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The Acorn: resistance update
Posted on May 19, 2020 by winter oak
Resistance update
The fight-back against the totalitarian Corona Coup continues to build in Europe – and so, inevitably, does the repression used against it.
The bravest politician on the continent has to be Italian MP Sara Cunial.
She told the parliament in Rome on May 14: "The real goal of this is total control, absolute domination of human beings, transformed into guinea pigs and slaves.
"We, with the people, will multiply the fires of resistance in such a way as you won't be able to repress us all".
The biggest protests have been in Germany. On Saturday May 16 people took to the streets in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Bremen, Nuremberg and Munich.
The most impressive wave of revolt against what is being called the Corona-Diktatur ("Corona dictatorship") has come in Stuttgart. The 50 people who turned out on the first weekend of protests have turned into thousands.
This time the authorities limited attendance to 5,000 people with thousands more in surrounding streets.
Two newly-formed campaign groups are involved: Querdenken ("anticonformist") and Widerstand 2020 ("Resistance 2020").
#BREAKING – #GERMANY: More than 7,000 peaceful protesters today in #Stuttgart participate against the inhumane #lockdown measures of the #Merkel government. #Querdenken711 #Resistancepic.twitter.com/lbvY1OGQQS
— ISCResearch (@ISCResearch) May 16, 2020
One of those present, Ahmed Aydin, aged 27, told the media: "People are starting to understand that this virus is being used to deprive us of our basic rights".
He said the time had come to "enter into resistance" in order to "save what's left of democracy".
Günter Klein, a protester in his 60s, said he was particularly outraged by the mask issue.
"Only slaves mask their faces, not free men. We are slipping into dictatorship, even fascism. It's good that all these diverse people here are awake to this".
In Munich, one protester, Gerion, told a reporter that the restrictions "serve an agenda that has nothing to do with health".
Germans have experience of resisting totalitarianism, whether of the right or "left" variety. A report from AFP explains: "Slogans like 'We are the people' or 'Freedom! Freedom!' refer back to the demonstrations that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989".
Hyde Park, London, on May 16 2020
In the UK, hundreds gathered in London's Hyde Park on Saturday May 16 to protest against the lockdown.
The message was clear from the placards and banners: "Freedom over fear". "No to the new abnormal". "This is not about a virus, it is about control". "I am a free man, I am not a number".
Protesters chanted "freedom!" in defiance of the Met Police's zero tolerance of dissent. "No more lies! Enough of the lies!" shouted one woman protester.
Another "Stand Up X" protest has been called for Clapham Common, London, on Saturday May 23, from 12 noon.
The French authorities banned a number of Gilets Jaunes demonstrations planned for Saturday May 16, but courageous freedom-lovers still took to the streets.
Police attacked protesters and bystanders in Lyons and there were arrests in Paris.
In Montpellier, hundreds of protesters turned out and blocked tram lines. A woman was taken to hospital after falling victim to a police baton.
One placard quoted George Orwell to the effect that dictatorship thrives on ignorance. Another declared: "We were here yesterday, we are here today, we will be here tomorrow, until victory. We won't give up! We will win back all our rights!"
At St Nazaire on the Atlantic coast of France, police used "insane" levels of repression against 200 people who had gathered to oppose totalitarianism.
Nos flics adorent terroriser les femmes! et tripoter leurs fessses! ils empêchent ce citoyen de filmer la scène!St Nazaire pic.twitter.com/facgyeRfuU
— L'infirmier 💎 (@Infirmier0) May 19, 2020
The state violence meted out in France is nothing new and continues the brutality used by the Macron regime to try and crush the Gilets Jaunes uprising.
Also familiar is the gross distortion of the protesters' political position by the corporate media.
The ruling elite went to great lengths to discredit the Gilets Jaunes, initially depicting them as far-right and even "anti-semitic".
Use of phoney "fascist" smears has long been part of the lies deployed by the neoliberal system to obscure its own totalitarian nature and to disallow its opponents' point of view.
This gaslighting approach, which inverses reality and presents victims as oppressors and defenders of freedom as fascists, is explored in some depth in this article on the organic radicals site.
Angela Merket is said to be concerned about conspiracy theorists
An additional level to this form of repression is the use of state-manipulated pseudo gangs to physically attack dissidents in a politically-disguised manner.
This already seems to be happening in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be "worried" by the protests uniting "ultraleft activists"; "conspiracy theorists" and elements of the right.
And here she is joined by elements of what can only be viewed as the fake left. Some of these groups are reported to have taken to the streets to oppose anti-lockdown protests and they specifically condemn "conspiracy theories".
One website attacking the pro-freedom rebels evidently realises it is impossible to claim they are all far right, so instead bandies around terms like "hippies" and "liberals".
But it then adds that "the wild mixture of 'corona rebels' is united above all by the anti-Semitic notion that a certain group, cosmopolitan and globally networked (WHO, science, etc.), is controlling and targeting the worldwide pandemic".
So here we have it yet again! The familiar device of condemning analysis and criticism of a global capitalist elite as automatically "anti-semitic", even when there is no mention of ethnicity and when the most commonly identified culprit, Bill Gates, is not Jewish.
Similar smears are also being rolled out in the UK, where the spectre of "anti-semitism" played a key role in keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of Dowining Street.
This time the victims include his brother Piers Corbyn, who has been a vocal campaigner against the nightmare police state being imposed in 2020.
Piers Corbyn was arrested at the May 16 protest
Piers Corbyn tweeted that The Sunday Times had lied about the London protest on May 16. "We had 300 not 50. Their photo shows their lies".
He added: "It wasn't a Freedom Movement demo. That was a pathetic hoax to brand us Far Right. We're StandUpX".
As we have already complained, too many "anarchists" in the UK have taken a pro-system stance over the Corona Coup and have been hysterical in condemning those who challenge official narratives.
Their dumbed-down binary thinking sees them easily tricked into automatically rejecting anything tainted with supposedly "right-wing" associations, even when this leads them into supporting the system they supposedly oppose.
Can we expect to see this sleight of hand being used to persuade left activists to mobilise against anti-lockdown protesters?
In the 1930s it was fascist militia who were used by the state to physically attack movements which challenged the capitalist system. Will the fake left be used to play the same role in the 2020s?
In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement rose above the "far right" smears because of the vast numbers of left-wing radicals who joined its ranks and, sometimes, physically expelled fascists from protests.
It is crucial that anarchists, and other comrades on the left, are not fooled by our rulers' lies and smears.
We must neither cede to the state nor cede dangerous long-term political ground to the far right, by stupidly standing aside and letting them be seen to lead popular resistance to the clampdown.
If our ideas and our principles mean anything at all, we need to quickly step forward to the front line of this historical struggle against tyranny.
For freedom!
Posted in Anarchism, The AcornTagged capitalism, coronavirus, fascism, resistanceLeave a comment
Posted on April 30, 2020 November 14, 2020 by winter oak
Join the resistance!
Imagine a world where we seek to destroy what destroys us
Between life and death
Humble but fiery reflections
A sort of a warning…
The rebels will return
The Gates of hell
Gustav Landauer: an orgrad inspiration
1. Join the resistance!
There had already been signs, before the coronavirus panic, that neoliberalism was shedding its fake-democratic mask and was preparing to switch to fascist mode.
And now we are well on the way. The global ruling elite have declared war on our freedom.
So what are we going to do about it? We reported in Acorn 56 that even last month there were signs of resistance.
Since then, despite the concerted efforts of the fake left to encourage supine obedience, there have been more outbreaks of anti-authoritarian revolt.
In Brussels, for instance, an anti-police uprising took place from April 10 to 12, unfortunately resulting in 100 arrests. There has also been spirited resistance on the streets of Santiago, Chile.
In France, the biggest reaction against the confinement has come from the poorest housing estates on the fringes of Paris and other cities.
The ongoing war between brutal, often racist, cops and local youth has intensified under the new police-state atmosphere and riots kicked off all over the place after Mouldi, a young man on a moped, was "accidentally" killed by police at Villeneuve la Garenne on April 18.
For night after night, in various parts of France, police were pelted with stones and fireworks and their vehicles and at least one local police station set on fire. "Mort aux porcs!", "Death to the pigs!" was the slogan of choice.
A statement supporting the revolts has been published by a number of anti-capitalists and Gilets Jaunes.
This declares: "We haven't forgotten that at the end of 2018 the violence of the Gilets Jaunes had become its last remaining option for seeking dignity and social justice.
"Some denied that this was the case and today there is another battle for the general interest that many would rather not see.
"This is the battle of the working-class areas who are fighting back with violence because violence is the only option the authorities have left open to them if they are to defend themselves against a police force which has granted itself power over life and death in these areas.
"As ever, and as was frequently the case with the Gilets Jaunes, the political and media class will condemn these popular revolts and explain to us that nothing can justify such violence. That people can be angry and have legitimate complaints, but that they can't be expressed in this fashion.
"This class will try to empty these eminently political acts of all their substance. It will tell us that this violence is just gratuitous barbarity. But the real barbarity here is injustice.
"This is a people's revolt and we must get behind it!"
Meanwhile, at least one call for protests in France on Friday May 1 has gone out.
"Because we are being trampled on. Because we can't let the State dictate our lives. Because ending the lockdown has got to be an integral part of our struggle".
The post on Nantes Indymedia adds: "Small-scale or individual actions are fine, but it is also important to take back the streets, to re-open a space that the authorities would like to close down".
In the UK, radicals are calling for Mayday action short of mass protest.
Say the Green Anticapitalist Front: "This Mayday is unlike any previous Maydays. There will be no marches in the streets and no public speeches. Yet, now more than ever, we need to show that we are still here, still angry and still fighting.
"GAF is calling for an autonomous day of action on the 1st of May. We can't demonstrate, but that doesn't mean we can't revolt. Take action alone or in a small crew. Mutual aid, solidarity, and direct action, all are valid. Keep it serious, keep it quiet. But above all stay safe.
"If you want us to share your action (after the event) on our social media, send us photos and details to greenanticapitalistfront@riseup.net"
In the USA, there have been sizeable protests against the shutdown. The flag-waving and pro-business elements in this libertarian wave are a little offputting for us, to be honest!
But the determination of large numbers of Americans to stand up to tyranny is heartening.
Could it be that, from now on, the only political fault line that really matters is between those who support and bow down to the new life-crushing global techno-dictatorship and those who rise up to resist it?
We will watch with interest how things evolve on the other side of the Atlantic.
Perhaps the most interesting developments have been coming in Germany, where a collective memory of the reality of totalitarianism remains strong.
Up to 1,000 people have been turning up for what are now weekly Saturday rallies in Berlin, with other protests elsewhere.
There are conflicting reports as to who is involved in these events, with some dismissing them as essentially far-right.
But it is clear that, as with the Gilets Jaunes in France, the wave of angry opposition is flooding across the usual political divides.
This report made it clear that the latest Berlin protest "attracted mainly far-left activists".
It added: "Some of the demonstrators wore T-shirts accusing Chancellor Angela Merkel of 'banning life' while others simply called for 'freedom'. Others brandished placards bearing slogans such as 'Stop the pharmaceutical lobby'".
Coverage was notably more hostile from other sources, such as Vice, with its dubious sources including "extremism experts monitoring the protests".
It conceded that the rallies were "organized by a fringe group that considers themselves left-wing anticapitalists", while still suggesting that they were contaminated by the right.
In another piece, Vice wrote dismissively of "conspiracy theorists" and "the paranoid belief that elites are imposing an oppressive 'corona dictatorship' on the public".
Anyone detect a hint of panicky state propaganda?
One of these dangerous subversives, Anselm Lenz, gives an interview in English here.
Lenz is a journalist who was thrown out of his job for questioning the official virus narrative.
He and others have now formed a Demokatrischer Widerstand (Democratic Resistance) movement, with a printed rebel newspaper.
He explains that this is being distributed all over the country. There are now more than 100 local DW groups up and running, he says.
On Friday May 1 and Saturday May 2, the dissidents will be distributing their paper in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, from 3.30pm, with simultaneous events far and wide.
We look forward to hearing news of the resistance kicking off everywhere!
2. Imagine a world where we seek to destroy what destroys us
by @frackfree_eu
For all those who have yet to decolonise their hearts and minds from the dominant system, and are to eager to run into the arms of those offering "solutions" to what are complex societal issues.
Imagine a world where we opposed the entire system, rather than parts of it. [1] [2]
Imagine a world where we ignored the mass media. [3]
Imagine a world where we spent our time fighting the latest corporate scam instead of being distracted by whatever the mass media is trying to distract us with.
Imagine a world free of advertising.
Imagine a world where we only consume what is absolutely necessary, reducing the need for exploitation of people and planet.
Imagine a world where communities lived off-grid.
Imagine a world free of factories producing stuff we don't need.
Imagine a world where corporations didn't exist because we produce what we need for ourselves.
Imagine a world where we all have access to land to grow enough food to be self-sufficient.
Imagine a world free of religion, where instead we hold in reverence Mother Earth and all her wonders. [4]
Imagine a world where people stopped placing their trust in NGOs and civil society organisations, and instead formed strong, organic communities to fight state and corporate greed. [5]
Imagine a world with minimum need for conventional medicine because Mother Earth offers us everything we need to stay healthy.
Imagine a world where we spent most of our days outdoors close to nature, strengthening our immune systems and building up resistance to any viruses that may come our way.
Imagine a world where we cared for each other without having to rely on governments, institutions or corporations.
Imagine a world where children are taught the importance of living in harmony with the natural world rather than removed from it by spending their days learning online between four walls.
Imagine a world where children are allowed to develop their imagination and creativity without having material forced down their throats.
Imagine a world where we exchanged our skills, and did away with the need for money. [6]
Imagine a world where we stopped arguing with each other over petty things, and instead focused on what unites us rather than on what divides.
Imagine a world where we took the time to genuinely listen to each other and understand each other, rather than making rash judgements, sticking labels on each other, putting each other in boxes, positioning each other on the left-right spectrum.
Imagine a world where we stood in solidarity with indigenous and tribal peoples instead of supporting the climate capitalists hell bent on plundering more of their lands. [7]
Imagine a world where we didn't feel obliged to get married, settle down, or have children.
Imagine a world where we didn't have to do work that we don't enjoy.
Imagine a world where we didn't live by the tyranny of the clock. [8]
[1] Read and watch: Crimethinc — To change everything
[2] Read: The Anarchist Revelation, Paul Cudenec
[3] Herbert Marcuse: 'The non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve — the disintegration of the system'.
[4] Read: The Green One, Paul Cudenec
[5] '[Ferdinand Tönnies] explicitly equated Gesellschaft, the opposite of his organic Gemeinschaft, with capitalism. "The merchants or capitalists", he wrote, "are the natural masters and rulers of the Gesellschaft. The Gesellschaft exists for their sake. It is their tool".'
[6] Read: The Moneyless Man, Mark Boyle
[7] Read, watch and listen to the resources at https://winteroak.org.uk/climate-capitalists/
[8] Read: The Tyranny of the Clock, George Woodcock
3. Between life and death
by @ludicluddite
Western Despotism can now unload the liberal baggage of bourgeois democratic institutions, having ruined the planet and enslaved humanity to its poisonous techno/industrial economy.
The capitalist disaster returns to its despotic origins, as the grave it is digging for itself threatens to take the rest of us and all living things that populate the planet.
The digital nightmare that will make domination inescapable is being foisted on a population terrorised by the very products it consumes and the mode of production that creates them.
The machine man and machine world that is domination's dream of total control requires a level of servitude that can only be realized through the coercive apparatus of the state and the techno industrial Hydra that has colonized daily life with increasing speed in the last 20 years.
The choices that we humans face boil down to one: the living death of servitude, as machines in a machine world or liberty, or put in a more clear way, between life and death.
4. Humble but fiery reflections
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: COVID-19, Corbyn and 'Crisis' is a new 44-page brochure on the 325 website which reflects that the UK anarchist movement has been badly led astray by the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon and now in its reaction to the virus clamp-down. It states: "Relationships that were built on shared ideas and experiences have become damaged. This isn't some teenage angst ridden over dramatisation, it is a genuine reflection, a question about what remains". The full text is available here, but below are few choice segments:
We planned to get this text together and then publish and distribute it when stuff "returned to normal". But, the reality is: there is no going back to what was "normal," so even though some may read this text as an unsympathetic distraction from a global "crisis", and an unhelpful poke in some festering wounds (when we should be focusing on "unity"), we hope our humble but fiery reflections will spark some much needed discourse. We are living in a hostile environment, but it was important to us not to shy away from our beliefs in these dark times, and to respond accordingly.
Already many mutual aid groups have become channels for gossip (who knows where this will go in the next few weeks… comrades in Italy warn us of neighbourhood snitching and people using these channels to do the work of the police). Already over half the police forces in England are co-opting the mutual aid groups and using them as an extension of their surveillance mechanisms. The divisive mentality that emerged with the growth of social media (the idea that you are inherently dodgy if you don't engage; as you must have something to hide) has spiked, and like the virus, it seems unclear when it will "peak".
To those who say that now is not the time for "civil unrest," that division is unhelpful, that we must keep going… we say: now is the time for it all. Mutual aid and solidarity can be no more than acts of charity if they are not combined with resistance in this current context. Carefully, whilst being safe and thinking of others… rebel, resist, and plan. Find
the gaps, use the skills and networks you have. Keep yourself sane and your rebellious heart burning, because when the virus eases, the police state will continue, and food parcels and lending books are not going to dismantle it. Stay sharp.
COVID-19 is in many ways a global gift to all leaders and politicians seeking to ramp up social control. After the virus eases, we will see unprecedented changes on a global scale as legislation that was rushed through hangs over us like a spectre and people obediently go about their business, terrified of Covid-20. We hope that we will never be too scared to resist. Corona shows us that the system is fucked. Will you kick it while it's down?
5. A sort of warning
by The South Essex Heckler
We've had week after week of wall to wall coverage of the COVID-19 crisis in the media. The question is, how many people are still paying attention to it and how many, for the sake of their sanity, are choosing to switch off from it? If this ever ends, it would be an interesting exercise to conduct research on what effect this barrage of coverage has had on people's mental health. It would also be interesting to see how much this relentless coverage has further undermined people's already shrinking faith in the media.
We've been doing what we can to try and keep up with developments but to be honest, we have days when the stress of trying to discern any meaningful signal from the cacophony of noise is so overwhelming, we simply switch off and try to re-focus the following day. Having said this, a still somewhat scratchy picture is starting to emerge of what we face in the coming months and years as the COVID-19 crisis evolves and morphs into something that will quite possibly be sinister and dystopian.
Fault lines are emerging. On the one hand, there are those who by and large accept the lockdown and the need for it to go on for some considerable time and also, are largely supportive of whatever tracking and monitoring measures have been mooted to ostensibly limit and eventually eliminate the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
On the other hand, there are those who have taken a look at the relentless coverage of the crisis, smelt a rat and are starting to question the narrative we're being fed, particularly when that is being used to justify measures which will restrict our freedom and subject us to more surveillance.
As regular readers of the Heckler may have gathered, we tend towards the latter. We're anarchists and as we're supposed to accept no higher authority than ourselves and those we collectively organise with, it would be downright negligent of us to not question the narrative we're being fed!
Coming right in over the top of this is the threat of more austerity to 'pay' for the money the government has spent in 'dealing' with the COVID-19 crisis. The impact of the last round of austerity is still being felt and has decimated the lives of millions of working class people. Another round of austerity will leave millions with nothing left to lose. That will have consequences as Dr Lisa Mckenzie clearly sets out in this piece: If the UK government brings in a new round of austerity to pay for Covid-19, it'll spark civil unrest that will see cities burn.
So, all of the extra powers the government has conferred upon itself and all of the surveillance and tracking that's coming our way, ostensibly to deal with COVID-19, will certainly come in handy when the shit hits the fan as the next wave of austerity is sent to crush us. Just one example are the powers that could see restrictions or bans on large gatherings for the rest of the year and quite possibly, into 2021. As we've mentioned previously, large gatherings will take in demonstrations and radical/anarchist bookfairs.
Which leaves us with mutual aid work and online propagandising. If you keep your mutual aid work away from digital networks as far as possible, avoid any hierarchy, keep it grassroots and face to face, you'll get by. Those of us who are basically propagandists and because of the dearth of opportunities to physically distribute our material, pretty much have to rely on being online, will be facing a very uncertain future as we slide towards more authoritarianism.
