bricolage
10th August 2009, 17:03
I saw this on indymedia today and I thought it was a very interesting read. It is longer than the bit I have posted here.
"I am intrigued as to why certain people are attracted to particular types of political thought and action. I know for myself how seductive I find the uniform of the autonomen, how excited I get by a black bloc, how much I like covert actions. But what are the aesthetic, cultural and gender values underlying this attraction, where do they come from, where do they lead and who do they serve?"
For ten years I have run with the black bloc, seizing every chance, every moment we were strong enough, to run riot and fill the air with the sound of breaking glass and baton rounds, and the heady smells of adrenaline, gasoline, testosterone and teargas. For ten years I have stood up for the “diversity of tactics” and pushed for radicalization: from social movement to social struggle to social war. So this text is difficult for me to write...
During the days in Strasbourg I was always in or close to the black bloc-style actions, because that is where my affinity lies. For me it was appropriate to react to Police complicity in yet another death, this time at the G20 demonstrations in London; we were right to be angry at the way the demonstration in Strasbourg was relegated to an abandoned industrial estate and divided by thousands of riot police across the French-German border; I supported the decision to fight the police to try to break out of the space they had pushed us into with their negotiations and their crowd control weapons, and to try to take our actions somewhere more meaningful; and it filled me with joy to see the border post burn.
Even the Ibis Hotel action made me smile. It is a more complex issue: I don't think our actions on Saturday (or possibly ever?) are worth risking someone being seriously hurt for. However, I understand that no one was hurt in the action, and it is important to remember that the Hotel was part of the NATO summit, one of five Hotels in Strasbourg publicly set aside to house the thousands of journalists there to cover the “celebrations”, and a place from which police were spying on the demonstrators. So, even if we ignore the fact that Ibis profit from the deportations of sans papier, it is difficult to say that it was not a legitimate target.
But despite all that, the experience of that week left me feeling uncomfortable, alienated and confused. We took advantage of a peace march to make it look like war... We used the camp space, ate the food, and shat in the toilets. But, compared to previous self-managed events and camps, our participation in the village life was mostly limited to drinking beer, hiding in closed action meetings, or fighting the cops around the camp-site, building burning barricades, and making it look like war... And through it all I found myself questioning more and more how our actions relate to our politics, ourselves, our interactions and our values.
I am not saying that we were wrong to behave the way we did. I have long been critical of the tendency to pour so much energy into building up “activist service industries” (legal support, medical teams, camp organisation, independent media, etc) until there is almost no one left to do the (in the end mostly symbolic) actions. In that sense, Strasbourg was a welcome change. But our arrogance disturbed me. There was no interest in participating, explaining, or at least showing some recognition of being part of a common dynamic, where people focussing on different things makes it possible for the whole action to happen and be powerful. The focus, perhaps the only interest, was in violent confrontation. And we seem to look down on anyone who questions or does not immediately understand why we think and act the way we do.
As usual, in the days after the demonstration in Strasbourg, the leaders of the dead-in-the-water political parties of the left denounced and disassociated themselves from the “violent minority” and the pacifists decried their actions “ruined” by hooligans with no political ideas. It is always frustrating to read those comments, and it easily creates the “them and us” divide that enables us to despise the “democrats” and “reformists” who take their symbolic actions and then go back to a comfortable bourgeois life. But at the same time I was embarrassed by the lack of respect or interest shown by the black bloc for the other participants in the anti-NATO actions, particularly because while they could do their actions without us, we could not have done our actions without them.
Sure, we are sexy, all dressed in black, striking yet another riot-porn pose for the cameras. But we really were only a small part of a big whole. It is ironic that the black bloc, who criticise the media so much, are also the first to accept the hype that makes breaking windows and burning garbage the only focus of the day. It is important to recognize that if it were not for the infrastructure provided by the camp organizers (which we mostly consumed), if it were not for the extremely hard work done by the legal team, which included negotiations with the police and creating legal and political pressure (which we scorn), and if it were not for the political and physical protection offered by the presence of thousands of protesters many of whom have political views and ways of acting different from our own, it would not have been possible to burn the border, destroy the cameras, or attack the police in the way that we did.
