“If you will not free yourself from the ropes that bind you while you are alive, do you think that ghosts will do it after?” Kabir
At this point, no one is innocent and all have made their choice. There is not one person who is not having to take sides. People are testing each other, testing society, testing how far they can go. Flexing their muscles, so to speak, before the clash. You can see it in the slight tilt of the lips as someone blames the immigrants or the Muslims in a roomful of strangers. Who will react?
There is no more information to be disseminated. There is no strategy now. There are no meetings that will change the world. There is only poetry and rebellion. There is the finding of accomplices. There is the finding of oneself. And in that act of discovery, the necessity of attack despite despair.
There is no blueprint for a future world. We will not promise or pretend there is one. Anything we could invent now would be contaminated by the prison we live in. We have no fixed structure for what happens ‘after’. Just as the baby cannot imagine what lies beyond the womb and yet still is born, so we must struggle from the anaesthetizing ‘comfort’ of this darkness and see what lies outside all that we know.
We attack because we must, not because we hope for anything, not because we have ‘a plan’, not even because we imagine we might win.
Whatever there is to win, we can win each day here, now, and that is the victory of our autonomy, our refusal, our initiative, our attack, our friendships, our projectuality. Today we win by giving in to our passions more than our fears, by giving in to our courage more than our comfort. Surrendering to the instinct for life rather than the instinct for security.
What are we trying to hold onto in our apathy, our compliance? What is it that is so precious? If we have only one life, then why do we let others dictate how it is to be lived? To live one day of pure, glittering love and rage is surely worth more than a thousand crawling on our knees. A cliché of course, but one that must have been forgotten.
Only those who can free themselves from the fear and conditioning of modern society will change their lives. Nothing else is sufficient. Life cannot be known in it’s totality, truth appears only to be forged through courageous free will, the infinite and indestructible source of all ideas.
There are two classes of human beings — the included and the excluded. Human history is the struggle between these opposing classes.
At the heart of the individual is the capacity to exceed all boundaries imposed by the authoritarian system, the possibility to change reality through acts of tremendous character. For a future free society, the present one must be razed to the ground and it’s representatives fall in a hail of bullets.
Historical continuation of the anarchist-nihilistcommunist tendency is only brought about by individual and mass violence against the exploiters.
We are individualists because we are human beings and we wish to see the liberation of each and every individual to their full potential.
We are nihilists because we have given up on ‘hope’ and we have come to terms with the realisations of chaos physics, in that consciousness is the prima materia.
We are anarchists because we are for stateless communism. In this aim, we organise collectively to directly attack capital, the state and alienation using the full spectrum of means at our disposal, and always in keeping with our libertarian vision of total freedom.
The anarchistic-mass-social turbulence is getting larger and uncontrollable, and there is so much social fragmentation, that the lack of cohesion adds to our dangerousness. Simply put though, we are not interested in politics, in dialogue, in the left-social game. We are interested in revolutionary organisation, arms and ideas.
We are outside and beyond the morality and restrictions of the dominant false culture. We will create widespread new values through our actions, or we will die trying, sure in the everliving vital life-force which surges like spring against the death-system.
The aim is to create situations beyond the control of anyone, where a cataclysmic destruction of the capitalist system can take place.
Our ideas are not seen as ends in themselves, but as weapons for creating reality. To fully realise this is to face a freedom in which nothing we have been taught or conditioned to believe is true, and everything is possible, there are no certainties, and the consequences can be horrific. Laughter seems to be the only defence against the realisation that ‘nothing’ is real.
Thus anarchy heralds the arrival of the death of all ideologies and fixed systems of identification. Chaos is here — right before your eyes.
The purpose is to create new realities by acting out our ideas to their radical conclusion. Armed free will is powerful enough to destroy all illusionary gods and entrenched political systems — the running dogs of capital are terrified by the liberated individual who has finally refused to submit to any domination.
