Green Anarchy #6

No.6 SUMMER 2001
$2 USA, $3 Can, $4 EU
Free to Prisoners!

CONTENTS

Against Mass Society

Feminism: A Male
Anarchist’s Perspective

Women and the Spectacle

Costs of Affluence II

Resisting Western
Penetration

Thoughts on Subversion
from Two Yippie Elders

Eyewitness Account
from Quebec City

Decolonization of
Colonial Descent

Earth’s Lament

Action Updates

. . . and much more!

Free Sentenced to 22 Years

Green Anarchy’s Statement of Solidarity

So, they have taken one of our warriors. When we up the stakes in our fight to protect the Earth and all that is wild, we expect that some of us will not remain free for long, but it is a wake-up call when it hits home so hard. It is our responsibility to see to it that the struggle in which Free is a part of not only continues, but intensifies. Already in New York, the ALF and ELF have carried out acts of revolutionary solidarity with Free since his sentencing, and before his sentencing a group of Earth liberationists carried out an action in solidarity with Free and Critter here in Eugene, in which 36 Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) were torched at the same auto dealership Free admits to targetting one year earlier, amounting to $1 million damage.

Here in Eugene, we have learned many lessons from these trying times:

1) There is a vital need for increased solidarity and security within and among ALL revolutionary communities.

2) Be assured that the state will mandate the harshest sentences to those who confront it in a direct and uncompromising manner.

3) Be equally assured that cooperation with law enforcement or any agents or agencies of the state will endanger you and other members of your community.

Most important to remember is that Free is in there for all of us, and he needs our unending and unlimited support. We all need to make sure that the actions Free took to protect life continue.

The following is a statement released by the Free and Critter Legal Defense Committe just after sentencing:

On June 11, 2001 Jeff “Free” Luers was sentenced to nearly 23 years on 11 charges ranging from Arson One to Attempted Criminal Mischief stemming from two incidents last year in Eugene, Oregon. Free had admitted to criminal mischief regarding a truck fire at Romania Chevrolet last summer. At the sentencing he read a statement taking accountability for the Romania fire, and emphasizing the care he took to ensure no one would be injured.

He said: “It cannot be said that I am unfeeling or uncaring. My heart is filled with love and compassion. I fight to protect life .... all life. Not to take it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re experiencing a period of extinction equal to that of the dinosaurs, 40,000 species go extinct each year, yet we continue to pollute and exploit the natural world... I will not ask this court to grant me leniency. All I ask is that you believe the sincerity of my words, and that you believe that my actions, whether or not you believe them to be misguided, stem from the love I have in my heart.”

The judge responded by saying that he “never doubted Free’s sincerity.” He stated that Free’s political beliefs would not influence the sentencing, that he would be sentenced “solely on the severity of the crimes.” Yet Free received a sentence harsher than that of many murderers and rapists. We are not so naive as to say we’re surprised with the sentence, but an analogy I shared with Free on the phone after sentencing is that we’ve had someone with a clenched fist standing in front of us for a year saying “I’m going to punch you.” Even though we were expecting it, it still took our breath away. The judge made many comments during the trial that indicated he’d already decided the outcome. He was often seen completely ignoring the testimony, typing on his laptop instead of listening. An appeal is already underway.

Frustratingly, throughout the past year, Free had been forced to remain silent about his actions at Romania Chevrolet, due to the fact that the State insisted on linking the two incidents, Romania and Tyree Oil Company, together. The judge denied many motions to separate the two. Free has stated and maintains that he had no involvement in the attempted arson at Tyree Oil.

The Legal Defense Committee asks for your continuing support of Free and Critter and other Prisoners of War. Make no mistake... a war is being waged on the Earth and all its creatures. Do not participate in the State’s campaign to marginalize and incapacitate those who take radical action in defense of the Earth. Failure to support our political prisoners is tantamount to sanctioning repression by the State.

Please write to Free (Jeffrey Luers) #13797671, 82911 Beach Access Rd, Umatilla, OR 97882 and Critter (Craig Marshall) #13797662, Oregon State Prison, 2605 State Street, Salem, OR 97310.

You can contact the Free and Critter Legal Defense Committee at POB 454 Willamette, Suite 205, Eugene, OR 97401. Checks and money orders to assist with Free’s appeal can still be sent to FCLDF, c/o OUR Credit Union, PO Bo 1192, Eugene, OR 97440. Our website is www.efn.org/~eugpeace/freecritter.

Thanks to all our steadfast supporters. Your help has been inspiring and irreplaceable.

Howl for Free and Critter. Howl for all political prisoners. They will hear you.

Against Mass Society

Many people desire an existence free of coercive authority, where all are at liberty to shape their own lives as they choose for the sake of their own personal needs, values, and desires. For such freedom to be possible, no individual person can extend his or her sphere of control upon the lives of others without their choosing. Many who challenge oppression in the modern world strive toward their conception of a “free society” by attempting to merely reform the most powerful and coercive institutions of today, or to replace them with “directly democratic” governments, community- controlled municipalities, worker-owned industrial federations, etc. Those who prioritize the values of personal autonomy or uncontrolled and wild existence have reason to oppose and reject all large-scale organizations and societies on the grounds that they necessitate imperialism, slavery and hierarchy, regardless of the purposes they may be designed for.

Humans are naturally sociable, but are selective about who they wish to associate with. For companionship and mutual support, people naturally develop relationships with those they share an affinity with. However, only in recent times have people organized themselves in large-scale groupings composed of strangers who share little of relevance in common with each other. For over 99 percent of human history, humans lived within small and egalitarian extended family arrangements, while drawing their subsistence directly from the land. The foraging bands and shifting horticultural communities of past and present are known to have enjoyed extensive leisure time, and have rarely required more than two to four hours daily on average to satisfy subsistence needs. Famine and war are extremely rare in these societies. Additionally, physical health, dental quality and the average life-span of small-scale communities are markedly higher than that of agricultural and early industrial societies. Leaders are temporary, and hold no power beyond their ability to persuade. While hunting/gathering and slash- and-burn gardening do indeed alter local environments and are sometimes wasteful, they have proven themselves to be ecologically stable adaptations. Foraging served humanity for three million years, while horticulture has been utilized in the Amazon basin for approximately 9,000 years. The smallscale cultures that remain today generally prefer their traditional way of life, and many are currently waging impressive political resistance against corporations and governments who wish to forcibly assimilate them so that their land and labor may be exploited. People rarely enter mass organizations without being coerced, as they lead to a decline of freedom and health.

The rise of civilization was made possible through compulsory mass production. When certain societies began to prioritize agricultural productivity as their highest value, they began to forcibly subject all life within reach of their cities to that purpose. Communities of people who wished to forage or garden on the land for subsistence would be mercilessly slaughtered or enslaved, and the ecosystems they inhabited would be converted to farmland to feed the cities. Those engaged in the full-time facilitation of crop and animal production would reside in the nearby countryside, while public officials, merchants, engineers, military personnel, servants, and prisoners would inhabit the cities. The task of creating a surplus to feed a growing specialist class caused the duties of the food producers to intensify, while simultaneously creating the need for more land, both for agriculture and for the extraction of materials for construction and fuel. Humans were forced into servitude for the benefit of their culture’s institutions of production as a prerequisite for continued survival, and non-human life would either be harnessed or eliminated for the sake of completing human projects. To occupy land, one would need to continuously pay tribute in the form of a tax or tithe (and more recently, in the form of rent or mortgage), hence requiring one to devote most of one’s time and energy to a politically accepted mode of employment. Upon being required to satisfy the demands of landholders or employers in exchange for personal space and commodities, it becomes impossible for people to make their living through subsistence hunting or gardening. Although small-scale self-sufficient communities would resist or flee the intrusion of military and commercial forces, those that failed would be assimilated. Subsequently, they would quickly forget their cultural practices, causing them to become dependent upon their oppressors for survival.

Capitalism is civilization’s current dominant manifestation. The capitalist economy is controlled mainly by state- chartered corporations; these organizations are owned by stockholders who are free to make business decisions without being held personally accountable for the consequences. Legally, corporations enjoy the status of individuals, and thus an injured party can only target the assets of the company in a court case, not the possessions or property of the individual shareholders. Those employed by corporations are legally required to pursue profit above all other possible concerns (e.g., ecological sustainability, worker safety, community health, etc.), and can be fired, sued, or prosecuted if they do otherwise. As a technologically advanced form of civilization, capitalism encroaches upon and utilizes even greater territory, causing further reduction of the space available for life to freely flourish for its own sake. Like civilization, capitalism conscripts both human and non-human life into servitude if regarded as useful, and disposes of it if regarded as otherwise. Under capitalism, most people spend the majority of each conscious day (typically eight to twelve hours) engaged in meaningless, monotonous, regimented, and often physically and mentally injurious labor to obtain basic necessities. Privileged individuals also tend to work intensively and extensively, but typically for the purpose of either responding to social pressure or satisfying an addiction to commodified goods and services. Because of the dullness, alienation, and disempowerment that characterizes the average daily experience, our culture exhibits high rates of depression, mental illness, suicide, drug addiction, and dysfunctional and abusive relationships, along with numerous vicarious modes of existence (e.g., through television, movies, pornography, video games, etc.).

Civilization, not capitalism per se, was the genesis of systemic authoritarianism, compulsory servitude and social isolation. Hence, an attack upon capitalism that fails to target civilization can never abolish the institutionalized coercion that fuels society. To attempt to collectivize industry for the purpose of democratizing it is to fail to recognize that all large-scale organizations adopt a direction and form that is independent of the intentions of the members. If an association is too large for a face-to-face relationship between members to be possible, it becomes necessary to delegate decision-making responsibilities to representatives and specialists in order to achieve the organization’s goals. Even if delegates are elected by consensus or by majority vote, the group’s members cannot supervise every action of the delegates unless the organization is small enough for everybody to monitor each other on a regular basis. Delegated leaders or specialists cannot be held accountable to mandates, nor can they be recalled for irresponsible or coercive behavior, unless held subject to frequent supervision by a broad cross-section of the group. Such is impossible in an economy based upon a highly stratified division of labor where no given individual can focus upon or even view the actions of the rest. Additionally, elected delegates are allotted more time and resources to prepare and present a case for their objectives, and are thus more likely to gain further power through deception and manipulation. Even if the group at large determines all policies and procedures (which is itself impossible when specialized knowledge is required), and delegates are only assigned the duties of enforcing them, they will still act independently when they disagree with the rules and are confident that they can escape punishment for ignoring them. Democracy is necessarily representative, not direct, when practiced on a large scale -- it is incapable of creating organization without hierarchy and control.

Because mass organizations must increase production to maintain their existence and to expand, they tend to imperialistically extend their scope of influence. Because cities and industries rely upon outside inputs, they aim to seize the surrounding areas for agricultural and industrial use, rendering it inhospitable to both non-human ecosystems and self-sufficient human communities. This area will expand in relation to any increase in population or specialization of labor that the city experiences. One could argue that industrial production could be maintained and yet scaled down, leaving ecosystems and non-industrial peoples some room to co-exist. Firstly, this proposal invites the question of why civilization should determine its own boundaries, instead of the victims of its predation. Secondly, there are no historical examples of production economies that do not expand, mainly because they must expand after depleting the resources available to them at any given time.

The structural complexity and hierarchy of civilization must be refused, along with the political and ecological imperialism that it propagates across the globe. Hierarchical institutions, territorial expansion, and the mechanization of life are all required for the administration and process of mass production to occur. Only small communities of self-sufficient individuals can coexist with other beings, human or not, without imposing their authority upon them.

“Against Mass Society” is included in the pamphlet Our Enemy Civilization, a new anthology of essays against modern life. To receive this pamphlet, send $2 to OEC, PO Box 11331, Eugene, OR 97440.

Green Anarchy and Classical Anarchism

Having given this subject much thought, some of us have decided that it is important to provide a critique of what has dominated anarchist thought since its genesis: anthropocentrism, the world view in which humans (most often ruling civilized male humans) are the highest being. While anarchism seems to be inherently against domination, for most of its history it has been silent in many ways about the domination of women, animals, and nature. As this publication is entitled Green Anarchy, we believe it would be worth an editorial dealing with exactly how the Green contextualizes the Anarchy.

However relevant the classical anarchists were in their time, they are certainly not today for several reasons that will be discussed below. Without an in-depth analysis of their (Proudhon, Godwin, Bakunin, etc) approaches, a general summation can be made. For one, traditionally, anarchism has focused upon domination within human society. This approach operates as if humans were the only species on the planet, their liberation from the shackles of class oppression the only form of oppression to consider. As we are all aware today, with an immediacy perhaps unavailable at the time of the classical anarchists, the biosphere is collapsing at the hands of civilization. Anarchism, a struggle for human liberation, does not necessarily address this at all. For the anarchist vision to be carried to its end, no consideration of ecological sustainability is required. Classically, the existence of the state and human hierarchy is all that needs to be problematized. The environment is essentially viewed in the same manner by anarchists as by the rulers of civilization, a passive plain upon which to script human struggle and existence, either under states or not.

Western thinkers in industrial nations of the nineteeth century could not have been expected to have a holistic ecological awareness. At this point we should take from their historically contextualized writings whatever applies, and be willing to abandon all that is not applicable. It should be clear that a workerist utopia where nature is subservient to human progress is ecologically impossible and therefore irrelevant. It should be clear that an anarchist revolutionary program dishonestly offering a future for what is now six billion of us to trample the planet as autonomous sovereign beings is irrelevant and certainly not “green.” It is not green in the context of ending domination of nature, beyond humans.

What anarchists must now consider is the fact that there is very little of nature left to live “harmoniously” within and the possibility that what nature there is left does not want us back, nor could it ever sustain us. Consider this: the only comparatively “biocentric” way humans have lived is as gatherer-hunters — and in some cases, shifting horticultural gardeners — which has been the mode of existence for 99 percent of our collective history. At the peak of the world population of our foraging ancestors, there were several million of us, with all global ecosystems intact and flourishing. Today there are six billion of us with a significant portion of nature destroyed. This reality, unaddressed by classical anarchists, is undeniable to us, and hence our resistance can no longer be based on the assumption that a viable subsistence base will always be there. It can no longer be assumed that we have eternity to do the impossible — the impossible being to create a utopian worker paradise for six billion people without hierarchy. What we also know now that the classical anarchists did not is that, historically and prehistorically, all societies of more than 100 to 500 people were based on rulership and authoritarianism. Eight hundred billion people experienced life on Earth prior to agriculture in a way that we would call anarchy.

It wasn’t statelessness alone that allowed this mode of existence to persist for three million years or to flourish throughout the entire planet. It was much more. It encompassed techniques of extracting energy and nutrients from the environment in a sustainable way, one that did not involve domestication and ecocide. Classical anarchism does not provide much insight with respect to population and sustainability issues as it assumes that nature will last forever, and that human struggle can reproduce itself into eternity. Anarchists traditionally thought as if we were not organisms, not animals, and not subject to the processes of the global biosphere and ecological communities. To escape this incomplete understanding of our species’ role on the planet, it will necessitate an understanding of sustainable and free human existence that is based on the knowledge, history, successes, and failures of the past. The anarchist, pipe-dream utopia of a speculative, unholistic visionary future is of no relevance to our current struggle. Green Anarchy, in our belief, must take anarchism to a new level, with the incorporation of dimensions dealing with human subsistence strategies, how they have worked, and under what conditions.

It is no longer sufficient to assume that humans must first liberate themselves and that sustainability will come later. We have to assume that sustainability has already existed, and with universal contexts and patterns. Our first identity is Green, subsequently Anarchist. We are green first, because human freedom in a civilized wasteland is meaningless to us. Valuing our history and that of 3.5 billion years of the wild free chaos of life forces us to privilege that above a pipedream future for modern human society.

Like all other entities, from corporations to co-ops, “green” approaches to the future are integrated into the anarchism of our time. The depth of this coloration is what this paper questions. If “nature” is still viewed by anarchists as the passive backdrop to our fleeting struggles, we will never learn that freedom, liberation, and autonomy are contextual, and as organisms, this entails peaceful co-existence with the biosphere. Unlike the classical anarchists, we don’t have the privilege of minimal environmental awareness. If we make the claim that free humans can choose to live in harmony with nature, we’d better discover ten ecologically flourishing new planet Earths to move onto, or else start to question our assumption that this single planet can sustain us at our present population, whether socialist, anarchist, capitalist, or fascist.

While we in no way prescribe mass human genocide for the sake of ecological preservation, we recognize that civilized humanity itself is voluntarily (although maybe unintentionally) committing collective suicide through its own unsustainable behavior. The bulk of humanity has already chosen its own fate, and we don’t consider ourselves obligated to rescue it from the impact of its own decisions. We do support those who swim upstream in resistance to civilization’s persistent assault upon their autonomy and sanity — and we support those who fight in defense of wild living beings and places that haven’t yet been destroyed.

The ecological impact of civilization is only one of many manifistations of domination. We intend to address in as much depth in future editorials and issues other manifestations of civilization’s domination. Because the destruction of wild nature is inextricably linked to the destruction of human inner-nature and the erosion of egalitarian social relationships, it is also important to critique civilization on a social level. This must include analysis of alienation and heirarchy within the constructs of human society.

Anyway, these are some of our thoughts at the moment. Read on, and get ready to deconstruct all reminents of liberal and leftist pipe-dream illusions of an industrialnation-state-mediated paradise on earth. Fight until the Earth is free! We strongly encourage feedback and submissions. Our deadline for our next issue is September 15th. We greatly appreciate all submissions on a Macintosh disc or via email to greenanarchy@tao.ca.

Hope your summer is incendiary!

Letters

We got a lot of feedback from the last issue, which was the first one put out by the current collective. While some responses were critical, most were pretty supportive . Unfortunately, we could only print a few, due to our current size restraints. In the future, we would like to print more, so we ask that people keep them to approximately 300-500 words, anything longer, submit as an article. Thanks for the feedback.

GA,

This is an open letter to anyone who has ever considered themselves a supporter of, or has stated they were in solidarity with an imprisoned insurrectionary or saboteur. I’d like to start by saying that the truest form of solidarity that anyone has shown me is the continuing ELF/ALF actions and the anti- authoritarian/anti-capitalist actions (no, not holding signs) happening throughout the world. Only by continual actions like these will we ever be able to overcome this dominant system. Only by hitting corporations and government establishments where they “feel it” will they ever collapse and take this “whole stinking order” with them. Writing ‘zines, or letters to congress people or judges has never changed anything, while destroying all of a corporations assets, on the other hand, will remove them from their position of power, and if we’re really lucky maybe a CEO may commit suicide or better yet “go postal” after having “lost it all”. Destroying these pricks where they live, now that’s solidarity. Walking around holding signs is a weakness, a piss-poor excuse for solidarity and support, whose main function is to pacify the minds of those who are too comfortable to act out in anyway that will actually change anything. Writing letters to fallen comrades raises the spirits of those of us who are incarcerated, but when someone picks up a bomb, instead of a pen, is when my spirits really soar.

Comrades of an accused person should never, except by reprinting a statement written by the accused, claim innocence or guilt for them in any manner, because misrepresenting them will only destroy their future credibility and possibly take power away from any message the perpetrators were trying to convey. It is their and their attorney’s job to deal with guilt or innocence. If someone chooses to be a supporter it is their duty to raise funds for retaining a competent lawyer, to make sure mistreatments of a prisoner be known, to spread the word that yet another comrade is being held hostage by the state, and most importantly keep up the fight. In no way am I saying not to write those that are locked up, because this indeed keep ones spirits up, but what I am saying is don’t make this the only thing you do. Revolt!

Craig “Critter” Marshall

Your article “The EZLN is not anarchist” is seriously lacking in a couple of respects. First, the insinuation that the EZLN does not represent its indigenous base is not at all accurate. True, the EZLN regulars (perhaps a few hundred) do generally live away from the autonomous communities. This makes a lot of sense, considering the intense army presence in the Lacondon and Altos areas actively harassing the locals and looking for the comandancia. For the comandantes to live out in the open would be suicidal to themselves and to their basesupporters. Still, they are in constant contact and more and more are spending clandestine time in the communities. I assume you haven’t spent any time in Chiapas, because if you had actually spoken with the indigenous people in resistance, you would have found that literally thousands of folks active in the offensive of 1994 have returned to their lives, but still consider themselves “irregular” forces of the EZLN. The reference to the comandantes and regulars as Maoists grasping for power and alienated from their supporters is pretty ridiculous and far from the truth. Second point, you are right about the Zaps not being anarchist. I don’t think they have ever claimed to be. Still, they embrace ideals like autonomy and non-hierarchical/ bottom-up decision making that many anarchists find inspiring and attractive. I have met anarchists each time I have been there who come to learn about a real people’s struggle, not to impart one’s own anarchist revolutionary project on the indigenous. That phrase flat-out stinks of imperialism and first-world egoism. And it is unrealistic to boot. The EZLN and its supporters have a lot to teach; they are living a real everyday struggle. You said pretty plainly that all social struggles cannot be expected to conform to some abstract anarchist ideal. I could not agree more. While I wholly embrace anarchist struggle and principles, anarchism is a political philosophy born in the west/north/first-world. It is not realistic to expect these indigenous people, who are struggling daily for their physical and cultural survival, to be sitting around with their noses buried in Kropotkin or Proudhon books. They have crafted a response to neoliberal capitalism that is appropriate for their situation and reality. For anarchists in the U.S. to somehow question their revolutionary zeal is flat out silly and insulting. No matter how disconnected you are from “Super America,” you still have access to some of the best squats, the biggest pockets of spare change, and the most resource rich libraries, infoshops, and dumpsters on the planet. To seriously challenge the tenets and methods of the EZLN’s struggle from where we all sit is pretty damned ironic. Thanks to GREEN ANARCHY for an overall great newspaper with interesting and challenging views.

Dear Green Anarchy,

As Susan Faludi describes in her awesome book Backlash, those who defend the status quo of male domination rely on many tricks in order to undermine challenges to power. An effective tactic is to assign specious beliefs to those challenging power and then proceed to demolish these “claims” while never dealing with the issues raised. Wolfi Landstreicher employs this tactic effectively in “Stuck in the Mud of Ideology.” More than this, Wolfi also uses another handy tool by focusing on the messengers rather than the message. It is easier to castigate the individuals who are bringing a complaint rather than question the oppressive behaviors complained about. While Wolfi probably doesn’t view “Stuck” as backlash, I argue that it becomes so by sidestepping the issue of alienating, macho behavior and by re-framing the debate as one over “ideology,” which, in regards to challenging male domination, is often applied erroneously to feminism.