I saw groups of pacifists, elderly people, people with children, running terrified from tear gas, flash-balls and stones (because there are always people who don't look who they are throwing at, or idiots who throw from the back and usually just hit the first line of protesters!) And for the first time I wondered what it must feel like to be on the outside of the black bloc.
We organised in whispered meetings in small, closed, paranoid groups. If you are not on the inside there is almost no possibility to participate. Yet we take our actions into spaces (like the demonstration) where they directly affect people who have had no opportunity to dialogue, to doubt, to debate or to decide. And we expect them to assume the consequences. We expect them not to publicly criticise, but we give them very little opportunity to criticise in private. We expect them not to disassociate from something they were not, in fact, involved in planning or perpetrating. We expect them to respect our political position and forms of action, while we often behave in ways that suggest we have no respect for or interest in theirs.
I am not a hippy. I am not a pacifist. I do not believe the State, the corporations, the Armies and Police, will one day, if exposed to enough information or enough persuasion, be convinced to put down their arms, their power, their assault on the earth and those who populate it. I do not think peaceful protest “works”. Actually neither am I convinced that violent action “works”, since our violence will always be less than theirs by dint of their access to new technologies, manpower and weapons. But I am prepared to do both since struggle we must, or give up.
I feel maybe I am older than a lot of the people who were in the black bloc in Strasbourg. I come from the generation that took to the streets and fought for the sheer mad joy of it in the mid-1990s. I guess I come from an age of innocence: before the death of Carlo Giuliani, before they called us terrorists, before all our creativity was swallowed into the meaninglessness of the "mass movement" at the Heiligendamm blockades, or the political emptiness of the ESF. I remember a time when we trusted, and sometimes we even felt like we had something to win. In that context, the “diversity of tactics” meant a willingness to consider all the forms of action available to reach our aims. But for that, we had to have aims...
One thing that alienated me in Strasbourg was that I was no longer sure what our aims were. The people involved in black bloc tactics did not seem interested in the blockades of the summit, or in other, less predictable actions; only in the demonstration. According to our own analysis, demonstrations are a poor substitute for “direct action”. But we put our energy into creating the space, or the situation, where we could riot (even if the only place we could do that was in an empty industrial estate miles from anywhere). The success or failure of the action, it seems, can be measured by how many rocks were thrown, how many bins were burnt, how much glass was broken, or how many cops were injured.
Riot ceases to be a tactic and becomes an end in itself. We do not need political arguments to defend or define our actions. Our actions are our political arguments: they require no more context than capitalism itself in all its forms, and they speak for and define themselves.
Which in some ways is good. Politics should come from the gut, not just from the head. But if we only use poetic, insurrectionist calls to arms such as apell (call) or ai ferri corti (at daggers drawn) to define what we do, then we end up abstracting our actions from reality. When I got home I re-read a book I'd read a long time ago, The Demon Lover: On the sexuality of terrorism, by Robin Morgan (ex-Weathermen). She describes the process of radicalising struggles as:
“...leading to an ends-justify-the-means attitude. As abstractions proliferate, the original issues are likely to be forgotten entirely...Rhetoric, 'turf', tools and weapons, uniforms, become fetishes of the manhood identity...The shift from living for a cause – e.g. fighting to enhance quality of living - to dying for a cause now locks into place. Violence. Those who question it are traitors...A politics of hope has become a politics of despair. The goal is now too abstract to be attainable, nor can manhood be satisfied by less. Cynicism sets in, as does the strategy of provocation and polarisation. What once aimed for a humanistic triumph now aims for a purist defeat.
The State obliges.”