Due to the beginnings of a new urban struggle, the European super-state is attempting to build a comprehensive database system for profiling and apprehending anarchist and autonomous radicals, and extensively cataloguing, monitoring and surveying the places and environments (online & physical) that “political radicalisation” and “extremism” are thought to reside.
From all aspects of life, language has been ripped to shreds by power and turned to signify its opposite. “Extremism” could never encompass a total description of our everyday struggle, and we reject the terminology of repression outright. Yet this abuse of language, this expropriation by capital of the essence, not only of communication, but of conceptual understanding, is at the very heart of the newest repressive measures. It begins by differentiating those on a list from those that are not on a list, separating the desirables from the undesirables, those that are obedient from those that aren’t... in the end, as we know from history, the list is simply a list, for a greater end, always at least potentially including everyone. So, like any fascist state, even those fictional ones created by visionaries like Orwell, the European Union is creating frameworks for manipulation and social control.
IGAST (international agierende gewaltbereite Störer), operated by the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt/German Federal Criminal Police Office), is a database which is categorised “violent troublemakers who are active internationally”, which has existed since 2003. In contrast to the other German “troublemaker” files, IGAST is a central database which collects and analyses information in the context of “Globalisationissues”, a catch-all term for anyone who is opposed to the capitalist system. In June 2009 information on 2,966 persons was stored in this database. Those who have been arrested or registered in the context of violent protests against “globalisation” in Germany or abroad are specified for inclusion. Given its nature as a centralised database on anarchists and autonomous “extremists”, which is both manually fed with data from various national/international sources and accessed solely by the BKA branch for “State Protection” (BKA-Abteilung ST — Polizeilicher Staatsschutz [political police]), it is evident that IGAST has a similar purpose to Europol’s ‘Analysis Working Files’, (i.e. the harvesting and mining of information to understand networks and reveal their social relationships), and will ultimately contribute to the bulk of the EU database in the initial stages of development.
The European database being created is based on the classification system of the BKA, which logs objects (i.e. evidence), physical and online places (homes, social centres, websites etc.), groups and individuals. The large BKA files on anarchists and autonomous radicals are already the cornerstone in the mosaic of the European police information landscape; which features Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems and DNA databases networked with their police counterparts in other countries under the auspices of the ‘Prüm Treaty’. The ongoing ‘search’ files for objects and persons, — these are sources from which the BKA’S officers feed the Schengen Information System (SIS — Governmental database used by several European countries to maintain and distribute information on individuals and property of interest, for the purpose of ‘border control’, ‘national security’, ‘law enforcement’).
During the Strasbourg NATO summit in April 2009, the BKA’s political police submitted information on 232 people whose data was stored in IGAST — the complete list of those deemed “troublemakers” — to their French colleagues, plus additional information on more than 400 people received from foreign sources. In actual effect, more than 100 individuals were hindered in crossing the German-French border and attending demonstrations in Strasbourg. Despite the cataloguing, anarchist and autonomous black blocs attacked and set fire to many buildings, including a ‘Hotel Ibis’ accommodating the French police and used for deporting migrants. A border post was also totally gutted by a fire set by the black bloc, and the cops had to fight hard to pin down the fighting in the industrial areas out of the main districts. This was a powerful symbolic victory showing up the impotence of the NATO the emergency contingency planning of various state police forces and security personnel.
3 years ago, on 12 October 2007, the Federal Council (Bundesrat, the chamber of the 16 German state-districts, represented by their councils) declared that: “the creation of a European database on violent offenders who are active internationally is essential in order to target measures against persons who are prepared for violence in their homelands [travel bans are mentioned explicitly] or at the locations of events.” Moreover, they note that a “general improvement in information sharing on violent offenders who are active internationally is urgent” to support the policing of major events. The Federal Council suggested making use of either Europol’s computer systems or the Schengen Information System, or to network existing or newly created national databases to guarantee the cross-border availability of “standardised data”. The Federal Government was asked to work towards the creation of a European database on “violent offenders who are active internationally”.