ASSIGNING BELIEFS: In the first paragraph of “Stuck,” Wolfi does exactly what he accuses the RBC of doing: he assigns belief and motivation of the RBC simply because they use the word “manarchy.” The authors never claim that manarchy is an ideology, but Wolfi declares that it is, then proceeds to belittle them for it: “Such a pathetic way to go about justifying one’s fearful avoidance of revolution.” That this interpretation is divorced from anything said in the “Manarchy” piece clearly doesn’t bother Wolfi, who is too busy setting up an ideological strawman to notice that the RBC defined manarchy perfectly: “acting macho, holier- than-thou, and elitist. Manarchy often results in exclusivity. Anarchism and direct action are powerful forces, yet we are still susceptible to taking on some of the oppressive cultural practices of the very system we are challenging.” Ironically, Wolfi proves a part of their point of exclusivity by accusing the RBC of “fearful avoidance of revolution.” Is Wolfi the expert on what entails revolution? Are revolutionary practices that perpetuate macho behavior revolutionary? The RBC’s point seems to be that some anarchists that they’ve encountered exhibit the same traditional, oppressive behaviors as the people and systems we are fighting against. While Wolfi deftly deconstructs the RBC’s critique of no compromise and calls for a means consistent with ends, he doesn’t seem to realize that this is, in effect, what the RBC is arguing for as well: that anarchists can’t achieve a non-hierarchical, nondominating end while acting like hierarchical, dominating people. Macho behavior and elitism are aspects of this behavior, and can translate as arrogance: the typical attitude of those with privilege.

The RBC never claims that manarchy is an ideology, as Wolfi says it is, but that some anarchist men exhibit alienating, macho behavior which they describe as manarchy. The word is employed as a handy adjective to distill certain behaviors and actions for the purpose of identification.

Wolfi writes, “Intelligent anarchists carry out their revolt in accordance with their capabilities and do not judge those whose capabilities differ.” That is exactly what the RBC is saying: they argue that they have come across men who do criticize others for not matching these men’s capabilities. More, the RBC postulates that such behavior alienates those who cannot participate in revolutionary struggle as these more macho men do. Rather than focus on ways to build on the “intelligent anarchists” statement and expand the concept of revolutionary struggle to incorporate people who aren’t militant street fighters, or focus on ways of eliminating macho behavior (real militant struggle should have no place for macho posturing), Wolfi homes in on the specific examples used and the generalizations the RBC makes of them. While it is important to critique extrapolations from a few incidences (though the RBC mentioned that these were only a few of many), Wolfi doesn’t go beyond this critique to actually deal with the issue raised, or to wonder why this issue has been noticed and challenged in other scenes (including Eugene).

He finds it easier to move the focus from alienating, macho behavior onto dismissals of “empowerment” as some “selfhelp bullshit,” to the author’s “well-to-do” status, and to black bloc tactics. All these points are worth discussing, but Wolfi uses them to avoid discussion of alienating, macho behavior and, consequently, the effects these attitudes have on revolutionary struggle.

It is disheartening to see that Wolfi never really deals with the problems the RBC brings up. Rather, he shifts the problem onto them by declaring them “ideological” and attacking who they are as people. By doing this, Wolfi not only avoids dealing with the main issues introduced, but appears “right” by framing the debate in terms of ideology. Thus, most anarchists can agree with Wolfi, who never steps out of the bounds of accepted anarchist discourse, and never wonders whether macho behavior is a problem at all. Wolfi can have his opinion, of course, but I wish he had dealt with the ideas and arguments actually presented in “Manarchy” instead of muddling the picture with false accusations of ideology. In my opinion, Wolfi Landstriecher has already made up his mind and has no tolerance for those who would challenge male domination.

Why does a lot of militant anarchist behavior mirror tough guy rhetoric and action? Because it is or because we are taught to associate anger and militancy with macho men? What are ways to militant without being macho? Why are many women’s liberationist castigated as militant feminists? Are street protests a relatively safe (and ineffective) space to get all het up and wave your fists? Or are they something more? As to striking against the state, given our few numbers, aren’t underground, guerilla style actions more effective? Is our talk around street protests and daily revolt honest and open or alienating and elitist? Are anarchists reaching out to oppressed groups in solidarity or know-it-all dominance? Are we truly committed to nondomination? What is revolutionary struggle? How many ways are there to participate in it? What is male privilege? How does it connect to racism, sexism, heterosexism, gender roles, ableism, and the state?

If there is no serious effort to understand and eliminate male domination, macho behavior, sexism, and male violence against wimmin, what does that say about our no compromising means to an end?

Ryan Mishap
P.O. Box 5841
I Eugene, OR 97405

Editors Note: This letter, “Ideological Constructs,” is a response to the article, “Stuck in the Mud of Ideology” by Wolfi Landstreicher, which appeared in Green Anarchy #5. Wolfi’s article was itself a response to an article called “Stick it to the Manarchy” by the Rock Block Collective (RBC) which had been published a few months earlier in several movement publications, including The Insurgent. Both articles, “Stuck in the Mud of Ideology” and “Stick it to the Manarchy,” have generated a lot of controversy and debate, and anyone wishing to take part in the ongoing discussion that’s occurring on the Internet over the issues raised by these articles should visit the following websites: www.venomousbutterfly.com (where “Stuck in the Mud of Ideology” is found) and www.infoshop.org (-where the RBC missive can be found in the Opinions and Editorials archive).

Green Anarchy Comrades,

Thank you for putting me on your mailing list; yesterday I got Green Anarchy No. 5. I have to tell you that you put out a great zine. What you did in your article is something that should have been said a long time ago. (“EZLN is not Anarchist”) Me as a Mexican Peace Punk Activist have been saying this for the longest time and have gotten in some serious debate over this, I do support the EZLN though. I will not deny it, I honestly think Subcommandante Marcos is trying to change the situation in Chiapas, but I don’t consider him an anarchist at all. They don’t even consider themselves anarchists. When I went to Mexico City to visit my father I saw a lot of Che t-shirts with the Zapatista name on the back. I think that this was a really good issue you touched. I also want to thank you for reviewing the Defiant zine. APLAN Yes, ABCF No! I also like that you hit issues that affect Wommin. I made copies for my girlfriend. She runs a feminist collective in Yale College.

I am stoked about your zine. It is great for my book study program that I hold here. I end this letter hoping you continue to distro GA.

Active Resistance, Passionate Existence, William

Towards a Functional Self-Critique of Green Anarchist Thought: What if you woke up one morning and found that all your friends had devolved into narrow-minded ideologues? I’ve been thinking a lot lately that what the green anarchist movement needs is more highly sophisticated intellectual rhetoric. I mean after all, if we keep making even a little bit of sense to people who don’t spend long hours drooling over the boring works of long dead rich white guys, our ideology might become tainted with populism or god forbid, a little of that lowercase “d” word (democracy). Sure, Hakim Bey was renowned for his “Ontological Anarchism” and certain intellectual movement movers have been showing off the size of their propensity for grandiose words by dancing around cute little subjects like “Positing Anarchist Epistemology Against the Nascent Turn of Neo-Utilitarian Doctrine,” but these isolated heroes of the bookish intelligentsia are no longer strong enough to fend off those ignorant saline bags the Left calls “the Masses.” It seems that if we are to preserve the sanctity of our perch here, high on the brows of the Radical Fringe, we must necessarily elevate and escalate our use of unintelligible intellectual jargon. After all, now that our terrible sense of fashion and general movement dysfunction are no longer scaring away all of those easily influenced youngsters, we might just find ourselves invaded and colonized by diversity in knowledge and experience, much the same way the Christian Identity Movement is finding itself dissolving in a sea of multi-culturalism and homosexual aliens. We must preserve our ideological purity at all costs. Now is the time to retreat from the info-shops and head off to dark rooms high in the offices of university philosophy departments. Now is the time to sever what few ties remain binding our ideology to the rest of the world. We must drive sharp wedges of intellectual steel between us and the rest of the radical log, so that we not be connected to “community” with all their silly issues or other struggles that don’t adhere to our nubile ideology verbatim. Like Liebnitz (or was it Spudnutz?) said, “The arch nemesis of any ideology is reality.”

Like Kodak film, if we were to expose our ideology to the harsh light of reality, it would probably dissolve before our very eyes. And no one wants to waste a perfectly good ideology. After all, the Green Anarchist Think Tank (GATT) still has hundreds and thousands of manifestos and books and broadsides yet to publish and a good dozen or so squabbles to pick between equally insignificant fringes of the Left.

So comrades of the black cloth, it is time for us to pull together and raze the words of our demise. Reality and Meaningful and Significant and Successful should all be burned to the ground in order that we may keep our multi-syllabic ideologies intact and virginal. We must continue to slander mainstream popular struggles like the neo-Zapatista movement in order that we can maintain our ideo-intellectual supremacy. In lieu of supporting movements who fail to meet our rigorous test of ideological purity, we should laud the efforts of puny, terminally ill movements in remote corners of the world, if for no other reason than they are the absolute furthest thing from our daily lives. By maintaining the strength of unaccountability and staying one step ahead intellectually of the rest of the Left, we can guarantee that our ideology will remain where it belongs: in the realm of ideas, with none of those pesky entanglements that so plague ideologies once they get put into real practice. So let’s see more talk of Cartesian Dualisms and neo-Aristotlian Reflections on the Blond Haired Boy Dichotomy. And more academic rhetoric decrying the merits of the Bharacaravabidini tribe of Central Samoa in their struggle against two sided loin cloths. And more talk slamming the Zapatistas and the Spanish Anarchists of the 1930s (damn work centered collectivist liberals!) and anyone else who doesn’t fit our blueprint to a T. With such brainpower among us, there is no reason to succumb to less than ideological perfection, which as we all know, is the only way to burn th....?????

FEMINISM: A Male Anarchist’s Perspective

By Pendleton Vandiver

“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat”

-Rebecca West, The Clarion 1913

Most people in the current anarchist milieu — female or male — would disagree, at least in principle, with most of the following statements: there are two immutable and natural categories under which all humans are classified: male and female. A male human being is a man, and a female human being is a woman. Women are inherently inferior to men. Men are smarter and stronger than women; women are more emotional and delicate. Women exist for the benefit of men. If a man demands sex from his wife, it is her duty to oblige him, whether she wants to or not. A man may force a woman to have sex with him, as long as he has a very good reason for making this demand. Humans are to be conceived of, in the universal sense, as male (“man”), and only referred to as female when one is speaking of particular individuals. Women are a form of property. To demand rights for women is tantamount to demanding rights for animals and just as absurd.

As ridiculous as most of these statements may seem, every one of them has been considered obvious and natural by most of the West at one point or another, and many are still more the rule than the exception to this day. If most of them seem a little strange, jarring, or just plain wrong, that is not because they contradict some vague notion of justice or common sense that we have all been born with. To the contrary, the change in attitude that allows most of us to claim a more enlightened, seemingly natural viewpoint, is actually the concrete result of an ongoing struggle which has claimed many reputations, relationships, and lives over the last 200 years and which, like all struggles for liberation, has been discredited, slandered, and marginalized since its inception. Although this struggle has been, and still is, strategically diverse and conceptually multifarious and hence hard to define, it is not hard to name: I am, of course, referring to feminism.

Feminism has changed our culture to the point where it is at least a common idea that women are fully human. If most people today claim to agree with this idea, this is not because society is becoming more benevolent, or evolving naturally into a more egalitarian state of affairs. Those who hold power do not simply decide to grant equal status to those who do not; rather, they only yield power when they are forced to. Women, like every other oppressed group, have had to take everything they have gotten, through an arduous process of struggle. To deny this struggle is to perpetuate a myth similar to that of the happy slave. Yet this is precisely what we do when we speak of feminism as somehow perpetuating a gender divide, or hindering our progress away from identity politics. Feminism did not create the conflict between genders: patriarchal society did. It is important not to forget that the aforementioned idea that women are fully human is not common sense but absolutely, emphatically, a feminist notion. To pay lip-service to women’s liberation while denying the historical struggle of women to achieve this for themselves is paternalistic and insulting.

Not only has Western society overtly relegated women to a subhuman role throughout its history, but, until recently, most liberatory movements have as well. This has often been partially unconscious, as a reflection of the mores of the dominant culture. Just as often, however, this has been fully conscious and intentional (cf. Stokely Charmichael’s famous quote that the “only position” for women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee [SNCC] was “prone”). Either way, people who purported to be working for the emancipation of all humans were really just working for the emancipation of “man,” which until quite recently, is exactly how it was usually phrased. Women who complained about this state of affairs were (and are) condescendingly told to wait until the more important struggle was won before they demanded their own liberation. This has been true of abolition, civil rights, the anti-war movement, the New Left, the anti-nuke movement, radical environmentalism and, obviously, anarchism. Women have been criticized for pursuing feminist aims as if these were wrong-headed, counterrevolutionary, or unimportant. Anarchists did not simply wake up one morning with more enlightened views of women, nor did patriarchy suddenly reveal itself as “just another form of domination.” Feminist theory and practice brought to light the oppression of women that often manifested itself in otherwise revolutionary milieus.

This is not to say that all feminists were/are not anarchists, or all anarchists were/are not feminists. But feminism is often criticized within the anarchist milieu, from several different angles. I will try to discuss the most common criticisms I have heard voiced, both publicly and privately, in anarchist circles. It has been suggested that feminism is essentialist. It has also been suggested that feminism, in keeping with its essentialist views, is a philosophy that asserts the superiority, in one way or another, of women to men. Finally, the charge has been made that feminism perpetuates gender categories, whereas the revolutionary task is to move beyond gender altogether. In other words, feminism is accused of being a kind of identity politics that perpetuates harmful and divisive societal roles that ultimately oppress everyone.

The one thing that all of these allegations have in common is that they posit a single, more or less univocal entity named “feminism.” However, anyone who studies feminism soon learns that there has always been a fair amount of diversity within feminist theory, and this has never been more true than it is now. No single set of ideas about sex and gender represents feminism; rather, feminism is a loose category that encompasses just about all forms of thought and action which are explicitly concerned with the liberation of women.

Although feminism has often been accused of essentialism, the critique of essentialism is particularly strong within feminism, and has been for quite some time. Essentialism is the idea that there is an unchanging substance or essence that constitutes the true identity of people and things. In this view, a woman is somehow truly, deep in her core, identifiable as a woman; being a woman is not simply the result of different attributes and behaviors. This is seen as a politically backward stance by many, because it implies that people are limited to certain capabilities and behaviors that are somehow dictated by their nature.

When we examine the range of ideas that has emerged from second wave (post-1963 or so) feminism, however, a different picture comes into focus. Probably the most famous quote from The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal 1940s work, is the following: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The book goes on to argue that gender is a social category, which individuals can reject. The influence of The Second Sex was enormous, and Beauvoir wasn’t the only feminist to question the naturalness of the category of gender. Many feminist writers began to draw a distinction between sex and gender, asserting that the former describes the physical body, while the latter is a cultural category. For instance, having a penis pertains to sex, whereas how one dresses, and the social role one fills, pertains to gender.

This is a distinction that some feminists still make, but others have questioned the use of supposedly pre-cultural categories like sex altogether. Colette Guillamin has suggested that sex (as well as race) is an arbitrary system of “marks” that has no natural status at all, but simply serves the interests of those who hold power. Although various physical differences exist between people, it is politically determined which ones are chosen as important or definitive. Although people are divided into supposedly natural categories on the basis of these marks, there is nothing natural about any category; categories are purely conceptual.

Building on the work of Beauvoir and Guillamin, among others, Monique Wittig has argued that the feminist goal is to eliminate sex and/or gender as a category entirely. Like the proletariat in Marx’s philosophy, women are to constitute themselves as a class for the sake of overthrowing the system that allows classes to exist. One is not born a woman, except in the same sense that one is born a proletarian: being a woman denotes a social position, and certain social practices, rather than an essence or true identity. The ultimate political goal of a woman, for Wittig, is to not be one. More recently, Judith Butler has predicated an entire theory of gender based on the radical rejection of essence.

Of course, there have been a number of feminists who, disturbed by what they saw as an assimilationist tendency in feminism, asserted a more positive notion of femininity that was, at times, undoubtedly essentialist. Susan Brownmiller, in her important book Against Our Wills, suggested that men may be genetically predisposed to rape, a notion that has been echoed by Andrea Dworkin. Marxist feminists like Shulamite Firestone sought the material basis of gender oppression in the female reproductive role, and several feminist theorists — Nancy Chodorow, Sherry Ortner, and Juliet Mitchell among others — have examined the role of motherhood in creating oppressive gender roles. “Woman-identified” feminists like Mary Daly embraced certain traditional notions of femininity and sought to give them a positive spin.

Although woman-identified feminists have, at times, taken essentialist positions, this brand of feminism has redressed some of the imbalances of that strain of feminist thought that rejects femininity altogether as a slave-identity. This has always been the dichotomy that has troubled feminist thinkers: either to assert a strong feminine identity and risk legitimizing traditional roles and providing fodder to those who employ the idea of a natural difference in order to oppress women, or to reject the role and the identity women have been given, and risk eliminating the very ground of a feminist critique. The task of contemporary feminism is to find a balance between viewpoints that risk, on the one hand, essentialism, and on the other the elimination of women as the subject of political struggle altogether.

The goal of feminism, then, is the liberation of women, but what that exactly means is open to dispute. For some feminists, this means that women and men will coexist equally; for others, that we will no longer see people as women and men. Feminism provides a rich panorama of views on gender problems. One thing all feminists can agree on, though, is that gender problems exist. Whether as a result of natural differences or cultural construction, people are oppressed on the basis of gender. To go beyond gender, this situation needs to be redressed; gender cannot simply be declared defunct. Feminism can perhaps be best defined as the attempt to get beyond the state of affairs where people are oppressed because of gender. Thus, it is not possible to go beyond gender without feminism; the charge that feminism itself perpetuates gender categories is patently absurd.

Since anarchy is opposed to all forms of domination, anarchy without feminism is not anarchy at all. Since anarchy declares itself opposed to all archy, all rulership, true anarchy is by definition opposed to patriarchy, i.e. it is, by definition, feminist. But it is not enough to declare oneself opposed to all domination; one needs to try to understand domination in order to oppose it. Feminist authors should be read by all anarchists who consider themselves opposed to patriarchy. Feminist critiques are certainly just as relevant as books about government oppression.

Ward Churchill’s excellent Agents of Repression is considered essential reading by many anarchists, even though Churchill is not an anarchist. Many feminist works, on the other hand, are neglected, even by those who pay lip service to feminism. Yet, while FBI repression is a real threat to anarchists, the way we inhabit our gender-roles must be dealt with every day of our lives. Thus, feminist literature is more relevant to the daily fight against oppression than much of the literature that anarchists read regularly.

If anarchism needs feminism, feminism certainly needs anarchism as well. The failure of some radical feminist theorists to address domination beyond the narrow framework of women being victimized by men has prevented them from developing an adequate critique of oppression. As a prominent anarchist writer has correctly pointed out, a political agenda based on asking men to give up their privilege (as if that were even possible) is absurd. Feminists like Irigaray, MacKinnon and Dworkin advocate legislative reforms, without criticizing the oppressive nature of the state. Female separatism (particularly as enunciated by Marilyn Frye) is a practical, and perhaps necessary, strategy, but only within the framework of a larger society that is assumed to be stratified on the basis of gender. Feminism is truly radical when it seeks to eliminate the conditions that make gender oppression inevitable.

Anarchism and feminism clearly need one another. It is all well and good to say that once the primary source of oppression (whatever that is) is removed, all other oppressions will wither away, but what evidence is there for that? And how does that keep us from oppressing one another now, while we’re waiting for this great revolution? Conversely, it is important to recognize that the oppression of women is not the only oppression. Arguments about which forms of oppression are more important, or more primary, are unresolvable and silly. The value, and the danger, of anarchism is this; it seeks to eliminate all forms of domination. This goal is valuable because it does not lose sight of the forest for the trees, getting caught up in distracting reformist battles and forgetting its trajectory toward total liberation. But it is also dangerous because anarchism continually runs the risk of ignoring real-life situations in favor of abstractions, and underemphasizing or dismissing movements that seek to address specific issues. Let’s have an anarchist feminism and a feminist anarchism!

The GA Collective is hoping to include more anarcha- feminist and eco-feminist perspectives in the future, as we believe it essential to broaden the traditional anarchist critique of the state into a critique of patriarchy itself, of which the state is just one manifestation. We welcome and encourage articles, essays, and poetry written by anti-authoritarian wimmin and radical feminists, and would love to recieve anarcha-feminist zines for review or trade.

Women and the Spectacle

It is difficult to consume people who put up a fight, who resist the cannibalizing of their bodies, their minds, their daily lives. A few people manage to resist, but most don’t resist effectively, because they can’t. It is hard to locate our tormentor, because it is so pervasive, so familiar. We have known it all our lives. It is our culture.

Situationists characterize our culture as a spectacle. The spectacle treats us all as passive spectators of what we are told are our lives. And the culture-as-spectacle covers everything: we are born into it, socialized by it, go to school in it, work and relax and relate to other people in it. Even when we rebel against it, the rebellion is often defined by the spectacle. Would anyone care to estimate the number of sensitive, alienated adolescent males who a generation ago molded their behavior on James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause ? I’m talking about a movie, whose capitalist producers and whose star made a great deal of money from this Spectacular.

Rebellious acts, then, tend to be acts of opposition to the spectacle, but seldom are so different that they transcend | the spectacle. Women have a set of behaviors that show dissatisfaction by being the opposite of what is expected. At the same time these acts are clichés of rebellion, and thus are almost prescribed safety valves that don’t alter the theater of our lives. What is a rebellious women supposed to do? We can name all the behaviors -- they appear in every newspaper, on prime time television, on the best-seller lists, in popular magazines -- and, of course, in everyday life. In a setting that values perfection housekeeping, she can be a slob; in a subculture that values large families, she can refuse to have children. Other predictable insurgencies? She can defy the sexual double standard for married women by having an affair (or several); she can drink; or use what is termed “locker room” language; or have a nervous breakdown; or -- if she is an adolescent -- she can “act out” (a revealing phrase!) by running away from home and having sex with a lot of men.

Any of these things may make an individual woman’s life more tolerable (often, they make it less so); and all of them are guaranteed to make conservatives rant that society is crumbling. But these kinds of scripted insurrections haven’t made it crumble yet, and, by themselves they aren’t likely to. Anything less than a direct attack upon all the conditions of our lives is not enough.