It is a bleak picture she paints, of political violence as a dead-end street; by embracing violence, she says, we condemn ourselves to reproduce patterns of patriarchy, authority and masculine value systems in our actions, collectives and relationships until the bitter end. I rejected this book as pacifist garbage when I first read it, but now it makes me think.
Sometimes it feels like our weakness, lack of direction, and lack of advance, creates a culture where we close ourselves into a political aesthetic (not even an ideology!) and limit what we can do, what we can say, and what forms of action are militant enough to be acceptable. We close ourselves off from complexity. We leave no room for doubts or questions. There is no assembly, no forum, no spokespeople, so our only form of political communication is our actions and the images they project. We create ourselves in the image of the black-clad urban guerilla; we give symbolic meaning to what is often only violent indirect action (as opposed to non-violent direct action) by creating the momentary image of the civil war that capitalism wages on life... But we should be able to be honest and sincere about the content of what we do, otherwise we will end up being all about image.
Under the shade of an oak tree we talk in whispers. My jaw is tight with the thrill of conspiracy, and with... pride. The secrecy and self importance that surrounds this group is infectious. In my pent up frustration at the ever deepening desert of the existent I am won over by their power, their language, and their arrogant conviction that they are right. My need to do something, anything, is seduced by their militance. I am honoured that they are talking to me, and I want to prove myself worthy of being part of this secret, self-important thing. So I learn fast, to speak this language of violence with confidence and hide my doubts and ambivalence like they do... but today I look at the faces of my compañeros, tight lipped and quick to disapprove, quick to condemn this or that breach of security, failure of militancy, or simple show of weakness. And I find an unexpected, stubborn and anti-authoritarian urge to say out loud “I am scared.”
And maybe it is because I am getting older (and I see that the faces around me change: people get tired, burn out, disappear, while the average age of the kids taking to the street stays the same). Or maybe it is because beneath my black hood, and behind my mask, I am still a woman. And, like it or not, as a woman I worked hard for my militant credentials, said the right things, and proved myself time and time again through trial by fire. But the masculine, insurrectionist values of unswerving ideological conviction and willingness to hurt for the cause do not always come naturally to me.
And if we are not really honest with ourselves, if we continually hide our feeling of weakness, despair and intimacy behind masks and militant posturing, then we limit ourselves, stop ourselves from examining our true position and from exploring where we can go next. We are not winning, we are losing. But only when we recognise and understand the problem, can we begin to search for a solution. I am writing this text because I feel we need to communicate something more than the arrogance of youth and the image of war.
For me it was exciting to be on the streets with the boys from the banlieu, racing about on their motor-scooters, given strength by our presence to take back streets that should have been theirs from the start. It was a rush to confront the cops together. Violence can (and in that case, did) unite us and help to build relationships. I doubt those boys would have been very interested if we had marched as a peaceful demo through their neighbourhood and given out flyers about NATO.
Nevertheless, from time to time I was disturbed by an edge I felt to the atmosphere. It was present on the street, and even more so in the camp, where sharpened by drink and drugs, it broke out from time to time into small macho dog-fights to establish the hierarchy of the day... Perhaps I am not nihilist enough (or perhaps it is because I am a woman?), but I struggle with the contradictions in this.
I want to reach out of our milieu to contact, to interact and to act with others, find the common ground to strike out together at the neon-lit plastic-wrapped prison of our everyday lives. But if we uncritically fetishise the street gang, the banlieu, the incarnation of “people's rage”; if we turn our actions over to a culture of violence and give them no content at all, then we are no different from the football crews and street gangs who set a time and place for a staged fight. (Saturday afternoon at the demo, instead of after the game!) To put it simply, there are dynamics, values and behaviours that I am not interested in reproducing, however “street” they may be.
I am intrigued as to why certain people are attracted to particular types of political thought and action. I know for myself how seductive I find the uniform of the autonomen, how excited I get by a black bloc, how much I like covert actions. But what are the aesthetic, cultural and gender values underlying this attraction, where do they come from, where do they lead and who do they serve?