On the subject of restrictions, there are strong rumours that many cafes, pubs and restaurants will not open again until close to Christmas. Bear in mind, many of these establishments face the prospect of going to the wall: Pubs in the UK Might be Closed Until Christmas – If They Survive at All. As we've written before, that's a massive loss of opportunities to meet up with friends for company, drink and/or food.
While those of us whose jobs have survived this massive economic shock will be gradually returning to work, there will be little or no socialising because there won't be anywhere to go. Life will be reduced to work, commute, eat, sleep, commute, work…repeat on loop, ad infinitum. Entertainment will not be the company of friends but whatever is being piped down to our TVs. A diet of fear-mongering so called 'news' designed to keep us frightened and reliant on the authorities to look after us. Sprinkled with a toxic dose of divide and rule to keep us divided, atomised and easier to manipulate and control.
That's for those 'lucky' enough to still be in 'steady' work. For the millions more who'll be on precarious zero hours contracts or unemployed, struggling to find work in an economy that's been gutted and reliant on Universal Credit, life will be grim. For those who are disabled and rely on Universal Credit and a gutted public sector for the support they need, life is already horrendous as they find themselves increasingly thrown to the margins. As it is for the elderly in care homes pretty much unable to access hospital treatment and finding that they're subject to 'Do Not Resuscitate' notices.
We're in a society where some lives are seen as worth considerably less than others – based on how much people can or can't contribute to the 'bottom line'. When that narrative starts to become widely accepted, what is essentially a cull by a combination of neglect and malice starts to become normalised.
The lockdown is tearing us apart from each other. If a loved one has been diagnosed as having COVID-19 before they passed away, not only were you not allowed to be with them in their final hours if they were in hospital, you're not allowed to see their body before cremation. Numbers are strictly limited at the funeral with physical distancing enforced and no wake afterwards. At a point in life where you need to emotional and physical support of family and friends, it's denied to you. People are going to be mentally scarred by experiencing the passing of a loved one in this way for the rest of their lives.
We live opposite a park with play equipment, now taped off. It's been silent since March when the lockdown was brought in. Along with the closure of nurseries and schools, kids have been denied the opportunity to play with each other. Play is not a frivolous activity. From toddlers onwards, play is how kids learn to interact with each other. It's how they learn to negotiate, compromise and co-operate with each other. It's how they learn from mistakes and go on to become fully rounded human beings. Denying kids the opportunity to play for any significant length of time is going to cause long term developmental and mental health issues down the line.
Adolescence is when kids really start to work out who they are. It's when kids quite rightly want to assert their independence and get out into the world. It's when long term friendships are formed. It's when they develop a support network of their peers. Can you imagine what an adolescent will be feeling when all of this is denied to them as they face what is to all intents and purposes, indefinite house arrest? A 'normal' adolescent will find this hard enough. Anyone with mental health issues will find this agonising. Tragically, this has already led to adolescents feeling they have no option but to take their lives.
Lockdown with an abusive partner or parent is a nightmare that doesn't even bear thinking about. It's a potential death sentence. Anyone advocating the continuation of the lockdown really needs to have some thought as to what urgently has to happen to prevent any more tragedies where an individual has been killed by an abusive partner or parent.
As we've written previously, it really does feel like we're being subjected to a massive psychological experiment: A few readings and thoughts on the psychological impact of COVID-19 anxiety and the lockdown. One in which we're simultaneously being subjected to an unprecedented level of fear-mongering and being torn apart from each other. One in which we're being made to feel that the only option of being able to move forwards is to subject ourselves to a loss of autonomy through increased tracking and surveillance, ostensibly for our own good. One in which our hopes and plans for the future have been trashed. One in which we're being atomised and made ever more dependent on the whims of our rulers for our survival. One which has already turned into a fucking nightmare for a lot of people and will do for many more of us.
It seems that when a commentator uses the word 'reset' to describe the social and economic turmoil that's coming our way, the accusations of 'conspiracy theory' start flying around. The last few weeks have been quite revealing in terms of where those accusations have been coming from because a fair number of them have come from people who consider themselves to be 'radical' and a few from so called 'anarchists'. The point is that the global lockdown has caused an economic shock of historic proportions that like previous shocks, will end up seeing more wealth concentrated in fewer hands. As has already been seen in the years since the banking crash of 2008.
So, people who may think they're doing the right thing by supporting restrictions on movement and gatherings, as well as increased tracking and surveillance are actually supporting the creation and enhancement of an apparatus that will completely screw our lives and freedoms. All we ask is that you take a deep breath, take a few steps back, do your best to get some perspective and start to ask some hard questions about what's being done to us. If those questions aren't asked and we continue on the trajectory we're on, for many of us, life will become mere existence as we're effectively plugged into a dystopian matrix. Many may not even survive to experience this.
You may find this hard to believe but we'd really love it if we were wrong on everything we've written above and ended up with a copious amount of egg on our faces. Trust us, we want to wake up and find this has all been a bad dream. The thing is, we wake up every morning, check our news feed, see the deserted playground opposite us, feel that tightening, sickening feeling in our guts and realise this is reality. We've got an all too narrow window of opportunity to act and start to resist what's happening to us. If we don't, not only are we screwed, generations to come will be as well…
6. The rebels will return
by Paul Cudenec
I have always been proud to be an anarchist.
I am proud to have found my way to anarchism some 30 years ago, proud to have learned all I could about anarchism, to have put anarchism into practice, to have met existing anarchists, to have led others towards anarchism, to have written and talked so much about anarchism.
I have lived anarchism and I know that I will die an anarchist.
That is why it pains me to have had to say that there are today some fundamental problems at the very heart of the anarchist movement, problems which reach deep into the very way it thinks and feels.
It saddens me to have had to point out that what presents itself to the outside world as anarchism is often nothing but the empty shell of anarchism, a zombie anarchism, still stumbling ahead with black flag held aloft, but cruelly robbed of its soul.
Needless to say there are plenty of anarchists around the world who are true to the essence of the idea, some of whom have let me know that they share my concerns.
But I have got a horrible feeling that these authentic anarchists are, these days, very much in the minority.
My first inkling that all was not well with anarchism, and indeed the wider social movement to which it belongs, came nearly 19 years ago.
Up until that moment, everything had been going swimmingly well for me. I was inspired and delighted by the seemingly unstoppable tide of the global anti-capitalist revolt of which I formed a tiny part.
I should say here that I wasn't at the great battles of Seattle, Prague or Genoa, although I was in the City of London on June 18, 1999 and at the subsequent Mayday events.
But missing out on all the "summit hopping" didn't make me any less enthusiastic about the great revolution that seemed to be approaching.
My comrades and I made sure the inhabitants of our home town were well aware of what was happening across the world, via leaflets, bulletins, posters, meetings, protests and squatted infoshops.
I am sure I was still feeling as motivated as ever on September 11 2001, as a group of us travelled to London Docklands to protest against the DSEI arms fair.
The demo ground to halt when news started coming in of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and people rushed to the pub to watch the news on TV.
We didn't, of course, understand the implications of what had happened and initially welcomed it as another sign of the impending collapse of the evil empire.
The actual effect of 9/11 on our struggle only became clear to me a few weeks later when I was attending a meeting in the nearby city whose thriving anarchist scene was, to me and my friends, a constant source of inspiration.
Someone who had been very much part of the pink-and-silver-samba-bloc Zeitgeist of the uprising told me that she wouldn't be doing that any more. It didn't seem right, after the terrorist attack, to continue our carnival-cum-war against the USA and its world of capitalism.
I was completely taken aback by this comment. I simply couldn't imagine how anyone – anyone on my side! – could have come to that decision.
Stop fighting against everything that was bad in the world because something else bad had happened, something that wasn't our fault, that was nothing to do with us, that had no bearing on the reasons or the aims of our struggle?
My disappointment resonates now across the years, vibrating with the brave new world of 2020…
Fortunately, this wasn't the end of the movement to which I had attached myself. It morphed seamlessly into the radical wing of the anti-war movement in 2002 and 2003.
The demos were less fun-based now, maybe, but the energy was very much still in evidence, together with a firmness of ethical conviction that was well able to withstand the weapons of mass deception unleashed by Blair, Campbell and Bush.
It wasn't just anarchists who didn't believe their lies, of course. Millions of people rejected their message of fear and took to the streets to say so.
The authorities hadn't quite perfected their narrative projection in those days. They hadn't properly closed down all the possibilities of dissent. But that still didn't stop them from going ahead with the invasion of Iraq!
Another moment of disappointment for me came in the summer of 2005 during the anti-G8 moblisation in Scotland, one which was strangely similiar to that of 2001.
Once again our protests came to a halt, this time because of the 7/7 carnage down in London.
Once again something bad had happened somewhere else, something that wasn't our fault, that was nothing to do with us, that had no bearing on the reasons or the aims of our protest.
Some people were saying we should call off the planned demos. Why? Why would we want to do that?
I recall that we broke down into bario meetings to discuss what to do. Our group was certainly in favour of carrying on the mobilisation and I heard later that the same was true of others.
But, somehow or other, the non-leaders at the Stirling convergence space deemed that the democratic decision had been taken to throw in the towel. Their de-escalation team went into action to defuse all that inconvenient anarchist rage.
They must have diligently continued their work everywhere afterwards, because from that point on, there seemed to be decreasing levels of anger, and indeed, energy, in the UK movement.
The very idea of physically opposing global capitalist summits, which had so inspired me in the past, was now considered hopelessly old hat.
The 2013 Stop The G8 campaign was largely snubbed by what was left of the anarchist movement in the country and the London mobilisation would have been a total flop without the enthusiastic participation of European comrades.
Since then, the movement and its attitudes seem to have become progressively drained of the coherent and powerful worldview which drew me to anarchism as a young man in search of political and philosophical truth.
Every couple of years, a new fashionable obsession seems to have taken a grip, speaking a language I do not know in order to express views which are completely alien to me.
Noam Chomsky has spoken about the "incomprehensible gibberish that comes out of left-wing intellectual movements", which he described as "just impossible to understand". (1)
There are two obvious consequences to this relentless advance of the anarchist scene into an intellectual and political dead-end.
Firstly, the people it recruits will be those who are prepared to uncritically conform to its one-dimensional newthink, who are willing to surrender their own independence of thought and swallow what Chomsky called "the latest version of post-modern this and that".
It now turns out, at this historical moment, that these are exactly the kind of people who are eager to accept whatever version of the truth is presented to them by authority figures.
They are also the kind of people who are eager to condemn and ostracise any old-fashioned anarchists who have the audacity to think for themselves.
I have noticed that, inevitably I suppose, they do so using the same reflexes and language with which they try to impose their dogma on their comrades.
The whole world becomes a "safer space" when they insist that you should not question martial-law lockdown because you could put others at risk.
When you point out that the virus is mainly killing those who are already sick or old, they declare that you are "ablist" and use their familiar shaming and accusatory tone in order to imply that drawing attention to the relatively low mortality rate is the same thing as welcoming the deaths of those who have sadly succumbed.
Someone saw fit to slip into his argument against my condemnation of the clampdown the fact that I am "white", which apparently means my views on absolutely everything are hopelessly polluted by privilege and can happily be ignored by all left-thinking citizens. (He is also "white", by the way).
The guilt-by-association smearing is pushed to the extreme. Whatever view you share which is critical of the panic and the global police state it has spawned turns out to be illegitimate because the person who expressed it is a believer in the wrong kind of freedom (see my previous post), or is an "anti-vaxxer", or uses language or arguments that sound suspiciously alt-right, or has otherwise not earned the blue tick of ideological purity.
Their greatest magical weapon is, of course, the term "conspiracy theorist". No sooner is it brandished, than all need to refute fact or engage logically is dispelled in a great puff of newthink smoke.
The argument has been won without even the need to address it!
The other side of the coin, the corollary to the take-over of the movement by zombie-anarchists, is the question of what has happened to all the born anarchists.
Chomsky's comments came in the context of his concern that young people would be turned away from anarchism by the cult-like ideological fixations that are today so dominant.
It's not even just the young. There are people of all ages who learn a little bit about anarchism, would like to find out more with a view to getting involved and so dip their toes into the water by turning up at an anarchist venue or event.
If they run a mile and never come back, what happens to them? And what happens to those who never even get that far, who get one faint whiff of the stifling intellectual claustrophobia via the internet and realise there is no place for them in that self-righteous and puritan little world?
I think they are still out there. They may or may not think of themselves as anarchists. They may use other labels or none at all. We don't have to give ourselves labels.
But they are still anarchists, natural anarchists, the rebels who would have formed a strong and healthy anti-capitalist movement if it had not been sabotaged from within by the zombies.
They are the anarchists who would have stood up, in anger and en masse, against the coronavirus coup d'état.
These natural anarchists will keep emerging in each generation, because a love of freedom and truth is part of what it means to be human.
They may emerge and rise up now, straight away, in the face of this unprecedented global power grab.
Or it may happen later, when they have had a chance to reorientate themselves and find each other.
But we can be sure that sooner or later they will cast off their muzzles, unplug their chains and try to smash to pieces the slave-system which has stolen everything from them.
Because, after all, as Gustav Landauer (2) put it, anarchy is life. Where there's life there's anarchy. Where there's anarchy there's hope.
1. Noam Chomsky, 'Anarchism, Intellectuals and the State', Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. by Barry Pateman (Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2005), p.217.
2. Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Kuhn, (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), p. 74.
7. The Gates of hell
One name which keeps coming up again and again in the context of the Covid-19 coup is that of billionaire Bill Gates.
Indeed, he himself announced on April 27 that as from that day, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would be focusing its "total attention" on the pandemic.
His allies and apologists are complaining that poor Bill is the victim of "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories" regarding his involvement and influence.
So horribly unfair when he has "donated $250 million toward the crisis, espoused the importance of developing a safe and effective vaccine, and supported the creation of a government-funded manufacturing infrastructure".
But it is undeniable that the Microsoft founder has got his fingers in many a pie.
Researcher Jacob Levich has described Gates' activities as part of a new "global health imperialism".
He says: "Interlocking networks of foundations, foundation-sponsored NGOs, and US government institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — notorious as a "pass-through" for CIA funds — work hand-in-hand in support of imperialism, subverting people-friendly states and social movements by co-opting institutions deemed helpful to US global strategy".
Bill and Belinda
Levich adds: "The Gates Foundation exercises power not only via its own spending, but more broadly through an elaborate network of 'partner organizations' including non-profits, government agencies, and private corporations.
"It orchestrates vast elaborate public-private partnerships – charitable salmagundis that tend to blur distinctions between states, which are at least theoretically accountable to citizens, and profit-seeking businesses that are accountable only to their shareholders".
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dishes out phenomenal amounts of funding every year across the global health sector. In the words of one NGO official quoted by Levich: "You can't cough, scratch your head or sneeze in health without coming to the Gates Foundation".
Some salient facts:
* The Gates Foundation is the World Health Organization's second biggest donor. "This largesse gives him outsized influence over its agenda" notes the Politico website. "Gates' priorities have become the WHO's".
* Gates Foundation cash has been pouring into Imperial College, London, which came up with the scaremongering death toll projections – £63 million in 2020 alone!
* Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the US equivalent of Imperial, received at least $2,876,472 from the Gates Foundation in 2019.
* The UK's chief medical officer Chris Whitty declared himself "delighted" in 2008 when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded £31 million for his consortium's malaria research in Africa. One good turn deservers another.
* The BBC, whose shock-and-awe propaganda has been keeping the UK public paralysed by fear, is funded by the Gates Foundation to the tune of many millions of pounds.
* The Guardian's "Global Development" section declares: "This website is funded by support provided, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation".
* Gavi, the "Vaccine Alliance", received $2,498,750 from the Gates Foundation in 2019. On its website it lists its first partner as the Bill and Gates Foundation, followed by Unicef, the WHO and The World Bank.
* Gates has been described as "a major player in trying to get the world to go digital and ditch cash, especially relevant given his role in the COVID-19 issue".
* The Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason, questioning why pesticides did not feature in a WHO-UNICEF-Lancet report, discovered that many of the 42 listed authors had received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
* Gates wants to create global health "governance" which would "work closely with Western military forces, specifically NATO, in operations targeting the developing world". It would have the power to bypass national safety regulations, suspend constitutional rights and impose surveillance networks.
It is not as if nobody had noticed the evolving Gates global power grab. It has been building up for some time.
In 2016, Global Justice Now warned that it was likely that "Bill Gates, who has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets, has become the single most
influential voice in international development".
It drew attention to the Gates Foundation's "aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media" and the astonishing absence of voices criticising its influence.
"Global Justice Now is concerned that the foundation's influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development, which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the foundation, are unable to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage".
But now, as events accelerate rapidly, lots more critical attention is finally being turned to the Gates empire.
Investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley, for instance, warns that behind the COVID-19 drama is "an entire pharmaceutical complex potentially protecting its own interests over any genuine concerns for the health and welfare of global populations". This involves The Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the British Government.
Gates' key role in advocating for a global vaccination programme is also probed by Eric Wagner in Multipolar Magazin. He examines "ID 2020", which wants to roll out a global "digital identity" system of control and says: "The founding partners of the project are Gates' company Microsoft, the Gates-sponsored vaccination alliance GAVI, the management consultancy Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the oldest and wealthiest foundations in the USA".
And a useful report on the Children's Health Defense site adds: "Globally, roughly 70 COVID-19 vaccines are in various stages of development — a veritable gold rush that will be all the more lucrative since Gates has made sure that the vaccines will be indemnified against lawsuits".
8. Gustav Landauer: an orgrad inspiration
Gustav Landauer died 101 years ago on May 2, beaten and kicked to death by proto-fascists after taking part in the defeated Bavarian Revolution of 1919. Here we share the profile of this important anarchist thinker from the orgrad website.
"Anarchy is life; the life that awaits us after we have freed ourselves from the yoke"
Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) was an important anarchist theorist and key precursor of organic radicalism.
He took part in the Bavarian Revolution at the end of the First World War but, with its collapse, he was arrested and murdered by proto-Nazi Freikorps soldiers in Stadelheim Prison, Munich.
Strongly influenced by Meister Eckhart, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Landauer was very much part of the Romantic anti-capitalist tradition identified by Michael Löwy and has been described as representing "a left-wing form of the völkisch current in thought". (1)
Like his friend Martin Buber, he saw a close link between human interrelationships and the rebirth of community which was needed to put society right.
Landauer also echoed the likes of William Morris and John Ruskin in condemning the "unculture" of industrial capitalist society.
He wrote in 1911: "Progress, what you call progress, this incessant hustle-bustle, this rapid tiring and neurasthenic, short-breathed chase after novelty, after anything new as long as it is new, this progress and the crazy ideas of the practitioners of development associated with it… this progress, this unsteady, restless haste; this inability to remain still and this perpetual desire to be on the move, this so-called progress is a symptom of our abnormal condition, our unculture". (2)
His vision was based on living human communities, social organisms with their own guiding collective spirit or Geist, arising from below and from within. This is very much the idea of the authentic human community, the Gemeinschaft, described by Ferdinand Tönnies.
Landauer was inspired by organic medieval society, which he contrasted with contemporary top-down artificiality.
He wrote: "The state, with its police and all its laws and its contrivances for property rights, exists for the people as a miserable replacement for Geist and for organizations with specific purposes; and now the people are supposed to exist for the sake of the state, which pretends to be some sort of ideal structure and a purpose in itself, to be Geist…
"Earlier there were corporate groups, clans, gilds, fraternities, communities, and they all interrelated to form society. Today there is coercion, the letter of the law, the state". (3)
The state combined with industrial society to destroy all authentic collective spirit, argued Landauer.
Writes Charles Maurer: "The most obvious sign of the absence of Geist was for Landauer the plight of the industrial workers.
"Separated from the earth and its products and spiritually isolated from each other despite the closeness of their living conditions, they become victims of alcohol, disease, and poverty.
"The relationship between worker and employer becomes completely dehumanized through capitalism, technology, and the state". (4)
Landauer bitterly opposed Marxists for remaining trapped in this mechanistic mindset and for failing to lead a deep and effective resistance to industrial capitalism.
Russell Berman and Tim Luke explain that, for Landauer, Marxism was itself "part of the problem posed by industrialization". (5)
They add: "Marxism, despite its revolutionary appearance, functions in fact as an impediment to socialism. In the light of Landauer's critique, nineteenth century scientific socialism ceases to appear as a radical critique of the status quo. Rather, behind its revolutionary pretenses, it buttresses the development of capitalist structures". (6)
In his booklet For Socialism, Landauer was vehemently outspoken against the Marxists who had taken control of the socialist movement of which he considered himself a part.
