re willing to try new foods and follow the recipes you'll find yourself exploring new foods and experiencing new tastes

If you're a vegan looking for sonething new, a meat-eater wanting to cut down, a veggie uncertain of boring vegan food, or just interested in Caribean cooking, this book will satisfy all who are prepared to adventure with their cooking. Forget your lentil burgers and tofu stew, fry Doubles, Channa, Pelau or Pone. Munch your way through Rum Potato and Patties. Then down it all with a Peanut Punch. Also discover that Coconut Milk is not the same as - Coconut Water’ And ask .the timeless question “is Sorrel really meant to be quite so purple?”

NEW ZINES

iiatimv ami mtio

Mart rtan

NEW LUDDITE* NOVEMBER 1995. PRICE c/o GREEN, YORKLEAF, STUDENT'S UNION,

GOODRICKE COLLEGE, YORK UNIVERSITY YO1 5DD.

The newsletter of an encouraging little ‘disorganised' group operating in Green Party circles, “challenging the legitimacy of science and technology ".

We aren't sure how far their opposition to technocracy goes — talk of opposing only “harmful” technologies implies all technology is not part of the same interdependant system of domination -- and planning to do for anti-tech what The Land Is Ours has done for land reform is hardly encouraging. Better do for anti-tech what the ALF has done for animal liberation, true Luddites in their assertion of morality over technocracy - and in their practice of genuine direct action, not its ‘‘NVDA’ parody.

We don’t want to come across as though we re trampling on fresh green shoots though - certainly worth finding out more about.

BLACK CAT #1. FREE BUT UNADDRESSED.

The Black Cat is the publication of an anonymous individual who refers to it as the first and perhapslast issue of “my crappy rant & ‘art' thing". Another issue is proposed for December 1995 and contributions are solicited, but as no addrewss (apart from the University of Brixton) is given, any future issue is likely to consist of all the writer’s own work!

Despite the author’s self-depreciating attitude, this publication isn’t crappy at all. I rue, some of the artwork is rather basic, but nonetheless effective. Some of the writing, however, is quite incisive. Apart from the editorial, the written text consists of a number of short pieces on the negation of media, the commodification, language and social control, single issue politics and the politics of difference, the fashion system, cycling and consumerism, medicene and the medical system, the Internet, self-organisation, and the politics of envy. Inevitably, the quality ' of writing is variable, but often the author gets the balance just right between anger, analysis and wit. the pieces demystifying the Internet and

assailing th we medical system, for example, are particularly useful.

All this is done in the belief that

the best way to effect social revolution is to do it This crappy pamphlet is my own attempt to begin this process

So what more can you ask? I picked up my copy at the 121 Centre in Brixton. Try to get hold of a copy if you can. I wish I could tell you where from. If the author reads this: let us know, will ya?

PRA HA ZHTERZA T: BIL’LETYN INFORMACYJNY. PRICE FROM 46-100 NAMYSLOW,

UL.REMONTA 59/7, POLAND

Prawa Zwierzat is a Polish animal lib zine. Sadly youcan only get PZ in Polish and if you're like me and can’t read Polish, you may have problems understanding it.

I've worked out it has articles on the Polski Front Wyzwolenia Zwierzat (Polish ALF) and repors on the Brytyjski (British) ALF. It carries news of prisoners and supporting them. And lots of animal lib articles — in #2, one on vivisection.

If you read Polish and support animal lib direct action, this looks good.

ZIELOMOWGLaWIE biuletzyn nr 3

CHRONMY LAS PRZED LESNIKAMI

Z!EL ONO WGL O W/E B U!L E T YN.

PRICE FROM KRZYSIEK, UL. STAROBOJARSKA 13 M 2, 15-073 BIALYSTOCK, POLAND

Zielonowglowie is another Polish animal lib mag. I still can t read Polish but it s very pro-direct action. It tells you about ALF activities in Poland and England (Anglia). In #3 there's a report on the Justice Department and even a small diary of actions. There’s a;so an

interview with Igor Strapko from AFERRA, whoever he is.

BEAR HATCH JOURNAL. PRICE FROM 1472 COMMERCIAL DRIVE, SUITE 201, VANCOUVER, BC, V5L3X9, CANADA

Bears come to mind as you read this journal. The whole journal is full of news about bears. Brown bears. Black bears. Grizzly bears, Spirit bears. Polar beasrs, they all get a mention. And its not just North American bears Bear Watch is interested in. In the curent issue there are articles about Russian bears and bear farming' in China.

Besides some interesting articles about bears, there are also articles about peoples attitudes to bears. According to an opinion poll, 91% of Briotish Columbians are opposed to Black bear ‘trophy hunting’. 78% want a ban on Black bear trophy hunting’ and 70% want more land put aside for wildlife sanctuaries.

On a critical note, I personally would have been interested in reading more articles about direct action to save the bears/against hunting. However, despite the lack of direct action new$, the Bear Watch Journal is a good read and if you're interested in bears, then it’s certainly worth checking out. .

FIGHTING BACK #10. £7 SUB FROM BOX 25, 136-138 KINGSLAND HIGH STREET, LONDON E8 2NS.

The national newsletter of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse is in black and white A4 format and is filled with well-presented articles, poems and information.

This issue contains articles from many contributors including a very interesting one on ‘knowing our limits' about problems that arise running survivors groups and helplines. It raised the imporant point of knowing our limits of what we can put into projects without draining ourselves completely An important lesson not just for those running survivors groups but any project or group. Alongside articles and information are personal articles, the Pear free story and much moving poetry.

Fighting Buck is an invaluable newsletter for survivors of childhood abuse and should also be read by everyone so that we all become

@

This law was part and parcel of the same package that allows squatters to own land after occupying it uncontested for 12 years It was all to encourage the poor to colonise wilderness still existing in the British Isles at the time.

Sadly all this has now been superceded, both by planning law and by land registration. You need planning permission to build anything and the land only becomes yours by dint of continuous occupation if it's not registered to anyone else before you occupy it.

PREPARING

FOR THE FIGHT

Before embarking on defending an area of land or taking part in confrontational or riot conditions, one must remember to consider the type of equipment and clothes &c that should be worn to protect oneself from too much injury, all the kinds of body armour and accessories that can be worn. The data below can give a few tips and ideas for modification. -

HEADWEAR

Many of us have been head bashed on demos, some serious, usually from truncheons &c. The best policy is to find a helmet or impact hat. Naturally a crash helmet would be ideal but can be quite claustrophobic, hot and sticky. An American football helmet is pretty useful as the metal grille can deflect blows from the face. One of the easiest, cheapest and lightest types is a basic construction helmet with a wooly hat underneath for a bit of padding. You can actually get a plastic visor for it too, though some folk in the past have attached a metal mesh that can be taken from a shopping trolley. With it painted black for camoflage and blending-in purposes, you re made.

FACE PROTECTION

Some elves have used the gauze or plastic cycling masks in the past but they can get very heated and you may feel dizzy adfter a while, so the best policy is to get a shamir — or PLO scarf, to you less educated -- which can be tucked in under the helmet so that it can hang down in front of your face and neck. It can also be doubled over so that you have a bit of padding between your helmet snd shoulders at the back. I -

CLOTHES AND PADDING

Generic clothing should be wom at all tifties so that identification becomes difficult for cops or security. If one knows that they are due for a clash, stick sections of foam around yur vulnerable parts — chest/kidneys, groin and back — but keep it light enough so you can still walk or run Steel toecapped boots are best, the small workboots as ■ they are lighter. Shin, shoulder and elbow pads are also a jnust.

SHIELDS AND PERSONAL DEFENSIVE TOOLS

commited to fighting back against abuse instead of so often silently ignoring it. -

SLOW LEEK Hl . PRICE FROM 4 ROBIN HOOD ROAD, HAVRE DE GRACE, MD 21078, USA. )

Short personalzine, mainly about art but with a page on ’’this month's topic” animal rights. .

VIDEO

RIOT POLICE. PRICE FROM WH SMITHS!

The video of “violent public disorder” is available at most major retail outlets. Its narrators are Peter Waddington. Sociology professor at Reading Diversity, and the criminologist Geoffrey Pearson, author of Hooligan.

The disorders covered are: anti-Mosely riots in 1936 and the 1950s, Grosnevor Square 1968, Brixton 1981, Toxteth

trained in specialist anti-riot units.

• -

Riot police use similar tactics to the old military strategies. The baton charge is used to ‘rouf the enemy like the old bayonet charge. Mounted police cut through enemy lines like medieval cavalry. Police with plastic bullet guns are concealed behind the riot shields of the front row of police. This gives the element of surprse. rather like unexpected archery fire.

Specialist riot police, like the French CRS,- are expensive to maintain. They're not used very often and are based in major cities, so if a riot breaks out in a small town it could be many hopurs before the specialist riot police arrive in large numbers.

Waddington and Pearson are very sceptical regarding the victories gained by rioting. They ignore the breakthroughs when issues like racism, unemployment and democracy are put. on the political agenda after riots. The 1990 poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square reduced many people's sense of isolation and encouraged them to campaign against the poll tax. Instead Waddington and Pearson claim that in' a riot the mob wins for a dat but nothing is changed afterwards. The video ' had a very sombre ending showing wide-spread looting to make rioters look like thieving scumbags.

After watching the video 1 came up with-a few ‘hypothetical' observations. As the police are not likely to risk being attacked "’by rioters posing as

bystanders, you shouldn't

be a

1981, -Orsreave

1984, Handsworth

1985. Trafalgar Square 1990. Celtic v Rangers march, 1990 World Cup,

bystander. You should join the riot, not just stand there and watch, especially as police will probably attack you anyway. If you get injured by a police officer, that’s too bad as you wanted to see him get injured after all.

Riot police are well-disciplined and so the baton and cavalry charges are

England v Sweden match. Germany v Holland match, French farmers 1992, Los Angeles 1992' India 1992, - Waterloo J992, eastern Germany 1993, and Soth Korea 1994.

Unfortunately Waddington and Pearson tend to dwell on the negative aspects of riots. The racist attack on a White truck ' driver in the LA riots is shown along with thje looting of stores and the nurning of innocent people's cars.

Police violence is described as almost inevitable in a riot situation. The police

effective in ‘routing^- the crowd. A counter to the police charge could be to push burning rubbish skips at them as they advance. Also activists with catapultd, fireworks and petrol bombs should stay about 50 metres behind the front line so they can fire without being %

routed. -

However the riot police are effective so it'would take a hell of a-lot of selfconfidence to stand rthere rolling rubbish skips .at an advancing mounted police charge.

3

0

but it is a great ska core sound with Hammond organ, trumpet and sax. It’s well worth checking out so if you're into this kind of stuff, this tape is a must.

DUS GETTING PATHETIC BY ACTIVE MINDS. £1.50 FROM LOONEYTIMES, 69 WYKEHAM

STREET,

Sounds a bit like the Clash with a sax thrown in in a few songs.

SUCK BY WITCHKNOT, 7” EP. £2 FROM FLAT EARTH RECORDS, P O BOX 169, BRADFORD BD7

Isuppose some people would call Witchknot a riot grrl band but this sounds to me like some early 1980’s band on Crass Records. The first song Pianist Envy (comparisons with Crass’s

- Penis Envy could be made) is about a school for women musicians helping them in a very male dominated industry. Other tracks cover topics as powered baby milk, sabotage and the CSA. Apparently MRR refused to take Hat Earth Records adverts with this record on aas it doesn't fit into their narrow idea of what punk/HC should be. Maybe Witchknot are too punk for MRR. ■ -

SUFFER EP. £2 FROM FLAT EARTH RECORDS, P O BOX 169, BRADFORD BD7 1YS.

A great EP from Bradford's Suffer who formed from the ashes of the mighty (loud) Health Hazard. It reminds me a bit of Deviated Instinct, but louder.

Nice booklet/cover ecogeddhon, Zapatistas.

professional-looking with lyrics coverring fighting back and the

SCARBOROUGH,

NORTH YORKSHIRE YO12 75A.

This single of raging punk comes with u booklet in German, French, Polish. Spanish and other languages 1 don't recognise. The topics range from religion, pollution, fashion, violence, politics, punk and its bloody good loo. Essential for listening for all punks so wake up to this band, cabbage heads!

DIVERSIONARY TACTICS BY AOS3. £7 (LP) OR £7.55 (CD) FROM DS4A c/o BOX 8, 82 COLSTON STREET, BRISTOL BSl 5BB.

Lovely orange viny! — fab! threat skanker stuff from this now-defunct Tvneside band. The) were great live and this is a grer*! remake of that and a good record io kick off the new Inna State Records. Good stutt v ith intelligent lyrics and great music. .

BAPTISED

SHIT BY

EXTINCTION OF MANKIND, LP. SKULD RELEASES AVAILABLE THROUGH YOUR FAVOURITE DIY PUNK/HC D1STRO.

What you have here is a whole LP (I I tracks) of Manchester s finest crusty punk. EOM's first album is as good as, if not better than their previous 7” on Split Releases. This kicks ass. mental

crust punk rock -- yeah!

PRISONS’S NO PLACE FOR PUNISHMENT CASSETTE BY PAIN

This is eight tracks of PAIN live at the Robev, PAIN being ex-members of RDF and AOS3. The music is therefore punky dub reggae, but is more powerful than RDF or AOS3. w ith a cover of the Ruts' Babylon Is Burning and Punx With Guns taken with them from RDF.

Hopefully some stupid stuff soon.

officers experience ‘Red Mist' when they are antagonised to a point where they have to lash out. Police develop a ‘Them and Us' mentality and lash out at anybody not in uniform. The narrators claim tat at this stage the police and rioters are caiught in the “same pyschological web”. Police will want to clear the streets so bystanders are just as likely to be attacked as the rioters are. Police can I distinguish between rioters and bystanders so anybody not in uniform is likely to be attacked during a dispersal operation.

Undisciplined, untrained security guards are easier targets. The security guards used at fox hunts, horse races and construction sites act as individuals and so are often some distance from - their colleagues. They can be tripped up by kicking their heel forward. Their equipment usually consists of just hard hats so darts, sand and fireworks can be thrown into their faces.

MUSIC

British police’s attitude to public disorders is quite “amateurish” compared to police on the European mainland. A police officer could be helping people with traffic directions one dat an(i then policing violent demo the next. Only a small number are

KNUCKLEHEAD LIVE 16.8^4. £3 I ROM DS4A c/ BOX X, 82 COLSTON STREET, BRISTOL BSI 5BB. .. .

An AFA benefit tape of Knucklehead’s last ever gis. After getting over the disappointment of being told that this sounds like the Bosstones, it doesn’t n« < i. i * m ?no i >r. I.) xmb th in?

ARBEITSSCHENS OSTLER’S

FLUCHTWEG FROM

TOI LSIIOCK RECORDS, FF218, 10182 BERLIN, GERMANY.

13 punchy German punk songs from Fhichtwen. Not being able to speak German, I don't know what they’re singing about but I still found myself singing along, so it must be good. 11. it rrit ii hi

There's no address on the tape, so you II have to catch rthem live

I AM NICE, I AM SPLAM DEMO CASSETTE BY MUCKSPREADER. £2 FROM FERNSIDE, DEADMILL LANE, LOWER SWAINSWICK, BATH

Poweful heavy crust punk with an ex- Amebix. This band have a sound of their own, no dis-core here. This is brilliant, it’s never out of my tape player. What more can I say? Get it!

PROJECTS—]

DON'T VOTE, GOVERN YOURSELVES ANARCHIST LEAFLET, BM 1715, LONDON WC1N 3XX.

We want ideas and money to help put

Page 36

together a short (A5 double-sided) leaflet about anarchism to distribute during the next General Election. .

We'd like every GA reader to contribute some ideas about what this leaflet should say. We d also like you to send us £2 and take at least 200 copies to give out during the election period.. Enclose an SASE so we can get back to you.

Things you think an anarchist antielection leaflet should say to the address above.

SURVIVAL

THE BIG ISSUE

HOUSE IN A DAY

In the Middle Ages, if you could build a house in a day and have smoke going up the chimney by midnight you could legally live in it.

Have any readers of GA ever thought about doing this?

Have you seen how much building material is throwm out of your average building site? So if a load of us got together with a few skips, it could be doner. What a way to bust the housing

shorage... - -

BASE WASTE

While on the subject of houses, in the 1950's and 1960's army camps and air bases had huge housing estates built round them, housands of people lived there, they were like small towns out in the countryside miles from anywhere with schools and shops....

Now the Cold War is over most of them are run down and these military council estates are completely empty. A lot of them are in East Anglia, one example is RAF Upwood near Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. Part of it is a US military Hospital but the rest of it, maybe a thousand homes, is empty. So any of you out there and homeless...

MAKE YOUR OWN CLOTHES

The revolution starts by how we think about ourselves. After seven yeasrs of recession permanoso by now its obvious enough who the repulsive systemites are by the way they dress.

Anyone with clothes less than 3 years old that didn t come from Oxfam is obviously one of them. So, instead of Oxfam, why don t we make our own clothes? - .

We don't have fancy overlooking sewing machines and the design techniques of modem fashion industry but we do have our own ideas. If we made our own clothes we would look completely different abnd scare the systemites shitless. Making our own clothes shows how we reject their system. Once we start looking different, we start feeling different, once we feel different, we act different and become ourselves and that's what makes a revolution. - -

So all you clothesmakers out there — come on and show us what you think the best dressed anarchists should be wearing for 1996!

- GA notes: Medieval self-housing law was used by Bradford strikers as recently as the turn of the century. They occupied land to feed themselves during a dispute that ran for over six months (see Squatting: - The Real Story).

shields and other useful tools for years, maybe why they've been more successful in resisting the State than us at times.

There are two types of shields, depending on your strength, size and the situation you may find yourself in.

The first is the heavy metal dustbin lid. The rim &c should be caved in until the surface is flat. This can be done either by heating the lid in a fire or jumping up and down on it until it gives in, though this can take a while. Cover the handle with a rubber inner tube and then cloth. Paint the shield black. The weight and size of the shield means I can also be used as a club.

The second type is the usual plastic dustbin lid which surprisingly can be used for a few clashes until it starts cracking. Again, bind the handle &c. This can easily be carried on one’s back. This kind of shield is ideal for quick skirmishes or attacks. Of course, better still, are any copper's shields you find lying about..,.

Along with the shield, a stick of some sort is very seful, possibly a broom handle, a thickish piece of (kosh) wood, or a sawm-off piece of piping.

A catapult or sling is also a useful side arm. It can be used sending back an aggressor, especially if a few are used at once or if windscreens are targeted. The Black Widow model is your best bet and has an arm rest which folds up, so securing your aim.

Smoke, paint and thunderflash cannisters can be bought at your local paint ball gun shop at reasonable prices. They're very useful, especially the smoke and thunderflashes when storming an enemy . position. But remember that coloured smoke is your best option.

FORTIFYING CAMPS

Many camps are now building defences, but these seem to centre more around things to lock on to than proper stockades or defensive earthworks. If you really want to hold a piece of land, then forget tree houses, as these are only delaying tactics.

In Germany stockades have been successfully combined with ditches and spiked fences. Earth works should be at least 6-1 O' high with ditches in front at least IO' wide and 6' deep. Pointed stakes are also useful to have protruding outwards, even razor wire wire wrapped around them.

Any entrances to the site should be tunnels so that the ground will give way the moment heavy machinery goes over it.

Gorse and rhododendron bush are great for barriers and can also be lit when desired. Bails of the stuff about 4’ high can also be pulled together and left on inclines or at the tp of earthworks so they can be used as rolling fireballs.

BREAKING POLICE LINES

Poice break demonstrators' lines and morale by attacking in a spear shape, immediately confusing and disorientating activists. The best way to deal with this is to either scatter to make the maneuver useless so that you can then attack the sides of the spear, or to form

a semi-circle so that you can encircle them and come from behind.

If you want to break a police or security line, then there are various tips apart from using the spear shape yourselves.

The barrow method is ideal. Find a cart- or wooden barrow and construct a 3' high wooden attachment on front, about 6-10’ wide. Activists can then get behind it as a battering ram. Pallets can be used likewise. If a spear shape is going to be used, then have sticks coming out the front so thast it resembles a porcupine.

If on a concrete surface and pursued, then marbles or spikes.are a good retreating tactic. Remember never to use anything that will injure horses. If attacked by cavalry, then a strong pungent stink bomb can be quite useful, possibly combined with smoke cannisters. Alternatively, elephant dung from your local zoo bolts 'em — say you need it as fertilizer for your allotment....

DIY MACE

Pigs think they're so smart demanding mace. Well, two can play at that game:

3 parts alcohol

1/2 parts iodine

1 /2 parts salt

or

3 parts alcohol

I part iodized salt (Mortons)

It’s trendy, tribal and trippy, the world’s oldest operation — trepannation’

Our ancestors learned c. 8,000 BC that a hole in the head "was a real high. All the cranial fluid between skull and brain is freed, so more blood can circulate. Trepannation might even , make you smarter!

Something so good is, of course, illegal. Only doctors are allowed to trepan someone else and they won’t.

If a mate’s prepared to help, the traditional tool is a shed deer antler. If you’re staying within the law, operating on yourself, make concessions to technology. A hand drill will probably be too slow - try a Black & Decker cordless in front of the mirror.

Go in through the crown of the head. Read biology books so you know what blood vessels to avoid but don’t worry about your scalp bleeding. Once in, come straight out again. Your brain can take a bit of drilling out not churning!

G.A.: The Zine

THE EDITORIAL

A ZINE WORTH RAIDING

ARNI were al it again last 16th January 1996, knocking down doors across the country in simultaneous early-morning raids only days after the editorial meeting that created this new-format issue. They re-arrested four alleged GA editors they’d kept on police bail since March 1995, as well as ALF press officer Robin Webb and SG editor Simon Russell. Whisked off to two hick cop shops in the depths of the New Forest, arrestees were all finally charged with conspiracy to incite criminal damage by fire. The trial date isn’t yet set but looks many months off.

We believe from the questioning that the “criminal damage by fire’’ referred to was an ARM arson wave on the Isle of Wight a couple of years ago. The supposed “conspiracy” is distribution of Into The 1990’s With The ALF as Hampshire cops claim to have found a number in Robin’s home last time they raided. Obviously this is ridiculous — that sort of thing happens only informally and if they can ‘prove’ “incitement” from this, they can ‘prove’ it against any paper in UK.

What it’s really about, of course, is Special Branch cops in Hampshire trying to ‘keep their iron in the fire’ after their attempt to do Robin for a one-man conspiracy to pass a press release to the press was laughed out of court in December 1995. They’ve gone for GA as we’ve made no secret of our support for Robin, pointing out ARNI planted a shotgun on him to silence him. That hardly makes us ‘conspirators’ but the cops can’t abide anyone contradicting their - - bizarre ‘animal lib terrorist’ hype — even journos wouldn’t be stupid enough to - publish it unquestioned if there are alternative voices to be heard.

Another reason they attacked GA is that it gives them an ‘in’ to the Greenie scene and ‘eco-terrorist* hype too. ARNI started filing Greenies during Twyford and now admits to having 1,000’s databased. Instead of dismissing this as paranoia (it derives from ARNI’s own public statements!) or using it as an excuse to become inactive, eco-warriors should learn fast from animal liberation! sts.

GA will continue BAMN so disregard all rumours to the contrary. Help us by:

• Sending money (not cheques!) to cover our legal costs to BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX - GAMO already have a benefit tape available from PO Box 407, Camberley GUI5 3FL '

• Volunteering to help edit GA or distro for GAMO in future — but take due care doing so (see our security warning opposite)

• Preparing to take the sort of action the defendants are accused of inciting if they’re convicted — so the juries verdict will be the incitement, not this.

THE NEXT ISSUE

TECHNOCRACY IS TYRANNY: You may look to your lifestyles of convenience and luxury when technology is questioned but don’t forget techno- industrial civilisation is only possible because of intense division of labour and pillaging of global resources. Our everyday lives are at the mercy of unaccountable experts and systems beyond our control - if technology is not questioned, they will determine our future instead of us. It’s not about replacing one set of experts with another either — tyranny is inherent in the logic of the techno-industrial system. It must all be destroyed if Anarchy is to live!

Articles for GA42’s core to BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX.

GA42 DEADLINE: 15TH JUNE 1996

THE SMALL PRINT

A BOSNIA OF CONSEQUENCE

We’ve published the latest on Leeds in this issue (p. 25) to help AFA’s deliberations into this cause for concern. Given the amount of disinformation disseminated by Bowman’s fans and the willingness of know-all know-nothings in the movement to uncritically circulate it, we felt it necessary to set the record straight before possible imprisonment (see above) intervened.

Too many stupid and misinformed people think everything published in GA on

anti-fascism eminates from Larry O’ Hara. It doesn’t A Bosnia of Consequence is our article, not his. As his liberty is not currently in jeopardy, he still awaits the outcome of AFA’s enquiry into Leeds with interest.

EARTH FIRST! IS STILL DEAD?

Earth First Is Dead was published in GA39 (p. 15) because EF! was sliding into the sort of recuperation so satisfactorily critiqued in As Soon As You’re Born They Make You Feel Small (World) — a pity space prevented us reproducing it here, for all its minor inaccuracies.

As soon as we went to press, Whatley happened, then Newbury. How could Earth First! be “dead” in face of such effective militancy?

It’s not about actions, numbers, resources — they’re all good reasons to gel in with big Green lobbyists. It’s about compromising with reformists. FoE and Greenpeace have only got more militant and attentive of their own grassroots as EF!s been a critical revolutionary alternative. Coming to terms with them ends this, yoking EF! to those that want to do deals with Industrialism, not destroy iu

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If you want to streetsell or subscribe to GA, send the form and blank postal orders — not cheques -- to the general editor. Add 30% to cover postage if you're overseas.

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When writing to us, use a false name or

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G.A. The Network

This is Green Anarchism

Civilisation is Exploitation

Mass society is too complex to work without specialisation. Specialised division of labour alienates us from each other and creates a hierarchy needed to co-ordinate production. Hierarchy divides society into the powerful and powerless. The powerless are treated as objects to be exploited. Exploitation on grounds of class, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference is intrinsic to mass society. Mass society cannot be reformed. It must be replaced.

Small is Beautiful

Mass society must be replaced with communities small enough for each person in them to be respected as an autonomous individual. In small communities, self-determination would replace hierarchy. You can’t fight mass with mass. If our means and ends are to be consistent, we must organise in networks of autonomous small groups to replace mass society.

Land or Death

Mass society alienates people from the Earth. By controlling the Earth’s resources, the State controls society. We must end our dependence on the State by taking back the land and living self-sufficiently. By re-establishing our relationship with the Earth, we undermine the hierarchical thinking that is destroying it.

Revolution on the Periphery

Mass society needs resources from across the planet to survive. Those most exploited by it are those that work the land in the Third World, only to have the fruits of their labour exported to profit the rich. They have nothing to lose by taking back the land at the expense of mass society. As less resources are imported from the Third World, mass society won’t be able to come up with the goods in this country. Self-governing, self-sufficient small communities will be more needed and easier to establish as the State loses control of the rest of the planet.

Autonomy Now

We must support the revolution on the periphery by making our own here. We must share the skills needed to survive without the State, create a culture of resistance to free us from the alienation of mass society, live free of exploitation by boycotting banks and multinationals, building an alternative green and black economy and defending ourselves and the Earth by taking direct action against military bases and labs, developers and industry, exploitation and bigotry.

G.A. CONTACTS LIST

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If you haven't time to organise a local group, join our confidential Urgent Action list also available via your Regional Co-ordinator. Your nearest local group will contact you when the next issue of GA is published and all contact groups will mail you Urgent Action Bulletins from then on. -

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BOOKS

CITY DEATH Stephen Booth’s apocalyptic novel of social collapse. Critiques the city and advocates its alternatives. £5

TEST CARD F The Institute of Social Disengineering's image/text assault on the media. £2.50

TURNING UP THE HEAT Larry O’ Hara's expose of Ml5’s post-Cold War role. £5

#35 SUMMER 1994: Sex ‘issue.

PAMPHLETS

GREEN ANARCHISM Its Origins & Influences. More history than manifesto, this pamphlet charts the development of GA's ideas in a broader green and anarchist context £l

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY & ITS FUTURE Amerika’s most wanted, the Unabomber's declaration of war on technocracy £1.50

THE ABOLITION OF WORK Bob Black's pro-situ American classic, lucidly arguing for ludic revolution 50p THE BOOK OF LEVELLING John Moore’s anthology of primitivist short storigs - £2

ANTI-MASS Methods of Organisation for Collectives. Seminal anthology of short essays attacking mass organisation and arguing for affinity group/cell structure alternatives. 50p

DEAR MOTORIST The Social Ideolgy of the Motor Car. Andre Gorz’s deconstruction of car culture 40p

L.A. WAS JUST THE BEGINNING Well-researched prophecy of the class war sweeping Amerikkka. 70p

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

Eyewitness account of the 1992 LA riots, challenging media lies. 50p A LIE TOO FAR Mina Productions’ ' unprededented expose of ‘anti-fascist’ magazine Searchlight, and its attempts to set up and smear anarchists. £ I

AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH Further expose of Searchlight and State links with its asset, Tim Hepple. £ 1.50 NO COMMENT Basic briefing on what to do if arrested. Good advice whether or not the CJA removes the ‘right’ to silence. SAE

LAND & LIBERTY Argues for self- sufficiency and re-establuishing contact with the land £ I SO

OUR ALLOTMENT Illustrated book for children, designed to encourage an interest in growing food 40p

WELL FED - NOT ANIMAL DEAD

Veganism as opposition to exploitation rather than simply a vegetable diet. Recipes, growing your own, and food for free. £1

RADIO SERMONETTES Essays by Hakim Bey on the essential importance of immediate experience and of the body as the least mediated of all media. Brill! £1

SMASHING THE IMAGE FACTORY A Complete Manual of Billboard Subversion and Destruction. A how as well as why pamphlet on turning the Image Empire against itself. 50p

TV TIMES A Seven Day Guide To Killing Your TV. Written in the spirit of Spectacular Times. £1

THE TYRANNY OF TYRANNY Cathy Levine’s critique of Jo Freeman's Tyranny of Sructurelessness and the bureaucratisation of the early Womens Movement. 35p

BEYOND SEXUALITY- ANSLIM’s controversial challenge to conventional notions of sexuality 75p

ASTERIX & THE ROAD MONSTER Hilarious anti-roads detoumment of the Asterix cartoons £ I

THE ECO-WARS AND OTHER POEMS Benefit for the McLibel Support Campaign £2

ZINES

ARNIE #7. Classic cult comic. 50p

DARK DIAMONDS #3/4. Shocking expose of how the Third World’s* getting fucked over. £ I

LANCASTER BOMBER #11. Controversial liberation theory, general outrage and anarchist excess! 50p

BYPASS Cross Currents In Under The Counter Culture #1-5. UK Factsheet

F/ve-style review zine. £1

LESBIAN AND GAY Freedom Movement Newsletter. 40p

E.L.P. JOURNAL #3. Listing of Earth Liberation Prisoners and others 60p

ECO-VEGAN #3. Short but sharp Earth 7 animal liberation newsletter. MOVE supplement. SAE

MUSIC

Crass Live. Tape of their last concert and first demo.

We Control The Horizontal, We Control The Vertical. Compilation tape with Conflict, Crass, Poison Girls and more, live.

Internal Autonomy. Single.

BACK ISSUES 4o_P

Countdown On Spanner, practical anarchy tips.

#36 WINTER 1994: Anti-Media and 10th anniversary issue. Free anti-CJA flexi-disc included!

#37 SPRING 1995: Anti-State / Surveillance issue. Directory of Scum, Searchlight expose, pomgraphy and non-monogamy.

i Date

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#38 SUMMER 1995: Primitivist issue. Mumia Abu-Jamal, veal war, Swedish ALF, AIDS fraud. Searchlight exposed again.

#39 AUTUMN 1995: Zero-work issue. Renew the Earthly Paradise, Earth First! is Dead, pom debate. Home exposed.

T-SHIRTS

Large. Black or multi-coloured on unbleached cotton £5.50 each

1. Don’t Send Guns

2. ' GA Dragon H

3. Warriors Of The Rainbow

4. Disobey

5. Where There Is No Vision

6. Stuff Your Jobs

7. GA Logo

20. ELF — By All Means Necessary

21. ELF Faeries . 7

22. ELF On Tour

POSTERS

A3 black and white 30p each

I. Don’t Send Guns

3. Warriors Of The Rainbow

4. Disobey

6. Stuff Your Jobs

8. * Justice Is Injustoce

9. Pyramid Of Oppression

10. Triangle Of Corruption

11. Biggest Bastard

12. Grow Up!.

13. Tax Is Theft

14. Only Guns Give Us Rights

15. Levellers -

16. Beguinning Of The World

17. Harmony With Nature

18. New W'orld Order

19. Fascism = Murder

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Page 40

ARC GET A PASTING

On 4th December 1995, a national day of action was called at Whatley Quarry in Somerset This was to oppose ARC’S new plan to extend the existing quarry another 6 miles which would trash a lot of fertile farm land and upset the area's natural water systems. ARC attempted to push through this proposal before but were defeated two years ago. They thought by letting the matter rest, they could gen a new application throufgh with no resistance. In fact they gave locals more time to organise despite ARC’S feeble justification that the quarry will bring more jobs.

South Somerset Earth First!, with the assistance of FoE and the Green

Party’, began networking in the summer. This paid off. Nearly 500 turned up on the day. Police and ARC were unprepared for the huge turnout as people gathered at Whatley gates at 5.30 am. ARC had optimistically presumed they could cany ion work as usual that day. In fact no trucks were allowed in or out as hundreds of activists invaded the compund, occupying machinery and gravel heaps. A tripod was even set up across ARC’s private railway. Police were overwhelmed — and were annoyed by the number of masked-up activists as well as those protestors physically dc-arrcstcd by their comrades.Frustrated by their inferiority, police did get out of hand, injuring demonstrators with punches and kicks. 62 arrests.

Apart from the occupations, ELF made good use of the day, causing £50,00ftp damage and forcing the quarry to close for over a week for repairs, lost production costing an extra £50,000 a day. Rails were ripped up early in the morning, making it impossible for stone to come in or out.

All in all, a good day, with EF! getting a bit more radical for a change, many locals involved, and

BSE COVER UP

Government figures show <600 BSE-infected cows arc slaughtered for human consumption each week in UK (Western Morning News, 13/11/95].

Farmer Geoff Nicholls had already experience BSE in his herd so he knew the symptoms when they arose in another cow. He called the government inspector but the official passed the cow fit for human consumption. Nicholls kept hold of the cow — which did develop fullblown BSE shortly afterwards.

The government’s been encouraging farmers with BSE-infected herds to register them ‘free of infection’ after an inadequetc period of nonincidence - so they can be sold on here and overseas at first opportunity [Green World #12].

Is it any coincidence Creutzfold Jakob Disease (CJD - human BSE), is on the increase? In 1994, 55 officially died of CJD, doubled the death toll a decade ago. One recent death was a farmer, the fourth so far [New Scientist, 14/10/95].

Watchdog found a quarter of people in UK won’t eat beef in case it’s BSE-infected [Western Morning News, 13/11/95]

another demo due at Dumford Quarry on 19th February.

SUPPORT THE DEFENDANTS via Hills Not Holes, 31 Hamdon Close, Stoke-sub-Hamdon, Somerset TA 14 6QN.

Issue 42

Date: Jun 1996

Keywords: Anti-Technology; Technocracy.

Read here

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Free Ted!

Stop the FBI frame-up of Ted Kaczynski

After 18 year [sic] of humiliating failure hunting the Unabomber, the FBI were relieved to announce to the worldwide media that they'd arrested Ted Kaczynski last Thursday, 5th April 1996.

Ted is a hermit whose lived alone in a mountain shack outside Lincoln, Montana, since 1971. He was so shy he found it difficult to talk to Lincoln residents when he got his weekly provisions from town, though he did manage to play pinocle with 84 year old Irene Preston. Townspeople can't believe he's the Unabomber.

...

Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed

Mass organisation and the division of labour destroy freedom: extracts from the Unabomber's Industrial Society & Its Future

Restriction of Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society

114. ... modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be. however. that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, “mental health” programs, etc.)

115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists. mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits—just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.

116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of anyone individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.

118. Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media and the modern health-care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects that most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. And for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

120. Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within the system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead of having each of its employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but for practical reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited extent, and in any case employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goals—their “autonomous” efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their employer’s goals, such as the survival and growth of the company. Any company would soon go out of business if it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible for most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial society. Even the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from the necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he must fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For instance, when someone develops a new technology, the small-business person often has to use that technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive.

The “Bad” Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the “Good” Parts

121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

122. Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils. Suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases susceptibility to which is affected by genetic factors (e.g., childhood cancer), resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population. The only solution will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a manufactured product.

123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.

124. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about “medical ethics.” But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper middle class, mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering were “ethical” and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large. Even if a code of ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea of what constituted an “ethical” use of genetic engineering. The only code of ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited ANY genetic engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no such code will ever be applied in a technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to a minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented by the immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible, especially since to the majority of people many of its applications will seem obviously and unequivocally good (eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the abilities they need to get along in today’s world). Inevitably, genetic engineering will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs of the industrial-technological system.

Technology is a More Powerful Social Force than the Aspiration for Freedom

125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “Okay, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.

126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long- distance communications…how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59–76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence. The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).

129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.

130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform.

131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda{3) or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.

132. It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progressed would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.

133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangement that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain, waiting. Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.

134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. If such a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable

136. If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the system in such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him consider how clumsily and for the most part unsuccessfully our society has dealt with other social problems that are far more simple and straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or domestic abuse.

137. Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural resources for our grandchildren. But on this subject we get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from the people who have power, and nothing like a clear, consistent line of action, and we keep on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the environmental issue consist of struggles and compromises between different factions, some of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment. The line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This is not a rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and successful solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get “solved” at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work themselves out through a process in which various competing groups pursuing their own (usually short-term) self-interest arrive (mainly by luck) at some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in paragraphs 100–106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social planning can EVER be successful.

138. Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.

139. And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent. Thus, while practical considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom). This isn’t just our opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g., James Q. Wilson) have stressed the importance of “socializing” people more effectively.

Revolution is Easier than Reform

140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.

141. People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier than reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or application of anyone segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for example. Not many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132, reformers seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a powerful reward-fulfillment of their revolutionary vision-and therefore work harder and more persistently than reformers do.

Top Ten Reasons to Vote Unabomber

Lydia Eccles on your presidential write-in choice for '96

THE BOYS. Clinton, Gingrich, Powell, Perot, Forbes, Dole, Gramm, Lugar, Alexander, Dornan, Keyes, etc.

HE'S HOT! His favorability ratings may be low, but his name recognition is close to 100% ...

Issue 43-44

Date: Sep 1996

Keywords: Anti-Technology; Newbury; ALF Animal Liberation Front;.

Read here

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Free Ted!

Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski was extradited to Sacramento, California. On 18th June 1996, he was charged with mail-bombing deforestation lobbyist Gilbert Murray, computer pusher Hugh Scrutton, ...

Issue 45-46

Date: Mar 1997

Keywords: Anti-Ideology.

Read here

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Fixed Ideas and Letter Bombs

Unfortunately, the response of american anarchists to the 'unabomber' (hereafter, FC) has mostly been one of knee-jerk disavowal verging on reactionary hvsteria. It seems these anarchists fear for their good reputation by which they plan to convert the masses to anarchism So there has not yet been an actual critical response from an anarchist perspective to FC s tract Industrial Society dr its Future. Since FC claim to be anarchists (defining this in terms of favouring self- determination for individuals and small groups over (he domination of large scale systems over our lives) and have involved themselves in doing something (whatever problems we have with their tactics), this non-response is absurd Industrial Society & Its Future is an attempt to deal with some significant questions often ignored or dealt with by sloganeering in the anarchist press FC's statement has many faults, often is shallow and inadequate to the challenge it is attempting to meet This stems from a lack of thorough social analysis, reliance on concepts which seem to come from pop psychology and adherence to fixed ideas (a fixed idea is a thought or idea that dominates the thinker, causing her to channel all thinking and analysis through that one idea, eg for the religious, god is a fixed idea, for the patriot the country). FC correctly sees that the industrial tot domination, but miss the fact that complex social system which needs let’s examine FC’s theses.

Leftism: a Neurotic Response to a Psychotic Society (Fc’s Theses 1-32)

FCs tract strangely begins with several pages critical of leftism Stringer still this criticism relies completely on psychology (and that of a rather crude pop[-] form) FC use this as n basis, later on. for a more general description of the psychology of people under the industrials system.

FC see leftism as having a psychological basis in ’feelings of inferiority'’ and 'ovcrsocialisation'. Modem amencan leftism is certainly based in what Mux Sinner called ragamuffinism and Nietzsche called ressentiment" Some recent anarchist writings have referred to it as the ’’ideology of victimisin' This ideology does seem to reftecl and promote feelings of inferiority, but FC seems to be, unfamiliar with these ideas and adopt instead a methodology reminiscent of pop psychology in their critique Fortunately for FC, leftists are apparently so afraid of any sort of criticism, that they could only respond to FC’s inadequate criticism with hysterical yammering.

FC are correct in saying that most amencan leftists come from middle or upper-class buckgrounds But FC miss what may be the most significant aspects of thia in terms of the psychology of leftism namely, that manv leftists believe Ural they are privileged, that they have an excess of social power, and they lied guilty about this. In a very Christum, messianic manner, thry "give themselves" to those who - according to their ideology - have received the short schnft from society This guilt and secular chnstianist activism explain the leftist masochism, self-sacrificc and dogmatism quite well Recognising the religiosity of leftism, we cun sec that it cun be compassionate, morally based and hostile all al once just like Christianity which compassionately and morally instituted pogroms, technological system is a system ol it is an integral part of a more to be attacked in its totality But inquisitions. wars and genocide against heretics and non-believers.

FC's attempts to interpret every aspect of the leftist’s life in terms of a pop psychology inferiority complex severely weakens the argument leftists, like nearly every one else in this society, lead very compartmentalised lives. I have known leftists who seem to like the blues or world beast music because they imagine such music is a way to gel tn touch with the feelings of black or thud world people Thus to the extent that leftism affects the art preferences of the leftist*it does not seem Io be in the direction of embracing defeat or irrationalism, but of trying to get in touch with' other cultures fhis is absurd and merely reinforces the commodification of these cultures but it does not. in itself, indicate inferiority feelings.

Certainly, leftists spend far too much tinw trying to prove the equality of oppressed groups and demanding that it be granted bv the state, but this does not so much prove the inferiority need to develop analyses of society and the left’s role therein thut go far deeper feelings of leftists as their adherence to relying on authority It is the leftist belief m a democratic social order — which is to say, a structure of democratic authority - which causes them to embrace vic t must tc ideology, an ideology which begs those in power to grant equality’, ’rights’, 'justice , etc This practise of constantly begging for what one wants (particularly when those wants have been transformed into abstractions which one can never sue accomplished) inevitably makes one feel weak and incapable — and so inferior. Leftist activists promote this form of radicalism because it guarantees their role within the present social structures When women, gays, blacks, etc., start taking their lives as their own as individuals, it brings them into conflict equally with leftist ideologues and with society, precisely because they are no longer begging and so no longer need lire leftists Io beg for them.

FC's concept of “oversociiliMUun" also proves to be inadequate because it depends on psychology rulhcr than an analysis of the social role of the leftist Leftism is a form of liberal democratic / humanist poliucs - that is, it is part of the political system to which the rise of capitalism and the industrial system gave birth So it is no surprise that leftists subscribe to the ’’liberty, equality, fraternity’' which are the shibboleths of such politics But the totality of the social system is far more complex and irrational than FC dunk Ihe real values of (his system, the ones for which it sacnfices all others, can be summed up rather simplistically as follows (I) the expansion of capital; <2) efficiency in production. (3) increasing social control in the daily lives of individuals to guarantee the first two Bcvond these fundamentals, die social system is quite irrational and full of contradictions Thus, the social structure is both anti-racist and racist us each of this tendencies max under different circumstances better serve the above-mentioned values (and. of course, aspects of earlier social structures do not disappear overnight) Ihe same can be said about sexism / anti-sexism, violence ! non-violence, war / peace, etc Leftists arc no more or less "ovCTKOciahzed” than conservatives, moderates or most radicals Leftists believe that the sopcial system can be rationalised, that Us contradictions can lie removed without destroying the system as a whole So they try to convince the authorities to abolish sexism, racism, violence, war - without realising that, within this social system, these arc a necessary pan of the same mcchamasm of control of which anh-sexism, anti- racism, non-violence and peace arc a pan - the one side needs the other, just as the nght needs the left and vice versa.

I do not deny the neuroses of leftism as evidenced in its guilt, masochism and moral stndencv But if we want to make an intelligent attack on the social system - as FC apparcntlv does – we than FCs pop psychology.

Fixed Idea #1: The Power Process (FC’s Theses 33- 98)

The first major fixed idea that dominates FC’s thoughts is 'the power process’’ This idea seems to form the basis of most of FC’s analysis, and that's too bad because it's a (lawcd idea - |>op psychology reminiscent of 70 s management strategies and self- help books FC describes the power process ‘Everyone ncols to have goals whose attainment requires effort. and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of these goals But do I need goals? No, I need or want specific dungs Some effort is inherently involved in getting these things and, of course, 1 will be happier if 1 do get diem and if I determine how I gel them But to transform tins need for actual dungs into an abstract need lor goals, effort and attainment which are simply words dial can be used to describe how one gels what one needs, and then to base an analysis of the present social svstem on this abstraction is absurd I have goals simph because I need or want specific things, but I do not need goals -- so I not need a 'power process”

The ‘power process ' is a psychhlogical model and. like all such models, springs from and is only useful w ithin u specific social context The ‘oedipus complex’ was a model developed in Victorian Europe which worked well for explaining much of the sexual psychology of victonun Europe Iver time il has pruned less and less useful and is nowe used <»nlv bv die-hard Freudians It has no applicability ro ancient Romans, Hopi Indians. Mbute pygmies, medieval English jicasants, etc The “power process' assuming irt has any application outside of pop psychology would also have to be understood in terms of a specific social context FC’s attempt to univcrsulise it leads lo a sloppy understanding of history and anthropology.

FC's anthropology is about 30 years behind the lunes FC socm to assume that primitive people needed to spent most of their time and energy satisfying biological needs It has been preitv well established that even in harsh envinximenls. the amount of time primitive people spent m activities which provided their basic needs is about one quarter of the amount of time spent by the average pcrason in industrial societv at work In other words, primitive pu»»ple got the things they wanted wrth less effort than most of us expend to get what we want In fact since there was no lime schedule which they had to follow to perform these activities, so thev could he done whenever «ine pleased (except in emergencies), it can be argued thast primitive societies were societies of total 'leisure With the nse of agriculture and cities about iO.tXK) yeasrs ago. the new technological sy stem doubled the amount of time that those who used it had to spend m meeting their basic needs and placed this activity on a *tnct seasonal time schedule — this could be considered the origin of work Industnal technologs drasticallv increased both the amount of work tiime and the ngidits of scheduling necessan f<» work So most

(xxiple in our society find themselves so exhausted bv activities not of their own making that in what little leisure time thev have they often chooac to vegetate through passive entertainment This problem is ahenatum EC are not completely unaware of thu in otu society people do rau satisfi their biokvgical needs AUTONOMOUSLY, but by functioning ax parts of an immense social machine

Alienation is noi merch a psychological problem Often the most alienated people arc the m»»st adjusted to their alienation Alienation is the realm of a social system m which our Ines, our activities and our interactions arc not our own to create as we choose, but haw been made for us in such a way that we become the pretpertv of society I he wav s oJ fulfilling our needs and.wants become ven convoluted and indirect, like a Rube Goldberg machine — but it isn i comical I want ftxxL shelter, a few things in give me pleasure So I travel — In car or public transit iwhich have bcawne another necessity I -- to a place where I spend eight hours — not masking niv own food »w shelter or phivihtngs — Inil maybe 'hullling papers ar welding paru to parts or serving food tn ■trangas .v sitting tn front of a computet processing information that means nothing to me 1 do not do these things because they give me am pleasure — usually thev arc miserably tedious tasks In themselves these

Civilisation as a system of social relationships makes my life and my corporation lor which I do (hex tasks ..ne ,hc _ac^j_vj-ti_es alien to me, so that they are

Mxnal system - m other words me " "

nerve piBjsKcs alien lo me What 1 get fin giving up io much of my life to >crw an alien cause is munei So after wi>rk. I have to go out to the shops with the tivmk’v I got from working to get kxxi clothing and pleasure items I want - vince n is as compulsory as a job. thi> chopping time should also be c» Hinted as w ork tunc — and J must pay rent to a land-lord or mortgsage to a hank fdor shelter In fact, with the cxceptnwi of a few who refuse, most people sacrifice most of iheir lives to huv survival and a few plastic trinkets Here there is a goal, an eflart of (he most horrendous sort and the attainment of liasic necessities — but there is no life, not one that is mv own

Ibc ledu*.'logical system is an essential part of this ahenasuon but not the totality A complex social system incorporating work. technology, capital, authmtv. ideology (including religion) and w on. all of which are integrally mien ui this is what turns our Ines into mere resources for society And it must be attacked in its totality bv those of us who want to take hack our Ines FC * “power process seems to me to have a meagre, palijctic view of the world as a constant struggle for -•unival This may well indicate the meagre, sdngv social context from which it springs — for the present era certamh is that But such meagreness will never get us out of tins mess That will take something strong and lively, something so certain of its abundance Oiat it has no fear of squarxiering Stimer speaks of such a thing calling it one s “own might the might of which one makes «me s life one s own. and so cornm u» have an excess of lie — and it is this, rnv lite as mv own, and n«A “the freedom to go tlirough the power process' . that I want

FCs reliance on tiieir fixed idea, the power process’ makes for very (xior — and. in my opinion dangerous — social unahsiA I have already punted out the fallacies this has caused in FC's understanding of primitive societies and the acquisition of necessities in industrial sucictv But I C take these lallacics further Wc II leave aside such minor absurdities as FC s a tin but ion of a lack of interest in having children to a durupb«) of the pnver process Ihe danger of FC’s use of the power pr<xxss as a basis for social analysis become- evident when it is applied to science I or FC science is essentially a tunogaie activity Scientists get involved in order to "go through the power pruccvs . <m*J xkikz is eniphaMis added oliedicnt only to thepiytluiloyical needs of the scientists and of Ilir govurrunent official* and corporation executives who provide the funds lor research

If only it were that simple, but science is rn»i just a surrogate activity to help a few people meet their psychological needs Science i> an integral part of the social svstem under which we live, an ideological and practical tool for the maintenance and expansion of that social svstem It is this goal to which science is Hindis obedient, and for the oiciul s\ stem, science is not a surrogate acinny. but u necessary component for its survival Whatever psychological lultillmcnt science mass provide to its ITHClitioiKTs is simply, like the paxcheck part of the bribe necc'san to make people willing to serve the needs of socieh m this wav

FC are obvmuslv aware of llic sv starnc

not my own, but are molds into which I am to try to fit. I try to destroy the system for myself as a way of taking back my life.

nature at least of industrial technology (even though they don't make the tuai to the social system as a whole), yet (hey are so fixated on their pop psychology concept of the power pnxccss that they develop tunnel vision and interpret everything through this faulty idea So then end up lacking a clear analysis of society This fixation <m the power process causes FC to describe ihmgs as universal problems which are only problems within this prcseni social context because of the necessary contradictions of this society Ihus. transexuahty among American the tribes m which it occured accepted it without censure If FC were to study sexual anthrojxjlogy thev would discover that many sexual practise which are considered perverted by our society are pcascticed by masny frumtivc people without the stigma of jiervcTxion and so were no problem Such aclivities l>ecome prHilcmauc in this society because sexuality is most useful to it when repressed and promoted at the same lime — transforming n into a hard-to-get commodity and into an identity Thus, the problematic nature of sexuality stems not from a disruption of thr power process' as FC would have it, but from its commodificatHMi Such separahon of sexuality from life is rarely a problem in primitive cultures

FC define freedom^ as The opportunity t<» go through the power jxocexs ' The only freedom I consider lo be worth pursuing is that my life he mv own to determine fruit nn interactions be my own to create, that rm iiclfienjuvmcnl be central to liow I Ine my life FC may try to claim that (hi* is uh/it tlsc 'power pfoyeM” is. but (heir own use of the (erm proves otherwise It is a fixed idea through which to interpret the world and w hich one should sacrifice oneself The desire for self-determination and scif-cnjoymcni will move me to fight for inysclf and possibly even to sacrifice vane ihtnys. but J will sacrifice them lo mysrlf and will never sacrifice myself Itoi adherence to a fixed idea (such as the power process ) moves one to tight for the CAUSE, to sacrifice oneself to the

CAUSE As I will show, EC call tor just such self-sacrifice, showing that the |x»wcr process’ lias nothing to do with making one's life one’s own. but is a fixed idea to be served having laid the grvnuxiwork wiolh die fixed idea of the power process FC now present their “analysis’ (more a description) of industrial- (ccghnological socictv FC introduce this jwrt of their essay with fiovc principles ot histiry As with most radicals for whom “history " is a central concept, thev refrain from defining it I find the five principles to be useless abstractions Ihev arc concerned with vast social trends and express only the most banal generalities about these trends The only positivbe thing I have to say on il is that they would lead anyone who desires individual self-detcmunaUon to conclyudc that they musty destroy society itself But FC use these principles' as logmas ny which ihev interpret induxtnal society

Nonetheless, this is the best section of FC s essay Their descriptions of this society are often accurate, though their interpretations are fcrquentlv shallow and poorly thopught out because of Ihor dqjendence on fixed ideas and dogma

FC rightly recognise that the industnal- technological system w .tot compatible with self-determination, dial it must, out of inhcreo! necessity, rcgulaste people s lives and thasi tlie level of regulation must increa.se as the system expands, but FC do not recognise that this is true exif the system as an integrated whole — including its political, cultural and ideological institutions. The whole is beyond reform and revolt against the totality is necessary - which means thast attacks against any part of the social sy stem can be worthwhile as long us they are aimed at taking back one's life In the same light just as g<xxl and 'bud’ ports of leduxjlogy cannot bv sejjcraicd. neither can good' and ‘had’ parts of civilisation as a whole

Ihr<>ugh<Mil this section. FC describe many horrbic aspects potentiuh of industrial technology, but provides no social analysis, no recognition that there is an entire social context which creates this technology One is left to wonder of FC think social context has any significance Several times, ihcy bring up their bchefin the genetic basis of human behaviour as if it were proven fact Stphcn Jay Gould has effectively argued that this is an unproven hvp»<ficMs which does nol explain human bchavuxir very well In any case I wonder if FC's reliance on psyetiological models might mot stem from their aiiltcrcncc to geneticism It certainly impoverishes FC’s argument by causing them to ignore the social syy stern of which technology is an integral part making their argument inadequate and unconvincing in many wavs And it leads FC to propose a revolutionary strategy that is self- sacrificial and. furthermore, absurd

FC's Fixed Idea #2: The Revolution Against the Industrial-Technological System (FC’s Theses 161-232)

I oppose not the industrial technology, but technology and civilisation tn their totality. So why do I call FC’s revolution against industrial technology a fixed idea? Because my opposition to civilisation is based on a recognition that civilisation as a system of social relationships makes mv life and mv uxctivities alien to me, so that they are not my own, but arc molds into which I am to try u to fit I would never willingly sacrifice mvself lor the destruction of civilisation Rather I try to destroy this system for myself as a way of taking back my hie

For FC the destruction of [tlx* industrial) svsiem must be the revolutionaries ONL Y goal no other goal can be allowed to compete w ith that one

So I am to be second to the gousl of destroying industnasl technology Haviong a goasl for which one is w illing to sacrifice oneself changes the nature of the battle against the sociasl system FC’s strategics, aside from being frequently absurd, are also strategics on an immense scale One almost gels the impression that FC expect to convert u large number of people to their cause who will then be willing to participate in a unified revolution Since FC make comparisons to the French and Russian revolutions, it seems that this is then model for icvolution. sufficiently modified for use against industnal (cclinology But both of these revolutions actual moved in the opposite direction to thst which FC calls for Each created modem states which msde transition to an industrial system easier 1 would argue that a unified rcvolutiion of the sort for which FC call can most likely only lead to the creation of a unified system, nol to the destruction of one If the goal is individual self-determination, then the struggle must start from the individual who united only us one chooses with whom one fights.

fhosc who have a cause with which to fight rather than fighting for themselves want converts So FC recommend a method of propagandising which involves inventing an ideology of “Wild Nature vs Induslriusl technology Ihn manipulative strategy hardly seems conducive to promoting individusl (or small group) autonomy FC’s strategy seems to promote a large grouop dynamic whec a few would lead and most would follow If this did not seem mostly like FC's fantasy, 1 would find this part of FC's ideas detestable Bui FC arc explicit rthc destruction of the industrial system must be the top priority For this, wc should be willing to support dictatorships if that will destablisc the industrial system, support agreements like NAFTA and GATT if they can mask? the system topheavy and so easier to push over, and have lods and loads of children because children of revolutionaries supposedly bec<»me rcvolutionariocs (al least according to the genetic theories to which FC apparently subscribe), For FC. there is no social context in which these things arise and for which they occur — capitalism technology, the slate, the family - all arc nothing for FC. onlv industrial technology and its destruction matter FC make an important point when they tell us that primitive people ru individuals were actually much better able to take care of themselves than industnalused people who haw aUowud themselves lo become dependent on an immense social system Hie significance of this for me is that it means (hat. to a much grweater extent than we can know, their lives were their own But is it only industrial technology dial ends this ownness? I haw already pointed out that hunter- gatherers apparently pursued the activities necessary for survival without compulsion, except in emergenev situations >eg droughts, severe storms), doing them when tliey felt like it — more for the joy of it than out oi need Individuals ware constantly figuring ways of making these activities easier and more enjoyable but these wavs werre not immense systems, but merclv tools and methods thin individuals could make and use lor them selves The rise of agnculturc(nol to be mistaken for small-scale gardening) was the intnoductivn of a technological system It created a compulsory seasonal schedule for the production of food But agriculture did not nsc in a vacuum Archaeological evidence indicates that agriculture developed in conjunction with the rise of early cities Cities mav, in fact, have come first There can be no doubt that a concept of exclusive (private or communal) property must have coincided with the development of agriculture There is also evidence of a connection between religion and agriculture The early cities already give evidence of structured hierarchies and a specialised warrior class which can nghliy be called a slate and its armv In other words, the technological system of agriculture arose as pasrt of an integrated social system - whast we call civilisation Ihis system, in its totalirty and thnxigh all of us structures (technology, the state economy, religion the family, work exclusive property .). took the lives of individuals from (hem and made these lives the propertv of society John Zerzan has presented evidence in a number of his writings that this ahenastion began well before the rise of civilisation, but this system of social rchitionshijis called civilisation changed life qualitatively in ways fruit made alienation a central defining quality of life The fatalism and religiosity that arc so much u part of agricultural societies can be seen as an expression of this alienation Peasants feel more as though things happen to them than (hat they du things Industrial technology certainly made a further qualitative change in the nature uf alienation Though farmers are forced to comply with a time schedule rad kt than doing things in their own tunc, they still (in peasant cultures, ru>t in agribusiness) arc directly producibng their food In industrial society, the activities into which one is forced in order to cam survival are not even directly related to one's survival needs in any way. They have become complexdy alien But once again, the Uxlinology is only part of an entire complex, integrated social system, all of which acts together to guarantee fruit we can only gain our survival by giving up our lives to the reproduction of the social system Those of us who want our lives back anno! limit ourselves to

FC ss "only goasl" We have much m.ore to destrov than the industrial system — wc have the whole civilisation to bring down and will attack it on asll fronts, the state and its protectors (cops, the military, bureaucrats ), economy (capitalism, work, property rights asnd so on), technology, religion, education, the family, ideology... And we won t do this as a cause, but selfishly , because we want our lives back I want to determine my own life, create my own activities and interactions for my own enjyment So any “revolution” that demands that I sacrifice mvself for its cause is as much my enemy as the social system which demands the same of me < )nlv a revolution which attacks society in a way that allows indinduusls to take back their lives interests me, and such a resolution would grow out of the revolts of uidividuals against their own alienation, not from u mass programme

FC a hatred of die technological system has my sympathy and agreement But 1 vehemently reject their adherence to fixed ideas, particularly their dependence on a psychological model, the "power process ”, as a means of analysing the technological system I wonccr if this psychological conception of the problem is why FC. who say that the destruction off the industrial sy stem is "the ONLY goal”, has chosen to blow up technicians, researchers and other human servants of the machine rather than large-scale industrial facilities which are more essential parts of the industrial system Don’t get me wrong, everyoner who has been attacked by FC has Ixxri working actively toward drastically increasing social control and destruction of wild places Ihe few deaths arc no loss to me - in fact, I smile, tghinking ‘One less technician to control my life" But kihng oil technocians one by one seems like an extemely slow wav to destroy ihe industrial system

I have many problems with FC s ideas Fhcir lack of a clear social analysis and their adherence to fixed ideas prevent them from making a coherent and convincing critique out of their often accurate descriptions of industrial society Furthermore, FC's fixed ideas channel the whole into an authoritarian and ven self-sacrificial conception of revolution. Nonetheless, FC has been doing sonething to fight the present social system One may question their tactics, but those who do so from an anarchist armchair or from the position of typical, ineffective and unsatisfying radical activism had best direct equally probing questions at themselves

Afterword: Some Thoughts on Violence

While there has been little response at all to FC’s essay, the rwactiobn to their vuiolence has come from nenrlv all sides Even Tad Kcpley's mostly sympathetic article in Anarchy. A Journal of Desire Armed #42 was tainted with morahsms regarding violence, in spite of Tad s claim to the contrary Tad says

The anti-authonianan who niakes use of violence ... must be aware of the contradictions in destroy mg to create, tn using violence in the hopes of creating a world without violence

Ihere are no contradictions in destroying to create — Every act of creation involves destruction When one makes a meal, one directly or ¥ indirectly kills or mutilates other living things making a shelter will involve destruction of one form of thing to make another But it is Tad’s second phrase that is more relevant to this question Fherc certainly would be contradictions in using violence if what one wanted was a world without violence, but FC never claims to want a world without violence FC want a world without a huge global system that destroys the artonomy of individuials and small groups I also do not want a world without violencdc I want a world in which individuals cun create their own lives and interactions in accordance w nh then desires - and, in such a world, conflict and therefore, violence is inevitable It is the state s monopoly on violence that 1 oppose, and when individuals use violence against the stale (or any other aspect of the system of social control) and its tools, they are breaking that monopoly

Tad Keplev and the critics of violence are wrong, Taking a life is not the ulumate act of domination Forcing someone — or hundreds, thousands, millions, billions - into dependency on a social system that bleeds their Ines away to rcpnxlucc itself and in exchange for survival (in the worst cases, not even that) and possibly also a few trinkets and glass beads - that is the ultimate act of domination The killer lavs no claim to the life of the victim until thev kill them, and even then they lay no claim to the life but only to the ending of that life Domination consists of forcing people to give away their life energy while they are living Certainly, donunators (or dominating institutions) sometimes kill to enforce their power, but as the cliche says "the living envy the dead" FC’s targets are precisely people who choose, bv their research or other work activities, to uphold and increase domination The "absolute irrevocable removal" of such a person takes nothing away from me that I would want to keep Because I am selfish. I will never willingh sacrifice myself, but I will gladly sacrifice anything or anyone that interferes with my ability to create my own hfe and interactions as I choose 'Human community’ is an abstraction Real interactions and associations arc those experienced by individuals - cither as self-determined creations or as impositions - not the mystical connections which spnng from such abstractions as humanity' or species being My interactions with cops. high-Uxh researchers m social control, stale bureaucrats, capitalists, religious leader* or any other authority figure, no matter how indirect the interaction. is one in which I am imposed upon, one aimed at making mv life alien from me Such an interaction can only impoverish me Ihc death of any such a figure of authonny. therefore. docs not impoverish me and may well enheh me Indeed, il can add a little brightness to my hfe. knowing that I have successfully managed to attack, in however small a wav. the structures of authority - even if that involves killing someomc who has willingly chosen to be a bully-boy lor authority. Certainly, it makes more sense tactically to attack targets of more significance than anty individual can ever be in maintaining authority — but such attacks on property also get condemned by those in power as mindless terrorism' And they are equally condemned by those who prefer to do nothing but continually beg the state to. please, abolish itself and, in the nicantine. be nicer to poor, sweet, harmless little anarchists

I am not meaning to be overly harsh to Tad His article at least shows some sympathy for FC's hatred of the technological system and avoids he reactionary hyslena found in Slingshot and numerous <h1k.t anarchist periodicals Bui m his assessment of violence. Tad seems to be kissing a bit too much pacifist ass Destruction of n global social system will involve violence, and that violence would not be ironic or contradictory' with its goal, it would be the uncons trained expression of the passion that those who are taking their lives back feel against the system that keeps them alienated

Issue 47-48

Date: Jun 1997

Keywords: anti-nationalism; Quebec.

Read here

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The Machine in Our Heads

Introduction

The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity. Most people do not see, understand, or care very much about this catastrophe of the planet because they are overwhelmingly preoccupied with grave psychological problems. The environmental crisis is rooted in the psychological crisis of the modern individual. This makes the search for an eco-psychology crucial; we must understand better what terrible thing is happening to the modern human mind, why it is happening, and what can be done about it.

Deep Thinking

The solution to the global environmental crisis we face today depends far less on the dissemination of new information than it does on the re-emergence into consciousness of old ideas. Primitive ideas or tribal ideas, kinship, solidarity, community, direct democracy, diversity, harmony with nature provide the framework or foundation of any rational or sane society. Today, these primal ideas, gifts of our ancestral heritage, are blocked from entering consciousness. The vast majority of modern people cannot see the basic truths that our ancient ancestors knew and that we must know again, about living within the balance of nature. We are lost in endless political debates, scientific research, and compromises because what is self-evident to the primitive mind has been forgotten.

For hundreds of thousands of years, until the beginning of civilization about 10,000 years ago, humans lived in tribal societies, which produced tribal consciousness a set of workable ideas or guiding principles concerning living together successfully on a diverse and healthy planet. The invasion of civilization into one tribal locale after another, around the globe, has been so swift and deadly that we may speak of the trauma of civilization. Because tribal peoples were unprepared and unable to deal with the onslaught of civilization, tribal consciousness was driven underground, becoming something forbidden and dangerous. Conquered peoples became afraid to think and act according to the old ways, on pain of death. There is much fear that lies at the origin of civilization.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny that is to say, the development of the individual is an abbreviated repetition of the development of the species. In childhood, a modern person travels an enormous distance between stone-age primitive creature and responsible contemporary citizen. When confronted with the awesome power of civilization whose first representatives are parents, teachers, priests (and, later on, police officers, legislators and bosses) the child faces, psychologically, the same situation as its tribal ancestors, namely, conform to the dictates of civilization or die. The helplessness of childhood makes the threat of bodily harm or loss of love, which is used by the parents and others to enforce civilized morality and civilized education, a traumatic experience. The developing little person becomes afraid to express its own tribal nature. There is much fear that lies at the bottom of becoming a civilized adult.

When the child becomes aware of ideas and impulses that oppose the dictates of civilization, s/he experiences anxiety, which is the signal for danger. It is not the insights and urges themselves that the child fears, but rather the reaction to them on the part of those in charge. Since the child cannot escape from those who control its life, s/he runs away from dangerous thoughts and feelings. In other words, the child institutes repression of its primitive self. Tribal ideas are now isolated, cut off from awareness, and unable to properly influence the future course of events.

The trauma or inescapable terror of civilization is responsible for the derangement of reason. That inner dialogue in the human mind that is the hallmark of self-consciousness has ceased, because the depth-dimension of reflective thought, which is the primitive mind, has been silenced. Modern people no longer hear their own primal voice, and without interaction between new ideas and old ideas, the demands of the individual and the demands of the tribe (and species), there is no deep thinking. On the contrary, when reason is cut off at the roots, it becomes shallow, unable to determine what is of true value in life.

The passage of tribal ideas from the oldest and deepest layer of the mind into individual consciousness is part of the natural, normal functioning of the human mind. Deep thinking is not the result of education; it is innate, our birthright as Homo sapiens. What civilization has done is to disrupt the free flow of ideas in the human mind by shutting down the primitive mind through traumatic socialization. In such a situation, cut off from the time-tested and proven ideas of prehistory, reason becomes one-dimensional, and is unable to solve the problems of modern life. No amount of new information can replace tribal wisdom, which provides the foundation for any good and decent life.

None of what has been said here denies the concept of progress, but it means that genuine progress is the outcome of deep mental dialogue in which new ideas are accepted or rejected by reference to that great complex of old ideas that have been perfected and passed down from one generation to the next generation over many millennia. In other words, genuine progress builds on basic truth. This is not idealization of primitive culture, but conscious recognition of its solid, intelligent achievements. Because civilization repudiates primitive, basic truth, we have no frame of reference for a good and decent life. What we call progress in the modern world is the aimless and reckless rampage of lost individuals. When one is lost, it is necessary to go back to the place where one had one’s bearings, and start anew from there.

The False Self

We have internalized our masters, which is a well-known psychological response to trauma. When faced with overwhelming terror, the human mind splits, with part of itself modeling itself after the oppressor. This is an act of appeasement: “Look,” the mind says in effect, “I am like you, so do not harm me.” As a result of the civilizing process, together with this psychological defense mechanism known as “identification with the aggressor”, we now hear the alien voices of the various representatives of civilization in our heads. Because of these alien ego-identifications we no longer hear our own tribal/primal voice. In order for deep thinking to commence again in the human mind, it is necessary to break down these internal authorities, overcome the resistances, that prevent tribal ideas from coming to consciousness. The modern problem is not simply that we do not listen to primal ideas, but rather that primal ideas are unable to come to consciousness at all, because of the internal counterforces, or ego-alien identifications, that contradict and overpower them.

These ego-alien identifications, built up over the course of a lifetime, cohere and form a distinct, circumscribed personality, or false self, that represents and enforces the rules and regulations of civilization. This false self is observable in the frozen facial expressions, stereotypic gestures, and unexamined behavioral patterns of the general public. This false self determines much of our everyday lives, so that we are seldom the origin of our actions. We lapse into the false self at the first sign of danger, under stress, or simply because it is the path of least resistance. In this unthinking mode of social role playing, we internally reproduce our own oppression.

Trauma is a necessary part of civilizing someone, because a natural, maturing individual will not otherwise accept the ideals of civilization. These ideals — hierarchy, property, the State, for example — are so contrary to our tribal nature that they must be forcibly thrust into the human mind. This causes the mind to rupture, to divide its territory that is, to surrender a part of itself to the invading enemy. For this reason, the false self is never really integrated into the human mind, but instead occupies the mind, as a foreign body, standing apart from and above normal/healthy mental life.

The Original Self

Beneath the false self, there still lives the original identity of the person. This original self is older than, and other than, the foreign personality that has been imposed upon it. This original self or primitive ego is the person one was in childhood before the mind was ruptured by the trauma of civilization and the person one still is at the core of one’s personal identity. This original self is closely connected to the oldest layer of the psyche. It is an individually differentiated portion of the primitive mind the first, personal organization of the primitive mind. As such, it has direct access to primal wisdom, an internally directed perceptivity, that permits the entry into consciousness, as well as the passage into activity, of tribal ideas.

In civilization, this original self is caught in the middle of a war between the status quo false self and the uprising of the tribal self. Even when an individual succeeds in holding its own personal identity, refusing to slip into the false self, the primal voice may remain unheard, smothered by the false self. As a distinct, circumscribed personality, the false self achieves a counter-will of its own that is always operational in the sick mind, at least in terms of repressing tribal ideas. Tribal ideas threaten civilization, so they cannot pass through the censorship of the false self, which functions specifically to ward off all serious challenges to civilization.

Furthermore, the false self tends to become more autonomous and extensive, owing to improved forms of social control and manipulation of consciousness in the modern world advertising, for example. Once the mind is broken, the false self, backed by the relentless power of civilization, takes over our lives. The original or primary self has become autistic, or severely withdrawn from active engagement with social reality. However, there remains some awareness, at least sometimes, of our primary identity beneath the false self, and so there is hope for lifting the repressions set down most effectively in childhood on primitive mental processes.

The True Self

Through identification, which is a normal psychological basis of personality development, the original identity of the person is stretched into something more and greater, on its path to the true self. This process of identification becomes pathological only when the continuity of the personality is not preserved, i.e. when there is a splitting in two of the mind, giving rise to a new psychic structure, a false self. This rupture of the mind is unfortunately precisely what occurs through compulsory training and education of contemporary civilized human beings. In contrast, the development of the natural and sane human mind does not entail any sharp delimitations between its various stages and functions. The true self is a continuation and culmination of the original self; it develops out of the original self, just as the original self develops out of the tribal self. In sum, psychical reality consists of the tribal self, together with the original self, and the dynamic interplay between them is responsible for the development of the true self. The true self is something that unfolds/progresses. Traumatic civilization has not eliminated the original self, but it has stopped the flow of tribal ideas into consciousness, which arrests or distorts the higher/maturer development of the personality. In order to resume deep thinking in the human mind, so that we can become our true self, it is necessary to push back and ultimately dissolve civilization, internally and externally.

The Message

The sadness of the modern age is that the public needs to be reminded of “unchangeable human needs.” This truth is not something to be imposed upon them, but something to be evoked within them. The fact is that people do not feel satisfied in the roles assigned to them by civilization. There is a widespread feeling that one’s true identity or potential is not being fulfilled, but unfortunately there is no awareness of the tribal self except among a small minority of individuals. Once the message of a tribal self is re-introduced into public consciousness, it may lie dormant in the minds of individuals for a long time, but it is never entirely forgotten again, as it was in childhood. This message is the catalyst for an intellectual awakening among the population, accompanied by the feeling that something old and familiar has been uncovered.

The power of this message to move an individual is due to the psychological fact that, although repression shuts down deep thinking, tribal ideas continue to push for entrance into consciousness. The mind seeks always to integrate all its ideas into one comprehensible whole. Whatever is part of the repressed unconscious is trying to penetrate into consciousness. When an individual gets the idea of a tribal self from an external source, via the message, it takes hold deep down. The message appeals to the conscious mind, tugs at it, rings true because it touches and stirs the repressed truth that is striving to break into awareness. For this reason, the triumph of civilization over the tribal self is never secure, so there must be a constant bombardment of lies and distortions from the representatives of civilization.

Whether or not an individual awakens to the message of a tribal self depends on the mental condition of one’s personal life. Crisis can open a person to ideas that would otherwise be shunned or rejected. A desperate or confused person seeking help may accept the notion of a tribal self intellectually, because it makes sense of one’s life-history; but this is not yet to grasp tribal ideas from within, the result of deep mental dialogue. Intellectual awareness of one’s tribal self, via the message, is the first prerequisite of a sane person, but it is not enough, not the same thing as hearing one’s own primal voice. Each individual must validate or prove, for itself, the message or theory of a tribal self.

The Journey Outward

What is required in order to hear one’s own primal voice and resume deep thinking is a journey outward by the original self, which is a matter of fighting to live according to fundamental ideas that one recognizes as good and right, a tribal ideal. This is the path of a warrior because civilization without (laws, institutions, and technologies) and within (the false self) is organized against it. It takes inner resolve and courage to go against civilization, outwardly or inwardly. The path of a tribal warrior in the modern world has nothing to do with picking up a spear or wearing a loin cloth; rather, it involves committing to, and standing up for the great ideas of prehistory: face-to-face democracy, rivers and streams as drinking places, respect for wildlife, etc. These ideas do not require more data, arguments, congresses or conferences because they are the irrefutable elements of original knowledge. The warrior stands on the unshakable foundation of basic truth, and the vicious lies of civilization that the Earth is property, or that the common good results from each person maximizing its own self-interest, for example are dismissed as the meaningless babble of the ignorant.

The psychodynamics of the cure consists in overcoming our fear of deep thinking by strengthening the original ego, through everyday practice, to the point that it no longer turns away from its own subversive ideas. We are afraid to think deeply or critically, due to the horror of the past. It is safer not to think about tribal ideas, and spare oneself the painful memories of punishment (and the attacks of anxiety) that are associated with the recall of these ideas. The childhood fear that one will be murdered or grossly harmed for primitive thinking lives on.

The child settles for an unsatisfactory adaptation to social reality namely, repression of its tribal self because it is unable to deal with the threatening menace of civilization in any other way. However, adults are no longer in the helpless position of childhood; it is no longer necessary to give up the struggle with civilization. There is plenty of opportunity in our everyday lives to question and refuse humiliating and debilitating authority. What matters, for now, is not that we win this or that battle with external reality, but that we stay true to tribal ideas in the face of civilization, and integrate them into the conduct or character of our lives. This is what slowly brings about a radical change in the personality.

The path of a warrior is that of upholding a tribal ideal with the therapeutic aim of bringing a strengthened ego into direct and open communication with the tribal mind, which dissolves the false self (and its punishment mechanism).

The personal journey of loosening the grip of the false self by strengthening the primary self is certainly not by itself going to bring about the overthrow of civilization; but it is the subjective precondition for building an environmental movement that will achieve this end. The public is firmly in the grip of the false self, which means that a revolution is definitely not on the agenda. The influencing machine of civilization is in our heads, and we must defeat it there first; for it is not to be expected that people brutally held down (for 10,000 years) by counter-revolutionary forces will revolt until the psychological groundwork of liberation has been adequately prepared. After enough of us have done the hard inner work of self-restoration, that is, re-claimed enough of our sanity, then we will come together in tribal units and smash civilization.

Crossroads

Human unhappiness within civilization is widespread and growing. People feel increasingly empty, anxious, depressed, and angry. Everyone is seeking an answer to serious mental problems. The Chinese ideogram for crisis combines the sign of “danger” with that of “opportunity.” This is exactly where we are in history, at the crossroads between two radically different futures. On the one hand, there is the danger of insanity, and on the other hand, the opportunity for a return of tribalism.

The Path to Insanity

Basic, vital needs or tribal needs are not being satisfied in civilization, and this produces frustration, which in turn activates aggression. As civilization “progresses” toward global interlock among new technological forms, we are removed farther and farther from the simple and basic joys of life, sitting in a shaft of sunlight, conversing around a fire, food-sharing, walking, the blue sky overhead, and so frustration and aggression also progress. More and more of a person’s concern and compassion for others and the natural world are withdrawing, and re-focusing on the self, in order to neutralize the growing frustration and anger within. This is the psychological explanation for the culture of selfishness that is underway everywhere in the modern world the first step on the road to insanity.

The second step, which is now on the horizon, is megalomania, a severe pathological state of consciousness in which the steady withdrawal of love from others and nature gives rise to the deluded mental condition of exalted self-importance. The megalomaniac feels more and more powerful, euphoric, and in control of things (due to an abnormally inflated self-love), while in reality s/he is becoming more and more isolated, impotent, and out of control (due to an excessive loss of love for others and nature). This pathological condition of megalomania is fueled by inner hatred, which is desperately seeking pacification by consuming more and more of a person’s available love, but it fails entirely to deal with the root-cause of our mental illness, namely, unmet primitive needs.

If people cannot access the tribal ideas that inform them of basic needs, then they cannot find the proper targetnamely, civilizationfor their frustration and aggression. As a result, rage is trapped in our minds and bodies and is destined to reach heights that are psychologically unbearable for any individual, which leads to madness. Insanity, the third and final stage of civilization, occurs when the original self becomes a tortured prisoner within the walls of its own fears, frustrations, and hostility. It is now extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach and influence the original self with any rational message.

The Path to Sanity

Civilization has enslaved us in the chains of dependency, isolation, and artificiality. All that we have suffered in civilization still exists in our minds for nothing vanishes from the human mind and it is accumulating into rage. The mechanism that civilization employs in order to prevent this rage from discharging itself against its source namely, civilization is the establishment of a dictatorship in our heads, a false self, that re-directs this rage toward the citizen in the form of self-blame. According to the false self, each individual is to blame for its own misery. The false self gets the energy it needs to punish and enslave us from our own blind frustration and aggression. Without conscious commitment to a tribal ideal, a firm hold on basic truth, by which to evaluate, condemn, and go against civilization, a person is at the mercy of its own mounting disappointment and aggression that the false self is designed to turn inward.

The tribal ideal is a staff for strengthening the original self and fighting off the false self. By upholding a tribal ideal, sometimes through the spoken word, sometimes through action, and sometimes through silence, we build self-respect on a solid foundation; for at the core of our being we are still fiercely independent, intelligent creatures, with strong affective ties to small human groups and large natural/wild places.

The importance of this self-respect as a prime motivator of human nature can hardly be overstated; it may enable an individual to defy civilization, even in the face of the hatred of the whole modern world. When an individual acquires fundamental self-respect, then s/he will be made a fool no longer, and all the blows of civilization are nothing but the battle scars of a proud warrior. Civilization is powerless against it, because a person who has re-claimed fundamental self-respect cares nothing about the laws and standards of civilization.

This self-respect leads to genuine self-love, the second and decisive step on the path to sanity, for self-love (and happiness in large measure) consists in becoming one’s own ideal again, as in childhood. This self-love eventually overflows and becomes love for others and for external nature. Concern for life on Earth is the result of a surplus of love, or as Nietzsche put it, “abundance in oneself the over-great fullness of life the feeling of plenitude and increased energy.” In other words, caring for life on Earth flows from an unbroken and expanding primary and healthy narcissism. Without this caring that flows from self-love, science and ethics will preach in vain for the preservation of biological diversity, ecological integrity, and real wilderness.

The megalomaniac or pathological narcissist has no love for others or for nature, because s/he needs all available psychic energy, and even more, in order to stave off a false self that is becoming more demanding and brutal. In megalomania, the backward flow of love, away from others and nature and toward the self, is a defensive reaction to the underlying reality of intensifying personal hurt and hatred: the original self is becoming weaker, and the false self stronger, because the gross injury to the psyche of the human being, by the trauma of civilization, festers.

Identification with the tribal ideal is the antidote to the massive narcissistic wounds inflicted on us by civilization, and it threatens civilization with disintegration because it goes to the source of our injury and begins to heal it. The third and final stage of the making of a revolutionary or eco-radical occurs when an individual, after arduous intellectual praxis, either remembers or intuits basic truth. The individual now hears its own primal voice, which rises up from within as an unstoppable conscious drive to assist fellow creatures and to make a positive contribution to the planet.

In sum, the path to sanity begins with the awareness of a tribal self. A personal commitment to this ideal builds self-respect, which in turn builds self-love. This self-love eventually overflows to take in others and nature. At last, individuals are psychologically secure and strong enough to enter into cooperative associations with one another in favor of a mass movement aimed at re-establishing small human villages, embedded in a healthy/wild landscape.

Conclusion

When the final crisis of civilization comes in the 21^st Century, the present system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate itself. People who are in the stranglehold of the false self will support whatever the system does, including the exploitation and destruction of National Parks, Designated Wilderness Areas, and The Wildlands Project (whatever it achieves). Unless people possess an assured, sane psychological core, everything else is in jeopardy. The personal pursuit of sanity is, or will shortly become, the overriding issue for the vast majority of people, and toward this end, each person, isolated and fearful in modern society, must be armed with an ideal or vision of what s/he would like to be and should be. There is nothing better to offer people than a tribal ideal. It is, then, up to each person to do the difficult psychological work of personal liberation that must precede real change. This personal task of healing the mind can be and must be accomplished, to a decisive point, in modern-day circumstances.

Issue 49-50

Date: Sep 1997

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Free Ted K

Former maths professor and Montana hermit Ted Kaczynski will be facing trial as the Unabomber in Sacremento, California, from 12th November 1992. His trial -- which could last three months, will se whether FBI claims that he killed two technocrats and injured two others as a result of a 17 year long letter bombing campaign are lies.

We know for a fact that Ted K has been framed. It'd have been impossible for him to have heard about the Oklahoma City bombing, travelled from Lincoln, Montana, to Oakland California three states away by Greyhound bus, and then posted out a parcel bomb and three communiques there all on the 13th May 1995 as the FBI maintain. It's just physically impossible! ...

Issue 51

Date: Mar 1998

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Concerning The Case of Theodore Kaczynski

A post-trial letter from the ex-Maths professor and Montana hermit framed as the Unabomber

Last 22nd January 1998, Ted Kaczynski was sentenced to life imprisonment ...

"For a matter of months preceding the beginning of my trial on Nov. 12, 1997, I had been aware that my attorneys wanted to use a defense that would be based on supposed evidence of mental impairment. However, my attorneys had led me to believe that I would have a considerable measure of control over the defense strategy, hence I was under the impression that I would be able to limit the presentation of mental evidence to some items that at that time I thought might have some validity.

The first weeks of the trial were devoted to selection of a jury, a process that told me little about the defense that my attorneys planned to use. But in late November I discovered that my attorneys had prepared a defense that would virtually portray me as insane, and that they were going to force this defense on me in spite of my bitter resistance to it.

For the present I will not review in detail what happened between late November 1997 and January 22, 1998. Suffice it to say that the judge in my case, Garland E. Burell, decided that my attorneys had the legal right to force their defense on me over my objections; that it was too late for me to replace my attorneys with a certain distinguished attorney who had offered to represent me and had stated his intention to use a defense not based on any supposed mental illness; and that it was too late for me to demand the right to act as my own attorney.

This put me in such a position that I had only one way left to prevent my attorneys from using false information to represent me to the world as insane: I agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for withdrawal of the prrosecution's request for the death penalty. I also had to give up al right to appeal, which leaves me with a virtual certain of spending my life in prison. I am not afraid of the death penalty, and I agreed to this bargain only to end the trial and thus prevent my attorneys from representing me as insane. It should be noted that the defense my attorneys had planned could not have led to my release; it was only intended to save me from the death penalty.

By concealing their intentions from me and discouraging me from finding anohther attorney before it was too late, my attorneys have done me very great harm: they have forced me to sacrifice my right to an appeal that might have led to my release; they have already made public the opinions of supposed experts who portray me as crazy; and they have caused me to lose my opportunity to be represented by a distinguished attorney who would have portrayed me in a very different light.

Perhaps I ought to hate my attorneys for what they have done to me, but I do not. Their motives were in no way malicious. They are essentially conventional people who are blind to some of the implications of this case, and they acted as they did because they subscribe to certain professional principles that they believe left them no alternative. These principles may seem rigid and even ruthless to a non-lawyer, but there is no doubt that my attorneys believe in them sincerely. Morever, on a personal level my attorneys have treated me with great generosity and have performed many kindnesses for me. (But these can never compensate for the harm they have done me through their handling of my case.)

Recent events constitute a major defeat for me. But the end is not yet. More will be heard from me in the future.

Theodore J. Kaczynski
January 26, 1998

P.s. Feel free to publish this message."

The Framing of Ted Kaczynski

An hour-long video exposing how the Unabomber suspect was set up, only £5 from BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX.

Write letters of support to:

Ted Kaczynski (X-Ref 316854), ...

Beyond the Fragments: A Reaction to Industrial Society and Its Future

Two polar positions have been assumed by most commentators on ‘the Unabomber’, even within the anarchist milieu. On the one hand, there is the predictable ‘fluffy’ repudiation of violence. On the other hand, there is a romanticization of the bomber(s) as outlaw hero(es — never -ines). Both responses are in error. The first can be rejected out of hand as just another symptom of bourgeois playacting at being revolutionary, all the more irritating when it is accompanied by praise of violent activity in other times and other places. The second is more problematic because ‘the Unabomber’ does raise a crucial issue of our time: the urgent necessity of outright assault on the industrial system. Rather, however, than appraise the acts of ‘the Unabomber’ (which others can do much better), this essay focuses on something more tangible: the ‘Unabomber’ manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future. If the following discussion remains largely critical of FC, this is due, not to any condemnation of the bombings, but to a question of ideological motivation. Emma Goldman refused to condemn Leon Czolgosz when he assassinated President McKinlay, even though was suspicious of his motivations and disagreed with his action, and this seems like an admirable anarchist example — even in the present instance, when I offer critical support for FC’s acts. But FC, unlike Czolgosz, act from a set of formulated principles, and these demand scrutiny. This essay questions FC’s commitment to anti-authoritarian radicalism and thus is intended to give pause for thought to those who would lend uncritical support to ‘the Unabomber’.

Introduction: Bomb culture

Baudrillard asserts that the explosion of the terrorist’s bomb causes an implosion of meaning, a gaping hole in the social fabric that power frantically seeks to cover in order to restore the tyranny of meaning. If this is correct, then Industrial Society and Its Future is unwittingly on the side of power.

On reading FC’s text, I feel, not disgust, horror or outrage, but disappointment. Given the opportunity, on a national or even international platform, to express at length a damning critique of the totality and pose a radical alternative, FC fail miserably. As other commentators indicate, the acts of FC are not unethical: they are scandalous, yet inadequate. But the words of FC are worse — they are inept. In place of critique, in place of vision, FC offers more dreary ideology. When rebel words are needed, FC gives tawdry tag-ends from the shopworn ideas of pop culture. Silence might have been better. In this instance, acts might have spoken louder than words. The acts may have been insufficient, but they do not need the apology of Industrial Society and Its Future.

Scattered among the garbage, the careful examiner can find some gems in FC’s text, although they need to be carefully disentangled from the ideational debris, the detritus of this system of institutionalised misery. The essays ‘Whose Unabomber?’ and ‘Letter Bombs and Fixed Ideas’, reproduced elsewhere in this volume, ably undertake this scavenging, and I do not intend to replicate their work. Rather, focusing largely on theses 180–206 of Industrial Society and Its Future, which concentrate on issues of strategy, I will intend to move discussion beyond the fragments of FC’s explosions.

Ideology and strategy

Like the Leftists critiqued in the opening theses of the manifesto, FC have little to offer except ideology. Summarising their attitude toward social change, they state (Thesis 166):

Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which the industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial society if and when the system becomes sufficiently weakened.

The notion of ‘social stresses’ is ambivalent, but in the context of FC’s actions it presumably refers (in part) to the letter bombs for which they are notorious. The problem with such a notion is that capital, in such a state of perpetual crisis, feeds on social stress, and power uses such stress as a way of reinforcing its controls — particularly in the present era, where socio-economic restructurations daily usher in a new form of democratic managerialist totalitarianism. Increasing such ‘social stresses’, in the absense of any radical alternative, thus plays into the hands of the control complex. But the only ‘alternative’ offered by FC is more of the same — just a different brand of ideology (Thesis 183):

But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature; those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).

Nature — and particularly wild nature — is of course an ideological construct and one cannot escape from the clutches of ideology by posing ‘nature’ — a relatively recent concept in human thought — over and against culture. Here, FC just repeats the mistakes of deep ecologist biocentrists and the older philosophical errors of Rousseau. Moreover, at this advanced stage in civilisation’s trajectory, it is rather too late to take of human nature. Human ‘nature’ has been lost, compromised by civilisation’s restructurings of the human, and we can no longer determine what the natural behaviour of human beings might be. Human beings can only now consciously choose to go wild: such a condition is no longer spontaneous ‘second nature’. The tiger (for example) does not need to think about acting ‘naturally’, it just does. For humans, going wild means consciously choosing to imitate which behaviours of one or another animal species which are coded as ‘wild’ in the dominant ideological system. Such an action is not an escape from civilisation, but a further binding into its categories. Nature (or wilderness) is at best a metaphor for certain qualities that are regarded as valuable — and this is how FC uses it. But it is a very suspect metaphor, precisely because it is a product of civilization’s ideological categories, not an opponent of them.

This becomes all the more clear when FC proceed to outline the target for this ideology(Theses 187, 188):

On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is particularly important to attract people of this type, as they are capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others .... On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms.

FC accept the hierarchical divisions of civilisation, rather than challenge them. And lurking beneath the overt distinction between thinking and unthinking or sophisticated and unsophisticated individuals is a barely concealed class agenda. FC share more in common with Leftists than they care to admit — hence perhaps the virulence of their (thoroughly justified) attack on the Left at the very beginning of the manifesto. Like the Left, FC are not only articulating a political ideology, and thus are already talking in terms of control structures and governance; they are also propounding a bourgeois ideology which aims at the continued subjugation of ‘the unthinking majority’. The asceticism, monomania and authoritarianism of the political vanguard cannot be far away, and it isn’t (Theses 200, 201, 206):

Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal. Other goals would distract attention from the main goal .... Suppose for example that revolutionaries took “social justice” as a goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice would not come about spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In order to enforce it revolutionaries would have to retain central organization and control ... Not that we have anything against social justice, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to get rid of the technological system .... With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology, and that no other goal can be allowed to compete with this one.

The shrill rhetoric and imperative language (’must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal’, ‘must not be allowed’, ‘we absolutely insist’, ‘no other goal can be allowed’) indicate the presence of an authoritarian politics. This mixture of arrogance and myopia is just as likely to result in totalitarianism as in a world of self-realization and self-enjoyment. Social justice — — i.e., equitable treatment within the current system of dominance — remains a very limited goal. But even social justice is rendered subordinate to the destruction of the industrial system: even minimal impulses toward human liberation must not be permitted to ‘interfere’ or ‘compete’ with ‘the single overriding goal’ of eliminating modern technology. And such is the bad faith of FC that despite their earlier assertion of spontaneity and ‘wild nature’ as an oppositional ideological position, they now reveal their cynicism, referring to human nature as a fixed category (’human nature being what it is’) as a justification for an inevitable need for post-revolutionary ‘central organization and control’. Just as women were told by Leftists that ‘after the revolution’ women’s issues would be addressed, so after the anti-industrial revolution, social justice issues might (not even will) be ‘fixed’ — no doubt by the same central committee!

The drums and the spears

Leaving aside the plainly absurd and often reactionary elements of Industrial Society and Its Future (such as the notion that (Thesis 204)),

Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited

this is the essence of FC’s strategies for change. The fact that these strategic considerations are framed in terms of an authoritarian, political discourse (’revolutionary strategy’) is telling in itself. It suggests that at least in the manifesto, FC have nothing new, no radical alternative to offer. Although they rightly pose the necessity for the destruction of the industrial system, they fail to situate this aim as part of a wider project of human regeneration through negation of the totality. And in the absence of such a contextualisation, their ideas are recuperated by the lure of authoritarian politics. Their ideological emphasis, and hence ideological bankruptcy, merely reflects the bankruptcy of the social formulation of which their ideology is a product.

To put it bluntly, at best FC have got things arse-backwards. Human regeneration can only emerge from cultural regeneration. (By ‘cultural’ I mean not the system of commodified mediations that currently pass under this term, but freely chosen actions and interactions characterised by spontaneous creativity). The attempt to prompt human regeneration in the absense of cultural regeneration can all too easily result in totalitarianism. Human and cultural regeneration are dialectically interrelated, but the latter provides the all-important context within which the former can succeed.

Fredy Perlman, talking of indigenous resistance to civilisation, says (Against His-story, Against Leviathan!, 258):

The resistance is not primarily a clash of arms ... The resistance is in the drums, not in the spears; it is in the music, in the rhythms lived by communities whose myths and ways continue to nurture and sustain them

This passage raises the question of the relationship between drums and spears, culture and armed resistance. but we are not in the position of these indigenes: civilisation has deprived us of those things that Perlman sees as the heart of resistance. We have no free communities of individuals, no life-sustaining myths and ways, no substantive community. So we cannot resist in the same way. We have no drums, and so FC suggest that we should just use the spears. Perlman indicates that this just leads to more war machines, more control systems. So what options are left?

Clearly, for us, there must be a closer, more informed relationship between the drums and the spears, even if the latter are subordinate to the former. But to forego the spears would be madness. The spears must have their place — but their place remains rooted in the world of the drums. And if the drums no longer sound, then we must beat them. And if we have no drums, we must build them. And if we’ve forgotten how to play them, we must remember or learn again. And if we can’t renew our continuity with the past, then we must make a virtue of our discontinuity and make it all anew.

Anarchists can best show their solidarity with the flawed if historically significant interventions of ‘the Unabomber’ by reformulating FC’s anti-industrial insurgency in radical anti-authoritarian terms — i.e., by advancing the insurrectionary project through direct actions and regenerative projects aimed at abolishing power in its totality.

The Irrationalists

Steve Booth on resistance in the new millennium

Eat Shit or Fight Back: The Choice is Yours

The irrationalists commit acts of intense violence against the system, with no obvious motives, no pattern. More important, there is no organization to claim responsibility, offer explanations, make apologies or demands. Then, with the Tokyo sarin gas attack, Florence Rey and Audry Maupin, the Unabomber, Oklahoma and many other such incidents, we entered the Age of the Irrationalists.

One Office Block, One Blue Truck

The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer capable of oppression.

Let a Thousand Aum Cults Sarinate…

The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the method of delivery was innefective. One day the groups will be totally secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely effective…..

I Have a Dream

One day there will be blue trucks rolling off underground production lines. Missiles will be fired into government buildings and financial institutions. Politicians will be shot. Microlights will spray botulism over every millionaire’s ghetto. More beautiful than all this, there will be no organisations claiming ‘responsibility’, no explanations whatsoever. The whole thing will seem as mysterious as the menacing laughter heard in the Roman baths at Colchester must have been shortly before the Iceni sacked the city.

Cold War into Cola War

Back in the 1970s we used to think the East was oppressive, totalitarian. Their people were brainwashed, elections rigged, dissident groups suppressed. We used to think the West was free, democratic, tolerant. Things were so bad under communism people built balloons out of bed sheets in order to escape. Their repression was so total, military forces were quite prepared to blow up the entire world with nuclear weapons to keep ourselves free. Then with the 1980s people discovered that East and West were the same. Britain had the Economic Leauge to blacklist dissidents. Nixon was as corrupt and as nepotistic as Brhznev. Thatcher was the English Hitler. We had the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Waves and waves of helicopters, miles of razor wire and the full might of the military machine were deployed just to evict a few CND peaceniks at Molesworth. Hilda Murrell was murdered by the State.

New World Ordure

The 1991 Gulf War shows how things are now. World US hegemony, a sordid little was for the oil companies. How can the soldiers go along with it? If they don’t get hit with Saddam’s Scuds, they’ll get Gulf War Syndrome from the West’s own anti-nerve gas tablets. Who could fight for this? Who could fight for Major, Tory Blair and his spin doctors? Europe? With all the world like this, where do we fly our home-made balloon now?

The crowd are passive. In their flight from the truth, people submerge themselves in irrelevancy. Aromatherapy,

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WELCOME TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTRE! YOU JUST WATCHED AND DID NOTHING SO HERE ARE YOUR SIDE-HANDLED BATON BLOWS AS YOU TRAVEL ON THE EBOLA SUBWAY, SUCKERS!

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drugs, role-playing games, the lottery, selling Amway. They all have their negative equity mortgages, unemployment, job insecurity, MuckDonalds Happy Meals, the Sun, Gulf War Syndrome…. In 1992, even after the poll tax and all that, thirteen million brain-dead morons voted Conservative. How many will vote for Blair? People pay money for the Sun. Millions of them buy lottery tickets. As Mystic Meg once said (echoing Sir Gerard Ratner with his “culture of crap”) “The people want trash, so let’s give them trash…”. All this goes on. Do they act to stop it? Do they bollocks. So in the long run, they get exactly what they deserve, and by heck they are going to get it….

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IT’S A LINE SO THIN YOU CANNOT STAND OVER IT – YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE WHICH SIDE TO STAND ON. YOU ARE EITHER FIGHTING IT. THE POINTN IS TO CHOOSE…

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The Importance of Ethics

As a fundamental, people are free and entitled to ercise that freedom and defend it. Freedom can never be granted grudgingly by authority (only to later be rescinded). Freedom has to be taken. Where we are faced with the systematic annihilation and negation posed against ourselves by The Machine, we are required to find ways to give value to our lives.

We have ethical criteria to judge actions it is wrong to lie, it is wrong to coerce people, it is wrong to stand back and do nothing to prevent injustice. Yet the whole Machine is founded on lies, run by coercion and lubricated with complicity. This requires a response.

The Ethical Void

Several years ago, an article was published in *Freedom (Politics and the Ethical Void, 7^th March 1992, p.7) showing how the ethical has no point of contact with the political. To call on politicians to recognize the ethical is as futile as writing a letter “Dear Mr Himmler, please be moral!” To try to bring the ethical to bear on the political is to be like the boy with his finger in the dyke, while 100 yards away, water pours through a gap as wide as the Atlantic. Politics is without ethics but that does not absolve us of our own responsibilities towards the ethical.

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IF JUST ONE PERSON CAN BE FREE, THE REST ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE

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The Ethical Imperative To Act

If I can do just one thing to fracture that Iron Grip I will have done something. Then again, if everybody did just one thing. The Machine would be abolished. But we are not in that situation yet, nowhere near it. The numbers of activists are few, very low indeed. Even so, the Sunday Express (14th January 1996, p.14) expo of Green extremists admitted the Stasi had identified as many as 1,700 road protesters in London and the Home Counties. 1,700 committed road protesters would easily stop the road provided they did not waste their energy in futile fluffy NVDA gesture politics but always go for the jugular.

Numbers are Not Important

It doesn’t matter how many of us there are, one, a hundred, or a thousand. All that matters is that I myself act. The duty to act against the tyrant system is always present and cannot be evaded. …

Issue 52

Date: Jun 1998

Keywords: punk and communism; Workerism; Developers; festivals.

Read here

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The Case Against Art

Art is always about “something hidden.” But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.

During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that “unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.

The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment — a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found “venus” statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the “sympathetic magic” or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.

The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer’s words, “creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.” Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of “the beginning,” the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself.

And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured.

The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability.

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further alienation and stratification.

Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstoy’s statement that “art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling,” elucidates art’s contribution to social cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing ritual required art; art works originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of art and the artistic production of ritual are the same. “Music,” wrote Seu-ma-tsen, “is what unifies.”

As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony; art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory. Nietzsche saw the training of memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning of civilized morality. Once the symbolic process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception, putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that one person’s action could be compared with that of another, including portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled. Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property of the subject.

Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman’s role was to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from nature and dominated, at the deepest level, socially. Art’s ability to symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic world, the Fall of Man.

The world must be mediated by art (and human communication by language, and being by time) due to division of labor, as seen in the nature of ritual. The real object, its particularity, does not appear in ritual; instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division of labor, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is gradually liquidated in favor of agriculture (historical production) and religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production.

The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, enroute to priesthood, leader by reason of mastering his own immediate desires via the symbol. All that is spontaneous, organic and instinctive is to be neutered by art and myth.

Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their actions and projected them on a TV monitor before the two. The man’s eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more exciting than the act itself. The evocative cave pictures, volatile in the dramatic, lamp-lit depths, began the transfer exemplified in Fischl’s tableau, in which even the most primal acts can become secondary to their representation. Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art has striven to make life itself an object of contemplation.

As the Paleolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic arrival of agriculture and civilization — production, private property, written language, government and religion — culture could be seen more fully as spiritual decline via division of labor, though global specialization and a mechanistic technology did not prevail until the late Iron Age.

The vivid representation of late hunter-gatherer art was replaced by a formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to symbolic shapes. This narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the symbolic universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who associate line with civilization: “This country has become civilized,” literally means, in Yoruba, “this earth has lines upon its face.” The inflexible forms of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordon Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that the pots of a Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art.

The work of art was in no sense autonomous at this time; it served society in a direct sense, an instrument of the needs of the new collectivity. There had been no worship-cults during the Paleolithic, but now religion held sway, and it is worth remembering that for thousands of years art’s function will be to depict the gods. Meanwhile, what Glu:ck stressed about African tribal architecture was true in all other cultures as well: sacred buildings came to life on the model of those of the secular ruler. And though not even the first signed works show up before the late Greek period, it is not inappropriate to turn here to art’s realization, some of its general features.

Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part of the symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that art does not imitate life, but vice versa; which is to day that life follows symbolism, not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Eliot, is “an attack upon the inarticulate.” Upon the unsymbolized, he should have said.

Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual, in adopting these modes of expression, didn’t settle for far too little. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our active undoing of all the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolutionary situations, immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly.

The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one’s own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification. Under the guise of “enriching the quality of human experience,” we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security.

Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic form are canons of symbolization, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely averred, for example, that a limited number of mathematical figures account for the efficacy of art. There is Cezanne’s famous dictum to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” and Kandinsky’s judgement that “the impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, this an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced.

Though art is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons. “Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne; Shelley praised the “unpremeditated art” of the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes, flowers, etc., beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact, termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge.”

Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s own existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire.

Art should be considered a religious activity and category also in the sense of Nietzsche’s aphorism, “We have Art in order not to perish of Truth.” Its consolation explains the widespread preference for metaphor over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis of art. In dominated life freedom does not exist outside art, however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcomed. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee.

This separate realm of contrived life is both important and in complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its institutionalized separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in general, where its elements are not, and cannot be, actualized; the work of art is a selection of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic terms. Arising from the sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to religion not only by reason of its confinement to an ideal sphere and its absence of any dissenting consequences, but it can hence be no more than thoroughly neutralized critique at best.

Frequently compared to play, art and culture — like religion — have more often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the ludic function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence, should be estimated as one might reassess the meaning of Versailles: by contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining its marshes.

Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the plane of daily struggle “to a world of aesthetic exaltation,” paralleling the aim of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the conservative office of art when he wrote that without art works civilization would crumble “within fifty years” ... becoming “enslaved to instincts and to elementary dreams.”

Hegel determined that art and religion also have “this in common, namely, having entirely universal matters as content.” This feature of generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce the notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art.

Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can be seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to repudiate its intent and contents with “well, after all, it is only art.”

Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized culture industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness, rather, a mass diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged control.

Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and music, largely through the electronic media, the representation of representation. Image and sound, in their ever-presence, have become a void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the distance between artist and spectator has diminished, a narrowing that only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate and manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of political power.

Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avantgarde movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue that Aestheticism, or “art for art’s sake,” is more radical than an attempt to engage alienation with its own devices. The late 19^th century art pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the world, as opposed to the avantgarde effort to somehow organize life around art. A valid moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that division of labour has diminished experience and turned art into just another specialisation: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its own content.

The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prizes novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated.

But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world’s capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.

Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde movements, its negative image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical collapse radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be against all “isms,” including the idea of art. But painting cannot negate painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that all symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and communication. [nor can writing negate writing, nor can typing radical essays onto diskettes to assist in their publication ever be liberating — even if the typer breaks the rules and puts in an uninvited comment] In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the rigidities and irrelevancies of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of art; Hans Richter’s memoirs referred to “the regeneration of visual art that Dada had begun.” If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists reformed it.

Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission of art. Before trailing off into Trotskyism and/or art-world fame, the Surrealists upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock “the Marvellous” which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false judgement that would have re-introduced art into everyday life and thereby transfigured it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art to repressive society. The real barrier is not between art and social reality, which are one, but between desire and the existing world. The Surrealists’ aim of inventing a new symbolism and mythology upheld these categories and mistrusted unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter, Breton held that “enjoyment is a science; the exercise of the senses demands a personal initiation and therefore you need art.”

Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision could art survive. With the least strain of embellishment possible in a formal language, art became increasingly self-referential, in its search for a “purity” that was hostile to narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it.

But the strategy of trying to empty art of symbolic value, the insistence on the work of art as an object in its own right in a world of objects, proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This “radical physicality,” based on aversion to authority though it was, never amounted to more, in its objectiveness, than simple commodity status. The sterile grids of Mondrian and the repeated all-black squares of Reinhardt echo this acquiescence no less than hideous 20^th century architecture in general. Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased Drawing, exhibited after his month-long erasure of a de Kooning drawing. The very concept of art, Duchamp’s showing of a urinal in a 1917 exhibition notwithstanding, became an open question in the ’50s and has grown steadily more undefinable since.

Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media (e.g. ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of a Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless, depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its world revealed.

The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the ’60s — Conceptual, Minimalist, Performance, etc. — and the accelerated obsolescence of most art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism” of modernism by an eclectic mix from past stylistic achievements. This is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments, announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so.

Occasionally critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability “to stimulate the growth of a really troubling doubt,” little noticing that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and as such must be superseded, that art is disappearing because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the world that must be voided.

Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification, throughout all culture. But this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is stymied by its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an aversion it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, Deconstruction’s seminal figure, deals with language as a solipsism, consigned to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own surface.

Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm, and crucified to a Volkswagen, we seen in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi — with his eyes closed. “Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write seriously.

In a jaded, enervated age, where it seems to speak is to say less, art is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century an more later how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare the consolation or station of “timeless” art.

Adorno began his book thusly: “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experiment with our hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must enact, the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will recommence at that moment.

Issue 53

Date: Sep 1998

Keywords: Education; Anti-Vaccination and other dangerous, stupid nonsense Blurgh!

Read here

Issue 54-55

Date: Mar 1999

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John Connor on reaction and Civilised values

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Our Obvious Critics

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But It's More Than This

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False Flag

An expose of the Black Flag racket

Black Flag # 215 spent six times more space slagging off Steve Booth's Irrationalists than on their story on the Gandolf case, which they were so noncommittal in reporting that they didn't even bother to end it with the defence campaign's address. This and repeated trashy references to GA throughout this issue suggests Black Flag might have a problem with us.

The article, coincidently titled Irrationalism - Steve Booth against "the Machine" implied Steve is "a fascist, misanthrope", although they hadn't got the bottle to say this plainly and don't believe it anyway as ... --------

"I do not find it difficult to survive here"

A letter from Ted Kaczynski on his imprisonment

Thank you for your letter of September 8. I don't know what press reports you may have said about the ADX, but you should bear in mind that press reports are wildly inaccurate - as I learned from press reports about my own case.

I think it is inhuman to keep people locked up under any conditions, but beyond the mere fact of imprisonment I don't feel that the conditions here are bad as you seem to believe. I'll describe them briefly, but it must be understood that this description applies only to the part of the prison where the high-profile (that is, the famous) prisoners are kept. I know nothing about the rest of the prison.

...

Ted K. Update

State-styled Unabomber Dr Kaczynski's trial in December 1997 was a farce. His lawyers kept him virtually incommunicardo and ignored his instructions. ...

Emporia State: The Crystal Palace And Its Aftermath

The Crystal Palace is Dostoevsky’s crowning symbol for the barrenness of industrial civilization ... In the Crystal Palace everything will be provided, man’s every desire will be satisfied, he will be insulated from pain — but the more he becomes the automaton consumer the more he will also suffer from excruciating boredom ... The Crystal Palace is the supreme economic manifestation of the utilitarian, liberal-rationalist philosophy: and it is the bourgeois paradise.

— John Carroll

The Crystal Palace burned down, of course, in 1936. But like a phoenix, or dragon’s teeth sown in the earth, it sprang up everywhere as the shopping mall.

May 1998

Earth First! amnesiacs complain that council plans to build 18 multiplex cinemas plus 1000 rooftop car parking spaces on the vacant site of the Crystal Palace break the understanding that further building on the site would ‘reflect the style of the original Crystal Palace’.

Welcome to the Milton Keynes of the soul.

In the hothouse environment of the mall, designer label commodities hold their grand parade, showing off their trophies, their human conquests.

During previous centuries millions died due to a wasting disease called consumption; in the present century millions also die due to a wasting disease called consumption.

In the emporia state, production is concealed, energy congealed, eyes sealed and hearts annealed.

The UK shopping centre encourages inwardness. The elements and inclement weather conditions are banished, and the massed ranks of shops haughtily turn their backs on the hostile outside world. The chill wind gusting along the back alley should find no place here. And yet still the draught penetrates. For when shoppers look within they find a barren wasteland of commodities, and shiver as the wind howls through their empty souls.

Laughter is not permitted in the shopping mall, neither outbursts of joy nor corrisive mockery. Consumption is a serious business, and misery finds a ready counterfeit in solemnity.

Some women refer, only half-jokingly, to the idea of ‘retail therapy’: shopping as consolation for the fact that domesticated life is shit. If you can’t change yourself or your world, change your image, change your commodities.

Thirty years of built-in obsolescence was condemned as a capitalist con; now both capital and consumers benefit from it. Capital maximises profit; consumers gain a pretext for consuming again and again.

Designer labels

Identifying with capital, acquiring a corporate identity — even during leisure-time, labour’s twin. Paying to act as a mobile advertisement and to extend capital’s empire to all time and space. An acceleration of capitalist fashion: a desire to connect with the increasingly elusive moment by purchasing a brand new commodity. ‘Brand’ — a term used for the branding of cattle as property, or human flesh for penal purposes; also indicates a stigma, as in the phrase ‘the brand of Cain’. Ever murdered your kin? Ever feel you’ve been shopped?

The myth of postindustrialism

We inhabit the factory and the factory inhabits us. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the buildings in which we live, work and die, the books we read, the media we ingest, the ideas we think — are all factory produced. And yet chaos is everywhere. Even as I walk through the barren waste of the shopping centre, I look up and see the sun boiling, the clouds scudding by, a flock of birds veering across the sky — and I feel the exquisite pulses, flows and currents that flow through my body.

The capitalist imperative: adapt or perish

A third alternative: rebel!

August 1998

Shopping centre travel agency poster: ‘Cut-price flights to the sun’.

Summer 1999

Total eclipse.

Ted Speaks

This June, Ted Kaczynski-the State-styled 'Unabomber'-gave an unprecidented interview to an ex-EF! Journalista. Below is Ted's story which we publish jointly with Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.

Kaczynski’s story represents a parable:

Once upon a time there was a continent covered with beautiful pristine wilderness, where giant trees towered over lush mountainsides and rivers ran wild and free through deserts, where raptors soared and beavers labored at their pursuits and people lived in harmony with wild nature, accomplishing every task they needed to accomplish on a daily basis using only stones, bones and wood, walking gently on the Earth. Then came the explorers, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, merchants and immigrants with their advanced technology, guns, and government. The wild life that had existed for millennia started dying, killed by a disease brought by alien versions of progress, arrogant visions of manifest destiny and a runaway utilitarian science.

In just 500 years, almost all the giant trees have been clear-cut and chemicals now poison the rivers; the eagle has faced extinction and the beaver’s work has been supplanted by the Army Corps of Engineers. And how have the people fared? What one concludes is most likely dependent on how well one is faring economically, emotionally and physically in this competitive technological world and the level of privilege one is afforded by the system. But for those who feel a deep connection to, a love and longing for, the wilderness and the wildness that once was, for the millions now crowded in cities, poor and oppressed, unable to find a clear target for their rage because the system is virtually omnipotent, these people are not faring well. All around us, as a result of human greed and a lack of respect for all life, wild nature and Mother Earth’s creatures are suffering. These beings are the victims of industrial society.

Cutting the bloody cord, that’s what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts. The freedom, for example, to commit murder and get away with it scot-free, with no other burden than the jaunty halo of conscience.

My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives — the domestic routine, the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of the automatic washers, the automobiles and TV machines and telephones-! ah Christ!,... what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!

Such are my thoughts — you wouldn’t call them thoughts would you? — such are my feelings, a mixture of revulsion and delight, as we float away on the river, leaving behind for a while all that we most heartily and joyfully detest. That’s what the first taste of the wild does to a man, after having been penned up for too long in the city. No wonder the Authorities are so anxious to smother the wilderness under asphalt and reservoirs. They know what they are doing. Play safe. Ski only in a clockwise direction. Let’s all have fun together.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

“I read Edward Abbey in mid-eighties and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that, ‘yeah, there are other people out there that have the same attitudes that I do.’ I read The Monkeywrench Gang, I think it was. But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods and so forth...”

— Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, in an interview with the Earth First! Journal, Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA, June 1999.

Theodore Kaczynski developed a negative attitude toward the techno-industrial system very early in his life. It was in 1962, during his last year at Harvard, he explained, when he began feeling a sense of disillusionment with the system. And he says he felt quite alone. “Back in the sixties there had been some critiques of technology, but as far as 1 knew there weren’t people who were against the technological system as-such... It wasn’t until 1971 or 72, shortly after I moved to Montana, that I read Jaques Ellul’s book, The Technological Society.” The book is a masterpiece. I was very enthusiastic when I read it. I thought, ‘look, this guy is saying things I have been wanting to say all along.’”

Why, I asked, did he personally come to be against technology? His immediate response was, “Why do you think? It reduces people to gears in a machine, it takes away our autonomy and our freedom.” But there was obviously more to it than that. Along with the rage he felt against the machine, his words revealed an obvious love for a very special place in the wilds of Montana. He became most animated, spoke most passionately, while relating stories about the mountain life he created there and then sought to defend against the encroachment of the system. “The honest truth is that I am not really politically oriented. I would have really rather just be living out in the woods. If nobody had started cutting roads through there and cutting the trees down and come buzzing around in helicopters and snowmobiles I would still just be living there and the rest of the world could just take care of itself. I got involved in political issues because I was driven to it, so to speak. I’m not really inclined in that direction.”

Kaczynski moved in a cabin that he built himself near Lincoln, Montana in 1971. His first decade there he concentrated on acquiring the primitive skills that would allow him to live autonomously in the wild. He explained that the urge to do this had been a part of his psyche since childhood. “Unquestionably there is no doubt that the reason I dropped out of the technological system is because I had read about other ways of life, in particular that of primitive peoples. When I was about eleven I remember going to the little local library in Evergreen Park, Illinois. They had a series of books published by the Smithsonian Institute that addressed various areas of science. Among other things, I read about anthropology in a book on human prehistory. I found it fascinating. After reading a few more books on the subject of Neanderthal man and so forth, I had this itch to read more. I started asking myself why and I came to the realization that what I really wanted was not to read another book, but that I just wanted to live that way.”

Kaczynski says he began an intensive study of how to identify wild edible plants, track animals and replicate primitive technologies, approaching the task like the scholar he was. “Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Lives of Game Animals” to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.

Kaczynski spoke at length about the life he led in his small cabin with no electricity and no running water. It was this lifestyle and the actual cabin that his attorneys would use to try to call his sanity into question during his trial. It was a defense strategy that Kaczynski said naturally greatly offended him. We spoke about the particulars of his daily routine. “I have quite a bit of experience identifying wild edible plants,” he said proudly, “it’s certainly one of the most fulfilling activities that I know of, going out in the woods and looking for things that are good to eat. But the trouble with a place like Montana, how it differs from the Eastern forests, is that starchy plant foods are much less available. There are edible roots but they are generally very small ones and the distribution is limited. The best ones usually grow down in the lower areas which are agricultural areas, actually ranches, and the ranchers presumably don’t want you digging up their meadows, so starchy foods were civilized foods. I bought flour, rice, corn meal, rolled oats, powdered milk and cooking oil.”

Kaczynski lamented never being able to accomplish three things to his satisfaction: building a crossbow that he could use for hunting, making a good pair of deerhide moccasins that would withstand the daily hikes he took on the rocky hillsides, and learning how to make fire consistently without using matches. He says he kept very busy and was happy with his solitary life. “One thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about dying, if things are good right now you think, ‘well, if I die next week, so that, things are good right now.’ I think it was Jane Austen who wrote in one of her novels that happiness is always something that you are anticipating in the future, not something that you have right now. This isn’t always true. Perhaps it is true in civilization, but when you get out of the system and become re-adapted to a different way of life, happiness is often something that you have right now.”

He readily admits he committed quite a few acts of monkeywrenching during the seventies, but there came a time when he decided to devote more energy into fighting against the system. He describes the catalyst:

“The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it” His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues, “You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn’t the first time I ever did any monkeywrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me... I made a conscious effort to read things that were relevant to social issues, specifically the technological problem. For one thing, my concern was to understand how societies change, and for that purpose I read anthropology, history, a little bit of sociology and psychology, but mostly anthropology and history.”

Kaczynski soon came to the conclusion that reformist strategies that merely called for “fixing” the system were not enough, and he professed little confidence in the idea that a mass change in consciousness might someday be able to undermine the technological system. “I don’t think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. They’ll take the easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your electricity, is not the path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I don’t think there is any controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses. That’s why I think the consequences will be something like the Russian Revolution, or circumstances like we see in other places in the world today like the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda. This does, I think, pose a dilemma for radicals who take a non-violent point of view. When things break down, there is going to be violence and this does raise a question, I don’t know if I exactly want to call it a moral question, but the point is that for those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be social disorder, there is going to be starvation, there aren’t going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won’t be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn’t going to be enough food to go around, so then what happens? This is something that, as far as I’ve read, I haven’t seen any radicals facing up to.

At this point he was asking me, as a radical, to face up to this issue. I responded I didn’t know the answer. He said neither did he, clasped his hands together and looked at me intently. His distinctly Midwestern accent, speech pattern, and the colloquialisms he used were so familiar and I thought about how much he reminded me of the professors I had as a student of anthropology, history and political philosophy in Ohio. I decided to relate to him the story of how one of my graduate advisors, Dr. Resnick, also a Harvard alumni, once posed the following question in a seminar on political legitimacy: Say a group of scientists asks for a meeting with the leading politicians in the country to discuss the introduction of a new invention. The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable, that the invention will increase efficiency and make everyone’s life easier. The only down side, they caution, is that for it to work, forty-thousand innocent people will have to be killed each year. Would the politicians decide to adopt the new invention or not? The class was about to argue that such a proposal would be immediately rejected out of hand, then he casually remarked, “We already have it — the automobile.” He had forced us to ponder how much death and innocent suffering our society endures as a result of our commitment to maintaining the technological system — a system we all are born into now and have no choice but to try and adapt to. Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?

“The big problem is that people don’t believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the eco-anarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it better... The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers... And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as many people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? I don’t know.”

Kaczynski wanted to talk about every aspect of the techno-industrial system in detail, and further, about why and how we should be working towards bringing about its demise. It was a subject we had both given a lot of thought to. We discussed direct action and the limits of political ideologies. But by far, the most interesting discussions revolved around our views about the superiority of wild life and wild nature. Towards the end of the interview, Kaczynski related a poignant story about the close relationship he had developed with snowshoe rabbit.

“This is kind of personal,” he begins by saying, and I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape. He says “no, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself” and he laughs. “Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can’t figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn’t catch him and why you would never see him... Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say ‘thank you Grandfather Rabbit.’ After a while I acquired an urge to draw snowshoe rabbits. I sort of got involved with them to the extent that they would occupy a great deal of my thought. I actually did have a wooden object that, among other things, I carved a snowshoe rabbit in. I planned to do a better one, just for the snowshoe rabbits, but I never did get it done. There was another one that I sometimes called the Will ‘o the Wisp, or the wings of the morning. That’s when you go out in to the hills in the morning and you just feel drawn to go on and on and on and on, then you are following the wisp. That was another god that I invented for myself.”

So Ted Kaczynski, living out in the wilderness, like generations of prehistoric peoples before him, had innocently rediscovered the forest’s gods. I wondered if he felt that those gods had forsaken him now as he sat facing life in prison with no more freedom, no more connection to the wild, nothing left of that life that was so important to him except for his sincere love of nature, his love of knowledge and his commitment to the revolutionary project of hastening the collapse of the techno-industrial system. I asked if he was afraid of losing his mind, if the circumstances he found himself in now would break his spirit? He answered, “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.” And he offered the following advice to green anarchists who share his critique of the technological system and want to hasten the collapse of, as Edward Abbey put it, “the destroying juggernaut of industrial civilization”: “Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost.”

Operation Washington and the Gandalf Trial. A Personal View by Stephen Booth

‘Government gunning for the Green Alliance’ — Guardian headline, 28^th May 1995, page 11.

In March 1995, the Hampshire police began ‘Operation Washington’, a long series of raids, at least 55 of them [13] up and down the UK. Many of the people raided were animal rights activists, some were greens, others, like myself, were anarchists. At least two alternative bookshops in Oxford, EoA and Artemis Books, as well as Frontline in Manchester, were turned over. On January 16^th, 1996, a second wave of arrests took place. Saxon Wood, Noel Molland and the ALF press officer, Robin Webb, were taken to Lymington police station. Paul Rogers, Simon Russell and myself were taken to Lyndhurst police station in the New Forest. After interrogation, we were all charged with Conspiracy to Incite Criminal Damage [14], and bailed. The committal hearing began on 9^th December 1996, at Portsmouth Magistrates Court, and lasted a week. At the end of this, Robin Webb was acquitted, but the police appealed against this decision and his case went for judicial review at the high court. The Crown Court trial itself started on August 26^th 1997, and lasted 12 weeks. Early in the trial, the barrister acting for Paul Rogers, Ken McDonald QC, refused to call secret state witnesses like the agent provocateur, Tim Hepple, and resigned the case rather than accept instructions. As a result of this, Paul was ‘severed’ from the trial on September 15^th. Of the remaining four, one, Simon Russell, was acquitted, and the other three, Saxon, Noel and myself, were jailed for three years. The jailings brought widespread international outcry, with a campaign mounted by London Greenpeace, and Index on Censorship putting information about the case on the internet. After four and a half months in prison, we were released, pending appeal, which was eventually heard at the High Court on July 21^st and 23^rd, 1998. The second Gandalf trial, of Paul Rogers and Robin Webb, began on November 2^nd 1998, but eventually collapsed on November 25^th, due to the legal unsoundness of the first trial.

Protest and Direct Action Politics. The Political Context of ‘Operation Washington’

During the 1990’s, the politics of protest and direct action has grown. Perhaps most prominent in this area are the road protesters. Twyford Down, near Winchester, in Hampshire, during 1991–1993 was the first large road protest, and the state employed Brays Detectives, of Southampton, to spy on the protesters [15] Group 4 and Reliance Security, large numbers of yellow jacketed security staff, were used to evict the Dongas protest camp on December 9^th 1992, but this did not break the back of the road protest movement, as had the Molesworth Rainbow Village Fields peace camp eviction in the mid 1980’s. Instead, the anti-road protest movement spread: Solsbury Hill, Wanstead, Cuerden near Preston, Pollok in Scotland, Stanworth Valley and Earcroft near Blackburn, and Newbury were all examples. Their tactics developed, from tree houses to tunnels, and Swampy became a national figure.

Direct action politics has many other forms. The 1990 anti poll tax campaign [16] marked a turning point where many people lost faith in the representational political paradigm, and used their own capacities to oppose the government policy. The same methods could be adopted to protest against multi-national corporations or different government bureaucracies. New movements responded to the growing awareness of environmental problems. [17] Earth First! blockaded the tropical hardwood importer Timbmet, at Cumnor near Oxford on 11^th May 1992. Peat cutting machinery on Hatfield and Thorne Moors was smashed on April 8^th 1992. In the Summer of 1994, Michael Howard’s Criminal Justice Act (CJA) brought together a whole swathe of disparate groups. On the 17^th February 1995, the Department of Transport HQ in Marsham Street, London, was broken into and computers were interfered with. On 14^th July 1996, Reclaim The Streets (RTS) blockaded the Westway in London, causing widespread traffic chaos in the metropolis. The execution of writer Ken Saro Wiwa and the threat of dumping the Brent Spar oil platform in the Atlantic brought a vigorous anti Shell campaign in 1995. The Ploughshares, natural successors to the 1980’s Peace Protesters, smashed Hawk jets at Warton, planes destined to be used for genocide in East Timor, on January 16^th 1996. Through 1994 and onwards, there was the long running McLibel case [18].

Animal Liberation

Animal liberation is a special category of the area outlined above. Animal liberationists have mounted big protests, like the anti-live exports showdown at Shoreham, Brightlingsea, Dover, Coventry Airport, in early 1995. More recently, there has been a long-running, ongoing series of protests at Hillgrove Cat Farm, near Witney, in Oxfordshire. At the same time as the large protests, there are militants like the ALF (Animal Liberation Front), breaking into laboratories, ‘liberating’ animals used in experiments, burning meat trucks, sabotaging slaughterhouses. Protesters can pull off ‘spectaculars’ as they did in April 1993, reducing the Grand National horse race to a total shambles, reportedly costing bookmakers ?63M. There are people like the Hunt Sabs, disrupting hunts. Groups like the ‘Justice Department’ (JD) or more likely, lone individuals, have posted tubular incendiary devices to vivisectors, and intervened in the live exports controversy — bombs were sent to the offices of Stenna Sealink in Ashford, June 3^rd 1994. The so-called ‘Animal Rights Militia’ (ARM) firebombed outdoor sports and leather goods shops in Cambridge, York, Harrogate, Oxford, and the Isle of Wight during the summer of 1994. The Isle of Wight bombings (24^th August 1994) swamped the fire services on the island, and it is thought that this is one reason why Hampshire Police chose to attack the protest movements by mounting ‘Operation Washington’

Hepplegate

If Green Anarchist (GA) is the most militant publication [19], drawing together elements from all across the protest movements, the secret state in particular, would have a a more immediate and distinctly personal reason to persecute GA. Green Anarchist had an important part in the Tim Hepple affair, as exposed by Larry O’Hara in his April 1993 pamphlet ‘A Lie Too Far’ (=ALTF), and subsequently ‘At War With The Truth’. (=AWWTT) [20]

Tim Hepple was an enthusiastic activist, if a somewhat changeable character, who hung about in the GA orbit. In September 1991, at the Green Party Wolverhampton conference, he took part in a banner unfurling stunt, protesting at the take over of the Green Party by the ‘Green 2000’ Jonathan Porritt / Sara Parkin faction [21]. Action of this sort was calculated to gain him credibility with the green movement. He introduced a friend of his to GA, Ray Hill, a shop keeper in the Caton village, who also wrote a column in Searchlight. At this stage we were naive enough to believe in Searchlight as a positive anti fascist credential. Ray Hill wrote an article ‘Creating a Community’ advocating people donate ?1,000 each to buy a Scottish island. This article was published in GA 28, pp 14–15.

Early in 1992, Hepple went off to Welling, in order to infiltrate the BNP (=British National Party, fascists) during the 1992 General Election period, on behalf of Searchlight. After this, he was supposedly hiding out in Scotland, but late in 1992, resurfaced, telling tales about a street war, with fascists attacking left wing people, Socialist Workers, and anarchists. The fascists were said to be publishing hit lists, ‘Redwatch’ and ‘Target’. In order to redress the balance, Hepple offered to supply a list of fascists’ names and addresses to GA. After all, who better to give these than the infiltrator who just seven months earlier had been inside the BNP ?

Hepple pleaded with GA to publish the details he had handed across in the magazine or as leaflets under our own logo. We would not do this. Many, but not all of the details on Hepple’s list were spurious; one of the addresses given that of the National Badminton Centre, for example. Hepple also demonstrated suspicious foreknowledge of the contents of ‘Target’ issue two, three months before it came out [22]

In early 1993, fascists from Combat 18, or perhaps state agents posing as C18, attacked alternative bookshops: Key Books in Birmingham, Mushroom in Nottingham, as well as an arson attack on the Morning Star newspaper, and the smashing of the Freedom bookshop and press in Aldgate [23]

On April 19^th, 1993, Tim Hepple appeared on ‘World in Action’ admitting his BNP infiltration, and being present at the vicious assault on the SWP paper seller so graphically described in that spook-opera. Syndicated highlights of his Searchlight ghosted biography were published in the New Statesman [24]. Shortly after the ‘World in Action’ programme, Larry O’Hara published ‘A Lie Too Far’, the booklet which first exposed Tim Hepple as an agent provocateur, and which began a chain of other events which eventually brought AFA (Anti Fascist Action) to proscribe Searchlight [25].

John Harlow and Jason Bennetto. Two Studies in Media Bias

If Green Anarchist was being made a target for manipulation by state-sponsored agent provocateurs like Hepple, the mainstream mass media were likewise concentrating their attention on the protest movements. I would like to present you with two key examples:

1. The John Harlow ‘Green Guerrillas Booby-Trap Sites’, Sunday Times, July 4^th 1993 [26]

The John Harlow ‘Summer of Hate’ piece is probably the archetypal anti green smear, claiming eco-protesters had dug Vietnam style pits with metal spikes in the bottom to trap and injure construction workers. The Harlow piece was published to coincide with an anticipated mass trespass at Twyford Down. Some of the same material later re-appeared in a TV documentary ‘Ride On’ in October 1994 [27]. Such false negative publicity self-evidently supports the security forces ‘make work’ project.

2. Jason Bennetto ‘Crackdown on Green Terrorists’, Independent, 28^th December 1994.

As with the Chester Stern Grand National piece, Bennetto specifically named Green Anarchist, but this article went further. GA was claimed to be a terrorist organization, in a re-cycling of the Harlow ‘Summer of Hate’ mantraps lie. ‘Nationally, organizations such as the Environmental Liberation Front (sic) and Green Anarchist have been credited with using booby traps to disrupt work on several motorway sites.’ [28]

This type of fabrication, hype and hysteria is not a one off or a mistake, but part of a consistent, consciously arranged pattern. Mostly, the media ignores the protest movements. On rare occasions, when it suits the state, it makes a splash, as with the August 1998 Ringwood mink releases, or the 10^th December Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ anti-ALF spook opera [29]. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see now how Bennetto was clearing the propaganda path for the start of ‘Operation Washington’ just over two months later.

Make Work

Police chiefs want Anti Terror Squad to Spy on Green Activists

Guardian top of page 1, March 27^th 1996

The central police in Frankfurt are themselves of the view that what is at stake above all is the need to secure the existence of the secret police, and what means we use to achieve this are of complete indifference.

State Asset Stieber [30]

With the end of the cold War, the IRA ceasefire, MI5, Special Branch and the other spooks have to justify their continued existence. Stieber, a police agent contemporary of Marx, describes the agenda perfectly. Outfalls like Harlow, Bennetto and Mike Durham repeatedly tell how the secret state is watching the ‘eco-warriors’. On March 6^th 1995, at just the same time that ‘Operation Washington’ was starting, it was reported that ARNI (the Animal Rights National Index, a Scotland Yard department and police data base) was being expanded to take in the greens. During the early 1990’s, ‘Operation Snapshot’ and various police / council schemes logged movements of so-called ‘New Age’ travellers. Other police groups like the ‘Forward Intelligence Team’ collected information about the RTS movement. All of this appears to be collecting together under one organization, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). There is a certain parallel between all this and similar state actions against the Autonomen in Germany, and anarchists in Italy, which suggests a certain unity of action and policy. ‘Operation Washington’ falls into place within a Europol / SCHENGEN Europe-wide clamp down on dissent.

MI5 Against the new Superpower

All the technological resources formerly used against Communism are now ranged against us greenies. So we had better start thinking and acting accordingly.

GA 49/50 page 11

The Concepts of Incitement and Conspiracy

Seven months before the beginning of the 1926 General Strike, on 13^th October 1925, twelve Communist leaders, including William Rust and Wal Hannington, were raided, arrested, tried and jailed for ‘Unlawfully conspiring to publish seditious libels and to incite others to commit breaches of the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797.’ [31]

Thus, we can see how ‘conspiracy to incite’ has a certain pedigree among British political charges. In the Autumn of 1979, the ‘Persons Unknown’ trial saw six people; Ronan Bennett, Stewart Carr, Vincent Stevenson, Irish Mills, Dafydd Ladd and Trevor Dalton charged in the same way with ‘Conspiracy to incite...’ Such a charge is a vague, catch-all type of ‘offence’, in that it is a multiple inchoate charge (inchoate — just begun). Nothing need have happened, it is all about desires and intentions. It is a different business from, for example; an animal rights activist breaking a butchers’ shop window. Here, in legal terms, an obvious crime, criminal damage, has occurred. These are substantive offences. Inchoate charges are incomplete, amorphous, fog like.

The real offence is that we exist.....

Something as broad and far-ranging as the radical protest movement is more of a culture, a revolutionary climate. As with the Taunton genetically modified crops, people know that the law will never protect their interests, and so trash the fields themselves. Direct action is so much more direct. It is not ‘smash this window’ but ‘smash the system’. If you steal a loaf from the bakery, this is serious theft, but how can the law deal with people who want to take the whole bakery?

Powerful though they are, even the police and the secret police state cannot suppress a whole ideology. So they grasp hold of shapeless legal concepts like ‘incitement’, attempting to make individual writers and editors responsible for the things they report. (Retrospective incitement). By a sort of legal osmosis, the publishers are made responsible for every action undertaken by the movement. It is all about your opinions and desires. The climate of protest is so wide, that by the time they get around to holding individuals responsible for it, the ‘guilt’ has to be spread a little thin.

Is it possible for publications to ‘incite’ protest? I do not think so. I think that the facts of the world as we find it are sufficient cause, a clear enough explanation for the origins of our climate of protest and the culture of resistance. The actions of the state and system are so outrageously unjust, that people will act against them. As the Oxford statement has it: ‘Environmental degradation, animal abuse, economic injustice and poverty, attacks on freedom, weapons exports, nuclear weapons — these among many others are the real inciting factors, not the reporting of direct action protests.’ [32]

Because the police are lazy, and because conspiracy is easier to ‘prove’, the police are increasingly turning to conspiracy charges in order to convict people. The concept of ‘Conspiracy’ is a politically dangerous legal weapon, and in any decent, democratic society, it would be abolished. A conspiracy is a joining together of people with a common purpose, under a tacit or implied (read non-existent) agreement to do harm. Thus most political groups could be said to be conspiracies. The fact the police resort to conspiracy charges shows that they cannot prove that a substantive offence has taken place; which in itself ought to start alarm bells ringing. In the legal sense, the radical movement as a whole is one big ‘conspiracy’, and as Desmond Thomas, the police officer in charge of ‘Operation Washington’ testified, virtually anyone connected with the radical movement could be prosecuted for participation. A connects to B, B connects to C and so A and C are in the same conspiracy, even though they never met. The only real limitations on the use of the conspiracy repression weapon, were the physical size of the dock and the capacity of the sixty police officers to process the paperwork. The fact that it could be anybody in there was part of its intended effect.

Exhibit 988A was a list of supporters / participants in the October 1994 ‘Anarchy in the UK’ Festival.

The legal notion of ‘conspiracy’ might be applied to any political group which the state takes a dislike to. The best defence against this is for people to exercise their capacity to speak freely more and more; not for the movement to be silenced but to develop and strengthen its own, multiple-path methods of communication. Experience shows that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to report what is happening [33] A stronger, more effective movement, with increasing political momentum for change, is the only real answer.

The December 1996 Committal Hearing

The committal took place at Portsmouth Magistrates Court, between the 9^th and the 16^th December. Portsmouth was chosen because as a reactionary right wing town, prosperous, southern and the capital of the Royal Navy, it gave the greatest likelihood of conviction after Winchester. Prior to the case starting, the defendants had been served with somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 photocopied pages of ‘evidence’. More was constantly being added to this during both the committal and the crown court case proper. This ‘evidence’ consisted of issues of GA, the ALF Supporters’ Group Newsletter [=ALF(SG)], together with many other anarchist, animal rights, environmentalist, punk and other magazines. [34] There were letters, invoices, art work, receipts, the animal rights bomb maker’s manual ‘Into the 1990’s With The ALF’, ‘Urban Attack’, and many other things. Basically, we six were being held responsible, not just for what we ourselves had written, nor collectively for each others’ writings, but for any and every other radical piece of protest literature collected during the 55 police raids, and produced or sold between 1990 and 1996.

The court process consisted of going through these documents page by page, picking out all the choice sentences of passages. It was here that we were first introduced to the concept of incitement by reviewing another publication. We also learned about retrospective incitement (just reporting the facts), incitement through commentary, incitement by slogan, incitement through expressing an opinion, incitement by advertising, and indirect incitement. Anyone who thinks that by allowing a barrister to read out a long, continuous selection of choice quotations could ‘prove’ that people who never met could be part of some vast but indistinct ‘conspiracy’ is a fool. I for example, as an anarchist who wishes to develop human capacities and freedoms, would like to see the state overthrown by a physical revolution, but I had little or no interest in animal rights. I had never met Robin Webb before the arrests, I had not even heard of Simon Russell; but here we all were — ‘co-conspirators’ for having some sort of place in very different parts of the ‘same’ broad protest culture and movement.

The main point of interest at the committal, was the testimony of Detective Superintendent Desmond Thomas. Quite a lot of words have been written about the mental state of DSI Thomas, particularly in animal rights publications. It is clear that he has mounted a crusade against animal liberation, and it is also clear that he has a personal vendetta against Robin Webb. The danger is that we personalize the Hampshire Police activities, so that the issue becomes Thomas. We personalise the police as Thomas, and end up with a mirror image of the Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ pastiche of ‘That evil terrorist Robin Webb’; or to give another example of the same type of process, the 1984 miners strike becomes that of Arthur Scargill’s mortgage. Thomas has a grudge, but he is also a ‘useful idiot’ to do the dirty work for the secret state.