When women talk about changing destructive sex role socialization of females, they pick one of these possible solutions: 1) girls should be socialized more or less like boys to be independent, competitive, aggressive, and so forth. In short, it is a man’s world, so a woman who wants to fit in has to be “one of the boys,” 2) we should glorify the female role, and realize that what we have called weakness is really strength. We should be proud that we are maternal, nurturant, sensitive, emotional, and so on; 3) the only healthy person is an androgynous person: we must eradicate the artificial division of humanity into “masculine” and “feminine,” and help both sexes become a mix of the best traits of each.

Within these three models, personal solutions to problems of sexist oppression cover a wide range. Stay single; live communally (with men and women, or with women only). Don’t have children; don’t have male children; have any kind of children you want, but get parent and worker- controlled child care. Get a job; get a better job; push for affirmative action. Be an informed consumer; file a lawsuit; learn Karate; take assertiveness training. Develop the lesbian within you. Develop your proletarian identity. All of these make sense in particular situations, for particular women. But all of them are partial solutions to much broader problems and none of them necessarily requires seeing the world in a qualitatively different way.

So, we move from the particular to more general solutions. Destroy capitalism. End patriarchy. Smash heterosexism. All are obviously essential tasks in the building of a new and truly human world. Marxists, other socialists, social anarchists, feminists -- all would agree. But what the socialists, and even some feminists, leave out is this: we must smash all forms of domination. That’s not just a slogan, and it is the hardest task of all. It means that we have to see through the spectacle, destroy the stage sets, know that there are other ways of doing things. It means that we have to do more than react in programmed rebellions -- we must act. And our actions will be collectively taken, when each person acts autonomously. Does that seem contradictory? It isn’t -- but it will be very difficult to do. The individual cannot change anything very much; for that reason, we have to work together. But that work must be without leaders as we know them, and without delegating any control over what we do and what we want to build.

Can the socialists do that? Or the matriarchs? Or the spirituality-trippers? You know the answer to that. Work with them when it makes sense to do so, but give up nothing. Concede nothing to them, or to anyone else: The past leads to us if we force it to. Otherwise it contains us in its asylum with no gates. We make history or it makes us.

This article was respectfully reprinted from “Reinventing Anarchy, Again” an excellent anthology edited by Howard J. Ehrlich, which is available from AK Press.

Part II: The Cost of Affluence

The name U’wa means “the thinking people” because of the fact that for thousands of years they have avoided conflict with neighboring tribes with the use of communication. Today, 5,000 U’wa exist in the cloud forests of the Colombian Andes. They were once a tribe of around 20,000 which occupied territory from southern Venezuela all the way into northeastern Columbia, an expanse of approximately three million acres. The Colombian government has since seized 85 percent of the U’wa tribe’s traditional land. In 2000, only about 247,700 acres were officially recognized by the Colombian government (rainforest action network 2000).

At the time of the arrival of Conquistadors in Columbia, the U’wa migrated far into the hills to avoid being enslaved and forced to dig for gold. When they were found by the conquistadors, according to the oral history of the tribe, they committed mass suicide in an effort to die with dignity and avoid the fate of the tribes that had been enslaved. According to myth, thousands of tribespeople committed collective suicide by walking off of a 1,400-foot cliff. The U’wa say that so many people were piled in the river below that its course was changed forever (ran 2000).

After the Spaniards abandoned the area, the remaining U’wa lived unaffected by civilization until the 1940s and 50s when roads were built that allowed for the settlement of displaced Colombian nationals during Colombian civil conflict. The settlers brought diseases that lowered the defenses of the indigenous population, making them more susceptible to cooperation with the medicine-offering Western missionaries (ran 2000).

Oil exploration has occurred since then in territories outside that of the U’wa; they have only recently been directly affected. In 2000 Occidental Oil planned to extract 1.5 billion barrels of oil from the fields below U’wa land. Their plan to drill has been halted by global resistance and outcry. The U’wa have been aware of the existence of oil for millennia. For them it represents something far different from what it has come to mean for industrialized nations. To the U’wa, oil is one of the five cosmological elements that make up their universe. These include earth, sky, water, mountains and oil. In their mythology, oil is the blood of the earth. It is called Ruiria, and it sustains life on Earth, which is the mother of life. To the U’wa, the extraction of the blood of the mother is a desecration that can only lead to the death of their people (ran 2000). The U’wa have promised to commit collective suicide once again if the oil project currently proposed occurs. They would take death over the acceptance of the loss of their sacred land and culture (ran 2000).

It is clear that in this case the resource being targeted is oil. Though slavery — in the typical sense — is not imminent, as it was 500 years ago for these people, the same threat exists in the form of assimilation into civilization and the wage slavery that would inevitably follow their being forced into cities. Here the cost of creating the affluent society would mean, for the U’wa, the abandonment of all they hold sacred: their land, their traditions, their ability to live as they have for millennia. These are the costs being incurred so first world consumers can continue in their path of waste.

The reasons oil is being extracted from the region are much more complex than those that brought explorers here in the first place to seek gold. Five hundred years ago, the sole purpose was the bolstering of the economic power of individual nations and the elites within them; now every endeavor is tied to a world-wide economic network of debt and investment. The recent protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC shed light on this system. Now there are several layers of interests that are involved in the creation of the affluent society. The pressure to exploit the people and resources of Columbia is many times greater under the institutions and corporations of modern capitalism than it was in a time when Europe was only beginning to shed its backwater marginality by betting on the riches of the New World (Ponting 1993 c: 117). What oil drilling in Columbia represents today is profit for the government, for the oil companies, for the markets into which the oil flows, and for the investors that fund not only the “development” of the country, but the projects themselves. I will discuss some of the details of this system in a moment, but first, a brief overview of oil drilling in Columbia and the effects it has had.

Since 1984, Occidental Oil has been operating in Colombia (outside of U’wa territory). In 2000 it claimed that there are approximately 1.5 billion barrels of oil to which it must have access. Because U’wa land is legally protected, Occidental Oil is basing their interpretation of U’wa land on a narrow definition that excludes the protection of their greater traditional land. As mentioned above, the pressure to start extracting oil from this territory is great.

Right now oil is Columbia’s largest export commodity, generating one fourth of its official export revenue. Colombia is the fourth largest and fastest growing oil exporter in South America; in 1995, Columbia increased its oil output by 30 percent. The United States is the largest importer of Colombian oil and, of all of the oil exported, the U.S. takes about 260,000 barrels a day (ran 2000).

The reasons for these developments are not solely based on Columbia’s voluntary expansion of oil extraction. Rather, what’s pushing these advancements is Columbia’s need to satisfy debts to the United States and international financial institutions. International financial institutions (IFIs) are organizations such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations are publicly funded, and though quite powerful, they pale in comparison to private financial institutions. One such private institution involved in Columbia’s oil economy is Citigroup. Citigroup is the world’s third largest financial institution.

To put this into scope, a comparison can be made between the currency exchange of public versus private financial institutions (ran presentation 2000). Four days of private financial institution currency exchange is equal to an entire year of public financial institution exchange. The money is truly in the hands of private investors.

The strength of these lending institutions exerted over small “developing” countries forces them to accelerate already unsustainable industrial practices. The real losers in this equation are the indigenous cultures and ecosystems that stand in the way. The real costs of creating the affluent society are incurred at this level.

Perhaps this might be a good time to address the concept of the affluent society again. It is clear that ecosystems and cultures are destroyed to create affluence for some. It is important to consider exactly who the affluent of the world now are. To an extent, all first world consumers should consider themselves the beneficiaries of the affluent society, but really, the affluence is funneling straight into the hands of monstrous global corporations and financial institutions. Though, as first world consumers, we may feel helpless in this situation, we can do a lot to protect the rest of the world from the costs of the affluence that exists in our countries. Consumers can, at the very least, boycott Occidental Oil, or if so inclined, take direct action, violent or non-violent. They can also organize awareness and opposition to drilling on U’wa land. What must be learned is that our affluence does not come cheap for the rest of the world on whose back we stand, blind to the costs we create.

It is the same old story of conquest. The differences between what’s going on today and what occurred 500 years ago are few. Though the methodology of the expansion of resource extraction may involve less outright bloodshed, it has only become more efficient as technological advancements have allowed for the expedient extraction and transport of raw materials from anywhere in the world. Though the names of economic systems have changed from colonialism, to imperialism, to neo-liberalism, the underlying paradigm has remained unchanged. In essence, what guides these endeavors is the deep-rooted belief that all of the universe, living and nonliving, is at the disposal of not only mankind, but the masters of mankind, the white capitalists. Christianity need no longer be the intellectual justification for genocide, rather all that is required now it the “bottom-line” defense. We all are expected to accept the notion that corporations have no obligation to be moral or ethical; their only obligation is to make money for shareholders. The bottom line equals profit.

The motivation for inflicting costs to create affluence is not new. Again the motivation is the same: power and profit. All that has changed is the methodology and the expression of ideology. The fact is, that though the conquest of indigenous cultures, to create civilized affluence, is no longer guided by outwardly racist religious doctrines, the blatant disparity in worth and rights between the “civilized” and the “savage” is as present as ever. First peoples are still viewed as valueless obstacles to be managed and overcome in order to secure the resources they negligently refuse to exploit. The logic of industrialization and corporate globalization is rooted in Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being. To states and corporations, indigenous people are impoverished savages who are stuck at the lower end of the spectrum of cultural evolution. Implicit to this logic is the assumption that civilizations — more specifically, modern industrial capitalist societies — are superior to all other “less developed” societies. This “View from Olympus” has been at the heart of the ideological framework that has justified the subjugation of simple societies for all of history (Hubbard: 2000).

Until this ideology is recognized, questioned, and destroyed, the affluent societies will continue to expand, exploit, and conquer. Furthermore, the rapidly diminishing indigenous peoples and ecosystems of the planet will continually suffer the costs incurred. Without the mobilization of a movement to end the intensification and further expansion of natural resource exploitation, we can reasonably expect to lose forever all cultures that have evolved free of civilized and material affluence.

As awareness of the costs of first world lifestyle and consumption has become more inescapable, movements have arisen. However, at this point in history, reforms will simply continue sustaining an inherently destructive and unsustainable system. Movements of the future must attack the systemic and ideological foundations of civilization itself, as well as the costs that its ever-changing, symptomatic leaders, nations, and corporations incur upon the earth.

Literature Cited

For more information on the U’wa campaign, contact:

Amazon Watch 115 South Topanga Topanga
Canyon, CA 90290 Earmarked: U’wa Defense

RESISTING WESTERN PENETRATION

(Notes on the Zapatista Army of National Liberation: EZLN) By Jesus Sepulveda

A month ago, my companera Janine and I were having breakfast while discussing the situation of the Zapatistas in México and we had a realization: Anarchy is a western response to western systems, and the Zapatista movement is the current indigenous response to western penetration. In effect, when people grow up in a rotten system that absorbs everything, there is no other way for emancipation than smashing the legal-political structure that justifies control and repression: i.e. the state, the ideology and its ramifications. But when people are born outside of that rotten system, they try to keep themselves outside and not get contaminated by its rottenness. This seems to be an act of common sense: people try to not get sick. This impulse is either instinctive or a conscious act. But it is real.

The Zapatista guerrilla movement is a conscious response organized in the form of resistance to western “civilized” penetration in the region of Chiapas and the Chiapaneco people’s everyday life. The movement broke through the media suppression in 1994 when a group of armed indigenous people, wearing balaclavas, assaulted the small town of San Cristóbal de las Casas. This occurred the morning after New Year’s Eve (maybe emulating the example of Cuban Revolution; the assault of La Havana also happened the morning after New Year’s Eve, in 1959.) Beyond the tremendous impact on the media that the balaclava of Zapatista spokesman Marcos had, there was a tactic of survival. The paramilitary — composed mainly at the time of ranchers and land owners and supported by the Army — were harassing, repressing and murdering anyone who was involved in any particular activity of protest against genocide and ecocide. Balaclavas and “paliacates” (bandannas) were a way to not be identified by the paramilitary in the first place, but with the development of the fight they became the symbol of Zapatista struggle. There was another emblematic aspect of that first assault on San Cristóbal de las Casas. January 1, 1994 was exactly the same day that Mexico became a member of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Thus, that day a guerrilla group of masked and armed people appeared in the southern part of Mexico to combat neoliberalismo just at a moment of bankruptcy of ideological resistance, postmodern justifications of the commodification process, and new tactics of imperialist aggression in Latin America.

Seven years later, the Zapatistas have managed to survive and to not be wiped out by the Mexican army, nor by the American army. The Pentagon has plans to install 12,000 American soldiers in Guatemala. Carlos Fazio thinks that the militarization and paramilitarization of the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, plus this provision of the Pentagon, are part of the “Plan Puebla-Panama” (PPP). This plan is part of the national security interests of the US and its tactics of re-establishing geographically and strategically the role of the Pentagon in Latin America before the increasing popular discontent against neoliberal politics (www.lainsignia.org/2001/marzo/ibe_113.htm). This plan is the antithesis of the San Andrès accords and it is a further step towards uprooting indigenous peoples from their communal ways and orienting them towards an individualistic monetarised economy. For the World Bank, Chiapas is an experimental field to invest in biotechnology and monoculture. In the 1.9 million hectares of the Lacandon rainforest, partly controlled by the Zapatistas, there is 25 percent of the surface water of Mexico (which generates 45 percent of its hydroelectric power), more than half of the species of Mexican tropical trees, 3,500 plant species, 114 of mammals, and 345 birds. Oil reserves are equally located under key areas of Zapatista influence, as are plans for further hydroelectric dams and privatization of water supplies (www.ainfos.ca/01/feb/ainfos00480.html).

Between February and March of 2001, the Zapatista comandancia marched from Chiapas to Mexico City, following the route of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, to demand the ratification of the San Andrès accords signed between the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and the Mexican government in 1996. The march culminated in the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City. In the Zócalo and its surroundings were approximately 200,000 people (four times more than the number of people who gathered in Seattle in November of 1999) to receive the Zapatista caravan. The means that the Zapatistas planned to use in order to achieve their goal — the ratification of the San Andrés accords — were the mobilization of the whole country and the support of international groups of anti-authoritarian and radical people, like the Italian anarchists, social rebels from South America, and North American activists. The three points of the San Andrés accords were: 1) to release all political prisoners, 2) to dismantle seven military bases located in Chiapas, and 3) to recognize indigenous rights. The government released political prisoners and dismantled the seven military bases, but it did not pass a law to constitutionally compromise itself to respect the autonomy of indigenous population of the southeast of Mexico. Of course, this would go against the interests of the Plan Puebla-Panama. The Congress voted for a legal packet called “indigenous rights” that instead recognizes and legalizes private property in Chiapas and defends the privileges that land owners and ranchers — some of whom are also members of the paramilitary — had already taken by force.

When the 24 comandantes, among them subcomandante Marcos, found out what the legal packet of “indigenous rights” was, they decided to go back to Chiapas and continue the military struggle — but this time, they went back with the whole country mobilized, a strong network of international attention and support, and seven military bases dismantled. That was a victory over the state and capital: the tools that the system uses to perpetuate civilization through itself. The name they give to that “civilizing” process is “modernization.” What the EZLN is actually resisting is the action of modernization — in other words, the action of western penetration in the southeast of México.

In the fifth issue of Green Anarchy somebody accused the EZLN of being a reformist movement with a reformist agenda, which is the EZLN capitulation of the war against “the state and capital... the institutions by which civilization controls our existence.” When I read this statement, I was reminded how important it is to avoid sectarianism. A sect always has a strong rhetoric and a strong tendency to isolate itself and misunderstand reality. Perhaps it is the effect of alienation. What the EZLN is actually doing is resisting the penetration of the state and capital in the region of Chiapas. This penetration is carried out through the Plan Puebla-Panama. The people who run the US want to accelerate this plan in order to pass the FTAA (Free Trade Area for the Americas). Vicente Fox and George Bush — the Mexican and the American spokesmen of transnational corporations, and both ranchers as well — have an agreement to carry out the Plan Puebla-Panama as soon as possible. This plan entails the construction of a railroad and a high-tech freeway from Puebla (south of Mexico City) to Panama. On either side of the railroad there will be sweatshops called maquilas running along both sides of the freeways. Of course, the plan for this “modern” form of penetration is also to impose a concrete highway in the middle of the jungle from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. This will destroy the ecosystem and will increase slavery practices, forcing native people to sweat labor in the maquilas which already exist in the northern part of Mexico along the border.

We already know what industrialization means: poverty, pag e 7 alienation, environmental and social destruction, and domestication. The maquilas and the freeway will bring paid enslavement and repression to the region. In Juarez City, for example, on the border with the US, people have to live in shanty towns, with cubicles and cardboard houses, and work from eight to twelve hours a day to make between US $0.75 and US $1 an hour. They buy TVs, and radio-stereos and other plastic articles of consumption. They suffer alienation. In four years, 260 women have been raped and murdered. Indeed, western penetration is a generalized form of social and ecological rape. If the Plan Puebla-Panama succeeds, it will bring to Chiapas and Central America all the industrial consequences that produce death in people, flora, fauna, and soil. DuPont, Pulsar, Monsanto, Novartis and Diversa are companies expecting to install sweatshops and monoculture factories of transgenic products. This imperialistic penetration will displace local farmers and indigenous communities from their land to cities like Juarez City. However, as long as the Zapatistas keep fighting this plan — which is the materialization of the state and capital, the institutions by which civilization controls our existence — soldiers and paramilitary won’t be able to guard the state sovereignty and the rich interests in the area.

Social struggle is not only a matter of ends but also of means. Neither one is more important than the other, but both have to align in order for people to have a coherent vision of what they want and how to fight for it. I believe that the Zapatistas have that vision. The Zapatista struggle is a fight against the neoliberal model and the global standardization of human life through the corporate agenda. Domestication is based on standardization, and that is an innate practice of civilization. The ultimate goal of the Zapatistas is to fight civilization. Indigenous people of Chiapas want their autonomy back. It is painful for them to adopt the western lifestyle. They called themselves Zapatistas and they fought the western penetration in their territory. Their tactics went from assaulting a city to marching to the capital. Anarchism fights western systems in another territory. Its means are diverse. In indigenous territory, western modernity materializes itself in the form of an army with “civilizing” tanks and soldiers. I remember seeing the tanks drive around. I was being controlled by the military check points when my companera & I went to Chiapas two years ago. I remember also seeing the national guard deployed in Seattle when the mayor declared the state of emergency and imposed a curfew. Any victory against the state and capital is a victory for autonomy and freedom. It is a victory against civilization. When the state becomes deterritorialized, the henchmen of the rotten system have to step back and abandon the occupied territories, leaving people alone. That is what the Mexican army had to do when the government dismantled the seven military bases. This was also a victory for indigenous people across the hemisphere. Indigenous people are rising up in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, northern Argentina and now in Chile, with the renaissance of Mapuche resistance. Someday, indigenous people from all reservations will march together with Black and Chicano people from the ghettos and antiauthoritarian folks across the United States to Washington, DC, to end imperialism. There are multiple means to work to that end but certainly sectarianism and solipsism are none of those. Radical people who fight against western repression in the western world must avoid the standardizing practice of what they are fighting against: uniformity, homogenization, categorization. To accuse the EZLN of reformism while sitting at a computer in the US is a tremendous irresponsibility. If anarchism fights for individual autonomy it must also fight for the total unfolding of anti-authoritarian peculiarities. Trying to standardize anti-authoritarian practices under one flag or one label is nothing but totalitarianism. It can drive any honest radical movement to reproduce the system. We have to understand that both anarchism and indigenous movements fight against the “civilized” order and its practice of standardization. That is the ultimate end. The ways to achieve this end depends on the means that each one chooses, which should never include sectarian judgments or standardizing practices. The instrumental logic of these practices has nothing to do with anarchism. On the contrary, it reproduces and perpetuates the western rationale and its colonizing expansion.

Eugene, Oregon, June 18th 2001
You can contact the author at:
helicoptero_oregon@hotmail.com

Thoughts on Subversion: From Two Yippie Elders

Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo were founding Yippies, activists in support of the Black Panther Party and militant participants in the anti-war movement of the Sixties. Judy was an early feminist. They are both portrayed in the video/dvd version of “Steal This Movie.”, A bio-pic based on the life and times of Yippie Abbie Hoffman. Judy and Stew live in Portland Oregon, where they continue to be active in the good fight.

You are invited to visit Stew’s “Yippie Reading Room” web site at “http://hometown.aol.com/stewa/stew.html

Stew, for the benefit of our readers, could you give us a quick synopsis of your background in radical politics and describe what led you to become a founding member of the Youth International Party:

I started marching and protesting against the Vietnam War in 1964. In 1965 I joined the Berkeley based Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) and was involved in marches, demonstrations and at least one riot. The group was beginning to lose energy in 1966 and was knocked out for good by an unsolved right-wing bombing of its headquarters. But it provided an example and a militant model for the national student based antiwar movement.

The Black Panthers started out in Berkeley and Oakland and I was an early supporter of this organization. I worked to create alliances between the Panthers and the Yippies. I was involved in a number of major protests against the war and racism, including the Pentagon sit-in and the 1968 Chicago riots.

Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, myself and others started the Yippies because we believed that the passions and ideas of young rebels, hippies and anarchists were not being represented by the old Left and pacifist leadership of the peace movement. We looked out at the crowds at peace demonstrations and they were mostly wild looking and young and then we looked at the speakers platform and everyone was mostly middle aged and middle class. It didn’t make sense.

I know from my readings on the Sixties Counterculture that many Yippies considered themselves “psychedelic anarchists” and the anarchist influence is obvious in books like “Do It” and “Revolution For The Hell Of It” but I was wondering if you could clarify for us just where the Yippie movement was coming from politically and what its relationship to anarchism was. What was it that made the Yippies different from the rest of the New Left and what were your long term goals as a movement?

We called ourselves Yippies, in part because we didn’t want to use any of the preexisting labels. But it’s true that our views and actions were more anarchistic than anything else. We certainly were not interested in reforming the state bureaucracy. We wanted to replace the State with Community. Abbie Hoffman said that the Yippies were creating a Woodstock Nation that opposed and sought the destruction of the Pig Empire. I used the term “Soulful Socialism” - to juxtapose us to Marxism-Leninism or what was called “Scientific Socialism.” In our style and tactics we were influenced by the Surrealists, especially when we threw money at stock exchange brokers, or when we ran a pig (Pigasus) for president. We were also influenced by the Dutch based Provo anarchist movement.

We American Yippies did run into some trouble with French anarchists, because they thought we were too pro-Castro and Ho Chi Minh but we felt that these guys might not be perfect, but because of their positive achievements and the enemies they made, we thought they were very worthy of support. So we weren’t perfect anarchists but I’ve never been perfect at anything.