He described their dogma as "the plague of our times and the curse of the socialist movement" (7) and bemoaned "the grotesque wrongness of their materialist conception of history" (8) in which they reduced everything to "what they call economic and social reality". (9)
Landauer also hinted at his disquiet over the growing influence of Marxism, and its modes of thinking, on the anarchist movement.
He refered disparagingly to "the syndicalists and the anarcho-socialists, recently so-called by a pitiful misuse of two noble names" as the Marxists' "brothers" (10) and specifically extended his condemnation to all Marxists "whether they call themselves Social Democrats or anarchists". (11)
Still today, Landauer's rich and powerful brand of anarchism is sometimes dismissed as "mystical" and therefore unacceptable to the shallow modern industrial world view adopted by too many so-called anarchists.
Like Constantin von Monakow, Landauer extended his concept of the organic to a cosmic level, regarding the universe as a living creature with a collective soul and writing that "the psyche [das Seelenhafte] in the human being is a function or manifestation of the infinite universe". (12)
Landauer's use of terms like Geist and Seelenhafte forms an inherent part of his anarchism, flowing naturally from the rest of his philosophy.
He was opposed to all private land ownership, declaring: "All ownership of things, all land-ownership is in reality ownership of men. Whoever withholds the earth from others, from the masses, forces these others to work for him. Private ownership is theft and slave-holding". (13)
He was equally opposed to the power of the state favoured by his Marxist rivals, which destroyed authentic and organic society inspired by the collective Geist.
The idea of Geist also fed into Landauer's ideas regarding revolution, along with his related concept of Wahn, a kind of motivating resonance which could bring about sudden radical change.
He explained: "Wahn is not only every goal, every ideal, every belief in a sense of purpose of life and the world: Wahn is every banner followed by mankind; every drumbeat leading mankind into danger; every alliance that unites mankind and creates from a sum of individuals a new structure, an organism". (14)
Landauer said the spark for revolution was always the stupidity, brutality or weakness of rulers, but that "the people, the thinkers, the poets are a powder keg, loaded with spirit and the power of creative destruction". (15)
The energy of Wahn would ensure that this powder keg ignited: "There is no need to fear a lack of revolutionaries: they actually arise by a sort of spontaneous generation – namely when the revolution comes.
"The voice of the spirit is the trumpet that will sound again and again and again, as long as men are together. Injustice will always seek to perpetuate itself; and always as long as men are truly alive, revolt against it will break out". (16)
Anarchism, said Landauer, was "a collective name for transformative ambitions" (17) and its role was to encourage Wahn and help create the resonance of revolution.
In this way it could rid the human social organism of the stifling restrictions imposed by property, the state and industrialism and allow it to breathe and flourish in a free and natural way.
As Landauer famously declared: "Anarchy is life; the life that awaits us after we have freed ourselves from the yoke". (18)
Video link: Soviet Republic of Bavaria (2 mins)
1. Russell Berman & Tim Luke, 'Introduction', Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, trans. by David J Parent, (St Louis: Telos Press, 1978), p. 8.
2. Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, pp. 35-36.
3. Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Berlin: 2nd ed, 1919), pp. 19-20, cit. Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), p. 93.
4. Maurer, pp. 108-109.
5. Berman & Luke, 'Introduction', For Socialism, p. 10.
6. Berman & Luke, Introduction, For Socialism, p. 11.
7. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 32.
8. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 123.
10. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 57.
12. Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Cologne: 2d ed, 1923) p. 7, cit. Maurer, p. 69.
13. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 128.
14. Landauer, Beginnen: Aufsätze über Sozialismus, ed. by Martin Buber, Cologne, 1924, p. 16, cit. Maurer, p. 92.
15. Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Kuhn, (Oakland: PM Press, 2010) p. 170.
16. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 82 & p. 130.
17. Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings, p. 304.
18. Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings, p. 74.
A wave of direct action has broken out against 5G, the central infrastructure of what some are calling the Fourth Industrial Repression. Masts have been torched in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands, with "conspiracy theories" inevitably being blamed by corporate media. Meanwhile, a study has emerged from Spain pointing to a very clear geographical relationship between "coronavirus outbreaks" and the presence of 5G networks. English version here.
An international day of action against mobile phones has been called for June 2O-21 2020. A new organization called End Cellphones Here on Earth (ECHOEarth) announces that its mission is "to end the root cause of the wireless web that is punching holes in our atmosphere and bathing us all in radiation".
Three Days Against Techno-Sciences is the title of an event to be staged in Italy in July. This is described as "an informal, convivial and international opportunity for discussion and reflection among individuals and organisations engaged in building an analysis and a critique of what we may call the technoworld". Contact info@resistenzealnanomondo.org
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has spoken out against the new covid-fascism. He wrote: "The disproportionate reaction to what according to the CNR is something not too different from the normal flus that affect us every year is quite blatant. It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation".
"The truth is that all that is living, all living organisms, the cells that comprise them and the ecosystems they exist within, are the sum total of our individual life". Beyond the Dark Horizon is a green anarchist review from so-called Australia and can be found here.
"Between the SDGs, the WEF's calls for a 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', and the rise of carbon-markets and 'natural capital', it's clear that ecomodernism is not just a buzzword for naive ex-hippies and dodgy PR agents; it is the ideological framework for an emerging green technocracy. A conservation-industrial complex, if you will". Android Wolves, Electric Sheep: Ecomodernism and The Rise of the Green Technocracy is the first article on a brand new blog, Symbiotic Culture.
Planet of the Humans is a new film by Jeff Gibbs, in collaboration with Michael Moore, and it is currently free to view. Like the Wrong Kind of Green website, we have reservations over its emphasis on population, rather than consumption, as a key issue, but this remains a splendid demolition of the climate capitalists' scam of selling us their industrial solutions to an industrial problem.
A very thorough analysis by Iain Davis on the Off-Guardian site presents evidence "which strongly suggests the State and the MSM, adhering to a globalist agenda, have colluded to mislead the public into believing the COVID 19 threat is far greater than it actually is". A must-read.
"This is a war. Not a war on a pandemic but a war on the people. This is corporate authoritarianism. This is fascism. We are nothing more than torture victims at the hands of these emotional terrorists". Quarantyranny is a remarkable 30-minute video from the Book of Ours team in the USA.
"Perhaps we've decided that freedom no longer has value. It would seem that safety has taken primacy in the left's discourse in recent years". So writes Lorenzo Raymond in a April 23 article on the Diversity of Tactics website.
"We must recognize we live in a capitalist economic system that serves capital first and foremost", warns investigative journalist Cory Morningstar. The World Economic Forum is using "influencers" such as David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and Jane Goodall to push us into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the monetization of nature, in lockstep with the deployment of central bank digital currency. She adds: "Covid19 is the conduit to the #4IR now in full motion. As people come to terms with what is being forced upon humanity, we will soon regret that we did not unite to oppose to draconian lockdowns and expanding surveillance that will serve to protect/insulate ruling classes from revolt".
We were all set to share with readers a clear, level-headed and professional exposure of the reality behind the virus scare by doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Bakersfield, California. But then we learned that, having notched up 4.3 million views, it had been removed by YouTube for violating its "community standards". Now why would that be? The original link was here, someone put it up again here, and it should still be available here and here…
A fake-left infiltrator of the socialist scene, spreading smears against anyone standing up to neoliberalism and imperialism… What has been recently unveiled in Germany very much chimes with the Labour Leaks scandal in the UK. Unmasking a Wikipedia propagandist is a fascinating interview with Dirk Pohlmann (pictured) of Wikihausen.de by US journalist Helen of desTroy.
Modern Medicine, the New World Religion is a book by Olivier Clerc which argues that the medical establishment has become the government's ally, as the Catholic Church was in the past. 'Charlatans' are prosecuted today, as 'heretics' once were, and dogmatism rules out promising medical theories.
Smartphones are so out of date these days. Imagine, some people might not actually carry them around with them every minute of the day! How would the authorities know where you are so as to keep you safe from terrorists, viruses and disinformation? But don't worry, you can get yourself microchipped! Apparently this is already catching on in Sweden, as this video report (and this) explain. This is the "new normal" they want us to swallow.
Acorn quote: "Mechanization and industrialization have rapidly transformed the planet, exploding ecosystems and human communities with monoculture, industrial degradation, and mass markets. The world now corresponds more closely to the prophetic warnings of primal peoples than to the hollow advertising claims of the industrial system: the plants disappearing and the animals dying, the soils denuded along with the human spirit, vast oceans poisoned, the very rain turned corrosive and deadly, human communities at war with one another over diminishing spoils – and all poised on the brink of an even greater annihilation at the push of a few buttons within reach of stunted, half-dead head-zeks in fortified bunkers. Civilization's railroad leads not only to ecocide, but to evolutionary suicide".
David Watson
Posted in Anarchism, organic radicalism, The AcornTagged 5G, anarchism, anti-capitalism, Bill Gates, capitalism, coronavirus, coronazis, Cory Morningstar, Demokratischer Widerstand, fascism, france, Germany, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, Gustav Landauer, neoliberalism, orgrad, resistance, technology, The Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, UK, USA, vaccines3 Comments
Anarchists and the coronavirus
Posted on April 3, 2020 April 3, 2020 by winter oak
Moments of crisis like the one we are currently experiencing can allow us to see through the surface of our world and grasp with greater clarity some hitherto hidden truths. It is with this in mind that we present this provisional and far-from-comprehensive analysis of the reaction to the coronavirus situation from anarchist and left-libertarian outlets.
Striking back
Criticism of capitalism
We are not "all in it together"
Against the police state
No to the "new normal"
Limits of the critique
Embracing the narrative
Rejecting "conspiracy theories"
The anarchist spirit
1. Mutual aid
Mutual aid features prominently in the anarchist response to the current situation.
Here is, after all, a perfect opportunity to put theory into practice and to show that acting together, by and for ourselves, is more effective and empowering than waiting passively for the state to save us.
There is also the possibility that the self-help community networks built up now could evolve into the bases of future revolutionary activity.
"Longstanding anarchist forms of organization and security have a lot to offer when it comes to surviving the pandemic and the panic it is causing".
"Within communities, mutual aid has been proven as the only way to get through the privations of lockdown and the fear of serious or fatal illness. Communities have acted quickly to share basic supplies and resources".
"We are seeing Mutual Aid groups spring up in local communities across the UK as crisis sparks compassion in many who want to help out and reach our most vulnerable, our isolated, the many left behind by successions of uncaring governments".
"Social solidarity and mutual aid pandemic care is blossoming in communities large and small".
See also here, here and here.
There has been occasional reflection on the limits of such an approach, asking how we can ensure that mutual aid networks do not simply turn into temporary means of helping people adapt to a situation they maybe ought not to be adapting to…
"If our capacity to care for one another fails to be instantiated in qualitatively different forms, they may very well simply be reintegrated into novel expressions of privation, dispossession, and precaritization in whatever new legal and economic systems that may attempt to establish themselves".
2. Striking back
Anarchists have also been vocal in their support for rent strikes, industrial action and prison revolts.
"With millions of people now wondering how they are going to make ends meet and pay rent, let alone survive the current epidemic, a new wave of struggles is breaking out across the social terrain. Prisoners and detention center detainees are launching hunger strikes as those on the outside demand that they be released, tenants are currently pushing for a rent strike starting on April 1st, the houseless are taking over vacant homes in Los Angeles, and workers have launched a series of wildcat strikers, sick-outs, and job actions in response to being forced onto the front lines of the pandemic like lambs to the slaughter".
"The first wave of this countermovement are the worldwide prison revolts, which now have spread to almost all continents. Simultaneous revolts in two dozen Italian prisons (with more than 20 dead prisoners), a wave of rebellion also in the prisons and internment camps for refugees in France, in Colombia the wings are burning, in Bogota alone more than 20 prisoners die in the process. Uprisings also in Argentina, on the African continent…"
"Around the country, as people lose their jobs and wonder how they will pay their rent or mortgage, the words rent strike are being heard more and more".
"As renters and mortgagors we need to pledge, en-masse, that we will collectively withhold all rental and mortgage payments while the COVID-19 pandemic requires vulnerable people to isolate without security of income and housing".
"Getting free from rent (which is to say, theft) and debt amid a full-blown pandemic crisis seemed like the best possible way to start. We believe that the simple tactics of refusal (rent strike, sick-outs, redistribution of resources, mutual aid) are essential to getting through this situation. We hope the rent strike spreads. We have the best chance of survival and victory together".
3. Criticism of capitalism
Criticism of the capitalist system is obviously very relevant today, not least the massive corporate handouts being justified by the virus.
"The corona crisis may have smashed stock markets and halted economic growth but for some it's a great business opportunity".
Attention has also been drawn to the "the short-selling millionaires bet against the shares of companies in corona-hammered sectors: for example, travel companies, restaurants, and real estate investment".
Anarchists are pointing out that, as ever, the fall guys for these latest capitalist scams are the people with the least wealth and (therefore) power.
"This crisis is being paid for by those who have an occasional or precarious job, currently without income and without any certainty of getting their jobs back after the epidemic has ended".
"The casual way in which workers have either been discarded without wages and adequate redundancy measures or exposed to further risk, depending on what best suited the needs and tendencies of the employing class".
Part of this criticism of the capitalism system involves highlighting its failure to adequately fund public health services. Anarchists point to "the British government's own systematic destruction of the NHS" and to "unnecessary cuts to our public services".
We have witnessed, they say, "over a decade of cuts to the NHS and other front-line services".
4. We are not "all in it together"
The myth of national unity is also being widely challenged by anarchists.
Some have in fact used the term "we're all in this together", in the context of mutual aid, while others suggest a need to be careful with the use of this kind of system-friendly language…
"It is a common tactic of states and capital to invoke the 'national interest' and 'we're all in it together' as a means of diverting attention from the class war".
"A big part of the state's narrative is unity — the idea that we need to come together as a society around a singular good that is for everyone… We can begin rejecting it by reminding ourselves that the interests of the rich and powerful are fundamentally at odds with our own".
This sometimes extends to a general warning about falling into the trap of obeying the men in white coats in the name of a "common good" as defined by authority (see the famous Milgram Experiment).
"Calls to surrender our own agency and to have faith in experts are already common on the left, especially in the climate change movement, and extending that to the virus crisis is a small leap".
5. Against the police state
Unsurprisingly, anarchists and libertarian leftists are unenthusiastic about the police-state measures currently being rolled out across much of the world.
There are powerful warnings against "power grabs that capitalists and state authorities are preparing to carry out".
"Let's be clear: totalitarianism is no longer a threat situated in the future. The measures being implemented around the world are totalitarian in every sense of the word. We are seeing unilateral government decrees imposing total travel bans, 24-hour-a-day curfews, veritable martial law, and other dictatorial measures… Worst of all, all this is occurring with the tacit consent of the general population. The authorities can do virtually anything in the name of protecting our health—right up to killing us".
"It will not be a surprise if the rhetoric of 'responsibility' will be used to further refine the disciplinary and social control mechanisms, to further restrict freedom of movement, to further restrict the freedom to strike and demonstrate, which is now in fact suspended".
Diverse voices are condemning "a lockdown that for many people in the country is probably the most drastic measure disruptive to normal life since the end of WW2".
"Beware of the state! A left that demands 'stricter enforcement of social distancing' from the state is an enemy of the working class, full stop".
6. No to the "new normal"
Looking beyond the immediate measures being taken to "control the virus", there is also criticism of the "new normal" which seems to be on its way, a post-coronavirus world of "biosecurity" and virtual "connectivity" which looks very much like the beginnings of a nightmare high-tech dystopia.
"We're accelerating into a future in which a digitally connected privileged class performs virtual labor in isolation while a massive police state protects them from an expendable underclass that takes most of the risks. In this context, there is bound to be revolt. It is likely that we will see some social reforms aimed at placating the population—at least temporary ones to mitigate the impact of the pandemic—but that they will arrive alongside the ever-increasing violence of a state that no one can imagine doing without, insofar as it is misunderstood as the protector of our health".
"This outbreak is the dream and an experimental laboratory for the expansion of surveillance and control and the enforcement of power".
"Once the pandemic is finally over, we don't want to see a permanent shift to cashless payment and the eventual elimination of cash".
Among the details of this "new normal" now emerging are "terrifying" plans for a mobile phone app that tracks people to check if they have been in contact with someone testing positive for the virus – initially optional, this may become obligatory in the post-crisis smart-fascist world.
7. Limits of the critique
We should also note what is generally absent from anarchist analysis. Fortunately, there is no take-up of the eco-fascist line that "humanity is the virus" or that the coronavirus represents nature's "revenge" against humankind.
But unfortunately, there is also little critical questioning of the reality of the coronavirus "threat" which is being so ably manipulated by the capitalist system to push its own agendas.
This is despite mounting evidence of something extremely fishy going on, presented by intelligent sources like the Off Guardian, Cory Morningstar, Club des Cordeliers, Helen of desTroy and Charlotte Gracias.
It increasingly looks as if the coronavirus scare has been whipped up as cover for a power grab by the network of capitalists promoting the Fourth Industrial Revolution of 5G, smart meters, the internet of things, nanotechnology and AI.
These are broadly the "climate capitalists" who have been flying the false flag of environmentalism to engineer massive "emergency" state subsidies for their "exponentially" lucrative investment projects.
For more info on all this see our "climate capitalists" library. For coronavirus updates see Coronavirus Thoughtcrime and Acorn 56.
Climate capitalist Marc Benioff
There is not a complete lack of questioning of the coronavirus narrative in the broader world of the libertarian left:
"Our current fear is an enemy to our developing and maintaining a critical perspective. The more we are frightened by graphs, by deaths, the more we are likely to submit to whatever we are told will keep us safe".
"In New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, the number of virus cases have been falling. This real news, which should reassure the isolated, is buried in daily media scaremongering as an effective police state is declared. Beware the new virus of unleashed authority".
"Currently, the count goes so far that, for example in Italy, corona tests are still carried out after death. If there is a disease, the person is counted as 'corona dead', although it is unclear whether the person died of the CoronaVirus or merely – incidentally – infected by it".
However, it seems that most fellow anarchists feel obliged to respect the prevalent social taboo. They insist that they are "not downplaying the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic" and are anxious to distance themselves from the dreaded "conspiracy theorists".
Analysis of the way the crisis is being instrumentalised usually stops at the point of the "opportunism" of state and capital.
Thus it is perfectly fine to point out the "nationalists and authoritarians intent on using this opportunity to set new precedents for state intervention and control", but any suggestion that there is something more dodgy going on is generally considered beyond the anarcho-pale.
Even someone who insists that "we need to break free of the narrative we are given" feels able to go on to speak, a few lines later, of "the benefits of an infection-control protocol" and limits the possibilities of narrative-challenge to merely "being critical of the ways the state is using this moment for its own ends".
8. Embracing the narrative
It's never been cooler to mask up
Because they accept at face value the narrative around coronavirus being pumped out by the corporate media, too many anarchists end up reinforcing and amplifying the fearmongering message.
They repeat, without the ideological-distancing practice of using quote marks, the language of their enemies. We are left in no doubt that "the global pandemic is upon us".
For these non-questioning anarchists, there is no denying "the reality of the coronavirus pandemic", "the exponential spreading of illness" or the fearful notion that "we're all at risk of Covid-19".
As "the world continues to struggle to contain this virus", "people are dying and getting ill in large numbers", they remind us.
"Unless everyone cooperates, the virus exponentially spreads".
Some are actually opposed to ending of police-state lockdown restrictions – "a move which threatens to undo anything that has been achieved by social distancing and attempts at quarantine".
Others warn that "the virus could resume spreading exponentially again as soon as the measures are suspended"and helpfully provide a link to the controversially alarmist modelling from Imperial College in London.
The epidemic (rather than the response it has triggered) is regarded "a national and international emergency" in which "human life is presently threatened on a planetary scale".
Some anarchists have been uncritically relaying alarmist predictions from the WHO and the Center for Health Security of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, linking to government sites and even declaring that "we want to help the government in the fight against this pandemic"!
Others not only declare that "we are facing a pernicious virus that terrifies the world" but add that "watching the news has become an essential activity to get through the day".
9. Rejecting "conspiracy theories"
It is unsettling to note that there are comrades who not only insist on absorbing and regurgitating corporate propaganda, but also join the likes of the sinister "Center for Countering Digital Hate" in a mission "to combat fake news and conspiracy theories".
They react hysterically and irrationally to the new heretics of the day – termed "Covid Deniers" by the CCDH, which incidentally played a key role in smearing former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with alleged "anti-semitism".
Drawing the public's attention to official statistics, or to the fact that the UK government itself has declared the coronavirus mortality rate to be "low", is regarded as the spreading of irresponsible "misinformation".
