Against His-story, Against Leviathan Chapter 6 (octopi and worms; Assyrian, Phoenician, and Chaldean Leviathans)

Against His-story, Against Leviathan Chapter 6

6.

The Phoenician octopus and its later Greek, Venetian and other offspring will come to be seen as something altogether different from the Assyrain worm. There will even be those who will see the octopus as a form of human freedom. I intend to show that this is an optical illsuion.

There is no doubt that the two Leviathans differ. The artificial worm's claws and fangs, its armies, are usually attached to the body, whereas the tentacles of the artificial octopus detach themselves from the body and can be said to move about freely, especially if the tentacles are ships. The worm is largely landborne whereas the octopus tends to be seaborne.

There is no doubt that two different types are in question. The point is that these are not types of human community but types of Leviathan. Both are what Hobbes will cal "artificial men." Each of them is an automaton, a machine, and like other machines it can sometimes be converted or adapted to do what the other does.

The main difference between them does not lie in the way the tentacles move nor in the medium through which they move nor in the size of the head, but rather in the way the two automata use the already-mentioned surplus. Both live off the surplus product of zeks' labor. But the worm uses most of its surplus to enlarge its head and body, its officials and armies, whereas the octopus keeps most of its surplus continually circulating between sources and destinations.

This different treatment of the surplus gives each a specific advantage over the other. The one tends to have greater wealth, the other greater power. An efficient and flexible octopus--and the Phoenician cities seem to have been both--can suck an ever greater part of Mother Earth into its tentacles. The Phoenicians not only could but apparently did carry a vast proportion of plundered and denatured Biosphere in the holds of their ships. But with all this wealth, the Phoenician octopus was still at a disadvantage to the Assyrian worm in terms of power, as a single campaign led by the third Tiglathpileser revealed.

We will be surprised by the ease of the Assyrian conquest. We will think the wealthy can buy power as easily as the powerful can grab wealth. We think of the British Empire, an octopus with the power of a worm, or of the American Empire, a worm with the tentacles of an octopus.

The Phoenicians do buy armies. A few of Levi's grandsons, in fact, distinuish themselves as mercenaries in those armies. But armies eat up the surplus in the ships' holds, and the heads of the mercantile houses know that all the wealth of the Phoenicia comes from taking the things in the holds to places where they're precious, and from filling the holds with cheap things that are precious elsewhere. The merchants also know that large armies acquire insatiable appetites and threaten to swallow all the things in the ships' holds. And of course the merchants are right.

When the third Tiglathpileser's war engines knock down Phoenicia's gates, the Assyrians do not inherit a world empire of floating tentacles. The Assyrian militarists do not need to deport Phoenicia's merchants, and they may not even want the floating empire to end. But the moment their hungry armies plunder the ships' holds, the Phoenician octopus collapses. All that's left of it are the pieces of tentacles beyond Assyria's reach, the outposts on both shores of the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic. The parent of all these outposts rots like the empty ships in its harbors. The ships, whose holds cow contain only what's left of a once lush Levantine forest, will eventually sink. The trees in the ships' holds will have no heirs because the soil on which they grew has been washing into the sea since the day it lost its cover. This soil, still rich with living organisms, will join the sunken ships in the bottom of the Mediterranean, where both will gradually turn into offshore oil.

* * *

The Phoenician seaborne octopus was initially nothing but a tentacle or outgrowth of Sumerian and Egyptian landborne worms, and one might wonder how the octopus managed to stay loose for as long as it did, especially in view of its unavoidable miliatry inferiority vis-a-vis the Assyrian monster.

We will have to keep reminding ourselves that the landed worm is a coherent and efficient entity only in the wishful thinking of a Hobbes. Continual decompsition is the normal state of artificial worms in the field. The human beings reduced to springs and wheels never cease to resist this reduction. The beast's military campaigns against external as well as internal resisters, naemly its attempts to halt the decomposition, are in fact the stuff of His-story.

Decomposition was also the normal state of the Assyrian Leviathan during the twenty or ten generations of Phoenicia's heyday.

When the Hittite Leviathan collapsed, Assyria's Tukulti Ninurta led his army to capture and enslave thousands of the fallen empire's stranded soldiers, probably thinking to gain as much power as the other lost. But Assyria did not gain by this capture, and the sudden scarcity of boasting tablets suggests that in trying to feed its enlarged army, Assyria lost the ability to sustain itself. Babylonia as well as Elam withdrew from the monster's east, and when the first Tiglathpileser recovered these losses, federated tribes of Mushki tried to storm Assyria's west. The great grandfatehrs of Medes and Persians are said to have been among these angry Mushki.