The background to the initiative was the G8 summit hosted by Germany in June 2007 in Heiligendamm. According to the Federal Council more than 20 per cent of the 646 people arrested at the summit were foreigners. Officials complained of deficits in international information-sharing which was said to be sporadic and non-standardised. On Monday 26 April 2010 the General Affairs Council of the Council of the European Union “nodded” through without debate Council Conclusions “on the use of a standardised, multi-dimensional semistructured instrument for collecting data and information on the processes of radicalisation in the EU.”
This “instrument” is to be set up to prevent people turning to “terrorism” through “radicalisation”. Firstly by analysing the “various environments” where “radicalisation” occurs, then secondly by introducing “systematic ways” of exchanging information on individuals or groups who use “hate speech” or “incite terrorism”. Information is to be exchanged on “radical leaders” who promote terrorism and their movements tracked with a view to “interrupt radicalisation processes in progress or to raise alerts in relation to them” (“alerts” could trigger action, such as questioning, placing under surveillance, detention etc). In conjuction, Europol (Centralised European Police) is asked to “generate lists of those involved in radicalising/recruiting or transmitting radicalising messages and to take appropriate steps”.
The document which the Council Conclusions are based is entitled: “Instrument for compiling data and information on violent radicalisation processes” (EU doc no: 7984/10 ADD 1). This new EU instrument to tackle those who “promote terrorism” only mentions one reference to “terrorism”. It is also odd that the terminology used flips between referring to “violent radicalisation” and “radicalisation” as if they are the same. “Extremism” and “Terrorism” are frequently used interchangably in modern policing jargon, but we are not going to cry about that, nor about our supposed civic “right to demonstrate”. It has gone too far for that. What a lie these “civil liberties” are. Democracy is a fraud and only a total break with all existing power structures will change this intolerable situation.
The target for this new “instrument” is clearly not people or groups who have or are planning to commit terrorist acts nor those inciting terrorism, because both come under the criminal law (arrest, charge, sentence etc.). This new database is targeted at all those in the mass society who hold different ideas than those permitted and expressed by the mass media. And who is going to be using this “instrument” placing a very wide spectrum of people and groups under surveillance? EU police forces, security and intelligence agencies plus “EU institutions and agencies”. How are these bodies and agencies going to compile and use the information gathered? The aim is to exchange information and increase the quantity “obtained by other, non-specific means or instruments” (by any means possible?). Apart from providing analyses (termed “ISSUES”) the information gathered would result in assessments and “tactical operational... decision making” (a security euphemism for targeting, undermining, destabilising and eliminating). The information, or rather ‘intelligence’, to be gathered will be drawn to complete a standardised list of 70 questions, covering ideologies, dissemination channels, factors influencing behaviour and impact of “RMs” (“Radical Messages”). Within the “semistructured data compilation approach” each agency or body will be able to add their own categories or definitions. The 70 questions will presumably be based on intelligence-gathering of personal data (from state and commercial sources) and surveillance (eg: examining the content of e-mails, surveillance of all major internet providers, vehicle tracking, covert operations) and be interpreted and passed on by police and security agents in each country or EU body. To which will be added suspicions or suppositions and second-hand information (eg: hearsay). Moreover, the interpretation of this information/ “intelligence” will vary greatly from state to state in the EU — and vary according to the political presumptions in each state as to which individuals or groups to target.
No-one should be under any illusions as to the intent and enormity of this plan. Another earlier, and also secret document (5692/1/10 REV 1) explicitly states that the purpose of the instrument is: “purely operational” with all the agencies across the EU free to amend or adjust the 70 questions in order to “optimise the results”. Each agency in every state will be free to work to their own definitions and assumptions on individuals and groups and freely circulate these around the EU. What is being planned is a largescale, automated, risk profiling system to target so-called “agents” of “radicalisation”. There are millions of people in the EU with “radical” ideas (in the eyes of the state) who may easily, in their own terms, use arguments which are also used by so-called “radicals”, without any intention whatsoever of using or encouraging “violence”. This shows once again, that any effective action, “violent” or “non-violent”, will be countered by the state using crude repressive methods backed up by a disruptive intelligence program which aims to be as comprehensive as possible. The online forums, social networking websites and newsfeeds will come under as close scrutiny and policing as the physical environments of “radicalisation”, the people using these services and spaces acutely monitored and profiled. Older generations will increasingly be painted as “ring-leaders” and other such idiocies.