The accounts that are spreading this (what I consider dangerous #misinformation) are the following: @frackfree_eu @compromisedngos @elleprovocateur @WinterOakPress @OffGuardian0
To be clear: I do not think they are evil or intentionally causing harm. I consider them comrades.
— Toni (@ToniBashy) March 20, 2020
A sceptical attitude to the tsunami of fear-mongering is interpreted, bizarrely, as a eugenist desire to wipe out old or vulnerable people: anyone who suggests that the coronavirus death toll has been massively over-hyped is held to be somehow morally responsible for the deaths of those who have succumbed.
Retweeting the thoroughly lucid coronavirus analysis of Peter Hitchens is considered a thoughtcrime because his general politics are not of the left.
Anyone questioning the official line risks being smeared with "right-wing" or even "fascist" associations, even when they are exposing a manipulation which is imposing a very real form of fascism on much of the global population.
This is, of course, a classic authoritarian liberal gaslighting technique, as outlined here.
So why this head-in-the-sand refusal on the part of so many anarchists to even consider the possibility that the risks from coronavirus have been massively and deliberately exaggerated, let alone to examine what might lie behind such deceit?
There are several possibilities. One of these is that they are making a tactical or strategic decision. In order to make their message understandable to the general public, it has to be be based on something which the public recognises as reality.
Rather than trying to tell people that everything they have been told is a lie, it is more effective to go along with the reality of the "danger", but to point out that bosses are sacrificing workers to health risks.
"We believe that large sections of the working class will have clearly seen how the boss class sees them as expendable, valued only as a wealth producer (for them)".
The argument about neoliberal cuts to the health service also involves no contradiction of the mainstream message. Indeed, suggesting that the risks from the virus have been overhyped would undermine this line of attack.
However, accepting the official narrative as a strategic ploy would be not only dishonest, but would risk undermining long-term anarchist credibility.
Another, ostensibly more plausible, possibility is that these people simply do not accept the dissenting narrative, being firmly convinced that the fear is justified.
However, the panicked and emotive tone of their responses (including a wave of blocking on Twitter) suggests that there is something else in play here, namely fear.
There is the fear being whipped up over the virus, of course, and with that the fear of being seen by society as a whole not to be respectful of other people's concerns and well-being. But beyond that there is the fear of being rejected by other anarchists.
"The intense fear and pressure to conform coming from many who would normally be our allies makes even finding space to discuss the crises on different terms a challenge".
In particular there is the fear of being considered a "conspiracy theorist". We have questioned in the past why this anxiety is so prevalent in our circles and seems now to be so deeply embedded in anarchist culture.
People seem uneasy even talking about well-documented historical phenomena like the "Gladio" network of NATO-sponsored terrorists in late 20th century Europe.
Any such reflections concerning more recent "terrorist" atrocities are considered completely out of bounds. Even investigations of contemporary capitalist manipulations, by "green" capitalists or Big Pharma, are rejected as "conspiracy theory" by people who nevertheless lay claim to opposing capitalism…
Beginning with the work of US intellectual Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s, the industrial-military complex has worked hard to create an intellectual climate in which analysis of its nefarious activities is considered illegitimate.
Those anarchists who have fallen for this trick are, per se, victims of ideological manipulation.
It would be very helpful if the anarchist milieu could assess whether further manipulation has taken place to the point where its capacity for collective critical thinking has been severely compromised – disabled, even – by state-corporate interference.
But, of course, it won't do that because any such reflection has been rendered impossible in advance by that very same "conspiracy theory" taboo.
10. The anarchist spirit
Happily, this worrying drift into conformity with state-capitalist agendas is countered by the nature of anarchism itself.
The anarchist idea remains intact and independent of those who claim to speak on its behalf at any given point. It is instrinsically opposed to all physical or psychological submission to authority.
"The anarchist does not merely stray outside the framework of acceptable thinking as carefully assembled by the current system – she smashes it to pieces and dances on the wreckage".
As the weeks pass, disagreements over the severity and extent of the coronavirus, about the means by which we arrived at this new point in history, will become less relevant.
Instead, the sole issue will be how to come together to fight and organise in the context of whatever it is that is facing us – whether a collapsing economic order ripe for toppling or a totalitarian new fascist order.
The fighting spirit of anarchism, its life-affirming call to revolt, to risk everything for our freedom, is still much in evidence as we write.
Some anarchists are already calling for grassroots "non-party political insurgent movements, fighting for revolutionary change", declaring that "alternatives must emerge from below".
And there is a growing feeling that these strange "virus" days herald the beginning of a battle of monumental proportions.
"Let's rebel in the streets, in the prisons, in the camps, like the prisoners of 30 Italian prisons, who, faced with the ban on visits imposed on them by Covid-19, rebelled, devastated, burned and in some cases even escaped their cages".
"Rioting and fighting back is the only real solution, not staying in your house and being afraid. The supermarkets and the other companies which are profiting massively from this 'crisis', – which is solely the responsibility of the structures of power and capital-, are valid and understandable targets for the nihilistic and anti-social rage against this situation. The lies of the media tell us that we are 'all in this together' but it's clear that we are not, and never will be. It's the fight of the young people and the irreducibles against this sick system and this is but one drop from the storm to come".
Posted in Anarchism, organic radicalism, The AcornTagged capitalism, Climate capitalists, coronavirus, Cory Morningstar, fascism, resistance7 Comments
Posted on March 29, 2020 by winter oak
We don't want your fascist future!
Fighting the coronazi clampdown
5G: resistance starts here
This is our planet, not theirs
When the walls of Babylon close in
Gerrard Winstanley: an orgrad inspiration
1. We don't want your fascist future!
We don't want your "new normal".
We don't want the "smart" fascist future you have been trying to sell us for so long and which you are now trying to force upon us with lies, fear and all your infrastructures of control.
We don't want to be little submissive cogs in your machineries of greed and exploitation.
We don't want to be told how to live and what to think.
We don't want to be locked up indoors at your majesties' pleasure, only allowed out of our cells to labour for your profit.
We don't want to be distanced, isolated and alienated.
We don't want to be the individually-wrapped slices of human flesh on which you gorge.
We didn't want your first industrial revolution – when you threw us off our land and caged us in your dark satanic mills – and we certainly don't want your fourth.
We don't want to be cut off from the living world and confined to your sterile fake reality.
We don't want to be policed and preached at by your drones and robots.
We don't have to ask your permission to enjoy the world in which we belong – we will do so whenever, however and with whomever we choose.
We are not prepared to be patronised, humiliated or microchipped.
We refuse to plug ourselves meekly into the matrix of your total control.
We want you to bear in mind that you do not own us, that you cannot buy us and you will never control us.
We want you to know that we are free and will remain so unto the grave.
We want you to realise that when our time comes, we will make you pay for what you are doing to us.
And we want to remind you that there are very many more of us than of you.
Coronavirus thoughtcrime
The politics of fear
2. Fighting the coronazi clampdown
A global resistance is beginning to form up against the coronazi clampdown.
Reports the Enough is Enough website: "The first wave of this counter-movement are the worldwide prison revolts, which now have spread to almost all continents".
There have been simultaneous revolts in two dozen Italian prisons (with more than 20 prisoners dead as a result), at least two riots in Belgian jails and a wave of rebellion in the prisons and internment camps for refugees in France.
Jails are also burning in Colombia – in Bogota alone more than 20 prisoners died in the process.
Hundreds of prisoners escaped from four semi-open prisons in São Paulo state in the south-east of Brazil after Easter prison holidays were cancelled and restrictions on visitors tightened because of coronavirus.
And prisoners rioted and set fire to part of a prison complex in northeastern Thailand on Sunday March 29.
Enough Is Enough report that there have been further uprisings in Argentina and in Africa.
Meanwhile, in the giant continent-sized prison previously known as Europe, French authorities have reportedly had to abandon attempts to impose the crackdown in some poorer suburbs.
Brutal and exaggerated harassment by racist cops prompted a feisty reaction, with police ambushed and atttacked by large groups and cars torched.
In Brussels, police trying to impose "social distancing" sparked a riot in the Schaerbeek district on Friday March 27.
In Sicily, cops with batons and guns have moved in to protect supermarkets after looting by locals who could no longer afford food.
In Panama, central America, which is under a coronavirus "state of emergency", people also came together in the spirit of mutual aid on Saturday, March 28, and looted a supermarket.
Resistance looks set to spread as the clampdown continues, even if the authorities take the êmergency step of closing down much of the internet.
If the coronazis have not abandoned their attempt to imprison humanity by the end of April, a historic day of worldwide revolt could well lie ahead.
May Day is always an occasion for coming together to commemorate not only the political struggle of the people against the ruling elite, but also the annual resurgence of the force of life itself.
We don't need emails, messaging or the internet to be collectively aware of the potential significance of Friday May 1 2020.
Neoliberalism is the new fascism
Liberalism: the two-faced tyranny of wealth
3. 5G: resistance starts here
Report by Jan Goodey
In the current malaise regarding the health of nations, calls are growing for 5G to be SWITCHED OFF.
Wuhan, the epicenter of the SAR-Cov-2 virus which causes the killer disease COVID-19, was China's first smart 5G city and location of its first 5G highway.
The epidemic was first discovered when 8,000 high 5G antennae were being built all over the city.
Royal Society of Medicine member Alan Cooke is in no doubt about the causal links. He told The Acorn: "If there's any doubt about health issues then it should be stopped. It's too late after there's already been exposure. The most vulnerable people are … the elderly, but everyone is at potential risk.
"The World Health Organisation (WHO) class microwave technology as a possible 2b carcinogen on the same level as lead, engine exhaust and the pesticide, DDT.
"It's absolutely diabolical what is happening with all this. We are the guinea pigs".
The predominant cause of death from this coronavirus is pneumonia. Pneumonia is known to be exacerbated by the deleterious effects of 2/3/4/5G radiation and Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) via Voltage -gated calcium channels (VGCCs).
According to Cooke, Lloyds of London refused to insure Telecoms companies over the health risks more than five years ago. There have been no safety tests with 5G and if you think the closest thing, we have to it frequency-wise is actually a US military grade weapon nicknamed 'the Growler' then it's hardly surprising.
All this as the telecoms and utility industries rake in huge profits from the Western indulgence with the 'internet of things' provided by 5G as well as the riches accruing from smart meter roll out.
Resistance is growing with groups springing up all over Europe concerned about health dangers and lack of public consultation.
Fifth generation cellular network technology (5G) transmits on a higher radio frequency than 4G, and in smaller millimeter waves which can interfere with small cells, like those in human and animal bodies as well as plants.
Stop 5G groups in the UK stretch from Brighton to the West Country to Waterford near Dublin. Ayse Leflef from Waterford said: "We raise awareness about this – about 40 people were on our last protest. All the different active groups around Ireland protest on the last Saturday of every month."
In Glastonbury, which became the first in the UK to ban the development of 5G, the Mayor, Cllr Denise Michell said: "We are standing up and saying enough is enough – other councils may wish to follow our lead. 5G is being slipped through underhandedly and I think it's very dangerous. The precautionary principle is key – we are postponing it until our working group finds out more about the risks."
And worldwide people are waking up to this – in California 16 5G masts were blocked in 2019; the Polish PM has voiced his opposition; and in Geneva and Brussels 5G is on hold over radiation safety standard fears.
In May 2019, scientists and doctors from 40 countries appealed to the World Health Organisation for a moratorium and for wireless to be reassigned as a Group 1 carcinogen, the same level as arsenic and asbestos. France, Cyprus and Canada have already banned the use of wireless technology in schools.
In the home, smart meters, which are being installed in UK homes as we speak, use the same wireless technology, pulsing out yet more radio frequency (RF) radiation into enclosed spaces.
"Smart Meters are the biggest swindle since time began but an absolute gold mine for the utility companies. There are absolutely no benefits to the consumer whatsoever," said a spokesperson for the group, Smart Meters Health Problems UK.
"They are not compulsory and there is no plan for them to become compulsory by 2020. The initial roll out is costing us £12bn, that's £420 per household, Smart Meters only live for 5 years. My analogue is 55 years and still going strong.
"Energy Suppliers can switch our power off remotely by the flick of a switch with an analogue meter they have to go through a legal process to gain entry to your property.
"There are [also] privacy concerns. Smart meters are computers that can be programmed to record everything we do and pass that info on to the utility. Utilities will make more money from selling our data than selling us fuel."
Public Health England maintains that wireless technology is safe and points you to regulations regarding safe radiation levels.
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090430163222/
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publichealth/Healthprotection/DH_4089500
Smart Meters Health problems UK:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SmartMetersHealthProblemsUK/?ref=group_header
Wireless Awareness
https://ukradiation.co.uk/
STOP 5G UK
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stop5GUK/
Jan Goodey writes on environmental matters and is a regular contributor to the Ecologist online
4. This is our planet, not theirs
On Friday February 28, activists from the Green Anti-capitalist Front courageously tried to storm the London Stock Exchange (above), causing it to be locked down for some four hours. They asked us to publish this statement, in which they call for "a new kind of environmental movement" which harnesses popular anger against the capitalists who are destroying our world.
At the Rally Against Capital, the Green Anti-capitalist Front wanted to show that it's not regular working people but the rich, the bankers and those who protect them who are causing climate change.
We led our demonstration to the London Stock Exchange, a centre of finance and capital for some of the most destructive companies on the planet, to attempt to disrupt some of their capitalist system.
We feel that what many environmental movements of the past have lacked is a direction of anger towards the capitalists, the rich and their industries of destruction and GAF London want to be a part of the new kind of environmental movement, a movement that will not only help activists but also regular working people in the struggle against oppression.
As per usual, this demonstration showed how aggressively the police will attempt to protect the rich and their property against the people, using fists, batons and choke-holds to stop us gaining entry to the building.
The climate movement will not get anywhere without radical direct action; this can sometimes be hard, dangerous and painful but we are thankful that we had medics from Queercare and a Legal Observer from the Activist Court Aid Brigade (ACAB) to assist GAF during the day.
We hope this action will inspire others to take action against capitalism and show that the people will not let the planet go down without a fight.
This is our planet, not theirs. They're about to start realising that whether they like it or not. Let's show them – get involved.
More info and GAF manifesto available here: https://greenanticapitalist.org/
5. When the walls of Babylon close in
Acorn reader Gilly Roots sent us this song in honour of the Gilets Jaunes in France.
Out! Out! Macron! Out!
It's a thin veil of LIBERTY,
That masks a lack of freedom.
We know there's no autonomy
Where we live in dread of a system
Afraid to express ourselves openly
For fear of retribution.
Stand with the Gilets Jaunes
Side by side we'll face the danger.
It's a fine line of FRATERNITY
Trying to divide the brotherhood
Never mind the language
As long as we're understood
Because they will exploit a nation's
Pride for their own good.
The thin veil of LIBERTY,
Masking a lack of freedom.
The fine line of FRATERNITY
The thin veneer of EQUALITY
Won't cover the injustice…..So
Out! Out! Macron! Out!…….
Repeat forever until he's gone !!
6. Gerrard Winstanley: an orgrad inspiration
"True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth"
Gerrard Winstanley (1606-1676) was a revolutionary writer and activist who has inspired generations of socialists, communists and anarchists.
Writing in 1906, Lewis H. Berens declared that "Winstanley was, in truth, one of the most courageous, far-seeing and philosophic preachers of social righteousness that England has given to the world". (1)
He was the best-known spokesman of the Diggers, or True Levellers, a group of men and women who occupied and cultivated common land at St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649 and called for an egalitarian society free of the chains of property, wealth and authority.
Along with like-minded people elsewhere in the country, Winstanley and his comrades wanted to push the English Revolution to a second stage.
After the execution of Charles I, they did not want to see power simply transferred to a new parliamentary authority promoting the interests of the mercantile classes.
Unfortunately, their revolt was crushed and, after this key moment in its history, the country took the disastrous path of rapacious capitalism, industrialism and imperialism, destroying the freedom and social stability not just of its own population but of peoples all across the world.
Winstanley's writings are strongly marked by a heretic and pantheistic form of Christianity, inherited from the revolutionary spirituality of the medieval Free Spirit movement and the early Protestant rebellions against the Roman Catholic Church.
Rather than being an unfortunate anachronism than can safely be ignored by 21st century radicals, Winstanley's spirituality is the foundation of his holistic anarcho-communism.
As Kenneth Rexroth wrote: "It was not his economics that was most important to Winstanley. What he sought was a spiritual condition in mankind which would be in harmony with the working of Reason in nature — the return of man, who had fallen into covetousness, to the universal harmony.
"Winstanley's communism was not an economic doctrine, but mutual aid followed from his organic philosophy as a logical consequence". (2)
Winstanley rejected the whole basis of authority in England as being an imposture, part of the "Norman Yoke" that had been inflicted on the people in 1066.
Central to this imposture, which had robbed ordinary folk of their god-given natural freedom, was the idea that land could be "owned" by certain individuals or families. Instead, he said, the earth should become "a common treasury for all". (3)
Winstanley declared in The Law of Freedom: "The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man. True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth". (4)
He told the landed class, in one of his characteristic broadsides, that the power of "enclosing land and owning property" had been created by the violence of their ancestors – "which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children". (5)
So although the rich of his day might not personally have had to kill or steal to attain their inherited wealth and power, they would have to answer for their ancestors' crimes "till your bloody and grieving power be rooted out of the land". (6)
The law was also frequently identified by Winstanley and his comrades as a central part of the violence inflicted on the common people by the wealthy elite.
He wrote in A New Year's Gift for the Parliament and Army in 1650: "England is a prison; the varieties of subtleties in the Laws preserved by the Sword are the bolts, bars and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are the Jailers; and Poor Men are the prisoners". (7)
He had no illusions about the legitimacy of the power which dressed itself up either as The Crown or, under William Cromwell, The Commonwealth: "It was clearer to Winstanley than to most radicals that the state and its legal institutions existed in order to hold the lower classes in place," remarks Christopher Hill. (8)
It was a measure of Winstanley's radicalism that he understood that royal power, church power, legal power and commercial power were all linked and could all be brought tumbling down by a real people's revolution: "If one truly fall, all must fall". (9)
Although the revolutionary idealism expressed by Winstanley and his fellow Diggers was clearly forward-looking, there was another aspect to their vision which looked back to the past.
In many ways, they were rebelling against England's transition from traditional co-operative community (Gemeinschaft in Ferdinand Tönnies' terms) to a modern, individualistic, commercial society (Gesellschaft).
In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley repeatedly condemned "buying and selling" in the same moral tone in which Leo Tolstoy was to condemn artificial money-based society, or in which René Guénon was to condemn the modern "Reign of Quantity".
Winstanley regarded the society he knew as a perversion of the natural, ethical, egalitarian way of life which should have been the birthright of every man and woman.
This perspective was rooted in Winstanley's heretical brand of Protestant Christianity, which identified God not as a personal deity or supreme being, but as an all-pervasive guiding spirit which he often referred to as "Reason".
In this, he was close to the ideas of the 16th century natural philosopher Paracelsus. Writes Hill: "Winstanley was certainly acquainted with the Paracelsian tradition, from which he no doubt took the antithesis of light/darkness which pervades his thought as it does that of Clarkson, Bauthumley and the Quakers, the Children of Light.
"Winstanley may also have learnt from this source that 'to know the secrets of nature is to know the works of God', the 'secrets of nature' being a familiar phrase in this tradition". (10)
In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley described "the law of nature" which "does move both man and beast in their actions; or that causes grass, trees, corn and all plants to grow in their several reasons; and whatsoever any body does, he does it as he is moved by this inward law". (11)
In The True Levellers Standard Advanced, he invoked the universal pantheistic view of nature as the mystical source of life when he referred to "thy mother, which is the earth, that brought us all forth; that as a true mother loves all her children". (12)
For Winstanley, this age-old sense of natural belonging was the basis of his egalitarianism, the belief that all of us were equally-loved children of Mother Earth.
Video link: Winstanley (95 mins)
1. Lewis H. Berens, The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth, 1906. http://diggers.org/17480-Digger-Movement-BERENS.pdf
2. Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, http://diggers.org/rexroth_diggers.htm.
3. Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649).
4. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652).
5. Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649).
7. Gerrard Winstanley, A New Year's Gift for the Parliament and Army (1650).
8. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 269.
9. Winstanley, A New Year's Gift for the Parliament and Army.
10. Hill, p. 299.
11. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom.
12. Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced.