Assyria's attempt to hold on to its extremities by military means apparently failed; the tablets speak of famines and withdrawals. Hurrian-speaking Mushki established themselves in a fortress called Uratu in the Armenian mountains, and even Assyria's Semitic-speaking zeks, both Aramean and Chaldean, began to witdraw from labor gangs and armies. The second Ashunasipal moved the head of the Assyrain Leviathan from Nineveh to Kalah to be closer to the rebels' strongholds, but his successor, the third Shamaneser, faced an even larger resistance, and this Civilizer had to raze Nineveh as well as Ashur to restore a Pax Assyriana.

Even then Assyria's troubles weren't over. The Hurrians of Uratu attacked in concert with zeks undermining Assyria from within, so that the third Ashrdan suffered what in Assyrain eyes must have been the greatest ignominy: military defeat on every front. And then his successor, the fifth Ashurnirari, suffered the even greater ignominy of being overthrown by the uprisng of his own capital, Kalah. For all these reasons, the Assyrian Leviathan did not even begin its career as swallower of all it competitors until twenty or ten generations after Tukulti Ninurta's capture of the stranded Hittites.

Assyria's third Tiglathpileser, called Pulu the Restorer by his contemporaries, was another of those great innovators along the wide path that leads from Barbarism to Civilization. Inhuman cruelty had been practiced by the Civilized before. This progressive monarch's innovation was to deport entire populations from their familiar places of refuge to strange places where they had to depend on the conqueror's generosity even for food..

The second Hiram of Tyre is mentioned on Assyrian tablets as a willing vassal; apparently this Hiram tried to buy his reprieve from the Assyrian tyrant. We've seen how much such a reprieve would cost Tyre and the other Phoenician cities.

Damascus, Edom and the little State of Israel with its capital at Samaria, tried to resist Pulu the Restorer, but King Ahaz of Judah and his troops served the deporter as auxiliaries who helped Assyria repress the resisters. Many heirs of Moses, people as well as prophets, rebelled against collaboration, and Ahaz was succeeded by King Hezekiah, who walled his kingdom in against the Assyrians. But by now all other independent Levantine Leviathans had been battered or turned to vassals by Pulu's successor, the fifth Shalmaneser, and the next Assyrian, the second Sargon, beat down the gates of Samaria and is said to have deported its entire population of twenty-seven thousand. Judah was now the last independent Leviathan on the Levant.

The second sargon's reign is another great leap forward for Civilization. This tyrant is far ahead of his Akkadian namesake in death-technology, inhuman cruelty and sheer killing power. Like his namesake, he sets out to conquer the world. At Khorsabad he builds a palace which will be dug up by our contemporaries: its impersonal, intimidating hierarchic sculpture and architecture expresses unequalled cruelty and terror.

This Sargon, also like his namesake, sets in motion forces that will swallow his successors. Already in his own reign, withdrawing Chaldeans and Arameans allied with Elamites find a champion in a former zek called Merodach-Baladan and leave the Assyrian no rest.

Sargon's successor Sennacherib, beset by continual rebellions, sacks and massacres most of his empire's inhabitants. During this madman's reign the Assyrians at last beat down the Kingdom of Judah and deport most of its inhabitants, they impound Phoenicia's empty ships, and they massacre the Chaldean and Aramean rebels at their Babylonian stronghold.

Then, under Essarhaddon, the Assyrians destroy Phoenician Sidon, besiege impoverished Tyre, and proceed to invade Egypt.

Ashurbanipal, the last tyrant of Assyria, inherits an empire embracing the entire known Leviathanic world, and lives to see his empire shrink to the size it was before Pulu set out to restore it. Ashurbanipal consoles himself by becoming a librarian and contemplating Assyria's pas greatness on the thousands of cuneiform tablets he collects at Nineveh. He is the precursor of historical scholars who will find similar consolation in their libraries.

Egypt, the Levant and Babylonia emerge from the decomposing Assyrian Leviathan, scathed and unable to resume.

Something else emerges, something that was set in motion from the world-raping Assyrian war engines: another federation of tribes from the steppes and mountians.