I am not suggesting that we leave behind the path we are on, not at all, only that we follow it with great care and consideration, understanding what it does to us. We need to constantly deconstruct how we respond to our acts, how they change our relationships to other people, what we personally and collectively need to do to go through with certain acts and how that affects us and our relationship with and attitudes towards others.
Violence – whoever is using it – has repercussions on the psychological health not only of those who are at the receiving end but also of those perpetrating violence, for whatever end, whatever ideology. I have no feeling for pacifism as an ideology. What I do feel is a need to help us fight militantly for longer and with greater personal and collective health. To choose a path of violence at great personal and collective risk means choosing a security culture whose inherent qualities are exclusion, paranoia, unspokenness and a complex of relationships in which important parts of your life must be kept hidden and not shared. This leads to tension and other feelings (jealousy, insecurity, not being valued). It is a path where you sometimes have to treat people not as you would treat your comrades but as faceless enemies with faces. This is not easy. And I believe it takes a great toll on us: on how we view others, and on how we view ourselves.
I am scared that voicing these doubts and questions will mean I am rejected. But such “un-warlike” values as empathy, ambivalence, reflection, and anchoring our behaviour in the personal and the real, are political too. So I will risk rejection and I will write. I hope that this text will be understood as self-criticism, and not as an attack. I hope that some of these ideas may find fertile ground to generate debate: to shatter our images and look at the substance beneath.
We are living in interesting times. Resistance is becoming more and more evident, in the face of the ecological, social, political and economic crises that are rocking the world, and it seems that States and corporate powers no longer even try to cover up the true face of capitalism, war and social control. Change (one way or another) may well be inevitable, and we will probably have to struggle through it, like it or not. In this context, I write with hope, out of the desire to look for some answers to the question asked by Greek friends, still riding high on the revolt of December 2008:
“and after we have burnt everything? what next...?”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/08/435985.html
"I am intrigued as to why certain people are attracted to particular types of political thought and action. I know for myself how seductive I find the uniform of the autonomen, how excited I get by a black bloc, how much I like covert actions. But what are the aesthetic, cultural and gender values underlying this attraction, where do they come from, where do they lead and who do they serve?"
For ten years I have run with the black bloc, seizing every chance, every moment we were strong enough, to run riot and fill the air with the sound of breaking glass and baton rounds, and the heady smells of adrenaline, gasoline, testosterone and teargas. For ten years I have stood up for the “diversity of tactics” and pushed for radicalization: from social movement to social struggle to social war. So this text is difficult for me to write...
During the days in Strasbourg I was always in or close to the black bloc-style actions, because that is where my affinity lies. For me it was appropriate to react to Police complicity in yet another death, this time at the G20 demonstrations in London; we were right to be angry at the way the demonstration in Strasbourg was relegated to an abandoned industrial estate and divided by thousands of riot police across the French-German border; I supported the decision to fight the police to try to break out of the space they had pushed us into with their negotiations and their crowd control weapons, and to try to take our actions somewhere more meaningful; and it filled me with joy to see the border post burn.
Even the Ibis Hotel action made me smile. It is a more complex issue: I don't think our actions on Saturday (or possibly ever?) are worth risking someone being seriously hurt for. However, I understand that no one was hurt in the action, and it is important to remember that the Hotel was part of the NATO summit, one of five Hotels in Strasbourg publicly set aside to house the thousands of journalists there to cover the “celebrations”, and a place from which police were spying on the demonstrators. So, even if we ignore the fact that Ibis profit from the deportations of sans papier, it is difficult to say that it was not a legitimate target.