Thomas himself testified, that during 1995, 56 police raids took place. [35] ‘Operation Washington’ had 15–20 officers working on it, with 24–30 active plus 30–40 support staff at peak times. For example, we can note that for the 16^th January 1996. Washington could command the exclusive use of two police stations. Thus, it compares with a murder case or a major anti-drugs operation. In money terms, the cost of the case has been put at somewhere between ?2M and ?10M. [36] A decision to commit police and CPS resources to this extent, is not within the remit of just one middle-ranking police officer with a personal grudge. It would have to be a policy decision, taken higher up. Obviously, given the politically charged character of the case, Thomas is not the ultimate point of control.

DSI Thomas himself, testified that the secret state was involved in the Gandalf case:

Could you just help me about this? You have told us that there were other forces involved in this investigation, that there has been public debate about the role of the secret services. Were they involved in this investigation?

I did. [quoting previous PLO trial transcript-] ‘They were involved in one part of it which was not significant until after Mr Webb had been arrested that other people had been arrested but may I just say that it does not relate to these proceedings today’ My answer did not refer to those proceedings or to Mr Webb in these proceedings and any other issues related to the security services, I would ask the court deal with by means of public immunity hearing. It related indirectly to these proceedings.

It would have been the middle of 1995. [37]

A lot of the cross-examination related to the earlier Robin Webb and Gillian Peachey Poultry Liberation Organization (=PLO!) egg contamination press release conspiracy trial, held in Winchester in late 1995. This trial was the result of the so-called ‘Operation Washington Part 1’ which held Robin Webb responsible for handing a press release out to the press, in his capacity as ALF Press Officer. The PLO trial collapsed on 11^th December 1995, when DSI Thomas revealed that some evidence taken during a raid on Gillian Peachey had been left unattended in the boot of a WPC’s car over the weekend. As a result of this, Peachey could no longer be charged, and for a conspiracy you need at least two people, so the whole case fell.

Why did Thomas reveal the fact that his own chain of evidence was broken? Four days after the PLO trial collapsed, on December 15^th 1995, the decision was taken to go ahead with ‘Operation Washington Part 2’, the arrests and raids taking place a month later. January 16^th 1996 was just three days after an openly advertised GA editorial meeting — this timing is not coincidental. Did Thomas receive orders from elsewhere to stop the first trial in order to widen his frame? [38]

James Wood, the barrister at the December 1996 Gandalf committal, argued for abuse of process. Robin Webb had been tried under the same evidence at Winchester. On the Friday, almost at the end of the committal hearing, the prosecutor, Richard Onslow, made a gross mistake, and conceded that were Webb to be re-prosecuted on his own, that would indeed be oppressive. However, he was being prosecuted along with others. James Wood, in reply, pointed out that each defendant must be considered on his own, each particular case weighed on its own merits. It was no less oppressive than if Robin Webb were there on his own. They could not use the fact that others were being prosecuted alongside to justify the prosecution of Mr Webb.

James Wood’s argument is just, of course, but this is what a conspiracy prosecution does. You need others to make a conspiracy, and their ‘guilt’ confirms you ‘guilt’. Wood’s objection lays bare the flaw behind the whole trial. Yet it was the mistaken concession by Onslow, which persuaded the Stipendiary Magistrate, Mr Clarke, to halt the case against Robin Webb, but allow those against the rest. At this point, it looked as though the whole Gandalf farce would unravel in the Hampshire Police’s hands.

In early 1997, we organised a Gandalf Tour to try to raise awareness of the case. We had begun campaigning in 1996, coining the name ‘Gandalf’ (Green Anarchist aND Animal Liberation Front) as a handy acronym to describe the defendants. During the 1997 general election, we carried out an anti Jack Straw campaign in Blackburn, Straw’s constituency, which failed to generate any media support — no surprises there. If nothing else, the Blackburn campaign gave us the chance to talk to sympathetic people opposed to censorship.

The Trial Itself Begins

‘Court hears men were devoted to anarchy’

Portsmouth cop outfall, the News, 29^th August 1997, page 7

The police appealed against the Webb acquittal, but went ahead with the trial of the rest of us anyway. The Crown Court trial began on 26^th August 1997, and did not get off to a good start. The first day was given over to ‘Public Interest Immunity’ or as I renamed it ‘Police Interest Impunity’. [39] PII certificates were used to convict innocent men in the Matrix Churchill case, and the mere fact they were used in the Gandalf trial, in my opinion, discredits the entire case. PII is incompatible with an open society. PII is an iniquitous procedure, a closed session, attended by the judge and prosecutor, but with the defence counsel and defendants excluded. Thus the one sided nature of the whole trial was shown on day one.

At the start of the trial, a list of questions were prepared, to try to exclude potential jurors who had connections with blood sports, road building, or the armed forces. [40] At the time, this seemed a fair procedure, but in retrospect, it would probably have been better not to have done this. To ask people about their awareness of environmental issues and politics automatically excluded the intelligent and aware. Decent people would have nothing to do with the trial, and we just provided people with ready-made excuses to avoid jury service. We ended up with the people too stupid to adopt an excuse, a jury of Sun readers. The anticipated length of the trial, 6 to 8 weeks, selected the older, middle class conformist types. The state’s choice of the Portsmouth venue had already determined the Blimpish, Nineteenth Century centre of political gravity of the jurors, in any event.

In my opinion, the state never intended to hype the Gandalf prosecution as a show trial. The mainstream media hardly reported the police raids or build up; except for one small item in the Guardian reporting the raid on the Frontline bookshop in Manchester, and a riposte to this, a character assassination piece on Paul Rogers in the Observer. [41] After the conviction, the more lurid selective quotes could be used, as with the Harlow and Bennetto above. The trial itself was aimed at the alternative press, and for this the alternative press and the radical rumour mill could be relied on to spread the message. It would not do to tell the dreaming public too loudly that they are living in a police state.

The timid conformity of the mainstream media is epitomised by the Portsmouth News reporter Graham Keely, who appeared to be wholly at the beck and call of the state. [42]

Any adverse mainstream publicity there might have been in the opening week [43] was wiped out by the crash of Princess Diana in Paris, and the tsunami of mass hysteria which followed this. Shortly after the start of the trial, between September 5^th and 7^th, in Oxford, the ‘Alternative Media Gathering’ [44] published a statement condemning the trial, and endorsed by many different groups. This was posted on the internet, and endorsed by many all over the world. We were filmed by the Undercurrents radical video makers. The Oxford Declaration was the real turning point in the radical fight-back against the trial.

Severance of Paul Rogers

It was a surreal experience to be on trial, with Robin Webb as a named co-defendant, without Robin being present in court, except perhaps in some notional sense, as a ‘virtual defendant’. Much was made of the now familiar story of the gay ex-Special Branch detective, who talked too much at a party somewhere, and revealed where the bug was planted in Robin Webb’s car. Much was made of a loan from the ALF(SG) to Robin Webb, to buy a Lada car to help him get around to meetings and protests. The fraud squad were called in but found nothing improper in the loan. This prompted a little rhyme about our virtual defendant:

What or where is Robin Webb?

Is he alive or is he dead?

Speeding off inside his Lada

Making cops work that much harder.

The first big crisis came on Thursday 11^th September. From the point of view of GA, the main part of the defence strategy was to raise the political cost of the trial by calling secret state assets like Hepple and others, putting Searchlight and the Secret State itself in the dock. We already had Thomas’s testimony at the committal, and the fact of the PII itself as starting points. In this, August 26^th and the Shayler Case, (much in the news at the same time), ought to have been used to develop momentum and discredit the trial in the minds of the jury, if possible, but certainly to the wider public. Our analysis and ambitions ran far ahead of our capacities. What was needed was not just a legal defence inside, but also political action outside. We also needed psychological warfare against the CPS and the judge. These strands would have worked together to turn it into a circus. The problem was that the animal lib defendants lacked the political confidence to try this. They just wanted a purely legal defence, which would obviously fail. Their dogma that ‘It’s all about Robin Webb’ depoliticised the trial.

I am not criticising the animal lib people for this, but simply trying to tell it how it was, then. Various attempts to politicise the trial were made; the free speech demonstration on PII day, which was successful, the Princess Diana Death Celebration, which was prevented. Hepplegate, which failed, the publication of GA49/50, a classic act of defiance in the face of oppression, and lastly the Selwood effigy burning. These five had some potential to turn it over, but because the initial momentum never developed, each event began from a lower point. Staging political events contradicted the animal lib purely legal approach. A political trial cannot be opposed in purely legal terms.

It is not about whether you are ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’, as if these judicially fabricated categories have meaning; but whether you’ve got enough treacle to gum up the machinery. All the PII and Hepple / secret state stuff were our best shot at stopping the trial, but the defence barristers just would not run with it. The crisis came to a head on the morning of the 11^th, when Ken McDonald QC, Paul’s barrister, refused to accept instructions to follow Paul’s strategy, and resigned the case. There was an almighty row over this, and harsh words were spoken. This left Paul unrepresented, with Judge Selwood demanding that Paul represent himself, adjourning the trial until the next week, to give him time to ‘prepare’. This led to one fortunate political consequence; in that Paul got a chance to look at and photocopy part of the unused evidence. The point about the unused is that this is the inconvenient stuff the police and prosecution would rather bury, for example material about informers within the movement, and provocateurs like Hepple. The unused stuff would be most useful for discrediting the case, politically.

However, when the court resumed , Paul was severed from the trial on the 15^th September, lest he do more damage. As Paul was the main editor of Green Anarchist, and in the absence of Robin Webb the principal defendant, this destroyed a lot of the intended effect. Paul could continue to publish the magazine, and he was left free outside to campaign on behalf of the rest.

ONSLOW: (Working his way through the case papers)

A Lie Too Far, Searchlight, Hepple and the Left — I’m not going to refer you to any of that....

— Tuesday 16^th September 1997

We can learn a lot from this. The legal system is terrified of secret state stuff. So one possible response, when being questioned by the police in a repression of freedom of speech case, is not to say ‘no comment’ but to answer every question with a statement like ‘Tim Hepple is an MI5 sponsored agent provocateur.’ In my opinion, when faced with a trial with some spook content, it would be a good idea to have at least one defendant unrepresented by barristers, and so free to ask the most awkward of awkward questions, assisted by a ‘McKenzie Friend’. In my opinion, political trials should be slowed down — we ought to bung them all up like the Mc Libel case. Challenge every page of evidence. If the political cost of the trial is raised enough — it just won’t happen.

The Plea Bargain

To join yourself to the law is to become part of the corruption.

Four Brothers, page 102

The political situation demands that when faced with a desperate situation like the Gandalf trial, it is important not to show weakness. Unfortunately, on 19^th September, the defence barristers decided they would attempt a plea bargain. This was a completely outrageous move, in my opinion, because it surrendered to the state the right to censor our magazines and punish the editors for their contents. We had no business to make such an abdication. Pleading guilty would also have implications for Paul Rogers and Robin Webb, and would make the next Gandalf type prosecution easier, and therefore certain. You have to draw a line somewhere. Simon was in favour of the plea bargain for pragmatic reasons. Noel, who sought animal rights martyrdom, was also in favour. Saxon and myself were against. I explained to the others that I would have no part of it, and if it came to that then I would sooner take the ferry than plead guilty. I had my passport with me, somewhere, but as far as I remember I did not actually wave it in their faces. During the lunch hour, I went out for a walk round the Portsmouth city centre. I felt so angry about it. I reasoned that Judge Selwood, who was obviously a bastard but not as big a bastard as I am would probably only tell them to ‘shove it’ and add five years on to the sentence for cowardice. So I walked back to the court, and I think I might have been a little late getting back. The others looked a bit worried, they were probably thinking ‘Perhaps he really has taken the ferry’. Luckily, Judge Selwood did tell them to ‘Shove it’, and saved them from themselves, but all the same it was a bad display of defence weakness, and something I wish hadn’t happened.

The Venton Memorandum

The police ignored their legal adviser because his advice did not suit their political objectives. One of the key prosecution documents of the case, among the unused evidence but revealed, perhaps unintentionally by the prosecution, was the ‘Venton Memorandum’. [45] Mr Venton, a solicitor and legal adviser working for the CPS in Portsmouth, had earlier testified during the committal hearing of December 1996. Among the facts learned there, about policy and the management of the case, was that the decision to go ahead with ‘Operation Washington Part 2’ was taken on the afternoon of 15^th December 1995.

Mr Venton had written out legal advice and notes about the case. He argued for a narrow definition of ‘incitement’, comprising the ‘How to do it’ articles, like the instructions on how to make an incendiary device contained in the animal rights pamphlet ‘Into the 1990’s with the ALF.’ Venton was afraid that a broad definition of ‘incitement’ would lay bare the political nature of such a prosecution. He was right, and it did.

‘All the subjects of this investigation are people who hold extreme political views, basically anarchists.’ Venton admitted near the top of his memorandum. Lower down, he then went on to say ‘I left out of the equation all general exhortations for direct action, as the literature is full of it, and it would be too easy to confuse specific incitement to commit crime with the expression of political views (however extreme) and the methods to achieve the aims’.

The uncovering of Roger Venton’s memorandum in the unused police papers was a good piece of legal work by Naim, Tim Greene and Ben Emmerson. Venton’s memo exposed the methodological flaw at the heart of the police process. Venton’s narrow definition of ‘incitement’ did not fit with the political intention of the case, and so was sidelined. Instead, the broadest possible definition (see note 22) of ‘incitement’ was taken, encompassing every type of radical literature, the ALF, eco protest and community resistance diaries in GA; slogans like Robin Webb’s ‘Take courage, take heart, take action’. Venton specifically denied that T-Shirts were capable of inciting, but on 29^th August, there they were; ALF T-shirts with pro JD slogans like ‘Animal Liberation — It’s Quicker By Tube!’ were paraded through the court like trophies of war, and being held up by Jill the court usher. If Venton’s advice had been followed, the trial would have been a lot shorter, but it would not have had the desired political effect of criminalising an entire ideology and movement.

Desmond Thomas in the Box Again

DSI Thomas took the stand on 8^th October 1997, and was asked more questions about the poultry product contamination press release case, covering much the same ground as before. Thomas then went on to ludicrously claim that Robin Webb is an anarchist, and that the ALF is an anarchist front! Much of Thomas’s hatred was directed against Saxon Wood, indeed the judge himself seemed to dislike Saxon more than the rest, aside from the Virtual Defendant, Robin Webb. DSI Thomas also ridiculously claimed Saxon had ‘duped’ his brother, Scott Wood, into writing for GA. The presence of Saxon in the dock was a continual reminder of Hampshire Police incompetence — initially they had arrested the ‘wrong’ S Wood.

From Thomas and Venton’s testimony at the committal, and also here, we learned that prior to ‘Operation Washington Part 2’ there was another trial intended (Operation Washington 1a?) a follow on to the PLO egg contamination trial, centred on a list of postal bombings carried out by the JD from October 1993 onwards [46] and published in the ALF(SG) newsletter and on the internet. Some of the same people prosecuted in the Gandalf trial would also have been present in Washington 1a, together with ‘at least four others’ including, as Thomas put it in his rabidly hyperbolic declamatory style ‘the animal rights terrorist, John Curtin.’ [47]

Thomas had a notion that anarchism was all about exploiting irreconcilable differences in society to create trouble. Thomas claimed to have discovered this from reading the works of ‘Guy de Bard’; and he found this author’s concepts of ‘Spectacle and Recovery’ (sic) helpful in understanding anarchy. At this point the barristers handed back a note saying that I must not laugh out loud at this tosh or make adverse comments. Thomas was asked what he thought was inciting about the phrase ‘we must recreate, and turn our backs on technology’ taken from GA 31, and he claimed that it ‘resonates’ with the concepts of ‘Spectacle and Recovery’. Thomas linked together GA, Robin Webb, Saxon, the Angry Brigade of the early 1970’s, into one seamless ‘conspiracy’. Even the judge seemed to reject Thomas’s laughable interpretation of anarchist politics. Thomas was obviously out of his intellectual depth.

The object of the police is to arrest people. As at the committal, Thomas was quite proud of the fact that he had discovered a crime he could arrest virtually anybody for. When being asked about that long list of raids, Thomas boasted ‘All the people referred to on the searches could potentially have been defendants’. [48] He was questioned about the arbitrariness of his procedure; some of the other editors and former editors of GA, like John Rogerson or Kevin Lano, or Richard Hunt for that matter, had not been charged. Another individual, who was known by the police to be the author of a magazine called the Terra-ist, and who was arrested selling it at a World Day event, on 23^rd April 1994, in Hyde Park, but not charged then nor put in the Gandalf dock, was asked about. Thomas said the police had to stop somewhere. There had to be limits — the dock could only hold so many.

Thomas made a damaging declaration, which openly proclaimed the circularity of all their reasoning, when he said ‘They are guilty because they sit in the dock together’. This seems to me to be a correct statement regarding the legal position, but if so, why go to the expense and bother of having a trial?

It may be that each conspirator had his own ends in mind — Rogers, Booth and Wood, anarchistic; Webb and Russell, animal rights, Molland a mixture of both, as well as earth rights, the case is that all joined in the one conspiracy to incite others to commit criminal damage. [49]

‘Half Time’ Legal Arguments

The main legal arguments were over whether or not there were one or two ‘conspiracies’. Various possibilities and permutations were offered; that there might be a ‘Green Anarchist’ conspiracy separate from an ALF(SG) conspiracy. Perhaps there might also have been a ‘Justice Department Internet Conspiracy’. (Echoes of Operation Washington 1a ?) The prosecution was supposed to show that there was just one, single, overarching ‘conspiracy’. The problem was that the unitary overarching conspiracy was not a hypothesis to be proved, but a fundamental assumption pushed by the police, adopted by the prosecution and accepted by the judge alike. To abandon this assumption would mean abandoning the trial, a political development the judge, for one, was not prepared to accept.

Given the vagueness of the notion of ‘conspiracy’, the defence barristers were wrestling with fog. They might advance along one path, arguing about a specific link between A and B, (the 12 second phone call say) but as they moved, the fog of that fundamental assumption would close in behind them again. The barristers tried their best, but nobody can be criticised for not doing something that is impossible.

Various diagrams were produced to illustrate the tenuousness of the ‘links’ between the defendants. I for example, had never met Robin Webb, or Simon Russell, prior to the arrests. Saxon’s sole ‘contact’ with Robin Webb was that he attended a 1994 rally in Cambridge where Robin Webb spoke. We were shown a police video of Robin Webb speaking at a rally in Sheffield on the 16^th July 1994. Robin Webb had rung Paul Rogers twice, to try to arrange a speaking venue for the October 1994 ‘Anarchy in the UK’ festival, one of the calls lasted for 9 seconds, somebody else answered the phone, Paul was out, and that was it! — It was that tenuous.

Some of this legal argument was hypothetical. ‘If there was indeed a conspiracy, then there were two of them...’ found the legal system at its surreal worst. Some of the barristers’ pleas were ingenious, but it was no surprise to me that Judge Selwood rejected them all.

On October 13^th, Steve Kamlish, the barrister acting for Saxon Wood, argued that Saxon’s intention (mens rea) was not to incite criminal damage. Steve said Saxon’s taped interview at Lymington showed this. The Judge’s response exposed the circularity of the whole case. GA is inciting, and therefore anybody associated with it is guilty. Saxon distributed it, and so conspired to incite. Essentially robotic and rubber stamp like, the task of the court was simply to fit people into the green chairs of the dock. ‘They are guilty because they sit in the dock together.’ Something like the Gandalf case is not about reasoned argument — yet another reason for rejecting the illusions of the liberal paradigm.

GA issue 36 printed a list of MP’s addresses, together with the rubric ‘have fun lobbying them’. This was taken to be some sort of incitement. A comparable list of MP’s addresses and phone numbers were published in the Sun newspaper, (July 31^st 1996) after some MP’s refused to vote for a guns ban after the Dunblane massacre. We wanted to introduce this for comparison purposes, but it was ruled inadmissible by Judge Selwood. Ben was quite upset by this. Any and every irrelevant document, like the ‘Matron From Hell’, thought helpful to the prosecution, or capable of prejudicing the jury, was allowed. ‘Tell The Six Guilty MP’s What You Think..’ from the Sun was excluded. One law for Murdoch, another for GA.

Saxon’s barrister Steve Kamlish, was responsible for one of the more dramatic moments of the trial, on Wednesday 15^th October, when he told the judge of his intention to inform the jury of their right to stop the case at any point. Naturally, Selwood opposed this, but what did he have to fear from the Good Burghers of Portsmouth? How many juries know of this right, and if no one knows this right exists, how shall they exercise it? Selwood fumed, but had to allow it. The cops and the judge were on safe territory though. They don’t accept any nonsense about freedom of speech in Dachau on Sea. As expected, the ratepayers’ association failed to assert their membership of any ethical community, and this was the first concrete indication of what was to come later.

Three of the Accused Take the Stand

ONSLOW: Are there links between the ALF(SG) and Green Anarchist?

SIMON RUSSELL: If you go far enough, there’s going to be links somewhere.

Saxon, Noel and Simon all went into the witness box. I did not, and I recommend this course to anyone faced with the same situation. In his case, Simon was right to go into the box as he was on as solid ground as he could be in that he had nothing to do with GA. Noel and Saxon were both wrong to take the stand, in my opinion.

The worst part of Saxon’s cross-examination, on October 15^th centred around the fact that Saxon had distributed the ‘Into the 1990’s With The ALF’ sabotage manual. In my opinion, Saxon did this because he believed in freedom of speech, not out of any fanatical commitment to animal rights. In the box, Saxon repudiated the politics of GA and described Paul Rogers as ‘a nutter’.

Noel Molland’s 21^st October testimony was probably the darkest point in the trial. Under direct questioning by Mr Onslow, Noel admitted that he supported butchers’ shop window breaking, damage to hunt supporters’ vehicles, damage to chicken sheds, Boots the Chemist, and criminal damage to road construction vehicles. He admitted that he thought his own newsletter, RAT ‘very stupid’. Even Judge Selwood joined in, and began asking prosecutatorial questions, unable to believe his own ears. What did Noel think a call for mass sabotage and economic damage in RAT issue 6 meant ?

... it would be too easy to confuse specific incitement to commit crime with the expression of political views (however extreme) and the methods to achieve the aims.

Venton Memorandum

And so it went on, with poor Noel sinking deeper and deeper into the shit with every question. Black Widow catapults, paint stripper, ‘supermarket sabotage’, immobilising vehicles, light bulb paint bombs; the printed suggestion to ring up the ALF press officer and tell him what you’d done. The judge questioned Noel about his attitude to the JD. Noel disapproved of arson because it could endanger the lives of small animals, mice and spiders.

Simon Russell went into the box on October 23^rd. In his position as editor of the ALF(SG) newsletter, he had taken legal advice, and had every word vetted by a barrister, Quincey Whitaker. This was clear proof that Simon had no intention to incite, intention being necessary to the offence. The intended presentation of the barrister’s notes, clearing each issue of the ALF(SG) prior to publication, was a reversal of the normal legal myth of ‘innocent until proved guilty’. But could the documents be presented in court? The prosecution put every legal obstacle in the way, and tried to have these notes ruled inadmissible, because legal advice from counsel to a defendant is protected by legal rules of confidentiality. After much legal argument, the Quincey letters were allowed in. [50]

At the committal hearing and throughout the trial, we often returned to this Alice in Wonderland argument that to publish a disclaimer at the end of a magazine is indicative of the intention to incite. Personally, I have no faith in disclaimers, legally they are not worth the paper they are written on. Let the magazine stand in its own right. This said, GA carries a disclaimer on it. Something of the same ‘if they float, they are guilty’ logic was applied against Simon Russell’s seeking of legal advice. To seek advice is indicative of intent to circumvent the law. [51] Wrestling with fog again.

The second front of the prosecution attack on Simon was about his previous animal rights conviction. Part of Simon’s defence was that he had been in prison previously, and so had no intention of going back there. He even wished to call his former Probation Officer to corroborate this. That was one reason why he was always sure of checking the ALF(SG) out with the barrister. There are rules about not mentioning previous convictions in court, but as this was germane to questions of intention, after legal argument, it was eventually allowed.

The third front of the ‘case’ against Simon hinged on the list of JD parcel bombings posted on the World Wide Web. A Canadian, Darren Thurston, was going to come to court and testify that he put the list on the web. Legal aid money was sought to fund the air fare. When Thurston arrived at Heathrow airport, on October 12^th, he was arrested by immigration officials, and deported back to Canada, supposedly on false information supplied by the RCMP [52] Simon, who went to the airport to collect him, was also interrogated. As ‘Underground’ magazine puts it; ‘The involvement of the RCMP, a foreign security service, shows the lengths the state went to, to twist the trial to secure a conviction.’ Perhaps the RCMP did indeed supply false information, but to do this they would have to have been approached by either Special Branch or MI5. Perhaps it was a collaboration between them (a conspiracy maybe?) I think that a simpler explanation is that the information went from the British Security Services directly to Heathrow, via contacts in the police or by telephone taps of the defendants. We only really have the immigration services’ own word for it that the information came from the RCMP. Just another aspect of the secret state in operation. All this effort just to prevent one defence witness testifying....

Judicial Transmogrifications. Judge Selwood’s Summing Up

This said, I am strongly opposed to measures that are going to undermine the autonomy of local groups or turn the GA network into a talking shop ... Such discussions should remain informal, with those hearing views they disagree with arguing against them and opposing tactics they disagree with by refusing to lend them their support. [53]

Judge Selwood began his summing up on Wednesday 5^th November, the same day that a protest had been planned, during which the judge would be burned in effigy outside his own court. Selwood was at great pains to deny that the case was a political trial.

He suggested five categories of incitement: (1) How to do it. (2) Direct exhortation, eg ‘get out there and do it’. (3) Promoting of literature, eg reviews and ads. (4) Lists of actions. (5) Narratives of actions.

Selwood then went on to review the evidence against each of the six in turn, starting with ‘Virtual Defendant’ Robin Webb. Selwood then went on to Paul Rogers, likewise absent from court. This took all morning.

After his return from the Mayoral Luncheon, Judge Selwood got a little hazy over the names of the remaining defendants, even though we were sitting in front of him all those weeks, while Paul and Robin were not. Selwood started with Saxon Webb, who lived at Parkhurst, (the name of a prison on the Isle of Wight) a somewhat Freudian slip indicative of judicial prejudice. The magazine itself changed its name from ‘Green Anarchist’ to ‘Green Activist’. Later, the defendant became Saxon Booth, in much the same way that later ‘Mad Dog Guzman’ became ‘Old Man Gazman’. The premiss behind many of Selwood’s comments was that ‘knowledge entails guilt’. The defendant, (whatever his name was) obviously knew of the publication; Green Activist, Do Or Die, or ‘Into the 1990’s With The ALF’ and certainly distributed them, but the magazine or booklet incited criminal damage and so Saxon Webb must be guilty.

‘My filing system is my flaw’ — Saxon’s interview transcript.

‘My filing system is my floor...’ — What he really said on tape. (30^th September)

Judge Selwood then went on to sneer about Noel’s RAT newsletter, particularly the ‘Janet and John’ story about catapulting the window of ‘Murdering Bastard the family butcher’. Then he mentioned the quick drying cement down the toilets at McDonalds, and all the rest of that. The judicial parody continued with a summary of the evidence against myself, mixing up Noel’s character reference as though it referred to me, claiming there was no evidence I ever met or spoke to Robin Webb (true) or to Paul Rogers (!), and describing me as ‘talented in a strange if unpleasant way’. A high compliment. He mentioned the water tank sabotage idea. In the course of wandering through various bits of correspondence, my jokey address of Kropotkin on Sea was judicially transformed to ‘Potemkin on Sea’. The oft cited quote ‘GA sets great store by its results pages’ was trotted out again, as was Rabid Eigol. Judge Selwood described me as ‘an archetypal anarchist’.

As Selwood read out the editorial to Anarchist Lancaster Bomber issue 10, Summer 1995, (Exhibit 268), his voice got louder, and his face got redder. This was the LB editorial after the first raids, calling for better actions and better magazines, announcing that freedom is worth defending, and saying ‘The illusion that ordinary people have anything in common with Tory Blair or Maurice Minor must be smashed. We have no common interest with any part of the state.’ Selwood declared that the Lancaster Bomber magazine was not harmless. (Conspiracy to incite criminal damage to political illusions — dangerous stuff!) After thus registering his disagreement with Mr Venton, Judge Selwood finished that afternoon sitting on a suitable note of high dudgeon, and must have considered it a job well done.

The next day, Friday 7^th November, after the 11:30 break, Judge Selwood then went on to summarise the case against Simon Rogers, or as he later had it, Paul Russell. [54] After this, he again stressed that the case had no political content or sub text behind it. At the end, Selwood mired himself down into a somewhat scholastic and casuistic argument about the difference between desire and intention, and whether both of these needed to be proved. By spinning it out in this way, the jury deliberations coincided with the start of the ALF fire bomber, Barry Horne. Doubtless, this would colour their deliberations.

Smashing the Image Factory. The Mainstream Media Response to the Gandalf Jailings

Indeed unless the billboards fall I’ll never see a tree at all.

Gandalf co-conspirator Ogden Nash

This is going to be a short section. The Daily Express, November 15^th 1997, page 2, ran the expected splash headline, ‘ANARCHISTS JAILED FOR BOMBING PLOT’. ‘No defence of press freedom from the Express then.’ [55] The Guardian, that suppository of all that the liberal establishment holds most dear, ran a more thoughtful piece by Diane Taylor, tucked away in the back G2 section [56] marred by the sensationalistic picture of a masked up ALF activist plastered over most of the page. This item was shown on TV’s ‘Big Breakfast Show’, and I have the distinction of being skitted on there, not for my politics, but for my bad hair cut. Media trivialization. Diane Taylor also wrote the article ‘The Man They Couldn’t Jail’ [57] pushing the animal lib ‘It’s all about Robin Webb’ angle. ‘People within the animal liberation movement believe the prime motivating force for the charges against the GA 3 and Russell was to drag Robin Webb along too..’ Er, and that’s it from the Big Boy Media. As the NUJ ‘Journalist’ magazine asked ‘Three jailed, where’s the commotion?’ [58]

Conclusion

The best way to fight for our own freedoms is to exercise them.

The mainstream media was mostly silent and complicit. Throughout the trial and after, the Portsmouth News was nothing more than a police sewer. (see note 30) Chris Atton, of ‘Index on Censorship’ wrote ‘Whilst mass media coverage has not been as hysterical as might be expected, given a case involving anarchists, it has been very disappointing.’ [59] The liberal establishment was also complicit, the group ‘Liberty’ promising help, and sending an observer on just two days out of the 12 week trial, after the end putting out a watery statement suggesting something ought to be done about multiple inchoate offences, while busy sucking up to Shayler. The Pinochet case has shown the close connection between the British judicial establishment and ‘Amnesty International’. The alternative movement, on the other hand, was amazing; the Oxford Statement of 5^th-7^th September 1997 being the real turning point, and ultimately vindicating my point of view about a political trial having to be opposed politically.

News about the case was reported on the internet, taken up by Index on Censorship, and London Greenpeace began organising a campaign. While I was in prison, letters of support kept coming in from all over the world; USA, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, Scandinavia, Argentina, as well as from all over Britain. The writers of the many magazines in those supermarket trolleys of evidence wheeled into court every day of the trial were all now on our case; and together formed an effective, multiple path, multi-mode means of transmitting information. The Undercurrents video was going the rounds. The very diversity of the radical movement was our strongest point. Far from being a single, monolithic, over-arching ‘conspiracy’, there were people from all over the world, from a variety of political standpoints, all saying ‘We’ve never even heard of you, we probably don’t agree with your politics, but this is totalitarian, it stinks, we oppose it, and you are coming out of there...’

The mainstream media were silent, hostile, but they couldn’t silence the alternative press. The supermarket trolleys of evidence found a sort of counterpart in the wodge of letters arriving at the prison every day. So it was that on March 27^th 1998, as I struggled to carry those four huge prison bin bags full of letters of support out of the gatehouse at Lancaster Castle, I saw that the trial had failed. For all their lies and propaganda, they just couldn’t silence the radical press. So, don’t think that what you do doesn’t make a difference.

Stephen Booth

12^th January 1999.

Issue 57-58

Date: Sep 1999

Keywords: Millenium Bug.

Read here

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False Flag Again

We expose the disinformers

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Mouthpiece Micah

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Fuckwit, His Guru

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False Flag

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The Irrationalists 7

Steve Booth restates his controversial 'Irrationalists' article, which has so upset the anarcho-establishment

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Introduction

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In what way is irrationalism an outworking of anarchist theory

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The state we're in and where it's all heading

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Liberalism becomes totalitarian

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What do we want? What do we really, really want?

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An end to gesture politics

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The future - more of the same, only worse

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Types of protest groups

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The uselessness of terrorism

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An end to negotiation

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Ted K Update

Ted Kaczynski, imprisoned as the Unabomber, had his first appeal turned down this June. He was not helped by his lawyer, Prof. Richard Bonney of Virginia Law School, fucking him off within three weeks of the appeal. Ted K was forced to hand-write a 120 page submission to court himself despite his lack of ...

John Ball — Primitivist: The Peasants’ Revolt and the State of Nature

No Poll Tax: The Peasants’ Revolt

When a third poll tax in five years was levied to fund the failing war in France, the peasants of the hundred of Barnstaple, Essex, were first to rise up on 29^th May 1381. Soon the peasantry were on the march through the Kent countryside too under Wat Tyler, sacking the manors of unpopular landlords, burning court rolls, breaking open prisons and forcing all they met to swear allegiance to ‘King and Commons’. They took Rochester Castle with hardly a fight on 6^th June, Canterbury on the 10^th and Maidstone the next day as they began their march on London. In Canterbury they barged into the cathedral during a service, threatening to have Archbishop Sudbury, who they deemed ‘traitor’ for misadvising Richard II on the French War. He was in London at the time, but ultimately found no refuge there.

Excommunicate John Ball, ‘the mad priest of Kent’, enters this story on 11^th June, when he was broken out of ecclesiastical custody in Maidstone. He’d been banged up there for unsanctioned preaching in April. By his own account, he began preaching in York, then Colchester (where Wat Tyler came from), then spent 20 years tramping round Kent, spreading his unorthodox gospel, being imprisoned twice for it. After releasing him once, Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury complained:

“He had slunk back to our diocese like a fox that evades the hunter, and feared not to preach and argue both in churches and churchyards (without the leave or against the will of the parochial authorities) and also in markets and other profane places, there beguiling the ears of the laity by his invectives, and putting about scandals concerning our own person, and those of other prelates and clergy, and (what is worse) using concerning the Holy Father himself dreadful language such as shocked the ears of good Christians.” [60]

What with the Church’s heavy embroilment in secular affairs — to the point of its leader in England approving the poll tax, and the Papacy divided between Rome and Avignon and at war with itself due to the Great Schism, it is no surprise such criticisms were voiced in England decades before Wycliffe.

Ball distinguished himself when the peasant armies of Kent and Essex rallied on Blackheath on 13^th June. According to hostile church chronicler Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, Ball began his sermon:

“When Adam dalf (dug), and Eve span Who was thanne a gentilman?”

“He then explained that From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord”

and ended by recommending

“uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future.” [61]

Walsingham concluded by noting the rebels’ rapturous approval of John Ball. They said only he was fit to assume the Chancellor Archbishop’s office when they’d found and beheaded the present incumbent.

This is probably not what he intended (see below) but following the king’s failure to negotiate, the insurgents went on to destroy Marshalsea prison, Lambeth Palace, and the homes of the Treasurer and the Mayor of London before entering the city proper unopposed on 13^th June. Historians argue whether the London mob or guild factions hostile to the Mayor opened the gates, though the former certainly participated in the extraordinary scenes that followed. After crossing London Bridge, they broke open Fleet Prison, destroyed all property of the Knights of St John (treasurer of Hales’ Order) and sent the lawyers and professional perjurers fleeing from the Temple and made a bonfire of all the legal records and law books they could find to delighted cries of ‘Away with the learning of the clerks’ A chronicler described the scene:

“It was marvellous sere how the most aged and infirm of them (lawyers) scrambled off, with the agility of rats or evil spirits.” [62]

Then they turned their attentions to the Savoy, Palace of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and military leader during the war in France. The Anonimalle Chronicle gives a particularly lively account:

“at last they came before the Savoy, broke open the gates, entered the palace and came to the wardrobe. They took all the torches they could find, and lighted them, and burned all the cloths, coverlets and beds, as well as the very valuable head-boards ... All the napery and other goods they could discover they carried into the hall and set on fire with their torches ... It is said that they found three barrels of gunpowder, and thinking it was gold or silver, they threw them into the fire so that the powder exploded and set the hall in a greater blaze than before, to the great loss and damage to the Duke of Lancaster.” [63]

The emphasis was on destruction rather than looting, or punishing ‘traitors’ One rebel was killed by the others for taking a single silver cup from the Savoy. [64]

Their first day’s destruction in London done, the peasants camped beneath the tower where the young king, advisors and retinue including Sudbury and Hales had taken refuge. Unable to escape, Richard II agreed to hear his ‘most loyal subjects’ demands at Mile End the next day. There Wat Tyler demanded the abolition of serfdom and all feudal dues, a general amnesty, the abolition of monopolies and a 4d per acre rent for all free tenants. The king said he agreed to all this and handed out dozens of charters saying as much. If he’d been sincere, Richard’s actions would have destroyed the feudal nobility as a class that day, the realisation of peasant aspirations since before the Black Death, but the charters later proved not worth the vellum they were written on.

One demand Tyler did win, through direct action rather than relying on the king’s word, was an end to the ‘traitorous’ architects of the poll tax. Whilst the king was still at Mile End, Tyler led a few hundred supporters into the Tower and beheaded Archbishop Sudbury, treasurer Hales and a couple of hangers on. The threats made in Canterbury only four days previously had been made good. The guard did nothing to stop them being dragged from their apartments, fearing this would put the king in jeopardy amidst the mob at Mile End.

Many peasants were conned into returning home with their worthless charters, leaving London to ‘the demagogues and the criminals and the fanatics’ [65] who exploited Authority’s palpable weakness to the max. Tyler’s lieutenant Jack Straw — a man of quite different character to the current Home Secretary! — torched the Priory of St John’s Manor in Highbury, while looting swept the city. The warden of Marshalsea was dragged from the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey and beheaded, and blocks were set at every major street corner where all who would not affirm support for ‘King and Commons’ met the same fate — surprisingly, only a few hundred. [66]

The occupation of London culminated in a second meeting between Tyler and Richard II at Smithfield Market. The king was treated most disrespectfully (by a commoner, no less) and it was later claimed he intended to seize the monarch there to use him as a puppet and hostage throughout England. Tyler’s second set of demands were even more radical than the first, and John Ball had considerable input. They included the abolition of outlawry and all law except that of Winchester [67], of all nobility except the king, and of all bishoprics save one; and the distribution of all church estates amongst the laity. With some political astuteness, the king tried to disarm Tyler’s demands by saying he would ‘grant all that was in (my) power to grant’ — which sounded good but meant fuck all, as the sovereign couldn’t grant any of this without Parliamentary approval and the nobles there were hardly likely to agree their own abolition. The negotiation closed when Tyler tried to pick a fight with one of the king’s retinue, but was run through repeatedly by the Mayor of London. Richard II could have gone down to the mob at this point — Oman notes the presence of ‘John Ball and other wild extremists ... in the press.’ [68] but conned them to follow him through Aldersgate while his underling, mercenary Sir Robert Knolles, rallied the propertied classes if London to surround and disperse the rebels. At this time, the king granted mercy, but he later revoked the charters he’d granted two days earlier and ordered the rebels hunted down.

When London fell to the rebels, peasants also rose in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (the university being a particular target in the latter county) and trouble eventually spread as far as Bridgewater, Somerset, and Beverley and Scarborough in Yorkshire. This was all put down quickly enough when the king regained control of the capital, the only pitched battles being at Billericay and North Walsham, 26-28^th June, the rebels being chased from behind their ditch and cart defences on the first charge. John Ball escaped the debacle of Smithfield, but was captured hiding in Coventry in July 1381 and taken for trial in St Albans. Working in conjunction with Jack Straw and the other London rebels during the rising, William Grindcobbe had humiliated the abbot, Thomas de la Mare, for keeping the town to feudal exactions over a century behind the rest of England. He was adjudged a ‘traitor’ alongside John Ball, and also hung, drawn and quartered on 17^th July.

The Coming Millennium

What were John Ball’s ‘ravings’ [69] so furiously denounced by Walsingham, which led to Ball’s persecution in life and ultimately violent death?

Church chroniclers put much effort into smearing Ball as a Wycliffite, conveniently forgetting Ball’s preachings preceded Wycliffe’s by over a decade. More to the point, though both call for radical reform of the church, Wycliffe counsels obedience to those secular authorities he thought could realise his vision whilst Ball more radically dismisses them as ‘tares’. Also, Ball nowhere shows the materialist contempt for the Host that Wycliffe was so renowned for. I’m inclined to support Oman’s view that:

“His inspiring idea was the ‘evangelical poverty which had been preached by the Franciscans in the previous century [70] to the point of even calling for the exemption of the friars (great enemies of Wycliffe, incidentally) from the general purge of clergy on occasion, but I would add to this that this does nothing to refute the accusations of heresy Ball’s contemporaries made against him.”

Dismayed at this degeneration of the monasteries into worldliness and affirming the poverty of Christ, St Francis rejected virtually all poverty and possessions. In 1211, canny Pope Innocent III decided it’d be better to have St Francis ‘inside the church pissing out, than outside pissing in’. By allowing advocates of Christian poverty within the church, he made possible counter-attacks against the heretics like the Cathars outside it living lives of poverty and attacking the church for its worldliness. This — and wanton massacre at the hands of crusaders — proved pretty effective in countering Catharism, but St Francis rather mucked things up by leaving a personal testimony trying to hold his followers to his extreme personal example and so stop his order degenerating into worldliness too after his death. When this degeneration inevitably set in, friars under Peter John Olivi of Narbonne stuck with St Francis’s testimony and formed a ‘Spiritual’ party which was denounced as heretical at the end of the 13^th century. Fired up by the millennarian weltanschauung of Joachim of Fiore, the persecuted Spirituals argued they were the true inheritors of Christ and the church that ejected them were imposters of Anti-Christ. They got quite violent about it. [71]

The Spiritual Franciscan tradition never made it to England en masse and the last noteworthy incursion of heresy had been a smattering of Pastereux crusaders in the previous century, who were quickly seen off. This doesn’t mean that the odd friar couldn’t have worked it out from first principles and passed the word to Ball — or that Ball might have thought things through for himself, hence the heterodox ‘hedge’ nature of his vernacular preaching. Norman Cohn argues strongly that Ball’s reference to the ‘tares’ was millennarian in content.

“By proclaiming that this prophecy is now on the point of fulfilment, that the harvest time appointed by God has come at last, the sermon in effect summons the common people, as children of the Kingdom, to carry out the annihilation of the demonic powers which was to usher in the Millennium.” [72]

He also cites one of Ball’s letters, arguing ‘God gives redress, for now is time’ as indicative of the imminence of the Second coming. Rodney Hilton also spots apocalyptic content in Ball’s couplet

“John the Mullere hath yground smal,
smal, smal
The kynges son of hevene (Christ)
schal pay for al.” [73]

and suggests this mentality suffused the revolting peasantry rather than being idiosyncratic to Ball himself. the strange general forbearance from looting at the Savoy and wholesale massacre of ‘tares’ in London support this view, reminiscent as they are of the Biblical example of Joshua’s storming of Jericho [74] Moderate historians like Oman argue:

“There were no attacks on the clergy qua clergy (though plenty of assaults on them in their capacity of landlords) no religious outrages, not setting forth of doctrinal grievances, no iconoclasm, singularly little church breaking.” [75]

To dismiss religious elements in the revolt and to present the rebels as moderates with purely economic grievances. We’ve seen already that most millennarian movements are provoked by the worldliness and carnality of the church (‘in their capacity of landlords’) and Tyler’s demands for the smashing of the church at Smithfield. Certainly the ‘wild extremists’ still remaining in London that phrased these demands wanted more than the revocation of a few feudal dues. A curiously anti-egalitarian anomaly — applied by the peasant mob to Ball himself after his great sermon on Blackheath — was the retention of one representative of nobility and clergy when all others were to be swept away. Hilton suggests

“Was this illusion or a practical recognition of the ultimate need for power in the state to reside somewhere? ... They seem to have envisaged a people’s monarchy (or monarchies) in which there would be no intermediary between the king and his people, that is, no class of landowning nobles and gentry controlling law and administration. Similarly, there would be a people’s church whose basic unit would be the parish, again with no intermediate hierarchy between Christians and the single bishop or archbishop who, as head of the church was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the people’s king. Somehow the people would make the law and administer justice.” [76]

That the insurgents argued for restructuring their whole society rather than just suggesting new counsellors replace the ‘traitors’ shows how far from cap-doffing petitioners they were. They certainly went further than the ‘revolutionary’ Levellers two centuries later — though, of course, they could have gone even further.

The State of Nature

However, my purpose here is not to establish the millenarian credentials of John Ball and his revolting peasants, but to draw out the primitivist content of his gospel. Strangely Hilton leads in here by noting

“Sermons in denunciation of the rich ... were not exclusive to heretics or other conscious rebels against ecclesiastical or secular authority. They were a common-place of clerical moralists who selected the characteristic crimes of every estate in the social order for castigation ... Walsingham was no doubt right in attributing to John Ball the sermon text ‘When Adam dalf and Eve span, who was than a gentilman’ but it was already a commonplace in this or similar forms, as is shown in an early fourteenth century religious poem: [77]

“When Adam delf and Eve span
Whare was than the pride of man?”

Why the medieval church was beset by endless eruptions of egalitarian heresy is because egalitarianism was an intrinsic — if awkward — part of their own ideology. The very basis of monasticism and the mendicant orders that followed them was Acts IV, which describes how the primitive Christian community in Jerusalem

“had all things common ... and distribution was made unto every man according to his need.”

Looking back to Eden — and the Stoics — St Ambrose (no less) said:

“The Lord God specially wanted this earth to be the common possession of all, and to provide fruits for all; but avarice produced the rights of property.” [78]

Nor was he alone in this opinion, through a route too unlikely to go into here [79], a passage glorifying the communistic state of Nature — even free love — was included in the basic Canon Law text, Gratian’s Decretum. (!)

There appears to be nothing between the sentiments of St Ambrose and John Ball (or Gerrard Winstanley, for that matter), but in fact the Church fathers did create a distinction. In his City of God, sourpuss St Augustine argued

“inequality, slavery, coercive government and even private property had no part in the original intention of God and had come into being only as a result of the Fall. Once the Fall had taken place, on the other hand, a development began which made such institutions indispensable. Corrupted by Original Sin, human nature demanded restraints which would not be found in an egalitarian order; inequalities of wealth, status and power were thus not only consequences of but also remedies for sin.” [80]

Just as Ball took conventional Church doctrine on the Millennium and radicalised it by making it imminent, so he took church doctrine on the communitarian state of Nature and radicalised it by rejecting the Fall and Original Sin [81]. There were those in the Spiritual Franciscan tradition that had — perhaps — come to the same conclusion [82] but this is more typical of the antinomian tradition beginning in the early 13^th Century with the Brethren of the Free Spirit. [83]

In looking to the origins of his society — albeit mythical ones — in order to explain and challenge the present, John Ball was a primitivist. In advocating equality in an abundant Nature, Ball came close to anarcho-primitivism, though we’ve already shown the residue of hierarchical thinking in his world view.; and in the earliest communities, people gathered the fruits of the earth rather than dug them up...

Looking for a utopian element in the Peasants’ revolt, Fredy Perlman also looked to Eden.

“The poor priests .. read aloud about a place called Eden where there were no priests or lords or merchants, where human beings were kin and shared all things in common.” [84]

Also noting Ball’s:

“Good folk, things cannot go well in England nor shall until all things are in common and there is neither villein nor noble, but all of us are of one condition.” [85]

Perlman places himself firmly in the millennarian, primitivist camp, arguing this is about the supercession of class society, utopia, not workerism.

“The English insurgents announce the end of the Leviathanic world, not its completion. The condition the insurgents want is not universal villeinage but universal freedom; it is the condition of communities of free human beings in the state of nature, unencumbered by Leviathanic separations and usurpations. The rebels say common people can cast off their yoke if they will; they can all gather the wheat and burn the tares. The wheat is Eden. The tares are priests and lords, lawyers and judges, masters and merchants.” [86]

If John Ball has passed any lesson for us down through the annals of history, this one — and none less — is still worth hearing. Not of moderation, of putting limited demands for financial improvement, but of the revolutionary desire for authenticity and true human community that underlay them, of the courage to fight for ourselves and our visions.

Issue 59

Date: Mar 2000

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Statement from Ted Kaczynski

Dear GA,

Beau Freidlander is publishing my book, Truth versus Lies, and he has been generously helpful to me in various ways, for example, by providing me with money to coveer my mailing costs. ...

Friends of Ted Kaczynski

Ted's expose of the lies told about him by his family and the mainstream media, Truth versus Lies, has been awaiting publication by Context Books for the last year. One reason for this delay is that Ted's grassing brother David is not allowing Ted to use letters he wrote proving David's a liar.

Issue 60-61

Date: Jun 2000

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Friends of Ted Kaczynski

Arrested in 1995 as the Unabomber, Amerika's Most Wanted, and accused of a 17 year-long anti-tech mail bombing campaign that left genetic engineers, cyberneticians, timber lobbyists and others dead and injured, Ted was sentenced to life without parole after a farcical trial in Sacramento, California, in 1998.

Ted is now held in Florence supermax, notorious across Amerika. Denied visits from nearly everyone he wants to see, Ted's only real contact with the Outside is by mail. His publisher Context Books, used to cover Ted's mailing costs but his deal with them fell through.

Please make your donations to support an anarchist political prisoner

A letter can cost as little as 36c

Ted Kaczynski, P.O.B 8500, ...

Lydia Eccles, P.O.B ...

Green Anarchist, BCM 1715, London WCIN 3XX, UK

Donations preferably in dollars and well-concealed cash. Clearly mark your donation 'Friends of Ted Kaczynski' and leave cheques 'Payee' blank. Donations straight to Ted should be by international money orders (IMO) and quote his prisoner number, 04475-046.

Issue 64-65

Date: Jun 2001

Read here

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Comrades of Kaczynski Summer Solstice Communique

... Ted Kaczynski is an example of a modern hunter-gatherer. Although never able to live entirely off the system (he spent something like $200 or less a year on food, staples and supplies such as matches, excluding money spent on actions), Kaczynski is living proof that the civilised can make huge strides in attempting to go feral. ...

... As Comrades of Kaczynski, we remain in solidarity with every crack in every piece of concrete. We hope to spread similar cracks in the collective conciousness enforced by the Powers-That-Be, whether those powers are reformist / leftist / liberal groups trying to contain and control revolt or police officers ordering us back onto the sidewalks, off corporate lawns and eventually into jail cells and early graves. Any enemy of freedom and wildness is our enemy. No one is perfect, and in this light, we support all of our comrades both in physical prisons and in the mental prisons we are constantly breaking out of. The transition from theory to practice is a sloppy one, but one that Kaczynski made and made effectively. This ccivisation is most definitely collapsing, and all of us who love the wild are going to push this fucker over the edge.

No regrets in the war for the wild, bring on the fuckin; ruckus.

He Tried To Save Us by Comrades of Kaczynski

Pamphlets

He Tried To Save Us by Comrades of Kaczynski. Price from Anarchists Anonymous Distro, P.O.Box 580444 MPLS, MN 55458, USA.

This 80-page compilation of selected pieces by or about Ted Kaczynski (convicted of the Unabombings in 1998) includes his 'Morality and Revolution' from GA 60-61, pictures of Ted's cabin under lock and key as evidence for his trial in a USAF hangar, and the original Postal Inspection Service wanted poster. Aside from Ted's rather obviously polemical short story 'Ship of Fools' (first published in Off) and his 1971 essay (which his grassing brother claimed 'resembled' the Freedom Club manifesto, Industrial Society & Its Future despite its reformist conclusions), none of this material features on the very out-of-date and rubbishy main website regarding Ted K and the Unabomber case - not even John Zerzan's 'Whose Unabomber?', which has been around since 1995.

The complete intro, with its "one person can affect tremendous change" tone, demonstrates the Comrades of Kaczynski's revolutionary credentials. Surprisingly then, relatively liberal discussion of the legal aspects of the case are most interesting - Michael Mello and the New Yorker author showing up the disgusting way Ted's lawyers acted at trial--denying him counsel of his choice, keeping him in the dark about outside media coverage and even supressing defence campaigns before final ...

Issue 66 - Globalisation

Date: Mar 2002

Read here

The Emperor Wears No Clothes: More on Mayday, May Day!

Written by John Connor before Prague S26 for the Reflections on MayDay anthology, this article was not published in it, further underlining his point about Chiapatnik manipulation of popular assemblies and restriction of debate within their ‘acceptable limits’.

Why debate with those that won’t listen? Certainly RTS isn’t listening to Earth First!. After every big London street party “against capitalism”, the consensus at EF! gatherings has been that capitalism isn’t the totality of our oppression. RTS always accepts this, only to ignore it hyping their ‘next big thing’. Rightly refusing representation, consensus conclusions at EF! gatherings are not binding and neither is RTS what it was, London EF!. Anarcho-ouvrierists who jumped on the RTS bandwagon as a result of the MayDay conferences from 1998 on — those responsible for the ‘bad penny’ references to capitalism — generally don’t even attend EF! gatherings, reducing the participation of those that do to propaganda / recruitment exercises. If they’re not prepared to listen to EF!ers criticism, the only purpose of RTSers attending EF! gatherings is to persuade others to contribute to their project on RTS’s terms, increasingly necessary as this one-way ‘dialogue’ means fewer and fewer are willing to organise street parties each time.

At the Winter 2000 Moot, RTS were told that protesting on a bank holiday would reduce the event to mere demonstration, symbolic and not direct action, and that this lack of true focus could be disastrous. Learning that this date had been imposed by the ouvrierists post-N30 with an announcement to the media in order to boost their MayDay 2000 conference, most at the Moot said they’d organise local street parties rather than accept this fait accompli. Unable to heed this criticism, RTS carried on regardless, precipitating the predicted disaster and — because of the demo ‘law of gravity’ that builds big (London) demos at the expense of smaller (regional) ones — drawing the majority of EF!ers into it too. If there had been genuine dialogue, this disaster could have been averted, or at least mitigated by more successful local street parties.

The May Day autopsy process at the EF! Summer Gathering was another exercise in illusory participation. There were half-a-dozen workshops over the course of days with ‘issues’ discussed in the minutest detail and endless quibbles about process and garbled report-backs, but by the time we all reached the last session everyone (especially facilitators) was so exhausted by the same people saying the same things again and again that even the patter of rain on the meeting-space roof was excuse enough for it to fizzle out. This ‘prevailing through exhaustion’ technique reminded me of the old CP’s, except critics get to bore themselves silly, which looks so much more participatory and leaves them feeling they only have themselves to blame! The autopsy process was made all the more futile by RTS’s indifference to any conclusion that could have come out of it anyway. Even if those present had cared — and their concerns appeared limited to improving the next street party, their reason d’tre, rather than whether there should be one — past experience shows that those that weren’t wouldn’t have.

Most depressing — and one thing that decided me to contribute to this anthology — was the discussions about ‘the next big thing’, Prague S26, going on parallel to the May Day autopsy at the Gathering. It was obvious from this that those hyping it had learned next to nothing They were as wedded to the mass demo formula as ever, even though May Day had shown how problematic it was. S26’s leading lights — the usual ‘organisers’ and ‘empire-builders’ — were urging passivity, stressing the objective was recruitment / propaganda and building up their contacts “for next time” rather than trying to kick the WTO out this time, in the spirit of Seattle N30. When will the WTO next be in Prague then, and why gather activists from across the world there for S26 if not to take action? Those suggesting disruption in this workshop were pointedly ignored and any that occurs is now likely to arise only as self-defence against fascist provocation, not as necessary, concerted offensive action. Throughout, the implicit agenda was leading lights aggrandising themselves by inculcating representational principles, both within EF!UK in the name of concerted action on demos (those falling for this being offered the compensation of thinking themselves ‘professionals’, ‘the select few’ in on the next trend) and beyond it in the name of international liaison.

But — again — why debate with those that won’t listen? Aside from testing the integrity of this platform (well done on that, anyway, assuming you’ve published [but they didn’t!]), this provides a space for responsibility and remembering, both things RTS aren’t hot on, now even revising their ‘No M11’ roots. I’m not saying they should stupidly ‘stand up and be busted’, just that the ‘house style’ is against future best effort. Hopefully elsewhere in this anthology, Squall’s Jim Paton has put the counter-argument to the ‘official version’ that May Day was somehow really about guerrilla gardening in Parliament Square and everything that happened elsewhere is to be blanked. I’ll take this opportunity to point to an elsewhen, Euston N30, where RTS offered no analysis and little comment on police provocation and subsequent easy containment of that event (‘the kettle’), rendering everyone vulnerable to carbon-copy treatment by the Met on May Day. This failure to acknowledge and learn from past mistakes means there are still idiots out there insisting ‘J18 was great’ as if every subsequent event will be a simple replay. They’re evidently totally oblivious to the law of diminishing returns operating with these mass demos or even such obvious local factors as demonstrators being unfocused and less up for it on May Day v. the Met being better prepared, resourced and trained to deal with public order situations than City police on what was their own best patch, central London. The point of debating here is not to appeal to those RTSers that won’t listen, but to others that will.

Mass and Mayday

One distinction made endlessly at the Summer 2000 Gathering was between big demos and mass demos. The latter were characterised as exercises in manipulation, a small number of organisers steering a large number of other, ignorant people where they wanted them to go to do what they wanted them to do. Another feature of this is RTS propaganda being dished out on the day to facilitate this process and to represent to participants and, more importantly, the media what the spectacle ‘really means’. RTS came in for a lot of criticism for the content of literature issued during J18 (some spuriously equating criticism of finance capital with anti-Semitism!), but almost none for presuming to represent the views of the majority of participants per se. These leaflets often present anti-globalisation issues in the opposite of concrete terms, adequate for disseminating ‘group-think’ jargon to the faithful but — as the May Day disaster demonstrated — the opposite of useful. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the emphasis on sound systems has now reduced, but the mass of people on events like May Day are really there for the party and adventure, not because of ‘issues’, and RTS’s current manipulative style only encourages this passive consumption of protest. Given their indifference to the motivations of the majority (and their ineffectiveness in disseminating their brand of ideology), is it surprising that most come to street parties with mainstream media-created expectations of them and act accordingly? (One plus: this blows all peace police talk of imposing ground-rules on street parties out the water). Figleaves to ‘popular participation’ like the microphones in Parliament Square aren’t enough — they were dead on the day and even if they hadn’t been, they’d have been used either to vent hot air (as with the Gathering autopsy) or by RTS to issue authoritative crowd directions (such de facto stewarding might have been necessary under the circumstances they’d contrived, perhaps, but hardly counts as ‘popular participation’).

Another problem with this representation is the shift in RTS manifestations from direct to symbolic action. The protest is about ‘sending a message’ rather than achieving anything in itself, what direct action is. This is a surrender of power to others supposed to act on the message rather than doing it yourself. The movement-building but not movement-doing tendency revealed by the approach of some organising Prague S26 is a variant of this and a symptom of the same problem — a slide into representation. The concern is with what looks impressive (numbers and publicity: spectacle) rather than with what is actually effective (direct action). Early RTS street parties were primarily direct action, pedestrians temporarily reclaiming space from cars. Reclaiming space from capital doesn’t mean anything on the same level — its temporary too but symbollocks because capitalism is more diffuse process than concrete place. As the original RTS Internet posting had an article by Graham Burdett in Green Anarchist 30 down as the inspiration for the guerrilla gardening on May Day, I particular want to take issue with this. Inspired by Anthony Wigen’s classic, The Clandestine Farm, Graham’s article suggested guerrilla gardening as a clandestine subsistence activity for small groups in diverse geographical locations, not a throwaway media stunt. No doubt a few will point to the odd dope plant left in Parliament Square as evidence that the guerrilla gardening was actually somehow ‘direct action’, but none of the veg planted then has fed anyone since, nor was it intended to. Endless blurb about the utopian potential of this action proves its symbolic intent — or else it wouldn’t have been done publicly and en masse, and it wouldn’t need explanation because in feeding people, its meaning would be directly obvious. I thought there was something particularly hollow about RTSers pitching May Day to ‘send a message’ symbolically and then take umbrage when this didn’t work out as they expected. What did they expect, given the reception they’ve always had from the mainstream media? Particularly noteworthy was the outrage directed against George Monbiot, supposedly ‘one of us’, for his Guardian piece despite endless previous proof of his moderation. Notably, this vitriol was not also thrown at The Ecologist’s Zac Goldsmith for a Telegraph piece equally hostile but also pushing his magazine’s very Right-wing ‘oppose corporations, not capitalism’ and ‘family, nation and tradition against globalisation’ lines. Then again, the Goldsmiths have put a lot more dosh into EF! UK through the back door than George Monbiot ever has....

I’d have thought it was prima facie unacceptable to pro-anarchy types to have a manipulative, hierarchical relationship between organisers and organised and — for what it’s worth — RTSers readily accepted this at the last Gathering. Affinity groups were suggested as a ‘half-way house’ solution, allowing big demos based on principles other than mass. Manchester’s May Day protest, where each group participating was given an action kit, was cited as an example of this in practice. However, this only involved a few hundred people, rather than the thousands attracted to big London street parties, and if they have trouble handing out enough leaflets, enough action kits is clearly going to be beyond their means. Perhaps this is a way for enlarging the number of active participants in a demo, but it still suggests central direction (eg. through issuing instructions in the action kits) and thus mass action with all the problems associated with that, just at one more remove. There’s also the problem of large numbers of out-of-it or leery people turning up anyway, led on by mass media expectations and not interested in this more self-directed activity. The most likely consequence of this is going to be a few hundred activist types acting in affinity groups and using the mass of others attending as cover, much as during J18. As well as being little more than a replay of previous elitism, current police containment tactics mean the time for this is past. Some will argue for this anyway, reasoning that getting large numbers of people together at a street party is more likely to win the ‘issue’ publicity and that some of those attending may ‘join the movement’ and take direct action later — propaganda / recruitment arguments. The difficulty with ‘publicity’ is that — as MA’M found to their cost, with the Met telling the mainstream media they were containing anti-monarchy demos MA’M never even called — is that the authorities now know the script and are scoring more points this way than the movement is, hardly surprising given the media’s own biases and the police’s better access to and control over it. Traditionally, a slagging from police mouthpieces in the mainstream media was simply adjudged the inevitable cost of effective direct action — but with the slide into representation, we’re getting a situation of bad publicity and no direct action either by way of compensation! No doubt the Met are thanking RTS for all that (unnecessary) bank holiday overtime too. A particular point to note here — and to show how the direct action movement moves in cycles — is that the authorities had no difficulty dealing with one-off / one-day disruption of the sort most street parties represents. During the early days of EF!UK, there were a series of blockades against tropical timber imports. The cops actually instructed mill owners targeted to shut down for the day, knowing blockaders and media would have a very boring day ahead (deterring both from future blockades) and the mill concerned could happily carry on with deforestation-as-usual the other 364 days of the year. This proved so successful that EF!UK was in a tail-spin until the start of the anti-roads campaign.

From Where to Where?

To summarise, RTS has gone from being a direct action movement superseding the traditional Left by uniting means and ends and effectively targeting what is specific and concrete, to a clique publicising grievances against airy abstractions using symbols, claiming to represent others probably indifferent to these ends by manipulating them into attending mass demos mainly for propaganda / recruitment purposes, like any Trotskyite party but without the ideological coherence. Before discussing alternatives, we need to ask how they made this transition.

Out of the 2^nd Encuentro for Human Dignity and Against Neo-Liberalism in Spain, RTS offshoot Peoples Global Action absorbed the Zapatistas anti-globalisation / anti-capitalist rhetoric and their penchant for delegates and mass organising (much of which is in the interest of the Zapatistas as a state-in-waiting, rather than the peasantry they presume to represent and whose ‘popular assemblies’ they manipulate true to their Maoist form). With anti-roads campaigns reaching a hiatus, the direct action movement looked to globalisation and capitalism as root causes for environmental degradation, especially when national regulations against it could be overridden by the likes of the WTO. Because of RTS’s effectiveness in opposing roads using direct action and their rather inarticulate anti-capitalist concerns, they linked with workers groups like the striking Liverpool dockers. ‘Linked’ is a shaky term here, implying formal agreement between formally-demarcated bodies, much like the old Left used to do. This wasn’t what was going on, but the idea of representatives with their contacts squirreled away ‘fixing things’ by acting as de facto delegates to workers groups in the name of anti-capitalism and the international anti-globalisation network obviously appealed to such people. Recognising a rhetoric and organising techniques increasingly like their own, RTS’s public activities drew in the anarcho-ouvrierists in a last-ditch throw to revitalise their tail-ending politics, something RTS had itself done much to discredit in the mid-1990s. With this came substantial back-doors bungs from the ouvrierists allies Chumbawamba, flush from signing to EMI, which further led to the use of catch-penny anti-capitalist rhetoric, discredited mass organising techniques, and secretiveness amongst the clique. Having an ability to deliver numbers to order is a big asset here, ultimately leading to absurdities like May Day, where a few people manoeuvred many others into a situation there was no opportunity for real direct action available whatsoever.

In terms of alternatives, we need to look why the anarcho-ouvrierist milieu failed before RTS repeats all of its mistakes. Their suggestion is that we need the active co-operation of the majority — typically identified in the vaguest terms as the working class — to make revolution, so we must adopt policies that will appeal to this majority and avoid issues and actions that won’t. By opting to struggle for a Cause as abstract from themselves (despite rhetoric, ouvrierists often make the revealing slip of calling the mass of people in society ‘they’ even if they’re working class themselves — their particular sect is, of course, ‘we’), this perspective is inevitably ideologised and shot through with all the difficulties of ideology. These include mistaking ideology for a complete world-view clashing with all others slightly different — such difference becoming a challenge to sectarian loyalties and power bases — slides into unthinking dogma, and a cult of self-sacrifice / self-denial akin to the repression / work fetishism that built this society and which is ultimately Christian in origin. Such a perspective is the worst concomitant of representation, intrinsically inauthentic and so inappropriate as a force for liberation. As proposing or acting on anything this majority aren’t already would be ‘substitutionalist’, anarcho-ouvrierist found themselves trailing behind various groups in dispute, repeating demands reformists were more likely to win them. Despite this, they claimed to represent the whole working class rather than only their own small group (or even just themselves), though the former hardly noticed them and would be most unimpressed if it did. The idea (often tricked up as ‘counter-power’) is to take the State’s legitimacy for themselves and then somehow to free the majority of society using this power. Concerned with mass mobilisation, they’ve never really dealt with the difficulties of delegating power and representing others in an authentically accountable way because that would discredit their whole perspective. As RTS are rapidly discovering and as any simple review of history would have shown them, you just can’t.

Rather than attempting to seize power or represent anyone but ourselves, we should recognise that we aren’t struggling for anyone else — our concern is with our own liberation, although by struggling against what oppresses us, we will contribute to the liberation of others also oppressed by it. The alternative to this is the cult of self-sacrifice / self-denial discussed above, intrinsically a dead-end. There is nothing to stop this being a collective process, struggling with and alongside others, but it’s not an act of charity that we can put off to return to some privileged background or whatever (I’ve seen too many ideologue-turned-bosses). The point is not to get others to ‘join up’ or for us to act on their behalf, but for them to take action by and for themselves. The most we can expect to teach by example is technique and maybe a little defiance. Our role shouldn’t be counter-power, but the destruction of power and how it is applied to hold together and hold down this society. At its inception, I thought RTS’s street parties could contribute to this as the focus on pleasure and the immediate got over difficulties of ideologisation and self-sacrifice / self-denial as well as the rigid distinctions that typified ouvrierist politics. I can now see how they’ve been recuperated into a form of passive mass entertainment or a ritual of blowing off steam at best — Carnival’s traditional role in preserving society through a one-day concession by gratifying the immediate desires of the mass — and actually acts as a surrender of initiative and self-determination.

Acting from clandestinity at times and places of our choosing and allowing our actions to speak for themselves inasmuch as they make more activity by more people possible should be enough as an alternative and should stop any unwanted legitimacy accruing to us. This is not to create a platform to put demands to the WTO or whoever to change their policies, it’s a way of stopping the implementation of these policies on the ground until they have to pack them in. Though tainted with reformism, the anti-GM crops campaign is an approximate example of this in action. Relatively small-scale crop trashings by a small but determined minority picking where, when and how they wanted to take such action, whether in conjunction with others emphasising different tactics or not, has proved uncontrollably flexible and a lot more effective in challenging globalisation in practice than any of the big London demos. I don’t want to get drawn too much into questions of whether this small group approach would have been as effective as J18 or N30 Seattle, not least because trying to attack where the system is strongest rather than where it is most vulnerable is frankly not smart tactics, but note here on J18 that any action was just down to a few hundred active people organised in affinity groups and a very inexperienced police force. On Seattle N30, it doesn’t take 10,000s to shut down any modern city, just a dedicated few in the right places who know what they’re doing (also — the SWP’s opportunistic, revisionist accounts not withstanding — it wasn’t the mass blockades but the looting of the few dozen involved in the Black Block that encouraged the local underclass to loot too, and it was this that provoked the state of emergency that forced the WTO from Seattle). One tragedy has been the amount of effort diverted from this into one-off symbolic mass actions well-signposted ahead which the police and media can easily contain, both physically and ideologically. Actions in decentralised campaigns cited don’t take half a year (and half a rainforest of leaflets) to organise and they don’t need big clandestine funders exerting their corrosive influence either (in fact, revolutionaries should make it a rule of thumb not to get together actions any bigger than they can fund from amongst themselves using their own resources, to ensure transparency and human scale). It seems whenever anyone wants to protest anything now, they just ritually intone: ‘why not organise a street party?’ or, even more pathetically, ‘why not get RTS to organise a street party?’. Instead of saying something so brainless and now — given the sophistication of current police tactics — pointless, it is past time we, ourselves, resisted actively.

Beware of White-Dressed Cops Some Italian rioters contrast Ya Basta!s image with the reality

The tute blanche (White Overalls) are already well-known in the European and American protest movement, being well recognisable with their uniform and protection pads in the front lines. They undeniably showed their reformist and reactionary core to the worldwide movement in Prague, but still they fail to get the adequate response true revolutionaries should give them, which is the same deserved by blue-dressed cops. That’s why we consider it necessary to spread info on them, their tactics and their lies.

The tute bianche / Ya Basta comes out of the bigger and more sold-out social centres of northern Italy, like Leoncavallo in Milan, Rivalto in Mestre and Pedro in Padova. Just giving a good look at these places, it’s easy to understand now the tute bianche can’t be other than reformist: here you find never-ending compromises with authority, collaboration with political parties, big events described as DiY, well-defined hierarchies and leaders, pretend-to-be-rebel identities sold with gadgets and smoke liberation fests, and annual incomes larger than in many companies.

With their statements and their actions, tute bianche play a hard-looking role, and are desperately trying to have more adepts among those opposing globalisation, but they cannot hide the truth of their relationship with Green and Leftist parties (actually, many Giovani Comunisi, youth section of the Italian party Rifondazione Comunista, are part of tute bianche) and of their own involvement in politics (some of their leaders like Casarini and Farina took part more than once in elections, even the 2001 ones, and are those same going on TV to declare war on the police for the Genoa G8 summit, backed by men in balaclavas!). Can we consider politicians on our side of the barricades? We think not, even if they wear balaclavas to look cool and hard, or speak of battles against power to get our complicity.

Actually we have to beware of them, since we know that when they say “battles in the streets” or “Seattle-style protests”, they mean something completely different, permitted marches with planned routes, no direct action and no civil disobedience. What made the Seattle example really inspiring was the element of surprise, with multiple street blockades and direct actionists attacking Capital outlets. What tute bianche sell as “Seattle-style” is a protest where everything is already decided for you, and the decision is: no riot, no action, no individuality, no disobedience (even to their rules).

We saw them in action many times in Italy, and the show is always the same. Part one: they declare war, fill their mouths with big words and say they will besiege and close down whichever meeting / forum. Part two: they ask for permitted marches and collaborate with police and political parties taking part in the protests (sic!). Part three: they appear at marches with their pads, helmets and protections, display in the front lines, take care that nobody has the insane idea of smashing bank or multinationals’ windows and that the march can take place without any ‘problems’. Part four: this is the most important one, here is where they try to get revolutionary credibility … clashes with police! They used to confront police at the end of the route with plastic shields and no offensive object, pushing in order to pass the ‘red line’. But these clashes are fake ones! They usually take place when most protesters have gone away, but TV cameras are still present, and last just a few minutes (which would be a very stupid way to clash with police indeed). Moreover, you can easily notice that cops hit mostly only on the shields, avoiding heads or other body parts and don’t use tear gas, which is their favourite weapon during real clashes or riots. What these co-ordinated clashes work for is to build consensus on their facade of hard core protesters, while giving no hassle to Power in practice. Their aim is to catch more and more potentially angry people, willing to practically attack Power and its meetings, and take them on a do-nothing-and-look-at-us fluffy aside.

Another important role they play during protests is also that of white-dressed cops. Many times tute bianche tried to isolate, demask or physically attack those who passed to action. In May 2000 at the biotech forum Tebio protests, they even distributed a leaflet with a sort of ‘10 commandments’ to follow during the march. Commandment #2 read “nobody can put in practice spontaneous acts of any kind”, while #11 similarly stated that “during the march no personal or collective action has to occur” and #8 that “you can throw nothing that has not been decided by the organisers”. And they also didn’t forget an invite to grass with commandment #12, inviting “to inform tute bianche of anything happening”. On that occassion these white cops couldn’t stop a block determined to attack banks and multinational stores during the march, but some days later they went to the square that hosted this block to threaten them for having ruined their show (and of course they didn’t forget to do it with their white-cop uniforms on). More examples come from Ancona, where in May 2000 they lined up between anarchists and cops, or Bologna, where a couple of months earlier at an anti-fascist demo they preferred the usual fake clashes rather than attacking fascists (which was done by others, later attacked and threatened by tute bianche!). Another example has been Prague, where they both made futile clashes, a fake attack at a McDonalds and prevented real acts of destruction.

It is clear that tute bianche are a dangerous infiltration in the revolutionary and protest movement, and a big obstacle for the genuine fight against capitalist power. It is time for worldwide comrades to know it, in order not to do again the error of collaboration and complicity. Actually, it is time to get rid of them! Knowing that they’ll try to lead the Genoa G8 protests, and are already preparing their show … will you take a part in it, or will you ruin it with revolt?

No Globalisation….and a good few ‘no’s when it comes to anti-globalisation too!

“We’re building a mass movement!” I heard Jason shouting as we were being dragged off some bridge in London. That happened years ago, around the time of Twyford Down. It was the first I’d heard of the mass movement thing. My first thought was “No, we’re getting dragged off a bridge by the cops!” How wrong I was. Looking back, it seems we were building a mass movement, though many of us had not the slightest intention of doing so. But now it seems we have such a movement, and it expresses itself through such organisations as Globalise Resistance (GR).

No Analysis

It’s not the intention of this article to go much into who is behind it all, such as the SWP; that has been well covered elsewhere. That very debate is obscuring deeper problems with the ethos of globalising resistance. Those are the things I want to investigate in this article.

The raison d’être behind such organisations as GR is that because capital (or oppression, or whatever your favourite enemy is) us global, so should resistance to it be. There is little if any talk of exactly WHY this should be so; it seems that it is considered to be self-evident. That so many people accept this shallow prognosis at face value and do not wonder about it shows a lot about our movement, and society as a whole.

Television, and more recently the internet, have had an incalculable effect on us. People generally are less able now to assimilate complex ideas. In the busy busy global village, where information spews incessantly from every electronic orifice, we need to have ideas pre-digested for us, then vomited out in bite-sized chunks by authority figures such as the news readers.

Instead of having a good overall view of what is going down in our own communities, we have a selection of decontextualised fragments from pre-chosen sources all over the planet. Meanwhile most of us don’t even know the names of our neighbours. Globalise Resistance reinforces this by giving us nice little sound-bite ‘causes’ like Gap sweatshops and the Zapatistas. Very few people would know much about any of these things, just what GR’s info sheets give; the lives, loves, history and desires of millions, summed up in a paragraph or two by a person who doesn’t know them. A few snippets of semi-random information does not constitute a planetary perspective. What GR purveys is more like ‘Global Awareness to go’. You want fries with that?

No New Thought

Conspiracy or not, the media control our communications to a larger extent than anything else does, and hence they shape our society. Recognising this, many activists have decided that it is important to get our voices onto those media. Other activists have argued that it is more important to organise ourselves and use our own media (including word of mouth). This is the more difficult path, and makes less sense in the context of this society. It is much easier to convince someone with just a few words of something they already understand, than to try to introduce something that goes against what they understand.

If you talk about ignoring the media and just getting on with local actions in small groups, most people do not understand what you’re talking about. Most people think that if an act doesn’t get big media coverage, it is not worthwhile. We have all been brought up to understand this idea. Pop stars, film idols, Great Leaders and Entrepreneurs have been rammed down our throats by the media from the moment of our birth. They are the only ones who can achieve anything. So when the call goes out for thousands to turn up at the next meeting of the Great and Famous G8 or World Bank meeting, it makes immediate (if misguided) sense, and can easily drown out the little voice that is asking for help to stop the local allotments from being sold off for development, or to stop a local woodland being chopped by a greedy farmer.

No Change

But it wasn’t like this a few years ago. Something has changed, and this is where we come to the inevitable swipe at the boring left-over Lefties. Back in the late-80s and early-90s, the Left was only beginning to realise that they were no longer relevant. Their ideas were rooted in the Sixties and Seventies, a pretty dismal time not many people wanted to remember. The Left were no longer sexy, and a new movement was emerging that was out-sexying them massively.

Ecological direct action was arriving in Europe, imported from the USA by groups calling themselves Earth First!. These people were jumping on diggers, building tree houses and tunnels, blockading timber depots and occupying construction sites in the most in-yer-face way imaginable short of total revolt. Being mostly young and not from political backgrounds, their rhetoric was devoid of all the boring legacy of socialist dogmas. They fired the imaginations of many and for a while there were camps and actions going on all over the country. The movement was growing exponentially, and in a very decentralised way. Groups formed and took action locally, networking with their own local communities, attracting help and inspiring similar things all over the world.

But this wasn’t to last. The Left was looking and learning (after a fashion). Gradually they infiltrated this movement and sometime in the late-90s, it dropped the ‘ecological’ and became just the ‘direct action movement’. The hierarchically-minded politicos who moved inon the initiative started by EF! and the ALF didn’t like the loose and uncontrollable nature of this movement, and neither did they like most of the ideas, so they are now in the process of changing both. Rather than change their ideas, they choose, the the way of all conservatives, to take the funky packaging and wrap their own unchanged dogmas in it. Is Genoa etc physically any different to, say, Paris in ‘68? Have they really learned anything at all?

No Local Roots

By making big anti-globalisation actions, GR et al take away the autonomy of the locally-organised action. All that local groups of concerned people can now organise is the buses to get there. The agenda and location is set by the World Bank or the IMF, or the G8, and relayed by a few self-appointed leaders who won’t even admit that they are leaders. It doesn’t matter what is happening in your local area. Or even, for that matter, what connections your own groups have. A visitor from West Papua to Dublin was invited to a GR meeting. Thinking this would be a good opportunity to get some support for his people, who are being massacred by Indonesia, he went along well-prepared to talk about what is going on and what people here in the West (where the problems all stem from) can do to help them. He didn’t get the chance. For the whole meeting, he had to listen to them talk about their recent visit to Genoa.

No History

Globalise Resistance and its look-alikes are apparently a reaction to the globalisation of something or other. Just what has globalised varies depending on whom you ask. Such a movement should claim its roots in the pirates of the Spanish Main, or the bandits who attacked pilgrims on their way to the various ‘holy lands’. Somebody must have given the Phonecians trouble too. I haven’t seen any such references. It’s as if the Empires of the last six thousand years never happened, and all this global commerce and oppression started just after the miners’ strike.

Resistance To What?

Now there is almost nothing going on locally, and if you talk to anyone remotely ‘radical’ they will babble on until closing time about Genoa or whatever, even if they only know the cousin of someone who went. Even just a few years ago, you would hear people talk about the issues, the things supposedly they are opposed to, and some ideas for other ways to do things. No, it is all about the spectacle itself. Who went there, who got arrested, who met whom, which clubs and gigs they went to, what the cops did, what the crowd did. Never a mention of why.

No Continuity

For those who can make it (get time off from the wage slavery everyone is now stuck in) these big anti-acronym actions may be real, but for the rest of us they are quite literally a spectacle with absolutely no relevance whatsoever to our own situation, our own lives, or even to the effects we have on the people who live in the places the raw materials come from to create our jobs. Even for the people who go to them, there is no real relevance. Like all the other media-driven moments that make up modern lifer, they are an experience to be consumed then added to the bank of ‘experiences’ which make up the totality of our fragmented lives.

Having smashed up a Gap or McDonalds in some far away place, we come back and do nothing go rid our towns of them, and wait for te Next Big Thing to be handed down to us from on high. Empowerment has become a bad word, a cliche, and the thing it refers to us also disappearing.

With this globalisation of resistance we lose the very thing we were struggling to recover: our autonomy. The only way to express our autonomy in such situations is to break the ‘rules’ of the organisers, by rioting, smashing things up and so on. This might seem fine, but isn’t it really the same thing as resisting rule in everyday life? Why should we have rules in our ‘movement’? Why go all the way to Genoa to smash up a McDonalds? Isn’t the whole thing about globalisation that things are the same everywhere?

Small actions, easily reproducible, requiring unsophisticated means that are available to all, are by their very simplicity and spontaneity uncontrollable. They make a mockery of even the most advanced technological developments in counter-insurgency. This is what capital and the State are afraid of, this is the news that never makes the headlines, but is carefully concealed from the public eye.
- Willfull Disobedience, Vol. 2, No. 6, ‘Against the Logic of Submission: Hatred’

The truth is that our movement (and that’s a whole other can of worms not to be opened here) was seduced into this course of action by the mass media, via a bunch of inadequate people who were not good enough to make it in the cut-throat world of business, and instead imposed their mediocre organisational skills on us, who were doing fine without them. Thousands of small acts by groups of friends and even single individuals got no coverage at all, while the bigger actions got onto the national news. We were thwarted by our own obsession with the state’s media. Direct action, by definition, needs no coverage. If state media is needed, then the action is not direct.

No Real-World Network

Computer technology is what allowed capitalism (or globalisation or whatever) to be manifested in its present form. In fact, it formed our present system, which was designed precisely to fit in with what could and could not be done with computers. Not surprisingly the same symptoms can be discerned in the new, globalised anti-G movement as in other aspects of computerised society. Depersonalisation is the first to come to mind: we are all just sheep, running around where the sheepdog directs us. When a few of us do try to strike out alone, we find it impossible because the majority of the sheep are doing as they’re told and we never get enough people interested in local actions to get anything meaningful established.

In any given town, it is relatively easy to get a group of people together to go swanning off to some big event, but not to plant fruit trees or close down a local parasite. It is easier to sit in a cybercafe communicating with other cyber-revolutionaries than to get a small meeting together in the local pub.

If we make the internet the basis of co-ordinating our struggles, for communicating our projects, actions and dreams, then our struggles, our projects and all that inspires them will become the kind that can be communicated through the internet—that is, projects, struggles and dreams that can be broken down into interchangeable bits of information where people, their passions and desires are of little importance except to the extent that they are useful in producing marketable bytes. This is because the kind of communication and co-ordination that can happen through the internet has already been organised before we start to use it, and it has not been organised in our interest, but rather in the interests of the social order of domination.
Willfull Disobedience, Vol. 2, No. 6, ‘The Internet and Self-organisation’

The same thing is true of the globalised resistance movement itself. We are diverting from impossible to control small-scale actions towards the mass actions which can be easily policed. Police forces prefer the Saturday night trouble to be confined in to one or two big night clubs than to be scattered all over town where they cannot control it. That’s why many dodgy clubs continue to stay open. The same principle applies to insurgency.

No More

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible… Look at one of those photographs of half the Earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognise your neighbourhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question “What will this do to our community?” tends towards the right answer to the world.
-Casey Neill

Eco means ‘home’, it comes from the Greek word, oikos. We need to put the eco back in our actions and use the global networks to enhance rather than destroy or consume our own local ones. Ultimately the global networks must be disconnected, as humans seem unable to cope with such concentrations of power. Whales have had global communications for millions of years, termites are good at civilisation, and buffalo are good at herding. Humans should concentrate on what they are good at, and not try to manage everything.

We need to push this eco aspect of our work, and not to let all and sundry dictate or misuse our actions. We need to redefine what movement it is that we are part of. How can we support the rights of workers when we are opposed to the place they work in, the materials they use and the end product of their labour, not to mention wage slavery itself? If supporting workers’ rights is a ‘clever’ way of getting them to listen to our views, why then do we not do the same with fascists? Socialism is no more relevant to a viable future on this planet than fascism.

Things happen locally or they don’t happen. Things happen locally all over the world. Nothing happens globally, except comets and asteroids. A sweatshop may be nominally part of a global corporation, but its physical reality is most definitely local.

A corporation (or a nation, for that matter) is an unthinking entity, it follows the line of least resistance, the path of most food. Managers are a figurehead, they have no real control over the direction of an organisation; that is determined by the survival needs of the organisation itself. If a manager acts against the interests of the corporation, he is rejected.

As Oliver Stone once said, the beast doesn’t know it exists. These Statesmen and leaders, the G8, the IMF and so on, are powerless outside of their respective organisations. The power they wield is not their own. They like to parade around as key decision-makers, VIPs, but the reality is that the organisations they are enslaved to have needs, and the will of the individual manager is irrelevant. All they have power over is the re-direction of a small percentage of the cash-flow into their own personal coffers, and that only if they fulfill the demands of their organisation.

By eschewing the local reality of capitalism / civilisation / whatever in favour of large-scale gatherings around VIPs we not only obscure the true nature of our enemies, but also give credit to the illusion of power those VIPs generate. What is needed now is not a mirroring of the power structure of the state, we need to attack the real source of that power, in our schools, factories. Road-building projects, and all the other local issues that together make up the global catastrophe. Most of all, we need to understand what things we do ourselves to support that system in our everyday lives, and to persuade others to do likewise.

Within every revolution are the seeds of what follows it. For anarchy to work at all, it has to be done locally, so a globalised resistance can do nothing to further our aims, only to make them more distant than ever by setting the stage for yet another power structure to emerge in place of the old one.

We don’t need anyone to speak to the IMF or World Bank on our behalf, we already spoke to them in countless places all over the world. We spoke to them in Seattle and Genoa too. Now it is obvious to even the most optimistic idiot that they have no intention of disbanding themselves. What is there to talk about? The big ‘global’ actions may have served a purpose, but now it is time to move beyond that. We need not a mass movement but a massive movement everywhere, built on local initiatives which are not answerable to anyone but the local communities themselves. No more building of platforms to be used to misrepresent us, no more collusion with devious (but not good enough for business) power-seekers.

Against The New World Order

Rob los Ricos

The death of Carlo Guiloana during the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa shocked many people in the First world. Carlo was assassinated by the militarized police forces of the New World Order, whose outright fascist nature was made clear when Guiliani’s arrested comrades were forced to pay homage to Il Duce in words and song by the Italian security forces. To the starry-eyed bourgeois activists in north America and Europe, Carlo’s death was a horrible travesty of justice against a movement to democratise global capitalism. To people in the South—the ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ lands—such assassinations are neither unusual nor unexpected. There has been a war raging over control of the Earth’s resources for a century (or more) and the fight to create a global corporate state—the New world Order by Bush I—is only the latest phase, one which has claimed dozens (Mexico, India), hundreds (Papua New Guinea), thousands (Columbia, Nigeria), even millions (Democratic Republic of the Congo) of lives around the world. Sadly, it’s only when these deaths occur in the presence of First World media and other witnesses that they register any sort of reaction at all.

The stakes in this conflict are extraordinarily high.

On one side are the megawealthy who wish to preserve the protected enclaves of privilege and material ease industrial society creates for them. In their way are the other 6 billion people on Earth, who the ruling elite wish to cast aside to fend for themselves in the waste and ruin industrialism continues to make of the world. Limited privileges are granted to the bourgeois and workers so they will tolerate the death dealt out to provide these privileges. For instance, the people of Africa being slaughtered to provide oil and cell phones for consumers. Will consumers in the First World give up gasoline and wireless communication devices in order to relieve the suffering of other, distant, dark-skinned people? Not willingly or they would already have done so. Many of the people involved in the anti-globalisation movement aren’t interested in or even aware of the plight of these other people. All they want is a better deal—a greater share of the profits raked in by the plundering of foreign lands. Their wildful naivete about how the post-capitalist world works is obscene. But to cut them some slack, there us an ongoing conspiracy by the shapers of society to prevent us from realizing the continuous efforts of the ruling elites to divide us so that we’ll gladly annihilate one another in order to maintain the illusions described as “capitalism” and “democracy”.

World War One was an effort by the ruling elites of the industrialised nations to divide the world into permanent have and have-not nation states and spheres of influence for the colonial powers. It also allowed them to crush the international solidarity rampant among the workers. One of the war’s chief apologists, US president Woodrow Wilson, described it as an effort to make the world safe for democracy. What he actually meant was that the natural resources of the world would be made available for the benefit of the industrialised nations.

Their attempt was only partially successful, so the attempt was repeated in the war over fascism (WWII) and further refined during the subsequent Cold War. What the elite learned from their experiments were:

propaganda campaigns could manipulate the people within industrialized societies to leap to their deaths unquestioningly, upon command

a modern society will accept death camps, as long as “other [minority] people” were being exterminated

no atrocity committed against a civilian population is inexcusable, especially if the media and government act like it never happened.

Having learned this throughout the course of the 20th century, the ruling elite were ready to implement the New World Order.

I could see the clubs … at their work. Their ends were smeared with blood, and blood sprayed the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Sometimes I saw the policemen hopping up on the benches, continuing to strike blows from there or jumping back down on top the bodies below

This is not a retelling if the actions of Italian police in Genoa, but a description of an ongoing campaign of violence directed at the people of New Guinea by the police and military forces of Indonesia (from the West Papua Action Update #2). Most of New Guinea is populated by people who still live closely with the natural world as hunter-gatherers, herds-people, fishers and gardeners. Fed up with ‘development’ that threatened their ways of life, the tribal hillfolk rebelled.

In 1988, on the Papua New Guinea side of the island, the people of Bourgainville shut down the massive Freeport copper mine by putting away their pens and picking up guns. They’ve been waging a successful guerrilla war against the armed forces of PNG and their Australian cohorts ever since.

This inspired a similar attempt to drive civilization from the Indonesian side of the island. By the time the event described above happened, this effort had seen 50 activists killed and hundreds more arrested or disappeared.

No doubt more people are familiar with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, timed to coincide with the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Several hundred Zapatistas and their supporters have died in the low-intensity fighting that followed the uprising of the EZLN. Like the Free Papua Movement in New Guinea, the Zapatistas are fighting for the right of indigenous people’s self-determination and against ‘economical development’ dictated by global financial concerns. Meanwhile, oil extraction is fuelling two genocidal wars, one in Africa and one in South America.

The Ogoni people of the Nigerian delta have already lost their lands to Shell Oil. They fight now for survival as a people. A similar conflict is currently being forced on people north of Ogoniland as an oil pipeline and drilling is forced upon people and land from Chad to the Atlantic coast.

Plan Columbia will escalate Columbia’s civil war into regional instability to ensure that social and political chaos there is carefully managed so as not to interfere with oil extraction or the cocaine trade. The peaceful, cloudforest-dwelling U’wa people are doomed.

Under the NWO, armed forces can sweep into countries and forcefully take whatever they want, literally, over the dead bodies of the local people. They’ve successfully demonstrated this in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A rare mineral used in wireless communication devices—solton—is being extracted from the DRC for First World corporations by the invading armies of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the mercenary forces of UNITA, a Cold War terrorist army from Angola. They are also helping themselves—and transnational corporations—to diamonds and coffee. No one knows how many Congolese have died during this invasion, which began on 1997. Conservative estimates are 3 million. The actual toll could be much higher, which would put this war on a par with the worst violence during African colonisation and the slave trade. We’ll likely never know how many people have died in this war because, quite frankly, most people in the First World aren’t interested.

Despite the horrors being inflicted upon people in South America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands, there is hope for us all.

The people of New Guinea want nothing to do with globalisation and may success in smashing the nation states trying to impose economic development upon them. The Zapatistas have demonstrated the effectiveness of organising communities with a combination of analysis and rifles. It was the influence of the Zapatistas that led to the international street festivals against the institutions of the NWO.

More recently, the people of Bolivia disrupted the daily continuity of life in their country to demand an end to IMF economic plans, such as privatisation of their water supply.

As I write this , plans are being made in India for a similar on-going uprising by a coalition of people’s movements. Among their demands are:

• Cancellation of India’s IMF / World Bank debts

• Human rights protection for women

• India out of the WTO

• Exxon and Monsanto out of India

• Farmland for agricultural families living in villages, not corporate farms

There have been dozens of lives lost in this struggle already as indigenous and poor people in India resist development and corporatisation of their lives and lands, and for an end to the dalit (‘untouchable’) undercaste’s repression. The people of India are poised to turn their society on its head in order to shape a better future for themselves and their descendants, just as the people of Bolivia are doing.

Now that the war to implement the NWO has been brought violently to us in the First World, how will we react? Some of the anti-globalisation protesters have no interest in giving up their private automobiles and cell phones, and will co-operate with the forces of economic order and power against those of us willing to act in solidarity with the struggles of distant peoples: we face common enemies in this fight for our lives. The peace and justice professional activists will denounce as insurrectionaries for being violent, even as people around the world are being massacred to sustain consumerist lifestyles. Rather than diminish our activity, however, we must go on the offensive.

The ‘Welcome’ column of the ‘00 issue of Resistance, the paper of the Earth Liberation Front’s press office, states:

The only problems I can find with actions like these (ELF) are that they aren’t happening frequently enough, and at severe enough levels

The same issue quotes Black Liberation Army fugitive Assatas Shakur on its cover

…not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance, to oppression is to serve the oppressor, no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out

Carlo Guiliani was not the first casualty in the revolt against the NWO. Rather than mourning or being frightened by his passing, we should be inspired that the NWO cannot co-exist with our desire for life, and resolve that we will be the ones who survive this conflict!

Post-911 Postscript

With the resistance to the NWO having grown from 50.000 people in the streets of Seattle to 300,000 in Genoa, the plans of the elite were in danger of coming unraveled. Something had to be done—quickly. How about starting an unwinnable, perpetual, religious war? First World people have already accepted a genocidal campaign against the Iraqi people, in which millions of civilians have been starved, bombed or otherwise killed by a combination of air strikes and economic sanctions. Today (19/09/01), the UN announced that 5 million Afghani people are in danger of starving to death in the immediate future. Unless, of course, the US military and its Afghani allies slaughters them first.

The media focuses on the atrocities perpetuated against the US—live on TV, even—and continues to remain silent about the genocidal warfare against the peoples of Columbia, New Guinea, the DRC, etc. Meanwhile the US government can exponentially increase its policy of robbing the taxpayers to give to the rich corporations, even as these same corporations throw hundreds of thousands of workers out the door.

This is George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare come true; a perpetual war raging through central Asia to keep the excess population occupied and / or terrorised, and give the governments an excuse to repress their domestic opposition.

What I have to wonder why did the US give the Taleban government $43 million in May ‘01, knowing they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, who was already wanted for bombing US embassies in Africa and blasting the USS Cole?

Unruly Harmony

Issue 67

Date: Sep 2002

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Beware of White-Dressed Cops: Some Italian rioters contrast Ya Basta!s Image with the Reality

The tute blanche (White Overalls) are already well-known in the European and American protest movement, being well recognisable with their uniform and protection pads in the front lines. They undeniably showed their reformist and reactionary core to the worldwide movement in Prague, but still they fail to get the adequate response true revolutionaries should give them, which is the same deserved by blue-dressed cops. That’s why we consider it necessary to spread info on them, their tactics and their lies.

The tute bianche/Ya Basta comes out of the bigger and more sold-out social centres of northern Italy, like Leoncavallo in Milan, Rivalto in Mestre and Pedro in Padova. Just giving a good look at these places, it’s easy to understand now the tute bianche can’t be other than reformist: here you find never-ending compromises with authority, collaboration with political parties, big events described as DiY, well-defined hierarchies and leaders, pretend-to-be-rebel identities sold with gadgets and smoke liberation fests, and annual incomes larger than in many companies.

With their statements and their actions, tute bianche play a hard-looking role, and are desperately trying to have more adepts among those opposing globalisation, but they cannot hide the truth of their relationship with Green and Leftist parties (actually, many Giovani Comunisi, youth section of the Italian party Rifondazione Comunista, are part of tute bianche) and of their own involvement in politics (some of their leaders like Casarini and Farina took part more than once in elections, even the 2001 ones, and are those same going on TV to declare war on the police for the Genoa G8 summit, backed by men in balaclavas!). Can we consider politicians on our side of the barricades? We think not, even if they wear balaclavas to look cool and hard, or speak of battles against power to get our complicity.

Actually we have to beware of them, since we know that when they say “battles in the streets” or “Seattle-style protests”, they mean something completely different, permitted marches with planned routes, no direct action and no civil disobedience. What made the Seattle example really inspiring was the element of surprise, with multiple street blockades and direct actionists attacking Capital outlets. What tute bianche sell as “Seattle-style” is a protest where everything is already decided for you, and the decision is: no riot, no action, no individuality, no disobedience (even to their rules).

We saw them in action many times in Italy, and the show is always the same. Part one: they declare war, fill their mouths with big words and say they will besiege and close down whichever meeting / forum. Part two: they ask for permitted marches and collaborate with police and political parties taking part in the protests (sic!). Part three: they appear at marches with their pads, helmets and protections, display in the front lines, take care that nobody has the insane idea of smashing bank or multinationals’ windows and that the march can take place without any ‘problems’. Part four: this is the most important one, here is where they try to get revolutionary credibility ... clashes with police! They used to confront police at the end of the route with plastic shields and no offensive object, pushing in order to pass the ‘red line’. But these clashes are fake ones! They usually take place when most protesters have gone away, but TV cameras are still present, and last just a few minutes (which would be a very stupid way to clash with police indeed). Moreover, you can easily notice that cops hit mostly only on the shields, avoiding heads or other body parts and don’t use tear gas, which is their favourite weapon during real clashes or riots. What these co-ordinated clashes work for is to build consensus on their facade of hard core protesters, while giving no hassle to Power in practice. Their aim is to catch more and more potentially angry people, willing to practically attack Power and its meetings, and take them on a do-nothing-and-look-at-us fluffy aside.

Another important role they play during protests is also that of white-dressed cops. Many times tute bianche tried to isolate, demask or physically attack those who passed to action. In May 2000 at the biotech forum Tebio protests, they even distributed a leaflet with a sort of ‘10 commandments’ to follow during the march. Commandment #2 read “nobody can put in practice spontaneous acts of any kind”, while #11 similarly stated that “during the march no personal or collective action has to occur” and #8 that “you can throw nothing that has not been decided by the organisers”. And they also didn’t forget an invite to grass with commandment #12, inviting “to inform tute bianche of anything happening”. On that occasion these white cops couldn’t stop a block determined to attack banks and multinational stores during the march, but some days later they went to the square that hosted this block to threaten them for having ruined their show (and of course they didn’t forget to do it with their white-cop uniforms on). More examples come from Ancona, where in May 2000 they lined up between anarchists and cops, or Bologna, where a couple of months earlier at an anti-fascist demo they preferred the usual fake clashes rather than attacking fascists (which was done by others, later attacked and threatened by tute bianche!). Another example has been Prague, where they both made futile clashes, a fake attack at a McDonalds and prevented real acts of destruction.

It is clear that tute bianche are a dangerous infiltration in the revolutionary and protest movement, and a big obstacle for the genuine fight against capitalist power. It is time for worldwide comrades to know it, in order not to do again the error of collaboration and complicity. Actually, it is time to get rid of them! Knowing that they’ll try to lead the Genoa G8 protests, and are already preparing their show ... will you take a part in it, or will you ruin it with revolt?

The Reinvention of Planets

Issue 68-9

Date: Jun 2003

Read here

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ORIGINAL AND BEST

No. 68/9 SUMMER‘03 £1/$2

Green
ANARCHIST

For the destruction of Civilisation

EARTH LIBERATION FRONT, MISSIONARIES, DIRECT ACTION DIARY, ANTIWAR DIARY, PRISONER NEWS, REVIEWS, FEST LIST

News

Bush – Don’t Dream It’s Over

As the G8 meet in Evian to squabble over the spoils of their latest war, Europe’s people show their determination to oust the power-mongers from their lands.

We’ve recently seen the latest set of running battles between anti-globalisation protesters and police at a meeting of world leaders. This time Evian for the G8. One man was severely injured when the cops cut the rope he was attached to and he fell 20 metres onto a shallow river bed.

The next confrontation is planned at the EU summit in Thessaloniki, Greece. This may remind the warmongers that there will be resistance to their plans and indeed their very existence, but how much closer it brings us to stopping them in their tracks is another matter.

It’s inspiring to see people on the streets attacking the police and engaging in property destruction but it is a reaction to their prescence, their summits. There is a war going on everywhere against everyone of us and has been for thousands of years—the war on life. Civilization has meant war since its inception, thousands of years of assault on the ecology of the planet and on us as well—through alienation, specialisation, seperation and hierachy.

Its time to attack without restraint the structures that keep this society going, it’s time to ‘bring the war home’.

NEW TRIBES MISSION TRASHED

Serious sabotage and damage committed during an invasion of New Tribal Missions HQ in the UK.

On 11 October more than fifty people took direct action against the New Tribes Mission (NTM) UK Headquarters in Grimsby, in solidarity with resistant indigenous people of the Philippines, West Papua and BougainvilIe. NTM have stated that they intend to preach to every tribe on the planet by 2025, such as the Agta of Northern Luzon and tribes in Mindanao.

The activists visited NTM wearing West Papuan masks, invaded and occupied the offices. They severely outnumbered the missionaries working there. Essential information and

equipment was removed which will prove valuable to research for resistance to NTM. Other people sabotaged and damaged essential computer hardware, software and other office equipment; Others argued with workers; Others demonstrated outside or in the village nearby with banners.

A timing device was planted in a toilet that later opened a valve on the cold water supply leading to flood damage during Friday night/Saturday morning. All the protesters left the scene without arrest, although missionaries attempted - and failed - to stop people leaving.

—See Missionaries core inside

BELGIAN FOREST SQUATTED

The forests surrounding D’Hoppe are threatened from every direction. Most are held by a private owner who exploits them to quarry and build landfills. 30% of the trees are to be cut; and the land is poisoned by untreated sewage from the village. Since April the forest has been squatted by a group of people calling themselves Patdagach, to halt these ecological disasters. People willing to help are more then welcome!

On saterday 28 june, starting at 2pm, we organise an actionweek in the occupied forest. We want to get as many peaple as possible together to increase the pressure in order to finally make an end to the destruction of the nature in d’Hoppe.

During this week there will be workshops, actiontraining, infosessions, and lots of actions! The week ends with a big demo on the 5th of july. Sleeping places available, but if you have a tent, bring it with you.

Vegan food will be cooked by the Mobile Actionkitchen ‘Kokkerellen’ Contact: (+32)/(0) 497-63 03 12 http://www.foert.org][www.foert.org

HAYDUKE GROUNDED

Paranoid security at Philadelphia airport stopped Neil Godfrey boarding his plane because he had a copy of the famous Edward Abbey book “Hayduke lives”. The cover has an Illustration of a hand holding sticks of dynamite.

He went through the checkpoint and sat down to read. About 10 minutes later a National Guardsman told him to step aside, then took his book and asked why he was reading it.” Within minutes, Police officers, State Troopers and airport security officials joined the Guardsman. 10 to 12 people examined the book for 45 minutes, scratching out notes the entire time. They questioned Godfrey about the purpose of his trip and refused to let him board the plane.

CARLO GIULIANI MURDER CASE CLOSED

On May 5th judge Elena Daloisio decided to close the enquiry against Mario Placanica, the Carabinieri who shot Carlo Giuliani - the young protester at the G8 summit of Genoa 2001. The official reasons why this murder won’t be prosecuted are because the policeman was allegedly defending himself, and also, under the article 53 of the Italian criminal code, this is a case of “legitimate use of weapons”. This will possibly constitute a dangerous legal escape for any member of the security forces that in future similar situations may commit “legalised” murder because of “acting on duty”. The remaining open cases against those responsible for the repression, illegal detentions, beatings and torture that took place during and after the anti-G8 demonstrations of Genoa 2001 may also now be dropped as a result.

Even though they have been accused of lying in court and repeatedly trying to avoid giving testimony in front of a judge, none of the officers involved in the enquiry have been found guilty or condemned. Carlo’s mother stated that “we are not scared of the truth, although others evidently are”.

DIARY OF DIRECT ACTION

More information: ALF Supporters Group, BM 1160, London WC1N 3XX; Arkangel, BM 9280, London WC1N 3XX; Earth First! Action Update Dept. 29, 22a Beswick Street, Manchester M4 7HS; Earth First! Journal, PO Box 3023, Tucson, AZ 85702, USA; Do Or Die c/o PO Box 2971, Brighton BN2 2TT and http://www.earthliberationfront.com][www.earthliberationfront.com

JANUARY

1: BEAR LAKE, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO, USA - Kiosk torched: $600,000 damage

3: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, USA - ALF sloganise and trash HLS baxker Warren Stephens’ house.

3: KIRKLAND, WA, USA - Four new homes torched in anti-sprawl action: $500,000 damage.

5: LAKE JAMES, EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA - The Frogs free three crayfish and five minnows from a fishing trap.

6: EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA - The Frogs spike construction site.

7: NEW YORK STATE, USA - ALF max out Warren Stephens’ credit card.

13: JEWELL, IOWA, USA - Documents seized from fur processing plant.

26: ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA - University GM department torched by ELF: $630,000 damage.

27: LAKEVILLE, MINNESOTA, USA - 10 construction vehicles sabbed.

28: SPRINGFIELD, OREGON, USA - Country Club and 140 golf carts torched.

DAKOTA COUNTY, MINNESOTA, USA - Plant building Target store trashed.

MANRECA, CALIFORNIA, USA - Nighttime Gardeners trash GM strawberries and wheat at Plant Sciences Inc.

FAIRFIELD, MAINE, USA - ALF / ELF trash plant being used to build new biotech facility.

HOUGHTON, MICHIGAN, USA - Michigan Tech University, U.J. Noblet Forestry Building sloganised twice.

FEBRUARY

4: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, USA Quilcap store bricked & daubed.

5: MANILA, PHILIPPINES - Activists blockade unloading of 17,000 tons of GM soya beans from the US.

21: VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA- Liberal PM’s office firebombed.

24: SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA - Electricity substation associated with Winter Olympics bombed.

26: GEEVSTON, AUSTRALIA - Logging equipment trashed: $3m.

MARCH

5: SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA - HLS backers Marsh have office locks glued, building stickered.

9: MONT BLANC TUNNEL, CHAMONIX, FRANCE / ITALY - Bombing plus 1,500-strong blockade closes it for the day.

LONG MARSTON, ESSEX - Over 100 people trash GM rape field.

10: SMETIEDE, BELGIUM - Aventis GM rape field trashed.

17: PIETRSANTA, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

21: NORTH BAY, USA - Three pickup trucks and 3 SUVs torched at Ford dealership: $135,000 damage.

24: WINTERGREEN GORGE, EIRE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - Generators, crane and pumps torched by ELF: $500,000 damage. Hundreds of trees also spiked.

25: KENILWORTH, ILLINOIS, USA - Huntingdon Life Sciences backer Marsh executive Thomas Wiegand’s home sloganised and windows smashed

28: SADALPUR, INDIA - Farmers burn tons of GM cotton seeds.

31: DEKALB, ILLINOIS, USA - Cavel International horse slaughterers torched: $2m damage.

31: INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, USA - ALF daub Heavenly Hams.

31: SAINT PIERO, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

MONTBLUPO, FLORENCE, ITALY - Two phone masts torched.

TRAVELLERS REST, PEI, CANADA - Activists Working For Animal Rights free 40 foxes from Walter Simmons’ fur farm.

NEW YORK STATE, USA: Milk contamination claimed in three counties: $50,000 damage.

APRIL

11: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA - ALF sloganise Starbucks in anti-dairy / anti-GMO action.

18: CYBERSPACE - Provisional HLS Campaign (Internet Division) launch 4 day denial of service attack in HLS.

19: GALATINA, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

20: VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA - RCMP car park torched: $15m damage.

24: MUNLOCHY, SCOTLAND - GM rape trashed by locals.

25: LIVORNO, ITALY - McDonalds bricked.

26: SIRETTOIA, ITALY - Power lines dynamited.

27: WEYMOUTH, DORSET - Occupation of GM maize test field in pink bouncy castle leads to trial being scrapped.

27-28: ROSKILL, BLACK ISLE, SCOTLAND - Locals trash GM rape.

28: WEST JORDAN, UTAH, USA - ELF sab 10 construction vehicles trashing protected wetlands: $50,000 damage.

MAY

3: BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA, USA - ALF torch refrigerated truck owned by Sims Poultry.

9: MADIGNANO, CREMONA, ITALY - Anonymous anti-biotech activists torch Synergia seed store and machinery.

12: HABOR CREEK, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ALF / ELF free 200 mink from Mindek fur farm.

13: COLTON, CALIFORNIA, USA - 3 ducklings freed from Maple Leaf farm.

24: COUGAR DAM, NR. EUGENE, OREGON, USA - 80 power line insulators shot out: $6,000 damage.

27: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA - New home torched in antisprawl action.

JUNE

3-6: COUGAR DAM & OAKRIDGE, OREGON, USA - More power line insulators shot out.

4: CAPRINO, BERGAMO, ITALY - TV towers torched in solidarity with Silvia, anti-TV tower activist.

7: LAKE FOREST, ILLINOIS, USA - HLS backer Marsh’s regional director James Meathe’s house sloganised and bricked by ALF, Special Operations HLS.

8: NEWPORT, FIFE, SCOTLAND - 250 locals trample GM crops.

11: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA - Marsh exec Andrew Hauser’s home sloganised.

15: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA - Marsh staffer Rob Harper’s house daubed with paint by ALF.

23: DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, USA - Marsh staff Dard Hunter’s house sloganised.

27: LAKE MONRIE, INDIANA, , USA - New home torched in antisprawl action: $725,000 damage.

29: NR. OSLO, NORWAY - ALF free six foxes from experimental fur farm and trash computers / other equipment.

30: OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - New town houses torched to stop sprawl: $1m damage.

EIRE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ALF free all foxes at Lawrence Dana fur farm.

July

Starbucks bombed.

8: VERREBROEK, BELGIUM - Red Devils trash Advanta’s GM sugar beet.

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, USA - ELF trash construction equipment building a new WalMart store.

9-10: STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ALF brick dress shop, then sloganise it: $900 damage.

10: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA - Smoke bombs let off in Marsh offices.

11: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA - 7 SUVs had tyres slashed.

12: TORRE BOLONE, BERGAMO, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

13: MARLIA, LUCCA, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

15: INDIA - Farmers torch more GM cotton.

18: STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ELF brick Hooters.

19: TUCSON, ARIZONA, USA - Construction site trashed: $1,500 damage.

27: SIENA, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

29: JERICHO, NEW YORK, USA - HLS backers Marsh staffer Frank Tasco’s golf course dug up and otherwise trashed by the ALF Frank Tasco Commando Task Force.

29: FRESNO, CALIFORNIA, USA - Dog freed from backyard of house.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA: Start of ELF anti-SUV campaign. 40+ trashed using etching fluid to date, damage totalling $20,000+.

AUGUST

^^IvEnhoe™"TEEEX"" Protesters trample a third of a GM maize field.

3: OAKRIDGE, OREGON, USA - 16 more power line insulators shot out: $40,000 damage.

6: RUDRANAKATTE, DAVAN- GERE, INDIA - Farmers destroy two acres of GM cotton.

9: PRYOR, OREGON, USA - Timber sale spiked.

11: IRVINE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - US Dept of Agriculture research station torched by the ELF, destroying 70 years of research and totalling $735,000 damage.

12: SAINT CESARIO, MODENA, ITALY - Bomb planted at xenotransplantation lab under construction.

16: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA - New home torched in protest against sprawl: $200,000 damage.

18: WAVERLEY, IOWA, USA - 1,200 mink freed by ALF from Misty Moonlight fur farm.

19: DORSET - Mass trespass stops final planting of Aventis GM rape.

26: HASTINGS, MAINE, USA - Cop car torched.

30: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA - HLS-linked Medical Diagnostic Management exec Rodney Armstead had windows smashed.

30: TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA, USA - HLS-related CBC USA glued, bricked and sloganised.

30: OAKRIDGE, OREGON, USA - More power line insulators shot, leading to two hour power cut.

31: DONCASTER, YORKSHIRE - 70% of Scotts peat destroyed.: £100,000 damage.

SEPTEMBER

ARMERS^RANCH^ExAS' USA - HLS scientist Dean Rodwell driveway and van daubed by ALF.

11: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA - Furrier bricked.

19: MANHASSETT, NEW YORK, USA - HLS-backing Marsh exec Frank Tasco’s home sloganised by ALF.

21: HENRICO COUNTY, VIRGINIA, USA - Attempt to torch shopping mall development.

25: DENVER, COLORADO, USA - ELF warn Water Board to stop blocking access to public lands.

28: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA McDonalds and Burger King windows etched by ELF, 28 in all.

25 SUVs treated likewise: $100,000 damage.

30: HONOLULU, HAWAII - 16 frogs freed from pet store by ALF. GOOCHLAND COUNTY, VIRGINIA, USA - House and plant torched: $3,000 damage - though they missed the US flag!

HARBOR CREEK, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ALF / ELF free fifty mink from Mindek fur farm.

GERRY, NEW YORK, USA - ALF set free breeding mink and destroy record cards at fur farm. LINKOPING, SWEDEN - Newly-built McDonalds torched.

OCTOBER

^^EWYoRKNEWYoRKUSA - Dungaree shop bricked.

5: USAF LAKENHEATH, SUFFOLK - Closed for the day by blockade.

6: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA - Anti-feral pig traps at California Maison condos destroyed.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA - ELF use axe to trash two SUVs: $15,000 damage.

COLORADO, USA - Three Dominican nuns trashed nuke silo lid in Ploughshares action.

7: CUMBRIA - 18 peat-trashing machines trashed on two sites. PORTLAND, OREGON, USA - Anti-war Anonymous Anarchists sloganise state capitol building.

8: DAVIOT, ABERDEENSHIRE, SCOTLAND - GM rape trashed.

14: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA - Military vehicles at recruiting station torched in "pre-emptive strike".

15: ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA - Six cars torched, inc. SUV and two cop cars.

15: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA - School torched.

19: BRISTOL, AVON - BurgerKIng glued over profits from occupation of Palestine

24: NSA MENWITH HILL, NR. HARROGATE, YORKSHIRE - Peace activists close US spy base by chaining gates.

EUGENE, OREGON, USA - Gravel pit equipment sabbed.

LYMM, CHESHIRE - Bayer’s GM maize trashed.

NOVEMBER

21: nr BOLOGNA, ITALY: ALF free 129 beagles from Stefano Morini breeders.

26: HARBOR CREEK, PENNSYLVANIA, USA: ALF / ELF free 250+ mink and torch feed barn at Mindek Brothers fur farm in three raids..

DECEMBER

3: BRUZAHOLM, SWEDEN - DBF (Swedish ALF) free 18 rabbits from breeder.

DEN HAAG, HOLLAND - ALF torch hoseboxes used in musical.

14: NSA MENWITH HILL, NR. HARROGATE, YORKSHIRE - Women With Boltcutters trash $1,000s of radio equipment at US spy base.

16: COUNTY TYRONE, NI - Mobile phone mast disappeared! ONTARIO, CANADA - Fur store glued and sloganised.

18: CAMPBELL RIVER, BC, CANADA - Timber West log unloader torched.

21: WALES - ALF free 84 turkeys from Dun Valley breeder.

23: KINGSTON & WALLINGTON, LONDON - 16 butchers and other animal abuse shops glued.

23-24: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA - 8 SUVs sloganised.

28: PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ELF (‘Sally and Peter’) trash luxury housing development.

31: CANFORD MAGNA, NR. BOURNEMOUTH, DORSET - 631 battery hens freed by ALF.

JANUARY

2: EIRE, PENNSYLVANIA, USA - ELF torch four vehicles at Ford dealership: $90,000 damage.

10: USAF MILDENHALL, NORFOLK - 15 anti-war protesters arrested for fence-cutting.

28-30: MARCHWOOD, NR. SOUTHAMPTON, HAMPSHIRE - Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior blockades war convoy for three days.

29: DERBY, DERBYSHIRE - Trident Ploughshares locked on to Rolls Royce gates protesting manufacture of nuclear fuel components.

30: SHANNON, EIRE - E500,000 done to US warplane at Irish transit airport. One arrest.

FEBRUARY

2: USAF LAKENHEATH, SUFFOLK - Closed that day by peacenik blockade.

22: USAF FAIRFORD, GLOUCESTERSHIRE - Gate pulled down by peaceniks + many got in protesting B52 base.

HULME, MANCHESTER - 20 Landrover trashed in protest at sales to Israeli military: £25,000 damage.

MARCH

PRISONERS OF WAR

These revolutionaries have been jailed for their beliefs so you can write them letters of support (nothing compromising!). Those not listed shouldn’t take it as a sleight they’ve been excluded - just send us your details and we’ll put you on our free mailing list! Prisoner details change rapidly and may be out of date by the time you read GA.

More information from: Earth Liberation Front Prisoners Newsletter, BM Box 2407, London WC1N 3XX and North American ELP, POB 11331, Eugene, OR 97440, USA. ELP-Poland PO Box 43, 15-662 Bialystok 26, Poland.

On the web, see http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk][www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

ECO-DEFENCE PRISONERS

obsession with wealth and power that caused environmental destruction. 2) She mailed warning letters with .38 calibre bullets affixed to various Government and corporate officials. These letters stated that their actions were like bullets fired into the heart of creation. 3) Using a jackhammer, she carried out a Ploughshares direct disarmament against a Mintueman II missile silo.

Ted Kaczynski (04475-046), US Pen.Admin Max Facility, PO Box 8500, Florence Colorado 81226, USA. Is serving multiple life sentences for the infamous ‘Unabomber’ bombings carried out against symbols of technology.

ANIMAL LIBERATION

Nathan Brasfield #202044100, King County Regional Justice Center Detention Facility, 620 West James St, Kent WA 98032. Arrested for felony theft of telecommunications service in relation to the campaign to close Huntington Life Sciences.

Jennifer Greenberg, 3100201610 Rose M. Singer Center 1919 Hazen St. East Elmherst, NY 11370 USA lettersforj en@hotmail .com. Please include a return snail mail address in the email if you would like a response. Was found guilty of a Class D felony (Criminal Mischief in the 2nd degree) at trial for alleged property destruction at the home of a Marsh Inc. executive in New York City. She was sentenced to one year on January 31.

Joshua Schwartz, 3100201611, NYSID# 1900738L, EMTC, 1010 Hazen Street,East Elmherst, NY, 11370,mailto:lettersforjosh@hotmail.com][lettersforjosh@hotmail.com. - Please include a return snail mail address in the email if you would like a response. Plead guilty to a Class D felony (Criminal Mischief in the 2nd degree) for alleged property destruction at the home of a Marsh Inc. executive in New York City. He was sentenced to one year on January 14th

Benjamin Persky, #1410212600, NYSID#9846577R, George Vierno Center, 0909 Hazen Street, East Elmhurst, NY 11370 mailto:lettersforben-jamin@hotmail.com][lettersforben- jamin@hotmail.com (mailed off weekly). Sentenced from 2-6 years on felony charges relating to a AntiHuntington Life Sciences/World Week for Animals protest in April 2002 .

Peter Schnell, Reg. # 99476111, FCI Otisville, PO Box 1000, Otisville, NY 10963. Serving 24 months for possession of incendiary devices. It is claimed the devices were to be used to torch dairy trucks.

Sonia Hayward KV5943, HMP Cookham Wood, Rochester, Kent, ME1 3LU, England. Serving 15 months for involvement in antibloodsports activity and the SHAC campaign.

Dave Blenkinsop EM7899, HMP Bullingdon, Oxfordshire OX6 0PZ England. Serving 10 years imprisonment. The sentence is made up of three parts. 1) Three years for a stave attack on the Managing Director of HLS. 2) 18 months for rescuing 600 guinea pigs from a lab supplier. 3) 5 years for planting incendiary devices under abattoir vehicles

Rae Schilling, GN6613, HMP Winchester, Romsey Road, Winchester, SO22 5DF,England. Serving 4 years for aggravated harassment against HLS shareholders.

Geert Waegemans, Gevangenis Hoogstraten, Gelnelstraat 131, 2320 Hoogstraten, Belgium. Serving 5 years for various ALF arsons. Controversially he named police informant, Anja Hermans, as aiding him with his actions after she named him as an ALF activist & alerted the police to his activity. Following Geert’s conviction for various ALF arsons the police are now threatening to prosecute Geert for membership of a criminal organisation (the ALF) and are also looking to place further ALF arson charges against him.

ANTI-CAPITALIST "

Around the world there have been several massive protests against global capitalism and its environmental impact. The following have all been jailed in connection with the protests.

Robert Middaugh, #T41137 Bldg, 410 23up, P.O. Box 8, Avenal, CA 93204. (3 years)

Robert Thaxton #12112716, OSP, 2605 State St, Salem, OR 97310, USA.(86 months)

PEACE/ANTI-WAR ~

Ploughshares is an international movement which uses accountable direct action to disarm weapons of mass destruction. The following have all carried out direct disarmaments.

The following people have been remanded because of a disarmament of a US Plane

Nuin Dunlop, c/o Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Karen Fallon, c/o Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Mary Kelly, c/o Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Damien Moran, c/o Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Ciaron O’Reilly, c/o Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

“Sacred Earth & Space Plowshares”

A couple of years ago four American nuns calling themselves “Sacred Earth & Space Plowshares” disarmed weapons of mass murder at Peterson Air Force Base in the USA. On Sunday October 6th 2002, three of the original four Sisters visited an N-8 missile silo in northern Colorado and using the name “Sacred Earth & Space Plowshares II” disarmed the equipment that transports nuclear missiles to their firing points. All three have been remanded. Letters can be sent to:

Ardeth Platte, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO 80444

Carol Gilbert, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO 80444

Jackie Hudson, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO 80444

Mordechai Vanunu,

Ashkelon prison, Ashkelon, Israel. Serving 18 years for telling world media about Israel’s nuclear capabilities.

Josh Richards JT5130, HMP Gloucester, Barracks Square, Gloucester GL1 2JN, England

Philip Pritchard, HMP Gloucester, Barracks Square, Gloucester GL1 2JN, England

Toby Olditch, HMP Gloucester, Barracks Square, Gloucester GL1 2JN, England

All three have been accused of damaging the perimeter fence of RAF Fairford, aggravated tresspass and conspiracy.

INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS

Leonard Peltier #89637-132, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048, USA. An American Indian Movement activist, serving Life after being framed for the murder of 2 FBI agents.

Eric Wildcat Hall, #BL-5355, Unit I/A 10745 Route 18, Albion, PA 16475-0002, USA. Serving 35-75 years for helping ship arms to Central American indigenous activists.

MOVE

MOVE is an eco-revolutionary group. There are currently eight MOVE activists in prison each serving 100 years after been framed for the murder of a cop in 1979. 9th defendant, Merle Africa, died in prison in 1998

Debbie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Holloway Africa (006308) and Janine Philips Africa (006309) all at: SCI Cambridge Springs, 451 Fullerton Ave, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238, USA.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973) and Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) both at SCI Grateford, PO Box 244, Grateford, PA 19426-0244, USA.

Edward Goodman Africa (AM4974), SCI Camp Hill, PA 17011-0200, USA.

William Philips Africa (AM4984) and Delbert Orr Africa (AM4985) both at SCI Dallas Drawer K, Dallas, PA 18612, USA.

Mumia Abu Jamal (AM8335), SCI Greene, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg PA 15370, USA. In 1981 Mumia was framed for the murder of a cop. Currently awaiting re-sentencing.

ANTI-FASCIST "

Matthew Lamont, #2057039, Intake/Release Center, 550N. Flower St, Santa Ana,CA 92710, USA. Remanded on four felony counts for allegedly making, possessing, transporting and using an explosive device.

Callum Currie, Michael Davison, Malachi Nicholls and Howard Oakes have all been released on the tag after being sentenced to 9 months for affray after joining in a counterprotest against a fascist demo in Leeds.

Tomasz Wiloszewski, Zaklad Karny, Orzechowa 5, 98-200 Sieradz, Poland. Serving 15 years for accidentally killing a neo-nazi whilst defending himself.

ANTI-WAR ACTION DIARY

Below is just a small sample of some of the actions around the war against war in Iraq.

MARCH

in the heart of the city and the crowd took control over the streets around the whole Charing X interchange up till midnight. In Edinburgh, protesters stormed the castle and Princes Street several times, die-ins were held while streets were again blockaded. In Brighton, over 1,000 protested and blocked roads with some even occupying the Town Hall - there were later reports of police using cs spray on demonstrators.

Nearby protesters shut down the centre of worthing. In Swansea protesters staged sit-down actions at major road junctions. A march and Esso blockade was held in Halifax and protesters blockaded the entrance the main Esso garage in Yeovil. Meanwhile in Cardiff the centre of the city was brought to a standstill for several hours before reports of clashes with police. In Leeds one of the main roundabouts was blockaded for four haurs causing road chaos in the morinign rush hour. Protests, blockades and direct actions were reported from all over the country - to numerous to mention

20 - Minneapolis, USA - Locks were glued, paint bombs thrown and windows broken at the Army Navy Recruiting Center.

20 - Portand, USA - Three bridges closed while another group wandered from the West to the East side of town, through the second major commercial center of town. A McDonalds had several windows broken out.

20 - San francisco, USA - An Estimated four to six thousand people still marching through the streets of downtown SF as of 10 pm. According to eyewitnesses, windows of corporate targets were smashed, graffiti was left all over downtown, fire hydrants were opened, newspaper boxes and garbage cans were moved out into the streets as barracades, corporate media vans had their tires slashed and were spraypainted, cop cars were spraypainted and had windows smashed and tires slashed, and a military recruiting center had their doors smashed in and interior dramatically redecorated, as well as files looted and tossed out into the streets. Police have claimed that after they arrested the Black Blockers, they found caches of Molotov cocktails, rocks, and other weapons, but the claim has not been confirmed.

20 and 21 - Canada - An act of sabotage against a symbol of the U.S. military on the UI campus prompted leaders to stop requiring cadets to wear uniforms to class. Authorities are looking for a person who smashed two glass doors at the Reserve Officer Training Corps office in the South Quadrangle building and spray-painted such slogans as "Stop U.S. military research" and "Fuck all wars" on four other UI buildings'

21 - SAN'A, Yemen - Police clashed with anti-war demonstrators trying to storm the U.S. Embassy in Yemen on, leaving a policeman and protester dead amid a barrage of bullets, rocks, water cannons and tear gas canis- ters.About 30 protesters were overcome by tear gas, and three were hospitalized in serious condition. Riot police fired rubber bullets at a smaller crowd in Bahrain, while water cannons and tear gas were used in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

21 - Athens, Greece - 200.000 people took part in the demo. Anarchists, antiauthoritarians, autonoms and youth who gathered behind a banner saying WAR TO THE WAR OF THE BOSSES were 800-1000 persons. When the bloc passed in front of the renovated luxury "Megali Bretania" hotel, eggs and red paint was thrown at the entrance. Some stones were also thrown against the Parliament and the cops guarding it, as well as against some cameras. In front of the French embassy the police guards' house and surveillance cameras got smashed. Red paint was thrown at the European Union building, while everyone on the bloc remained at the spot shouting slogans.

A symbolic attack was also made against the Italian embassy, where stones and molotov cocktails managed to "fly" over the high fence. The Portuguese embassy got some stones too...

After, there was another symbolic strike against the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with molotov cocktails and stones at the entrance. A little bit later, before the British embassy, riot police squads who were watching from distance till then due to the masses of the demo, approached the bloc. The US embassy was the main target. People, especially the pupils, passing in front of the building and the cops and police vans guarding it, were throwing bitter oranges, eggs, red paint and stones at them. The vans and the cops had paints and eggs all over!

Some time, among the other stuff thrown against them, they got four or five molotov cocktails from a really close distance... On the parallel street to the embassy a NOVA bank building was set on fire. In the street between the Hall and the embassy there were massive clashes of demonstrators against cops, where hundreds of pupils participated. Many people, enraged because of the war, the riot police for keeping the embassy safe and because of the suffocating teargas, started a counter-attack, using everything they could find: wooden sticks, bottles, stones taken from the pavements, bitter oranges from the trees, molotov cocktails... All over the street, fires were set in barricades to offer some protection from the gas. Many slogans, with principal COPS, PIGS, ASSASSINS!

A retreating group of about a hundred people reached the War Museum and set fire to some military airplanes exposed in the yard of the Museum, and afterwards attacked the building that houses the State RadioTelevision (ERT). But as this group had been isolated from the body of the demo, it became an easy target for the riot police who charged them, chasing them in the streets of the Kolonaki neighborhood.

In the meanwhile other blocs, the back ones of the main body of the demonstration were still going towards the embassy and there, objects were continuously thrown against the building and the policeguards.

21 - Seoul, South Korea - About fifteen to twenty thousand marched to the United States Embassy in central Seoul (directly in front of South Korea's main palace grounds). Despite the heavy security, about a thousand activists managed to get within a hundred metres of the embassy by charging up the back alleys behind the compound.

During a number of skirmishes university students held the line against the police, thwarting their efforts to push the protesters back.

22 - Fairford Military Base, UK - Thousands of protesters gathered for an anti-war demo at the base being used by US air force B52's. Cops turned back three coaches from London and escorted them all the way there with cop cars and motorbikes! When in London those on the coaches escaped by jumping off at a red light.

22 - Menwith Hill, England - Despite the huge police presence in and around the base, over a thousand people attended a demo outside Menwith Hill US spy base.

22 - London, UK - An estimated half a million march.

22 - Edinburgh, Scotland - Plaincloth policemen brutally tried to arrest a protester for no apparent reason which kicked off the bystanders to intervene, resulting in more arrests and detention. The crowd finally walked off to have a solidarity picket in front of St.Leonards police station. The demonstration broke through police-lines, when police tried to block their way.

22 - Montreal, Canada - More than two hundred and fifty thousand people gathered. As protesters confronted the American Consulate, the Montreal riot police began using pepper spray, clubs and shields to keep demonstrators from crossing over the barricades to confront the American Consulate directly.

23 - USA - Protests at the Oscars by those outside and some of those receiving awards.

23 - Guayaquil, Ecuador - Grenade attack on British consulate. A grenade was thrown at Britain's honorary consulate in the city of Guayaquil in Ecuado. The honorary consul in Guayaquil, Colin Armstrong, told local television station Ecuavisa he thought the attack could be a protest against the war in Iraq. No one was hurt in the attack, and the grenade did little damage.

24 -Frankfurt, Germany - Anti-war demonstrators clashed with police outside the U.S. Consulate'

24 - Australia - Prime Minister John Howard was heckled in parliament by activists opposed to his support for the war.

24 - Hamburg, Germany - Police turned water cannons on protesters, including middle and high school students, outside the U.S. Consulate.Police said a group of Palestinians and Kurds armed with wooden sticks, stones and bottles joined about eight thousand students who had been protesting peacefully outside of the building, and then began attacking officers. Police arrested 21 protesters. Several protesters and three officers were injured.

24 - Anglesey - Wales - RAF valley's runway was blockaded for 4 hours by seven people chained to the drag nets stopping hawk fighter jets from taking off+ training pilots for the war. the main gate of the base was also blockaded +chained shut by activists.

24 - Bangkok, Thailand - A thousand farmers protested against the war.

24 -Auckland, New Zealand - a Roman Catholic priest and another man said they used their own blood to make a 3-foot-long cross on the carpet of the U.S. Consul's office after they made an appointment to see the diplomat, purportedly to read him an anti-war statement.

24 - Bangladesh - Officials told foreign diplomats to seek police escorts whenever they leave their compounds after a string of anti-war protests.

25 - Fariford, England - Antiwar Activists Halt Bomb Convoy.

25 - Dakar, Senegal - Security forces in this largely-Muslim west African nation used tear gas to disperse a spontaneous, stone-throwing demonstration against the U.S.-led war in Iraq (news - web sites), police said Tuesday. "We tried to stop them but they threw stones at us and were insulting us, so we were forced to use tear gas to disperse them," the senior police official said.

26 - Sydney, Autralia - American fast-food restaurants and diplomatic missions were a particular target of the mainly student-led protests against US, British and Australian involvement in the war.Three officers were injured when police came under a barrage of makeshift missiles, including chairs, stones and golf balls, hurled during a student-led demonstration in Sydney. Police arrested 60 youths in pitched battles. Melbourne, Australia - 1,500 students sat in front of police cars and officers, and a march by about 1,000 people in Brisbane ended with five arrests.

Perth, Australia - Mounted police broke up a protest in which 500 students hurled paint, urine and tomatoes at the US doors of the Consulate General.

South Korea - police hauled away about 30 demonstrators from outside the US embassy and a dozen more from a downtown Seoul McDonald's where anti-war activists targeted US symbols of power and commerce. Members of the radical left-wing student group Hanchongryon surged through a police blockade at the US embassy, police said.

Java, Indonesia - About three thousand people rallied at Cilacap, urging the government to break relations with the US and calling for a "comprehensive boycott" of all US goods. And two thousand Islamic students held a similar protest in Semarang.

Yogyakarta - about 150 protesters massed outside two Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, while in the capital Jakarta about 200 students rallied at the British embassy and 40 students threw red paint and eggs at the

American Express building.

Manila, Philippines - Antiwar protesters gathered outside a McDonald's restaurant in downtown Manila, urging a boycott of US multinationals.

Italy - Italian police say at least two vehicles belonging to American military personnel have been firebombed near U.S. bases in northern Italy. A third vehicle was torched near the U.S. airbase at Aviano. Authorities say they believe the attacks were protests against the war in Iraq.

Khartoum, Sudan - Two students were killed and 100 policemen were injured, three seriously, in pro-Iraq protests in the capital, Khartoum. A second student died Tuesday at Sudan

University for Science and Technology during an anti-war protest.

Madrid, Spain - Tens of thousands of students protested across Spain, demanding the government's resignation and calling for a halt to war. Protests were also held in Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Seville. Protesters throwing stones and bottles clashed with baton-wielding riot police in Madrid, Barcelona and Zaragoza. In Barcelona, masked demonstrators smashed the windows of a McDonald's and a department store. On Friday and Saturday, riot police fired rubber bullets and smoke grenades during running battles with pockets of protesters in Madrid, leaving more than 150 people injured.

ALL NATIONS

HALLUCINATIONS

ARE YOU READY TO DIE

FOR TEE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION?

If we are going to insist on maintaining a state we can obey, then we have to breed children who will die for it. So quit whining.

27 - BOGOTA, Colombia - Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into a crowd of more than fifteen hundred demonstrators Thursday who tried to march on the U.S. Embassy in Colombia to protest the war in Iraq No serious injuries were reported.

Demonstrators hurled rocks and firecrackers at the riot police. "Yankees, get out of Colombia and all the countries of the world," one of the placards said. Another said: "We are all Palestinians, we are all Iraqis. Gringos, get out of here."

27? - Lebanon - Mob storms KFC as anti-war protests sweep country

Tripoli police fire in the air, arrest 25 Alia Ibrahim.

27 SANTIAGO, Chile- A small bomb exploded after hours at a Santiago branch of the U.S.-based BankBoston, police said on Thursday, in what appeared to be a protest against the U.S.-led war in Iraq. The spokesman said police found a pamphlet at the site that said "death to the empire," which he took as a reference to the United States. Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack.

28 - ROME, Italy - A dozen cars belonging to a Ford dealership on the outskirts of Rome were set on fire Friday in a protest against war in Iraq. Also on Friday, the remains of two Molotov cocktails were found by a Jaguar dealership in Rome, along with the same banner against the war. The devices did not go off, according to police, and no vehicles were damaged.

28 -Athens, Greece - In a possible anti-US protest on Friday night, unknown individuals threw a grenade into a McDonalds fast food restauran, damaging the interior. No one was hurt.

29 - US/Worldwide - 200 websites hacked and anti war slogans pasted onto them. Bringing the total to over 30,000 sites internet sites hacked into since war began.

April

1 -Montgomery, US - Vehicles at Navy Recruiting Headquarters were attacked overnight. Damages included messages spraypainted on three Navy sedans and two Navy vans. In addition, a large two-panel truck was set on fire. Damage estimates are not known at this time.

Messages included the slogans "Stop the War," "Leave Iraq" and "Stop Killing," clearly indicating the reason this ELF cell had targeted the military facility. It was also reported that all cars and vans targeted carried the ELF signature in spraypaint.

1? - Bologna, Italy - A bomb was found outside an International Business Machines Corporation. sales office and was defused by police. No one has claimed responsibility for placing the device, but police said they suspect it was the work of people who oppose the Iraq war.

2 - Bellingham, USA - "On the night that the dictator of the USA escalated its war against the citizenry of Iraq, an anonymous individual threw a rock through the front plate glass door of the military recruitment center in, WA.

No humans or animals were hurt in this attack. The US military has waged continuous war on the peoples of this world for long enough. Everything must be done to stop Leviathan."

2 - Mexico City - Hundreds of antiwar protesters hurl paint bombs, cow dung at U.S. Buildings.

corporate news report. When they arrived at the Embassy they burned large U.S. flags, and hurled rocks, orange peels, eggs, and cow dung at shield-protected police guarding the building.

Hit ’Em Where it Hurts

Below is an article by the former Earth Liberation Front Press officer. As I write this we have just gone to war (officially at least) with Iraq. Although the article is aimed primarily at and refers to the US anti war and peace movement(s), I feel that many of the criticisms and ideas in the article could just as easily be directed towards the movement(s) here in the UK.

As the Commander in Chief of the United States gears up at 8:00 pm (EST) to tell the nation and the world that war is inevitable; that the window of opportunity for Saddam to disarm and destroy his “weapons of mass destruction” has expired, serious questions need to be posed to the privileged anti-war movement in the United States. With massive U.S. led bombing of Iraq perhaps just hours away, the question remains, how far is the anti-war movement in the United States willing to go to stop the U.S. government and its unceasing atrocities?

So far the peace or anti-war movement in this country has mirrored the same strategies and tactics of past historical anti-war causes. By far the most important example to reference is that of the Vietnam anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Well over a million people participated in this effort, engaging in a variety of tactics and strategies in an attempt to stop the war, or even to prevent its further escalation.

From public education to picketing, boycotts to lobbying, marches to massive civil disobedience, to even outright suicide in the numerous cases of individuals lighting themselves on fire in protest, the Movement was extremely diverse. There was even a decent contingency of property destruction that occurred, no doubt condemned by the mainstream corporate peace organizations.