The avatars of this new assault from outside are the Medes, who easily install themselves in all-but devastated Elam. Behind the Medes are the federated speakers of Turkic and Iranian tongues whom the Greeks will cal Scythians and Persians. The newcomers help Naboplasser the Chaldean oust Assyrian power from Babylon and then join Naboplassar in putting a definitive end to Assyrain His-story.

Naboplassar the Chaldean, an armored man who spent his youth in the Assyrian war machine, seems to think the newcomers irrupted out of the Eurasian steppes in order to help him raise Babylon to the glory of fallen Nineveh. The Chaldean destoys the last remains of Assyrian power hiding in ancient Abram's town, Harran, and then proceeds to the Levant.

The next Chaldean, Nebucadrezzar, tyrant over a populous Babylon of glittering wealth and wretching poverty, reduces the by-now immiserated Levantine cities, and installs Zedekiah of Judah as puppet governor of Tyre, Sidon, Moab as well as Judah, but when Zedekiah offers to perform a similar service for Egypt's Pharaoh, the Chaldeans of Babylon besiege Tyre, burn Jerusalem, and deport the remaining Levantine Jews to Babylon.

This is as far as the Chaldeans are able to stretch their neo-Babylonian Leviathan. Nabonidus, the last of Babplastar's heirs, like Ashurbanipal the last Assyrian, is an antiquarian. The newcomers from the steppes overrun every stronghold ever held by Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians or neo-Babylonians.

* * *

exist! anarchism in a nutshell

props to a friend for putting this together. i doubt they'd want their name associated with it

unfortunately, i don't have the mad blogging skillz of the author, so you can find it at this link. maybe. https://tern.riseup.net/sm/src/download.php?startMessage=1&passed_id=1102&mailbox=INBOX&ent_id=2&passed_ent_id=0

remember, it's one of those deals where the correct order of pages is not immediately apparent. this is to facilitate our printing it out and making hardcopies so as to spread the One True Faith (tm)

aloha

the wind is so cold that it's blowing through the very solid and uncracked glass windows of the house i'm. thank goodness i'm not shivering in my drafty apartment with my room mate. i hope he brought someone back to have sex with, or he may very well get hypothermia or have a seizure.

maybe i will go to hawaii soon, for a permaculture internship. to help me accomplish this, i ask you to please listen to this hawaiian music, and maybe even focus some intention on my endeavor when you work magik, or prayer, or whatever you do or don't do. in any case, the music is very pleasant. http://www.HawaiianRainbow.com/listen.html. you could also listen to my friend's brother's ukelele hip hop, which is some rad tunes, @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F34WIf3t0QI

Clamor is going under; funny and apt Peak Oil article; Starhawk doing Newsweek, and other riff raff from a gimpy werebrock

i just got some of my major projects to a stopping point, so today has just meant chilling and surfing. cruising the links in my favorites, mostly. so here's some stuff i'd like to share from my foray. because noone really reads this, I can just put what I want. hooray!

my first comment is: o, phooey.

Clamor Magazine (last issue's cover pictured) is going under. this is a loss which can be filled in by other sources, but Clamor was shiny, well put together, drew from a diverse range of interesting and inspirational topics. it takes a super, eclectic researcher to find it all by themself, i never managed. RIP

feeling helpless/useless is a very bad mental state, 'specially if you're an idealist. I really dug the angle that Transition culture took on it: "Is Peak Oil Pessimism a Generation of Men Coming to Realise How Useless They Are?" (of course)

Starhawk now has a collumn or something with Newsweek, related to Interreligious Dialogue.

i'm reading a long ballad about someone named Suibhne (pronounced Sweeney) Geilt. he was a Celtic pagan king who got pissed at a Christian Bishop building a church in his territory. According to the story, first he threw the guys hand written, caligraphic psalter (good of prayers or something) into a lake. then he killed one of the Bishop's sons by impaling him with a spear, and then he through a spear at the guy. it richocheted off a religious bell that was hanging off the Bishop, who finally said "GOD, PISS ON THIS TURD". And according to the story, god did just that; the curse was that he'd be as flighty as a bird- he could fly, and he'd get so perturbed by loud human noises that he'd just fucking bolt and fly, talking in rhyme the whole time, to some other tree. i'm just past the part where he comes to a gathering place for "madmen" (shamans) after freaking out when some of his former subjects came to try and coax him down out of a tree:

17 Now when Suibhne heard the shout of the multitude and the tumult of the great army, he ascended from the tree towards the rain-clouds of the firmament, over the summits of every place and over the ridge-pole of every land. For a long time thereafter he was (faring) throughout Ireland, visiting and searching in hard, rocky clefts and in bushy J branches of tall ivy-trees, in narrow cavities of stones, from estuary to estuary, from peak to peak, and from glen to glen, till he reached ever-delightful Glen Bolcain. It is there the madmen of Ireland used to go when their year in madness was complete, that glen being ever a place of great delight for madmen. For it is thus Glen Bolcain is: it has four gaps to the wind, likewise a wood very beautiful, very pleasant, and clean-banked wells and cool springs, and sandy, clear-water streams, and green-topped watercress and brooklime bent and long on their surface. Many likewise are its sorrels, its wood-sorrels, its lus-bian and its biorragan, its berries, and its wild garlic, its melle, and its miodhbhun its black sloes and its brown acorns. The madmen moreover used to smite each other for the pick of watercress of that glen and for the choice of its couches. -http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T302018/index.html

what else? there's some new/old paganism making a comeback among the Ossetians: http://www.kuwaittimes.net/Navariednews.asp?dismode=article&artid=363476762

i also found the Sauna Club, a major accomplisment: http://saunaclub.blogspot.com/

megabus and Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Chapter 5 (Israel, an interlude, octopi proliferate)

Lately I’ve been recovering from a breakup and depression, brought about by facing the fact that the area that I grew up in will be developed. I don’t believe there’s anything I can do about it, since I’m leaving.

O yeah, I just applied to both the La’akea Community and Lost Valley Educational Center for permaculture interships.


I’ll be traveling through the Midwest on Megabus. http://www.megabus.com/us/. For some reason they gave me free tickets because I ordered so far in advance. I can totally understand them kicking me a heavy discount, but FOR FREE? There’s a $0.50 reservation fee, but traveling from Cincinnati to Chicago, and then to the Twin Cities, will actually cost me nothing. If I had a magic carpet, I’d spend more money on refueling my body to fight the cold than I am on these tickets. Werebrock is riding in style, and inside his budget even.

It’s pretty chilly in Cincy at the moment. I learned how to make really good expresso today. I had no idea that being a barista required any skills, but for sure it does. Hmmm. I also learned that all the good rock overhangs in my neighborhood are taken. I don't grudge the coons.
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Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Chapter 5

5.

The Israelites who withdraw from Egyptian captivity and then proceed to set in motion a worm of their own do not, by their efforts, introduce anything new to the Levant, despite their mentor's innovative theories.

They occupy fields and lodges of those they are able to defeat militarily, and then they try to follow the dead leader's precepts.

In addition to giving them the abstract Yahweh, Moses, is said to have been given his heirs numerous laws by which to keep themselves clean in the Abstraction's immortal eyes. After keeping themselves clean for two or three generations, they start to copy the ways of their unclean neighbors. Raving orators have fits of frenzy as they try to figure out just what it was that Moses had had in mind.

Such public outbursts, fits and trances seem to have been common in all the ancient Leviathans, and they make those places seem almost free compred to the controlled-communication cages we will live in.

Having gotten used to the lodges and fields of the expropriated Canaanites, some of the orators wonder if Yahweh might not want his chosen people to have some of their Phoenician neighbors' "good things," or some of their Philistine neighbors' iron weapons and military efficiency. One raving prophet discovers that the Israelites have only the concept of King of Kings whereas the people of the east, the Assyrians, have the real thing in the person of Ashur-rabi the second.

A man called Saul accepts the challenge and quickly emulates the Assyrians by levying troops. Saul is killed while testing the strength of his troops against the iron Philistines, and a man more familiar with the ways of iron giants reconditions the Israelite Leviathan into something comparable to the Philistine worm. King David then reduces the sons of Levi who have survived until now into efficient killing machines deployed in a permanent army supplemented by iron mercenaries.

With this force, the monarch is at last able to fulfill the rest of Moses' and Deborah's dream, to reduce Moab, Ammon, Edom and Aram. He then allies with the Phoenician Baal-worshippers of Tyre against his former Philistine allies, revealing by the ease of his victory that the iron men were not giants.

The victorious monarch, egged on by another orator, emulates the Baal-worshippers by building a Temple for his god. The fact that this god is not a dead relic from a pre-Leviathanic past but the King of Kings, the abstraction of Leviathan itself, bothers no one. The god of this Temple is treated exactly the same way as the gods of the Ziggurats.