But despite all that, the experience of that week left me feeling uncomfortable, alienated and confused. We took advantage of a peace march to make it look like war... We used the camp space, ate the food, and shat in the toilets. But, compared to previous self-managed events and camps, our participation in the village life was mostly limited to drinking beer, hiding in closed action meetings, or fighting the cops around the camp-site, building burning barricades, and making it look like war... And through it all I found myself questioning more and more how our actions relate to our politics, ourselves, our interactions and our values.
I am not saying that we were wrong to behave the way we did. I have long been critical of the tendency to pour so much energy into building up “activist service industries” (legal support, medical teams, camp organisation, independent media, etc) until there is almost no one left to do the (in the end mostly symbolic) actions. In that sense, Strasbourg was a welcome change. But our arrogance disturbed me. There was no interest in participating, explaining, or at least showing some recognition of being part of a common dynamic, where people focussing on different things makes it possible for the whole action to happen and be powerful. The focus, perhaps the only interest, was in violent confrontation. And we seem to look down on anyone who questions or does not immediately understand why we think and act the way we do.
As usual, in the days after the demonstration in Strasbourg, the leaders of the dead-in-the-water political parties of the left denounced and disassociated themselves from the “violent minority” and the pacifists decried their actions “ruined” by hooligans with no political ideas. It is always frustrating to read those comments, and it easily creates the “them and us” divide that enables us to despise the “democrats” and “reformists” who take their symbolic actions and then go back to a comfortable bourgeois life. But at the same time I was embarrassed by the lack of respect or interest shown by the black bloc for the other participants in the anti-NATO actions, particularly because while they could do their actions without us, we could not have done our actions without them.
Sure, we are sexy, all dressed in black, striking yet another riot-porn pose for the cameras. But we really were only a small part of a big whole. It is ironic that the black bloc, who criticise the media so much, are also the first to accept the hype that makes breaking windows and burning garbage the only focus of the day. It is important to recognize that if it were not for the infrastructure provided by the camp organizers (which we mostly consumed), if it were not for the extremely hard work done by the legal team, which included negotiations with the police and creating legal and political pressure (which we scorn), and if it were not for the political and physical protection offered by the presence of thousands of protesters many of whom have political views and ways of acting different from our own, it would not have been possible to burn the border, destroy the cameras, or attack the police in the way that we did.
I saw groups of pacifists, elderly people, people with children, running terrified from tear gas, flash-balls and stones (because there are always people who don't look who they are throwing at, or idiots who throw from the back and usually just hit the first line of protesters!) And for the first time I wondered what it must feel like to be on the outside of the black bloc.
We organised in whispered meetings in small, closed, paranoid groups. If you are not on the inside there is almost no possibility to participate. Yet we take our actions into spaces (like the demonstration) where they directly affect people who have had no opportunity to dialogue, to doubt, to debate or to decide. And we expect them to assume the consequences. We expect them not to publicly criticise, but we give them very little opportunity to criticise in private. We expect them not to disassociate from something they were not, in fact, involved in planning or perpetrating. We expect them to respect our political position and forms of action, while we often behave in ways that suggest we have no respect for or interest in theirs.
I am not a hippy. I am not a pacifist. I do not believe the State, the corporations, the Armies and Police, will one day, if exposed to enough information or enough persuasion, be convinced to put down their arms, their power, their assault on the earth and those who populate it. I do not think peaceful protest “works”. Actually neither am I convinced that violent action “works”, since our violence will always be less than theirs by dint of their access to new technologies, manpower and weapons. But I am prepared to do both since struggle we must, or give up.
I feel maybe I am older than a lot of the people who were in the black bloc in Strasbourg. I come from the generation that took to the streets and fought for the sheer mad joy of it in the mid-1990s. I guess I come from an age of innocence: before the death of Carlo Giuliani, before they called us terrorists, before all our creativity was swallowed into the meaninglessness of the "mass movement" at the Heiligendamm blockades, or the political emptiness of the ESF. I remember a time when we trusted, and sometimes we even felt like we had something to win. In that context, the “diversity of tactics” meant a willingness to consider all the forms of action available to reach our aims. But for that, we had to have aims...