With all this activity, with the incredible amount of participation, one would assume this would have been more than enough to stop the war, to pressure the federal government to pull out of Southeast Asia. Furthermore, when soldiers such as Ron Kovic, returned from the war angry and disillusioned and formed organizations such as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, even more intense pressure was placed on the U.S. government. But it was not enough. None of the strategies and tactics applied during the Vietnam anti-war movement in the United States were enough, either individually or combined, to stop the U.S. government’s military horrors. At the height of the Movement, Nixon’s response was not to stop the war but to initiate his policy of Vietnamization. This ingenious plan allowed the U.S. government to weaken the anti-war movement while continuing on with the war for another five years. When the peace accords were finally signed in Paris in 1973, they were more a result of the incredible success of the Viet Cong than any realistic effectiveness of the anti-war cause.

Each of the anti-war movements that have surfaced in the United States since then have attempted to mirror, to an absolutist extent, the strategies and tactics that failed during the Vietnam anti-war struggle. In fact these same strategies and tactics have been used in nearly all U.S. anti-war movements throughout history and the fact remains, never in U.S. history has any anti-war or peace movement actually prevented or ceased a U.S. military operation or war. And yet continuously, anti-war movements in the United States fall into the same mold of ineffective activism that stands absolutely no chance of threatening or challenging the power structure of the U.S. government.

In the current day, protests in select locations such as Washington, DC, New York, San Francisco, Los Angles, Portland, and more are considered successful due only to the numbers of people in attendance. The common argument is stated in defense of these activities that the message is getting out into the media and thus people in this country and around the world are learning that not everyone supports Bush’s war. Yet, from a strategic standpoint there is absolutely no realistic foundation to the belief that this form of public education can and will have any effect on the government’s decision to use military force in Iraq. Again, glancing back to the Vietnam period when the protests were even larger, when more people gathered and the tactics were even broader than those utilized today, Nixon refused to listen to the public and continued on with the war.

During the past few weeks cries have emerged from the “progressive” sectors of U.S. society concerning Bush’s statement that the anti-war movement is a mere focus group and would not effect his ultimate decision. This should provide at least some indication that the large parties — which some might call protests or rallies — are not capable of generating the needed pressure which could actually force the government to stop. If it hasn’t ever occurred throughout U.S. history and, arguably, the U.S. government is more powerful now than ever, there is no precedent on which to base this faulty behavior and activity. Yet, the large mainstream peace groups continue to give caring U.S. people false hope, that if they get involved in the movement there is actually a chance they can help stop the war.

If we are going to become serious about stopping this war, and even the U.S. led atrocities of tomorrow, we must be realistic about our strategies and tactics and actually begin to utilize those methodologies that can and will challenge the power structure of the country.

Yes, I am speaking of direct action, but not the generalized version spouted freely today and used to describe primarily conscience serving endeavors. An action is direct if it actually gets in the way, prevents, or stops an injustice from occurring. Unfortunately, the government sanctioned peace parades do not fit into this description. Even though public education is an inherent necessity of any movement, the time for public education by relying upon corporate media’s interpretation of your events has long since passed — if it was ever valuable.

The only possibility of stopping this current military action is to engage in strategies and tactics which severely disrupt the war machine, the U.S. economy, and the overall functioning of U.S. society; particularly how it relates to consumerism and the economy. Marches, picketing, rallies, parties, benefits, civil disobedience and even property destruction are pointless, and perhaps even counterproductive, unless they serve to severely disrupt the functioning of the political system and its economy. An atmosphere of severe unrest, if manufactured properly, will force the U.S. government to place military resources in the streets of the United States, will threaten the economy (the chief motive behind this military excursion) of the United States, and ultimately create a political atmosphere unfavorable for Bush to continue on with the war.

So how is an atmosphere of severe unrest and disruption generated? First and foremost, it must begin with our ability to look beyond the business as usual strategies and tactics that have failed miserably in the past. It must begin with our allegiance to come to terms with the realization that any and all tactics and strategies must be considered at least available for use. Next we must be willing to decipher exactly how the power of the political structure can be effectively challenged. Once this matter has been examined there is only one question remaining, will each of us become involved and use whatever tactics and strategies are necessary, or will we refuse and continue to engage solely in conduct which serves little other purpose than making people feel better about themselves.

Here are some suggestions for the necessary creation of an atmosphere of unrest and disruption in the United States.

1. Attack the financial centers of the country. Using covert or black bloc techniques, depending on the situation, physically shut down financial centers which regulate and assist the functioning of U.S. economy. This can be done in a variety of ways from massive property destruction, to online sabotage, to physical occupation of buildings. However the latter I would shy away from, especially the open civil disobedience type of activities which purposely involve arrests. This movement needs all the assistance it can get and absolutely no good will come from going to jail. Allowing yourself to be purposely arrested demonstrates that an individual has at least some faith in the U.S. legal system. This is completely foolish. One primary objective is to engage in serious unrest and disruption and not to get caught. Not getting caught means you are able to continue the struggle the next day.

2. Large scale urban rioting. With massive unrest and even state of emergencies declared in major cities across the country, the U.S. government will be forced to send U.S. troops into the domestic arena thereby taking resources and political focus away from the war. Unstable conditions in much of the country also serve as a political embarrassment for the Administration and could assist in forcing them to stop the war to deal with domestic concerns. Rioting should be focused on governmental agencies and corporations — especially those that are profiting from the war or destruction of life.

3. Attack the media centers of the country. It is the corporate media who has and continues to influence and control the minds of the mass body of people in the United States. These new media outlets cannot be utilized by the movement as they are owned by the very corporations one should be opposing. Using any means necessary, shut down the national networks of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. Not just occupations but actually engage in strategies and tactics which knock the networks off the air.

4. Spread the battle to the individuals responsible for the war and destruction of life — the very heads of government and U.S. corporations. No longer should these people be able to hide behind their occupations, living their lives in peace while they simultaneously slaughter countless people. Hit them in their personal lives, visit their homes, and make them feel personally responsible for committing massive atrocities.

5. Make it known publicly that this movement does not support U.S. troops as long as they are serving an unjust and horrifying political regime. Create an atmosphere lacking of support to assist U.S. troops at home and abroad in losing their morale and will to fight. If you are supporting the troops you are supporting this war and the very U.S. government that is the primary terrorist regime in the international arena.

6. Actively target U.S. military establishments within the United States. Again, following the above stated goal of not getting caught, use any means necessary to slow down the functioning of the murdering body.

7. When engaging in the above six activities, strike hard and fast and retreat in anonymity. Select another location, strike again hard and fast and quickly retreat in anonymity. Engage only in actions where you will be victorious.

Do not be concerned with alienating the mainstream sectors of the movement — that mainstream has never stopped a U.S. military activity or war. Do not get caught. do not get caught. Do not get sent to jail. Stay alert, keep active, and keep fighting. Remember, an action is only good (especially at this juncture in U.S. society) if it will serve to severely disrupt the political system of the country, its economy, and the corporate interests that drive this society.

These suggestions are not radical. They are merely recommendations for those that desire to actually have a chance at stopping this current military siege. As the peace or anti-war corporate organizations vocally oppose this message and its enclosed suggestions, continue to ask what realistic chance do their strategies and tactics have to actually stop this war? What historical precedent do their business as usual politics and policies have? As no peace or anti-war movement has ever stopped U.S. governmental military policies or activities using the state sanctioned and societal approved methods, what right do they have to give the caring public false hope?

Well over 500,000 Iraqi children have died since the Gulf War as a result of U.S. bombing and sanctions — not to mention thousands of innocent men and women. With the planned massive bombing campaign planned by the U.S. military, the death toll of the innocent will severely increase. And for what? The U.S. rhetorical line of “liberating the Iraqi people from dictator Saddam” is as much bullshit as our historical line of helping to spread freedom and democracy around the world. Surely Saddam is guilty of massive atrocities, but so are many other world leaders. Sure Saddam may have had weapons of mass destruction, but so do many evil leaders of nations around the world. Just why is it we have not targeted Israel and Sharon in the same manner as Saddam? Why is it leaders of the United States have not targeted the U.S. government for its weapons of mass destruction and incredible history of terrorist and murderous atrocities? Similar to Bush Senior’s Gulf War, this is another war for U.S. corporations and for the protection and, more importantly, expansion of the U.S. economy. With the incredible oil reserves in the region and the potential for U.S. corporations to have a hand in building and ruling a future Iraq nation, the motives are quite obvious. Of course, it wouldn’t be just if the U.S. did not claim that it was taking action against a horrible dictator for humanitarian purposes.

As the U.S. led military campaign gets fully under way in the very near future, the question remains... how far is the anti-war movement in the United States willing to go to stop the U.S. government and its unceasing atrocities? How far are you willing to go, what are you willing to do to stop the massive bloodshed once again caused by the U.S. government.

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War & Peace; Iraq and the continuing war against life by Jim Jones

The rationale of industrial society, capitalist or otherwise, is a constant war against life. The actual sustenance of society (or ‘civilisation’) has been the plunder, murder and enclosure of all life and the elevation of the State.

Industrial society requires that all life is turned into ‘resources’ to feed the machine of Industry; the Economy. The war against Iraq is not a quirk but is part of the life blood of this society; ‘peace’ in the context of this society is meaningless. The absence of declared war against a particular country is not peace but war by subtlety, it is war without television images, war unaccompanied by mass protest. An almost silent, extremely devastating war. Free flowing rivers are dammed, ancient forests are wiped out and turned into factories for producing wood and paper. Other species that we share the planet with are ‘farmed’, slaughtered en masse, while other millions are driven to extinction. Once free human beings are turned into workers, turned into yet another resource to serve the God of Economy, cogs in a machine that devours all life to feed its own survival.

The story of this all-devastating machine is one of invasion, plunder, genocide and imprisonment. Resitance through the ages has been incredible yet unfortunately has ended with taking over the reins of the machine and usually accelerating the destruction and misery, for example Christianity and Socialism. Where though does that leave resistance to the Empire today, dominated by one all-encompassing world power?

The obvious failures of the past must be left behind, our resistance must be determined, imaginative and based simply on the destruction of power and hierarchy. A ‘resistance’ based on half-measures or compromise is not resistance but acceptance of the status quo. A ‘resistance’ that accepts hierarchy and power is opposed to liberation.

The attack againt Iraq was inevitable and further invasions, military occupations and genocidal operations are certain while this socitety continues to exist. The majority of the opposition to the attack on Iraq was sadly also very predictable, offering a replication of what has gone before. Still pleading to the mass murderers. still dependent on the spectacle to promote the protest rather than aiming to stop the spectacle. The only aim of which appears to be getting on the news and boosting flagging careers. Glimpses of autonomous resistance though shone through to povide inspiration and hope.

The war against Iraq is a symptom of a life way that needs to be stopped. The exhilaration of rebellion needs to be brought to the forefront, we are in the belly of the Empire and we can pull the guts out of it. A great piece of grafitti recently declared “the war is everywhere” — exactly! The best way to support our brothers and sisters around the World and to reclaim our lives is by hitting the institutions, networks and infrastructure that sustain this nightmare. Simultaneously, we must also be constructing free association networks based on mutual aid and autonomy of every individual and group.

The Empire will crumble like all those that have gone before. Iraq was not the first and will certainly not be the last while the State, in any form, exists.

Words of Liberation from inside the Complex

An Interview With U.S. animal liberation ex-prisoner Petey Schnell

How did you get involved in the animal rights movement?

Well, after choosing vegetarianism, my earth and animal consciousness seemed to be ever growing, while becoming interested in looking into animal agriculture and the horrors behind such an industry was growing as well. After discovering and then bringing myself from a vegetarian lifestyle to a vegan one, I knew that a lifestyle change only was not enough.

Along with others, I organized to try and get the high school that I attended to choose more humane, alternative ways of studying the anatomy of a cat rather than dissecting the dead animal in this biology class.

Fortunately, this was the only dissection that took place in my school, but unfortunately we failed in our attempts to stop it. I grew up and went to high school in suburban New Jersey where I was introduced to the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance by another animal conscious classmate. The connections I made through my involvement with this organization were my initial introduction to the animal rights movement.

Do you consider yourself an animal rights activist?

I find this a very interesting question. I’ve always been wary of labels such as this, just as I’ve been wary of any and all ways of possibly alienating the general public instead of inviting each and everyone to be active, to speak up and speak out. If I attend and anti-war demonstration, amongst thousands, bringing my sincere opposition to this specific war the demonstration is protesting, am I an animal rights activist there, or am I an antiwar activist? Personally, I would then be neither of those labels. I’d actually be a person, standing up for what he believes in, refusing to be scared of speaking his mind, even if it’s in protest of what his government is proposing. If I’m organizing an antifur protest for example, I want you to be there not because you’re an animal rights activist, and so then its your duty to be in attendance. I instead want you to be there because you are sincerely in opposition to what the fur trade is all about, whoever you are. That’s important, that’s what matters the most. Yes, by definition, if you are active in any one political or social struggle you are then an activist, but I sincerely think we need to start being sincerely conscious of how we might be alienating ourselves from the general public.

To create any type of change we need the power of the masses, thus it’s important to try and appeal to the masses as best as we can, or at least make sure that the invitation is always there. So no, I don’t consider myself an animal rights activist as I sit here now, writing these words that anyone is capable of, with this extreme earth and animal consciousness that anyone is capable of finding, in prison for acting on that consciousness that anyone is capable of as well.

What led you to take a more direct approach to animal liberation?

I guess the escalation of my rage and passion got to the point where I realized that I wasn’t doing enough until I at least attempted to take such a direct approach at creating change. Granted, I guess some are not in the position to take the risks that go along with taking such a direct approach, whatever the circumstances are of their particular situation. I just realized that the temporary imprisonment that I may endure if captured, however long or short, isn’t much compared to the lifetime of suffering that the animals must endure. I don’t really think that it’s much of a risk, as it is what’s necessary in looking to create change.

Why do you feel that breaking the law is acceptable or necessary in the fight for animal liberation?

The overall attempt at creating any type of change, socially or politically, should be looked at as a puzzle , because just like a puzzle we need certain pieces to come together and become whole in order to be successful. Specific to animal liberation, we need those out there spreading the word about animal suffering and cluing the general public in on the vegan lifestyle, to create an overall consciousness. We need those on the legal front enforcing the acknowledgement of animals within the law and looking to ban such inhumane, legal events and practices such as the circus and racing, fur trapping and farming. Amongst the other puzzle pieces that I’ve neglected to mention as examples of necessary pieces in order for the proper connections to be made that will bring about change and bring this movement to success, is directly acting on behalf of the animals or yes, breaking the law. We need those out there breaking the law to bring immediate attention to an extreme situation. We need to present that the extreme situation that the animals are in, does call for extreme measures to be taken on their behalf. I feel that breaking the law should not be looked at as inappropriate even though it may be seen as such by the vast majority. Those willing to take a stand as the voice for the voiceless, those who value life over property, should look at the concept of breaking the law as secondary to the action itself. What can be accomplished and the necessary aspect of the action itself is what is primary. The fact that a law enacted by the state will be broken posing possible consequences should merely serve as the risk involved when taking such actions.

What about the legal system in your country? Do you feel that it is possible to make positive changes through reforms or other legal measures?

Yes, I do feel it is possible to make positive changes through legal channels. Just like I stated above, everything is intertwined when looking at the end goal, which is to liberate the oppression indefinitely. Nothing should be left out of the equation; we need every possible solution to bring us to the end result. I know that legal measures are necessary toward liberation, especially when I think about Austria and other countries that have banned fur farming for example. Is it positive? Any accomplishment made in this struggle toward an end to animal suffering and bringing these sentient creatures closer to their liberation is nothing short of positive and should definitely be looked at as such.

When you were arrested, how did it feel knowing that you could end up with a long prison sentence? In the U.S., sentencing tends to be much higher than in most European countries.

Well, when Matt and I were first indicted in a U.S. Federal Court it was brought to our attention that both of the charges that we were indicted on each carried a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment. I knew that if I were found guilty I’d be sentenced to some amount of prison time since it was also made known that we would not be eligible for any type of probation. Although due to my experience with the criminal system here in the U.S. and from what research I’ve done on it as well, I’ve come to realize that the maximum penalties are meant to instill fear in the defendant(s) leading them to the possible option of cooperating or pleading out. To say that I was never overcome by fear that I would face a substantial amount of prison time, even though I was able to look at the situation realistically and refused to be misguided by maximum penalties would actually be a lie. The type of fear that I experienced was a fear of the unknown, not even really fearing the unknown amount of prison time I’d possibly end up receiving, even within the realistic realm of possibilities, but just not knowing what to expect of prison life in general. Realizing, as human beings we adapt to new surroundings very well and that when taking an interest in looking for it, strength is found in times of struggle. I was satisfied with expecting the worst and hoping for the best as a general rule of thumb. This lead to a really positive outlook that I fortunately still posses today.

Did you ever consider cooperating more with the police to get a shorter sentence?

Matt and I agreed in solidarity to let our lawyers negotiate with the prosecution to see what type of deal they could orchestrate that we’d be willing to comply to in solidarity. This came after we realized that fighting the case was an unrealistic fight and not only were we setting ourselves up for disappointment but we felt that we were just setting ourselves up to receive a longer sentence then if we plead out. Possibly a defeatist attitude but we saw it as a realistic conclusion. So a deal was made to acccept responsibility for our actions and our intentions, which we did in solidarity, to plea to the lesser of the two charges and thus we were handed sentences of 14 months and 24 months respectively. Those sentences most likely would have been doubled had we taken the case to trial and lost.

Although this type of cooperation is the only kind that is acceptable, and we did it to avoid longer sentences so the day to be active once again would draw sooner rather than later, what’s really important is that we did it in solidarity. We set out on the night in question, together as one entity, and on our way to the frontline we were arrested together, as one entity. Therefore, every decision revolving around our situation was made together, as one entity, with the consideration of each other’s interests in solidarity through and through. As comrades with a similar drive to take action, passion, rage, and a thirst that needed desperately to be quenched for a liberated tomorrow, any other way of dealing with such a situation would have been completely unacceptable. That goes for us as well as anyone else captured at or on their way to the front lines. Solidarity from arrest to release (whenever that day may come) is the only option.

Being in prison can be hard mentally and physically. How/where have you found the inspiration to stick with your beliefs?

Certainly prison can be hard mentally and physically, and certainly some can deal with such a situation of isolation better than others and find the strength and stability to push through those hard times. Although, if what you believe in is sincere and has a truth to it that lies deep within your heart and soul, there is nothing at all that can take what you believe away from you or give you reason to find it again.

Personally, this experience has only reinforced what I so believe in and has given me many more reasons to believe. My earth and animal consciousness just grows and so does my will to fight. I know the slaughter and destruction remains as I sit here, but turning away is not the option. Staying conscious and remaining true is the only option that I see sitting here on the inside or walking trough life on the outside.

Has the support that you’ve received helped you get through your time so far?

Absolutely! Every day that I come away from mail call with a handful of letters from like-minded individuals, sending their support from all over the U.S. and all over the world, I’m filled with so much hope and joy. I hear the screams loud and clear that I am not alone in here, each time I open a piece of mail, not that I ever thought being alone in this struggle for animal liberation could actually be possible.

Although, when surrounded by the mainstream day in and day out, in isolation from the rest of the world and the progressive community you know and love, it is every reminder that action is taking place and people all over the world are standing firm as a voice for the voiceless that leaves you with a sensation that contributes to any and all amounts of strength you’re left with. The feeling is really indescribable in all reality. I often wonder what this time would be like if I didn’t have handfuls of mail to look forward to and dive into day after day in here. I think the alternative would leave this positive outlook I’ve been blessed with much harder to find.

What does the word solidarity mean to you?

Solidarity is the tie that binds any one progressive community together and the strength of this tie all depends on how solid the community is and how easily it can be broken. Solidarity should not be hard to find in any area of such community and its importance does not lessen in any one area nor is it any more important in any other area; it is equally important within the entire community. Solidarity is acknowledging the interests of every member of this community, considering everyone’s wants and needs without bias. Solidarity is never letting another member of the community fall without a conscious attempt at embracing their fall at whatever cost. Solidarity is supporting each other completely and thoroughly. Solidarity is not only the tie that binds, but it is what puts the wheels in motion toward progress in any one movement.

Do you feel that the destruction being caused to our earth, to people, and to the animals is reversible?

Is it even possible at this point to make lasting positive changes? I really think this is the question that becomes the deciding factor for most people who consider joining the struggle, which actually becomes a question of whether to become active or remain apathetic to the oppression, destruction, and slaughter that isn’t going away. What can one person do when the problems of the world are so great and the destruction this world has endured already is so terribly overwhelming? A question that seems to be asked in the same breath.

These problems are not going away, unless we intervene. When conscious of what these problems are and the consequences that will be brought to this world if such problems are allowed to continue and evolve leads to the only viable option, which is acting out in defense of the voiceless and oppressed, with the intention of halting any further destruction. Imagine if everyone said, “I can’t do anything, I’m only one person, and the problems are too great. Getting concrete results just doesn’t seem possible.”

As I’ve stated before, the greater the progressive community becomes, and the greater the movement becomes, in quantity, the easier it will be to get results and the closer we will be to bringing this beautiful earth and all her sentient creatures to a liberated state. So let’s each stand firm, as an example to others resting on the fence, against all odds and absolutely refuse to give in.

Do you have any regrets?

No, I don’t have any regrets. I’ve played the night in question over in my head so many times, realizing there are things we could’ve done differently in preparing for such a night, to decrease the likelihood of our possible arrest. Although this is just the process of living your life and then learning from the mistakes you may make along your way through the course of your life, even though this is a rather extreme way of doing so. I’ve really learned so much from this experience, stemming much further than how to make such a night successful. I find myself almost thankful even, rather that regretful. Thankful, not because I’m here in prison, learning what I have and am through revelations and realizations, but because I’ve let this situation bring me to such clarity and that I’ve come to conclusions given the circumstances of the situation.

Is there anything you would like to say to the people reading this, any words of wisdom?

Well, I’ve really enjoyed this interview, and certainly appreciated the chance to be heard and voice my opinion on these issues. I hope the statements I’ve made here are not looked at as words on paper, but instead are understood that this is where I stand on these issues, firmly and sincerely.

I live here behind these prison walls in isolation where my every will to believe and be strong is tested and still I stand firm in everything I hold true within my heart and soul. With every stance held firm, a promise is made to the earth and animals that I will never back down and will never give in. These are not words on paper, they are within me, burning, waiting to be released. These statements, what I believe, my passion, it’s what consumes me. It never dies.

When do you expect to be out?

August 27^th of 2003 is my expected release date, which is when my three years of supervised release begins, also a part of my sentence.

Josh Harper Statement on Home Raid

As many of you have heard by now my home was raided last Wednesday, April 23^rd. The FBI have been telling reporters that it was in relation to arson, animal enterprise terrorism, interference with interstate commerce, etc, etc. I’m sure that by now the pro-drunk driving crew at Consumer Freedom are celebrating my certain demise, and HLS collaborators everywhere are picturing the day that they can happily return to making money without us pesky activists saying something about it. I can see them now, visualising the boxes and boxes of FBI loot coming out the door, cheering as they think up the next chemical to pour down a beagles throat. What they should be visualising is this:

Me not giving a fuck and continuing to fight them the same way I have since I first got involved in this campaign.

The raid on my home is next to meaningless to me. I am angry, as anyone would be, that my personal belongings were taken. I’m saddened to see my baby pictures go. I am wondering why the FBI failed to report that they took a computer from my room. I am doubting that I will ever get to enjoy the pictures from my birthday party that were on the camera they stole. (Note to the Feds: the dancing pictures should be particularly funny. I hope you die laughing.) But my anger over those things is fleeting. In case people have failed to notice the FBI does this sort of thing every few years with me. I have grown used to it and realised that in the grand scheme of things it isn’t such a big deal.

I am in England right now and amazed at some of the people I have met here. Having their homes raided is old news to them. They take it in stride and keep on attacking the bastards who are ruining this world for the rest of us. They get arrested, go to jail, and then get off their asses and go back to it. I intend to do the same thing now, and in a few years when the FBI goes on their next attempt to intimidate me I will do the same.

So I hope that everyone out there doesn’t let this raid scare them. The FBI have nothing on me. Nothing they took can get me in any sort of trouble, although I am sure they will justify the raid with a publicised arrest and then let the matter quietly drop as my attourneys destroy their case, just as they always have in the past. I’ll deal with it, just as I know you all would. We have alot of work ahead of us, lets get to it shall we?

For VICTORY!

Josh Harper

I Find You Guilty

New Statement from Rob ‘Los Ricos’ Thaxton

This year started on an interesting note. On January 2^nd, Oregon Department of Corrections Security Threat Group manager came by to visit. He threatened to send me into exile in Eastern Oregon — far from my daughter in Portland — if I didnt move out of the cell I shared with Brian McCarvill. Brian is currently suing ODOC over their mailroom policies, which result in the rejection of anarchist literature sent to him. This has been something that has bothered me the past 3 years. I have over 200 mail violations notices concerning letters and publications sent to me here in prison. Their favorite reasons for such violations are because the publications are anarchist-related or because of STG symbol — in this case, a circled A, a symbol used internationally for anarchy.

I support Brian’s lawsuit. Plus he is a valued and trusted friend. We chose not to split up. On January 7^th, we receI’ved write-ups about unauthorized activity and disobedience of an order. This had to do with a card writing campaign I’d initiated a month earlier. I’d asked people to send postcards to us with a circled A symbol on them, along with the caption “This is not a gang symbol”. Two days after receiving the writeup, we were called to a disciplinary hearing. After discussing the issue with me, the hearings officer told me “I find you guilty of continuing to be involved in the anarchist movement.” Pretty illuminating, as this was not what I was charged with. But it does actually sum up ODOC’s attitude towards me. It has not been easy, but I have attempted to stay involved with events on the outside of these walls. I’ve been incarcerated since the international Reclaim the Streets day of solidarity to oppose the G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, June 18^th 1999. I’ve missed out on the Battle of Seattle, the anti-IMF/WB protests, the protests against both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and GW Bush’s bloodless coup. The summary of my hearing contained a few lies and halftruths, designed to make me appear to be a threat to the safety and the security of ODOC facilities, if not the world at large.

The hearings officer noted that I threatened to use my 30 years of organizing skills to cause trouble for ODOC. What I actually said was that I’d assured Benny Ward as well as the STG managers here at OSP that I would not use my extensI’ve organizing skills to create trouble for them. And I asked if it would be too much to expect that I be allowed to have my mail? Apparently it is.

The most alarming aspect of this, though, is the fact that ODOC has come to the conclusion that I am a member of the Earth Liberation Front. This despite the fact that I’ve never been arrested for, nor been questioned about any actions by the ELF. Indeed, there is no evidence or rumor of evidence that can connect me to the ELF in any way whatsoever. The ELF is a clandestine group whose sole purpose is to carry out acts of sabotage against corporations and research facilities that the ELF considers responsible for despoiling the earth. As such, it has been listed as a terrorist organization, and is one of the targeted focal points for several Joint Task Force(s) on Terrorism in cities, and stated across the US. I am a writer and an activist. It has been a deliberate decision on my part not to undertake acts of sabotage, since I lack the skill and knowledge to do so effectively and safely. So far, no one has been hurt or killed by an ELF action.

Despite losing my job in the prison infirmary, being sent to the hole for 120 days and being labeled a terrorist, I will continue to write for anarchist and alternative publications. I am an enemy of the New World Order. We, the people, shall overthrow the rule of corporate power. Sí Se Puede!

FATAL FLAW

A Poem by Kevin Tucker

To walk upon the Earth is to walk upon the graves of our ancestors.

We would believe that this is a thing of disrespect: desecration.

This could not be further from the truth.

The Civilized human has forgotten the greatest part of him or herself.

When we think of necessary functions; brain, lungs, and heart come to mind, but short of that we are apparently nothing.

Of course, there are always the oxygen and carbon dioxide conversions, But the scientists have left them off as just that, conversions: equations.

We are simply chemistry: fruits of Reason.

To deny the forests as our lungs, The rivers as our veins, The air as our hearts, And the wildness as our brains: Is to deny our true selves.

The Civilized human walks as a shadow of the real human.

The domesticate is really the half dead, for s/he has denied the majority of their own body as theirs.

Instead they grant the miracle of life to the synthetic self

We have already become cyborgs.

We think of Technology as our Iron Lung, Industrialism as our veins, Progress as our hearts, and Capital as our brains: the Spirit of Reason has engulfed our being.

We, having denied our being, put our faith in the Future, a Technological-Industrial Utopia: the half dead awaiting life.

We forgot that life is a cycle, life is now and it ends for all of us. Our decayed corpses will flourish life for generations well beyond our imagination.

This is one thing we know for sure, yet we continually hold out.

We deny life, and thus deny death,

Our legacy will only end in sorrow, the void of corpses looking no more satisfied in death as in life.

Those who neglected the problem before their eyes:

THE IRON LUNG HAS CANCER.

The hearings officer noted that I threatened to use my 30 years of organizing skills to cause trouble for ODOC. What I actually said was that I’d assured Benny Ward as well as the STG managers here at OSP that I would not use my extensI’ve organizing skills to create trouble for them. And I asked if it would be too much to expect that I be allowed to have my mail? Apparently it is.

The most alarming aspect of this, though, is the fact that ODOC has come to the conclusion that I am a member of the Earth Liberation Front. This despite the fact that I’ve never been arrested for, nor been questioned about any actions by the ELF. Indeed, there is no evidence or rumor of evidence that can connect me to the ELF in any way whatsoever. The ELF is a clandestine group whose sole purpose is to carry out acts of sabotage against corporations and research facilities that the ELF considers responsible for despoiling the earth. As such, it has been listed as a terrorist organization, and is one of the targeted focal points for several Joint Task Force(s) on Terrorism in cities, and stated across the US. I am a writer and an activist. It has been a deliberate decision on my part not to undertake acts of sabotage, since I lack the skill and knowledge to do so effectively and safely. So far, no one has been hurt or killed by an ELF action.

Despite losing my job in the prison infirmary, being sent to the hole for 120 days and being labeled a terrorist, I will continue to write for anarchist and alternative publications. I am an enemy of the New World Order. We, the people, shall overthrow the rule of corporate power.

SI Se Puede!

E.L.F.

Beyond the E.L.F

Craig Rosebraugh on creating a new direct action movement against capitalism and industrialization.

While the Earth Liberation Front has shown to have quite an impact in the United States since 1997, its targets have arguably been limited in nature. As the E.L.F. is at least in theory an organisation focused on environmental issues, its actions have stayed largely within that social movement. To their credit the E.L.F. has demonstrated a knowledge and understanding of a larger problem in society: the drive for profit and capital. Using economic sabotage the group has inflicted well over $34 million in damages since 1997 in the United States on entities profiting off the destruction of the environment. But is this enough?

The E.L.F. is definitley on the right track as far as tactics of economic sabotage are concerned. Yet there is a clear difference, strategically speaking, between burning a building completely to the ground and causing minor damage through various forms of vandalism. Granted I am under the assumption that the basic motives for all these actions would be the same and therefore would applaud the brave and heroic individuals for working to save the environment and smash corporate greed.

The main difference in my mind though lies in not only the monetary amount of damage done to a given target, but also in the target itself. The idea being that if an individual desires to engage in economic sabotage she/he should pick the best target possible at any given time. Then the best tactic should be chosen at each given time to ensure the most damage will be done. So how is this done? How are the best targets selected?

In my mind the best targets are those that will have the most effect in stopping the exploitation, destruction and deaths of the natural environment and all life coexisting on the planet. One must make every effort to look beyond individual social issues, be it human, animal, and/or environmental, to the higher cause of these problems. The desire, or manufactured desire, of the need for profit, material items, and ownership is at the heart of arguably many of these social issues. Yet instead of concentrating on fighting this desire most activists, largely of the leftist persuasion, appear content with continuing the exhausted state sanctioned legal means of protest, which have little effect. Underground organizations such as the ELF and the Animal Liberation Front have demonstrated a greater understanding of the role desire plays in the environmental and animal liberation movements. They have taken concrete steps to fight this desire within their own movements. Yet the real desire taught to us along with the American Dream, Apple Pie and Baseball is most often overlooked or clearly unseen.

There needs to be a direct focus on fighting the desire created by industrialization and the westernized way of life. It needs to be a direct action focus using not state-sanctioned forms of protest but underground guerilla tactics in the form of economic sabotage and beyond.

So how do we go about combating this desire? How do we go about choosing targets that will have most impact? The idea in the United States is to look at just what makes the country what it is. What symbols, what propaganda, what physical objects are involved in creating the atmosphere of desire? What makes the United States economically operate? Who and what are the infomation sources in the US that push and create the propaganda? Are there targets that could be selected which involve and effect many corporations? Are there symbolic targets that if destroyed would place a major blow to the false reality?

Think big. Wall Street, the stock market, Statue of Liberty, US Capitol, Mt Rushmore, Disneyland, media conglomerates, military installations, government agencies (CIA, FBI, BATF, USFS, etc.), large multinational corporations, automobile manufacturers, etc. Realize the difference between pulling up an acre of G.E crops and destroying Monsanto. The difference detween sabotaging logging equipment and destroying MAXXAM/Pacific Lumber. The difference between spraypaint and fire.

When the ELF torched Vail resorts Inc. in 1998 the organization was on the right path toward targeting desire. Vail is known worldwide as the ritzy, only for the rich, ski resort. A perfect symbol of desire. If you begin with nothing, work hard all your life, you too can become wealthy, powerful and can visit the planets premiere facilities, including Vail. Those who can’t are supposed to desire it.

The idea for a movement against capitalism and industrialization directly is nothing new. The Luddites 1811 — 1813 in England, used direct action with some success to combat the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Before the revolution hit many people for centuries worked out of their cottages and small shops in villages on machines which would be run by one person. Suddenly, industrial society appeared with new complex machinery commonly housed in multiple story buildings. This new way of working threatened and eventually killed the means by whch livelihood had been achieved for years. The luddites fought back using similar economic sabotage tactics seen today. Over an estimated $1 million in damages were inflicted on business owners during this two year time period. Some manufacturers agreed to actually stop using the new complex machines due to the Luddite threat of action.

The tactics of the Weather Underground in the US in the late sixties to early 1970’s also appeared to be focused against the ideology existing in the United States. While their operations appeared somewhat reactionary and their group politics arguably questionable, they did succeed in demonstrating that symbolic and real targets like those mentioned above are impossible to hit.

This demonstrates the possibilities of direct action against the idea of desire. The Luddites and Weather Underground are just two examples of earlier organizations targeting capitalism and industrialization through direct action.

The thought behind all of this is not to discourage, but rather encourage to get active and stay active in a way that will produce results. If the goal is to end environmental destruction, and the suffering and murder of life on this planet then a clear look must be taken at the real enemy. Whether the group is the Earth Lbieration Front or some new organization, the importance lies in re-thinking targets and choosing those which will produce the greatest success and damage. In either case the actions must not only become more strategic and be of an intensified scale but they must also occur with a much greater frequency.

Evolution of the Offensive. Final statement of Leslie James Pickering as spokesperson for the north american earth liberation front press office

By far, more than any other events within the context of my life thus far, the actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have been the most eye-opening, inspirational and empowering. The actions of the ELF have restored a hope in me that had otherwise been beaten into submission by the oppressive daily cycle of life within contemporary American civilization.

When I was a teenager growing up in suburban New York state I, like many of my peers, would do almost anything thinkable to break the mundane reality of our existence. One of the activities that drew my attention was attending loud, angry independent music events. These events appealed to me because they were welcoming atmospheres for me and my peers to vent our legitimate frustrations with the social and political situations we have been born into and forced to swallow. At one of the first of these shows I attended I was handed some literature, an independent publication, about an organization called the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). At first I didn’t think much of it, a souvenir to bring home and maybe hang on my bedroom wall, and I stuffed it in my backpack.

It wasn’t until later, when I had the time to look it over, did I realize the implications these stapled photocopies would have on my life. It turned out that the ALF was an ‘underground’ organization that struggled for the freedom of animals by ‘liberating’ them from factory farms, vivisection labs and other abusive institutions. The ALF were fugitives who broke the law to fight for freedom, much like many of our cultural heroes; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Boston Tea Partiers, Robin Hood, etc. I was fascinated. At this point I naturally had an appreciation for nature, but was not especially an ‘animal lover’, nor have I ever been. I had never considered being a vegetarian and had no awareness of any popular movement for animal rights. The direct, illegal tactics of the ALF simply made sense to me on an honest, fundamental level, based on my natural instincts for self-defense and the little I had learned about revolutionary / social movements from school and conversations. My fascination with this sensational organization soon led me to learn of the popular movements for the freedom of animals and environmentalism, and later to study any and all revolutionary / social movements that I could scrounge up information on. In 1997 the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) began taking ‘Direct Actions’, similar to the actions of the ALF.

From the onset the direct actions of the ELF were causing millions in damages to corporations and government agencies that were profiting from destroying the Earth. The actions and existence of the ELF created an enormous wave of attention across the US as authorities fruitlessly scrambled for evidence, often barely beginning one investigation before the ELF would strike again. Because of my efforts and dedication over the last decade I have been privileged to be in the position of spokesperson for an organization known as the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office. The press office has been referred to by the media as a ‘clearing house’ for the anonymous ‘communiqués’ of the ELF, but for me personally has been an opportunity to publicly speak my belief in direct action and to help the movement gain the public’s attention and support.

I support the actions of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front whole-heartedly. I unwaveringly support revolutionary action to bring about the liberation of the Earth and its animal nations, including the liberation of the human race. I feel that illegal actions, like those of the ELF & ALF, are a 100 % necessary aspect of a successful struggle for liberation, and hope to see the continuation and the rapid escalation of their activities until the Earth and all of us who live here are free of institutionalized oppression. That being said, shortly after co-founding the ELF Press Office I ‘vow(ed) to speak the truth about the ELF.’ I have since done the best job I could with my limited resources and opportunities to fulfill this promise, and I will continue to do so. However, I have come to realize that being in the position of spokesperson for the organization has presented me with difficulties in speaking this truth. There is an existing atmosphere of opinions within those who support the the ELF on the manner in which the underground organization should be represented. I am only able to honestly represent the movement in the light in which it appears to me, which is not necessarily the same light as all other supporters. As I see it, the ELF are part of a larger movement struggling for revolutionary change globally. The tactics that they engage in, which many consider ‘Non-Violent Sabotage,’ are a direct result of their analysis of the oppression they struggle against and the level of activity they perceive to be effective within the contexts of their actions. I consider the ELF a loose network of clandestine guerrilla groups struggling for revolution on a global scale. I see, and personally hope, that there is no proof that the movement in general should view the tactics of the ELF as the end all of action taken for liberation. I see absolutely no logic in a judgment that struggle perceived as ‘non-violent’ is the only legitimate kind to be waged.

In addition, I have no problem admitting that I personally do not consider the actions of the ELF and ALF ‘non-violent,’ as any dictionary will clearly spell out. Again, this does not mean that I do not support these actions 100%, only that I do not consider them ‘non-violent’ and do not believe ‘non-violence’ is the only legitimate means by which to struggle for liberation. Any dictionary will tell you that violence is more or less, any act that aggressively harms or threatens harm to anyone or anything. Therefore, if actions were ‘non-violent’ they would fail to even threaten harm to anything, which I certainly do not consider to be the case with the ELF. The entire intention of the ELF is to bring about liberation through engaging in effective acts of sabotage against oppressive institutions, to not even threaten harm to these institutions would therefore be failure. But regardless of what the dictionary says I believe that attaching the ‘non-violence’ label to these actions is based on a misguided understanding of public opinion and fear of a liberal backlash that comes regardless. I also believe the blind endorsement of this label is counterrevolutionary. Any notion that alleged ‘non-violence’ is the only way by which to achieve liberation is ill-informed and condemning of the many other effective tactics that have, can and must be put into practice in successful revolutionary movements. Throughout history liberation has been achieved through a healthy balance of a variety of tactics, many which have been considered ‘non-violent’ and many which have been considered violent. Even the most popular examples of ‘nonviolent’ resistance were far from existing in a vacuum. During the same period that Gandhi and MLK were waging their non-violent struggles numerous other organizations were struggling for the same liberation through what were considered violent means, and undeniably having a massive effect on the progression of the overall movements. In fact, I’ve yet to find a historical example of a successful revolutionary movement that consisted strictly of ‘non-violent’ activity, and do not believe that one is possible in our contemporary setting. Recently I appeared on a short television spot regarding the February 12, 2002 Congressional Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. Also on this clip appeared an unnamed representative of an unnamed organization allegedly from the mainstream environmental movement. Among other less interesting things he said, “Violence, when used in this county, is simply wrong.” I have found that a lot of the ideological basis for ‘nonviolence’ in the United States is fundamentally nationalist.

Why is it that when it comes to clearly violent struggle outside the borders of the United States, such as that waged by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, the majority of liberals are quick to lend their ideological support, while those same liberals adamantly condemn the actions of the ELF and ALF here within the borders of such a powerful and oppressive United States Government? I believe this is because they have been brainwashed by the system into buying the line that within US borders somehow revolutionary change can magically be achieved through reformist activity. I think we need to wake up and realize that the US is a global power, force-feeding its suicidal capitalist American Dream down the throats of everyone on the face of the planet.

Revolutionary change has never been achieved through reformist activity and is certainly not going to be handed to us on a silver platter by the Government of the United States. I have also found almost all of the popular cheerleaders of ‘non-violence’ are/were strongly religious people who endorsed the tactic largely due to how it related to their religious beliefs, not necessarily on the effectiveness to bring about revolutionary change. Recognizing the connection of ‘non-violence’ to religion was important to me because it helped me realize the larger intentions of the philosophy. The belief that one species, the human race, can somehow live an entirely ‘non-violent’ existence on this planet, when it is perfectly clear that no species throughout all of nature is capable of this, is blatantly anthropocentric.

The belief that humans are separate and somehow exempt from the laws of nature is a major cause of the disastrous unbalance that our species now suffers from. Often it seems that blind adherence to ‘non-violence’ philosophy is based on a reactionary denial of the level of resistance that it’ll take to bring about revolutionary change. When many begin to comprehend the level of oppression we face today, ‘non-violence’ philosophy gains appeal as a very comfortable heaven / fairyland where liberation can be achieved strictly through personal changes. I consider this state of denial a kind of psychological illness common among liberal North Americans. I strongly feel that anyone hypnotizing the people with the ‘non-violence’ as gospel dog-and-pony show is a criminal, disarming us in a time when we desperately need to defend ourselves.

This denial of what really needs to happen to liberate the Earth and ourselves from the deadly path that the system is leading us all down is a major factor in our inability to achieve that liberation. The outright condemnation of violent revolutionary action in America needs to come to an end before a true revolution can effectively take place. The system knows this, and its pigs are working harder than ever to brainwash the public into calling the ELF terrorists and the Pentagon a force for freedom More than anything else, I simply recognize the right and at times the necessity and duty of all people to defend ourselves when taking a beating, to fight for our very lives. This right is not only extended to those being crushed by the hands of this beast, but also to those of us being digested in its belly. In addition to the non-violence issue, I do not believe that the actions of the ELF are strictly environmental in their scope. It has probably already become clear that I recognize the actions of the ELF as acts of revolution, not reform. I have attempted to express this in every piece of literature, every interview, every public presentation and every conversation that has occurred as a result of my participation in the ELF Press Office, and increasingly so in recent months.

I can not perceive the Earth without conjuring up images of all life taking root within this atmosphere. The liberation of the Earth equals the liberation of everyone of us. And as I see it, the liberation of the Earth and the liberation of all species of the Earth is the goal of the Earth Liberation Front. I do not see the organization as simply an environmental group satisfied with the economic damages they inflict and attention they draw from each of their individual actions. I do not see the ELF only caring about the oppression caused by Vail Resorts Inc. and Boise Cascade. These are just platforms for a much larger message to get out on a global scale, and that message is “WE’RE NOT TAKING ANY MORE!” I see the objectives of any revolutionary movement for liberation being to off the oppressor, to smash the system of oppression and to create a free and just society in its place. I see no exception to this in the case of the ELF, and I certainly do not hope that I am wrong.

Currently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation consider the ELF & ALF ‘number one priority’ among domestic terrorist threats. This is nothing new, the same thing has been said about revolutionary organizations in the past that the system has perceived as a threat. This is, however, a noteworthy point in the struggle for liberation. It is recognition from the oppressor. The system does perceive this movement as a threat and is using an increasing amount of its resources to stomp out this threat. This is a point at which the struggle needs to evolve in order to survive, so not to suffer the same fate as revolutionary struggles of previous generations. This system has clearly proven itself to value its progress above and beyond anyone and anything. It represents a pursuit of profits and property at the expense of the people, the natural elements of the Earth that sustain our lives, and of the planet as a whole.

This ‘American Dream’ is a death wish and we cannot allow it to nail our coffins shut. The struggle must constantly assess and reassess the oppressor and the oppressor’s perception of the struggle. New tactical directions must evolve with these assessments. I, for one, have begun to question the power and use of any official press office for an autonomous organization or movement. If the purpose of a press office is to draw much needed attention to a movement then is there a point at which that press office is no longer needed or practical? Where is the point at which, within the context of an existing movement, the direct actions of the movement are able to speak for themselves? I recognize that all forms of institutional oppression flow from the same source, the institution, the system that dictates nearly every facet of our lives under its twisted objectives. Therefore, I am not an environmentalist, I am not an activist, I’m not a reformist nor any form of liberal. I am a revolutionary. I advocate the return of all power to the hands of the people by any means necessary on a global scale. I see anything short of this as failure, and as disastrous. And I’m not about to deny this reality because of any existing atmosphere of opinion within the popular liberal environmental movement.

To deny this reality is to limit the ability of this movement to evolve into one that truly has the capacity to achieve the objective of liberation. Arguing for a ‘non-violent,’ single issue revolution has placed us in a position of hypocrisy, and has allowed us to be backed into corners with our arguments. I believe that the movement hasn’t gained the public support that it needs to be successful because the intelligent public can see these glaring holes in our arguments. I have found that public opinion is not as the media represents it, and is far from what liberals perceive it to be.

I recognize that the only way to build a successful revolutionary movement is to present a sound and powerful argument, backed up by effective action. I believe that once this movement is presented to the oppressed peoples of the Earth public support will be powerfully behind it. ‘Non-violence,’ economic sabotage and armed propaganda are tactics, not strategies, not gospel, and certainly not the only effective actions to be taken as part of a successful revolutionary movement. Like the tools of a toolbox, each have a specific use and specific results. Depending on the job you have you choose a tool, or a set of tools, from your toolbox to use. You don’t choose only the tools that fit most comfortably in your hand or that are the prettiest, you choose the ones that’ll get the job done. Sometimes these tools do fit comfortably in your hands, but most of the time they give you blisters. No matter what though, at the end of the day, the objective is always to have the job completed. It’s idiotic to shun the sledge hammer when you’re working to knock down a wall. Our arguments and actions need to be sound, thorough and brutally honest. We need to awake from our coma and struggle for a realistic, not utopian, solution. No matter how uncomfortable this may seem to many of us it’s nothing compared to what will happen if we don’t, and what is happening already.

LONG LIVE THE ELF!
LONG LIVE THE ALF!
DOWN WITH THIS INSANE SYSTEM THAT PLAGUES THE EARTH AND ITS PEOPLES!
REVOLUTION IS LIBERATION!

With this statement I officially resign from my role with the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office, but I am by no means silencing myself. I intend to continue with increasing effort to struggle for revolutionary change without being bound to any dogmatic atmospheres of opinions. I encourage and welcome communication of any kind and can be reached at the below e-mail address.

Leslie James Pickering
no-one@tao.ca

Solidarity Means Attack

Before starting this short rant I want to address the fact that I’m probably going to piss off and alienate some of the ‘supporters’ I have by writing this. Tough shit. The reason I’m writing this is not to make friends, it’s to make people think. If you get offended by what I’ve got to say there is probably some reason beyond that I’m just an asshole, but that’s a title I’ll gladly accept if this gets even one person to expand their efforts toward actually putting ecocidal corporations out of business for good.

There are many people out there who call themselves ‘supporters’ of the ALF, ELF, Earth First!, or other groups doing direct action, but if all these supporters out there only support from outside the movement they are doing little more than pacifying their consciences. Solidarity means attack.

Solidarity is defined in my cheap-ass prison dictionary as a unity of interests among a groupî, and unity is defined as ìsingleness of purpose or actionî (my emphasis). If someone states that they are in solidarity with myself or other ecologically motivated saboteurs that singleness of purpose is to stop the destruction of the many different life forms that share this planet with us. So if one is truly in solidarity with us (s)he does not only sit around talking about how much they support direct action (s)he gets their hands dirty and takes action. I do not consider wearing some environmental grops t.shirt or simply stating that ones supports direct action solidarity. The ecocidal forces destroying life on this planet need to be taken out, and talking just isnt going to do it. The disemination of news of actions can be a valuable tool, the kind of thing that inspires action, but it is action that will bring this system to it’s knees while those who only speak of support continue to live on their knees giving fellatio to the master by perpetuating the myth that we are free because we can say that we support direct action.

Talk is not enough, it’s not even close if there were as many people swinging hammers in the forest as there are people running chainsaws those chainsaws wouldnt be running long. I’ve heard some supporters of direct action say that direct action and sabotage aren’t for everyone, well why the fuck not? When I’ve raised this question in the past with ‘white male priviledge’ has been raided as an issue. Though this may be a valid point, some people seem to be more interested in pointing fingures than confronting the priviledge (though I probably shouldnt call it priviledge but stupidity) that allows them to sit back in relative comfort while allowing, through inaction, life form after lifeform to be aradicated. Talking about supporting sabotage and direct action just isn’t going to cut it. This isn’t about competition, it’s not about who has monkeywrenched more machinery or who has liberated more lab animals, it’s about the fact that if we all don’t start doing something soon we are all fucked. It’s not about the one or two or two hundred species you didn’t give enough of a fuck about to spur you into action, it’s about the web of life and how your inaction is tantamount to your condoning the natural worlds destruction.

To put this into simpler terms ñ every life form on this planet is on the road to extinction that’s paved by the human race, and you are to blame if you don’t do something drastic to stop civilizations destructive course. Solidarity is not a word to just throw around to make you feel like you belong. Solidarity means attack.

Critter
anti copyright 2002

The Inseparable Earth and Animal Liberation Movement by Craig ‘Critter’ Marshall

Many people in positions of power (congress, FBI, etc.) corporations which by their inherent ‘nature’ profit from the destruction and exploitation of nature (or as they put it ‘resources’), and the mainstream environmental movements all claim the ELF’s tactics are too extreme, I on the other hand do not feel they are extreme enough.

My co-defendant is serving 22 years and 8 months for burning a few SUV’s, and if his lawyer hadn’t died in the middle of our trial thus, because of a technicality, forcing the prosecution into offering me a much improved plea deal of five and a half years, I’d also be serving an absurdly long sentence for an action with minimal results.

Most people do not get caught for their actions which only proves how effective planning and dedicaton can be. However, if people are risking many years of their lives, shouldn’t they be doing so in actions that are far more effective than torching a few trucks? I’m fairly sure that if my coconspirator and I had burnt the factory that produced these trucks we wouldn’t have been facing more than the 22 plus years my co-defendant ended up getting.

Though such an action would have been a great improvement over what we accomplished I also believe this would not have gone far enough, another factory would be built and the destruction of the earth would continue.

What we need to attack is the totality of the death machine that is industrial society, AKA: civilization. The earth and its creatures are being assaulted 24 hours a day on an enormous scale. How can we hope to stop this destruction by doing utterly ineffective actions such as burning a few trucks? Those who attack the biotech industry are making bigger, longer lasting dents in the machine’s armour, but these are still just dents. We need to cut off the head.

No matter how many animals are rescued, no matter how many trees are saved, if the current technological state progresses or even carries on at the rate it is currently destroying the eco-systems all life depends on, life on this planet is doomed. Civilization as we know it depends on the domination and exploitation of every type of ‘resource’ (whether living or habitat for the living) and cannot exist without such exploitation. Humans were once mostly nomadic, with few exceptions, only settling into permanent villages as plants and animals were domesticated. The exploitation of these life forms allowed the populations of these beginnings of civilization to increase which in turn allowed for the ‘need’ to further exploit the plant and animal populations and in turn the eco-systems which these life forms need to survive.

Flash 10,000 years into the future... Today, there are very few places on earth where humans have not tried to and for the most part succeded in forming some dominating relationship over the life forms which dwell there. The vast majority of the socalled civilized world has been scarred and/or covered over with concrete. The current rate of extinction rivals that of the dinosaurs, and while saving a particular grove of trees or all the hostages at a particular farm is a noble cause, it’s like trying to use a bandaid on a fucking chest wound.

If we could save every animal in the world from suffering in factory farms and labs, in the long run, what good would it do if there were no wild places left to free them into? Conversely, what would be the point of protecting the last wild spaces if the animals were all domesticated — their wild spirits broken? These struggles are inseparable. All the different aspects of civilization conspire against all that is wild. It is the totality of it — not just one element, that dooms life... that is, if we allow it to continue unabated.

Our struggles can not ever hope to be effective as long as we each only focus on one aspect of the dis-ease of civilization. We must attack the totality of it every single day. We must be relentless in our struggle — for civilization is ever progressing on its death march and we can not allow it to continue to trample over every existing life form. We must challenge the assumptions that are integral to the everyday existence of industrial society. We must attack the hubs of the wheel of oppression. The majority of people fighting for the liberation of one life form unknowingly or unthinkingly support the oppression of many others everyday. No? Well then its safe to assume you don’t use electricity? I do realize there are necessary evils if we want to be effective in our struggles, such as the use of petro-fuels in igniting huge bonfires in which we can watch corporations go bankrupt, but we must be aware of the negative impacts our actions (and tools) have on ecosystems (both local and distant).

Of course I am not condemning anyone who goes out and torches a sawmill, if that’s what you want to do, by all means burn the fucker to the ground. At the very least you will be making this hostage smile, but just be aware that you are NOT stopping the earth’s destruction, at best you are just slowing it down.

We need to relearn how to coexist with nature, to live in eco-systems rather than on top of them. As has been said, ‘I have seen the enemy and it is me’. It is hypocritical to attack one aspect of industrial society’s nature destroying machinery at night and then lend support to another by making purchases in the morning. We cannot carry on with our lives in the manner of those who condone civilization. Civization from it’s inception has been rooted in domination, it is dependant on it for it’s continued survival.

We need to get back to a sustainable culture — one in which we live in harmony with nature — but will this happen as long as industrial wastes, from packaging to poisons, are being pumped out by corporations whose only concern is profits? People have been led to believe that comfort and security come from working at least half their waking hours so they can buy things that will save them time and energy. Am I the only one who sees the utter ridiculousness of this? Fortunately not, but more of those who see it need to realise that even if they stop participating in this work/consume/die culture, the others who are still taking part are helping to poison all of us.

While burning down a sawmill may slow the ecocide being perpetuated by industry, I think a much more effective tactic is to take out the consumer goods before the point of production by destroying power plants and laboratories that enable such a cancerous society to exist. Every moment that is not being spent on destroying industrial society is tantamount to condoning it’s destruction of us and every other life form. We are being poisoned by toxins that are being pumped out 24 hours a day, yet the average person spends less than 24 seconds a week doing anything about it.

Hopefully this will not make you pat yourself on the back if you do more, hopefully it makes you realize how much harder those of us who are doing something need to attack. Each of us must face the totality and decide whether or not we want to continue to strike at the fingers of the beast that has all life in a chokehold, or if we need to strike at the head. Don’t get me wrong, biting off one of these fingers is never a bad thing, but unless it is part of a larger strategy it is not going to put an end to the human domnation of animals and nature.

We will never succeed in convincing corporate interests to stop the exploitation of animals and the earth — it is against their ‘nature’. We want to protect life at all costs; they want to protect a way of life no matter what the cost. Their job is to make as much money as possible regardless of the suffering. Our job is to put the bastards out of business because of the suffering.

Anti-copyright 2003

Critter

Craig Marshall #13797662 SRCI 777 Stanton Blvd. Ontario, OR 97914 USA Donations to Critter can be sent directly to DOC Central Trust for (Craig Marshall #131797672) 2575 Center St. NE Salem, OR 97310- 0470

The Elf and the Spectacle by ASAN

The “decentralized cell organization” of the Earth Liberation Front is today often presented by the media and its supporters as the most extreme, the most “heavy”, and the most radical challenge of Radical Greens to the dominant order. As a “front”, the ELF takes a bit of the Che Guevara image of third-world “national liberation” movements such as the Algerian “National Liberation Front” and extends it to a world scale.

Still how many aspect of this society are ultimately challenged by the practice of the ELF and their supporters? Like ELF supporters, we see a pressing need to ultimately put an end to the present horrific society. Unfortunately, we see the organizational setup of the ELF as reinforcing many of this society’s relations of representation, specialization and authority at the same time it challenges the immediate physical power of the system.

The underground cells of the ELF wind up as essentially specialists in destruction, intentionally cut-off from the entire milieu by the necessary security culture. Indeed, the more elaborate the vandalism pulled off by ELF cells, the more such cells have the appearance of elite military units. Not only do most people feel like they could never join such an effort, many people feel like “these experts will just create the revolution for us”.

Just as much, the above-ground “ELF supporters” windup as followers, viewing their activity as just an adjunct to the “real work” of the ELF. And both ELF activists and followers are dependent on the mainstream media to report their actions, which otherwise do not touch the lives of the mass of dispossessed people. Many “radical greens” today rightly look to the inspiring example of native communities, which have generally lived in balance with nature for thousands of years.

With this, some recognize that while we are not natives, we cannot survive unless we also become part of a human community, a community which involves balanced, direct relationships with nature and with each other. We must escape the present rootless, atomized social relation of modern humans. And some key parts of these social relations are people’s fixation on media and celebrities and their unquestioning obedience to experts, specialists and authorities. Many in the Radical Green/ELF milieu come out of the punk, mainstream activist, or animal rights “scenes”. However well intentioned, these “alternative scenes” are, they have much of the logic of the present order, sometimes in extremes. They are often rife with stars, divisions between who is or isn’t “cool”, fixation with pose and image, and so on.

We aren’t saying that those in these groups can’t escape this order but ELF ideology allows a similar dynamic to arise and works to prevent any critique of it. We aren’t saying that we would-be revolutionaries should regard ourselves as the nucleus of a new society. We aren’t surprised by the gulags and Chernobyls that activists of “real” liberation fronts have constructed in Russia, Algeria, Nicaragua, China and many other places.

While most Radical Greens don’t view themselves as a vanguard party, the horrors of re-education camps and so-forth are a natural product of the dictatorship of specialists in liberation. Since such a dictatorship is naturally a product of this society’s entire dynamic, we must actively avoid the role and the logic of specialists in revolution.

The practice we see instead of specialization is to work to inspire a developing community of resistance. And we should realize a community of resistance already exists on some level everywhere. The most powerful tactics for us are those tactics which allow the dispossessed to seize direct control of their lives — strikes, riots, squatting and occupations of streets and neighborhoods. These may only be possible in some circumstance but the dispossessed will always be resisting work and commodity relations by slacking off on the job, shop-lifting, dodging fares and many other tactics.

We aren’t limiting ourselves to a laundry list of tactics or to only doing actions approved by a democratic central committee. But at the minimum, those wishing to be revolutionaries need to be able to be part of a diverse, organic community. The specialization, the cutting off of contacts, the continuous panic, and the media-focus necessary for ELF practice is a serious barrier to this. To create a new society, we must be able to talk about all aspects of how we are living and how we want to live.

Yet the ELF practice makes it impossible to talk about even simple questions like which “targets” are valid. We don’t make this critique on the grounds of pacifism or arguments around “any resistance will make you like your enemy”. Rather we look to means of resistance, revolt and revolution which use a human community as both the end and the means. From Spain in 1936 to Paris in May of 1968 to the upsurge in Argentina today, we see the self-organization of the masses as a force which is capable of sweeping away governments and ultimately social systems. The Argentine Popular Assemblies today organize to help the unemployed at the same time they work for the defeat the present state. Not only is this self-organization quite capable of bringing the end of the present social system, it can be a way for a community to directly control it’s activity. It can be a nucleus of a new society.

ASAN
www.webcom.com/maxang

Perpetuating the Spectacle by Craig Marshall

April 2002

[ed: a response to the article “The ELF and the Spectacle by ASAN].

This is a short critique of the brief essay The ELF and the Spectacle which to me comes across as purely academic diatribe with very little basis in reality. It does, however make some very valid points, though few and far between. I agree wholeheartedly that people need to move beyond participating in ‘scenes’ and truly develop a culture of resistance to be effective, but the author(s) fail to recognize that people doing radical actions are quite possibly people very active in helping to develop sustainable communities. I’m wondering how many people actually in the “Radical Green/ELF milieu”, not the “scene”, that the author(s) know. Most who are purely in the “scene” do not take action, while most who take action are not just in a scene.

People who take action do so because they feel strongly enough about something to risk their relative freedom and/or lives to fight for what they believe in, so what are the chances that these people do not participate daily in being together “a community which involves balanced, direct relationships with nature and each other”? I, as one who is imprisoned for taking action, take exception with the stereotype the author(s) are helping the mass media to convey. All of the imprisoned saboteurs that I know personally, or am familiar with, lived lives prior to incarceration that were strongly based in helping our communities strive for a more harmonious relationship with the natural world we are all part of. Suddenly, there’s something wrong with using every tool in the tool box available to us to fight back?

The author(s) seem to be attempting to perpetuate the myth that we who feel strongly enough to take action are not part of the “mass of dispossessed people”. It is precisely because we are part of the dispossessed masses that we feel the loss caused by society’s destruction of, and alienation from nature, enough to be driven to act. Those who sit on their asses and write about inspiring the dispossessed masses fail to realize that the greatest inspiration is action. The actions I speak of include but are not limited to creating free spaces, community gardens and huge bonfires in which we can watch corporations go bankrupt, actions that those in the “Radical Green/ELF milieu” are quite likely to participate in.

The entire premise of The ELF and the Spectacle article, that people who do ELF type actions are not part of the dispossessed masses or “part of a diverse, organic community”, is false. People who do ELF actions come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but the one thing they have in common is that they have been affected by the destruction of nature and because of this have been driven by some internal force to take action. These people are precisely the “dispossessed” that the author(s) speak of who are developing communities of resistance. Your mother could be the one striking the match tonight, but if she is, I can almost guarantee, in the future she will not be sitting around writing a rant condemning the dispossessed who have been moved enough to put their safety on the line because in the long run, she realizes its her life, the lives of her children and that of every living creature on the line.

There will always be people developing communities of resistance who feel the need to strike out against the dominant order; they have my deepest respect, and I don’t feel they should apologize or hold back because they are some for the few who are moved enough to strike back. They also don’t need so-called “would be revolutionaries” joining the mass media’s efforts to discredit and marginalize their actions. People have been doing these actions long before the ELF was conceptualized and as a tactic that uses one of the state’s own tools (i.e. the media) to promote more such actions, I believe the ELF has been a resounding success.

Anti-copyright 2002

GREEN ANARCHY

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ISSUE 12

SPAING 3GC3 in* 14 S5 WDRLP

TREE TO PRISONERS

Missionaries

“Civilization from Savagery”

John Connor on Amerika’s Indian Schools and cultural genocide

Confining the indigenous peoples of south-western Amerika — notably Geronimo’s refusenik Apaches — to reservations took a quarter of the (admittedly small) US army decades. One of those responsible, Lt. Richard Henry Pratt felt a more efficient method of controlling these rebellious native Americans was to indoctrinate them in “the knowledge, values and mores of Christian civilization”, a process he started on Apache prisoners of war held at St Augustine, Florida in the 1875. Challenged by President Hayes that his time might be better spent in the (killing) field, Pratt responded: “Here a Lieutenant struggles to evolve order out of the chaos of fourteen different languages. Civilization out of savagery! Industry and thrift out of laziness! Education out of ignorance! Cleanliness out of filth!”

There’s no suggestion here that native cultures had the slightest worth to Pratt’s adherents, but then arrogant do-gooding ‘we-know-best’ liberals have always preferred their genocide cultural. Their interests dovetailed with the Army’s. As US Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan observed in 1882: “It cost $1 million to kill an Indian in battle, but $1,200 for eight years of schooling.” After three years at St Augustine, Pratt was given a facility of his own, Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute, and the year following that disused barracks at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As early as 1870, Congress cleared $100,000 to allow churches and missionary societies to run schools for the Indians on reservations.

Towards the Total Institution

What Pratt did — in line with European mass education theory at that time — was to create the Indian School as a total institution in the Foucauldian sense.

Firstly, he shifted his focus from adult Prisoners of War to their children, judged more vulnerable. Secondly, feeling ‘home influences’ encouraged them to hang on to their culture, the children were transported thousands of miles from the reservation by train (and later Greyhound coach) and boarded at Carlisle in order to disorientate and isolate them. Thirdly, Carlisle had an extreme emphasis on order and military discipline, each child being issued a uniform, taught to drill and subjected to severe rules.

Parents refusing to send children to Indian School could have rations withheld by the reservation authorities or the children physically seized from them. They had little idea where they were going or the fate that awaited them on arrival — possibly even death in light of past experiences at the hands of Civilisation. On arrival, their clothes and travel bags were burned, and they were given regulation European clothes. Their hair — considered sacred in many native American societies — was shorn had their “unpronounceable” Indian name replaced with a European one and a number. One woman described her experience:

“When you first started school, they looked at you, guessed how old you were, set your birth date and gave you an age. Then they assigned you a Christian name. Mine turned out to be...Fred.

English was the only permitted language. Children caught speaking their own language or failing to understand orders in English were punished with beatings or being forced to eat soap or kneel for hours on bare floor-boards. They were only permitted to return home for short periods once or twice a year and those attempting to run away had bounties offered to recover them. Some died trying, others of epidemics that swept such schools — over a hundred received Christian (not traditional) burials at Carlisle alone. Pratt boasted “each school has its own disciplinary cell”. Children were often chained there. They were considered “savages” to be “broken” in spirit like wild animals in need of domestication, though obviously it was Carlisle’s inculcation of Civilisation that was ‘savage’ (vicious) in its own terms. The emphasis on discipline and order even extended to Carlisle’s grounds:

The land was tamed, controlled and conquered and mirrored the process outlined and established to deal with the students, all an expression of the power of the white man... Never think for one minute that the Native children attending these schools were not at every turn reminded of their lesser status in comparison with white society.

Lessons Taught

So what — beyond a sense of inferiority — were the children taught? The young men spent even more time labouring than marching and the young women were taught how to do domestic chores. They were farmed out to local “Christian” families, supposedly to learn from their “Civilized” example but also to augment the School’s income. Implicitly, they were also being taught servile, dependant roles, particularly inappropriate for the young women given their power in their own societies as compared to their European sisters. What they also learned was brutalisation. Vi Hilbert of the Upper Skagit tribe remembers her time at an Indian School in Oregon, c. 1930:

[G]irls had to walk the gauntlet and get the backs of their legs switched [with belts, sticks or hairbrushes]. And if the switcher was too light on the switch, they had to do it hard. These girls had legs that were swollen three times their size.

As well as forcing them to beat each other, women graduating from these schools were sometimes made matrons, visiting their own brutalizing experience on others. Another side of the emotional trauma caused by education in such total institutions was an inability to express themselves. Oglala Sioux Ida Amiotte remembers:

My children always asked me ‘Why are you so cold? Why don’t you hug us?’ I said ‘I never learned how’.

In this way, the damage was transmitted from one generation to the next, instead of the traditional culture that would otherwise have been transmitted. Indian School survivors also recognise ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ of confusion and sudden rage, often suicidal.

When John Thomas, a Pima, shot himself in 1896, Phoenix Indian School officials claimed “No reason for such act can be ascertained”. They may have been arrogant and unreflective enough to have actually believed it themselves.

Beyond individual deaths, there was intended the death of entire cultures, as organiser of the excellent Heard Museum exhibition on Indian Schools LaRee Bates unequivocally put it: “This was an American Holocaust”. This was borne as much of crude economics as crude racism:

A wild Indian requires a thousand acres to roam over, while an intelligent man will find a comfortable support for his family on a very small tract... Barbarism is costly, wasteful and extravagant. Intelligence pro-motes thrift and increases prosperity.

European cattle ranching was probably as extensive as Apache huntergathering, though unprofitable. By forcing the Apache to settle and their children to become economically dependant on the European economy, they became locatable and controllable. A loose social structure that prevented the formation of permanent hierarchies and excess accumulation of private property was replaced by the authoritarian and capitalist European way of doing things, near-equality replaced by servitude, spiritual and emotional wholeness by loss of identity and missionary cant.

The Civilisers Lost

The Indian Schools movement has been described in David Wallace Adams’ Education for Extinction as “the last great Indian war ... waged against children”. Vastly powerful and surprising is that — for all its casualties — the (accurately) self styled Civilisers lost.

Given the brutality, the humiliation, the sheer lack of loving welcome, the children didn’t want to adopt European culture. They secretly spoke their own languages, hid their medicine bundles. They longed for their short vacations home “when I speak Indian” and often tried to run away there across thousands of miles. In face of the spectacle of menial dependency, even European liberals like G Stanley Hall were arguing by the 1920s:

Why not make him a good Indian rather than a cheap imitation of the white man?

Come 1928, even the Indian Commission was inclined to agree. The Meriam Report condemned Indian Schools as both educationally and hygienically inadequate. Reforms were made in an attempt to save the system: uniforms and drill were phased out by the 1950s, outwork a decade later. By the 1960s, the federal government described Indian Schools as “deplorable” and they were turned over to native American administration, at the same time education radicals were demanding the teaching of Black history in mainstream schools.

Despite this, now only half a dozen such institutions survive in Amerika, most boarded up and awaiting redevelopment.

Graduation ceremonies at Carlisle ended with the triumphal acclamation that “the Indian in you is DEAD” but native American cultures live on and — in Amerika at least — it is Lt. Pratt’s dream that has truly died.

Learning Lessons

Why, then, are Indian Schools still an issue? Firstly, the US administration still won’t acknowledge responsibility for damage done to native Americans, their cultures and children. Whilst Canada acknowledges national shame for the abuse of First Nation children in their Church schools and Australia annually says “Sorry” to the Aborigines, the US government will not acknowledge their abuse, yet another attempt to evade admission a genocidal history that also bred the Indiana Eugenics laws and other grotesque examples of crass, racist social engineering later to sweep the world.

Secondly, what happened in Amerika up to half a century ago is still happening now across the world, particularly in Africa. From the deeply racist Botswanan government interning Bushmen in the name of their human rights not to lead “wandering, illiterate, primitive lives” to the missionaries still dishing out new names, Western clothes and haircuts, the pattern set by Lt. Pratt is being replayed now in the name development, Civilisation and a compassionate deity.

But the third, most important lesson is that these genocidal measures can be defeated by the determined resistance of those it is intended to destroy. From Geronimo’s ‘last ditch’ resistance raising the cost of bullets above that of schoolbooks to those children that preferred death alone under bitter winter sky to a day’s more ‘liberal improvement’, it is as true now as then that “if they oppress us this badly when we resist, how much worse when we do not?”

Perhaps there is a fourth lesson too, one that goes beyond questions of cultural survival. Even run to that end by the native Americans themselves, the Schools still failed. Were they rejected because of the painful past associated with them or for the reason all schooling is instinctively rejected, as impersonal control, the same hatred of the wild and undirected, a shaping of identity and purpose to that of broader society and not our own freedom and authenticity?

Against Missionaries. Articles from “Green Anarchist”

Commandos for Christ!

The New Tribes Mission are a right-wing Christian missionary organisation, who have spread themselves all over the world. From their modest, though violent, beginnings they have never looked back. NTM’s purpose is to make contact with every ‘uncontacted’ tribe on earth and plant churches in the areas where these tribes live. They use coercion and force, having no regard for the peoples’ cultures and lives they are imposing upon.

They have links with the CIA and various multinationals, helping to maintain their power and growth to some of the most secluded places on earth. They have met with resistance from the tribal people whose wild existence they are on a latter day crusade to eradicate, replacing egalitarian ecological existence with authoritarian monotheistic religion. There have also been attacks on their modes of evangelism here in the West, through liberal do-gooding NGOs, such as Survival Int’l.

There has also been direct action taken against them here in England. This is an ongoing war of the civilised versus the savage, a war that most people thought died out in the last century. Most of us when we think of evangelical Christians conjure up images of tacky US TV preachers with microphones, fleecing cash from the alienated dumb(struck) wannabe believers. However, behind this exists the genocide of some of the last peoples on earth, forging an existence on the periphery of civilisation.

The NTM exist purely as an organisation who are set up to commit cultural genocide across the globe, and they have the resources to carry out this aim. They claim they have no money, asking their recruits to rely on God and fund themselves. Yet somehow they have offices across the world (if not you, who?), training centres for new recruits and even their own airline for flying in missionaries to remote parts of the earth. They use their planes to spot ‘unreached’ peoples as they fly over otherwise unpenetrable terrain, then build airstrips in jungles in order to land missionaries. These are the first wave of civilisation’s troops, followed hot on the heels by the military. The military use the missionaries’ airstrips, and enter with guns instead of bibles in their hands and the end result is the same: death. As they say themselves:

“The resources needed for this are beyond our human means. But what seems impossible to us is God’s opportunity to demonstrate who He is, to the praise and honor of His name. Now is the time. This is the generation. We are trusting God to use a worldwide team of believers to reach the last tribe in this generation. To God be the glory!”...“Motivated by the love of Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, NTM exists to assist the ministry of the local church through the mobilizing, equipping, and coordinating of missionaries to evangelize unreached people groups, translate the Scriptures, and see indigenous New Testament churches established that truly glorify God.”

The sect is extrememly authoritarian. Hardliners in the NTM are discouraged from socialising with ‘liberal’ missionaries. Marriage with nonAmericans is ‘strongly advised against’. Leaders are appointed rather than elected to their posts. The NTM has consistently been unafraid to use violence and force to coerce ‘unreached’ (re-wild) people into conversion to their bastardised brand of Christianity. They have admitted that it matters little to them if a person dies shortly after ‘taking god into their hearts’, as it is ‘souls they are saving’, not lives. The NTM’s brand of Christianity is the fire and brimstone version then multiplied by ten. Evidence of their violence and lack of feeling for their victims is highlighted in this incident from Guatemala...

“Having finished his photography in the central area of the camp, Donald had strolled off towards two huts on the outskirts, followed by Mr Stolz’s son, a friendly and clearly intelligent boy of about twelve who was by now carrying his tripod and who told him with reasonable pride that he was the only member of the missionary group who had been able to master Ache. A smiling young missionary overtook them and barred the entrance to the fists of the huts, saying that there was nothing there. Donald pushed him aside, went in and came back to call me. I followed him into the hut and saw two old ladies lying on some rags on the ground in the last stages of emaciation and clearly on the verge of death. One was unconscious, the second in what was evidently a state of catalepsy, because although her eyes were wide-open she did not move them to follow my hand as i moved it from side to side close to her face. The fingers on her left hand were covered with the black mud scrabbled from the floor. There was no food or water in sight. In the second hut lay another woman, also in a desperate condition and with untreated wounds on her legs. A small, naked, tearful boy sat at her side. Mr Stolz’s son, happy to help, gave us a matter of fact account of what had happened. The three women and the boy had been taken in a recent forest roundup, the third woman having been shot in the side whilst trying to escape.”

October 1974 p159, ‘Gods war against the indians’ by Norman Lewis

Lewis later had these photographs and accompanying article published in several major newspapers both here in the UK and in the US. The NTM denied the allegations strongly despite such overwhelming evidence.

But of course it is not just physical violence that the NTM missionaries use to coerce perfectly happy indigenous peoples away from their culture and lifeways they have enjoyed for millenia, but cultural violence...

“The missionaries had made a start with their inculcation of a sense of values by the provision of almost every toddler with a piggy bank. The older children showed us padlocks and keys from the same source. At this stage in Panare evolution, when there were no doors to keep locked, they remained purely ornamental, incorporated occasionally in necklaces.” 1982, P169

This is just one example of the values they were attempting to push on a people. Other examples include money boxes for people who do not use money, so that the idea of thrift and saving and capital accumulation can be foisted on a people who live egalitarian communal lives. This reminds us of the role of the puritans during the industrial revolution in Britain, when similar ideologies were being pushed onto the transitionary peasant/working class.

Shockingly the NTM Missionaries admit that one of their tactics in bringing a settlement under the moral rule of their warped beliefs is to find an individual, whom in our culture we would call ‘disabled’, and target them for favouritism, gifts etc and then use them to police the rest of the tribal group. They would do this by getting him to snitch on any practice of ‘outlawed’ behaviour, ceremonies, etc.

The NTM have spread across the globe. In 1945 they expanded into India, in 1946 into Venezuela, and in 1949 into Brazil, New Guinea and Japan. By 1952 there were missions in the Philippines and Thailand. Expansion followed rapidly in Latin America, Africa and the Far East. As of 1988 the NTM claimed to have around 2,500 evangelists in 24 countries, working with 159 tribes.

As one would expect, the behaviour of the NTM is often met with resistance in the places they impose themselves, their cultish behaviour and warped social values. As Norman Lewis points out in his ‘The Missionaries — God Against The Indians’ “both the Summer Institute of Linguaistics (SIL) and NTM have met with great resistance in the countries in which they have established missions; both sects have been excluded from a number of these, but have always succeeded in making a return”. The NTM had headquarters in Matlock, Derbyshire (england) until they were hounded out by the locals. It seems that they had made themselves hugely unpopular mainly due to the fact that they were brainwashing local teenagers. They now hide themselves away in the desolate flatlands of Lincolnshire.

This strange invulnerability has aroused increasing resentment in countries involved, with complaints of behind-scenes pressure permitting this to happen. Evidence of this pressure can be seen in the statement regarding a similar group, the SIL: “I never met a Bolivian who did not regard the Summer Institute of Linguistics as the base for CIA operations in Bolivia; possibly in South America itself.” p102. There are many examples of the NTM being involved in various dodgy things in the countries where they base themselves, and not just links with the CIA.

There are also accusations of the NTM having heavy links with corporations, even doing their groundwork for them. Naval captain Marino Blanco, employed by the state to keep an eye on the doings of foreigners in Venezuela’s remote regions, spoke of their scientific espionage. These allegations have also been made in several Latin American countries, not just Venezuela. He noted that the missionaries installed themselves in areas known to contain strategic materials, such as cobalt and uranium, and claimed to have proof that they were in the pay of American multinationals. Blanco also discovered bags with geiger counters in and claims the head of the NTM tried to bribe him. Other reports of the NTM’s corporate shit are reports that once they clear airstrips for their planes, they fly iconoclastic consumer crap in like Coca Cola.

As previously mentioned in this issue of GA last October there was an action carried out against the NTM and in solidarity with peoples of the South Pacific. People stormed the European HQ offices confronted leading NTM officials, whilst others appear to have been busy damaging and taking away computer equipment. As a bonus to all this, the action disrupted a very important meeting between leading NTMers from the US/UK, a meeting which we hear has failed to be re-scheduled since.

Since then there has been a wave of repression against activists across Britain. Over 30 people were arrested in a series of raids on houses in Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Doncaster and Norwich. Computers and personal items were seized. Doors were smashed in close to dawn and people were rounded up for arrest. All these people were placed on bail for ‘conspiracy to burgal’. Nearly all of these people have had their bail removed and only two have been officially charged. Another 3 are pending a decision on whether they will be charged or not. The investigation is being carried out by the Skegness division of Lincolnshire police. A force more used to dealing with inbreeding and cabbage theft than direct action in defence of wild peoples. There is also evidence that one of the cops involved in the operation was the son of the chairman of the NTM!

This must be one of the largest state attacks on the UK direct action movement for years, if not to date. One wonders where all this money has come from to mount dawn raids on so many addresses across the country, and what they will do when they are inevitably sued for taking part in a fishing expedition. We have to wonder if all the fuss is not the result of pressure from NTM’s US legal eagles. The NTM unsurprisingly seem to have been reluctant to actually publicize any news of this daylight raid. Nothing has appeared in any local papers, despite it being exceptionally newsworthy, one would have thought, for sleepy lincolnshite.

It seems evident that the NTM and others like them dont like it when the tables are turned — when the hunter becomes the hunted. Even the more reason to keep the pressure on. The action last October seems like a step in the right direction.

Quotes taken from Missionaries — Gods War Against the Indians, by Nornan Lewis

What’s Wrong with Missionaries? The Role of Religion in the Destruction of Human Diversity

Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between the Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several millennia, the two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millennium B.C., some Indo-Europeans, most specifically the Greeks, had adopted the practice of building cities, thus becoming involved in the process which they named “Civilization.”

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilizations. The Semitic peoples invented kilns which enabled the creation of pottery for trade, and storage of surpluses. As trade becomes more necessary, for whatever reasons, the tribesman becomes increasingly less of a tribesman and more of a peasant. The process is neither immediate nor is it necessarily absolute, but to the degree that a tribesman becomes dependent, he becomes less of a tribesman. The early kilns eventually evolved into ovens which could generate enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, tin and bronze. The Indo-Europeans developed a way of smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final meshing occurred. Rome is also the true birthplace of Christianity. The process that has become the culture of the West is historically and linguistically a Semitic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly termed the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in the early development of this kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God. It was a religion which imposed itself exclusively of all other beliefs. Primitive people did not feel the need to impose their particular spirits (or whatever) on other tribes. Spirits belong to the place they inhabit. The local people of the European forests were a people who believed in the spirits of the forests, waters, hills and the land; Christianity attacked those beliefs, and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. The Christian peoples, who possessed superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were able to militarily subjugate the tribal peoples of Europe.

You might think that only an imbecile would fail to see the irony in a culture which has almost entirely destroyed its own local habitat sending out people to teach neighbouring cultures, who haven’t, how they should live, but as I cycle away from my uncle Herbie’s special hospital after telling all his friends about missionaries, I can still hear them laughing nearly a mile away. Only the staff seemed unconvinced, and as I was being ushered out of the door I could see the syringes and pill boxes being hurriedly drawn from their shelves in a way reminiscent of the gun racks in a sheriff’s office.

The fact is that to anyone not a part of our great drive forward to erm... our great drive forward, just about everything we do looks totally insane, and that is why missionaries are an essential part of that great drive forward. Only blind faith in a false world-view can drive people to destroy their own source of wellbeing. Only fear can convince people to run blindly and only ignorance can enable people to ignore signs of danger. Religion provides these three things in bucketloads, together with sufficient emotional reinforcement to prevent subjects defecting back to reality.

Missionaries provide a dual service to the globalising monocultural monster we call civilization. On the one hand they actively assist the spread of lies and coercion into the last remaining peoples on earth who have held on to their freedom. On the other, they destroy the evidence of fulfilling human existences which are apparent in those places, which might otherwise cast doubt in the minds of the already brainwashed. They spread false propaganda about the people in their ‘care’, and directly assist genocidal regimes in their subjugation of those people. Many individuals within these organisations are probably well-meaning, but the organisations themselves are driven by the same bigotry that drove civilization into tribal people throughout history.

France made repeated attempts to send missionaries, especially Jesuits, among the nations of the Hau de no sau nee. These missions were the major tool of propaganda for the European nations. Missionaries then, as today, are expected to carry more than the message of Christianity. They serve as lay ambassadors of their culture, splitting off individuals from families, families from villages, villages from nations, one by one. Some priests even served as the leaders of troops going into battle.

The missionaries made persistent attacks on the economic structures of the People of the Longhouse. They specifically attacked the spiritual ceremonies as “pagan,” and thereby sought to end the practice of giveaways and public feasts. In addition, they sought to break the power of the clans by causing division which would split the people into nuclear households.

European churches, especially in colonial practice, take on their feudal roles as economic institutions. Among uncvilised people, they are the most dangerous agents of destruction. They invariably seek to destroy the spiritual/economic bonds of the people to the forests, land and animals. They spread both ideologies and technologies which make people slaves to the extractive system which defines colonialism.

In 1704, the first Anglican missionaries were sent, by England, to the Mohawks living along the Mohawk River. In 1710, a delegation of Mohawk chiefs received an invitation to visit England. They returned bearing four bibles, a prayer book and a communion plate for the Anglican chapel, gifts from Queen Anne. But the missionaries also brought behind them a long, long tail. To house themselves they needed a mission, to protect the mission they needed a fort, and to propagate the faith, they needed a school. Missionaries spread more than the word of God.

When there is no other culture to compare ourselves to, there will be no objective basis on which to appraise our ‘progress’. We will be unable to envisage other ways to live that are viable and the culture of domination will be unchallenged. The missionaries (along with the ‘development’ workers, who are merely missionaries of mammon and are here included in the term) are and always have been the spearhead of civilization’s attack on freedom.

The First Enemy: Religious Organisations.

Wiwa Wewo, a Lani man from West Papua and author of Just Leave Us Alone, on his experience of missionaries

I was born and grew up in a Christian family, therefore most of my criticism will go towards the work and teachings of Christianity, with very few references to the Moslem religion. As a Christian and based on my experience working in the church for more than ten years, I believe that there is something wrong with religions that come in from foreign countries. In what follows I will outline some of the problems that Lani people face due to religions from outside. Religious leaders and missionaries will definitely argue that I am wrong. They will ask my father and his colleagues as founders of my church to justify their arguments, however, this will be manipulative. It is because of the successful brainwashing process that has been happening since the1960s. The religious missionaries and leaders from the West poisoned my father and his colleagues with their philosophy. I know, from my deep heart, that they suffer a lot because of being Christianised and civilised. I know that they miss their world, the world that they have experienced, that vanished in the early 1960s, the world that missionaries would describe as “Primitive and animist!”

Religious believers are required to believe that theirs is the true religion. They stand against the beliefs that already exist in areas where they go and they also condemn other religions as being misleading. Their typical statement is this: “There is only one way to heaven, therefore, if you do not do this and that, you are in danger of going to hell!” This message means, all other things are wrong, and this is the only truth.

If someone threatens me with anything, a knife, a bow and arrow, a gun, the Gospel, the Qura’an, culture, education or whatever, then they are terrorising me. Those who terrorise me are commonly called terrorists. If I am wrong please correct me, but this is my basic understanding about terrorism. However, ironically, religious groups are called ‘good people’. I just cannot understand why people who terrorise my culture are called good people.

The result is that religion has completely destroyed he way we think, the way we behave and the way we talk. In the Lani community, all people look “brown in colour but white in behaviour!” Their arguments make sense, are very strong and sound correct, exactly the same as their missionary fathers did. They want to change everything we have into their missionary culture. However, we will never change our race, skin colour, or hair because the missionaries never allowed their children to marry with us. Once an Indonesian policeman fell in love with a missionary woman in my village. She was sent back to her home country straight away, accused of falling in love with people from “outside their culture”. In other words, what the missionaries want is for us to get involved in and believe in their religion, but they do not think we can marry them. Thus, philosophically and culturally, they want us to be in their world, but physically they want us to be separate because we are brown, we are curly haired, we are in Indonesia, and perhaps because they think we are inferior.

No doubt, it is obvious to me that all troubles that come into the Lani community are brought in through the door marked ‘religion’. Therefore, if people come into my village and destroy my life, my worldview, my culture, then the first thing to blame is the religion, nothing else. They have started the cultural genocide, and they claim to be ‘good people’, preaching good news and messages of peace. What on earth is this?

It is typical of the West. They have a belief that there is always right and wrong, and that they are best to judge them. This concept relates to all other things like the way of talking, the way of working, the way of governing, the way of farming, and so on. In this way they set themselves apart from the rest of the world. In comparison, we never ever judge other cultures, other religions, or other communities based on knowledge of our own.

We never tried to impose our culture and our belief on others. We never think that the West needs to learn from us. What we know is that they are Western people, they have their own life and culture, we cannot change them, because they are as they are. However, they do not have this concept. They do not judge things through the eyes of other cultures, but instead bring all things into their world and then make judgement. And this is wrong, according to me, anyway.

The result is that we Lani people have lost our own identity. If people asked “Who are the Lani?” then the first answer, unfortunately, will be “They are all Christians”. They are not the Lani anymore, they are Christians. If I were to list the characteristics of being a Lani, then about 90% would not exist in the life of Lani people anymore. What has happened? Christianity has replaced them all. What a pity! Western Christians, however, will say, “Praise the Lord!”

Religion does not only spread widely because they believe it, but also because they want to win other people to join their religion, to gain strength in numbers. Some of the political parties are based on religious beliefs. It is clear to me now that some politicians and political parties have been born from religious beliefs; that they fight for religions and make decisions based on this. In other words, human beings and humanity become second to religion. That is why it is not surprising for me to see many West Papuans saying “We need to get rid of Indonesian Muslims!” even though this is not the reason we should fight for. Neither Christianity nor Islam are from the Lani. Why should we bother with them and why should we base our struggle on them? Why can’t our position be based on our own culture? Is it because we are already assimilated into modern religions?

In many cases governments have sponsored the activities of religious groups. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having religions, but what is wrong is imposing one’s religions onto others and creating problems, starting wars against other religions. I agree that religion is one part of the culture but the problem here is imposing one culture on the other, and considering other religions as wrong and dragging other people into one’s religion. Religion has caused, is causing, and will continue to cause most of the brutal wars in human history, but it is still strongly regarded as something essential within human life. In what sense is it important? This is not clear and I cannot understand it. If not the atomic bomb, religion will destroy planet Earth. However, people love religion. It is true that religion has ended some tribal wars in West Papua. This is what the imams and missionaries are proud of. This is what they point out as the result of their ministries.

However, it is also true that they have started more than one war; religious wars, denominational wars, economic wars, political wars, to mention just a few. These wars have no simple solutions, have no moral basis, and are very destructive. Imagine tribal wars. Almost all tribal wars happened because of tribal problems like theft, sexual relationships and other domestic affairs. There is rarely war because of one tribe’s intention to exploit or conquer another. Tribal wars are like small conflicts inside a family. There was no serious damage after tribal wars, there was even real peace established, which does not and cannot exist in modern society. Compare the peace that follows tribal war with that follows wars in civilisation. What peace in the Balkans after Bosnia? What peace in the Gulf after Desert Storm?

Religions increase the intensity of war. The feeling of affiliation to religion has caused so much trouble on this plant. Let us forget the words like ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘extremist’. For me, most often these terms are related to war and religion. From the records in the Bible and Qura’an, wars are there. Therefore, for me, trying to end wars, especially by religious leaders or religious figures, is nonsense. In Indonesia, it is called “Usaha menjaring angin” (’the efforts to catch the air’). Religions even justify some wars. Therefore, as long as people are committed to religion(s), there is great potential for war, not the reverse.

Below is a story:

Once upon a time, there was a man called Mbakwi Gombo. He lived a nomadic life, a bit strange for all his fellow villagers. He built his houses on the banks lf the river Mulik, a river that changes course, sometimes flowing in the eastern bank, sometimes on the western bank. It was difficult to figure out, even within a day. Mbakwi likes the behaviour of the Mulik. He had been living in ‘his way’ all of his life.

He did not farm. He ate fruit and leaves from the forests, and meat from hunting. Most often he caught little pigs, snakes and cassowary birds. He raised them in the riverbank, he fed them and they knew him well. He built them their nests and huts. He knew when they were hungry, when they were sick, and when they were crying. He loved the animals and they loved him in return. Sometimes, people from other villages came to his hut and asked him to give them some of the animals he had, either in the bush or those around him. He then asked people to choose which ever they preferred. After they chose what they wanted, he then led those to be killed into a pen. Her then fed them ell and talked to them, pretending nothing dangerous was happening. Even the food at this time seemed better than before. The animals were so happy. They greeted him very well. Unfortunately, they were animals and they did not know what was actually happening. The guests shot and killed them in front of Mr. Gombo. The animals shouted at him, they cried to him, and sometimes they ran to him and died in front of him. Yes, but Mr. Gombo wanted money, not just to raise them. These animals could not give him money, so they should be killed to make him money.

When some of the fellow animals were killed, the rest ran away to the bush. They became wild again. However, with his skills, Gombo called them back, and fed them ell. They became friends again. I do not know what was happening in the minds of those animals. Did they remember how their fellows were killed in front of their eyes? Were they prepared to be slaughtered as had happened to the others? How did Gombo manager to become a ‘good shepherd’ while at the same time her was their killer? How come the animals did not run away from him forever? Who is Mr. Gombo? Mr. Gombo is ‘the missionary’. And who are the people who came to kill those animals? They are the ‘government’. And the animals are us, the Lani, all tribal people. It is clear to me that religions have been used by the civilised community as a tool to brainwash and control the minds of people. When I became a Christian, I can see how foolish I was to respond to this world’s powers. As a Christian, I need to forgive those who kill me, I must forget what happened yesterday, I must give my eyes if my ears are taken away. Religion is a tool used by those in power to control the human beings of this earth.

The Book ‘Just Leave us alone’ is available from Solidarity South Pacifi, c/o SDEF!, Prior House, 6 Tilbury Place, Brighton, E. Sussex, BN2 2GY, UK. Price £2.50

Missionaries Forbid Traditional Culture. Another Papuan speaks out

I am quite amazed to see the UN Declaration on Minorities that clearly protects the rights of the tribal people to own, practice and belong to our cultural heritage, such as our beliefs. I was questioning when I was reading the articles, “Who is writing these?” I realised later that the terms used and the contexts presented in the declaration are based on European values and beliefs, or Eurocentric.

Then I questioned, “Who are the people in West Papua who tell us not to own and practice our cultural beliefs?” The answer was, “The same Europeans!” In fact the “don’ts” of the missionaries are also Eurocentric. Then I wondered, “What on earth are they doing?” “What are they doing?” “What should I do?”

Perhaps what they meant by their declaration on minorities was not regarding the cultural beliefs of the Tribal people? If so, are we humans? Are we minorities? Are we not also subjects to the declaration?

If so, then I need to state that:

1. Missionaries are actually in essence terrorists. Why? They come to us and say, “If you don’t do as we say, you are going to hell! You will die! You will be judged! You are not part of us! You are children of the Satan!” etc.etc. Aren’t these sentences terrorising?

2. The missionaries are actually the people to be accountable for misconduct against the Resolution on Minorities.

3. How can the declaration be promoted without calling the missionaries responsible for their sins of killing the cultures of minorities?

4. Are the beliefs we have as tribal people not part of the resolutions? If so, what are our cultural beliefs called?

5. I think that missionaries should be responsible for what they have done to us. They at first killed our culture, planted their culture and then left us to die in their new cultural perspectives.

6. They opened the doors for Indonesian military to come and kill us. It is missionaries that built airstrips all over villages. It is them that first came to our isolated villages. It is them that came wth Gospel in their right hand and Guns in their left hand. After they opened the isolation, they brought in government officials, opened army and police offices, and started killing us. Can they deny their involvement in killing us? NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!! They are part of various human rights violations in West Papua, they are the doors to various human rights violations in West Papua.

7. Do you know what missionaries have done when the Indonesian army they brought in were killing us? They left the villages. Lucky, they got airplanes to fly them out from the bombardments into the villages. After some months, after houses and churches were burned down, after many of their sheep (flocks) were killed, they come with big smile and open hands to embrace and to encourage poor Papuans to repent and thank God that they were not killed. What do they preach? FORGIVE! FORGIVE! If they kill your brother, give your husband as well, that is according to our culture that we brought in to you. DON’T fight back, if you do so, you are going to hell.

8. So, you can see how well the missionaries and Indonesian army work together to kill Papuans both culturally and physically.

9. And for me, they who kill my culture are the most terrorist people in the world. Killing a culture means killing the root of a people. If Indonesians kill hundreds of Papuans physically, I know there are one or two Papuans alive and they will live as Papuans. But what can happen if one million Papuans are without any knowledge of Papuan culture? Are they Papuans? Are they Christians? Are they ......?

Anyway, missionary work is more dangerous to indigenous and tribal peoples than any other work on earth that you know. Remember this!

Modern Primitives

Stars in Their Eyes

Notes on the origins of the cult of celebrity

Having abandoned her worthy husband for a toy boy, a young woman dies of a heroin overdose, accompanied only by her traumatised 3 year old daughter. The reaction of mid-50s Daily Mail readers, a demographic not known for their tolerance of druggies and single mothers? Fascination, almost adulation — certainly celebration of the woman that died. Of course, she wasn’t just any single mother, she was Paula Yates, a celebrity.

Perplexed by this double-standard on behalf of my then-colleagues, I asked what was it Paula Yates was famous for anyway? They seemed pretty vague about it, despite knowing an alarming amount of biographical detail about a woman I’d have thought they had almost nothing in common with. Was it her presenting a bad 1980s yoof pop programme, The Word, badly; getting off with Aussie shag artist, Michael Hutchens, who subsequently managed to hang himself whilst wanking in a closet; being the unacknowledged daughter of another nondescript bygone entertainer, Hughie Green? It seems she was somehow just famous for being famous. None of this seemed sufficient reason for them to suspend their usual judgemental attitudes. I decided to turn to anthropology for an explanation, to find the origins of this pathology.

Before They Were Famous

There is no celebrity in hunter / gatherer, band-scale societies. Farley Mowat observed that whilst individuality was greatly prized amongst the Inuit he lived with, individuals as such are not cherished.[87]

This is the first great law of the land: that a man’s business is sacred unto himself, and that it is no part of his neighbours duty to interfere in any way unless the community is endangered.

The San (Bushmen) are more intolerant of individual prowess, as pointed out by Kevin Tucker.[88] The San are probably the only people on the planet that still use the exhaustion hunt, one man literally running down game until it collapses with exhaustion. When its meat is returned to the camp, the likely also decidedly knackered hunter isn’t met with praise, instead with taunts and demands he hurry up and distribute the meat quickly and fairly to the rest of the band. In Western civilized society, such behaviour would hardly be deemed good manners, but to the San, it is a way of stopping an exceptional person (one fit enough to run down game) getting above himself, feeling he is more special than the community as a whole — and deserving of greater privileges.

The band is so highly prized as each person in it can only survive through mutual effort, either when particular people are too young, old or sick to fend for themselves or when a task needs doing collectively. This extends to a pooling of property — what Bookchin calls usufruct, that property is only private when actually used by someone and someone else’s when they take it up in their turn.[89] Band people define themselves by the group. Australian aborigines believed that those removed from their bands were effectively ‘dead’ (though they’re most pleased and surprised when they return from police custody or wherever) and Hartmut Heller observed that the Hadza of East Africa strive to be physically in contact with each other at all times. The idea of people sleeping alone and ‘personal space’ in similar respects is alien and most disturbing to them.

Big Men — Come On Down!

The German sociologist Max Weber argued that the first forms of authority were charismatic. By sheer force of personality, some individuals managed to assert themselves above and beyond their society. This is a complex question and here is not really the place to explore it at length. Regarding celebrity, the ‘big men’ of New Guinea are a useful touchstone though. The Tairora aren’t hunter / gatherers, they are horticulturalists where there is personal wealth is based on holding small gardens and pigs. This wealth allows for the rise of disinct individuals:[90]

The Big Man’s leadership accrues from his wealth, his personal charisma, and sometimes from his sheer physical power and size.

The Big Man uses his pigs to serve up huge banquets, obligating those partaking of them to him. However, eventually he presses too much on these debtors’ obligations and is then typically ambushed and killed by them. This is a salutary reminder of the hunter / gatherer principle that however powerful one person is, s/he is never more powerful than the group as a whole. Marshall Sahlins suggests that in New Guinea, societies like the Tairora go through cycles of Big Men and their overthrow by people disadvantaged by the consequences of such individualism for everyone else.

It’s rare for a Big Man to have influence over more than 2,500 people due to the limits of personal charisma and communications in New Guinea’s mountainous heart-land. This sort of celebrity is a bit like that around the more authentic punk or country bands, based on personal contact with fans who don’t like the idea of band members ‘thinking they’re better’, getting too much above them.

Tyranny — Celebrity Proper

Kingship arises when power can be delegated, village headmen (sort of like the Big Men above) acting as local governors and tax / tribute collectors for one ruling over them, their king. The king is inherently despotic, a tyrant, at this stage of societal development. As Weber noted.[91]

Rather than dating the effacement of the individual from the institution of despotic authority, we must, on the contrary, see in this institution the first step made towards individualism. Chiefs are, in fact, the first personalities who emerge from the social mass. Their exceptional situation, putting them beyond the level of others, gives them a distinct physiognomy and accordingly confers individuality upon them. In dominating society, they are no longer forced to follow its movements. Of course, it is from the group that they derive their power, but once power is organised, it becomes autonomous and makes them capable of personal activity. A source of initiative is thus opened which had not existed before then. There is, hereafter, someone who can produce new things and even, in certain measure, deny collective usages. Equilibrium has been broken.

Rather than the individual being bounden to their society, now the individual — at least one very special individual, the king — has society bounded to him. It is by the king’s whim that bounty and punishment is distributed, the death of hundreds seen as an appropriate response to any real or imagined (maybe magical/ witchcraft) threat to the king, and the ruler allowed to break deadly taboos such as those against incest or the eating of certain foods forbidden everyone else with near-impunity.

It is precisely this that hunter-gatherers seek to resist so strongly. Even some relatively complex pastoral groups like the Nuer’s neighbours, the Kaingang do:[92]

Although the Kaingang respect power they cannot tolerate any kind of intensification of it: for such intensification is felt by them to be disruptive. Through their insistence on the primary importance of the other person and their failure to reward achievement, the Kaingang have suppressed processes that encourage the concentration of power in the hands of outstanding individuals.

It is under tyranny that we find the emergence of ‘heroes’, warriors under the king who have songs sung about them, their characters and (typically murderous) deeds described, albeit in rather rudimentary terms — a star system, in effect, as well as a war by the privileged few upon the many.

Thoroughly Modern Wo/Man

A peek into Sir Thomas Malory’s 16^th century Morte d’Arthur shows how long this heroic narrative persisted, although at least the proto-bourgeois Malory shows the tensions between king Arthur and lesser nobles like Lancelot, the only ones he really bothers to characterise.

The English Civil War a century later was as much about this question of individuality as it was about power. In arguing for absolutism, Charles II insisted he was the Godappointed unique individual, whereas the bourgeois Parliamentarians were arguing for a democratisation of individualism to all. They even had laws and sciences based on such individualistic principles — atoms and so forth. Beheading ‘Charles the tyrant’ didn’t end tyranny, of course, it just created millions of personal tyrannies, each wo/man ruling themselves most harshly, each separated in their individuality from the next in a way that would horrify and mystify their original hunter / gather ancestors.

This atomised individualism was ideal for running an economy where people did highly specialised roles (intense division of labour) mediated through a mechanised industrial / productive grid. The trouble was that this sort of individualism created feelings of vast loneliness and powerlessness, people yearning for older forms.

And in the pages of OK and Hello, the gossip columns of the tabloid press, we have it. Certain individuals have been raised up as celebrities, albeit strangely not those directly wielding power such as politicians and soldiers, even great thinkers, but entertainers and perhaps the more freaky of curiosities, Jerry Springer and National Enquirer material. Their nature is paradoxical: they are presented as both exceptional and everywo/man, remote from us yet aspirations to be achieved. Jennifer Lopez well-illustrates this, whose manufactured image is ‘just another Latina from the barrio’, yet who not only surrounds herself with the grossest displays of opulence, including up to 70 personal assistants, limo convoys, and (highly tacky) fur coats and ownbrand perfume, but actually trumpets this too as part of her image. Clearly, we are being transferred here from the realm of the real to the realms of ‘Amerikan dreams’, peoples’ own aspirations being acted out in the person of such individuals. This, too, is why excessive ‘rock star’-style behaviour a la Paula Yates is also enthusiastically received — as was that of the archaic tyrants even by those they oppressed. In pre-colonial Buganda, the court of the kabaka felt his potency as a ruler declined proportionate to any decline in the number of executions — necessary or not — that he ordered.

Promisingly, identification with celebrities is not total. They are not role models to be followed mindlessly, not least because most people can’t afford their product-placed lifestyle options anyway. The fall of celebrities is followed as enthusiastically as their rise, and most people are glad to hear the like of shaved monkey Robbie Williams confess his life as a celebrity has been extremely unhappy. Some of this is pure class hatred — what, apart from fame, makes them any better than us? — but some of it is more than that, a feeling that they are living their lives at our expense, that by living our lives through celebrity surrogates, they have somehow stolen our lives from us. Of course, the reason the likes of Williams are so unhappy is that their own lives are nearly wholly unreal too, their celebrity images carefully cloaking their real, private lives, existences made all the more insecure as their disclosure is bound to contradict the image and destroy it. Like the Big Man, the star is destroyed by debts, this time to reality, though modern ‘Big Men’ only survive by appropriately modern carefully contrived isolation from their debtors rather than constant contact with them.

It was the Stranglers that sang “No more heroes any more” (amusingly including Leon Trotsky amongst that exalted number), but why is it celebrity persists? Because they are a safety valve for majority’s unrealized aspirations (‘someone made it — it could be you’, etc) and hotel room-trashing behaviour, a money-spinner in fact. As the Situationists acutely noted, we need to really live without these mediations, to live our own dreams. In fact, it is impossible to truly live with them. Celebrity is the enemy of community. It, and the complex society that denies us full being, are the inheritance of tyranny. All must be destroyed.

Counter Culture

A Culture of Make Believe

Kevin Tucker’s review of the book by Derrick Jensen

...we need to get rid of civilization. Maybe that seems absurd, to you. It doesn’t, to me. It just seems like a lot of work, done by a lot ofpeople in a lot of places in a lot of different ways. But I’ll tell you something that does seem absurd to me: the possibility of allowing this inhumane system to continue.” (CoMB,603).

Perhaps no other writer has been able to deal with the problem of civilization as sincerely and intensely as Derrick Jensen. He has a way with words and concepts, possessing the ability to both wound and heal: conveying the “dark heart” of civilization while remaining true to the very essence of the human spirit and the joys of life.

Derrick is author of four books, of which A Language Older than Words and his most recent book, Culture of Make Believe, have been landmark texts against the menace of civilization. Language, stemming from Derrick’s own experiences, is a characterization of the sickening desperation and disgust that have characterized our ‘highly modernized’ level of civilization through the issues of domestic abuse. Culture carries on his work to try and understand the role of ‘hate’ in allowing civilization to function everyday.

The title of the opening chapter of Language, ‘Silencing’ seems to be the most predominant concept throughout the two books. Through both books, the underlying issue is always prevalent; civilization continues to exist through the silencing of life. Derrick is very explicit about this:

“Religion, science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology medicine, literature, linguistics, and art have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races, other cultures, the natural world and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and personal histories.” (LOTW, 3)

This silencing, as Derrick shows allows us to turn our cheeks to the destruction that this way of survival carries. We look beyond the immediate and long term consequences for the sake of a rational, linear ‘Future’ thatawaits us. In turn, it is always easier to ignore the “grenade rolling across the floor”, going with the flow rather than taking any risks to get rid of it.

Culture of Make Believe continues to look into this kind of silencing, although it focuses more on the rationality of hate. He opens the book looking into racism, one of the most obvious forms of hatred. The first

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chapters detail through the direct outpourings of racism that has been put onto non-whites, taking us through the slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan and into the cops and prison system. Moving through explicitly racist literature, it becomes all the more apparent that “hate” may not be the full issue. No matter how bad the arguments for slavery were, they were still needed, and the arguments follow the rationality that originates in the formation of civilization. His search moves farther from any safety zones.

These conclusions may be much more uncomfortable for many people than most books dealing with the subject of ‘hate’.

At this point we are forced to look inwards and ask what it means to hate, and even more personal, is hate always the underlying motive. Essentially what you end up questioning is the entirety of civilization. We return to the issue of silencing: as Language shows, we are able to destroy a world that no longer speaks to us because it is distant. We are able to rationalize the world and turn other beings into things: we can destroy out of love. The success of civilization, above all else, comes to the ability to believe in a system that goes against everything that we are by eliminating the voices of our bodies and souls.

What Derrick asks then is if this system is one carried on by hatred. The problem seems to be much more complex than this, and where the questioning goes returns to the issue of silencing and further. Everything we are doing to the Earth and to other people isn’t being done out of hatred, it is just being done: the simplicity comes through our hyper-rationalized trance.We turn to reduction: our hyper-technological, efficient reality predates Henry Ford and his assembly line, but lies in the complete alienation between the self and the ‘Other’. The history of the last 10,000 years could easily be seen as a process of automation: the turn from

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Already the author of Living at the End of the World, a review of post- Medieval apocalyptic movements in UK, Benjamin is evidently fascinated by utopian myths that form the undercurrent of our culture.

Confessing to "idolising the astronauts" during their heroic moonshot era, Benjamin now finds them stuck in the back room of an autograph convention, revered only by a particularly nerdish fan base. (And in Moscow, cosmonauts will drive your taxi for you...) Indeed, so many now find the moon shot so incredible that they believe it did not happen (instead being faked up in a secret Hollywood studio like in the film Capricorn 1) that NASA had to issue a detailed rebuttal, something that inevitably only fed conspiracy theories by not a world of qualities to a world of quantities. The scientific, religious reductionism of the world into a collection of things has brought the lesson that the sum of all parts is equal to the whole, but despite the propaganda of the Spectacle, it is obvious that we are much more than strands of self-replicating DNA. However, this lesson has been internalized and we become spectators to a life of destruction that is somehow seen as beyond us.

Derrick points to the ability of ordinary folks to believe anything just as long as they can be convinced they stand a chance. He points to the Nazi Holocaust (as one among many) where people walked right into gas chambers because they wanted to believe that they were just getting a shower.This is the essence of civilization, being reduced to the bear minimum and just accepting it. We are so afraid of taking the risks to get to a better world that we would do just about anything to survive another day. A further consequence of this mentality is the effect that it would have on others. If we are willing to be subjugated so long as it’s not the worst-case scenario, how much are we willing to impose on others? This is an issue Derrick tries to portray.

The world is not being killed solely by a few greedy people;it is being killed by a world that allows those people to do what they are doing. Everything is massified and reduced to the point where every act is an act of genocide and ecocide, where this becomes the standard and we are left numb and amnesiatic. The act of destruction that we make possible is completely removed and mechanized:

“It is possible to kill a million people without personally shedding a drop of blood. It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one’s living room.” (CoMB, 408)

Since authoritative power was created 10,000 years ago, we have seen a constant centralization aided by an increasing level of technology which “give them the capacity to destroy human life” (CoMB, 423). The issue comes down to the ability of people to kill indiscriminately and with little to no consequence. Derrick goes through the example of financer J.P.

responding exhaustively to their every last point.

Benjamin pronounces the manned space programme dead not of the latest Shuttle disaster—which went down just after her book came out— but of the 1986 Challenger disaster, which "recategoris[ed] space as a place better fitted to machines than human beings".

Of course the astronauts were only ever front men for the Cold War ICBM programme and of course Columbia burn-up on re-entry was the consequence of design compromises—some would say a Faustian pact—between NASA and the NRO (Amerika's secretive spy satellite agency), but Benjamin isn't really interested in the military aspect or other realities of the space programme. Rather she is interested in the fantasies it has unleashed in our culture, space-as-spectacle.

Morgan, as an example of the gross extremes that a person will go through in order to have a larger numerical value. What Morgan represents though, is the larger issue of “monolithic power”, the manifestation of a “cultural urge to simplify complexity and thus increase control.” (CoMB, 422)

Derrick brings in the role each of us plays in all of this. Moving through

pornography, what he finds is the same. People see a silent, emotionless image, without the baggage of another being, yet without the warmth and reality, yet one can impose what they want upon this ‘person’ without consequence. That ‘person’ is distant, much as those who made the computer this is typed on are, or those who made the shirt I’m wearing, and the trees this paper was made from. There is nothing easy here. We are all apart of this mess, not because we hate this or that, but because it is here and we are pushed along in it.

This book leaves you in reality, that distant place that we are taught to think of as cold. It leaves you with the likeliness that we may all be fucked, and it might be too late for us to survive all of this. Yet it gives the hope and spirit of life: that regardless of all this, there are still reasons to fight. What Derrick has done, is to display the grotesque outpourings of civilized brutality in their full detail. He is able to give the details of what occurs without the callousness of reporting and or the leftist kind of parading of misery. He has the ability to convey these with the full realm of true humanity, constantly hitting the reader with a constant look into our reality. Yet he remains true to the earth and the spirit of resistance.

It was 'the great communicator', arch-reactionary Ronald Reagan (perhaps echoing the abysmal Star Trek) that first used the phrase "the new high frontier" regarding the conquest of space—and more particularly, his own looney-tunes 'Star Wars' programme—and this well-illustrates its imperial utopian content and cultural resonances in the US that strike a rather duffer note in Europe. Amerika has always been a culture devoted to crass technical mastery, but allied to this is the settler myth of a new frontier which just has to be occupied to guarantee freedom and prosperity to anyone individualistic and enterprising enough—first the West and then the universe, Manifest Destiny uber alles! Despite its Nazi origins (Werner van Braun, the slaves of Pina Munde, and Operation Paperclip), the moon rocket was therefore a better vehicle than many for spinning such

This book is uncomfortable yet welcoming, confronting yet reassuring, it is upfront, personal, and above all, urgent. It is, as is laid out in the introduction “a weapon. It is a gun to be put into the hands of all of us who wish to oppose these atrocities, and a manual on how to use it. It is a knife to cut the ropes that bind us to our ways of perceiving and being in the world. It is a match to light a fuse.” It can and must be used.

It is impossible to write a book of this size (over six hundred pages of text) and mention all of the points that Derrick mentions, although many of them are vitally important. What is also included is a full range of all the ways in which life is doomed through civilization, and the threat has and never will go until all of it is gone. The dire situation is one in which there is no reason left not to fight.

We can see all of what is going on, or we can continue to usher our family, friends, planet, et cetera into the gas chambers just so we can continue going on another day. As Derrick often mentions, the realization of all this should never be a reason to roll over and play dead or just give up, but reasons to give the fight all we have got.

Derrick’s work has been criticized before for perhaps not having been direct enough on the problem that lays ahead, namely the entirety of civilization. The evidence of this comes from leftists and single issue activists world wide taking sections from this work and adding it to ‘their causes’ without seeing the entirety. Some of this comes from Derrick’s overall likeability, but it’s hard to say that he hasn’t been direct, as the opening quote states. However, while I felt more strongly about this criticism before, I found out that one of Derrick’s next two books (both hopefully out in 2003) is dedicated to trying to find ways to tear civilization down. We can only hope that book is able to fully drive the full issue home for those who have left a blind eye to anything that may otherwise be critical of their own limited agenda.

Both books are published by Context Books and are available from Re-Pressed Distribution in Europe and Black and Green Distribution in the United States. Be sure to check out http://www.derrickjensen.org][www.derrickjensen.org on the internet for more of Derrick’s writings and other information.

fantasy into US propaganda during the Cold War. Even nowadays, the nerd fans of the astronauts see the end of the space programme as a denial of freedom and a racial suicide by confining humanity to a finite Earth rather than an acknowledgement of Earthbound realities including humanity's ultimate mortality and our smallness in the universal scale of things.

Against them, I would argue that the absurdity of mortality is no greater than the absurdity of immortality, and will force us to focus on valuing the immediate rather than devaluing our lives now for fantasies of the future and universal mastery. Benjamin also doesn't mention space junk—the likely author of Columbia's burn-up— where NASA's casual pollution of near-space is making it too dangerous to launch even unmanned vehicles through it. For all their high rhetoric, NASA are doing themselves out of a job and Amerika out of its favourite fantasy.

Dreams of space colonisation didn't start with Reagan, of course (he was no visionary, for all his presentational skills as far as Middle Amerika was concerned), but originated much earlier in the inter-War period, just as colonialism on Earth was beginning to get reversed. The crystallographer and socialist J D Bernal first proposed "spherical shells" orbiting the Earth, each containing 30,000 colonists. Usually acknowledged as progenitor of the dehumanising ideology of extropianism, Bernal spawned a host of anti-life spin-off notions, including turning ourselves into brain / machine amalgams (cyborgs) to survive space travel that way and of virtuality as another way to "leave the flesh" which repelled him like some latter-day monastic as instinctual and uncontrolled, corruptable and corrupting.

The Bernal Sphere of 1929 became the O'Neillean L-point colony of the 1970s, orbital real estate with countrified parks, jogging and no doubt Californian self-realisation groups thrown in. In the wake of Earth Day, a disturbing amount of cod-Green rhetoric was mixed in with this technological utopia—"Love the Earth - leave it" and so forth—but fundamentally the O'Neillian colonies were about extending the limits of growth to orbit, a techno-fix likely unworkable anyway, given the energy and resources that would have to be expended reaching orbit in the first place.

The Whole Earth Review was quick to jump on the bandwagon and to this day continues to hype and peddle every extropian fad from human immortalism and computer 'chaos' through to 'wiring' yourself and every sort of space junk other than the real thing. They lost a real star with LSD guru and arch-huckster Tim Leary's demise a few years back - despite decades of telling his dopey adherents that "death is a fraud". Even at the time, many more authentic protoGreens saw through the hype, Lewis Mumford denouncing the O'Neillian colonies as "technologucal disguises for infantile fantasies" of dependence on a machine-Mother and inventor Steve Baer saw them as potential new ghettoes-in-space, uncomfortable dumping grounds for those unwanted below:

I see acres of air-conditioned Greyhound bus interior, glinting, slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint. I don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean - I hear piped music and smell chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous vague, low-key 'airplane fear'.

Benjamin doesn't actually mention the terrestrial version, Arizona's Biosphere 2, but GA regulars will know already the farcical failure and cultishness that this project fell into when its 'reality' was challenged by the real-world version.

Given that manned space exploration is a dead letter, how do space cultists cope? Aside from the few extropian sickoes that think that if space is "better fitted to machines than human beings" then we should become machines, the majority seek to go to space virtually, in their imagination as mediated by computer-generated Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs). Again, we find the usual cast of extropian techno-hypsters and rows of spotty teens at their terminals plugging into unreality like battery chickens, chatting, building virtual 'castles in the air' and swapping 'avs' (avatars: computer representations of themselves) like voluntary internees of the Matrix, of a most literal manifestation of the society of the spectacle, and victory of the world of text, representation and symbol over reality. Of course, none of it is real in anything but the most quibbling philosophical sense ("if I say it's real, it is"). Amusingly, when Benjamin tries to immerse herself in a Mars MUD, she finds it incredibly clunky, blundering about trying to negotiate the controls - no sense of reality for her, so thankfully an initiation into the realities of technological mediation rather than the unrealities of a bodiless mental / virtual world where one ends up controlling nothing through the illusion of controlling a whole imagined world of pixels.

Given the obvious lack of satisfactoriness in 'virtual' space travel, there is a falling back on earlier forms, a call for the intervention of angels—or at least ETs—to miraculously take believers Heavens-ward. Benjamin powerfully evokes the nothingness of Roswell, both as the arse end of New Mexico, an arse end state, a really small town where the Christian fundamentalist majority find the UFO cult a New Age offense (and rival) to their backwoods faith, and as a place of mind cluttered with tawdry alien bric-a-brac, typically for sale, sou- veneirs of the town's annual carnival where costumed, Klingon-speaking Trekkies intermingle with equally absurd self-promoting 'abductees' (the Hill case gets a good mention - 'lost time': lost lives). There is a telling search for significance—finding nothing but rock and mesquite at the supposed site of the 1947 crash miles out in the desert, a new, richer landscape is constructed out of post facto crowd-pleasing local rumour and self-reinforcing conspiracy theory. Yet they're all still waiting full of hope for the Space-Arks from beyond this corruptable world, hopelessly waiting to hitch their ride to the stars.

A more modern, scientific gloss on this millenarian atavism, the SETI Project, taps in to the home computing gimmick. Using screen saver computing time, this government- funded search for extraterestrial signals using huge radio telescopes has created the most powerful computer network in the world. All this on-line time is voluntarily donated, by millions across the world. Benjamin is right to say this shows its universal appeal—above, say, the appeal of trying to end the AIDS pandemic, or apple pie and mother-hood—but what is this appeal? A desire to end our cosmic aloneness? But this sense of 'lonely crowds' is precisely a consequence of the mediation of our lives through technology (especially the intense division of labour that characterises techno-industrial society) and SETI extends this mediation even more than the nerds in their MUDs, who at least type inanities to each other. SETI's adherents are yoked together to nothing, a cabal of no-hoper scientists and through them, the faint, random hiss of the distant universal electro-magnetic background.

Ultimately, the absurdity and bleakness space cadets project onto the universe is one of their own creation, much as the first empire-builders projected their own savagery on the wilderness and peoples they sought to subjugate and so civilize. Their ideologically-driven desire or its unintended consequence—depending on how far-gone they are—is a substitution of face-to-face community with supposedly more predictable and controllable technology. As the Columbia explosion—like Shakespeare's "ill-starred omen" over Texas—the flaming crash of an old symbol of technology / waste Concorde on take-off, and even the inevitable early death of Dolly the clone demonstrate like harsh slaps of reality, these 'rocket dreams' are fantasy, inhuman lies sold to us by the powerful for their own inhuman ends.

“SHADOW WALK” BY AMOS KEPPLER, PUBLISHED BY MIDNIGHT FIRE MEDIA. ISBN 82-91693-02-1

http://www.midnight-fire.net/sw/][http://www.midnight-fire.net/sw/

“Our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows”. - John Carpenter, “Prince of Darkness” Our language makes describing ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’ experiences very difficult—we simply don’t have the appropriate vocabulary in so many of these matters. It’s very difficult to describe what our intuition tells us is true, is real, but not concrete. Our noun-centred language straightjackets us into very narrow patterns of thought, locks our experiences up in word boxes ‘til before you know it you’re trapped into a civilized world-view. That’s why the new book from Amos Keppler is such an extraordinary one.

“Shadow Walk” is a powerful tale of magick and empowerment which manages not to sound like a mindbody-spirit-self-obsessed-hippie book. This is full-on reality. Blood and sweat and shit—nothing’s toned down or dulled. The intensity of life comes through strong and meaty. Real life bursting off the pages.

The plot spirals round Jill who’s starting college in a sleepy New England town and feels herself transforming, reverting to her true wild state. She and the group of witches drawn to Frazer Hill begin discovering their power and learning the truth about the many layers of themselves and the world they’re a part of. These “mutants”, witches, the uncivilised, become an “unstoppable force” and the story charts their fight to reclaim themselves and the earth from the damp, grey fog of civilisation.

Many obstacles in their journey try to trip them up, especially the hierarchically-minded, manipulatitive priestess, Laurie and the scientists who want to harness and neutralise the witches’ power. As the witches’ power grows they inevitably come into confrontation with the church, suspicious townspeople and sinister business men. One of these, Scott Thompson, lords over the town from his huge shopping centre and will stoop to anything to get rid of the trouble-making witches.

Meshed into the plot are atmospheric, informative pieces about civilisation—its birth, rise and development—flashbacks to times when our uncivilised, wild ancestors were wiped out or assimilated by civilised farmers and city soldiers, and possible future scenarios if the “grey fog of concrete, glass, plastic and steel of technology” isn’t stopped. There are some brilliant rants about how totally shite civilisation is and how we can reclaim our natural birthright, given by Gabi, one of the rebel witches, in the shows she puts on in the town square and pub and by the other witches in the magickal orgies in the woods. But this isn’t a new agey, wishy-washy, herbal-tea drinking kind of witchcraft. This is much more raw, cuts right to the bone.. Amos has no time for the christian morality peddled by many pagans and wic- cans, and rubbishes their idea that magick should not to be used in a so- called ‘negative’ way, for eg. with anger. “The concept of The Raging Witch is ancient. The Witch when seeing injustice and intolerance unfold threw a fit of rage and if sufficiently powerful, made knots of the offending parties.” he says.

“We are human beings, not lambs or sheep, and as human beings we should Live, not be content to exist in a prison of our own making. Emotion, passion in all forms is vitality. Without vitality there isn’t Life. Modern society is destroying everything making Life worth Living. We should not aid it in that endeavor. We should all be enraged by it. A thousand year’s Rage isn’t enough. Or a million. Not as long as the Machine is still working, still claiming new, fresh victims every fucking second of the day. Destroying Life on Earth.”

And hopefully this’ll inspire all ye rebel witches out there. Help you throw off the shackles clamped on you since before you were born and push that bit harder to experience life in ALL it’s glory. Anything that makes us stronger as individuals, gives us more strength to fight for the end of civilisation. It’s not a case of either actively working for the demise of civilisation or embarking on our personal journey to our wild core. They are the same process. And we need to keep ourselves strong, to gain sustenance from the animals, birds, trees and streams we live with. If we want to be effective, we need to tap into all the powers, within and without (which of course is another false dichotomy, but you know what I mean, hopefully.) If we’re constantly smothering parts of ourselves that don’t fit in with the majority’s consensus then we will be very weak. And if we refuse to recognise our shadow, our true wild selves, or the true wild nature of the rest of nature then we will be only half-human and not effective at all.

This book is free from programs, but has vision aplenty. I asked Amos if he has read, “The Story of B” as there are striking similarities in their ideas. “I haven’t read the Quinn book, but it isn’t strange that you thought I had. His thoughts are very similar to my own. People said that I had read Zerzan, too, many years before I actually did. There is truly an emerging consciusness. Not the mushy new age shite stuff. But there are people coming to similar conclusions, independently of each other. And it pleases me that it is a far more realistic approach to life than the utopian like fantasies so popular in bygone eras. No more flower power. These days it’s blood, guts and Life. Great. That in itself makes me ‘hopeful’.”

This really is a fantastic book. Crammed full of ideas and atmosphere, pulsing with life and anarchic energy, satifying on many levels. Maybe some feministy people might be shocked with the sex in the book, but we are sexual beings like any other animal and to deny this is to deny a huge part of ourselves. Civilised people have a neurotic obsession with sex as it’s always trying to control forces of nature, it cannot allow anything untamed to stalk among it. All of us brought up within civilisation are sexually dysfunctional - there is no way we could have a healthy attitude to sex living in such a domesticated, taboo-ridden place, where all our desires are tamed. “Shadow Walk” blasts these taboos to pieces, much as Amos does in ‘real’ life in the “Witch nights”.

The first of these, held in a Norwegen forest over ten years ago, attracted all sorts of people wishing to breach the borders between the mundane world and the real, wild one. A “life-threatening party” is how Amos describes it! Others were held in Hyde Park, London in 1988 and 1992 - powerful nights of sex-magick right in the belly of the beast. These witch nights break down the boundaries which ordinarily exist between our rational selves and the rest of the universe. (Imaginary boundaries, like the rest of civilisation’s boundaries, fences, walls, borders.) and formed some of the inspiration for Shadow Walk

Amos has created a Shadow Walk section on his website with recently taken photo’s, new writings and snippets about the book. Like the rest of his midnightfire site, it’s evocative and beautifully put together. Midnightfire includes a weekly report news section (which is mailed out every week too), a brilliant biography of Aleister Crowley, anti-civ rants, stories, poems, graphics and info on magick and the paranormal - over 500 pages of stuff in the same vein as the following.

“The world’s pyramids shall crumble to dust. We don’t want humanity to live in the overgrown anthills called cities. ten thousand years ago, when something went terribly wrong, with the the start and expansion of agriculture, the coming of the first cities. Humanity, natural nomads stopped being nomads and got stuck. We are nomads. It’s our natural way of Life. We must discover what we have lost, misplaced. When that happens we won’t live in a perfect world. There’s no such thing. But we will live closer to the living Earth, close to our Self. and we will Live.”

A CAT'S CHANCE IN HELL EDITED BY ANNY MALLE. £7 FROM SLINGSHOT PUBLICATIONS, B.M. BOX 8314, LONDON WC1N 3XX (SEE AD).

This is the story of the campaign to save the Hillgrove cats, as told by the campaigners themselves (their accounts were solicited through the very worthy ARCNews).

The story starts with the disap- pearence of Witney nurse Cynthia O'Neill's cat Snowy, whose photo illustrates the book's cover. Perhaps she'd have been better named 'Sparky', in Lenin's sense of a spark that leads to a social explosion, that set the world—or at least a good part of Oxfordshire—aflame.

Unfortunately for the cat thieves— and there is every suggestion that Snowy was one of hundreds stolen in the area for vivisection—Cynthia was one of those exceptional, impossible people that think they can defy the world and in thinking so, do. Her unstinting efforts over the course of the next eight years led to scenes of what one contributor called "medieval warfare" at a fortified Hillgrove Farm, a county police force given a blank cheque and a free hand for any degree of lawless brutality by beleagued Home Secretary (and Brown's fellow-parishioner) Jack Straw still humiliated, and the end of cat breeding for vivisection in UK. All this is powerfully evoked by the first-hand experiences of the contributors and the result is both moving and inspiring. The book shows both that we have and can win, and means that we can never forget this.

The book also pulls no punches about local media and national animal protection organisations only too happy to collaborate with the vivisec- tors. The contemptible Maggy Jennings of the RSPCA is specifically named for OK-ing Hillgrove Farm and even putting out leaflets telling people not to campaign against in just before it closed! This sort's constant cry of "work through the system" is shown as utterly empty and useless to the animals by, for example, the Home Office licensing body in Swindon not only refusing to accept a 10,000 signature petition but actually calling the police on those trying to deliver it! Although no specific contact address for the ALF is given in the voluminous listings concluding this book, there is no attempt to conceal or excuse such militancy; if anything, it is defiantly flaunted.

This said—and for the sake of historical accuracy—I should say here that the riot at Consort and the labtrashing convoys that first set out from HMP Bullingdon during Barry Horne's hunger strike there really galvinised the Save the Hillgrove Cats campaign. Also a key incident in finally forcing farmer Brown to close the cat farm—the tying of his wife to a fence by activists unknown—disappointingly doesn't merit a mention. It is also disappointing that so many contributors feel justified in presenting stone-throwers at demos as provocateurs and suggesting the prime consequence of militant action was to win harsher treatment for less militant demonstrators arbitrarilly arrested. There are also a couple of occassions where A Cat's Chance is too modest - a knock-on effect of the anti-Hillgrove campaign was that Oxford Uni's breeder Park Farm also closed, and even local magistrates— usually pillars of reaction—had to be replaced with stipendiaries as certified police 'rubber stamps' as a local magistrate wrote to the papers saying the majority sympathised with the protesters' ends. Yes, even the magistrates...

A footnote to all this is that the same dogged determination that got Hillgrove closed got this book published. It took dedicated volunteers, a campaigner’s bequest, and the backing of Martin J Walker's Slingshot Publications (who previously pub- lised the highly controversial and worthwhile expose of Wellcome's AZT racket, Dirty Medicine) to get this one published. GA readers have been offered a 30% discount, so do use the form appended to A Cat's Chance's ad in this issue...

SILENCING POLITICAL DISSENT BY NANCY CHANG. £4.99 FROM SEVEN STORIES, UNIT 3, OLYMPIA TRADING ESTATE, COBURG ROAD, WOOD GREEN, LONDON N22 6TZ.

This booklet is about the Patriot Act, 'anti-terrorist' legislation as repressive as it is risible, passed in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and—not incidentally—just before Bush's invasion of Afghanistan.

Like recent British 'anti-terrorist' legislation, pretty much anyone— whether violent or nonviolent—can be arbitrarily defined as a 'terrorist' by an anonymous and unaccountable

NANCY CHANG

medium-level law enforcement official simply for conspiring "knowingly or otherwise" with "one or more others". Anyone sending money to, writing about or otherwise associating with these arbitrarily defined 'terrorists' then risks decades in prison, and then those that know them risk the same, and so on through all 'seven degrees of separation'. And, of course, the Kafkaesque absurdities of Camp X-Ray (or whatever the military's spin doctors have 'revisioned' it now...) show that US officials are more than happy to use these powers to crush any dissent, relying on a compliant judiciary of proven political placemen and a grossly ignorant and 'patriotic' electorate. Apparently, few Congressmen bothered to even read the 85 pages of the Patriot Act when presented to them (just as UK's Prevention of Terrorism Act went through on the nod) and the one Congresswomen that voted against it has now recieved death threats, etc. The Bush administration is obviously using (largely self-made) 'crisis' to justify widescale social control and conformist 'patriotic' loyalty in the name of 'anti-terrorism'. The booklet abounds with tales of people visited by (admittedly hick) Feds and / or fired for 'disloyally' (but accurately) suggesting it might just be all about the oil....

Aside from bringing ready examples of Bush's tyranny at work—to some extent, the Patriot Act just legitimised then-current 'anti-terrorist' practice, thousands of innocent Moslems being interned post-9/11 much as the Japanese were after Pearl Harbour—Nancy Chang and respected radical historian Howard Zinn (in his preface) put this in the context of other reigns of tyranny on the US, most notably the post-WW1 'Red Scares' and post-WW2 McCarthyism.

Chang is a prominent advocate for civil liberties—in fact already having defended some of those targeted post- 9/11—and so writes principally from a legalistic perspective, of defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is also the suggestion that fear-less journalism—obviously threatened directly by this legislation and the likelihood the current unashamedly bent, opportunistic administration will use it with utmost cynicism—might make a difference. In the real world, this is a question of power, not law - for all it matters, the Bush junta is already considered illegitimate by just about anyone prepared to act against it. It's more likely defiance where possible and clandes- tinity where not + a few guns in the right hands are all that will stop the current drive to complete corporate / military control of Amerika. The US has a rhetoric of defending freedom in the face of tyranny - let the rattlesnake swallow it's own tail.

IN SEARCH OF THE WORLD ED. IVORY BELL. $6 / $11 INT’L FROM P.O. BOX 1081, CARRBORO, NC 27510, USA.

Originally intended as the 'Travel' section of CrimethInc's Days of Love, Nights of Rage, it grew to be a whole anthology. Initially it warns readers (with an irritatingly excessive ellipsis characteristic of word processoritis)

...don't see this as a book on how to travel (or even how people used to travel!), but as a small map (or antimap for that matter) of the world of amazement and beauty and difference we walk through every single day, whether our eyes are open or not.

This subject interested me because—given the predilictions of so many ex-comrades—travel appears to be the graveyard of revolutionaries. I still haven't figured out why. Maybe, having failed to change their own society, the ex-revolutionary hopes to find another, better one on their way. In Search of the World suggested, however, that travel was more about changing the world in oneself in some quasi-mystical sense.

Judging from his latest travelogue in 5th Estate about the pretty boys in newly-'liberated' Afghanistan, Hakim Bey's lengthy contribution to this anthology points out this avant-garde tradition is, well, really most traditional - predating Rimbaud's "idle stroller" and the 1960s Sits' derive (which proved, at least to themselves, that they needed to get out more) to the wandering Sufi mystics and Taoist pilgrims. (Incidentally, to Bey's great credit, he also analyses the rise of Islamic reaction and intolerance of diversity, mainly as a reaction of their losing 'hegemony' to the West in the last 200 years. He won't use the term 'Empire' in relation to Islam, of course.) All those past great spiritual travellers Bey mentions get sections too, and you can't help having a soft spot for the lad Rimbaud abandoning European civilisation for an "Abyss-iania" of his imagination on a whim, though his pseudy artsy tone is typical here and grating, encouraging me to quote the retort of one mock-contributor:

Funny too, how the beginning of a journey encourages all kinds of fatuous philosophising.

Any anthology that manages to drag in Uncertainty, fractals (sort of like fossils for those that can't remember them) and quotes from postmodern Saints, all as apparently Relevant to this matter in hand (as any other) tries too hard to please readers / fans that clearly don't deserve it.

The contributors' narcissistic tone does mirror that of typical travellers, in my experience. Their encounters with different lifeways and environments apparently matter to them only inasmuch as they change their perceptions of themselves. We aren't talking cultural exchange here or living demonstrations that Civilisation is not the be-all and end-all of existence in some anthropological sense, but rather spiritually epiphaniac experiences that move them into some personal 'Now'. I suspect it is more with wide-eyed approval than for ironic counterpoint that Nietzsche's last, 'mad' correspondence is quoted illustrating this as beyond Reason, beyond expression in language (my anticynic superego hectors 'don't mention his tertiary syphilis', but I(d) can't resist).

But it's too easy to jeer at unabashed pretentiousness. They tell a story about another whim-traveller, hitch-hiking from the US to Stockholm, as far as that is physically possible. He doesn't know why he's doing it and is embarassed when inevitably asked. Asked whether he found a 'Jerusalem' at the end of his pilgrimage, he waffles about his journey and—sans specifics, of course—finally insists that as a result of the journey he did find a kind of healing of childhood trauma and not the Absurd nothing we all expected. There is something to this or people wouldn't have done it since before the dawn of Time. There's a sort of freedom, making your own decisions and owning only what you can carry and probably less, a freedom of personal responsibility largely free of societal responsibility though contradictorily usually dependant on its charity and— interesting for Dan Quinn readers—to that of Chance and Nature. There is more. One contributor, who (due disrespect intended) reads like an authentic CrimethInc fan, noted his parents updated their wills before going away and regaled all and sundry with travellers' horror tales, even though their destination was only a tour of domesticated, social democratic Denmark. He concludes:

I think the only reason left for people like my parents to leave the house is the possibility of danger. Deep down they crave it.... Wouldn't they like to risk their lives for something interesting?

Not knowing anything about PM's domestic circumstances, I suspect they also leave home to earn money for his European holiday. I also suspect they'd pay to experience danger, real or imagined—in fact, this is precisely what PM says they are doing— so it can be spectacularised and commodified. But he is right, sort of - almost everyone wants to wander, to find a new world. Translating this into revolution rather than backpacker lifestyle is another matter though....

In conclusion, In Search of the World is a 'curate's egg', good in parts. I thought 'The Road to Hyperborea' excellent but a lot of the rest bogus, self-indulgent and / or pretentious. Perhaps picking your way through it was meant to be like the travel experience itself, a sieving of (in this case, most tellingly as equivalent to the 'tourism' so lambasted throughout the book, secondhand!) experience for worthwhile meaning.

JUdith"mAliNA"7oVF^ POLITICS (2001) BLACK AND RED, P.O.BOX 02374, DETROIT, MICHIGAN 48202

This is a collection of Judith Malina’s poetry. Forgive my ignorance, but I don’t know who Judith Malina is - should I? The book presumes that you know her already and are familiar with her work. There are no clues as to whether this is even her first publication, or any hint of a biography. Maybe this is an intentional omission and I should know better than to ask these questions.

Once you are past the sickeningly sycophantic Preface (“Listen to Judith, she knows”), you come to her poems. They aren’t in any particular grouping or theme, but they don’t really need to be. Perhaps this is challenging her own need to ‘define/ And make categories’ (‘Learning Shame’). There are definitely strong themes threading through the poems, which hold the collection together well.

The ‘Love’ part of the title comes in dealing with love and death/loss. ‘Walking Around the Block Without Julian’ is the first poem you come to where she mentions this Julian. He crops up again and again, and it’s not hard to work out that Julian was her lover/comrade who has now died. Malina uses his words for inspiration for her poetry, ‘ “I am a Prisoner Dreaming of Escape.” ’, as well as describing the loss and pain in losing him. So he is both a muse and a subject. But you are never really told who he was or how he was politically active, which I think would help an understanding and appreciation of the poems. He is described in the Preface as ‘her presiding eagle-angel of anarchism’, but I don’t think that description helps a great deal.

The ‘Politics’ part comes in where she talks of the Spanish Civil War and actions where she’s experienced police brutality. Again, it’s difficult to know whether these are her direct experiences, as the poems appear to be biographical. Although I suppose you have to decide yourself as to whether that matters.

She also explores her position as ‘other’, as a woman and a Jew. In ‘Women Crying’ she explores men’s repression towards emotion. In ‘Pressing’ Malina sees, ‘Everything is intrusion’ and therefore an exclusion of something else, such as men’s ‘instinct for penetration’. She also talks of her experiences and revelations as a young girl learning from her Jewish background, religion and anti-semitic history. She doesn’t really challenge religion, but is working out of it from herself.

There are also some beautiful lyrical poems. I particularly like ‘Five-Word Permutations on Light and Dark’. This takes a line from the Bible, and subverts the words, struggling with their order and comprehension. ‘In the World We Envision’ she explores simply and rhythmically a picture of the world without ‘borders. police. .frontiers. polluting mills and dams’.

The more you read poetry, the more you find, and this is certainly true of Malina’s work. Read some, then read it again.

‘CRITICAL MASS: BICYCLING’S DEFIANT CELEBRATION ED. CRIS CARLSSON, PUBLISHED BYAK PRESS £12

This book has been compiled for Critical Mass’s 10 year anniversary. Starting in San Francisco in 1992 (although there is evidence of Critical Mass style events happening in Ramsgate, Kent in the early 80s!) the idea of Critical Mass has spread across the world, taking its pro- bike/anti-car message. The book includes articles about experiences of Critical Mass rides world-wide, flyers, graphics, photos, political debates, explorations of what Critical Mass really is, emails from pissed-off car drivers etc.