When we talked up in Portland in January, you commented on how interesting it was to you that so many younger anarchists were deeply immersed in the study of anthropology, while many of the radicals of your era were focused on studying psychology and the workings of the human mind. This was fascinating to me, as I consider an understanding of group psychology absolutely essential to subverting the dominant paradigm. Could you explain to us how your knowledge of psychology benefited you as a revolutionary and maybe give us some examples of how it was utilized by the Yippie movement ?

By 1967 we realized the war wasn’t going to go away nor the boring oppressive bureaucratic conformist society that spawned that brutal imperial adventure. We started thinking about how we could broaden our influence. Change people. Win them over. We knew the media was screwing us. Misrepresenting us when they were not ignoring us completely. We started thinking up ways of both getting around the media and using it. We started our own weekly newspapers all over the country. It was called the underground press. But we were determined to get people’s attention by any and all means including TV and the mainstream press. We knew that if we just lectured people about morality, if we tried to make them feel guilty, we knew they would ignore us. After all they had their parents and teachers to make them feel guilty. Why did they need us? We also knew that America was becoming an entertainment based society and that if our tactics were boring and repetitive we would turn people off. So we took on the techniques of what would someday be called performance art — and also a little from Brecht and Artaud -- mostly we wanted to do surprising things that made people pay attention. We wanted to touch people’s emotions but also their sense of humor. We wanted to put out a message that the best and most worthwhile time in America could be found in the rebel movement. And we wanted to create events that were so visually interesting that CBS would be forced to put us on the 7 o’clock news. So running a pig for President and getting arrested with that Pig. The Chicago police threw us all in a police wagon, Phil Ochs, Jerry Rubin, me and others and also our candidate Pigasus. The images went out all over the global village via TV- and all over the world people were laughing at the American election and the police. And thinking we were a great bunch who they would like to emulate. And many did.

Many revolutionaries active during the 1960’s and 70’s (including yourself) felt the full iron heel of fascism in the form of the F.B.I.’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In fact, your generation were the ones who first exposed COINTELPRO to the larger public and you were also the first to analyze the Grand Jury system and to develop effective strategies for dealing with it, and other forms of state repression. What sort of security advice do you have for younger activists who might not yet be familiar with the history of state repression in this country ?

The first thing would be to become familiar with the history of American repression — the home grown Iron Heel. There are plenty of books — there’s lots to read. The FBI files are very important to read - and there is lots of good stuff to search out on the web. I think the first thing is, to grasp a truth about the American system. It only tolerates freedom — when freedom is not a threat to its rulers. That was true in Chile when the US overthrew a legally elected socialist government and imposed a violent dictatorship. It’s true now in Columbia where labor leaders are being murdered and it becomes true here in America to the extent that we radicals are being effective. The last presidential election ended in what some call a velvet coup. I’m sure that if there was a strong national movement against the coup — the velvet would have been taken off - and the iron heel would be its replacement. So we have to understand the system without illusions.

I think that those who are full time involved in fighting against global capitalism need to take security more seriously. To protect their homes and offices and selves and yet it’s important to do this without being paranoid — if protection is over done it will frighten people away. So a balance must be struck. And look, some stuff seems improperly categorized — like people tell me that wearing bandannas protects them. But the truth is (the way the police work) wearing a bandanna may keep your face out of the papers, and it’s great revolutionary theater for sure, but who do you think will become a candidate for being followed home? Or to a bar? Or wherever. Its better to learn how to find electronic bugs or develop mail drops or learn how to lose a tail or like the Panther’s to learn enough law to protect yourself, a little bit, against the law. That can help you. But bandannas? They are a great way to express Zapatista solidarity but I don’t think they give any protection.

How were issues of gender inequality, male privilege, and patriarchy approached by the Yippie movement? Where if anywhere along the continuum of priorities of the movement was women’s oppression situated? How willing were men to listen to women about these issues, and further educate themselves on women’s history and subjugated role in society?

From Judy Gumbo Albert: What’s interesting about what we called the women’s liberation movement is the myth that’s come down from 30 years ago, and the reality. Everyone experienced their own sixties but what comes down today as historical facts are predominately tales of sexism, oppression, patriarchy (although we didn’t call it that back them) and even rape. It’s true that Eldridge Cleaver glorified rape as an insurrectionary act in his book “Soul On Ice”. It’s also true we were asked to make coffee, roll joints and do menial tasks. But to believe only that the sixties was patriarchal and oppressive to women is to buy into a myth — a partial totality. For the Yippie women — myself, Anita Hoffman, Nancy K., Genie Plamondon, Robin Morgan and many others the experience of being leaders, movers, shakers, speakers, rioters, revolutionaries, guerrilla theatrical performers and producers, writers, editors, flower children, anarchists and sexually liberated beings was as much if not more part of our experience as sexism and patriarchy. Plus, we were not wimps. When Yippie women came up against sexism, we fought back. We took the term “women’s liberation” from the liberation movements that surrounded us — black people, Vietnamese. We knew that women had to be free and formed our own liberation movement. Freedom, in Janis Joplin’s words was just another word for nuthin left to loose.

How did the guys take it? Not well — at least at first. Every Yippie relationship, including Stew’s and mine, broke up in the height of the women’s movement. After all, how could I love a sexist oppressor? Did Stew change his behavior? You bet. Did I? Absolutely. We were lucky because we both came to understand that behavior had to change — both the sexist oppressor and the victimized oppressed. And that both our behaviors affected each other. (We were reading Fanon’s the “Wretched of the Earth” at the time.) Eventually Stew & I we were able to re-build our relationship — which isn’t true of any of the other Yippie relationships from that time.

What is most important about that period that we women learned to do things that we never had access to before — from repairing VW engines to controlling our reproductive lives, to conquering our fear of facing down the pigs. We learned to be leaders and to stand up from the core of our being for what we believed in. I know for a fact that the commitment to feminist self-determination that we learned from being part of the Yippies stayed with all of us Yippie women as we proceeded down the rest of our lives — each in our different way.

To what extent did an ecological agenda manifest within the Yippie movement? What was the nature of the discourse on matters such as the (un)sustainability of industrial civilization, the relative ecological harmony of “primitive societies”, population growth, the culturally constructed historic role of modern civilized humans(men)as the owners and destroyers of the earth?

The first time that I started paying attention to ecological issues was when I started reading articles in the underground press by a Yippie named Keith Lampe. He called his articles, “Earth Read Out,” and in some ways they helped start the ecology movement. The Yippies were around only in the early days of green politics. We were very active in creating People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969. We took over some abandoned land and put down, grass, flowers and trees - it became a massive community event. But Governor Ronald Reagan called out the police and the National Guard and they shot up Berkeley. They killed and they maimed and they built a fence around the park. Many who were involved in creating the park never heard the word “ecology,” But that’s what the park was about.

The Yippies did not think industrial society was sustainable. We were into postindustrial thinking. We looked toward a computer-based decentralization of society, Perhaps we romanticized computers. We were sometimes called neoprimitives, because we wanted to combine high-tech with much more simple forms of living.

Leading up to and during the late 60s, could you explain the role and influence of “do-it-yourself” publications including flyers, newspapers, pamphlets, etc. and how the distribution of such propaganda affected and instigated radical action? What forms of propaganda did you find most effective? What production methods proved the most tenable considering limited funding?

I wonder about the practical relevance of this question, since we didn’t have the benefit of web pages and the Internet - and in a way the game has changed or maybe it hasn’t? When it comes to effective propaganda — nothing has changed. If you don’t have lively layout that conveys energy and some joy you will cut down on your readership. And your language has to have life in it. No clichés and anything becomes a cliché if you repeat it enough. Humorous images, surrealistic juxtapositions are always great. And here’s another thing to remember about propaganda. It should stimulate critical thought but not try to provide all the answers. It should leave room for the readers to fill in some answers of their own. And you should have a big ear, willing to listen and reflect what people say. If your propaganda is really good, even our enemies will reluctantly enjoy it, when that happens you know you’re having an impact. You know your enemies children will soon be joining your ranks.

anarchist sunrise

It’s Time to Disorganize!

By Kevin Tucker

If there’s anything that the failures of the left prove, particularly the unions (from the UAW, AFL-CIO, to the IWW), it’s that any “revolutionary” theory that doesn’t question the key elements of civilization is going to do nothing more than shift the social order to a slightly “modified” version. That is if they work at all. We can no longer look to any kind of reform for an end to the death machine that is civilization. It has long been an embedded idea in “revolutionary” strands that success requires organization. The age-old calls of the Wobblies, “It’s time to organize!” are ringing hollow as the leftist milieu grinds them into the pages of dead social movements in radical history. What has our past of “organization” brought us? We can say that it has brought us some success because those at the top of the newly created social hierarchies tell us we have. Organization pushes us back into the same top-down hierarchies that we are trying to revolt against and erase. What will this bring us? Goodbye old boss, hello to the new, any difference? Maybe there’ll be a mild greening (or Redding more likely), but it’s still the same social order, which generally is unquestioning of destructive civilized lifestyles. But even in the short run they offer little more than pushing forward new leaders to tell us how and when to act out and how and when we’ve won. It’s getting us nowhere. Little, lefty reformist games comprised of a lot of talk and no action. “Consensus” meetings held behind closed doors by chosen or predetermined delegates will lay out the guidelines of how much reform the masses will stand behind. We have no choice in the matter and don’t realize the two-faced realities of those disposing of empty rhetoric. It has not and will not get us anywhere.

If we do truly desire an end to the civilized social order, we can only do so by enacting insurgence and revolt by means that keep no aspect of the current social order, or push for a system that mirrors this. The only hope we have is for spontaneous acts of revolt to come from the passions and rage of individuals. No top down orders or “plans for action” can wake the insurgent drowned out by the totality of civilized thought.

The only true and successful revolution will not be brought about by predetermined games of give, give, borrow, silent marches and banners, and especially new hierarchies. It will come from the hearts of those who bear the blows of civilization (which is all of us, including non-humans). Those whose dreams are shattered, those who will never live autonomously, unrestrained from the totality of the civilized concrete cages we are born into. Those who have been shut off at birth from their birthright to flourish as individuals and a community, and from the community of Nature that would offer them more love than we can conceive in our current downtrodden state. The failures of all hierarchies are becoming clearer daily. The constant collapse of the social order from it’s overbearing weight will draw more to find their catalyzing points, and thus to their own revolts. Insurgence is rising, and civilization is falling. Give it the final shove by using your own words and actions. Breaking the spell of civilized order is the only way to finish off Leviathan, and everyday is bringing us closer.

The author can be reached c/o Coalition Against Civilization, POB 835, Greensberg, PA 15601; coaltionagainstcivilzation@hotmail.com; www.emote.org/CAC.

The Coalition Against Civilization has recently published a powerful 29-page essay by Kevin Tucker called “The Disgust Of Daily Life”, which examines the disease of civilization in a very personalized, detailed manner. We strongly encourage our readers to order a copy from the CAC or from the GA distro.

“The search for cures is part of the unquestioning ideology of civilization. A cure presumes one is needed...”

View From The Armed Front: The Dialectic of Revolutionary Violence, Law And Reformism

Reprinted below is an interesting Black Liberation Army (BLA) communiqué from the mid-seventies critiquing technology from the perspective of the Black colony here in North Amerika. In this communiqué, the BLA discuss the way in which the ruling class utilize technology to oppress and exploit New Afrikans and advocate the use of revolutionary violence to dismantle this technological web of domination.

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Our recognition of the economical contradictions of capital in no way obscures the social and political realities that now confront us and our struggle for Black Liberation. To the contrary, it enhances and deepens our perspective and clarifies the dialectical role of armed struggle in our liberation process.

We have begun to recognize and analyze those forces in a modern technologically advanced society that set our particular struggle apart from other Third World peoples struggles, as well as the common factors all oppressed peoples share as a result of U.S. and western imperialism. One such factor that sets our struggle apart from other struggles is the profound influence of organized technology on our consciousness, social relationships and behavior. People who live in the technologically advanced societies of the west have been programmed to perceive their needs as being one and the same as the technology that created these artificial needs. Because the masses of working people do not control this technology it has been consistently used to manipulate their whole lives. We are told what to buy, what to eat, whom to hate, and what to love by rulers and controllers of an exploitative system. Technology in the context of Capitalism is the ultimate means by which the masses are programmed out of the need for real freedom. A whole social value system has evolved to support our dependence on corporate-state technological control. We no longer know what freedom is or what self determination is. We perceive the value of competition as being in the natural order of human relationships, instead of contrary to the fact that humans are a social animal more attuned to co-operation than competition. We must create in the course of destroying our system of oppression, whole new value concepts, concepts that exist in dialectical opposition to the values that buttress our oppression. Even more than this, we must create a new need within ourselves for freedom, so that we can harness technology in our behalf. As it stands now, Black people cannot even conceive of real freedom, we are afraid of real liberation because we have been programmed to be afraid by racist class oppression. Technology has immensely aided in reinforcing our fear of the dominant ruling circles. We must break this social psychosis.

The BLA has undertaken armed struggle as a means by which the social psychosis of fear, awe, and love of everything white people define as being of value, is purged from our peoples minds. Our historical experience in North America has shown us that we as a people have always suffered while the racist ruling circles have never suffered. We have seen throughout our history, pain, blood, rape, exploitation, poverty, our families torn asunder by a cruel and brutal culture, our youth murdered and socially crippled, our women degraded, our lives ever at the mercy of the cold American dream machine. We realize that the results of this historical experience has caused Black people to fear America’s capacity for racist violence, and on the other hand, has reinforced the racist ruling circles in their attitudes of arrogance and confidence. The fact that the majority of whites who are equally oppressed and exploited do not really understand who their real enemy is, does not deter us from doing what must be done to break not only our peoples mental chains, but theirs as well. We therefore, will illustrate in the only terms that the ruling classes understand, the terms of blood - their blood. America must learn that Black people are not the eternal sufferers, the universal prisoners, the only ones who can feel pain. Revolutionary violence is, therefore, not a tactic of struggle, but a strategy. A Strategy designed to drive the capitalist system further into crisis, while at the same time forcing all those responsible for oppression to realize that they too can bleed, they too can feel our pain. As it stands now, the powerful do not believe they can hurt and therefore, find concession to our demands for liberation ridiculous. Our social/psychotic fear of the racists ruling circles must be purged also, and only by developing our capacity to fight our enemy will this unreasonable and reactionary fear be eradicated from our social psyche. Revolutionary violence is not so much a cleansing process as it is a necessary ingredient in creating a psychological frame of mind amongst the ruling classes that our liberation must be granted.

DIRECT ACTION NEWS

RESISTANCE MEANS ATTACK!

][ELF slogan left behind on a building in Clatskanie, Oregon.]]

Anti-Genetix Actions

May 17, 2001

Activists Destroy GE Crops at Research Facility in Brentwood, CA

Communiqué:

In the early morning of May 16th, 2001 a group dedicated to the right to good food, untainted by genetic engineering, occupied and acted against one DNA Plant Technology research facility. This research location is located outside of Brentwood CA on Balfour Road, 1/2 mile east of Highway 4. We prevented further steps in transgenic crop experiments, within this entity, from occurring this season. Transgenic strawberry, tomato, and onion plants were uprooted and destroyed.

This is not the first time that people have taken direct action against transgenic strawberry experiments: the first anti-GE action in the US took place less than a mile from the DNAP facility. Night time gardeners targeted GenTech’s Frostban strawberry, setting the stage for more than 50 anti-GE actions to date.

DNA Plant Technology Holdings was recently acquired by ELM, a multinational bioengineering corporation that also owns Seminis Vegetable Seeds, the largest distributor of fruit and vegetable seeds in the world. DNAP is currently growing more than 15,000 acres of genetically engineered field crops in Mexico and the US, mostly without the public’s knowledge. DNA has more than 50 patents for such technologies as promoters, gene introduction, selectable markers, and plant regeneration. One gene silencing technology, trademarked Transwitch, allows agribusinessmen to switch genes on and off at will, for example the gene responsible for ethylene production in tomatoes. The Flavr Savr tomato utilizes this technology to create a tomato with a shelf life of two to three weeks. Like most applications of genetic engineering, this trait benefits neither the workers who grow the tomato nor the people who buy these pale-pink, plastic-wrapped, nutritionally zapped tomatoes.

Now DNAP is moving into so-called “second wave” research which is trying to incorporate drugs into the tissues of food plants. But our resistance is rooted deep in the land, and as long as they attempt to develop these alterations to our food, our resistance will continue. Researching this company and it’s facilities, we discovered an unusual level of secrecy surrounding it’s operations. DNA Plant Holdings was conspicuously absent from tax assessors listings, had no posted signs of any sort in this otherwise neighborly agricultural community, and otherwise went to great lengths to conceal the nefarious nature of their business. We unearthed a report for DNAP stockholders that boasted of the site’s remoteness and inaccessibility to public view. Seminis, also owned by ELM, has been a frequent target of anti-biotechnology actions, and the DNAP report reflected this paranoia. They even reassured the stockholders that the test plots were protected by security guards against ‘fauna trespassers’.

In recent years, more and more Americans are becoming fed up with corporate secrecy and lack of accountability for the changes they make in communities, human health, and the environment. The backlash against the WTO was one sign of this dissatisfaction, and ongoing antibiotechnology test plot sabotage actions are another. Upset by what we were learning of the health and environmental ramifications of Roundup Ready technology and of the business practices of Seminis and DNAP in particular, we rounded up our favorite animal friends and decided to take action in spite of their boasted security measures.

On a dark night we slipped through the open field surrounding the experimental facility. Working less than 50 feet from a brightly-lit house equipped with motion sensor/security light apparently aimed at the DNAP fields, we entered the 1-acre strawberry test plot. True to Roundup Ready test protocol, the plants were enveloped in a dense carpet of weeds, ready for application of the poisonous herbicide. We removed an acre of the enormous, leathery Frankenplants to a short new life- in plastic bags full of bleach to prevent any possibility of survival and replanting.

We next proceeded to one of the two greenhouses of DNAP’s tomato experiments. We took a walk right through the walls, found a 1/4 acre of 4-foot tall fruiting tomatoes and dispatched them to their rightful dwelling place in hell. We invalidated the year’s experiment in less than 10 minutes, and caused some uncounted amount of economic damage.

Safely outside on DNAP’s poisoned earth, we turned our attention to a half acre test plot of mature onion plants that deserved to share the tomatoes’ and strawberries’ fate. Our frenzy of uprooting took down another experiment in 5 minutes. A good nights work lying in shreds behind us, we melted into the night the way we had come.

May 26, 2001

Belgium: Aventis Crop Silenced

An Aventis owned genetically modified winter oilseed canola rape farm located in the district of Velzeke (Eastern Flanders, Belgium) was destroyed during this week-end. This action is to be seen as a trial to strike a blow to the current GMO’s invasion creeping from our fields to the daily food. As a matter of fact, despite all reassuring governmental and agro-transnational statements, we can draw a more and more accurate picture of GE consequences. Health damages are firmly known today (allergies, increased antibiotic resistance,...). Spreading GMO’s also results in irreversible environmental havoc: biodiversity loss, a much greater pesticides consumption, insects and weeds resistance’s, gene transfer (horizontally as well as vertically) to other species,... It all combines with a perverse enslavement mechanism providing for an ever growing farmers dependence on GE seeds producing corporations. Farmers are led to buy “improved” seeds and adapted herbicides to the same company, hence strengthening their total subjection. Facing those threats we necessarily have ourselves to put into practice the precautionary principle, opposed to profit making obsessed structures.

June 7, 2001

Activists cast vote in GM field at Munlochy

The first votes of election day were cast not in a ballot box, but in a field of Genetically Manipulated (GM) Oilseed Rape Canola.

In the early hours of Election Day, campaigners cut an ‘X’ shaped swathe through the controversial GM crop currently growing at Munlochy on the Black Isle, Inverness.

The GM trial has been vociferously opposed by the local community from the start.

“People have very real and reasonable fears about the effects of GM on the environment, Scottish biodiversity, and, of course, on human health. The Government has ignored these arguments and sided with transnational corporations, who are only out to make big bucks, over the interests of their people.”

One of the campaigners responsible for the action said: “Our action sends a clear message that GM is not welcome in Scotland - nor are any politicians or companies who support it.”

Local organic farmer Donnie Macleod said, “Those people that carried out this action are simply echoing the opinion of the vast majority of the local community. I hope this means that no more fields of contamination are planted in the Highlands.”

June 15, 2001

Anti-GE group targets Seminis

Begin Communiqué:

To Whom It May Concern at the Genetix Alert Press Office, We came across your business on the internet. Can your service help get news out about what’s happening here in Idaho:

There’s a company called Seminis Vegetable Seeds in Filer and we would pass it’s research center everyday. We started wondering what kind of research they were doing. There is a lot of agriculture around here but everything is bigger and bigger companies who don’t say what’s being grown or how.

A bunch of us around here doing farming and trucking crops decided to find out anything we could about Seminis. And then the information we got made us take things into our own hands and go out into their field one night and rip out their pea plants. The night was June 10 and we yanked out over 20 small plots of peas, It must have been thousands of plants. These peas weren’t normal. They had their genes changed to make the plants stay alive when sprayed with glyphosate herbicide. That’s like the brand Roundup for people who don’t know.

The internet was how we looked up a lot of information. You can get Addresses there and find out businesses have going on. We did a search and find Seminis’s web site. We also went to the USDA, that’s the US Dept. of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS] web site: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/permits.html. They do permitting for gene-modification research. If you click on “How Can I Check on an Application to Import, Move, or Field Test or a Petition to Deregulate? (Biotechnology Database)” you can find records about who’s testing what kind of altered plants. We found Seminis’s permit # 01-065-01N # 321 for peas, saw the peas in their field and it went from there.

These gene-altered plants can cross-breed with regular plants and we don’t know what they will do to people, animals, the soil, or anything. It was really easy work to take them out of the picture and didn’t take very long, once we got used to the dark and relaxed into the work.

We hope this story will be interesting to people, especially people wondering what’s going on right down the road from them. Why don’t we take things into our own hands at this point and take out these crops?

Seminis’s place is right on Highway 30, at the 2300 Rd. corner, next to The highschool.

June 18, 2001

ELF Claims Responsibility For Action Against Genetic Engineering At University Of Idaho

Communiqué:

“Biotech Out of Our Community!

ELF claims attack on University of Idaho Biotech Building

The University of Idaho Biotechnology building, currently under construction, was targeted in the early hours of the morning on June 10th by a cell of the Earth Liberation Front calling themselves the Night Action Kids. Survey stakes were removed and the exterior of the new building painted with such sentiments as ‘NO GE!’ and ‘Go Organic’.