Article from the orgrad website
Eco-activists targeted the premises of Tesla, the electric car firm, in Hamburg on the night of February 26 in solidarity with those resisting its factory in the forest at Grünheide. They report: "We attacked at least 12 luxury cars and one company car of Tesla with bitumen. Tesla is a company that profits from the ideology that all problems of this world can be solved via the further development of technologies. An important part of their image is that the technologies that they are working on (e.g. they are pioneers in the fields of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving) are of value to the general public in the areas of social and environmental safety. We reject the constant perfection of human beings through technology, as it is associated with the extension of control and the further restriction of freedom. We also oppose the destruction of nature, which, contrary to popular claims, is inevitably accompanied by the expansion of technology".
"Vaccine revolution. Financialization of Nature. Fourth Industrial Revolution (Green New Deal). A global shock/disruption as we step into, in the words of Salesforce (& WEF founder & CEO Klaus Schwab) 'the future of global governance'. The new world of #BioFascism." This forms part of an important thread on Twitter from investigative journalist Cory Morningstar.
Police should be allowed to fire baton rounds and use tasers against people who defy the UK's coronavirus lockdown, according to former senior cop Kevin Hurley. For more updates on the new coronazi police-state check out "Policing the Corona State: A diary of security and surveillance during Britain's state of emergency".
"They make people beg for the police state". New York journalist @velocirapture23, aka Helen of desTroy, explains how Coronavirus is being used as "a NEW new Pearl Harbor" in this video.
Two important and informative articles on coronavirus have been published on the Off Guardian site. They give details of no fewer than 22 medical experts whose opinions on the Coronavirus outbreak contradict the official narratives of the MSM, and the memes so prevalent on social media.
Anyone trying to make sense of what is happening today would do well to take a look at a 2015 article in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology by Jacob Levich. This explains that Bill Gates tried to use the Ebola scare (remember that, anyone?) to create a worldwide, militarized, supranational health authority governed by Western powers and targeting the underdeveloped world. This, warns the author, amounts to nothing less than "global health imperialism".
"One would think you could trust the WWF to know what's best when it comes to conservation, but they are merely a front and a tool for the interests of capitalists". So writes Jordan Lunness in an excellent new article in The Commoner, entitled The Brutal Marriage of Capitalism and Conservation.
An interesting video has been posted on YouTube about the need to stand up to threats and intimidation. Warns Richard Grannon: "I'm warning you it's coming. If you don't say 'no' you will get hurt. And if you won't do it for yourself, do it for the people around you. If you're thinking of saying 'no', start early. You need to gird up your loins now. They can't win. There is nowhere anywhere near enough resources for them to win. It's a threat. They're relying on you being nice".
Acorn quote: "In France, as everywhere else, nostalgia for certain moral values from the past, the idealisation of certain pre-capitalist social forms (rural living or cottage industry) and the rejection of industrial/bourgeois civilization were an essential component of anarchist culture" .
Posted in Anarchism, organic radicalism, The AcornTagged #Giletsjaunes, #YellowVests, anti-capitalism, capitalism, climate, Climate capitalists, coronavirus, coronazis, Cory Morningstar, fascism, france, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, industrial capitalism, Julian Assange, neoliberalism, orgrad, resistance, UK, WWF3 Comments
It is hard to believe what has happened to our "liberal democratic" Western societies over recent days.
Even those of us who have long been warning that we were heading into a new 21st century form of high-tech neoliberal fascism have been left gasping at the speed of the Blitzkrieg waged upon us.
C.J. Hopkins sums up the situation in a March 27 article on the Off Guardian site.
"Police are patrolling the streets of Europe, checking people's 'permission-to-go-outside' papers.
"In the UK, soldiers are standing by to assist with 'protecting possible quarantine zones,' or to 'cope with the breakdown of civil society.' Israel is tapping its formerly secret collection of everyone's mobile phone records to identify people who might be infected, and assorted 'others who need to be quarantined'.
"Macron (now relieved of his Gilets Jaunes problem!) is ready to 'rule by decree' if necessary. California is 'prepared to enact martial law'. The US military is 'prepared to deploy in support of potential extraordinary missions,' including 'quelling civil disturbances'.
"The US Department of Justice is asking Congress for the power to detain people indefinitely. The British Parliament is on the brink of passing an emergency "Coronavirus Bill" that will (among other unsettling provisions) grant authorities the power to arrest and indefinitely quarantine anyone they deem a 'potentially infectious person' … or, in other words, pretty much anyone they want".
Winter Oak author Paul Cudenec has warned on his blog: "This is a nightmare world in which the total full-spectrum control of our lives by an arrogant, sociopathic ultrarich elite is imposed by all-pervasive lies and propaganda, by brutal force and by fear".
Meanwhile investigative reporter Cory Morningstar, renowned for her groundbreaking work exposing the "climate capitalism" scam, has been exploring the forces behind the coronavirus hype.
For instance, she highlights the role of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who chairs the World Economic Forum's Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (see Acorn 53).
She reveals that on March 11, 2020 the WEF announced a partnership with the World Health Organization to establish the COVID Action Platform For Business and on that same day the WHO officially characterized COVID-19 a pandemic.
Dissident medical experts have also been speaking up to challenge the alarmism which is justifying all these totalitarian measures.
John Lee, a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist explained that there are serious issues with the coronavirus figures.
He said: "Most of UK testing has been in hospitals, where there is a high concentration of patients susceptible to the effects of any infection.
"As anyone who's worked with sick people will know, any testing regime based only in hospitals will over-estimate the virulence of an infection"
"But there's another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare 'notifiable disease'.
"Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu.
"That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
"There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not.
"It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded.
"In the next few days and weeks, we must continue to look critically and dispassionately at the Covid-19 evidence as it comes in.
"Above all else, we must keep an open mind — and look for what is, not for what we fear might be".
Dr Lee is far from alone. For instance, Dr Yoram Lass,an Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry, has said: "In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus".
Professor Hendrik Streeck, German epidemiologist, professor of virology, and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research, at Bonn University, comments: "The new pathogen is not that dangerous, it is even less dangerous than Sars-1".
Prof Neil Ferguson
UK government advisor Professor Neil Ferguson has said that up to two thirds of people who die from coronavirus in the next nine months are likely to have died anyway this year, from other causes.
He told the Science and Technology Committee that experts were now expecting around 20,000 deaths, although there may turn out to be a lot fewer.
Bear in mind, for context, that around 500,000 people die in the UK every year.
There are more dissenting medical views here and here.
In the light of all these voices challenging the system's fear-inducing propaganda, it comes as no surprise that Operation Corona looks set to move into its second phase of repression.
This will be to silence dissent and to stop anyone from questioning or examining what is happening to us in 2020.
More information about this appears in an article in The Daily Telegraph by their "Global Health Security Editor" Paul Nuki, entitled "Covid Deniers: How shadowy social media groups are spreading myths and conspiracy about coronavirus".
Note how the term "Covid Deniers" is casually rolled out as if it was self-evidently a thoughtcrime to question the current agenda!
The piece claims: "Conspiracies and fake news about Covid-19 are spreading across millions of users' timelines".
Nuki speaks the familiar newspeak of liberal authoritarianism, talking about "false and divisive lies and myths spreading across the web".
Any challenges to the line spun by the authorities are branded "hate, bigotry and misinformation" peddled by sinister "health misinformation groups".
All the tired old neoliberal propaganda clichés are shamelessly trotted out by Nuki, not least the spectre of "conspiracy theories".
He writes of the offending thought criminals: "They are an odd mix of new and existing groups ranging from anti vaccination campaigners to right wing extremists to Russian-linked peddlers of fake anti-western news."
One of these heretics, a woman interested in natural healthcare, even apparently had the effrontery to declare that "I think it's really important that we don't just believe what the media tell us."
Send the police to smash down her front door and drag her off to the Global Health Security Re-Education Camps without any further ado!
It seems that another "Covid denier" claimed – unbelievably enough! – that we were witnessing a period of "mass hysteria".
Lies! Treason! Heresy! Hate speech! Burn him! Burn him!
The main source used by Suki for his article is, bizarrely, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (and yes, although it is based in East Finchley, London, it uses the American spelling of what should, in the UK, be "Centre").
This organisation previously came into prominence for its role in the Labour Party "anti-semitism" controversy and its patron is Rachel Riley, the pro-Israel TV presenter who famously pointed the finger at Jeremy Corbyn.
Its CEO, Imran Ahmed, used to work as a spin doctor for Labour Party politician Angela Eagle.
But the CCDH has now suddenly, and inexplicably, switched its focus to attacking those who dare to challenge the official line on the coronavirus.
In doing so, it is using the very same language ("hate", "populism", "conspiracy theories") that it has previously used in an entirely different context.
Very strange indeed!
The aim of all this hype is of course to clamp down on free speech and to impose a fascistic new world where it is considered a crime to question authority or its mass propaganda outlets.
In this totalitarian aim, the CCDH is perfectly in step with the World Health Organization.
Nuki reports: "Throughout the outbreak the World Health Organization has been vocal in warning that fake news can be as damaging as the virus itself. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, has repeatedly said that the world is fighting an 'infodemic' as well as a pandemic.
"In the UK, social media firms will be called in to Parliament after the extended Easter recess to explain what they are doing to combat the spread of false information".
It is worth noting that countering "fake news" and "disinformation" also formed part of the notorious Event 201 pandemic "exercise" hosted in New York by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on October 18, 2019.
Draw your own conclusions!
Posted in The AcornTagged coronavirus, fascism5 Comments
On liberalism and fascism
Posted on March 16, 2020 March 16, 2020 by winter oak
We have added a new in-depth article to this site: Liberalism: the two-faced tyranny of wealth. This is very much a companion piece to the 2018 article Bringing down the fascist machine. Here's the list of contents for the new analysis: 1. The rule of money 2. Liberalism as deception 3. Liberalism and fascism 4. […]
via On liberalism and fascism — organic radicals
QuotePosted in organic radicalism, UncategorizedTagged capitalism, fascism, liberalism, neoliberalismLeave a comment
Posted on February 13, 2020 February 18, 2020 by winter oak
Future on fire!
When the state means business
New Deal for Profits
Jailed for exposing US war crimes
Guy Debord: an orgrad inspiration
1. Future on fire!
Riot cops protect the Bank of England from anti-capitalists.
Green anti-capitalists are to target the financial heart of the City of London on Friday February 28.
A Rally Against Capital (Fuck the Banks, Fuck the City!) has been announced for 2pm outside the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street as part of the week of action mentioned in Acorn 54.
The activists have already notched up a notable success, by occupying a former police station in Paddington Green.
Said a statement from the Green Anticapitalist Front: "The future of the planet is under attack. We are living through the willful destruction of Earth's ecosystems and the billions of people who depend on them to survive.
"We know what is causing this destruction – the capitalist system we live in and the people who get disgustingly rich while knowing that they are only able to do so by destroying the future for everybody.
"Currently they ignore the plight of the global south while stealing resources to pad their pockets all the same; it's about time we said no more. No more exploitation. No more capitalism. No more climate change!
"Join us on the 28th of February at 2pm in the City of London to tell the bankers, the rich, the powerful that we won't let them take our planet – the people will not go down without a fight and we're taking the fight to them to show them what we can do when we organise ourselves".
GAF were quick to express their solidarity with anti-capitalist comrades in Paris who carried out a powerful action on Monday February 10.
They invaded and occupied the French HQ of BlackRock, Inc. an American global investment management corporation.
The radical environmental activists, along with some Gilets Jaunes and other individuals, poured into the business's premises in the French capital – see this video.
They managed to take the police by surprise and barricaded themselves in the building for the whole morning.
This infamous multinational corporation, very close to President Emmanuel Macron, makes billions in profits on privatised pensions.
Coincidentally, of course, Macron's neoliberal regime is pushing through controversial pension "reforms" in the face of massive opposition (see Acorn 54).
BlackRock's premises were redecorated with an assortment of graffiti, and some "trophies" awarded to BlackRock went out with the rubbish.
As they tried to make their escape before heavily armed state units reached the building, the environmental activists were surrounded by dozens of CRS riot cops.
The youth climate militants (only distantly related to the UK's law-abiding mainstream climate scene) were celebrating the birthday of their movement.
Said a statement from Désobéissance Écolo Paris: "We are therefore inaugurating a new cycle of friendly visits to our beloved 'policy-makers', by organising an 'open day' in the offices of the BlackRock corporation, known for its financial ties with Vinci, Total, BNP, and Société Générale.
"Obviously the choice of this corporation is a nod to our friends fighting against Macron's pension reform, who know that BlackRock insisted on the French government to make this reform".
"Liberal environmentalism – a lie of capital" read one piece of graffiti inside the business's HQ. "Corrupt system", someone had added.
"BlackRock murderers" and "Burn BlackRock. Save a dolphin", recommended others.
And, expressing a prophecy of life-affirming insurrection against the impending industrial capitalist doom – "Future on fire".
2. When the state means business
"The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire.
"They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, ie. bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan.
"Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?" (1)
Gaetano Salvemini
When Gaetano Salvemini wrote these words, he wasn't referring to the 2020s, but he might as well have been.
There are plenty of anti-capitalist comrades out there, who, even when they oppose the limited content of a Green New Deal or a New Deal for Nature, are tempted to give such schemes the benefit of the doubt in that they appear to be a step in the right direction, away from the unchecked market forces of "laissez-faire" capitalism.
But, as Salvemini points out, we need to look carefully at who exactly is pushing these ecnomic plans and whose interests they are designed to serve.
Here, the hard work has already been done for us by investigative journalist Cory Morningstar and other writers featured on our Climate Capitalists page of links.
The briefest dip beneath the fake green surface of this contemporary political pond reveals it to be less a source of environmental and social hope than a rancid cesspit of private interests (see also article below).
We find ourselves deep within a massive global network of organisations and initiatives with names like the World Resources Institute, The B-Team, We Mean Business, Tomorrow's Capitalism, The Natural Capital Coalition and Corporate Impact X.
Here we can have the pleasure of meeting a former CEO of Unilever, the daughter of a CIA-backed Latin American president, the powerful founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum or a Silicon Valley billionaire hoping to get even richer through a "Fourth Industrial Revolution".
In this strange upside-down world, in which Big Business is going to "save the planet", we come across brave "solo" campaigners supported and promoted every inch of the way by international PR professionals, youth movements described as "grassroots" which are in fact funded and steered from above, high-profile activist "rebellions" cheered on by venture capitalists.
We hear talk of "exponential opportunities", "the investment of trillions of dollars", and a "transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before... a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres".
In short, as Morningstar explains, the so-called Green New Deal is being promoted "as the catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the 'fourth industrial revolution'. This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the failing global capitalist economic system and bring in the financialization of nature".
Having found the answer to the question recommended by Salvemini, we might reflect that it is not exactly surprising to find capitalism manoeuvring to incite state support for its money-making activities.
It was in 1469 that the banker Lorenzo Medici observed: "Things can go badly for the rich if they don't run the state".
It is a big mistake to fall for the capitalist lie that their world of "market forces" somehow operates independently of the existence of states.
We perhaps might expect that naivety from advocates of the oxymoronic absurdity known as "anarcho-capitalism", but it is strange to witness anti-capitalists likewise imagining that the involvement of state machineries in capitalist activities will inevitably act as some kind of brake on profiteering.
Capitalism has always depended on the existence of a state in order to impose and enforce its domination. Indeed, we would argue that the state only exists in the first place as a tool of the wealthy elite.
Its role has always been to rubber-stamp, with its self-proclaimed "authority", the theft from the majority carried out by a greedy and self-interested minority.
It is the state that announces that "property" is sacred and lawful and that any attempt to take it back amounts to "crime".
It is the state that physically protects the property and wealth of the rich by employing gangs of thugs to intimidate, attack or imprison anyone who threatens to confiscate it, by whatever means.
It is the state that legitimises and enforces the expulsion of people from their land, that cuts them off from subsistence, from communal autonomy, and forces them into the waiting jaws of capitalist wage slavery.
The Highland Clearances
It is the state that raises armies and navies to conquer foreign lands so that its capitalists can plunder , cheat and exploit still further afield.
It is the state that taxes the population, ostensibly in "our" interest, only to divert vast amounts of collective wealth into the pockets of capitalists, whether via their highly lucrative construction schemes (needed for "our" infrastructure), via their profitable arms dealing (needed for "our" defence) or, today, via their pseudo-green technologies (needed to save "our" planet).
When state and capital work together in a more visible way, as with the planned "Green New Deal" and "New Deal for Nature", this does not mean that capitalism is on the retreat.
It just means that, in order to get through a period of crisis, capitalists are, once again, pretending that their interests are "our" interests, that we are all facing an "emergency situation", that "our" future is at risk and that, therefore, trillions of dollars of public money should be stuffed, by the state, into the pockets of our capitalist saviours.
Those who persist in seeing a state-intervention version of capitalism as necessarily a step in the right direction, would do well to heed Salvemini's study of one particular "limited planned economy deferential to capitalism", (2) which just happened to be the Fascist regime in Italy.
He wrote: "Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of planning exhibited by the government of Soviet Russia. When an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale industry which could be confused with 'the higher interests of the nation', has threatened to collapse, the government has stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by emergency measures.
"The policies of the Italian dictatorship during these years of world crisis have been no different in their aims, methods, and results from the policies of all the governments of the capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is responsible to the state. In actual fact, it is the state, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer's burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social".
Salvemini summed up the overall impact of Fascist state intervention in the dealings of "laissez-faire" capitalism, by concluding: "The intervention of government has invariably favoured big business". (3)
Why would we expect things to be any different today?
"All hail to the Green New Deal!"
1. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), p. 379, cit. Ishay Landa, The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 73.
2. Landa, p. 73.
3. Salvemini, pp. 379-80, cit. Landa, p. 73.
See also: Neoliberalism is the new fascism
3. New Deal for Profits
Following our report in Acorn 54 on the launch of the No Deal for Nature campaign (which has websites here and here), some people have asked us to explain what exactly the New Deal for Nature is and what is bad about it.
In response, we suggest that these readers take part in a little experiment.
Search for "New Deal for Nature" on the internet as a whole, Twitter or wherever you fancy.
When you find a website promoting the idea, note who is behind it, what language they use in describing the plan, what other sites they link to, where they get their funding from, who they list as their "partners".
Follow their links and perform the same exercise with every organisation you come across.
It won't be long before you have found out – for yourself! – that the New Deal for Nature is an entirely corporate phenomenon, which uses the language of "sustainablity" to promote a 21st century version of the state-backed capitalism historically favoured by the Fascist and Nazi regimes.
We'll show you what we mean. We found the "New Deal for Nature and People" Twitter account and discovered that this links directly to the WWF website.
This, in itself, should be enough to turn you against the New Deal for Nature, if you have been paying sufficient attention.
As Brussels-based academic Frédéric Leroy has explained: "Geneva-based WWF Intl has received millions of dollars from its links with governments & business. Global corporations such as Coca-Cola, Shell, Monsanto, HSBC, Cargill, BP, Alcoa & Marine Harvest have all benefited from the group's green image".
We reported in Acorn 54: "The WWF is an extremely dubious organisation, as the excellent documentary video Silence of the Pandas reveals.
"Alongside their sterling work throwing indigenous people off their land on behalf of their big business friends – under the false green flag of 'conservation' of course! – the WWF are very prominent in the climate capitalist lobby calling for a New Deal for Nature.
"The WWF was one of the founders of the Business for Nature lobby, as Cory Morningstar has set out.
"One of the many big corporations to which the WWF is close is Unilever, the massive transnational consumer goods company.
"Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, was one of the 'XR business leaders' who signed their support for Extinction Rebellion last year".
For more information on WWF, we recommend the Boycott WWF Twitter account and the excellent work of Survival International.
But let's not stop there. Let's follow the links down to one particular area of The New Deal for Nature – food.
We learn that the New Deal will "enable us to provide enough food and water for a global population that will grow to nine billion people in coming decades".
Adds the WWF, on behalf of the New Deal for Nature lobby: "In particular, we support consumption of independently verified (credibly certified) sustainably produced food".
To this end it says is working "with a variety of stakeholders". Stakeholders, eh? Now who could that possibly be?
The link below this statement reveals all, taking us to the "Future 50 Foods" report, jointly produced by the WWF and Knorr, the dehydrated food brand owned by WWF's bestest friend, Unilever.
Game over? Point proved? No, let's dig little further yet by having a look at the list of acknowledgements at the end of this charming brochure.
Entirely Knatural
This says that "the creation of this report" was led by Dorothy Shaver of Unilever and that it "ultimately reflects the views of Knorr, WWF and Adam Drewnowski".