With a book like this, dedicated to a single issue, you kind of get the feeling that the editors are trying to convince you that CM is the most radical and revolutionary thing ever ever ever. In fact, Cris Carlsson (editor and “founder” of CM) actually says, “Critical Mass is one of the MOST POLITICAL events of this depressing world”. Not entirely convinced there.

It has inspired things such as RTS and has been used to further different political ideas, criticising the oil industry, wars, governments, city- & work-life etc. It has spread all over the world, from Colombia to Cairns, and from Philadelphia to the Philippines, each in its own way, so it must pull some cables for all those peoples. However, this book does give pretty good examples that, on the whole, CM is performed within the strict confines of police/state control and isn’t going anywhere else particularly fast.

There are certainly articles within the book, which debate this idea of it being highly “velorutionary”. There are good observations of the very nature of cyclists’ behaviour on CM rides. The notion of “no leaders” and how this really works in practice: the cyclists at the front steer the ride and the rest follow like sheep—not really revolutionising everyday life there then. Or sticking to routes planned by the cops, or having signs to apologise to drivers for holding them up. and even councillors joining the ride for their own publicity.

Although heavily reliant on American contributions, there is interesting stuff from participants worldwide, showing how it’s been adapted and received elsewhere to San Francisco.

A contribution from Stuttgart, Germany was amusing. The author was the only person who turned up for the CM event one day. There was a large police presence, ready to control anything that may happen. A cop came to ask what the cyclist would do if nobody else showed up. “I am a Critical Mass,” he replied, determined to ride alone if he had to. The cop then returned, having conferred with his fellow officers, and told the man he “had misinterpreted the idea of Critical Mass as the police understood it.” The cyclist nevertheless pursued his intention, was given a route map to follow (?) and was given “presidential treatment” as he was accompanied by the cops through the city.

There was an interesting article from Lancaster, UK, illustrating the nature of the activist scene in the 90s and its subsequent demise this century. Nowadays, “we are the ones now trying to turn our activist experiences into a means of paying the bills, or struggling hard to be good countercultural parents”. Sound familiar?

So CM has become a “comforting bit of counterculture spectacle. [with] a condescending, compartmentalising attitude that keeps any radical act from really breaking through”. But the question we surely should be asking ourselves, could a radical act ever have happened when a bunch of cyclists come together for an “organised coincidence” in the city for a couple of hours each month during rush hour? Maybe not. Still, it’s an interesting, thought-provoking, historical and amusing collection of stuff.

PAMPHLETS ~

PRISON SURVIVAL / PRISONER SUPPORT. £1 FROM REPRESSED, 16 SHOLEBROKE AVENUE, LEEDS LS7. FREE TO PRISONERS.

This is a promisingly practical little booklet, anthologising the experience and advice of some of those inside and those supporting them. It talks about prison procedures—how Reception and the canteen (prison shop) works, etc—and how you're likely to feel on getting banged up and getting over that. There was even advice from someone on the run about this important related subject, staying out of prison. Worked for them, I guess!

This is all very commendable and I'd recommend it, both as an ex-con and as someone whose done practical prison support. I would say, though, that if anything Prison Survival is a bit too empowering, inasmuch as it doesn't deal much with situations that do go wrong—eg. bullying by screws or predatory prisoners—just how to avoid such situations where possible.

Aside from basically saying "don't", it doesn't deal with drugs in prison and issues around piss testing and privileging 'drug-free' prisoners over others.

It doesn't have much to say about organising politically in prison— though making this keystone of the system unworkable deserves some consideration—and there's also the implication that this booklet's mainly written for people that aren't going to be inside for very long.

The need to support people in the first few months after leaving prison—who may have got hazy about such basic survival skills as buying and preparing their own food, traffic sense, etc due to institutionalisation that can set in disturbingly quickly—might also have merited more attention.

NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR! EDITED BY ANNA KEY. £2 FROM KATE SHARPLEY LIBRARY, B.M. HURRICANE, LONDON WC1N 3XX.

This topical pamphlet anthologises anti-militarist texts of Flores Magon and Emma Goldman vintage, all impressively trenchant and direct, and including the classic 'War is the Health of the State’.

The arguments are extremely familiar, though it’d have been useful in

A Cat in Hell’s Chance tells the story of a crusade started by a political novice, which gathered momentum over ten years and became a mass movement which, after battles with Oxfordshire police, many arrests, court appearances and jailings finally shut down Hill Grove cat farm.

The book, written almost entirely from contributions by campaigners, tells the true story of one of the most effective campaigns against the breeding and sale of animals for experimentation and vivisection.

ORDERS: Less than 10 copies £10 per copy, plus post and packing (20% UK + 40% overseas).

More than 10 copies £10 per copy with no packing or mailing costs.

Arrangements with considerable discounts can be made for people wanting to raise money for local groups.

All cheques in pounds sterling where possible, made payable to Slingshot Publications

BM Box 8314 London WC1N 3XX.

No order will be returned without prior payment.

NAME

ADDRESS

POSTCODE

the intro to have more thought given as to why the workers’ international against war fell into such bastard offspring as national syndicalism with the advent of the First World War. The discussion of Japanese militarists’ use of anti-Korean racism following the Tokyo earthquake to also neutralise Leftists and trades unionists was also useful - and disturbingly relevant today.

The most interesting documents were those distinguishing anti-militarism from pacifism, Makhnovist and Spanish revolutionary accounts. It’s also worth noting the concluding text is from former Feral Faun’s Wilful Disobedience, still sharp in trashing domestication etc despite blatant ideological ‘product placement’ ("Armed joy") and being past his best.

NEW ZINES "

QUICK #3. $2 / $3 OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA FROM 17 SPARKHILL AVENUE, TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA MK4K 1G4.

Taking its name from Paris ‘68 slogan “Vite!”, this highly impressing pro-AP zine is packed full all sorts of original, good stuff.

Highlights include an interview with primitive affluence theorist and anthropologist Richard B Lee (a fellow Mad Max fan), an Anarcho- Primitivist analysis of The Matrix, rejecting agriculture with ‘food for free’ (though you’d probably starve on one of each of the foodstuffs featured), and a hoax latest letter from

Ihe story Of TMe carrpsigr against Hill Grtret Cat Fdiai Written by THE CAMPAIGNERS ediied bv ANNf MALLE

1930s aviatrix Amelia Earhart (“Every time I have to leave the house without the express goal of enjoyment or subversion I feel ill”). It was also really encouraging to see an open publications policy when it came to letters—everyone from some pomo academic eulogising 5th Estate liberalism to angry young punx who came across as a lot more sussed— and clever, political band interviews (as opposed to the usual fan drool). The cartoons were cool and even the history pieces (including on the 19th century nomadic Amerikans, the Tribe of Ishmael) didn’t have my eyes glazing over.

SOLIDARITY SOUTH PACIFIC NEWSLETTER NO.1 FREE WITH S.A.E FROM SSP C/O SDEF!, TILBURY PLACE, BRIGHTON, EAST SUSSEX, BN2 2GY, UK.

This is the first newsletter from the ‘Solidarity South Pacific’ campaign. SSP is the consolidation of various individuals and groups who work highlighting people’s struggles in the pacific region and where possible acting in solidarity with people in struggle there. This newsletter puts the campaign in the context of the work done by various EF! groups around the country over the past ten years.

News in this issue includes updates on the situation in West Papua - including appropration of arms by the OPM/TPN, (liberation army of the Free Papua Movement) and the current situation in Bouganville. Also a report by activists recently returned from the Philippines visting tribal groups in struggle there and two EF! groups based in Manila and Daveo. There is also news of various actions that have taken place here in the UK, most notably the action at the ‘New Tribes Mission’ offices (report elsewhere in this issue of GA).

It’s good to see a piece included entitled ‘Radical Solidarity not Charity’ explaining the difference between the work of SSP and NGO’s etc, and of course there are details of various corporations and companies involved in Ecocidal and Genocidal activities in the South Pacific.

Find them - Sab them!

Please send your materials for review to the GA address (see page 19). We will make every effort to review them.

G.A. The Zine

John Moore, 1957-2002

Formative British anti-Civilisation theorist and poet John Moore collapsed on his way to work as a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Luton last 30th October 2002.

Originally writing from an autonomist perspective, John was heavily influenced by anarcho-primitivist Fredy Perlman, particularly his early- 1980s mythopaeic classic ‘Against His-Story, Against Leviathan’. John’s key pamphlets ‘Anarchy & Ecstacy’ and ‘Love Bite’ challenged boundary distinctions in almost every respect, certainly concerning authorial authority. These pamphlets employment of myth to this end was widely misunderstood, particularly by wilfully literal-minded reviewers at ‘5 th Estate’, which led John to even more determined attempts to subvert the authoratitive voice through ‘The Book of Levelling’ and poetry emphasising cultural challenges to the Totality.

John played a big role in the Anarchist Research Group through

STANDING DEER, REST IN PEACE

Robert Hugh Wilson, also known as Standing Deer, was found dead in his home here in Houston, TX on Tuesday. Standing Deer was stabbed to death by a houseguest, Pius Smashed Ice (a Native American who had recently been released from prison and was staying with Standing Deer because he had no money).

The police report said that Pius killed Standing Deer after an argument on Monday, but didn’t call police until Tuesday, where he attempted to pass the crime off as a break-in. Pius later confessed and is in custody now. Standing Deer was stabbed in his bedroom, so it’s still not clear if it happened during an argument or later after a dispute.

MONICA HARVEY, ANIMALS’ FRIEND

Monica Harvey, a leading light in Salisbury Animal Rights and longterm Green Anarchist subscriber, died last June. She spent decades campaigning against the abuse of animals on her doorstep, at government chemical warfare research centre Porton Down and its breeder, Allington Farm.

Monica was an enthusiastic supporter of direct action and I remember how she and her husband Richard helped set up Porton peace camp to this end in the late-1980s, turning up opposite the Pheasant in a hatchback crammed with portaloos, firewood and their pack of enormous, friendly dogs.

out the 1980s and also founded the Anarcho-Primitivist Network following the 1993 Anarchy in the UK festival in London, publishing the ‘Primitivist Primer’, an instant classic still in wide circulation today. APN counted editors of ‘Do Or Die’ and ‘Green Anarchists’ amongst its enthusiastic participants, and so was influential in the ‘green wave’ of ecoradicalism that characterised the mid- 1990s. John’s contacts ranged through Lorraine Perlman to the editors of ‘Freedom’, dealing with each with good humour and principle.

John was erudite, generous and brave. He left us all too early and with much still to say, and has already recieved tributes from the likes of John Zerzan, the ‘Black Badger’ and the editors of ‘Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed’. He leaves his widow and co-worker, Leigh Starcross, and will be much missed.

John Connor

Whatever the case, the loss of Standing Deer is something we in the area are struggling with.

Standing Deer is best known as the prisoner who was affiliated for many years with Leonard Peltier, and who exposed the government assassination plot against Leonard. He was released only two years ago after serving 27 years in the pen. To his friends, Standing Deer epitomized kindness, warmth, honesty and revolutionary commitment.

He had been working with many young indigenous activists in Houston and Texas, offering his insights and wisdom. His death was senseless, but Standing Deer’s spirit will live on.

Army of One

by Jeff ‘Free’ Luers

I bow before no master

I salute no superior

To myself and those I love

I owe my intelligence

Under no flag

Will my body lie

The cause for which I fight

Is my own

With each breath I draw

I struggle for freedom

I am an army of one

And I stand with millions

Read more about Free at http://www.freefreenow.org][www.freefreenow.org and http://www.breakthechains.net][www.breakthechains.net

WHY PRINT THE LISTINGS?

I dont know if this was gone over in the trial, but one thing that comes to mind is that the mainstream media goes to great lengths to imply that everything is under control, the majority of the people are content and not rebelling (only committing acceptable undisturbing crime). Stories like the radio mast destruction or a butcher’s window rarely get published.

These stories are a measure of what the state of the ‘world’ is. Fifty years ago people’s main interest was local. Now because effects are felt more widely, interest has widened. Also, with the cult of celebrity (see page 22) local issues have been made to appear mundane and uninteresting. This, coupled with the growing sameness of all localities in our monoculture, has made global issues overshadow the local completely.

Global issues are far easier to misrepresent. Only the people directly involved in an event know if what you read about it is an accurate representation. Locally, you know these people, globally you rarely do. There is no check on the newsmongers.

NEXT ISSUE - No 70

The next issue (No. 70) core is about alternative technology. Will all the new high-tech and low-tech solutions being touted by an unholy alliance of new-agers and venture capitalists pull us all back from the brink and enable us to carry on living as civilised creatures? Or will it merely enable us to perfect the global prison we are all busily constructing for ourselves, eventually bringing about Paul Shepherd’s vision of per- maculture as a ‘world inhabited solely by humans surrounded by their

The listings and many of the articles in GA and in similar publications show the lies and omissions of the mainstream media very clearly. It is for this reason that they are so resented by the state.

People are interested in the ‘news’ because it is intelligence of the state ofthe world, and we need to know the state of the world to get feedback on our actions, and to make decisions about future actions. With skewed feedback we make uninformed decisions. People must know what is really happening in the world to make judgements as to what future actions are appropriate.

If people believe that everyone else is content with things as they are, they will believe that they should be content too. This should normally work well and make for a good ‘system’ (eg in a small tribe). In this bigness, its easy for people to be given false or incomplete information. This misleads them. This is bad. It is crucial for a healthy society that each individual has access to the information they want/need. This is as true in ours as in a tribal society.

genetic slaves and mutants’? How can we make computer chips out of hemp?

Or then again, is it all pointless fiddling with sustainable trivialities while the life of the world dies all around us? Should this culture of ours be sustained at all? Why do so many people, having realised the problems facing us all, go off and absorb themselves in some ‘green’ business? Sustainable development, as it is sometimes called, seems to be a frequent visitor in our arguments with the proponents and defenders of civilisation, so it makes sense to have a look at the ideas, however silly they may seem, in order to be able to point out the fallacies commonly accepted by people.

The common faith in these fallacies is a major obstacle to the search for real understanding of what’s going on, because as long as we generally believe that alternative ways to continue with civilisation could indeed work and be sustainable, we will not question the existence of civilisation itself. And unless green anarchists are familiar with the pro-tech arguments and fallacies, we won’t be able to counter them.

A good many potential ‘revolutionaries’ have been sucked into the ‘alternative technology’ blind alley. Green Anarchists would do well to

This could be put more clearly and simply I’m sure. This is just off the top of my head. I for one don’t want to INCITE anyone to anything. An anarchist should not really want that, except on a personal individual basis. Use of an organ solely for incitement is an abuse. Respect for readers should preclude this abuse, and should encourage a desire to inform. Action taken by readers based on information that is true is without blame. If the infomation is false then the purveyor of that info is guilty of a crime.

For example, if I rush in and tell you that the bloke next door just raped your girlfriend, and you then rushed round there and killed him, would I be guilty of incitement? It depends on whether or not I told the truth. Does telling you the actions of others constitute incitement? Does telling how many others are taking a cetain kind of action? Does even telling you that I think such and such an action is a good thing and I think you should do it as well constitute incitement? That is where the so- called freedom of speech comes in.

find out why, and how to prevent further enchantments. The main arguments against our ideas are no longer denials that bad shit is happening, but rather vague references to alernative technology as the solution to these problems. This conveniently shunts off the need for any difficult changes into the future. It enables people to believe they are part of a solution while still being an active and dedicated part of the problem.

Of course, the state and all the other institutions of this civilisation encourage such tendencies by taking the pressure off people who give in to them. In most Western countries now you can set up a nice ‘green’ business (or work for one) and get subsidised, no matter how pointless (or even unprofitable) such a project might be. All you need to do is learn modern management systems and not do anything disruptive, and you can get onto many government schemes that pay the same as the dole.

Another aspect of this encouragement is social. No matter what else you do, if you don’t have a job or a ‘scheme’ you are ostricised from mainstream society and marginalised into a shrinking sub-culture.

Anyway, please send in your art- cles, and any appropriate graphics/photos.

GREEN ANARCHY NOW

WHO ARE WE?

The State spent £10m jailing GA’s editors in an attempt to shut us up. We’re still here...

WHY SMASH CIVILISATION?

Civilisation is exploitation of mass society. Specialisation, division of labour creates hierarchies to maintain the complex web of production / consumption - techno-industrial mass society. Exploitation divides mass society and the individual on grounds of class, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference. Mass society can’t be reformed. It must be replaced.

DISINTEGRATION IS BEAUTIFUL

In small communities each person is respected as an autonomous individual. Self-determination replaces hierarchy and so the city ends. Mass can’t fight mass. The Left’s living proof.

LAND OR DEATH

All life derives from the land. Civilisation alienates us from the Earth using nationhood and propertyy law. We must take back the land and living self-sufficiently, re-establishing our relationship with the Earth. Those of us most exploited by Civilisation live in the South, the Third World, the fruits of our labour exported to the rich North. We’ve nothing to lose fighting for self-governing, self-sufficient small communities. Both North and South we need to expand our culture of resistance to free ourselves from alienation from our Earth..

DIRECT ACTION

Build an alternative green and black eco-nomy and enjoy yourselves in the smashing of banks, multinationals, military bases, labs, exploiters, bigots and developers. Organise underground in networks of autonomous small groups.

Letters

PIECE OF SHIT

Dear GA,

There is no hope and we cannot even hope for a quick end. O cruel needless years of misunderstanding - it’s better that we shoulde go with the flow and fully embrace our enslavement and servitude.

Misc.

CRITIQUE OF GA 67

The planet is being killed, what are we going to do about it?

An article originally posted by Anony Mous on the GA website discussion board. See www.greenanar- chist.org/discus/

When I saw that GA London was going to be critiquing “Anarchy - Green or Grey” I imagined that this would be a refreshing, reflective look at “ourselves” as a “movement”. This would have entailed looking at the reality that the “ecological movement” (or whatever you wish to call it) has been killed off by Leftism. This has meant that the very stark reality of mass ecocide and the continuing robotisation of the human population with the extinction of those peoples who are superfluous or a direct threat to consumer nothingness (indigenous people)is indeed merely another “issue”. The essay “Everyones Going Liberal are You” dealt slightly with this development but in my opinion did not delve deep enough.

I agree with basically all that was said in this article, however, I feel that it failed to address the very crucial question (which incidentally was covered brilliantly in the critique of Crimethinc) and that is the overwhelming nature of exclusivity within the “activist milieu”. That is, the milieu itself is isolating, limiting and is unfortunately a small clique getting smaller as the bored drift off to do something more interesting or they basically find another “cause”— Palestine, “the War”, Argentina, take your pick. Obviously (this should go without saying but...) these are all pertinent “issues” but they cannot be seperated into isolated little packages ripe for consumption by the liberal do-gooder. The overwhelming question today is “the planet is being killed, what are we going to do about it?”

The nature of the milieu has contributed significantly to the minimising of this crucial question, it was inward looking based on shallow trends predominantly around being “alternative”, a “drop-out”, a “free

Anarchists are basically social misfits due to their being unattractive and geeky, and there is no hope for surgical correction of the ugliness that afflicts anarchists, so I suggest that we campaign for brain surgury [sic] or better medication so that our minds can come to terms partyer” etc which is all good etc. but like all shallow fashion trends it comes to an end, and “we all grow up” onto “bigger and better” things like “anti-capitalism” (being merely one). Due to the fact that the milieu was (I speak in the past tense due to the fact that the bulk of the “ecological resistance” in Britain is basically non-existent) inward looking, and a great sense of elitism developed (always present among leftist trends). No attempt was made (well no serious one anyway) to deal with the privilege and the inherent neocolonialism in the form of “guilt” present in the “movement”. Nor was any attempt made to deal with the problems (personal and psychological) of the individuals involved in the “movement”. Indeed the social dysfunctions developed as a direct result of living in this hell hole society were (are) simply ignored. Drugs become more than an escape more of a crutch and the personality problems get worse as the “movement” becomes more of a “retreat” (a pretty bad one) from the vile society. What sort of “movement” is that, where the individuals participating cannot even communicate with one another never mind with anyone outside the clique? Isolated, inward looking, delusional, paranoiac, removed from everyday life, disparaging towards “outsiders”; perhaps content to feel that they are “different”? They are “activists”, they are “radicals”, “revolutionaries” blah blah.

The possibility of radical action being taken to defend Mother Earth, to stop the genocidal attacks upon all life dissappeared in the smoky haze of one too many squat parties, when the grips of paranoia got too much for the “ecological resistance”. The “voices of the ecological resistance” (in Britain at least) retreated into the bunker of much talk little action. Meanwhile the Earth is left with “defenders” like transport 2000 and Friends of the Earth, etc, with friends like these hey?!

with our insecurities and our ugliness.

It is outrageous that the Government lets geeky drop-outs such as ourselves suffer so very painfully, WE NEED TO BE CARED FOR! But we can all know that the Government needs us as an example to normal people.

The Government will never care for social mis-fits such as ourselves, because normal people need to feel good about being normal, and the example of the hellish life of an ugly and insecure anarchist makes normal people feel happy and content.

THUS: The sooner we all give up attempting to change things, the sooner things will change; or at least we can hope for the end of the world

Some who only frequently go to the Bunker Paranoia have abandoned the idea of changing anything and are mostly participants in protests called by the left. Others have gone lock, stock and barrel into reformism or charity work, with trips to Chiapas or the Philipines or wherever they can find suitable deserving “victims of oppression”.

So, my personal run down of the “anarchist scene” (all the above applies to the anarcho-leftoids who are an all together sadder case, chasing the coat-tails of Better Organised brethern). It might be pretty hard to stomach and a bit too critical, some may say despairing, but in most cases (of those who abandoned a radical eco-anarchist approach) it is goodbye and good ridance. The “movement” got itself caught in a groove and could not move out of it. It could not develop, it could not grow.

The idea of affinity groups operating everywhere, developing projects of insurrection, physically dismantling the techno-industrial hydra is still very possible and extremly vital. The problem lies in breaking down the failure of communication and rampant paranoia prevalent in the remnants of the “scene”. To begin to reject and dismantle the cliquishness.

People must have affinity with each other (and not in some vague sense) before they should take action, action without this human basis is pointless. This is the revolution, the development of closeness between humans and a bond to set out and make themselves free, a bond to destroy that which is destroying the planet. The most inspiring example of this model appears to be the animal liberation movement, perhaps something “eco-anarchists” can all learn from?

That is all, hardly comprehensive but merely written as a means of further debate and discussion.

Towards a wild unmediated life for the destruction of civilisation and the end of our living geeky misfit HELL!

We need help! We need to be cared for!

John Peterson

Absurd Futility correspondent

A LITTLE OVERSIGHT "

Dear comrades

I received "Green Anarchist" issue number 67 Autumn. Thank you very much, for your solidarity too! I’ve to correct a little oversight: my mother has no interests in NOK, we are a family with no interests in big or little business. The source of this oversight: it’s the young woman inquiryjudge of my case who has interests in NOK. It’s the daughter of the president of the Swiss electricity supplier monopolist (with nuclear plants too)

Send your letters to Oxford Green Anarchists, BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX, but remember:-

• We print all letters received on a ‘no censorship, no endorsement’ basis. Your letters are your responsibility, not ours. We think readers are grown up enough to think for themselves, so won’t usually comment on letters we print — even those we don’t agree with — unless asked. The only exception to this are letters from fascists and other such bigots and pisstakers. These will be binned, though we will note their arrival.

• We will ruthlessly edit all letters we think too long or boring. So keep ‘em short so everyone can have their say too. Cut letters are marked with a [ ] with the original number of words inside the bracket.

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KINGDOM OF GARBAGE!

Dear GA,

The capitalists create the gargabe - they landfill it - they recycle it - they make $millions out of it -

Smash the Capitalist Garbage Conspiracy -

A comrade, Scotland

Feb 2003

USEFUL ADDRESSES

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mailto:repressed@mail.com][repressed@mail.com

• http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/][http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/ - Online green Anarchy Archive

• http://www.primitivism.com/][www.primitivism.com/

• http://www.animalliberation.net/][www.animalliberation.net/

• Ecotopia -

http://www.sindominio.net/ecotopia/][www.sindominio.net/ecotopia/

Spanish eco anarchist page.

• Coalition Against Civilization P.O.

Box 835,

Greensburg, PA 15601

United States

• http://www.blackandgreen.org/][www.blackandgreen.org/ who investigates against a saboteur of her fathers business, just for to show that they not only are class justice but really private corporate justice too...

Best regards, solidarity.

Marco Camenisch, Pfaffikon

PS: Because of the correspondence restructions this confirmation] will be sent you through my wife.

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News

ANIMAIS ON THE ATTACK

A polar bear gnawed on the rudder of a U.S. submarine and then attacked it after the sub surfaced in the ice pack during maneuvers between the North Pole and Alaska this spring. The submarine Connecticut, a new Seawolf-class sub, had partly surfaced with its sail and rudder sticking through the ice on April 27.

“When an officer looked around outside via tlie periscope, he noted that his sub was being stalked by a hostile polar bear,” the Navy reported. In a series of pictures from the periscope’s camera, the bear apparently chewed on the rudder, then batted it around.

Badger Attack

An angry badger attacked five people during a 48-hour rampage in a quiet suburb. One man required two skin graft operations, after the badger woke him up and attacked him when he went outside to investigate. Other victims included a man who was attacked as he walked home from a pub, in Evesham, Worcestershire.

Press and badger society speculation as to why it attacked (badgers normally avoid humans) ranges from it being raised with humans when a cub to being injured, no- one has suggested it might just be angry.

FESTUST 2003

[over £25 per day not listed]

JUNE

14-15: Lamington Pace festie, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Free!

17-22: Isle of Wight fest, £60.

20-22: Holidays in the Sun, Morecombe. Punk, £67.50. 02476 55992.

21-22: Henge Acoustic Free Fest, nr. Amesbury, Wiltshire. English Heresy have got the soltice on the wrong day!

27-29: Glastonbutiy fest, nr. Pilton, Somerset.

JULY

4-6: Guilfest, Guildfod, Surrey, £65.

5: St Paul’s Carnival, Bristol. 0117 9421870.

11-13: Willow festie, by River Nene, Peterborough. Free, 01733 346529.

13: Brighton Peace festie, Hove Lawns, Brighton, Sussex. 01273 241625.

17-20: Larmer Tree festie, Larmer Tree Gardens, nr. Tollard Royal, Wiltshire / Dorset border. Free!

18-20: Wickerman fest, Dundrennan, Galloway, Scotland. £30, 01738 449430.

19-20: Aston Court festie. £3 / day, 0117 9042275.

9-20: Truck festie, Hill Farm, Steventon, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, £25.

20: Ambient Green picnic, Shalford Park, Guildford, Surrey. Free!

24-27: Healing Field gathering, Shepton Mallet.

26: Pride in the Park, Hyde Park, London. 0870 1200722.

CHILDREN OF GUINEA wotiwc. THE HAITIAN EDVOLUTIDN AND A FT Efl

Ar JOhw Connor

New John

Connor Book available from GA One of the only successful slave revolts in history, the 1793 Haitian revolution saw the defeat of the french and british armies by ex-slaves armed with little more than sticks, and ultimately the worldwide end of tlie slave trade.

This book is available for £3.50 from Green Anarchist Books, BCM 1715, London WC IN 3XX

Also on tlie web at: www. greenanarchist. org/cog/

30-3: Big Green Gathering, nr. Cheddar, Mendip Hills, Somerset. 01458 834629.

31-3: Cambridge folk festie. £62, 01223 457245.

AUGUST

2-3: Nottingham Riverside festie. Free, 0115 9153591.

1-8: Sidmouth International festie, Sidmouth, Devon.

7-10: Cropedy folk festie, nr. Banbuiy, Oxfordshire, <£60.

9: Brighton & Hove Pride, Preston Park, Brighton, Sussex. Free, 01273 775939.

13-17: Earth First! Summer Gathering, n. Yorkshire, £10.

20-26: WIT festie, W. Wales. Women only.

22-24: Canterbuiy Faye, Mount Ephraim Gardens, Hemhill, Kent. £70, 01494 794887.

22-24: Leeds festie. Nasty.

24: Deep Dale jazz fest, Marsh Bam, Bmham Deepdale, Norfolk. £10, 01485 210404.

28-3: Skaothraki Dance festie.

29-31: Eastern Green Gathering, nr. Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. 01284 728253.

29-31: Off the Tracks atumn festie, Catle Donnington. £35, 01332 384518.

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ORIGINAL AND BEST

HIST

For the destraction ol Civilisation

EARTH LIBERATION FRONT, MISSIONARIES, OIRECT ACTION OIARY, ANTI-WAR OIARY, PRISONER NEWS, REVIEWS, FEST LIST

STOP THE WAR AGAINST LIFE!

the continuation of civilization is the ongoing war against life

4: NORTH BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, USA - McDonalds and BurgerKing glued.

10: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA - Used car office torched, damaging 13 cars: Total $40,000 damage.

PACIFIC LINCOLN, USA -

Lumberers torched: $40,000

damage.

18 - Philippines - Protesters planned to spend their night in a vigil in front of the US Embassy in reaction to US President George W. Bush's 48-hour ultimatum before war erupts. Their plan, however, did not occur after the picket was brutally harassed by the police and pro-US group Discovery Crusade.

19 - UK - Students and school children were taking to the streets throughout the country blocking city centres in an internationally co-ordinated protest. Thousands took to the streets blocking traffic in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester, and Whitehall in London. There were arrests as police dragged away teenage protesters and several reports of police violence as well as students fighting back. Students walkouts and protests occured throughout the day in scores of towns and cities across the country including Leicester, Swansea, Presteigne and Worcester as the countdown to war

entered its final hour

20 - All over UK - Lancaster town hall was occupiedby protesters, the centre of Leamington Spa was shut down.

In Reading the Labour Party SouthEast Regional HQ was Occupied. Over 5000 people shut down the centre of Manchester protesting and blockading roads - it was a similar story in Birmingham as thousands dropped everything and heading into the centre of town. In Oxford, thousands of people converged on Carfax tower, holding a rally before civil disobedience blocked three bridges.

Demonstrations against war raged through Sheffield for 9 hours, there were multiple sit-down protests, the main roundabout into Sheffield from the M1 was occupied 3 times, petrol stations, the local BBC office and the police HQ were targeted by protesters. In Bristol, the centre of the city was gridlocked as thousands joined protesting students in blocking roads.

Crowds pushed through police lines and the M32 was blockaded In Glasgow, thousands halted all traffic

5: AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND ALF trash vehicle and driveway of HLS-backer Marsh staffer.

6: SCARSDALE, NEW YORK, USA - ALF trash home and vehicles of HLS financial advisor Mark Bibi.

7: VOREPPE, FRANCE - McDonalds under construction torched.

17: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA - 13 vehicles (inc. 4 SUVs) had tyres slashed.

8: USAF LAKENHEATH, SUFFOLK - 9 trashed fences and cycled around inside base.

15: CHICO, CALIFORNIA, USA - ALF torch McDonalds.

18: BAKER, NEW JERSEY, USA - Direct Action Front trash hunting store.

21: SUPERIOR TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN, USA - ELF torch two new houses: $400,000 damage.

28: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, USA - 6 military vehicles trashed by ELF at Navy recruiting HQ.

29: CYBERSPACE - Hack attacks against both pro- and anti-war media sites by various groups.

Raul Zapatos, Dorm 6-C, Maximum Security Compound, Bureau of Corrections Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila, Philippines. Forestry Official whose job was to stop illegal loggers. While trying to do this, Raul was attacked by some armed men, which included police officers. Raul defended himself by grabbing a gun. Some of the people he defended himself against died. Raul has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.

Grigory Pasko, c/o Russian Federation, 690 100 g. Vladivostok, ul. Ivanovskaya 2, kv 24. Russia. An eco-journalist serving 4 years for exposing the Russian Navy dumping nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.

Dr. Yuri Bandazhevsky, Ul. Kalvarijskaya 36, PO Box 35K, Minsk 220600, Belarus. Serving 8 years for whistle-blowing about the nuclear radiation around Chernobyl.

Marco Camenish, Sennhofstrasse 17, 7000 Chur, Switzerland. In the 1970’s & 80’s Marco carried out a number of anti-nuclear bombings in Switzerland for which he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. After two years imprisonment, he escaped from custody with a number of other prisoners and was on the run for ten years. While on the run Marco carried out a number of other ecobombings. However his luck ran out and he was eventually discovered in Massa in Italy and after a shoot out with the police he was re-arrested. After serving a twelve year prison sentence for eco-bombings in Italy, Marco was finally extradited back to Switzerland where he is to finish the remainder of his ten year prison sentence. Plus he is to face trial on additional charges relating to his prison breakout.

Inaki Garcia Koch, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - Irunez - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain. Serving just under 5 years for sabotaging a dam construction site.

Jeffrey Luers, #13797671, OSP, 2605 State St. Salem, OR 97310, USA. Serving 22 years & 8 months for burning three SUVs in the summer of 2000. He was also framed for the attempted arson of an oil truck. His case is currently on appeal.

Craig Marshall, #13797662, SRCI, 777 Stanton Blvd, Ontario, OR 97914 USA. Serving 5 years 5 months for conspiracy to commit arson and possession of incendiary devices, having used the devices to destroy SUV’s to raise attention to the environmentally destructive nature of these vehicles.

Fran Thompson (93341), 1107 Recharge Rd., York NE 68467, USA. An eco-activist serving Life for shooting dead, in self- defence, a stalker who had broken into her home.

Helen Woodson, 03231-045 FMC Carswell, POB 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127, USA. Serving a total of 27 years for three separate actions. 1) She robbed a federal reserve bank of $26,000 before setting fire to the money whilst distributing a statement denouncing the materialism and

Issue 70

Date: Sep 2003

Read here

---

The Small Cover

ORIGINAL AND BEST

NO. 70 AUTUMN 03 £1/$2 FREE TO PRISONERS

Green
Anarchist

For the destnictloi of Civilisation

ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY ISSOE. LIGHTS 00T IN NEW YORK. THE PERENNIAL WILD MEN. BETRAYAL ON BOUGAINVILLE. DIRECT ACTION DIARY. PRISONER SDPPORT. COMDAT DISPATCH. DOD DIACK’S APES OF WRATH. HAMMER OF WITCHES.

PIES FLYING EVERYWHERE

Our esteemed leaders are getting hot (and cold) under the collar as the anarchist Biotic Baking Brigade steps up its campaign of ridicule and disrespect.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 28: U.S. Ambassador Peter Allgeier, co-president of the FTAA, was pied during a press conference by Bakers Without Borders (pics above). The press release didn’t say what the FTAA is but its sounds the same as the WTO so fair play to ‘em! These people are so boring it probably stands for free trade agreement of amerika.

Los Angeles, California, August 12: Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader got a pie in the face at an event with one of the people running for California governor. At the end of a news conference, a man ran into the room, shoved a pie in Nader’s face, and ran out. Nader threw some of the pie at the unidentified man as he took off — but the police didn’t catch him.

Alberta, Canada, July 9: Monday morning, in Calgary, Alberta’s premier was busy flipping flapjacks and beef sausages (because he can’t sell them to his friends in the USA anymore) when a team of dedicated pie-throwers delivered him the long awaited dessert that he deserved: a succulent banana-cream pie.

Ralph would not permit that in his province, even though the rest of Canada’s governments will stop harassing gay citizens and let them marry.

Is it surprising to see Ralph Klein opposing the Kyoto Accord for the right of big corporations to pollute, tlie same corporations that finance his campaigns? Talk about democracy in action! He even threatened to separate from Canada for his friends’ right to pollute.

And there’s still a bolshevik party! The campaign to clean up electioneering by Russia’s top electoral official, Alexander Veshnyakov, has got off to a bad start. As he closed a five-day conference involving 27 political parties in Moscow, the mudslinging, or rather the mayonnaise-slinging, began. A radical activist from the National Bolshevik Party squirted a packet of salad dressing at the Electoral Commission’s chief. Veshnyako, his suit splattered with mayonnaise, retorted by calling the young activists “Scumbags”. Taking part in the closing ceremony of the Elections-2003 forum were the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, the LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and secretary of the general council of United Russia among others

The Biotic Baking Brigade.......... coming

soon to a pie-o-region near you.

Look for “Let Slip the Pies of War: The BBB Cookbook,” to be published by AK Press <akpress.org >in early 2004.

PLEASE NOTE: the BBB has a new email address and website...

bbb?../../../../../../../../../bioticbakingbrigade.org][/bioticbakingbrigade.org bioticbak- ingbrigade.org

Friends of the BBB: c/o POB 40130, San Francisco, CA 94140, Amerika

The Large Cover

ORIGINAL AND BEST

No. 70 AUTUMN‘03 £1/$2 FREE TO PRISONERS

GREEN
ANARCHIST

For the destruction of Civilisation

ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY ISSUE. LIGHTS OUT IN HEW YORK. THE PERENNIAL WILD MEN. BETRAYAL ON BOUGAINVILLE. DIRECT ACTION DIARY. PRISONER SUFFORT. COMBAT DISPATCH. BOB BIACKS APES OF WRATH. HAMMER OF WITCHES.

AUGUST 1, 2003, SAN DIEGO:

IF YOU BUILD IT
WE WILL BURN IT

News

DIARY OF DIRECT ACTION

More info: ALF Supporters Group, BM 1160, London WC1N 3XX; Arkangel, BCM 9280, London WC1N 3XX; North American ALF Supporters Group (NAALFSG), PO Box 428, Brighton, Ontario, Canada K0K 1HO; Earth First! Action Update c/o PO Box 2971, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 2TT; and Earth First! Journal, PO Box 3023, Tucson, AZ 85702, USA.

FEBRUARY

1: CAPRALBA, ITALY - ALF free 2,000 mink.

2: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA - 58 trucks damaged by ALF at lobster wholesalers. $50,000 damage.

6: UPPSALA, SWEDEN - ALF break windows at chinchilla farmer’s home.

9: VOLKEL, NETHERLANDS - US military satellite dish trashed, - 11 nuclear missiles off-line for 24 hours. $500,000 damage.

11: PIEVE DI TECO, ITALY - Phone mast torched, ‘Free Marco’ slogans left.

15: PONTEDURA, ITALY - Two Benetton shops bricked and slo- ganised.

17: UPPSALA, SWEDEN - ALF break more windows at chinchilla breeder’s home.

19: AMELIA, ITALY - Phone mast torched. ‘ALF’, ‘Free Marco’ slogans left.

19: ROME, ITALY - Attempted phone mast torching - ‘Free Marco, Free Everyone’ slogans left.

DUBLIN, EIRE - US Navy warplane trashed at Shannon airport. Five areests.

MARCH

5: LECCE, ITALY - Benerron shop damaged.

7: TRENTO, ITALY - Four Esso garages sabbed.

9: HUMBOLDT COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, USA - Thousands of surveyors flags removed by Forest Defenders to prevent logging.

13: TURIN, ITALY - Duck freed from ornamental pond built for Olympic complex.

18: SIDNEY, AUSTRALIA - Huge ‘No War’ slogan painted on roof of Opera House.

20: BRISTOL, AVON - Two cop cars trashed and Labour offices sloganised: ‘No War’, ‘Murderers’.

21: ROME, ITALY - 8 Esso garages torched.

22: BROADMEAD, BRISTOL, AVON - McDonalds bricked.

21: SUPERIOR TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN, USA - ELF trash urban sprawl under construction: $400,000 damase.

22: MILAN, ITALY - Mollies thrown at McDonalds and Israeli tourist agency during peace demo.

23: TRIESTE, ITALY - 5 Esso garages sabbed.

24: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA - Fur and Andrews- related windows catapulted.

25: TURIN, ITALY - Two uni departments using Morini (HLS subsiduary breeder) animals daubed and sloganised. Peace flag substituted for ‘No Peace for Killers’ banner.

26: BRISTOL, AVON - Starbucks trashed. ‘Stop the War’ slogan.

27: AVIANO, ITALY - US military car torched.

27: DANTIAGO, CHILE - Cashpoint machine blown up at US-owned BankBoston.

27: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA - Car and home of HLS.

27: VICENZA, ITALY- More US Army personnel cars torched.

27: ROME, ITALY - 12 cards at Ford dealership torched. Like attempt at Jaguar dealers. Antiwar protest.

29: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, USA - ELF torch US Nany truck and sloganise five more: ‘Stop the War’, ‘Leave Iraq’.

30: MILAN, ITALY - Esso garages sabbed.

31: PIETRASANTA, ITALY - Six city council cars torched in antiincinerator action.

30: BOLOGNA, ITALY - Bomb found I front of IBM offices.

31:WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - ALF brick two McDonalds, three butchers and another burger outlet.

APRIL

1: CAGLIARI, ITALY - Esso garage torched.

2: ALFEN / BORCHEN, GERMANY - 24 dogs freed from vivisection breeder.

3: BRISTOL, AVON - BP petrol station trashed. ‘No War’, ‘No Blood for Oil’ slogans.

4: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA - ALF torch tiger meat store. $100,000 damage.

5: TARRANO, ITALY - 11 tourist chalets torched.

8: SANTA CRIZ, CALIFORNIA, USA- ELF sloganise 65 SUVs and trucks: ‘No War’, ‘SUVs Suck’, ‘No Blood for Oil’.

10: ESSUNGA, SWEDEN - ALF free 8,000 mink from fur farm.

10: LIVORNO, ITALY - Forest Service manager’s house dynamited.

10: LIVORNO, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

10: SASSARI, SARDINIA - Two Natural Reserve boats torched in access dispute.

11: FORLI, ITALY - Two fur shops, Benetton and Blockbusters paintbombed.

16: TURIN, ITALY - Sumitomo (HLS customer) glued and slo- ganised.

18: DUBLIN, EIRE - Peace protestors plant potatoes on Shannon airport runway.

19: ORISTANO, ITALY - McDonalds bomb-damaged.

25: PIETRASANTA, ITALY - Three Benetton shops trashed.

27: TURIN, ITALY - University customer of Morini (HLS customer) glued.

MAY

3: LIVORNO, ITALY - Benetton bricked. ‘Solidarity with Mapuche people’ slogan.

9: ALBANY, NEW YORK, USA- Office trailer of asphalt company torched.

9: PISA, ITALY - phone mast torched.

18: MODENA, ITALY - Forty quail liberated by ALF, two hunt kennels trashed.

22: PISA, ITALY - Two Sisley (Benetton subsiduary) shops bricked.

30: VENICE, ITALY - Satirical masked individuals shove shit in psychiatrist’s face.

30: CASALMORANO, ITALY - Fires set amongst trucks and machinery at Sygenta site. ‘No GMOs, No Sygenta, No Pesticides, Sab Biotech’ slogan left.

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA - Thirty SUVs at dealership trashed with etching fluid.

JUNE

3: CHICO, CALIFORNIA, USA - ELF opposing sprawl try torching luxury home: "Civilization as a whole has provenm detrimental to human and non-human animals. We won’t settle for anything less than complete collapse."

4: DETROIT, MICHIGAN, USA - ELF torch two homes under construction. $700,000 damage.

7: TREVISO, ITALY - 24 cashpoint machines for biotech-funding back sabbed.

7: LECCO, ITALY - Two Esso garages damaged.

14: SASSARI, ITALY - Phone mast bombed.

14: DORGAZI, ITALY - Phone mast torched.

18: ROME, ITALY - Transport company supporting Morini (HLS subsiduary breeder) superglued and sloganised.

19: ROME, ITALY - Two Morini- connected vivisectors’ homes sloganised.

20: CAGUARI, ITALY - Shop owned by beach-polluting local politician torched.

23: EDMOND, OKLAHOMA, USA- ALF trash HLS unvestor’s home.

26: NUORO, ITALY - Tourist structure bombed before opening. WINSHILL, BURTON, STAFFORDSHIRE - Halls (viv breeders) employee’s car paint- strippered by ALF.

JULY

12: PISA / FLORENCE / LIVORNO, ITALY - ARPAT (Tuscany regional agency) offices sent bullets and Green Core communique: "In these years you destroyed our land, now it’s enough. Your peace is finished"

13: SARDGNA, SARDINIA - Proletarian Cores for Communism send bullet to senoir military officer to oppose waste dump construction.

14: SURREY - Three HSS Hire shops (HLS-related) glued by ALF. Cancelled HLS contract.

13: PUCKAPUNYAL, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA - Australian ALF destroy electrified fencing trapping thousands of kangaroos the night before a military cull.

20: AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA- ALF trash home of HLS lobbyist in solidarity with Lindsey Parme. ‘Abbott Kills’ and ‘ALF’ slogans.

HAMPSHIRE - thousands of pheasants freed from fattening pens and sheds.

WINSHILL, BURTON, STAFFORDSHIRE: Halls (vivisection breeders) employee trapped in home by house-wrapping chains.

AUGUST

1: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - ELF torch condo complex, $50 million damage.

10: REGGIO EMILIA, ITALY - Morini (HLS subsiduary breeder) farm owner’s car dramatically destroyed.

12: SONOMA, CALIFORNIA, USA - Foie gras resturant trashed.

15: PARMA, ITALY - Pioneer Hi- Brred production plant torcned, stopping production in peak-harvest. ‘Pioneer pollutes seeds. Fire to GMOs’ slogan left.

SEPTEMBER

27: KATHIMERINI, GREECE - Unidentified assailants threw molotov cocktail bombs at a National Bank branch in Thessaloniki at around 3 a.m. before launching another two at a nearby branch of McDonald’s. Minor damage to bank’s ATM and a fire in the McDonald’s branch.

SAN DIEGO CONDOS BURNT

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has accepted responsibility for a $50 million fire in San Diego, California, that destroyed an unfinished five-story condominium complex on August 1. No one was hurt in the blaze, which was credited to the ELF through a painted slogan: “If you build it, we will burn it. E.L.F.”

The Golden Triangle area, where the complex was located, is adjacent to Rose Canyon—home to bobcats, coyotes, ash-throated flycatchers, red- shouldered hawks, barn owls and orioles, as well as at least two rare and threatened plants.

From 2,000 years ago until the last century, the Kumeyaay people inhabited a seasonal village in Rose Canyon, gathering acorns from the once abundant coastal live oaks, weaving baskets from the arroyo willow and hunting not far from where a seven-million-dollar crane was destroyed by the ELF fire.

This particular project, La Jolla Crossroads, when completed would comprise 1,800 apartments with an average monthly rent of $1,340. The 42-acre Nobel Research Center, which will house the biotechnology company IDEC Corporation, is planned to be built adjacent to the site. Following the fire, a small, handprinted sign was taped to a traffic barrier near the construction site: “Thank-You E.L.F. Burn Baby Burn.” Tad Simmons of Carlsbad said that as an environmentalist he had mixed feelings about the fire. “Part of me thinks it’s kind of cool that somebody had the guts to stand for something like this-a cause, and that nobody ever gets hurt.”

No arrests have been made, but the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force said several suspects were being tracked. On August 14, FBI agents raided the home of animal rights activists affiliated with the San Diego-based Compassion for Farm Animals (CFA). CFA organized a lecture with Rod Coronado on the day of the ELF fire. Agents seized phone lists, a computer, a video camera and videotape of the lecture, which was part of ongoing Revolution Summer events in San Diego.

Since the fire, CFA activists have been under constant surveillance and have had their home mysteriously broken into and vehicle stolen.

Thanks to the Earth First Journal http://www.earthfirstjournal.org][www.earthfirstjournal.org representative daubed with red paint by ALF.

ELF PUTSSUV’S OFF-ROAD FORGOOD

On August 22, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) simultaneously carried out acts of property destruction at several auto dealerships in California.

Clippinger Chevrolet of West Covina, California, sustained more than one million dollars in damages after 20 SUVs-mostly H2 Hummers- were set on fire. Twenty additional vehicles were damaged by the fire, and a warehouse on the site was destroyed.

In Duarte, California, SUVs from Advantage Ford were spray-painted with messages such as “ELF,” “Gross Polluter” and “We (Heart) Pollution.” Across the street, thirty cars at Duarte Mitsubishi were also hit with graffiti that condemned SUV ownership.

At Rusnak Mercedes Benz in Arcadia, California, 10 luxury SUVs were spray-painted with the words “terrorist,” “killer” and “ELF.” Rusnak estimated losses of up to $300,000.

According to the ELF Press Office, “ELF actions are a reminder to SUV owners of how their personal choices affect the society and environment in which they live.”

PRISONERS OF WAR

These revolutionaries have been jailed for their beliefs so you can write them letters of support (nothing compromising!). Those not listed shouldn’t take it as a sleight they’ve been excluded - just send us your details and we’ll put you on our free mailing list! Prisoner details change rapidly and may be out of date by the time you read GA.

More information from: Earth Liberation Front Prisoners Newsletter, BM Box 2407, London WC1N 3XX and North American ELP, POB 11331, Eugene, OR 97440, USA. ELP-Poland PO Box 43, 15-662 Bialystok 26, Poland.

On the web, see http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk][www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

ECO-DEFENCE PRISONERS

Dr. Yurl Bandazhevsky, Ul. Kalvarijskaya 36, PO Box 35K, Minsk 220600, Belarus.

Serving 8 years for telling the world that the nuclear radiation around Chernobyl is worse than the Belarus Government has admitted.

Jose Bove, N° d'ecrou 22377 Y, Bloc A 07, 34753 Villeneuve-les-

Maguelone, France.

Serving 10-months for trashing GM crops.

Jen Bradley, (CS# 057 454 68), Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women, 7900 Fraser Park Drive, Burnaby, BC V5J 5H1, Canada.

On remand for forest defence activity.

Marco Camenisch, Hornlistrasse 55,8330 Pfdffikon/ZH Switzerland

Serving 10-years for anti-nuclear eco-bombings. In 2002 he completed a 12-year sentence in Italy for similar actions. Charges relating to his escape from prison in the 80s are also expected. Marco reads French, German, Spanish & Italian.

Ted Kaczynski (04475-046), US Pen - admin Max Facility, PO Box 8500, Florence Colorado 81226, USA.

Is serving multiple life sentences for the infamous 'Unabomber' anti-technology bombing campaign.

Inaki Garcia Koch, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - Irunez - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain.

Serving just under 5 years for sabotaging a dam construction site.

Betty Krawczyk, (CS# 037 939 24), Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women, 7900 Fraser Park Drive, Burnaby, BC V5J 5H1, Canada.

On Remand for forest defence.

Jeffrey Luers, #13797671, OSP , 2605 State St. Salem, OR 97310, USA.

Serving 22 years & 8 months for arson on a car dealership & attempted arson of an oil truck.

Craig Marshall, #13797662, SRCI, 777 Stanton Blvd, Ontario, OR 97914 USA.

Serving 5 years 5 months for conspiracy to commit arson and possession of incendiary devices, having used the devices to destroy SUV's to raise attention to the environmentally destructive nature of these vehicles.

Fran Thompson, 1090915,

Chillicothe Correctional Center, 1500 W. Third St, Chillicothe, MO 64601, USA.

An eco-activist serving Life for killing, in self-defence, a stalker who had broken into her home.

Helen Woodson, 03231-045 FMC Carswell, POB 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127, USA.

Serving 27 years for:

1) Robbing a federal bank of $26,000 and burning the money whilst distributing a statement denouncing materialism, wealth and power that caused environmental destruction.

2) Mailing .38 calibre bullets with warning letters to various Government & corporate officials stating that their actions were like bullets fired into the heart of creation.

3) Using a jackhammer, she carried out a Ploughshares direct disarmament against a Mintueman II missile silo.

Raul Zapatos, Dorm 6-C, Maximum security compound, Bureau of corrections, Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila, Philippines.

Serving Life for shooting dead, in self-defence, armed men connected with illegal logging after they tried to attack him.

ANIMAL LIBERATION

Dave Blenkinsop EM7899, HMP Bullingdon, Oxfordshire OX6 0PZ England.

Serving 10 years.

1) Three years for a stave attack on the Managing Director of HLS.

2) 18 months for rescuing 600 guinea pigs from a lab supplier.

3) 5? years for planting incendiary devices under abattoir vehicles.

Benjamin Persky, DIN: 03R3916, Lakeview Shock Incarceration Corr. Fac., PO Box T, Brocton, New York 14716-0679 USA.

SHAC activist serving 2-6 years for "Criminal Mischief'.

ANTI-CAPITALIST

Kratoumeno SIMON CHAPMAN, Dikastikes Fylakes Diavaton, T.K. 540 12, Thessaloniki, Greece

(On Remand)

Robert Thaxton #12112716, OSP, 2605 State St, Salem, OR 97310, USA

(86months)

PEACE & ANTI-WAR ~

Carol Gilbert, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO80444, USA.

Jailed for 2 years 9 months for antinuke action.

Tony Haughian, JM9774, HMP Pentonville, Caledonian Rd, London N7 8TT,England.

On remand for alleged anti-war activities.

Jackie Hudson, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO80444, USA.

Jailed for 2? years for anti-nuke action.

Ardeth Platte, PO Box 518, Georgetown, CO80444, USA.

Jailed for 3 years and 5 months for anti-nuke action.

Ulla Roder, HMP Corton Vale, Stirling, FK9 5NY, Scotland.

Jailed for disarming a Tornado war plane.

INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

Leonard Peltier #89637-132, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048, USA.

Serving Life after being framed for murdering 2 FBI agents.

Eric Wildcat Hall, #BL-5355, Unit I/A 10745 Route 18, Albion, PA 16475-0002, USA.

Serving 35-75 years for helping ship arms to Central American indigenous activists.

MOVE

Debbie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Holloway Africa (006308) and Janine Philips Africa (006309) all at: SCI Cambridge Springs, 451 Fullerton Ave, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238, USA.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973) and Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) both at SCI Grateford, PO Box 244, Grateford, PA 19426-0244, USA.

Edward Goodman Africa (AM4974), 301 Morea Rd,

Frackville, PA 17932, USA.

William Philips Africa (AM4984) and Delbert Orr Africa (AM4985) both at SCI Dallas Drawer K, Dallas, PA 18612, USA.

Mumia Abu Jamal, (AM8335), SCI

Greene, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg PA 15370, USA.

In 1981 Mumia, was framed for the murder of a cop. Awaiting re-sentencing.

ANTI-FASCIST

Matthew Lamont T90251, A-5-248 UP, Centinella State Prison, PO Box 901, Imperial, CA 92251. USA. Serving 3 years for possessing an incendiary device, allegedly intended to be used to disrupt a neo-nazi gathering.

Tomasz Wiloszewski, Zaklad Karny, Orzechowa 5, 98-200 Sieradz, Poland.

Serving 15 years for accidentally killing a neo-nazi whilst defending himself.

SPANISH ANARCHIST PRISONERS

The latest news we have from our Barcelona comrades imprisoned in September say that they're all under FIES-3 Classification (FIES:Special Prisoners Survey File), which is applied to members of armed band or group.

They were arrested on the morning of September 16th, being held without bail for a trial that could take years. They’re being accused of sending a book-bomb, urban terrorism, planning 2 assassinations, illegal possession of firearms, arson attacks, belonging to a terrorist group, etc.

Communications with the outer world are reduced to two letters in and two outside of prison every month. Their families say they are still healthy.

We still have no news about the other ones being driven to other prisons, or if they're still held at Soto del Real Prison, where Roger and Igor were sharing a cell. We also don't know nothing about Joaquin, which isolation was kept even after declaring in Audiencia Nacional and who wasn't allowed to be assisted by the lawyer who travelled there from Barcelona. We have no clue if he was carried to the same prison or to another one, and also don't know about his health.

the two whose location is known:

Rafael Tomas y Gaspar, C.P.

Madrid - 3. Ctra Pinto a San Martin de la Vega, Km 5, 28340 Valdemoro - Madrid

Carolina Forne Roig, C.P. DE AVILA, Ctra. Vicolozano-Brieva, s/n. 05194 Brieva (Avila)

Protests at spanish embassy or other actions appreciated. Bail and legal fees needed. International bank account open.To make a donation you will need the following codes:

IBAN: ES58 0182 7028 2102 0153 0482

BIC: BBVAESMMXXX

This is an ongoing process against anarchist movement in Spain which started almost a year ago.with the arrest of 4 people in Valencia, and four more 10 months later.

MARCO SOLIDARITY RAIDS

On 24. Sept, Italian police from the Carabinieri Special Operation Branch (ROS) conducted fifty house raids against suspected eco-activists. The ROS is investigating an alleged conspiracy to create economic sabotage against environmentally destructive creations like skiing resorts, incinerators, mobile phone masts and television towers.

This alleged conspiracy is meant to be led by Marco Camenisch, who is currently imprisoned for eco-bomb- ings against the Swiss nuclear power industry. Marco’s cell in Pfaffikon prison was also raided.

This is not the first time that Italian police have tried to link Marco with alleged conspiracies in a blatant attempt to try and break his spirit and destroy the solidarity Marco gets from his friends and supporters alike.

Between thirteen & twenty activists are under investigation for this alleged conspiracy. All those who were raided are eco-activists/eco- anarchists who have actively supported Marco either by taking part in demonstrations outside Swiss Embassies or by creating websites and other information about Marco.

This investigation appears to be concentrating on a series of direct actions which occurred in solidarity with Marco when he was on hunger strike earlier this year. The actions being investigated include an arson attack on 18. January, against a nearly built chairlift at a ski resort which resulted in six million euros worth of damages. A spray painted slogan at the scene of the arson read “Free Marco - Fire to destructors”. The same slogan was found the same night near a phone mast torched and a television tower bombed elsewhere. More actions followed against phone masts, all claimed in solidarity with Marco.

ELF PRESS OFFICE STATEMENT ON JOSH CONNOLE'S ARREST & RELEASE

On September 12th Josh Connole, a known environmentalist and peace activist, was arrested by the FBI. Josh was accused by the FBI of involvement with the ELF-claimed fire and vandalism of SUV dealerships in West Covina, California on August 22nd, which resulted in over a million dollars in damages.

On September 15th, Connole was released without charges due to a lack of evidence to make the case against him. It is obvious that the FBI seriously blundered in this case, rushing to make an arrest in the middle of the night based on no physical evidence at all.

Even during the lead-up to josh's release, no concrete evidence was put forward by the FBI to suggest that Josh Connole was in any way involved with the West Covina Hummer dealership action. They apparently based the raid on a likeness comparison from blurry security-video footage and nothing else. While there no physical evidence to suggest that Josh was at the site, there "is" plenty of evidence that Josh was assisting a friend moving into their house on the night the Hummer action took place, and wasn't anywhere near West Covina.

The arrest is part of a pattern of harassment the FBI has been visiting on activists in Southern California since mid-August in a desperate attempt to claim "success" in their hunt for ELF members. Since 1997, very few ELF activists have been arrested which has led to a growing frustration in the FBI as evidenced by the recent raids against activists in the San Diego area and now this arrest on what appears to be nonexistent grounds.

The Earth Liberation Front Press Office would like to send a message of solidarity and support to those activists undergoing harassment by the FBI in Southern California and elsewhere. We encourage people who wish to support Earth Liberation prisoners to contribute to the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network.

COMBAT DISPATCH 106: VOLUNTEERS

Going To War with Brian McCarvill

Combat Dispatch 106: Volunteers

Part I

I chose the term “Volunteers” because it is apropos to combat. “Comrade” or “comrades” is another term that I like to use a lot in conjunction with combat. I feel as though the two terms are genuinely applicable to Anarchists. I am an Anarchist. As an Anarchist I try to frame my thoughts, my mode of Life, my spirit, in terms of Anarchism. My Anarchism. My Anarchism is what I believe it to be, not what I am told it should be. Still, my Anarchism is fluid. I constantly thirst for, and seek out, Anarchist literature and comraderie, from anywhere and everywhere that I can. As a prisoner in the Oregon gulag, all contact with outside Anarchists was gradually being choked off. More on that in a moment. Let me close this opening paragraph by stating that “Volunteers” and “combat” extend beyond the confines of Anarchism. “Volunteers” and “combat” encompass the struggle to move the revolution forward. Given this very simple request, both “Volunteers” and “combat” will tolerate and seek extra-Anarchist support.

Back to the situation within the Oregon prison system.

In 2000 the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) “documented” [93] Anarchists as a security threat group (STG). [94] At first, this STG designation by ODOC definition earned Anarchists designation as a gang. Prior to this secretive documenting, interaction between myself and outside Anarchists was relatively free and open. Rejection of Anarchist publications was rare. As far as I know, no Anarchist publication has ever caused an actual security problem within an ODOC prison facility that I had the pleasure of being interned in. [95] Once the documentation occurred, almost all Anarchist literature was intercepted and rejected by ODOC. The reasoning tendered for almost all of the rejections was the display of the circle-A or Anarchist Black Cross symbol. It is the rare Anarchist publication that does not contain either a circle-A symbol or an ABC symbol. ODOC was aware of this and they wrote a provision into their mail rule which declared the circle-A, the ABC cross, and the black flag depictions within Anarchist publications to be “gang / STG paraphernalia”. They followed up this declaration with a policy of “zero tolerance for any gang / STG-related activity”. My interaction with outside Anarchists essentially ceased to exist. I was pissed.

I was not the only one pissed off. Other Anarchist prisoners, comrades of mine and yours, were equally pissed off. We all attempted to challenge the rejection problem by utilising ODOC’s administrative review process. While I was at EOCI (Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution), every once-in-a-while one of these administrative reviews would terminate in my favour. This did not last long before I was transferred to OSP (Oregon State Penitentiary). At OSP, not one single administrative review for any anarchist prisoner that I knew of terminated in the Anarchists’ favour. [96]

We were in a quandary as to what to do about this problem. It became obvious to me that only a court injunction was going to get us any relief. I was loathe to file such an action. Tried pleading our case with all of the ODOC brass who’s sphere of influence touched upon the mail rule, or whom could influence the mail rule. It was totally fruitless. It appeared that the lawsuit avenue was to be our only chance of relief. It was a big chance. I was an experienced prison litigator and prison legal assistant. I knew that the courts were not friendly to prisoner litigation. Coupled with the bad press that Anarchists were getting in Oregon it seemed hopeless. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We were already in a position of total repression. We could only improve our situation. However, a loss in court would only seal our fate in the form of our current dilemma. I filed suit, McCarvill v. DeHaan et al., United States District Court, District of Oregon, case no. 02-1167-KI, Portland, Oregon.

The combat had begun. I do not want to bore you with the ins-and-outs of litigating the suit. Anyone truly interested in this aspect of the combat can access the court file and gain a pretty good idea of the massive effort required to prosecute such a suit from the perspective of a prisoner. [97] It was formidable, I can tell you.

We won the suit. Notice that I said “we”. I could not have accomplished this win alone. This is the point that I wish to make. Had I been alone in this effort I would have lost.

There was all manner of support in this combat. This is Anarchism at work. This is revolution at work. In the matter at hand this was victory. Of course, not all Anarchists, particularly those who pose themselves as ethically pure Anarchists, or principled Anarchists, chose to participate. This is certainly OK. I support them in their principalities. They are often keepers of the flame, the ones that can be relied upon to perpetuate both theory and history, to pacify with knowledge and truth, noble, pertinent, and necessary tasks to be sure. But, be that as it may, there is a war in progress, the litigation that I started was a battle in that war, militarily speaking, an engagement.

Once started, the litigation was, in fact, approached as a battle. It was all or nothing. This was no skirmish. As in any battle, militarily speaking, to win against a formidable enemy, a firmly entrenched enemy, an enemy with superior firepower that holds the high ground, the tactics would necessitate creating multiple fronts and out-flanking the enemy on all of those fronts. This required more than me as the litigator, much more.

My cellmate at the time, and comrade, Rob los Ricos, came up with a plan to mobilise outside forces. A second front was born. Rob, with myself in full agreement, organised a campaign wherein outside supporters were requested to protest ODOC’s repression by sending both of us postcards with a large circle-A symbol displayed over the words “This is not a gang symbol”. Hundreds of postcards flowed in. ODOC reacted by throwing both of us in the hole for 120 days, convicting us of “unauthorised organisation 1”. [98]

The hole time turned out to be a blessing in disguise as far as litigating the lawsuit was concerned. Approximately 90% of the written discovery efforts were conducted by me from the hole. Yes, I had to hand print it all on unlined paper with a miniature pen the size of a run-of-the-mill birthday cake candle, but I had plenty of time to accomplish it all. Had I been in general population, I would not have had the opportunity to perfect the tremendous amount of written discovery. This proved to be a key downfall in the enemy’s defences on the central front.

As I hammered at the enemy with the full frontal attack of the litigation, the outside support network kicked into full mobility. The Anarchist Prisoners Legal Aid Network, with us from the beginning, both raising and supplying monies that supported the litigation, went on line and otherwise organised massive publicity for the battle. APLAN also coordinated the continued postcard campaign, as well as an effort to arrange declarations in support of the litigation from interested Anarchists from all over the world. [99] Break the Chains and Green Anarchy of Eugene, Oregon, mirrored APLAN’s efforts, providing a position statement and kicking the bushes for declarations. John Connor and Green Anarchist of London, England, provided an in-depth position statement. Joanne Rankin and comrades of Dublin, Ireland, held a fundraising event and provided much appreciated moral support — thank you, Joanne. Ryan Foote and Mishap zine of Eugene, Oregon, provided an in-depth position statement and support that considerably freed-up ODOC restriction on zines. John Zerzan provided much-needed declarations that substantially took the legal substance away from ODOC’s position. Countless others from everywhere contributed declarations, postcards and, probably most important to me, moral support.

It turns out that, had I approached the litigation on my own, the cause would have failed. Had ODOC been approached without the litigation, the cause would have failed. Because we approached the battle multilaterally, with full force and conviction, we won. Anarchist comraderie was the binding influence. In this age of information we are a power to be reckoned with. The isolation that accompanied Anarchist individualism in the past is no longer a detriment. Organisation, as a verb, not an entity, as in this instance, is a proven battle winner.

Winning the war is next. It involves combat. Fuck Uncle Sam, the revolution needs you.

Part II

Combat begets casualties. War is hell. How true. Revolution is not a dinner party, after all. [100] Casualties were suffered by us all around. Impact, both immediate and long-term, varied by degrees as to the participants. I am reminded of a conversation that I had with two of the defendants from the lawsuit, Greg Atkin, the OSP safety officer, and Jacy Duran, the then-central mail administrator. [101] Prior to my actual filing of the suit I had told Duran and Atkin (to his credit, Atkin had brought Duran to my cell door in an effort to solve the circle-A problem) that the only avenue of relief that I had left was to actually file suit. I asked them both if there would be any hard feelings in the event that I did file suit and of course they both professed that there would not be any “paybacks”.

I am currently sitting in ODOC’s showcase isolation unit prison, Two Rivers Correctional Institution (TRCI). How and why did I arrive here? If you have had enough wherewithal to read this far, you obviously are able to rationalise the answer. I am getting ahead of myself here somewhat. Let me back up.

The first casualties in the battle were absorbed by you, our supporters, and us prison rank and file, in the form of monetary cost. Court filing fees were $150.00. Legal copies and postage expenses quickly took off exponentially, costing multiple hundreds of dollars all total. You raised these funds for us. Your actions and support in doing so constituted a state defence. Although the state complains of costs, there is no impact upon its individuals, it simply squeezes its taxpayers a little harder. The costs to you and I are intended to deter. Capital at work controlling us.

For me this has never been an obstacle. For you, well, I must say, thankfully, that those of you who were not deterred, occurred, and hopefully will continue to occur, in adequate numbers to move the revolution forward. To those of you who were deterred by either financial cost, time incurred, or simply by the necessary effort, I implore you to get the fuck out of the way, take your social-climbing non-committal arse elsewhere — there is no place in the revolution for you.

I recognise that outside support for us prisoners, whether it be monetary, physical effort and/or moral support, takes away from other valuable life experience. I think I speak for more than myself when I say that we prisoners deeply respect and appreciate your efforts.

Economic impositions upon us, the prisoners involved (Rob los Ricos and I here) are, of course, amplified very quickly as we deal with very small amounts of money in our lives. We were immediately impacted when we lost our jobs and were thrown in the hole for the postcard campaign.

As long-term prisoners, it was rather easy to take this in stride, particularly because of the outside support that we receive. Still, the state imposes the penalty as a deterrent, it’s all that it knows. Personally, I lost 100 or so days of good-time as well as my prison job. In the long run, the loss of income will become a considerable hardship factor in my quality of life and my ability to interact with the outside. The hole time (120 days) and the loss of good-time are somewhat inconsequential deterrents.

The greatest casualty suffered by me is my transfer to TRCI. The state knows this, it is why they did it. There was a clamour from the outside and from me to ODOC high-rankers to restore Rob and I as cellies and to our jobs. Even the attorney general’s office recommended return of the jobs and no transfers. But authority must have its pound of flesh, gained in this case through the mental anguish inflicted upon me through the transfer to TRCI. Not only did they knowingly separate Rob and I, the worst thing they could do to me, they transferred me to the only prison in Oregon that has no means of ever sitting with back support. They did this with the full knowledge that I suffer from severe spinal trauma and wedged discs. So they know they are torturing me mentally and physically. Still, separating Rob and I was and is a tremendous blow to my good mental health. We pose absolutely no threat to ODOC of any kind. Filing of the lawsuit, your support, the engagement, was an affront to ODOC security’s fascist ego, nothing more, nothing less. They simply cannot stomach that they were wrong, both morally and legally. Authority, like a trod-upon viper must bite and bite it has.

Conclusion

I am currently in physical and mental agony as I write this piece. Perhaps by the time it is read conditions will have improved. I know that comrades at APLAN have put out a call for a write-in campaign to ODOC officials on my behalf. Asking that I be returned to OSP and be given adequate medical treatment via indy-media on the Net. Regardless, I’m a casualty of war, of combat, a willing casualty. We must not be daunted by authority, by capital, or by combat. It has been said that history is written by the winner. My friends, we should have and maintain every intent to write that history.

Articles

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

That’s the way to do it: John Zerzan on when the lights last went out.

New York, New York: When the lights last went out

“Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time.”

“Seeing the City Disappear”, Wall Street Journal headline, 15 July 1977

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great Bastille Day break-out unfolded: “People are going wild in the borough of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload.” Another cop added later: “Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they looted, they burned.”

At about 9:00 p.m. on July 13 the power went out in New York for 24 hours. During that period the complete impotence if the state in our most ‘advanced’ urban space could hardly have been made more transparent.

As soon as the lights went out, cheers and shouts and loud music announced the liberation of huge sections of the city. The looting and burning commenced immediately, with whole families joining in the “carnival spirit”. In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a Pontiac dealer lost the 50 new cars in his showroom. In many areas, tow trucks and other vehicles were used to tear away the metal gates from stores. Many multistorey furniture businesses were completely emptied by neighborhood residents.

Despite emergency alerts for the state troopers, FBI and National Guard, there was really nothing authority could do, and they knew it. A New York Times editorial of July 16 somewhat angrily waved aside the protests of those who wondered why there was almost no intervention on the side of property. “Are you kidding?” the Times snorted, pointing out that such provocation would only have meant that the entire city would still be engulfed in riots, adding that the National Guard is a “bunch of kids” who wouldn’t have had a chance.

The plundering was completely multi-racial, with white, black and Hispanic businesses cleaned out and destroyed throughout major parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Not a single “racial incident” was reported during the uprising, while newspaper pictures and TV news bore witness to the variously coloured faces emerging from the merchants’ windows and celebrating in the streets.

Similarly, looting, vandalism, and attacks in police were not confined to the City proper; Mount Vernon, Yonkers and White Plains were among suburbs in which the same things happened, albeit on a smaller scale.

Rioting broke out in the Bronx House of Detention where prisoners started fires, seized dormitories, and almost escaped by ramming through a wall with a steel bed. Concerning the public, the Bronx District Attorney fumed, “It’s lawlessness. It’s almost anarchy.”

Officer Gary Parlefsky, of the 30^th Precinct in Harlem, said that he and other cops came under fire from guns, bottles and rocks. He continued:

We were scared to death... but worse than that, a blue uniform didn’t mean a thing. They couldn’t understand why we were arresting them.

At a large store at 110^th Street and Eighth Avenue, the doors were smashed open and dozens of people carried off appliances. A woman in her middle-50s walked into the store and said laughingly: “Shopping with no money required!”

Attesting to the atmosphere of a “collective celebration”, as one worried columnist put it, a distribution center was spontaneously organized at a Brooklyn intersection, with piles of looted goods on display for the taking. This was shown briefly on an independent New York station, WPIX-TV, but not mentioned in the major newspapers.

The transformation of commodities into free merchandise was only aided by the coming of daylight, as the festivity and music continued. Mayor Beame, at a noon (July 15) press conference, spoke of the “night of terror”, only to be mocked heartily by the continuing liberation underway throughout New York as he spoke.

Much, of course, was made of the huge contrast between the events of July 1977 and the relatively placid, law-abiding New York blackout of November 1965. One can only mention the obvious fact that the dominant values are now everywhere in shreds. The “social cohesion” of class society is evaporating. New York is no isolated example.

Of course, there has been a progressive decay in recent times of restraint, hierarchy, and other enforced virtues; it hasn’t happened all at once. Thus, in the 1960s, John Leggett (in his Class, Race and Labour) was surprised to learn upon examining the arrest records of those in the Detroit and Newark insurrections, that a great many of the participants were fully employed. This time, of the 176 people indicted as of August 8 in Brooklyn (1,004 were arrested in the borough), 48% were regularly employed. (The same article in the August 9 San Francisco Chronicle where these figures appeared also pointed out that only “six grocery stores were looted while 39 furniture stores, 20 drug stores and 17 jewelry stores and clothing stores were looted”). And there are other similarities to New York, naturally; Life magazine of 4 August 1967 spoke of the “carnival-like revel of looting” in Detroit, and Professor Edward Banfield commented that

Negroes and whites mingled in the streets [of Detroit] and looted amicably side by side....”

The main difference is probably one of scale and scope — that in New York virtually all areas, even the suburbs, took the offensive and did so from the moment the lights went out. Over $1 billion was lost in the thousands of stores looted and burned, while the cops were paralyzed. During the last New York rioting, the ‘Martin Luther King’ days of 1968, 32 cops were injured; in one day in July 1977, 418 cops were injured.

The Left — all of it — has spoken only of the high unemployment, the police brutality; has spoken of the people of New York only as objects, and pathetic ones at that! The gleaming achievements of the unmediated / unideologized have all the pigs scared shitless.

Advert: Green Anarchy #13 OUT now!

Issue #13 (Summer ‘03) features: “Youth Liberation: Burn the Schools and Destroy the Media”, “The Rising of the Barbarians”, “Between Analysis and Vision: Moving Beyond the Theory -Practice Dichotomy”, “ A Quest Among the Bewildered”, “Thoughts On the City”, “On the Sabotage of the Fine Arts”, “Zero War — Total Liberation”, “Decoding the Apocalypse of the Militant Left”, “Green Amazon Economics 101”, The Doctor is Sick: Schizophrenia, AntiPsychiatry, and Anarchism”, “News from the Balcony”, re-prints from the finest of sources, updates from insurrections around the world, direct action reports, state repression and prisoner info (including a Break the Chains Conference Manifesto), reviews, letters, and much, much more! This one is 36-pages (our largest yet!)

Print copies of issues #6-12 are available for $3 each U$A/CAN ($4 world). Green Anarchy is free to prisoners.

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Apes of Wrath

From the Associated Press (which did such a bang-up job on the Iraq war), dateline Boston, September 29, 2003: A 300-pound gorilla will be kept off display after it escaped from its zoo enclosure and roamed through the Franklin Park Zoo and along nearby streets for nearly two hours before it was sedated with tranquiller darts, according to Zoo New England CEO and President John Linehan.

Even zoos, it turns out, have CEO’s. Undoubtedly so do circuses, and I don’t mean the one in Washington, and so does every other institution which once thrilled children with icons and images and visions of another life, a life of magic and marvel. Of course now they view images quite as exciting or more so when they go on-line. But a zoo or a circus (they are not too different), even in our flattened down era, puts on a show which, for all its phoniness, surpasses anything virtual.

18-year-old Courtney Roberson worked at the zoo and was taking 2-year-old Nia Scott, her friend’s little sister, for an outing when Little Joe escaped, according to family members. The gorilla grabbed the child, threw her to the ground and jumped on her, according to Dale McNeil, Scott’s godmother.

If so, there was remarkably little harm done: “Neither zoo officials nor Boston Police could provide any information on the injuries. But family members said Scott had a gash on her cheek and needed several stitches. Roberson [who was not thrown to the ground and jumped] was bitten on the back and scratched on the leg, said her mother, Shamika Woumnm.” (I find her name even less likely than her story.) Clearly the family members saw their chance for a score and wasted no time creating evidence. The accusations against Little Joe are grave but, I suspect, self-serving. If a 300 pound gorilla jumped on a two year old girl, I would expect her to incur serious injury, if not death, but probably not just a gash on the cheek. For a rounded picture, we need to look at it from Little Joe’s point of view. From the Associated Press we further learn: In August, the 5 foot, adolescent gorilla also escaped from its section of the Tropical Forest exhibit, which had a 12-foot-wide, 12-foot-deep, moat. No one was hurt then, and zoo officials installed electrified wires to keep him from escaping again.

The Associated Press story, aided by the family’s litigation-oriented statements, is all too obviously scripted under the influence of the King Kong and Mighty Joe Young films, with adjustments for details. Little Nia Scott is Fay Wray. Mighty — er, Little Joe is framed, perhaps literally, by these evocative antecedents, which it is not necessary for the word-thrifty Associated Pressman to mention because they are deeply rooted in popular consciousness. Little Joe, at a first pass from the sensitive, anonymous Associated Press reporter, is strikingly depicted as an African American rapist: “The gorilla grabbed the child, threw her to the ground and jumped on her, according to Dale McNeil, Scott’s godmother.” Then, and only after that impression has sunk in, the AP journalist indicates that Little Joe is perhaps as much like Houdini as he is like King Kong. Little Joe has twice thwarted the best efforts of his captors to hold him in bondage. Not a 12 foot moat, not even an electrified fence stopped the 5 foot tall, 300 pound young primate.

The movie the AP guy should have reviewed, at least in his mind, before writing his story was not King Kong or Mighty Joe Young but The Great Escape. Young male gorillas like Little Joe, who was born in captivity, pose problems because of their agility and restlessness, according to Linehan. “They go through a stage where, physically and psychologically, they’re growing much stronger, and become much more lean and long, and containment can be an increasing challenge at that age,” he said.

Other young male primates go through the same stage. Some of them formed the anarchist Black Blocs in Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere. Others disperse their “agility and restlessness” in frat parties, liberal politics, music subcultures or even by joining the Army to meet cute dumb hillbillies like “Daisy Mae” Jessica Lynch. As that astute psychologist/CEO Linehan explains, they go through a stage where they’re becoming strong (which, after the indignities of childhood, is a heady realization) and naturally they cast about for something to test their strength against. For Little Joe, there was an only and obvious challenge: his captivity.

I used to live in the Boston area and I knew exactly where Little Joe escaped from, and where he was recaptured. Needless to say, there was nowhere for him to live in Boston as the magnificent animal that he is. He would not survive the coming winter. And since he was born in captivity, he would not even survive in the rain forest where gorillas belong, were he released there.

This the CEO obviously does not intend for his investment, since Little Joe is one of 6 of the exhibition gorillas he has acquired since 1998. Except that now Little Joe, after his recent adventure, is not on exhibit — he’s locked down — which is perhaps a partial victory for Little Joe. I remember Charlton Heston, in Spartacus, howling in his cell, “I am not an animal!” Would it have made any difference if he were?

Truth being, as Nietzsche taught us, multi-perspectival, we might set the measured, classical restraint of the Associated Press story beside the romantic exuberance of the version in the New York Daily News (“Teen Was Helpless Against Raging Ape,” Sept. 30, 2003). Much of the story is the same, as we might expect, since the writers are both American Journalists pledged to Objectivity, but the Daily News story focuses on the romantic interest. For it seems that Little Joe is not the only 300 pound adolescent primate in the picture. “He was too strong for me, and I’m a big person,” says teenage nanny and zoo employee Courtney Roberson. “I weigh close to 300 pounds.” In this, slightly more plausible version, Little Joe knocked Little Nia out of Roberson’s hands “and stomped on her before going after Roberson again.” There is nothing about what happened to Roberson, or what happened at all, after Little Joe’s “going after” her. Presumably he did nothing ungentlemanly. Since the incidents recounted could not have taken more than a minute, and Little Joe was on the loose for two hours, evidently once he got a good look at Roberson he betook himself elsewhere. Love hath no fury like a woman scorned. And did Little Joe “jump on” Little Nia (AP) or “stomp” on her (Daily News)?

According to Nia’s godmother, “When he snatched the baby, the gorilla took the baby and ran with it. And when he went to run, he turned around and he looked at Courtney and he dropped the baby and ran after Courtney” — contradicting her immediately previous statement that Little Joe stomped Little Nia. Dropping is not stomping. Or did he drop-kick her? By the time the case comes to trial, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. The Daily News, then, departs from the Hollywood paradigm of the Associated Press — this is not a Fay Wray situation at all. Here the helpless, innocent human female, Little Nia, was a sort of bystander who got in the way. This was something between Little Joe and Big Courtney Roberson, who probably looked more like a young female gorilla in heat than any animal the born-in-captivity, hormonally charged up Little Joe had ever seen. She may have played on that. There’s some monkey business here. After Little Joe’s August breakout, “zoo officials installed electrified wires to keep him from escaping again,” in addition to the 12 foot wide, 12 foot deep moat. How did he get past all of that? “There’s a lot we have to find out, and we’ll be reviewing what happened,” as CEO Linehan is quoted in both stories as saying, so it must be true. I have a theory. It was an inside job. Little Joe got out just before closing time, i.e., just when many zoo employees were probably getting off work. I think Big Courtney Roberson was one of them. She claims to have been taking Little Nia “for an outing” — not at the zoo, which was closing — but apparently right outside, although the neighborhood has no other attractions. I think Roberson, recalling the publicity around Little Joe’s first escape, turned off the juice and let him out, and then planted herself, babe in hand, in his path. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were the aggressor. I think what Courtney was courting was a juicy lawsuit, or a tryst, or both.

If I am right, the “raging ape” was the victim here in a most immediate way. He was set up and he was exploited. But if I am wrong he is still a victim, but in that case not the only one. Incarceration in a zoo is a far more serious wrong than a bite on the back from a runaway gorilla.

Now that we know that we share something like 98% of our DNA with Little Joe and his kind, we might rethink our relations with gorillas. About 15 years ago, a visiting Slovenian anarchist, Gregor Tomc, joined me for a visit to the renowned Washington Zoo. An anti-Communist dissident, he was especially curious to see the pandas donated by the Red Chinese. (Nobody calls them the “Red Chinese” any more. Why not? They haven’t changed.) The monkey house depressed him: “They’re too human,” he said.

I know what he meant. I spent a minute alone before a gorilla in a cage. I looked him in the eye and he looked me in the eye. Anyone could see the intelligence and the pain — and it was in his eyes too. Tomc was quite right but I would rephrase what he said. ‘We’re too animal” is more like it. The enslavement of Little Joe and so many other animals eerily reminiscent of ourselves really indicates our failure to come to terms with our own nature, which is an animal nature. In domesticating animals we have made ourselves the ultimate domesticated animal. For us to escape, on an individual basis, from civilization — from the state, the market, the class system, from religions and moralities — that is scarcely more realistic than for Little Joe to pass a quiet winter in Boston where he was recaptured, “near a football stadium.”

But we do differ in an important way from our fellow animals. We have language. Recent research establishes that this is not the qualitative break it was long thought to be. Gorillas appear to have a rudimentary vernacular language, and they can even be taught English sign language in controlled circumstances. Noam Chomsky does not believe this, not because it isn’t true, but because it refutes his Cartesian linguistic theory. He is like those 16^th century prelates who looked through Galileo’s telescope and denied what they saw because it could not be true.

In tribute to Chomsky’s Scholastic obtuseness, the researchers who study Koko and her fellow gorillas have named their dumbest gorilla student “Nim Chimsky.” Language — especially written language — has served as an instrument of domination. Like most truths about the life we live, this one sounds extravagant or overstated or metaphorical, but that is only because it is so difficult to stand apart from that life, if only in thought, to see it as it is. It is a finding of sober archaeological fact that for the first one thousand years of writing (in ancient Sumer — now known as Iraq), it was devoted exclusively to government record-keeping and occasional chest-thumping by the Ozymandias-style autocrats who still rule in the Cradle of Civilization, only now they are American. Literacy was so restricted to bureaucrats that Hammurabi, for instance, probably could not read the Code of Hammurabi. Now history is not necessarily destiny, but it certainly should inform those who would be makers of destiny, if they know what’s good for them.

The question is whether there is any other way than through language to get out of what language has gotten us into. Even those who say “no” contradict what they say just by saying it. Language posits the only possibility, if there is one, of the Great Escape. And it has to be a Great Escape, a collective adventure, because anything less than that is just like Little Joe busting out to — to where? to what? That’s just it. Little Joe got out, but while he had a place to escape from, he had no place to escape to. I wonder what he thought of the streets of Boston which he wandered for two hours. He could hardly have found there what he was looking for, if he’d even thought that far ahead. I know I never did.

I have given my reasons for doubting whether Little Joe went ape, but even if he did, going ape is something apes never do in the wild and in the society (for they have one) of other apes. Going human is really a better, if also an inadequate description of what he is accused of doing. Our prisons — our human zoos — are filled with humans who have gone ape, which really just means, stir-crazy. They experience domestication literally with a vengeance. Elsewhere, in school or in the workplace, it’s not usually so obvious. But your boss has made a monkey out of you all the same. Alexander Pope wrote a couplet — about a dog, not an ape, but he was saying the same thing I am (Kew was a royal palace):

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

Free Little Joe and all other political prisoners! A zoo and a circus — these words are not only effective metaphors for our civilized society, they really surpass metaphor by verging on straight reportage, much like the Objective reportage of the Associated Press and the Daily News. It is no accident that we so often reach for one of these words to disparage some feature of the political or social scene. They fit the hand so well. It never required DNA evidence, not for anyone “with ears to see,” as Ivan Stang once phrased it, to notice that the animals deservedly called the great apes are amazingly like ourselves. I have never understood how any creationist moron could visit a zoo and look at the primates and come away with his Bible bigotry intact. He is, I suppose, our own Nim Chimsky. Unfortunately, our Nim Chimsky has the right to vote.

Winning the War, Losing the Peace: Ecological Revolution Flounders on Bougainville

With a population of only 160,000 Bougainville has managed to close and keep closed one of the biggest copper mines in the world. Despite having to fight the Australian-armed Papua New Guinea (PNG) army, they have held their ground for twelve years with home made guns made out of water piping and planks, scavenged mine trucks and petrol made from coconuts.

In 1969 a RTZ plc copper mine was forcibly established. From the beginning the people resisted. News footage of women fighting with riot cops over survey pegs received international coverage. In Bougainville women are the traditional landholders; land is passed from woman to woman. On this occasion it was clear their land was not being passed on in the traditional manner.

The building of the mine made 800 villagers landless and another 1,400 without fishing rights as land was seized and the subsistence life of gardening and fishing was destroyed. 220 hectares of rainforest was poisoned, burned and bulldozed.

After 20 years the mine had grown to a crater half a kilometre deep and nearly 7km in circumference. Over a billion tonnes of waste was dumped into the Jaba River valley creating a wall of waste hundreds of metres high, turning one of the islands biggest river systems bright blue.

After ignored protests, petitions and legal claims the Bougainvilleans had had enough. A handful of islanders stole company explosives, destroying electricity pylons, buildings and machinery. By using guerrilla tactics they succeeded in closing the mine. Until the war broke out in 1988, the mine accounted for around 45% of PNG’s total export earnings. Without these earnings PNG is going bust. PNG, with the assistance of Australia, responded by sending in the military. State soldiers strafed villages from helicopters. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) was formed to defend the land and people from further exploitation. Ten years of war followed.

PNG herded people into ‘care centres’ (concentration camps) and enforced a medical blockade on the island. 10,000 Bougainvilleans died in the conflict. Despite being heavily outgunned the BRA succeeded in keeping the mine closed. They pushed the state soldiers off most of their island and forced a peace. The land of the mine is slowly regenerating. The people have returned to their age-old subsistence agriculture.

Unfortunately the people who originated the revolution — the people local to the destruction and with the most to lose — have now become isolated from the rest of Bougainvilleans. Most of the others seem to want to re-open the mine and instigate other developments, The locals are holed up in their mountain stronghold.

Francis Ona, the instigator of the original revolution, is vilified by the mainstream press and virtually all communication with the rest of the world is controlled by the prodevelopment lobby. Ona’s group, the Me’ekamui Defence Force, (MDF) have about fifty armed people to defend the site of the mine, and the BRA now stand in opposition to them, with about a thousand.

Recently the BRA tried to remove a MDF roadblock barring foreigners passage to the mine, killing some of the defenders. All the NGOs who once supported the struggle against colonialism now seem to see nothing wrong with what they call the ‘peace process’ and are slagging off Ona and his people, who are ultimately the ones whose decision about their land should be final. There are lessons to be learned here about both NGOs and ‘nationalist’ struggles (not to mention ‘peace’ processes), and the wisdom of co-operating with those who hold views antipathetic to our own.

Very little news comes out at all from the MDF; the little that does is hopelessly mangled by corporate lackey journalists. Unsurprisingly, Ona doesn’t trust outsiders, and particularly not journalists. He hasn’t been interviewed in the 6 years since the BRA won the war, until recently. In that interview, after being accused of having no connection with the Bougainville peace process, he said:

“I never have any no connection with the peace process on Bougainville. You know, peace on Bougainville is always here, yeah, but what they are trying to import on Bougainville is trying to... economise peace, you know, they want to put money into the process and then try to... I see it as a psychological warfare on Bougainville, yeah.”

Papua New Guinea has most graciously agreed to allow Bougainville a referendum on independence in ten years time, but Ona says there’s no reason to wait. Bougainville can go it alone. “I don’t know why ten years...” he says. “Right now we can have a referendum. Bougainvilleans through the last 14 years have proven that we can look after ourselves.”

Francis Ona has literally stuck to his guns. His men remain heavily armed, untouched by the ‘disarmament process’ (the BRA and foreign interferers still have guns...) which they’ve rejected. At the roadblock, the MDF exchanged fire with the BRA as recently as March this year. Ona says “It’s really a violation of the peace process on Bougainville... I’ve got a paper here which proves that the UN and PNG has planned all this. You know, it’s written here.” He asked the fuckwit journalist to take the paper but was ignored.

In spite of the situation, the MDF appear confident. “The outside input into Bougainville has destroyed our people’s lives. We’ve gone through fourteen years without money and we still exist.” As with all people who are truly resisting the onslaught of civilisation, it’s hard to know what we can do in the west in solidarity with them. It seems that anything we do to undermine civilisation here will be more useful than trying to get through the maze of disinformation put up by the ‘human rights’ and development organisations.

There is an international spokesperson for the MDF, Clive Porabou, working out of PNG. Typically, he has support only from a few individuals; the cowardly NGOs go along with the oppressors.

To get news out and gather support for the struggle the MDF need to get their transmitter repaired.

If you can help to fund new communications equipment (even just a few quid will help), contact GA and we can put you in touch with them. See P.14 for addresses.

The Panguna landowners’ story shows that there is really no point in working with such organisations. These are the enemies of freedom as much as the more obvious ones are.

Desire for Freedom: MDF Statement, 26 Sep 2003

From the South to the Northern tip of Bougainville there is a growing “restlessness” for freedom and that freedom is total Independence. In Central Bougainville No Go Zone where Inter-Government Relations Minister sir Peter Barter focus his attention, Francis Ona and his Me’ekamui National council and the Me’ekamui Defence force have no right to stop people from seeking medical assistance or joining the imported peace.

Even in the peace areas there are Me’ekamui Hardliners with Me’ekamui basic aims and principal, Independence. Me’ekamui Defence Force are not the party to weapons disposal, those are BRA A company who joined the peace process the same people who signed the petition. The road block at Morgen junction will remain. Bougainvilleans go in and out of the No Go Zone areas freely but outsiders are not allow.

No Go Zone does not prevents people from proper service, assistance and medical treatment but it is helping them to keep their birth right. Me’ekamui Goverment and its Millitary Arm [ MDF ] is not disrupting the peace process, why blame the Me’ekamui Government?

Bougainville peace is from time immemorable, long live peace on Bougainville.

Clive Porabou, MDF Spokeperson

Green Anarchists Gather in Pennsylvania

The 1^st Green Anarchist Gathering took place July 10–13, despite the FBI. The first site was a private campground at the intersection of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. The Feds thought it too close to one of the largest underground natural gas storage facilities in the US, a facility on the Homeland Security watch list, so we got a call from the campground owner: “Your event is being canceled. We’ve had several visits from the FBI and other law enforcement. You lied to us. You didn’t tell us you were terrorists.”

The FBI under Mike Hudak of the Scranton / Wilkes-Barre office had not only visited the campground but sent Pennsylvania state troopers to the township meeting to inform citizens of this redneck idyll of the vipers poised to descend on their community. “Just look at their web site,” they urged, giving them the URL to the Black and Green pages. Helicopters and black sedans then showed up. With help from a State Park official, we were back on track within a week at a new location only 60 miles away.

The Gathering

There were 100+ pre-registered via the web site and we were hoping for even more, so I opted for communal catering, like the Anarchist Teapot at EF!UK Gatherings. It was a younger crowd; out of the 80 there, only 10 of us were over 30. Most were from eastern and southern states. The downside of larger workshops was that organizers spoke too much and newbies too little.

A real highlight of the gathering was the two full days of primitive skill share with Tim, a ‘professional’ from the Teaching Drum School, who instructed the future primitives in tracking, shelter building, wild plant identification skills, and answered lots of questions in an informative and good-natured way.

There was a conflict resolution workshop where many of us found we faced the same issues with regards to finding alternative ways of dealing with conflict without making appeals to authorities. Many had been involved in conflicts with individuals who could be clinically categorised as ‘mentally disturbed’. We discussed how we all are misfits, but those who’d really lost all grasp of reality are drawn to activist communities whose tolerance and openness to society’s oppressed may be well known. Those with truly anti-social, if not violent, tendencies can cause real problems in terms of the emotional health of those around them.

Ted Kaczynski’s ‘Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts’ article (Green Anarchy #8) led to lively and most interesting discussion, especially to Fed infiltrators. Some of us tried clarifying arguments for economic and infra-structural sabotage.

There was a civ and patriarchy session that I found boring, with men in attendance professing their genuine open-mindedness and unconditional support of women in general and the women bringing up anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

I find this inevitably veers into the issue of rape, and then tends to be discussed in the same hypersensitive terms liberals use. As a woman and anarchist I find this discouraging. I can’t help but feel that elevating that particular violation to the status of most heinous just an ideology of women’s victimization beyond remedy. Too bad that the state has the monopoly on violence, our communities could sort out that issue amongst ourselves with much more success.

One goal of the Gathering was to exchange info, facilitated by the presence of the ‘A-Hole’, the Coalition Against Civilization’s tent full of Anarcho-primitivist scholarship and agit prop. The only security issue was potential confrontation with ‘Young Marines’ in the adjacent camping area, whose cries of “Yes Sir!” we had to endure each day, all day long, but nothing happened except their complaint that they saw someone from our group naked next to a car, changing clothes. Hope to see you there next year!

Alt Tech

Fuck ‘Alternative’ Technology! Fuck the ‘Alternative’ Green Ghetto!

Standing up on this hill, as the sun filters through the trees you occasionally catch the reflection of solar panels on the roofs of the houses beyond the wind farm. The gentle swishing of turbine blades is inaudible here, but the hum of a tractor is just perceptible as it sows next year’s bio fuel crop in the fields below...

Though the reality of alternative technology providing a “green” and sustainable life for us all in the 21^st century may seem a long way off, may seem an almost impossible task of enormous proportions, it is becoming more widely accepted as a necessary step in the progress of our industrial society. It is, however, rarely seen for the sham it is.

The disastrously clichéd picture painted above is incomplete without a quick look behind the scenes. Though minute details of the industrial processes employed are beyond the scope of this article, and frankly do not interest me, even a cursory examination will show that the manufacture of photovoltaic panels, wind gennies and bio fuel production facilities is not a particularly green (or alternative) business. From mineral and metal ore extraction (think open cast, think indigenous land rights, think health and safety) to metal purification (think blast furnace, think slag heaps, think massive energy consumption) to manufacturing (think conveyer belts, think toxic effluents, think wage slavery) to transport (think container ships, think road deaths, think more and more fucking airports) to mass consumer society (think, no don’t think, consume), when western industrial society decides it wants something, regardless of the apparently benign nature of the product (or even it’s intended use in excusing the excesses of our society), the product has a price attached to it, namely the “concealed drudgery of many and the despoliation of the natural world” [102]

There seem to be many people in the alternative green ghetto who have become engrossed in the provision of power through ‘alternative’ means, usually at festivals and free parties, and who even see this as a form of green activism. Embarrassingly this mostly takes the form of boys playing with their (hi-tech) toys. An unfortunate group caught out by technological determinism. Just because it’s possible it doesn’t follow that it’s a good idea.

Many have been fooled into thinking that this new product of consumer capitalism will further the goals of those seeking sustainability without questioning the use of electricity itself and the innately unsustainable nature of all the industries involved in its consumption.

Although industrial production (of alt-tech gear or otherwise) is inherently unsustainable (surely with just a bit more technology...) some products are often justified if they, for instance, allow autonomy or independence to those in struggle, but then the same goes for making use of any of the tools of civilization in order to fight against it. But people tend to consume ‘alt tech’ as a lazy alternative to using more inventive methods, which are usually more in conflict with the system.

The problem arises around so-called ‘ethical’ consumption and the quasireligious zeal that surrounds the cult that is alternative-technology. Ethical consumption is steeped in petty moralism and guilt, but rarely challenges consumption itself.

As anarchists we shouldn’t look to the marketplace to fulfil our needs — but rather seek to feed off the detritus of civilization whilst attacking the pillars that are its foundation.

What are we doing with all this ‘alternative’ electricity? Whether it’s being fed into the grid or used where it’s made (via lead-acid batteries), it is the use of electricity itself that must be questioned, not where it comes from. In the same way that the suggestion that our vehicles could be fuelled by vegetable oil does not question car culture, the cult of electricity is rarely examined. From computers to sound-systems, light-bulbs to fridge-freezers all of these things just add to the devastation of the natural world, and severely limit any chance of salvaging a genuine unmediated human existence.

It would be foolish to forget that a green city is still a city. It comes down to whether you merely want to tinker with the system (however you dress that up in anarcho-leftist rhetoric), creating a green tinged society a la Bookchinite ‘Social Ecology’) whether your desire is to embark upon a project that seeks to dismantle all that curtails a more authentic exitence. Though there are apparently still some anarchists who believe that controlling the means of production would somehow allow the develoment of a libertarian society, it must be realised that the technological system is simply a part of the structure domination that (one would think) anarchists strive to destroy.

Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we live in. [103]

It may have become apparent that I am using the terms “technology” and “alternative technology” interchangably, but it should be obvious by now that there can be no reasonable differentiation between them. The notion that technology is neutral and exists independently of social relationships has no basis.

Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.
(Fifth Estate Quoted from ‘The Primitivist Primer’ by John Moore).

At the heart of the technological system are the division of labour and specialisation. Resulting from these are dependency. We are held to ransom, dependent on others, childlike in the face of the complex organisation of technological society, alienated from the natural environment.

Most anarchists recognise that the state, private property, the commodity system, the patriarchal family and organized religion are inherently dominating institutions and systems that need to be destroyed if we are to create a world in which we are all free to determine our lives as we see fit. Thus, it is strange that the same understanding is not applied to the industrial technological system.[104]

It appears that what is needed is a seditious mutiny of the technological mindset that seems to be so pervasive even within so called ‘alternative’ green and radical circles. That ‘alternative’ technology will fail to avert any of the pitfalls of conventional technological approaches is clear. Therefore its status among many as some form of tool of a future ecological society is grounded in shallow and ill thought out analysis of the current technological society we find ourselves in and the historical forces that brought this about.

Never before have people been so infantalised, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.[105]

More Alternative Problems

Geothermal Plot

The Shasta, Modoc and Pit River nations peoples have told Calpine corporation and CalEnergy General that they do not want development in the Medicine Lake region.

Two 50 Megawatt plants are proposed. Sitting on the southern edge of the Cascade Mountains, the treeshrouded Lake, the watershed of the Sacramento River, is critical to Indians. The mountains are considered sacred.

Around Telephone Flat, the areas are used for vision quests and for the gathering of healing herbs. And there are also women’s mountains, where they go to get their power. Over 100 years ago the same tribes were decimated by gold rush miners.

The Death of Rivers

If the James Bay project in Quebec is completed, it will embrace over 30 major dams and 500 dikes. Completed in 1995 LG1 is churning out 1,368 megawatts of electricity. More is added all the time.

The project threatens the way of life of the Cree and the Inuit. The James Bay wetlands and forests are habitat of lynx, black bears, waerfowl, and one of North America’s largest caribou herds.

The new complex would take a tumbling, 225-mile-long river and convert much of its length into a series of artificial slack-water lakes. These reservoirs would submerge more than a thousand miles of riverine lands and untamed forests.

Fusion is No Solution: An antidote to the usual, incredible hype

Alternative technology tends to be sold as small / human scale and so decentralisable and autonomous until such time as the ‘powers-that-be’ actually take it seriously, at which point it becomes a mega-project under centralised expert control. Witness wind power spawning huge 100m high wind farms, with wave power next to get the same treatment — and it’s typically those pushing such energy generation as ‘alternatives’ that get to be the experts ‘benevolently’ imposing them as soon as the government money starts to come in.

No one could pretend fusion is anything but hi-tech, highly centralised, highly expertise-dependant and demanding huge injections of funding and power, but some still believe it is somehow “clean” and can yield massive amounts of energy, like the old ‘Atoms for Peace’ / ‘too cheap to meter’ codswallop they used to sell us fission back in the 1950s. Needless to say, this is the opposite of the truth.

First off, the isotopes of hydrogen smashed together at super-hot (plasma) temperatures are radioactive. Sure enough, deuterium only has a half-life of 12 years — one reason why its use as a ‘doping agent’ in US nuclear weapons has quietly rendered most of them obselete — but the free neutrons generated by this process often impact the torus’s cladding and not the hydrogen fuel, which really is a long-term waste disposal problem.

Secondly, as well as being radioactive, tritium can cause cancer, birth defects and other such problems. Dealing with tritium emissions incidental to conventional fission reactors, the Conception Group discovered a Health & Welfare Canada (HWC) report admitting: [106]

a ‘statistically significant’ correlation of central nervous system (CNS) birth defects with large releases of tritium to air: five Pickering infants with CNS defects (anencephaly, microcephaly, spina bifida with hydrocephalus, and two others whose defect code was not on record) were born in January-July 1978, following the airborne tritium releases of April-October 1977. Medical experts link CNS birth defects to radiation exposure, as found after the atomic bombing of Japan.

Fusion researchers concede this is a problem, but claim they only need a small amount of tritium to initiate neutron emission from the deuterium. Engineers admit, however, that “a tritium inventory of 40 kg” as the minimum required to ensure viability.

Thirdly, as hydrogen is such a small molecule, virtually anything is porous to it, making containment much, much more difficult than for fissionable materials. Hydrogen is highly explosive (witness the Hindenberg!) and will be used in combination with super-high temperatures, making plant safety a big issue. One nuclear engineer frankly stated: [107]

“I would be a lot more concerned about a Tritium fire twenty miles away than a meltdown at a fission plant”. There are also likely to be day-to-day hazards caused by the intense electromagnetic forces used to keep the hydrogen plasma off the torus wall, likely affecting workers’ reproductive and central nervous systems and potentially causing leukaemia, if typical of other nonionizing radiation hazards. The same spectacle as occurred at Sellafield — where workers there were warned not to have children — is likely to occur at any future viable fusion plant.

Fourthly, as noted already, both tritium and deuterium are key components of nuclear weapons — indeed, it was Lawrence Livermore’s Edward Teller (a.k.a. ‘Doctor Strangelove’) that first promoted them in the form of the hydrogen bomb, while he was still at Los Alamos — and so represents a proliferation risk, with all the ‘security state’ ramifications of that. So much for ‘fusion for peace’, not that anyone has ever pretended anything so patently stupid — and as Karl Jung argued against fission in his Nuclear State three decades ago, a nuclear state is inevitably ultimately also a totalitarian state.

Fifthly, fusion is mega-science feeding a Promethian mega-science mentality, with huge resources diverted into keeping such experts on the hitech gravy train. The CANDU torus (also known as ITEC) cost the Canadian government £14 billion when established in 1992. It is a pure research facility which will never generate a watt of electricity for nonresearch use and, typical of those that have had a living gifted to them, all objections by citizen groups such as Sierra Club Canada have so far arrogantly been waved aside.

Finally, despite the industry hype we’d all be on fusion power by 1980, not a watt of electricity has been generated by fusion for research purposes as well as for non-research ones. Nuclear engineers admit: [108]

The biggest issue facing DT is the actual breeding of the tritium in the Lithium blanket. It is not a simple problem and may be the death of DT fusion if no practical way of efficiently breeding the tritium and harvesting it quickly without having even minimal losses. This is the part that is the most pessimistic, in my opinion.

In other words, that fusion has always been complete hype and that they may never get it working at all. In this, it certainly is fission+, where at least it was only the safe disposal of the waste they hadn’t figured out before spinning stories to suck the public purse dry.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells: Energy of the Future, or South Seas Bubble?

by Mr. Blobby

In a world facing wars for oil, we desperately need an ‘alternative’ energy source for the future. Hydrogen fuel cells, as used in the Space Shuttle, are the energy source of the future, according to the hype surrounding fuel cell research. But research funds are worth lots of $$$; so how well founded in scientific reality is the current optimism in the face of problems which beset the hydrogen fuel cell industry?

Look at a working model of a hydrogen fuel cell, and you see a wonder of science: Hydrogen ‘burned’ with no smoke, water the only exhaust. Look a little deeper into this miraculous technology, and you see that the heavy and cumbersome hydrogen fuel tank is only large enough to supply fuel for barely a few minutes if it is fitted into a car used to give a flashy film promotion of fuel cell technology.

The car in a video to hype the fuelcell technology stops moments after the 2 minute video stops. It’s run out of fuel already. To get the number of miles between refills you’d expect from a petrol or diesel powered car, the super cold liquid hydrogen fuel tank would need to be bigger and heavier than the car could fit. Recent developments have brought smaller and lighter fuel tanks, but the problem of fuel storage will not go away.

Then there is the problem of how to make the hydrogen to use in the fuel cells.

Naturally, no non-nuclear means is known to make terrestrial hydrogen that does not consume considerably more energy than it delivers. Note that commercial hydrogen is nearly always produced by the reformation of methane. But the methane really has to want to reform. Please also note that because of the staggering loss of energy, use of electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do. It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso. www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp

Harnessing energy from geothermal springs in Iceland, to make hydrogen, has led the fuel-cell hype industry to claim Iceland will become the “Kuwait of the North.” In reality, it’s a scenario similar to the bullshit claims made about vegetable oil biodiesel fuel. It can never supply more than a tiny fraction of world energy needs, even when exploitation levels reach their natural boundaries.

On Internet sites that contribute to the hydrogen fuel-cell hype, there is little or no mention of these insurmountable problems: At the time of writing this, I did an Internet Google search for “hydrogen fuel cell” and got 32,200 results. I didn’t have many hours to click through hundreds of links looking to find a site not part of the bullshit hype...

Hydrogen’s potential use in fuel and energy applications includes powering vehicles, running turbines or fuel cells to produce electricity, and generating heat and electricity for buildings. The current focus is on hydrogen’s use in fuel cells.

A fuel cell works like a battery but does not run down or need recharging. It will produce electricity and heat as long as fuel (hydrogen) is supplied. A fuel cell consists of two electrodes — a negative electrode (or anode) and a positive electrode (or cathode) — sandwiched around an electrolyte. Hydrogen is fed to the anode, and oxygen is fed to the cathode. Activated by a catalyst, hydrogen atoms separate into protons and electrons, which take different paths to the cathode. The electrons go through an external circuit, creating a flow of electricity. The protons migrate through the electrolyte to the cathode, where they reunite with oxygen and the electrons to produce water and heat. Fuel cells can be used to power vehicles or to provide electricity and heat to buildings.

The hype industry gets off scot-free with outrageous bullshit. One Stanley Meyer claimed to have invented a new way of making hydrogen which violated thermodynamic laws, energy conservation, Faraday’s laws, the nature of Fourier Series, hydrogen overvoltage properties, the concept of mathematical integration, the max power transfer theorem, and at least one fundamental current standard. His little scam ripped off investors life savings, and eventually they complained. Judge Corzine of the Ohio court system found a “gross and egregious fraud”, but imposed a fine of only $1.

The Hype continues, and dreamers still think this technology will bring in a new era of pollution free transport.

HYDROGEN FUEL CELLS

Energy of the Future, or South Seas Bubble?

by Mr. Blobby

In a world facing wars for oil, we desperately need an ‘alternative’ energy source for the future. Hydrogen fuel cells, as used in the Space Shuttle, are the energy source of the future, according to the hype surrounding fuel cell research. But research funds are worth lots of $$$; so how well founded in scientific reality is the current optimism in the face of problems which beset the hydrogen fuel cell industry?

Look at a working model of a hydrogen fuel cell, and you see a wonder of science: Hydrogen ‘burned’ with no smoke, water the only exhaust. Look a little deeper into this miraculous technology, and you see that the heavy and cumbersome hydrogen fuel tank is only large enough to supply fuel for barely a few minutes if it is fitted into a car used to give a flashy film promotion of fuel cell technology.

The car in a video to hype the fuelcell technology stops moments after the 2 minute video stops. It’s run out of fuel already. To get the number of miles between refills you’d expect from a petrol or diesel powered car, the super cold liquid hydrogen fuel tank would need to be bigger and heavier than the car could fit. Recent developments have brought smaller and lighter fuel tanks, but the problem of fuel storage will not go away.

Then there is the problem of how to make the hydrogen to use in the fuel cells.

Naturally, no non-nuclear means is known to make terrestrial hydrogen that does not consume considerably more energy than it delivers. Note that commercial hydrogen is nearly always produced by the reformation of methane. But the methane really has to want to reform.

Please also note that because of the staggering loss of energy, use of electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do.

It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso.

http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp][www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp

Harnessing energy from geothermal springs in Iceland, to make hydrogen, has led the fuel-cell hype industry to claim Iceland will become the “Kuwait of the North.” In reality, it’s a scenario similar to the bullshit claims made about vegetable oil biodiesel fuel. It can never supply more than a tiny fraction of world energy needs, even when exploitation levels reach their natural boundaries.

On Internet sites that contribute to the hydrogen fuel-cell hype, there is little or no mention of these insurmountable problems: At the time of writing this, I did an Internet Google search for “hydrogen fuel cell” and got 32,200 results. I didn’t have many hours to click through hundreds of links looking to find a site not part of the bullshit hype...

Hydrogen’s potential use in fuel and energy applications includes powering vehicles, running turbines or fuel cells to produce electricity, and generating heat and electricity for buildings. The current focus is on hydrogen’s use in fuel cells.

A fuel cell works like a battery but does not run down or need recharging. It will produce electricity and heat as long as fuel (hydrogen) is supplied. A fuel cell consists of two electrodes—a negative electrode (or anode) and a positive electrode (or cathode)—sandwiched around an electrolyte. Hydrogen is fed to the anode, and oxygen is fed to the cathode. Activated by a catalyst, hydrogen atoms separate into protons and electrons, which take different paths to the cathode. The electrons go through an external circuit, creating a flow of electricity. The protons migrate through the electrolyte to the cathode, where they reunite with oxygen and the electrons to produce water and heat. Fuel cells can be used to power vehicles or fl to provide electricity and J heat to buildings.

The hype industry gets off scot-free with outrageous bullshit. One ic laws, energy conservation, Faraday’s laws, the nature of Fourier Series, hydrogen overvoltage properties, the concept of mathematical integration, the max power transfer theorem, and at least one fundamental current standard. His little scam ripped off investors life savings, and eventually they complained. Judge Corzine of the Ohio court system found a “gross and egregious fraud”, but imposed a fine of only $1.

Stanley claimed

Meyer to

have invented

new way of ’ making hydrogen which violated tliennodynam-

tmues, and

dreamers still think this technology will bring in a new era of pollution free transport.

Modern Primitives

The Perennial Wild Men. The ‘war on terror’ is their fear of a wild planet

Despite 9/11, Americans are still more likely to be struck by lightening than by terrorists, but only obsess about the latter.[109] They are thousands of times more likely to be shot by spouses, neighbours or workmates than terrorists, despite which they vigorously defend their ‘right to bear arms’. The sociologist William Catton has done us all the favour of putting fears about terrorism in context:[110]

The annual death toll from influenza in the United States is almost ten times the seven or eight year global toll from terrorism, yet most people tend to think of flu as more of a nuisance than a dire peril.

US foreign policy is led by a ‘war on terror’ that has killed more people — typically as ‘collateral damage’ — than the ‘terrorists’ targeted by several orders of magnitude and blithely draws up lists of conveniently oil-rich ‘terrorist states’ to intimidate or invade when it is in fact only the US itself that has been judged terrorist by the International Court for Reagan’s 1987 mining of Nicauragua’s harbours. Claiming the ‘war on terror’ is in defence of Freedom (capital F used ironically to indicate the ‘freedom’ concerned is purely abstract rhetoric never to be applied in practice), administrative ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation has practically extinguished any freedoms of assembly, association and expression, reinitiated internment without trial and McCarthyism in America, and jailed Black people (called ‘Portland Asians’ as they were devout Moslems!) for exercising their supposed ‘right to bear arms’ for self-defence against transparently obvious state tyranny in the more hick, Islamophobic parts of the nation.

The absurdities and hypocrisies of the ‘war on terror’ should be obvious to anybody not mummified by the Flag, but on that you can go and read anything by Noam Chomsky or the small industry of liberal publishing around him if you need to. The purpose of this essay is not to further elaborate on such detail, but to examine why ‘terrorism’ has exercised such a firm grasp on the modern imagination. ‘Terrorism’ has not just been sold through the spectacle of media manipulation or its logical flipside, public gullibility — those are but the techniques of power — but has actually taken root. We must go a lot deeper to understand the unique appeal of ‘terrorism’ — why it is being sold, rather than some competing compliance brand.

Power and Chaos

The term ‘terrorism’ has been so tainted by political expediency that it now has no agreed definition. As the Reagan administration showed over Nicaraugua, those labeled ‘terrorist’ by others won’t willingly accept their definitions, and even when someone takes the rare and strange decision to label themselves ‘terrorist’ — as FC (the Freedom Club) did in the Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future — others may refuse them this label because they feel it confers too much prestige!

Thus, having sold FC as a much-needed example of domestic terrorism throughout the entire 1980s, the FBI relabeled Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski a “serial killer” when he came to trial in 1995 as they’d been so humiliated by their inability to catch him in almost two decades, undermining their credibility (and potential funding) as an effective counter-terrorist force (and, incidentally, FC’s potential to inspire further militancy).

At best, terrorism is defined as some sort of non-state-level indiscriminate targeting intended to bring about a crisis in the state unable to meet its Social Contract obligations to protect its own citizenry. At worst — and this is really the point, its utility as a mechanism for maintaining State power — terrorism’s definition all too easily broadens out to mean ‘anything opposed to us’.

Again, you can check out concerned liberal scholarship for the more obvious implications of this — such as how, by appealing to Social Contract theory, terrorists paradoxically affirm the State they’re attacking and statehood generally, although this should hardly come as a surprise concerning nationalist groups — but that is not my purpose here. What interests me is that the indiscriminate nature of terrorism is mirrored in the indiscriminate nature of its definition. Lacking numbers or firepower to take on the armed forces of the state toe-to-toe, the terrorist adopts tactics of clandestinity and unpredictable, symbolic attacks. Consequently, the terrorist could be just about anyone and — more significantly — so could his or her target.

Many advocates of armed struggle will huff and puff about this, insisting they are not terrorists because they are very careful in their selection of targets. Well, all the best to them, but the State is playing the equally inevitable opposite game of narrowing down who the terrorist is likely to be to as small a group as possible and presenting potential targets as as large a group as possible, as everyone else, to isolate and provoke discrimination against the struggle’s supporters. It is standard militant rhetoric that unlike in conventional warfare, one successful action is the equivalent of a thousand additional symbolic ones, those that could have been hit and may be in future. This, in part, explains why reactions to terrorism in terms of overestimation of personal threat is so great — so useful both to terrorist and counter-terrorist. Clearly, the target’s perception of their targetability is something largely out of the militants’ control. Even if they have been strict about what is and is not an appropriate target to date, the very virtue of guerilla warfare, its unpredictability, means that new targets will be sought in future. Also, aside from rare highly-disciplined and typically compromised groups, militant groups are highly Protean, inclined to splits, breakaways and even government pseudogang activity, meaning splinter groups may well hit targets the parent group refuses.

What, then, are we really looking at here, this perception of anonymous, random violence? We are looking at chaos. And how does this culture deal with chaos? What is its perception of that? As the celebrated anthropologist Mary Douglas writes in her seminal Purity and Danger:[111]

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder.... Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment.

On a visceral cultural level, then, terrorists are not the worthy chaps with legitimate grievances and desperate but necessary measures they take themselves for, they are dirt, social pollution to be removed from State society like some deadly plague organism — typically by the State itself and its loyal subordinates, the better to magnify its own power. The Bush administration, for one, uses exactly this rhetoric — likely unconsciously appealing to society’s instinctual revulsion against pollution, given Dubya’s proverbial lack of erudition — and it is no surprise that references to terrorists acquiring germ weapons and ‘dirty bombs’, all previously the exclusive property of governments, are now the typically baseless stock in trade of anti-terrorist propaganda.

From this, it should be obvious what the State gets out of terrorism — to the point of promoting and controlling terrorist groups, as the Italian government did during the ‘years of lead’ in the 1970s, on an ‘eternal threat, eternal loyalty’ principle[112] — but how do the terrorists benefit? Of course, being portrayed as monsters totally beyond social norms enhances the appeal and power of some, those that believe their revolution really will smash social norms, appealing to others thinking likewise and enhancing the symbolic intimidation of those that do not (the ‘multiplier effect’ discussed above).

However, there is more to it than this. As Douglas argues at great length, what is taboo is sacred as well as polluting. Those challenging the order of the universe define themselves not just as dirt, but also as godlike. Guerillas are often criticised for élitism precisely because their actions are seen as requiring a revolutionary courage, clear-sightedness and dedication that is beyond the majority to emulate, that is effectively superhuman.

Similarly, in death — and such activity surely invites death and torture, which is an attempt to kill the revolutionary’s spirit, what “a positive effort to organise the environment” means in this context — martyrs are revered in a quasi-religious manner, piously put ‘above criticism’ and iconised as propaganda tools much as were the saints of Medieval Christianity, as intercessors with the Divine (or the historic / material forces as the Left would have it...). To their great discredit, some guerillas actively promote such personality cults precisely because they are élitist, promoting their own power at the expense of others’ liberty.

Wild Origins

Because definitions of terrorism are so contested, so too is any prospect of identifying the first terrorists. Some say the ‘White’ royalists of Brittany opposing the French revolution, though this looks like a conventional national liberation struggle to me. Some would say the Assassins that wrecked dynastic havoc during the Middle Ages, but the Zealots preceded them by a millennia and were the same, only less ambitious. No doubt some would say the first ape to ambush another along the trail was a ‘terrorist’. Again, this pedantry does not interest me. What does is the origin of the chaotic, violent stereotype of terrorism, with all its symbolic force.

Who, then, was ‘outside society’ as the stereotypical taboo-busting terrorists now are? The answer, given in Aristotle’s Politics, was “the Barbarians” or to contextualise it with the full quote:[113]

Humanity is divided unto two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who were born to obey.

Yes, the question of who was outside social norms was an important one in ancient Greek society because it determined who could make slaves and who could be made slaves. Implicitly also, it defined who could make laws, or else slaves would just make laws freeing themselves. Despite abundant evidence of other civilisations abounding in the ancient world — not least Egypt or the rival Persian empire — the great Philosopher so revered by Mediaeval scholarship preferred logic to common sense and went on to argue that non-Greek societies had no laws (rather than that Greek law somehow overrode theirs) and that non-Greeks therefore lived in a state of Nature like animals, and that enslaving them was therefore probably even sort of doing them a favour introducing them to Greek civilisation.... This patently absurd, self-serving argument would be vastly elaborated as ‘White man’s burden’ in centuries to come.

Inspired by Aristotle and no doubt bored by their own, overcontrolled society, the Mediaevals fantasised about the pagan state of Nature, imagining wild, bearded Green men in the woods bedecked with leaves and antlers, living life without restraint much like the Greek Dionysus or Roman Pan. Whether this was a folk remembrance of the Neolithic (itself not wholly an oasis of human freedom thanks to religious and work impositions) or idealisation of the lives of greenwood outlaws, such ideas pervaded Medieval society to such an extent that representations of Green men survive as ironic / talismanic church gargoyles, rural pub signs, springtime village Springtime customs and even in literature, as in Gawain and the Green Knight.

The late-Mediaeval Sir John Mandeville — who is neck and neck with Heroditus as ‘father of lies’, history-wise — portrayed these wild men as “eat[ing] both flesh and fish all raw”, alongside all those on nonexistent, distant islands with faces in their chests and feet big enough to function as sunshades.

Amusing fantasy perhaps, even a sign of yearned-for natural freedom, but in practice such stereotypes were applied exactly as the Greeks did. On arrival on the Carib island he named Hispaniola in 1492, Columbus was quick to insist Mandeville’s fantasies were reality, reporting back to distant Spain:[114]

Men with one eye, and others with dog’s noses, who ate men, and that when they took a man, they cut off his head and drank his blood and castrated him.

Clearly, these Caribs were beyond the law and hardly human. In the enslavement of the Gaunches on the Canary Islands that had been going on simultaneous to Columbus’s colonisation of the New World, Isabella of Castille had already had Aristotle’s apologia for slavery rewritten, substituting the word ‘Spanish’ for ‘Greek’ in de Coroba’s infamous 1460 primer, Garden of Noble Maidens.[115] Because of the vagaries of Christian — as opposed to Greek — religiosity, Isabella went one step further than Aristotle in arguing not that “A slave is a property with a soul”, but that they were essentially soulless, like animals, and therefore their labour could not be lost to the Church through manumission by conversion. Consequently, millions of Caribs perished mining in Columbus’s silver mines in less than a decade, best illustrating who was ‘savage’ and who best benefited from “the law of nations”.

This is a key point; as US retaliation for ‘terrorism’ is orders of magnitude greater than the initial terrorist act or even what they’re capable of, so the ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ is recast as a projection of the Civiliser’s own unrestrained violence, their true savagery alibied. In his mythopaeic Against History, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman points to the transformation of wilderness from being simply a place of Nature outside human control to a place of subjective terror, of potential ambush, due to the introduction of Civilised warfare and its unreasoning fears to it:[116]

The world outside Ur is not the wilderness our word will designate. Their wilderness clearly is not the forest or desert, the plants or animals, since the nature-loving temple residents have all these brought into the city.

Could it be that their wilderness is the wilderness created by the Lugal [war leader] and his men; the battlefields surrounding all of Sumer’s towns, the settings of raids and counter-raids, the scenes of torture, slaughter and capture.

If the wild was not itself ‘savage’, it might be a desirable alternative to Civilisation — indeed, to the survivalist Right, its supposed Darwinian savagery is precisely why it is desirable — and in any case, this paranoid perception where the Civilisers’ violence is attributed to what they designate non-Civilised as it is beyond their control rationalises its destruction in the name of ‘self defence’.

Forgive the stridency of the example — though it is easier to see what is typical when an example is falsely presented as exceptional — but Nazi imperialism and its inevitably atrocious consequences were characterised by exactly such paranoid projection, which presented the German people as surrounded by overwhelming numbers of communists and other supposed untermenschen as well as a nonexistent ‘world conspiracy’ of Jews, with real genocide ‘justified’ as a response to this projected, imaginary threat.

To make this threat ‘real’, the Nazis even faked incidents, burning the Reichstag (the German parliament) in 1936 and then blaming their own handiwork on ‘red savagery’, the better to reinforce their own tyranny. Though such reasoning verged on the clinically insane, it perfectly suited the aggressive ideolgy and expansionist aims of a clinically insane state, not that the Nazis have been the only such state evident in modern times....

Unveiling the Myth

The language used to describe modern terrorists exactly matches that used to describe the Medieval wild men. John Pilger evokes the familiar Washington media’s stereotype of “Flag-burning, embassy-storming, bearded, wild men of Islam”[117] [my emphasis] whilst Likud zealot Benjamin Netanyahu referred to hijackers as “wild beasts that prowl our airways and waterways”[118] and as GAL carried out their merciless campaign of cross-border assassination of Basque activists, the Madrid press wrote most tellingly of:[119]

The activists of ETA, who are not men, who are beasts... No human rights come into play when a tiger must be hunted. The tiger is searched after, is hounded, is captured, and if necessary is killed.

The ETA fighters assassinated were, of course, human beings and not tigers — the point is they were equated with these animals symbolically, as peculiarly savage creatures of the wilderness, even though tigers, too, rarely pose a real threat to humans not encroaching on their own territory and are really the ones disproportionately threatened by such encroachment.

Uncivilised humans, animals and Nature itself are equated, united in being seen as soulless and chaotic, fit only to be ordered and controlled by law-making humans for their own benefit. This is the lesson of that other great Christian garden myth, that of God giving Adam mastery over Nature in Eden. How much this stereotype has been employed to characterise terrorists as chaotic forces of Nature in need of human mastery is illustrated by Malcolm Timbers’ Jungian analysis of terrorism as infantile and unconscious:[120]

By drawing on the works of Jung and Nietzsche, I am attempting to show that the terrorist is influenced by an archetypal element in Nature that is historically represented by the god Dionysus in an extreme, distorted sense, while, in this game, the West represents an extreme and distorted Apollonian element as a civilization bent on dominating and exploiting Nature... I personally knew a FLQ terrorist[121] who also talked a lot about ecology and spoke of the Earth unconsciously, in an infantile manner, as a metaphor for the mother’s body. That is, mentally he was in the Oedipal role of the hero-son saving the Earth / Mother from being ravished by the evil Father / Capitalism.

It is a natural conclusion that if Man (and they mean ‘Man’) can regulate ‘soulless’ Nature better than it can itself after billions of years evolving its own self-regulation, and if simple societies stable for millennia are better run by Civilisers than by their own people (who, though mature adults with social skills far in advance of the Civilisers, are conveniently “like children” in need of a patriarch), so terrorists are prey to unconscious destructive urges and too need to be ruled or crushed.

There is no question of intrinsic value here, that in all humility the Civilisers might possibly be the ones that are in the wrong. Like Freud, Jung believed we had to suppress what is natural and spontaneous, instinctual, in us in order to cooperate and create ‘shining cities’, higher consciousness and higher Civilisation. In fact fantasies of omnipotence and of being at the centre of a universe made solely for oneself is more typically associated with infantile consciousness and more exactly typifies the mentality of the Civiliser, the conquerer, the engineer, bending the whole world to their own control.

If these arguments are starting to ring bells with some readers, it’s because they are very familiar. Dan Quinn concludes Ishmael by mythologically noting:[122]

The Takers’ [Civilisers] story is, ‘The gods made the world for man, but they botched the job, so we had to take matters into own own, more competent hands.’ The Leavers’ story is, ‘The gods made man for the world, the same way they made salmon and sparrows and rabbits for the world; this seems to have worked pretty well so far, so we can take it easy and leave the running of the world to the gods.

This, then, is the unveiling: the ‘war on terror’ is a misnomer. The Civilisers’ true motive is to exert absolute control over the entire world, over what is wild in human nature and beyond it — even at the expense of their own laws. Terrorism is selected only because it is a particularly distasteful manifestation of natural resistance to their encroachments, an obstacle to the further accumulation of the monopoly of violence on behalf of the State. The ‘war on terror’ is then actually a war on freedom and a war on Nature (including even human nature), an attempt to eliminate everything not under the control of a select few from the world. Terrorists are not the infantile, chaotic forces of Nature anti-terrorists pretend — in fact, typically they are tainted by the same authoritarian drives as those they seek to ‘liberate’ the rest of us from third-hand — but in the realm of the symbolic, what is truly real has long been eclipsed by its representation. For the world-eating Civilisers, their projections of free humanity are monstrous, cannibalistic — but even these are preferable to those, like Terminators, that “can’t be bought off, can’t be stopped, that just keep coming”.

In his Technological Society, ex-French Resistance fighter Jacques Ellul pointed out that for a security state to work effectively, everyone must be treated as a potential threat, the better to identify and neutralise actual threats. Unfortunately, the machine logic of Efficiency means any resistance to this, stemming from a desire for autonomy, even privacy, moves citizens into the ‘threat’ category and tightens the security state’s intolerant definitions of ‘terrorism’ still further.

As the supposed bearers of social disorder, today’s terrorists are called monsters. Tomorrow, inevitably, we will all be called terrorists. To truly live as free human beings, we are given no option but to challenge this man-made prison of a society and to fight. In fighting, however, we must never forget how to live, never allow them to reduce us to the level of symbolic cyphers.

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Counter Culture?

The Malleus Maleficarum — The Hammer of Witches: A Review

The Malleus Maleficarum — The Hammer of Witches: a review of the book by Heinrich Kramer and Jacobus Sprenger as translated by Rev. Montague Summers

Witch-hunt: an investigation of or campaign against dissenters (as political opponents) conducted on the pretext of protecting the public welfare.

Heretic: From the Greek, “able to choose”, characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards It was the time when European men enslaved 11 to 15 million Africans and caused 70 million deaths of Indians in the so-called New World.

The “Burning Times” here in Europe when millions of their own inhabitants were tortured and killed, and the last vestiges of our wild ancestry wiped out. A systematic persecution of all dissenters, political opponents to the church/state and deviators from the civilised norm.

And Malleus Maleficarum was the book on every Judge’s bench. The handbook for every self-appointed Inquisitor, every sanctimonius christian, every law-abiding citizen. An inspirer of fear and distrust, rationalising the intrusion of christian civilised society into every corner of the earth.

The book is divided into three parts. The first ponders such questions as: “If it be in Accordance with the Catholic Faith to maintain that in Order to bring about some Effect of Magic, the Devil must intimately cooperate with the Witch, or whether one without the other, that is to say, the Devil without the Witch, or conversely, could produce such an effect.” (That’s just a sample so you can see how turgid these men were)

The second describes all the virile member/bestial transformations kind of stuff and the third relates to the judicial proceedings in both the ecclesiastical and civil courts. This covers the way the arrest, imprisonment, torture and sentencing should be carried out. One section deals specifically with “the Trial with redhot irons”

Everything by the book, by the letter of the law.

It doesn’t mention the sexual assault and rape carried out regularly by prison guards and interrogators, but you know that wouldn’t have bothered Frs. Kramer and Sprenger anyway. Their anti-women stance is extreme even by the church’s standards and they have the usual civilised obsession with sex.

To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs 30: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.

The accused witch must be “often and frequently exposed to torture. If after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he [the inquisitor] should have other engines of torture brought before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does not confess. If then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture must be continued.” If she remained obdurate, “she is not to be altogether released, but must be sent to the squalor of prison for a year, and be tortured, and be examined very often, especially on the more Holy Days.”

All perfectly reasonable.

The edition reviewed here has Pope ‘Innocent’ VIII’s Papal Bull endorsing it. Pope Innocent VIII had two kids — his son married a daughter of Lorenzo de Medici and his daughter married Gherardo Uso de Mare, a very wealthy Genoese merchant who was also Papal Treasurer. He feared anarchy like every wealthy businessman does and was obviously very concious of the ways to influence and brainwash people. To get them afraid and docile, more manageable to the Holy Empire, he and his cronies manufactured the witchcraze so they could subdue rebellions, destroy dissent and snatch as much land as they could. (All witches had their property confiscated by the church, none was ever given back)

Published in 1486, there were 13 editions by 1520, 16 more by 1669 and translations into German, French, Italian, and English. One of the most widely read books along with the Bible, it was pushed with all the ignorant fervour you now get with the “War on Terror”, post 9–11.

Then, as now, there were many people unwilling to give up their ways and land. Many heretical movements sprung up, especially in German-speaking areas where the witch hunts were particularly concentrated.

And there were families and individuals who were happy with their pagan ways, or non-religious ways, and didn’t buckle easily to the christian plunderers. The church resorted to increasingly violent measures to whip these heretics back in line.

The Inquisition itself was established by Pope Gregory IX in 1233 to eliminate the Cathars[123] and other threats to church power. This mainly meant persecuting heretics labelled the “Free Spirit Movement”, a convenient banner for a highly diverse flourishing of animist or mystic thought.

One member of the Free Spirit movement was interviewed by German mystic Heinrich Suso in 1330:

Whence have you come? I come from nowhere. Tell me what are you? I am not. What do you wish? I do not wish. Tell me what is your name? I am called Nameless Wildness. Where does your insight lead? Into untrammelled freedom.

In the early thirteenth century, David of Dinant taught that “God and Matter and Mind are one substance.” and Amalric of Bena held that “God was the formal principle of all things, and that every single person was as much God as was Christ.” The works of both men were condemned as heretical and burned. A group of fourteen clerics, which included Amalric’s secretary, rubbished the notion of sin and began to preach “all things are One, because whatever is, is God.” In 1210 they were burned at the stake.[124]

Things were beginning to intensify by the 13^th and 14^th centuries and the church compiled lists to be used as handbooks in the persecution of dissenters which included the following “errors” of heretics:

A man unified with God could rob from others, could lie or perjure himself without sin, and, if a servant, could give away the property of his master without license. More than that, the perfect could eat in secret as much and whatever they wished and could avoid work.... There is no need for any mediation on the part of the clergy or any need to seek counsel from learned men.” and “he could exceed the traditional bounds of charity and arrive at a state beyondgood and evil.”

The lists of course have the usual sexual stuff with most heresies encouraging “the satisfaction of the desires of the flesh in every way”[125] The Ad Nostrum (another list) mentions more ‘errors’ propounded by heretics: “He need not honor his parents nor work with his hands, and he can receive alms, even if not in orders, or indeed steal, since all property is held in common.” They also preached that man should follow his own interior instincts rather than the Gospels and those free in spirit can do whatever they wish with their bodies without sin. A perfect woman need not obey her husband and all should be released from servitude including those who had been previously bound to a king or other lord.

These animist anarchist ideas were the leftovers from our wild past. They continued to be spread and lived throughout Europe and many people were prepared to die rather than surrender to civilised christian morality.

It is wise to remember that when the word “God” is used, the heretics and witches do not mean it in the same sense as christians and other religious do. Although the American Indians had no concept of “God” their ideas of the Life-force or animating spirit were labelled “God” by modern anthropologists. Even by calling it Life-force I am not doing justice to the idea animists have of Life.

It is worth bearing this difficulty in mind when reading heretical texts or christian versions of them. “God” is an easily understood and generally accepted way to talk about the LifeForce, but the heretical idea of “God” and the religious one of it are utterly different.

Most of the stuff I found on the web about heretics and witches is written by academics who don’t have any idea what animism is about and the accounts we have of heretical thought or witchcraft come from hostile church sources, especially Inquisitorial records. So we have to read a lot between the lines to figure out what might have been going on.

“Grant to nature all that it desires without remorse of conscience.” — Marguerite Porete[126]

“Nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin.” — Johann Hartmann

“Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” — John of Brünn

The only thing we can be certain of is that there was a huge diversity in heretical thought. While there are obvious similarities between groups and individuals, there was no set doctrine, no fixed dogmas — only beliefs as individual and varied as you can imagine.[127]

According to a Franciscan chronicler, when three heretics were arrested and interrogated in Constance in 1339. “They confessed to more than thirty errors so vile that they made their audience sick.... One was that there was as much divinity or divine goodness in a louse as in man or any other creature, another that communion bread should be served to pigs. They also supposedly maintained that if a man and a woman had sexual intercourse on an altar at the same time as the consecration of the host both acts would have the same worth.[128]

Another group called the Adamites wanted to live as Adam and Eve did before the Fall into civilisation.

According to John of Viktring, men and women of various classes assembled at midnight in an underground hideaway which they named a temple. There Walter, ‘a priest of the devil,’ said mass and delivered a sermon. Then the assembly put out the lights, chose partners, and feasted, danced, and fornicated. This, they said, was the state of paradise in which Adam and Eve lived before the fall.[129]

Then there was the more normal beghards and beguines who believed a lot of christian stuff, but embarassed the church by actually living as christ supposedly had done. They abandoned all possessions, wandering around the country preaching about the corruption and wealth of the church. Individuals varied in how revolutionary their teachings were — some said that the church was a useless parasite that should be disbanded, others were more reformist and hoped the church would just punish its corrupt clergy.

The degree to which other people described as “Free Spirits” were revolutionary or reformist is not clear. The texts that have survived — very few — were often watered down versions of what was preached by nonliterary heretics. It’s impossible really to know how many revolutionary heretics were around in the Middle Ages or to know how much of their ideas that have survived have been altered or diluted. Also, taking into account only the standard “Free Spirit Movement” texts would be like a person in fifty years trying to analyse our ‘movement’ (such as it is!) by looking only at Greenpeace press statements.

Many of the Free Spirits were anarchic revolutionaries, advocating a life free of church/state interference. And then again many were christian and/or very wishy-washy — like modern hippies — watering down their work to try to escape the noose or stake. But the church burnt them all anyway, not allowing any deviation from their civilised codes.

These ‘enemies of the church’ were usually called heretics before Malleus Maleficarum and witches afterwards.[130] For propaganda purposes it was perhaps easier to generate fear and suspicion of witches — because of their ‘supernatural’ powers they can kill cattle, shrivel up your willy, etc. The Malleus Maleficarum makes it clear that witches regularly destroy property, sicken livestock and generally behave maelevolently towards the community.

With the publicattion of Malleus the witch-hunts intensified and some reckon up to four million were killed, though the true number will never be known. The death rate was highest in German-speaking places, and their immediate neighbors, especially Poland. Witch hunts were frequent in Scotland and England, but there were almost none in Ireland. (They didn’t need an excuse there — the English just killed everyone who disagreed with them.) They were not widespread in Russia and rare in Iceland and Portugal, and while there were many investigations in Italy and Spain, few were executed. Although the witch hunts were at their height in Europe in the Middle Ages there were other notable campaigns of persecution against witches. For example, in 367 a crusade was launched in the East with many magicians, ‘soothsayers’ (‘truth tellers’) and others killed. Every major religion preached against witchcraft — even Manichism had Ten commandments, one of which forbade the practice of magic.

Civilised people have always feared witches and magick as it can unleash unpredictable energies and has an anarchic, un-lawful nature. In early Constantinople a man named Sopater was executed for “binding the winds by magic” causing the cargo-bearing ships to crash. We will never know to what extent many of the later witches and heretics were causing trouble, sabotaging property, etc. If we never hear of the acts of the ELF in the national media now, then how would be know of acts carried out hundreds of years ago by uncompliant individuals and groups?

With the obliteration of witches went knowledge of our herbs and healing methods — handy for the christian doctors then anxious to gain money and power. Birthing, abortion, infanticide and contraception were other skills either made illegal or appropriated by institutional professionalism. Women especially found any power they had as village midwife and healer taken off them.[131] Traditional community bonds disintegrated and in Sweden, for example, in 1664, church ordinances increased the penalty for certain offenses from fines to corporal or even capital punishment. These “crimes” included premarital sex, communal feasts and processions, public singing and dancing, may poles, and wedding processions — long-held customary traditions.

The distrust and suspicion generated by the witch-hunts severely eroded traditional ways of life. People were afraid to talk to anyone who might turn out to be a witch, as under torture many were made to inform on friends and neighbours. Civilised people, always herdish animals, became even more domesticated — paranoid, isolated individuals, living in fear of the courts and clergy. The world they created was one of fear and isolation, where anyone outside the norm was shunned. It was a form of selective breeding as the trouble-makers, thinkers and healers were bred out and the conformist collaborators populated Europe.