This is the second action against the Biotechnology building. The first of which individuals entered the building and caused an unknown amount of damage.

An anonymous ELF Night Action Kid compares research in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology to the scientific studies which lead to the creation of the nuclear bomb. ‘Biotechnological research may be intended for good ends by the scientist, as was nuclear research, but in our free enterprise police state society it will be used almost solely for greed and control. With Genetic Engineering we are creating another bomb.’

Monsanto and other large corporations are patenting seeds and forcing farmers to sign contracts that they will continue buying these GE, and many times pesticide resistant, seeds from the same corporation year after year, effectively taking control over our food sources. Genetically Engineered food on our grocery store shelves is not labeled as such, so the individual does not know what he or she is eating. Genetically Engineered fish are escaping into the wild populations with the chance of killing off the entire species. Genetic testing for predisposition to certain diseases, such as cancer, may soon keep you and your children from getting insurance or a job.

‘GE corporations and their supporters have claimed that we [anti-GE activists] are using scare tactics to further our viewpoint. The fact is that Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering are scary prospects when placed in the hands of large corporations who care only about profits and not about the health and safety of the people, or the effects they are having on the environment. Through the University of Idaho Biotechnology Program we are teaching our children to work in a field which is developing faster than its effects, both physically and ethically, can be monitored and has the potential for causing catastrophic harm to all humans and the planet,’ claims another Night Action Kid, who continues, ‘Get Biotech out of Moscow! It is not wanted in our community.’”

June 25th 2001

Activists eliminate field tests

This is a translation of a report by the Dutch actionmagazine Ravage (http://www.antenna.nl/ravage)

Amsterdam - In the night of Sunday to Monday June 25 activists calling themselves “Razende Hazen” (Enraged Hares) have sabotaged two field tests of Genetically engineered sugar beets in Brabant, the south of The Netherlands. They made up a test of ‘Roundup-Ready’ sugar beets by agro-multinational Monsanto.”We removed the green of the plants, making the test uncompletable,” says the group in a statement delivered to Ravage.

“The purpose of this action is to directly stop the spreading of genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) in our environment and food,” state the Hares. The RoundupReady beets have been genetically altered to be able to resist Monsanto’s herbicide ‘Roundup’. “This way, Monsanto can sell both more seeds and more Roundup.”

The Enraged Hares have in this way made a contribution to the national debate on genetics and food. The activists say this debate is “mustard after a meal [a Dutch expression], because the government’s already decided to actively stimulate genetic technology. In the so called public meeting that the government commission is organizing today, the public will not be allowed to speak. They will be ‘educated’, but there will be no debate,” say the activists.

“Even though there’s wide spread doubt on use of GMO food, the biotech industry keeps going on the road of social and ecological destruction. Large companies and governments set the agenda to globalize patent-laws, that privatize life as ‘intellectual property’, selling science to motives of profit and power.”

Tonight’s actions were part of the second international day of actions against the biotech-industry.

Earth Liberation Actions

April 21, 2001

Saboteurs Hit Powerline Construction Site

An unknown person or persons attacked the construction site of the 23-mile powerline to the University of Arizona’s Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) late on the night of April 21. Using sledgehammers and crowbars, the saboteurs caused $200,000 in damages to the powerline, construction vehicles and equipment. MGIO talking head Joe Carter said that “vandals” cut the exposed powerline in several places and put abrasives into the oil and gasoline tanks of several pieces of excavation machinery. “Most of the damage is to the vehicles,” he said. “I think this is an example of eco-terrorism,” Carter said. “It’s most unfortunate that folks don’t use the courts to resolve problems but take things into their own hands” — an ironic statement, considering Judge Marquez’s subsequent ruling in favor of the powerline project.

April 23, 2001

ELF Takes Responsibility For Arson Of Ross Island Sand And Gravel Cement Trucks

“The Earth Liberation Front claims responsibility for the fire that took place at Ross Island Sand and Gravel on Sunday, April 15th. For many years Ross Island Sand and Gravel has been guilty of stealing soil from the Earth, specifically the lagoon on Ross Island. Further, the recent acknowledgment of the dredging of toxic disposal cells has drawn our attention to the exploitation that Ross Island Sand and Gravel commits against our Earth. In their Easter basket we decided to leave four containers with gasoline and a time delayed fuse placed under two of their cement trucks. If Ross Island Sand and Gravel mines in the Columbia River Gorge, then the E.L.F. will take necessary action. Let this be a warning to all the greedy corporations who exploit our Earth’s natural resources, especially those who plan on doing it under the FTAA and the title of “free trade.” -the elves and the Easter bunny”

May 21, 2001

Earth Liberation Front Claims Responsibility for Simultaneous Actions in 2 States; Over an estimated $3 million in Combined Damages

Part 1

At 3:15am on Monday, May 21, the research of Toby Bradshaw was reduced to smoke and ashes. We attacked his office at the University of Washington while at the same time another group set fire to a related target in Clatskanie, Oregon, 150 miles away.

Bradshaw, the driving force in G.E. tree research, continues to unleash mutant genes into the environment that is certain to cause irreversible harm to forest ecosystems.

After breaking into Bradshaw’s office at the Center for Urban Horticulture, we inspected the building for occupants and set up incendiary devices with a modest amount of accelerant. Although we placed these devices specifically to target his office, a large portion of the building was damaged. This extensive damage was due to a surprisingly slow and poorly coordinated response from the fire department, which was evident by their radio transmissions.

As long as universities continue to pursue this reckless “science,” they run the risk of suffering severe losses. Our message remains clear: we are determined to stop genetic engineering.

From the torching of Catherine Ive’s office at Michigan State University to the total incineration of GE seeds at the D & PL warehouse in Visalia, CA, the Earth Liberation Front is growing and spreading. As the culture of domination forces itself into our very genes, wild fires of outrage will continue to blaze.

ELF

Part 2

Early Monday morning, May 21, we dealt a blow to one of the many institutions responsible for massive hybrid tree farming in the Northwest. Incendiary devices at Jefferson Poplar in, Oregon, burned an office and a fleet of 13 trucks. Unfortunately, due to a design flaw, one targeted structure was left standing. We torched Jefferson Poplar because hybrid poplars are an ecological nightmare threatening native biodiversity in the ecosystem. Our forests are being liquidated and replaced with monocultured tree farms so greedy, earth raping corporations can make more money.

Pending legislation in Oregon and Washington further criminalizing direct action in defense of the wild will not stop us and only highlights the fragility of the ecocidal empire.

As we wrote in Clatskanie “You cannot control what is wild.”

ELF

Earth Liberation Front

June 1, 2001

Three log trucks set on fire at timber sale

Estacada, OR. Three log trucks were set on fire on Friday, June 1st at a timber sale where logging was set to begin over the protest of environmentalists who have camped out at the site. No one was injured in the blaze, officials said. An employee of Ray A. Schoppert Logging Inc. spotted the fires and reported them at 2:40 a.m., said Angela Blanchard, Clackamas County sheriff’s spokeswoman.

One of the trucks was completely destroyed and two others were damaged, the trucks were valued at about $50,000 apiece, Blanchard said. Six simple incendiary devices were planted on each of six log trucks parked in a rural area near the timber sale but only one ignited, said John McMahon, spokesman for the federal BATF.

June 11, 2001

Luxury homes torched

Local and federal authorities are investigating a possible connection between the arson fires of four Catalina Foothills luxury homes near Tucson and 11 similar fires in the Phoenix area during the past three years.

Officials said it is too soon to say if there is a link between the Tucson fires and those in Phoenix, which were reportedly set by people upset at homes being built on the edge of a nature preserve. But authorities said graffiti similar to that found at some Phoenix arson scenes were also found at the Tucson fires. The letters “CSP” were scrawled in red spray paint on at least one of the homes’ walls.

In Phoenix, where nine houses were burned near the public Phoenix Mountains Preserve, and in Scottsdale, where two homes burned near the public McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the letters reportedly stood for the Coalition to Save the Preserves. All of the homes were at least 5,000 square feet and most cost close to $1 million.

No one was living in the homes in Pima Canyon Estates, where East Ina Road curves into East Skyline Drive, Feldt said. They had a total value of about $5 million. One of the fires was started at the doorway of a home and the rest began on rooftops. They caused at least $2 million damage.

Pima Canyon Estates has about 300 lots, with occupied homes or houses under construction on about 200. Homes start at $750,000 and typically cost between that and $1 million, said Linda Cohen, a consultant for Foothills Resort Properties Limited, o wner and developer of the community.

Actions on Behalf of Animal Liberation

April 19, 2001

Animal Liberation Activists Hit Wash. State Fur Farm

Animal liberation activists have struck once again at Brainard’s Fur Farm in Snohomish County, Wash., setting 200 mink free on April 19. This is the fourth time Brainard’s has been targeted by activists in the past five years, and the largest release at that site. The mink were set free and released into the surrounding wilderness. The action has not been officially claimed by the Animal Liberation Front or any other group or organization; the ALF Press Office learned of the action through an Everett Herald article on April 26. The report identified the fur farm as being located “in the 19100 block of Welch Road in the Snohomish area.” Brainard’s Fur Farm is located at 19127 Welch Rd.

June 13, 2001

The ALF and ELF join forces in New York State

To whom it may concern,

During the early morning hours of June 13th members of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts attacked various Bank of New York branches and offices in efforts that massive economic damages will dissuade them from further management of American Depository Receipts belonging to Huntingdon Life Sciences. HLS is responsible for the deaths of over 500 animals daily and hundreds of thousands annually. These animals are murdered in crude attempts for pesticide and pharmaceutical corporations to pursue Avenues to legalize their products. Monsanto and other earth destroyers use HLS’ fraudulent practices to place potentially lethal and environmentally hazardous chemicals on the public market.

This is a message to the general public. HLS does not care about the health of people, does not care about the preservation of wild lands and life, and brutalizes, probes, tortures, and murders thousands of lonely, frightened and beautiful creatures.

The Earth will be Revered; We will deliver!

These Animals Need Love; We will deliver!

HLS must close; and We will deliver!

The following attacks were made on June 13th:

1. Bank of New York, Huntington, Long Island Branch - Had locks glued and the slogans “BNY Invests in Murder”, “Investors in Murder”, and “ALF” spray painted.

2. Bank of New York, Kings Park, Long Island Branch - Was spray painted with the slogans “Bank of NY Kills Puppies” and “ALF”.

3. Bank of New York, Commack, Long Island Branch - Exterior ATM machine damaged by glue and plastic strips in card slot and glue in keypad. On the building’s side wall the slogans “Investors in Murder”, and “Stop the Torture” were spray painted in bold letters.

4. Bank of New York, Babylon, Long Island Branch - Two exterior ATM machines were damaged by glue and plastic strips in card slot and glue in keypad. On the bank’s main building various slogans were spray painted.

5. Bank of New York, Suffolk County Office Building, Farmingdale, Long Island - Over 25 windows were smashed out and the slogans “ALF” and “ELF” were spray painted behind as a warning that these actions were not random vandalism, they were planned and calculated.

Unless BNY stops trade in HLS’ American Depository Receipts, they can look forward to many more nights of broken glass.

These actions were dedicated to the 130 thousand animals who will perish this year for HLS’ greed, and dedicated to Jeffrey “Free” Luers, an outspoken forest preservation activist, and green anarchist who was just recently incarcerated.

Love, Life, Action

The Earth Liberation Front

The Animal Liberation Front

YOU CAN NOT CONTROL WHAT IS WILD!

Cincinnati Erupts

On April 9th, As Green Anarchy #5 was going to print, major riots broke out in Cincinnati over the police murder of 19-year old Timothy Thomas, a New Afrikan youth and victim of racist profiling. Although we weren’t able to report on these riots in our last issue due to our publishing deadline, the GA collective is in complete solidarity with the black colony and their struggle against white supremacy and the fascist police state. What follows is a brief account of what occurred in Cincinnati in April:

Three months after the largest urban disturbance in the US since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, officials in Cincinnati, Ohio are prosecuting hundreds of minority workers and youth involved in four days of protests and rioting that followed the police killing of an unarmed black teenager on April 7.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen, who denounced participants as “law-breaking thugs who should be prosecuted vigorously,” announced he is indicting 63 people on felony charges, ranging from aggravated rioting, breaking and entering, weapons possession and “inducing panic.” If convicted many could face prison sentences of up to one-and-a-half years in a state penitentiary. A 17-member “Riot Prosecution Task Force” is also reviewing videotape of the riots subpoenaed from local TV stations in order to identify and prosecute additional suspects. We were told by witnesses that they saw officers celebrating after they hit their targets. On the second night of the curfew police were riding through the neighborhoods shouting “Nah, nah, nah,” through their bullhorns to taunt residents. They were pointing shotguns at residents looking out of their windows. My only concern is: if the Cincinnati police do these things when the world’s cameras are watching them, what do they do when there are no cameras?”

The shooting of Timothy Thomas

The protests and rioting erupted after Steve Roach, a cop, shot and killed 19-year old Timothy Thomas after a chase in Cincinnati’s largely black and impoverished Over-the Rhine neighborhood. Thomas was wanted on 14 misdemeanor counts—12 of them traffic infractions, including not wearing a seat belt and driving without a license.

Roach claimed that the youth was reaching for a gun in his waistband, but no gun was found. City officials, including Mayor Luken, have acknowledged that elements of the cop’s statement—including how far he was from Thomas—have been contradicted by an initial investigation of the evidence, which includes eyewitness accounts and a videotape of the incident recorded by a police cruiser.

In the last six years the city’s police department has killed 15 suspects, all of them black males, including 29-year-old Roger Owensby, an unarmed man who was asphyxiated last November while being arrested by five cops.

Tensions in the city erupted after police and city officials refused to say why Thomas was shot and killed, even after the young man’s mother publicly demanded an explanation. County Prosecutor Allen—a former Cincinnati pig— blocked the release of the police videotape and Roach’s contradictory statement to investigators, claiming this would do irreparable harm to any probe into the shooting.

Angry protesters converged on an April 9 city council meeting demanding an explanation, but were stonewalled by city and police authorities. Later that evening a crowd of 1,000 workers and youth converged on the District 1 Police Station in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, shouting, “You’re killing us!” Some stones and bottles were thrown at police, who lined up in front of the station and watched the crowd on horseback and in police cruisers. After an hours-long standoff the police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and beanbags to disperse the crowd.

What followed were several days of protests, violent
confrontations with police and rioting, particularly in poorer minority neighborhoods. These areas have been largely bypassed by the city’s renovation projects—including the $1 billion investment to build two new sports stadiums on the Ohio Riverfront—but have received the most attention from the police. The Over-the-Rhine neighborhood lies just blocks from the downtown area where some of America’s largest corporations, such as Procter & Gamble and Kroger’s Supermarkets, are headquartered. But over 90 percent of the area’s 7,000 residents live below the official poverty level, and two-thirds of the apartment units are below code or abandoned.

State of emergency imposed

On April 12, Mayor Luken, a Democrat, put the city under a state of emergency and called in 125 riot-trained state troopers to back up his police force. Luken denounced the protests, saying they had little to do with the “very legitimate concerns” about police abuse. “I see on the faces of most of the people involved in these activities, not people with a social or political agenda, but simply people intent on destruction. Many of them seem to be having fun, enjoying themselves. There is nothing at all funny about this... The time has come when we must make every effort to quell such violence in our streets.”

That week, while hundreds of Cincinnati residents were being processed through the criminal justice system, Mayor Luken announced that city and business leaders would spend $2.2 million to create 3,000 summer jobs for teenagers. At the same time he acknowledged that this gesture would do little to calm city residents and warned that social tensions were reaching a breaking point throughout the US: “There are flash points like ours in every city in America. If there is a mayor in any major city not worried about the coming summer, then he or she is not thinking.” “By this time, after the smoke and blood of Cincinnati, at least one thing should be clear: that the federal government offers no hope of change or compromise, and no real chance of prosecution of brutal or murderous police officers. Hell, it takes a mass rebellion even to get them to perform a half-hearted “investigation”. We will not obtain any form of social justice for all those killed by the police by depending on this government. If we want freedom or social justice, we will have to fight for it, it ain’t being handed to us.”

- Lorenzo Komboa Ervin on the April Cincinnati Riots

May Day Rebellions

Violence has flared in European capitals as anti-globalization protesters clashed with police at May Day rallies. Police in London came under fire from a hail of makeshift weapons as they charged at demonstrators who had brought the center of the city to a standstill. In Berlin, around 6,000 people confronted police, who arrested scores of people and used water cannon to break up blazing barricades set by demonstrators

Violence erupted in London after several thousand demonstrators were surrounded by police in riot gear on London’s Oxford Street — one of the city’s major shopping areas containing many multinational-national companies. After hours of largely peaceful protest, in which police kept separated differing groups of demonstrators, the mood turned ugly. Police charged demonstrators forcing them back only for the protesters to counter-charge as makeshift weapons rained down on police lines and masked demonstrators recked traffic lights. Around 6,000 police officers had been ordered onto the streets to keep the crowds under control.

CNN’s Paul Sussman said from the scene of the clashes: “Bottles, sticks, and debris was hurled at police as they baton-charged protesters who had lit a fire on Oxford Street. People were driven to the floor as police charged the crowds. Several protesters lay with blood pouring from wounds. One group of protesters were penned in at Oxford Circus, and police told them they were being detained. Whenever someone was arrested, they were handcuffed and their faces photographed by police. Drums pounded, whistles were blown, and shouts of ‘bash them’ rose from the crowd around the city, as the mood became increasingly angry. Punches were thrown and some officers retaliated by lashing out with their batons at protesters to drive them back.”

In Berlin, Germany, police had turned water cannon on demonstrators before dawn on Tuesday in a prelude to feared May Day mayhem. The demonstration had been banned by the authorities, but during the night about 500 protesters erected barricades, set fires, and threw stones and bottles at police, who responded with water cannon.

Three Anarchists Shot In Sweden

Goteborg, Sweden- Three anarchists were wounded by police gunfire during twelve hours of rioting which paralyzed the Swedish city hosting the European Union summit meeting. According to Pider Avall of Sahlgrenska University Hospital, one person was shot in the abdomen and was in critical condition. Another person was shot in the thigh, and a third person was also wounded by police gunshots, but their injuries are not considered life-threatening.

Video footage webcast on the Sweden IndyMedia site (sweden.indymedia.org) indicates that the shooting incident occurred as riot police attempted to shut down a Reclaim The City action. “The video seems to prove that it was police stupidity, and possibly hatred of dancing, music, fun, happiness, young people, etc. - that led to the use of deadly force against protesters,” said the videographer who filmed the footage, viewable on-line at http://clients.loudeye.com/ imc/sweden/reclaim.ram.

The three wounded anarchists were part of a powerful black bloc which took control of the streets at several points throughout the day, often overwhelming the police. Various explanations have been offered for the lethal use of police force against anarchists. Some news reports have stated that the police were outnumbered, flanked ad trapped by demonstrators, but video footage from three different sources indicates that the heavily armored police were not in life-threatening danger. Other reports stated that the police resorted to lethal force because “non-lethal” riot guns and tear gas were not available. A Swedish police chief stated, “Let me make this clear. We were not shooting at demonstrators. It was other individuals who were there to disturb the demonstrations. We call them criminals.”

Several eyewitness accounts have stated that as many as fifteen shots were fired. Video footage available at this time clearly indicates that at least seven shots were fired. An unconfirmed report stated that one cop was shot by “friendly fire”. Hundreds of people were arrested during several days of powerful demonstrations, and several dozen people were injured by police.

The next day, an elite battalion of Swedish “anti-terrorist” police stormed a convergence center at the Shillerska School, forcing more than 250 people, including a mother who was breast feeding her child, to lie on the floor for more than an hour. Also that day, police surrounded a spontaneous demonstration at Jarntorget square and refused to allow anyone to leave without first being searched. As negotiations with police disintegrated, the mother of one of the young men who had been shot spoke to the crowd: “My son was shot yesterday and I want to stay here as you and I have a right to do so. We have done nothing criminal and this is a peaceful meeting. There are no weapons here. I find the police attitude very provoking and very unnecessary. For more info: www.cascadiamediacollective.org

CrimethInc. Eyewitness Analysis

Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit
Quebec City, April 19-22

The April anti-FTAA protests in Quebec reflect an intensification and escalation of tactics on the part of the international anarchist movement and also point to the growing influence of anarchist ideas within the anti-globalization struggle (which is becoming more and more a war with capitalism itself). Rather than just reprinting the boring, factual data on what transpired in Quebec, we would rather include some radical analysis on what went down. (We have edited the report down for reasons of space):

What happened in Quebec?

In short, a handful of autonomous groups took to the streets and fought the pigs until what seemed like the entire city was fighting them. This is an unprecedented event in the recent history of the anti-capitalist struggle in North America.

The conditions that made this possible

Quebec, the French-speaking region of an otherwise English-speaking nation, has a long-standing independence movement, and many people from Quebec harbor some resentment against both their government and the cultural standardization imposed by the nearby United States. This proved to be really decisive in the events of the weekend, though few if any demonstrators saw in advance how important this would turn out to be.

The Canadian government, fearful of another demonstration like the one that took place in Seattle during the WTO meeting, had a concrete wall with a chain-link fence atop it built entirely around the center of Quebec City, and closed off the space within it entirely to everyone not possessed of a residence card. The wall was built at great expense to Canadian taxpayers, and trained riot police were sent in from other regions of Canada, armed with water cannons, new stun guns, tear gas, etc. All this infuriated the locals. The organizing

To my knowledge, this was the first major demonstration on this continent in which a large part of the organizing was done according to anarchist procedures, including a sympathy for what was referred to as a diversity of tactics... In Quebec, diversity of tactics basically proved to be a euphemism for property destruction, provocation and aggressive self-defense. The two French Canadian groups organizing for the protest, CLAC and CASA, that accepted this approach, took a lot of heat from the more traditional, cuddlier and cuter, more authoritarian organization, S.a.L.A.M.I., which predictably reserved the right to tell protesters exactly what to do and how to do it.

CLAC and CASA took the approach of separating the demonstration into different levels: green for little danger of arrest, yellow for some danger of arrest for nonviolent civil disobedience action, and red for tactics of deliberate provocation (such as attacking the police fence). The green and yellow areas were charted on a map of Quebec, affinity groups at the spokes council meetings identified themselves as taking green or yellow approaches (no one spoke about red groups or actions, for obvious reasons, until the action was taking place), and this helped to reassure everyone involved that they had a good idea of the approximate risk they were incurring. As it turned out, most people were ready to go a lot farther than they’d expected once the possibilities of the situation were clear, so the color-level categories were pretty much meaningless by the time the demonstration got going.