Furthermore, this initiative comes on top of plans under the ‘Stockholm Programme’ to create an EU-wide database on all political activists (“protestors”) under the guise of tackling “violent troublemakers”. Under both plans anyone deemed “radical” would be targeted and everyday social life could become contaminated by unseen and unaccountable suspicions manufactured by agencies of the state.
These mechanics of the repressive machine cannot resolve the contradiction: Modern industrial capitalist society itself is our ‘laboratory’ of “radicalisation”. Here in the ‘community’ where ‘citizens’, soft-cops, snitches, nationalists and the religious attempt to lord over us. Here in the workplace where we are humiliated everyday in a thousand different ways. Here in the cold meaningless exploitation of daily life. You cannot travel to escape this void. You cannot remain ignorant if you have seen past it. If nothing will change, it will just all get much worse.
All the police with all the information technology in the world cannot stop the realisation of the broader picture happening here on Earth, a storm is coming which cannot be stopped.
Decentralised informally federated diverse small groups of 2–3 people operating in conditions of mass struggle, which understand their operating environment can defeat standing armies, masses of police and technological infrastructures of control. A starting point of the new urban social war is to become unpredictable and chaotic, by taking up new forms of struggle and constantly spreading into new areas of contagion. An internationalist perspective is essential if we are to defeat the interlocking cartel of nation-states, multi-national corporations, industrialists and bankers.
The capitalist system and its systems of surveillance and policing are based on patterning and habitual behaviour, but the contradiction is that the dictates of the economy mean that our lives are unstable, and have the potential to be mobile in a way they were not traditionally. We are compelled to change jobs, town or countries to the demands of survival. It is easy to place under surveillance some-one who lives all their life in one place and is tied there. Not so easy if they change social circle, friendship group and job every 6 months, as is frequent for the young exploited. Austerity measures of the neo-liberal reforms in line with the economic cuts mean a broad attack against social services, health and welfare, and although this means that immiseration will become widespread, it also means that the state has less control over the exploited and new alliances will be created amongst those struggling to survive in the face of these capitalist manoeuvres. So, the transience and precarity that has been forced on us is also our weapon. But we have also to learn how to handle this. And this means becoming strong individuals uniquely at war with that which oppresses us, individuals capable of coming together and moving apart like mercury.
Informal organisation is not only a component of anarchist-insurrectional methodology, it is the key facet of the successful “asymmetric” (unequal) urban warfare model which is being studied and respected by conventional military forces worldwide in their war against “terror”.
The mobile new generations of exploited proletariat are coming to consciousness of their situation increasingly fast due to cheap availability of decent telecommunications, the new online self-publishing formats and new low-cost print technologies which are becoming available. The new technologies are enabling the co-ordination and spread of our ideas deeper than ever before during this critical period and although anarchists and autonomous left radicals are few in number, through organisation we can realise our collective strength in mass terms. The contradictions of using the new medias, topographic/mapping software, social networking sites and selfpublishing platforms, is that although they let the state plan better their demographics of control, they are also leading to the demise of conventional print media like newspapers, magazines etc., and people are transmitting and receiving information in a much more direct way. Of course, the new paradigm is not without it’s dangers and there is much to be written about the impoverishment of language and social relationships, but essentially, these tools are useful for the distribution and informal organisation of the attack, and they have largely kept the mass media on the back-foot in terms of direction and focus. Now usually all major media companies offer ‘comment’, ‘forum’ and ‘contribute’ sections to their racketeering operations. Internet self-publishing and new medias are going to make corporate journalists largely irrelevant. The plethora of direct actions and armed urban groups in the 1970’s and 1980’s were held back by lack of effective communication with the base population, and the anti-capitalist struggle constantly undermined by the Cold War and Soviet Union. These no longer exist, whilst there exists this acute and seemingly irreparable total crisis at all levels, the nature of which is being communicated ever quicker. Whilst we don’t have any interest in making any predictions, there are some matters that are as sure as the Arctic becoming a blue ocean.