Diabolus means slander or enmity. Hence Satan is ‘the slanderer’, ‘the enemy’. Now they call them “terrorists” — the forest peoples still left on earth who fight to keep their forest home, the earth liberation front fighting to slow down the destruction in their home, the individuals fighting many battles to hold onto some of their freedom.

It reaches ever more ridiculous proportions, as they tighten their grip over all life. They, like their Inquisitor fathers, can’t afford to leave any people live as an example contrary to their doctrine. And of course they want the land — the timber, oil, gas.... They dress it up in press releases as ‘terrorism’ to justify their plunder and murder, and with the mention of “terrorists” think they’ve a license to do anything to protect their interests, just like years ago they mentioned “witches”[132]

Washington-AP — The head of the international police agency Interpol wants a worldwide crackdown on music and software piracy. He says the illicit proceeds are helping fund terrorist networks, including al-Qaida and Hezbollah. Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble is calling for stepped-up efforts to trace the proceeds of pirated CD’s, DVD’s, computer software, and counterfeit clothing and cigarettes.

The language of hypocrites and liars. Pretending their money-making exploits are matters of national security. Pretending their plunder of oil and timber is for the good of ‘undeveloped’ thirdworlders. Their war against Life, all life, goes on. Their propaganda attempting to excuse it gets ever more elaborate.

Just as the majority of people kept their heads down and pointed the finger and hid behind rational excuses, listening to the screams of their neighbours, watching the flames lick their freedoms to ashes, so now the majority go along with the persecution of forest people, anarchists, and other heretics. They allow themselves to be hypnotised by television, cinema, newspapers, radio, billboards... as the propaganda machine reaches into every home, every mind.

And they fear the non-normal realities. They believe in devils and evil and all that rubbish. They shun the shadow worlds and paranormal ways.[133] They subdue their own wild natures and train themselves to see only their solid, measurable, mundane reality, persecuting anyone who doesn’t agree with their civilisation dogma. They live lives completely devoid of freedom, of intuition of Life, of forest ways. Disconnected from all the rythms of nature, alienated from their true wild selves, separate from all other life-forms.

Religion perverted our animist experiences into rigid codes and strict laws. Spontaneous experiences of the wonder of Life became book-bound commandments. Wild outdoor gatherings became litanys in stone churches. Sexual pleasures were dulled to marriage.

Magick became a childish triviality — like Harry Potter and Sabrina the Witch, sanitising witchcraft beyond recognition. The idea of magick being a technique to focus on nonnormal realities is completely absent in most modern people. The witch hunts largely succeeded in their systematic attempt to wipe out any knowledge of that which is beyond words. That which we know intuitively.[134]

Civilisation has always been afraid of those who ‘know’ (‘Witch’ comes from wit: ‘to know’), those who seek the truth behind propaganda lies, those who know all imposed rules are bullshit, designed to rob us of our freedom.

They said “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, but we do live on. In every digger trashed, every lab burnt down, every single act of defiance; in every experience of ‘that which is beyond words’, every sensing of Life’s mystery and power, every blow struck against the chains of civilisation,

We live. We live.

LIFESTYLE

WILD SWIMMING

Of course, swimming in natural settings is our common human heritage—and perhaps our origin—but now, inspired by Resurgence contributor and Schumacher College lecturer Roger Deakin’s 1990 Waterlog (ISBN: 0099282550), a rising tide of Nature-lovers are taking to UK’s ponds, rivers and lakes. Describing wild swimming’s appeal, Deakin writes:

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is: water. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. The swimmer experiences the terror and bliss of being born.

So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries; the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land and your sense of the present is overwhelming.

Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are sign-posted, labelled and officially ‘interpreted’, turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official versions of things.

Needless to say, officialdom is not happy about all this unprofitable, uncontrolled sensual pleasure—never mind “regain[ing]... what is old and wild”—and is doing its hopeless best to regulate or ban it.

Absurdly arguing they’ll be liable for the actions of wild swimmers who sneak over their fences on their own initiative, Buckinghamshire County Council have banned all unauthorised swimming on their property. Others have settled for the lesser measure if posting ‘no swimming’ signs at every particularly beloved watering places, a precaution heartily mocked by the Digger’s annual ‘most anal sign’ award (‘Digger’ here being a pun, naming both members of the archaeological labourers union and the com- mutarian followers of Gerard Winstanley centuries before).

Thus, their website carries pics of signs sternly warning against "deep water" ("so good for diving in") with "submerged rocks" beneath it ("too deep to cause harm"). Another warns of the dangers of rat-borne Weils disease ("as not recognised by the European Water Quality directive") because, of course, unmediated contact with Nature is contaminating and ‘dirty’ as far as these body-hating, desk-bound bureaucrats are concerned. The Digger even posts translated ‘no swimming’ signs encountered whilst holidaying in the "socialist republic" of Vietnam, a lesson in itself.

Knowing the natural world enough to interact with it on its own terms is part of the appeal of wild swimming, but wise, practical tips are included on the Digger site too: check for depth, current, temperature and glass. Watch out for potentially electrocuting exposed cables nearby and--a bigger risk on these densely- populated islands--your clothes in case some prankster runs off with them!

Mercifully no-one is playing out their perverse organisational obsessions by establishing some chartered, rulebound ‘Wild Swimming Association’ (witness the Ramblers for a depressing dry-land contrast). It’s just people going out alone or with mates ‘doing what comes naturally’ and if at a banned spot, well, they can’t watch us all and such defiance makes any prohibiting law or regulation a dead letter anyway...

NEWZINES

MANUFACTURING DISSENT - PRISON WRITINGS OF ANARCHIST ROB LOS RICOS.

Regular readers should be familiar with Rob’s writing already. He has been contributing to Green Anarchist as well as other anarchist zines, such as ‘Anarchy — A Journal of Desire Armed’ for some time. This is Rob’s third zine since his incarceration some three years ago and in my view the best (the first two were ‘Rob the Rich’ and ‘Fuck You Bearden’) .

The production quality and layout of ‘Manufacturing Dissent’ is great but more importantly it reads really well. Illustrated throughout are a whole host of articles by Rob that put together here in one collection read like they flow together well.

There is some information on Rob’s life-history in the introduction, some backround to the june 18th 1999 riot in Eugene that led to Rob’s subsequent imprisonment, articles on illegalism, chaos, direct action and even Rob Los Ricos Vs Chumbawamba.

It’s definitely worth going out and getting this whether you’ve read Rob’s other zines or not as there is a lot of new stuff in here.

VEG@NARSI. PRICE FROM mailto:VEGANARSI@MAIL.COM][VEGANARSI@MAIL.COM.

Veg@narsi is a green anarchist zine from Turkey. It apparently includes green anarchist, primitivist and veganarchist articles and has had four issues since the project was started in 2000.

However I don’t understand Turkish so you will have to be satisfied with the description of this zine as a fairly chunky cut and paste job jam packed full of graphics and articles.

The author translates a lot of stuff from english language anti-civilization websites and distributes them through this zine. it certainly seems like a project worth supporting and maybe someone out there can even translate the odd article from turkish? Get in touch at the email address above.

Many more reviews in next issue...!

G.A. THE ZINE

GREEN ANARCHIST SAYS

AN OPEN FORUM

At this years Earth First! Gathering, at a well-attended meeting of anacho-primitvists from across Europe—including the hosts of this May’s anti-civilisation conferance in Barcelona—GA was enthusuastically welcomed as an open AP forum.

Of course we welcome such an initiative, though GA has served as a forum for free discussion of AP and direct action for the best part of a decade, initially sharing this responsibility with the Anarcho- Primitivist Network’s Missing Link (founded by John Moore and Leigh Starcross out of Ian Bone’s 1994 Anarchy In the UK festival) and certainly not seeking to be some sort of exclusive voice now.

As the last three issues’ editorials have shown, we are commited to free speech in a way those carrying such claims on their mastheads are not. Too many movement publications are commited to free speech for them- selves—even demanding it of other publications more principled than themselves—but will refuse a word’s space to their critics, even in response to blatant defamations.

In our experience,those keenest to shout “censor”, “liar” or “sectarian” at others are typically also those most afraid of the plain truth about themselves seeing print. Some even elevate this refusal to debate with those they can’t refute into a political strategy, hoping readers aren’t well-read enough to know the full picture and find such glaring omissions laughable indictments in themselves.

More insiduous are those who are- maintaining that printing contrary opinions is ‘divisive’ or ‘unrepresentative of the movement’—as they see it, of course—which means that only what is unchanging and unchallenging ever sees light of day, the very opposite of revolutionary dialectic.

Such arguments are often used in the most absurdly self-serving way—one north American eco-action journal so keen not to ‘upset the apple cart’ that they regularly rejected ‘unrepresentative’ contributions (including a nearworld exclusive) in favour of those from a banal local contributor who happened to generously give them access to her swimming pool!

If there are ‘divisions’ in a movement, there is usually good reason for them, of otherwise unacknowledged power inequalities. If opinions are deemed ‘unrepresentative’, then ’ware those claiming they ‘represent’ the movement! What is so irreproachably attractive about cultivating illusions of ‘unity’ at such costs anyway - except to wannabe politicians? As revolutionaries seeking to transcend all mediation, we should at least deal with realities, not their mis/representation.

Our view is that we aren’t wiser than the movement Green Anarchist is situated in, certainly not wise enough to decide what should and shouldn’t be said, even if it appears inarticulate or stupid to us as individuals.

We’re just here to provide space for it to speak for itself in all its diversity and for readers to decide for themselves who is inarticulate, stupid or just plain wrong and contribute their own responses in turn.

We are not Leninists, believing we can somehow nurture free thought and a free society under the heavy hand of ‘provisional’ / ‘transitional’ censorship, even if—the most typical but patronising rationalisation from such types—this makes for the best propaganda.

Green Anarchist 71’s deadline is around April 2004. We’re very keen to open Green Anarchist out beyond the usual circle of editors and regular contributors, so it’d be good to get a meeting together before then to discuss future input to the mag, as well as mutual cooperation on ideas, projects and action. In addition to the paper, Green Anarchist now has a much-expanded website and on-line discussion forum for easier reader access and rapid reaction to events between issues and we’ll shortly be launching our own newsgroup. Be in touch now!

TWO DECADES OF DISORDER

Come 2004, Green Anarchist will have been publishing for twenty years. It’s certainly come a long way since the eclectic Greenzine that came out of Easter ‘84’s Stop the City demo and subsequent Poison Girls’ benefit.

We’ll be celebrating this with a retrospective next issue, Green Anarchist 71, and we’re inviting reminiscences from early contributors now. Hear from you soon!

NEXT ISSUE: THE VOYEUR SOCIETY

It seems that we live in an ever more voyeuristic society. Surveillance is encroaching more and more on many parts of our daily lives. From chips in Gillette razors to chips in the clothes you buy.

From ‘reality’ TV shows to the wide array of webcam websites. Everything from piss-cams to internal-cams! It appears that pretty soon every part of modern life will be either on camera, on a database or on record somewhere.

People seem unhappy just getting on with their daily existence, they need to be seen to be living. So instead of people getting on with living they’re own lives in pursuit of their desires, they sit at home watching other people on television through big brother style programmes getting on with theirs. Mostly, it seems, in the hope that someone will get naked or people will fall out and have a fight More and more people seem happy to settle for a simulation of a life with real

experiences, happy with a mediated world of virtuality. It’s not just a simple case of state surveillance Big Brother style, but a case of ‘self-surveillance’.

An increasingly alienated world of mirages engulfs us. From ID cards through RFID chip technology, store loyalty cards and GPS tracking systems to mindlessly banal ‘reality’ TV shows, webcams and CCTV. We want your articles on the rise of this voyeur society

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• Ecotopia -

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• Coalition Against Civilization P.O. Box 835, Greensburg, PA 15601 United States

• http://www.blackandgreen.org/][www.blackandgreen.org/

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GREEN ANARCHY NOW

WHO ARE WE?

The State spent £10m jailing GA’s editors in an attempt to shut us up. We’re still here...

WHY SMASH CIVILISATION?

Civilisation is the exploitation of mass society. Specialisation, division of labour creates hierarchies to maintain the complex web of production and consumption that is our techno-industrial mass society.

Exploitation divides mass society and the individual on the grounds of class, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference. Mass society can’t be reformed. It must be replaced.

DISINTEGRATION IS BEAUTIFUL

In small communities each person is respected as an autonomous individual. Self-determination replaces hierarchy and so the city ends. Mass can’t fight mass. The Left’s living proof.

LAND OR DEATH

All life derives from the land

.Civilisation alienates us from the Earth using nationhood and property law. We must take back the land and living self-sufficiently, re-establishing our relationship with the Earth. Those of us who are most exploited by Civilisation live in the South, the Third World, the fruits of our labour are exported to the rich North.

We have nothing to lose in fighting for self-governing, self-sufficient small communities. Both North and South we need to expand our culture of resistance to free ourselves from alienation from our Earth..

DIRECT ACTION

Build an alternative green and black eco-nomy and enjoy yourselves in the smashing of banks, multinationals, military bases, labs, exploiters, bigots and developers. Organise underground in networks of autonomous small groups.

Green Anarchist,

BCM 1715,

London

WC1N 3XX, UK mailto:info@greenanarchist.org][info@greenanarchist.org

Letters

LETTER FROM THE U’WA PEOPLE CURRENTLY UNDER OCCUPATION BY THE COLUMBIAN STATE

U’wa Communique

The U’wa people are tired of the proliferation of false promises that the Colombian government has made to us. We, the U’wa, are the guardians of this, our ancestral territory of thousands of years, and each day, the government and corporations are violating our sacred territory.

According to the State, indigenous people are the minority, but we, the U’wa, say that we are only a minority in the white society; in reality, we are the majority, because we know and live with Nature. Because of this, the father and mother of the sky, and all of the spirits of nature, care for and protect our struggle to defend the natural world, even if it means that we lay down our own lives.

It is for this reason that the U’wa have one Law only, unchanging and inviolable; the Law that was given to us by the creator, which is unwritten and yet woven into our cultural practices: to protect Nature, to love her, to care for her, and to use her gifts well. But the government follows other laws, and the laws that they have made are changeable and breakable, so that frequently they will do away with those laws they do not favor. This is why Colombia is a country wherein so many laws fail; laws are violated, and written by a minority for everyone to follow, while the Law of the U’wa passes from one generation to the next, unaltered.

As the government has invented its Law, they therefore say that the riches of the ground and beneath the ground belong to the State; and now, we ask, “Who made the Earth and its riches, the water, the plants, mountains, the sun, the moon, the stars? Who made man himself? Where are the tools that they use to destroy nature taken from? This is to say, where do men get the materials that they use to age the world and bring destruction to it? Moreover, we want them to demonstrate for us that their laws and codes are capable of creating anything like the earth that we live in; if they cannot, then they have no claim to ownership of the Earth and its riches.

This is why we require that the Government and the industries respect the sacred ancestral territory. And not only should they give respect to our ancestral grounds and to those titles given to the U’wa under colonialism, they should see that the U’wa also constitute a State, with our own laws and codes to manage and protect nature.

We will continue defending our ancestral territory, though we have already been victims of kidnapping, torture and death. We have lost a boy and three indigenous rights advocates from North America (Ingrid Washinawatok, Lahena’e Gay, and Terence Freitas) who came to support the U’wa cause. How long will it be until we are left in peace? Or will they drive to extinction the entire U’wa people, so that they can take all of the resources in our sacred ancestral territory?

If the company takes all of the resources of our Mother Earth, where are they going to get the materials they need to exploit the riches of the ground and the substrate? What will happen? And where are we going to live? Under the earth, in the air, in the sky? When nature and the creator of this world and those forces beyond it send their punishment for the disrespect of the natural world, their punishment will not be communicated to anyone; no one will know the day and hour of the destruction of the Earth.

If the government and the company think that money is God, as well as progress and development, then the god of money will save their lives while the U’wa will die in the defense of nature; therefore, the U’wa will not go to toil for industry. We are born to die or to live, and no single human being may save himself, or defy the rule of God, or of Nature. Perhaps if the company and the government have faith in their Money God, and if he really exists, he will save them, making another world for them to destroy; if he does not, they will all die.

Historically, the territory of Indigenous Peoples was ample, limitless; we were free to go to any part of the indigenous territory in the Americas, from North America to Chile, and beyond. We did this without private interest; we traveled to exchange gifts, and to learn each other’s customs.

But when the Spanish invaders arrived, they changed all of this, and now we live on tiny, limited parcels of land. Currently, they are trying to put an end to our culture through their invasions: through the Church, industry, and the government, as well as those who compete to strip our sacred territory in order to get petroleum and the other resources above and beneath the ground.

We the U’wa demand that the government, oil companies, colonists, and armed groups respect our sacred territory, and that white society’s abuse of our daughters, mothers, and wives is halted- we want no more of the Mestiziation which is the result of the Spanish invasion and the rape of our women.

We ask you whites: are you not yourselves descended from indigenous ancestors? You are. Therefore help us to protect our culture and cease the abuse of this planet, which is home to us all. Before the arrival of the Spanish, white people did not exist on this continent; oceans separated this from the white world. Thanks to the Spanish, there are now white people here, and thanks to those indigenous people you coupled with, there are Mestizos who you now refuse to recognize.

Why won’t you leave our Ancestral Territory and the lands that you occupy— which is property of indigenous peoples— in PEACE? The whites who do not understand us abuse indigenous women more and more each day. Therefore we demand that the government punish whites that abuse indigenous people. This is why the government makes laws, and if this law isn’t complied with, what good are laws?

We want ECOPETROL to leave our territory, since its presence is a form of the violation of our culture. Oil is not development. Instead, it brings war, hunger, poverty, death and destruction. The government says that oil brings “progress and development”, but we the U’wa do not want our territory to become another IRAQ, and we know that oil brings progress only to a few rich and established capitalists. We don’t know where the money derived from our resources goes. It only benefits a few individuals and families.

If you do not listen to us, if you regard us only with rage, or hatred, or grudging, we the U’wa are prepared to lay down our lives when the day of invasion comes. We will die defending our territory when you send your troops to kill all of the U’was, because we are tired of receiving, from the companies and the government, so many threats to destroy our territory, its resources, and our culture.

We the U’wa have faith in God, faith in our Mother Earth, faith in the Gods of Nature, faith in the spirits of Nature, and thus we know that they will revenge the destruction of this world. We know which is the owner of this world, between you or God. And if the Earth really is the State’s, then they should control the furies of Nature, because for God, nothing is impossible.

If an U’wa disagrees with cultural principles, he is not U’wa, he isn’t anything.

—THE INDIGENOUS U’WA PEOPLE

“Cultures with principles have no price”

ROYALLY SHAFTED

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you because I believe that the Animal Rights Movement has been unjustly blamed for a very public crime staged by others. I am referring to a device taped on to a butcher’s shop window (Taylers) in Moray Way, Rise Park, Romford back in February of this year. There is also an issue of the persecution of a long-term local environmentalist.

I have phoned the anti-terrorist branch on four ocassions and been told every time that “animal activists are responsible” however we are now in September and there have been no arrests, no charges and nobody held for questioning. Howevr, the association with animal rghts activists has remained— encouraging the smearing of any green campaign in the area as “terrorism” to a political aiudience whipped-up about crime by Andrew Rosindell MP.

I had distributed leaflets in Rise Park, before the device, advertising myself as a local journalist. I had also ben accepted as the Green Party candidate in a council by-election for the ward of Rainham and Ennington. Around the same time, the build-up to a royal visit to Romford was taking place. About two weeks afer I had distributed leaflets the device was taped on the butcher’s window. It was well known by local tories that I was both involved in Green politics and campaigns. It is my suspicion that the heightened security around the royal visit was used by Andrew Rosindell MP to try and smear the Green movement by an association with terrorism. Rise Park is a tory area and they don’t want green campaigners setting themselves up as local journalists and trying to reduce their majoriy - hence, I believe, the bomb.

Also, the manager of the Romford Oxfam shop and long-term animal rights campaigner Tony Edwards was sacked after a complaint was made about him. I worked part-time in the Oxfam shop myself for a couple of years. Tony Edwards was the managr for over twelvs years and refused to take a salary to help Oxfam’s aims even further. Tony Edwards is a pacifist, a vegan and a committed environmentalist. However, somebody had him expelled from his position. At no time before Andrew Rosindell became an MP had Tony Edwards come under attack in any way. At no time before Andrew Rosindell became an MP had a bomb been planted in my local butcher’s shop— and all within the space of a few months—designed to coincide with the first ever official visit by the Queen to Romford. Andrew Rosindell MP is an ardent royalist who has ben accused many times of having links with extreme right-wing terrorist groups.

Send your letters to Oxford Green Anarchists, BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX, but remember:-

• We print all letters received on a ‘no censorship, no endorsement’ basis. Your letters are your responsibility, not ours. We think readers are grown up enough to think for themselves, so won’t usually comment on letters we print — even those we don’t agree with — unless asked. The only exception to this are letters from fascists and other such bigots and pisstakers. These will be binned, though we will note their arrival.

• We will ruthlessly edit all letters we think too long or boring. So keep ‘em short so everyone can have their say too. Cut letters are marked with a [ ] with the original number of words inside the bracket.

• If you don’t want your letter, your name or your address printed, let us know.

For your general infomation, the device was reported to police on 27th February 2003, and was given the reference number CAS1439. The crime report number is 5403726/03.

Yous faithfully,

David Peacock, Director, Gooseberry Pie, Romford.

TATTOOS

hi!

sorry to disturb you. I am a green anarchist I want to find a tatto models about green-anarchy, anarchy, animal-earth liberation, primitivism and vegetarianism that I can make I am searching tatto models. if you know a site can you direct me towards that site...

and I am searching the graphichs of hammer and monkeywrenchs.

please help rne^.

mailto:fourteenyears@hotmail.com][fourteenyears@hotmail.com

STREETSELL GA

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Back Page News

BAYER DOWN BUT NOT OUT MEET THE

A key GM crop developer, Bayer, has decided to halt UK trials of genetically modified plants. The move is seen as a major blow to the industry. Bayer was the last company carrying out GM trials in the UK, though it said yesterday it hoped to start up again soon when conditions were ‘more favourable’.

Until last week, Bayer CropScience, Bayer’s crop subsidiary, believed it was close to a deal that would allow GM crop test sites—which are regularly destroyed by protesters—to be kept secret. The Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment had said this was ‘acceptable in terms of risk assessment’, as one might expect of industry stooges, but at the last minute the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told Bayer it would not support this change in regulations.

After many years of night-time crop trashings, and hundreds of arrests and raids, with the withdrawal of Bayer all the companies doing trials of Genetically Engineered crops in the UK have pulled out.

Most GM crop trials carried out over the past few years have been sabotaged, not only those of Bayer. Other companies have pulled out. Now Bayer, the last to continue with them, has decided to call it a day. The current ‘brain drain’ of greedy british agricultural scientists to the US and Canada is now likely to intensify. Good riddance too.

Although this is good news, it doesn’t mean that Bayer have pulled out of GM completely, just that they’re not going to do any more trials in the UK this season—they can still potentially produce the 9 seeds that are due to be commercially grown. However, it shows they’re on the retreat already and with continued pressure they ’ 11 abandon their plans for GM in the UK altogether.

www.stopbayergm.org/

NEW BOSS-

The African National Congress government is using colonial-era principles to justify refusing to hand back a lucrative South African diamond mine to the tribes who originally lived on the land.

In a case with huge constitutional and financial implications, the Nama community has accused the government of being as racist as the whites who created apartheid.

The Nama once lived at Alexander Bay, on South Africa’s north-western coast, but were evicted from the land after diamonds were discovered there in 1925. Since then tlie mine has produced millions of carats, and tlie tribe is demanding compensation which could run in to billions of pounds, as well as the return of their land.

But lawyers representing the ANC in court cited an old, colonial-era principle, claiming that tlie Nama were so “uncivilised” that they could not enjoy any land rights. Citing tlie British principle of terra nullius, empty land, the lawyers argued that even though tlie Nama lived in the area they were so backward that they did not warrant ownership rights.

ANC backers said the party remained committed to land restitution but the case of the Nama people must be opposed because it threatened to “open the floodgates” for countless frivolous claims.

Yet another outcome of yet another pointless nationalist struggle, supported and misrepresented here to us by lefties.

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The Convoy

The state's brute violence

While the Establishment turned its blind eye ( the Sunday Times didn't even mention it), its animal henchmen beat hell our of the Convoy, on its way to set up the Stonehenge Free Festival. 700 self-selected sadists, trained at Greenham and the miners' picket lines, ran amok, beating up hippies, punks and pregnant women, destroying their buses - their homes.

The state, imposed by the sword, still maintains its power by such violence. The state well knows that it cannot survive without vicious reprisal against the smallest act of defiance.

Three convoys, one from Rainbow Village, had gathered at Savernake Forest. On June 1st, about mid day, they set out for Stonehenge (the National Trust notwithstanding)

'It was a good convoy. Everyone waited for the slow ones. People on the road were waving and smiling.' (Sarah) But the police, following behind, were already picking off the stragglers.

Then four or five miles from Stonehenge, (outside the exclusion zone of the injunction) the Convoy met the massed forces of police on the biggest operation ever mounted by the Wiltshire police. The road was blocked by piled gravel with a convenient turn to the left just in front of it. The Convoy turned left, into the trap. Another right turn and into another road block of piled gravel. The trap was set.

Hearing shouting and breaking glass from the front, the buses broke through into the field on their right. But they were surrounded, trapped.

They tried to negotiate a return to Savernake. By now they realized there was no chance of them establishing the festival and they only wanted to get away with themselves and their homes in one piece. The police gave them one option only, to walk away from their vehicles and be processed by the police station. A helicopter flew above, telling them to surrender.

Sarah, with a truck and trailer, says: 'We didn't accept that. We wanted to keep with our buses, otherwise we knew they'd be trashed.'

The Convoy, listening to the police on CB radio, heard them say 'Keep them talking until you're ready, then move in.' And about 7 pm they moved in, bursting through the hedge in full riot gear, helmets, shields, truncheons, 700 of them.

ATTACKED

'Pigs on site! Pigs on site!' and everyone raced for their vehicles. 'We started to drive. Anywhere. But there was nowhere to drive to. We were just driving round and round, trying to get away from the pigs and trying not to drive into each other. Then they started breaking windows, going for the front first. Four times the truncheon banged onto my windscreen, then it broke. I was so outraged. Then my small side window went. I just stopped the truck and got out. They took my keys.' (Sarah). The police then used Sarah's truck and others to ram the buses until only one bus was left.

BEATEN UP

Nick writes: 'From our coach we could see other people being beaten up, everyone was in a panic and trying to escape. Our bus was the last to surrender. As we careered about, the police threw rocks and wood through the windows and launched out with their truncheons. Glass was flying everywhere. We were rammed and stopped, surrounded by screaming police. 'Out, Out, Out!' I was dragged by the hair through the smashed coach window, on to the ground, kicked, truncheoned. They just went mad. Then they dragged me off to an ambulance, banging me into any truck or tree that we passed. I got three stitches in my head. A boy next to me had a broken wrist, and the cop who was cuffed to him kept twisting the cuffs, making the boy scream in pain.

500 of the Convoy were taken off and charged with illegal assembly, a medieval law long disused but revived by our 'betters' specially for the occasion. They were let out on bail as long as they stayed 25 miles from Stonehenge.

Sarah's truck is a write-off. The next time I saw it, the whole front had been twisted and crunched right in. But the engine's good. I'll do something with it.

There's now a sign at the picnic area in Savernake Forest, where the Convoy has gone back to, saying that this isn't a festival and that they were just trying to put their lives back together again. But it's becoming a festival of sorts and the convoy doesn't seem nearly so sorry for themselves and the sign makes out.

A court injunction has given them seven days to leave the site, 'Just about right for getting to the stones on the Solstice!'

FROM AMESBURY THEY GOT THROUGH BUT THEN ...

A group of 600 people had gathered in Amesbury with the intent of meeting the peace convoy at Stonehenge to set up the 1985 Stonehenge festival. At about 4 pm we began marching through Amesbury towards Stonehenge. We saw virtually no police until we came within sight of the monument. The police were blocking the road, so we climbed over a fence and went cross country until we reached a field opposite Stonehenge. Some riot police (about 15) were in front of us on the other side of a fence, so to avoid a confrontation, we sat down, and some people began to put up tents.

No one had any weapons. Most people expected the police to do something, but the general feeling was 'that if we were not violent they won't be.' The police brought in reinforcements - then suddenly the attacked us without provocation, hitting the heads of the nearest people with their truncheons. The rest of us ran back in panic. We were marched back to Amesbury by violent and aggressive police. They were indiscriminately arresting people. I was truncheoned, but in the chaos he wasn't certain who he'd hit, so I avoided arrest.

The excessive violence by the police shocked most people who had no experience of this before. When we reached the Amesbury turn off, we were told to walk out of Wiltshire (interestingly towards the convoy) along the A 303. We explained many people had vehicles in Amesbury. We sneaked off the road back into Amesbury.

CONVOY AT WESTBURY

After being evicted from Savernake, the Convoy went to Westbury, where a white horse is carved into the chalk. The site was on the top of the hill where about 3,000 held a festival. Hawkwind, Here and Now and Osric Tentacles were among the bands that played. On the Solstice, instead of Stonehenge, a group of about 30 went to Glastonbury Tor for their rituals.

At Westbury 'there was a really good feeling on the site'. You could walk anywhere without feeling threatened like in a football crowd. From the site on the top of the hill the lights on the plain below, all round, reminded me of the camp fires of the Roman armies invading our iron age encampment.

Issue 71-72

Date: Mar 2004

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News

Ubiquitous Id Tags on the Way

RFID chips are being embedded in everything. Though barcodes have been with us a while, and are an accepted part of civilised life, they are relatively new and originally encountered a lot of opposition. The patent for bar codes was issued in 1952. It took twenty years before a standard for bar codes was approved, but they still didn’t catch on. Ten years later, only 15,000 suppliers were using bar codes. That changed in 1984. By 1987 — only three years later! — 75,000 suppliers were using bar codes. So what changed in 1984? Who, or what, caused the change? Wal-Mart.

When Wal-Mart talks, suppliers listen. So when Wal-Mart said that it wanted to use bar codes as a better way to manage inventory, bar codes became de rigeur. If you didn’t use bar codes, you lost Wal-Mart’s business. That’s a death knell for most of their suppliers. Walmart at that time belonged to Sam Walton, who died in 1992. The combined wealth of his heirs is almost double that of Bill Gates. This was and is an extremely powerful family.

The same thing is happening today. Walmart are pushing the uptake of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags. Invented in 1969 and patented in 1973 RFID tags are essentially microchips. Some are only 1/3 of a millimeter across. They act as transponders (transmitters/responders), always listening for a radio signal sent by transceivers, or RFID readers. When a transponder receives a certain radio query, it responds by transmitting its unique ID code, perhaps a 128-bit number, back to the transceiver. Most RFID tags don’t have batteries. Instead, they are powered by the radio signal that wakes them up and requests an answer. Visa is combining smart cards and RFID chips. These smart cards can also be incorporated into cell phones and other devices. Michelin, which manufactures 800,000 tires a day, is going to insert RFID tags into its tyres. The tag will store a unique number for each tire, a number that will be associated with the car’s VIN (Vehicle Identification Number).

The European Central Bank may embed RFID chips in the euro note. Ostensibly to combat counterfeiters and money-launderers, it would make it possible for ‘governments’ to track the passage of cash from individual to individual. Cash is the last truly anonymous way to buy and sell. With RFID tags, that anonymity would be gone. Incidentally, it is being speculated that the legalisation of cannabis will be a prerequisite to getting the mindless majority to accept the end of cash. Bear this in mind when you celebrate the inevitable ‘victory’. Obviously tagging notes is not the preferred way to perform total surveillance of transfers.

Manufacturers and retailers getting involved include Gillette (which purchased 500 million RFID tags for its razors), Home Depot, The Gap, Proctor & Gamble, Prada, Target, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. Especially Wal-Mart. Others are talking about placing RFID tags into all sensitive or important documents. In other words, those documents you’re required to have, that you aren’t allowed to live without, will be forever tagged.

Applied Digital Solutions has designed an RFID tag — called the VeriChip — for people. Only 11 mm long, it is designed to go under the skin, where it can be read from four feet away (with current technology). They sell it as a great way to keep track of children and anyone with a medical disability, but it can be used on anyone, anywhere. In May, delegates to the Chinese Communist Party Congress were required to wear an RFID-equipped badge at all times so their movements could be tracked and recorded.

Surveillance is getting easier, cheaper, smaller, and ubiquitous. You could remove the chip from your jeans, but you’d have to find it first. More menacing is the possibility of all the chips you don’t know about. Major changes are coming. The law of unintended(?) consequences is about to encounter surveillance devices smaller than the full-stop at the end of this sentence. The wet dreams of tyrants throughout the ages are about to become real.

Terror Excuse for ID Cards

The ‘terrorist threat’ to the UK will lead to ID cards being introduced “more quickly than even we anticipated”, according to ‘Prime Minister’ Tony Blair. Comments at his monthly briefing to journalists follow on from the “route map” to ID cards unveiled by the UK Passport Service in March.

“I think that the whole issue of identity cards that a few years ago were not on anyone’s agenda are very much on the political agenda here, probably more quickly even than we anticipated, and that is because we are living in a new world and with a new threat that we have to take account of,” he said.

It means the Cabinet’s deal to delay the introduction of ID cards seems to have been thrown out of the window and that Blunkett will be given the go-ahead to fast-track the project. Blair also claimed the current climate had lessened privacy concerns and that there “is no longer a civil liberties objection”.

Obviously there are objections, and both sides will argue about this till the cows come home, but what isn’t being debated is the fact that the vast majority of security experts maintain that cards will do nothing to enhance security, because every system so far invented (and thus any system the ‘government’ chooses) can be easily breached by even those with modest assets, for example by forging or stealing and altering cards. If they won’t work, what are they for?

The conclusion is hard to avoid: ID cards are for surveillance of the population as a whole, not to prevent terrorism. Together with RFID, face recognition and all the other hi-tech ‘solutions’ being introduced simultaneously, we are not far from Henry Kissinger’s dream of being able to monitor every individual at all times.

Of course “If you’re innocent you should have nothing to hide.” Tell that to the people who ticked the “Jewish” box in the Dutch census in the early 1930s.

Their government at the time could be trusted with that information. But when Hitler invaded, the Nazis had access to all those records and could use them for their own purposes.

DIARY OF DIRECT ACTION

More info: ALF Supporters Group, BM 1160, London WC1N 3XX; Arkangel, BCM 9280, London WC1N 3XX; North American ALF Supporters Group (NAALFSG), PO Box 428, Brighton, Ontario, Canada K0K 1HO; Earth First! Action Update c/o PO Box 2971, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 2TT; and Earth First! Journal, PO Box 3023, Tucson, AZ 85702, USA.

FEBRUARY 2003

22: HINSDALE, ILLINOIS, USA HLS backers Deloitte and Touche offices sloganised.

25: EDMOND, OKLAHOMA, USA HLS linked Legacy Trading bricked.

27: BERLIN, MARYLAND, USA ALF free 115 chickens from lab in solidarity with HLS campaign.

MARCH 2003

6: CHICO, CALIFORNIA, USA ALF attempt to torch McDonalds.

18: EDISON, NEW JERSEY, USA Direct Action Front smash glass door of recruiting office protesting war in Iraq.

25: PETALUMA, CA, USA

Veal slaughterhouse torched, “stop the killing” slogan left. $10,000 damage.

28: COMMACK, NY, USA Pro-HLS Phillip Petito's yacht trashed.

30: LOS ANGELES, CA, USA, ALF trash pro-HLS CBC offices.

MAY 2003

18: Home of pro-HLS Jim Devico trashed.

26-27:LEIDERDORP, N’LANDS Attempt to torch HLS-related Yamanouchi HQ.

JUNE 2003

9: McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs glue locks of backhoe digging canal.

16: McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs pour dirt into construction plant.

17: LONDON - Labour Party website hacked by anti-war activists.

18: EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA Frogs pull survey stakes at construction site.

29: ROCKAWAY, NJ, USA

ALF brick McDonalds drivethru.

30: EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA Frogs scatter nails at housing development.

JULY 2003

2: S. WINDSOR, CT, USA ELF sloganise housing development.

18: McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs trash electric meter on bank billboard.

19: McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs pour dirt into construction plant.

Des. Res. at nine ladies. See camps on p.4

20: EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA Frogs pour dirt into even more construction plant.

26: MERCEDES, TEXAS, USA Frogs remove labels at GM cotton test field, invalidating research.

27: MISSION, TEXAS, USA Dirt poured into construction plant by the Frogs.

28: SANTA ROSA, CA, USA Foie gras restaurateur's home trashed.

30: SONAMA, CA, USA Another foie gras restaurateur's home trashed.

31: NEW ORLEANS, LA, USA ALF sloganise Barnum & Bailey circus railway carriages.

McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs spike tree.

AUGUST 2003

1: SAN DIEGO, CA, USA ELF torches five-storey condocomplex. $50m damage, largest ever in US history.

1: McALLEN & EDINBURG, TEXAS - Frogs pour dirt into- construction equipment.

6: SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA 17 Starbucks glued and slogan- ised.

12: SONOMA, CA, USA

Foie gras-related restaurant had drains concreted, then flooded.

23: PIEDMONT, CA, USA Home of HLS-related Linda Short had windows etched.

24: SULTAN, WA, USA

ALF free 10,000 mink from fur farm. $500,000 damage.

28: EMERYVILLE, CA, USA Animal Liberation Brigade explode two pipe bombs at Chiron Corporation, US's largest biotech company, protesting links to HLS.

29: FAIRBANKS, ALASKA, USA ELF sloganise construction site.

SEPTEMBER 2003

2: MONTREAL, QUEBEC, HLS-related Sumitomo offices sloganised.

2: HOUSTON, TEXAS, USA- Frogs scratch, slash and shoot (with BB guns) twenty SUVs. $60,000 damage.

5: SANTA FE, NM, USA ELF sloganise SUVs with

Biblical seven deadly sins (!), causing $10,000s damage.

19: ELF torch new housing development. $1m damage.

19: EDINBURG, TEXAS, USA Frogs put dirt into construction equipment.

23: MECOSTA CO, MI, USA ELF leave incendiaries at Nestle Waters pumping station.

25: LOUISIANA, USA

ALF trash vivisection equipment at Louisiana State University Inhalation Toxicology Research Facility. $300,000 damage.

26: THESSALONIKI, GREECE Fire bombs thrown at bank and McDonalds.

28: McALLEN, TEXAS, USA Frogs pour dirt into construction equipment.

30: SHAKLEE, CA, USA Animal Liberation Brigade plant nail bomb to protest against HLS.

OCTOBER 2003 "

5 SANTA MONICA, CA, USA Home of Animal Services supremo daubed by ALF.

8: JEMEZ MTNS, NM, USA ELF trash US Forestry Service construction equipment.

24: MARTIN, IN, USA Survey stakes pulled at Walmart construction site.

PORTLAND, MAINE, USA Acadian Green Brigade / ELF trash Boise Cascade (loggers) vehicles.

NOVEMBER 2003 "

3: NEW HYDE PARK, LONG ISLAND, USA- ALF trash home of HLS-related Mellon Investment employee. Action dedicated to Barry Horne.

5: PT WASHINGTON, NY, USA ALF trash home of high-ranking HLS-related Sumitomo official. Action dedicated to Barry Horne.

7: ASHEVILLE, NC, USA ALF sloganise two Little Pigs Bar-B-Que delivery vans.

27: BERGAMO, ITALY

Pipe bombing of Bayer factory power station: “Bayer leave the GMO's market - No to Biotechnology”.

DECEMBER 2003 "

7: WILLOW GROVE, PA, USA HLS-related Sumitomo's regional office glued.

19: WILLOW GROVE, PA, USA Sumitomo director Mark Peckham's home trashed and office sloganised.

JANUARY2004 "

21: LONDON

Top GM scientist at Bayer, Paul Rylott, pied at pro-GM conference with chocolate fudge cake by Biotic Baking Brigade(BBB).

FEBRUARY 2004 "

2: ISTANBUL, TURKEY Veganassi report trashing of three butchers protesting Eid: “If you slaughter, we will attack - Direct Action against Animal Slaughters”.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, USA ELF trash plant plant at construction site, leaving slogan “Your construction term destruction”.

MARCH 2004

10: HALIFAX, S. YORKS, UK Plant trashed and soap put in fuel tanks following large demos against sprawl housing development.

RUSSIAN NRA TRIAL

On the 14/05/03 three Russian “New Revolutionary Alternative” (NRA) activists were given lengthy prison sentences for anti-war activities. A fourth defendant, Tatyana Sokolova, was given a non-custodial sentence after she “actively cooperated” with the authorities and informed on her co-defendants.

The three who were jailed are Nadezhda Raks who received 9 years in prison, Larisa Romanova who received 6.5 years (reduced to 5.5 years on appeal) and Olga Nevskaya who received 6 years imprisonment. All three are to serve their sentences “in a camp of normal regime”.

The NRA first appeared in Russia in the Autumn of 1996 when they attempted to burn down a military call-up (conscription) centre in Moscow. In a Communiqué the NRA explained that they took their action in protest against the Chechen war.

Over the next few years the NRA carried out a number of actions, mainly criminal damage but also a few symbolic explosions. The NRA targets included Government, military and police buildings including another military call up (conscription) centre. They also detonated explosives under a statue of Nikolai II.

On 04/04/99 the NRA caused an explosion close to an FSB (former KGB) building. Following the investigation into this a number of people where arrested leading to the arrests of Larisa, Nadezhda and Olga.

Out of the three, Olga Nevskaya defines herself as an anarchist. Olga is also an eco-activist and has been involved with Rainbow Keepers in the past. Larisa Romanova is a member of a Bolshevik group and has also been a member of Rainbow Keepers. Nadezhda Raks is a member of a Bolshevik but is also said to have links with far-right groups. Because of this GA is not supporting Nadezhda Raks but we do recognise the other two as Anti-War prisoners.

For more information including information about an active support campaign set up for eco-anarchist Olga Nevskaya contact P.O. Box 13, 109028, Moscow, Russia.

Larisa Valerevna Romanova, pos. Golovino, OD 1/2, Sudogordskiy Rayon, 601395 Vladimirskaya Oblast, Russia. New Revolutionary Alternative (armed left wing group) activist serving 5.5 years for various arsons, criminal damage & explosion actions against Government and Military buildings. Larisa is an ecoactivist and former member of Rainbow Keepers

Olga Aleksandrovna Nevskaya, UU163/5, 7 Otryad, pos. Dzerzhinskiy, Mozhaysk 140090 Moskovskaya oblast, Russia. New Revolutionary Alternative (armed left wing group) activist serving 6 years for various arsons, criminal damage & explosion actions against Government and Military buildings. Olga is an eco-activist and former member of Rainbow Keepers.

Marvels of Technology: The ID Sniper rifle TM

The ID SNIPER(TM) rifle is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector.

The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.

At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lens fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis.

As the urban battlefield grows more complex and intense, new ways of managing and controlling crowds are needed. The attention of the media changes the rules of the game. Sometimes it is difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the all important image of the state. Instead EMPIRE NORTH suggests to mark and identify a suspicious subject on a safe distance, enabling the national law enforcement agency to keep track on the target through a satellite in the weeks to come. [manufacturer’s description]

The ID SNIPER(TM) rifle was presented by Empire North in Beijing at the China Police 2002 exhibition.

PRISONERS OF WAR

These revolutionaries have been jailed for their beliefs, so you can write them letters of support (nothing compromising!). Those not listed shouldn’t take it as a sleight they’ve been excluded - just send us your details and we’ll put you on our free mailing list! Prisoner details change rapidly and may be out of date by the time you read GA.

More information from:

Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network, BM Box 2407, London WC1N 3XX. email:mailto:elp4321@hotmail.com][elp4321@hotmail.com

Spirit of Freedom on-line newsletter: http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk][www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

North American ELP, POB 11331, Eugene, OR 97440, USA. email: mailto:naelpsn@graffiti.net][naelpsn@graffiti.net

ELP-Poland PO Box 43, 15-662 Bialystok 26, Poland. email: mailto:insurec-tion@riseup.net][insurec- tion@riseup.net

Italian ELP Support Network: mailto:italianelp@yahoo.com][italianelp@yahoo.com

Turkey ELP Support Network: elp mailto:tr@hotmail.com][tr@hotmail.com

Tre Arrow, mailto:freetrearrow@lists.rise-up.net][freetrearrow@lists.rise- up.net http://www.trearrow.org][www.trearrow.org see news on this page

Dr. Yurl Bandazhevsky, Ul. Kalvarijskaya 36, PO Box 35K, Minsk 220600, Belarus. Serving 8 years for telling the world that the nuclear radiation around Chernobyl is worse than the Belarus Government has admitted.

Marco Camenisch,

Flughafengefangnis, ZURICH- FLUGHAFEN, Postfach 8058, Zurich, Switzerland. Serving 10- years for using explosives to destroy electricity pylons leading from nuclear power stations. In 2002 he completed a 12-year sentence in Italy for similar actions in Italy. Marco reads French, German, Spanish & Italian.

Angela M Cesario, 66522-065, Federal Prison Camp Dublin, 5675 8th St. Camp Parks, Dublin CA 94568, USA. Serving 41 months for an arson attack on logging trucks at the Eagle Creek logging site.

William Cottrell, #0403300535, 630 East Rialto Avenue, San Bernardino, CA 92415-0025, USA. see news on this page

Ibai Ederra, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - Irunez - - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain. On Remand awaiting sentencing for sabotaging the controversial Itoiz dam construction site

Ted Kaczynski (04475-046), US Pen - admin Max Facility, PO Box 8500, Florence Colorado 81226, USA. Is serving multiple life sentences for the infamous ‘Unabomber’ anti-technology bombing & murder campaign.

Inaki Garcia Koch, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - - Irunez - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain. Serving just under 5 years for sabotaging the controversial Itoiz dam construction site.

Aaron Linas, Block M C/O Northern Neck Regional Jail, Warsaw VA 22572, USA. Serving 42 months for a series of ELF actions aimed against a number of targets including McDonalds & Burger King; urban sprawl; the construction industry; and an SUV dealership.

Jeffrey Luers, #13797671, OSP , 2605 State St. Salem, OR 97310, USA. See news this page

Craig Marshall, #13797662, SRCI, 777 Stanton Boulvd, Ontario, OR 97914 USA. Serving 5 years 5 months for conspiracy to commit arson and possession of incendiary devices, having used the devices to destroy SUV’s to raise attention to the environmentally destructive nature of these vehicles.

Jeremy Rosenbloom, 66521-065, Federal Prison Camp Sheridan, PO Box 6000, Sheridan OR 97378, USA. Serving 41 months for an arson attack on logging trucks at the Eagle Creek logging site.

Fran Thompson, #1090915 HU 1C, WERDCC, PO Box 300, Vandalia, MO 63382, USA. Serving Life for killing, in self-defence, a stalker who had broken into her home. Before her imprisonment Fran was active in ecological animal & anti-nuclear campaigning.

John Wade (Jailed in USA - Address Unknown). Serving 37 months for a series of ELF actions aimed against a number of targets including McDonalds & Burger King; urban sprawl; the construction industry; and an SUV dealership.

Helen Woodson, #03231-045, c/o Bates County Jail, PO Box 60, Butler, MO 64730, USA. See news on this page

ANIMAL LIBERATION

Dave Blenkinsop EM7899, HMP Bullingdon, Oxfordshire OX6 0PZ England. Serving ten years in total. 1) Three years for a stave attack on the Managing Director of HLS. 2) Eighteen months for rescuing six hundred guinea pigs from a lab supplier. 3) Five and a half years for planting incendiary devices under abattoir vehicles.

Paul Le Boutillier KA9326, H.M.Prison, Hull, HU9 5LS, England. Serving 5 years for making threatening phone calls to various animal abusers including people associated with vivisection, blood sports and farming.

Hanna Ekegren, Box 1005, 718 92 Frovi, Sweden. Serving 10 months for an accountable action that saw the damaging of a hatchery egg conveyor belt and the destruction of thousands of eggs.

Paul Holliday KA9328, HMP Lindholme, Hatfield Woodhouse, Doncaster, Yorkshire, DN7 6EE, England. Serving eighteen months for making anonymous and silent phone calls to various animal abusers including those associated with vivisection, blood sports and farming.

PEACE and ANTI-WAR

Ploughshares is an international movement which uses accountable non- violent direct action to disarm weapons of mass destruction.

Sister Carol Gilbert, #10856-039, FPC Alderson RI, Box A, Alderson, WU24910, USA. Ploughshares activist serving 33 months for antinuke action.

Sister Jackie Hudson, #08808-039, FPC Victorville, PO Box 5100, Adelanto, CA 92301, USA. Ploughshares activist serving thirty months for anti-nulear action.

Olga Aleksandrovna Nevskaya, UU163/5, 7 Otryad, pos.

Dzerzhinskiy, Mozhaysk 140090 Moskovskaya oblast, Russia. New Revolutionary Alternative (armed left wing group) activist serving 6 years for various arsons, criminal damage & explosion actions against Government and Military buildings. Olga is an eco-activist and former member of Rainbow Keepers.

Sister Ardeth Platte, #10857-039, FPC Danbury, Route 37, Danbury, CT06818, USA. Ploughshares activist serving 41 months for antinuke action.

Larisa Valerevna Romanova, pos. Golovino, OD 1/2, Sudogordskiy Rayon, 601395 Vladimirskaya Oblast, Russia. New Revolutionary Alternative (armed left wing group) activist serving 5.5 years for various arsons, criminal damage & explosion actions against Government and Military buildings. Larisa is an ecoactivist and former member of Rainbow Keepers

Igor Sutyagin, c/o Irina Petrovna Manannikova, Obninsk, Kaluzhkoy oblast, ul. Zvezdnaya, dom 1A, kv. 82 239039 Russia. Serving 15 years for espionage after he openly distributed anti-nuclear weapons information.

ANTI CAPITALIST

Around the world there have been several massive protests against global capitalism and its environmental impact. The following have all been jailed in connection with those protests

James Borek LL6803, HMP Wandsworth, PO Box 757, Heathfield Road, London SW18 3HS, England (54 months)

Robert Thaxton #12112716, OSP, 2605 State St, Salem, OR 97310, USA (86 months)

INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

Leonard Peltier #89637-132, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048, USA. Serving Life after being framed for murdering 2 FBI agents.

Eric Wildcat Hall, #BL-5355, Unit I/A 10745 Route 18, Albion, PA 16475- 0002, USA. Serving thirty- five to seventy-five years for helping ship arms to Central American indigenous activists.

ANTI-FASCIST

Matthew Lamont T90251, CSP/A5- 114, PO Box 901, Imperial, CA 92251, USA. Serving 3 years for possessing an incendiary, intended to be used to disrupt a neo-nazi gathering.

Tomasz Wiloszewski, Zaklad Karny, Orzechowa 5, 98-200 Sieradz, Poland. Serving 15 years for accidentally killing a neo-nazi whilst defending himself.

MOVE

MOVE is an eco-revolutionary group. There are currently eight MOVE activists in prison each serving 100 years after been framed for the murder of a cop in 1979. 9th defendant, Merle Africa, died in prison in 1998.

Debbie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Holloway Africa (006308) and Janine Philips Africa (006309) all at: SCI Cambridge Springs, 451

Helen Woodson Rearrested

9 March 2004, Helen Woodson was released from prison after a 27 year sentence for three separate actions: Robbing a bank then setting fire to the money whilst condemning capitalism, corporate greed & destruction of environment; Mailing bullets to corporate directors with messages telling them their actions were like bullets fired into the heart of creation; Using a pneumatic jackhammer to disarm a nuclear missile silo.

In August 2003, whilst Helen’s chances of release where being debated by the authorities, ELP reported that Helen had made a statement saying if she was released she would carry out another action.

After release it was part of her bail conditions she reported to Federal Probation officials. On 11 March 2004 she walked into the federal courthouse, up to the security desk and allegedly deposited a tin of red paint over the security apparatus before making a Christian inspired eco/peace statement.

Please send urgent letters of support to: Helen D Woodson, #03231-045, c/o Bates County Jail, PO Box 60, Butler, MO 64730,USA.

Marco Camenisch

On 01/04/2004, the eco-prisoner Marco Camenisch entered into a hunger strike to protest against the daily harassment inflicted in the jail of Zurigo Kloten. Between the reasons of the protest, that will last until the First May 2004, there is the block of the mail of the not familiars.

Marco Camenisch, Flughafengefangnis, ZURICH- FLUGHAFEN, Postfach 8058, Zurich, http://www.freecamenisch.net][www.freecamenisch.net

TURKEY: Istanbul

On 16th of November 2003 some ELP volunteers, hang 2 banner on a bridge, supporting Thessaloniki prisoners on hunger strike and eco-pris- oner Marco Camenisch. On the banners is written “Free Thessaloniki prisoners” “Free Eco-Prisoner Marco Camenisch-Destroy Prisons! ELP”

After the action ELP volunteers stated that they’ll support and be in solidarity with the prisoners who are active in the defence and liberation of earth and its residents and everyone interested in the liberation of earth and its residents should support and spread the solidarity for prisoners. We share their feelings and desires of freedom.

Billy Cottrell

Billy Cottrell’s arrest last month was the latest in a string of desperate attempts by the FBI to apprehend those responsible for an ELF action last August involving southland SUV dealerships. Since his arrest he has been held in questionable conditions, all the while maintaining his innocence. Billy’s in urgent need of support letters and people whom he can

Fullerton Ave, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238, USA.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973) and Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) both at SCI Grateford, PO Box 244, Grateford, PA 19426-0244, USA.

Edward Goodman Africa (AM4974), 301 Morea Rd,

Frackville, PA 17932, USA.

William Philips Africa (AM4984) and Delbert Orr Africa (AM4985) communicate with. Please let him know that we support him, are watching his case and are mobilizing to get him out!

Billy’s trying to recreate his library and would like to receive articles on string theory and other topics in physics. He’d appreciate paperback books sent directly from the publisher to the address below. To contribute to Billy’s legal defense fund: Free Billy Defense Fund P.O. Box 3372 Anaheim, CA 92803- 3372, USA. (please make checks payable to William Cottrell)

Please sign up for periodic updates from Billy Cottrell’s support network. To subscribe, please send an email with “Add” in the subject line to mailto:freebilly@mutualaid.org][freebilly@mutualaid.org.

William Cottrell #0403300535, 630 East Rialto Avenue, San Bernardino, CA 92415-0025, USA

Tre Arrow

Tre Arrow, an activist in Portland, Oregon, is accused of ELF actions. Currently under arrest in Canada, awaiting extradition, Tre faces many years in jail for 2 actions he is accused of: arson of trucks belonging to Ross Island Sand and Gravel and arson of 3 logging trucks outside the Eagle Creek timber sale.

Tre has participated in forest defence campaigns in the Northwest for sometime. He is in dire need of support right now and is currently fasting in a Victoria prison. [Demand the prison let him out of solitary: Phone: (250) 953-4400, Fax (250) 953 4453 Write Rawn Phalen, VIRCC, 4216 Wilkinson Road, Victoria BC, BC V8Z 5B2 Canada].

For more information, see http://www.griffinsforge.com/truth2p][http://www.griffinsforge.com/truth2p ower. To contribute to Tre’s Legal Defence Fund, send checks/money orders made out to ‘Tre Arrow Legal Defense Fund’ and mail to 125 NE 83rd Portland, OR 97220.

mailto:freetrearrow@lists.riseup.net][freetrearrow@lists.riseup.net http://www.trearrow.org][www.trearrow.org

Jeff “Free” Luers

June marks the fourth year that our friend and comrade, Jeff “Free” Luers has been imprisoned and held captive by the state. Sentenced to 22 years and 8 months for burning three Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs), Jeff has continued to be active in prison and fight back with his words and inspiration. This June 12, we aim to strengthen his efforts by promoting a day of action and solidarity with Jeff throughout the world.

There is no central organizing body or group to check in with but the J12 Organizing Committees can help by providing you with flyers, graphics, and merchandise such as videos, zines and stickers about Jeff’s case. It is imperative that you be able to speak about Jeff’s case if you do a public event. Take some time and read about it on our website: http://www.freefreenow.org][www.freefreenow.org

Friends of Jeff ‘Free’ Luers mailto:freefreenow@mutualaid.org][freefreenow@mutualaid.org

both at SCI Dallas Drawer K, Dallas, PA 18612, USA.

Mumia Abu Jamal, (AM8335), SCI Greene, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg PA 15370, USA. In 1981 Mumia is a former Black Panther and a vocal supporter of MOVE. He was framed for the murder of a cop. He was originally sentenced to death but is currently awaiting re-sentencing following a court hearing in 2001.

PROTEST CAMPS ROUND-UP

Ancient Woodland near Blackwood, South Wales.

Blackwood.

Ancient woodland near Blackwood, South Wales is being destroyed by Costain to build a road for an arms factory.

Three camps have already been evicted, but not without resistance from both long-term activists and up for it locals. New sites are being set up and there is still much work to be stopped.

call 07952 774525 or 07708 420 446 For directions and up to date info.

Faslane Peace Camp

Still resisting the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons. The camp celebrates its 22nd birthday this year. During 7th-13th June we will be holding workshops and actions. There is also a birthday party on Saturday 12th June, with punk bands and sound systems. All welcome! Recently we played host to hundreds of CND marchers, who held a rally outside the North Gate of the Faslane base on Easter weekend. We also held unannounced blockades 2 days in a row over Easter.

One peace camper, Karen Fallon, is awaiting trial in Ireland for a “Pitstop Ploughshares” action - disarming a US warplane heading for Iraq. Karen needs any support that people can offer at this time. For more info, check out http://www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk/][www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk/ karen.html. We like visitors and are always up for doing more actions, so why not come and visit us? (Also there is a Big Blockade of Faslane in August organised by Trident Ploughshares — http://www.trident-ploughshares.org.uk][www.trident- ploughshares.org.uk. For more peace camp news, please write and ask for the current issue of our zine, the Faslane Focus.

http://www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk][www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk mailto:faslanepeacecamp@hotmail.com][faslanepeacecamp@hotmail.com 01436820901

Faslane Peace Camp, Shandon, Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute, G84 8NT, Scotland

St Davids Woods, Nine Ladies

The site has existed since 1999 to stop the planned quarrying of Stanton moore. Papers have been served so eviction could be anytime. The pres- cence of the site has deterred quarry expansion in the Peak District, and direct action has taken place throughout the campaign. The national grid reference for the site is SK247634. Site phone: 0700 594 2212 http://www.nineladies.uklinux.net/][http://www.nineladies.uklinux.net/

Bilston Glen

Here at Bilston Glen Anti-Bypass Protest Site we get more sorted for every day that passes by. More defences are coming up constantly and the standard of the camp is steadily improving. We have a new kitchen, a new info-space, a well sorted and cosy communal, a new guest house and a new shower. We’re currently building a huge communal tree-house and some other tree-houses are also underway. For three months we’ve been organizing “Sunday Free Cafes” (open days) the first sunday every month, which we intend to continue with. Spring is here, the birds are singing and the leaves are coming out, we’re looking forward to the summer. The 1-4 of July we’re inviting like-minded for a green anarchist gathering to discuss how to fight the megamachine and learn primitive skills.

The planning permission for the road is still there. PPL, the company who where gonna finance the road have gone bust (way-hey!) though, so as it looks now it’s up to the local council to pay for the road. But PPL has been bought up by Bayer, the enormous bio-tech monster, so they might very well finance the road. Central government money might also come in as Tony & co want to see the biggest bio-tech cluster in Europe here outside of Edinburgh, and a road for the transports to and from it.

So we still want and need more people to fight against this part of the horrible destruction of our world. You and everyone else who support us is very welcome to join us!

Save Bilston Glen! No More Roads! For a life wild and free!

by Bamse, part of the Bilston Glen collective

mailto:info@bilstonglen-abs.org.uk][info@bilstonglen-abs.org.uk http://www.bilstonglen-abs.org.uk][http://www.bilstonglen-abs.org.uk

Sherwood Green

Has won a two month reprieve. Following an intensive local campaign, Mansfield District Council agreed, at an 1oth march meeting, to an independant enquiry into the feasability of the proposed junction. An eviction could still happen though

Call the Sumac Centre on 0845 458 9595 to be put on the phone tree.

MEKAMUI STAND

24. May 2004 Statement:

The BRA (Bougainville Revolutionary Army) and the political wing BPC, signatories to the peace agreement are going ahead in destroying arms with the talks of gaining highest form of Atonomy from PNG Government. Mekamui Government and Mekamui Defence Force stand is sound and clear, Independence for Bougainville no more no less.

Talks are under way to discuss the reopening of the Panguna mine, again Mekamui Government who are in control of the Panguna mine area which is a No Go Zone area want to make it clear that re- opening of the mine will further bring blood shed on the Island and we don’t entertain it.

Visit our website @ http://www.eco-action.org/mdf/][www.eco-action.org/mdf/

The BRA forcibly shut down Panguna mine in May 1989 and have fought a long and bloody independence war to keep it shut. Now that ‘peace’ is being introduced, the first thing the ‘peacemakers’ want is the mine. Without any outside support, it is only a matter of time before the mine re-opens and destruction is resumed. To find out how you can support those still resisting the mine, contact Solidarity South Pacific via email mailto:ssp@eco-action.org][ssp@eco-action.org.

ANTICIVILIZATION GATHERING

Weaving a Cobweb April 30th - May 3rd

This year’s anti-civilisation gathering suffered slightly from less numbers than the previous year’s gathering. Still there were people from a range of European countries and different groups and projects.

Last year’s gathering was at a large squat called “Can Masdeu” in the suburbs of Barcelona, but this year the organisers had opted for a campsite called “Solell de les Codines” further north near Montesquiu, a village in the area of Osona, in North of Catalunya.

It’s possible that the concrete manicured campsite, relatively close to a large road was not quite the ideal venue for a gathering of civilizationresistors, and this may have had a detrimental effect on the discourse.

However, it seems preferable in some ways to the disputes that occurred at last years gathering due to the antagonism of some of the inhabitants of Can Masdeu, a squat that is notorious for it’s liberal politics within Barcelona. Squatters there seemed happy to cook and feed those that attended the gathering, but not to have them in the house and to charge extortionate amounts for what was in effect free food that had been foraged from bins.

One of the suggested aims of this years gathering was to build some kind of network, or to ‘Weave a Cobweb’ of groups and individuals in Europe in order to aid better communication and solidarity. Unfortunately this failed to happen, outside of the more informal networking outside of meetings.

Discussion ranged from ‘New Technologies of Control’ through to debates around tactics used to fight for earth and animal liberation, with a small minority present whom expressed a distinctly non-combative and wholly moralistic approach. This minority seemed to have little analysis of power relations, there answer to civilizations assault appeared to be to go off and grow there own organic vegetables somewhere so as to make a ‘positive’ effort. Enough said really!

This isolationist perspective seems typical of those that seek a ‘selfsufficient’ way of life and fail to realize that this is not possible — we are surrounded, something Ted Kaczynski soon discovered. Others were acutely aware of the moribund nature of the ‘official’ anarchist movement. . One participant stated ‘the anarchists and afraid of anarchy’.’ Something I couldn’t agree with more.

There seemed to be much interest in the ‘Solidarity South Pacific’ campaign, which someone gave a brief presentation about and people from Italy told of the growing animal liberation movement there, where actions against the fur industry are ongoing. The film ‘Surplus’ was shown, an anticonsumerism film, to some extent sympathetic to the critique of civilization and which features John Zerzan as well as someone from ‘AdBusters’.

Although the meetings were at times hard to follow due to lack of structure and of course the translation is hard work, it was good to meet up with people from across Europe where an interest in the critique of civilization seems to be growing more and more.

With the ‘Green Anarchy in the UK’ gathering here in the UK in July as well as a second gathering in the US later this year it seems hopeful that more and more people are showing an interest in ideas that take on the totality.

Articles

THE BATTLE AGAINST BAYER

BAYER: THE END...or is it?

The facts of the anti-GM movement in the UK would seem to be this: Inspired by anti-GM actions, the first of which took place in California in 1987, followed by others all across the world, people in the UK began to take action against GM crop trials 6 years ago. This mostly consisted of very simple night-time activity: groups of people pulling up the crops. There were also some open and accountable actions, some succesful and some failed daylight raids, some other sabotage of GM facilities and companies plus a lot of pressure from lobby groups.

In summer 2003 at an EF! gathering, with commercialisation looming and the last of the crop trials fled from Britain, the largest genetic company in Europe, Bayer AG, won itself the attention of a national campaign. 6 months later the government gave a half-arsed handshake to the biotech industry by saying yes to GM maize and no to rape and sugar beet. Bayer, battered and bruised by the combined efforts of the anti- GM actions and lobbying said thanks but no thanks.

And the happy ending is that no GM crops are to be grown in Britain in the foreseeable future. not for the next 4 years at any rate.

This is undeniably excellent news, and whilst Bayer's parting comment was one of commercial unviability, all those with sore knees from pulling crops, or quick metal still stuck under the finger nails, we knew different. But what went on behind the scenes, and is it really over?

The campaign against Bayer saw over 50 actions in a few months. Offices were occupied, spraypainted, blockaded, glued up and smashed, directors were harassed at home, scientists were pied, events attended by their speakers were ruined, and in the last month the Boycott Bayer campaign was launched with stickers, leaflets, posters and a website.

As with all struggles though, the tensions were not only between biotechnology and its enemies. Within the anti-GM ranks there was also painful conflict. Some of these tensions were to be expected as people were in the battle for different reasons—from consumer pressure groups to green anarchists, and obviously, the motives and moves of each were rag- ingly different.

Earth First!

Summer Gathering 2004

Wednesday 4th - Monday 9th August

This year’s Earth First! Summer Gathering will be held somewhere in the East Midlands,

There will be a full timetable planned right through to Monday morning so even if you can only make the weekend you’ll get a full program of activities.

Offers of workshops should be direc Ltd to ef5gw0rkshopsf<lara,co,Lil( or .

0845 355 DIM

hut F,b>»

http://www.eartfrfirstg.irheting.org][www.eartfrfirstg.irheting.org, uk J

The anti-Bayer campaign was sprung from the ecological direct action movement but this didn't mean a smoother ride. People fell out massively over tactics: in particular the issue of home visits, and the promises of regular actions fell to the wayside with a shockingly tepid commitment to activism. (The vast majority who swore they would do regular actions just didn't.) There was an injunction against several individuals and several groups which seemed to floor the campaign's ability to do anything which wasn't strictly legal in the first place. There were, of course, some tasty bonuses; such as the sacking of Paul Rylott as head of Bioscience, and when Michael O'Brien (company director) resigned, the injuncted groups got a letter from his solicitors telling us, effectively, to now leave him alone please. But by the time Bayer announced it was packing up and going home it felt as much like relief as victory.

The direct action campaign against Bayer was succesful because there was such a hefty anti-GM lobby and because of the dislike of the British public against anything new. A hatred of immigrants and a hatred of GM seem to stem from the same vile conservatism and commitment to western civilisation AS IT IS. making uneasy bedfellows with the eco- direct action movement. The ecological direct action movement so happened to be on the same side for once. The disappointing truth is the ecological direct action movement is not strong enough or commited enough to have beaten Bayer out of this tiny island otherwise. The campaign was marred by broken words and general softness and we are lucky that the feisty few who stuck their necks out didn't in more trouble. But hey, we didn't co-opt our politics and we didn't go to prison and it was certainly the best thing going on over the last year. and we still haven't given up.

"We do expect GM oilseed rape to be harvested in the fields of Cambridgeshire before the end of the decade" Julian Little, spokesperson for Bayer Cropscience.

We too expect GM to be planted before the end of the decade. Biotechnology is essential for the growth and expansion of the totality and that's the mammoth battle we've taken on. The Boycott Bayer part of the campaign is still going, and there isn't a reason in hell to NOT continue to target Bayer as major players in biotech. Bayer will be back here but we're waiting for them. And hopefully the ecological direct action network will be mad enough and bad enough to walk the walk not just talk the talk. See you on the frontline.

http://www.stopbayergm.org][www.stopbayergm.org

Bayer Actions

29 April 04 - Bayer Cropscience sub- sidary, HC Starck, was visited at night. A message: Bayer -STAY out of GM, was spraypainted on the front wall. This was one of a few gentle warnings to Bayer that if they do carry on trying to bring GM Crops in, we will target them again.

22 April 04 - Newbury town centre surrounding Bayer Plc’s UK headquarters was flyposted and stickered with ‘Don’t Buy Bayer’ stickers to let them know that although the campaign is ending, they are being watched and any further attempts to grow GM in the UK will be met with direct action.

22 March 04 - This day saw a phone and email blockade aimed at disrupting communications and creating extra hasssle.

11 March 04 - Anti GM messages were sprayed on a wall and sign at the Bayer Crop Science works in Widnes, near Liverpool.

30 January 04 - The Bayer Crop Science building in North Newbalds, North Yorkshire, had its locks jammed with paperclips and superglue.

27 January 04 - Windows were bricked at HC Starck in Sheffield and also an Anti-GM slogan (the specifics of which, this reporter can’t remember) was painted on the wall near the main entrance. This action took place as part of the ‘Bail out of GM’ week of actions.

27 January 04 - W H Hawley targetted during the 10 days of Anti-Bayer action. As one of several actions against Bayer during the 10 days of action the following was reported: W H Hawley (part of the Bayer group)in Burton- On-Trent was visited. A tanker had 5 of its 6 tyres slashed; the 6th had a dodgy valve so the tyre could not be deflated as it is dangerous to puncture lorry tyres under full pressure. Also cables ripped out. the side of the tanker spraypainted with “STOP GM CROPS” also the pipe used to empty the tanker was punctured.

21 January 04 - Paul Rylott, top GM scientist at Bayer Cropscience delivered a stirring speech on how to manage consumer response to biotechnology, at a conference on Managing and Predicting Crisis in the Food Industry. As he took his place in the queue for his buffet dinner a polite call of “Mr Rylott?” brought him face to face with a chocolate fudge cake (skipped and stale) covered with the sweaty rotting whipped cream and the shout “That’s for GM!” Before the assualting party fled, some leaflets were given out to the surprised and immobilised crowd and all those protesting left before the cops arrived. The biotech baking brigade stated: “GM Technology is the latest onslaught of a bland and tedious industrial technological society against the planet. We are against monoculture and for biodiversity, against the domestication of people and land, and for the wild. There is no neutral ground: everyone is called upon to choice their side. Whenever They strike—be they government, corporations or greenwash quangos—we will strike back. They have declared war on us and our planet: we will answer it.

28 December 03 - Activists sabotaged Bourne golf course near Cambridge as a protest against Bayer Cropscience, having received information that there would be a Bayer golf tournament there the next day. Turf was removed and slogans expressing anti-GM/anti-Bayer sentiments were both spray painted and etched into the grass of the greens to convey the message that, until they cease their UK GM programme, Bayer representatives will be persued wherever they go.

19 December 03 - Activists visited the offices of PBI Home & Garden, a Bayer owned company in Hertfordshire, stuck up anti-GM posters, glued the locks to the front door and intercom and spray painted “NO GMO”.

Neither does she3

Hunt saboteurs Assodahon -

You have a choice. To vote or to act. To save a life or lock the other way. Which will it tie?

Direct Action Against All Blofldsuoits - saving lives for 4A years http://www.hunisabs.Drg.uk][www.hunisabs.Drg.uk PO Box 5254, Mhampten NN1 3ZA

12 December 03 - Cheshire Against Bayer paid a visit to Bayer’s pesticide manufacturing site in Widnes to protest against Bayer’s involvement in GM crops.

12 December 03 - Locks were jammed at Dystar, a Bayer subsidary, in Huddersfield.

5 December 03 - Michael O’Brien recieved another visit from concerned individuals on the evening of Monday 1st December. At around 10pm, 18 people arrived at Michael’s suburban Essex estate to let him know that it really would be a good idea for Bayer to get out of GM. While we made our presense known to Michael (who observed us from his bedroom window) with air horns and shouting, a more permanent reminder of our message was left . ‘NO GM’ was sprayed with weed killer on his front lawn. Our time with Michael was brief and after not more than five minutes we vanished into the night as sirens made the sound track for our exit. (ie. the police response time was about 5 minutes and two squad cars were sent—short and sweet visits seem the way forward!) Until next time Michael.

28 November 03 - Martyn

Hargreaves, company secretary of Bayer Cropscience was visited tonight. A tin of paintstripper was poured over his 2 cars in the drive and “No GM” was sprayed on the drive and the walls of his garage.

28 November 03 - A visit was made to the flat of Joachin Schneider. These flats have communal entrances with CCTV cameras, so activists sprayed “Stop Bayer’s GM Crops” on the brick walls outside the entrance.

27 November 03 - An electricity supplying station in Bergamo, Italy, was subject to a pipe-bomb blast. Also some unexploded incendiary devices

have been found on site. On the wall a spraypainted message: “Bayer leave the GMOs market—No to Biotechnology” Near this electricity supplying station is a Bayer industrial site, including the Bayer Crop Science department, which is heavily involved with the development and use of GMOs in agriculture.

The communique left on site and published by local newspapers stated that the action was done to stop the works inside the factory and as a direct attack against the genetic engineering projects of multinationals, addressing to Bayer Crop Science a responsability in all of this.

The explosion led to a black out for 3 small towns in the area for a couple minutes, until an emergency generator switched on. As a response to the action Bayer said they have no links with GMOs!

In the last 5 years in Italy many multinational companies dealing with GMOs had to face not only protests but also direct action, that resulted in millions of euros of damages allto- gether, with crops destroyed, seeds stores torched, machinery sabbed, labs raided and trucks torched. Nestle, Monsanto, Aventis, Syngenta, Nunhems, Piooner Hi-Breed, Bayer and various universities have all been subject to extensive direct action against genetic engineering.

23 November 03 - 15 people paid a visit to Michael Gerad O’Brian (Director of Bayer CropScience) at his suburban Essex home.

25 November 03 - Bayer Cropscience HQ in Hauxton, near Cambridge, was invaded on Thursday 20th November by over 40 people opposed to genetic engineering.

20 November 03 - Around 100 antibayer campaigners gathered outside Bayer HQ in Newbury and made a horrible racket.

17 November 03 - Fence damaged at bayer cropscience factory in Norwich.

13 November 03 - 15 people paid a visit to Martin Newson, Company Secretary of Bayer PLC. They confirmed with a neighbiour that he was definitely resident at the property and then proceeded to hold their own noisy demo outside his house.

11 November 03 - The british crop protection council iwere having its conference from the 10th until the 12th of november in Glasgow, followed by a corporate game of golf at turnberry, one of the “best golf courses in the world”. Bayer were one of the main contributors to this international conference. Anti-Bayer activists visited the course. They damaged four areas where the holes are and two teeing off areas by digging up the turf, spraying weed killer and spraypainting messages on the turf proclaiming: bayer - no gm, and “BCPC - no gm”. Nobody was arrested. we hope actions like this will help make it difficult for bayer to appear at corporate events as well as ruining the good time of the wealthy.

5 November 03 - Activists entered the Bayer Crop Science chemicals facility in Widnes, Cheshire with the minimum of hassle by merely scrambling under a gate. As soon as they had entered, the alarm was raised. “Intruders have entered the facility - secure all doors and windows - do not make contact with the intruders” blasted out of the tannoys. They wandered around, with security in pursuit, and were given a guided tour of sorts by a security officer called Homer - apparently, Bayer are a company who conform to all the government standards, and in fact care about the environment more than activists realise. As proof of this assertion, the intruders were shown the gold fish pond in the facility.

31 October 03 - Fence damaged at bayer cropscience factory in Norwich.

30 October 03 - Offices of Symrise in Marlow, Buckinghamshire were visited by around 6 people.

28 October 03 - Martyn Hargraves has been consistantly targetted over the past few weeks, with junk mail blockades by post and by email. His details have also mysteriously been appearing on internet sex chat and dating sites...

15 October 03 - The Bayer Cropscience site at North Newbalds in North Yorkshire was targetted. Locks had had liquid metal squirted into them, graffiti was sprayed and fencing was damaged.

14 October 03 - 15 activists occupied the foyer of Allianz-Cornhill, London, who are one of the main shareholders of Bayer.

13 October 03 - Activists went to Aizlewoods Mill, Nursery Road, Sheffield. This is the building in which HM Starck, a company wholy owned by Bayer, have their offices.With sedcurity guards oblivious inside the building people spray- painted walls and doors with anti-gm crops slogans, and with this web address.

13 October 03 - A second ‘e-block- ade’ was held. People were encouraged to phone, fax and email Bayer Crop Science letting them know what people thought of their plans to grow gm crops in Britain.

10 October 03 - Bayer Plc’s headquarters in Newbury was visited in the night and had flyposters pasted up on walls, doors, sign posts and bins all around the site.

6 October 03 - Since the beginning of September, various key individuals within Bayer had recieved an ever increasing number of unwanted comemerative plates, holiday brochures, book club subscriptions and so on through the post. Many of these are recieved on a ‘buy now, pay later’ basis, meaning they have to cancel the order or pay, tying up yet more office time that could have been spent on increasing Bayer’s productivity! Bayer office phone numbers have also found their way into free ad papers, attached to ‘company going bust - bargain rates on office furniture and supplies’ type notices.

2 October 03 - A demonstration was held at the Leamington Spa branch of Sainsbury’s in which customers were informed over a megaphone that Sainsbury’s milk is contaminated with GMOs. Hundreds of leaflets were given to interested customers and scattered all over the store. These leaflets explained the issues and also named BayerCropScience as the company most likely to be growing GM animal feed in this country, giving their number for customers to ring up and tell them what they can do with their GM crops.

2 October 03 - 13 anti-GM activists occupied the offices and warehouses of W Hawley & Son, Burton upon Trent, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer AG - the UK’s GM number one!

1 October 03 - Was National Forage Maize Day: exhibitions in conjunction with Shepton Mallets Dairy Show. (One of the biggest in the country, over 8000 farmers). Three people went, intent on embarassing Bayer, only to find that they already seemed to be running scared—and had decided not to come. The website had advertised a seminar by a pro GM acedemic on the ‘GM Debate’. We arrived to find that even this had been cancelled a month before, because (according to both rumours in the press room and from some of the organisers) the issue was regarded as ‘too controversial’.

30 September 03 - In the last couple of weeks the bayer cropscience factory in Norwich was graffittied and had one of its fences trashed.

25 September 03 - A group raised their own anti-GM flag at the Bayer CropScience factory in Widnes, to hammer home the message given by the British public in the government’s recent consultation: NO to GM crops in the UK!

25 September 03 - We originally panned to occupy the head office of Bayer Cropscience, but after an insider informed us there would be a large police presence we went to our plan B: The house of Martyn Hargreaves, company secretary at 15 Coppice Ave, Great Sheldon, Cambridge.

17 September 2003 - Bayer were targeted as they held a stall at the dairy industry’s national ‘Dairy Event’ near Coventry. Two protesters held a banner, and gave out leaflets, telling the farming community about Bayer’s poor record as a responsible pharmaceutical company, and warning of dangers of them leading the way in the commercialisation of GM crops.

17 Sept 2003 - Dystar in Huddersfield, partially owned by Bayer, was visited again. Walls windows and frames were liberally spray painted, including with the address of this website, while the only door had its lock sealed up with super glue.

4 September 2003 - A daylight raid resulted in £5000 of criminal damage at York university. The action was aimed at a Bayer presentation at a Genomes conference which the company was also sponsoring.

3 September 2003 - Anti-GM Protestors Wreck The Bayer Stand At British Potato 2003 Event

29 August 2003 - Dystar is a textiles company partialy owned by Bayer. On the evening of the 29th of August their offices in Huddersfield were visited. “Bayer - Stop GM” was spray painted on two walls, and “no gm” on several windows. The only door hads its lock sealed up with liquid metal.

Towards the End of the Week: The Tyranny of Time

Some of the units we use to measure time just can’t be argued with. The spinning of the earth or its orbit around the sun are clear reasons for the existence of a ‘day’ or a ‘year’ — and even a month is more or less in tune with lunar reality.

But the same just can’t be said for a ‘week’, an oddity of which the origins and purpose are obscure. The biblical reference to the ‘seventh day’ of rest does not mean that the sevenday week has been anything like universal over the centuries.

The ancient Egyptians used a ten-day week and the Mayan calendar used a 13 and a 20-day period. Lithuanians used weeks of nine days before adopting Christianity. In other words, there’s nothing natural about the week. It’s an enclosure of time, an artificial construct imposed on the world by a succession of centralising, controlling forces from the Roman Empire, through the Christian Church and the British Empire to the global techno-business hegemony of today.

We have now reached the point where the seven-day week has completely enchained us to its rigid cycle of routine and the limited horizon with which it has been stifling humanity for far too long. When we wake up each morning, what we are really experiencing is a new day, a day we have never experienced before. But the first thought that enters our heads on regaining consciousness is whether this day is a ‘Monday’, a ‘Saturday’ or a ‘Thursday’.

It seems that each of these days already has its own character before it has even unfolded. And what lies ahead of us in the future is in reality a series of unlived days which are but blank canvases on which we can paint our dreams and our lives.

Instead of that, we see nothing but short, brutal closed loops of ‘days of the week’, tired and familiar cliches through which we have trudged time and time again in our sadly confined lives.

This is of course ideal for those who would keep us as their slaves on a perpetual treadmill of production, for those who fear the moment we raise our gaze from the factory formula of routine and catch a glimpse of the free-time world which should have been our lifelong playground. From early in life, children are taught to mould themselves into the authoratitive contours of the official week. “Tuesday is painting day. Friday is dressing up day.”

When they start school, they are also forced to swallow the biggest lie of all — the weekend. The weekend is good, we are told. It is special. It is something to be celebrated. It is our freedom. And yet its true role is to confirm that the other five days of the week are set aside for slavery. By the time children come out of the education treadmill, they no longer question this, no longer dare suggest that the finite days of their unique, precious, existence on this earth belong to them and to nobody else.

As would-be liberators of the human race, we must look beyond superficial changes in social organisation. We must dig deep to uproot the imagination of our species from the dank heavy sterility into which it has grown embedded.

We must not waste a single minute calling for shorter working hours or fewer working days. We must aim higher in our attack on temporal tyranny. It is time we looked as far ahead as the end of the week!

Two Decades of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist’s first twenty years

Few anarchist publications survive to their 20^th year, and then typically spoil it by resounding triumphant about their minuscule ‘great achievements’. At risk of sounding pious, it is not our role as revolutionaries to holiday from criticism — especially essential selfcriticism — or to publish propaganda, which implies an unequal, manipulative relationship between writer and reader. Like the Trotskyites of yore, there are ‘Walter Mittys’ in the movement that go over the in-house press with a fine-toothed comb for any portent — however tiny or obscure — of their imminent ‘achievement of historical destiny’, a tendency that actually only emphasises their risible, self-deluded megalomania and pathetic insignificance. For all the postSeattle myth-making, Leviathan’s enemies have achieved little on global terms, so it is more appropriate to present ourselves with modest humility, as learners rather than teachers.

Our Origins

London Greenpeace presented the Easter 1984 Stop the City (STC) as a forerunner to such anti-globalisation spectacles as J18. With hindsight, this is nothing to boast about and GA’s role in it less so. As others were penned outside the Bank of England trading smoke flares with the Met, veteran Freedom columnist and owner of the Keverall Farm organic commune Alan Albon and a young Green CND herbalist Marcus Christo met in a nearby pub, quietly agreeing to found a “green” anarchist publication to join the Green wave of the time. Donations from one Poison Girls benefit later, they did so. The first issue featured articles by Colin Ward, London Greenpeace’s Dave Morris and a cringe-inducing cover portraying the wished-for coming together of two dissident youth counter-cultures — hippies and punks — but was a pretty mixed bag.

The first cover was by one Richard Hunt, bought in as GA’s artist and record-keeper. An odd customer even by movement terms, Hunt had been variously a SIGINT operative during his national service in Hong Kong and a torture victim of the psychiatric establishment (‘aversion therapy’), but most relevantly here had quit both the Green Party and John Carpenter’s dissident splinter, Green Line, for failure to adopt what he portentiously described as “my economic analysis”.[135] He was one of the first to latch onto Richard Lee / Marshall Sahlin’s ‘primitive affluence’ thesis, that whilst band-societies are typically commodity-poor, they are time-rich and use their leisure to live full, harmonious, egalitarian lives. Despite Sahlins also noting agriculturalists were worse off in all respects than forager bands, Hunt’s mid-1970s pamphlet The Natural Society argued in terms typical of that decade’s utopianism for the decentralisation of society to the level of small, selfsufficient communities (tweely rendered as “villages”), with any losses in technology and high culture written off as inevitable, if not desirable.

The Hunt Years

Hunt’s extreme dogmatism led him to demand the informal GA adopt his analysis as “policy” and then, come 1986, to use his control of the zine’s records to force the other editors out when they would not. He later claimed the sticking point for his blatant take-over was “violence”, the peace movement dominating the protest milieu and the minds of the other two editors at the time. In this, Hunt — fresh from crawling through a hedge to escape a battering at the battle of the Beanfield, where Thatcher’s rompersuited storm troopers trapped and physically smashed the Peace Convoy — was probably more in touch with social reality. Lacking coworkers, in 1987 he formed an editorial collective from prominent Stonehenge Campaign veterans, Oxford students and the odd local pagan, but this fell apart after one issue, largely as they were unwilling to subordinate themselves to Hunt as his ‘mere mouthpieces’.

Ploughing on regardless, Hunt halved GA’s already feeble circulation gratuitously attacking pacifists, theists and workerists — though the latter with considerable provocation. With the Rekjavik accords and the end of Soviet power in sight, the peace movement was failing and a Leftism that shared his dogmatism — if not his non-analysis of class conflict — was filling the vacuum. At this time, many of the workerist high-ups were unashamedly sectarian Leftists and Platformists, fetishising (their) organisation and ideology. Many of their followers were ex-vegan/peace police asserting their new proletarian Cause with convert zeal, despite their professional parents and public school educations (i.e. they themselves were the “middle class wankers”).

Despite this, Hunt formed a second ‘collective’ the next year, consisting of Chris Laughton, a libertarian who made a living as the test subject of medical experiments rather than draw the dole, and Paul Rogers, an expeace camper and Peace Studies student disillusioned with all that following Peace News’ denunciation of direct action by Autonomous Peace Action. Laughton left for Keverall Farm following his failure to establish Earth First! in the UK, being replaced by our resident doctor of programmes geekery, ANSLIM’s Kevin Lano (Anarchist Sexual Liberation Movement), someone Hunt evidently found inappropriately disturbing.

Hunt wanted to leave GA to them so he’d have more time to expand The Natural Society to book length, finally published as a result of an inheritance from his unbeloved mother in 1998 as To End Poverty. He left sooner than intended in 1991 when his confused support for the first Gulf War saw him criticised in print by the other editors, who had been repeatedly arrested for actively opposing the war. To this day, Hunt takes massive umbrage at this ‘peasants’ revolt’, being treated as he treated the original editors. He went on to edit what he hoped would be a rival publication, Alternative Green, on which sadly more below.

The 4^th Collective

As Lano left for computer business in Australia, Rogers had to get out GA29 on his own before being joined by fourth editorial collective. This included a young Camberley punk whose brother was involved in animal rights, Saxon Wood, who did the distribution; obsessive ALF / ELF list-keeper and editor of Rabbixian Anarchist Times (RAT, later Ecovegan) in the West Country, Noel Molland, who did the direct action listings; and ex-RAF helicopter maintenance man Steve Booth, a former anti-poll tax bailiff buster who also edited the Lancaster Anarchist Bomber. All were to become the ‘GA’ portion of the GAndALF defendants, but this was only the culmination of a Stateorchestrated campaign of spookery directed against GA from 1992 or so.

With Booth came his fellow NW bailiff busters Ray Hill and Tim Hepple, both fascists-turnedSearchlight assets. Because Hunt was even then making disturbing noises about “not Left or Right, but centralist or decentralist” — he invariably spoke axiomatically, further illustrating his ideological rigidity — we were more open to the ‘gruesome twosome’s blandishments than was wise, even publicising Hill’s ‘Creating a Community’ scam about readers sending money to buy a Scottish island (we were later told he was a notorious fraudster, something he grudgingly admitted himself in his autobiography). With Hunt’s resignation, Searchlight had no need to infiltrate GA to spy on the far-Right (quite the opposite in fact), so we can only assume it was to fulfil some State agenda.

With huge Green Party gains in the Euro elections and GA principally reporting EF!UK,[136] we were a natural target for infiltration and manipulation. When the BNP finally cottoned on to Tim Hepple’s infiltration of their infamous Welling bookshop by early-1993,[137] he insisted GA publish a hit list of fascists he claimed were involved in Combat 18, a neo-Nazi street gang given endless sensationalist and lucrative publicity in Searchlight for publishing their own hit lists in Target magazine, something Hepple also knew suspiciously too much about. Needless to say, this would have been legally and physically dangerous, but what really set alarm bells ringing was Hepple’s claim that details of antifascists had been supplied to C18 not by him but by an ex-NF figure then prominent in Class War, Tim Scargill. As we’d been building bridges since the Hunt years,[138] we knew Scargill personally and meeting him through the auspices of Searchlight’s most single-minded foe, the spook-obsessed anti-fascist researcher Larry O’Hara, it was obvious to us he was being framed to create a three-way street war between GA, CW and C18 and — not incidentally — slap Class War for their reversing their Searchlight-sponsored expulsion from Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) on absurd smear grounds in 1985.

With input from the others being set up, O’Hara published the first of a series of pamphlets exposing Hepple’s provocateur tactics, A Lie Too Far, which provoked a campaign of intimidation, smears and threats of violence from those reliant on Searchlight’s dubious intelligence to maintain their position in AFA.[139] Aside from transparent Stalinist garbage like Terry Liddle, whose exwife is a Searchlight photographer, this realignment was done by early1995 or so, though the State were hardly done with GA.

The Gandalf Trial

Although the smear campaign by Stewart Home, Fabian Tompsett and their fans began as early as 1994, I’m leaving that for later. It’s noteworthy here that they didn’t hesitate to use the same language (“terrorists”, etc) as journalists fed anti-GA smears directly by the State — Home even claiming to know one of them personally, Jason Benetto — and when marginalised or desperate enough, used facts (e.g. numbers, personal details) that could only have been available from police surveillance sources.

Having exposed Hepple (and a portion of the State’s strategy to demonise the militant Green movement as “ecoterrorists”) and refused the arms and communications equipment we would probably have needed to survive the street war he was manoeuvring GA into as a small group, his MI5 masters started planting incredible stories on an “ecoterrorist” theme about GA and EF! in the mainstream media from mid1993. John Harlow of the Times (and Construction News...), for example, was claiming protesters “threw babies under bulldozers” in his coverage of the Solsbury Hill and M11 protests. It was pretty obvious the journalists were getting a common briefing as all consistently rendered ‘ELF’ as ‘Environmental Liberation Front’ rather than the wittier, less wordy accepted movement form, ‘Earth Liberation Front’.

With the start of the Newbury bypass campaign in early-1995,[140] the State turned bluster into action with raids on PO boxes and then homes under Operation Washington. Eventually over fifty homes, bookshops and printworks were to be raided, some repeatedly and some for such trivial reasons as having written goodwill cards to defendants, and some 10,000 pages of ‘evidence’ seized. As GA’s editors, we were surprised to discover we had ‘conspired to incite criminal damage by fire’ with ALF press officer Robin Webb and his younger, semi-retired sidekick Simon Russell. Evidence of ‘association’ included such nonsense as Sax Wood selling GA at a meeting Robin Webb spoke at half a decade before. At no time was there any suggestion contact between any GA and ALF-supporting ‘conspirators’ went beyond normal exchange of journalistic information — in the direction of a book of matches, for example....

What was Operation Washington about? It’s important in understanding it to know that it had been running a couple of years before anyone from GA was even arrested. Operation Washington Mk. I (for want of a better designation) featured an attempt to frame Webb for possession of a wrapped shotgun passed him as a ‘tool’ by a Sussex animal sanctuary owner Dave Hammond, who later mainstream media ‘exposés’ of the ALF implied had turned State asset. Webb’s trial at Lewes collapsed when police refused to name their sources.[141]

Operation Washington Mk.II started out as an attempt to pin Barry Horne’s arson wave on the Isle of Wight — a resounding success inasmuch as it forced Boots to close their Thurgatton vivisection lab and made their ‘cruelty-free’ labels authentically cruelty-free — by reasoning that anyone knowing about it must have directly or indirectly been informed by the fire-starter, supposedly a ‘conspiratorial association’. Unfortunately, Horne was arrested placing devices in Bristol before we were first dragged into court, so evidence about him was removed from the bundles and the brief expanded to suggest that any reporting of direct action implied prosecutable ‘conspiratorial association’ with its unknown perpetrators. As Robin Webb and GA (though its Direct Action Diary) were then just about the only publications carrying such reports in UK without added ‘police spin’, how much this all suited the State as a weapon in the propaganda war was pretty obvious.

This is not the place to give a blowbyblow account of a prosecution process (including Operation Washington I) that ran from 1993- 1999, included three major trials and ended up costing the State nearly £10m.[142] However, this new weapon of political repression’s first outing was ill-served by its advocates, ailing CPS prosecutor Alan Ventnor insisting at our first hearing at Portsmouth in early 1997 that his definition of conspiracy had been ignored and that Hampshire Constabulary’s ‘broad definition’ threatened free speech — until he was literally dragged out of the court between two cops and ‘spoken to’. Then the acting prosecutor, the portly, florid Dick Onslow whose family may have been associated with the 1977 Persons Unknown conspiracy trial, got so badly muddled by his legal definitions that the State’s prime target, Robin Webb, had to be acquitted — and the chronically scared Simon Russell should have been then too, as any supposed ‘association’ with GA defendants was through Webb. Of course, not to let the law interfere with a good show trial, Robin was thrown back into the legal process for the unsuccessful 2^nd and 3^rd trials of 1998 anyway.

Rogers felt most strongly that a political prosecution needed to be fought politically (even pragmatically speaking, ‘conspiracy’ was such a catch-all it could hardly be fought legally!), and was backed in this most strongly by Booth. The GAndALF (GA-and-ALF) Defendants Campaign was formed over Simon Russell’s typically unsussed objection that his poor, sick mother might find out about the case in consequence, and was backed administratively by the Stevenage-based National Anti-Hunt Campaign. Much of the GDC’s limited (giro-level!) resources went into trying to publicise the case including two (chaotic and ill-attended) national speaking tours, but the mainstream media consistently pleaded sub judice rather than admit their own tacit complicity with police censorship by acknowledging others uncowed by it. It took the start of the 1^st GAndALF trial in Portsmouth, August 1997, for the liberal NCCL to send even a token observer and for Stephen Hancock, a principled NVDAer once jailed for UK’s first Ploughshares action and who knew Rogers personally, to kickstart movement media coverage at an alternative media gathering in Oxford — not least as they realised they were next. Only after the end of the first trial did we see a second support group formed by London Greenpeace and solidarity actions ‘to make prosecuting more trouble than not prosecuting’ such as the bricking of butchers’ shops in Portsmouth and Dr. Margaret Jones’ disruption of Bristol’s intercollegiate boat race.

Another important element in fighting a political prosecution is to have lawyers prepared to argue a case politically in court, for all the restrictions imposed by the Law Society. The firm most commonly used by activists then, Bindmans, were rejected out of hand as Jeffrey Bindman is lawyer to Gerry Gable, Searchlight’s editor, but the alternative Birnbergs proved almost as bad. They agreed to argue direct action — and incidentally reporting on it — was necessary selfdefence against State threats to established liberties, which would give us scope to drag spooks, their assets and compromised journalists into court, ask Hepple about his home-made sabotage manual, the Ecodefenders Handbook, dig up highly embarrassing dirt about 1970s coup plots like Wilsongate, etc, at a time when a new Labour administration was thinking of butchering MI5’s budget. When the case came to court, all Birnbergs barristers did was get a few off-therecord admissions PIIs (public interest immunity certificates) were being used to cover up MI5’s role in the case and then did their best to play one defendant off against the others and get them to denounce their own politics in best US ‘client management’ manner, in the hope the jury would find them too disunited, pathetic and stupid to ever conspire together. Naive defendants — and none of GA’s editors other than Rogers had ever even been arrested before Operation Washington — such as Noel Molland identified so strongly with the lawyers that he allowed himself to be destroyed by prosecutor Onslow on the stand for days on his lawyer’s advice, ran to them at first hint of counter-demos against the trial (in the hope organisers would be arrested — as documented in Grassy Noel, a post-GAndALF pamphlet endorsed by Robin Webb) and continued to defend their conduct even from jail! In the long term, the lawyers did more damage to GA than the police, their only apology coming through word of mouth and a third party at the 2000 Mayday events in London.

Because Rogers only insisted the lawyers do what they were hired to do, he was presented as a paranoid endangering other defendants liberty, with his lawyer Ken McDonald QC [143] quitting mid-trial rather than represent him, insisting “I’d be struck off” for running the agreed defence. When military judge David Selwood refused to allow him new representation, Rogers made it quite clear he would call every spook he could lay a writ on, deliberately picked out all proof of complicity (e.g. Hepple and police references to “PO Box 100”, MI5’s drop) in reviewing the evidence under their noses [144] and tried to contact David Shayler, the dissident MI5 officer then hiding out in Paris, via the Daily Mail’s Mark Hollingsworth. Returning to court the following Tuesday, Rogers was immediately severed from the case by Selwood, as originally requested.

Other than Simon Russell — who really had nothing to do with it and damn all to actually worry about — the other, more naive defendants were all convicted after a three month-long trial. Selwood deliberately span out his blatantly hostile summing-up three days to ensure Barry Horne was sentenced the day before the jury began their deliberations. Sax Wood’s parents saw them reading about it in the paper on the train to court. They each got 3 1/2 years, lucky as Barry Horne got 18 and the laws of conspiracy make them as culpable as he supposedly was. In fact, arson can carry a life term, even if all you did was write up a report on it gleaned from the Net. Consistent with MI5’s “ecoterrorist” smear strategy, what national press deigned to report the story at all (no longer sub judice now it suited them) ran ‘Anarchists Jailed for Bomb Plot’ headlines conveniently omitting any reference to their true ‘crime’, writing, and pretending it was them there with the candles and pop bottles full of petrol the whole time.

Determined GA should continue, Steve Booth continued to contribute articles and Community Resistance Diary listings from Lancaster Castle, hidden in the body of his prison letters. Rogers was arrested four times and had phones, papers and computer seized twice in the next three months, all supposedly ‘unrelated’ hunt sab stuff. A back-up editorial collective was briefed, but as it was, the paper continued. Plans were made with new lawyers to ambush then-MI5 director Stella Rimington at a meeting in Brighton to serve a writ on her and Rogers and O’Hara tracked Tim Hepple — then living under the pseudonym Tim Matthews — to a UFO meeting in Southport where he was preparing grounds to launch his book on the subject. They exposed his past to ufologists, who were shocked by the ex-fascist’s immediate resort to strong arm tactics.[145] Attempts to force through a 2^nd trial of Webb and Rogers, who escaped the first, before the jailed editors could appeal foundered when Rogers’ lawyer, Tim Murphy, turned out not to be a lawyer after all. An active hunt sab and no friend of the police, Murphy had been disbarred by the Law Society but had taken the case regardless by way of revenging himself on the Establishment.

In the three months granted to instruct a new lawyer, the furore was getting unmanageable for the authorities with even two Nobel Prize winners signing up to the Alternative Media Gathering’s anticensorship declaration,[146] and the jailed editors were released on a technicality to do with ambiguity of the wording of the indictment after less than four months inside. Thanks to a stream of supportive letters, the defendants had done better than might be expected in jail — except Molland whose shrill, ‘holierthan-thou’ attitude antagonised otherwise sympathetic prisoners and who had his cell trashed by fascists on arrival at HMP Totnes.

Just how thin the technicality was as an excuse to release the editors was shown up by the 3^rd trial, where it proved impossible for the prosecution to find any indictment wording that wasn’t deemed “ambiguous”, meaning both Webb and Rogers also finally got to walk free. There followed a standoff into early-1999 where police threatened an appeal and we threatened to sue. They blinked first — and the paper, of course, kept on coming out.

The Home Clones

Steward Home flooded London with his ‘Green and Brown Anarchist’ leaflet in mid-1994, arguing GA’s supposed support for “Green death camps” because of Hunt’s former involvement.[147] He continued churning this crap out at least until 1998, deliberately trying to blur the distinction between ‘ecofascists’ (a Lyndon Larouche-coined term for those favouring authoritarian environmental measures, particularly re. population control) and ‘common or garden’ fascists (those committed to a fuhrerprinzip and so related supremacisms), as if we at GA — as anarchists, consistently antistatist and anti-fascist — were either. We were naively inclined to dismiss the first one or two leaflets as the sort of scandalous publicity-seeking initiated by the Surrealists and decidedly tired by the Situationists, who Home affected to ape in the hope his association with their techniques would discredit them, not him. After all, Home — a deliberately execrable writer, as if he could be any other kind — was seeking an ‘in’ to the early-1990s notoriety of Brit lit that followed Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting.

After that, we responded with a ‘pot calls kettle black’ editorial paragraph noting Home’s association with National Front member Tony Wakeford and to date have so far had three different claims from Home as to when he disassociated himself from him as well as insubstantial, self-serving claims that Wakeford has left off fascism, each disproved by a subsequently discovered document. This sounded like someone with something to hide to us... When we collared Home’s space cadet sidekick Fabian ‘Fuckwit’ Tompsett at one of their artsy do’s at the Oval two years into this crap, he couldn’t even define ‘fascism’, insisting it was “a matter for sociologists”. This didn’t stop them throwing similarly incoherent mud for another half-decade.

By 1997, the ‘who said what’ of this manufactured scandal was so bewilderingly convoluted that people thought it all poor entertainment at best — with a few opportunistic lice like AK Press also seeing it as a bulwark against anarcho-primitivist supersession of their antique ideologies. Then Home and his clones — I won’t call them Neoists as he did, following Neoist founder tentatively a convenience’s denunciation of their attempt to discredit Neoism by appropriation — started to broaden their aim. Fuckwit issued a pamphlet denouncing ‘anarchist saint’ Stuart Christie, a veteran Black Flag editor who tried to assassinate Spain’s generalissimo Franco, as a “fascist” for advocating anarchist militias. As typical with this crowd, Christie’s distinction between classic anarchist militias in Spain and racist, Christian fundamentalist ones in the US was deliberately blurred. At the 1997 Anarchist Bookfair, when they prematurely hoped GA’s editors would already be safely jailed and not there to answer back, Home and his clones issued Anarchist Integralism, a pamphlet claiming all anarchists as tainted by anti-Semitic “Bakuninism”, although neither this nor ‘integralism’ were ever defined. Of course, the anarcho-Establishment sat there and meekly took it, not knowing the ‘joke’ (such as it was) was on them.

Surrounded by a fan base of exceptional sycophancy and stupidity — typically college kids dressed up as skinheads, as if they think this fools anyone — Home is used to passing outrageous remarks that go over their heads and, I suspect, enjoys trying to worm his way round criticism if confronted over any of them. He’s happy to use the Evolian slogan “Long live Death!” in one of his AK-published booklets, claiming it to be an anarchist Civil War slogan when challenged. It may well have been. Incidentally. Which I doubt is the reason Home used it. Similarly, we knew what integralism was, an irrational ultra-nationalist belief promulgated by the darling of the ‘political soldier’ far-Right as ‘more extreme than the Nazis’, Cornlieu Codreanu, fuhrer of the Romanian Iron Guard during World War 2. We knew what “Bakuninism” was too, an alternate term for so-called nationalanarchism, a far-Right attempt wellestablished in Germany and Russia to appropriate anarchism, much as national Bolshevism was a fascist attempt to appropriate Stalinism in the run-up to World War 2.

How did we know all this stuff, other than Home’s suspicious interest in the obscure byways of the farRight and as a consequence of our ongoing association with the train/ fascistspotterish Larry O’Hara since the Hepple affair? Because we had to. Flattered by political attention from anyone at all, Richard Hunt (remember him?) had let his Alternative Green (and his mind) grow rank with fascist weeds, opening its columns to ‘political soldiers’ like Patrick Harrington (a big chum of Wakeford’s), Richard Lawson and Troy Southgate. Pretty soon, Hunt himself was arguing the same sort of meaningless distinctions as them between ‘racial nationalists’ and Nazis and claiming the Strasser brothers “weren’t Nazis” despite years of being card-carrying NSDAP members, albeit a tad more proletarian than usually accepted into its upper ranks. Southgate is happy to call himself a ‘national-anarchist’ and ‘Bakuninist’ and is welcome to provided he doesn’t attempt — as Home and his clones have not coincidentally consistently tried to do — to confuse this with any authentic, nonbogus, anti-statist form of anarchism. Lawson edited a publication called Perspectives, using the old Mosley study group trick of suckering in the middle class by never overtly using the ‘F’ word. Long-since exposed — not least by GA — Lawson then moved in on Alternative Green as founded by someone authentically Green and guaranteed to cry long and hard if his appropriation of it was ever challenged. The fascist tactic of convergence is to lay claim to juicy terms (“freedom”, “ecology”, “anarchism”) and hope that those already using them will drop them like poison rather than be poisoned by association with those misappropriating them. This cultural ‘war of position’ has been meat and drink to the ‘political soldiers’ for at least a quarter century now.

We’d been actively discouraging sales of Alternative Green since it started to go rotten at its 2^nd issue. But Hunt’s new chums were ambitious, having him front a series of ‘Anarchist Heretic Fairs’ in contrast to the annual Anarchist Bookfair in London, as showcases for one species of convergence after another. Trouble — for them — was this didn’t get very far, with venues consistently crying off when told what sort was really planning to show up and eventually even the mainstream anti-fascist movement — which typically can only spot the sort of fascist that wears jackboots and says “sieg heil” — woke up to what was going on and shooed a frustrated Hunt and his stall off the front of the 2000 Bookfair, sans stock. They showed less enthusiasm for moving on those promoting a convergence agenda within the Bookfair, organisers Martin Peacock and Carol Saunders being longstanding chums of the ‘avant garde’ Home and Fuckwit. In fact, Peacock showed more enthusiasm for beating up a GA leafleteer alerting Fair-goers to convergence than barring those promoting it from his event. Equally tellingly, other attendees have shown typical movement principle in preferring a stall at the Bookfair to challenging its organisers over this blatant incident.

And what of Home now? Virtually silent, whether because Brit lit’s star has fallen and without himself even tagged to its tail (so no publishers, no moronic pseud fan base, etc — hard life, eh?) or because the final expose of the convergers at the 2000 Bookfair — there have been no more ‘Heretics Fairs’ attempted since — means he has lost his rationalle to continue smearing GA. And he knows we have the full gen on Wakeford and he now too, of course.... Throughout this Homestyled “feud”, there has been an undercurrent of collaboration between him and the State as well as the fascists. Of course, both before and after World War 2, fascists were wellserved by their connections to intelligence as a deniable reservoir of anti-Communist brute force. It also suits both their agendas propagandawise to infiltrate militant Green circles and so have them portrayed as violent and fascistic.

Splits and Schisms

The end of the GandALF prosecutions also marked a slow, acrimonious end to GA’s fourth editorial collective.

As you’ve already read above, the obsessive Noel Molland — who had neither understanding of or sympathy with GA’s broader politics and used our pages simply to get his listings printed in the name of animal lib movement cred — moved out of our orbit even before the first trial was done and now plays on his short spell inside as an angle in publishing his Earth Liberation Prisoners newsletter. A rigid, mother-identified individual, Molland’s publication is more appreciated by the animal lib movement than he is. His compromising behaviour — including sneaking off to a hotel room to talk to a journalist that then ran one bogus anti-ALF programme after another — during the GAndALF trial is a matter of record, after all.

Sax Wood also legged it out of UK rather than get called to testify at the 3^rd GAndALF trial. This was the start of a strange odyssey indeed. EF!UK refuses all representative principles — including that there is an “EF!UK” as opposed to a scattering of distinct local groups — and yet Wood addressed his way across Canada to the Amerikan West Coast as its selfstyled “representative”. He landed a post at the Earth First! Journal then based at Eugene, Oregon, this way too. He first offered to get GA printed over there for global distribution — marginally cheaper than UK printing, much better security, and distribution inroads into the US too — and then decided to fuck us off after a couple of issues on realising he could make more money publishing his own paper from Eugene instead (that this doubled our print costs in UK meant nothing to him). Much as Molland claimed to be nonanarchist (despite years publishing something called the Rabbixian Anarchist Times) and nonviolent on lawyers’ advice during the Gandalf trial, so they had Wood dream up some ‘fundamental’ green anarchism out of the pre-Hunt primordial soup, an Albonesque mishmash of allotments and homespun pacifism. Calling it Green Anarchy, Wood touted his version from venue to venue around the States, claiming it to be “the American version of Green Anarchist” and himself to be me, John Connor. Needless to say, he prevaricated endlessly about allowing any criticism to be published in it by GA (UK) — a green anarchist publication open to all except other green anarchists, evidently! Well, it would have rather blown that little scam of his and there is no dole worth talking of Stateside.... Ironically, the Eugene-based crew he eventually recruited as co-editors — his dyslexia made it impossible to edit the publication beyond reprints on his own — took him at his word and when they, too, insisted on anarchoprimitivist content like the UK version, Wood worked himself up into a huff and walked out, compiling his more honestly titled News from Nowhere from the East Coast thereafter. A further delicious irony was that this all happened only months short of the N30 antiglobalisation protests in Seattle, which (absurdly) hyped the Eugene anarchists and their GA (USA) to worldwide attention.

Whilst at the Journal, Wood met radical archaeologist and fellow editor, Theresa Kintz. Although she’d been involved in EF! over a decade, she had only become aware of the anarcho-primitivist perspective on meeting John Zerzan in Eugene. When the Journal received the offer of a first interview with Ted Kaczynski, convicted for a 17 year campaign of antitech Unabombings and at one time Amerika’s #1 Most Wanted, Kintz took on an assignment the other largely upper-middle class, liberal editorial group wanted nothing to do with. The Journal wouldn’t publish this ‘dynamite’ material — not least on the insistence of Daryl Cherney, the big money Californian EF! supremo then suing the FBI for injuries caused by their bomb during the Redwoods Summer campaign — who subsequently had her purged from the editorial group. Kintz then left for the UK, both because GA had agreed to publish the interview without any of the official nastiness that might accompany Amerikan publication and because it was possible to write her thesis on radical archaeology and anarcho-primitivism in the British academic climate but not any Amerikan one (nice to live in a free country then...).

Unfortunately after little over a year in UK, Kintz and myself found Larry O’Hara our de facto landlord whilst doing (extended) summer work in London. O’Hara has serious, unresolved problems to do with women, particularly his deceased, adopted mother [148] and it didn’t take much prompting from a malicious neighbour (who also happened to be a copper’s wife) he’d adopted as a mothersubstitute for things to turn very nasty indeed. Things might have ended with our de facto eviction but O’Hara, never one to under-do vindictiveness, then encouraged Steve Booth to believe Kintz was (in his own words) “an agent for the American equivalent of Searchlight”. As the Irrationalist debacle during the GAndALF period demonstrated, Booth is given to inappropriate quasiautistic fixations and at this time, Larry O’Hara was one of them. He was happy to believe and / or do anything O’Hara told him, whether it made sense or not. Despite repeated public and private challenges to provide any evidence of his agentbaiting BS, none has being forthcoming with Booth himself admitting in private correspondence that his risible amalgam of paranoid surmises are “not proof”. This didn’t stop him from a covert campaign of unsubstantiated, hostile whispers and mail interception (given our precipitate move, we had to route our mail via his home before we knew of his ‘aberration’ and until a more secure alternative was available), ultimately setting up his own spoiler publication, also called Green Anarchist, ‘to save it’. Needless to say, Booth could hardly publicly admit the true reason for his ‘split’ without deserved ridicule, so he first pretended it was to do with Kintz trying to sell a second Kaczynski interview to porno mag Penthouse (surely a matter principally between Ted and her) and then later, when that didn’t get sufficient reaction in these post-feminist times, claimed it was due to “differences of approach”.

Current Issues

As early as N30 (by which I mean my time in the Euston pig pen), we at GA have been warning that the antiglobalisation movement would revive massified Leftism and that would swallow the autonomous direct action initiatives where real hope for a similarly autonomous future lies. That prediction has sadly proved largely true, militancy (if we can call it that) being largely confined to ‘mile wide, inch deep’ ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ demos that satisfied the more complacent type of liberal in the 1980s — but even then were augmented by a hard edge of clandestine ALFers, base busters, saboteurs and street fighting anti-fascists which I’m relieved to say the complacent liberals didn’t approve of. Fredy Perlman said that anarcho zine publishing represented a “reappropriation of capital” inasmuch as you always have to put money into them to keep them alive, that they never pay for themselves. One odd consequence of the massification of the movement is that outlets for alternative publications have plummeted.

A key reason I had to work in London from summer 2000 — and continue to work now, nights and / or in shit call centres — despite being opposed to work as a matter of temperament and general principle was that this was the only way remaining open to me to finance the paper. Booth — who at that time was living in a fantasy world of an ever-expanding movement and where nothing ever had to be paid for — simply couldn’t understand why he was being asked to do more of GA’s admin, only having 8+ hours a day more free time to do it than I then did. I had no objection in principle to him editing the paper fulltime, leaving me time to write and finance GA, but when I saw the first and only prebreak issue he produced, I knew there was just no way he should be allowed to ever produce another under the Green Anarchist mast head. Despite access to a perfectly good printer, he had halved its size and doubled its price, making it cheaper for readers to photocopy than buy, which I guess proofed them against further rip-offs. All mention of direct action and even prisoners listings had been dropped, replaced by diatribes in triplicate on the worth of unity with statist organisations like the Green Party, trivial reformist calls to lobby politicians for more easily recycled packaging and renationalisation of the railways, and off-the-wall conspiracy theory of the sort that so endeared O’Hara to Booth. Despite his level (indeed, strangely flat and humourless) tone, the weakening of emphasis was so pronounced that I concluded this new GA was either written by a different person from that who’d versified

Fluffy wankers make me chunder / Soon you’ll all be six feet under

(the original perhaps replaced by pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers...) or one in the grip of a profound mental illness (perhaps some sort of obsessive-compulsive reformism!).

In full auteur mode, Booth wouldn’t budge an inch, of course, so I had to deny him access to GA’s Monomarks box and activate the mag’s back-up editorial collective, those prepared to edit it had the entire 4^th collective gone down as a result of the GAndALF trial. Since the dark days of mid-2000, we have produced half a dozen new issues of the ‘original and best’ GA,[149] addressed comrades as far afield as the US, Italy and Turkey, seen AP gatherings in UK, Spain and the States and outsold Booth’s pseudo-GA two to one with more frequent publication. It is a source of particular satisfaction to me that now Booth has to go to the bother of publishing and selling the mag himself, his “trees of Reason” have been dealing him some harsh blows as to economic and movement realities that he should have been alive to four years ago. We (i.e. the new editors, largely involved as Booth is not) were especially amusing to hear he was reduced to impersonating a vegetarian so Lancaster Animal Rights Group would take him to a SHAC demo to streetsell his wretched little reformist rag there.

Of course, whilst this publication is not produced solely to spite Steve Booth, satisfying though that might be (the opposite, when it comes to his pseudo-publication, might not be the case however), it’s worth paying some attention to his “difference of approach” just to illustrate where GA is going in future.

Like Sax Wood before, Booth felt that by weakening GA’s content and consciously adopting a ‘popularist’ (i.e. propagandistic) format, he’d win more readers and influence — conventional political prosletysing tactics, in fact. This approach is flawed because whilst there are 101 reformist publications out there, all more established and better resourced than Booth’s, there is only one GA, a unique voice (not counting Booth’s GA, of course, which is unique only in its residual demented conspiracy theorising!). Revolution is not made by halves — without challenging the totality, radically and totally, nothing will ultimately change, something we all know deep down. A ‘popularist’ approach can’t even touch on these fundamental areas in case (its advocates patronisingly assume) it ‘scares the horses — and the proles’. Rather than having deep appeal, such propaganda touches on deep insecurities. It is Booth and not us that is “elitist” inasmuch as we demand full, open dialogue whereas Booth feels only some ideas are fit to be fed to his ‘limited, weak-minded’ readers as The Answer from Upon High whilst others must be rigidly censored and excluded from his publication, despite references to “free speech” on its mast head. The result is an unattractive, uninteresting monologue, and all readers hear is the drone of a wannabe boss-in-waiting lording it over them intellectually — as in the rest of the Left and anarcho-Left press.

Booth stupidly argues that an absolute position achieves nothing, as if we were a political party recruiting members according to certain criteria, with only those ‘in’ allowed to do anything politically meaningful. Sadly, perhaps Booth does now see politics in such conventional terms — but I do not. Whoever acts in an unmediated way for their own liberation is ‘in’ as far as I’m concerned and my ‘party’ — if one can so name something that does not and should not exist — is the total liberation of all, human, animal, plant and rock by the tearing down of all separation and alienation. One moment of piercing, epiphanaic love or of well-directed anger outweighs any thousand petitions addressed to the waste paper baskets of the already powerful as far as I’m concerned.

Anarcho-primitivism occupies the same place of universal evil in Booth’s wonky worldview as perhaps Searchlight, Freedom Press or (in pre-movement Cold Warrior mode) Communism once did. For those who have seen only the ‘reasonable’ face Booth puts on for public consumption, it is instructive to read him rant and rave in his anti-AP pamphlet, literally contradicting himself page by page, never mind such errors of fact as accusing John Zerzan, author of The Catastrophe of Postmodernism, of being a postmodernist just because Booth doesn’t like post-modernism either! You won’t know it to read Primitivism: An Illusion with No Future (free off the Net) that Booth was around as early as Ian Bone’s 1993 Anarchy In The UK festival when John Moore and Leigh Starcross bought out the AP latent in Hunt’s adoption of Sahlin’s ‘primitive affluence’ thesis or had read and distributed over a dozen issues since with specific AP core themes and even (hard for a hermit like Booth) met a few of them over the years, all without a word of objection and then — bang! — as soon as he breaks with revolutionism, AP is the world’s greatest evil. Those given to psychological analysis would point out here that Booth has no issues with AP, just with whatever I happen to advocate but more substantially, from his current perspective Booth has every reason to take issue with this sort of analysis. From its inception, Camatte’s critiques of ideological ‘gangs’ and Perlman’s satirical Manual for Revolutionary Leaders unequivocally rejected the sort of conventional manipulative power politics Booth has now adopted, insisting we trust the people’s own instinct for selfliberation over any that choose to ‘represent’ (dominate) them. And, of course, AP criticises the totality, the fundamentals of Civilisation and Empire, of symbolisation and separation and this, too, is poison to the partial, mediated, reformist approach. But I think what really scares Booth in his current state of mind is AP’s critique of domestication. A jazz fan, there was a time when Booth could let himself go. All that is no mystery to him, for all his petit bourgeois background. But currently, any loss of control might force him to break out of a rigid circle of selfdelusion and selfpolicing that is keeping reality and any admission of error on his part at bay — meltdown time, baby!

In this, Booth is like the ossified anarcho-Left as a whole, which already knows all the arguments about ‘the iron law of oligarchy’ that will lead to its supersession because they are applied exclusively to criticise other, like organisations and never used to criticise their own. This state of affairs can only be maintained by the most rigid ideological double-think, Booth’s sectarian ‘ins’ and ‘outs’. They know they are an obstacle to revolution but can never, ever even whisper it. Because we consistently say the unthinkable and encourage others to — ’”more goad than guide” as one lot hilariously put it — GA has been anathematised by such groups year on year, and we’d be disappointed if we were not. We don’t matter, organisations don’t matter. All that matters is the love and rage of the people, a flame that with burn away all this old world.

My future vision, then, is of a universal, all-consuming, passionate, liberating inferno. As to myself, I wish I spent more time smashing and burning (as I once did), less on writing, but more even of that than nothing. Whatever — GA or something like it will continue if I write for it or not. However big a part it’s been in my life, it is a small thing indeed in the grand scheme of things. It is a great pleasure to me to see other pro-AP groups and tendencies springing up all over the world, as it makes my — and GA’s — role all the more dispensible.

Readers of this account may no doubt be offended by the way GA’s internal politics are conducted — as if some other, more bureaucratically ‘democratic’, ‘representative’ system might work ‘better’. Reputedly, when asked on his deathbed who should inherit his empire, Alexander the Great’s dying words were that it should go to “the strongest”. Beneath the transparent tissue of civilised lies, when has this ever not been so — and gladly, honestly so, at that?

---

Surveillance

New York Surveillance Camera Players — Live at Leeds

Between 7 and 11 October 2003, Bill Brown of the New York Surveillance Camera Players stayed in Leeds, England, as the guest of the Evolution 2003 Arts Festival, an offshoot of the Leeds Film Festival.

On Tuesday 7 October, after arriving in Leeds and checking into his awful hotel (the newly built Park Plaza), Bill mapped out the locations of surveillance cameras installed in public places in the city centre. As the final version of his map indicates, this rather small, densely packed area is watched by a total of (at least) 153 cameras: 115 installed on the exteriors of privately owned buildings, and most likely operated by private security guards; 22 hidden within uncommonly large, black-tinted globes, and most likely operated by the police; and 16 installed atop poles, and definitely operated by the City Council.

In other words, the Leeds city centre is a super-surveilled place, one in which it is impossible to walk around without being videotaped, no matter where you go. The city centre occupies 16 square blocks; and so there are, on average, almost 10 cameras per block. By contrast, there are only 7 cameras per city block in the most highly surveilled neighborhoods in New York City and Chicago, which are of course much larger cities. With Leeds in mind, it’s easy to believe the accuracy of the estimate that England as a whole is watched by over 2 million surveillance cameras.

The situation fairly boggles the mind. The police cameras installed on top of poles aren’t enclosed within globes, as they are in New York City. As a result, all of their grotesque movements — sweeping back and forth, stopping to watch someone in particular, following someone around, etc. — are clearly visible to everyone. Though these cameras are almost always accompanied by signs, these signs contain a glaring mistake: they say “CCTV [Closed-Circuit TV] in Operation,” when the cameras these signs accompany are in fact wireless or OCTV [Open-Circuit TV]. The police cameras that are enclosed, are enclosed within globes larger than any Bill has ever seen. Furthermore, these huge black globes are never accompanied by signs, which makes their dark presence on poles and the exteriors of certain buildings even more menacing. As if all this wasn’t enough (!), the police also use highly visible Video Vans, which mostly cruise around at night and are probably equipped with infrared cameras.

It’s worth noting that, almost without exception, each privately operated surveillance camera in Leeds has a small sign on it that proclaims the name of the company that manufactured it. And so, every time one sees a camera, one also sees the name of a company (ADT, Secom, Philips, Symantec, Securicor, etc etc). It’s a form of advertising. This clearly suggests that, not only are surveillance cameras designed to create an environment in which it is safe to do business, surveillance cameras are themselves a (big) business.

On Thursday 9 October, Bill was quite busy. At 11:15 am, he gave an hour-long presentation about the SCP to an “Evolution” audience. More than 100 people were in attendance. There were a great many questions; but, this time, about half of them were “pragmatic” in nature (i.e., less questions than thinly disguised objections). One woman had the nerve to ask if Bill had ever been the victim of crime; another said she was “disturbed” by the fact he was wearing a suit and tie, and not dressed the way she imagined people like Bill should be dressed.

And yet, immediately after his presentation, when Bill offered a walking tour of surveillance cameras in the city centre, there were in attendance over 50 people, all of whom were clearly supportive of Bill’s unrelenting critique of surveillance, police departments and the State. The group didn’t have to walk far to see the three types of cameras Bill had mapped. Indeed, the group didn’t have to do any walking at all; all it had to do was stand still at the northeast corner of Albion and the Headrow, a spot from which the group could see — and be seen by — all three camera-types.

Bill had expected that there would be problems with the police. Before departing for Leeds, he’d been contacted by a reporter for The Guardian, who’d told him that the Leeds City Council — one of the sponsors of the event — had already expressed discomfort with the proposed walking tour. In particular, the Council was uncomfortable with the reference to “the conditions under which the cameras do not work” in Bill’s description of what the proposed walking tour would highlight. This clearly suggests that the Council is experiencing problems with its system, and doesn’t want this fact publicized, or that the Council is all-too-aware that its system can easily be interfered with. In any event, there were no problems at all. The police simply used the nearest pole-mounted OCTV camera (it was right across the street) to keep a careful “eye” on the walking tour the entire time it was taking place.

There was sufficient interest for a second walking tour, which took place at 5:30 pm. Meeting at the same spot as before, this tour was attended by about 10 people, all of whom had been at the first one. And so, rather than offer the same program a second time, Bill moved on to other, more advanced subjects (automated surveillance, targeted assassinations, and UAVs). As before, the group was obviously being watched by the OCTV camera across the street.

Once he’d concluded his remarks and answered people’s questions, Bill led the group around the corner and into heavily surveilled Dortmund Square. After explaining what he was about to do and inviting others to join him, Bill began performing God’s Eyes Here on Earth in front of one of the pole-mounted police cameras. He was joined by 6 other people, including a homeless man who “prayed” to the camera by making an internationally recognized gesture for fuckyou. When the watcher turned the camera away and pointed it in the opposite direction — as if refusing to give the performers the satisfaction of knowing that their gestures had been seen — the group picked up, moved to the spot in which the camera was looking, and started the performance again. Once again, the camera turned away and refused to look. Success was declared, and the group went off to find a pub.

www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

“I Can See the Future”: 10 predictions concerning cell-phones

”My guess is that the real revolution in law enforcement capability will come from digital radios, rather than from video cameras.” — Arnold Kling, 21 October 2002.

Unlike the grainy pictures taken by today’s picture phones, the Nokia Observation Camera snaps high-resolution images of 640 by 480 pixels. This means it rates as a surveillance system under British and European law, so people buying one will have to register with the data protection authorities as a CCTV user, says Britain’s Office of the Information Commissioner. “If this device captures an identifiable image, it will be classed as a CCTV device,” says the office’s compliance manager Fay Spencer. “Anyone who is not exempt will have to register as a CCTV user.” Under the act, anyone can ask a registered user to see what they have recorded. Watching your car in your drive or on the street outside your home would be exempt. But watching other people, their homes or cars would not. “The guiding principle is fairness, telling people how the camera is being used and why. That’s why shops have notices warning customers that they are on camera,” says Spencer.

1. In place of the video surveillance cameras currently installed on the exteriors of buildings, on city-owned poles and in other public places, the security industry will instead install cellular telephones (“digital radios”). Unlike video cameras, even those that are outfitted with transmitters, so-called “cell-phones” are fully integrated, multi-purpose devices. They can be outfitted with tiny digital cameras that can take high-quality stills or moving pictures, can be controlled by remote units, and can transmit images to far-away locations almost immediately after taking them.

2. All cell-phones will come with two types of built-in surveillance/tracking devices: transponders that communicate with the US military’s semicommercialized system, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. These devices will allow both the military government and the private sector to identify the precise location and track the exact movements of each and every cell-phone user, no matter where they go.

3. Cell-phone users will be actively encouraged use their cute little cellphones to surreptiously take pictures of people who look “suspicious” and then send these pictures to the local police and/or the FBI, who will use computers to see if they match any of the pictures that are stored in their huge and always-growing databases. Winners in this game of snitch will be financially rewarded and turned into “heroes” by the media (see #5 below).

4. Sexually repressed and ethically corrupt people — American males — will use their cell-phones to take “up the skirt” shots et al of girls and women who don’t know and in such a despicable fashion. This will quickly become a real problem, much worse than it is now: cell-phones already take better pictures than most video cameras; cell-phones get rid of the evidence (send it somewhere else), rather than storing it where it can easily be found; unlike video cameras, cell-phones don’t require disguises or excuses to be brought into such sensitive areas as schools, gyms, locker rooms, bathrooms, beaches, etc.

5. Reality TV shows a la Big Brother will accentuate the “novelty” of having a group of people cooped up together in a single place for a long time and watched by hidden cellphones, not hidden video cameras.

6. As cell-phones become increasingly relied upon to provide a wide range of services (telephone calls, text-messenging, pictures, video games, Internet connection, personal digital assistance, etc.), they will become increasingly attractive to thieves, who will see the value of both the device itself and the information (the “identity”) contained within. To guard against both kinds of theft, all cell-phone users will have to prove that they are indeed who they say they are (the rightful owners) before they can use their own phones.

7. The most popular method of authentication (“logging on”) won’t be typing in a 7-digit password (hard to remember) or placing a digit on a device that can read and remember fingerprints (too reminiscent of what the police do to bad people when they arrest them); no, it will be letting the cute little cell-phone take a picture. This picture (of the user’s face or eyeballs) will be analyzed by the cellphone, which either won’t find a match (“Please try again”) or will find a match and only then allow access (“You’ve got mail!”).

8. It’s possible that a user who fails to log on after 3 tries may find that his or her service has been temporarily suspended while the service provider tries to “determine the nature of the problem.” Is it incompetence on the part of an legitimate user, or the result of deliberate actions by an illegitimate user? Because “an illegitimate user” might be a criminal (thief) or a terrorist (Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or someone else on the Bush Administration’s “missing persons” list), every single attempt to log-on to a cell-phone will — using the very same system described in #3 (above) — be “monitored” by Verizon/AOL-Time Warner/the FBI/theCIA.

9. The Israeli Defense Forces have already shown that alleged terrorists — whether they are legitimately using their own cell-phones or are using others’ phones illegitimately — can be assassinated from a safe, faraway distance by systems which place calls to the alleged terrorists’ private telephone numbers and then fire air-to-ground missiles at the locations provided by the alleged terrorists’ very own cell-phones, that is, if they are unlucky enough to answer or “pick up.” It’s only a matter of time before the same system is used by the United States government, which has already used it to summarily execute suspected “terrorists” in Yemen from a safe, far-away distance.

10. Ownership of a cell-phone will be mandatory. A free cell-phone will be given to each and every person, starting at birth.

— Surveillance Camera Players, 21 June 2003.

How Can You Think Freely in the Shadow of a Church? by Grimalkin

Dominant discourses lead us to believe that we are living the best life that there has ever been; at all other times in all other places things were nasty, brutish and short. You may be bored shitless — but then there must be something wrong with you — work harder, drink, take Prozac, take up a cause... But this luxurious life is fragile, and others are jealous, they are not prepared to work for it like you do, they just want to take it, and send you to the place they are now.

You must be on your guard at all times. Have a ‘cop in your head’, invite the Internet spy into your home, nowhere is safe, carry your mobile phone, do not rely on yourself, the benevolent god of technology is there to help. You are domesticated, you are dependant — you don’t want to go taking action yourself now do you — report it to the experts... they are to be trusted.

In a ‘democratic’ society where authority is legitimated in an inverse relation to its exercise, domestication must be enforced through ‘voluntary’ compliance, through self-discipline. Domestication is achieved by allowing ‘difference’ but annihilating any autonomy through a divide and rule system. Related to this is Gramsci’s concept of hegemony — the idea that no state or social structure can exist for anything but a brief time by coercion alone.

Surveillance exists to enforce ideas of normality and deviance — of morality; this universalising morality produces docility. Surveillance acts to exacerbate fear of the other, leading us to accept our further domestication in return for ‘protection’. In Perlman’s words ‘The task of capitalist ideology is to maintain the veil which keeps people from seeing that their own activities reproduce the form of their daily life; the task of critical theory is to unveil the activities of daily life, to render them transparent, to make the reproduction of the social form of capitalist activity visible within the people’s daily activities’.

Obviously an important technique of control is that of the media, not only that advertisers attempt to repackage our desires within the symbolism of consumer goods, so that through their purchase we can construct a physical, visual narrative of our lives. More fundamentally the media offers a closed discourse with the central issues never up for discussion.

The loss of two-way communication at community and societal levels is indicative of the destruction of spatially conscious communities. Individuals are linked into something much less tangible, thus we can feel a sense of intimacy with public figures whom we have never seen, let alone met. Trust experts and opinion polls, yet we are subject to whipped up fears about our neighbours. This process, particularly the induced fear, facilitates the technological panopticon. Allowing tightening of its ability to regulate movement and control our actions — to prevent us from acting on our desires, or at least perverting our desires, trapping us into the reproduction of capital.

Additionally, when all others in a space are behaving ‘appropriately’, the undomesticated body becomes marked and available to the attention of surveillance systems. Residents of cities are treated like tourists, welcome to spectate and consume, but not to act on their own. Local residents cannot appropriate a domesticated space; it has already been reduced to a single meaning. Unmediated conversation with those around you might just break the fear, you might discover that you have been lied to, you might just begin to live.

‘If the discourse is one-way, no communication is possible. If someone has the power to impose the questions, the content of the latter will be directly functional to this (and the answers will contain subjection). Subjects can only be asked questions whose answers confirm their roles as such, and from which the bosses will draw the questions of the future. The slavery lies in continuing to reply’ (At Daggers Drawn).

This is relevant in all areas of life, for example the post WW2 welfare programmes are generally accepted as at least benevolent, yet they have only served to increase the intensity of our control.

Slum clearance led to a loss of communal space and activity, an increased reliance on the nuclear family, the isolation of women within the home, a loss of the living kitchen and its replacement with the mediated environment of the ‘living room’. We accept losing autonomy in order to receive wealth or health benefits, we have become desensitized to being numbered and tracked. Given the loss of public / collective space, where are the places to fight from the outside, ‘how can you think freely in the shadow of a church?’

The domination of socialisation is hard to resist, it is something we are immersed in and absorb continuously, we do not feel coerced, it is everywhere and nowhere. Thus is not just relevant to us at adults. Many people seem to have the idea that it is wrong to educate kids outside of mainstream education; considering this bourgeois and somehow reducing their future choice!

We have chosen not to participate, and it is felt unfair not to give them the option to opt in — this shows a massive lack of understanding of basic socialisation, and of the methodology of control. Self-surveillance is learned from childhood. Children no longer have the freedom even to play unobserved, to explore their sexuality, to create their own spaces. Instead they grow up expecting to be watched, to be protected, to be dependant, to be fearful. ‘You need to experience freedom in order to be free. You need to free yourself in order to experience freedom. Within the present social order, time and space prevent experimentation of freedom because they suffocate the freedom to experiment’ (At Daggers Drawn).

Within the anarchist milieu there is the general acceptance that we are aware of surveillance, we know about Echelon, and CCTV — we take care where we talk about what, we fight Big Brother where we can etc. But this is only the outward form of surveillance; rarely do we seem to look at the way the self-discipline of surveillance morality has crept into our own sub-cultures. Which rules are questioned, and how are ideas about morality and deviance defined and enforced within our groups?

We also seem to have accepted the comfort zone of sub-cultural permanence — housing coops, social centres, activist groups — these are hung onto no matter how destructive, no matter how domesticated because of not wanting to waste the work put in — thus we perceive work as a means to an end, rather than an enjoyable, satisfying activity in itself. Yet surely it is the working together on a project that is most important — and learning, and communicating — not whether the outcome of the project is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. We hang onto groups because they have worked in the past, allowing roles to become cemented, knowledge to become protected — a creeping specialisation, which negates the possibility of spontaneity. We create spaces that are different in that wider morality becomes skewed, but remain tainted by civilisation.

How much are we creating spaces for ourselves that allow us to ‘survive’, but prevent us from truly living. Surviving on the detritus of capitalism is still dependency on it. Have we become civilisations scavengers rather than its parasites? Surely we are just as dependent as if we were actually participating. The opposition that legitimises the status quo.

How are we developing a revolutionary praxis? Are we even pushing ourselves to question what we have been taught. Over the last ten years there has been much activity, but has anything we have done challenged or slowed the tightening of the noose in any way? Surely we have just become more and more subsumed into the system on all levels — do we even understand any more what we are fighting. Are we through our acceptance of our socialisation, our morality, our self-surveillance, active accomplices in our imprisonment, destined never to create the space to become ourselves? There is a long anti-civilisation insurrectionary history — pirates, slave revolts, luddites... People could remember that there used to be other ways of being, and knew almost instinctively what the enemy was. Yet we appear to have lost meaningful class analysis — allowing it to be subsumed even in the ‘anarchist’ world into unions, federations, and working class fetishism. Accepting post-enlightenment ideas of progress, with the dualistic morality that this entails, thus attempting to fight the system from within the confines of its thought control. This is not embracing freedom and can only be disastrous, it is superficial as opposed to fundamental change — the illusion of freedom whilst subject to the bureaucratic morality of the mass.

‘It is to the way in which we can come together to transcend the environment of the technology of isolation that we must apply our efforts and attention. How we organise to this end is organic; it will be neither formal nor permanent, and it cannot be programmed or platformed. We start by communicating on equal terms — without the mediation of technology, specialism and representation — with those who suffer the same alienated existence. We grow stronger as likeminded people work together seriously (and playfully) in common projects of self-determination that shatter established social relations. ‘The heart of the State’ is found and demolished in our own relations. Let your desire be armed’. (Test Card F).

Where do we draw the line, is any compromise possible? There is no such thing as partial freedom only ‘bigger prisons, longer chains’. To submit to self-discipline, to repress desire, to allow morality and mediation, is to embrace android culture. Self-surveillance and control is to submit to the logic of the technological panopticon and accept our ultimate domestication.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ON STRIKE

In the course of the night of October 22-23, 101 surveillance cameras were attacked and put out of commission throughout the city of Milan, Italy. Along with the action, a humorous statement was released in the supposed voice of the cameras, claiming that they were ‘on strike’ and ‘no longer want to serve this mania for security’.

The statement ends: “We will show you through our absence how much our presences weighs in order to invite you to reflect on how much space we steal from you. Last night we turned ourselves off, we broke our wires, we stained our screens with paint, broke the lenses; we have self-destructed, and self-darkened. or we have simply gone away. If we have not explained ourselves ---> WE ARE ON STRIKE!!!”

Perhaps surveillance cameras in other cities—maybe where we love—would appreciate some assistance in organizing a similar wildcat strike.

From Willful Disobedience

SURVEILLANCE AND DOMESTICATION

John Connor on the rise of surveillance and our acquiescence in it

Surveillance is sold to us on the grounds that 'the innocent have nothing to hide', but the reluctance of the watchers to also become the watched--the police will plead 'operational security' to excuse themselves from disclosing even the most trivial points of detail about themselves, such as canteen menus, etc--shows this as both a transparent excuse to extend surveillance way beyond the point where it should be socially acceptable and a disguising of what is in the interests of the powerful with reference to what is supposedly 'in the interest of all'.

THE WORM IN ADAM'S APPLE

By way of excusing current levels of surveillance, where there is now one camera / four people in UK alone, it is possible to present the first band societies 'where everyone knew everyone else's business' as the most surveilled societies of all. This totally misses the point, however, as people then felt they were 'everyone else's business'. Although individual's 'right' to 'do their own thing' in negotiation with the band regardless of traditional custom was highly respected,[150] there were not the firm boundaries of selfhood that characterise capitalism's atomised individualism, not least because personal and societal survival were so intimately interrelated. Part of your identity was your relationship to the rest of the band and you would not be complete without this, nor think of withholding something from them as you would from yourself. These were free, equal societies where an unevenness of knowledge, where it was hoarded to advantage one over another, was an entirely alien, civilised concept except possibly between genders and then not always. In fact, continuous sharing of news and skills were as much part of the fabric of daily life in hunter-gatherer societies as the sharing of tools (usufruct) and resources.

With the rise of class society, where it became in the interests of the labouring majority to conceal resources and information about them, work rates etc ,from the non-labouring minority overseeing them, it equally became in the interests of the latter to try to find out what was being concealed from them. This, in truth, was the birth of the surveillance society, it's limited effectiveness still pretty much restricted to what could be seen directly by overseers and residual 'group think' that led people to disclosure information they really wouldn't in modern, individualistic societies.