Planning for earlier demonstrations has often been characterized by endless, pointless, symbolic debates about whether or not organizing committees should give permission to protesters to use direct action tactics like property destruction. This time, a lot of energy and trouble was saved by acknowledging from the beginning that demonstrators were going to do whatever they believed was right, sanctioned or not by self-appointed authorities, and that the role of organizers should be simply to help coordinate cooperation between different groups.

Black Bloc preparation and action: provocation or self-defense?

This was the most organized, best armed and equipped, and most broadly supported Black Bloc I have ever witnessed. Considering that many of those in its ranks were in a foreign country, some of them illegally and even with outstanding arrest warrants, I was amazed at how confrontational they had prepared to be: people had brought bolt cutters (for the hated fence) and other tools, projectiles such as hockey pucks, slingshots and marbles, helmets and homemade body armor, larger shields and similar equipment. It turned out to be the right decision.

Friday’s march began at the university, neither accompanied by nor, strangely enough, harassed by the police, who remained concentrated around the fence both Friday and Saturday (this was fortuitous, for it meant we could move around the rest of the city without serious fear of arrest). The Black Bloc was dispersed among the crowd, already disguised but not clearly identified as a group.

Shortly before the march arrived at the fence around central Quebec, those who wished to remain in the green sector split off from it. The others proceeded on, and as soon as they arrived at the broad square which bordered on the fence, the Bloc came together and moved immediately to attack the barrier. Within seconds, a wide section of it was torn down — something not thought possible by most of the protesters in attendance — and a few passed through it. The police quickly appeared in greater numbers from within, firing tear gas; the rest of the day and following night was given over to back-and-forth struggles between the police, who sought more to hold a line than to advance, and the confrontational activists who threw projectiles at them and were reinforced by the numbers of less aggressive activists.

But back to the provocation question: clearly the Black Bloc were not the only ones interested in attacking the wall after the first day of action; at the spokes council meeting Friday night, when there were few if any participants present from the Bloc, it was decided that the next days actions should concentrate on again attacking the wall (by people who had earlier seemed much more timid about doing this). Thus the Bloc helped protesters to feel more confident about doing what they already wanted to do, by showing that it was possible.

The police, if my experience is correct, had not just assembled tear gas, water cannons, concussion grenades, plastic bullets, and such devices for show: they intended to use them to break up whatever demonstration took place. They were prevented from doing so precisely because the Black Bloc was so organized and ready to fight: every one of hundreds of tear gas canisters shot at the crowds was immediately thrown back in their faces by a small number of courageous gas-masked Blockers, to such an extent that sometimes one could only tell where the police lines were by the cloud of poison surrounding them; the police feared to close in for arrests, because of the constant shower of rocks, glass bottles, broken concrete, and even Molotov cocktails that the street fighters maintained.

Saturday was the official protest day for the more mainstream organizers, principally the Canadian unions (the other government, I’ve been calling them since that day), who demonstrated just how absurd it is to organize anti-authoritarian protests in authoritarian ways. They arranged a giant union march, departing from a place in Quebec city away from all the action and moving through the empty industrial areas, where there was no one to even see them marching, to a dead end in a park where a small band was playing. The tens of thousands who participated in this march couldn’t have felt more like they were wasting their time—even the mainstream newspapers reported that it was all the union marshals could do to keep the workers marching in line away from the real action, let alone chanting along with the monosyllables blaring from megaphones attached to the cars in which their leaders rode, resting their precious feet. Anyone could see the difference between their approach to politics and ours by comparing the amount of freedom available to their marchers to the open relationships between autonomous demonstrators on our side of the city. Meanwhile, we kept up our street war in central Quebec, strengthened by new numbers now surrounding and attacking the wall from all sides. Those who had thought they only wanted to hold signs now backed up masked kids tearing up the sidewalk to make projectiles.

Escalation

As the sun set over Quebec, the police slowly pushed forward to the north, until they reached a standoff at the foot of a freeway overpass. At this point, practically everyone had their faces covered, for protection from the tear gas that filled the air; at the same time, people who had been timid before had lost their fear, from two days of watching police hit in the head with bottles, of seeing supposedly impregnable walls torn down with ropes, of breathing tear gas until it lost its power to scare them. It was impossible to tell now who had been from the Bloc and who had newly joined the struggle: Quebec youths and street kids held the front lines, throwing back tear gas canisters and rocks as they had seen the acti doing, thrilling in the feeling of reclaiming their city from the powers of police. They hid behind makeshift barricades, running up close to the police line to throw Molotov cocktails into it, showing extraordinary courage in the face of the once intimidating riot troops. Behind them, over three thousand people, of all ages and class backgrounds, stood on the freeway, beating out a deafening rhythm on every surface available in support of the street warriors. The street signs, which only two days before had told them where to go and how fast, became sounding boards for their frustration and their conviction that this was worth acting on, worth fighting for. The concrete, which had cut them off from the soil beneath their feet and reinforced the corporate propaganda on every street corner proclaiming that this was the only possible world, capitalism, competition and cultural standardization and mind-numbing work. The concrete was torn up to become hammers to play that music of revolt, or else be thrown, carried on the echoes of that percussion, into the faces of the insect-like riot pigs across the road.

Below the freeway, in the activist camp that had once been part of the green zone, free food was shared, hundreds danced joyously in circles, spirits were higher than they’ve ever been for parades or holidays. It seemed the entirety of the old world was about to puncture and collapse ...

The value of what happened

All the obvious things out of the way, the important thing is that everyone there, the local non-activists especially, got a demonstration of what anarchy is, how it works, how individuals can work together in large enough numbers to overpower the forces of control marshalled against them. The revolution isn’t some far-off single moment, anyway, its not the crux of history Marx talked about; it’s a process going on all the time, everywhere, wherever there is a struggle between hierarchical power and human freedom. In Quebec, I was part of the largest scale manifestation of mass cooperation and struggle against control I’ve ever experienced; I’ve seen this before, hundreds of times, I’ve chosen a life of pursuing it, so this particular weekend may not have been as absolutely transforming for me as it was for those who hadn’t recognized such a thing going on before, but it was still something amazing, which I will remember clearly until I go to my grave.

In moments like this, living becomes something like music is for the musicians who improvise together: everyone contributes their own theme, but rather than a conflict, a cacophony, the different elements combine to form something much greater and more compelling than the sum of the individual parts. In this sense, the weekend in Quebec was important to me above all because it was a sort of pilgrimage, to a moment of anarchy as irreplaceable as all such moments are.

Earth's Lament

Once I was wild. Once countless creatures crept, crawled, wriggled and ran over me. Flowers and trees shot up wherever they pleased. Sometimes they competed for space, but just as often they co-operated to live together in harmony. The same was true of the animals: they preyed upon one another only as they hungered. They knew nothing of murder or genocide. The law of the jungle was take what you need, and no more.

In those golden days, the thin-haired apes who call themselves people were just another tribe among my laughing, playful children. They foraged and hunted as their hungers dictated. They fornicated and procreated as their passions moved them. They built simple, efficient structures to protect themselves from the elements, and spent most of their time in play.

Some might say that they did nothing but play. They had no time clocks, bosses or rigid work ethic. Maybe you could argue that these early people were really engaged in productive work only when they weaved, sculpted, cooked or hunted, while their dancing or story-telling were unproductive leisure and play. But this distinction would come as a surprise to the happy, hairless apes themselves. All their activities were voluntary, and all fulfilled essential human needs — to these uncivilized humans, gaiety and camaraderie seemed just as essential as food and shelter.

Unfortunately, somewhere, at some time, some of these hairless apes decided that they constituted the center of the universe. They decided that the lives of those in their tribe were more important than the lives of all the other creatures around them in the community of life. They decided that they possessed the knowledge of who should live and who should die, and the sole power to save or destroy the world. Misled by these delusions, some human tribes decided that they could remake the entire world to fit their purposes. To this end they began to tamper with the intricate systems of life that had spread across my body during billions of years of chaotic interactions.

Because of the egotism of a few hairless apes, these infinitely complex systems, in which every organism’s independent actions served the interests of the community of life as a whole, were rapidly replaced. The apes constructed simplified systems meant to serve only the interests of a few human masters. Wetlands, forests and prairies filled with diverse life gave way to geometrical rows of plants and subdued herds of animals, completely dependent upon human care for survival, and bred only to service humans’ material needs and designs.

Maintaining fields and herds required much more time and effort than living off what naturally grew up from my body. The domesticating humans fought a constant battle to defend their ordered gardens from the vital, natural chaos around them. One threat came from other human tribes, who still lived wild and free off my plenty. This way of life, without respect for property or boundaries, was incompatible with that of the domesticated tribes.

In fact, everything wild seemed incompatible with human-made systems: one of the biggest threats to life came from the dangerously unpredictable behavior of birds, deer, insects and even other plants. All seemed set on consuming the crops that these tribes had sowed, or upon taking advantage of the growing conditions in their fields. These relatives of the hairless ape did not understand that the new domesticated lands were not meant to exist as free space in a wild garden, where every thing was provided for your consumption through the larger design of a chaotic system.

To stop the wilderness threatening their controlled design, the civilized apes took up arms against their wild relations, conquering and enslaving all that they could. Free plants and animals were domesticated. Free humans became servants or slaves — or were simply assimilated as fellow farmers enslaved to a plot of land that they must constantly maintain and guard. Those humans, animals and plants who would not be pacified, and therefore threatened the new human-designed world order, were exterminated. In this way murder and genocide came to be.

As these brutal apes imposed a hierarchy on the community of life, where they decided what people and other organisms outside of their own tribe would be allowed to live or die, the internal organization of their tribes also came to reflect this unequal power dynamic. The new, domesticated human societies were invariably formed in a hierarchy. A few bullying tyrants or self-important individuals would go about making decisions for other people based upon their own needs and whims, just as they made decisions for the entire living world based upon the interests of their tribe.

Despite many successful crusades to kill off all that was wild and free, these early human leaders were constantly thwarted in their attempts to rule the world. Slaves rebelled, free tribes continued to raid their herds and gardens, and pestilences continued to destroy their crops. The community of life, in all its glorious chaos, was constantly showing how impossible it was for any humans to rule over me.

Yet these early rulers did not step back to question the source of their constant insecurity. Or, if they did, they were too blinded with self-importance to assess what was really happening. Perhaps a few thoughtful storytellers were getting at this when they created tales about a lost Garden of Eden, where life had been all easy play. But these stories explained humanity’s fall from paradise in terms of punishment from an all-powerful supreme being. This explanation obscured the voluntary choice humans had made to accept authority and domestication, and made obedience to powerful authorities seem inescapable.

Neither the human leaders nor their bullied followers comprehended their mistakes early on, when they had just begun to betray my trust and love by killing and enslaving my other children. Instead of abandoning their brutal ways, they began a full-scale attack against my body itself. They tried to make my soil barren through their wasteful, ill-conceived agricultural enterprises. They pitted my body with mines and quarries in order to build huge structures, temples to their self-importance, or in order to burn the prizes they had dug up and send up clouds of smoke to blight my breath.

Human societies began to move faster and faster, working to gobble up all that was wild and turn it into factory farmland, or piles of slag and debris, or massive stone and metal monuments to the brutal apes’ self obsession and complete estrangement from the community of life. Even in those few spots, those few nature preserves set aside for creatures not of immediate use in the human-made system, constant efforts were made to police, regulate and control my other children, so that they could never become strong and plentiful enough to leave the sanctuary and reclaim the blighted human world.

I grow old, I grow old... this refrain comes from a poem by T.S. Eliot, one particularly adroit wordsmith among the most privileged classes of the brutal apes. Eliot also wrote a poem characterizing the modern human society in which he lived as a barren wasteland. These observations are important. They tell me that, through their constant insistence that slave-master relations are the only interactions possible, humanity’s leaders have not just deprived other creatures of their joy, play and freedom. Even those at the top of the human-designed social system can sense that, without the ability to interact with all living things as brothers, they have lost all chance for beautiful, full lives. They have lost the chance to live in a world that is beautiful because it is out of their control.

But even though they know that they are empty, only a handful of these humans have ever tried to let go, and restore the world to its previous, chaotic order. Most take the easy way out, trying to fill up their emptiness through redoubled efforts to impose human-made order at every level of life. T.S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in order to find meaning in its rituals, and he was not alone in this. Over their brief history, the vast majority of humans seeking escape from the brutality of their social order have become trapped in ritual, religion, superstition, philosophy or science. In fact, the efforts of some humans to return to wild freedom and the community of life have even been used to create new religions or philosophies, and thereby increase the weight of their chains and the severity of my injuries.

With each passing moment, I lose hope that the thin-haired apes will make any kind of peaceful, voluntary return to a state of free play, mutual respect, and wild nature. Once I wished for this possibility in every moment, and looked constantly for signs that it was coming. Now it is only a very misty deep dream. Instead of wishing for the best, I find myself hoping that the absolute worst does not come to be.

Perhaps these misguided ape children of mine, guided by their egotistic leaders, will destroy me completely in one final blast of egotism. Or perhaps they will only annihilate themselves and the majority of life, and I will be able to enter a long, deep sleep of healing and rejuvenation. But what I most fear is that they will find a way, using their technology, to prolong my life and their own, keeping us alive indefinitely in a tame, debilitated state—just as they string out the mutilated lives of their own elderly with painkillers and hospital respirators. I would rather that they kill me in a bright blaze than that they keep me alive as the single flickering flame of vital life in a cold world of stone temples and sickly slave farms. But the choice is not mine. . . by Everyday Revolution

The Struggle to Free West Papua Continues

June 13,2001

Separatists clash with police in Irian Jaya, long live the struggle of West Papua! Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s Irian Jaya province, also known as West Papua, have killed five policemen in an attack on their post.

Police commanders are sending in reinforcements and a tugboat to collect the bodies of the officers killed in the jungled Wasior area in the district of Manokwari.

June 26, 2001

The Papua New Guinea government shot dead three students and wounded 17 others who were protesting against the IMF and World Bank. As news of the shooting spread, rioters streamed into Waigana, looting, burning and smashing up shops as they went.

Contact OPM Support Group: opmsg@eco-action.org

THE HUMAN, EARTH AND ANIMAL

LIBERATION GATHERING

August 17th, 18th, and 19th, 2001- in L.A. Workshops, Speakers, Films, Art Show, live music, theatrical play, & more...

Alternative Gathering Collective, P.O. Box 17546 Los Angeles, Ca. 90017-0546 agcollective@disinfo.net

The Human Earth and Animal Liberation Gathering is being organized by the Los Angeles Alternative Gathering Collective, along with many people and groups who worked to put on the North American Anarchist Conference last August, as well the West Coast Food Not Bombs Gathering and the many Solidarity Festivals that have taken place here in Southern California over the past few years.

Many different groups will be present at the Human, Earth, and Animal Liberation Gathering. We wish to build a bond of solidarity amongst a wide range of groups struggling for similar ends. This means that all the groups attending and sharing information at the gathering will have the ultimate goal of the total liberation of all life on earth and the healing of the planet. We do not wish to work with sectarian or authoritarian organizations including groups with sexist, homophobic, racist, or other authoritarian tendencies.

Decolonization of Colonial Descent

By Chris Kortright

(Author’s note: Many of the writers I mention are not anarchists, but there is more in common between the antiindustrial and anti-civilization movement and them than the majority of the anarchist movement or the entire leftist movement).

This is not a final thought; it is an idea of how to start looking at the necessity and possibility of decolonization of colonial descendants. It is also meant as a call for white activists within the anti-industrial and anti-civilization movement to start doing solidarity work and learning from indigenous people here in the colony of North America (as well as indigenous people in other colonies). My goal in writing this is not only to see authentic growth within this movement and have individuals become active in the land recovery movement, but also I hope we as individuals from western civilization can decolonize ourselves; our decolonization and the destruction of our culture is the only way to create the society we desire.

My focus may be our decolonization, but this does not mean that I don’t think involving ourselves with land recovery for its own sake is not important; I feel there are better sources for this information besides myself (Ward Churchill’s Struggle for the Land is a good starting place as well as many other indigenous writers). There are many fears that activists have about working with the land recovery movement; these fears not only need to be overcome, but it is in our best interest to work with this movement.

DECOLONIZATION OF COLONIAL DESCENDANTS: Many people object when I discuss the decolonization of colonial descendants; to these people we are the colonialists, or we at least benefit from the colonial system. All of this is true, but as Edward Said pointed out in Beyond Orientalism, when the colonizer created the colonized, they created themselves. This does not mean we are victims of colonization; it means that if we are to destroy the colonial system we live in, we must rid ourselves of the colonial ideologies and mindset we have. The colonialist ideologies are embedded in us from birth: religion, science, the work ethic, all of the isms, and economics based on profit to mention just a few; the process of us unlearning this, and the process of us listening and learning to other cultures so we can find a new way to live is what I call “the decolonization of colonial descendants.”

IT’S TIME TO LISTEN: If we look within the antiindustrial and anti-civilization movement almost all the theorists who are writing or we read are from western civilization; it is time we start reading and listening to people outside of the this culture. This is not to say these writers are not important, but we must look to people of other cultures as well. There are a lot of teachings from people who are living or are still connected to a way of life that is in direct confrontation with our colonialist culture. We need to start listening to those who can teach us a different way to view the world that we are a part of (a good start would be reading Vine Deloria’s books on science vs. traditional knowledge). We cannot forget or ignore our own theorists, but we must broaden our outlook by listening to other cultures as well. Often an outsider can shed light on a situation that one living within it may not have seen.

IT’S TIME TO ACT: Reading is only one way to learn; the other and more important way of learning is through experience. This is where I think the land recovery movement can teach us. Just getting involved in the land recovery movement to topple the U.S. colonial structure is, in my mind, important, but by doing this we would have a great opportunity to learn different life ways in the process of helping indigenous people free themselves and the land. This also could evolve into working with people in other colonial settings where they still live traditionally, and all they want is to be left the fuck alone. By giving solidarity to this movement we would be answering the question we are always asked “How do you expect to get from our society to the society we desire?’”

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE: This was a short piece intended to get the ball rolling in regards to these ideas. Individually we can start listening to other cultures teachings and get involved if that makes sense to us, but most important of all we must start exploring and actualizing our own decolonization. I invite anyone interested in this exploration to contact me atFeral: A Journal Towards Wildness : PMB 321, 530 Divisidaro, SF CA 94117. Hopefully we can find old paths to explore and carve some new ones in the process.

Indigenous Environmental Network

PO Box 485 Bemidji, MN 56619

Support For Native Sovereignty

PO Box 2104 Seattle, WA 98111 policy of genocide against our people and our lands.

Native Resistance in Melvin Creek

Greetings from Sutikalh, St’at’imc Territory

On May 2, 2000, grassroots traditionalists within the St’at’imc Nation began reoccupying a piece of their traditional territory at Sutikalh or Melvin Creek (approximately 4 hours north of Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory “British Columbia, kanada”). Sutikalh was started by St’at’imc women, and they have been guiding the community over the past year. Band council chiefs (who receive their authority from the kanadian government) were not involved with Sutikalh until the people forced them to support it and take a stand for St’at’imc sovereignty. The settlement stands in the way of a $55 million ski resort that is planned for the area by Nancy Greene Raine (an Olympic gold medalist) and her husband, Al Raine, through the permission of the “bc” government. In August 2000, environmental assessment approval gave the final stamp to the development, but the machines have been halted by Sutikalh. The people at Sutikalh have remained strong in their stand and continue to resist the genocidal kanadian government. They need help in spreading the word about Sutikalh and informing the international community. International attention must focus on Sutikalh now, before the situation erupts into another Oka or Gustafsen Lake (two recent police/military assaults against Native people in kanada).

A Declaration from the Sutikalh Community.

Greetings from Sutikalh, St’at’imc Territory

May 10, 2001, May 10, 1911 Declaration

We the people of the St’at’imc Nation resettled our original land base here, at Sutikalh (Melvin Creek) on May 2, 2000. Due to our living conditions on reserves, we felt this action was necessary for the survival of our people as a nation. Not only is it legally and morally correct, it is also our birthright to sustain ourselves on our lands of our choosing. This pristine area, we call home, is also home to Grizzly Bears, Mountain Goats, edible and medicinal plants and all life. The ski resort that Nancy Greene Raine, Al Raine and the governments are planning is once again an anti-life policy of genocide against our people and our lands.

The environmental assessments and following studies were not complete and honest. The process was structured so that the corporations would gain approval and that Native people would once again be sacrificed, at any cost. We are making this stand for all people that want to live in peace. Looking back at our oral history, we know that our land is our only hope of surviving the coming storm. We encourage all people of like mind to return to their lands, or help people that are in the process of doing so. Here at Sutikalh, we believe that our action is the only way we can help others believe in their birthright to their lands. Our position challenges the assumed jurisdiction of the “province of bc.” The “province of bc” is in the process of stealing more of our lands and, possibly, assaulting our settlement. The change of government (from a centrist leftist [NDP] to a right wing government [BC Liberals]) on May 16, surely means aggression will be directed at us. We are prepared to do what ever it takes to defend our position. We need people to be aware of what we are up against and aware of what exactly is being done against us daily.

The support we need is endless. We do not have financial support from anybody. We need building materials and things to help us sustain ourselves. We need help letter writing and with paper work. But most of all, we need people to spread our word. We foresee all kinds of negative thoughts and actions taken against us.

We will remain here on our lands, forever, like our ancestors. We will hold our position as long as people can support us being here. People can help by keeping informed at all times or by dropping in to visit the community at any time. We welcome dialogue of all kinds with all people.