Anarchist-nihilist-communist insurrectional methods are the only real threat to the all encompassing capitalist system, there is no other way out. When our methods are successful we can expect opposition from this totalitarian prison society, the technological aspect of which far surpasses anything dreamt of by the classical fascist regimes. The key to the future is to unlock new dimensions of acting and communicating, that spark mass incidents of rupture, chaos and self-organisation. All the boundaries between the anti-system rebels are being reconfigured, new enemies and comrades are emerging. Many of these activist ‘social centres’, political platforms, ‘movements’, ‘federations’ and labels are impediments to the mass struggle, as they are eclipsed during the necessarily uncontrollable insurrectional clash. If these political organisations were organisations of struggle there would be a greater dimension to their participation and critique, and they would expand in quality instead of trying to defend their own territory. In the moment of rupture, many more previously unknown comrades and new centres of exchange and dialogue outside these left-activist identities/spaces open up and surpass the fictional movement. Often this fictional movement responds by seeking to defend its status-quo. Repression is usually also dealt with in a similar way, waiting for a moment to conveniently point and delineate, which always helps to prepare the repressive work of the police. Through denunciation seeking to find a moment to express their own conforming identity, which of course can only become the worn-out plea of social management, because they have nothing to offer anyone any more. These people are the ambulance chasers of the social democratic illusion, their time is over.
These people, regardless of what they call themselves, and without naming some, for the purposes of withholding from them our energy, and our consideration, could never be satisfied. If they try to back down from confrontation with the class enemy, try to impose limits and regulations from above or repeat smears and lies against any part of the movement they cannot control they can expect answers. They know nothing about our revolutionary struggle nor social insurrection, in short — they know nothing about the real anarchist-nihilist-communist movement which is not mediated through political or ideological fictions.
How does the conscious mass respond to state repression? By moving away from the leftist political model and refusing to describe other peoples’ actions in terms of an outdated methodology and political approach. Finding our autonomy in the streets means respecting and allowing other people theirs, not fixing people into hypothesises which ultimately benefit the system. The real movement is beyond all spaces, ‘revolutionary organisations’, councils, assemblies etc and is the motion of all.
The repressive forces of the state and corporations constantly depict the individuals in struggle and the new urban guerillas, as having no respect for life, as “insane”, “criminal”, “fanatical”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imagine what would happen if the masses of people were communicated with in a way they could understand the truth of what had been denied to them? Deceitful propaganda is endemic and is obviously not a new thing, and does not only concern anarchists and the autonomous left, where they exist. Capitalism aims to debase every aspect of life with its double-speak. The corporate media has attempted to set the agenda around ‘immigration’, ‘crime’ and the ‘war-on-terror’ to such a disgusting and reprehensible degree that it is clear who they serve. Language is twisted to signify whatever power and hierarchy want it to mean. The changing social conditions, communicative nature of revolt and intractability of the economic and environmental crisis not only escapes the mainstream media, but almost everyone else involved in social control and police propaganda. The spread of anarchist-nihilistcommunist direct action across Europe and beyond is the consequence of the development of a new generation of interlinked militant social struggles based in mass unease with existing power structures.
Who would have thought after the G8 Genoa summit of 2001 the Carabinierie (Italian paramilitary police) would head the Europol’s anti-anarchist unit? Only the sane. Of course, despite Carlo Guiliani dead, hundreds beaten, degraded, tortured and imprisoned in a cruel theatre, the democratic masters gave the dogs the bones. In due course, now 50 Carabinierie arrive in Athens, an anti-anarchist unit, advising on “anarchist-insurrectionalism”, the media in tow. Media terror-hysteria has always been the speciality of the Carabinierie. In such a reversal of fortunes is it possible for any collaborating journalist to expect anything other than disdain? No. Mainstream media formulates the ‘truth’, it does not report it.