Alvarez's Centuries of Childhood is very good in pointing this up in the Medieval era, when any idea of an 'internal dialogue' was the privilege of a literate monastic minority. Others would say what they thought, their expression being limited to the presence of others with whom it could be shared - possibly getting back to the ears of feudal law enforcers and tax collectors. The most radical significance of the book in terms of shaping the human psyche was that it allowed private thoughts and expression in 'dialogue' (for surely the relationship is not mutual in the way conversation is) with the page. The first diaries--typically records of spiritual exercises by cloistered divines--are thus Medieval.

The self-enclosure facilitated by writing led, of ruling class necessity, to the elaboration of more sophisticated techniques of surveillance - the spy networks engendered by Elizabeth I's courtier Sir Francis Walsingham, for example, still celebrated as original in Establishment spook circles today. They would solicit disloyal comment through infiltration techniques, pretending to be who they were not to suspects, as well as incidentally engaging pretty comprehensively in mail interception and attempting to crack counter-measures such as concealment and cipher. They were still largely dependant on the word, however, often words procured by duress (torture) and misrepresentation (forgery or 'over-reading' of intercepted correspondence). Of course, this was also the era of the witch hunts with their 'spectral evidence' (the testimony of 'victims of witchcraft'), but this dependence reached its apex in the reign of Charles II and the baseless conspiricising of the Protestant fanatic Titus Oates and his 'Popish Plot'. Simply on the basis of tortured 'confession' and guilt by association, an anti-Catholic pogrom was whipped up, though its only true substance was Oate's own paranoid fantasy.

THE ALL-SEEING EYE

This sort of thing may have been adequate as an instrument of terror befitting the majesty of absolute kings, but increased rationalism and individualism associated with the ascendance of Protestantism, with its claims of the believer's unmediated relationship with the Divine, meant consequent increased demands for physical evidence as a break on the arbitrary power of courts (both kingly and judicial), especially in matters concerning the 'sanctity' of private property.

Paradoxically, as well as demanding more explicit legislative regulation, the bourgeoisie's pet religion also demanded greater self-regulation, the self now being bounded by contract- and financial relationships rather than intimate, social relationships. Thus we have the commonplace appearence[151] of the divine 'all-seeing eye', as seen miserably decorating Protestant homes and chapels to this day, as well as topping the Masonic pyramid Washington and Jefferson incorporated into the design of every dollar bill. This idea of 'the Lord sees all' meant that even the individualistic Protestant clung on to the vestige of community, of public being,, in the sense of being in a community of two, s/he and the ever-watchful God, even if real community--typically more reciprocal, less judgmental of 'sin' and 'slackness'--was sacrificed to such an unremitting moralistic code in consequence.. As well as insisting that the worshipper be hard-working and thrifty, the Protestant faith self-imposed harsh standards of personal behaviour when it came to the body and bodily interaction with others. As Norbert Elias classic study of the rise of 'good manners', The Civilising Process, graphically documents, food became problematic, no longer to be indulged in gluttonously or passed from mouth to mouth but rather, like sexual or excretory functions, to be seen as a shameful concession to physicality to be controlled and bounded by taboos, best a private thing the better to avoid public shame. Such etiquette was literally domesticating, confined to the home, and homes too became more elaborate, with particular concessions to the body confined to particular rooms - a dining room for eating, a toilet for excretion (the corners of rooms having previously been preferred, even at Louis XIV's Versailles!), and the bedroom for sex behind curtained, canopied beds. The point of all this specialised architecture--of privacy--was that as few people saw it as possible. And so lose respect for someone shamefully indulging their body, as if we all don't It was mainly something between a wo/man and the all-seeing Lord.

SEEING BY NUMBERS

A combination of capital accumulation secured by resultant fixed, abstract laws and 18th century innovations in food production and transportation made the mega-cities that characterised the Industrial Revolution possible. This, then, was when surveillance came of age. On one level, faced with cities inhabited by millions, many born and raised undocumented or newly immigrated from the countryside and forming tight village / ghetto communities closed to casual investigation by outsiders, it was impossible to surveil them using the old techniques of gossip gathering On the other hand, this redoubled the need for self-surveillance as a curb on the spontaneous, riotous street mob behaviour of previous centuries as the only practical guarantor of social order.

On a general level, the inculcation of a self-denying moral code into the poor was the responsibility of charismatic Methodism--as in the ruling class dilemma of the early-1800s, 'Wesleyism or revolution?'--and later 'do-gooders' dispensing unwanted advice about thrift, temperance and other supposedly good domestic practice. For those who wouldn't accept social inequality as a problem to be resolved by behaviour adjustment on their part, there was the hero of bourgeois rational social calculation, Jeremy Bentham, and his panoptican, a prisonhouse designed to do this architecurally.[152] It's two key features were (1) individual cells, a rule of silence and the hooding of inmates outside their cells to enforce complete isolation from their community and force them to fall back on the Protestant 'God and I' 'community' instead and (2) a central tower from which guards could watch each cell unobserved, much like the Protestant God. Whether actually watched or not, the prisoner had to assume the worst for fear of harsher punishment, also inculcating a feeling of permanent surveillance and thus self-regulation. Needless to say, in practice this brutal, unnatural treatment amounted to sensory deprivation and whilst it made some suggestible enough to be effectively brainwashed, it broke others entirely, yielding horrifying hallucinations and self-harm. As recidivists could expect many more years in such a system than first offenders, there was naturally an attempt to evade such treatment by increased anonymity and impersonation of identities amongst the urban poor.

Of course, Michel Foucalt dealt with this extensively in his Discipline and Punish, but it is often forgotten that the first concern of the new generation of surveillants was not to control crime but rather to contain disease, a much more widespread and deadly threat to the rich living in close geographic proximity to the poor. High walls, sturdy footmen in livery and a mastiff would no way keep cholera from their doors, so we find as early as the 1830s the first epidemiologists descending into the unplumbed depths of 'darkest London' o identify sources of disease and its carriers. This was rightly seen as social control being imposed on areas that typically rioted before admitting even one of Robert Peel's newly-minted 'blue devils' (police). The proletariat typically refused to acknowledge the reality of epidemic crowd diseases such as cholera (uniquely deadly in the early megalopolises and once a key check on their development) and to destroy cholera carts intruding into their space as a conspiracy to confine the poor to 'houses of death' (as they reckoned hospitals, not without justification) for the sadistic amusement of surgeons, during and after life.[153] And, of course, the poor only had to look to the panoptican to see with what degree of humanity they would be treated by the new impersonal total institutions we seem so disturbingly accepting of today.

A combination of a bureaucracy not sophisticated enough for individual documentation of entire populations before that developed out of regimented military practice during the American Civil War, and widespread illiteracy and resistance by its intended target population meant that the issuing of identification documents to the poor for voluntary presentation was not practical. In fact, it was so impractical that the threat of epidemic disease wasn't resolved by way of identifying and confining individual carriers (typically bourgeois moralistic 'blaming the victim') but rather by anonymous sanitation measures such as the building of London's sewers in reaction to the 'Great Stink' of the 1850s, even though the idea of the state assuming responsibility for such massive, tax-eating public works would have previously been anathema to bourgeois sensibilities.

The breakthrough came in Paris as late as 1870 when a Surete clerk Alphonse Bertillon developed biometrics from a 14th century Chinese model. Bertillonage considered of individually identifying anonymous individuals by a 20 minute examination when many key features of their body--their height, the length of their limbs, the spacing of their facial features--were systematically measured and then recorded to card indexes. Potential recidivists were typically uncooperative during these examinations, later (1903) augmented by 'mug shots', so called by the subject 'mugging' (pulling faces) at the camera in an (often amusingly successful) effort to make themselves less identifiable in future. It should be noted that Bertillon was heavily influenced by the imperial anthropology of its day, with its emphasis on the physical classification of 'types'. Like the absurd Italian criminologist Lombroso, he attributed mental and moral characteristics to these physical signs, typically in a classist and racist manner than only served to reinforce such ideologies in future.

Bertillonage finally failed and fell out of police use not because it was racist or unwieldy or even because it was felt to be an excessive intrusion on individual privacy ('sir, my statistics are my own') but rather because it couldn't do it's job. In 1903, a man called Will West was confined to Leavenworth jail for murder on the basis of biometric measurements actually appropriate to another man, coincidentally also called William West, despite a supposed 243m-to-one chance against this happening (not counting any slips of the police tape measure!). Besides, by then they had something quicker to collect and easier to file, which didn't require the perp's physical presence to identify him. It is probably no surprise that fingerprinting arose from a colonial context, that other great 'submerged mass' that caused the Victorian elite such worry. A chief magistrate in Jigupoot, Sir William Herschel first noticed in 1856 that Indians either illiterate or otherwise unfamiliar with English script signed themselves with thumb prints instead of writing, an administrative procedure for unique identification he adopted himself. From there, it was a short step to Darwin's pal Sir Francis Galton writing this up in the scientific journal Nature and a former supremo of Bombay's colonial police, Richard Henry introducing fingerprinting to Scotland Yard's repertoire of crime detection procedures in 1896.

LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHER

Although the state had a technique for distinguishing one anonymous individual from another with unerring accuracy,[154] this was fairly useless if that individual could disappear into the anonymous urban mass. As former Resistance fighter Jacques Ellul noted in his Technological Society, an immediate consequence of seeking to surveil particular individuals is that the whole society in which they might conceal themselves has to be surveilled also, the 'innocent' majority as intensively as the 'guilty' few.

Perhaps more surprisingly, by the time fingerprinting was initiated, the resolute resistance to classification of the early-19th century was crumbling. There were a number for factors accounting for this, but key was the inducements offered the majority not to remain anonymous. Mass education on a monitor system--much like that adopted by Napoleon's Grand Armee, the basis of Bentham's panoptican--not only provided a more literate, technically sophisticated workshop with a greater chance of individual socio-economic betterment, it also meant the young came to accept such treatment as normal--both classification by name and number and harsh restrictions on personal behaviour in class ('no talking, no fidgeting')--and could be systematically documented, generation by generation. This was augmented by the centralisation of registers of births, deaths and marriages in places like Somerset House instead of scattered through disparate parishes, the taking of censuses to facilitate national planning,, and the creation of employment-based taxation which meant both bosses and workers (unless inclined to fraud) had to declare their identities along with their earnings if they were to make a living at all. Even systematic mapping, such as carried out initially for military reasons by the Ordnance Survey, meant that space in which people could exist anonymously evaporated ('everyone in their place'). This process was only accelerated by the Liberal welfare reforms of the early-1910s and the post-World War 2 creation of the welfare state, both of which had disclosure of identity as prerequisite requirements of receiving their services. It was a citizen's 'right' (the 'carrot') and 'duty (the legislatively-enforced 'stick') to enter into all this, without realising that my surrendering their anonymity to the state, they were also surrounding a key check on its otherwise unlimited power.

I could rehearse at great length the elaboration of technological means that now exist to strip us of any possibility of anonymity, but this is done elsewhere this issue and besides, there is always Privacy International to consult. I will note that when a text like The Technology of Political Control was written in the supposedly paranoid 1970s, the suggestion that a comprehensive database could be linked with face recognition programmes and cameras blanketing every public space in the country was regarded as pure science fiction, something out of George Orwell's dystopian 1984. But today this is, of course, a reality and augmented by overgrown police and internal security agencies, parallel services like social workers and market researchers that want to know everything from the value of your home through to your children's eating and TV watching habits the better to predict and manipulate you, easily surveilled e-communications (ECHELON) and card transactions, 'predictive' databases and profiling,, and any other amount of technical intelligence. No - the point of this section is to explore why people have come to accept that quarter of a century ago would've been thought totalitarian ('like Russia') and nightmarish.

We've already had the homo Economicus version above - that people gained in terms of access to education, employment and healthcare by bringing themselves to the attention of the state and lost in terms of prosecution if they failed to do so. However, I think there is more to it than this. A phenomenon like mass observation in the inter-War years was popularly and eagerly supported in its detailed documentation of everyday life - and what do you make of the dating rituals in Chile where, after years of state-orchestrated surveillance to the nastiest of ends, courting couples now trail each other round with video cameras, 'romantically' building files on each other?

The point is that with all the mass institutions that came out of Bentham's panoptican, the traditional role of the community in providing education, employment and neighbourly care has been replaced by these. Community has been replaced by institutionalised specialisation and so people feel it only natural that such specialists look out for them now there is no meaningful community to. They have been given no reason to get to know other people and so have no reason to trust them. Far from it - as society atomised, anyone can be a criminal under the rubric of surveillance and lacking any social feeling except fear of punishment under the eye of the camera only encourages selfish behaviour. Of course, the cameras are sold on the grounds not that we are the criminals, but that they are there to protect us from everyone else who potentially is. The old Wesleyans were right that give someone a penny in their pocket and the slightest whiff of a chance of advancement and they'll see everyone else around them as a threat to that, either as potential thieves or as temptations to be repudiated with the zeal of the tempted. 'Terrorists' are currently flavour of the month threat. Before that it was 'paedophiles', meaning kids had to be microchipped and cameras installed in every family home while a generation of kids turned into scared, whiny couch potatoes alongside their parents. Not many years ago it was witches, for fucksakes, absurd social workers seeing cracking the local coven of 'satanic abusers' as their next step up the career ladder. If this doesn't convince you what nonsense it all is, it's agreed that now surveillance is so ubiquitous it can't displace crime anywhere else (itself surely an exercise in imposed policing), it's not actually reducing crime rates. Offences of violence people fear most--irrationally, as they're still rare--are committed spontaneously by people too drunk or angry to be deterred by a camera or too cunning to get filmed by one.

Why do people still welcome surveillance despite this? Well, the reliance on experts and definition of ourselves that comes through identification with their institutions and their representations of us--qualifications, income, birth and marriage certificates, conformity to consumer trends, and all the rest of that inane kit and caboodle--continually serves to emphasise our insignificance, an eight digit number in their overwhelming megamachine. It is this that leads people to love Big Brother, essentially a show where we pass tabloid-like judgement on intensively surveilled wannabe nonentities undergoing months of sexual frustration in the hope of getting to be childrens' TV presenters at the end, Endemol's even more sinister Shattered where people were subjected to voluntary sleep deprivation in the manner of victims of Stalin's Cheka, and even lower on the totem pole, searching for themselves in crowd shots (be it big sporting events, pseudo-archaic spectacles typically orchestrated by the royals, or futile 'crawl round London' marches) or 5 second slots on clip shows using RL footage the police or whoever have cobbled together as an extra earner.

ONE IN THE ELECTRONIC EYE!

How do we put an end to the reign of surveillance - assuming you don't want to lead over-controlled lives like shadows until you die of boredom and insignificance, that is?

Well, firstly don't take advice from me and start thinking for yourself, but a few suggestions include:

• First realising that there is not a quip pro quo between you and those surveilling you, that they are not accountable to you, that they have no right to do to you what they would not tolerate done to themselves, and potentially these voyeuristic parasites have the power to make quite a mess of your life from as little motivation as boredom-induced whim. They are the enemies of a free society, not its guarantors, a further concentration of state power that prevents any injustice being righted.

• Unplugging yourself from all the BS images surrounding you--the clowns in the Big Brother house, the endlessly banal biogs of the lives of the rich and famous, the five day fashions, all that irrelevant crap--and learning to laugh at them and (with consequent increased self-confidence) yourself and your past folly

• Unplugging others through irreverent satire and sheer indifference to the manufactured dreams they undoubtedly hold so dear. You'll probably start with the people you know best (typically a tiny number now people have careers, not friends) but best try to broaden it out a bit more than that, as a key factor for sustaining a surveillance society is intolerance and fear of anyone at all different. The new / old you will have better things to do and talk about, maybe even the recreation of authentic, trusting human connections without constant manufactured electronic babble and distraction, of baseless paranoia.

• Disconnection and direct action of a more 'hands on' kind, a refusal to fill in tax returns and other official or quasi-official requests for information--the census, market research, card applications--.or responding to them in absurd, misleading ways to gradually fill their databases with (even more) useless shit. Believe me - when up against it, you'll find it's really possible to live without that credit card and all the form-filling bureaucratic BS, especially with a few mates on board with you too. Reformists please note: denying paperwotk and opportunities to surveil the public cuts the lifeblood of the dozens of agencies that exist principly for that purpose, so they can start being laid off as irrelevant too. And the campaign against speed cameras is way to go for all intrusive surveillance and related records, the creation of genuine unmonitored space (at risk of sounding bogus: 'liberated zones') and the return of the lawless, deprogrammed 18th century King Mob!

In conclusion, I'd like to say that I am not arguing for 'privacy', a thoroughly bourgeois concept based on self-disgust and shame. No, let yourself go and do what comes naturally - fuck in the streets, I say! I am arguing for the revolutionary re-creation of original, genuine community where there are no secrets, no shame and no surveillance of the powerful as a tool to rule over the powerless.

<br?

TRIBAL ROUNDUP

LAST FREE AYOREO ATTACKED

The Ayoreo's home is in the Chaco, a huge region of forest, rivers and swampland which encompasses the whole of the western half of Paraguay and extends into other countries. They are a nomadic, hunter-gatherer people.

Their first sustained contact with white people came in the 1940s and 50s, when Mennonite farmers established colonies on their land. Subsequently missionaries attempted to contact and settle them. Although the Ayoreo resisted contact and largely rejected the missionaries, they did begin to come out of the forest; there is now only a small group of nomadic Totobiegosode living uncontacted in the forest. Most Ayoreo land is now owned by private landowners, who hire work-teams to clear the forest of valuable timber and then introduce cattle. Some is still owned by the Mennonites and the New Tribes Mission (NTM - See GA 68/9).

During the 1970s and 80s, the Ayoreo experienced intensive missionary activity, as the NTM made aggressive attempts to convert them. They would encourage groups of missionised Ayoreo to go into the forest to capture the uncontacted, nomadic Ayoreo, their traditional enemies, and bring them back to the NTM base. This resulted in violent clashes and several deaths as the Indians were exposed to diseases to which they had no immunity at the mission camp.

In recent weeks bulldozers have entered the heartland of uncontacted Indians in Paraguay. This illegal action threatens the survival of the last isolated Indians south of the Amazon basin.

They, will almost certainly already have fled their communal houses and gardens, and be living rough in the forest. Parojnai Picanerai, a Totobiegosode man who came out of the forest in 1998, told Survival (http://www.survival-international.org/][http://www.survival- international.org/, write a letter.) of his memories of seeing bulldozers approaching: ‘We thought the bulldozer could see us... We thought the bulldozer saw our gardens and came to eat our vegetables and fruits, and us as well.’ Parojnai’s wife Ibore added, ‘We left all our things behind us and ran and ran.’ Since 1991 there have been at least eight known occasions when bulldozers working for the area’s landowners have encountered the Totobiegosode. Most of these incidents caused the Indians to flee, abandoning their houses, crops and belongings. They are already, therefore, effectively being chased from one corner of the forest to another. The name of the company in this instance is Carlos Casado. (See letters, p.23).

UNCONTACTED INDIANS IN DANGER

The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indians of western Paraguay are the last uncontacted Indians south of the Amazon basin. They now face a real crisis.

The land being claimed on the Indians behalf by supporters in Paraguay was until recently mostly undisturbed forest and grassland, in the hands of large landowning companies. Recently two ‘landowners’ sold properties to Brazilian companies, intent on exploiting the hardwoods in the forest, and clearing the scrub for cattle-ranching. Several of the injunctions have recently been lifted by a local court: the Indians’ supporters are appealing against the decision. However, overflights of the area show huge tracks bulldozed into the forest, even in areas still ‘protected’ by injunctions.

The land surrounding the claim is being rapidly logged, and there is real concern that unless action is taken their land will be invaded and logged, and there will be a violent and disastrous encounter with the loggers.

The Ayoreo are a nomadic, huntergatherer people, who once inhabited a vast area of forest. Their first sustained contact with white people came in the 1940s and 1950s, when Mennonite farmers established colonies on their land. Subsequently missionaries attempted to contact and settle them.

Although the Ayoreo resisted contact and largely rejected the missionaries, they did begin to come out of the forest; there is now only a small group living uncontacted in the forest. Most Ayoreo land is now taken by private landowners, who hire work-teams to clear the forest and then introduce cattle. Some is still owned by the Mennonites and the US-based New Tribes Mission (NTM).

‘Even though you don’t know us, please continue helping us, because we need our traditional land.’ Erui Etacori

SEMAI NON-VIOLENT BUT WILL FIGHT

The Semai people, who live in the densely forested mountains of the central Malay Peninsula, are known among anthropologists for their nonaggressiveness and aversion to interpersonal violence of any kind: Husbands do not beat their wives, nor parents their children; children do not fight; physical assault and murder are virtually unknown.

The Semai represent the remnants of a population of hunting, gathering, and gardening peoples who once occupied most of Southeast Asia. Over the past several thousand years, however, these original inhabitants have been gradually displaced from the lowlands by more technologically decadent peoples—Thai and Burmese descending from the north and Malays sailing from the Indonesian islands to the south—who brought with them stupid social systems and intensive padi-rice agriculture.

Today, the descendants of this original population and way of life remain only in scattered enclaves in the remote mountains of Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. These areas, because they were malarial and unsuited to wet rice farming, were of little interest to the people of the lowlands until recently. But the situation is changing rapidly.

In order to consolidate the political hegemony of their states, and to exploit the land, timber and other riches of the rain forests, national governments throughout the region are now making a concerted effort to bring them under state control.

Consequently, the traditional mountain cultures and ways of life are rapidly disappearing as bands are “resettled,” “civilized,” and otherwise forced into the national political and economic systems. Bands living near the lowlands, having no real alternative, have modernized rapidly, taking up wage labor, buying motorcycles and automobiles, sending their children to school and even to college.

Despite the intense external pressures to modernize, groups living in the remote mountains and deep forests still pursue their traditional ways of life. They have continued hunting, trapping, making fields, and summoning their spirit kin to help in time of trouble, although they recognize full well that they too will eventually be swept into the modern world.

“At present violence isn’t a problem here. By 2020 [when the Malaysian government plans for the country to be “developed and industrialized] the Humans [Semai] will probably be violent. We’re not violent now because we’re still primitif. We still have places to flee to now, but by then we’ll be shut out of all those places. We don,t want to fight, but when we

98 A.D.: ch .21.1-2, RKD tr.)

Healing Ourselves

“And there are other losses involved. A loss of basic trust. A loss of feeling of mutuality of relatedness. In its stead is emplaced a contempt for self and others. If you’ve been punished for showing autonomy, iniative, or independence, after a while you’re not going to show them.

In the aftermath of this kind of brutalisation, victims have a great deal of difficulty taking responsibility for their lives...They seem to behave as though they’re still under the perpetrator’s control, even though we think they’re now free. But in some ways the perpetrator has been internalised.”

— interview with Judith Herman in “A Language Older Than Words” by Derrick Jensen.

Anarchists and activists are just as traumatised and brutalised as Shell executives or George Bush. We can be just as short-sighted, just as destructive in our own way.

To think we’d be able to create a better world while we’re still sick is to deny the nature of oppression cycles. And just as many abused children go on to abuse kids themselves unless they are healed, so we replicate the patterns we’ve learnt as traumatised, abused citizens. We repeat the manners and ways of civilisation within whatever fight we choose. So doesn’t it make sense to look at our own thoughts and actions and start healing our domesticated, fractured selves?

How do we go about this? How do we re-wild ourselves? I am loath to share my ways with you because they don’t translate into the language I’ve been trained in. Our civilised language doesn’t have the right words for processes that matter. And besides, my ways mightn’t suit you or your experiences and would only cripple you further. Trusting in your own direct experiences is the key to all this healing so there’s not much point in me telling you — that would only direct you in the way that I went, not in the way you need to go.

So what was the point of this article then? The start of the journey. The begining of a process of re-wilding, of healing. Of admitting there is a problem with ourselves — yes! us enlightened ones! Of realising how little we know as civilised people and then trying to learn from Life all that it’s willing to teach us. And Life’s not stingy — we got a lot to learn.

We can listen to the lessons the wild teaches. We can listen to the words of still-wild people alive today. Then we can change our lives — transform ourselves from crappy slaves to budding freemen.

“You don’t need to save the world, you need to save yourselves.”

— Mbatian Nkomo

Maybe it’s because we feel we don’t have any self-control that we feel the need to control others. More and more I’m thinking the activism is just another way of indulging in that other-control rather than self-control.

The Aborigines (and apologies for lumping in hundreds of different tribes, but I think there was many similiarities between the groups) are allowed to behave any way they want when they are babies. They are not chastised for having tantrums, for being greedy, for throwing stones. They are allowed to express any emotion, any feeling they have. By the time they are toddlers they have grown out of this self-centred, infantile behaviour. (Gently encouraged to be responsible animals, not forced to be ‘good’) They then learn to be selfcontrolled, autonomous beings within the safety and love of their community of people, animals, plants, minerals, etc. How do we get beyond our infantile behaviour without the security and love of the community of life? We can’t. So we have to feel this safety and love and completedness of Life that’s ever present in the Wild before any healing can occur. Maybe if people can tap into this energy things would start changing. We would start changing.

BRAZIL: TRIBE FIGHTS BACK

In recent weeks there have been violent confrontations between the Cinta Larga tribe and diamond miners who have illegally invaded their reserve in the western Amazon. Miners responsible for killing several Cinta Larga last year returned to the Indian reserve; as the Indians tried to defend their land, conflict broke out and at least 29 miners were killed.

BIGOTRYTEST

Think you’re better than all those nasty missionaries? Try this test to make sure.

The people of Romonum Island in the Truk group consider premarital coital activity desirable in early adolescence for both sexes. Teenage males are introduced by older women.

In the Lepcha society in the Himalayas by age 11 or 12 females are engaging in intercourse with adult males. First coital experiences occur at an even younger age in the ners and ways of civilisation within whatever fight we choose. So doesn’t it make sense to look at our own thoughts and actions and start healing our domesticated, fractured selves?

Trobriand Islands, New Guinea. There, girls as young as 6 and boys of 11 have their first coital experience with other children under adult tutelage. Children of the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia are given very sophisticated sexual instruction by adults at an early age. The boys begin masturbating at two to three years old and engage in group fondling by age five to six years. Girls also experience self stimulation and homosexual contacts from an early age.

The aborigines of Arnhem Land openly accept extramarital sex for both husbands and wives. Older females sometimes take boys for lovers. In the Sambian society of the mountains of New Guinea the men believe that a young boy becomes a strong warrior and hunter by drinking as much semen as possible from post- pubertal boy’s penises.

Civilised westerners’ sexual dysfunctionality masquerades as political correctness or ‘morality’. It isn’t just missionaries who are a threat, any sick minded westerner with power to impose their repressed and depraved sexuality on other cultures is a danger to free living people.

Plus ga change...

“To sedentize dispersed and alien indigenes., he exhorted private individuals [to invest] and helped communities build temples [to Roman deities], market-places, [and permanent Roman-style] houses.. Wearing our clothing became an honor, even togas a lot of the time. Gradually [the natives] succumbed to our vices. And to that the conquered gave the name of ‘modernization,’ which was actually part and parcel of their enslavement. (Tacitus

ANIMAL ANTICS

Slot Machine Looters

When Bill Dougherty discovered his Fredericksburg VA car wash machine was coming up several hundred dollars short per week, he initially sus

pected his employees of using pass keys to loot the machine. When he set up a surveillance camera to catch the thieves in action he did indeed manage to snap pictures of the perpetra

tors in the act, but they weren’t quite what he expected. Not only were the “thieves” who were stealing the quar

ters of the avian variety; they were working in tandem to do so: one bird would go up inside the machine to jimmy coins loose, and the other birds would grab them and fly off with them.

German cop beaten up by dwarf kangaroo

A German policeman has been injured after he was kicked and punched by a dwarf kangaroo. The marsupial, which had escaped from a zoo in Verl, North Rhine-Westphalia, was spotted hopping on a nearby autobahn by motorists. It was resisting arrest. -Ananova

No Parole

Officials say 11 inmates at India’s only monkey jail are unlikely to ever be released. The monkeys are held in appaling conditions and the prison should be shut down

The prison in Patiala houses monkeys apprehended by game wardens in Punjab state for thieving and attacking people. Hindu beliefs in Hanuman, the monkey god, mean even rampaging monkeys are not destroyed by the authorities.

An Indian newspaper reports how the monkeys at the prison in Motibagh Bir Zoological Park snarl and glare at visitors from their heavily-barred cages.

Jailer Ram Tirath said the present inmates were too wild to be released: “All 11 monkeys are hard cases who have been apprehended by game wardens for thieving, terrorising and biting people. It’s unlikely any of that any of them will ever be paroled.” One monkey was recently “arrested” for attacking students on the campus of Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana, another pair were caught after stealing handbags from women and a monkey is being hunted for attacking eight children over the last month in a New Dehli suburb. Troops of monkeys have also caused chaos after spreading into government buildings in New Dehli, even the HQ of the Indian Air Force.

Slaughterhouse Escapes

A cow escaped from a slaughterhouse by jumping a 6-foot fence at Ken Meyer Meats in Camp Washington Feb. 15. She evaded police and officials from the SPCA while crossing Central Parkway and entering Mount Storm Park in Clifton, where she was last spotted by one TV station’s helicopter “Cow Cam.”

“The problem is, this is a free-range cow that isn’t going to come to any human,” said SPCA general manager Harold Dates. “And when you weigh 1,200 pounds, you can pretty much go anywhere you want to go.” At City Hall and from coast to coast, where CNN and other news outlets have chronicled the four-hooved fugitive’s run for freedom, the cow’s fame grows daily. If and when the runaway 7-year-old cow is captured, Mayor Charlie Luken plans to give it the key to the city.

Another cow had less luck in Austria; after escaping a slaughterhouse in Graz, she ran into a car park, chased shoppers and then attempted to head out on to the road. Police set up a roadblock using two police cars. The cow demolished both of them, but was caught with a rope as she settled down on top of one, and was led back to the slaughterhouse.

Seditious Seagulls

(fortean times) In may 1989 a seagull shot a dung pellet onto the electronic eye of a new swing bridge in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, causing eight hours of traffic chaos.

A Blackout in Newbridge, Gwent, in April 1994 was caused by a bird dropping a newborn lamb onto an electicity substation, a method adopted a month later by a bird in California’s Morongo basin, the missile being a rosy boa snake.

Buffalo Attacks Cops

Constable Clay Evans told how he woke at daybreak Feb 12 to find his house shaking. He walked to the back veranda to be confronted by a buffalo banging and rubbing its head against the outside stairway. He tried to chase it away but the buffalo stood its ground and continued shaking the house. He hurled a thong [?] at the animal, hitting it on the head. The buffalo looked up, swung its horns against the stairway a couple of times - then turned and trotted off.

Police believe it could be the same buffalo that rolled over Sergeant Gavin Kennedy’s car in January. Kennedy lay in his overturned vehicle for about 25 minutes until a passing motorist stopped to help. - Northern Territory News

Millipedes stop train

A train was brought to a halt in the mountains of Japan - by a swarm of millipedes. Millipedes up to six centimetres long covered a 400 metre stretch of track near Osaka, western Japan.

The single-carriage train, carrying only two passengers, skidded to a halt after crushing lots of the insects. Millipedes favour dark conditions and the incident occurred on a shadowy upward slope, on a local train line in Hyogo prefecture. -The Age, October 2003

Police Dog sacked for failure of duty

OSLO, Norway (AP) - When Varg the police dog was sent into a candy factory to track down two intruders, his sense of taste got the better of his sense of duty.

The German Shepherd nearly ate himself sick. Leif Berglund, a police spokesman in the central Norwegian city of Trondheim, said that police were called to the Nidar candy factory after seven thirteen- to fifteenyear-olds were found helping themselves to candy after they broke in.

Five surrendered at once, but two ran away. So police sent Varg to follow their trail. What he found was the trail of candy they left behind, as well as more candy in the building.

“He helped himself greedily,” said Berglund. He said he was so full of candy “that we had to immediately transfer him to a more urgent assignment” on the lawn outside the building. The two children got away. At 9 1/2 years of age, Varg is set for retirement, so wouldn’t face any disciplinary action, Berglund said.

PATHOLOGICAL SOCIALISING by Ransu

Ransu on lazy, self-obsessed hippies and their appropriation of radical thinking

People Have Lives! This was what was screamed at me when I criticised peoples attitudes and commitment towards activism. It was revealed to me that there are excuses which are taboos — never talked about or challenged. These excuses include: girl/boy friends, parties, alcohol/drugs, children, jobs, etc. The painful truth is that as our movement lacks resources, manpower, support of all kinds and a good network, and the little hope that is left is wasted by people spending their time and energy on socialising with friends, going to parties and getting pissed.

Is it coincidence that any half successful movement or revolution was achieved only by certain rules which in most cases included limitations on alcohol and drug use? I’m not advocating a ban on alcohol or drugs — the will must come from inside.- just pointing out the irony of hippies idealising the Zapatistas while ignoring the fact that their heroes have one simple rule which extends on the whole of the occupied zone by Zapatistas: a total ban on alcohol and other drugs.

‘Fascist’ they call me when I mention the word ‘self-discipline’, yet what is wrong with someone restraining themselves for a cause because they respect their friends in the movement and would be ashamed to let them down?

Even the ‘enlightened’ individuals of our movement seem unconvinced by the current situation in the world. It seems that only in countries where peoples baby’s are getting killed people finally realise what the cost of freedom is. It seems to me that it is not enough in this country for peoples babys’ being killed by the government slowly with dioxin, fluoride, BSE, etc. — how can you convince these people? Do you have to have persons intruding into their apartments shooting the fuck out of their kids in front of them while wearing tshirts with “THE STATE” written on them before they SEE? Freedom is not a consumer item one can purchase from their local Bodyshop. It is the result of a struggle with commitment, sacrifice, respect and discipline.

Why am I angry? Because I have been pissed on and fucked up by people doing exactly the things I have described here — wasting my time and most importantly wasting the little effort I have tried to push toward saving this planet.

“People Have Lives!”. So I don’t have a life...? I have chosen not to have lots of friends to go to parties with, or to abuse myself with alcohol and drugs, or a full-time job, a car and other mod cons, useless hobbies etc. This is something I have chosen so I can fight for the destruction of civilisation. If these people’s ‘life’ requires such trivia to be worthwhile, I don’t see much to recommend it.

Some years ago I voiced these ideas to activists at the EF gathering. I said that I thought having entertainment, i.e. alcohol, loud music etc. at a gathering that should be primarily about serious issues isn’t acceptable. This is because only one thing can be a priority at one time.

The EF! gathering exhibited some of the most gruesome hypocrites I’ve seen for a long time. There were a lot of people there who’s priority wasn’t the serious issues at hand but having a good time generally and entertainment particularly. Because of these people the gathering was made into a festival, a ‘happening’, and the Earth was not first but last.

The entertainment thus became a priority and dispite the limitations of time and space applied to as camouflage it by-passed the serious issues we should have been working on. This phenomenon is not exclusive to Earth Firsters and contributes greatly to the failure of environmental organizations and movements to bring about real, rather than superficial change. If we are serious about tackling civilisation we have to be utterly self-disciplined and focused. Alcohol, drugs, sex, socialising, etc distract us and re-deploy our energy, weakening our intent and dissapating our actions.

“My countrymen, shall the glittering trinkets of this rich man, his deceitful drink that overcomes our mind, shall these things tempt us to give up our homes, our hunting grounds, and the honorable teaching of our old men? Shall we permit ourselves to be driven to and fro — to be herded like the cattle of the white man?” — Oglala Red Cloud

Not only do sex, alcohol, drugs, computer games, tv, etc. sap energy and time which needs to be devoted to other more important things. But they make us self-indulgent and dependent on the thing we have to destroy. So why is there such a dissappointing pattern of substitute activities among what’s classed as ‘activism’? And why are activists so self-indulgent and un-self-disciplined?

Jean Liedloff, in “The Continuum Concept” describes the differences between civilised children and the Indians she lived with in South America. She noted the following explanation for why the Indian children were so happy, self-motivated and confident compared to the unhappy, dependent, self-destructive civilised kids:

“Ironically, the reason it’s possible to make these profoundly social animals bad or anti-social is because we are so social. Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders.”

— Interview in ‘Touch The Future’ www.continuum-concept.org

Self-destructive, substitute activities are expected of us. And even activists find it hard to ignore Mother Culture, our modern elder. We scream for our ‘right’ to get drunk, socialise, etc as loudly as any pampered brat, truly not knowing how we could live without our substitutes.

“The world’s full of the walking undead and you want to party?”

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer

If activists were to expect their allies to be sober and self-disciplined, then we might have a good chance of eliminating our self-centred indulgent behaviour. If we were expected to act with determination and dedication then maybe we would start acting that way. I think a good way to start changing this is to completely eliminate unneccessaries like drugs, alcohol, parties, tv, etc and incorporate the idea of self-discipline into our lives. But as I said, the will has to come from inside, when we’ve decided we’re really serious about kicking civilisation.

Counter Culture?

VIEWS FROM NOWHERE

Bob Black reviews “Design Your Own Utopia” by Chaz Bufe

DESIGN YOUR OWN UTOPIA. BY CHAZ BUFE & DOCTRESS NEUTOPIA. TUCSON, AZ: SEE SHARP PRESS, 2002. 20 PP.

The intellect can betray man more easily than his conscience”

- Paolo Soleri

Chaz Bufe is an anarchist writer widely published by Chaz Bufe. His self-publishing history (as See Sharp Press) is ignominious.

In Listen, Anarchist! (1986) Bufe issued what the Fifth Estate called “a hysterical parody of authoritarian anarchism” — except that it was not a parody. In it he preached a literal Ten Commandments of moral rectitude to anarchists — at the same time that he defended Processed World, a violent crypto-Marxist cult, which conspicuously violated nearly all of his pious prescriptions.

Bufe, a simpleminded atheist, is a sucker for cults, and not just Processed World. In A Future Worth Living: Thoughts on Getting There (1998), he touted an authoritarian German cult commune, ZEGG, founded on the sexual exploitation of women. He repeats the endorsement here. I suspected that his nominal coauthor, “Doctress Neutopia,” was a German on detached service from ZEGG. But from ZEGG’s website it seems that her name is Libby Hubbard, although her being there does confirm the cult connection. Bufe’s first foray into utopianism was thus an embarrassing failure. We shall now take a look at his latest attempt.

Unenlightened and undeterred, Bufe is back. This time, Bufe’s idea is that it would facilitate utopian thinking to publish a detailed questionnaire to help would-be utopians figure out exactly what they want. Although it’s a silly idea, it’s a better idea than I would expect from Bufe. And sure enough, he is copying somebody else.

As Lewis Mumford and Marie Louise Berneri have observed, the classical utopias were mostly closed, static, and authoritarian. Typically - Plato and St. Thomas More, for instance - they combined political authoritarianism with economic egalitarianism. Now this combination is not really feasible, but the ideology, in distorted forms, is not greatly far removed from that of the Marxist-Leninist regimes which afflicted the 20th century and did so much to extinguish anarchist and utopian tendencies as historically effective.

As a self-important yet insecure pundit, Bufe feels the need to justify himself. Why design a utopia? There are “several reasons,” but Bufe can only think of one: “utopian thought is essential to social change.” Really? Is it assumed that social change is always for the better? Whose utopian thought was essential to the Industrial Revolution? Or the Neolithic Revolution, for that matter? The Highland clearances, the Tokugawa Revolution, the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, and 50 other phenomena - here were rapid, far-reaching social changes not informed by any thought that even Bufe would consider utopian. Or would he? For Bufe never defines utopia.

Bufe remarks, encouragingly, that “utopian thought does not have to be applied on a global scale to be of value,” if it inspires small-scale experiments - models - “which can and sometimes do become the triggers for the adoption of ideas which, except for the models, would never have been adopted wholesale.” Perhaps they “sometimes do,” but I am not aware of a single example. There may be utopian ideas which have won some general social acceptance, or had some influence. But Bufe is claiming much more, that their influence was mediated by exemplary intentional communities which successfully implemented those ideas. But I am being unfair to Bufe. I am taking what he says seriously as if he knows what he’s saying.

Bufe — a district attorney trapped in the body of a businessman — asks a lot of leading questions. To which I, a lawyer, say: “objection!”

II.3. Would individuals choose their own goals and values, or would their goals and values be those of your utopian ideology?

Right off the bat, Bufe just takes for granted a conflict and separation between individual and collective goals, although the very idea of a utopia is to transcend this dichotomy! He also takes for granted the persistence of ideology, which is something else a utopia might strive to surpass. And he takes for granted that the utopians are subject to “rights” and “duties” (III.4, 5) - in other words, law — which is something else that should be an open question, not a leading question.

For the lay reader: a leading question is a question which suggests to the witness what answer is desired. A really good leading question, if the judge lets you get away with it, practically forces the witness to say what you want to hear. Here are two examples:

V.2. What sort of social and political organization would your utopia have?

A. Would it be based on political authority, with some giving orders and others obeying them in a vertical hierarchical structure, as at present [emphasis added]?

B. Or would it be based on voluntary cooperation in a horizontal, noncoer- cive structure?

The lady or the tiger? Even a Platformist knows what he’s supposed to say. The “as at present” language alone is leading (and misleading), since it compels dissent from (A) and assent to (B). In effect, Bufe is asking utopians if they are utopians. How would - how could - great utopians like Plato or More answer these questions? They were communists who sought cooperation within and between functionally defined social orders providing complementary services. They would protest that the literal answers to these questions - indeed to most of Bufe’s questions - would not only distort their visions in details but suggest fragmentation where they sought harmonious unity.

The writing of Bufe, as of some other self-published writers, suffers from a lack of editing. Each question is riddled with redundancy. In (A), political authority is expressly equated with order-giving and order-taking. But that implies “a vertical hierarchical structure,” surely? Besides, are there any horizontal hierarchical structures? I suppose ZEGG and Processed World might qualify. In (B), if “voluntary” is not synonymous with “noncoercive,” what’s the distinction? Is there one? Has Bufe devoted even a little thought to the meanings of these words? Even the use of the feel-good word “cooperation” in (B) is tendentious. Why not, in (A), to be fair, refer to hierarchic coercive cooperation, “as at present”?

Bufe rounds out (V), “Power & Politics,” by asking what the utopia’s decision-making processes are, whether there is a constitution, and - “How would officials and coordinators be selected?” (V.3-5). Officials? Bufe never asked if there would be officials. He takes authority for granted. Am I amiss in identifying these “officials” with the order-givers, the “political authority” already denied? Bufe concludes the section: “How would you deal with abuse of authority by officials or coordinators?” (V.6). Officials could not abuse authority unless they had it.

By omission and fiat, Bufe has already excluded from any possible utopian agenda the critique of ideology, the critique of law, and the critique of political authority. Naturally he next excludes the critique of work in the same way. He asks “How would work be compensated?” (VI3). Work and pay are posited, not open to question. Is it equal compensation for all, or more compensation for those doing dangerous or unpleasant work, or even communism, to each according to his needs?

I was surprised that Bufe’s list even included the anarcho-communist option - after all, it’s a bit radical. But I was reassured that it was the same old goofy Bufe when he went on to ask a subquestion about this question (but not about the first two, the workaffirming questions, which presumably are not problematic): “If so, given present social conditioning, how would you prevent parasitism?” (VI.3.C.a) In other words, how would you force slackers to work? The identification of the unemployed as “social parasites” derives from Stalinist rhetoric, but it’s cherished to this day by the worst of the leftist anarchists, including the worst of the petit bourgeois anarchists, Bufe and Woodworth.

Some critiques of work - mine, for instance - take issue with the institution of “jobs.” The lifetime restriction of a worker to one or sometimes two productive tasks has been denounced by utopians at least since Charles Fourier; and even by the young Marx, who was much more of an anarchist in the 1840s than Bufe is now. My point is not that utopians or anarchists are obligated to embrace a critique of work. My point is that a “Design Your Own Utopia” questionnaire should entertain, at the very least, a perspective which embraces a well- known point of view with many past and present adherents. Indeed it was acted upon by numerous Fourierist American communes in the 1830s and 1840s. Zero-work was deeply implicated in the origins of American socialism.

But here’s Bufe: “How would people determine what jobs they do?” (VI.4). What people? What jobs? Why jobs? I suppose it is superfluous to quote questions like: “How many hours per day would your utopians work?” (VI.8). When did you stop beating your wife? “Who would do economic planning?” (VI5) (!). “Would you set aside time for play and creative pursuits?” (VI.10) — certainly not, in my dreamworld, Mr. Gradgrind’s world, which, unlike all societies past and present, is all work and no play, and above all, no creativity! What a moronic question. Even Kim Il Jong would answer yes.

Bufe predictably bungles such topics as sex and sex roles (what with ZEGG’s bastardization of Wilhelm Reich), science and technology (somehow his communes would sustain a space program), religion, food, etc. I will spare my patient readers the details. They have endured much. In every area, the questions are loaded, and some crucial areas are not interrogated at all - such as the moralism which infuses this and all other Bufe productions. And Bufe has even forgotten to ask about the role of the market.

Whether any questionnaire could benefit utopians is in some doubt. The very form of the thing - analytic, atomistic, reductionist - militates against the totalizing, harmonizing spirit of most utopias. Lewis Mumford wrote that a virtue of utopian thought is that “the classical utopian works had all treated society as a whole, and had, in imagination at least, done justice to the interaction of work, people, and place, and to the interrelationship of functions and institutions and human purposes.” Whereas our society, which is thoroughly anti-utopian, has “divided life into compartments: economics, politics, religion, war, education; and within these larger divisions efforts at reform and improvement, or at invention and creativity, went on in even smaller compartments, with all too little reference to the whole in which they played a part.” Bufe’s questionnaire is much better suited to fostering a society of specialization and alienation than a utopian community. It is intrinsically anti-utopian.

I would be willing to see the questionnaire idea fairly and intelligently tried - but that would have to be done by somebody else. It could do no harm. But it’s hard to imagine that this ostensibly practical text would be of use to anybody except its author. The tract is designed, not to assist the reader in clarifying her own ideas, but to induce her to embrace Bufe’s ideas, which are set forth explicitly toward the end of the pamphlet, “Our Vision.” These are mostly the ideas of the ZEGG commune/patriarchal sex cult (http://www.zegg.de][http://www.zegg.de - see for yourself).

Amusingly, Bufe, in setting forth his “Vision,” does not even answer the questions he has pressed upon the rest of us - because “answers to all of the above questions would take up considerably more space than the questions themselves.” No doubt! But if that’s a good reason for Bufe not to answer his own questions, it’s an even better reason for everybody else not to answer them. It also suggests that he has something to hide. “We’d love to hear from those of you,” he says, “who have similar visions.” He doesn’t want to hear from those of us who don’t.

Bufe first sketches “A Small-Scale Utopia,” an intentional community identical to ZEGG. Although these pages are replete with laughs, I shall move on to the finale, “A Global Utopia,” “which would in many ways mirror our community utopia.” As the questionnaire has predetermined, Bufe’s global utopia, like his smallscale utopia, is not anarchist. It involves imposing on the whole world “democratic decision-making,” according to the “democratic, egalitarian system” set forth in Michael Albert’s Looking Forward. Even so oleaginous an opportunist as Michael Albert does not pretend that what he’s peddling is anarchist. In fact he polemicizes against anarchists. Bufe’s tenderness toward Albert might have something to do with the fact that Albert’s Z Magazine published, according to Bufe himself, the only favorable review of his execrable Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations (1992, 2001).

Most modern utopians — not only anarchists, but various socialists and Marxists (except Murray Bookchin) - have called for the dispersal of urban agglomerations and the erasure of the difference between city and country. Even Marx did. But not Bufe. “Our cities would be very different from those at present”: they will involve more “high-density living.” That doesn’t make them very different.

Here Bufe follows the quack urbanist Paolo Soleri, whose Arcology (1969) is a deservedly neglected masterpiece of 60s totalitarian mysticism. Soleri faults the modern city for not being crowded enough, since “lack of compactness is lack of efficiency.” He calls for what he ludicrously labels the “miniaturization” of the city, “an urban solid of superdense and human vitality.” Soleri suffers, one might say, from claustrophilia. His city would be a closed system, like a space station, although its “closest ancestor” is, he says, a passenger liner - hardly an anarchic or even a democratic model (recall the class- stratified Titanic where the workingclass passengers in steerage drowned like rats).

The only thing Soleri says specifically about the political structure is in two murky paragraphs which seem to say that the political burden of the past will impede the “arcological” reconstruction of the city. No doubt! Let’s hope so! The governance of the arcological city will apparently take care of itself somehow. It’s the province of some sort of group mind, a “superorganism of a thousand minds that will ecologically cradle such persons.” I swear I’m not making this up! This is Bufe’s guru talking!

“The organization of man’s life,” quoth the seer, “subtly directed by the machine, which is organization, is going to reach forms unheard of.” Jacques Ellul and John Zerzan never put it any better. Man “will submit in other words to a situation that carries coercion without a reason behind it, if one excludes the notion of randomness.” Soleri also espouses, in impenetrable gibberish, the cosmic evolutionary mysticism of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, what Soleri calls “the estheticogenesis of matter.” It may not be true that all roads lead to Rome, but this one does: “Is there any difference between the aim of the city and the aim of the Roman (universal) Church? They are one and the same.” Bufe the atheist is indeed “super- dense” if this techno-Catholic Orwellian madness is his idea of utopia.

Exactly, or even inexactly, how Bufe’s “participatory democracy” is to be implemented in high-rise “high- density” cities with millions of inhabitants, he does not say. (The best real- life approximation of Soleri’s high- rise city is the authoritarian city-state of Singapore, whose regime herded the entire population into high-rise apartments each of which receives, twice a year, a visit from a policeman taking a thorough survey.) Soleri, as we saw, is, as to politics, and much else, vacuous, incoherent and above all indifferent. Even Murray Bookchin noticed that there was a problem here, although his solution is preposterous. Bufe does not even seem to be aware that there is a problem.

This insoluble conundrum conclusively refutes Bufe’s notion that a regional, national or international society could be modeled, in most important respects, on a local commune. Higher levels of coordination must involve representation and/or bureaucracy. None of Bufe’s questions addresses extralocal representation. None of his answers do either. Yet Bufe specifically calls for a resumed and expanded program of space exploration. That would require labor, resources and coercive coordination on an even wider scale than would the administration of major cities. Utopian? Maybe Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein might have thought so. But anarchist? Impossible. What we have here is high-density dogma.

The arts and the media, Bufe says, would no longer be the province of corporations and the “gifted few.” Bufe would naturally espouse this opinion, since nobody ever thought for a moment that Bufe was one of the gifted few. For him, the only options have always been self-publication or no publication. I think he is mixing up two different matters. One is a muddled mood of resentment of his intellectual and creative superiors. The other is, maybe, a complaint about media concentration and monopoly. But even if they were decentralized, his mediocrity would persist.

In his previous pamphlet, Bufe observed that most people “don’t think very well.” In certain cases, such as his own, that’s an understatement. It is probably not just his density which makes it so regrettable that Bufe went in for radical publishing instead of something more suitable, like the Army or the ministry. (I almost added “tabloid journalism,” but then I recalled Karl Kraus’s definition of a journalist: “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Bufe lacks the ability to express them.) It is rather his combination of density with a near-pathological incapacity for irony and humor which leaves the thus doubly disabled Bufe bewildered by the world “as at present” and incapable of imagining alternatives. And so, for security, he clings to cults and gurus and ideologies to structure his confusion. He read the wrong books by Wilhelm Reich. The one for him, and about him, is Listen, Little Man!

BOOKS

THE WHITE HEADHUNTER BY NIGEL RANDELL. £14.99 FROM CONSTABLE & ROBINSON, 3 THE LANCHESTERS, 162 FULHAM PALACE ROAD, LONDON W6 9ER.

Randell uses the story of shipwrecked Orcadian sailor Jack Renton, stranded on Malaita 1868-1876, to explore Civilisation’s encroachment on the Solomon Islands. As such, it’s almost a detail of Adrian Moorehead’s moving Fatal Impact, although considerably less sympathetic to the colonised. For example, Randell keeps trying to spuriously compare Renton’s experience to that of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, though he was never some god-like master over the islanders and Civilisation’s treatment of them was—as always—far more savage than their treatment of each other.

Curiously, the Melanesians of the Solomons were amongst the first Pacific peoples to be contacted by Europeans, even though they were also amongst the last to submit to their hegemony. Conquistadors hunting mythic (but non-existent) gold landed in 1568, unleashing an epidemic that had all Whites trying to land thereafter treated as nguanguai (‘plague carriers’), killed on sight. Renton survived only because the Malaitans thought he might have useful skills. After three weeks quarantined with the village pigs, he was made slave to the local headman. He won his freedom by joining a headhunting raid on his host village’s neighbours, who had slaughtered his shipmates when they washed ashore. During this, the Malaitans found Renton was indeed skilled - in war. He killed three that first night, then rose rapidly in status by orchestrating massacres previously beyond his host’s imaginings, finally insisting on journeying to a distant island where Western firearms were already being traded. He journeyed with fellow warrior Kwaisulia, who ultimately used his experiences on the periphery of the West to become a warlord ruling over all the local islands and the colonialists’ proxy.

Just as Kwaisulia Westernised, Renton ‘went native’, initially forgetting how to address his rescuers in English when the Bobtail Nag arrived in 1876. In both Australia and Scotland, he hid his participation in head-hunting (from the war trophy necklace of betel-stained teeth Renton kept as a memento, he may have killed up to 56 men), cannibalism and—even more distressing for Victorians—native marriage, but he was esteemed and remembered by the Mataitans to such an extent that Randell found out the full, true story from their descendant oral historians 140+ years later. Having trouble keeping his half-truths straight, Renton returned to the Solomons as a uniformed government inspector seeking to regulate blackbirding and was ambushed and ritually eaten in 1878 on Aboa, the only Polynesian- populated island in the Solomons archipelago.

Its genocidal treatment of the Aborigines aside, Australia is often seen as a racially tolerant, ethnically diverse country. Unfortunately for all concerned, the origins of this diversity came from blackbirding, the forced recruitment of plantation labour from across the Pacific - principally of Melanesians. Ships would arrive at islands pretending to be traders or missionaries, only to kidnap any islanders that turned out to greet them. However, this was not slavery, then prohibited for decades. After three years, the impressed labour was allowed to return from the cane fields of Queensland and even paid in kind - payment that typically included an old Tower musket for the labourer and another for his chief. When the Solomonese warriors learned guns were to be had, recruitment no longer had to be coercive, though this triggered an arms race and a ‘knock out’ contest as power rapidly concentrated in the hands of a few trader warlords responsible for recruitment and the distribution of resultant muskets. A veteran of the Queensland plantations and an English speaker himself, Renton’s comrade-in-arms Kwaisulia ultimately proved most adept at this.

The warfare wasn’t what dealt a death blow to Solomonese independence, however. It was missionaries who typically actively opposed it— even getting arms importation stopped in the end—that did that. The early-1860s voyages of two mission ships, the Hirondelle (for the Catholics) and the Southern Cross (for Protestant sects) spread flu and measles from island to island, epidemics worsened by converts being packed together in mission halls, where chances of infection were greatest. The fanatic missionaries were indifferent to the damage they were doing, though even the Baptist John Geddie reflected:

It is remarkable that the deaths that have occurred for some months past have been amongst the Christian Party only. He, who doeth all things well, has wise, though mysterious, ends in view.

When they finally realised they’d killed over a third of the archipelago’s inhabitants—and in some areas in was much worse, churches converts built could hold the epidemic’s survivors three times over—they fell back on evolutionary rationalisations for imperial genocide, dismissing those the dubious Thor Heyrdahl called “the Argonauts of the Pacific” as “decadent”, “weakened by [the] feckless ease” of abundant island living and therefore somehow deserving extinction.

The missionaries were seen particularly as ‘bringers of death’, but the cultural disruption they caused simultaneously weakened tabu, increasing the scale and ferocity of warfare, and magnified the attractiveness of missionary appeals for an end to such warfare (at least to defeated). Even when the impact of the epidemics was blunted, populations continued to decline. In a profound 1908 study on the islands of Simbo and Vella, anthropologist WHR Rivers found the colonial prohibition of headhunting had removed the traditional central meaning from the islanders’ lives:

Why should we bring children into the world just to work for the White man?

Ultimately, the missionaries won out when Queensland’s closer political integration with the rest of Australia led to a ban on blackbirding on the racist grounds that it was competition with native (i.e. White) labour. Traditional war leaders like Kwaisulia were then replaced by Christian converts as middlemen, Kwaisulia himself ending his life dynamite fishing in his lagoon (a typically ‘modern’ innovation, with its waste and excess force) in 1909, possibly deliberately.

What of use does Randell tell us in White Headhunter? The Solomonese were a ‘heroic’ warrior-orientated society, hierarchical and rigidly ordered by tabu, so hardly anarchist. Randell’s description of the Mataita’s calculated slaughter of porpoises to use their teeth as prized local currency also graphically illustrates a social system dedicated to the domination of Nature. Obviously, Randell shows how malleable human identity is, both in the way Renton gleefully adapted to Solomonese custom and how the Solomonese ultimately had to adapt to that of his parent culture. Particularly interesting are his incidental sketches of the lives of beach- combers—typically brutalised sailors that fled Civilisation Croatan-style— to live a life of ease and respect as mercenaries or technicians to Pacific chiefdoms. Moby Dick author Herman Melville mentions them too in his earlier sea novels, and almost became one. More importantly, it illustrates techniques used to integrate free human communities into Civilisation that have been quietly written out of Western popular history—try asking any Australian about blackbirding—and are different only in detail today. Finally, most interestingly, by exposing this hidden history of exploitation, it explains the roots of Melanesian resistance in the Pacific—for example, in Bougainville—that are ongoing today.

PIE ANY MEANS NECCESSARY - THE BIOTIC BAKING BRIGADE COOKBOOK, AK/REBEL FOLK PRESS, 2004.

What a great snack!

The antics of Le Gloupier, Pieman, the BBB and other pie pixies are well mixed, the photo on the cover is a fantastic topping, and overall the taste is quite satisfying. Shite, I have been reading this too long!

So you’ve probably heard of most of the famous ones—Bill Gates, Milton Friedman, Robert Shapiro, et al. But what about the Pie-Kill, where you could hire an agent to pie your enemy? When Pieman was hired by two Catholic school girls to pie their narky headmistress nun? Cool.

Of course it would have been better to help them do it themselves. And I suppose that’s the only problem I have with pieing. Everyone loves to see the rich and powerful get their comeupunce—as long as they don’t have to do anything. And just like the carnival (which is mentioned in the book as being liberatory) serves to only diffuse the anger and discontent in a fairly safe, non-threatening way. The rich and powerful have always allowed the plebs to have carnivals in order to vent frustration and let them think they are free. Bread and circuses. Bread and circuses.

So I’m ambiguous about this stuff now. Though the article on Belgian pie throwing anarchist Le Gloupier is very funny and the stuff on the PieKill era in 1972’s California is interesting too. This pierect action group “advocated utilizing spontaneity and chaos to confront power in the symbolic arena.” They were highly critical of the ‘Peace Movement’ who they likened to the ‘Democratic League’ in the novel “Agents of Chaos”. “The approach of your Democratic League was to fight that Order in an ordered manner. Since the Hegemony is far more ordered than the League could ever be, you could never obtain the social energy needed to substitute your Order for the existing Order. In fact, the League, as the ‘disloyal opposition’ absorbed much of the random hostility to the Hegemony and converted these random factors to predictable ones and thus actually contribute to the Order of the Hegemony.” Maybe the pie has had its day? New recipes needed.

Also can’t help noticing the complete lack of primitivist books in the AK Press titles listed at the back. Although they pretend they’ve got a few Zerzan books, when you order them they say they’re out of stock and send you some lefty anarcho stuff instead (this actually happened to a friend!) So don’t forget AK press is no better than Collins - no worse, but no better either.

MORE OF US THAN YOU THINK BY PHILLIP BOSEMAN & STANLEY PARKER. £10 FROM 52 CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON SW4 7UN.

This looks like an academic thesis put between two covers to meet institutional publication quotas, shoehorning the anti-globalisation milieu into the two bearded, senior authors’ specialities. There’s more than a whiff of ‘trendy vicar’ about these two, too.

There are a number of things I found irritating about More of Us than the immediately obvious though. Firstly, there seemed to be precious little research done into the actually existing anti-globalisation milieu actually out there beyond the ivory towers. Anonymous interviewees are quoted post-facto supporting Boseman and Parker’s characterisations of them, but there’s no account of the movement, its history or its literature and, lacking this context, we’re just reliant on authors’ own words for it as to what’s ‘in’ and what not.

Secondly, following on from the first, they seemed to be laying down prescriptions instead of descriptions, hardly the objective social science their schema simulates. They create a continuum between what they label Status Quo Maintainers (inevitably acronymised ever after as ‘SQM’) who are violent conservative types up tight about sex, race and taxes through to the groovy, free-spirited guardians of social justice, the Basic Change Activists (‘BCA’s). Like, hey, which are you, dude? You wanna be some old bigot or a paragon of virtue? Pretty hard to see which role you’re invited to read yourself into as you go through category after category, ‘issue’ after ‘issue’ where this schema is applied with tedious repetition, eh?

The trouble is that as typical academics, Boseman and Parker haven’t really connected with the movement directly. Because they don’t have the necessary understanding, the real revolutionaries go off the scale as far as they’re concerned. The BCAs (damn, this acronymitis is contagious - the ‘Basic Change Activists’, right?) supposedly think technology should be something “People use... but [are] uncontrolled by it”, totally ignoring critiques distinguishing technology from tool use advanced by such well- known American social analysts as Lewis Mumford over half a century ago and—lest there is still excuse in that—actually advanced by the most militant anti-globalisers as an argument for the destruction of all technology as enslaving, if only the sage pair could be bothered to have found out about them rather than using ‘the movement’ in abstract as a mirror to their own prescriptions. Similarly, the Eugene anarchists (excessively) credited as the apex of the definitive antiglobalisation confrontation in Seattle were hardly on an agenda of “conflict resolution .. peace and justice” as much as wresting the monopoly of violence from the hands of the State, a perspective that (conveniently and unsurprisingly) fits nowhere in pacifist Boseman and Parker’s schema.

Bizarrely for a book entitled More of Us Than You Think—but in line with their not venturing outside the groves of academe—there is no great effort made to quantify how many of ‘us’ there are out there in the real world. The nearest you get is percentages of interviewees, which is really down to how they’re selected and ques- tioned—in other words down to the mind-numbing esoterics of research technique—rather than reflecting any real-world reality.

In this book’s favour, I will say that although we get all the pseudo-objective moralising that characterises wannabe liberal recuperators, at least we’re spared the unintentionally funny hack-journalese descriptions that characterised earlier offerings such as McKay’s coffee table bluffers guide, Senseless Acts of Beauty. Whatever happened to him? Hey, you even remember him.? Well, hopefully the fate of all his kind and a mark of the true extenbt of their influence. What more need I say?

“DA VINCI CODE DECODED”, MARTIN LUNN,

DISINFORMATION COMPANY, 2004, $9.95.

It’s decoding “The Da Vinci Code”, by Dan Brown, a recent bestseller that caused a bit of fuss for being ‘antiCatholic’. You wouldn’t need to have read it to understand “Da Vinci Code Decoded”, but I suppose the heads in marketing know better than I do.

The material on Da Vinci is interesting. This ‘genius’ worked for Cesare Borgia for years. The Borgia’s were legendary for their ruthlessness - the Bush family of the Middle Ages - and no doubt Davinci did all he could to help his employers in their war mongering. He worked for seventeen years for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan as technical advisor in fortifications and military matters; hydraulic and mechanical engineer; and court jester. “It was at this time he developed his universal genius most fully.”, according to Lunn.

So Da Vinci drew a few paintings, designed a few gadgets (tank, helicopter, etc.) and aided and abetted the most ruthless rulers of his day. (I kept thinking of Fredy Perlmans observation that the average tribal person has far more skills than the overrated ‘renaissance man’.) The reason Da Vinci’s in this book is because he painted some clues concerning heresies into “The Last Supper” - for eg. Jesus’ twin brother, Thomas sitting at the table - which lead down all kinds of alleys.

These alleys have all been covered elsewhere, most notably by Henry Lincoln, Micheal Baigent and Richard Leigh in “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and other books, which explored the real story of Jesus, how and why the Christian Church pushed their Pauline religion and how various secret societies have tried to preserve ‘ancient knowledge’ down through the years. This is the subterranean pulse of our history—the Egyptians, Templars, Priory de Sion, Masons. The ideology that fuels our civilisation.

These undercurrents are vital for any understanding of civilisation and we’ll cover it in more depth next issue. For now though, this book’s worth getting for an overview/synop- sis of various threads of the puzzle. It’s a concise version of most of the main points and is admirably clear and straightforward. This, in a genre that attracts a large amount of bad writers and lunatics, is no mean feat!

SKEWED BY MARTIN J WALKER. £12.00 FROM SLINGSHOT PUBLICATIONS, B.M.BOX 8314, LONDON WC1N 3XX.

I don’t recall who said ‘you’ve got to be crazy to be a psychologist’, but they’ll get ample further proof of this from Dirty Medicene author Martin Walker’s latest daring expose, Skewed. Wordily subheaded

Psychiatric hegemony and the manufacture of mental illness in multiple chemical sensitivity, Gulf War syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome

(phew - that fills half the front cover), Skewed exposes how a clique of psychiatrists led by the litigious prof. Simon Wesseley are redefining ailments with physical causes as ’just in the mind’. Ailments like ME were first treated in the 1960s as simply physically neurologic in origin and are still so-regarded by the World Health Organisation. Despite this, Wesseley and his cronies have been consistently attacking this, equating ME with the vague Victorian patrician malady of neuresthenia, a.k.a. ’the vapours’, or with hysteria. This slots in with a long line of examples where genuinely ill patients have been dogmatically dismissed as malingerers and attention-seeking nutters, everything from the dismissal of all allergy to the twitching of Parkinsons’ sufferers being characterised as arising from their supposed frustrated desire to masturbate.

The main difference is, of course, who gets to treat patients and how. Under a psychological regimen, the problem is the patient, not the toxin or allergen contaminating their body. They are treated by being told to ’pull themselves together’ and given ’tough love’ (abuse) to shock them out of their ’false illness beliefs’. This treatment is particularly outrageous in the case of children, who have been seized from parents, whose care is misrepresented as feeding the child’s ’delusions’ or even behavioural ’Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy’, a condition best known as manifested in the mass murdering nurse Beverly Allitt. A Kafkaesque situation arises where instead of being needed and healed by the supposed ’caring profession’, the patient is humiliated and tortured (e.g. by throwing a paralysed child into a pool to ’sink or swim’ in the style of a Medieval ’witch swimming’) by them whilst it is caring parents that are branded abusers and harassed by the tools at social services, ever-willing to unthinkingly serve Authority.

So why are they doing this? It goes beyond simply dogma and medical niche-carving. Wesseley is a member of Walker’s old adversary HealthWatch, hard-core rationalists and so- called ’quackbusters’ linked to the huge pharmaceutical corporation Wellcome and the food additive and insurance industries. All stand to gain by dismissing a wave of new claims arising from conditions like ME and multiple chemical sensitivity, conse- quences--say their advocates in clinical ecology--of an increasingly toxi- fied and artificial industrial environment. One US insurance company, UNUM, systematically rejected every insurance claim for chronic fatigue syndrome, based on this sort of tosh and had to be subject to class action suits to finally cough up. Even something as obvious as OP poisoning is dismissed as delusional and requiring aversion therapy / psychological coercion, despite what it says on the tin. In the search for a fall-back position on links between poisoning and consequent symptoms, one of these loons even claimed people thinking their poisoned led to them acting out a ’poisoning victim role’ which might manifest in terms of physical symptoms. Walker responds to this with justifiable derision, suggesting by this absurd ’logic’ world hunger could be solved by treating everyone in the world to one good meral and then just having them smell or see photos of it ever after to escape starvation by acting out a ’well-fed diner’ role! Cheekily presenting complaining patients and alternative therapists as ’anti-science’, the psycholo- gisers are in fact the ones simply not interested in scientifically investigating physical causes, in fact their ratio- nalle is to prevent such investigation and discredit / suppress that already established.

With Gulf War syndrome, political factors compounded with psycholo- gising obfuscation and MoD pennypinching to deny war veterans (the Sun’s “heroes“ in wartime) treatment and generally wreck their lives. Not daring to present them as whingers, scroungers and histrionics, the veterans were presented as manipulated by cynical alternative therapists and compensation-hungry lawyers— which was pretty much turning the truth on its head.

This is a disgraceful episode and Walker links the bogus ’health fraud’ movement in with the corporate- backed greenwash campaigns that characterised the 1990s, even appropriating the term ’junk science’ that best characterises the green-washers own obfuscation. He doesn’t hesitate to name names, including the ubiquitous Lord Sainsbury. He courageously exposes the Royal College of Surgeons as an ’old boys club’ making a mockery of peer review in their attempt to defend transparently flawed medical orthodoxy. Get this book before they ban it!!!

PAMPHLETS

A NEW APPROACH TO ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISM BY ANDRES CAMESELLE. ANDESCAMESELLE@YAHOO. COM.

As is the way with these things, I had a copy of this pamphlet conspiratori- ally thrust in my direction at last year’s Vegan Festival in London. On reading it I formed the impression the author was more worried about attracting the attention of other festival-goers than that of the authorities.

Using the sort of utilitarian calculation all too common in the animal rights milieu, that led one bright spark to conclude the ALF shouldn’t burn down labs after raids as it would kill more spiders, woodworm, etc, than experimental animals liberated, Andres concludes the best way to save the maximum number of animals is to jack in direct action and “diversionary” campaigning and for everyone to focus all their attention on street stalls “converting” others to veganism. He asserts this aping the authoritative tone and deductive logic of Peter Singer, and is most intolerant of anyone having the temerity to disagree with him. I got the impression he thought this would make him sound convincing and important, rather than just irritatingly nerdish.

Even if we accept Andres’ argument, campaigning to ban fly spray or even just to encourage others to abstain from using it (’roll up, roll up—sign the anti-insecticidal Pledge, brothers and sisters’) would save more animal lives than prosletysing dietry change and would likely prove more ’successful’ in terms of sheer numbers commiting to it as it involves so much less hassle in terms of lifestyle change, so little real commitment. Moreover, he is clearly not the deep thinker he presents himself as, swallowing the myth that there’s a ’level playing field’ when it comes to the war of ideas (street stalls v. multi-million pound TV ad campaigns and likely the law too later - Peta’s antimeat proppaganda has already been banned from the Tube as “upsetting”) and that all it takes for change is for enough people to be persuaded to make it. Far from fundamentally challenging the assumptions of this speciesist society, Andres naively reasserts and so merely reinforces its power structure.

Animal abuse continues because it profits the powerful few, and it will continue however many people disapprove of this until it is stopped. This will take direct action, precisely what Andres disparages. While they’re at it, they should come to realise all power relations need overthrowing by the same revolutionary means, something Andres would also not accept, given his insistence that anarchists have “infiltrated” animal rights and “put people off”. As far as I’m concerned, the ’means’ of direct action and coming to see things in revolutionary terms is a lot more important than the gross numbers of animals liberated from any particular action. Ultimately this creates a route along which all will be liberated, whereas Andres’ stall strategy will just perpetuate animal abuse (and wider hierarchy) indefinitely through its superficiality.

For most GA readers, I imagine most of the above is pretty much a no- brainer. Frankly, I think this Andres more interesting than his pamphlet. The defensiveness of his writing style implies both that (1) he has already been told the above again and again by AR people he’s previously tried to prosletyse to, and (2) he’s one of those people that appeal to the ’silent majority’ but couldn’t in fact handle any acceptance by them as that might involve some degree of dialogue and undermine his sense of pure election, a ’special rightness’ above that of the common herd (yes, irony intended).

You get the impression that because Andres presumably devotes his time to doing stalls promoting veganism, he feels this is the best thing in the world to do because it is what he does, that he feels superior to anyone else failing to do as he does, and that he also feels sleighed that his great ‘innovation’ (actually as old and lifeless as the hills) has not been recognised by the movement and perks due him in terms of some sort of movement celeb status have not accorded him.

I have my suspicions Andres is one of those types that deep down don’t give two shits about the animals, that he has as little love for them as he does other people, and that he’s actually quite a damaged sort of person himself. We all know this sort—the AR type that wants nothing to do with animals, rationalising this as “speciesist”, the obverse of the incoherent ‘pet lovers’ that drag their long-suffering substitute children everywhere, typically under everyone else’s feet at big events.

I suspect Andres is attracted to the AR movement because it provides an informal but rigid structure he can use to win status by being seen to conform to the ‘rules’ and to score points against others violating them (oh, the horror of it, the prurient frisson of broken tabus!), without meaningfully engaging emotionally with anyone - beyond perhaps feeling anger when his drive for power gets frustrated, as currently through his misinterpretation of aforementioned ‘rules’. His use of logical- sounding but frequently spurious (and likely self-serving) argumentation rather gives him away, an insistence on (superficially) rule-bound, predictable impersonal Reason.

Any similarly structured ‘cause’ would serve his im/personal needs as well - and probably will in future (all together now, comrades, to the tune of Any Old Iron?: ‘Ideology, ideology / Any, any old ideology?’). His petty insistence on broader political correctness at its most humourless, inhuman and sometimes irrelevant is telling. An amusing example: he considers sab gibes at fat, violent hunt supporters (out in the sticks, they breed ‘em that way) reprehens-ible and irrelevant, shockingly “not animal rights arguments” according to his schema. OK, so it’s not PC to call those cunts “fat” - but don’t they just beg for it? Oh, big point - so what? What does this show apart from a lack of humour, that he’s never been up against these people directly himself, and his failure to see the broader “not animal rights” picture?

On the other hand, you get the impression the rejection of his ‘new’ approach by the broader AR movement is less to do with logical evaluation of his actual ideological variant as ‘groupthink’ loyalty to that of others higher in the movement’s ‘star system’, which is currently very orientated around DA, and also ritualistic displays of anger (“evil!”) that probably are tactically inconsequential at best, however satisfying they feel to participants.

Of course such reduction of a liberation struggle to celeb-run groupthink and conformist ritual is crap, and stupid crap at that - but then so is legalistic liberal ‘rights’ theory a la Peter Singer, which implies a State to enforce it and is a product of the same Enlightenment that saw an explosion in Cartesian dualism, the tellingly titled ‘Social Contract’ models and bourgeois societal atomisation generally, mechanicism and vivisection. Both Andres and his AR critics would do well to consider that animal (and all) liberation will be better achieved not by replacing old ideology with ‘new’ variants, but rather by the negation of rule/s and categoric distinctions through an unleashing of fellow feeling, a genuine empathy with others, whether human or not.

ON YER NIKE BEELZEBUSH BY LORD BIRO. PRICE FROM 26 FALCON GROVE. SHERWOOD RISE, NOTTINGHAM.

The horns crudely drawn on the Bush head cut out of the paper sets the tone for this very thin collection of poems. They are few and technically rarely rise above limerick level, but are clearly impassioned and often pretty funny:

GEORGE WASHINGTON BUSH It was I who executed / the Cherry Tree / it was just too /doggone ‘green’ I’ve replaced it / with a Nut Tree /it’s more suited / to my team.

Cherry trees are probably “just too / doggone ‘red’” too, especially the cherries, but I guess that just wouldn’t scan.

Elsewhere, Lady Maud Biro (presumably related to the editor) informs us “I’d like to screw Rebekah / in a bloody Khaki sweater”. These lines are certainly worthy of Martin Amis and his Yellow Dog, though other than suffering from the disability of being featured on the front page of Murdoch’s Sun, we learn no more of this lucky lassie.

Lord Biro claims to be archbishop of the Church of Elvis Militant, the eponymous Amerikan icon apparently being alive and well amongst the Zapatistas as his penance for Fun in Acapulco. Just so you know...

STANLEY’S EXPLOITS, OR, CIVILISING AFRICA THIRD EDITION, NICOLL, DJ. KSL 2001. ISBN 1-873605-97-8. £1.50

Living in Nineteenth century Sheffield, Nicoll uses Stanley’s own damning words to illustrate a critique of the civilising juggernaut. Although lacking in theoretical analysis, his understanding of the process of colonization, and religion as the precursor to civilisation remains relevant today, as we witness the last areas of wilderness being subjugated by the likes of NTM and Bayer.

Like other pioneers of civilisation, Stanley a pproaches the problem with a mix of gleeful duplicity and mass slaughter. “[H]is ultimate aim is the extension of trade and civilisation - that is, the extension of ‘shoddy commercialism’, including the ‘improvement’ of the savage off the face of the earth by the Martini-Henry rifle, the Gatling gun, the whisky bottle, and the worst diseases that our civilisation breeds. We can see in Africa, and all over the world where ‘civilisation’ spreads, that the poor savage perishes from the face of the earth, or, at the best, sinks down into a hopeless, degraded being, as wretched and miserable as the outcasts of our great cities”. Unfortunately the authors of the introduction to the pamphlet chooses to ignore all this, claiming references to ‘civilisation’ to be quaint, and perceiving Nicoll’s writing as concerning a uniting of workers.

Separating peoples from nature by violence and dualistic religions - enforcing a belief system that sees flesh as weakness, man as ringmaster, the earth as inert, and life as resource ripe for exploitation. The story although old remains pertinent, coexistence is not possible, the last places of wilderness are being domesticated—the south pacific, alaska, DNA, the deep ocean, outer space—for now at least these are places not completely subjugated by being inCorporated to the god of progress. “Look upon your ‘god’ little ones, and behold a murderous monster, whose barbarous cruelties should make even the murder fiend of Whitechapel shudder, and for whom instead of feasts, banquets, applause, and honours, a stout rope and a long drop would be fitting reward.”

MUSIC

0XDXTHE ALBUM, BY REMI B GOD. POB. 858 WARRENSBURG MO 64093. USA.

Hmm, well when I saw this CD my immediate reaction from the cover was that this guy fancies himself as a bit of a Jim Morrison lookalike. Musically very rock/70’s punk. I was going to say it’s quite derivative of everything from the Stooges to The Rolling Stones, but having opened up the sleeve and had a better look, these tracks are in fact covers of songs by those bands. Not really my cup of tea. Too heavy on the ‘raawk’ side of things, and I can’t get over the idea that they all fancy themselves a bit too much. This was only increased when I realised that the note with the address of where to send the review to was on the back of yet another picture of the guy on the front of the CD. Having said all this it’s not the most god-awful music I’ve ever heard. I had a quick look at their website http://www.godworldwide.com][www.godworldwide.com. It’s very flashy, has pictures of the guy from the front cover again- and the opportunity to join the international fanclub! This doesn’t appear to be tongue ‘n’ cheek. Hmm.

‘ODES TO AMBIGUITY’, BY DANIEL HALES. PRICE FROM mailto:SELAHSONGS@HOTMAIL.COM][SELAHSONGS@HOTMAIL.COM

No idea how to describe this. It’s all over the place really. First song ‘Ode to Ambiguity’ the vocals reminded me of Dylan, next track, ‘let your light shine before men’ was reminiscent of Floyd. ‘Swept Downstream’ reminds me of US EF! Campfire songs. Whereas the next one is just a short electronic instrumental. I quite like bits of this. It’s also thoroughly DIY, the slip inside the case encourages us to borrow and burn corporate CD’s, nothing particularly unusual about that of course. But it seems like even more important advice at the moment with various corporate labels attempting to sue individuals for file sharing on the Internet. The label is ‘algorithm records’, their website is http://www.geocities.com/rithmage/algo.html][http://www.geocities.com/rithmage/algo.html

Zines

IN YA FACE - JOURNAL OF BARRICADE BOOKS. $3, PO BOX 199, EAST BRUNSWICK, VIC, 3057, AUSTRALIA.

This zine is full of analysis of events and political issues arising out of the Melbourne Anarchist/’Autonomous’ scenes. There is an article that appears to have caused quite a debate on Melbourne’s Indymedia (some 60 pages!) entitled ‘Renegotiating the Terrain’ which is an analysis of the S11 action in Melbourne and the autonomous networks that were a driving force behind it. Although naive in places the article seems to be quite fresh compared most of the anarcho stuff I’ve seen come out of Australia. Although these ‘New Autonomous Networks’ bare an uncanny similarity to the ‘AntiCapitalist’ movement, this article does at least give credit to a whole host of groups for inspiration, and don’t just see anti-capitalist resistance beginning in Seattle. Some of the groups credited with inspiring these new networks are Earth First!, RTS, and the UK’s anti-roads movement along with punk and techno culture. And this is where one of the criticisms of the article printed in a critique in the following pages is aimed. In ‘Renegotiating the Terrain: An Anarchist Perspective’ the author bemoans the lack of class analysis and heavy reliance on what he describes as ‘subcultural’ groups. He also criticizes the lack of emphasis that ‘Anarchism’ gets. The author tries to make it clear that this is nothing to do with ideological branding or whingeing about not getting any ‘credit’ (honest) but that these new ‘autonomous movements’ are always going on about how important ‘autonomy’ is but do not seem to have any other political objectives such as anarchist revolution. Again similarities here can be drawn with the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. However from the little I know of Melbourne’s anarchist scene, it is steeped in anarcho-workerism and petty in-fighting, so I can see why these ‘new autonomous networks’ are growing and why they may want to keep Melbourne’s anarchist scene at arms length, in the same way the UK’s direct action movement did.

The very next article ‘A Proposal for A regional Anarchist Federation’ reaffirms my view of the Melbourne anarchist scene as being hopelessly leftist. This article is a horrendous example of massification, organisa- tionalism and platformism to boot. It makes scary reading, and criticizes any detractors from this path as ‘hyper liberalism’ or extreme individualism. There is a lot of other stuff in this Zine including articles on prisons, planning actions against the WTO and an anarchist critique of Aboriginal Sovereignty.

VEG@NARSI. PRICE FROM mailto:VEGANARSI@MAIL.COM][VEGANARSI@MAIL.COM.

A green anarchist Zine from Turkey. It apparently includes green anarchist, primitivist and vegan-anarchist articles and has had four issues since it was started in 2000. However I don’t speak Turkish so you will have to be satisfied with the description of this Zine as a fairly chunky cut’n’ paste job jam packed full of graphics and articles. The author translates a lot of stuff from English language anti-civilization websites and distributes them through this Zine. It certainly seems worth supporting and maybe someone out there can even translate the odd article from Turkish? Get in touch at the email address above.

NOW OR NEVER - NEWSPAPER OF NORWICH ANARCHISTS. ISSUE NO.3. 35P FROM PO BOX 487, NORWICH, NR2 3AL.

Now or Never is a tabloid size periodical very much in the style of Class War. It’s full of anti-war and hunt-sab news, has a prisoner list and review section, and a sense of humour. However the useful contacts section at the back bizarrely includes the ‘Socialist Party of Great Britain’ and other lefties like the SWP front ‘Stop the War Coalition’, this is alongside the likes of the ALF SG, EF! Action Update and Green Anarchist, but includes the ‘Steve Booth version’ and ‘Paul Rogers version’, maybe this would be a good time to point out (yet again) that the paper you are reading is a collective effort and that many people contribute articles and time to it’s production. Anyone can contribute an article (see editorial in last issue) and it’s not just a mouthpiece for an individual unlike some other pale imitations.

HOWIES 2003 CATALOGUE. PARC HOUSE, PARC TEIfi, CARDIAGAN, SA43 1EW, WALES.

This is one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever had to review. It’s basically a clothes catalogue! Howies are apparently Cardigan Bay’s third biggest clothing company as they proudly proclaim inside this full colour high production value catalogue. There is a personal note from one of the co-founders inside telling us how their mission is to ‘have a nice company doing nice things’. (groan!)

The catalogue is full of ‘environmentally’ friendlier clothes. The jeans are spun on small shuttle looms, there are no chemical finishes, the t-shirts are organic etc, etc. But of course the average price of a pair of jeans is sixty quid and T-shirts are twenty- five quid. Not expensive compared to some designer high street stores maybe, but still. There is also a list of ‘brain food’: a library that they invest in every year that you can ask for a book from and they will send it to you. It all seems to be aimed at the skater, BMX / Mountain biker market. It’s certainly one of the more unusual clothes catalogues I’ve ever flicked through, and has some impressive shots of the Cardigan Bay area. But a clothing company is a clothing company none the less. Make your own?

GA The Zine

NEXT ISSUE: Militarism & Anti-Militarism

Green Anarchist originated in the 1980s protest milieu dominated by CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), a reformist anti-militarist umbrella group that numbered millions of members. At my last meeting with the late John Moore, he suggested GA run anti-militarism as a core theme. Given the economy’s domination by military production and the current bellicose international situation, I think it therefore only appropriate GA72’s core should be ‘Militarism & Anti-Militarism’.

As there has recently been too little contribution from readers to past such themes, I think it appropriate to say something about GA’s ethos here. We are not here to write propaganda and otherwise tell you what to think — a free society is one where people think for themselves. We are offering a free, uncensored forum where you can state and debate your own opinions — and then act on them. This is your forum, not ours! If the editors and a few of their mates are the only ones contributing opinion, it suggests that (1) we are clever and you are stupid, that we’ve got all the answers and you’ve got nothing to say, and (2) that we’re better writers than you. As you can see from my deathless prose so far, none of us are either Einsteins or Shakespeares and don’t expect you to be. You just have to feel strongly enough about something to take up the pen — something some find even more intimidating than taking up the balaclava and fair play to them as long as their activism isn’t totally mindless and / or manipulated by others. We don’t care if you’re particularly articulate (we aren’t ourselves!) — passionate and original will do. On the grounds our readers are wiser than we are, we make a point of publishing pretty much everything we receive short of complete word salads. History may be written by the highly literate but it is fundamentally made by those that are not, the marginalised and ultimately the repressed majority tapping into such undercurrents.

Without being prescriptive, I can see at least four areas of particular interest here, though feel free to contribute your own!

Militarisation and Civilisation

To oppose militarism, we need to understand it and where it came from. Lewis Mumford pointed out that the first forms of massified social organisation were probably the ancient labour gangs and armies of Mesopotamia, and Foucault later pointed out that the unique, surveillance-orientated organisation of modern society had its roots in Napoleon’s Grande Armee, a levy of unprecidented size and requiring new organisational forms. In charting the geneology of militarism, is it also possible to argue that it is intrinsic to Civilisation, with obvious implications for its future viability and ultimate downfall? Or can we have a ‘demilitarised’ civilisation, disarmed but preserving the old organisational forms or perhaps capable of armed defence but somehow organised in a different, freer way, Stuart Christie’s citizens militias perhaps?

Militarisation and the Movement

There is a species of revolutionary who — from the best of intentions or often not — decides the best way to effectively oppose the state is to imitate it in every respect except rhetoric, and even then feels no compunction at resorting to their own brand of propaganda. The defeated Ukranian nationalist Nestor Makhno well illustrates this. Having been defeated by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (1917–21), he proposed ‘the Platform’, Bolshevik (authoritarian) organisation for anarchists! His justification was the same as the Bolsheviks used to excuse their resort to systematic tyranny and brutality, so-called ‘war communism’ — as a necessary defence against ‘counterrevolutionaries’. There are few now that would bluntly call themselves ‘platformist’ in their praise of ‘organisation’ (of others) as their revolutionary panacea and they are ideologist fossils. More insiduous is the trend noted at the end of ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin’s biography of a vibrant, imaginative (albeit self-promoting) 1960s counterculture ossified into paranoid cliques all toting their arsenals and militaristic language — they are “armies” at “war”, their “soldiers” waging “offensives” against “legitimate targets”, etc. In his seminal Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman again and again illustrates how movements (e.g. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, even Christianity) rebelling against oppressive Civilisation become civilisers and oppressors. To a certain extent, this is down to the ‘liberation theology’ becoming ideological cant voided of its original meaning, preserved mainly to be recited as a mark of loyalty to its dispensers. However, this is also down to the militarisation of the movement, that same old ‘defence of necessity’. As revolutionaries, we need to give very serious thought to identifying such trends amongst our own and finding means of effectively opposing them if any revolution is going to be meaningful.

Militarisation and Nonviolence

Despite a long history suggesting otherwise and ritualistic Leftist attempts to assert so now, anti-militarism has come to be seen as the almost-exclusive ‘property’ of advocates of nonviolence. I’ve already suggested the question of a future anti-militarist society also being a strictly nonviolent one needs to be discussed (is homo lupis a myth and if not, does this imply armies are ‘natural’ and inevitable?) — but also whether promulgating strict nonviolence is the best way to achieve it or the worth of such nonviolence as an end. The ‘body snatcher’ techniques of the Left — whereby lively, angry, loving people are transformed into will-less zombies zealously and frantically, but mechanically reciting canned dogma — has been touched upon above, but I’m not the only one to notice this applies equally to the hardcore devotees of the ideology of nonviolence. George Orwell, fresh from fighting Francoist fascism in Spain, called them “creeping Jesuses that should all push off back to Welwyn Garden City”. Nonviolence is ‘the answer’ to everything despite its shallow ‘tunnel vision’ analysis and its devotees will become evasive and aggressively defensive (typically by accusing their question of ‘verbal violence’) if put questions they’re not equipped to answer. Much emphasis is placed on conforming to higher prescriptive codes of personal behaviour — including the boycotting (tabooing) of ‘violent’ products — in a way that implies a closed cult whose main interaction with a ‘fallen world’ beyond is evangelising to it in the hope of ‘saving’ a few more ‘lesser mortals’. To me, this self-policing / self-repression seems unfree, unnatural and itself violence in a most perverted form (much more than S/M spanker types, who at least acknowledge their desires), but it is surely a bigger question how vwe avoid both the Scylla of movement militatisation and the Chabaris of ideological nonviolence.

Anti-Militarism Now

I feel its important that this forthcoming issue is as much an activist resource as it is a forum for theoretical discussion — one should imply and animate the other. Factfiles documenting and analysing current trends in militarisation and effective opposition to it (e.g. the Spanish insumiso anti-conscription movement), interviews and campaign contacts are all eagerly welcomed.

I’m sure you may want to react to this and have plenty more to say than I can think of. Your contributions to GA72 to BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX by early Sept 2004 please!

HOW HARD IT IS TO BE ALONE IN CIVILISATION

In the forest no-one can hear you scream. As it should be. Here everyone’s watching and judging, and keeping themselves in check, hoping to fit in, be like everyone else. Lonely, but no time or space to be truly alone. Cameras, lights and millions of spies...

So where do we go to be alone? Where are our places of sanctuary when all around us is concrete, plastic and metal? When all of Life screams under the yoke of civilisation?

And how do we be alone with ourselves? Are there any places left inside us which aren’t mined and desecrated already? As we’re put through the school mill, the family mill, the work mill . how do we preserve our primitive shape, hold onto our original wildness?

“There is the young girl in me traveling west

With the bear which taught me to look inside

The bear stood by himself and said,

There is a time for being alone

So that you do not take on

The appearance of your friends

There is a time for being at home with yourself.”

- “Many Winters” by Nancy Wood, in Paul Shepard’s book, Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature

Where do I go to be alone?

Here, in the land where there is always someones mark, some humans presence.

Where do I go that yellow streetlamp don’t out-glow the moon?

And looming houses don’t block the wind?

Where barren fields don’t scream in pain?

And desolate mountain cries of empty skin, scalped dry?

Where can I run?

Where I can I be free to look inside?

Where do I go when the sounds in my head clamour to be released,

And my heart explodes a hundred times a day?

When I am surrounded on all sides - inside and out -

And I can’t see no gap in the fence anymore?

Anger burns

Red and sweet

Telling me to hold on, To fight back.

Two swords.

Neither worth anything on their own. But together, make the difference.

One sword to cut the path to wildness, Reaching blade in deep, Past nerves and pain, To where my guts lie buried.

And one sword to defend against my enemies, Flashing bright to warn, And staining red if needs be.

With these I might someday find that place To be myself, To be at home.

Until then I keep on moving, Roaming, Searching, Swords in hand.

No peace while this war rages, No home when all is destroyed, No rest til I meet a bear on forest path,

And he tells me he’s safe, That it’s been many years now since civilisation rusted away. Then I can sheath the swords Lie in swaying branches, Hear lifes-sounds roar, Bear roar At home.

GREEN ANARCHIST SAYS

INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE

USEFUL ADDRESSES

Having been refused permission to hold a workshop on primitivism (“go back to the Stone Age and gas some commuters” - Terry, one of the organisers) we decided we’d definitely have to go down and hold a workshop at the ‘Grassroots Gathering’ in Galway, Ireland last November.

Billed as a non-hierarchical activist gathering, the lineup included a debate about bin charges between the Workers Solidarity Movement and a Labour Party drongo, a talk about how to compromise yourself with the mainstream media and a how-to on ‘menstrual activism’ (really I’m not making this up!).

So we gave our workshop, handed out info, and generally gave a big pain in the arse to the GG ‘organisers’ (mainly WSM). Most people had never heard any critiques of civilisation and were genuinely interested in finding out more. Many also agreed about the lack of anarchic spirit at the GG and wondered why it had such a lefty feel to it.

I asked one of the WSM, Andrew Flood, who was manning the only other info stall why exactly we had been officially excluded from the GG and treated with such hostility. “Your paper advocates the use of sarin gas.” he stated, po-faced. After explaining that the nutter who said that was kicked out of the paper and was probably only joking at the time I asked why they couldn’t look at the arguments and ideas in the paper now and address them.

I also told him I couldn’t see any difference between the SWP and his lot. “Well we are different.” he stated with no hint of irony, “We are socialist anarchists.” Huh? Images of cats with elephant heads came to mind, or Papist witches, and I began to see why this GG was such a pile of lefty bullshit. I also began to realise why so many people who, quite rightly, shun the SWP, seem to think the WSM aren’t so bad. Pretending to be anarchist while really pushing a socialist agenda, the WSM manage to suck in many budding anarchists in Ireland and divert their energies into non-anarchic, lefty bullshit.

The GG had many of the same problems and it was clear that the real reason for our exclusion was that the self-appointed leaders didn’t want people finding out about primitivism. These leaders later stated that we had

A beleaugured sun sinks into the clouds behind WSM’s depressing vison of the future. You can almost see the words ‘arbeit macht frei’ rising behind the endless factories.

been too late in asking for a workshop yet they quite happily slotted in the workshop on genital mutilation on the day with no previous notice.

They had also censored a message to their email discussion list from someone critical about our exclusion from the GG and on the day told people there was no primitivist workshop organised.

Let’s hope those dissatisfied with the way it’s going start demanding and organising a real anarchist gathering instead of going along with this kind of Grassroots Gestapo Gathering.

• re-pressed distribution 145-149 Cardigan Road leeds, LS6 1LJ, UK.

http://www.re-pressed.org.uk/repressed@mail.com][www.re-pressed.org.uk/repressed@mail.com

• http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/][http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/ - Online green Anarchy Archive

• http://www.primitivism.com/][www.primitivism.com/

• http://www.animalliberation.net/][www.animalliberation.net/

• Ecotopia -

http://www.sindominio.net/ecotopia/][www.sindominio.net/ecotopia/ Spanish eco anarchist page.

• Coalition Against Civilization P.O. Box 835, Greensburg, PA 15601 USA

HALL OF SHAME

• http://www.blackandgreen.org/][www.blackandgreen.org/

• Anarchy-a journal of desire armed, C.A.L. Press

PO Box 1446

Columbia, MO

65205-1446

http://www.anarchymag.org/][www.anarchymag.org/

• Re-Evolucion

Apdo. 1047

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mailto:anticivilizacion@hotmail.com][anticivilizacion@hotmail.com

• Il Silvestre

(Terra Salvaggia)

Via del cuore 1

56100 PISA, Italia

Housmans may be Britain’s longest- running pacifist bookshop-founded by the Peace Pledge Union in the late-1930s-but it looks like it won’t be running much longer. Faced with legal difficulties and mounting debts, it’s adopted the same ‘cutting its own throat’ tactic of many alternative bookshops in trouble, refusing to pay its suppliers in the implicit hope that they will continue to supply anyway, either out of desperation or of charity. Housmans has run up a bill of well over £1,000 with GA and has made no attempt to clear this or even acknowledge our final ‘no mags’ invoice sent instead of last issue. We will no longer be supplying them and urge others to fuck them off likewise.

Although nowhere near as disturbed a scene as the gone-but-unlamented Compendium in Camden—a milieu featuring religious cultists and bullying-induced staff suicide as well as the systematic cheating of suppliers—Housmans also had its unsavory side. I remember being told they wouldn’t take GA’s and the world’s first edition of the Freedom Club’s Industrial Society & Its Future because “Housmans is a pacifist bookshop” despite them happily selling tracts by German guerrillas and An Phoblact there (not that I’d discourage anyone from selling that either!).

Serious political / alternative bookshops are now few and far between, especially in London, which is why a lot of movement publications are now streetsold from necessity, despite the embarrassing Trotskyite image (“This week’s Socialist Worker?”) adhering to this. If you’re in London and don’t want to get GA this way (unreliable) or by subscription (insecure), then go to UK’s oldest anarchist bookshop, Freedom, in Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, especially now the old reformist clique there has largely died off.

GREEN ANARCHY NOW

WHO ARE WE?

The State spent £10m jailing GA’s editors in an attempt to shut us up. We’re still here...

WHY SMASH CIVILISATION?

Civilisation is the exploitation of mass society. Specialisation, division of labour creates hierarchies to maintain the complex web of production and consumption that is our techno-industrial mass society.

Exploitation divides mass society and the individual on the grounds of class, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference. Mass society can’t be reformed. It must be replaced.

DISINTEGRATION IS BEAUTIFUL

In small communities each person is respected as an autonomous individual. Self-determination replaces hierarchy and so the city ends. Mass can’t fight mass. The Left’s living proof.

LAND OR DEATH

All life derives from the land

.Civilisation alienates us from the Earth using nationhood and property law. We must take back the land and living self-sufficiently, re-establishing our relationship with the Earth. Those of us who are most exploited by Civilisation live in the South, the Third World, the fruits of our labour are exported to the rich North.

We have nothing to lose in fighting for self-governing, self-sufficient small communities. Both North and South we need to expand our culture of resistance to free ourselves from alienation from our Earth..

DIRECT ACTION

Build an alternative green and black eco-nomy and enjoy yourselves in the smashing of banks, multinationals, military bases, labs, exploiters, bigots and developers. Organise underground in networks of autonomous small groups.

Green Anarchist,

BCM 1715,

London

WC1N 3XX, UK mailto:info@greenanarchist.org][info@greenanarchist.org

Letters

Send your letters to Oxford Green Anarchists, BCM 1715, London WC1N 3XX, but remember:-

• We print all letters received on a ‘no censorship, no endorsement’ basis. Your letters are your responsibility, not ours. We think readers are grown up enough to think for themselves, so won’t usually comment on letters we print — even those we don’t agree with — unless asked. The only exception to this are letters from fascists and other such bigots and pisstakers. These will be binned, though we will note their arrival.

• We will ruthlessly edit all letters we think too long or boring. So keep ‘em short so everyone can have their say too. Cut letters are marked with a [ ] with the original number of words inside the bracket.

• If you don’t want your letter, your name or your address printed, let us know.

EMPTINESS

A good day to you,

I am a 24 year old social prisoner who is locked up in a desert wasteland (snowy this month) about 400 miles inland from the Pacific coast of Oregon. I am originally from a very lush and green forested area, but today I find myself unblessed with an unobstructed and desolate view through the fence for miles in every direction. Yes, these parts of the US are very involved in the mass cultivation of potatoes and not much else.

A political prisoner who happens to be a close acquiantence of mine has strongly suggested that I take some time out of my days (uneventful) to read some of the publications that you put together. I have been very pleased with the reading material that he has suggested in the past, and I feel confident that a good portion of whatever you may decide to send me will be read with 'open' eyes and seriously considered and contemplated upon.

Ecologically speaking, a much more 'future-primitive' lifestyle seems to

hold the greatest promise for the continued survival of our species and our planet. As I sit here, surrounded by technology's promise of a happier and longer existence, I can't help but notice the emptiness in the 9 to 5 working man's eyes. That stare, indicating that he is permeated by the worker-bee mentality of the imperialist hive. And sadly, the honeycomb structure, the hive, is falling apart because of the queen bee's insatiable greed and the shortsightedness of her advisors.

I sincerely hope that you decide to share some of your ideas and opinions.

Awaiting a reply,

Daniel DuBois [#12680946], SRCI, 777 Stanton Blvd., Ontario, OR 97914, USA

CRITICALMASS

In the Green Anarchist No.68/9, on the books review pages, there was mention of the group known as Critical Mass. I can confirm that there was a group of anarchists who formed Critical Mass during the summer of 1985 in Ramsgate, Kent.

One of their most successful actions was the squat of abandoned buildings too highlight the plight of homeless people, I myself spent some time at the squat. The Ramsgate Critical Mass also published a magazine and managed too attract a few local youth to their banner.

I lost touch with the group during 1986 and have not heard from them since. I would be grateful for any info on the original group.

Leslie North [please reply via GA address in contacts section]

SUPPORT SOMEONE

Dear GA,

I call on your readers to support someone involved in a conspiracy case, as you were. If Maxine Carr had been married to Ian Huntley, she would not have got three and a half years' jail - see s.2 Criminal Law Act 1977, a discriminatory law. There were many other odd features of her case. She was refused bail, denied electronic tagging, and had her trial interfered with by "trial by media" (unlike you!) who conspired to pervert justice against her re. conviction and sentence.

Now they hope to hound her and publish her address when she is released. The press have no regard for Holly Wells + Jessica Chapman as like creepy maggots they prey on their corpses not giving a penny to their families, cashing in on the child pornographic features of their murders, Why don't journalists just admit they want the girls dead?

And do you know Maxine has made friends with a man who survived near child murder & molestation?

Yours, JAYNE, Brighton

PS: Journalists are lying scum

Letter from Ayoreo- Totobiegosode leaders to friends overseas.

[see p.15 this issue] The leaders have met to voice their concern about the land.

Gabide Etacori’s opinion: At the beginning, when we began to reclaim our land, we asked that people should not enter into the land with bulldozers. Until now we have not alllowed the cutting of trails in the forest.

I do not want people to enter [into our land] to cut trees and kill what we eat, because the forest is for us and the uncontacted indians.

Erui Etacori’s opinion: We met with the president of INDI [Paraguayan Institute of Indian Affairs], we requested that people should not enter our land with bulldozers.

DECLARATION FROM TURKISH LIBERTARIAN COORDINATION AGAINST NATO

Our dreams are getting darker day by day. We feel as if there is no hope. Some people want us to feel that way. The control of our lives is taken from us, so that some people would make their capital bigger and bigger. The boss is exploiting the worker, capital owner is exploiting the poor, rich countries are exploiting the rest of the world. This is the order of the money, capitalism.

Since many years, capitalism supports itself with organizations such as IMF and NATO. NATO serves today as the biggest army of the system. This time, the NATO meeting that the masters of the universe organize, to take decision in our name, would be taking place in Istanbul. NATO which is formed by the USA and its allies, is a global organizaton ready to slaughter everything to support the existence of capitalism. USA is on

I want to look after our ancestors’ ter- see trails cut, or the white man’s

ritory because some areas have already been stolen from us, and trees have been cut down and grasslands have been created. We are happy to be sending this note to our friends overseas.

Chiri Etacori’s opinion: I am not a leader, but I am going to give my opinion too. I have the same thoughts as our leaders. I also don’t like the fact that bulldozers come in because it’s forbidden to enter with bulldozers. I am happy that our friends will read this note. I also don’t like it that people enter with bulldozers, because the uncontacted indians don’t like to the one hand, the state which takes the most profit of the system, on the other hand, it is one of the countries in which many homeless and poor people live most. A state does not represent us but only the masters and it protects the capitalists whose taxes it deeply needs. For us the struggle to come together and to organize is the struggle to build a world without exploitation. This struggle would be groundless unless it causes that the means of production get into the hand of producers directly. This is because a society which reproduces its existence by consuming the objects in which the explotatiton is sticked can not be free.

We don‘t think that the solution is to change the owner of the focus of authority. What we want is a world in which there are no authorities. The bosses, the commanders, the leaders, things.

Eduejai Etacori’s opinion: I have the same thoughts as the leaders because the forest gives us life and we use it for hunting and other things. I don’t forget the words of our leaders who said, ‘Don’t abandon the fight for the land.’ That is why I do not stop fighting for the land.

Signed

Gabide Etacori Erui Etacori Chiri Etacori Eduejai Etacori the husbands and the olders made us believe that they could make better decisions in the name of us. But we believe that nobody has the authority to make decision in the name of other people. We think that it‘s neccesary to create collective bodies in which people make their decisions all together, and to support people who try to create those kind of bodies. The way to build a world without authority and explotation is only possible through the struggle which is claimed by the people whose labour is exploited, whose culture and language are planned to be destroyed, who are insulted because of their sexual identity or orientation..

LIBERTARIAN COORDINATION AGAINST NATO http://haziran2004.cjb.net][http://haziran2004.cjb.net mailto:antiotoriter2004@yahoo.com][antiotoriter2004@yahoo.com

STREETSELL GA

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News

GOODBYE BAYEB

The Bayer Cropscience building at North Newbalds had all 56 of it’s windows broken. The message “No GM—Not Now, Not Ever” was spraypainted on a wall. The windows were doubleglazed so although only the outer panes were smashed the whole lot will probably have to be replaced. One window had both panes broken and a litre of white gloss paint was thrown through to add to the disruption and expense. Let Bayer be aware - if they become the main GM offender again, we’ll be back.

This was one of 4 actions against Bayer that happened over the last month as a warning to Bayer to stay out of GM crops. The 4 actions were the closing of a succesful campaign using direct action against Bayer AG—who were the major GM players in the UK and are still major the world over. This campaign saw over 50 varied and diverse actions in a few months, part of a 17 year history of direct action against GM crops the world over.

See page 5 for particulars of the other Bayer actions.

FESTIVAL LIST

tliegreatrockandrockswindle.com

MAY

27-31: Mayfair 2004

29-30: Free festival, Newcastle Upon Tyne

JUNE

5: Strawberry Fayre, Cambridge 18-20: Oceanfest, north Devon.

21: Stonehenge Peoples Free Festival

JULY

4: Ambient Green Picnic, Guildford, Surrey

SWEDISH ANIMAL LAB LIBERATION

During the night to May 19th, members of the Swedish ALF broke into a building belonging to Goete Olofsson, Selkna gard, Uppsala, in Sweden. Inside the building thousands of rats and mice were found in horrible conditions.

This breeder has a pennit to breed 100 guinea pigs for the vivisection industry every year and was raided by another animal rights group in 1998, when all animals on the fann, 92 guinea pigs, were liberated. After that raid the breeder said he would quit, but has now instead built new buildings and started to breed rats and mice.

The ALF rescued as many animals as possible that could be rehomed. Several hundreds of rats, some mice and also 20 chickens that were bred in the facilities were liberated. After the animals had been liberated, as much damage as possible were done:

slogans sprayed all over the building and on vehicles outside, cages were destroyed, paint was poured over the floors and walls and other damage was done as well as documents taken.

This is the second time this place is raided. Next time the ALF will not be satisfied to just liberate the animals and cause some damage, so our advice is to stop now or else...

The breeder Goete Olofsson are waking up to hell tills beautiful Wednesday morning. At tlie same time, hundreds of animals are waking up to their new lifes. For them animal liberation came overnight and they will never again be made to suffer under the hands of human beings.

Djurens Befrielsefront (DBF) Swedish ALF

PRISONER STOP PRESS

On 20/05/04 Italian animal rights activist, Sergio Maria Stefani, was arrested in Rome by police investigating damage carried out against several fur stores, butchers and the discovery of an incendiary device in front of a butchers in March 2004.

Sergio is involved with several animal rights campaigns, and in particular the Close Morini Fann Campaign (Morini is a laboratory animal supplier which breeds dogs and rodents for torture & death at the hands of vivisectors).

Please send letters to:

Sergio Maria Stefani, Casa Circondariale Regina Coeli, Via della Lungara 29, 00165 Roma, Italy

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Issue 73–74

Date: Sep 2004

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EARTH DEFENDER MURDERED IN PHILIPPINES

Isabelo dela Pena, a forest defender who is a key figure in derailing massive logging by big corporations in Southern Mindanao was shot dead by unidentified gunmen.

According to reports, two unidentified motorcycle-riding men gunned down the forester while he was in a car. The slain forester is now one among hundreds of earth defenders in the country who are consequently been murdered by hired goons, only to allow big corporations in continuing the vicious business of forest exploitation.

Davao forest is one among the big forest reserve in the country that has a rich diversity of plants and species that supports the life system of all inhabitants including indigenous people. But the massive abuse of cutting down trees and mining by local and multi-national companies, causes the deterioration of the forest, leading to landslides, flashfloods, species extinction and disruption of the natural habitat.

In 2003 Solidarity South Pacific activists visited imprisoned environmental official Raul Zapatos, jailed for killing (in self defence) a mayor involved in illegal logging who at the time was attacking him with a sub-machine gun.

These are the kind of extreme situations faced by environmentalists in much of the world—even when simply enforcing conservation laws! Thankfully Raul is now free (see our prisoner section at http://www.eco-action.org/ssp][www.eco- action.org/ssp), but the situations he faced remain.

ECOLOGICAL STRESSES TAKING THEIR TOLL WORLDWIDE

Amphibians are experiencing a precipitous decline across the globe, according to the first comprehensive world survey of the creatures, which include frogs, toads and salamanders. The rapid drop is the equivalent of tens of thousands of years’ worth of extinctions in just a century. Amphibians are often considered “canaries in the coal mine” because their permeable skin makes them especially sensitive to environmental changes.

“This is the first group being affected by a death by a thousand cuts in the way that we as humans have been affecting the biosphere in the past 50 or hundred years,” said Claude Gascon, a scientific adviser to the study.

Surveys showed the amphibian population of Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest, for example, was stable until 1987. The next year it began to crash, and by 1989, 40 percent of its amphibian species had gone extinct.

POWER UNES SADDTAGED

OAK CREEK, Wisconsin Oct 11: Someone removed bolts from the base of a high-voltage electrical transmission tower, causing it to fall on a second tower and knock out power to 17,000 customers.

The incident caused a four-hour outage Saturday for 17,000 customers, including General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee.

Downed wires from the towers lay across railroad tracks much of Sunday, delaying passenger and freight trains from Amtrak and Canadian Pacific Railroad.

Tanzanian wildlife authorities are investigating the deaths of some 10,000 flamingos over September at the Lake Manyara National Park.

Preliminary tests have shown the birds might have died from toxins in algae, the park’s chief warden Betty Loibooki told AFP news agency. Samples have been sent to Germany for further analysis. Lake Manyara in north-eastern Tanzania is home to over 300 bird species with more than three million flamingos.

It would seem that many animals in the Wildlife Kingdom are experiencing the ‘ill- effects’ of something unseen and unexplained. Whale and dolphin carcasses are beaching in various coastal areas when they shouldn’t be, leaving marine biologists stumped, and Linda Moulton Howe of ‘www.earthfiles.com’ has reported on many strange happenings with Deer and Elk in the Midwest of U.S.A.

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News

Who Wants To Be A Millenarian?

A report published this year predicts nuclear war, megadroughts, famine, mass migrations and rioting around the world by 2020 as abrupt climate change causes massive disruption of the world’s food and water supplies.

By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. Levees in the Sacramento river delta are breached, disrupting the aqueducts transporting water south.

Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit with an average annual temperature drop of 6°F. Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia. War and famine deaths run into the millions until the planet’s population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope. A “significant drop” in the planet’s ability to sustain its present population will become apparent over the next 20 years.

Riots and conflict tear apart India, S. Africa and Indonesia. Access to water becomes a major battleground. The Nile, Danube and Amazon are all mentioned as being high risk. Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt and North Korea. Israel, China, India and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.

By 2010 the U.S. and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90F. Climate becomes an “economic nuisance” as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.

Mega-droughts affect the world’s major breadbaskets, including America’s Midwest, where strong winds bring soil loss. Bangladesh will become nearly uninhabitable because of rising sea levels which contaminate inland water supplies.

Military showdowns could be fast and furious: In 2015, conflict in Europe over supplies of food and water leads to strained relations. In 2022, France and Germany battle over the Rhine River’s water. In 2025, the United States and China square off over access to Saudi Arabian oil.

This report did not come from some fruitcake environmentalist thinktank, but from that paragon of rationality and pricipled endeavours, the Pentagon. The fact that the Pentagon should be considering these doomsday scenarios as possible, even probable in the near future should be worrying for us insignificant minions, when we consider who is occupying the seats of power in the US today.

In recent issues of Rachel’s Environment and Health News (www.rachel.org) is a wellresearched series of articles about the religious right in the US and its influence over the Bush administration. It shows that the U.S. is pursuing contradictory and seemingly selfdestructive nuclear policies: Bush stresses that the two greatest dangers facing the U.S. are the spread of nuclear materials and know-how into the hands of (a) terrorists and (b) erratic and belligerent countries.

Meanwhile Vice-President Cheney and the Commerce Department are promoting the sale of nuclear power plants around the world even though it is widely acknowledged that nuclear power provides a sure path to nuclear weapons.

Bush has initiated a “second nuclear age” ordering up a new generation of small atomic bombs which are needed because they are “more usable”. Bush has announced provocative new war policies, including the threat of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against even enemies without nuclear arms.

The U.S. is deliberately dragging its feet in efforts to secure thousands of loose nuclear weapons in countries of the former Soviet Union, and is failing to retrieve tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that were given or lent to 40 or more countries under the “atoms for peace” program.

It’s as if U.S. leaders — or the political supporters to whom they are beholden — believe that the rogue detonation of a nuclear device in some key city like Jerusalem or even New York is inevitable and can’t be stopped, or perhaps might even be beneficial in some way and therefore should be enabled.

Certain fundamentalist Christian leaders within the United States say they believe that World War III is inevitable (some even say desirable) because it is part of God’s plan, and those same Christian leaders control the political agenda of the Republican Party, which in turn controls the Congress and the Executive Branch.

These fundamentalist Christian leaders are, therefore, in the best position to promote the spread of nuclear technologies abroad, and to slow U.S. efforts to retrieve and secure weapons-grade nuclear materials. Many of them also preach that a fiery conflagration is required to defeat the armies of the Antichrist and thus usher in Christ’s thousand-year reign of peace.

Christian fundamentalist leaders are much further along toward their goal of dominion than most people realize. They control the Congress and the White House, and they are now working methodically to take over the courts. Perhaps because religious beliefs are considered to be a private matter in the U.S., the mass media have largely ignored this, the most important political story of our time. These leaders believe that before Christ returns to Earth he will physically transport to heaven (“rapture”) all those who have been saved, whether they be dead or still living. As the Reverend Billy Graham wrote in 1984, “The day is fast approaching when Jesus Christ will come back to ‘snatch away’ His followers from all the graveyards of the world, and those of us who are alive and remain will join them in the great escape!”

Reverend Jerry Falwell boasts that he can mobilize 70 million dispensationalists (36% of all U.S. adults); others say the true number of dispensationalists is no more than 40 million (20% of all adults). Either number is politically significant because only 50.99 million people voted for Al Gore in 2000 and even fewer voted for George W. Bush.

For people holding such views, the present U.S. invasion of Iraq may hold special meaning because it can be seen as an essential step toward the second coming of Christ. Indeed, President Bush describes his own role in the Iraq war in deeply religious terms. When the President visited the Middle East a year ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which is owned by the New York Times, reported that the President said, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did....”

In short, the mightiest military machine the world has ever seen is in the hands of nutcases. Modern Day equivalents of Ghengis Khan have at their disposal a far greater power than any tyrant has ever wielded. Yet they are the same in that they believe they are fulfilling some great prophecy or destiny. Any revolutionary strategy has to take this madness into account.

We cannot assume that our enemies think or operate in anything like the way ‘normal’ people do. Nor should we underestimate their power and dedication.

DIARY OF DIRECT ACTION

More info: ALF Supporters Group, BM 1160, London WC1N 3XX; Arkangel, BCM 9280, London WC1N 3XX; North American ALF Supporters Group (NAALFSG), PO Box 428, Brighton, Ontario, Canada K0K 1HO; Earth First! Action Update c/o PO Box 2971, Brighton, East Sussex BN2 2TT; and Earth First! Journal, PO Box 3023, Tucson, AZ 85702, USA.

MARCH

11: MALMO, SWEDEN - Fur store daubed.

24: SWEDEN - Three fur stores bricked and sloganised.

26: ITALY - Vivisectors car trashed.

28: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - Fishing and game shop trashed.

29: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - Fur store trashed.

30: RUSSIA - ALF trash butchers, hunting and fur shops.

HAMPSHIRE, UK - Wickham labs workers had cars trashed. STAFFORDSHIRE - Isotron’s director (Newchurch supplier) had two cars paint-strippered. NOTTINGHAM, UK - Fish whole-saler bricked.

SWEDEN - Butchers bricked and sloganised

AUSTRIA - £8,000 mink coat torched - whilst still being worn!

OSLO, NORWAY - Fur store bricked.

APRIL

1: SWEDEN - Two fur stores paint-bombed.

BERLIN, GERMANY - 27 furtrimmed jackets slashed in three fur stores.

I HE

OF CUR CIvtUEMIOel'

NOTTINGHAM, UK - BOC (HLS supplier) HQ bricked. FLORENCE, ITALY - Hundreds of rodents freed from university cancer experimental labs.

2: EASTERN GERMANY - Two rabbits freed.

4: SPAIN - SECAL (vivisection) president’s home sloganised.

EASTERN GERMANY - Hunting platform felled.

GERMANY - Fur store manager’s home daubed and slogan- ised.

5: RUSSIA - Two fur stores slo- ganised.

6: UK - Daiichi worker and sales rep had cars trashed.

WEST BYFLEET, UK - Yamanouchi (HLS financier) gates sloganised.

8: SWEDEN - Fur store bricked. GERMANY - Five butchers and two meat trucks trashed.

9: SPAIN - Two fur stores and McDonalds ad trashed.

CARRAL, GALICIA, SPAIN - 6,500 mink freed from fur farm.

E300,000 damage.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNYSL- VANIA, USA- 47 animals freed from agricultural school.

EASTERN GERMANY - Another rabbit freed.

OSLO, NORWAY - Fur store sign pulled down. Another store bricked.

UK - Three vehicles trashed at Emerson (Yamanouchi landlords).

10: FALKENBERG, SWEDEN - Chicken truck torched. Two others damaged.

NORWAY - Lab dog breeder sloganised and targeted with firecrackers.

SPAIN - 19 hens freed from battery farm.

PASSAU, GERMANY - Mink farm and fur store paint-bombed. GERMANY - Deer fencing cut down.

12: SKI, OSTFOLD, NORWAY - Fur store trashed.

BERLIN, GERMANY - Fur store etched.

13: ITALY - Fur store glued and sloganised.

15: UDINE, ITALY - Four churches sloganised to protest Christian ritual slaughter of lambs for Easter.

NORTHAMPTON, UK - ACS and B&V Water Treatment (HLS suppliers) bricked and slogan- ised

TROLLHATTAN, SWEDEN - Fur store and bestiality porn shop trashed.

16: UK - Montpelier chair (Oxford monkey house associate) had car trashed.

GEORGSMARIENHUTTE, MUNSTER, GERMANY - McDonalds repeatedly trashed; butchers also glued.

GERMANY - Fur shop manager again attacked.

18: EASTERN GERMANY - 11 rabbits freed.

19: Seaboard Securities (HLS associate) glued and sloganised.

20: UK - Forest Labs (HLS client) raided. Documents and phones taken by ALE STAFFORDSHIRE, UK - Newchurch (breeds guinea pigs for vivisection) owner’s daughter’s home trashed.

ITALY - Vivisector’s cottage

paint-bombed.

21: ITALY - Morini farm (vivisec tion breeder) mail service slo- ganised and glued.

KAUHAJOKI, FINLAND - 300 mink freed from fur farm.

E100,000+ damage.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - 119 frogs freed from vivisection lab just outside the Russian capital. Lab was then trashed.

22: SHOHOMISH, WASHINGTON, USA- ELF torch two houses in anti-sprawl protest. $1m damage.

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, UK - 40 chickens freed from battery farm; animal transporter’s tyres slashed.

USA - Sumitomo (HLS client) staffer’s home daubed.

23: UK - Plysu (vivisection supplier) vehicles trashed.

UK - Animal Rights Militia (ARM) sent warning letters to HLS directors.

OXFORD, UK - Home of monkey house-associated vivisector paint-bombed.

25: BEEKSE BERGEN, HOLLAND - Zoo that supplies surplus rhesus monkeys to vivisection lab daubed.

28: HOLLAND - Yamanouchi (HLS financier) staffer’s car trashed.

29: SWEDEN - Rabbit freed from zoo.

Builder involved in Oxford monkey house had car trashed.

ITALY - Two fur shops trashed.

30: BERLIN, GERMANY - Fur store attacked twice more.

UK - Montpelier Group car trashed.

ITALY - Seven incendiaries ignited in fur store; Morini Farm advertiser’s office sloganised.

UK - Aramak (former HLS supplier) worker’s home bricked.

MAY

1: YORKSHIRE, UK - Starving dog freed from back yard. WEST SUSSEX, UK - Rentokill van trashed.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - Circus posters removed.; fur store and its insurers etched. ITALY - RBM worker sent death threat; Morini farm breeder sent hoax bomb; fur store bricked and daubed.

GERMANY - 20 hens freed from factory farm.

3: ITALY - Four trucks at pig farm torched by Animal Rights Militia (ARM).

4: RIMINI, ITALY - Home of fur shop owner sloganised.

FLORIDA, USA- Fur store bricked.

5: MILAN, ITALY - Five fur stores glued and paint-bombed. CHESHIRE, UK - Three key Emerson (Yamanouchi landlords) staffers had cars trashed. VADSTENA, SWEDEN - 120 chickens freed from battery farm.

6: UK - Three Aramark (HLS supplier) workers had cars trashed.

7: UK - Roads en route to Newchurch workers’ homes slo- ganised.

ITALY - RBM lab worker’s car trashed.

8: SWEDEN - Shell (HLS linked) station sloganised.

9: UK - Yamanouchi (HLS financier company) director’s car slo- ganised.

LEATHERHEAD, SURREY, UK - Yamanouchi (HLS financier) worker’s garage sloganised. UK - ‘Voodoo’ effigy left outside Newchurch Farm worker’s home.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - 110 rats and five rabbits freed from State University Biological Department lab.

10: UK - Hoax bomb sent to Newchurch worker’s unpleasant mother-in-law (no jokes, please!).

SARDINIA, ITALY - Pig farmers’ union president’s car torched.

11: ITALY - Two butchers glued. SKARA, SWEDEN - 133 rabbits freed from fur farm.

12: POOLE, DORSET, UK - Two Sigma Aldrich (HLS supplier) vans and three cars trashed.

13: NORFOLK, UK - 40 chickens freed from battery farm.

14: ITALY - Pharmacia director’s home sloganised.

15: BARCELONA, SPAIN - Three hamsters freed from pet shop. GOTENBURG, SWEDEN - Fur shop owner’s home trashed.

16: GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK - Six pheasant pens destroyed. £8,000 damage.

VALENCIA, SPAIN - Poultry farm trashed.

17: SOMEREN, HOLLAND - Two and a truck at rabbit slaughterhouse torched.

PROVO, UTAH, USA - Two dives, five finches and six rabbits freed from Brigham Young Uni lab.

18: SPAIN - Bull-fighting ring glued and daubed.

19: VOORSCHOLEN / LEEDENS- DORP, NETHERLANDS - BPRC director’s home paint- bombed.

CRAWLEY, SURREY, UK - Bomb hoax at BOC plant. SWEDEN - Vivisection breeder’s premises trashed.

SWEDEN - Hundreds of rodents and twenty chickens freed from vivisection breeders.

19-20: UK - Emerson (Yamanouchi landlords) workers’ cars trashed.

20: BRACKNELL, BERKSHIRE, UK - BOC (HLS supplier) director’s home paint-bombed. UPPSALA, SWEDEN - Chinchilla farmer’s home daubed.

21: UK - RMC (Oxford monkey house builders) site had 11 lorries, conveyer belt and computers trashed.

GERMANY - 30 dogs freed from vivisection breeders.

23: GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN - Two fur shops sloganised.

23: CHAPMANS POOL, DORSET, UK - 50 lobster pots destroyed by Lobster Liberation Front.

24: UK - Hoax letter sent to neighbours of Newchurch Farm worker’s pro-vivisection mother-inlaw.

UK - Four BOC workers had car tyres slashed.

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO, USA - Three dogs freed from animal shelter.

25: SWEDEN - 76 rabbits freed from fur farm.

ESKILSTUNA, SWEDEN - Circus posters destroyed. HOLLAND - Circus posters destroyed here too.

26: LATINA, ITALY - Molotov cocktails thrown at Blockbusters store.

UK - RMC (Oxford monkey house builders) had thirteen vehicles (diggers, etc) wrenched and three transport barges unmoored.

27: AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND - ABN Amro (BPRC financier) had cash point machines glued; slogans and butyric acid (horrendous-smelling!) thrown over HQ.

28: FLORENCE, ITALY - Two fur shops glued.

29: ITALY - Butchers, fish and pet shops glued in solidarity with Sergio Maria.

31: NORWAY - Fur Animal Avengers bomb-hoax fur convention, shutting it down. PROVO, UTAH, USA - Brigham Young Uni had vehicles trashed, buildings slogan- ised, etc.

JUNE

1: FLORIDA, USA- Fur-selling clothes store etched.

2: UK - Montpellier (Oxford monkey house associates) staff had seven cars paint-strippered; site lorries, bulldozers, tractor and water pump, etc, also trashed. UK - Rotary Club secretary (gave HLS advertising) had car etched. Withdrew support from HLS.

3-4: UK - HLS suppliers’ cars trashed.

4-5: HAMPSHIRE / WILTSHIRE, UK - Pheasant pens destroyed.

5: DORSET, UK - 1,000s of pheasants freed from breeding pen.

WILTSHIRE - Fox traps also destroyed.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - 94 rats freed from State University animal physiology department.

USA - Santen (AVS subsidiary) employee had home spray-painted.

6: UK - Ten animal transportation lorries used for live exports had tyres slashed.

HAMPSHIRE, UK - Pheasant pen trashed.

7: KIMMERIDGE, DORSET, UK - Pheasant pen destroyed by ALF.

8: UK - HLS supplier’s two cars trashed.

UK - Bullock director (Montpellier owner) had his new BMW trashed.

UK - Newchurch driver’s home sloganised.

PROVO, UTAH, USA - ALF torch Brigham Young Uni meat and livestock facilities.

9: UK - HLS supplier’s car paint- strippered.

NIJMIGEN, NETHERLANDS - ABN AMRO cah point machines glued.

10: DORSET, UK - Hunter Paul Swaffield had signs to his crap theme park over-painted. HAMPSHIRE, UK - Another pheasant pen trashed.

UK - Newchurch Farm’s fence power cut off, provoking a security alert.

UK - BOC and Gist (HLS suppliers) had 6+ vehicles trashed. OSLO, NORWAY - McDonalds repeatedly bricked.

11: MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Russian ALF free ravens and crows from State University.

UK - HLS worker had two cars trashed.

UK - Newchurch Farm worker’s home paint-bombed.

12: UK - HLS monkey driver’s home trashed.

UK - Another Newchurch Farm worker sent hoax bomb.

13: CHAPMANS POOL, DORSET, UK - Lobster Liberation Front freed thirty lobsters and three crabs from fisherman, trashed his boat and house, etc. He subsequently went out of business.

NOTTINGHAM, UK - RMC vehicles trashed.

UK - HLS supplier had car covered in acid.

COUNTY MEATH, EIRE - Vegus Circus advertising destroyed.

14: UK - Yamanouchi (HLS financier) employee’s cars etched.

15: UK - Amersham Biosciences worker’s two cars trashed.

SKYBERGA, SWEDEN - Mink farm building torched.

HENGELO, NETHERLANDS - ABN AMRO sloganised.

16: UK - Bomb hoax at BOC.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN - Three fur shops daubed and glued.

SWEDEN - Chinchilla farmers’ homes etched and daubed.

OSLO, NORWAY - Fur shop bricked again.

17: ARNHEIM, NETHERLANDS - ABN AMRO Cash point machines glued and sloganised.

18: EMMERICH, GERMANY - Kao Chemicals (HLS client) glued and paint-bombed.

20: VOORSCHOTEN / LEIDER- DORP, NETHERLANDS - Two BPRC workers’ homes paint- bombed.

21: UK - Montpellier (Oxford monkey torture house financier) shareholders sent warning letters, causing share values to tumble.

OTTOWA, CANADA - Fur shop bricked.

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Sankyo (HLS client) sloganised and daubed.

UK - Oxford University fundraiser’s nicked credit card used to buy Montpellier director a hammer!

22: BEDFORD, UK - RMC (Oxford monkey house builder) had five buildings trashed in quarry.

24: SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - KFCs bricked.

25: BOURNEMOUTH, DORSET, UK - RMC (Oxford monkey house builder) vehicles, crane and conveyer belt trashed.

SPAIN - Sankyo Pharma (HLS customer) director’s home daubed by ALF.

CALIFORNIA, USA- Johnson Matthey (HLS supporters) had locks glued. Since quit HLS.

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Fur shop paint-bombed.

27: SWEDEN - Fur shop daubed and glued.

28: THE HAGUE / NIJMEGEN, HOLLAND - ABN-AMRO (BPRC monkey house financiers) cash machines glued.

30: SURREY, UK - ALF torched RMC’s (Oxford monkey house builder) three large vehicles and buildings.

JULY

2: UK - HLS supplier’s director had three cars paint-strippered.

UK - 2 Charterhouse (HLS supplier) vehicles slashed and etched.

EEMSHOVEN, NETHERLANDS - 1,000 GM potatoes destroyed.

3: ZWANENBURG, HOLLAND - Sankyo Pharma (HLS customer) had two vehicles trashed.

4: HAMPSHIRE, UK - Pheasant pens destroyed.

UK - Two bomb hoaxes caused chaos at BOC depots across UK. URBINO, ITALY - ALF freed thirty rats from university.

7: ITALY - Fur shop glued and slo- ganised.

8: GERMANY - 100 hens freed from three battery farms.

10: SORIA, SPAIN - 100 partridges freed from shooting compound. USA- HLS director’s home and car sloganised; vp of HLS client also had two cars trashed.

GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 15 battery hens.

11: MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Russian ALF free two foxes from hunting station.

HAMPSHIRE - Pet rabbit freed from bad conditions.

BREUHEUEN, HOLLAND - Chicken slaughterhouse roof torched. €3m damage.

12: NERVIANO, ITALY - Medical centre daubed for buying monkeys from Covance vivisection breeders.

13: SWEDEN - 90 rabbits freed from fur farm.

14: ARNHEIM, NETHERLANDS - Circus posters trashed.

AUSTRIA - Hunting towers felled.

15: STAFFORDSHIRESHIRE, UK - Newchurch Farm’s killing shed D-locked shut.

MILAN, ITALY - Posh fur shop daubed with red paint.

16: ITALY - 30 rats freed from lab.

18: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 20 battery hens. LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA- ALF trash garden furnishings (even security cameras!) of Andrew Baker’s CEO following the arrest of a protestor in New York.

19: USA- Piss poured through letter box of HLS vet.

GERMANY - Fake blood daubed on homes of two Chiron (HLS supporters) managing directors.

23: ZEIST, NETHERLANDS - Covance (HLS-related) office windows bricked.

24: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 51 battery hens. PISA, ITALY - 210 rabbits freed by ALF, in solidarity with Il Silvestre’s editors (see PoWs).

25: HAMPSHIRE, UK - Two Wickham lab workers had cars trashed with paint stripper.

SUORE, SWEDEN - DBF free 90 rabbits.

27: NEW YORK CITY, DOVER PLAINS, NEW YORK, USA- McDonalds trashed.

LUIJIK, HOLLAND - MacDonalds torched.

28: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 42 battery hens. MENDRISCO, SWITZERLAND - Deer hunter’s home sloganised.

30: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 17 battery hens.

31: CREWE, UK - Dietex (was HLS-related) homes and cars sloganised.

AUGUST

1: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free six battery hens.

3: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 22 geese.

4: VOORSCHOTEN, NETHERLANDS - BPRC director’s home paint-bombed.

5: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 4 battery hens. FIVE OAKS / PULBOROUGH, W. SUSSEX, UK - 2 cop cars torched. Attempt to torch cop shop too.

11: EALING / EAST SHEEN, LONDON - HLS-related workers had car trashed and house sloganised.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Russian ALF free two animals near the capital.

15: ALASKA, USA- Fur coat in souvenir shop slashed.

16: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 20 battery hens.

18: CHEADLE, CHESHIRE, UK - Emerson (was Yamonouchi landlords) car paint-strippered.

MILAN, ITALY - Fur industry offices superglued.

21: REGGIO EMILIA, ITALY - Bomb hoax at Morini (vivisection breeder) associates.

22: LINKOPING, SWEDEN - DBF erase hunt shop sign.

23: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 2 chickens.

24: LINKOPING, SWEDEN - DBF trash fur store; remove circus posters.

26: NOTTINGHAM, UK - Pipes cut at four sites supplied by BOC (HLS-related); two vehicles trashed and gate D-locked.

27: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 7 battery hens. RUSSIA - Russian ALF daub meat suppliers.

28: UK - Arco (HLS-related) director had car trashed by ALF. UMEA, SWEDEN - Anti-vivisection slogans painted by DBF.

29: UK - Newchurch Farm employees two cars paint-strippered.

30: UPPLOND - Hunting place sabotaged by DBF.

UK - ALF free 100s of battery hens.

SEPTEMBER

1: VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Sankyo Pharma (HLS-related) yard glued. Two trucks sloganised.

2: WELLINGTON, N. ZEALAND ALF free 2 hens from battery. BARCELONA, SPAIN - Fur shop trashed in solidarity with Gina Lynn.

4: ESSEN, GERMANY - ALF destroys circus posters.

5: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 10 battery hens. MILAN, ITALY - Fur shop trashed.

6: BURTON, STAFFORDSHIRE, UK - Newchurch Farm employee’s neighbourhood sloganised by ALF.

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA- Animal Lovers Anonymous etch fur shop.

UPPSALA, SWEDEN - Fur shop trashed by DBF.

8: GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free 30 battery hens.

9: MILAN, ITALY - Bomb hoax against BOC (HLS-related).

10: WOKING / CRAWLEY

DOWNS, SURREY, UK - Northingen (was HLS-related) directors’ cars bricked by ALF. 11: YSTAD, SWEDEN - ALF trash fur shop.

UK - Oxford University fundraiser hit by credit card fraud re. the planned monkey house. LEON, SPAIN - Beagle freed from university lab by ALF in solidarity with prisoner Gina Lynn.

13: MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Russian ALF free racoon from hunter’s cabin near city.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - Three fur shops trashed.

OSLO, NORWAY - McDonalds bricked.

FLORENCE, ITALY - Hunting shop trashed.

14: BERLIN, GERMANY - Animal abuse shops glued.

14-15: OSLO, NORWAY - McDonalds and two fur shops bricked.

15: KENTUCKY, USA- A tipsy Ed Furlong (from Terminator 3) was arrested for attempting to liberate a lobster from a store.

16: HOLLAND - ABN AMRO cash point machines glued.

18: GERMANY - Circus posters trashed.

FLORENCE, ITALY - Fur store trashed.

19: TAMPERE / SYVASKYE, FINLAND - Fur shops bricked.

21: MILAN, ITALY - Fur shop trashed.

24: BURTON, STAFFORDSHIRE, UK - ALF sent Newchurch Farm employee unwanted crap.

25: UK - Hoax mass mailing at the expense of Newchurch Farm employees by ALF.

26: GERMANY - 10 hens freed by German ALF

AUERBACH, SACHSEN, GERMANY - Three more animals freed

27: BURTON, STAFFORDSHIRE, UK - Fireworks shot over Newchurch Farm employees house.

NEUENBURG, GERMANY - 34 rabbits freed. By ALF

28: AYLESBURY, BUCKINGHAM-SHIRE, UK - HLS-relat- ed director’s car torched.

BARCELONA, SPAIN - Sankyo Pharma (HLS-related) chairman’s car torched.

NOTTINGHAM, UK - USS (HLS-related) secretary’s property damaged by ALF.

BILLINGSHURST, W. SUSSEX, UK - BOC (HLS-related) worker’s property torched.

GERMANY - Friends of the Animals free pig.

PRISONERS OF WAR

These revolutionaries have been jailed for their beliefs, so you can write them letters of support (nothing compromising!). Those not listed shouldn’t take it as a sleight that they have been excluded—just send us your details and we’ll put you on our free mailing list!

Prisoner details change rapidly and may be out of date by the time you read GA.

More information from:

Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network, BM Box 2407, London

WC1N 3XX. email:mailto:elp4321@hotmail.com][elp4321@hotmail.com

Spirit of Freedom on-line newsletter: http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk][www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

North American ELP, email: mailto:naelpsn@graffiti.net][naelpsn@graffiti.net

ELP-Poland PO Box 43, 15-662 Bialystok 26, Poland. email: mailto:insurec-tion@riseup.net][insurec- tion@riseup.net

Italian ELP Support Network: mailto:italianelp@yahoo.com][italianelp@yahoo.com

Turkey ELP Support Network: mailto:elp_tr@hotmail.com][elp_tr@hotmail.com

ECO-DEFENCE PRISONERS

Tre Arrow, c/o Rudy Kischer, Embarkation Law Group, 609 W. Hastings St., 6th Floor, Vancouver, BC, V6B4W4, Canada. On remand accused of involvement with an arson on logging trucks and an arson on vehicles owned by a sand & gravel company. Both arsons occurred in the USA.

Dr. Yurl Bandazhevsky, Valiuk for Bandazhevsky Y.I., 231318

Grodnenskaya oblast, Lidski raion, PESKOVTSY ul. Oktiabrskaya, 2, Belarus. Serving 8 years for treason after revealing the true extent of the nuclear radiation around Chernobyl.

Marco Camenisch, Postfach 3143, CH-8105 Regensdorf, Switzerland. Serving 27 years. Ten years for using explosives to destroy electricity pylons leading from nuclear power stations. Seventeen years for the murder of a Swiss Boarder Guard whilst on the run. In '02 Marco completed a 12-year sentence in Italy for destroying electricity pylons in Italy.

Angela M Cesario, 66522-065, Federal Prison Camp Dublin, 5675 8th St. Camp Parks, Dublin CA 94568, USA. Serving 41 months for an arson attack on logging trucks at the Eagle Creek logging site.

William Cottrell, #29526112,

Metropolitan Detention Center, PO Box 1500, Los Angeles, CA 90053, USA. On remand accused of involvement in a series of ELF actions that saw the damaging and destruction of approximately 125 SUVs.

Ibai Ederra, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - Irunez - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain. On Remand awaiting sentencing for sabotaging the controversial Itoiz dam construction site.

Ted Kaczynski (04475-046), US Pen - admin Max Facility, PO Box 8500, Florence Colorado 81226, USA. Is serving multiple life sentences for the infamous 'Unabomber' anti-technology bombing campaign.

William Frediani, Carcere Don Bosco, Via Don Bosco 43, 56100 Pisa, Italy. Il Silvestre defendant on remand accused of promoting sabotage and participating in direct action.

Manase Furima, Lembaga

Pemasyarakatan Manokwari, Jl. Sabang No.4, Manokwari, Papua, Indonesia. On remand for taking part in a road block to prevent illegal logging.

Inaki Garcia Koch, Carcel de Pamplona, C/San Roque. Apdo. 250, 31080 - Irunez - Pamplona, Navarra (Espana), Spain. Serving just under 5 years for sabotaging the controversial Itoiz dam construction site.

Jeffrey Luers, #13797671, OSP , 2605 State St. Salem, OR 97310, USA. Serving 22 years & 8 months for arson on a car dealership & attempted arson of an oil truck.

Craig Marshall, #13797662, SRCI, 777 Stanton Blvd, Ontario, OR 97914 USA. Serving 5 years 5 months for conspiracy to commit arson and possession of incendiary devices, having used the devices to destroy SUV's to raise attention to the environmentally destructive nature of these vehicles.

Matius Nasira, Lembaga

Pemasyarakatan Manokwari, Jl. Sabang No.4, Manokwari, Papua, Indonesia. On remand for taking part in a road block to prevent illegal logging.