For more information or to donate to Sutikalh contact: Rosalin: (604)894-2400, Fax: (604)894-6841, Box 309, Mt. Currie, Lil’Wat Territory, “bc, kanada” V0N 2K0

Zine Reviews

Antipathy #7 is possibly one of the most engaging and fascinating personal zines available, and issue #7 is no exception. This lengthy tome is chock-full of the sometimes humorous, sometimes somber, sometimes controversial, and always thought-provoking rants that we have come to expect from Mike Antipathy. This particular issue contains many profoundly personal writings in which the author recounts past sexual traumas, as well as insensitivity to his sexual orientation that he has experienced (even within punk and anarchist circles). He devotes many rants to critiquing the anarchist movement of which he is a part, taking it to task for insularity, and in some cases, hypocrisy. In one essay, Mike comments that those who spend the most time criticizing him for his “privilege” are and have always been significantly better off economically than he is. He also writes extensively about how little the anarchist movement has to offer the most oppressed classes of people in the country, and argues that we would do well to shed our pretentious image and way of speaking. His message is somewhat inconsistent, as he maintains that poor rural blue-collar whites, migrant Latino farm workers, and urban blacks do not need or want our help, while simultaneously suggesting that anarchists should disingenuously alter their behavior and message for the sake of appealing to people (which, in my opinion, would be a form of dishonest manipulation). Issue #7 contains an interesting comparison of the militia/patriot movement with the anarchist movement, which notes a few relevant similarities, while not glossing over their differences. Many excellent narratives of travel, wilderness experiences, and interactions with interesting (but not always nice) people fill this publication. Highly recommended. Send $3 to PO Box 11703, Eugene, OR 97440 or contact antipathy@morelos.com

Hot Tide Discussion Bulletin Volume 1, No.1

The Hot Tide Discussion Bulletin is an excellent new anarchist paper dedicated to taking a critical look at the anti- globalization movement and it’s shortcomings. The first article in this paper, “The Scale of Capitalism and Resistance”, analyzes the new forms that capitalism is assuming as it begins to reorganize itself internationally and discusses the new types of resistance that need to emerge in response to this global consolidation of power. A few select quotes from this superb article should give readers a good idea of where the publishers of “ Hot Tide Discussion Bulletin” are coming from politically: “We need to reconceptualize how we envision resistance to capitalism. The time for thinking in terms of the “mass” is long gone (if there ever was one). Organizations should have a particular purpose for which they come together, and once that particular purpose has been reached they should disband. Permanent organizations have a tendency to become authoritarian and waste most of the energy of the participants in trying to build the organization or push it’s line”. Other thought provoking articles in this issue include “Direct Action Cannot Be Televised” and “Terrorist Threats”. This paper ( which is brought to you by the same folks who produce “Killing King Abacus”) originally began as an on-line zine, but thankfully, is now available in print form for those of us who hate staring at computer screens. You can order a copy of this great new paper from the following address : Hot Tide 41 Sutter St. PMB 1661 San Francisco, CA 94104

Tar and Feathers #1

If you’re looking for a fresh perspective on issues like civilization and industrial domestication, then look no further than “Tar and Feathers”, a promising new pro-primitivist zine full of passion, attitude and humor. From front to back cover, this zine kicks serious ass over most of the dull, academic primitivist (and anarchist) literature out there, the main difference being that publisher Matt Wallace is working class and writes from the position of someone who is not just “intellectually” oppressed by modern society but economically oppressed as well. This gives his views a lot more credibility in my eyes and makes his tirades against social domestication and the destruction of the natural world more relevant to my own life. I honestly don’t think most anarcho-primitivist theorists realize how alienating their writing style and pretentious verbiage is to your average pissed-off, struggling wage slave, nor what a turn off their text book language and endless footnotes are to people who would otherwise be sympathetic to an anti-industrial critique. Fortunately, “Tar and Feathers” brings an air of authenticity to the discussion with some practical, down-to earth advice on primitive survival skills (such as starting a fire without matches and making glue from pine sap) in addition to critiquing the techno-industrial nightmare in crystal clear language that a six year old could understand. This is one of the best zines that I’ve read ( or reviewed ) in quite a while and I urge our readers to order a copy. Free! Tar and Feathers #1 C/o Matt Wallace 37 E. Chesnut #3 Asheville NC 28801

Disorderly Conduct # 3 (Late Spring/ Early Summer)

Hot off the presses and almost too hot to touch, Eugene’s own Disorderly Conduct, produced by the “Bring On the Ruckus” Society, is back with a phenomenally strong third issue. This issue includes choice, well-selected reprints from the best anarchist papers out there, as well as some top-notch original writing and graphics. Being personal friends with the publisher of this zine, I’m more than a little biased towards their work, but were I able to set all that aside and be completely objective in my appraisal of this paper, I would still whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a good introduction to anti-authoritarian thought. This current issue is chock full of anarchist networking links (far more than we’re able to include in the pages of GA) and could almost be viewed as an anarchist/anti-civilization primer of sorts, or at least a general overview of some of the more revolutionary trends in anarchism today. Some highlights include “How

Post- Modernism

Saved Me From Becoming a Socialist and an Architect”, “In Tribes We Trust”, “Ever Wake Up Thirsty”, “Gun Control Kills Kids” and a wide variety of humorous jabes and propaganda from an insurrectionary-green anarchist perspective. If you’re only able to purchase one paper in the next couple of months, I suggest you make it Disorderly Conduct # 3. (Note: DC #4 is due out in mid-August). Available for $3 from PO Box 11331 Eugene, OR 97440

Le Feu de Femme (The Fire of Womyn)

Le Feu de Femme was refreshing for me, as a woman, since rarely do I find feminist zines with such strong, novel, and interesting pieces within. This zine discusses struggles faced by women, construction of gender, and herbal treatments for health problems that women may encounter (especially reproductive concerns), among other insightful articles. Undoubtedly, my favorite piece was “Wimmin in Pre-History,” which discusses the freedom and equality women enjoyed in non-hierarchical hunter-gatherer groups prior to the “tragedy of civilization,” as Le Feu de Femme puts it. With these articles and other such notable ones as “Sex Work,” which explores the idea of a woman’s right to use her body for money should she so desire, and a discussion of the history of women’s medicine, Le Feu de Femme is a necessary read for anarchist women and men who are truly committed to gaining knowledge of women’s history, health, and daily struggles. Contact realitywhitewash@hotmail.com for availability and prices.

Resistance volume 2, number one.

What was once a boring lefty rag two years ago is now the “Journal of the North American Earth Liberation Front (ELF) Press Office and I must say, the new zine is impressive. Printed in magazine format, this newsletter publishes the full text of all ELF communiqués from October 2000 to April 2001. It is inspiring to view this collection of communiqués all in one place; from the latest Long Island actions to the anti-biotechnology actions in California to the Northwest attacks on the timber industry. Other standouts in this issue include: “Is the ELF a terrorist and violent organization?” and a critical piece on career- oriented environmentalists that has some great quotes from Sierra Clubbers condemming direct action. Aside from the printing of ELF “guidelines” which seem to come more from the press office than the actual ELF, I fully support the work done by the ELF Press Office and highly recommend this issue as well as issues 3 & 4. Single copies are $5 (US) and $6 (elsewhere). Wholesale rates are available as well. Resistance, POB 4783, Portland, OR 97208; 503-478-0902; lesliejames@tao.ca.

Live Wild Or Die (LWOD)

Just as we were going to print we received the long awaited (since July ‘98) new issue of LWOD. We did not have much time to review it extensively, but at a quick glance it looks smokin’. Towards the beginning, there is a new original piece by Ted Kaczynski entitled “When Nonviolence is Suicide”, which explains the necessity for self-defense.

There is no shortage of anti-industrial and anti-authoritarian essays, graphics, and art work done in LWOD’s Luddite cut-and- paste tradition. There are several pages of obscure news-clippings dealing with eco-actions, poetry, and updates on international struggles. There is an interesting interview with “no-wing” militia women, Carolyn Chute, entitled “Wicked Good Militia” and of course LWOD’s famous “Eco-Fucker hit list”. This paper continues the vital “No Compromise” approach which made it infamous, not only to radical environmental, but also the FBI. So, be sure to pick this one (wearing rubber gloves and sun glasses from an anonymous PO Box) Send $5 to POB 580444 Minneapolis, MN 55458. g-spot@tao.ca

Spirit of Freedom June/July 2001

This issue of the North American Earth Liberation Prisoners Support newsletter features updates on political prisoner Jeffrey Luers (Free), the Santa Cruz 2, Mark Sands, Rob Thaxton, among others. Also in this issue, there is an article on the importance of prisoner support by POW Michael Collins. In addition to the usual up-to-date prisoner listings, Spirit of Freedom provides news on even more new “anti-terrorism” legislations being proposed across the US on both the state and federal level. Spirit of Freedom is available free to prisoners and for two stamps to everyone else from NAELPSN, PO Box 11331, Eugene, OR, 97440.

Black Clad Messenger #18

As usual, this bi-monthly focuses on action and lots of it. Renamed a “Journal of Revolutionary Anti-Industrial Anarchism”, BCM offers analysis and reporting of events and actions particularly relevant to the Pacific Northwest but definitely interesting to others. This issue’s standouts include pieces on domestication, Revolutionary Solidarity with Free, “No matter where you look” by Derrick Jensen, and a massive section detailing resistance against industry and civilization. This zine continues to get better and sharper in its critique. In the future, I hope it offers more original pieces and reprints from out of print/hard to find books. Available for $2 from BCM, POB 11331, Eugene, OR 97440.

We Never Sleep May/June 2001

We Never Sleep (WNS) is the bi-monthly newsletter of the Anarchist Prisoner Legal Aid Network (APLAN). APLAN was formed in the summer of ‘99 by two dedicated anarchists, Dave Negation and Rob “Los Ricos” Thaxton, in order to provide an effective anarchist prisoner support group that could be a complementary alternative to the largely rigid and dogmatic Anarchist Black Cross Federation. Each issue of WNS contains dialogue between antiauthoritarian prisoners on such topics as the concept of revolutionary solidarity, the necessity of developing a strong prisoner-support movement, and the need for the anarchist milieu to move beyond mere rhetoric and into the realm of direct action. In addition to this, WNS provides in-depth coverage of government repression against activists of all stripes from all around the globe. WNS is a must read for all revolutionary-minded activists and anarchists. Please support this extremely important project! Send $2 to APLAN, 818 SW 3rd Ave, PMB #354, Portland, OR 97204.

Earth First! Journal Beltane and Litha Issues

Wow! Just when you had finally given up on the EF! Journal, a new collective takes over, moves to Tucson, changes to magazine format, and puts out the best two issues in years. As someone who has been critical of the EF! Journal in the past, I was excited to learn that a new crew of mostly anarchist-leaning editors would be attempting to provide a more comprehensive overview of the current environmental movement. I was very pleased when I received the first new issue, Beltane May-June, starting with “The Essence of Earth First!” statement which proclaims “it is essential to take direct action to reverse, stop and ultimately overthrow that which is causing the miserable destruction of the planet’s delicate and diverse biosphere” The EF! Journal seems to finally be taking state repression a little more seriously, as seen in the excellent coverage of the targeting of Long Island activist Connor Cash, the silencing of Rod Coronado, the raids on the ELF Press Office, extensive updates on Jeffery Luers (Free), and an interesting piece on the security concerns within the direct action movement. It was good to see more confrontational and less extreme actions side-by-side in the “Frontline News” section, as an attempt to show support for all methods of resistance. While there definitely seems to be a long overdue full-on embracing of eco-sabatoge, there still seems to be some mixed emotions, or misrepresentations about anarchy, as displayed in an article entitled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness and EF!” which states,” Those who believe that anarchy is synonymous with disorganization need some introductory reading. There is nothing inherently bad or oppressive about organization. We just tend to fear it... we had negative experiences with hierarchical structures.” A few exceptions aside, it was a good start.

I was once again relatively pleased with the second issue from Tucson, Litha June-July. This issue has a heavy emphasis on biotechnology, and the growing resistance to it, including a “blank wall-special insert” giving basic information on genetic engineering. The highlight for me was definitely the “Dear Ned Ludd” section which promotes the wonderful publication, The Nighttime Gardener and the trashing of “contaminated” GE-crops, as well as a plug for the new Setting Fires with Electrical Timers—An ELF Guide and the endorsement of arson as an effective tactic in combating modern industrial society. Thanks Ned! Unfortunately, the EF! Journal comes with much baggage, namely the EF! movement. As long as the Journal strives to represent those who still use the name Earth First!, it can never truly become a “radical” environmental Journal. EF!’s wimpy, watered-down, banner-hanging, letter writing, self-promoting, liberal politics will always leave a bad taste in my mouth. I have to, however, give the new Journal staff a lot of credit in trying to bridge the exciting new phase of resistance as seen with the Earth Liberation Front, international indigenous struggles, and the boring-as-fuck Earth First! movement. If you haven’t read the Journal lately, check out the Beltane and Litha Issues, for the most part you will be pleasantly surprised in how much it has changed. $4 an issue. $30 subscriptions ($25 low income). Free to Prisoners! PO Box 3023 Tucson, AZ 85702. collective@earthfirstjournal.org www.earthfirstjournal.org

Book Reviews

The End Of Work - By Jeremy Rifkin, Reviewed by Free This book is thoroughly researched and very well written.

Rifkin addresses key issues of our dysfunctional capitalist system. The book discusses and points out the racism of corporate culture, stupidity of genetic engineering, and blatant imperialism of trans/multinationals, along with environmental degradation and other pertinent issues. Rifkin mixes reform with radical ideas and real solutions. For doing away with wage labor and bringing power back to a community level, he gives many alternatives to the current social structure, including “community service as a revolutionary alternative to traditional forms of labor. Unlike ... wage labor, it is neither coerced nor reduced to a judiciary relationship.” The End of Work utilizes facts and statistics to show the growing gap between the rich and poor. Rifkin superbly points out that corporations are growing in power and profits while giving nothing back. In the end he goes on to say, “Rising levels of worldwide unemployment and the increasing polarization between rich and poor are creating the conditions for social upheaval and open class warfare on a scale never before experienced in the modern age. Beyond the quiet suburbs ... and urban enclaves of the rich and near rich lie millions upon millions of destitute and desperate human beings. Anguished, angry ... They are the potential levelers, the masses whose cries for justice have gone unheard and un-addressed.” Although the book contains some reformist ideas that are hard to stomach, it more than makes up for it with its insight to the real politics of the American economic system.

Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City and the World

Edited by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg

This book is a small but in- depth look at the inner-city guerrilla gardening movement, with a few short chapters on bioengineering and the international resistance to it. Most of the essays in this book deal with “reclaim the land” movements in large urban environments like New York City, where squatters and rooftop farmers routinely seize vacant lots for the purpose of non-capitalist (free) food production. While I admire the confrontational and defiant spirit of many of these public land reclamations, I do feel that the energy put into these projects is largely misdirected. Many of my co-conspirators here at GA would undoubtedly disagree with this statement, but in my opinion, guerrilla gardening (as helpful as it might be in generating free food for our communities) can never be a substitute for more insurrectional activity aimed at the destruction of the state. The fact that in the past three years more than 100 community gardens in New York City alone have been bulldozed to make way for development (with 41 more slated for imminent annihilation) should be evidence enough that our focus needs to shift from “feel good” lifestylism to aggressively opposing the Mega Machine. Community gardens have value in that they help provide for our collective food/survival needs and contribute to the creation of genuine community solidarity, but these efforts at urban rewilding are ultimately doomed to failure unless we begin to challenge the power and existence of the state. I agree with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) in his introductory essay that gardening might possibly “ constitute a kind of resistance or refusal of agriculture” and that “gardening remains prior to and outside agriculture” but unless we stay focused on our main problem—the State and it’s unwillingness to let us live freely—our attempts at creating green autonomous zones will remain nothing but a permacultural illusion.

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APLAN Needs Your Help!

The Anarchist Prisoners’ Legal Aid Network (APLAN) is a Portland, Oregon based network of prisoners and their allies working to end the prison system. APLAN supports ongoing action by and for anarchist prisoners and against prisons.They also publish a newsletter entitled We Never Sleep that is an incredible organizing tool for anarchists in prison. The future of this project is in jeopardy due to lack of funds. If you have any extra money to help APLAN continue doing their vitally important work, then please contact them at: APLAN, 818 SW 3rd Ave, PMB #354, Portland, OR 97204; aplan@tao.ca

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feral: a journal towards wildness is now on-line. #1 is up now and #2 will be up soon. www.angelfire.com/journal2/feraltowardswildness

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Igniting The Revolution: An Intro to the ELF The first video in existence discussing the ideology of the ELF, and the logic and necessity of using covert direct action to protect life on earth. Produced and distributed by the N.A. ELF Press Office in Portland, OR USA. 20 min, 2001. This video can be ordered for $10.00 ppd within the U.S. and $12.00 elsewhere. Make checks and/or money orders payable to: Resistance, P.O. Box 4783 Portland, OR 97208

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The Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) will be holding its annual meeting in Whistler, “Bc” (Unceded Lil’wat Territory) July 25-28, 2001.

The little known PNWER consists of alberta, bc, yukon, alaska, washington, idaho, montana, and oregon. Trade ministers, senators, preimers and wealthy investors will be meeting to discuss the future of the Pacific Northwest, with one thing in mind... profit!

For more information, see www.tao.ca/~resist/pnwer

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DEAL WITH IT

A journal currently put out by anti-sexist anarchist men in support of the struggle to end sexist oppression, deconstruct gender, overthrow patriarchy, and achieve total liberation Issue #1 is available for $1 From PO Box 5841, Eugene, OR 97405 www.fruitiondesign.com/ againstpatriarchy

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Mujeres Creando Take Bankers Hostage in Bolivia

Mujeres Creando is an anarcha-feminist group from Bolivia with roughly 15-20 members who address issues of gender, sexuality, class and race, and who back up their unflinching critique of society, government and culture with concrete actions. The main organizers of the group include the only two openly lesbian activists in all of Bolivia, who are both unapologetic in their advocacy of violent insurrection. In recent years, Mujeres Creando’s agitational activities have included running a cultural center, publishing, and an ongoing revolutionary graffiti campaign, always signed “Mujeres Creando” (Women’s Initiative). Their favorite targets include neo-liberals, smug and macho leftists, and mainstream feminists or “gender technocrats”. But this week, they upped the ante and armed with dynamite and molotovs, helped spearhead the violent takeover of government offices in Bolivia. (See our back cover for the full story.)

Bounty On LA Cops

Los Angeles (5-16-01): Los Angeles police officers have been told to take extra precautions after reports surfaced that a street gang is offering money for those who wound or kill cops.

The 18th Street Gang, the city’s most notorious band of outlaws, has reportedly put out word that it will pay $10,000 to anyone who injures a police officer and $25,000 to anyone who kills one.

Police said they are taking the threat seriously.

Gang members told a reporter they knew nothing about any bounty for dead or wounded police officers.

But the police department is already noting what it calls some suspicious activity: they believe gang members are placing false calls to the department to see how officers respond. “Information also indicated that the gang members are utilizing surveillance and counter-surveillance on officers and department facilities,” the internal memo reads. “It is believed that these gang members are placing false calls to see how LAPD responds to calls and the tactics deployed.”

PRISONERS OF WAR

Anarchist

Ali Khalid Abdullah #148130, Thumb Correctional Facility, 3225 John Conley Drive, Lapeer, MI 48446. Serving 10 -20 years for “assault with intent to rob while armed” for his involvement in trying to shut down a major drug dealer. Ali was recently turned down at his parole hearing despite many letters from supporters.

Christopher Plummer, #677345, Route 2, Box 4400, Gatesville, TX 76597. Serving fifteen years for taking action against a neo-nazi group in Texas.

Harold Thompson, #93992, Northwest Correctional Complex, Route 1, Box 660, Tiptonville, TN 38079. Sentenced to life plus 50 years for a 1979 robbery of a jewelers, killing a police informer who had murdered his partner and a shooting incident in Ohio. He was later given an extra 32 years for a failed escape attempt.

James “Rio” Johnson, #8952263, SRCI, 777 Stanton Street, Ontario, OR 97914. Currently in the hole at Snake River Correctional Facility.

Mark Barnsley, WA 2897, HMP Wakefield, 5 Love Lane, Wakefield, WF2 9AG, UK. Mark was attacked by a gang of drunken students and defended himself. He has refused to admit guilt and is having his parole delayed because of it. Nikos Maziotis c/o Daphne Vaganou, Ozortz, 10689, Athenes, Greece. His 15 year sentence, for bombing the Greek Ministry of Industry in solidarity with the residents of Strymonikos Bay fighting TVX-Gold’s plans to build a factory, was recently reduced to 5.5 years because of public outrage in response to his lenghty prison sentence.

Ojure Lutalo #59860, POB 861, Trenton, NJ 08625. Black liberation activist and anarchist. Ojure was jailed in 1975 for expropriation, paroled in 1980 and re-arrested in 1982 for an armed attack on a drug dealer. He was sentenced to 20-40 years and is being held in the Trenton Management Control Unit, where political prisoners are isolated by the authorities.

Robert Thaxton #12112716, OSP, 2605 State Street, Salem, OR 97310. Rob Los Ricos was convicted of assault and riot for throwing a rock at a cop in self-defense at the 1999 Eugene J18 Reclaim the Streets. He recieved a 7-year sentence. He is currenly assigned “Anarchist security group status”. Do not send anything with the name “anarchist” in it or containing any circle-A’s.

Shaka N’ Zinga s/n Arthur Wiggins #196612, POB 534 (MHC-X), Jessup, MD 20794.

Silvano Pellissero, Com. Mastrolierto, Via Ferrerinoli no2, Sanponso, 10080 Torino, Italy. An anarchist sentenced to 7 years for allegedly sabotaging a rail line construction site in the Northern Italian Alps. He can read Spanish, French and Italian but not English.

Thomas Meyer-Falk, JVA Bruschal, Zellle 3117, Schonbornstr. 32, 76646, Bruschal, Germany. Anarchist activist.

Anti Imperialist

United Freedom Front Prisoners

The following three individuals are serving huge sentences for their role in actions carried out by the United Freedom Front (UFF) in the 1980’s. The UFF (formerly known as the Jonathan Jackson/Sam Melville Unit) carried out solidarity bombings against the US government on a variety of different issues. All of these individuals are excellent people to write to and will answer letters.

Ray Luc Levasseur, 10376-016, Box PMB, Atlanta, GA 30315.

Richard Williams, 10377-016, 3901 Klein Blvd., Lompoc, CA 93436.

Thomas Manning, 10372-016, Box 4000, Springfield, MO 65801

Bill Dunne #10916-086, Box 1000, Marion, IL. 62959. Anti-authoritarian sentenced to 90 years for the attempted liberation of a prisoner in 1979. Bill was recently transferred back to the infamous Marion Control Unit in Marion.

David Gilbert #83A6158, Attica C.F., POB 149, Attica, NY 14011.

Larry Giddings #10917-086, PO Box 1000, Lewisburg, PA 17837. Anti-authoritarian prisoner jailed in 1973 for attempted expropriation, paroled in 1978 then re-arrested in 1979 while attempting to liberate a comrade from prison. Doing multiple sentences of life in prison and 75 years with no known parole opportunities.

LindaEvans, 19973-054 Unit A,5701 8thStreet,Camp Parks, Dublin, CA 94568.