King David's son inherits the crown and reduces yet more people in the god's name, and powerful subservient men fill their houses with good things, also in the god's name, exactly as Babylonians do in Marduk's name, Assyrians in Ashur's and Phoenicians in Baal's. The god's origins and traits are different, but nothing else is, even after the unified Leviathan splits into two bickering Leviathans called Israel and Judah. The stories are Sumero-Akkadian, the Law is Babylonian, the proverbs are Egyptian, the psalms are Phoenician.

There is a glimmer of something differecnt when the orator Elisha rages against this lack of originality on the part of a people with such an unusual god, but this orator does not suceed in launching a new start or even a second Exodus.

Stanley Diamond will point out that the Book of Job is an apology for this unwillingness to move in a humanly more meaningful direction. Personal wealth in a sea of poverty seems unreconcilable with older modes of sociability to the archaic-minded Job, until he convinces himself to accept the wealth as a reward for blind submission to the inscrutable god.

The smugness of the much later Puritans described by Max Weber is already being publicly aired. Such complacency willnot be denounced until the Egalitarian shepherd Amos rails against it, but by then it will already be too late, as Amos himself will see from the writing on the wall. The thrid Tiglath Pileser will recondition a moribund Assyrian Leviathan into an efficient war engine and start swallowing all of Mesopotamia and the Levant. The militarist's successor, the second Sargon, will swallow the first State of Israel and will deport its inhabitants, and Sennacherib will deal a similar blow to the State of Judah. It will be during their long captivities in Assyrian and then Babylonia that the heirs of Moses will forge something new. The memory of the Messiah who led them out of an earlier captivity will give them not only hope but a solidarity uncommon among captives of any age.

* * *

This lack of originality on the part of Moses' liberated heirs cannot be attributed to encirclement by hostile counter-revolutionary armies, an excuse Lenin's heirs will use later. The Israelites in Canaan are not bothered by the armies of the giants nor even thoses of the pygmies for twenty or ten generations (the number depends on whether or not one can trust the generally-accepted chronology; its trustworthiness will be questioned).

The Hittite giant stops bothering anyone on the Levant because it drops out of the picture altogether. This slouching Leviathan that faced the might of Egypt at Kadesh decomposes so completely that the Greeks who later plant olive trees on its buried fortresses will not even remember its name. The Israelites who write the Book will remember only the Hittites' name, and the grandeur of this Civilization's progress will not be remembered until archeologists of our day dig it out from under mounds of dirt. No massive invasion or drought or tectonic shift is needed to explain the breakdown of this heir to Mohenjo Daro's fate. Egyptian scribes who witness their monstrous neighbor's demise say simply that no one stood up for Khatti. The bands of Myceneans, Phrygians and Ionians resisting conscription into the Anatolian Leviathan's armies are able to storm Khatti's last fortresses for the same reason that Attila the Hun will later be able to sack Rome. The monster has been evacuated.

The immortals do die, after all, and not only when they're swallowed by larger Leviathans. The immortals also die when their human contents withdraw and let the carcasses rot. The artificial worms have no life of their own.

Dancers form circles around Cybele, the Earth goddess, and celebrate their recovered freedom. They will still be dancing ten or fifteen generations later when visiting Athenians will describe them as peoples ruled by queens, which is how the later Athenians will understand people who are ruled neither by archons nor by kings.

It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing remains in Anatolia of the Hittite worm. Former conscripts, the iron-armed Mycenean and Ionian bands of male adeventurers and killers whose exploits Homer will celebrate, are unhealing wounds left on Cybele's Anatolian Earth by the late Leviathan. The segments continue to operate. But these sgments remain nothing but pests on the outskirts of peaceful villages until the Phoenician octopus fills them out with its purple ooze.

The Egyptian giant stops bothering the Levant for similar reasons, although this Leviathan does not decompose as completely as its Hittite neighbor. It freezes. Having to promote potential conspirators, having to buy off leaders of striking labor gangs, having to negotiate with former provinces that defected to Libyan adventurers, Egyptians no longer ventureto do anything their predecessors didn't do. This conservative posture gives Pharaoh, priests and people ample occasion to show proper respect to the dead gods in the temples and shrines. Wasn't this the main goal of the worm's founders? The gods come first in Egypt; modernism and secularism would only sweep away what little still remains of a long-dead past.