Alessio Perondi, Carcere Don Bosco, Via Don Bosco 43, 56100 Pisa, Italy. Il Silvestre defendant on remand accused of promoting sabotage and participating in direct action.

Jeremy Rosenbloom, 66521-065, Federal Prison Camp Sheridan, PO Box 6000, Sheridan OR 97378, USA. Serving 41 months for an arson attack on logging trucks at the Eagle Creek logging site.

Fran Thompson, #1090915 HU 1C, WERDCC, PO Box 300, Vandalia, MO 63382, USA. Serving Life for killing, in self-defence, a stalker who had broken into her home. Before her imprisonment Fran was an eco, animal & anti-nuke campaigner.

John Wade #38548-083, FCI Petersburg Low, PO Box 1000, Petersburg, VA 23804, USA. Serving 37 months for a series of ELF actions against a number of targets including McDonalds & Burger King; urban sprawl; the construction industry; and an SUV dealership.

Helen Woodson, #03231-045, c/o Bates County Jail, PO Box 60, Butler, MO 64730, USA. On remand awaiting sentencing after pouring a tin of red paint over the security desk of a federal court; posting 4 letters that contained threats; and making a threatening telephone call. Before her arrest Helen had just completed 27 years for various Eco & Peace direct actions.

ANIMAL LIBERATION

Dave Blenkinsop EM7899, HMP Rye Hill, Onley, Warwickshire, CV23 8AN, England. Serving 10 years. 1) Three years for a stave attack on the Managing Director of HLS. 2) 18 months for rescuing 600 guinea pigs from a lab supplier. 3) 5? years for planting incendiary devices under abattoir vehicles.

Paul Le Boutillier KA9326, HMP Weal stun, Walton Road, Wetherby, LS23 7AZ, England. Serving 2? years for making threatening phone calls to various animal abusers including people associated with vivisection, blood sports and farming.

Sergio Maria Stefani, casa circon- dariale di Palmi via Trodio n°8, 89015 Palmi (Regsgio Calabria) On Remand accused of criminal damage to butchers & furriers stores and involvement with the planting of an incendiary outside a butchers shop. Also accused of being involved with a letter bombing campaign.

Sergio was moved from Regina Coeli in Rome at jail of Palmi in Calabria (extreme South of Italy).The jail of Palmi is a high controlled building. This is clearly an attempt to send away Sergio from his family and supporters.

ANTI-CAPITALIST

Mario Altkat

Janeck Eissler buchnr. 325-04-6, Julian Fiorentino, Markus Herzberg, Hannes Jager, buchnummer 1618-4, Mirco Kaduk, Sven Kinpping, Marco Koswisna, Kai Langemeir, Stafan Mittag, Martin Nowak, Sven Pitereit, Lukas Reiter, Sven Rumbach, Johann Christian Sollf, Reck Stadtler, Thiemo Trobitsch-Rull, Silvio Uschner, Dennis Witt, Henrik Wohler,

(all at) Justizvollzugsanstalt Moabit, Alt-Moabit 12a, 10559 Berlin- Tiergarten, Germany. (All on Remand - Please write to each person separately)

Markus Bederke, Jugendarrestanstalt Berlin, LutzowstraBe 45, 12307 Berlin-Lichtenrade, Germany. (On Remand)

James Borek LL6803, HMP Wandsworth, PO Box 757, Heathfield Road, London SW18 3HS, England (54 months)

Robert Thaxton #12112716, MCCF, 4005 Aumsville Hwy, Salem, OR 97301, USA (86 months)

Maarten Blok 04-332 Kriminalvarden, Kriminalvards, Myndigheten, Goteborg,

Hisingen/Fororter, Anstaltenskogome, Box 3003, 422 03 Hisingsbacka, Sweden

PLOUGHSHARES & ANTI-WAR

Sister Carol Gilbert, #10856-039, FPC Alderson RI, Box A, Alderson, WU24910, USA. Ploughshares activist serving 33 months for antinuke action.

Sister Jackie Hudson, #08808-039, FPC Victorville, PO Box 5100, Adelanto, CA 92301, USA. Ploughshares activist serving 30 months for anti-nuke action.

Sister Ardeth Platte, #10857-039, FPC Danbury, Route 37, Danbury, CT06818, USA. Ploughshares activist serving 41 months for antinuke action.

Igor Sutyagin, c/o Irina Petrovna Manannikova, Obninsk, Kaluzhkoy oblast, ul. Zvezdnaya, dom 1A, kv. 82 239039 Russia. Serving 15 years for espionage after he openly distributed anti-nuclear weapons information.

OTHER POLITICAL PRISONERS

Marco Ferruzzi, c.c. “Poggioreale”, via Nuova Poggioreale, 170 sezione Venezia, 80143 Napoli, Italy. Codefendant of Animal Rights prisoner Sergio Maria Stefani. On Remand accused of sending letter bombs to non-animal rights targets.

Simone del Moro, cc Regina Coeli, via della Lungara, 29- 00165 Roma, Italy. Co-defendant of Animal Rights prisoner Sergio Maria Stefani. On Remand accused of sending letter bombs to non-animal rights targets.

Olga Aleksandrovna Nevskaya, UU163/5, 7 Otryad, pos.

Dzerzhinskiy, Mozhaysk 140090 Moskovskaya oblast, Russia. Ecoactivist & former member of Rainbow Keepers serving 6 years for arson, criminal damage and causing explosions in protest at the war in Chechnya.

Larisa Valerevna Romanova, pos. Golovino, OD 1/2, Sudogordskiy Rayon, 601395 Vladimirskaya Oblast, Russia. Eco-activist & former member of Rainbow Keepers serving 5.5 years for arson, criminal damage and causing explosions in protest at the war in Chechnya.

David Santini, c.c. "Le Vallette", via Pianezza 300, 10151 Torino, Italy. Co-defendant of Animal Rights prisoner Sergio Maria Stefani. On Remand accused of sending letter bombs to non-animal rights targets.

MOVE

is an eco-revolutionary group who carried out protests in defence of all life. There are currently eight MOVE activists in prison each serving 100 years after been framed for the murder of a cop in 1979. 9th defendant, Merle Africa, died in prison in 1998.

Debbie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Holloway Africa (006308) and Janine Philips Africa (006309) all at: SCI Cambridge Springs, 451 Fullerton Ave, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238, USA.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973) and Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) both at SCI Grateford, PO Box 244, Grateford, PA 19426-0244, USA.

Edward Goodman Africa (AM4974), 301 Morea Rd,

Frackville, PA 17932, USA.

William Philips Africa (AM4984) and Delbert Orr Africa (AM4985) both at SCI Dallas Drawer K, Dallas, PA 18612, USA.

Mumia Abu Jamal, (AM8335), SCI Greene, 175 Progress Drive, Waynesburg PA 15370, USA. In 1981 Mumia, former Black Panther and vocal supporter of MOVE, was framed for the murder of a cop. He was originally sentenced to death but is currently awaiting re-sentencing following a court hearing in 2001.

INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS

Leonard Peltier, #89637-132, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048, USA. Serving Life after being framed for murdering 2 FBI agents.

Eric Wildcat Hall, #BL-5355, Unit I/A 10745 Route 18, Albion, PA 16475-0002, USA. Serving 35-75 years for helping ship arms to Central American indigenous activists.

ANTI-FASCIST

Matthew Lamont #T90251 / D3- 140, 44750 W. 60th Street, Lancaster, California 93536, USA. Serving 3 years for possessing an incendiary, intended to be used to disrupt a neonazi gathering.

Tomasz Wiloszewski, Zaklad Karny, Orzechowa 5, 98-200 Sieradz, Poland. Serving 15 years for accidentally killing a neo-nazi whilst defending himself.

Billy Cottrell Update

Billy Cottrell appeared in court on August 2nd for a pre-trial motion. His defence team sought to have his charges reduced, specifically the 924c which carries a mandatory minimum of 30 years to life. There are legal issues in charging him with both arson AND using a destructive device during a violent crime (924c). He's basically being charged twice for the same offence. Of course, all motions were denied and Billy's charges remain:

7 counts of arson, 1 count of conspiracy to commit arson, 1 count of using a destructive device during a violent crime

If Billy is convicted he will spend 35 years in prison, essentially a life sentence. Due to mandatory minimum laws relating to federal crimes, Billy would be required to spend 85% (30 years) of the sentence in jail before he even has a possibility of being released.

USA-SHAC Seven

Earlier this year seven American animal rights activists, linked to the campaign 'Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty" (SHAC), where indicted under the controversial Federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

The SHAC 7 are alleged to have run a website that reported on & expressed support for protest activity against Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) and its business affiliates.

This included alleged support for ALF style actions. For their alleged support for direct action the seven are charged with "terrorism" offences and risk years of imprisonment.

For more information contact The SHAC 7, c/o NJARA, PO Box 174, Englishtown, NJ 07726, USA. Or see the website.

Review of “Green Anarchy in the UK — Gathering of the Tribes” Held at Bilston Glen Protest Site, 1–4 JULY, 2004

First of all I’d like to thank everyone for coming and helping out to make the gathering happen! I had a great time myself and everyone else seemed to enjoy it as well. I’d especially like to thank the people who turned up a couple of days before the gathering to help out. I also want to point out that this review is based on my own experience of the gathering and is a very small excerpt of what went on those days. And I won’t tell you how many we were at the gathering in numbers, as that’s impossible, as we’re all unique and therefore can’t be counted.

The first day we had the discussion “What is green anarchy? Why anticivilization”. It contained, among other things, people’s opinions on the differences between the anthropocentric and biocentric worldviews, the differences between green anarchy and other forms of anarchism, whether or not we’re sentimentalising nature and opinions on the origins of civilization. It became clear during the discussion that some people we’re addressing the totality of civilization while others just had problems with some of it.

The next day started with a “Gender and violence” discussion. We talked about how we deal with violence in our communities, how many chances we give violent people and whether we emphasize on physically fighting the system or on building communities. The one conclusion we came to was that communication is the key to solving a lot of problems. After that some of us regrouped to have a “Beyond veganism” discussion. With a group consisting mostly of “freegans” (people who eat animal products from skips and animals who live wild), we talked about whether or not it would be possible to survive in the north of Europe on a wild vegan diet, if we would rather die that kill an animal in a survival situation, whether we want to try to become wild animals again following our instincts or if we thought morals was something good.

In the afternoon we went for a foraging walk held by a local storyteller. He shared some of his knowledge about various plants, how eco-systems work and how to tell if a woodland is ancient or not. In the evening we gathered around the campfire for the workshop “Visualizing collapse”, a discussion about how to deal with a possible future collapses. Almost everyone seemed to think that an ecological and industrial collapse here in Europe is very likely in our lifetime. So we talked about what to do in that case, the likely necessity of fighting for your own survival in competition with others and how the state and ruling class are going to treat us anarchists.

The morning after I joined some others in trying to make fire primitively. We used the bow drill method and managed to get smoke going quite fast. But then we where interrupted by one of the worst hail-rains I’ve ever experienced, and thunder and lighting along with that. After it stopped a bunch of us continued with a workshop called “Biotechnology and other advances of the mega-machine”. We shared thoughts and ideas about biotechnology, nanotechnology, surveillance technology, new laws of control, the proposed new ID card for the UK, and how to fight all of this. Another division amongst us also became clear; that some of us see technology as something inherently authoritarian and unequal, and that we therefore have to get rid of it altogether, while others thought that technology in itself is not the problem, it’s how we use it. In the afternoon I participated in a workshop called “Nature awareness”, where we played some games and tried walking silently.

The last day of the gathering some of us had a “Primitive shelter building” workshop, which resulted in three different very cool constructions made totally of what we could find around us in the forest. The workshop also included cordage making.

Later on we had a discussion about “Science”. Some of us thought that science is just about trying to control everything and that we therefore should get rid of it. Others thought that we could use the “good aspects” of science to make the world better. We also discussed whether we should and/or need to “clean up after the industrial society”, planting trees etc, or if we should leave that for nature to take care of, and if planting is not just a way of controlling nature. Later in the evening we talked about “Creating a nomadic tribe”, which sprung from the great feeling of being in this big tribe during the gathering and wanting this to continue. Some people visualized a tribe travelling by vehicle between festivals, protest sites and the like, while others wanted to see a hunter-gatherer tribe walking around living of nature, fighting the system and showing another way of living.

Finally I’d have to say that getting the idea of organizing this gathering, carrying it through and experiencing it, is one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done!

What a Load of Crap: The Anticivilisation Encuentro, Pyrenees, April ‘04 by Rusty Nail

The expected Friday night meeting to plan out the schedule was sabotaged by the organisers, a Spanish anarchist group, who declared that their role as organisers was to get us to the site and now it was our conference. All very well, but they hadn’t put it that way in the initial literature. We were a bit wrong-footed and ended up doing a half-arsed introductory thing and making no schedule for the rest of the meeting. Auto-organisation is a worthy thought but not at 11pm on a cold night. Yes, it was cold and to make things a little more ludicrous we discovered that despite the weather, it was illegal to burn wood anywhere in the Pyrenees in spring and the police would happily shut us down if they spotted any fires.

We entered the realm of a bad joke when some bright spark flooded the campsite with about fifty electric lights. So we wouldn’t trip over on a nasty stone? So we could make sure our arses were clean?

With a start like this, it was not a great surprise that we ended up with three days of sprawling unfocused discussion, with occasionally interesting moments. A lot of people chose to leave early.

The first day we did a stupid goround again, then a few old men with beards dominated the discussion. We were introduced to the exciting notion of a cobweb of resistance. “Who is the spider?” someone asked. The second day saw rain stop play for a bit and a welcome diversion with a film, a presentation about the OPM struggle in Papua and a fairly interesting animal rights debate. The final day saw a basic primitive skills workshop and an uninteresting Stirnerstyle pro-individualist rant from some guy who used to be a Maoist and now enjoyed being a chinstroking anarchist.

I had optimistically expected an anticiv gathering to draw out of the woodwork some people well advanced in sustainable and nonhierarchical living in practice, but I was wrong. Instead I encountered some people doing good stuff but still trapped in wage slavery ad lots of anarchists who were interested in anticiv as an increasingly trendy new concept they had read about in a ‘radical’ magazine, doing fuck all about it in their personal lives and thus with nothing to contribute to the meeting.

Thus the majority of the people came as passive lemmings rather than participants and the meetings of 20–30 people mainly consisted of one person ranting and everyone else halflistening and trying to keep warm. I was unempowered. In fact, no wonder people left early. We missed a lively Mayday in Barcelona for this.

Still, it wasn’t totally in vain: some connections were made as we warmed our hands with copious cups of thyme tea. The language barrier of English versus Spanish was dealt with fairly well. Some nice people were there. I met Italians, Catalans, Basques, Andalucians, Dutch, English, Swedish, Irish, German, Portuguese and Libyans. Any cops there must have been satisfied with the woeful state of our resistance. I learnt a lot about how not to organise a conference. I also saw how fucked most people will be when Babylon crumbles and falls. If there are people out there seriously planning to survive, they weren’t at this meeting. Maybe anticivilisation means many different things to different people — unfortunately we didn’t ever get to a stage where we could discuss that.

The Earth First! Summer Gathering, 4^th — 8^th August 2004 — Lincolnshire

To be honest I was dreading another EF! Gathering, wavering on whether or not to go, I ended up reluctantly making the trek to the not exactly ‘des-res’ location of Lincolnshire.

Arrival on site reaffirmed my belief that Lincolnshire is a county of flat farmland denuded of trees. Still as time progressed, my rather cynical view of Lincolnshire being a desert stripped of wildness was changed slightly by the discovery of Adders and other positive examples of wildness being present.

This vision of wildness, for the most part, soon evaporated like a mirage on entering the various meetings and workshops that were put on for the week. The usual array of campaigns were represented through workshops, rather like a careers fair I thought, everything compartmentalized for easy access. There was a lack of anything particularly inspiring, but of course that only represents the current sad state of affairs of the direct action scene.

Last year the organizers had planned a whole series of gathering-wide discussions which they thought were important for all those present to discuss in smaller groups. This met with mixed reactions, some thinking it was a great gathering but many loathing the gathering wide discussions, some accusing them of being ‘ideologically loaded’.

However, this year there was only one gathering-wide discussion... on the G8 and the ‘Dissent Network’ set up to organize mobilisations against it. Personally I thought this incredibly ideologically loaded, mass mobilizations seemingly being placed at the top of the agenda for discussion by all those present at the gathering. On probing one of the organizers on this point I was told that Dissent were the only people who asked for a gathering-wide discussion and that’s why it had been timetabled as one. Fair enough, but I couldn’t help wondering whether others would have the arrogance to suggest their campaign was important enough to deem such a meeting.

As it turned out many weren’t interested in the G8 meeting, either not attending and finding other things to do in the glorious sunshine, or leaving the meeting when it broke into small groups. Still, many people were in attendance, so we will have to wait and see what happens with next years G8 summit.

Highlights of the gathering, besides the weather, included a very well attended introduction to AnarchoPrimitivism, which proved an interesting discussion, and an interesting dissection of the successful Bayer campaign (see previous issue of GA for more on the Bayer campaign).

Of course as already mentioned there were the usual array of campaign meetings, practical workshops and ‘re-pressed distribution’ had a book stall, Veggies provided snacks and the ‘Anarchist Teapot’ provided meals.

I went away from this years EF! gathering feeling less disappointed than I had expected, but coming to the conclusion that the gathering is more of a ‘direct action summer camp’, than a meeting of radicals associated with the EF! Network, which lies in worse and worse tatters every year.

A meeting about the EF! Action Update was attended by a pitiful number of people, none of whom had turned up to take it on, so it seems having become increasingly irrelevant and inconsistent over the years, the EF!AU is finally dead.

Best quote of the gathering was one overheard in a workshop on ‘EF! Culture’ by someone saying they felt alienated by the gathering because it ‘focused too much on ecology’ (!).

Thoughts on the Total Liberation Fest. January 10–11, 2004. Erie, Pennsylvania.

From the very start, this immense winter project had been under fire from the Feds. Routine methods of harassment meant getting every place the organizers had secured taken away from them. This went from using scare tactics on the owners to scare tactics on their insurance agencies. Never-the-less, the organizers stood their ground and refused to back down to the pig presence. With the Feds lurking, the only option was to have as many back up spots as possible and not to give out the name of the venue until the last minute. In the end, this worked out well, even when the first venue got cancelled a couple of hours before the show started, another location was ready to go in less than two hours.

No doubt all of this and winter storms scared off a number of people who would have otherwise been there. In total, there was still over 300 people present. The first day was dedicated to music, and this for many the ‘main attraction’. However, it was not mine. A lot of people are definitely reviewing how the bands did and they’re more qualified than I, so I’ll let people find that on their own (check out the message board at www.total-liberation.com).

Another day, another venue (and a warmer one at that). Kevin Jonas was the first speaker. Passionate and well spoken, but devoted to animal rights. He’s one of the founders of Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which is a rather successful campaign to shut down one of the largest vivisecting corporations in the world. What bothered me was Kevin’s seemingly ungrounded belief that there is some hope for ‘justice’ within the system, hitting a barrage of quotes with a tint of patriotic hope. He also spoke a good deal about speciesism, the AR belief that humans systematically oppress animals.

This is, without a doubt, true, but the concept of ‘sentience’ frankly frightens me. By saying that certain animals are sentient and deserving equal rights, there is also the implicit statement that other animals or life is not sentient. When you see the earth as an entire living entity and care as much for all life, this becomes a little hard to swallow. It seems the sentiency paradigm may just add more animals to the favored pet status without any real hope for total liberation.

Next was Species Traitor co-editor, Evan Cestari, and myself. An already short slot was cut shorter by rightful anticipation of harassment for my diet (I eat wild and road kill meat). We did the best we could to touch on the major points of green anarchist and anarcho-primitivist critiques, suffering all the consequences of trying to touch on a million things at once, but the point was really just to open the door. What followed was both the most amusing and obnoxious part of the day. Without having talked about my diet at all (since there was no reason for it), nearly every question surrounded my diet. This is what happens when a person who advocates a gathering-hunting lifestyle speaks before an audience of primarily straightedge vegans!

Now much of the things said were nothing new. What seems most apparent is that vegan dogma has no middle ground. If you say you eat meat or hunt, vegans can’t think of anything short of eating McDonalds and riding on quads with shotguns. This, of course, is far from the truth. Advocating gathering and hunting as a part of rewilding seems to have gone straight past the more arrogant and vocal of the bunch who heard nothing more than ‘I eat meat’. Despite being a bit annoyed, after the whole ordeal I realized that the vocal minority was very much a minority. Folks were really supportive of the idea, and while not necessarily in agreement, they were open to the concept and equally annoyed with those who couldn’t see past the thickest of dogma.

Next up was Andy Stepanian, an exanimal liberation prisoner of war. His talk was much more personal and straightforward than Jonas, and was fully appreciable. He spoke for a bit about his own experiences with prison and towards the end offered a lot of good advice for the likely ‘future political prisoners’ in the audience. His central focus was on the SHAC campaign, but from a tactical perspective. He spoke honestly about what has and hasn’t been effective as well as the many successes of the campaign. As much as I’m not into single issue campaigns, the SHAC one is worthy for having thus far been rather effective. I found his talk really informative and worthwhile.

Following Andy was anarchist panther Ashanti Alston. Ashanti is an exP.O.W. having been involved with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. In fairness to Ashanti, I missed a bit of his talk, so I can’t give a complete review. He spoke mostly about his own experiences as a radical, in prison, and then spent a lot of time talking about how whites should be putting more effort into working with non-whites. I can agree that whites need to try and see the world from other positions, but I’m not sure everyone would really appreciate a bunch of white do-gooders flocking to ‘non-white communities’. The white perception tends to be really paternalistic. I think forcibly challenging white privilege is necessary, but any revolutionary relationships should be more organic. Then again, Ashanti is coming from a leftist position and is rooted in organization and platforms. Coming from an anti-left position, we have different ‘goals’ and means.

After Ashanti did his talk, he read a letter from Ramona Africa, one of the most notorious spokespersons and ex-P.O.W. from MOVE. The letter was good though I was a bit disappointed to miss seeing one of Ramona’s extremely powerful talks. The letter had to do though. Talking about state repression, the problems of the system and making connections between MOVE, the ELF and the ALF. I imagine that letter may be floating around the internet somewhere or might be relatively easy to get a copy of.

Following Ashanti was University of Texas Professor/AR advocate Steven Best. Take every standard AR position and hand it to a motivational speaker and you have Steven Best. His spotty and random rhetoric tried it’s best to appeal to everyone and people got caught up in the cheering ‘phrase-a-long’ speech. Unfortunately, this meant overlooking the details; 1) Best was flamboyantly patriotic. Speaking about the assault on our “civil rights” by way of the Patriot Act, he completely didn’t question to real heritage of this nation. News flash, America was not founded on “the right to dissent”, but on genocide, ethnocide, ecocide, slavery, capital, and every other form of exploitation. Best, a post-modernist Marxist somehow failed to take note of that one. 2) In suit with point 1, I hate to break it to the AR movement, but this nation isn’t likely going to have a movement against speciesism. Not to forget that the past movements against oppression haven’t gotten nearly as far as whites think they have. 3) I appreciate Best’s attempts to spread knowledge about ALF/ELF actions, but we could spare some of the dogma! Frankly, and this doesn’t just apply to Best, I’m really tired of hearing direct action as being rooted in things like the Boston Tea Party, isn’t anybody else?

I can’t understate my thankfulness for Russell Means following up to Best. Means is one of the most notorious American Indian Movement activists. He’s survived 5 assassination attempts, a lifetime of resistance to the capitalist government of the U.S., has fought along side Mayans in Nicaragua against the communist Sandinista government, and more. Now, I must say that Means, having been a prolific critic of industrialism among other things, was a big encouragement to me, but I was a bit weary about possible turns he might have taken after his acting career took off and his run for governor of New Mexico.

His talk got rid of any skepticism I had almost immediately. He spoke about his life as it related to his radicalization, his experiences with whites and white ‘radicals’, and a number of other things. The huge part of his speech focused on a powerful critique of patriarchy. He spoke about Sioux life as anarchistic and about how male rule has taken this world for a wrong turn. He referred to himself as a primitivist and claimed to be a revolutionary in the sense that he wants to return to the beginning as hunter-gatherers.

I was among some of those who were really into his talk, but it seems a lot of the AR crowd absolutely hated it. Here’s why: he spoke of AR as being a part of white privilege. In keeping with his past writings and speeches, he was straight to the point, confident, and well-spoken. For him, ‘Grandmother Earth’ is a series of relations. There is no split of sentient and non-sentient life, but recognition of the circle of life and the role we all play in that. AR folks seem to have a hard time really tackling this concept.

No time seems better than now to bring up an important point that I noticed. There seems to be a lot of implicit racism involved in the AR scene in specific, but the left/radical movement in general and this is something that has bothered me for a while, but my experiences at the TL Fest gave me a better perspective on it. The gist of what Means was getting at regarding liberation was not too different from what EC and I said hours before him. However, the reaction was quite different. When EC and I talked about the hunting aspect of rewilding, it seemed inconceivable for those vocal people mentioned earlier. For whites to talk about the spirituality of the earth is apparently ridiculous. In fact, one person said meat eating was understandable for some “ethnic” people. Apparently as whites and having confronted vegan ideology we were still within the ‘rational’ sphere and worth arguing with and ‘ethnic’ people are still outside of that realm. The old savage versus civilized split lives on. When Means confronted this ideology as white privilege, it was seemingly strong enough grounds to just write him off. Comparing that to Ashanti’s allusions to white privilege, this one must have really hit a bit closer to home for a good share of the audience. I guess if you’re nicely asked to challenge your position it’s easy to say ‘ok’ and go along, but if a nonwhite states it more blatantly then they’re just “an ass”. Hmmmm.

All this aside, I was really impressed by Means and really recommend folks reading his book Where White Men Fear to Tread, if they don’t have a chance to see him in person. After Means was a rather hilarious interlude of short radical films from the Lost Film Festival. Because of time constraints we just got a few highlights of the full three hour version. If the whole thing is like the bits viewed here, I’d say it’s definitely worth pursuing. A letter from Jeffrey ‘Free’ Luers was also read. Free is currently serving a near 23 year sentence for torching SUV’s with co-defendant Craig ‘Critter’ Marshall. Free was one of the P.O.W.s who would be receiving the funds made from the fest. His letter was a passionate call for action and I believe it is on the freefreenow.org website, so look for it there.

Rod Coronado was the final speaker and was one of the most impressive speakers I’ve seen to date. He spoke about his radicalization and very explicitly about the actions that he has taken. Rod, a Yaqui warrior, exAL P.O.W., and persistent target of the U.S. government, spoke intensely about his connection with the earth and how this became the inspiration for a string of liberations and actions leaving a number of mink research facilities being reduced to ashes. He spoke about his time in prison and how the relentlessness of the wild kept him going. A really powerful and involving talk, which was definitely a great way to end the Fest.

I should state here that I am not an advocate of animal rights or any rights for that matter. No ‘justice’ will ever be granted by the state and I think true liberation will only come at the complete dismantlement of civilization (not replacement). It is from this that a lot of my criticisms come and I hope that deeply entrenched dogma won’t cause these remarks to be seen as straight blows, but rather as criticisms. We could all benefit from being a bit more open with each other and up front. Regardless, I see animal, earth, and human liberation as all vital aspects of the struggle against civilization.

What really struck me about this fest (despite my numerous criticisms here) were the folks who attended. That all of these people stayed around after the day of music to sit intently through 12 hours of speakers, films and discussion was really motivating for me. People came and took an active role and taking in a lot of information and being open. So I’d like to send thanks out to all of them, but the greatest thanks go to the organizers. This was a huge event and not bowing to the pressure of state repression can’t be underestimated. This was all done really well with a bit of variety in the speakers. Everyone staying around and taking part was a great ‘fuck you’ to the pigs who tried nearly everything they could to keep this from happening. Hopefully this is just another opening for folks to get involved and for more events like this in the future, so to quote the ever so prolific G. W. Bush, “bring it on”!

A Look at the Feral Visions Gathering. Uncivilizing Physically, Mentally, and Spiritually. By Felonious Skunk

Feral Visions Against Civilization, the “2^nd annual Black and Green Anarchist Gathering”, took place the first week of August and was facilitated by various collectives of the Black and Green Network. Our goal was to help bring folks with similar perspectives into a wild environment and help break down mediation between ourselves, our world, and each other. The gathering provided an introduction to the various strands of anti-civilization thought, an in-depth forum for discussing and developing the theoretical and practical aspects of anarcho-primitivism/green anarchy, and also a skillshare for primitive skills and post-industrial/survival tactics. The entire event was centered on active participation and sharing and was, in my opinion, a tremendous success.

The location of the gathering (disclosed through our website, voicemail, and flyers only days before, for security reasons) was Twin Lakes in the Umpqua National Forest. This beautiful site in the Southern Cascades of Oregon was used for the 1998 Earth First! National Rendezvous, and was well-equipped to handle large crowds. With two crystal clear lakes for swimming, fresh mountain springs for drinking, tons of berries, and lots of huge Douglas fir, Cedar, and Spruce trees to hike through, climb, or sit beneath, the location was ideal for people to re-connect and re-wild.

The “organizing” was very loose and open. Through various informal networks (publications, flyers, internet, radio, word of mouth), lots of people got the word out months ahead of time, while a core group, mostly living in the region, took the initiative to get the main supplies and site details together in the few weeks leading up to the gathering. The lakes were a mile and a half hike uphill from the parking lot, so some folks arrived a couple days early to haul supplies for the kitchen and temporary infrastructure. By the time people started rolling in, a top-notch kitchen, numerous shitters, and general information (signs, maps, etc.) were ready for the nearly 200 people who were there throughout the week (with approximately 100 or so at a time).

Although we contacted lots of folks with specific skills, knowledge, and opinions, we wanted to keep the schedule open to encourage everyone’s participation, so we decided on loose themes for each day, both on theoretical and practical levels, as suggestions or general orientations for people to plan around. At each morning circle we passed around a board for people to schedule discussions or skill-shares they wanted to facilitate or see happen. The theoretical themes were: Intro to Green Anarchy and Primitivism, What We’re Up Against (Civilization, Patriarchy, the State), Moving Beyond the Left and Ideology, Insurrection and Nihilism, Direct Action and Tactics, and Visions and Strategy. The more practical themes were: Intro to Earth-Skills and Primitive Life-Ways, Shelter, Containers, Water, Plants (food and medicine), Healing (self-care, community care, spirituality), Hunting, Scavenging, Self-Defense, and Fire and Restoration. While things generally stuck to the themes, the event also had a flow of its own, which worked out quite well. Although it was not possible to go to everything, and there were times when the length of discussions were limited by the schedule, altogether it was invigorating without being too stressful. Inevitably, there did seem to be those who gravitated toward theory, and those who preferred down-and-dirty skillssharing, but many people got a balance, not to mention the personal interactions, direct experiences, and play throughout the week!

Preferring to learn and practice my rewilding skills on my own or in small groups, and loving the intellectual stimulation of critical folks I don’t normally get to interact with on a daily basis, I tended to stay in the thick of the discussions and debates. I really appreciated “Leftism 101” by Lawrence Jarach of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, in which he gave a concise history of the Left, and its typical contemporary manifestations, so that anarchists could better understand the non-liberatory political tendency they often criticize (and in some unfortunate cases, consider themselves part of). Also of interest to me were the non-ideological discussions of Primitivism, a strategic look at the destruction of civilization’s infrastructure (electric grid, communication networks, economic systems, etc), and a look at some ways of creating insurrectionary communities.

I was a little disappointed with the anti-climatic discussion of the controversial new pamphlet, “Barbaric Thoughts”, billed as the long-awaited smack-down between insurrectionalist Wolfi Landstreicher and primitivist John Zerzan. Both sides seemed disinterested in this discussion, and most others seemed fairly timid in challenging any of the questionable ideas. Throughout the week the debate between insurrectionalism and primitivism came up in numerous discussions, and most people felt that while there are rigid and dogmatic aspects of both tendencies, the ideas are connected in some very fundamental ways, and it seems that most of the differences are a matter of prioritization (to oversimplify: primitivists prioritizing origins, insurrectionalists focusing more on current institutions) and not opposing in terms of analysis or goals.

It was not all talk. There were also plenty of plant walks, animal skinning, and tool/weapon making to keep any feral forager more than busy. I particularly enjoyed the baskets and lanterns that were made from urban scavenged materials and the tanning of animal hides.

There were lots of informal skills shared as well, like communicating with feral noises over distances and backwoods stealth training when the Forest Service came to snoop, or the various shelters that spontaneously popped up during the week, especially when it started to rain.

There was also an amazing infoshop put together by various distros in which tons of anti-civilization, insurrectionary, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) guides, and primitive skills zines were available for free.

Nighttime was a particularly interesting time at the lakes. Because of extreme fire danger, we had only two fire-pits, which encouraged folks to either play in the moonlight or get together for story-telling, reading poetry, rants, pickin’ and singin’, as well as larger discussions on topics including patriarchy, healing from civilization, and strategy. Most interesting was the radical/anarchist dismantling of identity politics as a limited, and often repressive approach to liberation (not a conversation that is easy to have in many leftist college towns).

One night towards the end of the week, the BASTARDs (Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory and Research Development) did an amazingly hilarious shadow puppet show, mocking every single element of the anarchist milieu. As popcorn was passed around the fire, we traveled with John Zerzan as he went on a journey with his anarchist companions to find a “primitivist way” to fix his broken glasses.

At everyone’s expense, we were thoroughly entertained with spoof characters like Tennessee Toad (editor of Fifth Estate), Brenden B. Judas (former primitivist turned leftist/liberal), Whitey McGuilt (who certainly bore no resemblance to Chris Crass), Luna Earth Child, the Plateauists, the Hermit of the Long Haul, Eco-Archy, Anthro Boy, Manny the Manarchist, Donna the Doormat, White Lion (suburban Rastafarian) and Spitting Crow (an annoying self-righteous anti-civ insurrectionary who constantly interrupts to spew the same old rhetoric...and excessive saliva).

Everyone’s favorite character seemed to be Gimili, JZ’s faithful companion with a battle axe and short temper for anything reformist, leftist, or even mildly annoying. Each scene would end with “Gimili feeling feral fury!” and destroying that which oppressed him (or got in his way), as the audience cheered on! Woefully, Gimili finally got it in the end when the Sphinx (David Watson) guarding the Oracle of Detroit (Fredy Perlman) gave him a trick question. But John finally makes it to the end of his journey, and learns that ideological thinking (even in fixing his glasses) is not always the best way to achieve one’s anarchist goals. This magnificently performed theatrical extravaganza of sectarianism and insider humor was a treat for everyone!

Overall, people were generally helpful and enthusiastic about contributing to the temporary community, yet there did seem to be an informal division of labor occurring at times. There was a dedicated security team and a solid kitchen crew, which were open and flexible, yet seemed to consist of a lot of the same people. This was a little disappointing, but we are all trying to figure out how to contribute and cooperate after being taught to either compete or be too dependent on others to survive. Even in this regard there was growth at this gathering.

And while the group was fairly homogeneous in some respects, it was actually diverse in many ways, with the militants, intellectuals, survivalists, raw-foodists, crusties, artists, gardeners, goat herders, foragers, and tree-sitters offering an interesting mix of perspectives on the decivilizing process. However, noticeably missing, especially in a gathering of this type, were many indigenous folks, something to definitely think about in the future.

Despite taking certain security precautions, since this was an open gathering on “public land”, we had to deal with the fact that we were always being watched from outside and from within. The overt pigs (Forest Service and Sheriff’s Department) were not too big a problem. When they appeared (about every other day), we mostly played off the trails, so they couldn’t count us or see what we were up to. But the undercovers and informants were a little more troubling. They were definitely there, but we tried to maintain a balance of precautions without becoming paranoid or judgmental of those who dressed or acted differently than most. We should expect that whenever we are doing anything that threatens the system, they will do what they can to investigate, infiltrate, and/or disrupt our activities. But as long as we take our safety and security seriously and take the necessary actions to protect ourselves and each other, and don’t act like a bunch of liberals who believe in playing fair or being honest with the state, this doesn’t have to impede our activities.

This is only a broad look at the gathering, barely a glimpse of the personal and interpersonal experiences and adventures of people there. In general, most people who attended agreed that it was a very meaningful event. I want to give personal thanks to all those who facilitated workshops, the security team who gave us warnings when the forest service was coming, those who bottom-lined the kitchen and provided everyone with three great vegan meals a day, those who donated food, supplies, literature, energy, and money, and everyone who participated respectfully with an open yet critical mind.

It was obvious that there is a strong desire to do this again, and people in the southeast have proposed organizing the “3^rd annual Black and Green Anarchist Gathering” in their bioregion next August (We’ll keep you posted). We also talked about different bioregions possibly organizing their own local events a few weeks before the larger one.

Each day it becomes more clear to many of us that the anti-civilization tendency within the anarchist movement is taking things seriously in many regards and constantly growing as a potent dynamic contributing to the momentum against civilization.

For more info, email:

feralvisions@greenanarchy.org or wildrootsnc@ziplip.com

Articles

A Green Anarchist Project on Freedom and Love

by Mae Bee

Whilst this short piece hopes to inspire thoughts it is not meant to be complete: much is missing from it.. And if it causes controversy I hope that is to arouse emotions, discussion and hopefully other writings, rather than cause upset.. It is merely my current contribution to something ongoing rather than a final word.

This piece is not advocating another option, another “choice” of relating for couples. It is rather a recognition that our “common project” — the abolition of all power relations includes the abolition of coercive/closed relationships. these are those relationships with fixed stature, those relationships with rules or permanent contracts. these relationships cannot really be part of a free society. and just as with other coercive relations at odds with our freedom they must be confronted by all who seek such freedom and communities.

“We need to pursue our sexual encounters as we do all of our relationships, in total opposition to this society, not out of any sense of revolutionary duty, but because it is the only way possible to have full, rich uninhibited sexual relations in which love ceases to be a desperate mutual dependence and instead becomes an expansive exploration of the unknown.”

On sexual poverty — Wilful Disobedience 4

“At best then, anarcho-primitivism is a convenient label used to characterise diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations. E.g structures of control, coercion, domination and exploitation ñ and the creation of a form of community that excludes such relations.”

John Moore — An introduction to Anarcho-Primitivism

Rules of Engagement

i am going to use the term “rule relationships” or sometimes “coercive or restricted relationships” because i do not know another generic term for monogamous relationships and those which claim to be polyamorous or open but have rules. by the latter i mean those where the consenting coercion is that whilst a loved one is not restricted to one person only but they are still not at liberty or encouraged to follow their desires.

from a political view these two relationship options are the same. if your reasons for non-monogamy are merely about increased sexual gratification with an increased number of people than rule relationships may serve that purpose.

if, however, it is through the desire to create communities not couples, for desire not consent, for trust not fear....why then, the “banned list”, the “not in my company”, the regulations must all go. when open relationships or free relationships are referred to in this text i mean exactly that..

Choice and Respect

whilst there is an acceptance of open relationships within our eco-anarchist communities, there is equal acceptance of restricted relationships. this comes in part from sound motives: people can be at liberty to agree their own relationships, there are no set patterns, etc. however, there are a host of reasons why this libertarian outlook is an idle one.

firstly, in mass societies we consent to all sorts of coercive relationships. working for a wage, signing on, being a customer and therefore an exploiter of workers....indeed it is difficult to find many relations which are not based on some degree of coercion or exploitation. consenting to coercive relations in no way indicates that we desire them. since the 1970s (at least!) radical feminism has been exploring the very major differences between consent and desire, particularly in the realm of love and sex. many women consent to sex to avoid rape, for example. consent is rooted in the language of law and of property rights. this is why it is useful for mass societies but useless for creating radical ones. it is certainly not a radical place in which to understand a world based on desire. and surely, our sexual relationships are one of the more obvious places to situate desire and not consent.

so, people consent to rule relationships as they do to other coercive relations but do they desire them? fundamentally, this is an oxymoron. we do not need to make rules about things we do not fear. if two people only desired to have sexual relations with each other then there would not need to be rules made to govern this. this does not make it a coercive relationship, although it makes it literal monogamy. the coercion is in the governing of that desire, not just for oneself but for the one you desire and love.

monogamy is a contract precisely because we do not expect literal monogamy, because we expect our lover to desire sex with others who are not us. maybe not now, but certainly in the future. we also expect our lover to make rules to govern our desire because we have no trust in the singleness of our sexual desire either. it is ridiculous then, for monogamists to claim they have forbidden each other to have sex with others because they only desire sex with each other.

rule relationships then operate on sexual consent but not desire. although of course, there are reasons we do desire to coerce and be coerced. we desire this because we desire to control, own and possess that which is around us. this is a desire fixed in the myth that we can do this with living beings, and worse, that we can do this in the name of love when really it is only control. if we cannot give up our belief in possession of the limitless: and by that i mean things like love, affection, sexual desire....how do we begin to relinquish control of that which is limited: such as the resources of the world? an inability, or rather a lack of desire, to free the ones we love the most ñ and at no real cost to ourselves ñ suggests we are so far gone in the madness of mass society that there is no going forward, no coming home to freedom.

it is worth mentioning here, although only as an incidental aside, that outside of using constant surveillance and/or force, nobody can really stop their loved one loving or fucking another. they can only choose to believe they can which to me would suggest a form of mental illness.

Jealousy and Other Feelings

the infant often reacts to a new sibling at it’s mothers body with extreme jealousy, intense feelings of rivalry and anger, and ultimately ownership. as adults we watch with sympathy but not horror. we do not expect the mother to put the newcomer away or keep her love for the new one out of the older child’s eyeshot. we expect instead that the mother will reassure the first child she still loves and cares for it as well as assuring the child she loves and cares for the new baby also. except in very rare cases the child’s jealousy lessens and the child accepts the situation.

in comparison we have the relationship of adults: the adult often reacts to a new person at it’s lover’s body with extreme jealousy, intense feelings of rivalry and anger, and ultimately ownership. as adults we expect either the newcomer to be put away (monogamy) or for a code of conduct to be obeyed, such as love for the new one to be out of the first one’s eyeshot (restrictive relationships). of all the complex and different emotions between the three, or more, people, we give the jealousy and rivalry of the first lover priority.

how can this possibly happen? this seems to demonstrate a civilised and artificial separation of the potentials of children and of adults. we deem children’s emotions unreasonable and therefore not masters of a situation, but adult’s emotions reasonable and allowed to govern. the confusion of restricted relationships is that we do not think other feelings e.g. desire for another’s body, unreasonable, but just that those particular feelings are the ones to be controlled.

the desire to possess and own takes precedence over other desires. (it is worth noting that this is particular to certain cultures and sexual jealousy is not comprehended in some. whilst it is “natural” for those of us raised in monogamous society to feel jealous, this does not mean those raised in polyamorous societies are just repressing their emotions!)

another key difference is that civilised society believes emotional growth occurs in childhood not adulthood. learning is not for life. this means the child can be given the opportunity to grow and develop but the adult is now retarded and incapable of learning.

and this, brings us onto respect. coercive relationships are NOT respectful, for they are denial not only of desire but of growth. if i am bound by my lover’s jealousy i presuppose them incapable of dealing with their emotions and too retarded to change. there is of course some truth in this. it is harder to be flexible at 30 than it is at 3. at 30 i have had 30 years of the megamachine and its myths of personal ownership. i have more shit to wade through, and i am likely to be hampered by well-meaning others trying not to “hurt” me. that hurt is just growing pains.

for someone to feel hurt by another it does not mean anyone has wronged anyone else. this is tricky land to negotiate but it is far from impossible. to openly accept feelings of jealousy and fear without asking or expecting another to restrict their behaviour thereby “solving” those feelings forces us to be the possessors not of another but of our own emotions. my hurt is my hurt. we can ask loved ones to love us through the hurt, and like the infant, we will probably find that hurt lessen and often leave. in particular, the victim culture of women ñ even amongst anarchists and feminists — is shackled by concepts that someone else is responsible for our feelings of rejection or upset. it is pitiful to blame our lovers for wanting someone else, even desiring someone else more than you, and even desiring someone else and not you.

Break Out or Break Up

due to our position of existing in mass society, and our needs to survive, some co-options and compromises are inevitable. our need to eat and have shelter makes us exploitative consumers, whether of “fairtrade” products or of pepperoni pizza. we are not connected with nature at any meaningful level even if we do grow our own vegetables in the “countryside”. we all use technology to a greater or lesser degree. our relations meanwhile, are one of the places we are most free to try to be wild ñ to live in the here and now and without owning and oppressing each other.

to accept coercive relations as well as free ones is as full of folly as hoping industrial societies, or societies with governments, can exist alongside nature based ones. if my love is free, but yours is not then scarcity is created. to say i am at liberty to not possess land but you are at liberty to possess land is ludicrous. fortunately, your possession relies on my compliance with it, and as anarchists we do not accept your ownership and possession. if we believe love should be freely given from desire than we cannot respect the culture of love-ascommodity-lover-as-possession.

“the middle person in the triangle often manifests a certain compassion for the suffering of the jealous one, respecting his “humanity” even though she regrets the unpleasant effects of misery’s manipulations and melodramatics. this complicity remains loyal to the couple form, because it respects the traditional rules of love.”

— Issac Cronin

this means that for me to not act on my desiring in loving who i will when i will, is to be complicit in a system of coercion, of control and of ownership that i am opposed to. no, i do not and cannot, accept the rules of “your” relationship. in a free society we will not be asking for the consent of one person to sleep with another anymore than we would ask a father for the “right” to marry his daughter. and here and now, we can also live that out. to “respect” restrictive relationships is to uphold them.

Direct Action

would it be so controversial to call a war on monogamy? to seduce the lovers of the possessive? could we help those trapped by their timid jealousies to grow into freedom by “stealing” kisses from those forbidden lips in front of their terrified eyes? if this shocks or offends you perhaps you should ask yourself why.

Communities Not Couples

rule relationships, and the acceptance of them, betrays an internalised hierarchy. the relationship of a couple is of greater value and worth than others in the community. it would be equally unrealistic and undesirable to hope for everyone to feel as much love and connection with every single one of

their community ñ down that path lies formalised and institutionalised groups or other coercive ways of relating which are just as damaging as rule relationships and coupledom.

community is more than one and it is more than two also. to create selfgoverning, self-sufficient small communities there cannot be the tyranny of individualism or of coupledom. to create wild and anarchistic communities we must also forsake the idea of sacrificing individual desires for the sake of the community. we have been so programmed by the megamachine that it is hard to imagine such a world where cooperation rather than competition does not elicit us as without. even harder to imagine is a world where we are free to take our pleasures and our desires openly. but if these are the communities we are in the process of creating then we must be honest and open and challenging. these communities will not prosper by shying from conflict but rather by not fearing it.

an argument often given by those who do not necessarily preach coercive relationships but are restricted by the ideology is this: it is reasonable for A to not kiss B in front of C. it is reasonable because A cares for C as much as she does for B. A does not want to upset C.

nobody wants to upset those we care for. but if we restrict or inhibit our own desires for the false peace of not upsetting others, then we are left in a passionately deficit world. what then if C was upset because A and B were both female and C’s masculinity was threatened by queer sex? or if C was upset because A was black and B was white and C’s security as a black man was upset by mixed race love?

as radicals we would inevitably say the lovers should challenge homophobia and racism, that the onus is on C to deal with his feelings. and rightly so. homophobia and racism are internalised and damaging dynamics of control and power that must be challenged. so are rule relationships. would you kiss B in front of C if C would be upset?!

Right Here, Right Now

the defining features of green anarchy include a desire to live in small, selfgoverning communities, individual and collective self-determination, a reconnection with the wild and an understanding that we live only in the present, in the here and now.

living in the real here and now instead of in the unreal past/future is a discerning feature of many nature based societies and one of the greatest poverties for us in mass society. dredging up dysfunctional childhoods or storing pensions for our old age deny us the being alive of the present. sitting in an office dreaming of the weekend or spending free time engaging with mythical soap opera characters instead of real people is clearly not healthy. equally unwellmaking is having feelings incompatible with the here and now. sitting in the woods with a lover but being miserably occupied with something that happened as a child is the same as not enjoying a feast because once you had felt hungry. the past is behind us. the future might never happen.

happiness is also located in the here and now, in the moment. we have spent our lives unlearning this but we catch glimpses of it through sex, love, pain, reunion, the unexpected etc. for our relations to be happy ones they must also be in the here and now, because, really, they only exist in the here and now. the famous quote “there is no such thing as heterosexuality and homosexuality, only heterosexual and homosexual acts” can be extended to realise that sexual unions are sexual only in that defining moment not the day before or the day after. it is delusional and painful to insist on consistent sexual desire, to demand your lover of today still loves you tomorrow.

gay, straight, my lover, your primary partner, it’s all identity politics of ongoing contracts unbefitting to lives of mutual desires. we don’t need to “work” at our relationships, merely have them. without contract, demand, competition and coercion

“I hate all those who, by ceding through fear and resignation, a part of their potential as human beings to others, not only crush themselves but also me and those I love, with the weight of their fearful complicity or with their idiotic inertia.”

Albert Libertad, I Hate the Resigned

GA Article Not Popular with Lifestyle Activists

Discussion of ‘Pathological Socialising’ from GA 71

The following is part of a discussion sparked by the “Pathological Socialising” article by Ransu in the last issue. See web board (www.greenanarchist.org/forum.html) for full discussion and to join in if you can bear it.

seamimac@yahoo.com:
The milieu that sets its agenda as one of serving a cause is lost from the start because they immediately prime themselves towards a goal of subservience to an abstraction. Sacrifice of ones life is therefore promoted as a good thing.

re-wild@mail.com:
If you look on it as ‘sacrifice’ then your priorities are seriously fucked up.

If a tiger’s cubs are being attacked, does she view it as a ‘sacrifice’ to fight back? Does she feel it’s a drag to have to forego hanging out at the watering hole, shagging more tigers? If so, her cubs won’t survive very long.

Of course, if you view the struggle for survival and liberation as being a ‘sacrifice’ then you should stick to hanging out with radical cliques, socialising, being cool, etc. But don’t pretend to yourself that that in itself is radical or liberating.

Self-discipline isn’t ‘subservience to an abstraction’ — it’s a practical way of living which doesn’t put short-term goals (like where the next joint is coming from, or what party is on at the weekend) ahead of doing something to make this world a better place for free people to really live in. If you think drugs and sex are necessary for happiness, then I feel sorry for you. Maybe you need to get out more. Out of your closed, civilised mentality that is.

Although I wish it were otherwise, the activist community is just as fucked in the head as the average consumer. Some are trying to do the right thing — but because their peer group is obsessed more with socialising than actually affecting change their efforts come to little. If our priorities were different this wouldn’t happen. The activist community would become a vibrant force to be reckoned with (like for example the black panthers who saw the destructive nature of alcohol and banned it from their organisation) and individuals within the community would regain a lot of their personal power in the process.

With this personal power and vibrant community, this would be a completely different place. But of course, if you prefer to live in an alcoholic, drug infested pit of sexually dysfunctional, puerille, apathetic slaves...

seamimac@yahoo.com:
A call for people to sacrifice more is the call of religionists of all stripes ... Let us be done with all this self-rightiousness and judeo-christian nonsense.

re-wild@mail.com:
Self-discipline is not exclusively a judeo-christian or even religious attribute. Martyrdom, hypocrisy and sacrifice are used by those institutions to keep people servile — the complete opposite of the aim of real self-discipline. Things like responsibility, selfdiscipline and commitment are not ‘religious’, they are neccessary ways of dealing with the current mess we’re in. But of course, it doesn’t sound sexy, what a turn off maan...

seamimac@yahoo.com:
... breaking the multiplicity of chains that restrain the insurrectionary instinct, will mean abandoning the old tired concepts promoted by the rulers and would be rulers down through the years, many of them promoted as “revolutionary” despite them being the complete opposite.

re-wild@mail.com:
“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile the subjects to the servitude which is their fate.” — Aldous Huxley, Forward to “Brave New World”, 1932, Harper Collins.

I’m sorry, maybe I missed something, but aren’t sex and drugs completely condoned by the rulers and the ruled, as long as they don’t interfere with production. The rulers and the ruled have a long tradition of believing they are free simply because they can indulge in whatever they’ve been told is fashionable at that time. Like a bit of activism at the weekend... As long as none of this interferes too much with the churning of civilisation it’s perfectly acceptable to the rulers and the ruled.

seamimac@yahoo.com:
The whole issue of imposing “good” and “bad” on people who are merely escaping the monotony of daily life is replicating civilisation, who decides who is a worthy activist and who isn’t? will there be written rules? what happens to tresspassers of this new code of conduct?

re-wild@mail.com:
I agree that codes of conduct, issued diktat-like, would only enslave others even more. That’s why I haven’t advocated this. I am asking for people to be aware of the detrimental effects of things like drink and drugs on their hearts, minds and willpower, and to ask themselves if this is what they really want. Of course this isn’t effective unless it comes from the individual — something Ransu was at pains to point out in “Pathological Socialising”. In that article Ransu explicitly states that the will to be self-disciplined must of course come from the individual and not from any organisation. The more astute readers might have realised by now that this is actually the meaning of the term “self-disciplined”!

seamimac@yahoo.com:
For the re-wild poster to then use the example of the stalinist black panthers as something positive is strange to say the least. Sure we are up against it but will demanding more tight lipped, grim faced “determination” lead us anywhere?

re-wild@mail.com:
I used the Black Panthers as an example of a movement that recognised the destructiveness of certain activities and therefore eliminated them. I didn’t say we should model our struggle on them, just that they had a certain amount of sucess due to their appraisal of the situation they were in at that particular time and place. Looking around us now, you can’t help but be struck by how destructive many of our practices are and therefore should we not be looking for ways to end them? In order to make ourselves stronger and freer — not to strengthen a power base for any organisation.

seamimac@yahoo.com:
So you are seemingly very pissed off that the activist club does not do what you would like them to do, fuck ‘em you are responsible for yourself [full stop!] organise outside the “cliques”, organise on your basis, from the point of your dreams, do what you want, if it is inspirattional it will spark a fire, if not it won’t, but at least try and enjoy doing it?

re-wild@mail.com:
I am not pissed off that activists don’t do what I would like them to do. I am pissed off because they are doing exactly what their enemies want them to do. It is perfectly acceptable to civilisation for vast amounts of time, energy and passion to be squandered in pointless displacement activities. It would be nice if this didn’t happen and that activists started prioritising their freedom. They would become, as the Panthers did in their time and place, a force to be reckoned with and some real change might come about. Until then we just keep on posturing, throwing dust in the face of a dragon...

YOU CAN’T RENT YOUR WAY OUT OF A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP

a work in progress by rogue element

This article has been written by a group of people who have been involved with squatted social centres and other forms of direct action over a number of years. We write in response to the recent plans to create a host of new social centres that are neither squatted nor co-operatively owned, but rented. It is our opinion that social centres should come from ‘need’, initiated by a critical mass of individuals and groups that have a common desire and/or need for autonomous space. This network of social centres has, on the other hand, been initiated by a wealthy, albeit well-intentioned, individual within the activist milieu who wanted to collectivise their wealth. The collective that was put in place to manage this money decided to share £70,000 among local activist groups through the Dissent! Network to help set up a network of ‘anti-capitalist’ social centres in the run up to the G8 summit, being held in Gleneagles in 2005.

This discussion document has not been written to ‘slag’ people off, but rather to start a dialogue on the issues raised so we can move closer towards realising our desires and challenging our political and personal comfort zones. We did not feel as though we could just ‘put up and shut up’ as we are very passionate about the issues we are discussing here. We hope that these rented spaces are indeed a springboard to more confrontational action, a place in which to ask why and what and how, and that the people involved in them will support other initiatives that occur in their localities - even if that means closing the rented spaces for a few days.

“Legalisation is one of the most effective remedies against the inconveniences of subversion. It was used by the Social Democratic regimes in particular in order to suppress the most radical and openly subversive elements.”

Against the Legalisation of Occupied Spaces by El Paso Occupato and Barocchio Occupato

“We think it is important to have a confrontation of these topics, even at the risk of disturbing the sleep of the civilised.” Barbarians: the disordered insurgence by Crisso and Odotheus The Dissent!

Network, the PGA and Conflict

“How can we engender radicalism in our society if people’s first point of contact with nonmainstream politics is a space built on compromise, which exists only because the state says it can?”

Social Dis-Centres, p185 Do or Die Issue 10

The new Dissent! Network, mobilising against the G8 in Britain, has adopted the hallmarks of People’s Global Action (PGA). The Dissent! Network website reads as follows:

“As a group we decided that we wished to work non hierarchically with a view to enabling direct action protests against the G8. To enable the non-hierarchical working we agreed to adopt the PGA Hallmarks. The hallmarks promote a confrontational direct action approach, since we believe that it is impossible to negotiate with the encumbent governmental institutions.”

The PGA says it is absolutely committed to confrontational approaches to the dissolution of the global capitalist system and social relations built on patriarchy, sexism, inequalities of wealth and status etc. Grassroots groups from all over the world are part of the PGA network.

Groups or networks cannot really describe themselves as confrontational and anti-capitalist when they submit themselves unnecessarily to legal infrastructure. Squatting in the UK is possible (as well as preferable).

Renting a social centre in the run up to the G8 is not only in direct conflict with the idea of promoting radical self-organisation, do-it- yourself alternatives (ie that which can be replicated by any group of people - £10,000 anyone?) and resistance to the state, it is also in direct conflict with those struggles abroad, such as the Piqueter@ movement in Argentina, with whom many involved in networks like the Dissent! Network would claim to be in solidarity with. When a woman from the MTD Solano (part of the militant Piqueter@ movement) in Argentina toured Britain to talk about their experiences, she talked as well of her own life choices: a trained clinical psychologist, she gave up her well-paid job and the house that she owned, long before the ‘revolution’ in December 2001, in order to set up a grassroots community health initiative in a poor barrio of Buenos Aires and to live in occupied spaces with a collective of unemployed workers and others like herself. Here in Britain, our experience is that there are an increasing number of people taking the easy route, trying to maintain one foot in the system (reaping the benefits of personal security, status and financial reward) whilst posing as radicals plotting it’s destruction.

As we understand it, the key reason for renting rather than squatting a space that can be used as a social centre (or a series of social centres) seems to be people’s desire for a space defined by its continuity. If something is not continuous because it is constantly repressed - such as a squatted space - then surely the alternative is not co-option or the creation of continuity by buying into the system, but resistance. Throughout history, many politically confrontational and challenging times have been accompanied by a strong, and confrontational, squatting movement. It was true with the ecological direct action movement in 1990s Britain. Not only were there many urban squats, but squatted land in the form of protest camps. If you are doing something the state doesn’t want you to do, if you are challenging the way things are, then you will be repressed. Renting a social centre is, in our opinion, an admission of failure and cannot promote anything other than the idea that the anti-capitalist movement has been absorbed into the system. It demonstrates a lack of commitment to realising the ideas that you expound, and by calling such a space ‘radical’ is to rewrite the dictionary.

Sort's** SJTA64MOOI0D6C

Worse still, state-approved social centres can have a damaging impact on other projects. For example, in Italy, social centres that have negotiated with the state - often run by people associated with the White Overalls Movement/Tute Blanche, now ‘Disobbedienti, - have not only become recuperated but, through their negotiations with the state, have further marginalized the squatters movement. In the preface to ‘Barbarians: the disordered insur- gence’ (a critique of the ideas of Negri and Hardt) the authors talk of the activities of leaders of the ‘Disobedient’ causing the state to issue an ultimatum, either you dialogue with the system or you are labelled ‘terrorist’ and repressed.

THE SOCIAL CENTRE AS DIRECT ACTION

“...the act of occupying a building is a form of direct action: illegal - collective - carried out openly that leads a group of individuals to reconquer a living space previously taken away from the collectivity by those in power.”

Against the Legalisation of Occupied Spaces by El Paso Occupato and Barocchio Occupato

“Increasingly, in the face of the juggernaut that is civilization, our present social reality, I hear many radicals say, “It’s necessary to be realistic; I’ll just do what I can in my own life.” This is not the declaration of a strong individuality making itself the center of a revolt against the world of domination and alienation, but rather an admission of resignation, a retreat into merely tending one’s own garden as the monster lumbers on.

The “positive” projects developed in the name of this sort of realism are nothing more than alternative ways of surviving within the present society. They not only fail to threaten the world of capital and the state; they actually ease the pressure on those in power by providing voluntary social services under the guise of creating ‘counterinstitutions’.” ‘Realism’ in Against the Logic of Submission, by Wolfi Landstreicher

In our opinion, an anti-capitalist social centre, paying rent to a landlord, paying rates, and bills, obeying licensing laws, legal structures, and insurance, cannot in essence be in any way in conflict with the capitalist system. It is not direct action and it is not confrontational. At its heart is defeat, sometimes called realism.

To occupy, to squat a building is an act of direct action. It is taking what you want when you want it. Although squatting is not illegal in Britain, much of what goes on in a squat is illegal - providing food, beer, and entertainment for people without a license and without insurance. By squatting, we introduce ourselves to the new social relationships that develop when we take what we want from the state and property-owning class rather than asking and paying for it - and to the very idea that it is possible for us to exist outside those parameters. The experience of opening a squatted social centre is fundamentally more liberating than setting up a legal structure, a bureaucracy, in order to rent a building from a capitalist landlord. The experience of entering an occupied space is also fundamentally different to that of entering a legitimised one. There is often an atmosphere of anything can happen. In some senses this is the very essence of wildness, of revolt, and therefore in direct opposition to domesticity and obedience. The feeling that one is outside the petty rules and regulations of the system, even in some small way, is a magnificent one. Entering a centre that follows rules, pays it’s rates and licences, and has financial and cultural ownership of the space is radical suicide.

Private property is a product of theft, repression and exploitation. It is an agent of oppression and exploitation. The land used to be ours, now it is theirs. It is a principle of radical political activity to refute this ownership by simply taking back what we used to hold in common. Squatting is taking ‘private’ space and opening it back up to the collectivity. To rent space and call it a ‘radical’ or ‘anticapitalist’ social centre is an oxymoron. As it was said during the May ‘68 insurrection in Paris “ Don’t demand. Occupy!”

The history of revolt is one that occurs largely outside the workplace, the rented house, the ballot box. The rented social centre is no more radical than an alternative cafe. It is not what you say (or how many leaflets you put out), it is what you do, that matters. Revolt is about bringing the war home in a society where it is often too easily hidden beneath the veneer of isolation and alienation, where we are told (and believe) the war is always somewhere else, where we continue to labour under the illusion that we are privileged and where in fact some of us do actually have a ‘nice life’, where abundant opportunities arise for recuperation and the insidious selling out of ideals. To bring the war home is to make war on this society, on the way we live our lives, on the power structures that exist both outside ourselves and within us. Our project is one to destroy a system that impoverishes us and leads us to live increasingly mediated existences devoid of any meaning.

We wonder if the rented social centre offers a perfect displacement activity for those who are essentially part of the system, but wish to appear to be involved in radical politics. A rented social centre is never going to be a substitute for the spontaneous, transformative human interaction that comes about when people live together, struggle together, and spend time together on their own terms on a daily basis. When people have to come together against a system that doesn’t want them there.

“Politics is the art of recuperation. The most effective way to discourage all rebellion, all desire for real change [is] to transform a subversive into a man or woman of state. Not all people of state are paid by the government. There are functionaries who are not found in parliament or even in the neighbouring rooms. Rather, they frequent the social centre and sufficiently know the principle revolutionary theories, they debate over the libratory potential of technology; they theorise about non-state public sphere and the surpassing of the subject.

Reality—they know it well—is always more complex than any action. So if they hope for a total theory, it is only in order to totally neglect it in daily life. Power needs them because-as they themselves explain to us-when no one criticises it power is criticised by itself”

From Ten blows against Politics, by Il Pugnale May 1996

SAMBA, SUMMITS AND COUNTER SUMMITS

“We who cultivate the taste for adventure and the free flow of passions see that only through the ongoing practice of direct action, springing beyond the four walls, going beyond the limits of lawfulness imposed by the state, can we succeed in opening new spaces for the selforganisation of our lives outside the squat and instilling new dignity into the existing occupations. In short, in spreading the practice of generalised selforganisation.”

Against the Legalisation of Occupied Spaces by El Paso Occupato and Barocchio Occupato

The rented social centres that will be springing up in cities in England, Scotland and Wales in the next year have been initiated through the anti- G8 process that began in Britain a year ago. They are to be part of the build-up to a mobilisation against the G8 when it comes to Gleneagles in June 2005.

It is outside of the scope of this article to go into much detail on the role of summits, the mobilisations for them and ‘summit hopping’ as a phenomenon, but we would like to say just a few words about them. Since the kick start of what has variously been called the ‘anti-globalisation’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, arguably June 18th 1999 or the anti WTO protests in Seattle in the same year, the level of autonomous direct action has gone down. Much of what passes for action now is a crowd of people kettled by cops, occasionally breaking free, only to follow a samba band around whilst dressed in pink and silver. For example, at the BP AGM action in London in April 2003, most of the crowd were content to protest the meeting by partying with a samba band outside - despite the fact that 100 shareholder tickets were available to enable people to get

23TOPIA LIVES ON

IN JUNE this year a group of anarchists in Worthing, West Sussex, occupied a large, prominent, recently closed nightclub in the centre of the seaside town and turned it into a protest social centre.

Initially conceived as an anti-G8 protest to coincide with this year’s Sea Island summit and draw attention to the 2005 protests, 23TOPIA hosted a week-long “Festival of Resistance”, also taking on local issues and the global ecological struggle.

They went on to stage a series of video evenings, parties, band nights, a critical mass protest and general socialising and discussing, attracting more than 150 members and drawing in many people, some very young, not previously involved in the ‘political’ scene.

Amonth later it was ended, on a high note as a resounding success, and the following statement released:

23TOPIA is dead! Long live 23TOPIA!

past security and disrupt the meeting. The majority of protestors, however, were happy to engage in spectacular pseudo-resistance rather than confrontation with those they claim as their enemies. There is no doubt that in Seattle, and in Genoa, a critique free of mediation by ‘organisers’ and against domination was demonstrated, despite the dates being set by the leaders, and the presence of reformists in the street. Seattle took cops of all types by surprise, and at Genoa we hear of people physically challenging the authority of ‘White Overall’ stewards who were attempting to orchestrate resistance according to their ‘acceptable’ confines. But if domination and oppression are in every part of society and in daily life, attack has no need for dates set by the enemy. We can develop forms of action that can act as concrete exam- 23TOPIA was never a place, never an organisation, never anything that could be categorised, authorised, criminalised or sanctified.

23TOPIA was an act, a beautiful act of defiance, an explosive device spraying colour shrapnel across the monotone wastelands of the great ghetto of chronic consumerism and terminal TV dependency we know as Worthing.

Our act of resistance had a beginning and an end, but for the most considered and timely acts, the end is always in fact the beginning.

An act, like 23TOPIA, can never be undone, expunged or evicted.

23TOPIA is now a reality that has forever left its imprint.

23TOPIA lives on, and will always live on, in a multiplicity of unfathomable ways.

23TOPIA lives on in every tiny act of assertion and defiance of arbitrary authority, in every momentary thought-crime that passes through the ples of why people are resisting the G8, rather than a one-off carnival, a temporary rented social centre and a symbolic street fight against a meeting where the decisions have already been made.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KRAAKERS!*

“In Berlin and Hamburg, during the occupation movement of the early eighties, the number of illegal squats was gradually reduced until they nearly vanished. At the same time, the most radical struggles also diminished.”

Against the Legalisation of Occupied Spaces by El Paso Occupato and Barocchio Occupato

So the rented social centres are going to act as some sort of focal point for those that want to resist the G8. But with all this energy going into officialdom and cake selling, what will come of direct action and resistance? Will all the form filling, maintenance and cafe shifts not sap the energy from those who might otherwise be taking part in acts of resistance against what the G8 represents, and direct action?

“If we think we need ‘access points’ to be inspired by our political perspective[s], then surely this is best achieved through practising direct action - not through acquiring crippling mortgages [or rents], obeying a myriad of regulations set by the state and spending years doing DIY of the conventional sort.

The energy that has gone into social centres during what has been an action-quiet couple of years may well have found other avenues for action had a lot of very energetic people mind of the slave who knows, deep down, that freedom can never be eradicated.

23TOPIA lives on in the breeze on Cissbury Ring, in the spray of the waves at Splash Point, in the ancient woodlands of Titnore, where the birdsong even now falls silent in anticipation of the murderous violence about to be unleashed by the slavemasters and their money machines.

23TOPIA lives on in the nexus of new friendships and understandings born from its creative flash and the collective will that its alchemy has conjured from the disparate despairs and frustrations of a small army of lost souls, dreamers and champions of the human spirit against the Goliath of global greed.

23TOPIA lives on in the rising tide of certainty that another world is not just possible, but necessary.

23TOPIA has been and gone!

23TOPIA is here to stay!

not been engaged in property development.”

Social Dis- Centres, Do or Die Issue 10

In terms of action, there is also the potential for conflict to emerge between ‘users’ of the space, those whose priority is the centre, and those who take action, which may place the centre at risk. This is often a fraught relationship. This was even the case with a squatted social centre in Manchester when those running the social centre tore down another collectives flyposters because they were publicising an action in the city which they thought might bring down repression on the squat.

The squatted social centre A-Spire in Leeds has been about for a number of years now. It has opened and run buildings for parties, film nights, queer events, political workshops and action planning, a free cafe, an illegal bar, healing spaces, art projects, hanging out space and much more.

The last A-Spire happened in December 2003. It had clearly run its course. Attendance was low, the crew was small, the space was formulaic (though probably no less formulaic than the proposed rented spaces).

But a network of squatted social centres, in bolder and more daring locations, carried out in increasingly creative ways, is a far less compromised and more combative way of doing things than the sordid compromise of the tenant. As someone once said ‘How can you think freely in the shadow of a church?’.

Surely the rented, fully licensed social centre is that church?

“The expansion of the possibilities opened up by the insurrectionary break, the full exploration of the panorama of selfdetermination and of the “collective movement of individual realization”, requires, above all, indomitable individuals who associate on the basis of affinity and the pleasure they find in each others’ singularity, refusing every compromise.”

Against Compromise, Willful Disobedience Vol. 3, No. 2

*Dutch for squatters

The Nano-Nightmare

from Terra Selvaggia

Those who remain as pure humans and refuse to improve themselves will have a serious handicap. They will constitute a subspecies and be the chimpanzees of the future.

— Kevin Warwick, technophile with multiple subcutaneous chips

As in a game, a macabre game, technology has been pushed to the manipulation of matter on the scale of a nano-meter, i.e., the millionth part of a millimeter. What is manipulated is something that shades off into the boundaries between the non-living and the living: the atom.

This technology, called nanotechnology, creates new ‘products’ actually starting from the manipulation of atoms, subatomic particles and molecules. Unlike biotechnology that manipulates the structure of DNA, creating organisms through the recombination of genes, nanotechnology ‘breaks down’ matter transforming it into atoms with the possibility of artificially synthesizing them and thus of creating something material from nothing (atom by atom). At the moment, attention is focused on carbon atoms, the skeleton of matter, but soon it could be extended to other elements. In short, scientists would like to control the elements of the Periodic Table at will; according to science, this would allow combining the characteristics of a product (such as color, resistance, melting point) in a manner completely different from what has been possible up to now. For example, the enterprises that deal with nanotechnology have tested new products such as stainproof fabrics, self-cleaning windows, cement with special characteristics, anti-pollutants for diesel, etc.

As absurd as it may seem, nanotechnology has the pretension of making new products by constructing them atom by atom. For example, it has the ridiculous idea of replacing food with an ensemble of atoms that could be transformed into wine or whiskey or orange drink, depending on the need of the consumer, ‘simply’ by triggering off a determined reaction.

The enthusiastic supporters of nanotechnology have thought that ultimately if one reaches the point of manipulating matter in its most basic component, the atom, why not mix biotechnological studies of the biomolecular world with the precisely with the research on atoms? Thus, nano-biotechnology is born. No longer satisfied with creating new apparently static products starting from atomic technology, instead by blending it with the technology of life, it aims for the creation of new products where the boundaries between living and non-living beings are erased. For example? Self-cleaning plastics in which enzymes feed on the dirt, airplane wings full of proteins (if the wing breaks, proteins that function as adhesives are released repairing it), ultra-fast computers with circuits based on a ‘framework’ of DNA, electric conductors of dimensions on a nano scale in a protein base, i.e., the ‘living plastic’ built on a genetically manipulated bacterium capable of producing an enzyme that can polymerize according to scientists.

But the applications unfurled before the great public are just shoddy goods, useless innovations to satisfy infantile desires generated by technology in the ‘consumer’. And, in fact, the applications described above for the manipulation of matter turn out to be just the tiniest part of the results sought in current research projects. The miniaturization of information processors is concealed within these worthless gadgets, and this is of some importance. This miniaturization will lead to the presence of ‘intelligent’ microchips on any object in the market, from scales to clothes to pens all the way to nutritional mixtures capable of communicating with the refrigerator.

But this final application foreseen for these microchips is not certain, and it is not the first time that behind the humanitarian pretenses or the miraculous improvement of the average lifestyle there is quite a different project hidden, carefully concealed from most of us. This is the case for the most disturbing applications of nanotechnology, such as the humanmachine link or the application of subcutaneous microchips, which use as their excuse the combination of the curing of rare diseases and the protection of poor, defenseless citizens from brutal criminals.

In fact, the field I which nanotechnology is most developed is that which is linked to military studies. The scenarios that the media showed during the last war in Iraq already pointed to the finalization of ‘intelligent’ equipment capable of adapting itself to internal and external conditions and weaponry that was also endowed with extraordinary powers conferred by sensors, microchips and so on.

An obvious example is that of the MEMS (micro-electrical-mechanical systems), the first generation of nanomachines. These are miniature receivers and motors the size of a grain of dust, the proto-types of which are already coming into use in industry. The application currently being studied is that of surveillance powder that will be sprayed onto a battlefield or into an area under observation in order to get various types of information. The future of the robotics of war is increasingly that of versatile and low-priced microand nano-robots used as highly specialized weapons.

In the wake of these studies another important aspect is that of social control. A chip the size of a grain of rice that is meant to be inserted under the skin has been put on the market by the American company Applied Digital Solutions. It is called the Verichip and is capable of containing information about the person and can be endowed with GPS capabilities that would allow knowledge of where the person ‘wearing’ it is at all times (one can even buy it on the Internet if one wants to know it up close). The Verichip can be injected with a syringe, using a simple local anesthetic. It is sold as an electronic bodyguard for preventing abductions, so that already many multi-millionaires are requesting it. But an intuition easily develops that soon such a chip will not be an optional convenience for the rich, but rather a heavy burden for the poor. At the beginning, they extol the humanitarian aspects of such instruments, mentioning that in some cases they will be of use to doctors for intervening quickly or to police for preventing abductions and violence. Then applications on increasingly larger portions of the population will be justified until the day in which we cannot live without it. On that day the chip implant will be obligatory and getting rid of it will be a serious offense.

Finally, the chips that the British government proposes for implanting in pedophiles who are already sentenced are the latest frontier. Besides registering the position of the one under surveillance, these chips will register the heartbeat and arterial tension, giving a warning about the imminence of an eventual act of violence. It will not signal a state of sexual arousal, but nervousness and fear. The same nervousness and fear that a thief or a saboteur might feel while at work. Besides, one should not consider the pedophilia alarm, with which the media has been bombarding us for years in a way that is hugely disproportionate to the reality of things, to be incidental to the project of social control.

By maneuvering collective hysteria in this way, children increasingly become the objects of state property, and thus their protection becomes an obligation to carry out. This doesn’t merely justify chip implants in pedophiles, but also the proposal of experts and parents’ associations to chip all the children in England after the latest extraordinary case of Holly and Jessica, raped and murdered in 2002. But who will protect these children from the penetrating eye of their parents and the state? Who will protect them from the inescapable network of technological control?

We might, indeed, be the last generation of human beings lacking technological prostheses at birth.

The great importance of nanobiotechnology for the economic and institutional world is shown by the huge appropriation of funds by the American government, which invests between 600 and 700 million dollars a year in the development of the sector. Furthermore, in Europe there is enormous financing for research projects or centers dedicated to the development of nanotechnology. The case of Grenoble is revealing. It is the French town considered to be the European capital of technological development, where some projects financed by the European Union benefit from funds of hundreds of millions of Euros. Among these is Minatec, considered the European project capable of competing with the largest Japanese and American rivals, originating in the efforts of the EU and multinationals like Philips, Motorola and STMicroelectronics.

In past years, science fiction has entertained us with stories about replicants capable of multiplying autonomously and in great numbers until they conquer the earth. This is also the fear many experts feel about nano-biotechnology, that some artificially constructed living organism could escape the controls of science and live, multiplying itself beyond measure (a fear that is concretely verified for the products of genetic manipulation).

But as always, every fear, and not just those that are most absurd, is set aside in the name of progress to the benefit of humanity. Furthermore, the world of science has always been defended by maintaining that the misdeeds of techno-science are due to the bad uses that have been made of the knowledge; by maintaining, as always, that technology is neutral, just as those who, with their studies of nuclear science, then fully contributed to the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the tragedies of nuclear accidents and to the proliferation of armaments, were quick to say. It is certainly not by allowing the usual experts from the same academic-political world the only say in the matter that we will be able to resolve such questions. Nor will we be able to do so by placing our trust in the information arising from the scientific world since one of its current prerogatives is to openly make people accept the new technological applications of scientific research. In reality, its transparent information merely communicates decisions to us that have already been made in our names and over our heads and discloses the results of research that has already been carried out.

Who knows if in the case of nanobiotechnology, as already happened with biotechnology, those who claim to oppose it will once again venture into demands for regulation, precautionary rules, independent structures of control.

Then the story will end just as it did for biotechnology: a minimal opposition to applications related to food with arguments easily recuperable (and recuperated) by a part of the scientific clique, with transgenic food that already makes part of our daily diet. No opposition at all to medical biotechnology that is rather looked upon by all as a great opportunity for sick people.

And these things are really what the entire apparatus that has everything to gain from biotechnology focuses on: no more debate on GMOs in the dietary field, no more alarmism, no more news, despite the fact that there are still people who want to struggle, opposing the harm with the only possible solution: destruction.

And so it will happen in the field of nano-biotechnology. As soon as it is talked about and the scenarios are made increasingly clear, the sterile opposition will raise on oppositional voice about the dangers inherent in those projects that are most open to question such as those in the dietary or military fields. Nothing more.

What to do? If Kevin Warwick is right, then we will stock up well on bananas, because we will certainly be among those who form the chimpanzees of the future. But it is known, even a well-known film teaches us, when chimpanzees get pissed off...

[from Terra Selvaggia #13 , summer 2003]

Low-Life Researchers

“Insects can do many things that people can’t,” Professor Isao Shimoyama told a press conference in Tokyo, “such as being able to lift hundreds of times their own weight. The placement of the electrodes is still a very inexact science, but within a few years we’ll have electronically-controlled insects carrying colour minicams with surroundsound stereo microphones, and equipped with hitech backpacks. The potential applications of this work for mankind could be immense.”

In a speech reminiscent of the blather about radio ID tags being used to help rescue lost old ladies and kidnapped children, Shimoyama was ‘explaining’ to the terminally stupid why the Japanese government had just awarded a $5,000,000 grant to his bio-robot research team at Tokyo University.

“We envisage insects crawling through earthquake rubble searching for victims, or being slipped under doors on espionage surveillance, in suspect restaurants for example.

At present, we’re experimenting with the American cockroach. We remove the wings and antennae, then equip them with tiny microprocessors, and fit pulse-emitting electrodes where the antennae used to be. That way, researchers can control them remotely by sending signals to the backpacks, making them turn left or right, scamper forward, or spring backward. The technology isn’t so difficult. The real problem is understanding what’s happening in the nervous system.”

Raphael Holzer, a Swiss researcher on the team, added: “We breed them by the hundreds in plastic bins, and they are not nice insects. They stink, and there’s something nasty about the way they move their eyes and antennae. But they look nicer when you put a little circuit on their backs, and remove their wings.”

STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY WITH ‘IL SILVESTRE’

Green Anarchist abhors the arrest of the fellow-writers and revolutionaries of ‘Il Silvestre’, Italy, a call to action. Whether bogus or not, the Italian judiciary’s constant resort to conspiratorial theorems from the fascist (Mussolini) era to both exercise and excuse political repression is a direct attack on supposed freedoms of association and expression. As it is, these theorems are bogus, absurdly linking ‘Il Silvestre’ to Marxist-Leninist groups in an astounding display of either crass expediency or political illiteracy on the part of the examining judge. Never has the axiom that ‘terror is but one extension of statecraft’ been better illustrated, nor the need for free information and revolutionary / societal self-defence from such abuses. Of course, in court fire must be fought with fire (law), but these issues are never decided there.

Only defiance by continued and expanded publication of exactly that the State seeks to suppress, backed by action to cost them more than they gain by repression will carry the day for our Italian comrades—as it already did for the GAndALF defendants.

Below is a slightly edited article recently received by us over email.

The lies of the news and their calls for repression have never stopped, taking profit from the current situation... it’s tried to definitely kill all the experiences from the group.

Blow to blow—active solidarity with ‘Il Silvestre’

Here are some communiques done by comrades who were directly implied on the repressive wave that has been conducted since June against radical ecologists and anarchists. The group ‘Il Silvestre’, that does the radical ecologist magazine ‘Terra Selvaggia’, is under attack. Some of the people involved in that group (that at the beginning weren’t even investigated, are now under preventive arrest waiting for the investigations to end, charged with terrorism and subversive association, the latter, nowadays under debate).

All this has happened because during a search police found a document where a group called COR (Revolutionary Offensive Cells, who did many attacks in Toscana) claimed responsibility for an action they did. This document arrived by mail to the magazine Terra Selvaggia, but also to other local newspapers wanting them to publish it. These comrades, always in the front line supporting fights against ecological, animal and human exploitation, against repression and toxicities of this society through the pages of their magazine—they now need our ACTIVE solidarity. As well as those arrested and investigated for the CERVANTES case in many cities of Italy also are targets of the ROS (a special force of the Carabineri mainly dedicated to terrorism) that were ‘unemployed’ after the Marini case ended just seven months ago.

FROM PISA—

After months of criminalisation through the mass-media, on June 7th the latest repressive attack against the ecologist group ‘Il Silvestre’ took place. First Alessio, Leo, Betta, Gioacchino and Alice (who was quickly left without charges) were arrested, being applied house arrest and incomunicated from the outside. Alessio is transferred to the prison of Prato. Next week Constantino is arrested based on the local media articles that showed him as a dangerous leader. Some days later, house arrest is also applied to him.

The lies of the news and their calls for repression have never stopped, taking profit from the current situation in which it’s tried to definitely kill all the experiences from the group ‘Il Silvestre’, who for more than six years has been an annoying and constant presence in a big territory through dozens of campaigns of struggle and giving voice to the resistances all over the world in the pages of the magazine ‘Terra Selvaggia’

On Friday July 30th, as the massmedia were announcing in the days beforehand, more arrests took place: Beppe, Francesco and William are kept on ‘caution custody’ through house arrest; but the prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation, Di Bugno, isn’t satisfied enough: he wants to see our comrades imprisoned.

The accusations for all the arrested is to belong to the COR ( Revolutionary Offensive Cells ), a group that has struck right wing and trade union symbols and facilities, most of the time through incendiary devices since July 2003.

These arrests in Pisa seems not to satisfy the prosecutor, who doesn’t need much evidence, keeping in mind the actual situation in where ,on a national basis , the groups that take forward a radical dissent are striken very easily and in a very strong way by the Magistratura. From Roveretto to Lecce, from Roma to Cagliari, other comrades have been targeted lately and repressed because of their fights against this murdererous system.

Just in these days where this same system is spreading terror all throughout this planet with ecological devastation, the wars that exterminate civilians, the stupidity of consumerism that grows in a society in ruins— The people they show as terrorists are the individuals that fight opposing all that, without fear to express their solidarity to everything and d everyone that rebels with any means they think as necessary. Guilty for us are those who benefit looting and oppressing all the corners of this world; and also their unresponsible accomplices, those who shut their eyes on the ecological disasters that approaches more and more every day.

BLOW BY BLOW

They wanted to ‘do the proper thing’ with that space on ‘via del Cuore’ in Pisa (headquarters of ‘Il Silvestre’ and ‘the Uncontrolled’) where, since two years ago, many comrades are struggling many fights in defence of earth, of animals and searching to destroy every cage for the liberation of all living beings.

A meeting point where dozens of initiatives have been planned and done, from the ones against biotechnology to the ones for animal liberation, from the Spanish war to the critique against medicine, from the support of imprisoned comrades to the support of those groups who defend their own land in Patagonia.

Also the publication of magazines such as ‘Terra Selvaggia’ or ‘Mamora’, the production and distribution of books, pamphlets and more materials. A group of people that has taken forward a struggle for a world without prisons, some of them of the ecologist group ‘Terra Selvaggia’, others of the anarchist group ‘Uncontrolled’ and lots of individualities that, together during those years, have expressed a clear and radical dissent towards this world, never hiding their complicity with those that are exploited in any way.

That’s what this space in ‘Via del Cuore’ in Pisa was and still is. And this is what police, prosecutors, and informers-journalists want to destroy. They want to judge nbody of laws on their hand- friendships, solidarities and affections through an ‘associative crime’ that wants to create an associative structure with leaders and affiliates, showing the dullness and absurdities inherent to ‘justice’.

Through their miserable journalists they try to build the feeling that they have ended with those dangerous terrorists, first publishing our names, then our houses and at the end our faces in the garbage of their pages and TV screens.

But these purposes, wherever they reach, will have to face (and will break apart due to) the determination of all the individuals that, accomplices beyond any ‘justice’ and ‘guilty’ as we are of not accepting this world in a passive way anymore, still go on fighting for a totally different existence, with neither masters nor servants, without exploiters and exploited and without prisons.

The dozens of concentrations, pamphlets, the spray paintings, the initiatives, the solidarity with the investigated and imprisoned... all the strength that, after all, those people from ‘via del Cuore’ and other territories show, those are realities that no prosecutor or prison will be able to break apart.

A determination in fight that makes us respond blow by blow to all the ‘brilliant’ operations of the ROS (Carabineri special branch dedicated to mainly terrorism), Digos (the political police) and all that shit: facing searched and arrests, facing intimidations and beatings, facing those coward journalists accomplices of the inquisitors, facing the attacks of fascists.

To support the hunger strike of the imprisoned comrades, to solidarize with any means necessary with those directly striken by the State, forward with the fights against this murderous system. If solidarity is a weapon, this weapon has to be targeted against the ones that oppress, devastates and exploits.

A big hug to the rebel prisoners, to those who escaped and to all those comrades that don’t abandon us and that seek to destroy every cage.

Two imprisoned comrades

WITH ANY MEANS NECESSARY

Both Alessio and William imprisoned; Leo, Betta, Gioacchino, Constantino and Beppe are under house arrest; Francesco — who was under house arrest — has decided not to enter prison, thus escaping from an announced detention which was prepared (as with the other ones) by the sell-out journalists of the local media, which are day by day more full of lies, slanders and police stories.

If it’s obvious that those responsible for this repressive operation are the Magistrates (Magistratura) and the law enforcement agencies, it is also true that without the participation of the media it wouldn’t have been possible to justify and give strength to this powerful repressive attack.

Every day, since some time ago, through any ways and with every means, journalists (no matter which ‘color’ they defend) have shot bullets in their articles, loyal to the directions coming from above having depicted ‘Il Silvestre’ as a den, and the comrades as very dangerous criminals which need to be imprisoned for as long as possible

The highest, nastiest and most cowardly point was reached when these shitty journalists, last Sunday, published the pictures of our comrades, showing them as in a ‘WANTED’ poster, forgetting in their crazed accusations that Alice is free without charges, and that the other comrades haven’t had their trial yet.

‘Not that serious’ must have thought the journalists, and well, what the fuck!, they’re not even important people or bank managers, neither financial brokers which have fallen suddenly into misfortune and that have to be well treated. These are dangerous anarchists, they don’t need to be depicted in a polished way, nobody will complain about the lack of privacy they have suffered, for their smashed right to defend themselves and for the lack of guarantees. What does it matter that they lose their freedom, not able to live their lives plenty, their passions and their feelings.

With any means necessary journalists have to try to transform their affective relationships and their social relations into dangerous and obscure clandestine relations to isolate them and forcing them into silence, depicting them as bloodthirsty monsters.

If later due to their delirious articles, something like the other investigations in Val De Susa about ‘ecoterrorism’, in a similar ambient, ended with Edo and Sole committing suicide, well, these are accidents that will be cured thanks to the journalists professional sensibility.

We have nothing to tell to judges and journalists except for our rage. To you, to those well-minded, we want to say that they are making you believe that your enemies aren’t the exploiters, the speculators, those who pollute, those who poison, the killers or the torturers.

They want to make you believe that your enemies are the individuals who rebel against the exploitation of human beings over other human beings, over nature and animals.

They are making you believe that we are your enemies. The choice is yours. We, as well as our comrades in prison, under house arrest, escaped. we, along them, never accomplices, never resigned, through our fights for a better society, without poisons or prisons.

LIBERI TUTTI

Ribelli

William Frediani, Carcere Don Bosco, Via Don Bosco 43, 56100 Pisa, Italy.

Alessio Perondi, Carcere Don Bosco, Via Don Bosco 43, 56100 Pisa, Italy.

Military

ETERNAL FRONTIER — ETERNAL WAR

Wars may end, but not war.

As I write this people are being killed systematically. As you read this people are being killed systematically. Bodies, lives, beings, torn to shreds by bombs, bullets, napalm, and flame: not just killing, but maiming, uprooting and devastating lives. Devastating life.

Right now that killing is going on in Iraq. The people being killed are children, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and lovers. We see numbers. That is if we see anything at all. What people in Iraq see are bodies without limbs, people broken mentally and physically.

There is a movement to end the ‘occupation’ of Iraq. People want an end to wars. They march, hold signs, protest, get beaten and arrested, and occasionally attack the war machine symbolically.

But the end to war will not come. The end of war cannot come.

Wars may end, but not war.

For the most part, protestors can accept this. That is why they fight against wars. They are brutal and nasty. Most people know someone involved. They tie ribbons around trees. Somehow I doubt the trees care much about soldiers. But wars can and will end. Things can go back to normal for those not on the receiving end of the bombs.

Stop the wars and its back to business as usual. Back to everyday warfare.

Civilization is warfare.

This is not a rhetorical statement. Civilization is the culture of cities. Cities are permanent settlements with a lot of people on a little amount of land. All those people on that little amount of land need ‘resources’. Those have to come from somewhere. The countryside is the other half of cities. They are one in the same and they need each other.

This has always been the case. This will always be the case, if not locally, then globally. Rows of cash crops and mines on one end: rows of houses and people on the other. The people in cities will take what they ‘need’ to survive. They must because a city cannot support itself and the countryside must grow with it. Almost always this taking requires force.

This is what Stanley Diamond was thinking about when he wrote: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”¹ Where people cannot be coerced into giving on their own, there are armies and police to ensure that things run smoothly. Between states this is called war. But states do the same thing everyday to their citizens. It is still war, but we can’t call it that. The state can’t afford for us to call it that.

At the root of the problem, there are two things that happened to set all of this in motion: gardens and settlements. Both of which are usually tied, but not always. But the garden and the settlement represent two different aspects of war. There are ecological reasons and political reasons for war, respectively.²

Gardening is about taming wildness. Pulling weeds, clearing forest land, and selective breeding are all methods of domesticating. This is as true for small scale horticulturalists as it is for industrial agriculturalists.

The damage that can be done depends on the relationships of the people to the land and the scale. Small scale horticulturalists typically see the earth as their home and have things like longer fallow periods and shifting gardens to make sure they don’t destroy it.

Industrial agriculturalists see the earth as something dead and use science to ‘fix it’. Naturally if they see the earth as dead matter, they have no real issue with killing it as they do.

Bioregions are picky. The healthiest ecosystem is a wild one, but a balanced ecosystem can take some sway. Horticultural societies can exist without tipping the scales.

Occasionally those scales do tip and something must be done to bring things back in balance. That can take days or years. Even if it takes over 6,000 years (as in our case), it is something that must happen. The far end of that balance is what is called carrying capacity. It means simply how much life can be supported by any particular bioregion.³

Gardens challenge carrying capacity because people settle around them. Being nomadic has shaped who we are as humans. Our ecological role has been defined by this. As nomadic gatherer/hunters, there are any number of ways to keep us within carrying capacity that are just inherent to that way of being. When people settle down, populations increase. Populations increase, more food needs to be grown. More food needs to be grown, more land must be cleared and used. When that land is being used by other people, there will be violence.

This is the formula for ‘primitive warfare’.

This kind of warfare serves a number of ecological purposes. For the most part it is largely symbolic. It is typically spaced at least ten years apart and has a minimum amount of casualties. In some ways it has been considered a kind of play.

It is easy to see why when you see the novelty size arrows shot high into the air or that the bulk of ‘fighting’ is really shouting insults which both sides may laugh at.⁴

But it is still warfare. It is not unheard of for whole bands to be wiped out in raids or battle. This kind of warfare happens between people who know each other intimately. It is an accepted part of life. But it serves the ecological purpose of not tipping the ecological balance.

The sociopaths who brazenly pervert skies, climate and weather for power and profit are the same madmen who have waged four limited nuclear wars since 1991

Warfare happens in time of ecological stress.⁵ People do die in raids and battle, but that is not the most effective way of keeping numbers down. In these societies, being a warrior is extremely important. Gender becomes an important distinction and raising strong boys takes priority. Having warrior sons becomes important. The result is female infanticide. The result of having far fewer women than men is there are fewer children in the end.⁶

This is not what must happen, but this is what has happened over and over again. If you live a way that challenges carrying capacity, there must be some way of keeping the balance. Warfare and the values that come with it have been that solution for horticultural societies in almost every instance.

But this is not what has always happened. If it were, we wouldn’t be in our current dilemma. If it were, civilization would have never existed. We would never have to destroy it.

The problem is that not all societies went through a horticultural stage. The old lists of ‘social evolution’ are something that our linear/historical orientation needs, not something that necessarily happened or must happen. The societies that originate civilization typically skipped the horticultural step or barely went through it. They were settled people who technically lived by gathering and hunting. They cultivated fields and fields of wild grains.

Domestication came later, but they became settled and dependent upon stored grains first.

Politics can be created in two ways. In horticultural societies like the ones mentioned above. When the population does expand and people stick together rather than break apart and create new bands, there tends to be people who have more influence. These people are called Big Men (they are not always men, but most often).

Big Men talk. A lot. They rant about everything in the morning or the evening. They have an opinion and must voice it. For the most part, people don’t even notice. Lying in hammocks or around the fire, they can hear the rants. Sometimes they go listen, but not all the time. This ranting is important though. That is what a Big Man must do. They are typically no different than other people, but they gain notoriety because of their ability to convince and typically they are able to pull together more stuff for massive feasts or general redistribution.

The Big Man rants and the people tolerate it. Occasionally they listen to him. Occasionally he’s talking about raiding or attacking a neighboring village. Sometimes he can convince a number of people to get involved, but their decisions are always voluntary.

The Big Man has no power, no authority, and no ability to coerce. Only his voice. Nothing exists for him to hoard so much that he can control or attempt to control the actions of others. His position is far from permanent and a lack of a Big Man never hurt anybody.

They can wage wars, but only if other people are willing to go along with it.

That usually works for a raid or battle, maybe two. But if people had the choice to go to war constantly, they would chose not to. That has almost always been the case. There are no specialists. There are no armies: bands of people specialized in the art of taking lives.

Sometimes war just happens.

The other way power is created is through surplus. Some horticultural societies expand and some become empires. Power is held by chiefs or kings. The role of a chief can be slightly different than the role of a Big Man, but it can also be slightly different than the role of a king. A chief must be a good talker, but he has more than a voice. He has a surplus.

A chief and occasionally a Big Man will have multiple wives. What this means is that he has a number of gardens and a number of people working them. A single garden can feed the family that works it with relative ease, but there are times when they need more or crops fail. The chief, with a number of gardens, can compensate them. In fact, they must. This is where coercive power comes from: the perception of dependency.

The chief gives and talks. The people listen so long as the chief provides something for them and tells them what they want to hear. The power of a chief is not absolute. The position can be terminated. But the position does carry some power.

They are called in to settle disputes between people and in the process become the first true political institution. Politics are created here.

In return for these services, people will listen to them. The most authority they can possess is in times of war. Their voice has more sway in this time than a Big Man for two reasons: they already have an upper hand in the society and they are known for their prowess in battle.⁷

Through all of these, the power of a chief is created and affirmed. They cannot force anyone into battle, but their decision becomes a political one and there can be consequences.

Civilization is really born in war. That is the essence of the state, of kingdoms, of empires.

The influence or power of a Big Man or some chiefs was never absolute, but absolute power is the basis for kings and some more powerful chiefs. How did this happen?

In the societies mentioned above, as long as the chief or Big Man had something to offer or was reasonable, people might listen to them. The only time this was ever truly exercised was during battle or war where some leadership is necessary.

But as populations continue to grow and devour the earth and its relations surrounding them, war becomes not an occasional ordeal, but a part of everyday life.

The origins of absolute power could only be created through fear. People don’t compromise their autonomy unless they must or they are convinced that they must. The need for land puts people on the offense. The knowledge that others may be in the same situation puts people on the defense. The role of those in power has always been to play up these two aspects. Society must be under attack. Society must be defended.⁸

Under these premises people will be willing to compromise. Under these premises states, nations, and empires are created. The earth is attacked. People are attacked. Lives are destroyed.

This should start sounding familiar.

Eternal war is as tied to civilization as the need for the eternal frontier. There must be room for growth. There must be resources. There must be people willing to throw their lives away to defend the ‘greater good’.

States grow and roles become more and more specialized. Police can be trained and soldiers can be conscripted. People can dedicate their lives to advancing technology. The art of killing and maiming becomes increasingly efficient.

This is how civilization must be. The only thing that’s changed over the last 10,000 years is the scale and efficiency of tools meant to do nothing but destroy.

This is our heritage, reaffirmed daily. We remain distanced and entertained. But this is the true cost of our way of being.

No one really likes war. At least no one involved in the actual fighting. The actual destruction of life.

The very word can turn your insides. As long as we are entertained and distant spectators we’re fine. Pictures are posted of civilian casualties and people will react. They will react just enough to believe that their hands are morally kept clean.

Lately we’ve been hearing the word quagmire used in terms of the Iraqi War. It’s a flashback to the Vietnam War that we’re stuck in a completely undesirable situation, but one that must be dealt with. Whether we support the war or not it is still going on. That is the reality that has been created for us and we are told to deal with it.

It’s a depressing thought. No amount of good intentions or hope will bring back lives cut short, lives torn apart, or mend the very flesh of the earth: our home.

But this is our world. This is where we are.

This is a reality that we should never have to deal with. The power to destroy lives across the planet just by trying to survive is something that was never meant to exist. But it does.

Civilization should never have existed. Lives should have never been wasted serving rather than living. Our home should never be threatened.

Perhaps quagmire is the most appropriate word, not only for the war in Iraq, but for our entire way of life.

We should have never been in this situation; we should never have to destroy civilization so that we may one day live free. So that life may exist on this planet after we are gone. But we are in this situation and it is in our hands to do something about it.

Civilization is warfare. Like civilization, warfare has an origin. Like civilization, warfare will have an end. It will die with the system that creates and requires it.

Civilization can be destroyed and if we truly want an end to war, it’s time to pull the plug.

REFERENCES

1 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. Pg. 1.

2 Andrew Vayda, ‘Expansion and Warfare among swidden agriculturalists’ in Vayda (ed), Environment and Cultural Behavior. New York: Natural History Press, 1969. Pgs 202-220.

8 Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

4 Andrew Vayda, War in Ecological Perspective. New York: Plenum Press, ‘76.

5 Roy Rappaport, ‘Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people’ in Environment and Cultural Behavior. Pgs. 181-201.

6 Marvin Harris, Our Kind. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Pg. 297.

7 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State. New York: Zone, 1987. Marshall Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: political types in Melanesia and Polynesia’ in Culture in Practice. NY: Zone, 2000.

AEROSOL & ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPONS IN THE AGE OF NUCLEAR WAR by Amy Worthington

North America is now suffering its seventh year of conspicuous and dangerous aerosol and electromagnetic operations conducted by the U.S. government under the guise of national security. Concerned citizens watch in fear as military tankers discolor the skies with toxic chemicals that morph into synthetic clouds.

We continually witness bizarre meteorological occurrences as powerful electromagnetic devices manipulate both the jet stream and individual storm fronts to create artificial weather and climatic conditions. Black operations projects embedded within these aerosol missions are documented to sicken and disorient select populations with biological test agents and psychotronic mind/mood control technologies.

Part of what is happening in the atmosphere above us involves the Pentagon’s secret space weapons program, designed for strategic, operational and tactical levels of war. NASA missions will soon be transferred to Pentagon control.¹ The Air Force Space Command declares that, in order to monitor and shape world events, it must fight intense, decisive wars with great precision from space.² Air Force Secretary James G. Roche has stated: “Space capabilities are integrated with, and affect every link in the kill chain.”³

A glimpse into new death technologies under construction is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinch. His unsuccessful Space Preservation Act of 2001 was intended to ban space deployment of:⁴

• electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry

• high altitude ultra low frequency weapons

• plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons

• laser weapons

• strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons

• chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons

• chemtrails (this item was stricken from a later version, suggesting duress)

In their quest to remain top dog in the kill chain, the purveyors of perpetual war have deliberately dimmed earth’s life-giving sunlight,⁵ and reduced atmospheric visibility with lungclogging particulates and polymers.⁶ This ecological terrorism has severely compromised public health, according to thousands of testimonials. Years of mass appeals to legislators, media and military officials for information, and for cessation of catastrophic atmospheric degradation, have fallen on deaf bureaucratic ears. Public awareness of what befalls us remains as murky as our skies because those “in the know” are muzzled by national secrecy laws and Americans have no authority to challenge matters of national security. Left to gather clues, we know this much so far:

1. At least part of the aerosol project has been dubbed Operation Cloverleaf,⁷ probably due to its multifaceted operations, which include: weather modification, military communications, space weapons development, ozone and global warming research plus biological weaponry and detection testing.

2. Dumping tons of particulate matter from aircraft has geo-engineered our planetary atmosphere into a highly charged, electrically-conduc- tive plasma useful for military proj- ects.⁸ The air we breathe is laden with asbestos-sized synthetic fibers and toxic metals, including barium salts, aluminum, and reportedly, radioactive thorium.⁹

These materials act as electrolytes to enhance conductivity of military radar and radio waves.¹⁰ Poisonous on par with arsenic and a proven suppressant of the human immune system,¹¹ atmospheric barium weakens human muscles, including those of the heart.¹² Inhaled aluminum goes directly to the brain and medical specialists confirm that it causes oxidative stress within brain tissue, leading to formation of Alzheimer’s like neurofibrillary tangles.¹³ Radioactive thorium is known to cause leukemia and other cancers.¹⁴

3. Only a small percentage of the military’s atmospheric modification projects are visibly obvious. What we can’t see is equally dangerous. The ionosphere, the earth and its inhabitants are continually bombarded with high frequency microwaves used to manipulate the charged atmosphere for weather modification, information gathering and for tectonic (earthquake-producing) weaponry.¹⁵

The sociopaths who brazenly pervert skies, climate and weather for power and profit are the same madmen who have waged four limited nuclear wars since 1991

Independent chemtrail researcher Clifford Carnicom confirms that we are also continuously subjected to extremely low electromagnetic frequencies (ELF) pulsing at 4 hertz multiples, frequencies known to profoundly affect human biological and mental functioning.¹⁶

4. There is a well-documented biological component to continuously ongoing atmospheric studies in which nations and regions are furtively inoculated via specially designed delivery systems with combinations of viruses, bacteria, fungi, mycoplasma, desiccated blood cells and exotic biological markers so that testmasters can assess human, animal and plant response.¹⁷

5. The multi-organizational megalith perpetrating these bio-chem projects against humanity includes the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and its research arm DARPA, plus the Department of Energy (DOE) with its huge network of national labs and universities. Private defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies are heavily involved.¹⁸ Cooperating governments of other nations and probably some United Nations agencies are complicit, since the aerosol projects are global in scope.

Gross chemical and electromagnetic pollution is only part of the horrific realities we endure. The sociopaths who brazenly pervert skies, climate and weather for power and profit are the same madmen who have waged four limited nuclear wars since 1991. Radioactive weaponry, declared both illegal and immoral by the entire civilized world, has been used by the Pentagon in Desert Storm, the Balkans campaign and the on-going occupation-wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Few Americans understand the extent of carnage inflicted in their name across the planet.

By scientific definition, the missiles, tank penetrators and bunker busting bombs unleashed against Iraq and Afghanistan by United States and British forces in the so-called war on terror are nuclear weapons.¹⁹ Refuse from radioactive weaponry does not disperse, but remains in the atmosphere organotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic to all living flesh for 4.5 billion years.

Inhabitants of the Pentagon’s two newly “liberated” nations are now slowly dying of radiation and heavy metal poisoning. Victims of U.S. weaponry used in Afghanistan have a concentration of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their bodies never before seen in civilian populations.²⁰ Tons of depleted and non-depleted uranium contaminating their land, air, food and water guarantee their painful demise. Using data from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), nuclear scientist Leuren Moret calculates that the estimated 2,500+ tons of depleted uranium used against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 is sufficient to cause 25 million new cancers.²¹ Is it a coincidence that the population of Iraq, according to the CIA, is 25 million?

The quarter million U.S. and British fighting forces who have helped the Pentagon deliver this holocaust also face inevitable radiological death by slow burn. Rotated into atomic war zones since 2001, coalition troops have inhaled and ingested millions of tiny invisible ceramic uranium particles which emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation as they embed in lungs, kidneys, blood, lymph and bone.²² Radiation exposure to a single internalized U-238 (uranium) alpha particle is 50 times the allowable whole body dose for one year under international standards.²³

As U-238 decays into daughter isotopes, it becomes ever more radioactive, causing cell and organ destruction to escalate over time.²⁴ Uranium contamination leads to incapacitating, multi-organ system disorders identical to illnesses suffered by thousands of Gulf War I vets. Bodily fluids poisoned with uranium isotopes sicken spouses and visit upon offspring a genetic Armageddon.²⁵

Who knows what a disabled and prematurely dying military population will mean to future stability and safety of USA? Yet Senator Chuck Hagel (R- Neb.) now demands that America provide more fodder for its atomic battlefields by reinstating the military draft so that “all of our citizens.. .bear some responsibility and pay some price” in order to “understand the intensity of the challenges we face.”²⁶

Despite disingenuous denials that biological harm will result from atomic warfare,²⁷ the Pentagon knows full well the gruesome realities of uranium weaponry by virtue of its own voluminous studies spanning 60 years. Pentagon documents confirm that America’s war establishment knowingly exposes its own troops to dangerous levels of radiation.²⁸ The resulting illness of those now returning from the war zones is already making headlines.²⁹

Because our military-industrial overlords brazenly poison the very grunts who make their war games possible, we must logically conclude there is virtually nothing they would not secretly and sadistically do to the rest of us. Military officials lie as perniciously about chemtrail operations³⁰ as they do about effects of DU weaponry. If people were to consider the published science regarding chemtrails and DU, they would understand that we are all in mortal jeopardy.

Both the Pentagon’s aerosol operations and its limited nuclear wars are deeply interconnected. We can trace the beginnings of Operation Cloverleaf right to the Strangelove brain of Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and proponent of nuking inhabited coast lines

rearrange them for economic proj- ects.³¹ Before he died in 2003, Teller was director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where plans for nuclear, biological and directed energy weapons are crafted. In 1997, Teller publicly outlined his proposal to use aircraft to scatter in the stratosphere millions of tons of electrically-conductive metallic materials, ostensibly to reduce global warming.³²

Shortly after Teller’s presentation, the public began seeing frenetic chem- trailing. In 2000, CBS News admitted that scientists were “looking at drastic solutions for global warming, including manipulating the atmosphere on a massive scale.” CBS confirmed that the plan to load the air with tiny particles would “deflect enough sunlight to trigger global cooling.”³³

Teller estimated that commercial aircraft could be used to spew these par- tides at a cost of 33 cents a pound.³⁴ This gives credence to a report by an airline manager, forced by a compulsory non-disclosure agreement to remain anonymous, that commercial aircraft have been co-opted to assist the military in

some schools

cusses

showing a large orange-red

jet with the caption, “Jet engines running on richer fuel

would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen.” The logo on the plane says “Particle Air.”³⁷ The implications of this crucial information should not be understated. A program to make America’s millions of annual jet flights a source of specially designed particulate pollution is serious business.

invisible to the human eye. By comparison, a human hair is 60 to 100 microns in thickness. Scientists and the EPA report

that because PM 10 and sub-micron pollution particles bypass lung filters and enter the blood stream, they cause radical changes in the endocrine and nervous systems. ^3S They can trigger high blood pressure and cause heart attack within two hours of inhalation.³⁹ They cause the blood to become sticky, making it tougher for the heart to pump and increasing the risk of blood clots and vessel damage.⁴⁰ Now researchers in Taiwan document “a significant increase” in the number of stroke victims when PM10 pollutant levels rise.⁴¹ The American Lung Association confirms that we are breathing more toxic air than ever.⁴² No wonder nationwide asthma rates have been soaring in recent years.⁴³

Tiny synthetic filaments called polymers are part of the brew. In 1990, a NATO report detailed how highflying aircraft can modify the atmosphere by spraying polymers to absorb electromagnetic radiation.⁴⁴ U.S. patent number 6315213 describes how cross-linked aqueous polymers dispersed into a storm diminish rain.⁴⁵

Polymer chemist Dr. R. Michael Castle has studied atmospheric polymers for years. He has found that some of them contain bioactive materials, which can cause “serious skin lesions and diseases when absorbed into the skin.”⁴⁶ He has identified microscopic polymers comprised of genetically-engineered fungal forms mutated with viruses. He says that trillions of fusarium (fungus)/virus mutated spores, which secrete a powerful mico-toxin, are part of the air we breathe.⁴⁷ Allergies anyone?

We can safely bet that into our particle-enriched air, experimenters are also dumping nanoparticles, developed for a variety of military and industrial uses. These engineered carbon molecules, as small as one-thousandth the diameter of human hair, display bizarre chemical properties and are known to trigger organ dam- age.⁴⁸ A recent study at Southern Methodist University found that fish exposed to one type of nanoparticle suffered severe brain damage after only 48 hours.⁴⁹

The military’s aerosol operations have been climate altering to the extreme. Air traffic is a huge source of greenhouse pollution. Increasing that traffic exponentially in order to scatter tons of heat-trapping metallic particulates and heat-liberating barium salts have undoubtedly led to accelerated global warming. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, have reached a record high this year.⁵⁰ As carbon dioxide levels rise, oxygen levels decrease.

In 1996, Scientists for Global Responsibility compiled a report contending that dangerous geoengineering, as proposed by Teller and the Global Change Research Coordination Office, would be absolutely ineffective in mitigating global warming. The report noted that climate engineering research is funded by industry with a vested interest in continued high consumption of fossil fuels.⁵¹ The hair-brained scheme of particle engineering was contrived to ensure that industry polluters will never be forced to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. But because warming and pollution trends have worsened drastically since the aerosol projects began, we must suspect that the warming mitigation program is a hoax and that chemtrailing is really intended, among other things, to create a series of “hobgoblins.”

The establishment’s modus operandi for maintaining a fierce and lucrative hold upon the collective American mind has been defined precisely by satirist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) who wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

In The Report from Iron Mountain published in 1967, just as the Pentagon’s lucrative Vietnam War was being revved into high gear, establishment braintrusters confirmed that perpetual war is absolutely vital for controlling and manipulating the masses. The document even suggested a number of options for creating fictitious enemies, noting that perpetual war induces populations to give blind allegiance to political authori- ty.⁵²

during NATO operations in the Balkans, black clouds suddenly materialized out of blue skies, hailstones were the size of eggs, and surreal thunder and lightning terrified the people

Since the 1930s, when the Eastern Establishment, including the Bush family, used its New York banks and oil companies to secretly fund Hitler’s German Nazi party,⁵³ our controllers have employed FEAR, the concept of ENEMY and WAR to keep us in bondage. Chemtrailing is a manifestation of the Fourth Reich, an era of corporate fascism ushered in by a powerful military juggernaut, which manufactures enemies and unleashes fake terror attacks to scare us into voiceless submission.

Both Saddam Hussein and the al Queda networks have long been nourished with U.S. government and corporate funding and groomed by U.S. military and corporate advisors to play useful roles as “enemies.”⁵⁴ Former German Technology Minister Andreas von Bulow recently confirmed on U.S. radio that hijacked planes were able to fly around the eastern U.S. on 9/11 unimpeded by military interdiction because those attacks were part of a carefully- orchestrated “covert operation” designed to coerce America into perpetual conflict with the Muslim world.⁵⁵

Now, a “secret” Pentagon report has been conveniently leaked to the media. It contends that abrupt climate change is the most fearful hobgoblin yet.⁵⁶ Authored by change agents with ties to the CIA and the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the report contends that abrupt climate change will lead to a global catastrophe of monumental proportions, including nuclear war and natural disasters, as whole nations disappear beneath the encroaching sea and survivors fight for dwindling food, water and energy supplies.

Yet the Pentagon has been involved for decades in the drastic manipulation of weather, climate and atmospheric conditions. The U.S. used a chemical agent dubbed Olive Oil during Operation Popeye to induce heavy rains in Vietnam 40 years ago.⁵⁷ The Air Force document titled “Weather As a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” lists its weaponized agenda for creating abrupt climate change including: Storm creation and modification, fog and cloud creation, precipitation enhancement, precipitation denial, drought inducement and artificial creation of “space weather.” This document also states that the military’s radical weather modification agenda will “become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications.”⁵⁸

Weather weapons are now routinely used in war zones. A citizen reporting from Serbia noted that during NATO operations in the Balkans, black clouds suddenly materialized out of blue skies, hailstones were the size of eggs, and surreal thunder and lightening terrified the people. He reported that scientists found that the electromagnetic field over Serbia had been punctured, causing rain systems to circumvent the region.⁵⁹ In addition to manufactured drought, scientists also predict that Serbia will suffer 10,000 cancer deaths from DU weaponry used there.⁶⁰

According to University of Ottawa Professor Michael Chossudovsky, the military’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), operating in Alaska as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is a powerful tool for weather and climate modification.⁶¹ Operated jointly by the U.S. Navy and Air Force, HAARP antennas bombard and heat the ionosphere, causing electromagnetic frequencies to bounce back to earth, penetrating everything living and dead.⁶²

HAARP transmissions make holes in the ozone,⁶³ creating yet another hobgoblin. HAARP inventor Bernard Eastlund described in his original patent how antenna energy can interact with plumes of atmospheric particles, used as a lens or focusing device, to modify weather.⁶⁴ HAARP is capable of triggering floods, droughts and hurricanes, much to the chagrin of both the European Parliament and the Russian Duma.⁶⁵

HAARP also generates sweeping pulses through the ULF/ELF range.⁶⁶ In 2000, independent researchers monitored HAARP transmissions of 14 hertz. They found that when these signals were broadcast at high output levels, wind speeds topped 70 miles per hour. They watched as these same transmissions dispersed a huge weather front approaching the west coast from California to British Columbia.

Although precipitation had been originally forecast, the front was seen shredding apart on satellite photos and rain did not materialize.⁶⁷ The hobgoblin drought can be an enriching and empowering tool for certain corporate and governing entities.

HAARP is not only capable of destabilizing agricultural and ecological systems anywhere on the planet, but its effects can target select regions to affect human physical, mental and emotional responses during non- lethal warfare projects.⁶⁸ HAARP frequencies beamed at specific targets can generate catastrophic earth- quakes,⁶⁹ exactly like the quake last December which killed thousands of people in Iran, a nemesis nation according to the Bush administration.

The Pentagon’s warning about climate catastrophe is surely nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to prepare the masses for the bizarre atmospheric upheavals we can expect as the military continues to brutalize our planet and near space with its grotesque toys. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Dr. Eastlund and his ilk have developed plans for solar power satellites designed to modify the weather with electromagnetic beam output that dwarfs the present HAARP system.⁷⁰ As abrupt climate change is increasingly orchestrated, we will surely need additional fascist agencies, an ever-growing military budget and more poison-particle projects that just happen to ensure population reduction as a side benefit.

Despite visual evidence that every aspect of our physical environment is being manipulated and damaged for war games, some Americans cannot accept that dangerous covert operations are being conducted by a government they still believe to be a virtuous defender of freedom. Their stumbling block is a numbing belief that their own officials would never perpetrate dangerous experimentation on humanity since “they have families too.” History and the release of declassified government documents disprove such naivete.

Although “they” had families too, the U.S. government and its defense contractors exposed citizens of the northwest U.S. to huge and deliberate releases of radioactive iodine 131 from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where plutonium was produced for nuclear bombs.⁷¹ Those Cold War releases unleashed radiation illnesses upon thousands of downwinders, some of whom received up to 350 rads of radiation when a maximum safety dose is set at .025 rads annually.⁷² Between 1949 and 1952, radioactive pellets, dust and particles were tested on the hapless citizens of Utah and New Mexico.⁷³

By 1963, 1,200 nuclear weapons tests conducted at the Nevada test site had exposed every person in the U.S. to deadly radioactive fallout, causing millions of fetal deaths, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths and birth defects.⁷⁴ The U.S. government also conducted over 4,000 radiation experiments on individual human test subjects without their informed con- sent.⁷⁵ The delayed effects of decades of radiation exposure from weapons testing are today demonstrated by a U.S. population plagued with epidemic cancer and heart disease, neurological disorders, low fertility, chronic fatigue, obesity (thyroid involvement), immune system dysfunction and learning disabilities. Approximately half of all pregnancies in the U.S. result in prenatal or postnatal death or an otherwise less than healthy baby.⁷⁶ As military tankers spew white chemical plumes across America at a cost of $3,448 per hour per tanker,⁷⁷ we are reminded of Dr. Leonard Cole’s 1994 testimony before a Senate Committee regarding 45 years of open air testing during which military aircraft sprayed American cities with bacteria, fungus and carcinogenic chemicals.⁷⁸ Between 1962-1973, the U.S. Navy conducted hundreds of bio-chem tests known as Operation SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). SHAD projects like Autumn Gold and Copper Head exposed 10,000 navy personnel to aircraft spray laden with biological and chemical warfare agents, including sarin nerve gas.⁷⁹ The cocktails used in those genocidal “tests” are now linked to cancer, heart and lung problems suffered by surviving guinea pigs.

We are told that defense officials perpetrated these atrocities so that scientists could learn about how to “protect” Americans from attack. So why, in the late 80s, would our “protectors” fall all over themselves to supply Saddam Hussein’s war machine with 90 shipments of chemical and biological weaponry, including sarin, anthrax, botulism, brucella and West Nile Virus?⁸⁰

It will likely be years before Americans are told what is being tested upon them during our present chemtrail/space wars era. The Hanford downwinders did not learn until 1986 what had been unleashed upon them some 30 years earlier; SHAD victims filed suit in 2003 to learn the extent to which they were intentionally exposed to dangerous substances in the 60s.

To understand how our nation has arrived at this doomsday corruption, we must recall that immediately after WWII ended, the U.S. government initiated Operation Paperclip through which a large number of German Nazi scientists were imported to the United States. Once issued new identities, these death industry pros were employed in U.S. military laboratories to develop a dazzling array of secret weaponry projects.⁸¹

With congressional funding, the crowning achievement of this nexus was the creation of ghastly new bioweapons, including the AIDS virus⁸² and an incapacitating chronic fatigue agent engineered from mycoplasma and brucella.⁸³

The military is empowered to continue lethal experimentation by devious wording of Section 1520a Chapter 32 of U.S. Code Title 50. The law states that the Secretary of Defense may NOT conduct any chemical or biological test or experiment on civilian populations, unless such tests are for

THE MILITARY ABUSE OF ANIMALS

Chemical and biological warfare has been dubbed a ‘higher form of killing’. this is reflected in the military’s endless quest to ‘perfect’ the deadly nature of each compound through animal experimentation.

Killing and maiming is not enough, great importance is attached to the scientific nature of the weapon’s effect. Whether it is by burning, poisoning, suffocation, infection or attacking the nervous system, each method is meticulously ‘refined’ on sentient, unconsenting lab animals.

Napalm, Agent Orange, 245T have all been extensively tested on animals. So too will other weapons.

for example, rhesus monkeys and marmosets have been used at Porton Down in the UK to study the effects of the nerve gas Soman. Those receiving a high dose suffered violent convulsions and quickly collapsed. About 75% regained consciousness and experienced an incresed rate and depth of respiration. Some made attempts to crawl around the cage before eventually relapsing and dying one to two hours later.

Few published examples of military abuse exist. Everything is hidden under a ‘top secret’ label. Even the pathetic regulations applied in commerce don’t apply here. Sadistic or misguided freaks are free to act out medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial purposes or for research in general or for protection against weapons or for law enforcement purposes, including riot control. So DOD may not use us for guinea pigs, unless it is for any “good” reason under the sun!

It will likely be years before Americans are told what is being tested upon them during our present chemtrail/space wars era

The law states that human subjects must give informed consent. But a nasty loophole in Section 1515 of Chapter 32 allows informed consent to be suspended by executive order during a period of national emergency, a situation under which this nation perpetually labors by deliberate hobgoblin design.

Few American test rats realize that the Pentagon’s boys in Congress have now:

• appropriated millions of dollars for the manufacture and testing of new “mini nukes” and bunker buster bombs.⁸⁴

• authorized the DOE to resume nuclear testing in Nevada.⁸⁵

• exempted DOD and DOE from landmark environmental laws in the development of these new weapons.⁸⁶

America’s 70,000 nuclear weapons manufactured since 1945 are not sufficient! As DOE gears up to develop and test fourth-generation nukes, numerous reports continue to surface about the agency’s sordid corruption and mismanagement. DOE’s habitual cover-up of site contamination and its devious efforts to downplay serious illnesses suffered by many of its nuclear workers are among recent scandals.⁸⁷ whatever their sick imaginations can conceive of.

Each year in military establishments across the world, animals are shot, blasted, burnt and subjected to other forms of injury. All of this takes place against a backdrop of a violent world in which all of these injuries are being inflicted upon humans on a daily basis.

In Britain, information is scarce, but it is known that sheep, pigs, rabbits and monkeys have been wounded at Porton Down. One published experiment detailed how 20 anaesthetised rhesus monkeys were shot through the head with a 3.2 mm steel ball. They survived between 2 and 169 minutes. In Germany 20 dogs were shot in the hind leg from 50metres, with the objective of fracturing the upper thigh, shattering the bone column and destroying the hollow marrow bone. Nine dogs

When new “low yield” nuclear weapons (defined as being smaller than 5 kilotons) are tested in Nevada, downwinders might like to know that a mini .5 kiloton nuclear warhead would have to burrow 150 feet to eliminate atmospheric fallout.

No weapon yet developed can penetrate more than 40 feet into the earth. A tested nuclear warhead that burrows to only 40 feet will throw a million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the atmosphere.⁸⁸

The Pentagon’s new nuke era is in the capable hands of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has so ably presided over the pre-emptive nuclear incineration of Middle Eastern Muslims. Rumsfeld has never adequately explained why his Department was unable to defend the Pentagon building despite a full hour’s notice that hijacked planes were in the air.

Should Rumsfeld be replaced due to the Pentagon’s Iraqi torture scandal, we are assured that his Bush-appointed successor will share his have- nuke-will-travel ideology.

Working closely with Rumsfeld is a coven of pro-nukers, including his advisor Keith Payne, a vocal advocate of pre-emptive nuclear war. Payne has written that an “intelligent” nuclear offensive launched by the U.S. would result in only 20 million U.S. casualties, “a level compatible with national survival and recov- ery.”⁸⁹

Now that we have tied together the historical and political realities for which we mindlessly wave our flags, died within 48 hours and the remainder were operated on and then treated for several weeks before being killed.

In the US stray animals can be bought and abused by the military. In 1983 public pressure forced them to stop using cats and dogs, but this only transferred the agonies to other species. In that same year more than 400,000 animals were massacred by the US military.

This immoral abuse of animal life has only one purpose—the development of even more deadly weapons and we still hope that sufficient numbers of American lab rats will miraculously awaken from their collective stupor and take stock of our appalling situation. After all, rodents have a notoriously short life span and are always killed when no longer useful to those conducting research. The irony of this horror story is that we rats are being plundered to finance our own demise. Our national debt of 7.2 trillion grows by $1.8 billion a day.⁹⁰

The Pentagon cannot account for $2.3 trillion of its shadowy transac- tions.⁹¹ The radioactive operations in Iraq are costing $3.7 billion a month, those in Afghanistan $900 million a month.⁹² No one knows how many $billions are being flushed into Operation Cloverleaf and other hobgoblin projects. The U.S. spends $11,000 per second on weapons, according to calculations of celebrated author William Thomas.⁹³

So, while we await the great awakening, have a wonderful, barium-dried summer under a synthetic tarpaulin of aluminum-white, particle-laden, electrically-charged aviation scum that passes for sky. Endure well your respiratory and ocular difficulties while staring at huge oily sun rings and smeary sundogs, the patent signature of chemical assault. Don’t forget to salute and click your heels when you see tanker formations patriotically saturating the atmosphere with such a dense, micro-particulate brew that they cast black shadows alongside or ahead of themselves.

As you witness the noxious drama in the skies, remember, it’s all just part of the “kill chain.”

© Copyright belongs to http://www.global-research.ca][www.global- research.ca 2004. For fair use only. The footnotes took up nearly 2 more pages and were unfortunately too long to include here. You can get them from the website mentioned above, or http://www.greenanarchist.org][www.greenanarchist.org, or by sending an S.A.E to GA.

new methods of waging war. There will be no peace until we end our abuse of animals.

Ending warfare experiments would be a good place to start.

The above article was cobbled together mainly from an excellent pamphlet published in 1987 by the British Union for the Ablition of Vivisection and written by Chris Fisher. It can probably still be got from Turnaround Distribution, or BUAV.

ISBN 1 870356 00 4

FASLANE PEACE CAMP: 22 YEARS OF RESISTANCE

An Interview with a camper

FASLANE PEACE CAMP is situated 30 miles North of Glasgow, in West Central Scotland. Since 1982, peace campers have taken action against the Trident nuclear weapons system based on the nearby Gareloch.

Faslane has been UK’s longest-running peace camp. Can you tell us a little about how and why it started, and a quick history of the camp since?

How camp started has nowadays descended into myth. The most popular story goes as follows: There had been temporary camps happening at Faslane for a while. On 12th June 1982, another, longer temporary camp was supposed to start. It was meant to be closer to the base’s South Gate, but on the way a caravan broke its axle and couldn’t be moved. Camp was set up around that van. People decided they wanted to carry on the site, and 22 years later the “temporary” peace camp is still here! At first, the local council was West Dumbartonshire, which had an antinuclear policy. They supported camp and rented us the land for a pound a month. Then, 7 years ago, the council boundaries changed.

The newly formed Argyll and Bute Council was staunchly anti- peace camp, and took out an eviction order against us. This actually worked in our favour - from having 2 burnt our residents, site became full of people determined to build defences and fight the eviction. Numbers hadn’t been so high since the 1980s heyday of the anti-nuclear movement. Nowadays the council still want to evict us, but can’t afford to politically or financially!

Can you fill us in on the background to Trident, UK’s so-called ‘independent deterrent’, and the direct action campaign the camp has led against it?

There are four Vanguard class subs at Faslane, which fire Trident nuclear missiles and are nuclear-powered.

They are backed up by a supporting fleet of nuclear powered “Hunter Killer” subs which fire conventional Cruise missiles, as well as minesweepers, minelayers, frigates, tugs etc.

Trident was planned in 1982 and the first Vanguard sub arrived at Faslane in the early 90s. Trident a first-strike system, replaced Cruise, a second- strike system, so the introduction of Trident clearly indicated that the UK was moving from a defensive to an offensive nuclear policy. The UK does not have complete control of the Trident system - it’s US technology and the UK depends heavily on the goodwill of the US to keep Trident running.

There are 16 missiles on each Trident sub, and each missile holds 64 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It’s worth pointing out that ALL the UK’s nuclear weapons are based at Faslane.

As anarchists we wouldn’t say we “led” the direct action campaign against Trident. We work with other likeminded groups and are always looking for new folk to do actions with. Our actions take in anything that can put a spanner in the war machine - blockades, fence cutting, smashing expensive equipment, office occupations, phone blockades, stopping nuclear warhead convoys and so on. We do a mixture of pixie (sabotage) actions and Ploughshares- style accountable disarmament. In general tho, peace campers see no reason to make ourselves accountable to the state.

How does the camp’s anti-Trident campaign link to other areas of contestation, for example re. the environment or human liberation? Is there some sort of concensus what it comes to a critique of militarism and if so, what is it? If not, what are the different viewpoints and principle debates?

Nuclear weapons cause massive ecological destruction and human misery even if they are never fired. For example, Uranium mining (carried out by Rio Tinto Zinc among others) is notorious for causing the displacement of tribal peoples. It also poisons ecosystems and people near the mine. At the other end of the process, decommissioned nuclear reactors from old subs are already causing problems here in Scotland. The Ministry of “Defence” is trying to find a community which doesn’t mind having radioactive waste dumped on it for the next few thousand years. Strangely, this is proving difficult.

Capitalism depends on the military for its very survival. Not only do arms companies rake in the profits, the whole “free” trade system is supported by militarism and ultimately by nuclear weapons. For this reason, all the residents at camp at the moment are anti-military, anti-capitalist, and anarchist. Some of us are also against industry and civilization. We do discuss the connections between war, industry and civilization, but have never agreed on everything so far! Anyone who is a positive force in anti-nuclear work, and who respects our community, is welcome at camp tho - you don’t have to share the political views of the current residents.

We tie in our anti-militarist stance to other struggles by encouraging and taking part in anarchist organising and ecological direct action throughout Scotland and beyond. Peace campers have been involved in direct action against GM food in Scotland, for example.

Many in the 1980s peace movement saw the peace camps as utopian experiments as much as loci of protest, particularly at Greenham, the womens’ camp against US nuclear Cruise missiles based in the Home Counties. Is there anything like that in Faslane’s ethos now and if so, what can you tell us about it?

At camp we try to live out an alternative to the society which created Trident. We believe that state society is nothing but the means of preparing for war, so for this reason we live along anarchist principles. Important decisions are made by consensus at camp meetings.

There is a strong emphasis on communal living and communal responsibility. We try to have a (vegan) group meal every day, and do big tasks as a group. We also help each other with personal jobs (babysitting, living space maintenance, legal/prison support) if need be. Camp has a mild work ethic and we generally find that working together helps build our sense of community. We also socialise together and consider each other as friends.

Although still very dependent on civilization, we do try to live more sustainably and closer to nature than mainstream society. We have a compost toilet, get heat from burning fallen wood, and use only a small amount of electricity from renewable sources.

Hopefully camp is a welcoming place for all sorts of people. Any sort of discrimination or intimidation is not tolerated. The newest addition to site is an extended wheelchair path. Wheelchair users and older people have lived here in the past, so don’t be put off if you’re not 18-30 and able bodied!

We understand that the Left-leaning Scottish National Party (SNP) were once very sympathetic to Faslane as part of their campaign against the militarisation of Scotland. How prominently do Scottish issues feature in camp discussions?

The destruction caused by nuclear weapons knows no borders, and is carried out in the name of global capitalist domination. Therefore we try to see our actions from a global perspective. That said, we do discuss Scottish issues a lot.

There is a definite nationalistic element to the Scottish anti-nuclear movement, because all the UK’s nuclear weapons are based in Scotland. Many Scottish anarchists also started out as Scottish nationalists, but became disillusioned with party politics and the inevitable rightwing tendencies of nationalism. (The SNP has become more and more conservative in many ways, although it is not a racist party). While it would be a definite victory to get rid of nuclear weapons from Scotland even by party political means, we don’t think it’s likely to happen that way.

A major concern for us is the lack of direct action in Scotland. We think this is due to two factors. Firstly, the left is much stronger here than in the rest of the UK. Both the Scottish Socialists (SSP) and the Scottish “Greens” (SGP) have considerable representation in the devolved parliament.

Prominent members of these parties have spoken in favour of direct action, but the party hierarchies all to often try to quash any real dissent (for example, trying to control civil disobedience at the begining of the Iraq war).

This isn’t really surprising as these people hope to form the government one day, and are scared of a population truly thinking and acting for itself! Secondly, there is a lack of autonomous spaces in Scotland, exacerbated by the anti-squatting laws here. Squatting has been illegal since the Highland Clearances of the 19th Century.

Highland peasants were cleared from their land to make way for sheep farming, and the law prevented them

returning to abandoned homesteads. Cheers!

Things are improving tho - Faslane and Bilston Woods protest sites are doing well, there has been a resurgence of rented social centres this year, more housing co-ops are planned and there’s talk of starting a squatting movement in Scotland.

Is there anything practical readers can do help the camp and its campaigns?

Most of all we need people to come to camp, whether you can stay for a day or want to live here full time. There are loads of things you can do to help on site, from actions to daily tasks to baking vegan cake!

If you can’t make it here, camp also need money to keep running and fund actions. Please make cheques payable to Faslane Peace Camp.

And don’t forget, the Trident system stretches across Britain. People in England and Wales wanting to do solidarity actions will probably find a base near them that is involved with

Trident in some way.

Peace camp contact details: Faslane Peace Camp, 81D Shandon, Helensburgh, Argyll, G84 8NT, SCOTLAND. http://www.faslanepeace-camp.org.uk][www.faslanepeace- camp.org.uk

mailto:faslanepeacecamp@hotmail.com][faslanepeacecamp@hotmail.com

Telephone 01436 820 901

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Yes - peace camper Karen Fallon is currently awaiting trial in Ireland for disarming a US warplane in the run up to the Iraq war. Please send her letters of support and donations, care of Roz, Talamh Housing Co-op, Birkhill House, Coalburn, Lanarkshire, SCOTLAND. More info on Karen at http://www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk/karen][www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk/karen .html

We produce our own zine, the Faslane Focus, about twice a year. Suggested donation for a year’s subscription is 3 pounds, more is great and less is ok if you’re genuinely skint but interested. Get in touch with your address if you’d like a copy.

Modern Primitives

A BAND OF BROTHERS?

Military manipulation of primal instincts

Be all you can be, Who Dares Wins... the army rhetoric is as bad as any advertising jingle. No-one could possibly take it seriously when you see what the brave ‘heros’ actually get up to. But soldiers are not exactly monsters either. Many are looking for somewhere to belong, some group to be part of. More than any loyalty to Queen or state is this strong group desire—the ‘band of brothers’ tribal impulse to belong to a group.

Most soldiers don’t swallow the patriotic bullshit any more than your average zombie—some do even less because they’ve seen the bloody workings of the state in action. Instead they act out of misplaced loyalty to their soldier comrades, to what they feel is their tribe.

In Mogadishu, Somalia in 1992, US special forces were shot down and stranded in the middle of a very hostile native force. Some of the men managed to escape back to base, most had been shot and injured, some quite badly. When they got back to base they were told they had to go back in again and rescue some of the men who’d become stranded.

While a loyalty to the American state is seen among these men, no amount of loyalty to an abstract concept is going to make them go back into such a nightmarish situation. A different kind of loyalty is at work here. A loyalty to their fallen soldier comrades, their drinking buddies and often best friends.

It is this loyalty, this sense of belonging to a group which makes them overcome their fear and go back. It’s not a rational feeling, but one which comes from their gut—a primal feeling which is far stronger than anything the State could have hoped for.[155]

The State of course encourages this impulse. It’s a feature of military training to play on it. A soldier from a special unit in the second world war describes his experiences:

“The three of us, Jake, Joe and I, became. an entity. There were many entities in our close-knit organizations. Groups of threes and fours, usually from the same squads or sections, core elements within the families that were the same units, were readily recognised as entities.This sharing. evolved never to be relinquished, never to be repeated. Often three such entities would make up a squad, with incredible results in combat. They would literally insist on going hungry for one another, freezing for one another, dying for one another.”[156]

Andy McNabb, a SAS man sent undercover to Iraq was captured and tortured for days.

“Hour after hour, day after day, beating after beating, taking my turn with the other two, lying curled up, cold and in pain, waiting for the terrifying noise of the door being kicked open.I knew one thing. I knew the other two weren’t giving up because otherwise my interrogations would have stopped. I kept saying to myself, it’s not going to be me, I’m not going to let them down, I’m not going to be the one to put the others in the shit.”[157]

So the army nurtures this instinct because it knows that it will keep the men together far better than any other brainwashing trick.

Another primal instinct played upon by the military is the young male’s desire to prove himself in the company of other men. Although women are tolerated as long as they act like men, the average soldier would prefer them to keep out. The only woman I ever met who was in the army eventually left because she was raped by fellow soldiers.

So I think it’s fair to say that soldiers prefer a male environment and that in itself is not unnatural. Of course how they go about it is—but the desire to put himself through physical and mental tests in an exclusively male environment is something which most men have done in many different cultures.

The Australian aborigines have many different approaches to this. They believe that women don’t need to do all this silly stuff because women are of the earth already, but men are a different matter! They need to get some sense, often the very hard way.

Most of the ‘walkabouts’ common to native people are usually exclusively for men. They spend many weeks on their own trying to learn lessons which maybe the women instinctively know.

Robert Lawlor in “Voices of the First Day—Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime” writes that “female initiation rites are always related to biological changes such as menstruation, defloration, preganancy and childbirth. women mark these stages by gathering together and performing certain rituals and songs.”[158] Whereas men have elaborate, very serious rituals usually involving a lot of pain and hardship.

The military takes this masculine instinct and uses it for its own benefit. “Be all you can be!” Be a man, prove yourself, and at the same time supply us with limitless fodder for our nasty endeavours. Everybody hates the soldiers. But they’re no worse than a bank clerk or a supermarket attendant or a housewife.

The military cliche of regimented blind obedience is just as present in the hordes rushing to work every morning. The mindless workers waiting for their orders.

“Suits are the Descendants of military uniforms, unfold the lapels and turn up the collar and it resembles a high-collared military tunic.”[159]

Aren’t we all manipulated into roles which destroy ourselves and our home, the earth? There’s no role within civilisation which is free from manipulation and perversion, there’s no-one who is free to follow these instincts in a natural way. Instead of demonising soldiers, it’s better to look at how we all allow ourselves to be manipulated and our energy channelled into keeping civilisation alive.

Of course, there’s no reason to romaticise them either. The current spate of special forces books (Tom Clancy, etc.) are cashing in on the average zombie’s fascination with those people who have some semblance of hunter-gatherer skills. From a bored housewife or harried office worker’s point of view, these skills must seem very impressive. Living vicariously through these superhumans’ exploits is about the nearest these repressed, dull couch potatoes ever get to ‘wildness’.

The skills the soldier learns are closer to what a hunter gatherer learns than any other profession. Tracking, survival shelters, finding food, etc. But they learn them in a spiritless way, a way which is utterly different from primitive people. This lack of spirit is crucial. It prevents the soldier from entering into any kind of meaningful relationship with himself and surroundings and despite his longing for a real tribe to belong to, it destroys any hope of attaining a community of kin. The soul-less knowledge leads to misery and frustration, death and destruction, with only civilisation (that soul-less monster) benefiting.

By not being able to immerse themselves in nature the soldier cannot learn what nature can teach. For instance, in Tom Brown’s “The Science and Art of Tracking” Stalking Wolf describes how in his tribe, by the time a child is five they can track a mouse across solid rock.

“By the age of six they could follow ants across the same rock. Yet this only qualified them to be considered common trackers.”[160]

The master trackers, the Scouts, could track across solid rock with ease and identified well over five thousand pressure releases (each feature inside a track).