Drewnowski is a trustee of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) which, according to a study reported in The Guardian in June 2019, is "an industry lobby group that masquerades as a scientific health charity" and is "used by corporate backers to counter public health policies". Surely not?
Others involved include:
* Crops for The Future, which researches "Biotechnology and Crop Genetics".
* EAT Foundation, the "science-based global platform for food system transformation" which, Gaetano Salvemini would have been interested to hear (see above), aims to "influence and align political and business action".
* Edelman, the giant US PR and marketing consultancy firm which boasts: "We develop powerful ideas and tell magnetic stories that move at the speed of news, make an immediate impact, transform culture and spark movements". One of these "powerful ideas", is that "the way forward is for government to revitalize its role as an essential partner to business". Of course – what else are governments for?
* The Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU), whose aim is "growing better business" and declares: "We believe business has a critical role to play in achieving the outcomes for climate, biodiversity, public health and prosperous livelihoods that the world needs". Prosperous livelihoods, eh?
* FReSH (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health) which is "one of the key initiatives of World Business Council for Sustainable Development's effort to create a set of business solutions to drive the transformation of the food system". Not just any old "solutions", note, but business solutions!
* The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), which was created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and also gets funding from the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, US Aid, BASF (the chemicals firm which produced Zyklon B for the Nazi gas chambers), and… oh! Unilever again!
Mmmm… Nutritious!
* Gro Intelligence, a data-orientated business interested in how "the next agricultural revolution might work with artificial intelligence".
* The Global Crop Diversity Trust, aka The Crop Trust, which is "extremely grateful" to donors such as pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, agrochemical giant Syngenta, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and… wait for it! … Unilever.
We'll stop there and let you while away happy hours carrying out your own research into the New Deal for Nature and People.
One thing that is totally clear to us is that this scam is corporate to its core.
It has nothing to do with either "nature" or "people" and everything to with racking up state-facilitated big business profiteering, exploitation and control.
4. Jailed for exposing US war crimes
More and more voices are speaking up in defence of Julian Assange, a political prisoner of the neoliberal US empire.
The 48-year-old WikiLeaks founder has been locked up in HMP Belmarsh in London since April 2019, after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy under political asylum.
He is facing up to 175 years in prison in the USA in relation to charges filed under the Espionage Act, despite not being American and not having been in the USA when the alleged offences were committed.
The increasingly desperate US state seems to be declaring the right to punish anyone, anywhere in the world, who exposes and challenges its war crimes and impunity.
The servile UK authorities are, of course, happy to go along with Washington's orders.
At a meeting in London on February 4, Professor Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, condemned the way Assange has been treated.
"We are living in a time when our own war crimes are no longer prosecuted," he said.
"175 years for whatever they are accusing Mr Assange of, it's certainly not violence, certainly it's not genocide, certainly it's not massacring civilians or torturing anybody, and people for genocide in the Hague they receive 35 or 45 years. I'm genuinely outraged."
In Germany, more than 130 prominent figures from the world of art, politics and media have signed a petition calling for Assange to be released from prison.
In France, young lawyer and author Juan Branco has followed his anti-Macron book Crépuscule with a book about Assange, called Assange: l'anti-souverain.
He says: "Julian Assange is a completely unique personality and his actions mean he will long retain a place in history".
Meanwhile, 100 supporters of the Gilets Jaunes movement in France travelled to London at the end of January to take part in an Assange solidarity protest at HMP Belmarsh.
Magali Chastaing told The Canary: "The case of Julian Assange is not just only about one person, it's the symbol of the treatment given to truth today… and this is affecting all of us".
In Brussels, Assange was hailed as a "resistance fighter of the 21st century" as journalists gathered to demand that the Belgian government take urgent action to block his extradition to the US.
International Federation of Journalists general secretary Anthony Bellanger asked for Assange to be recognised as an honorary citizen of Brussels.
In Sweden, Karin Pettersson wrote on February 9 that "the process against Assange risks having far-reaching consequences for journalism and press freedom" and noted that "there is evidence that he is subjected to torture-like conditions in prison".
In Assange's native Australia, academic Alison Broinowski noted on the same day that the WikiLeaks man had been jailed for "telling the truth".
Commenting on the possibility of a 175-year sentence in the USA, she wrote: "The absurdity of such a sentence, when the worst war criminals get 45 years, reflects the fury of the US security state at being caught out and the subservience of its UK colleagues.
"Those on both sides of the Atlantic determined to get Assange are unrelenting".
And, reports The Canary, Australian MP Andrew Wilkie has announced that he will travel to London to visit WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison. On February 10 , Wilkie also tabled a "massive petition" in defence of Assange in Australia's parliament.
Nearly 300,000 people have now signed a global petition to "Free Julian Assange and to stop the legal precedent being established of a USA Extradition for a non USA journalist that exposed USA war crimes".
Julian Assange's extradition hearing begins on Monday February 24. A protest is lined up from 9.30am. Latest info from the Defend Wikileaks site.
On Tuesday February 25 an event called "Imperialism on Trial – Free Julian Assange" is being staged at St Pancras New Church, Euston Road, London, from 6.30pm, with speakers including George Galloway, Craig Murray, Neil Clark, Tareq Haddad and Mike Barson from the ska-pop group Madness. Entry is £8.
See also: Julian Assange: an enemy of the empire
5. Guy Debord: an orgrad inspiration
"There remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry"
Guy Debord (1931-1994) was a philosopher and social critic, part of the Letterist and Situationist movements.
He and his comrades, such as Jaime Semprun, forged a deep-rooted critique of the industrial capitalist system, not merely in economic terms, but as a cultural and psychological prison.
This "spectacle" was "the superficial reign of images" (1) he wrote, where "the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making". (2)
This modern world was inherently false and artificial, Debord said: "The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation". (3)
It was not merely false, but presented its own falsity as an unchallengeable reality, he added: "What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic". (4)
Debord's analysis in 1967's La société du spectacle was strongly anti-industrial, stating:
"The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist". (5)
He condemned "the dictatorship of the automobile", "the domination of the motorway" and "temples of frenzied consumption". (6)
This industrial society was devoid of any real content, or intent, with its sole aim being its own meaningless perpetuation. It was a dead thing, "the concrete inversion of life". (7)
"Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle", (8) wrote Debord, and the system imposed its vertical domination on the population by denying them any horizontal connections.
Organic, authentic, society was made impossible by the crushing force of industrialism: "From the automobile to the television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for the constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of 'lonely crowds'". (9)
Debord made it clear time and time again that the spectacle was nothing less than the commercialisation of the world, the reduction of the world to the empty level of product and profit.
This commercialisation had gone deeper than the economic domain and destroyed the health of the human social organism itself.
"The spectacle is the other side of money". (10) "The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy". (11) "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has achieved the total occupation of social life". (12)
Debord reported in his 1988 Commentaires sur la société du spectacle that the situation was now even worse than in the 1960s: "There remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry". (13)
And where did this leave the individual who had been reared within the capitalist cage and had never known anything but the illusions of its artificial anti-society?
No matter how hard he might try to speak out against the system, he risked remaining trapped inside its basic mindset and assumptions.
"He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination's success". (14)
Debord highlighted the role of the secret state and its involvement in imposing this underlying capitalist syntax, even within ostensibly radical circles.
He warned that its highest ambition was "to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents" (15) and that it could use all its traditional techniques in an ideological context – "provocation, infiltration, and various forms of elimination of authentic critique in favour of a false one which will have been created for this purpose". (16)
Terrorism, he wrote, was something constructed by the system itself because "its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results". He explained: "The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable". (17)
Video links: La Société du Spectacle (film, 1 hr 26 mins), The Society of the Spectacle – The Remake Pt I, (9 mins) and Pt II (9 mins).
1. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 152.
2. Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 31.
3. Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 3.
4. Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 56.
6. Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 133.
10. Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 29.
13. Debord, Commentaires, p. 20.
15. Debord, Commentaires, pp. 21-22.
Opposition is growing to a massive sand and gravel quarry which threatens to ruin the rural landscape between East Tilbury, Linford and Stanford-le-Hope in Thurrock, Essex. Write local anarchist campaigners at The South Essex Heckler: "The applicant can stick this proposal for a quarry extension where the sun doesn't shine – this quarry is a step too far. Sod the bottom line and the cult of endless growth that sees the earth as nothing more than a resource to be plundered, regardless of the cost to nature and humanity. Suffice to say, this fight does not end at the conclusion of the planning process, it'll go on beyond that…"
There's no stopping capitalist "progress". Despite all the hot air about climate crisis and all the claims that there is no "magic money tree" to fund public health services, the UK state has announced it is going ahead with the £106 billion HS2 high-speed rail line. This will destroy ancient woodlands, nature reserves and hundreds of classified wildlife sites, wrecking the landscape across a huge swathe of England. Resistance is expected.
"The insurrectionary movement is becoming increasingly radical. I am betting firmly on a phase that, after the phase of frontal struggle against power, will destroy the State from its foundations, creating communes or territories managed directly by the people and for the people". So says Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian Situationist and survivor of the May 1968 revolt in France, in an article making a link between events in France and the anti-capitalist uprising in Chile.
A thoughtful article on the situation around the Hambacher Wald has been published on the Hambi Bleibt website (see Acorn 54 for news of the apparent "saving" of the forest by a government U-turn on lignite mining). The new piece says: "Beyond safeguarding the trees still standing, the significance of what has happened around this neck of the woods lies within the propagation of a spirit of defiance as an epoch of climate chaos and growing authoritarianism is dawning. As capitalism overstretches its ecological constraints and people grow increasingly conscious of the self-destructiveness of our current course, more cracks are to be expected. Let them burst and then bloom!"
Angry protests have been held in London against the far-right Tory government's expulsion of people of Jamaican origin. "This wholesale deportation of people to Jamaica, tearing them away from their families is unjust, inhumane and racist in intent", said campaigner Zita Holbourne.
Is the Evil Empire crumbling? The Philippines has officially told the USA that it is scrapping a security pact that allows US forces to train and take part in joint exercises there. News agency Reuters comments that the move "could be a blow to Washington's interests in maintaining a troop presence in the Asia-Pacific, amid friction over the presence of US personnel in Japan and South Korea and regional security concerns about China and North Korea".
"For more than 15 years successive British governments have covered up the role that the UK's foreign intelligence service, MI6, and its security service, MI5, played in the abduction and subsequent torture of people they regarded as potential terrorists". That is the finding of a report by Richard Norton-Taylor for the Declassified UK journalism project. Read the full article here.
"Drugs, dynasties, and Nottingham Forest: Marinakis and Greece's Mafia State" is a fascinating piece of investigative journalism on the Stateless website. While the Greek authorities claim to be fighting crime, drugs and terrorism in their war on the insubordinate Athens neighbourhood of Exarchia, the real villains lie within the country's ruling business elite.
A multi-millionaire businessman has come up with a spiffing plan to help those who fall victim to the capitalist system of which he is a part, and end up without a roof over their heads. They can sleep in a "pod" made from two plastic dustbins. "Let them eat cake" and "let them live in bins". Two examples of the elite's blind arrogance that can only end badly… for them.
Acorn quote: "It has taken me all of my life so far to realize that the single great obstacle in the way of survival and an extended human vision is the industrial society itself and its expropriation and suppression of the most sensitive & creative qualities of the mind".
Kit Pedler
Posted in Anarchism, organic radicalism, The AcornTagged #Giletsjaunes, #YellowVests, anti-capitalism, capitalism, climate, Climate capitalists, Cory Morningstar, Declassified UK, fascism, france, Gaetano Salvemini, Greece, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, greenwashing, Guy Debord, Hambach, HS2, industrial capitalism, Julian Assange, Kit Pedler, neoliberalism, No Deal for Nature, orgrad, Philippines, protests, Raoul Vaneigem, resistance, Thurrock, UK, Windrush, WWFLeave a comment
Crushing freedom in Saint Jean du Gard
Posted on August 20, 2019 August 26, 2019 by winter oak
Anyone who has been following the Gilets Jaunes' struggle since November 2018 will appreciate to what extent France is slipping into 21st century neoliberal-style fascism.
From the sheer physical violence of the state's attacks on protesters, through its draconian use of bans on protests and "pre-emptive" arrests, to the cover-up and denial of what is happening by politicians and their tame media, the situation is truly alarming.
We can expect more evidence of this in coming days when the full force of Macron's Reich will be deployed to prevent any signs of dissent against the G7 summit in Biarritz, in French-occupied Euskadi.
But to understand the extent to which this authoritarian cancer has riddled French society from top to bottom, it is instructive to look at what has been happening in recent weeks in the little southern village of St Jean du Gard.
The place is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. However, this year a local group has been active opposing the imposition of Linky smart electricity meters and generally challenging the right-wing mayor, Michel Ruas.
The astonishing thing is that all they have been doing is handing out leaflets – mainly at the weekly market, which has been held on Tuesday mornings for a thousand years.
Incredibly, the mayor passed a law banning all leafleting for a year. Even more incredibly, the authorities from the Gard department have backed up this totalitarian gesture by sending in cohorts of cops to enforce it and to threaten those who stand up for their basic freedom of speech.
An update from local campaigners on Tuesday August 20 reported that the morning's market had again been targeted by Macron's uniformed thugs.
A week previously, there had been a call-out for supporters to come from around the area to challenge the year-long ban on all leafleting (unless "authorised" by the mayor/dictator Ruas) issued on July 31.
But on August 20 there was just a little Stop Linky stand as there has been every week for months.
When a woman campaigner held up a photocopy of the mayor's new Nazi-style law to show a passer-by, the zealous gendarmes decided a 'leafleting' offence had been committed and tried to fine the woman.
This aggressive move shocked everyone present, but the cops weren't finished there and not only kept pursuing the woman but used force against those trying to defend her from them, pinning people violently against a wall.
They also turned on passers-by who remonstrated with them, accusing one disabled person using a crutch of possessing an offensive weapon!
Say campaigners: "These measures are unacceptable and revolting. We are therefore calling for a protest on Tuesday August 27 from 9am at the market of Saint Jean du Gard".
International solidarity with the freedom fighters of St Jean du Gard!
UPDATE AUGUST 26. VICTORY FOR CAMPAIGNERS! MAYOR FORCED TO CANCEL LEAFLETING BAN!
Posted in authority, UncategorizedTagged fascism, france, Macron, neoliberalism, RuasLeave a comment
Posted on March 9, 2019 April 8, 2019 by winter oak
Yellow voices
Defending nature means fighting capitalism
Zombie archaeology
Everybody expected the Neoliberal Inquisition
Tall tale of "eco-terrorism"
1. Yellow voices
The Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vests, movement in France is the most important political phenomenon to emerge in Western Europe so far this century. It has smashed through the barriers of political stagnancy and sterility which so often disempower and stifle spontaneous expressions of popular discontent.
The yellow banner of revolt has rallied parts of the population previously unreached by political organising and the relentless determination of hundreds of thousands of men and women has shaken the citadels of neoliberal power to the core. As well as the rubber bullets, grenades, water cannon and tear gas deployed by the French state against the uprising, another major weapon against the Gilets Jaunes has been the corporate media.
Constant lies, smears and alarmism in France have been matched by almost total silence elsewhere, punctuated by small dribbles of largely inaccurate information. We at Winter Oak have been trying to help counter this information war against the rebellion by reporting their activities and opinions in English. Below we present five new translations which offer some useful insights into what is currently being spelled out in yellow in France.
The uprising is very much ongoing as we write this, with Act 18 of the protests on March 16 likely to be significant, particularly in Paris. For news updates about the movement follow us on Twitter.
i. Power to the people!
This declaration was agreed at the Yellow Vest assembly of assemblies in Commercy at the end of January, attended by delegates from across France. It was then "sent back" down to the local assemblies, who have gradually been endorsing it from the grassroots.
Ever since November 17, from the smallest village in the countryside to the biggest city, we have been rising up against this profoundly violent, unfair and unbearable society.
We are not going to be pushed around! We are revolting against the high cost of living, against precarity and misery. We want our loved ones, our families and our children to live in dignity.
26 billionaires own as much as half of the human species and that is unacceptable. Let's share wealth and not misery!
Let's do away with social inequality! We demand immediate increases in pay, in the minimum wage, in benefits and in pensions; the unconditional right to healthcare and education; free public services for everyone.
It's for all these rights that every day we occupy roundabouts, that we organise actions and protests and hold discussions everywhere.
With our yellow vests on, we are having our say, which we have never had before.
And what's the response from the government? Repression, contempt, denigration.
People killed and thousands injured, the massive use of weapons fired directly at us which mutilate, take out eyes, wound and traumatise.
More than 1,000 people have been arbitrarily prosecuted and jailed.
And now the new so-called "anti-vandal" law aims simply to stop us demonstrating.
We condemn all violence against protesters, whether it comes from police or violent factions. None of that is going to stop us!
The right to protest is fundamental. End the impunity for the government forces! Amnesty for all the victims of repression!
And what a con, this Grand National Debate which is nothing but a government PR exercise taking advantage of our desire to discuss and take decisions!
The real democracy is the one we practise in our assemblies and on our roundabouts. It is neither on the TV nor in the fake debates organised by Macron.
He insults us, says we're less than nothing, then depicts us as hateful crowd, fascistic and xenophobic.
But in fact we are completely the opposite: neither racist, nor sexist, nor homophobic, we are proud to be together with our differences to build a society of solidarity.
The diversity of our discussions is our strength and even now hundreds of assemblies are drawing up and putting forward their own demands.
They involve real democracy, social and fiscal justice, environmental and climate justice, the ending of discrimination.
Among the most debated demands and strategic proposals we can find: the eradication of misery in all its forms; the transformation of institutions (citizen-initiated referenda, constituent assemblies, an ending to privileges for elected representatives); environmental transition (energy precarity, industrial pollution); equality and the valuing of all women and men regardless of their nationality (people with disabilities, gender equality, ending the neglect of working-class districts, rural areas and overseas territories).
We, Gilets Jaunes, invite everyone to join us, as and how they see fit. We call for a continuation of the series of "acts" of protests, of the occupation of roundabouts and the blockading of the economy and of the effort to build a huge national strike.
We call for the setting up of committees in the workplace, at places of study; and everywhere else so that this grave can be built on the basis of the strikers themselves.
Let's take control of our own activities! Don't stay on your own, join us! Let's organise democratically, autonomously and independently!
This assembly of the assemblies is an important step which allows us to discuss our demands and our means of acting.
Let's come together in federations to transform society!
We ask the whole of the Gilets Jaunes movement to circulate this call.
If, as a Gilets Jaunes group, you agree with it, then don't hesitate to send your support to Commercy.
Please do discuss and draw up proposals for the next assembly of the assemblies, already under preparation.
Macron resign!
Power to the people, for the people, by the people!
The "nothings" are on the streets
ii. The ghost of 1789
This is an extract from a leaflet issued by a group of Gilets Jaunes in southern France after a local bigwig, the Prefect, accused "anarchists" of inciting hate of the state and confrontations with the police.
Mr Prefect, there is no need for anarchists to sow hate as your government is managing to do that all on its own. Oh, nobody for the moment is talking about reaching for their rifle, but everyone can see what they earn and what the rich earn. Hate is on the rise. The Gilets Jaunes are simple people, generally workers at the bottom of the scale on low wages, or people living on modest pensions…
They say, when they talk about the rulers and the fat cats in this country: "They are like the kings and aristocrats used to be". They are not talking about having a revolution here and now but they talk a lot about our great revolution: it is always coming up in conversation.
Macron has said repeatedly that he won't change course: so we can expect nothing from him but scraps of charity. One day or the other the poor, like in 1789, will take action and a lot of others with them.
This won't be a revolt, but a revolution!
It is clear that every government since 1983 has done all it can to ensure that the poor are in this state of mind.
In our assemblies there are, among the hundreds present, lots of workers and pensioners. There are also teachers and nurses.
Some anarchists work and earn roughly as much as the other Gilets Jaunes, others are unemployed, like many others.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there is nothing to differentiate them from other Gilets Jaunes except that, perhaps, some of them are more active than most: that's their right and we don't hold it against them!
iii. Our community is the struggle!
This analysis comes from issue 2 of an eight-page A3 street paper, Jaune: Le Journal Pour Gagner (Yellow: the Paper for Winning).
From the start of this movement, two symbols have been competing on the roundabouts. The yellow vest and the tricolour flag. Of course, many wouldn't put it that way. They would say that the flag is the symbol of the French people, while the yellow vest is the symbol of the struggle, so the two are complementary. And it's true that in each instance those who sport them regard them as signs of rallying around something in common. But there are different kinds of commonality.