The Assyrian giant also leaves the Levant alone, at least for the twenty or ten generations before it swallows and deports the Levant's Israelite and Phoenician inhabitants. But I'll return to this giant later.

First I'll look at the pygmies, the Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon and other independent enclaves, the next-door neighbors of the Israelites in Canaan. These seaborne salesmen are called Red Men or Purple Men by people on all coasts their ships can reach because the Phoenicians have a world monopoly on purple dye and they guard it well. Their purple cloths and garments are as precious the world over as gold and uranium will be in later ages.

* * *

The sons of Levi establish the closest relations with their Phoenician neighbors, going so far as to marry women of Tyre and even, on occasion, prostrating themselves to Baal. I suspect that it is precisely this closeness that helps explain the lack of originality of the Levantine Israelites. The curse of labor falls heavily on the planters and reapers who give a substantial part of their yearly harves for their wealthy neighbors' purple garments and other good things, most of them from distant places.

The prejudiced of later ages will portray all Jews as merchants, but from King David's time until King Hexekiah's the ins and outs of commerce are more alien to them than Baal is. They are farmers, or more accurately, peasants. In our day we would say that the two small Israelite States are economic colonies, they have neither the time nor the energy to be original.

The garments and other trinkets which the men of Tyre give so generously to their hard-working neighbors cost the Phoenicians little, and in return the mercantile towns are supplied with much of their needed cattle and grains from their own friendly hinterland. They don't need to send ships to Anatolia or Syracuse to secure these necessities, and can fill the ships with lighter and more precious things than cattle and wheat.

The Phoenician merchants, whose main secret is to give things that cost them little and take things that cost others much, carry ever larger amounts of things abundant in one place to another place where such things are reare. And they continue carrying until the originally abundant things are depleted at their source, at which point they start to deplete another source.

Before the time of King Solomon of Israel and his father-in-law King Hiram of Tyre, trees as well as elephants teemed in the Levant. After the reigns of these kinsmen, the Levantine trees are all in hulls of ships and walls of temples, and elephants have become as exotic on the Levant as caribou.

Big Phoenician ships now cross the Red and the Arabic seas to tusks from Indian elephant-killers greedy for Levantine purples and Libyan ores. In terms of the reduction of living beings to forms that can be carried on ships, and in terms of reshuffling murdered fauna and flora from places where they thrive to places where they cannot thrive, the Phoenician artificial octopus is a greater rapist of the Bioshere than all the earlier Leviathans combined. The Western Spirit against the Wilderness will owe to Phoenicia much more than pruple dyes.

The twenty or ten generations that start with the demise of the Hittites and end with the Assyrian conquest are the great age of the Levantine metropolis, not of its economic colony. The octopus-like Artificial Men of tiny Tyre and Sidon are the only Leviathans still operating west of China, and I would even venture to guess that the relative quietism of the war engine called Assyria is due at least in part to the onslaught of exotic commodities, the purchase of which strains even Assyrian means.

Yet the Phoenician precursors of Athenians, Venetians and enterprisin Americans are more poorly documented than any other ancient Leviathan. We learn of them mainly from what others say of them. The merchants carry their secrets with them to the grave.

All we know is that their octopus-like empire consisting of ships and trading posts embraces many if not most of the world's shorelines. We know that they establish their ports on the shores of Africa and on Spain's Atlantic shore. Barry Fell will suggest that the Phoenician ships cross rough ocean ages before the sailors of Seville will, and others will suggest they might even venture across the peaceful ocean and give rise to statues of bearded men on Polynesian islands.

We will know that on the Italian peninsula, during or shortly after King Hiram's reign, Etruscans suddenly learn to write their own language using Hirams alpahbet and that in Attica as well as Anatolia the more settled of the roving adventurers also learn to write, and with the same alphabet. We will know of that many of these trading posts, whether Gadir (=Gades= Cadiz) or Tarshish on the Atlantic shore, or the famous Carthage, Sardinia or Sicily, or the numerous posts on the Adriatic and Aegean seas which will later acquire Greek names, quickly grow into octopus-like monsters which plunder and deplete their own hinterlands with the thoroughness of their founders, in order to be well supplied with items when the great ships come in.

Thanks to the progressive activities of the secretive Phoenicians, western Eurasia is well on its way to becoming a thick web of interlocking tentacles, a place where a free human being can neither jump nor stand nor sit.