One thing that alienated me in Strasbourg was that I was no longer sure what our aims were. The people involved in black bloc tactics did not seem interested in the blockades of the summit, or in other, less predictable actions; only in the demonstration. According to our own analysis, demonstrations are a poor substitute for “direct action”. But we put our energy into creating the space, or the situation, where we could riot (even if the only place we could do that was in an empty industrial estate miles from anywhere). The success or failure of the action, it seems, can be measured by how many rocks were thrown, how many bins were burnt, how much glass was broken, or how many cops were injured.
Riot ceases to be a tactic and becomes an end in itself. We do not need political arguments to defend or define our actions. Our actions are our political arguments: they require no more context than capitalism itself in all its forms, and they speak for and define themselves.
Which in some ways is good. Politics should come from the gut, not just from the head. But if we only use poetic, insurrectionist calls to arms such as apell (call) or ai ferri corti (at daggers drawn) to define what we do, then we end up abstracting our actions from reality. When I got home I re-read a book I'd read a long time ago, The Demon Lover: On the sexuality of terrorism, by Robin Morgan (ex-Weathermen). She describes the process of radicalising struggles as:
“...leading to an ends-justify-the-means attitude. As abstractions proliferate, the original issues are likely to be forgotten entirely...Rhetoric, 'turf', tools and weapons, uniforms, become fetishes of the manhood identity...The shift from living for a cause – e.g. fighting to enhance quality of living - to dying for a cause now locks into place. Violence. Those who question it are traitors...A politics of hope has become a politics of despair. The goal is now too abstract to be attainable, nor can manhood be satisfied by less. Cynicism sets in, as does the strategy of provocation and polarisation. What once aimed for a humanistic triumph now aims for a purist defeat.
The State obliges.”
It is a bleak picture she paints, of political violence as a dead-end street; by embracing violence, she says, we condemn ourselves to reproduce patterns of patriarchy, authority and masculine value systems in our actions, collectives and relationships until the bitter end. I rejected this book as pacifist garbage when I first read it, but now it makes me think.
Sometimes it feels like our weakness, lack of direction, and lack of advance, creates a culture where we close ourselves into a political aesthetic (not even an ideology!) and limit what we can do, what we can say, and what forms of action are militant enough to be acceptable. We close ourselves off from complexity. We leave no room for doubts or questions. There is no assembly, no forum, no spokespeople, so our only form of political communication is our actions and the images they project. We create ourselves in the image of the black-clad urban guerilla; we give symbolic meaning to what is often only violent indirect action (as opposed to non-violent direct action) by creating the momentary image of the civil war that capitalism wages on life... But we should be able to be honest and sincere about the content of what we do, otherwise we will end up being all about image.
Under the shade of an oak tree we talk in whispers. My jaw is tight with the thrill of conspiracy, and with... pride. The secrecy and self importance that surrounds this group is infectious. In my pent up frustration at the ever deepening desert of the existent I am won over by their power, their language, and their arrogant conviction that they are right. My need to do something, anything, is seduced by their militance. I am honoured that they are talking to me, and I want to prove myself worthy of being part of this secret, self-important thing. So I learn fast, to speak this language of violence with confidence and hide my doubts and ambivalence like they do... but today I look at the faces of my compañeros, tight lipped and quick to disapprove, quick to condemn this or that breach of security, failure of militancy, or simple show of weakness. And I find an unexpected, stubborn and anti-authoritarian urge to say out loud “I am scared.”
And maybe it is because I am getting older (and I see that the faces around me change: people get tired, burn out, disappear, while the average age of the kids taking to the street stays the same). Or maybe it is because beneath my black hood, and behind my mask, I am still a woman. And, like it or not, as a woman I worked hard for my militant credentials, said the right things, and proved myself time and time again through trial by fire. But the masculine, insurrectionist values of unswerving ideological conviction and willingness to hurt for the cause do not always come naturally to me.
