Bugger.
‘Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology’ by James L. Gelvin is available on my blog and as a PDF. Gelvin’s main argument is that, based on a comparative analysis, Al-Qaeda is a contemporary form of anarchism.
D’oh!
In the real world, anarchists around the world face state persecution as terrorists. One recent case involves eight folks charged with ‘Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism’:
The RNC 8 are: Luce Guillen Givins, Max Specktor, Nathanael Secor, Eryn Trimmer, Monica Bicking, Erik Oseland, Robert Czernik and Garrett Fitzgerald. All were preemptively arrested prior to the RNC and have been falsely charged with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism under the Minnesota PATRIOT act in response to their political organizing. This site contains news updates, press releases, biographies and information for donating to their legal support fund and defending the RNC 8.
It’s possible that the RNC 8 were planning on hijacking some planes and flying them into buildings, but apparently that’s already been done.
Well, sorta.
The Twin Towers were brought down by pulsed energy scalar weapons launched by US airforce weapons platforms that operate in sub-orbital earthspace and which are protected from earthly observers by cloaking technology back-engineered from the Roswell UFO crash of 1947 (see the photos of John Walson for rare images of these craft). These platforms also projected holograms of the planes onto the sky beforehand – the real planes and passengers were teleported shortly after takeoff to the secret underground US military base at Montauk on Long Island using technology developed in the Philadelphia experiment of 1941. The passengers and crew were there reprogrammed by MKULTRA operatives to forget their past lives and used as pawns in the military experiments in time travel taking place in Montauk based upon the ‘unified field’ technologies developed by Nikola Tesla and confiscated by the US government in WW2.(ref the work of Montauk whistleblower Al Bielek and others). Doutre, Gage, Jones and other 9/11 ‘truthers’ are disinformation agents whose ideas of ‘controlled demolition’ distract the populace from the ‘real’ truth as to the US military/Draco-Reticulan alliances’ attempts to control the very fabric of time and space itself.
Fact.
Also in the U$A, Marie Mason is currently serving the longest sentence of any environmental activist (aka terrorist) — 21 years and 10 months. Marie is one of dozens of individuals to have fallen victim to George II’s ‘Green Scare’.
In France, Sarkozy has declared war on members of the ‘anarcho-autonomous milieu’, and to this end nine folks from Tarnac — in particular Julian Coupat — are facing charges. Most recently:
New appeals fail, member of Parisian support committee detained
May 1, 2009Le Monde has reported that the 4th appeal for the release on remand of Julian Coupat failed on April 29. Earlier the 8 other defendants announced that they would no longer respond to any of the judge’s questions in order to “collectively protest a process of individualization that has been continually increasing in this case”. Meanwhile a member of the Parisian support committee was recently detained by anti-terrorist police.
Coupat has been targeted as the presumed author of a text called ‘The Coming Insurrection’ (extract below).
For other examples of state repression, see links on the sidebar under ‘War On Dissent’.
In Australia, building workers are, via the coercive and investigatory powers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, subjected to laws which render them without rights, including the right to silence. See : THE AUSTRALIAN BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION COMMISSION: AN APPROPRIATE USE OF PUBLIC POWER?, Forum on Industrial Laws Applying in the Australian Construction Industry, National Press Club, Canberra, 25 August 2008, George Williams, Anthony Mason Professor of law, University of New South Wales (PDF). Established under HoWARd, and continuing to enjoy the full support of the KRudd Government, there is nevertheless an ongoing campaign to abolish the ABCC.
The ABCC — and the Royal Commission which preceded it — has proven to be a failure in terms of its declared aims (Howard’s construction inquiry bore little fruit, Andrew West, The Age, March 5, 2009), but in terms of its real aims — which are to tame a ‘militant’ union (as part of a more generalised attempt to rollback workers’ rights and crush working class dissent) — the outcome remains uncertain.
“I AM WHAT I AM”
“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?
“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.
Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”
The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.
“I AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state.
“WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges – at certain times and places – that being which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.
It’s dizzying to see Reebok’s “I AM WHAT I AM” enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.
“I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.
France wouldn’t be the land of anxiety pills that it’s become, the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis, if it weren’t also the European champion of hourly productivity. Sickness, fatigue, depression, can be seen as the individual symptoms of what needs to be cured. They contribute to the maintenance of the existing order, to my docile adjustment to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my crutches. They specify the selection of my opportune, compliant, and productive tendencies, as well as those that must be gently discarded. “It’s never too late to change, you know.” But taken as facts, my failings can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They then become acts of resistance in the current war. They become a rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us, to amputate us. The self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn’t mean knowing how to adapt – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it’s the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more sharable than all the fantasy lands this society maintains for its purposes.
We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn’t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect “behavioral disorders” at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.