“They moved as the shadows, mastering camouflage and stalking to a point of invisibility. They could get right into the middle of an enemy encampment without being observed. They could read the symphony of movement and sound around them and know what was going on many miles away. Most of all they could glance at a track and read into the maker’s very soul.”[161]

Compared to this don’t the special forces skills rapidly become less impressive? But to those who’s biggest dilemna of the day is what to have for lunch it’s not hard to see why the bluster seems good. If only they could see beyond the modern primitives cartoon version and see the far more impressive feats of huntergatherers.

Counterculture?

Books

STAKEKNIFE - BRITAIN’S SECRET AGENTS IN IRELAND BY MARTIN INGRAM AND GREG HARKIN, £8.99, O’BRIEN PRESS, 20 VICTORIA ROAD, DUBLIN 6, IRELAND. 2004.

OVER the decades the British media has worked hard to present the role of the British army in Northern Ireland as a ‘peacekeeping’ one.

Our forces are depicted as essentially neutral, caught between two insane, warring sectarian factions.

If the military operated any agents within paramilitary groups, it would go without saying that their task would be to tip off the authorities to possible atrocities, thus saving lives and salvaging the ‘peace process’ to which the British state is so publicly committed.

Of course, a few cracks have from time to time appeared in this rosy facade and the public are gradually getting an idea of the murky reality beneath.

Stakeknife is a very useful addition to the literature exposing this crucial area of the secret state’s operations.

Investigative reporter Harkin has teamed up with Ingram, a disillusioned former British army intelligence officer, who ‘handled’ British agents in the paramilitary organisations and has been blowing the whistle on what really goes on.

The main focus is on Freddie Scappaticci, known as ‘Stakeknife’. He was deputy head of the IRA’s ‘Nutting Squad’ a kind of internal Gestapo dedicated to rooting out and punishing (usually by torture and death) suspected informers or infiltrators.

Unfortunately for the IRA, he was also an agent of the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU). While on some occasions Scappaticci’s inside information did manage to save the odd life, this certainly was not the main purpose of his role.

The book details how many sound and loyal IRA operatives were usefully taken out by this British plant in the heart of their movement, having been wrongly accused of treachery.

This also had the bonus effect of causing revulsion among the dead militants’ friends and family, potentially leading to more republicans coming forward and offering to spy on the IRA.

And if the killing of IRA men or women does not strike you as morally reprehensible, Scappaticci was also not adverse to torturing and even killing fellow British state agents in the IRA, in order to maintain his credibility and cover.

The authors stress the enormous implications for the IRA of Scappaticci’s exposed double role. “Yes, they are penetrated, but that should come as no surprise. It is the depth of penetration that has caused the high level of concern.

“The perception which was always prevalent within the movement was that if you got your hands dirty—ie, hands-on killing—you were clean. This was the single most damaging assumption the movement made in the present campaign.

“This assumption was played upon by the security forces. I suppose the belief was that even the Brits wouldn’t allow people to get away with murder, especially multiple murders. How wrong can one be?”

While Scappaticci was sticking his stakeknife into the republican movement from the inside, others were doing similar work from within the loyalist ranks.

The authors home in on one Brian Nelson, a notorious long-term British agent within the UDA. His role was very different to that of Scappaticci, though.

Rather than murder members of the group he had infiltrated, his job was to pass them information enabling them to kill republican enemies of the British state.

Information and photographs relating to the victims—who included ‘nuisance’ non-paramilitaries such as lawyers—fell into the hands of the loyalist gangs and security mysteriously evaporated just long enough for the murders to be carried out. As the authors comment:

“The thinking of the FRU at that time was not dissimilar to that of recent regimes in Colombia, where right-wing paramilitary death squads were armed and run by the State... The FRU was using loyalist paramilitaries as an extension of the British Army.”

The authors retain throughout a sense of the human cost of all these parapolitical games, listing and describing many of those who fell victim to the murderous double-dealing of British state operatives on both ‘sides’ of the conflict. They add:

“Little wonder then that the clear-up rate in bringing killers before the courts was so appallingly bad over the past thirty years. So many of those killers, both loyalist and republican, were also working for the security forces.”

They rightly scoff at the hypocrisy of British politicians’ pious condemnations of killings which were in fact carried out by their own employees. And they comment:

“The final chapter on those who died during the Troubles has yet to be written. When it is, perhaps one question in the conclusion will be this: who really ran the Troubles?”

With the question marks mounting over the true origins and purpose of certain other notable ‘terrorist’ acts used to justify increased state control and militarisation, this issue could hardly be more poignant.

Are we now reaching the end of an era when capitalist states could govern by laying claim to the moral high- ground and thus command the implicit support of the majority of the public?

Are they aware that the lid is lifting rapidly off their cauldron of lies and mind games? Is the vast array of repressive legislation and surveillance hardware currently being developed coming in readiness for what the authorities know will be a ‘gloves-off’ assault on dissident threats to their power?

If so, then potential future freedom fighters ought to make note of another lesson to be learned from the Stakeknife affair.

The IRA’s security wing was in effect turned into a weapon of the British state by means of infiltration.

If it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone.

Read the blurb somewhere on these pages again—this is exactly why autonomous cell structures are the only safe approach!

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP BY GERMAINE GREER, PROFILE BOOKS 2004 €12

I heard Germaine Greer on the radio a few weeks ago talking about her new book, and it sounded great. She was talking about the chronic malaise of white Australian society, and reccommending a total change towards a hunter-gatherer existence, and that all Australians should be learning from the aboriginal tribespeople how to live on the land. Unfortunately—after getting my mum to buy me the book—I was quite dissapointed. While she does reccommend adopting “aboriginality” for everyone living in Australia, it seems to be without considering the inevitible technological collapse that would follow everyone “going native”, and the serious fallout in the short term. By ignoring it, it plays into the hands of the cynics (nine of whom line up at the end of the book to scorn the essay), as there is obviously no way of transforming civilised mass society into a continent of new-aborig- inies, without big painful changes.

The essay discusses early colonists, and how they failed time and time again in their attempts to submit the bush to agriculture, and to submit the natives to their way of life.

“..their delusion was their utter conviction of their own mental and moral superiority and their god-given right to civilize and subjugate all other groups in the Great South Land. The settlers toiled like madmen to remove the scrub, bush, and trees that stood in the way of cultivation.”

Interestingly, Greer says that aborig- inies always welcomed the ‘settlers’ with tolerance and an open hand, and tried to help them in whatever ways they could. Presumably trying to share their country with the strangers, even after it became clear that the strangers were brutal and ignorant. She contends that even now, aboriginal people would be willing to share their knowledge with the invaders if they would only ask. Thats as may be. I don’t know any australian abo- riginies, and don’t really even know any immigrant australians. But I do know that however many million people can’t all turn to hunting and gathering overnight (and survive) and Greer neglects to mention that at all. She could have put a valid case forward for an urgent population reduction, and an end to mass production, industrialism and earth destruction. Or considered the outcome of a more immediate change to hunting and gathering and faced the probability of large scale loss of human life, but instead the essay just calls for an adoption (“admittance”) of every Australians aboriginality, and pretty much leaves it at that. I would have liked her to follow through on the idea, and as a “renowned writer academic and broadcaster” she would have had a lot of people listening.

It seems that Greers vision of an aboriginal nation (the books subheading is “the shortest way to nationhood”) is not one of a nation of free individuals and bands of self-sufficient people getting on with life like they did up until a coupla hundred years ago, but rather it’s an attempt to incorporate some general currents common to aboriginal societies, into a socialist style state. That may be more appealing than the curent situation over there, but it totally loses the point she seemed close to grasping. While I’d say she has genuine intentions, and is publishing some very accurate analysis of the colonizers psycho(path)logy, she just seems trapped inside a western perspective, but still often hitting the nail on the head.

“My white countrymen appear to me afflicted by a kind of emotional paralysis, a pathalogical indifferance.. Australians have access to adequate and reliable information about the threat represented by their mismanaged environment but they remain unable to give a damn.”

I can’t decide whether this essay does more harm than good. On the one hand it does make the point that the european (and presumably elsewhere) invaders have brought ecological disaster with them to Australia. That they have nearly driven the original human culture to extinction, and that they have everything to learn from the aboriginies.

“The country I love has been crazily devestated by whitefellas who seem unable to give a damn, and who even now insist on continuing in their madness, knocking down its mountains, grinding up its trees, diverting its watercourses, building high- rises on its flood plains, creating an endless nightmare of suburbia from which our kids try to escape by sticking needles in their arms.”

The essay also calls for the learning of hunter-gatherer skills, and defence of hunter-gatherers around the world too. On the other hand there is no look at worldwide colonization and the spread of civilization as neccesar- ily barbaric. Greer imagines an Australian Aboriginal State which would maintain trade (?) with other continents. She calls for adoption of hunting/gathering as a way of life but dismisses the requirement to leave their houses and cities (?). She even unfortunately makes reference to the Native American situation, as being somehow something for Australia to aspire to (??)

However I’d like to think that Greer does have a genuine desire to see change in Australia, even if she may not have looked too deeply into our global sickness. It is possible that she simply has not considered life outside civilization (like most people) and is writing as well as she can from her perspective of an educated and thoroughly civilized person. Maybe the next book will explore these themes further, with a bit more hard truth. I’d say it’s worth a read anyway, and there are a lot more good bits than bad. Her essay ends :

“..Australia doesn’t owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping it’s guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification,

dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if.”

STONEHENGE: CELEBRATION AND SUBVERSION BY ANDY WORTHINGTON. £14.95 FROM HEART OF ALBION PRESS, 2 CROSS HILL CLOSE, WYMES- WOLD, LOUGHBOROUGH LE12 6UJ.

Our review copy was misbound, pp.93-188 running backwards, and we hope all the other copies weren’t too as Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion is an excellent first book from Andy Worthington. The author is a veteran of the last days of the 1980s Stonehenge festivals himself, but no space cadet. His research into the history (if little pre-history) of the monument is impressive and illuminating in its rigour, all claims on the monument—mythic, mystical or archaeological—are treated with a good-humoured if sceptical neutrality, and Worthington has had excellent access to most of the current key players in the Stonehenge access debate, largely letting them speak for themselves so we as readers can decide which are the bullshitters (and they are hardly unheard of in this milieu.).

Of course, you get all the well-trodden Stukeley and Aubrey material (with incidental reference to bizarre claims the poet William Blake was a practising druid), but what was most fascinating to me as a fellow old Stonehenge hand were accounts of pre-1970s festivals at the Stones. It seems the Druids always felt themselves exclusive and always got due stick from revellers that came for the beer and music (1920s ‘sound systems’ being gramophones.). Similarly, the mid-1980s exclusion zone was hardly the first and all met similar defiance, if not the same brutal enforcement.

If history is necessary transmission of memory from one generation to the next, Worthington has done the current generation of Solstice-celebra- tors a great service, documenting the police excesses of the Thatcher era and underlining that this is still unfinished business, not one cop currently held to account for the brutalities of 1985-6. It’s also interesting how strongly the move to end the festival was driven by English Heritage’s ‘old school’ archaeologists and their view that the festival-goers mythic take on Stonehenge was an affront to their profession and their interpretations of the ‘Truth’ of the monument. In this, they reminded me of the blinkered ‘quack busting’ doctors that rigorously evade scientific investigation of medical phenomena they arbitrarily deem ‘unscientific’.

The re-opening of Stonehenge appears multifaceted. On one hand, the old Stonehenge Campaign hands were joined by a new generation of activists invigorated by the anti-roads milieu (some readers will be new to this, never mind the 1970s free festival movement...) prepared to systematically defy the exclusion zone, culminating in the ubiquitous Dr. Margaret Jones’ challenge that voided it of legal meaning.

On the other hand, the old scientistic generation of archaeologists administering the Henge were replaced by a new generation that took ‘Earth Mysteries’ type stuff a tad more seriously and more often than not had attended the 1980s festivals themselves. Post-processionist archaeologists like Barbara Bender even linked up with Stonehenge campaigners with a joint ‘Stonehenge Belongs To You and Me’ exhibition and defied the exclusion zone. Anyway, they were prepared to let the festval-goers in provided the consequent gathering wasn'’ actually called a festival (“using the F-word”).

Aside from explicitly reinstating the festival, the biggest current issue is the cut and fill tunnel likely to be imposed on the landscape. Again, we find elitist druid orders cheerleading this and the more reflective realising this will be both archaeologically destructive (bulldozers and pristine straitigraphy hardly mix!) and restrict access still futher. Andy Worthington has given the historical context to understand current emphases and alliances, a valuable service in itself.

THE DIOXIN WAR BY ROBERT ALLEN. £12.99 FROM PLUTO PRESS, 345 ARCHWAY ROAD, LONDON N6 5AA.

The struggle against dioxin is the prequel to that against GM, almost seminal in creating the modern Green movement, albeit surprisingly forgotten. Karen Carson’s Silent Spring was as much about dioxin-based herbicides as direct pesticide impacts on wildlife.

Then was not now though. Then big chemical corporations like Monsanto and Dow (dioxin’s principle manufacturers) could do what the fuck they liked, with absolutely no restraint or regulation. They could tip as much crap in the river as they liked and if it poisoned whole communities, then that was “scientifically unproven”. Exaggeration? The Dioxin Wars documents the notorious Times Beach incident at a chapter’s length, where an illiterate scrap dealer type who later pleaded ignorance spread dioxin-contaminated oil salvaged from electrical equipment across horse paddocks across the entire county, causing untold equine and human mortality. This incident was key to the EPA’s formation, so Monsanto just got up a bunch of ‘scientific experts’ to automatically naysay any evidence this was a problem (c.f. US industry nonsense about the so-called ‘myth’ of global warming now) and when the junk science angle wasn’t playing, they just sent their scientists into the EPA as ‘advisory experts’ and bought as many local officials as they could. There is still no justice in Times Beach county now, twenty years later, and so the citizenry are now getting behind Earth First! as the only option still open to them.

But a rural county in backwoods America is surely mere bagatelle compared to weaponised dioxins in the form of Agent Orange sprayed over a quarter of Vietnam by Operation Ranch Hand. The literally hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese born subsequently with horrendous birth defects were casually dismissed as “Communist propaganda” and when the war came home and it was American kids and their Nam vet fathers dying, they too were a threat to corporate profit dismissed for

THE DIOXIN WAF?

decades. What sort of society is it that thinks it can fuck over its own military—the last line of defence against egalitarian social relations—and still expect to have survive into the longterm? This game, too, is not over. Two decades after Seveso (where even the Pope recognised dioxins cause such terrible birth defects that he approved abortion as an alternative), there’s still been no admission of liability on Monsanto’s part, though their investment in GM ‘diversification’ shows how their position is becoming untenable.

With the power to just cut off funding (directly or indirectly) to hostile research (as happened to Alistair Hay at Leeds or Arpad Puztai re. GM at the Rowett Institute), the chemical industry is incredibly arrogant in imposing its own convenient version of ‘scientific Truth’. When cows started dying under the cloud of Merck’s incinerator in Tipperary, the executives just blamed the wogs’ “bad husbandry” rather than admit they’d poisoned them - and the farmers themselves too, of course. Ireland was just another 3rd World country they could dump on as they pleased. Like the tobacco industry, it’s the old story of ‘deny, deny, deny’ - and we’ll hear more of the same over GM in a few years too. Actually, we’re hearing it already now.

This is a necessary, timely book, but I want to say a few words about the author. He’s a column editor for the Establishment’s paper of record, the London Times, but faced with such abuses, even he can’t help himself mentioning “capitalism” disparagingly and talking of “the dark side of science” and mixed blessings of Progress. By his account, dioxins suffuse our society to such a great extent that they, in themselves, account for the cancer boom of the last few decades. Monsanto and all claim that without their herbicides agriculture would collapse. Cancer or starvation? It’s no choice. The real choice is a world without them and their sort in control of our food supplies - and if the most massive, radical social change is necessary to achieve this, so be it.

THE IDLER BOOK OF CRAP JOBS BY DAN KIERAN. £9.99 FROM BANTAM, 61-63 UXBRIDGE ROAD, LONDON W5 5SA.

The Idler’s been getting a lot of coverage in the broadsheet press at the moment, with anti-work sources familiar to the rest of us for decades recycled as challenging and innovative to its new, privileged audience.

We’ve seen people’s (anti-)working experiences anthologised right back to Studs Turkel’s Working back in the early-1970s and more radical versions such as Sabotage in the American Workplace (a.k.a. Sabotage the American Workplace), but this is certainly entertaining enough. The 100 crap jobs listed range from grossly overworked executives through to £6.50 / hour pig wankers (the resultant cum being used for artificial insemination in agriculture), all categorised by degrees of humiliation, disgusting-ness, danger, immorality and futility.

‘Top of the unpops’ is apparently phone sex line work, though this actually sounds quite fun to me, certainly preferably to other call centre work where the customers’ enquiries are a lot more boring and they habitually only act like tossers. Sales jobs sounded the pits to me, with unlimited hours, commission-only income you can starve on and will lie outrageously to earn, selling to people that don’t want and can’t afford it, and ritualistic humiliation and / or physical assaults on those not making sales quotas both by bosses and even by their own colleagues accepted custom and practice.

All the work experiences have come in from the Idler’s readership. A lot of them sounded like holiday jobs taken by students on their way between public school and Oxbridge—typical Idler readers indeed!—and so whilst the writing is stylistically good and the writers’ traditional upper class distaste for exerting themselves is noteworthy, there’s a lot of contempt shown for the poor sods stuck doing this crap for the rest of their lives (some do sound odd in this version, but no doubt the contempt was mutual). Still, there are some ‘real people’ contributing too (“so I endured it for another five years before they finally sacked me”, etc) and it’s noteworthy that even the ‘Calvinist’ middle class are coming to realise the work ethic has gone way too far in terms of there being nothing else to their lives. In one of the few stats included in Crap Jobs, it’s noted three times more people have been killed by work since World War 2 than by warfare. This rejection appears inarticulate as it is instinctual rather than ideological (“I just hate it”), and is all the better for that.

“WAR IS A RACKET - THE ANTI-WAR CLASSIC BY AMERICA’S MOST

DECORATED SOLDIER” BY BRIGADIER GENERAL

SMEDLEY D. BUTLER, FERAL HOUSE, 2003 (ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1935).

OK, we’re short on space and the man puts it well...

“I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism...”

“... I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds again gathering [aren’t they always!], I must face it and speak out.”

“... Why don’t those damned oil companies fly their own flags on their personal property - maybe a flag with a gas pump on it.”

Smedley describes the profits industry made in the first world war. For eg. Du Pont earned $6 milion a year from 1910-14, but $58 million a year from 1914-16, Bethlehem Steel made $6 million a year from 1910-14, but $49 million a year from 1914-16 and General Chemical Company averaged profits of less than a million for the three years before the war, but $12 million a year from 1914-16. From the companies who made the soldiers shoes to the bankers who engineered the whole set up, there were many, many rich industries by the end of the slaughter and Smedley was well pissed off about it.

An interesting essay, it’s a pity his other writings don’t come up with better solutions than for the US to have only a defensive army (‘Ammendment for Peace’). And although the whole thing could have been issued as a pamphlet, Feral House is charging $10 for the book! Mmm. Ok, it’s got some gory war photos at the back, but really you can see that stuff in most newspapers these days.

“AS FAR AS MY FEET WILL CARRY ME”, J.M. BAUER, GRANADA PUBLISHING, 1966.

Clemens Forell joined the German army in 1938, working first in the Alpine Troops, later volunteering for the paratroops and further specialised training as part of an squad called the “Fire Brigade”. This commando unit were used in Russia to blow up bridges, depots and other strategic targets. Forell was captured, imprisoned in a work camp for the rest of the war and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in a lead mine at the outer tip of Siberia. This is where the book begins, the story of his work at the mine, escape and trek through Siberia, across the USSR to Istanbul. Whatever you feel about Nazi special forces, you got to admire a man who can manage such a feat—8,000 miles through freezing snow, evading socialist bureaucrats and search parties—never mind the initial escape from the lead mine.

Although Forell had a family back in Germany, at one stage he contemplated staying with a tribe of reindeer men who adopted him. The tribe were generous, friendly and thoughtful and Forell noted that “here at least he had something more than an existence—a life that at times seemed to contain all he could want” (pg 103) The tribe taught him how to build decent shelter, catch fish and tan hides. They expected nothing in return and never put any pressure on him to leave. They joked a lot, took things easy and paid little attention to the Moscow dictates pushing collectivisation. Forell was surprised at the relationship they had with the reindeer— none were counted or fenced in and when the tribe wanted to move on, the reindeer gathered back at the village again.

Later in his journey, Forell was saved by another tribe, who treated him with similar respect and love. Without meeting these native people he would certainly have perished as they healed both his body (after he was attacked by a fellow escapee from a different mine), and mind— gave him a different view of the land he was travelling through—a more sane perspective which helped him to survive.

One of these tribes, the Yakutes, were huskie breeders who lived in small tents — two in each sleeping bag. Forell says he was shocked at the casual way women approached the infant mortality rates. “There would be yet more children, the Yakutes explained, if so many of them did not die soon after they were born.” (pg 165) Forell, in the manner of many a

civilised observer, feels that a bit heartless, but then he wouldn’t have to cope with a tent full of kids and a tribe over-stretching the area they are camped in. The Yakutes accepted fortune “good or bad as foreordained.” Which is another way of saying they weren’t egomanical, anthropocentric control freaks who were willing to make decisions best left in the hands of Nature.

It was with great sadness Forell left that temporary family to continue on his way and paradoxically things got harder the further he got from the Siberian wilderness. When he eventually reached civilisation he was struck by the “teeming menace and oppression of modern industry, oilfields, refineries, blocks of ferroconcrete skyscrapers, the hoot and surge of motor traffic and crowds. In every corner of the huge, artificial, roaring nightmare seemed to lurk the agents of the M.V.D. (socialist police).” (pg 217)

Very interesting book and well worth reading.

PAMPHLETS

BARBARIC THOUGHTS: ON A REVOLUTIONARY CRITIQUE OF CIVILIZATION VENOMOUS BUTTERFLY, 818 SW 3RD AVE., PMB 1237, PORTLAND, OR 97217, USA, 20 PAGES. 2004.

This short pamphlet is really a concise version of all the usual arguments against the anarcho-primitivist critique. I was hoping it would be worthwhile and original, but it makes the same misstatements and straw person attacks that have just become the norm. The tone is horribly self- righteous and presumptuous, making patently absurd attacks.

In this case, the most overarching one is that for some reason green anarchists and anarcho-primitivists are not concerned with social relationships and that somehow the bulk of us are really just insincere about our approaches (sorry folks, apparently the communist, egoist perspective is the one truth, and also the most “fundamentally anarchist”?!).

If I try to think about where these ‘attacks’ are going or what they are really pointing towards, I just get really irritated at best. What is being argued is just so counterintuitive to what I feel and know: There’s more to life than billions of individuals acting on their own behalf with no greater connection. You can call it biocentrism, paganism, whatever you want, but I know there is something greater to life that connects all beings. According to this pamphlet, that is somehow moralistic. According to this pamphlet and its author, nearly everything that isn’t coming from that communist, egoist truth is moralistic. How or why this is so is beyond me and the pamphlet and all other Venomous Butterfly publications have yet to convince me. But what I have learned is that morality is an easy label to place, but when used so easily, should we be surprised when it no longer has meaning?

There is a post-modernist angle that goes against anarcho-primitivist critiques: that we have no roots, or at least none worth pursuing with any real meaning, and even more so, there is no ‘we’. Any concept of primordial selves or human nature is forbidden, because apparently they can only be used to naturalize and legitimate a power dynamic or morality wielded against others. This is a leap that would make sprinters jealous. Anyways, the denial of roots is nothing new, but that doesn’t make this usage any less obnoxious. Apparently we can’t look at other societies without reifying and further romanticizing them. But even if we could (somehow this is all only hypothetical), they aren’t worth seriously looking at.

Now this point really bothers me, probably for reasons that should be fairly obvious considering the contents of this zine. But I don’t understand this point. It doesn’t matter whether you think nomadic gather- er/hunters are or are not an image of humanity in the state of nature. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think there’s anything ‘primal’ about our being or not.

What does matter is that there are living examples of anarchy in action. Not theory, not speculation, nothing but real beings. That doesn’t mean we need to recreate their every day lives, but it’s something that anyone seriously interested in destroying the state (especially those wanting to destroy civilization) should, at the very least, take serious notice of.

All of this is completely pushed aside or thrown out. What is pushed is the importance of “something different”. It’s all about this one true path to revolution and about freeing ourselves from all of our limits (though rather rigid guidelines as to how this ought to be done are clearly elaborated), but at some point something positive needs to be done to create and not just destroy whatever it is oppresses us at the level of the self, whatever that may be.

But for all the pushing aside of anar- cho-primitivist and green anarchist critique, and all the talk of going to that ‘nebulous’ “somewhere different”, it’s clear that the proper steps to a revolutionary project of destroying civilization aren’t so open. It’s all about class struggle and class struggle exclusively.

The pamphlet really labors this point without clearly explaining why the only valid egoist struggle against civilization is through class. But it seems apparent that for all the word mincing, the communist, class struggle orientation is hardly such an unknown rather than an unspoken image of what the outcome of this illustrious revolution may really be. The revolutionary wears no clothes, comrade.

There’s enough in this pamphlet to make me want to dissect and tear it apart piece by piece, but really I just don’t think it’s worth the time and effort. I’d like to say I found something useful here and on certain levels there are, but the amount of groundless straw person attacks taken to get to rather well covered topics such as the problems of utopia or ideology or morality doesn’t merit the effort it takes to find the needles in the haystack. Perhaps it’s of use to others, but the one thing blatantly clear to me after reading this is that I have little to nothing in common with its author and its approach. That is probably the only thing the author and I have agreed upon.

All my problems aside, we all should and do have our own approaches and visions. Such is extremely important. But in the end I only hope that we can find more productive ways of articulating those visions without having to misrepresent each other. There are enough differences that we don’t have to make up new, straw ones!

THINKING ALLOWED BY SARAH YOUNG. £2.00 FROM NORTHERNSKY PRESS, P.O.BOX 21548, STIRLING, U.K.

This quick, cheap, charmingly illustrated pamphlet bills itself as “a manifesto for successful political change” and as is the way with such things, it’s a lot more articulate when it comes to problems than answers. Descriptions of the patheticness of current everyday consumerist life are vivid and hilarious, obviously drawn from lived experience (pp.6-7):

A - If you have a little money:

‘Farmfoods’ groceries, items from the Argos Catalogue, take-away food, clothes from Mark One, wishing you had a bit more money.

B - If you have a bit more money:

Sainsbury’s groceries, items from IKEA, restaurant meals, clothes from Monsoon, deluding yourself into thinking that you are leading a more worthwhile life than Type A people.

This, then, is what two billion years of evolution has come to for the selfstyled ‘most advanced species’ on the planet!

Young is particularly good in describing how the lives of young women have ‘progressed’ in the last few decades, now forced by extortionate property prices directly from their fathers’ homes to their husbands, as dependant on them as Victorian chattels once were. I think also with a personal angle in mind, Young is surprisingly sympathetic to on-the-ground social workers as the only ones giving a shit for their clients. Somehow I doubt she’s ever had a straight answer from her clients as to how much use they think well-intentioned social workers are.

What is most satisfying about Thinking Allowed is that it is. In dealing with the pseudo-revolutionary Left as same-shit-in-miniature, pages of sectarian ranting would be typical in anarcho publications of this sort, but instead we get to ‘OK, they’re bad, ‘nuff said, move on’ mercifully quickly.

Instead of laying down dogmatic lines and dictums after softening up her readers by slagging others (the ‘they are dogmatic, but I am right!’ school of propaganda), Young concludes by putting open questions to readers (some not even leading!) and asking for genuine dialogue based on these. Such lack of politico arrogance is refreshing.

Sadly, what is least satisfying is the ‘and next’ bit. Young latches onto popular movement buzzwords, particularly ‘community’ and ‘participation’, and uses them like catch-all incantations without any idea of content or application. ‘Participation’ is a magic wand to be waved over society to change everyone. I suppose a lot of this harks back to the Sits in the watered-down, decohered currency of movement-speak.

They saw their magic wand, ‘workers councils’ (even then already old-linesounding and feeling at odds to the rest of their profounder anti-spectacular / spectator critique) realised in the form of ‘worker self-management’ at the occupied Lip watch factory and quickly discovered that all this meant in practice was the workers working themselves harder than they would have done when they had a boss peering over their shoulder.

A ‘radical’ consumer market for Lip watches hardly impressed them either - except to critique. Nowadays ‘participation’ is a management buzzword too, albeit corporate doublespeak that translates into pseudo-participation. My problem is that ‘revolutionaries’ again and again have also created similar pseudo-situations using the same ideological currency. More, then, on smashing social structures across the board would have been welcome. OK, changing personal attitudes and small-scale social experiments are something, but so easily co-opted and drops in the ocean otherwise, as Lip showed.

NEW ZINES

325 #1. PRICE FROM 325 COLLECTIVE @ HUSH.COM.

The title isn’t a bullet calibre as you might expect from the contents and so is likely something more arbitrary - the shared house where the editors all live or whatever. Such speculations aren’t that interesting - I mention them just so you (don’t) know.

More interesting than 325’s title is the publication itself, clearly well-connected with current reports on the Il Silvestre and Marco Carmenisch situations and contributions from Mark Barnsley, ‘some Brixton anarchists’ and the stroppier elements of the Bristol rave scene.

Clearly written from an insurrectionist perspective, there’s a great deal of coverage of impressive prison revolts in France and Spain, a general lauding of criminality-as-revolt, and— most usefully—a good listing of biometric equipment suppliers.

325 looks and sounds good, but there is a smell of superficiality about it. The only real extended theoretical piece, on anti-psychiatry, is just recycling of the SPK’s Turn Illness into A Weapon (even recycling their ‘toons) written two decades ago and uncritical guerillista lauding extends to a lot on imprisoned Action Directe with no mention of the question marks over many of them playing provocateur roles. Maybe another case of “where’s the beef?”, but time will tell. We’ll see.

BURNOUT #1. PRICE FROM R.A. C/O BOX 1683, ROCKFORD, IL 61110-0183, USA.

Billing itself as “a journal of optimistic negativity”, this anarcho-prim- itivist zine is incidental content hung on an extended academic essay by noted geologist Richard C Duncan, The Peak of Oil Production and the Road to Olduvai Gorge, which essentially argues that the oil will run out within the century and with it the basis for viable civilisation.

The rest of the zine seemed more compilation that original composition, not necessarily a bad thing, but it speaks a little of the editor having more confidence in academic authority than on his own judgement and— even less desirably—imposes an unfeasibly moderate tone on the content, given conclusions reached. CrimethInc’s weak post-9/11 ‘Your Leaders Can’t Protect You’ gets included, for example.

This zine is incidentally useful, but probably needs stronger, more original content.

ULTRAMILITANCE #5. PRICE FROM XULTRAMILITANCEX @ DONTEATMEAT.COM.

Like it says on the tin, this is a compilation of Earth and animal liberation targets and tactics, with good graphics and shouty slogans (starting with “This is a declaration of war” right on the front cover). Such coverage is both necessary and brave and we can only commend it.

However, the ‘x’s in the e-mail address are brought into sharp relief by a centrepiece interview with a Spanish band, Justice Department, on vegan straightedge. As with another like publication we reviewed half a decade ago, Hardcore, there is an extremely self-denying, self-sacrificial tone to Ultramilitance that feels unsettling, almost unhealthy, stemming from a lack of love, especially self-love.

AFA’s old favourites, the Eidelweiss Pirates, are showcased to illustrate Ultra-militance’s anti-fascist credentials - but these are usually celebrated as examples of popular street-level anti-fascist resistance under Nazism, and were surely no straightedgers! Obviously they are no fascists either (sadly, the Stalinist tradition of so- labelling every tendency more radical than themselves still persists in some quarters) but the emphasis on rigid control, starting with rigid self-control, seems both inhuman and unnatural.

Animals don’t live this way. If we are to live in harmony with them, we could at least learn the lessons of their lives, lessons in true, natural freedom without the restraints of abstract Morality and tabu.

Women and Violence — Gender Myths: A review of some literature from the other side

President Clinton launched the 5 billion dollar funding for the “Violence Against Women Act” in 2000. He spoke of the 900,000 women beaten every year, “one every 12 seconds” and refused to mention that that figure was actually closer to the number of men beaten every year. [162] And he’s one that should know! Just a year before he was on tv sporting a nasty red welt on his head. Sources in the White House leaked that the injury was due to an attack from his wife and that secret service agents had to pull her off him the night before.

The fact that women are violent is not really that interesting. We’re civilised too, so what do you expect? But it’s the fact that so much of the evidence about violent women is covered up and suppressed — the double standards, hypocrisy and whitewashing displayed by so many feminists — that is interesting.

In “When She Was Bad” Patricia Pearson looks at many different aspects of female violence. From husband bashers to serial killers, she notes the way in which women are rarely afforded the same agency as men in similar situations and are more usually treated as victims than as autonomous adults.

From PMS, post-birthing psychosis, and even ‘lactational insanity’ women are viewed to be totally at the mercy of their bodies and hormones, under the control of their bodily functions and cycles (which being part of nature are unpredictable and destructive, according to civilised doctors and psychologists).

Why this need to pretend women aren’t capable of the same violence, anger and spite as men are? Surely the problem of all this violence and hatred is not a gendered one, but one of civilisation, of the way we are forced to live today?

This ‘victim’ shite can reach really ludicrous heights as in the case of Guinevere Garcia, who, just released from a stint in jail for smothering her baby daughter, shot dead her husband in cold blood. On death row she’d requested that her execution go ahead as she felt she’d done wrong and wanted to be punished. What happened?

“Everyone ignored her. Amnesty International sent Bianca Jagger to tell the prisoner review board that ‘Garcia is the quintessential case of a battered woman and an abandoned child.’ Garcia responded, ‘This must be her cause for the week, rather than the Screen Actors Guild or cruelty to animals.’” The press reported her fifteen years enduring abuse at the hands of her husband, “a battered wife who exploded after years of abuse” (New York Times) and that “after a life filled with tragedy she is not capable of choosing her own fate” (National Public Radio).[163]

Garcia had just been released from jail for killing a kid — she couldn’t have been suffering as a battered wife in jail! But the battered wife syndrome is certainly one designed to stop any questions. It has become part of public perception that most women kill out of fear or selfdefence, yet that’s not true in the majority of cases. Peter Cook mentions a study he looked at in his book, “Abused Men — the Hidden side of Domestic Violence” which found that most female spouse killers don’t kill for either of these two reasons.

“Some murder out of greed, others because they have taken a new lover, and for a variety of other reasons. There are many such cases in the anecdotal newspaper record. For example, there is Donyea Jones of Seattle, who was shot by his wife in the back of the head (not a case of imminent fear) in front of their children, and then was dragged out of the house and set on fire. This murder took place in National Domestic Violence Awareness month, but of course, neither Seattle newspapers nor any domestic violence advocate in Seattle pointed to this case.”[164]

Partner battering is just as common for women to instigate as men (some studies including the one mentioned further on show them as being even more likely to beat their partners), yet you’d never think it to read the official documentation, newspapers, etc. Lesbian couples suffer the same high rates of domestic violence and many studies are now showing women as just as likely to abuse their children too, with high rates of neglect and beatings.

Pearson mentions the Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz book, “Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family”, which showed mothers had a 62% greater physical child abuse rate than fathers.

“Mothers beat their children nearly twice as often as fathers do, and fathers are less likely than mothers to throw objects at, slap, spank, or hit their child with objects.” [165]

Mothers are also more likely than fathers to murder their children. (Do they do this to their children out of fear and self-defence too?) 55% of under-twelve killings according to US Dept of Justice.[166] And if the child is very young, chances are the deaths will be put down to SIDs (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), a catch-all for any death with unknown causes. This is not to say every SIDs mother has killed her baby — of course not — but like with the battered wife defence it has been manipulated and used in inappropriate situations. Interestingly enough in the case the SIDs label was manufactured from in 1972 the mother later confessed to smothering all five of her children. But it was twenty years later and by then the label had stuck and coroners were using it indiscriminately.

But don’t expect the truth when you’re dealing with popular perceptions. I recently went into the local video shop where two new releases looked equally uninviting. One was about John Wayne Gacy, infamous US serial killer. The cover looked pretty menacing and the description on the back was the usual ‘monster who stalked the community’. The other video was about Aileen Wuornos who according to the back ‘killed out of self-defence’ and only because she had been traumatised by a life on the street. The fact that she murdered innocent men who picked her up as she hitchhiked and that her attacks were completely unprovoked won’t be dealt with too seriously. And the fact that Gacy was abused by his father as a young boy won’t get him too much sympathy either! [167] One standard for women, another for men.

The video touted Wuornos as the first female serial killer in the US.

“Only four years earlier, ten female serial killers had been arrested across the United States. Less than two years before, Dorothea Puente was convicted. And less than a decade earlier, the state of North Carolina executed Velma Barfield, who poisoned five.”[168]

When the moron majority get to spouting they won’t be mentioning the many women who’ve been serial killing in the past. (All white by the way — Puente is a marriage name)

“Not the dozens of women who killed up to forty patients in hospitals; nor the dozens more who have killed ten men, or twenty; nor Puente and others who preyed upon tenants. Never mind Marybeth Tinning, or any of the mothers and angels of death.”[169]

The point is not that women are violent — living civilised they could hardly not be. The point is the amazing level of disingenuity feminists display on this subject. Research in 1985 showed that women were being beaten in the home on average once every 15 seconds. Feminist groups rallied around the figure and it became household knowledge. But that same study showed that men were being battered on average once every 18 seconds![170] The researchers received death threats for their troubles — a common occurance for those daring to threaten the feminist gravy train.

Erin Pizzey, founder of the first womens shelter, now has to have a police escort for public speaking because she started looking at the ways in which to help men who suffer beatings from their female partners.

“There is now an established domestic violence industry which fears any acknowledgement of the well-established scientific fact that women can be as violent as men with their intimate partners... Because of these views, and daring to speak out, I’ve been vilified and physically threatened many times by women in the domestic violence movement. Don’t tell me women can’t be violent! Nowadays, you won’t even find my name or my domestic violence books mentioned in the established domestic violence literature... I’ve been erased because of heresy, for daring to speak the truth.”[171]

This industry needs to propagate various myths so that they can soak up all the funding. There’s big money in ‘victim women, nasty men’ routines. Clinton allocated 5 billion to womenonly services in the early nineties, so a lot of feminists stand to lose out if mens groups start leaching their money.

Well, they could cater for both sexes and get all the money still like in a very few shelters in the US, but that’d require a change in ideology and a little more imagination — not something those feminists are keen on.

So what if this culture is patriarchial? Individual men are just as disempowered as individual women. They suffer the same shit living within civilisation as their civilised sisters. Male or female it doesn’t matter, if you’re living tame and demoralised and working for Leviathan, then you feel the same rage and self-loathing. Living in a culture which denigrates sharing and compassion, both men and women have little of either. Living under conditions that humans were never supposed to live under (little box, screaming brats, isolated from any community, pressures of money — hey we all know these things!) why are we surprised if we lash out at those closest to us? I don’t believe patriachy is the problem. It’s one of the symptoms of a sick, unbalanced, unhealthy way of living. Civilisation is the problem and until feminists (and that includes all you men too) start addressing that they’re doing nobody any service.

By continuing to view womens violence as non-existent, trivial, a result of bodily functions over which they’ve no control or as a result of male coercion (frequently given as an excuse in partnered violence), civilisation can continue to explain away the huge levels of hatred, distrust and agression that civilised humans commonly display. And with men as the big nasties, no-one has to look at the real problem — civilisation itself.

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG

This industry needs to propagate various myths so that they can soak up all the funding. There’s big money in ‘victim women, nasty men’ routines. Clinton allocated 5 billion to women- only services in the early nineties, so a lot of feminists stand to lose out if mens groups start leaching their money.

Well, they could cater for both sexes and get all the money still like in a very few shelters in the US, but that’d require a change in ideology and a little more imagination—not something those feminists are keen on.

So what if this culture is patriarchial? Individual men are just as disempowered as individual women. They suffer the same shit living within civilisation as their civilised sisters. Male or female it doesn’t matter, if you’re living tame and demoralised and working for Leviathan, then you feel the same rage and self-loathing. Living in a culture which denigrates sharing and compassion, both men and women have little of either. Living under conditions that humans were never supposed to live under (little box, screaming brats, isolated from any community, pressures of money—hey we all know these things!) why are we surprised if we lash out at those closest to us? I don’t believe patriachy is the problem. It’s one of the symptoms of a sick, unbalanced, unhealthy way of living. Civilisation is the problem and until feminists (and that includes all you men too) start addressing that they’re doing nobody any service.

By continuing to view womens violence as non-existent, trivial, a result of bodily functions over which they’ve no control or as a result of male coercion (frequently given as an excuse in partnered violence), civilisation can continue to explain away the huge levels of hatred, distrust and agression that civilised humans commonly display. And with men as the big nasties, no-one has to look at the real problem—civilisation itself.

News

TRIBAL ROUND-UP

Tasmanian Genocide

Once upon a time a people lived happy and free. They practiced no agriculture, made no pottery, wore no clothes and were as gentle and content as the other wild animals they lived with.

Then the civilisers came. And within seventy years all the native people of Tasmania were wiped out. It was called the “The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land”, the official campaign of extermination begun in 1803, which decimated the native people of Tasmania in the usual brutal civilised way.

“The Tasmanians were by missionaries and friends of man civilized under the earth.”

— German anthropologist, Hellwald.

By 1830 the few remaining Tasmanian natives were rounded up and imprisoned on Flinders Island where by 1843 only fifty survived.

“On Flinders Island Robinson was determined to civilize and Christianize the survivors. His settlement — at a windy site with little fresh water — was run like a jail. Children were separated from parents to facilitate the work of civilizing them. The regimental daily schedule included Bible reading, hymn singing, and inspection of beds and dishes for cleanness and neatness. However, the jail diet caused malnutrition, which combined with illness to make the natives die. Few infants survived more than a few weeks. The government reduced expenditures in the hope that the native would die out. By 1869 only Truganini, one other woman, and one man remained alive.”

Jared Diamond (www.cwo.com)

The last survivor, Truganini, was defiant to the last.

“An old woman lay dying in a white-walled room, upon a white bed, surrounded by whiteskinned doctors and nurses. In all that whiteness, her dark skin glistened affirmatively; even with the sweat of death on her face, a dominant vitality seemed to flow from her. She cursed at her doctors, and sometimes, in a cracked voice, she sang and chanted. At last she fell back against the pillows and whispered, ‘Bury me behind the mountains’; and so she died.” (pg 137, “Fall of the Sparrow” by Jay Williams, Oxford University Press, 1951)

Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European, her sister was kidnapped by Europeans and her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. Even in death she was mocked — displayed in a museum in contradiction with her dying wishes. (She was eventually, in 1976 allowed rest at sea after a lot of fuss.)

What do we know about her people? No record remains, only impressions of missionaries, anthropologists, invader settlers and government agents who made no effort to try to understand Tasmanian culture. They were hunter gatherers who lived in small bands, (nine widely dispersed tribes at the time of the European invasion), breastfed their kids to a ripe age, practiced no circumcision or cannibalism, sang and danced a lot, were well-fed, strong, happy, and abhorred agriculture.

Archaeologists found certain peculiarities in the Tasmanians’ history:

1. They had started to wear clothes at some stage, but then abandoned them again about 4,000 years ago. Although the climate was cold and wet in winter, the Tasmanians wore nothing but a small pieces of wallaby skin as necklaces.

2. They stopped using the bone tools they’d been using to make the clothes and didn’t seem to have a need for weaving tools, axes, spearthrowers or boomerangs.

3. They stopped eating scale fish. When the Europeans arrived the Tasmanians preferred to swim further out into the open ocean to gather abalone and other shellfish.

4. They had been using fire to flush out small animals and encourage fresh plant growth, but discontinued this practice too.

5. They had no fire-making tools, but kept a fire stick burning and if one tribe’s fire went out they had to go and ask another tribe for some fire. Mainly used for ritual, sacred purposes, not to keep warm by.

All the changes occured about 4,000 years ago and neatly turn civilised ideas of progress on its head. The usual argument, that ‘they didn’t know how to’ do such and such, was clearly not true as, for example, catching scale fish involved far less skill and knowledge than gathering shellfish from far out in the sea. And in the other things, like cloth-making, they obviously did know how to do them, just chose not to for some reason.

We don’t have any testimonies from the Tasmanians themselves, so I’ll just hazard a guess as to why these changes occurred. They felt more free while naked, they were afraid of over-fishing the scale fish and were guided by instinct and observance to see the destructiveness of burning areas of bush land. They weren’t afraid of ditching an obviously unusable idea if it hindered them in any way or damaged their home. Being free was far more important than being comfortable.

Of course, we don’t know though because all the people were murdered without telling anything of themselves. Anthropologists must surely be wringing their hands over the rock paintings which will never reveal their secrets to them (a large number of hieroglyphic rock carvings were found) and spend many long hours hypothesing about what the natives might and might not have ‘believed’ in. Perhaps the Tasmanians knew how futile it is to talk to these white fellas who cannot understand anything.

Perhaps their last defiance was to leave this earth without divulging anything of themselves to the stupid, brutalised and brutal people who visited their land and destroyed it. Fuck you! Miserable fellas from the prisons of Europe you wouldn’t know what we are about even if we told you. Better to die than live like you, as prisoners. We go to our deep earth graves whole, intact, impeccable, while you must live in the hell you’re creating.

The Tasmanians are an enigma, a glimpse of a way of life that could not survive alongside the civilised invasion. They gave nothing to the nasty morons who over-ran them, preferring to hold onto their dignity and integrity, revealing none of their stories or songs, nothing of their history, none of themselves. So we don’t even know what they called themselves or the land they lived in. It wouldn’t have meant anything to us anyway. And their stories and songs and philosophy of the universe — we would understand them even less.

---

The Military Abuse of Animals

Chemical and biological warfare has been dubbed a ‘higher form of killing’. this is reflected in the military’s endless quest to ‘perfect’ the deadly nature of each compound through animal experimentation.

Killing and maiming is not enough, great importance is attached to the scientific nature of the weapon’s effect. Whether it is by burning, poisoning, suffocation, infection or attacking the nervous system, each method is meticulously ‘refined’ on sentient, unconsenting lab animals.

Napalm, Agent Orange, 245T have all been extensively tested on animals. So too will other weapons.

For example, rhesus monkeys and marmosets have been used at Porton Down in the UK to study the effects of the nerve gas Soman. Those receiving a high dose suffered violent convulsions and quickly collapsed. About 75% regained consciousness and experienced an incresed rate and depth of respiration. Some made attempts to crawl around the cage before eventually relapsing and dying one to two hours later.

Few published examples of military abuse exist. Everything is hidden under a ‘top secret’ label. Even the pathetic regulations applied in commerce don’t apply here. Sadistic or misguided freaks are free to act out whatever their sick imaginations can conceive of.

Each year in military establishments across the world, animals are shot, blasted, burnt and subjected to other forms of injury. All of this takes place against a backdrop of a violent world in which all of these injuries are being inflicted upon humans on a daily basis.

In Britain, information is scarce, but it is known that sheep, pigs, rabbits and monkeys have been wounded at Porton Down. One published experiment detailed how 20 anaesthetised rhesus monkeys were shot through the head with a 3.2 mm steel ball. They survived between 2 and 169 minutes. In Germany 20 dogs were shot in the hind leg from 50 metres, with the objective of fracturing the upper thigh, shattering the bone column and destroying the hollow marrow bone. Nine dogs died within 48 hours and the remainder were operated on and then treated for several weeks before being killed.

In the US stray animals can be bought and abused by the military. In 1983 public pressure forced them to stop using cats and dogs, but this only transferred the agonies to other species. In that same year more than 400,000 animals were massacred by the US military.

This immoral abuse of animal life has only one purpose — the development of even more deadly weapons and new methods of waging war. There will be no peace until we end our abuse of animals.

Ending warfare experiments would be a good place to start.

The above article was cobbled together mainly from an excellent pamphlet published in 1987 by the British Union for the Ablition of Vivisection and written by Chris Fisher. It can probably still be got from Turnaround Distribution, or BUAV.

ISBN 1 870356 00 4

Eternal Frontier — Eternal War

As I write this people are being killed systematically. As you read this people are being killed systematically. Bodies, lives, beings, torn to shreds by bombs, bullets, napalm, and flame: not just killing, but maiming, uprooting and devastating lives. Devastating life.

Right now that killing is going on in Iraq. The people being killed are children, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and lovers. We see numbers. That is if we see anything at all. What people in Iraq see are bodies without limbs, people broken mentally and physically.

There is a movement to end the ‘occupation’ of Iraq. People want an end to wars. They march, hold signs, protest, get beaten and arrested, and occasionally attack the war machine symbolically.

But the end to war will not come. The end of war cannot come.

Wars may end, but not war.

For the most part, protestors can accept this. That is why they fight against wars. They are brutal and nasty. Most people know someone involved. They tie ribbons around trees. Somehow I doubt the trees care much about soldiers. But wars can and will end. Things can go back to normal for those not on the receiving end of the bombs.

Stop the wars and its back to business as usual. Back to everyday warfare.

Civilization is warfare.

This is not a rhetorical statement. Civilization is the culture of cities. Cities are permanent settlements with a lot of people on a little amount of land. All those people on that little amount of land need ‘resources’. Those have to come from somewhere. The countryside is the other half of cities. They are one in the same and they need each other.

This has always been the case. This will always be the case, if not locally, then globally. Rows of cash crops and mines on one end: rows of houses and people on the other. The people in cities will take what they ‘need’ to survive. They must because a city cannot support itself and the countryside must grow with it. Almost always this taking requires force.

This is what Stanley Diamond was thinking about when he wrote: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”[172] Where people cannot be coerced into giving on their own, there are armies and police to ensure that things run smoothly. Between states this is called war. But states do the same thing everyday to their citizens. It is still war, but we can’t call it that. The state can’t afford for us to call it that.

At the root of the problem, there are two things that happened to set all of this in motion: gardens and settlements. Both of which are usually tied, but not always. But the garden and the settlement represent two different aspects of war. There are ecological reasons and political reasons for war, respectively.[173]

Gardening is about taming wildness. Pulling weeds, clearing forest land, and selective breeding are all methods of domesticating. This is as true for small scale horticulturalists as it is for industrial agriculturalists.

The damage that can be done depends on the relationships of the people to the land and the scale. Small scale horticulturalists typically see the earth as their home and have things like longer fallow periods and shifting gardens to make sure they don’t destroy it.

Industrial agriculturalists see the earth as something dead and use science to ‘fix it’. Naturally if they see the earth as dead matter, they have no real issue with killing it as they do.

Bioregions are picky. The healthiest ecosystem is a wild one, but a balanced ecosystem can take some sway. Horticultural societies can exist without tipping the scales.

Occasionally those scales do tip and something must be done to bring things back in balance. That can take days or years. Even if it takes over 6,000 years (as in our case), it is something that must happen. The far end of that balance is what is called carrying capacity. It means simply how much life can be supported by any particular bioregion.[174]

Gardens challenge carrying capacity because people settle around them. Being nomadic has shaped who we are as humans. Our ecological role has been defined by this. As nomadic gatherer/hunters, there are any number of ways to keep us within carrying capacity that are just inherent to that way of being. When people settle down, populations increase. Populations increase, more food needs to be grown. More food needs to be grown, more land must be cleared and used. When that land is being used by other people, there will be violence.

This is the formula for ‘primitive warfare’.

This kind of warfare serves a number of ecological purposes. For the most part it is largely symbolic. It is typically spaced at least ten years apart and has a minimum amount of casualties. In some ways it has been considered a kind of play.

It is easy to see why when you see the novelty size arrows shot high into the air or that the bulk of ‘fighting’ is really shouting insults which both sides may laugh at.[175]

But it is still warfare. It is not unheard of for whole bands to be wiped out in raids or battle. This kind of warfare happens between people who know each other intimately. It is an accepted part of life. But it serves the ecological purpose of not tipping the ecological balance.

Warfare happens in time of ecological stress.[176] People do die in raids and battle, but that is not the most effective way of keeping numbers down. In these societies, being a warrior is extremely important. Gender becomes an important distinction and raising strong boys takes priority. Having warrior sons becomes important. The result is female infanticide. The result of having far fewer women than men is there are fewer children in the end.[177]

This is not what must happen, but this is what has happened over and over again. If you live a way that challenges carrying capacity, there must be some way of keeping the balance. Warfare and the values that come with it have been that solution for horticultural societies in almost every instance.

But this is not what has always happened. If it were, we wouldn’t be in our current dilemma. If it were, civilization would have never existed. We would never have to destroy it.

The problem is that not all societies went through a horticultural stage. The old lists of ‘social evolution’ are something that our linear/historical orientation needs, not something that necessarily happened or must happen. The societies that originate civilization typically skipped the horticultural step or barely went through it. They were settled people who technically lived by gathering and hunting. They cultivated fields and fields of wild grains.

Domestication came later, but they became settled and dependent upon stored grains first.

Politics can be created in two ways. In horticultural societies like the ones mentioned above. When the population does expand and people stick together rather than break apart and create new bands, there tends to be people who have more influence. These people are called Big Men (they are not always men, but most often).

Big Men talk. A lot. They rant about everything in the morning or the evening. They have an opinion and must voice it. For the most part, people don’t even notice. Lying in hammocks or around the fire, they can hear the rants. Sometimes they go listen, but not all the time. This ranting is important though. That is what a Big Man must do. They are typically no different than other people, but they gain notoriety because of their ability to convince and typically they are able to pull together more stuff for massive feasts or general redistribution.

The Big Man rants and the people tolerate it. Occasionally they listen to him. Occasionally he’s talking about raiding or attacking a neighboring village. Sometimes he can convince a number of people to get involved, but their decisions are always voluntary.

The Big Man has no power, no authority, and no ability to coerce. Only his voice. Nothing exists for him to hoard so much that he can control or attempt to control the actions of others. His position is far from permanent and a lack of a Big Man never hurt anybody.

They can wage wars, but only if other people are willing to go along with it.

That usually works for a raid or battle, maybe two. But if people had the choice to go to war constantly, they would chose not to. That has almost always been the case. There are no specialists. There are no armies: bands of people specialized in the art of taking lives.

Sometimes war just happens.

The other way power is created is through surplus. Some horticultural societies expand and some become empires. Power is held by chiefs or kings. The role of a chief can be slightly different than the role of a Big Man, but it can also be slightly different than the role of a king. A chief must be a good talker, but he has more than a voice. He has a surplus.

A chief and occasionally a Big Man will have multiple wives. What this means is that he has a number of gardens and a number of people working them. A single garden can feed the family that works it with relative ease, but there are times when they need more or crops fail. The chief, with a number of gardens, can compensate them. In fact, they must. This is where coercive power comes from: the perception of dependency.

The chief gives and talks. The people listen so long as the chief provides something for them and tells them what they want to hear. The power of a chief is not absolute. The position can be terminated. But the position does carry some power.

They are called in to settle disputes between people and in the process become the first true political institution. Politics are created here.

In return for these services, people will listen to them. The most authority they can possess is in times of war. Their voice has more sway in this time than a Big Man for two reasons: they already have an upper hand in the society and they are known for their prowess in battle.[178]

Through all of these, the power of a chief is created and affirmed. They cannot force anyone into battle, but their decision becomes a political one and there can be consequences.

Civilization is really born in war. That is the essence of the state, of kingdoms, of empires.

The influence or power of a Big Man or some chiefs was never absolute, but absolute power is the basis for kings and some more powerful chiefs. How did this happen?

In the societies mentioned above, as long as the chief or Big Man had something to offer or was reasonable, people might listen to them. The only time this was ever truly exercised was during battle or war where some leadership is necessary.

But as populations continue to grow and devour the earth and its relations surrounding them, war becomes not an occasional ordeal, but a part of everyday life.

The origins of absolute power could only be created through fear. People don’t compromise their autonomy unless they must or they are convinced that they must. The need for land puts people on the offense. The knowledge that others may be in the same situation puts people on the defense. The role of those in power has always been to play up these two aspects. Society must be under attack. Society must be defended.[179]

Under these premises people will be willing to compromise. Under these premises states, nations, and empires are created. The earth is attacked. People are attacked. Lives are destroyed.

This should start sounding familiar.

Eternal war is as tied to civilization as the need for the eternal frontier. There must be room for growth. There must be resources. There must be people willing to throw their lives away to defend the ‘greater good’.

States grow and roles become more and more specialized. Police can be trained and soldiers can be conscripted. People can dedicate their lives to advancing technology. The art of killing and maiming becomes increasingly efficient.

This is how civilization must be. The only thing that’s changed over the last 10,000 years is the scale and efficiency of tools meant to do nothing but destroy.

This is our heritage, reaffirmed daily. We remain distanced and entertained. But this is the true cost of our way of being.

No one really likes war. At least no one involved in the actual fighting. The actual destruction of life.

The very word can turn your insides. As long as we are entertained and distant spectators we’re fine. Pictures are posted of civilian casualties and people will react. They will react just enough to believe that their hands are morally kept clean.

Lately we’ve been hearing the word quagmire used in terms of the Iraqi War. It’s a flashback to the Vietnam War that we’re stuck in a completely undesirable situation, but one that must be dealt with. Whether we support the war or not it is still going on. That is the reality that has been created for us and we are told to deal with it.

It’s a depressing thought. No amount of good intentions or hope will bring back lives cut short, lives torn apart, or mend the very flesh of the earth: our home.

But this is our world. This is where we are.

This is a reality that we should never have to deal with. The power to destroy lives across the planet just by trying to survive is something that was never meant to exist. But it does.

Civilization should never have existed. Lives should have never been wasted serving rather than living. Our home should never be threatened.

Perhaps quagmire is the most appropriate word, not only for the war in Iraq, but for our entire way of life.

We should have never been in this situation; we should never have to destroy civilization so that we may one day live free. So that life may exist on this planet after we are gone. But we are in this situation and it is in our hands to do something about it.

Civilization is warfare. Like civilization, warfare has an origin. Like civilization, warfare will have an end. It will die with the system that creates and requires it.

Civilization can be destroyed and if we truly want an end to war, it’s time to pull the plug.

Faslane Peace Camp: 22 Years of Resistance

Faslane Peace Camp is situated 30 miles North of Glasgow, in West Central Scotland. Since 1982, peace campers have taken action against the Trident nuclear weapons system based on the nearby Gareloch.

Faslane has been UK’s longest-running peace camp. Can you tell us a little about how and why it started, and a quick history of the camp since?

How camp started has nowadays descended into myth. The most popular story goes as follows: There had been temporary camps happening at Faslane for a while. On 12^th June 1982, another, longer temporary camp was supposed to start. It was meant to be closer to the base’s South Gate, but on the way a caravan broke its axle and couldn’t be moved. Camp was set up around that van. People decided they wanted to carry on the site, and 22 years later the “temporary” peace camp is still here! At first, the local council was West Dumbartonshire, which had an antinuclear policy. They supported camp and rented us the land for a pound a month. Then, 7 years ago, the council boundaries changed.

The newly formed Argyll and Bute Council was staunchly antipeace camp, and took out an eviction order against us. This actually worked in our favour — from having 2 burnt our residents, site became full of people determined to build defences and fight the eviction. Numbers hadn’t been so high since the 1980s heyday of the anti-nuclear movement. Nowadays the council still want to evict us, but can’t afford to politically or financially!

Can you fill us in on the background to Trident, UK’s so-called ‘independent deterrent’, and the direct action campaign the camp has led against it?

There are four Vanguard class subs at Faslane, which fire Trident nuclear missiles and are nuclear-powered. They are backed up by a supporting fleet of nuclear powered “Hunter Killer” subs which fire conventional Cruise missiles, as well as minesweepers, minelayers, frigates, tugs etc.

Trident was planned in 1982 and the first Vanguard sub arrived at Faslane in the early 90s. Trident a first-strike system, replaced Cruise, a secondstrike system, so the introduction of Trident clearly indicated that the UK was moving from a defensive to an offensive nuclear policy. The UK does not have complete control of the Trident system — it’s US technology and the UK depends heavily on the goodwill of the US to keep Trident running.

There are 16 missiles on each Trident sub, and each missile holds 64 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It’s worth pointing out that ALL the UK’s nuclear weapons are based at Faslane.

As anarchists we wouldn’t say we “led” the direct action campaign against Trident. We work with other likeminded groups and are always looking for new folk to do actions with. Our actions take in anything that can put a spanner in the war machine — blockades, fence cutting, smashing expensive equipment, office occupations, phone blockades, stopping nuclear warhead convoys and so on. We do a mixture of pixie (sabotage) actions and Ploughsharesstyle accountable disarmament. In general tho, peace campers see no reason to make ourselves accountable to the state.

How does the camp’s anti-Trident campaign link to other areas of contestation, for example re. the environment or human liberation? Is there some sort of concensus what it comes to a critique of militarism and if so, what is it? If not, what are the different viewpoints and principle debates?

Nuclear weapons cause massive ecological destruction and human misery even if they are never fired. For example, Uranium mining (carried out by Rio Tinto Zinc among others) is notorious for causing the displacement of tribal peoples. It also poisons ecosystems and people near the mine. At the other end of the process, decommissioned nuclear reactors from old subs are already causing problems here in Scotland. The Ministry of “Defence” is trying to find a community which doesn’t mind having radioactive waste dumped on it for the next few thousand years. Strangely, this is proving difficult.

Capitalism depends on the military for its very survival. Not only do arms companies rake in the profits, the whole “free” trade system is supported by militarism and ultimately by nuclear weapons. For this reason, all the residents at camp at the moment are anti-military, anti-capitalist, and anarchist. Some of us are also against industry and civilization. We do discuss the connections between war, industry and civilization, but have never agreed on everything so far! Anyone who is a positive force in anti-nuclear work, and who respects our community, is welcome at camp tho — you don’t have to share the political views of the current residents.

We tie in our anti-militarist stance to other struggles by encouraging and taking part in anarchist organising and ecological direct action throughout Scotland and beyond. Peace campers have been involved in direct action against GM food in Scotland, for example.

Many in the 1980s peace movement saw the peace camps as utopian experiments as much as loci of protest, particularly at Greenham, the womens’ camp against US nuclear Cruise missiles based in the Home Counties. Is there anything like that in Faslane’s ethos now and if so, what can you tell us about it?

At camp we try to live out an alternative to the society which created Trident. We believe that state society is nothing but the means of preparing for war, so for this reason we live along anarchist principles. Important decisions are made by consensus at camp meetings.

There is a strong emphasis on communal living and communal responsibility. We try to have a (vegan) group meal every day, and do big tasks as a group. We also help each other with personal jobs (babysitting, living space maintenance, legal/prison support) if need be. Camp has a mild work ethic and we generally find that working together helps build our sense of community. We also socialise together and consider each other as friends.

Although still very dependent on civilization, we do try to live more sustainably and closer to nature than mainstream society. We have a compost toilet, get heat from burning fallen wood, and use only a small amount of electricity from renewable sources.

Hopefully camp is a welcoming place for all sorts of people. Any sort of discrimination or intimidation is not tolerated. The newest addition to site is an extended wheelchair path. Wheelchair users and older people have lived here in the past, so don’t be put off if you’re not 18–30 and able bodied!

We understand that the Left-leaning Scottish National Party (SNP) were once very sympathetic to Faslane as part of their campaign against the militarisation of Scotland. How prominently do Scottish issues feature in camp discussions?

The destruction caused by nuclear weapons knows no borders, and is carried out in the name of global capitalist domination. Therefore we try to see our actions from a global perspective. That said, we do discuss Scottish issues a lot.

There is a definite nationalistic element to the Scottish anti-nuclear movement, because all the UK’s nuclear weapons are based in Scotland. Many Scottish anarchists also started out as Scottish nationalists, but became disillusioned with party politics and the inevitable rightwing tendencies of nationalism. (The SNP has become more and more conservative in many ways, although it is not a racist party). While it would be a definite victory to get rid of nuclear weapons from Scotland even by party political means, we don’t think it’s likely to happen that way.

A major concern for us is the lack of direct action in Scotland. We think this is due to two factors. Firstly, the left is much stronger here than in the rest of the UK. Both the Scottish Socialists (SSP) and the Scottish “Greens” (SGP) have considerable representation in the devolved parliament.

Prominent members of these parties have spoken in favour of direct action, but the party hierarchies all to often try to quash any real dissent (for example, trying to control civil disobedience at the begining of the Iraq war).

This isn’t really surprising as these people hope to form the government one day, and are scared of a population truly thinking and acting for itself! Secondly, there is a lack of autonomous spaces in Scotland, exacerbated by the anti-squatting laws here. Squatting has been illegal since the Highland Clearances of the 19^th Century.

Highland peasants were cleared from their land to make way for sheep farming, and the law prevented them returning to abandoned homesteads. Things are improving tho — Faslane and Bilston Woods protest sites are doing well, there has been a resurgence of rented social centres this year, more housing co-ops are planned and there’s talk of starting a squatting movement in Scotland.

Is there anything practical readers can do help the camp and its campaigns?

Most of all we need people to come to camp, whether you can stay for a day or want to live here full time. There are loads of things you can do to help on site, from actions to daily tasks to baking vegan cake!

If you can’t make it here, camp also need money to keep running and fund actions. Please make cheques payable to Faslane Peace Camp.

And don’t forget, the Trident system stretches across Britain. People in England and Wales wanting to do solidarity actions will probably find a base near them that is involved with Trident in some way.

Peace camp contact details: Faslane Peace Camp, 81D Shandon, Helensburgh, Argyll, G84 8NT, SCOTLAND. www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk
faslanepeacecamp@hotmail.com
Telephone 01436 820 901

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Yes — peace camper Karen Fallon is currently awaiting trial in Ireland for disarming a US warplane in the run up to the Iraq war. Please send her letters of support and donations, care of Roz, Talamh Housing Co-op, Birkhill House, Coalburn, Lanarkshire, SCOTLAND. More info on Karen at www.faslanepeacecamp.org.uk/karen.html

We produce our own zine, the Faslane Focus, about twice a year. Suggested donation for a year’s subscription is 3 pounds, more is great and less is ok if you’re genuinely skint but interested. Get in touch with your address if you’d like a copy.

Cheers!

A Band of Brothers?: Military manipulation of primal instincts

Be all you can be, Who Dares Wins... the army rhetoric is as bad as any advertising jingle. No-one could possibly take it seriously when you see what the brave ‘heros’ actually get up to. But soldiers are not exactly monsters either. Many are looking for somewhere to belong, some group to be part of. More than any loyalty to Queen or state is this strong group desire — the ‘band of brothers’ tribal impulse to belong to a group.

Most soldiers don’t swallow the patriotic bullshit any more than your average zombie — some do even less because they’ve seen the bloody workings of the state in action. Instead they act out of misplaced loyalty to their soldier comrades, to what they feel is their tribe.

In Mogadishu, Somalia in 1992, US special forces were shot down and stranded in the middle of a very hostile native force. Some of the men managed to escape back to base, most had been shot and injured, some quite badly. When they got back to base they were told they had to go back in again and rescue some of the men who’d become stranded.

While a loyalty to the American state is seen among these men, no amount of loyalty to an abstract concept is going to make them go back into such a nightmarish situation. A different kind of loyalty is at work here. A loyalty to their fallen soldier comrades, their drinking buddies and often best friends.

It is this loyalty, this sense of belonging to a group which makes them overcome their fear and go back. It’s not a rational feeling, but one which comes from their gut — a primal feeling which is far stronger than anything the State could have hoped for.[180]

The State of course encourages this impulse. It’s a feature of military training to play on it. A soldier from a special unit in the second world war describes his experiences:

“The three of us, Jake, Joe and I, became... an entity. There were many entities in our close-knit organizations. Groups of threes and fours, usually from the same squads or sections, core elements within the families that were the same units, were readily recognised as entities...This sharing... evolved never to be relinquished, never to be repeated. Often three such entities would make up a squad, with incredible results in combat. They would literally insist on going hungry for one another, freezing for one another, dying for one another.”[181]

Andy McNabb, a SAS man sent undercover to Iraq was captured and tortured for days.

“Hour after hour, day after day, beating after beating, taking my turn with the other two, lying curled up, cold and in pain, waiting for the terrifying noise of the door being kicked open...I knew one thing. I knew the other two weren’t giving up because otherwise my interrogations would have stopped. I kept saying to myself, it’s not going to be me, I’m not going to let them down, I’m not going to be the one to put the others in the shit.”[182]

So the army nurtures this instinct because it knows that it will keep the men together far better than any other brainwashing trick.

Another primal instinct played upon by the military is the young male’s desire to prove himself in the company of other men. Although women are tolerated as long as they act like men, the average soldier would prefer them to keep out. The only woman I ever met who was in the army eventually left because she was raped by fellow soldiers.

So I think it’s fair to say that soldiers prefer a male environment and that in itself is not unnatural. Of course how they go about it is — but the desire to put himself through physical and mental tests in an exclusively male environment is something which most men have done in many different cultures.

The Australian aborigines have many different approaches to this. They believe that women don’t need to do all this silly stuff because women are of the earth already, but men are a different matter! They need to get some sense, often the very hard way.

Most of the ‘walkabouts’ common to native people are usually exclusively for men. They spend many weeks on their own trying to learn lessons which maybe the women instinctively know.

Robert Lawlor in “Voices of the First Day — Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime” writes that “female initiation rites are always related to biological changes such as menstruation, defloration, preganancy and childbirth... women mark these stages by gathering together and performing certain rituals and songs.”[183] Whereas men have elaborate, very serious rituals usually involving a lot of pain and hardship.

The military takes this masculine instinct and uses it for its own benefit. “Be all you can be!” Be a man, prove yourself, and at the same time supply us with limitless fodder for our nasty endeavours. Everybody hates the soldiers. But they’re no worse than a bank clerk or a supermarket attendant or a housewife.

The military cliche of regimented blind obedience is just as present in the hordes rushing to work every morning. The mindless workers waiting for their orders.

“Suits are the Descendants of military uniforms, unfold the lapels and turn up the collar and it resembles a high-collared military tunic.”[184]

Aren’t we all manipulated into roles which destroy ourselves and our home, the earth? There’s no role within civilisation which is free from manipulation and perversion, there’s no-one who is free to follow these instincts in a natural way. Instead of demonising soldiers, it’s better to look at how we all allow ourselves to be manipulated and our energy channelled into keeping civilisation alive.

Of course, there’s no reason to romaticise them either. The current spate of special forces books (Tom Clancy, etc.) are cashing in on the average zombie’s fascination with those people who have some semblance of hunter-gatherer skills. From a bored housewife or harried office worker’s point of view, these skills must seem very impressive. Living vicariously through these superhumans’ exploits is about the nearest these repressed, dull couch potatoes ever get to ‘wildness’.

The skills the soldier learns are closer to what a hunter gatherer learns than any other profession. Tracking, survival shelters, finding food, etc. But they learn them in a spiritless way, a way which is utterly different from primitive people. This lack of spirit is crucial. It prevents the soldier from entering into any kind of meaningful relationship with himself and surroundings and despite his longing for a real tribe to belong to, it destroys any hope of attaining a community of kin. The soul-less knowledge leads to misery and frustration, death and destruction, with only civilisation (that soul-less monster) benefiting.

By not being able to immerse themselves in nature the soldier cannot learn what nature can teach. For instance, in Tom Brown’s “The Science and Art of Tracking” Stalking Wolf describes how in his tribe, by the time a child is five they can track a mouse across solid rock.

“By the age of six they could follow ants across the same rock. Yet this only qualified them to be considered common trackers.”[185]

The master trackers, the Scouts, could track across solid rock with ease and identified well over five thousand pressure releases (each feature inside a track).

“They moved as the shadows, mastering camouflage and stalking to a point of invisibility. They could get right into the middle of an enemy encampment without being observed. They could read the symphony of movement and sound around them and know what was going on many miles away. Most of all they could glance at a track and read into the maker’s very soul.”[186]

Compared to this don’t the special forces skills rapidly become less impressive? But to those who’s biggest dilemna of the day is what to have for lunch it’s not hard to see why the bluster seems good. If only they could see beyond the modern primitives cartoon version and see the far more impressive feats of huntergatherers.

--- Steve Booth issues after the split ---

SB Issue 62

Date: Mar 2001

Moving Things Forwards

It is clear that the protest movement is moving forwards. How can we develop, how can we be more effective?

If anarchism and the protest movement are to grow, we have to break free of ideology. We have to be more united in our approach, and learn to work together despite our wider political disagreements. We have to be better than the state, Which means using more effective tactics and techniques, and we also need to be more ethical in our activities, and to build trust inside the movement. …

Making Bridges

Truth

Independence Isolation Faction

Where Are We Now?

How To Move it Forwards?

Negativity

Silence Brings Violence

Dissafection is not enough

Hobbyism

Fear of Success

Smash The Status Quo

Theoretical Impedements

Numbers and Resources

Integrity

Impact

Seriousness

Responsibility

References

Anarchist Yearbook

The Anarchist Yearbook published the Phoenix Press seems to have died a death, which is a great pity, because it was a good idea. Yet there is scope for such a project. …

Chaos and Revolution

For an end to humanity as we know it

Dr R@t on Anarchy and Civilisation

I enjoy your chronologies so here’s my one. Civilisation, here understood to mean a society of free people with no God or Master, began about 80 years ago.

It arose in a part of Asia called UKRAINE. It had to fight almost continuously for its survival on several fronts. It lasted 2 or 3 years before being overrun. …

The Doomsday Book

Slums

A Green Anarchist Vision

Imagine how good it could all be … Work towards creating it. If we are to make any difference in the present, we need a strong vision of what we want in the future. A utopian vision is an important part of what we are about. Where to start to describe it though.

We do not count, when set against the inhuman world of the political machine and multinational corporations. The individual does not count. The individual is completely lost. We, by contrast, have to start with that individual. The way each person acts legislates a world into being, and what is comes out of the total collection of such actions. Start with myself. Start with my particular situation as an alienated individual, stuck within this complex, this web of totalitarianism, alienation, oppression. Start by taking a close look at the concrete tower block, the motorway, the office block, the DHSS office, the polluting factory … Contrast this with the possibility of real community.

Try to think of what a human scale community would be like. Try to imagine the many distinctive styles of building, the regional accents, the village where people are known by name and recognized, where each person’s individual contribution is acknowledged.

Their world is tetreating into virtual reality – a postmodernist desert where the logo is more important than the product, where …

Counterculture

Pamphlets

Letters

A view from Detroit

SB Issue 63

Date: Jun 2001

---

Editorial

To get right to the point, yes, GA has split. ...

SB Issue 64

Date: Dec 2001

---

A Revolution of the Whole Body

SB Issue 65

Date: Unknown

SB Issue #66

Date: 2004

--- Articles from Unknown Issues ---

Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder by Bob Black

[A rejoinder to a polemic by “Walter Alter” published in Fringe Ware Review]

If patriotism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the last refuge of a scoundrel, scientism is by now the first. It’s the only ideology which, restated in cyberbabble, projects the look-and-feel of futurity even as it conserves attitudes and values essential to keeping things just as they are. Keep on zapping!

The abstract affirmation of “change” is conservative, not progressive. It privileges all change, apparent or real, stylistic or substantive, reactionary or revolutionary. The more things change — the more things that change — the more they stay the same. Faster, faster, Speed Racer! — (but keep going in circles).

For much the same reason the privileging of progress is also conservative. Progress is the notion that change tends toward improvement and improvement tends to be irreversible. Local setbacks occur as change is stalled or misdirected (“the ether,” “phlogiston”) but the secular tendency is forward (and secular). Nothing goes very wrong for very long, so there is never any compelling reason not to just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s gonna be all right. As some jurist once put it in another (but startlingly similar) context, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind fine.

As his pseudonym suggests, Walter Alter is a self-sanctified high priest of progress (but does he know that in German, alter means “older”?). He disdains the past the better to perpetuate it. His writing only in small letters — how modernist! — was quite the rage when e.e. cummings pioneered it 80 years ago. Perhaps Alter’s next advance will be to abandon punctuation only a few decades after James Joyce did. And well under 3000 years since the Romans did both. The pace of progress can be dizzying.

For Alter, the future is a program that Karl Marx and Jules Verne mapped out in a previous century. Evolution is unilinear, technologically driven and, for some strange reason, morally imperative. These notions were already old when Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx cobbled them together. Alter’s positivism is no improvement on that of Comte, who gave the game away by founding a Positivist Church. And his mechanical materialism is actually a regression from Marxism to Stalinism. Like bad science fiction, but not as entertaining, Alterism is 19^th century ideology declaimed in 21^st century jargon. (One of the few facts about the future at once certain and reassuring is that it will not talk like Walter Alter any more than the present talks like Hugo Gernsback.) Alter hasn’t written one word with which Newt Gingrich or Walt Disney, defrosted, would disagree. The “think tank social engineers” are on his side; or rather, he’s on theirs. They don’t think the way he does — that barely qualifies as thinking at all — but they want us to think the way he does. The only reason he isn’t on their payroll is why pay him if he’s willing to do it for nothing?

“Info overload is relative to your skill level,” intones Alter. It’s certainly relative to his. He bounces from technology to anthropology to history and back again like the atoms of the Newtonian billiard-bill universe that scientists, unlike Alter, no longer believe in. The breadth of his ignorance amazes, a wondering world can only, with Groucho Marx, ask: “Is there anything else you know absolutely nothing about?” If syndicalism is (as one wag put it) fascism minus the excitement, Alterism is empiricism minus the evidence. He sports the toga of reason without stating any reason for doing so. He expects us to take his rejection of faith on faith. He fiercely affirms that facts are facts without mentioning any.

Alter is much too upset to be articulate, but at least he’s provided an enemies list — although, like Senator McCarthy, he would rather issue vague categorical denunciations than name names. High on the list are “primitivo-nostalgic” “anthro-romanticists” who are either also, or are giving aid and comfort to, “anti-authoritarians” of the “anarcho-left.” To the lay reader all these mysterious hyphenations are calculated to inspire a vague dread without communicating any information whom they refer to except dupes of the think tank social engineers and enemies of civilization. But why should the think tank social engineers want to destroy the civilization in which they flourish at the expense of most of the rest of us?

If by religion is meant reverence for something not understood, Alter is fervently religious. He mistakes science for codified knowledge (that was natural history, long since as defunct as phrenology). Science is a social practice with distinctive methods, not an accumulation of officially certified “facts.” There are no naked, extracontextual facts. Facts are always relative to a context. Scientific facts are relative to a theory or a paradigm (i.e., to a formalized context). Are electrons particles or waves? Neither and both, according to Niels Bohr — it depends on where you are looking from and why. Are the postulates and theorems of Euclidean geometry “true”? They correspond very well to much of the physical universe, but Einstein found that Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry better described such crucial phenomena as gravitation and the deflection of light rays. Each geometry is internally consistent; each is inconsistent with the other. No conceivable fact or facts would resolve their discrepancy. As much as they would like to transcend the inconsistency, physicists have learned to live with the incommensurable theories of relativity and quantum physics because they both work (almost). Newtonian physics is still very serviceable inside the solar system, where there are still a few “facts” (like the precession of Mercury) not amenable to Einsteinian relativity, but the latter is definitely the theory of choice for application to the rest of the universe. To call the one true and the other false is like calling a Toyota true and a Model-T false.

Theories create facts — and theories destroy them. Science is simultaneously, and necessarily, progressive and regressive. Unlike Walter Alter, science privileges neither direction. There is no passive, preexisting, “organised, patterned, predicted and graspable” universe out there awaiting our Promethean touch. Insofar as the Universe is orderly — which, for all we know, may not be all that far — we make it so. Not only in the obvious sense that we form families and build cities, ordering our own life-ways, but merely by the patterning power of perception, by which we resolve a welter of sense-data into a “table” where there are “really” only a multitude of tiny particles and mostly empty space.

Alter rages against obnosis, his ill-formed neologism for ignoring the obvious. But ignoring the obvious is “obviously” the precondition for science. As S.F.C. Milsom put it, “things that are obvious cannot be slightly wrong: like the movement of the sun, they can only be fundamentally wrong.” Obviously the sun circles the earth. Obviously the earth is flat. Obviously the table before me is solid, not, as atomic-science mystics claim, almost entirely empty space. Obviously particles cannot also be waves. Obviously human society is impossible without a state. Obviously hunter-gatherers work harder than contemporary wage-laborers. Obviously the death penalty deters crime. But nothing is more obvious, if anything is, than that all these propositions are false. Which is to say, they cannot qualify as “facts” within any framework which even their own proponents acknowledge as their own. Indeed, all the advocates (of such of these opinions as still have any) stridently affirm, like Alter, a positivist-empiricist framework in which their falsity is conspicuous.

So then — to get down to details — forward into the past. Alter rants against what he calls the “romanticist attachment to a ‘simpler,’ ‘purer’ existence in past times or among contemporary primitive or ‘Eastern’ societies.” Hold it right there. Nobody that I know of is conflating past or present primitive societies with “Eastern” societies (presumably the civilizations of China and India and their offshoots in Japan, Korea, Burma, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, etc.). These “Eastern” societies much more closely resemble the society — ours — which “anarcho-leftists” want to overthrow than they do any primitive society. Both feature the state, the market, class stratification and sacerdotally controlled religion, which are absent from all band (forager) societies and many tribal societies. If primitive and Eastern societies have common features of any importance to his argument (had he troubled to formulate one) Alter does not identify them.

For Alter it is a “crushing reality that the innate direction that any sentient culture will take to amplify its well-being will be to increase the application of tool-extensions.” Cultures are not “sentient”; that is to reify and mystify their nature. Nor do cultures necessarily have any “innate direction.” As an ex- (or crypto-) Marxist — he is a former (?) follower of Lyndon LaRouche in his Stalinist, “National Caucus of Labor Committees” phase — Alter has no excuse for not knowing this. Although Marx was most interested in a mode of production — capitalism — which, he argued, did have an innate direction, he also identified an “Asiatic mode of production” which did not; Karl Wittfogel elaborated on the insight in his Oriental Despotism. Our seer prognosticates that “if that increase stops, the culture will die.” This we know to be false.

If Alter is correct, for a society to regress to a simpler technology is inevitably suicidal. Anthropologists know better. For Alter it’s an article of faith that agriculture is technologically superior to foraging. But the ancestors of the Plains Indians were sedentary or semisedentary agriculturists who abandoned that life-way because the arrival of the horse made possible (not necessary) the choice of a simpler hunting existence which they must have adjudged qualitatively superior. The Kpelle of Liberia refuse to switch from dry- to wet-cultivation of rice, their staple food, as economic development “experts” urge them to. The Kpelle are well aware that wet (irrigated) rice farming is much more productive than dry farming. But dry farming is conducted communally, with singing and feasting and drinking, in a way which wet farming cannot be — and it’s much easier work at a healthier, more comfortable “work station.” If their culture should “die” as a result of this eminently reasonable choice it will be murder, not suicide. If by progress Alter means exterminating people because we can and because they’re different, he can take his progress and shove it. He defames science by defending it.

Even the history of Western civilization (the only one our ethnocentric futurist takes seriously) contradicts Alter’s theory of technological will-to-power. For well over a thousand years, classical civilization flourished without any significant “application of tool extension.” Even when Hellenistic or Roman science advanced, its technology usually did not. It created the steam engine, then forgot about the toy, as China (another counter-example to Alterism) invented gunpowder and used it to scare away demons — arguably its best use. Of course, ancient societies came to an end, but they all do: as Keynes put it, in the long run, we will all be dead.

And I have my suspicions about the phrase “tool extension.” Isn’t something to do with that advertised in the back of porn magazines?

Alter must be lying, not merely mistaken, when he reiterates the Hobbesian myth that “primitive life is short and brutal.” He cannot possibly even be aware of the existence of those he tags as anthro-romanticists without knowing that they have demonstrated otherwise to the satisfaction of their fellow scientists. The word “primitive” is for many purposes — including this one — too vague and overinclusive to be useful. It might refer to anything from the few surviving hunter-gathering societies to the ethnic minority peasantry of modernizing Third World states (like the Indians of Mexico or Peru). Life expectancy is a case in point. Alter wants his readers to suppose that longevity is a function of techno-social complexity. It isn’t, and it isn’t the opposite either. As Richard Borshay Lee ascertained, the Kung San (“Bushmen”) of Botswana have a population structure closer to that of the United States than to that of the typical Third World country with its peasant majority. Foragers’ lives are not all that short. Only recently have the average lifespans in the privileged metropolis nations surpassed prehistoric rates.

As for whether the lives of primitives are “brutal,” as compared to those of, say, Detroiters, that is obviously a moralistic, not a scientific, judgment. If brutality refers to the quality of life, foragers, as Marshall Sahlins demonstrated in “The Original Affluent Society,” work much less and socialize and party much more than we moderns do. None of them take orders from an asshole boss or get up before noon or work a five-day week or — well, you get the idea.

Alter smugly observes that “damn few aboriginal societies are being created and lived in fully by those doing the praising [of them].” No shit. So what? These societies never were created; they evolved. The same industrial and capitalist forces which are extinguishing existing aboriginal societies place powerful obstacles to forming new ones. What we deplore is precisely what we have lost, including the skills to recreate it. Alter is just cheerleading for the pigs. Like I said, they’d pay him (but probably not very well) if he weren’t doing it for free.

Admittedly an occasional anthropologist and an occasional “anarcho-leftist” has in some respects romanticized primitive life at one time or another, but on nothing like the scale on which Alter falsifies the ethnographic record. Richard Borshay Lee and Marshall Sahlins today represent the conventional wisdom as regards hunter-gatherer societies. They don’t romanticize anything. They don’t have to. A romanticist would claim that the primitive society he or she studies is virtually free of conflict and violence, as did Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in her book on the San/Bushmen, The Harmless People. Lee’s later, more painstaking observations established per capita homicide rates for the San not much lower than from those of the contemporary United States. Sahlins made clear that the tradeoff for the leisurely, well-fed hunting-gathering life was not accumulating any property which could not be conveniently carried away. Whether this is any great sacrifice is a value judgment, not a scientific finding — a distinction to which Alter is as oblivious as any medieval monk.

About the only specific reference Alter makes is to Margaret Mead, “a semi-literate sectarian specializing in ‘doping the samples’ when they didn’t fit into her pre-existent doctrine” (never specified). Mead was poorly trained prior to her first fieldwork in Samoa, but to call the author of a number of well-written best-sellers “semi-literate” falls well short of even semi-literate, it’s just plain stupid. I’d say Alter was a semi-literate sectarian doping the facts except that he’s really a semi-literate sectarian ignoring the facts.

Mead’s major conclusions were that the Samoans were sexually liberal and that they were, relative to interwar Americans, more cooperative than competitive. Mead — the bisexual protege of the lesbian Ruth Benedict — may well have projected her own sexual liberalism onto the natives. But modern ethnographies (such as Robert Suggs’ Mangaia) as well as historical sources from Captain Cook forwards confirm that most Pacific island societies really were closer to the easygoing hedonistic idyll Mead thought she saw in Samoa than to some Hobbesian horrorshow. Alter rails against romanticism, subjectivity, mysticism — the usual suspects — but won’t look the real, regularly replicated facts about primitive society in the face. He’s in denial.

If Mead’s findings as to sexuality and maturation have been revised by subsequent fieldwork, her characterization of competition and cooperation in the societies she studied has not. By any standard, our modern (state-) capitalist society is what statisticians call an outlier — a sport, a freak, a monster — at an extraordinary distance from most observations, the sort that pushes variance and variation far apart. There is no “double standard employing an extreme criticism against all bourgeoise [sic], capitalist, spectacular, commodity factors” — the departure is only as extreme as the departure from community as it’s been experienced by most hominid societies for the last several million years. It’s as if Alter denounced a yardstick as prejudiced because it establishes that objects of three feet or more are longer than all those that are not. If this is science, give me mysticism or give me death.

Alter insinuates, without demonstrating, that Mead faked evidence. Even if she did, we know that many illustrious scientists, among them Galileo and Gregor Mendel, faked or fudged reports of their experiments to substantiate conclusions now universally accepted. Mendel, to make matters worse, was a Catholic monk, a “mystic” according to Alter’s demonology, and yet he founded the science of genetics. Alter, far from founding any science, gives no indication of even beginning to understand any of them.

The merits and demerits of Margaret Mead’s ethnography are less than peripheral to Alter’s polemic. It wasn’t Mead who discovered and reported that hunter-gatherers work a lot less than we do. There is something very off about a control freak who insists that ideas he cannot accept or understand are Fascist. I cannot denounce this kind of jerkoff opportunism too strongly. “Fascist” is not, as Alter supposes, an all-purpose epithet synonomous with “me no like.” I once wrote an essay, “Feminism as Fascism,” which occasioned a great deal of indignation, although it has held up only too well. But I didn’t mind that because I’d been careful and specific about identifying the precise parallels between Fascism and so-called (radical) feminism — about half a dozen. That’s half a dozen more analogies between feminism and Fascism than Alter identifies between Fascism and anarcho-leftism or primito-nostagia. The only anarcho-leftists with any demonstrable affinities to Fascism (to which, in Italy, they provided many recruits) are the Syndicalists, a dwindling sect, the last anarchists to share Alter’s retrograde scientism. It’s Alter, not his enemies, who calls for “a guiding, cohesive body of knowledge and experience as a frame of reference” — just one frame of reference, mind you — for “diagrams and manuals,” for marching orders. There happen to be real-life Fascists in this imperfect world of ours. By trivializing the word, Alter (who is far from alone in this), purporting to oppose Fascists, in fact equips them with a cloaking device.

Artists, wails Walter, “don’t believe that technology is a good thing, intrinsically.” I don’t much care what artists believe, especially if Alter is typical of them, but their reported opinion does them credit. I’d have thought it obnosis, ignoring the obvious, to believe in technology “intrinsically,” not as the means to an end or ends it’s marketed as, but as some sort of be-all and end-all of no use to anybody. Art-for-art’s-sake is a debatable credo but at least it furnishes art which for some pleases by its beauty. Technology for its own sake makes no sense at all, no more than Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. If tech-for-tech’s sake isn’t the antithesis of reason, I don’t know reason from squat and I’d rather not.

The communist-anarchist hunter-gatherers (for that is what, to be precise, they are), past and present, are important. Not (necessarily) for their successful habitat-specific adaptations since these are, by definition, not generalizable. But because they demonstrate that life once was, that life can be, radically different. The point is not to recreate that way of life (although there may be some occasions to do that) but to appreciate that, if a life-way so utterly contradictory to ours is feasible, which indeed has a million-year track record, then maybe other life-ways contradictory to ours are feasible.

For a 21^st century schizoid man of wealth and taste, Alter has an awfully retarded vocabulary. He assumes that babytalk babblewords like “good” and “evil” mean something more than “me like” and “me no like,” but if they do mean anything more to him he hasn’t distributed the surplus to the rest of us. He accuses his chosen enemies of “infantilism and anti-parental vengeance,” echoing the authoritarianism of Lenin (”Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder) and Freud, respectively. A typical futurist — and the original Futurists did embrace Fascism — he’s about a century behind Heisenberg and Nietzsche and the rest of us. Moralism is retrograde. You want something? Don’t tell me you’re “right” and I’m “wrong,” I don’t care what God or Santa Claus likes, never mind if I’ve been naughty or nice. Just tell me what you want that I have and why I should give it to you. I can’t guarantee we’ll come to terms, but articulation succeeded by negotiation is the only possible way to settle a dispute without coercion. As Proudhon put it, “I want no laws, but I am ready to bargain.”

Alter clings to objective “physical reality” — matter in motion — with the same faith a child clutches his mother’s hand. And faith, for Alter and children of all ages, is always shadowed by fear. Alter is (to quote Clifford Geertz) “afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it.” He’ll never experience an Oedipal crisis because he’ll never grow up that much. A wind-up world is the only kind he can understand. He thinks the solar system actually is an orrery. He has no tolerance for ambiguity, relativity, indeterminacy — no tolerance, in fact, for tolerance.

Alter seems to have learned nothing of science except some badly bumbled-up jargon. In denouncing “bad scientific method” and “intuition” in almost the same bad breath, he advertises his ignorance of the pluralism of scientific method. Even so resolute a positivist as Karl Popper distinguished the “context of justification,” which he thought entailed compliance with a rather rigid demonstrative orthodoxy, from the “context of discovery” where, as Paul Feyerabend gleefully observed, “anything goes.” Alter reveals how utterly out of it he is by a casual reference to “true methods of discovery.” There are no true methods of discovery, only useful ones. In principle, reading the Bible or dropping acid is as legitimate a practice in the context of discovery as is keeping up with the technical journals. Whether Archimedes actually gleaned inspiration from hopping in the tub or Newton from watching an apple fall is not important. What’s important is that these — any — triggers to creativity are possible and, if effective, desirable.

Intuition is important, not as an occult authoritative faculty, but as a source of hypotheses in all fields. And also of insights not yet, if ever, formalizable, but nonetheless meaningful and heuristic in the hermeneutic disciplines which rightfully refuse to concede that if they are not susceptible to quantification they are mystical. Many disciplines since admitted to the pantheon of science (such as biology, geology and economics) would have been aborted by this anachronistic dogma. “Consider the source” is what Alter calls “bad scientific method.” We hear much (too much) of the conflict between evolutionism and creationism. It takes only a nodding acquaintance with Western intellectual history to recognize that the theory of evolution is a secularization of the eschatology which distinguishes Christianity from other religious traditions. But having Christianity as its context of discovery is a very unscientific reason to reject evolution. Or, for that matter, to accept it.

Alter is not what he pretends to be, a paladin of reason assailing the irrationalist hordes. The only thing those on his enemies list have in common is that they’re on it. Ayn Rand, whose hysterical espousal of “reason” was Alterism without the pop science jargon, had a list of irrationalists including homosexuals, liberals, Christians, anti-Zionists, Marxists, abstract expressionists, hippies, technophobes, racists, and smokers of pot (but not tobacco). Alter’s list (surely incomplete) includes sado-masochists, New Agers, anthropologists, schizophrenics, anti-authoritarians, Christian Fundamentalists, think tank social engineers, Fascists, proto-Cubists ... Round up the unusual suspects. Alter’s just playing a naming-and-blaming game because he doesn’t get enough tool extensions.

“How many times a day do you really strike forward on important matters intuitively?” Well said — and as good a point as any to give this guy the hook. Riddle me this, Mr. or Ms. Reader: How many times a day do you really strike forward on important matters AT ALL? How many times a day do you “strike forward on important matters” — intuitively, ironically, intellectually, impulsively, impassively, or any damn way? Or do you find as day follows day that day follows day, and that’s about it? That the only “important matters” that affect you, if there even are any, are decided, if they even are, by somebody else? Have you noticed your lack of power to chart your own destiny? That your access to “virtual” reality increases in proportion as you distance yourself (a prudent move) from the real thing? That aside from working and paying, you are of absolutely no use to this society and can’t expect to be kept around after you can’t do either? And finally, does Walter Alter’s technophiliac techno-capitalist caterwauling in any way help you to interpret the future, much less — and much more important — to change it?

Mayday, May Day: Critiquing Mayday 2000 as a Political ‘Racket’

MayDay 2000’s hype may be a bit wonky, but it’s already as unavoidable as that of its predecessors — multiple glossy leaflets through the post, listings in all the movement press, stickers all round the Tube, the carefully tricked-up ‘must go’ ambience, though no-one you know can really think why. You should trust your own instincts a little more and the anarcho-herd’s a little less — this one’s a con, always has been.

MayDay 2000 doesn’t come out of Reclaim the Streets (RTS), Earth First! or anywhere else in the direct action / DiY milieu. It’s prime movers are the Anarchist (Communist) Federation, old guard anarcho-Lefties more into promoting themselves and their ideology than revolution. Unlike June 18^th and November 30^th, it’s not primarily a street event, it’s a Lefty conference with the street party just used as a come-on to sell the conference and up their ideological cred.

The story behind MayDay 2000 is one of manoeuvring and manipulation and the lesson is not to let yourself be used as cannon fodder in someone else’s power games.

Splits, Spooks and Secret Bungs: Mayday ’98

The first MayDay conference was in 1998, held at Bradford’s 1-in-12 Club, then the heart of the Northern Anarchist Network. Its leading lights presented themselves as open-minded and undogmatic in the last issue of Class War they had input into and their magazine, Smash Hits, claiming that as their own class struggle politics had failed, they were open to exploring new ways of changing society. Mainly because of their newly-forged alliance with striking Liverpool dockers, Earth First!ers and Reclaim the Streets were invited to Bradford MayDay and listened to indulgently.

There was, of course, a lot more to all this than met the eye. The Greenies had been invited because workers turning to them for support instead of ouvrierists that had tail-ended them for months showed how exhausted and unattractive ouvrierist politics was even to industrial workers. Even Greenies could mobilise numbers, enthusiasm and activity that the ouvrierists could only dream about — and the dockers were mainly interested in allies that could get results, not just give lip service. The ouvrierists needed the Greenies to survive ideologically into the 21^st century and, given this, their invite to MayDay ’98 can be seen as just another cynical Leftist attempt to resuscitate their exhausted ideology.

It’s noteworthy who wasn’t invited to MayDay ’98 — the Class War Federation the Leeds lot split from and tried to shut down, Anti-Fascist Action who they split from when AFA got wise to their collaboration with local police and MI5 front Searchlight, and any other groups that knew about their collaboration with the State. The entire Northern Anarchist Network had been led by the nose for years by Searchlight asset Paul Bowman into a street war tricked up with local fascists that got all their pics on World In Action; local MPs whining for more secret state repression of ‘extremists’, Left and Right; and surveillance cameras installed at the 1-in-12 Club compromising everyone attending MayDay ’98, amongst other events. Anyone principled enough to point this out was politically isolated and subjected to a vicious whispering campaign, not least using the networks laid down at MayDay ’98.

Most involved weren’t so naive they didn’t know this at the time. They were told. They pressed on with it because they put power before principle. Behind the Leeds lot stood a wealthy and influential anarcho-Leftist network centring on AK Press and Leeds-based Chumbawamba, flush from recently signing to EMI. Both Chumba’s Alice Nutter and AK’s Dean Plant knew Bowman well, Plant from early-1990s anti-poll tax campaigning. Chumba underwrote the Bradford conference, and the book fair and publicity there were largely down to AK, always keen to rack up another marketplace for their anarcho-wares. Plenty of the participants including RTS and Brighton-based eco-zines SchNews and Do Or Die were covertly bunged thousands of pounds by Chumba in an attempt to buy the direct action movement. Local Chumba beneficiaries in Leeds were primed with the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ ideology the ouvrierists used to supersede rival ‘lifestylists’ in the late-1980s in the hope that they’d establish formal structures in EF!UK so it could be easily taken over in classic Lefty style. EF!UK’s anti-centralising ethic held, so the ouvrierists had to content themselves with secretly funding the cliques their proxies were publicly criticising in an attempt to tie strings to the direct action milieu that way. Certainly, we’ve never seen any of them critique Chumba or AK since 1998, nor have they published anyone else’s criticisms of them.

How the fed Got to be King of the Hill

The Anarchist Communist Federation have been around since the early-1980s and claim to be the bearers of a British anarchist-communist tradition dating back to Victorian times. If that doesn’t sound Lefty enough to you, note how they could never bring themselves to unite with the Class War Federation — also anarchist-communists — just because Class War are livelier and less dogmatic than them. Despite this, they claim they’ll work with anyone and the ‘must go’ hype around MayDay ’98 called their bluff and forced them to Bradford. There are ACFers in south Yorkshire in with the Bowman clique who’ve behaved disgracefully towards other anarchists and even others within the ACF, but we think the Fed’s main motive for getting involved was the backstairs influence and dosh, and they were prepared to play a ‘long game’ to get the lion’s share of it.

The Leeds / Bradford 1-in-12 Club lot certainly weren’t up to holding the MayDay ’98 network together. Their continuing collaboration with the secret state meant they couldn’t even deal effectively with fascists on their own doorstep (the street war being make-work for the spooks), and a reputation for continually manipulating others for ulterior motives tainted them. As they’d said their own ouvrierism was bankrupt but actually believed the only point of the MayDay ’98 network was to revitalise ouverierism, meaningful debate in Smash Hits was impossible and it collapsed. The ACF were happy to serve as a pipeline for news of Bowman and his cronies’ indiscretions and eventually even politically-illiterate AK and Chumba got the point and shifted their patronage to the ACF who’d also — much against their nature and handicapped by their unwieldy and archaic ideology — been striking up informal links with RTS, just to show their patrons they could ‘get the goods’ that way.

The ACF celebrated their ascendancy by unveiling their new collective identity as the ‘Anarchist Federation’ at the October ’99 Anarchist Bookfair. Lest you mistake this for the non-sectarian, all-inclusiveness the Leeds lot tried to sucker people in with at the start of the MayDay scam, this ‘federation’ is no more than the ACF under a new name. The ideology hasn’t changed, it doesn’t encompass more individuals or groups, though now those groups are expected to fall in behind them. The rival Northern Anarchist Network is denounced as “Marxist” even though many are as anarchist-communist as the former ACF (eg. the ex-CWers in Leeds / Bradford) and they appeared perfectly happy to work alongside them for the previous two years. Chumba funding has given the Fed the opportunity to arbitrarily classify some groups as ‘in’ and others as ‘out’ regarding their own favour and through it, access to the anarcho-Leftist power complex. There have been other competitors for Chumba’s patronage — the wannabes of the Scottish Anarchist Federation centred on the Neoist-controlled Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE — not!) spring to mind — but it was the sect formerly known as the ACF that were sneaky, subservient and rigidly ouvrierist enough to win the Chumba-dumbos and their political advisors at AK over.

Cracking the Whip: Mayday 2000

Power is nothing unless it is exercised. Also at the 1999 Anarchist Bookfair, the Anarchist Federation first proposed MayDay 2000, a key mark of their ascendancy. Sure enough AK proxies the Solidarity Federation / Black Flag fell in behind them, as did the Class War Federation, no doubt glad to come in from the cold that Chumba’s previous favour for their rivals in the North consigned them to.

Tapping into RTS’s international anti-globalisation network and putting a reductionistic ouvrierist spin on the anti-capitalist rhetoric RTS put about for J18, MayDay 2000 sent delegates to a post-Seattle N30 meeting in Canada and proposed 1^st May as the next world day of action against globalisation. Although International Workers Day is an attractive enough date for people from their ideological tradition and would boost their conference internationally, it was a significant departure from previous world days of action inasmuch as they’d been selected to coincide with dates the WTO were actually meeting. Even this practice had been criticised as giving those outside the country concerned no opportunity to act directly against the WTO meeting, but the choice of May Day eliminated even this direct action component, reducing the whole to empty protest. Later criticised for setting this arbitrary date, MayDay 2000 blamed some trade unionists in Canada for proposing it.

Equally high-handed was their organisation of the conference and call for (futile) mass street action to boost it. A two-day programme was laid down to sell ‘ordinary working class people’ simple-simon anarchist ideas, then the books (AK’s marketeering cut), then the cult heroes in the form of a Q&A panel discussion, then maybe a bit of excitement in the form of street action. Because they didn’t have the resources to make all this happen without the assistance of activists from outside their own circle, MayDay 2000 had to make some display of openness — to the old RTSers, EF!ers, and the new DiY milieu generally. When this led to criticisms of the patronising ‘mug and jug’ nature of their own ideological proselytising, critics were told there wasn’t time to discuss anything more than implementing the pre-decided programme, ie. more of the same quasi-Leninist arrogance. This objection didn’t apply to the Neoist Alliance’s Fabian ‘Fuckwit’ Tompsett, who wasted half a meeting absurdly arguing anarchism is fascism without being shut up or kicked out, but then this Holocaust denial apologist and secret state asset is a pal of AK and their Black Flag proxies and is honest enough to openly attack Greenies rather than concealing these sentiments enough to trick ‘useful work’ out of them. The sum total of all these criticisms was that the tag-line for MayDay 2000 was amended from ‘anarchist’ to read ‘anti-capitalist’, a measure of how carefully they were listening to them, especially when these were considered “the same thing”. It had to be pointed out to them that anarchists are also anti-State / anti-hierarchical. The obvious deficiencies of MayDay 2000’s definition were shown up when overt Leninists tried to jump on their bandwagon. They excluded Workers Power as opportunists (ie. ideological competitors), but didn’t exclude themselves for playing exactly the same game at RTS’s expense.

The conference is one thing — a cut-rate version of the SWP’s utterly unoriginal ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ May Day conference, but otherwise indistinguishable from it — but the street party’s something else. No doubt because Chumba saw street events like J18 and N30 as ‘the latest thing’, MayDay 2000 announced they’d be staging one on 1^st May to the mainstream media, then presented this fait d’accompli to Earth First!ers in the expectation they’d organise it for them. They expect to claim credit for any ensuing disorder whilst all EF!ers will get out of it is cracked heads. There’s also the small matter of such disorder achieving little — May 1^st being a bank holiday, there’s no real target and N30 Euston shows the cops know how to contain and control this stuff now even if there were — and it being used to legitimise anti-terrorist legislation designed to end open civil disobedience in UK.

The Moot and After: What’re We Going to do Now?

When Anarchist Federation, Black Flag and Aufheben types went to the winter 2000 EF! Moot to present their fait d’accompli, they left huddled and pasty-faced with it rejected as take-over tactics. EF!ers weren’t prepared to accept their dictatorial, manipulative style, their elitist propagandising or their gesture politics demonstrations.

Though it’s good to see EF! can defend itself from this sort of attack (assuming future attackers will also need their co-operation), this incident has opened more fundamental questions about what sort of alliances and actions are appropriate as far as EF!ers are concerned in making revolution. People objected when MayDay 2000 took over the representation of a big street party, but must now question why anyone should presume to represent others motivations in participating in such actions (largely to do with immediate, non-ideologised, pleasurable experiences of one sort or another, IMHO). The point is that the majority of participants in any big event are largely passive, voiceless and directed — why this sort of mass action was so attractive to Leftist racketeers in the first place. Similarly, MayDay 2000 were so arbitrary in their selection of date to make it obviously empty symbolic protest, but don’t most street parties border on this, protesting abstract ‘capitalism’, ‘globalisation’ or which ever buzzword is current (pick which ideologues you want to attract!) rather than specific manifestations where we can make concrete differences?

Most EF!ers at the Moot decided to organise local street parties instead of supporting one centralised in London, not half an answer to the questions raised above. The anarcho-Leftists want power by winning converts from the current ruling ideology to theirs — no wonder they act like governments-in-waiting! Our role isn’t to win converts, but to destroy power and make it possible for people to live free of it. We need to study what most immediately and concretely oppresses us we can destroy, then having done that, the next most immediate and concrete oppression, and by liberating ourselves we’ll also liberate others. This isn’t about an ideologically-imposed external ‘cause’, it’s about our own lives and using our everyday lives as cover, just as the more avant garde German guerrillas did. We need to study the physical infrastructure and the legal / cultural infrastructure, how it relates and how we can pixie it most easily.

Without mass actions, we don’t need mass funding, a corrupting and corrosive influence on EF!UK from its inception. If people insist on big actions, funding should be limited to what participants can raise amongst themselves, from their own resources, rather than what they can whistle up clandestinely from one big donor. That way, some level of popular participation, accountability and transparency will remain — and it’ll be harder for demos to get to a monster scale where some can pretend to represent the motivations of other participants. If Chumba want to fund the movement, they should do so openly and without the ulterior motive of propping up archaic and manipulative ideologies or bribing others to do so when this is never going to make revolution. They should look beyond what the direct action / DiY movement is doing at one important thing we are saying: we aren’t prepared to lead, nor should any free person be led.

Finally, EF!UK already has a rule of thumb not to co-operate with political parties — why they were sussed enough to refuse co-operation with the SWP over May Day. What’s implicit in this critique of power needs to be bought out. If we rejected all representation, all peddlers of ideology and spectacle for what is immediate, we’d have picked up on the Leftist take-over from within all the earlier and defused the May Day 2000 debacle before it became an embarrassment to our liberatory perspective.

Together let us end representation, seperation, spectacle, ideology and illusion!

[1] "An Interview with Richard Hunt". Web.archive. 12 March 2005. Archived from the original on March 12, 2005. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[2] "Counter Information on Green Anarchist". www.counterinfo.org.uk. Retrieved 2016-12-27.

[3] "Green Anarchist Documents". Stewart home society. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[4] "Counter Information on Green Anarchist". Counterinfo. 28 April 1999. Retrieved 14 May 2015.

[5] autonomous.org.uk Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine

[6] Black writes, “Bakunin considered Marx, ‘the German scholar, in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German,’ to be a ‘hopeless statist.’ A Hegelian, a Jew, a sort-of scholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist — does this sound like anybody familiar?’ Full text available on The Anarchist Library at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-after-leftism

[7] “The original affluent society” of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, where people only had to work a leisurely couple of hours a day to get together the basics of life — a lived just as long as people do in industrialized societies.

[8] Fredy Perlman’s Against His-Story, Against Leviathan (Black & Red, Detroit, 1983), pp.13–15.

[9] Power-crazed scum saw Imperial Rome as their model of the ideal society. Such Classicism culminated in fascism.

[10] Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny (Vintage, 1985), must reading for pop tribalists who ignorantly assume all things tribal are good, not that most get beyond facepaint and fashion...

[11] All from Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom (Cheshire, 1982), chap. 2. A reformist, he offers “new ethics” instead of following through the logical, primitivist conclusion of this chapter.

[12] People dismissing John Zerzan’s critique of symbolisation in Elements of Refusal (Left Bank, 1988), Part 1, as weird should appreciate such thinking is more familiar to primal people.

[13] 55 raids — the figure arrived by Green Anarchist, but see note 23, the testimony of Desmond Thomas on 11^th December 1996.

[14] The precise wording of the charges as issued on the 16^th January 1996: That between 1^st January 1991 and 17^th January 1996 [the six named] conspired together to unlawfully incite persons unknown to commit criminal damage contrary to section 1 (1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
An amended charge dated 9^th February 1996 was the same except ending: contrary to section 1 (1) and (3) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971, contrary to common law.

[15] New Statesman, 17^th February 1995, page 9.
Thus Hampshire became a logical county police force to build up a base of experience and information about the road protest movement. The Hampshire Constabulary has a long track record of reactionary behaviour, the Stoney Cross attack on the traveller convoy, (1984) being one obvious example. ‘The Hampshire Police and the KGB would get on like a house on fire.’ Alan Bennett, ‘Writing Home’, page 147.

[16] The best account of the poll tax campaign is:
Danny Burns ‘Poll Tax Rebellion’ AK Press, 1992.

[17] For general news about this area, SchNews is a must, PO Box 2600, Brighton BN2 2DX

[18] John Vidal, ‘McLibel — Burger Culture on Trial’, London, Pan Books, 1997.

[19] Mike Durham, Observer, 9^th July 1995, page 10.
‘The most radical underground newspaper on the animal rights and road protest fringe.’
Student Outlook, Summer 1995
‘Green Anarchist, Britain’s most notorious and seditious radical newspaper.’

[20] Larry O’Hara, ‘A Lie Too Far’ ?1.50p from BM 4769, London WC1N 3XX (April 1993)
Larry O’Hara ‘At War With The Truth’, October 1993

[21] ‘Confused? You Won’t Be’, GA 33, page 4, Winter 1993, explains the Hepple saga.

[22] ‘At War With The Truth’ page 3 and page 20.

[23] Freedom Press was first attacked on 27^th March 1993.
See issue of Freedom dated 2^nd April 1993.

[24] New Statesman, 6^th August 1993 and 13^th August 1993.

[25] ‘Fighting Talk’, 19^th April 1998.
see Notes From The Borderland, issue 2, Autumn/Winter 1998–99, page 41.

[26] The John Harlow ‘Summer of Hate’ piece is reproduced in GA 36, page 9, and Stephen Booth ‘Into the 1990’s With Green Anarchist’ Oxford 1996, p 121.

[27] ‘Ride On’ documentary, Channel 4, 25^th October 1994, is described on page 2908 of the Gandalf Case evidence. This documentary claimed that with the Criminal Justice Act, then just on the statute books (October 1994) the road protesters would be forced to either shut up shop or turn terrorist. As evidence of the terrorist option, the ‘Terra-ist’ magazine was hyped, (Terra-ist featured at length in the Gandalf Trial) and the Harlow ‘Summer of Hate’ was recycled in TV form. Gordon Waters was the Tarmac spokesman. Mark Ponsford and Mike Hartwell spoke for Reliance Security. Ken Petch repeated the pit and spikes story for the Highways Agency.
An example of the same type of approach was the Chester Stern Mail on Sunday piece, 6^th February 1994, blaming GA and the ‘Lancaster Bomber’ for the 1993 Grand National fiasco.

[28] Bennetto’s fable was the subject of a PCC complaint by GA. We consider the PCC to be beneath contempt. We also wrote to the NUJ, pointing out the piece was in breach of the NUJ code of conduct. This was replied to by Jacob Ecclestone, deputy General Secretary of the NUJ on January 24^th 1995. A handwritten comment on this letter, which formed part of the Gandalf evidence, seemed to amuse Judge Selwood.

[29] Propaganda outfalls are closely co-ordinated. Consider this: On November 7^th 1998, we had our old friend, Jason Bennetto repeating the ARNI / NPOIU broadening out the terms of reference story in the Independent. On November 8^th, we had Inspector Wexford ‘Road Raging’ cop serial, (a two parter), showing how the nasty eco-terrorist kidnappers were a threat to civilization and decency. Then on the 9^th November, Europol threw in their bit by reporting the 10 McDonalds restaurants torched in Belgium, a news item they admitted sitting on for three months. As if to reinforce the horrible eco-terrorist angle, they claimed the animal libbers had dug up a corpse and dumped it at McDonalds. Why this sudden convergence of themes? — The second Gandalf trial began on 2^nd November....

[30] Karl Marx ‘Herr Vogt, A Spy in the Workers Movement’ 1860, tr R A Procter, New Park, 1982, pages 203–231.
Notes From The Borderland issue 2, page 25.

[31] Margaret Morris, ‘The General Strike’, Penguin Books, London 1976, p 162.

[32] Corporate Watch issue 5/6 has a print out of the text of the Oxford Statement of 5^th — 7^th September 1997.

[33] Jane Affleck reports on the Gandalf appeal in Lobster issue 36, page 29, commenting on the mainstream media silence; see also the ‘Smashing The Image Factory’ below.

[34] Stephen Booth ‘Gandalf Diary’ on the Index on Censorship website listed some of the publications in the trial:
Terraist, Bolton Evening Noose, Land and Liberty, Arkangel, Animal Liberation Primer, No Compromise, Do Or Die, Liberator, Smashing The Image Factory, Without A Trace, Partizan, Kerosine (Yugoslavia) Underground (Canada) Berkshire Wood Elves, ALF(SG) Newsletter, Smoke & Whispers, Cement Cross, Urban Attack, No Comment, Devastate to Liberate, By-Pass, New Zealand Anti Vivisection Society Newsletter, The Power Is Ours, Anarchy in the UK, Against All Odds, Keep it Spikey!

[35] In the printed court transcript of Thomas’s testimony, 11^th December 1996, Thomas gives several figures, and it is not clear how these relate together. He seems to be saying there were two waves of raids, 44 in the first, 31 in the second, and 25 raids related to the defendants. Do we add 44 to 31 and subtract 12 = 63 raids? Do we count ourselves twice = 75?
The transcript is not exactly what he said, more a paraphrase, typed out by a clerk as he spoke. In my own court notes I have the figure 56, which is what I remember him saying.
GA counted up the figure of 55, from raids known about plus what we could sort out from disclosed papers in the evidence. There was a list of raids, Exhibit 952, but as far as I know none of us was given a photocopy of this. So 55 or 56 are probably close to the truth, as close as we are going to get.

[36] I distrust putting a figure on the costs. All those police though, all those raids, the CPS reading through the evidence, police time, barristers in court. The court itself was admitted to cost ?7,000 per day. ‘Quite a few hospital wings and kidney dialysis machines later ....’ (As Ben Emmerson put it in his closing speech.)

[37] Desmond Thomas’s testimony on 11^th December 1996, page 4 of the transcript, p 788 of the evidence. This is as typed, but it is not quite what he said. It captures the convolutedness and pompous tortured style of his speech, though.
At the time, I took this to refer to the Hepple case. I still think this, but now I also think it relates to the Super-Arni / anti Green Squad / NPOIU too, as mentioned in the regulation issue Bennetto type newspaper article. ‘Let’s target the greens’ they said. ‘Let’s go after Green Anarchist.’ Hepple’s activity fits with that same agenda.

[38] Bail was cancelled after the first batch of raids on 11^th May 1995, but the raids resumed and continued until late November. Frontline Books, for example, was at the end of June. There were various reports of raids in Freedom, mostly playing down the seriousness of it all, pretending they were a joke. ‘Hampshire Special Branch On Tour’ for example, Freedom, 22^nd July 1995, or ‘Green Anarchist reader raided’ from 19^th August 1995, page 4.

[39] The police interest impunity joke appeared in An Phoblacht / Republican News, Thursday 20^th November 1997, page 13.

[40] Simon Russell, ’12 Weeks in Portsmouth’, ALF(SG) Newsletter, January 1998, is Simon’s account of the trial. He gives the list of questions asked of the jury.
See also: Portsmouth News, August 28^th 1997, page 7 ‘Potential Jurors are asked about fishing.’

[41] David Ward, Guardian, 30^th June 1995, page 5.
Michael Durham, Observer, 9^th July 1995, page 10.

[42] ‘Underground’ North American ALF(SG) newsletter, Winter 1997, page 15.

[43] Just prior to the start, and quite uncharacteristically, there were two sympathetic pieces in the mainstream:
Nick Cohen, ‘Have a go justice at the greens’ Observer, 24^th August 1997, page 10.
Matthew Kalman, Independent on Sunday. 17^th August 1997, page 4.

[44] Corporate Watch, issue 5 / 6.

[45] The Venton memorandum is reproduced in GA 51, Spring 1998, page 5.

[46] The Justice Department list was Exhibit No 965, page 4757 and onwards in the Gandalf case evidence.

[47] Committal court, Thomas testimony, 12^th December 1996.

[48] Committal court, 12^th December 1996, transcript p 14 = p 798 Gandalf evidence.

[49] Richard Onslow, prosecution case summary, page 3.

[50] Simon Russell, ’12 weeks in Portsmouth’ — Simon points out that as he was acquitted on a majority verdict, even after producing these letters, at least one and perhaps two of the jurors still thought him guilty.

[51] ‘Journalist’ January / February 1998, page 9. Compare this to libel, where newspapers have lawyers checking them for libels. This must mean that newspapers want to commit libel. Well, yes, up to a point, M’lud. But intention is not required to libel.

[52] Underground 9, Winter 1997, page 15 has an account of the Darren Thurston episode. This says that the incident took place on October 10^th, but I am fairly certain it was the 12^th.

[53] This is from a letter by PNR, 2^nd August 1993, which was Exhibit 125, page 565 in the evidence. It suggests a radical decentralization of the GA structure, with an eventual aim of rotating editorships, spreading out the workload of producing it. In fact, this was the post Hepple re-organization of GA. Much was made of the letter in court, but by applying the principle of ‘refusing to lend support’ to tactics people disagree with, the very diverse character of anarchism was clearly shown. The principle expressed in the letter disproved the prosecution.

[54] Simon Russell in the ’12 Weeks in Portsmouth’ article considers it a fair summing up in his case.

[55] Quoting Mark Lynas Corporate Watch 5/6, Winter 1997, page 8.

[56] Diane Taylor, Guardian, November 24^th 1997, page 8.

[57] Diane Taylor, Big Issue, November 24^th-30^th, pp 6–7.

[58] ‘Journalist’ January / February 1998, page 9.

[59] Chris Atton ‘Foundation Stone of a Police State’, Index on Censorship website.

[60] Charles Oman ‘The Great Revolt of 1381’ Greenwood, New York, 1906, p42.

[61] R B Dobson ‘The Peasants revolt of 1381’ Pitman, Bath, 1970, pp373-375

[62] Oman op cit p 59.

[63] Dobson, op cit p 157

[64] Not all were as scrupulous or as unlucky. In 1382 a small group of Rochester men were indicted for sneaking the Duke’s strong-box over the Thames to Southwark, making themselves £1,000 the richer. Oman, op cit, p 58

[65] Oman, op cit, p 68

[66] One of the more regrettable excesses of this third day was the massacre of 160 Flemings, some because they were trading as prostitutes under Hales’ licence, but many simply because they were commercial rivals to those guildmen who’d sided with the rebels.

[67] Dobson, op cit, p 164n, suggests the ‘law of Winchester’ was about converting the punishment for some offences from death to blinding or mutilation. This trivial demand hardly goes with ‘the rebels [attempt to] wipe out the whole legal system’ (Hilton p 227.) I think Tyler instead demanded a return to pre-Norman law, once seated at Winchester. That serfs would cite the Doomsday Book as proof of no serfdom in their areas immediately following the Norman Conquest suggests a lively mythology of a golden age of liberty before the ‘Norman Yoke’ was common currency as early as the 14^th Century, an attitude reinforced by all legal proceedings still being conducted in Norman French during this period.

[68] Oman, op cit p 77.

[69] Dobson, op cit p 42.

[70] Oman, op cit, p 375.

[71] Malcolm Lambert ‘Medieval Heresy’, Blackwells, Oxford, 1994 chapter 11.

[72] Norman Cohn, ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium’, Random, London, 1970, p 203.

[73] Rodney Hilton, ‘Bond Men Made Free’, Routledge, London 1988, p 223.

[74] Joshua, vi, 18–24.

[75] Oman, op cit, p 19.

[76] Hilton, op cit, p p 225, 229.

[77] ibid. p 211.

[78] Cohn, op cit, p 193.

[79] ibid. pp 193 — 195.

[80] ibid. p 192

[81] Hilton, op cit, makes this point eloquently, pp 222–223.

[82] I’m thinking here of Fra Dolcino and his followers at Monte Rebello, 1307, extreme even by Spiritual Franciscan standards, and strictly speaking not of that order. Damian Thompson, ‘The End of Time’, Random House, London, 1999, pp 67–71.

[83] Cohn, op cit, chaps 8–9. The best known examples of this tradition are the Ranters of the English Civil War period. See A L Morton, ‘The World of The Ranters’, Lawrence and Wishart London 1970. Lambert, op cit, p 130 refers to Cathar bishops that may have thought themselves above sin to have sex (usually taboo) as early as the 12^th century.

[84] Fredy Perlman, ‘Against History, Against Leviathan!’ Black and Red, Detroit, 1983, p 212.

[85] Dobson, op cit, p 375.

[86] Perlman, op cit, p 213.

[87] Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer (Joseph Michael, 1954), p.173. Male-biased archaicisms are his.

[88] Personal communication via Coalition Against Civilization, PO Box 835, Greensburg, PA 15601, USA.

[89] Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom (Cheshire, 1982), chap. 5.

[90] Harold Barclay’s People Without Government (Cienfuegos, 1982), p.66.

[91] Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny (Vintage, 1985), p.301.

[92] ibid., p.302.

[93] This is ODOC’s terminology. Webster describes a document as: “A paper that furnishes information, proof, or support of something else”.

[94] This according to a sworn statement by Benny Ward, ODOC’s STG manager.

[95] Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution at Pendleton, Oregon, and the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem, Oregon. My interaction with outside Anarchists earned me my transfer from EOCI to OSP for “administrative security concerns”.

[96] At least not until the date this dispatch was written.

[97] The court file will show you documentation actually filed. It will not show you the tremendous amount of written discovery that took place in the form of Requests for Production and Requests for Admissions submitted to each of the ten separate defendants. This was a brutal, voluminous task, but proved to be exceptionally effective. The court file should be accessible online for anyone wishing to view the documents filed.

[98] Of course we first had a fair trial!

[99] Declarations are sworn statements on par with affidavits. Federal courts allow declarations. Declarations do not require the declarant to swear before a notary public. The court accepts the declarant’s statement as true as a matter of independent honour.

[100] Please forgive my quoting of Mao but many of his observations are fairly astute on removal from the ideology.

[101] Duran proved to be extremely vindictive. She rose to her position of ODOC authority via a stint as a line officer and an Internal Affairs officer. Since the prosecution of this action, she has been supplanted as head Central Mail Administrator by Randy Geer. Duran’s vindictiveness was instrumental in the backlash against this author.

[102] John Zerzan ‘On the Transition; Postscript to Future Primitive’ or on the web here www.insurgentdesire.org.uk

[103] John Zerzan ‘Technology’ Future Primitive CAL Press or on the web here www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/technology.htm

[104] from ‘The Machinery of control: A Critical Look at Technology’, Wilful Disobedience Vol. 3, No. 2

[105] from ‘Technology’ by John Zerzan from Future Primitive CAL Press. Or on the web here www.insurgentdesire.org.uk technology.htm

[106] Conception Research, Postal Station “B”, Box One, Toronto Ontario, Canada M5T 2T2.

[107] Personal e-communication

[108] ibid.

[109] Joseba Zulaika and William A Douglass’s Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (Routledge, 1996), p.6.

[110] ibid., p.5.

[111] Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (Routledge, 1966), p.2.

[112] Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s On Terrorism and the State (Chronos, 1982), which focuses particularly on the ‘hoax’ of the Moro kidnapping, though this aspect of Italian politics has always been a ‘hall of mirrors’ strangely reminscent of Orwell’s highly realistic but satirical portrayal of inter-war Trotskyism (‘Emmanuel Goldsteinism’) in 1984.

[113] Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (Picador, 1997), p.26.

[114] Zulaika and Douglas, op cit., p.154.

[115] John Connor’s ‘Precedent for the New World’ in The Rise of the West: A Brief Outline of the Last Thousand Years (Green Anarchist Books, 2001), p.68.

[116] Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan: An Essay (Black & Red, 1983), p.24.

[117] John Pilger’s ‘The World’s worst Terrorists are based in Washington’, www.users.bigpond.com/nlevine/worstterrorists, p.3.

[118] Zulaika and William, op cit., p. 157.

[119] ibid., p.157.

[120] Malcolm Timbers’ ‘On the Apollo vs Dionysian Conflict’ in ‘The Psychology of Terrorism’ series, Mysterium Journal of Suffering and Death, www.geocities.com/ aquapontica/terrorism. I hasten to add that this is quoted not because I in any way endorse Jungianism — unlike Freud, Jung felt no good reason to flee the Nazis, to put it mildly — but rather because Timbers himself unconsciously discloses Civilisation’s own assumprions about terrorism.

[121] The FLQ were the Quebec Liberation Front, an early-1970s clandestine Leftnationalist group seeking seperation of French speakers from Canada. Not given to indiscriminate violence, they could hardly be called ‘terrorist’ in terms of strict definitions.

[122] Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (Bantam, 1992), p.241.

[123] The Cathars didn’t acknowledge the sacraments, the doctrines of hell or purgatory, or the resurrection of the body and developed their own church and ritual, rejecting the authority of the Church. They had lives of simplicity and penance in which salvation lay only in the Lord. Thousands were killed and many more tortured into accepting orthodox faith and by 1244 they had been crushed.

[124] “The Brethren of the Free Spirit — divine amorality”.by Paul Harrison www.totse.com

[125] Those are from Nordlinger and Albert Magnus lists. “The decree of Vienne also listed eight errors of ‘an abominable sect of malignant men known as beghards and faithless women known as beguines in the Kingdom of Germany’ which are generally considered to be the essence of the FreeSpirit heresy. The first tenet was the central one. This stated that man can attain such a degree of perfection in lis earthly life that he is incapable of sin. In this state he can achieve no additional grace because such would give him a perfection superior to Christ. The second point followed that such a man need not fast or pray because in his state of perfection sensuality is so subordinated to reason that he can accord freely to his body all that pleases him. Similarly the third point was that such a man is not subject to human obedience or to any laws of the Church because ‘where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’ (2 Corin. 3:17) — from “The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages”, Robert E. Lerner, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972,.(extracts on web at: www.scitec.auckland.ac.nz prints/book/consum/gnos/lerner.htm#anchor 189274)

[126] Around the end of the 13^th century Marguerite Porete wrote “The Mirror of Simple Souls” which was condemned and burned by the Bishop of Cambrai. She refused to be shut up and eventually was arrested and tortured. Refusing to answer any Inquisitors questions even after a year in prison, the authourities eventually executed her by using extracts from her book as evidence. She was burned along with a converted Jew who “relapsed” and spat in hatred on an image of the Virgin.

[127] In 1307 at Aix-en-Othe the Bishop accused a man of having said that normal baked bread was as good as bread consecrated on the altar and that it was better to confess to a tree trunk than to a priest. How many individuals were accused on this kind of basis? How many we never hear about?

[128] The report finishes...“Finally, though this was not an error so much as an anecdote, when one of the heretics was asked by thrce women to teach them about the Trinity, he had them take off all of their clothes and lie on their backs. Then, after binding each by the leg to the other, he violated them all sexually “in the most scandalous manner,” and, “casting his lecherous eye on their exposed shame,” he said “here is the Holy Trinity.” Afterwards he had intercourse with each of them separately.” (from “The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages” — see note 3).

[129] Ibid.

[130] In 1486 a Papal Bull to the Bishop of Brescia and Inquistior of Lombardy, “emphasises the close connection, nay, the identity of witchcraft with heresy.” (Introduction to the Malleus by Rev. Montague Summers) Summers holds that “In fact heresy was one huge revolutionary body, exploiting its forces through a hundred different channels and having as its object chaos and corruption. The question may be asked — What ws their ultimate aim in wishing to destroy civilisation? What did they hope to gain by it?”

[131] Although in places like Finland, Russia and Estonia more men than women were killed, overall about 85% of those killed were women. Women can be naturally more intuitive, more in touch with Life/Power/Whatever you want to call it. Don Juan described women as having a direct relationship with the Nagual, whereas men had to work on it a bit more and many initiation rites in primitive tribes are concerned with trying to get the boys to open up. In a lot of places the girls are assumed to just know this stuff instinctively. I’m not suggesting that women here in civilisation have this gift — it’s obvious that they don’t — but in a culture where intuitive forms of knowledge are prized, women do seem to have a natural ability to tune into energies around them. Maybe by the time of the witch-hunts more men had lost this ability, while women were still a little ‘tuned in’ and therefore a much bigger threat to civilisation.

[132] It’s interesting to see how this is repeated throughout history. Tacitus records “Therefore to scotch the rumour that the fire had taken place by his own order Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.”

[133] Paranormal means ‘beyond normal’. It’s worlds away from the christian idea of ‘supernatural’ ‘above nature’. Nothing can be above nature, nothing can be outside of Life. Paranormal also has some definitions as “beyond the range of scientifically known or recognizable phenomena”. That is more what I mean than anything ‘outside of nature’ — a ludicrous idea.

[134] Old English wigle: ‘divination’, wiglian: ‘to divine’. Divine: to perceive, make out, or discover intuitively or through keenness of insight. (All in the Webster-Merriam dictionary, as are all definitions mentioned) This animist way of knowing is in complete contrast with civilised habits of prioritising reason above intuition. “Let a man obey the law of his intellect rather than that of nature...” the Malleus warns, yet no knowledge can come purely from the intellect.

[135] Hunt’s full biographical details can wait for his obituary, surely not far off following a mentally debilitating stroke two years ago.

[136] In fact, GA was first to interview Jake Burbridge and Jason Torrance, Earth First!s founders in UK, when they were still out painting dumpsters around Hastings at night. At this time, they hadn’t met exRainforest Action’s George Marshall, who had peacenik contacts that gave them numbers enough for inter/national headlinegrabbing spectaculars.

[137] Apparently as a result of a fascist customers officer, Jim White, that Hepple had sacked for involvement in CS gas smuggling insisting on his accuser being named at his industrial tribunal.

[138] We found Class War had more principle and humour than most workerist groups — not entirely devoting their whole programme to chasing anarcho-monopolist AK Presses favour and thus Chumba’s money — though they were (are!) still publicity hounds full of hot air.

[139] A Lie Too Far got an absurdly hostile review in Class War as their Leeds group was dominated by Searchlight’s Paul Bowman, who Red Action backed to the hilt in one bogus ‘inquiry’ after another as they were then equally complicit. As GA wouldn’t ‘toe the line’ RA had set on this, their ensuing fatwa meant hassle from their decidedly slow ‘street meat’ for years even after RA themselves broke with Searchlight. Now, of course, Bowman is a thoroughly nice chap and an environmentalist following a mental breakdown as a result of this affaire, though he split Class War and then bizarrely tried to dissolve his own faction before it was resolved. Red Action, of course, have an Irish line of their own to follow. Having tried to dominate AFA for so long through a combination of public rhetoric lauding ‘unity’ and behind-thescenes manipulation and thuggery, they’ve now thrown in with hopeless Socialist Alliance electoralism and Sinn Fein-style community-building through their front, the International Working Class Association (IWCA). I think, to date, they have one local councillor to show for their typically principled volte face.

[140] I was actually first to pitch a tent at Tothill, later an important protest camp. Unfortunately, due to bail conditions set after the Operation Washington arrests, subsequent involvement was limited to advising 3^rd Battle of Newbury on blockading contractor depots, etc.

[141] Hepple never offered to wrap our guns for us, but its difficult not to see the same sort of offer and the same consequences as both these parallel State ‘games’ targeting the direct action movement were played out.

[142] We later worked out that it’d have been cheaper for the cops to have bought up every copy of the zine we produced at £5,000 each than bring their prosecution, and ran a “£5,000 to cops” line on GA’s mast head to taunt them about it!

[143] Having begun his career defending such early-1970s ‘Robin Hoods’ as antiapartheid campaigners caught sabotaging the All Blacks rugby tour and pornographers, McDonald is ending it as the first Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to be cautioned for cannabis possession.

[144] Hepple wasn’t the only one in Lancaster at the time that the police unreasonably failed to question on visiting there. This erstwhile Ecodefence editor of GA — though endorsed by perpetual naif ‘Grassy’ Noel Molland in characteristic stereotypical terms as a “good activist” — used to churn out sabotage manuals like billy-oh and was delighted every time one got national publicity — at the start of the Newbury campaign, for example, when he was good enough to attend a GA editorial meeting at the local university and give each of us something compromising on his usual theme the day before the cops simultaneously raided every known GA editor — except him, that is...

[145] Hepple / Matthews claims he only got into all this because of his wife’s interest in ufology rather than serving some State agenda, though full documentation questioning his version can be found in O’Hara’s extended and rather odd pamphlet, At War With the Universe. Nowadays, Hepple / Matthews has nothing to do with UFOs either, promoting wrestling in the Midlands under yet another pseudonym ‘Matt Violent’. (See, Tim, you did have to get yourself another name, just like we said you would that night in Southport..!

[146] The linguist Noam Chomsky and playwright Harold Pinter — the ‘usual suspects’, in fact.

[147] To give him his due, whatever else Hunt has said, even he has never said anything this offensive or stupid.

[148] GA has had so many problems with mother-fuckers, pro or anti, over the last twenty years that we now make a point of asking anyone wanting to get involved what their attitudes are on the subject. Those that just think it’s an odd question usually get in. Those that start raving insanely about childhood reminiscences involving having to wear the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit or how their mother was a saint or how she used to masturbate them, etc, don’t. Ever. No thanks — been there, done that.

[149] This joke appropriation of Irn Bru’s ad line — a traditional Glaswegian beverage I am partial to — met with an especially humourless, selfrighteous response from Booth, who wasted considerable bandwidth spouting Sax Wood-style about Alan Albon’s primordial soup on the Net. Particular satisfying, then, to see a later contributor to the list note that the ‘original and best’ GA at least pre-dated his and had the additional merit of not being pissboring. Not that this will make the slightest impression on Steve, of course, who assumes all adverse comment is the result of a global anarcho-primitivist conspiracy to prevent him achieving ‘deserved greatness’ rather than just being what it obviously is to the rest of us, fair comment.

[150] In his Human Cycle (Touchstone, 1983), Colin Turnbull cites a Mbutu (Pygmy) lad taking a nanny goat as his 'wife', something his band members discourage not with the horror of taboos against inter-species sex being violated you might expect in this society (they have none, though the situation was unusual) but because, as a domesticated village animal, the she-goat could not be expected to cope adequately in their beloved forest. The Mbutu typically extend refusal of the distinction between self and other to that between human and other.

[151] It had its origins in the early individualism of monasticism, of course. We have not missed the irony that though denouncing 'monkery', Protestants bought monastic practice outside its traditional confines, universalising its body-loathing codes of behaviour.

[152] The first such panoptican was HMP Pentonville, London, where I was myself confined in 1988.

[153] Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) is excellent on this. See also my forthcoming essay, 'When Doctors Were Hated'.

[154] In fact they did not. As with Bertillonage, there is an outside statistical chance of accidental correlation of fingerprints from otherwise dissimilar individuals--and there have been documented miscarriages of 'justice' arising from this--and twins always have identical fingerprints. As de facto clones, even DNA doesn't distinguish twins, only retinal scans as the pattern of blood vessels at the back of the eye develops post-natum.

[155] “Black Hawk Down”, Mark Bowden, Signet, 2001.

[156] “Band of Brothers”, Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon and Schuster, 1992, pg 21.

[157] “Bravo Two Zero — the true story of an SAS patrol behind enemy lines in Iraq”, Andy McNabb, Corgi, 1994, pg 318.

[158] Robert Gieves of Gieves and Hawkes, Saville Row. (Forbes, Nov 23, 1992)

[159] “Voices of the First Day — Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime”, Robert Lawlor, Inner Traditions International, 1991, pg 204.

[160] “The Science and Art of Tracking”, Tom Brown, Berkeley Books, 1999, pg 21.

[161] Ibid, pg 4.

[162] pg 127 “The Whole Truth about Domestic Violence” by Philip W. Cook, in “Everything you know is Wrong — The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies”, ed Russ Kick, Disinformation Co. Ltd, 2002. An excellent article with plenty of links and articles for further research.

[163] pg 59–60 “When She Was Bad — a controversial and explosive look at female aggression” by Patricia Pearson, Virago, 1998. If you want the details for any of the cases mentioned here, the book explains them and more in a straightforward, nongory way. Very well referenced with plenty of leads to further info.

[164] pg 128 “The Whole Truth about Domestic Violence”.

[165] pg 263 “When She Was Bad”.

[166] pg 111 Ibid. And although the bias is towards looking for male molesters, some research has shown upward to 25% of sexual abuse perpetrated by female molesters pg 263 Ibid.

[167] Who hears about Texas serial killer Henry Lucas regular beatings by his mother while a little kid? Or Mansons early life as a rejected and uncared for kid?

[168] pg 156 Ibid.

[169] pg 157 Ibid.

[170] Murray Straus, and Richard Gelles, ‘Societal Change and Change in Family Violence from 1975 to 1985 as Revealed by Two National Surveys’ quoted in “The Whole Truth about Domestic Violence” pg 125.

[171] Erin Pizzey, founder of first womens shelter and author of “Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear” quoted in “The Whole Truth about Domestic Violence” pg 131.

[172] Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. Pg. 1.

[173] Andrew Vayda, ‘Expansion and Warfare among swidden agriculturalists’ in Vayda (ed), Environment and Cultural Behavior. New York: Natural History Press, 1969. Pgs 202–220.

[174] William R. Catton, Jr., Overshoot. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

[175] Andrew Vayda, War in Ecological Perspective. New York: Plenum Press, ‘76.

[176] Roy Rappaport, ‘Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people’ in Environment and Cultural Behavior. Pgs. 181–201.

[177] Marvin Harris, Our Kind. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Pg. 297.

[178] Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State. New York: Zone, 1987. Marshall Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: political types in Melanesia and Polynesia’ in Culture in Practice. NY: Zone, 2000.

[179] Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

[180] “Black Hawk Down”, Mark Bowden, Signet, 2001.

[181] “Band of Brothers”, Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon and Schuster, 1992, pg 21.

[182] “Bravo Two Zero — the true story of an SAS patrol behind enemy lines in Iraq”, Andy McNabb, Corgi, 1994, pg 318.

[183] Robert Gieves of Gieves and Hawkes, Saville Row. (Forbes, Nov 23, 1992)

[184] “Voices of the First Day — Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime”, Robert Lawlor, Inner Traditions International, 1991, pg 204.

[185] “The Science and Art of Tracking”, Tom Brown, Berkeley Books, 1999, pg 21.

[186] Ibid, pg 4.