And if we are not really honest with ourselves, if we continually hide our feeling of weakness, despair and intimacy behind masks and militant posturing, then we limit ourselves, stop ourselves from examining our true position and from exploring where we can go next. We are not winning, we are losing. But only when we recognise and understand the problem, can we begin to search for a solution. I am writing this text because I feel we need to communicate something more than the arrogance of youth and the image of war.
For me it was exciting to be on the streets with the boys from the banlieu, racing about on their motor-scooters, given strength by our presence to take back streets that should have been theirs from the start. It was a rush to confront the cops together. Violence can (and in that case, did) unite us and help to build relationships. I doubt those boys would have been very interested if we had marched as a peaceful demo through their neighbourhood and given out flyers about NATO.
Nevertheless, from time to time I was disturbed by an edge I felt to the atmosphere. It was present on the street, and even more so in the camp, where sharpened by drink and drugs, it broke out from time to time into small macho dog-fights to establish the hierarchy of the day... Perhaps I am not nihilist enough (or perhaps it is because I am a woman?), but I struggle with the contradictions in this.
I want to reach out of our milieu to contact, to interact and to act with others, find the common ground to strike out together at the neon-lit plastic-wrapped prison of our everyday lives. But if we uncritically fetishise the street gang, the banlieu, the incarnation of “people's rage”; if we turn our actions over to a culture of violence and give them no content at all, then we are no different from the football crews and street gangs who set a time and place for a staged fight. (Saturday afternoon at the demo, instead of after the game!) To put it simply, there are dynamics, values and behaviours that I am not interested in reproducing, however “street” they may be.
I am intrigued as to why certain people are attracted to particular types of political thought and action. I know for myself how seductive I find the uniform of the autonomen, how excited I get by a black bloc, how much I like covert actions. But what are the aesthetic, cultural and gender values underlying this attraction, where do they come from, where do they lead and who do they serve?
I am not suggesting that we leave behind the path we are on, not at all, only that we follow it with great care and consideration, understanding what it does to us. We need to constantly deconstruct how we respond to our acts, how they change our relationships to other people, what we personally and collectively need to do to go through with certain acts and how that affects us and our relationship with and attitudes towards others.
Violence – whoever is using it – has repercussions on the psychological health not only of those who are at the receiving end but also of those perpetrating violence, for whatever end, whatever ideology. I have no feeling for pacifism as an ideology. What I do feel is a need to help us fight militantly for longer and with greater personal and collective health. To choose a path of violence at great personal and collective risk means choosing a security culture whose inherent qualities are exclusion, paranoia, unspokenness and a complex of relationships in which important parts of your life must be kept hidden and not shared. This leads to tension and other feelings (jealousy, insecurity, not being valued). It is a path where you sometimes have to treat people not as you would treat your comrades but as faceless enemies with faces. This is not easy. And I believe it takes a great toll on us: on how we view others, and on how we view ourselves.
I am scared that voicing these doubts and questions will mean I am rejected. But such “un-warlike” values as empathy, ambivalence, reflection, and anchoring our behaviour in the personal and the real, are political too. So I will risk rejection and I will write. I hope that this text will be understood as self-criticism, and not as an attack. I hope that some of these ideas may find fertile ground to generate debate: to shatter our images and look at the substance beneath.
We are living in interesting times. Resistance is becoming more and more evident, in the face of the ecological, social, political and economic crises that are rocking the world, and it seems that States and corporate powers no longer even try to cover up the true face of capitalism, war and social control. Change (one way or another) may well be inevitable, and we will probably have to struggle through it, like it or not. In this context, I write with hope, out of the desire to look for some answers to the question asked by Greek friends, still riding high on the revolt of December 2008:
“and after we have burnt everything? what next...?”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/08/435985.html