The idea of a community founded on belonging to a territory, defined by a state and the defence of the borders of that state, is very old. We can see it in the founding myths of the Roman Empire.
Some will say that this is a hard reality. They will argue that every country has its share of misery and that at the end of the day defending your tribe, your territory, your compatriots, is a necessary part of being human. Their slogan is "our own before the others".
But who are "our own"? Have you really got more interests, aspirations and sufferings in common with the rich of France than with someone who works on the same building site as you but hasn't got the same passport? More in common with the Loréal family than with an Italian or Algerian delivering for an Amazon subcontractor? More in common with someone else on the minimum wage, regardless of nationality, or with someone who used to pay the highest rate of income tax until Macron scrapped it?
Nationalism will tell you that yes, French people, regardless of their social position, have more interests in common together than with any other form of solidarity, such as that based on a common situation. But where does that lead? Who profits from saying that? Who benefits from nationalism?
Everybody knows the line about divide and rule. It implies, of course, that it those who rule who divide the others. So, let's put the question this way: who rules? Who owns the wealth and the means of producing more wealth? The rich, the bourgeoisie. And who is divided according to passport and nationality? The poor, the workers, the unemployed.
Anyway, do you really think the bourgeoisie practises what it preaches for us? Do you really think that the French rich feel closer to you than to their friends in such or such a country, with whom they go skiing in Switzerland or Dubai while you go to work? Let's not be naive.
But there is another community: the community of struggle. Thus, in France, for a long time now, a revolutionary tradition welcomes all those who want to struggle. As far back as the French Revolution, lots of people from every corner of the world came to lend a hand. During the Paris Commune, as well, the organisation of the barricades was partly organised by Polish revolutionaries.
And we can see this solidarity in struggle and revolution at many other times of history and in many other parts of the world. That is the community which brings us together. Today, it has a rallying call: the yellow vest. This call is universal and as such it is closer to the spirit of past revolutions, including the French one.
So we are saying it loud and clear: we are on the side of the yellow vest, of what it says about common struggle and also about a shared refusal of our dire situation, about chilly early mornings blockading and about evenings around a pile of burning palettes, talking about our rock-bottom living conditions.
Yellow Vests of every country, unite!
iv. Poisoned by neoliberalism
From an interview with François Boulo, a lawyer and a Gilets Jaunes spokesman in the northern city of Rouen (source: Thinkerview).
How do you see the current situation with the Gilets Jaunes?
There is a fight to be won in terms of communication. The mainstream media are trying to criminalise the movement. But the real question of immorality lies with the distribution of wealth. To live in a country and pile up a personal fortune that is 10, 100, 1,000 times more than you need to live, while in France 9 million people teeter on the brink of poverty and 140,000 are homeless…
What kind of politics are you proposing?
For the last 40 to 45 years there has been an ideological drive to poison our minds with the dominant neoliberal thinking, which is presented as the only possibility. This is the framing for the way we think about politics today. This economic framing is imposed on us and they tell us that there is no alternative. This has generated a mood of resignation.
The economic debate has been closed down. They explain to us that we have to have permanent growth, even though we live in a finite world. We have a cake and they tell us we can't change the rules for allocating the slices of the cake. I think citizens' control is needed.
What do you think of the political and policing climate around the Gilets Jaunes movement?
Right from the start, everything was done to ramp up the climate of tension. On the second Saturday of protests in France, from 8.30 or 9am people were being "kettled", caught in a trap, and teargassed! How do you expect them to feel that their right to protest is being respected?
What about Europe ?
We have got to stop following the demands of the banks and investors, because their financial games do not help the real economy. We should finally create the social Europe we were promised.
v. A breath of fresh air
Here is an abridged version of an in-depth article in issue 12 of Avis de Tempêtes: Bulletin anarchiste pour la guerre sociale (Storm Warning: Anarchist bulletin for social war), a 20-page A5 zine with a yellow and red cover. The piece takes a witty swipe at a certain kind of comrade who considers themself too ideologically pure to possibly be able to join in the diverse and mould-breaking Gilets Jaunes uprising.
For once, a movement has erupted in a self-organised way without political parties and trade unions, for once it immediately set its own agenda – an agenda which is often daily and not at the weekly or monthly rhythm of the big days out orchestrated by the troop masters and agreed in advance with the police – even deciding for itself its own places and routes of confrontation and blockage by obstinately refusing to beg for official authorisation.
In short, a breath of fresh air for all those activists who have been waiting for nothing other than a big collective movement before venturing out of their homes. However… While the meagre crumbs claimed by any number of reformist, trade-unionist or victimist organisations – backed up by a show of strength in the streets to help their representatives in their negotiations with authority – have never put too many people off taking part, now we see those marvellous anti-authoritarian activists diligently dissecting those who have lit the yellow-vest fuse.
The anti-authoritarian activist, well schooled in swallowing all kinds of reformist demands in order to join in various struggles, this time finds that there is not enough familiar common ground.
With the Gilets Jaunes movement, the activist has suddenly discovered the world around him. Having been in raptures over the Arab Spring without finding his enthusiasm impossibly deflated by the "interclassist" use of the term "the people" ("The people wants the fall of the regime" was a much-used popular slogan) and the abundance of national flags, he is now disgusted by the same limitations on his own side of the Mediterranean.
Having rioted against the Loi Travail labour reforms, or last May Day, without feeling his presence incompatible with that of massed hammer and sickle flags, or with the sometimes-dubious banners at the head of Parisian demos (emblazoned with the wise words of 100%-reactionary rappers), he is now mortified by the tricolour flags and populist slogans.
He had chosen to be blind to the hundreds of tricolour flags in the left-wing France Insoumise rallies at the last elections, as well as to those wielded by hundreds of thousands in the streets after the epic victory in the footballing spectacle of July 2018 (sported in unison by poor urban youth and old rich racists).
No, the activist is as simple as his organic-supermarket ideology. An unclean symbol equals a fascist. Full stop.
Tear gas and rubber bullets on the streets of southern France
Yellow is the new bloc
Yellow fever: long live the revolutionary mob!
Gilets Jaunes: unfiltered anti-capitalism
"Police everywhere, justice nowhere!" – Gilets Jaunes on the streets of Nîmes
The heartbeat of the yellow jacket revolt is rural
Christmas with the gilets jaunes
May our yellow sparks of revolt set the world ablaze in 2019!
France on the brink: either we topple the system or it will crush us
2. Defending nature means fighting capitalism
A radical anti-capitalist dimension to the Extinction Rebellion (XR) has emerged in the UK, with the creation of a new alliance.
The Green Anti-Capitalist Front is born of the realisation that if we want to defend nature we have to fight capitalism.
It says it wants to support the high-profile XR "with a parallel mobilisation that has a greater focus on the capitalist roots of climate catastrophe".
GAF explains: "As we all know, capitalism is killing the Earth. We have been observing the rise of the Extinction Rebellion movement and, while we are glad to see a growing interest in fighting climate change, we do not think their critique goes far enough and believe a specifically anti-capitalist critique is needed.
"As such we are calling for the formation of an anti-capitalist block to tap into this rising interest in radical politics and to fill the vacuum of a green and anti-capitalist movement in London. We plan to loosely work alongside Extinction Rebellion's actions, especially their week of actions planned from April 15th, while also developing our own unique
approach.
"The Green Anti-Capitalist Front is intended as a broad coalition of groups with varying ideologies, but with a common interest in tackling environmental problems at their social roots".
In an open letter to XR, GAF praises it for having reinvigorated environmental activism at a time when this was most needed.
It says: "XR has been bold in its aims when much of the established movement has been cynical, and has managed to tap into a broader sense of alarm over environmental degradation, and mobilised many people not previously involved.
"XR has grown at a speed that many people would have thought impossible before we saw it happen.
"XR has also been far more radical in this broad appeal than many people would have thought, pursuing a strategy built around both local direct action while maintaining an international orientation.
"We cannot overstate the overwhelmingly positive effect that XR is having on environmental politics".
However, GAF says it has "doubts about some of the tactics that XR has adopted" and thinks a conversation is needed about this.
GAF is inviting like-minded people and groups to get in touch via
greenanticapitalistfront@riseup.net. It has a website, Twitter account and Facebook presence.
3. Zombie archaeology
by Eric Fleischmann
In the 21st century, the world is now veritably swamped with commodities. According to APLF ltd. American consumers purchase an average of 7.5 shoes per capita per year. The LA Times reports that "the average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards."
I am not by any means claiming that everyone is an affluent borderline-hoarder. One of the fundamental problems of capitalism is the unequal access to this seeming abundance of goods.
With so much paraphernalia in the world, it is inevitable that significant portions will be wasted.
In an article for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explains that in a year the world creates around 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage—"the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings."
Much of this is food waste, but many inorganic items are produced with cheap plastic and other materials that fall apart quickly. Some companies, such as Apple, even reportedly preprogram their products to stop functioning properly after a certain amount of time in order to force consumers to buy new wares at a much greater rate than they otherwise would.
All this waste, all this stuff tossed away, has to go somewhere. Such rubbish becomes part of the planet's topography, enters into its ecological systems, and eventually returns to the human sphere of interaction – much to human detriment.
This is zombie archaeology; when the remnants of our past are not uncovered by human beings but return to us by themselves with a vengeance.
In this age of capitalism-induced ecological collapse, zombie archaeology is certain to become only increasingly suited for describing the world. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, writes of Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But… …[t]he storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."
But what happens when the wreckage and debris – both literal and figurative – begin shambling towards the present? When the dead are, in a sense, awakened? Zombie archaeology poses these questions.
4. Everybody expected the Neoliberal Inquisition
We have been drawing attention for some time now to the ideological smears being deliberately used by the neoliberal elite to stifle dissident voices.
Unlike Monty Python's ridiculous "Spanish Inquisition", this one has long been expected by everybody who has been paying attention.
The most important task, we feel, is to point out the essential dishonesty behind these attacks.
Neoliberals differ from the old-fashioned right in that they like to paint themselves as the Guardians (yep, quite!) of Progressive Thinking, as somehow vaguely left-wing despite their full-blooded backing for capitalism, militarism, imperialism and everything that goes with it.
So they cannot attack the left in the traditional way, by simply saying they do not like it because it is too left-wing and threatens the status quo which they support.
Instead, they pretend to be attacking their enemies from a progressive position, one which occupies the liberal moral high ground.
This is the case with the longstanding smears against deep green thinking which try to claim it is a continuation of Nazi ideology, even though Hitler's regime was the epitome of industrialism (see our article Organic Radicalism: Bringing Down the Fascist Machine for a full analysis of this).
Neoliberals, including pseudo-leftists, aren't honest enough to say that they oppose deep green politics because they support industrial capitalism – that would blow their ideological cover.
Instead, they have to pretend that it is because they have cleverly identified it as a sinister right-wing threat to democracy as we know it.
The same phenomenon is basically at work with the "anti-semitism" allegations cropping up everywhere at the moment.
This issue is slightly complicated by the fact that it is partly about Palestine and the need for the pro-Israel lobby to silence all criticism of the apartheid state by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
A real witch-hunt atmosphere has been created here, which the original Spanish Inquisition would surely have been proud of.
Once accused of "anti-semitism", the victim is faced with a dilemma similar to that of the famous ducking stool – if you drown you are not a witch and if you don't then you are a witch and you have to be burned alive.
If the person accused of anti-semitism admits guilt and apologises, not only will they not be left alone, but they will also have surrendered important political ground and will have set a precedent for the next absurd denunciation.
If they deny having said anything wrong, this denial will be regarded as a further offence of perhaps even greater severity.
This is what has been happening to UK Labour Party figures such as Chris Williamson and to US lawmaker Ilhan Omar (see here and here).
The secondary smear technique has also been used against the Gilets Jaunes in France, particularly following an incident in which intellectual Alain Finkielkraut was called a "dirty Zionist".
Comments, or lack of comments, on the much-hyped confrontation were used to attack prominent Yellow Vest supporters such as journalist Aude Lancelin and leftist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
It is important to note that all these smear attacks have been targeted at the political left. Anti-semitism on the right is rarely even mentioned.
It is clear that the Palestine question, important though it is both for supporters and critics of the Israeli state, is not the only issue at stake here, as the likes of Jonathan Cook have been pointing out.
Seattle 1999
One of the great successes of the wave of global protests that took place in the 1990s and at the start of the 21st century was to put anti-capitalism on the public stage.
Previously, the mainstream had never even accepted that we lived in a capitalist society, let alone that people could be against that.
The word "capitalism" was regarded as a nonsensical one, used only by communists or other left-wing cranks.
Suddenly, they were talking about anti-capitalism on the BBC, examining who these troublesome anti-capitalists were and what exactly they wanted.
Twenty years on, the Establishment feels under threat, its system crumbling and its mind-control power over the population lifting like fog in the sunshine.
It therefore seems to have decided to try to push anti-capitalism back out of the public domain, beyond the perimeter fence of ideological validity.
We have commented previously on the peculiar political argument that there is something "anti-semitic" about opposing the "1%" who own most of the world's wealth (it's a lot fewer than that…) or about condemning bankers or international capitalist organisations like the IMF, the WTO or the Bilderberg group.
As we pointed out last July: "What appears to be happening, in some cases at least, is that the 'Jewish banker' figure is again being deliberately deployed to thwart opposition to capitalism.
"Previously, it was used to steer people away from anti-capitalism and into anti-semitism, but now the aim is rather to steer people away from anti-capitalism with the threat of being labelled anti-semitic".
This twisted approach is now being presented as a common-sense view by mainstream media, in tandem with the other smear attacks on left-wingers.
Right-wing Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh spun this toxic propaganda on BBC Radio 4 on March 4, with presenter John Humphreys helpfully summing up: "In other words, to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-semitic?"
Such are the desperate, dangerous lies of a system that senses its days are numbered…
5. Tall tale of "eco-terrorism"
In his new "extremist" novel, No Such Place as Asha, Paul Cudenec gives a fictional airing to the ideological smears often deployed by neoliberals against opponents of their ecocidal industrial capitalist system. This excerpt describes a speaker at a private conference of the "Transatlantic Alliance for Freedom" (TAF) in Edinburgh…
His special subject was environmentalism. He started off paying lip service to the importance of balancing economic growth with sustainable practices, of ensuring the well-being of human and animal communities, so on and so forth. Responsible environmental organisations acted as crucial watchdogs that reminded the authorities and industry of their responsibilities. While TAF did not always agree with their positions, they recognised the role they played, etcetera, etcetera.
Then he moved on to the substance of his talk. Unfortunately, there was always a fringe of green protesters who took things too far, who refused to play by the rules. He talked about "eco-terrorists" in the USA and "hardcore" environmentalists in Europe, such as 1990s road protesters in the UK, a mobilisation against a high-speed rail line in Italy, a protest camp against an airport in France, another against mining in Germany.
More recently, the "worst" instance of these campaigns was the anti-fracking movement in the UK. The dangers of these extremists' illegal direct action were well known, he said, as was the "Luddite" ideology that inspired them.
But lately things had taken a turn for the worse. These groups were starting to develop a common ideology, aided by the exchange of news and views made possible by the internet. They were borrowing ideas from campaigners on the other side of the world and incorporating them into their own rhetoric. They were increasingly identifying the enemy not just as their local government, or business, but as something they termed "the industrial capitalist system".
Up against this, they were piecing together their own counter-position. They had taken the idea of "sacred land" from indigenous struggles in North America, Australia and elsewhere and were applying it to their own sites. The use of direct action was turning into an ideology of direct action, an anarchist contempt for the rule of law and the due democratic process. French and German groups had fed into the mix the idea of "degrowth", which rejected the very fundaments of our society – the idea of progress, economic growth and increased prosperity for humankind.
I wrote down a complete quote at this point. "Let's be clear, these people are negationists. They are guilty of progress denial. And I would suggest that this brand of negationism should be treated as seriously as the other one of which we are all too well aware. Because that's where it ends, ultimately. It all ends at the same place. The destruction of civilization. The deaths of millions of men, women and children in the name of fanaticism."
There was a great burst of applause across the room at this point. Having established his moral high ground, Heath went on to spell out the particular form this Eco-Terrorist Apocalypse would take, which seemed to involve mainly a drop in the profits of "important wealth-creating institutions", faced with increased grassroots resistance to their projects and falling levels of consumption as the "poison" of anti-growth views contaminated the population.
A top-notch new comic has been published by Corporate Watch in London. Worlds End uses words and pictures to help people understand climate change and capitalism and encourage a different approach, one that builds power to fight them. Read it online here.
"Just because the participants in the growing number of Extinction Rebellion actions may be predominantly middle class, it doesn't mean to say that we as working class people aren't concerned about environmental issues". So says a useful article in The South Essex Heckler. It adds: "What we need to do is to start to own the narrative of the campaigns around those issues so that it's our voices that are being heard. We're the ones on the frontline from traffic induced air pollution through to being housed in flood risk areas".
Disturbing evidence keeps emerging about the way the environmental movement, particularly the climate justice element, is being hijacked and manipulated by big business. For instance, a Daily Mail report in February revealed that Tory peer John Selwyn Gummer, who heads the UK government's Climate Change Committee, has a private company which has been paid more than £600,000 from "green" businesses hoping to profit from government subsidies. And the full report from Cory Morningstar mentioned in Acorn 46 is now online and a must-read for any nature-defender who wants to avoid being used as a useful idiot by a bunch of lying industrial capitalists.
The threat of new industrial capitalist mega-projects in Mexico has been highlighted in a letter from Zapatista women to their sisters across the world. The authorities' destructive schemes include the Mayan Train, the "development" of the Tehuantepec Isthmus and massive commercial tree farms. The letter declares: "We're going to fight with all our strength and everything we've got against these mega-projects. If these lands are conquered, it will be upon the blood of Zapatista women".
"Fracking is stoppable, another world is possible!" is the title of a highly informative and inspiring new online bulletin from the frack free movement. Issue 1 is available here but issue 2 should be out very soon – follow the excellent frackfree_eu on Twitter for updates.
The 2019 Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair will be held on Saturday April 13, 11am till 5pm at The Black-E, 1 Great George Street, L1 5EW. This will be a day of stalls and workshops, with a vegan cafe and kids' space – free entry (donations towards event costs welcome). Says the website: "Books, zines & more to feed your brain let's learn, organise, grow & create!"
If the neoliberal Establishment succeeds in totally destroying the (very mild!) threat presented to its domination by Corbyn's Labour Party, there will no doubt be a few we-told-you-soes from us anarcho-cynics. But the anger sparked by such a collapse in people's hopes could well lead to something more interesting happening in the UK. As Jonathan Cook notes: "If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest".
Acorn quote: "The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man. True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth".
Gerrard Winstanley
Posted in Anarchism, Degrowth, The AcornTagged #ExtinctionRebellion, #Giletsjaunes, #YellowVests, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, anti-semitism, capitalism, Chris Williamson, Corporate Watch, Eric Fleischmann, Extinction Rebellion, fascism, Fracking, france, GAF, Gerrard Winstanley, Green Anti-Capitalist Front, Ilhan Omar, industrial capitalism, Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair, Mexico, neoliberalism, Paul Cudenec, protests, resistance, technology, The South Essex Heckler, UK, USA, Zapatistas5 Comments
Posted on January 20, 2019 January 21, 2019 by winter oak
The system must be destroyed!
Controlling the narrative
Climate of manipulation
Against their world of artifice
1. Yellow is the new bloc
January 19, 2019: week 10 of history-forging French uprising
For the tenth weekend running, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all across France in the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests revolt against neoliberal capitalism – and this in the face of unprecedented state violence and oppression.
President's Macron pathetic attempt to take back the initiative with his "Grand National Debate" has been exposed as a sham, with his regional roadshows protected by armies of riot police – deployed to keep at bay the people he is supposed to be listening to!
In Paris, for Act 10 of the uprising, the latest in a series of massive marches was estimated by observers to stretch for 4km and was met with the usual hostility and teargas from the "forces of order".
#Paris Tensions en cours. Face à face entre la BAC et les Gilets Jaunes #GiletsJaunes #ActeX #Acte10 #19Janvier #19janvier2019 pic.twitter.com/fw3eMtVxtI
— Stéphanie Roy (@Steph_Roy_) January 19, 2019
Gilets Jaunes in Lille set up a burning barricade to keep the cops at bay.
En #Lille los #ChalecosAmarillos franceses empiezan a montar barricadas para intentar detener la disolución policial de la manifestación.#GiletsJaunes #ActeX pic.twitter.com/Qudc0MRoEN
— PdePolítica (@PdPolitica) January 19, 2019
Down south, protesters in Avignon forced open the gate to the police station and tried to set the town hall on fire.