Marilyn Buck, 00482-285, Unit B, 5701 8th Street, Camp Parks, Dublin, CA 94568. Serving 50 years to life for actions taken after she escaped prison herself including an armed robbery of a Brink’s armored truck and the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison. She is the only white member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA)

Mutulu Shakur, #83205-012, Box PMB, Atlanta, GA 30315

Ecological Resistance

Craig Marshall (Critter) #13797662, OSP, 2605 State Street, Salem, OR 97310. Serving a five and a half year sentence for conspiracy to commit arson and possession of unlawful devices.

Helen Woodson, 03231-045 FMC Carswell, POB 27137 Admin Max Unit, Fort Worth, TX 76127. Serving 27 years for robbing a bank and then setting the money on fire while reading out a statement denouncing greed, capitalism and the destruction of the environment

Jeffrey Luers (Free) #13797671, TRCI, 82911 Beach Acess Rd, Umatilla, OR 97882. Serving 22.5 years on politically-motivated arson charges related to the arson of cars at Romania Chevrolets and an attempted arson at Tyree Oil in Eugene, Oregon.

Jeremiah Rush Bowen, #108016, DCC, 1140 East 10 Road, Delta, CO 81416. Serving two years for the arson of a townhouse in Boulder, Colorado in the summer of 2000. Lee Himlin EX7748 HMP Perry Road, Sherwood, Nottingham, N65 3AG UK. Imprisoned for criminal damage to quarrying equipment at the Nine Ladies quarry.

Marco Camenish, Viale dei Trigli 14, 13900 Biella, Italy. Imprisoned for bombing attacks against a number of ecologically destructive companies. He also killed a cop in an attempted jailbreak.

Ted Kaczynski (04475-046), US Pen-Admin Max Facility, PO Box 8500, Florence Colorado 81226.

Sentenced to multiple lifetimes in prison for the “Unabomber” bombings.

Animal Liberation

Dave Blenkinsop, HM Prison, Bedford, MK40 1HG, UK. On remand for allegedly causing “grevous bodily harm” to the managing director of Huntington Life Science.

Mel Broughton DJ8216, HMP The Mount, Molyneaux Avenue, Bovingdon, Hemel Hempstead, HP3 0NZ, UK. Serving 4 years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

Barry Horne, VC2141, HMP Belmarsh, Western Way, Thamesmead, London SE28 0EB, UK. Serving18 years for various anti-vivisection arsons and attempted arsons.

Indigenous

Eric Wildcat Hall, #BL-5355, Unit I/A 10745 Route 18, Albion, PA 16475-0002. Serving 35-75 years for helping ship arms to Central American resisters.

Lenny Chavez, c/o SAIIC, POB 28703, Oakland, CA 94694. An AIM activist who defended himself & his family from an armed racist. Lenny disarmed his attacked by stabbing him with a penknife and was jailed for attempted murder.

Leonard Peltier #89637-132, PO Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048. An American Indian Movement (AIM) activist, serving two life sentences, having been framed for the murder of two FBI agents.

Robert Wilson (Standing Deer) #640289, Estelle Prison, 264 FM 3478 Huntsville, TX 77320. Standing Deer has been in super-max prisons for the last twenty prisons. In 1978, he exposed a plot to kill Leonard Peltier and was given additional years tacked on to his sentence.

MOVE

MOVE is a radical, ecological movement that has been attacked by the Philadelphia Police since its inception. Nine members were convicted and sent to prison for life following a 1978 siege at their house in which one cop was killed by another cop. One of those nine, Merle Africa, died in prison last year after not being treated for a health issue.

Debbie Simms Africa (006307), Janet Holloway Africa (006308), Janine Philips Africa (006309) SCI Cambridge Springs, 451 FullertonAve, Cambridge Springs, PA 16403-1238.

Michael Davis Africa (AM4973), Charles Simms Africa (AM4975) SCI Grateford, PO Box 244, Grateford, PA 19426-0244.

Edward Goodman Africa (AM4974) SCI Camp Hill, PA 17011-0200.

William Philips Africa(AM4984), Delbert Orr Africa (AM4985) SCI Dallas Drawer K, Dallas, PA 18612.

Prisoner Support Contacts

Anarchists Prisoner Legal Aid Network (APLAN) 818 SW 3rd Avenue, Portland, OR 97204. aplan@tao.ca

Free and Critter Legal Defense Committee 454 Willamette Street, Suite 205, Eugene, OR 97401. 541-343-8548 eae@efn.org www.efn.org/~eugpeace/freecritter

North American Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network. POB 11331 Eugene, OR 97440. naelpsn@yahoo.com www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

North American Animal Liberation Front Support Group Box 69597, 5845 Yonge Street

Willowdale, Ontario M2M 4K3.

South Chicago ABC/Thought Bombs zine

An excellent resource for prisoners. POB 721, Homewood, IL 60430.

We recommend the Anarchist Black Cross Federation website for more detailed information on many of the antiimperialist and indigenous prisoners: www.abcf.net Friends of MOVE, POB 9709, Philadelphia, PA 19143.

UK Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network c/o BM Box 2407, London, WC1N 3XX,UK

Cops and Anarchists Clash in Long Beach, CA on May Day

Long Beach, CA- A May Day Reclaim the Streets turned into a battle between anarchists and pigs. The action consisted of nearly 100 black bloc anarchists and about 30 or so others in downtown Long Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles, and turned into a brutal show of force by cops.

From the start, the pig presence was enormous, with anarchists outnumbered 3-1 by riot cops equipped with guns, leg length batons, and two armored personnel carriers. The black bloc took a beating all along the march rout, but managed to hold together as a group and push on despite repeated blows from the pigs.

The LBPD started their brutal attack by opening fire with rubber bullet rifles and bean bag shot guns (over 50 rounds according to the cops themselves). In addition, the pigs began to take full-force two-handed overhead swings at the people in the streets. Many people were beat or shot in the back as they attempted to flee. In the end, the police surrounded the crowd and arrested over 100 people.

Over 70 adult cases still remain against those arrested on May Day (cases against the juveniles were dropped). Most arrestees are being charged with six separate misdemeanor crimes: failure to disperse, conspiracy, riot, remaining at the seen of a riot, rout, and illegal assembly. Everyone plead not guilty. There are also more serious charges, including felony assault on an officer.

Javier Perez has spent over one month in custody. Javier, who has lived in the US since he was three, was deported to Mexico by the INS. While most of his family live in the Los Angeles area, he has made contact with anarchists in Mexico and is in communication with southern Californian comrades.

Alex Schwartz is charged with felony assault on a cop. Alex was released on bail and is awaiting trial.

Rob Middaugh is being charged with felony assault on a cop. Rob is still in custody and is in need of spiritual and financial support. You can write to Rob at #6859467 Cell bloc 1400 pod 2, PO Box 86164, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles, CA 90086-164.

Help support the arrestees buy sending donations to the Alternative Gathering Collective, Re: May Day Support, PO Box 17546, Los Angeles, CA 90017-0546. Please make out checks or money orders to Ron Jones.

Oregon State House Approves Eco-Terrorism Bill

The same day that people torched log trucks outside the controversial Eagle Creek Timber Sale (near Estacada, Oregon) the Oregon House of Representatives approved anti eco-terror bills #2344 & #2385. They expand Oregon’s racketeering statutes to include crimes against research, livestock and agricultural facilities and make “interference with agricultural research” a new crime. Also, passed was HB #2917 which includes technical clarifications to better define crimes of research and animal interference. It doesn’t appear that this bill, or the similar bills proposed in Washington State, New York and nationally are having any effect on the underground resistance movement. Lets hope it stays that way.

Viva ELF! Viva ALF!

GREEN ANARCHY MAIL ORDER

How to order from the GA distro:

-Please send well concealed cash, checks, or US Post Office money orders (Please do not send Western Union type money orders or loose change)

-Checks can be made out to “Green Anarchy” and mailed to POB 11331, Eugene, OR 97440.

-We fill orders fairly quick but delays may occur. Please be patient. Email us at greenanarchy@tao.ca if it is taking a long time or if you have any questions about availability. Sometimes orders are delayed if we are waiting on a particular item.

-Put “Attn: Mail Order” on the envelope to help us fill the order faster.

-International orders can take longer because we prefer not to ship air mail as it is quite expensive.

-We consider publications for our distro on a regular basis. Send us any zines that you think we would want to distribute

Thanks,

Pamphlets

Abolition Of Work & Primitive Affluence $1

Angry Brigade: Documents and Chronology. An excellent introduction to the Angry Brigade. $1

Against Technology-a speech by John Zerzan 50 cents

Anarchists Are Going To Eat Your Children $1

Myths, misinformation, and misunderstanding about anarchism and the Eugene community.

Anarchist Survival Guide For Understanding Gestapo Swine

Interrogation Mind Games $1 Harold Thompson

Fairly self explanatory zine.

Anti-Mass: Methods Of Organization For Collectives 50 cents

Armed Joy - Alfredo Bonanno $1

A Brief History Of The New Afrikan Prison Struggle $1

Sundiata Acoli

Bring The War Home: vol. 1 Forgotten Heroes; the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. $1 Chaos - Hakim Bey $1

The Continuing Appeal Of Nationalism-Fredy Perlman 75 cents Enemy Of The State: An Interview With John Zerzan by Derrick Jensen 50 cents

From Riot To Insurrection - Alfredo Bonanno $1

Fuck the System: $2 fundraiser for legal fees

Political writings by/about political prisoners Free and Critter

Grand Juries: Tools Of Political Repression 50 cents

Craig Rosebraugh

Guerrilla Warfare: A Method - Che Guevara 50 cents

Fuck You Bearden $2

Jailhouse Writings And Rants From Political Prisoner Rob Los Ricos.

Future Primitive - John Zerzan $1

Taken from the book by the same name, this essay presents a scathing critique of civilization and technology.

Hands Up! $1

A booklet containing information about four anarchists arrested in Italy in the mid 1990’s for an armed bank robbery.

If an Agent Knocks 25 cents

All you need to know about visits by the feds

Lessons Of Easter Island - Clive Ponting $1

Taken from his book “A Green History of the World”. This essay traces a history of genocide and ecological devastation on this continent beginning with the arrival of Columbus.

Memories Of Freedom - Western Wildlife Unit Of The ALF $2 An excellent introduction to the ALF and its direct action campaign of the early 90’s. Contains the story of Rod Coronado’s activities and capture.

Nighttime Gardener All you need to know about researching, locating and destroying genetically engineered crops in the US. $1 The Neo-Luddites & Lessons From The Luddites $2 Kirkpatrick Sale

Two essays reprinted from his book “Rebels Against The Future”. A very convincing condemnation of industrial civilization.

Plan Columbia 50 cents

A short but to-the-point analysis of the situation with Plan Columbia. A Primitivist Primer - John Moore 50 cents

An interesting and very accessible introduction to the movement against civilization.

Primitivist Critique of Civilization - Richard Heinberg $1

Prison Abolition - Yves Borque $1

Rants: Essays and Polemics - Feral Faun $1

Rants and essays against all of authority and domestication.

Rob The Rich! $2 fundraiser

Jailhouse writings of political prisoner Robert Thaxton A.K.A. Rob Los Ricos.

Society Against The State - Pierre Clastres $1

An analysis of the anti-authoritarian nature of many indigenous peoples by this French anarchist and anthropologist.

Stopping The Industrial Hydra: Revolution Against The

Megamachine - George Bradford $1

The ecological disasters perpetuated by industrial capitalism are not just isolated incidents that can be prevented through workers’ self-management: they are the inevitable consequences of technological civilization.

The Truth About The Bonnot Gang - Ezra Brett Mell 50 cents

We All Live In Bhopal - David Watson 50 cents

In the technological society, we are all subjected to poisonous chemicals and contaminations.

Women In Prison: Who We Are - Assata Shakur 50 cents

Venomous Butterfly Publications

Venomous Butterfly publications is a project aimed at making writings available which express an insurrectionary anarchist perspective in the form of pamphlets and zines.

All titles are $1.50 except for #11 which is $2

1) Choosing To Serve: Anarchy Against Democracy

2) Futurist Attack

3) Without Asking Permission

4) Where Do We Meet Face To Face?

5) Dreams Of Insurrection

6) A Strange And Outcast Poet: The Life And Writings Of Renzo Novatore

7) A Mind Of One’s Own

8) Flower Of Harm #1

9) Flower Of Harm #2

10) This Is What Democracy Looks Like

11) Towards The Creative Nothing- Renzo Novatore

12) The Undesirables

Zines

Black Clad Messenger. Current Issue. Two-year running journal of anti-industrial anarchism. $2 each

Break The Chains. Current. Newsletter for prisoners about state repression/terrorism in the Northwest. Free to prisoners. Three stamps to anyone else

Disorderly Conduct #1-3. An insurrectionary green-anarchist quarterly, brought to you by the “Bring On The Ruckus” Society. $3

Mayhap- Personal punk zine with a strong anarcha-feminist perspective. Current issue available. $1.50 each.

Spirit Of Freedom- The newsletter of the North American Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network. Detailed information on earth liberation prisoners, hate crime legislation and grand juries. Two stamps.

Green Anarchist-Issues 57/58, 59 available. $1 each

Old-school British anarcho-primitivist magazine. Very odd stuff.

Harbinger- Current Issue Available. 55 cents stamp

Insightful proto-situatinist zine put out by CrimethINC.

Weed Lover #1-5 available. Everything you need to know about permaculture, radical gardening, water conservation, seed balls and more from Food Not Lawns! $2 each

Willful Disobedience- Current and back issues available (#1-7). $1.50 each

Books

Against Civilization $9

ed. John Zerzan

A substantial collection of essays and articles critiquing the plague of civilization.

Against His-story, Against Leviathan $8

Fredy Perlman

A history of civilization and the resistance to it.

Anarchist Farm $10

Jane Doe

The Anarchist version of Animal Farm

Anarchy After Leftism $6

“Anarchy will not be vital until the last Leftist is hung by the guts of the last Social Ecologist.” - From the preface.

Beyond Bookchin $8

George Bradford A critique of social ecology from this luddite activist and long-time contributor to the Fifth Estate magazine.

Elements Of Refusal $14

John Zerzan

Zerzan’s extensive research attempts to trace the roots of domination. From time, agriculture, language, and so on to the various other forms of social control to domesticate and dominate all life.

Last Days of Christ the Vampire $10

The excellent fictional book exposing the vampire cult of the Christian church.

The Nihilist Princess $12

Louis M. Gagenuer

Videos

Breaking the Spell: Anarchy, Eugene and the WTO $10

The most accurate and inspiring documentary of the N30 protests in Seattle.

A Year in the Streets $14 NEW!!!!!

A great new video documenting resistance in America in the last two years from Seattle to the DNC to Quebec and GW Bush’s inauguration. Full of direct action and excellent video work. Put out by the Cascadia Media Collective (www.cascadiamedia.org) US off the Planet $12 NEW!!!!!

An evening in Eugene with Ward Churchill and Chellis Glendinning. Both discuss ideas of decolonalization and resistance to oppression.

New Additions to the GA Distro!

Zines/pamphlets

Against Patriarchy

A compilation of articles against the patriarchy brought to you by the same folks who organized the Against Patriarchy Conference. A solid read. $2

A Map - Chellis Glendinning

The contents of a speech delivered by Chellis at the annual E.F. Schumacher Society. Very good. $3

The Black Cat Sabotage Reader

Now back in print! Over 100 pages about eco-sabotage-how and why. $5

Black Star North #1

Current. New zine put out by anarchists from the Northeast. $1.50

Cracks In The Empire #1

More a book than a zine (at 150 pages!) this incredible publication delves deep into anti-industrial and pro direct action perspectives. #1 has extensive articles on Earth First! and its demise, computer sabotage, armed resistance to the state in 1970’2 Europe, primitivism and more. Offers a solid, working class/anti-technology foundation. $5

Devastate To Liberate Or Devestatingly liberal?

Old English pamphlet that deconstructs the movement for animal rights. A well done class analysis of animal rights from a former ALF member. Applicable to the US as well. $2 The Disgust Of Daily Life - Kevin Tucker

A creative piece furthering the critique of civilization and its totality. From the zine, “We are the gears, the cities, the future and we can stop the megamachine. Not another minute shall we live for Civilization. It’s time to start living”. $2 Earth Liberation Front: Frequently Asked Questions What is the ELF? How does one join? Why did they burn down Vail? All this and many more questions are answerd in this new pamphlet about the ELF. $2

Essays Toward A New Eco-Anarchism Chris Kortright $1 The Final Days

“a revolutionary, illegalist publication” from Southern Californian Anarchists. Issue #3 focuses on Long Beach’s May Day riot, Quebec FTAA actions, and self defense. $1 Globalization: From The Gun Boats To The WTO - Z.Z. An Indigenous anti-capitalist analysis. 50 cents

Listening To The Land: An Interview With Ward Churchill

An interview with American Indian Movement activist and indigenist activist Ward Churchill conducted by radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen. This essay was reprinted from Derrick’s wonderful book Listening To The Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture and Eros. $1

Our Enemy, Civilization $2

A series of essays documenting humanity’s transition (fall?) into civilization and the effect that civilization has had on the planet.

Resistance #5

The newsletter of the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office (see review section). $2

Species Traitor #1

Excellent primtivist zine written by the folks at the Coalition Against Civilization. Features “What is the Totality” and “A Poem for the ELF ” as well as some interesting reprints. $2 The Struggle For West Papua - Amung Tabbi

A short but to-the-point history of colonization and resistance in the land of Irian Jaya. This article originally appeared in the Earth First! Journal. 50 cents

We Are Everywhere: Prisoners In The Northwest

A compilation of essays, rants, songs, poems, and artwork from a number of politically-conscious prisoners in the Northwest including but not limited to: Robert Thaxton, Free & Critter, Dale Morris, Brian McCarvill, and Ezra Stockman. $2 Books

Feral Revolution-Feral Faun A new collection of Feral Faun’s writings. You gotta check it out! $6

With Dynamite and Molotov’s, Anarcha-Feminists Stage Insurrection in Bolivia

(July 2, 2001) Small debtors have been calling for a solution to their credit problems for 95 days. At ten o’clock this morning some of them took over government buildings. Among them were members of the anarchist-feminist group Mujeres Creando (Women’s Initiative), whom the government named as responsible for the action.

About a hundred activists occupied the office of the Defensoria del Pueblo (People’s Defense). Several dozen also occupied the office of the Catholic archbishop. But the most striking event occurred at the banking supervisory agency, where a thousand debtors occupied offices and detained 94 of the institution’s functionaries.

One group of activists passed unnoticed by security guards, went into the banking authority building and took some of its employees as hostages. Groups were also able to enter the bishop’s office and the Defensor’a before they were noticed.

Once inside the banking agency, activists sprayed the entrance hall with gasoline near the door of the superintendent’s office. From the top floor of the building they threw sticks of dynamite into a plaza in order to prevent the police from entering. Groups of plainclothes cops attempted to retake the building.

Top-level functionaries of the banking authority were tied up in their offices and bundles of dynamite were tied to their bodies to prevent any kind of police intervention. The activists wore dozens of dynamite sticks around their bodies and some carried old military firearms.

At least a dozen activists positioned themselves on the balconies of the fifth floor of the banking authority’s building and gave speeches using bullhorns.

“We are here because nobody is listening to us. These people are showing the typical hard-heartedness of bankers. We are here because we cannot pay our debts.” Their words echoed loudly from their fifth floor position, accompanied by insults and songs directed against the bankers.

Carrying a bullhorn, Molotov cocktails and sticks of dynamite, the small debtors walked around the building’s balconies, setting off more than an explosion in the plaza Isabel la CatÙlica in order to make their demands heard.

One woman protester used a bullhorn to communicate her complaint to the police surrounding the place: “For the poor there is no relief, no justice. They have taken everything from us, leaving us sticks of dynamite to eat. Because only the deal-makers have rights, we have been here, living in the street, in the cold of night, with scarcely one meal a day, for more than 90 days. And nobody will listen to us.”

Representing the debtors at a press conference, another woman declared, “We cannot leave while there is no dialogue to solve our problem, and if no solution is found, we are determined to commit suicide right in front of them— because we cannot put up with this situation any longer.”

This protest movement includes 12,000 workers and unemployed people who have borrowed small sums ot money and have been abused by the private banks’ usurious practices. Today they are demanding total cancellation of their debts, an end to the suits against them and an end to the impounding of their meager goods. For three months thousands of debtors have been coming to La Paz from all parts of Bolivia to stage daily protests. These had pacifist beginnings but later became more radical, going as far as attempting to burn banks. During the conflict, because of the misery and desperation surrounding them, more than six debtors have committed suicide. Many have been forced to give up all their belongings and live in the street. Meanwhile, the government favors the rich by pardoning their debts and granting them immense sums of money.

In the middle of the night, attempts were begun to free the 94 functionaries still held in the banking authority building. This involved a six-person committee for assuring their safety, including the anarchist Julieta P., as well as some low types such as the rightwing legislator F. Kieffer, a former paramilitary operative. While the negotiations continued the building remained closed. Included in the talks were debtors (headed by the anarchist MarÌa Galindo Mujeres Creando group) and representatives of the private banks, senior Catholic clergymen, the Defensora del Pueblo (People’s Defense), and members of Derechos Humanos (human Rights).

There has been a ban on cameras and bringing in food or drink. The building is constantly surrounded by a cordon of police. According to unofficial reports, sharpshooters have been positioned in the area and specially trained commando units have been brought in.

The Bolivian government is openly fascist. The genocidal President-General Banzer has had many social fighters murdered during the four years of his regime. We denounce the human rights clowns, the reactionary Catholic Church and the Bank vultures as makers of a smoke screen to divert attention to the negotiating table while the government prepares its dogs to execute a bloodbath.

The activity of the small debtors is by nature anti-capitalist, because it delegitimizes private property and directly attacks profits. It utilizes direct action and self-organization.

The Bolivian state has been called the most corrupt in the Americas. Inequality verges on the sordid. Hunger, massacres and unemployment rule. The intensity of the class struggle is making the exploited more radical in their struggles. Twelve days ago Aymara farmers blocked highways in the Altiplano region to demand an end to neo-liberalism. The state responded by murdering two of them. The answer was dynamite attacks on power-line towers.

We call on the anarchist movement in particular and anti-capitalists in general to protest at Bolivian embassies, to spread word of our struggles in order to stop a genocide in the making.

Violence is justifiable, insurrection is indispensable

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Green Anarchy

PO Box 11331

Eugene, OR 97440

greenanarchy@tao.ca