For the sake of illumination: we could look at the phrase “Eco-terrorism”, which prevails to allegedly describe environmental direct action. This terminology is a more apt description of the colossal horror BP (British Petroleum) have caused in the ‘Deepwater’ incident in the Gulf of Mexico, not a description of eco-anarchists who have a deep regard for all life. To know the exboss of BP, Tony Hayward, who is responsible for the ‘Deepwater’ catastrophe, is to walk away with a £10 million pension fund plus bonus, is enough to seal fury into bullet-chambers. “Eco-terrorism” is not only this coastal ecology in collapse, it is the entire biosphere plundered and destroyed for profit world-wide.
Anarchists respect life in ways that remain unequalled, the restraint shown by our tendency is exemplary. For all the grief and damage inflicted and looted from devastated forests, broken peoples, ruined oceans, there has not been nearly enough revenge from the heart of the Earth. Our compassion is that heart.
Anarchists make the future using methods that represent the free society that they embody. Even when we use pistols and explosives we’ll use them with consciousness and imagination, and without apology, and always aiming at the exploiters, for not a single one of the excluded must be harmed.
If we act as urban guerillas, we act because we define ourselves to be the co-creators of future libertarian realities defining new values, which are expressed by our state of being in a social war.
An anarchist-nihilist-communist assassination is not a faceless random murder. It is not indiscriminate, it does not threaten the mass. It has a specific motive, and a considered target. And it is not faceless in the sense that, although one individual may not claim responsibility for it, the anarchist cadre who have undertaken the act will often claim collective responsibility. How different this is from the state or the corporate boss who controls a labyrinth of orders and procedures that allow the back-handers paid to death squads, the blind eyes turned to poor work practices which lead to so many ‘accidental deaths’ and the acts of general devastation of human, animal and ecological life described above? This is faceless random terror — never owned, untraceable, and utterly indiscriminate. When an anarchist kills, each anarchist takes that blood onto themselves, carrying that responsibility, in a very deep and noble way. Each anarchist who fights and takes life chooses to live with the consequences of taking life, refusing to hide behind anything. The anarchist ‘terror’ only threatens those, we might say, with something to hide. Attentat is in fact the diametric opposite of state terror. It is an expression of our historical struggle against all oppression, using the methods that are most identical to our libertarian vision.
The role of the individual within mass struggle is to comprise a nucleus of destruction and creation, to find others who share the rebellion and immediacy, to collectively organise effective methods of revolutionary struggle, not within the anachronistic model of the political left, but within the social and economic dimension of our lives.
Each method of struggle depends on the continuation of all the others — radical media, popular dinners, reading circles, non-hierarchical assemblies, occupations, armed expropriations, riots, attacks, direct action and so on... The projects of widespread subversion which are growing around the world aimed at a new libertarian society of mutual aid, voluntary cooperation and free exchange cannot be stopped by terminology, computers or violence, although the authorities will most assuredly try. Reality is beyond quantification and limitation, or to speak directly: some things are worth more than money, and rebellion is priceless!
Mass means of communication and coordination, are critical. To this end, cohesion, foresight and organisation are needed if we are to enter a new dimension of international struggle. Permanent conflict and cross-border subversion has been achieved through relatively simple means: through identification of intermediate struggles by specific informal networks of people leading to continual individual and mass social clashes.
The new realities are approaching, it seems like it is too late for anything other than a catastrophic outcome, which looms over post-industrial civilisation a short distance into the future.
In the face of this chaos, we find our precious refusal, sabotage and resistance is based in a loss of hope in this human-world, which might never recover from the exploiters, but joy and free will are found in fighting back. All those who do not now the price of this take note.
For social insurrection and the destruction of all prisons.