🔴 À #Avignon, des #GiletsJaunes ont fait céder le portail du commissariat, hier, avant d'être repoussés par les forces de l'ordre. pic.twitter.com/IiydsqgDGI
— Christopher Lannes (@c_lannes) January 20, 2019
#Avignon : situation tendue devant le commissariat de police.#ActeX #GiletsJaunes #Police #Insurrection #19Janvier pic.twitter.com/ylBLPsEOv0
— Humain du capitalisme tardif (@humainducapital) January 19, 2019
🔴 URGENT – #Avignon : Des #casseurs ont tenté de mettre le feu à l'hôtel de ville. Ils ont incendié un container à poubelles devant la porte en bois du bâtiment situé place de l'Horloge avant de prendre la fuite en cassant tout ce qu'ils pouvaient sur leur passage." #giletjaune pic.twitter.com/EQo9qrVZw8
— FranceNews24 (@FranceNews24) January 19, 2019
A protester was seriously injured in Rennes.
#GiletJaune injured in #Rennes #Acte10 #Yellowvestspic.twitter.com/4T9cGl1KyN
— nonouzi (@Gerrrty) January 19, 2019
allo @Place_Beauvau – c'est pour un signalement – 339
Grenade (semble-t-il) sur un GJ.
Images trés dures. Cris insoutenables.#Rennes #ActeX
Source:https://t.co/3D1SzQTsrj pic.twitter.com/pGzbSc2Xsb
— David Dufresne (@davduf) January 19, 2019
Rennes: Yellow, determined and revolutionary
In Toulouse, even the city authorities admitted that 10,000 people turned out and their protest was received with the usual politeness by the police.
Ça se passe de commentaires.#toulouse #giletsjaunes#ActeX pic.twitter.com/hkWfVkayJ8
— Hugo Murail (@HMurail) January 19, 2019
One Gilet Jaune was the victim of a particularly nasty attack: "At least five or six cops descended on him, he was literally smashed to the ground. There were baton blows. He started to convulse".
This is how Macron's neoliberal democracy defends itself against dissent.
allo @Place_Beauvau – c'est pour un signalement – 334 (précisions)
«Au moins 5/6 policiers lui sont tombés dessus, il a été écrasé littéralement au sol. Des coups [matraque] sont partis. Il a commencé à convulser.»#Toulouse, #ActeX
Photos et témoignage: @x_MsrDjof_x pic.twitter.com/Qy4jkUcUJ5
There were reports from Bourg-en-Bresse of protesters being injured by rubber bullets, grenades and the firing of teargas.
#ActeX pour les #GiletsJaunes de Bourg-en-Bresse !
De nombreux Gilets Jaunes se sont encore vus blessées par des tirs de Flashballs, de Grenades, de jets de gazs lacrymogènes. pic.twitter.com/RZZyUh0jbA
— Ahmet Çetin🔱 (@ahmeet_ctn) January 19, 2019
Some Gilets Jaunes in Clermont-Ferrand invaded the city's shopping centre, chanting "Macron resign!" and blocking the escalators.
Les #giletsjaunes de Clermont-Ferrand ont envahis le Centre Jaude en criant "Macron démission" et en bloquant les escalators "#ActeX #Acte10 pic.twitter.com/6lHoBLqwfF
— Jean Hugon🔻 (@JeanHugon3) January 19, 2019
Everywhere there were thousands and thousands of people demanding an end to the neoliberal misery being imposed on France by Macron's regime and the whole corrupt political system.
Caen, Rouen, Nîmes, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Toulon, Dijon, Beziers, Perpignan, Montpellier, Lyons, Angers, Poitiers, Marseilles, Bergerac, Brest, Longeville-lès-Saint-Avold, the little town of Foix in rural Ariège…
And from everywhere the same images and reports came flooding in: big crowds, police provocation, teargas, grenades, batons, water cannon, blood and defiance.
Ten weeks on, this is still only the start!
Just a whole population getting tear gassed!
Did you know many major cities have BANNED the use of tear gas in populated areas because of effects on innocent bystanders which could include children and the elderly #GiletsJaunes #ActeX#Acte10pic.twitter.com/pFwbDrgL83
— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) January 19, 2019
🚨 #France ℹ #Bordeaux 🔴 explosive SITUATION 💥 right now ongoing between #GiletsJaunes and regime forces during #ActeX #19January #YellowVests #Resistance #GJ #Solidarity #GiletsJaune #Breaking pic.twitter.com/0Xrz9LIKWP
— Partisan FB🏴 (@PartisanDE) January 19, 2019
#ActeX à Perpignan ! pic.twitter.com/DfVfJ7UCsy
— En Cause (@EnCausee) January 19, 2019
🔥 #GiletsJaunes à #Rouen #acteX #acte10: la charge des #CRS sur les manifestants et un blessé au pieds! ⚡ c'est chaud!!#Souillac #Macron #GrandDebatNational #explosion #Paris #France #YellowVests #Bordeaux #Toulouse #Marseille #weekend pic.twitter.com/0fIbYAOveb
— Gladiator (@1_jaunes) January 19, 2019
#GiletsJaunes #Acte10 gazage à Lyon, des Gilets Jaunes aident une personne âgée pic.twitter.com/XQvbO5KnBU
— Diju réfractaire 2847 ✊♻🌍🌿 (@Diju69) January 19, 2019
Intervention en cours à #Montpellier #GiletsJaunes #ActeX pic.twitter.com/Bhc5c9bkZl
— lemouvement.info (@lemouvementinfo) January 19, 2019
#GiletsJaunes protest: #Bordeaux pic.twitter.com/kX83Xsc1fG
— Oh boy what a shot (@ohboywhatashot) January 19, 2019
#Marseille , le vieux port remplit de #GiletsJaunes #Acte10 #ActeX pic.twitter.com/SY91TM9oWF
— яévolte fiscale 🇫🇷 (@Revolte_Fiscale) January 19, 2019
#GiletsJaunes protest: #Bergerac #Dordogne #Acte10 pic.twitter.com/juMZwcvLof
⚡FOIX / Énormément de #GiletsJaunes dans cette petite commune de l'Ariège pour l'#ActeX pic.twitter.com/WeEN7xOkTx
— Pure. (@PureTele) January 19, 2019
"12 dead, 2000 injured. Social movement or social war?"
Brest: "The Gilets Jaunes are carrying on! We won't give up. Support us – support YOURSELVES!"
2. The system must be destroyed!
Let's be clear about this: the system exists.
You can call it what you like – The Establishment, The Thing, The Matrix or the Industrial-Military-Prison-Propaganda-Complex – but it exists.
It has become trendy in recent years to pretend that this is not so, that what we are seeing is merely a collection of economic or interpersonal relationships.
But it is the system that promotes, protects and imposes all the layers of domination and exploitation that mark our everyday lives.
It is the system that tells us we have to spend our best life energy working for it, just for the right to eat and exist in the world it claims it owns.
It is the system that pays its hired thugs to beat us up, intimidate us, lock us up for years if we refuse to play by its rules.
It is the system that maims and murders human beings on an unimagineable scale across the world, all in the interests of its profit and power, and still always claims the moral high ground.
It is the system that lies through its teeth, with a slick smile on its face, and is always quick to accuse anyone who challenges its lies of being a liar.
It is the system that devours, poisons and destroys our air, our water, our land and our bodies.
It is the system that brings death and extinction while claiming to bring growth.
It is the system that is always looking at new ways to monitor us, to control us, to infiltrate our lives, to direct our thoughts, to crush the tiniest possibilities of our freedom and resistance.
It is also the system, of course, that insists that the system does not exist, that we should not confuse the many trees of its oppression and control with an overall wood that could be termed an entity.
It says that anyone who talks of the system is necessarily a simple-minded fool who imagines the world is all controlled in every detail by half a dozen James Bond villains sitting around a conference table in an underground bunker.
It says that anyone who talks of the system is a conspiracy theorist liable to start spouting all kinds of deranged, maybe anti-semitic, nonsense.
The system says this because it knows full well that the rest of us – the powerless nobodies it so despises – will never be able to effectively challenge the system if we don't even know that it exists.
On this point, and this point alone, we agree with the system. Identifying the existence of the system is the necessary first step to clearing the way for a worthwhile future for humankind and our planetary home.
The second necessary step is to destroy the system in its entirety.
3. Controlling the narrative
The system has always depended on being able to control the narrative of the societies it controls, ensuring that its own existence remains invisible and that all its lies are accepted as self-evident truths.
It knows that it is in big trouble if serious numbers of people start ripping the propaganda drip-feeds from their brains and sourcing their information from elsewhere, if people stop parroting the sermons of the system's priests and start thinking for themselves.
It has been interesting to see the system in panic mode in France, being forced to work through every step of the emergency disinformation procedures as the Gilets Jaunes revolt gathers more and more momentum.
To start with, the Gilets Jaunes were just a passing nuisance. Then they were right-wing extremists, or left-wing extremists if the message was being aimed at a right-wing audience. After that, they were violent thugs and village idiots. Then it was all a flop and dying out. Then they were suddenly threatening armed revolution. They subsequently switched back to being fascists again, maybe of the elusive "red-brown" variety evoked by neoliberals everywhere in their desperate attempts to equate far left with far right and present themselves as the only safeguard against the horrors of so-called "populism".
Again and again, the well-groomed and arrogant faces of the Parisian elite appeared to inform the French people that they were nothing but uneducated riff-raff who deserved to be shot and telling them to pack it all in. But nobody was watching TV on the roundabouts.
The media even wheeled out the tired old spectre of the Le Pen family once again, with inflated reports of how they were poised to come to power. It's a great double-act for the capitalists, the old nice-nasty routine: support capitalism or you get fascism.
While there have been howls of media outrage over every flower-pot thrown towards the serried ranks of armour-plated riot cops, the huge levels of brutal violence inflicted by the police themselves have been sidelined or even ignored.
Individual cops have complained publicly that the instructions for this violence – by means of tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, grenades or just good old-fashioned beating and kicking – are political and have come straight from the state.
RÉPRESSION CONTRE LES GILETS JAUNES : UN POLICIER MET EN CAUSE LE GOUVERNEMENT
"Le message envoyé par le gouvernement c'est : on veut aller à la confrontation, on ne veut plus éviter la répression, tout est mis en place pour que ça dégénère".
Alexandre Langlois, @VIGI_MI pic.twitter.com/wpGlX7T0Je
— Le Média (@LeMediaTV) January 18, 2019
The system has given orders for the Gilets Jaunes to be left bloodied in the road, handless or eyeless in several cases. The system has given orders for its media to pretend this just isn't happening.
And people have seen that. Millions of people have seen it and seen through it. The system has played its hand and it cannot keep playing it again and again with the results that it expects.
This is the scenario it fears most. The scenario in which the hologram illusion of democracy projected by its vast range of propaganda techniques flickers and disappears from the minds of the people.
Instead they see reality as it, as it has been for a long time: a criminal gang of professional liars, manipulators and thieves successfully holding millions of people in a state of thralldom, and being prepared to use unlimited violence to hold on to their power.
It is not just in France that the system is afraid of losing control, although the population there seem to be several steps ahead of others in their awareness of what is going on and their courage in actually trying to do something about it.
That is why for years the system has been infiltrating radical political movements – and often sabotaging them from within so they can never successfully mobilise against its domination.
That is why it runs outfits like the Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative to push its propaganda and try to head off even the risk of a reformist social-democrat like Jeremy Corbyn getting a piece of power.
That is why it is rolling out products like NewsGuard to filter internet intervention and try and make sure only the system's version of reality, the system's views, can reach the public.
That is why it is constantly removing pages and accounts from social media, policing the internet to try to ensure that small voices of dissent can no longer be heard, while claiming that this insidious censorship is all about countering "fake news".
That is why journalists who help whistleblowers expose the system's crimes and manipulations are not only targeted by the system's police but mercilessly smeared by the system's faithful media lackeys.
But can the system ever really regain full-spectrum narrative domination and get all that information toothpaste neatly back into the mind-control tube?
We suspect not.
4. Climate of manipulation
Greta Thunberg: darling of the climate change reformists
Needless to say, we at The Acorn are fully behind environmental campaigns like Extinction Rebellion (see Issue 45) which warn that we face planetary disaster unless our society makes radical changes.
But we have to admit that we are often puzzled as to why there is quite so much emphasis on climate change as the primary evidence of something going badly wrong.
Why less talk of the plastic that is choking our oceans, the chemicals polluting our water sources, the nanoparticles absorbed by our bodies, the noxious fumes poisoning our air, the microwaves causing cancers in our brains?
Why so little mention that there is a name for all of this – industrial capitalism?
Why so few calls for the dismantling of this productivist profit-based insanity and the instigation of degrowth to restore a society which produces solely according to its real needs?
Surely it couldn't be because the climate change movement is being insidiously manipulated by elements of industrial capitalism itself?
Surely it couldn't be because the issue is being hijacked by powerful private interests as a way of getting rich on the new technologies that will supposedly solve the crisis?
Could it really be the case that genuine environmental activists, arrested and locked up for their courageous actions, are being used as human cannon fodder for a global marketing campaign?
Cory Morningstar is asking some awkward questions of the climate change movement
Anyone tempted to dismiss these questions out of hand might like to take a look at the new work published online by radical ecologist researcher and writer Cory Morningstar.
This concerns the "non-profit industrial complex", which she describes as "the most powerful army in the world".
She writes that we are currently witnessing "the launch of a global campaign to usher in a required consensus for the Paris Agreement, the New Green Deal and all climate related policies and legislation written by the power elite – for the power elite".
The policies this campaign is trying to push through include carbon capture storage (CCS), enhanced oil recovery (EOR), bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), rapid total decarbonisation, payments for ecosystem services (referred to as "natural capital"), nuclear energy and fission, and "a host of other 'solutions' that are hostile to an already devastated planet".
The overall aim is the opposite of the degrowth we so badly need and would involve the "rebooting" of the capitalist economy by creating new markets and new growth.
Morningstar warns: "What is being created is a mechanism to unlock approx. 90 trillion dollars for new investments and infrastructure".
The first part of her in-depth report focuses on "the manufacturing of Greta Thunberg" and the We Don't Have Time organisation.
Future sections promise to investigate the role of Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, the World Wildlife Fund, the Green New Deal and, yes, Extinction Rebellion.
We look forward to reading them.
In the meantime, it is important that all of us who want to head off environmental catastrophe make it quite clear that this is not going to happen so long as we remain trapped inside the capitalist system.
Degrowth and the death of capitalism
Envisioning a Post-Western World
End industrialism or humankind dies
5. Against their world of artifice
The artificiality and abstraction of life under contemporary capitalism is dragging us further and further way from a real sense of being alive – in our bodies, in our daily lives, in our environment.
That is the crucial message from anti-capitalist philosopher and writer Renaud Garcia in his latest book, Le Sens des limites: contre l'abstraction capitaliste (Paris: L'Échappée, 2018).
He describes our Western world as "a civilization with money as its universal mediation" in which capitalism "encloses" and privatises all aspects of life.
It cannot tolerate the idea of anyone living outside of its enclosure, hence its need to stamp out the practice of "subsistence" farming, where communities have the cheek to simply produce enough food for their own requirements, rather than for the requirements of the capitalist profit-machine.
It forces people into its system by giving them no choice, he explains: "Declaring war on subsistence means dissolving the autonomous ways of life of thousands of people and thereby enslaving them to commercial needs which they can only fulfil by going out to earn a wage".
The idea of defending a natural world, which includes human communities' relationships with the environment, has been neglected by Western anti-capitalism, he says, particularly under the influence of mainstream Marxism.
Uprooted from our previous rural existences, we today often find ourselves living in a sterile and life-denying suburban sprawl, a space created "for the demands of capital", where people are trapped in a dependence on their cars and thus on the oil industry.
Garcia draws much on William Morris and echoes his critique of the artificiality of industrial capitalism: "In this world of artifice, going beyond the surface to a deeper level, that of the sheer essence of things, is no longer conceivable".
Garcia dedicates another section of the book to examining, and condemning, transhumanism, which he terms "the official ideology of technological capitalism".
This ideology "reduces the human brain to a simple processer of information, a mere calculating machine" and is built on the "basic negation of the reality of living organisms".
Behind it lurks a "brutal dualism" which regards mind and body as completely separate, and thus imagines the possibility of a "posthuman" self with no fleshly existence.
Worryingly, this ultra-capitalist creed is also embraced by some who term themselves left-wing and have swallowed the lie that technological and social progress amount to the same thing.
You can read the full version of this book review by Paul Cudenec on his blog.
"The Wet'suwet'en and Unist'ot'en remain steadfast in the determination that we will be successful in halting the toxic Coastal GasLink pipeline". This was the defiant message issued on January 17 after the Canadian branch of the industrial-capitalist-military complex used shocking force against the indigenous peoples to try and clear the way for its polluting infrastructures, prompting an international wave of solidarity actions.
Hundreds of people marched in Bern, Switzerland, on Saturday January 19 against the World Economic Forum being held at Davos, and against capitalism in general. They declared: "The infinite greed for profit and power that is seen at the Forum in Davos has no limits. Let the ruling class feel our anger".
Protests are to be held in Berlin on February 16 against the European Police Congress being hosted in the city. Says the call-out: "Let us use the police congress as an opportunity to take to the streets together against the police, the security authorities and their laws. Against state violence and repression. Against a world in which it is okay to let thousands of people drown on the borders of Europe, a world in which people are persecuted, imprisoned and killed because of their aspirations for liberation, a world that wants to destroy all forms of a life based on solidarity and collectivity".
A new book on squatting has been published by Squatting everywhere kollective (SqEK) and is available to read online. 'Fighting for spaces, Fighting for our lives: Squatting Movements today' provides glimpses into a diverse and multi-faceted movement, with accounts from local struggles, experiences of repression and stories of collective forms of life which have grown out of squatted spaces in various cities and countries throughout the world, including accounts from Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Seattle and Australia.
"Stop 5G on Earth and in Space!" is the message from a new international appeal. It calls for a halt to the deployment of the 5G (fifth generation) wireless network, including 5G from space satellites, explaining: "5G will massively increase exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation on top of the 2G, 3G and 4G networks for telecommunications already in place. RF radiation has been proven harmful for humans and the environment. The deployment of 5G constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law".
In India's densely populated megacities, residents are rallying against the widespread destruction of trees to make way for capitalist development, reports Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar. She highlights grassroots resistance in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi which are keeping alive the Indian tradition of tree-hugging and passionate defence of nature.
Brazil's new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has already set out his vile agenda, reducing the minimum wage and unveiling plans to step up privatization, toughen prison sentencing guidelines, and hand control over Indigenous land to the Agriculture Ministry. The pro-US, pro-Israel Bolsonaro could well be the first in a new line of authoritarian neoliberals ready to impose industrial capitalism on the world without worrying too much about the facade of "democracy".
An eye-opening account of life for workers in China has been provided by Dissent Magazine. Uprooted from the land, peasant-workers have to take jobs in the electronic, garment, construction, or service industries whose low wages force them to work punishing hours of overtime. They live in crowded dormitories, under CCTV surveillance and the constant threat of eviction if they protest. "This is the true 'miracle' of Chinese industrialization: a highly vulnerable, precarious, and exploited working class".
A very interesting article has been published by our US comrades at It's Going Down, addressing the thorny issue of alleged ideological similarities between deep-green anarchism and fascists, who often used nature-based rhetoric in their propaganda. The author finds that even the way the two traditions talk about nature reveals the apparent resemblance to be superficial: "The philosophies of the fascists came to largely revolve around concepts of domestication, husbandry, design, and surgical intervention; those of the primitivists revolve around wildness, biodiversity, voluntary association, and self-determination". 'Fascism, Ecology, and the Tangled Roots of Anti-Modernism' sits nicely alongside our own 2018 article, 'Organic radicalism: bringing down the fascist machine' as a step towards clearing up this area of painful ideological misunderstanding.
Acorn quote: "What is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?"
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
Posted in Anarchism, Degrowth, The AcornTagged #ExtinctionRebellion, #NoNewM4, 5G, Anarchist Federation, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, Argentina, Berlin, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Canada, capitalism, CGO, China, Crimethinc, Davos, degrowth, E.F. Schumacher, Extinction Rebellion, fascism, Fracking, france, Germany, Greta Thunberg, India, industrial capitalism, Integrity Initiative, Jair Bolsonaro, neoliberalism, NewsGuard, police, protests, Renaud Garcia, resistance, squatting, technology, transhumanism, UK, Unist'ot'en, USA, WEF, William Morris1 Comment