* * *

The Phoenician octopus feeds on Israelites and on other peoples drawn to the Mediterranean by an initial decision to resist Leviathanization.

We've seen that earlier Leviathans provoked Steppe peoples to flee or defend themselves, and that either alternative set off waves of motion that could even be felt in distant China.

Mittani, Kassites and Hittites wwere some of the many who braced themselves to confront the Leviathan head-on and then found themselves trapped in a Leviathanic net of their own making. Once armored and entrenched, the iron Httites then set in motion new waves with their conscript-hunts and tribute-raids.

Myceneans, Ionians and Dorians may have descended to Anatolia and the Greek mainland and archipelago in response to Hittite provocations. Linguistically these people are cousings of of Httites, Kassites and Mittani, of Aryans who showed up in India, and even of the Persians who will eventually succeed to the whole of Anatolia and the Levant.

Iranian- (or Indo-European) speaking and Turkic-speaking people seem to move together in the steppes. Later they will turn up together on the borders of Rome's empire; at least they're not strangers to each other. Some of these people are seed planters who move only when pushed; others are pastoral nomads. Some of them are horse-breeders who can move quickly from Mesopotamia to China, and a few forge their weapons out of iron.

Mycenean Greeks were already in Anatolia and on the Greek mainland during the heydya of the Hittite Leviathan. Mycenean vases dating from the middle Hittite period will be found Cyprus, Egypt and the Levant, and as far as Sicily and Ireland; Mycenean olive oil must have been transported to all these places in Phoenician ships, since there will be no evidence of a large commercial Mycenean fleet. They made occasional use of a script, but had neither a king nor a permanent army. Their former community had shattered, but they had not yet encased themselves in a Leviathan of their own, although their Theseus tried hard. They either joined Hittites on conscript hunts or else went tribute huntings on their own; newcomers of almost identical speech didn't treat them as kin but as enemies. The Myceneans fortified their towns and held off the newcomers, probably with Hittite aid. Almost immediately after the demise of the Hittites, one after another of the Mycenean strongholds began to fall to the Ionian and Dorian Greeks.

The indignities suffered by the newcomers before their arrival will not be accessible to scrutiny, since the later Greeks will choose to forget their pre-Leviathanic past. We can nevertheless try to form some idea of the nature of these indignites by looking elsewhere.

On an Assyrian tablet contemporary with the destruction of Mycenae, the scribe of the first Tiglathpileser boasts that in a single campaign to the region north of Lake Van, the tyrant and his army captured thousands of Mushki, by which name the Assyrians designated Phrygians, Hurrians, Greeks and other speakers of Indo-Iranian languages.

The Greeks sweep their Mycenean predecessors away during the period when the Phoenician commercial empire is at its height. Like their Guti predecessors, the Greeks form tribal leagues of warriors led by Basileus, a one-time priest who is now a war chief. Also like the GUti, they remain federated for such a long time that they lose all contact with their original communities. Of their own former deities they bring mainly Zeus, the spear-throwing thuderer who guides the war cheif. They take the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, Helen, Artemis and Demeter from Anatolia and Crete. The Phoenician ships bring them Cadmus, Europa and a Leviathanic project.

The earliest federations, among them the famous Agamemnon's, seem as determined as the much later Mongols to sweep away every trace of what the Greeks will later call Civilization. They raze fortresses and don't rebuild them, flatten palaces and don't copy them, destroy writings and don't learn their script. They use the tablets of Hittite scribes as stones in walls of new fortresses. Their spears are their gods and they live for battle.

But when the big ships come in and unload purple cloth and ivory, the heroes commit themselves to regaling the strangers with gifts next time. Their neighbors, especially the women among them, squeeze the oil out of olives and the juice out of grapes. The Greeks offer to protect the neighbors instead of harassing them, and they offer some of the gifts they've received from the Phoenicians. They post guards at shrines and dance-grounds where women become demented and gang up against protectors. And the Greeks stock up on vases.

Agamemnon's grandsons turn up on the Aegean's shores as merchants of wine and olive oil. One after another enclaves becomes a tentacle of the Phoenician octopus.

When the head of the octopus is swallowed by the Assyrian worm, each Greek tentacles is on its own.

This story is usually told as the shadowy emergence of the Greeks out of darkness and into the light of Civilization. But at least one Greek who is not yet armored experiences the sequence as something quite different from an emergence into Light.

The poet Hesiod remembers better times. He is contemporary of the Assyrian invasion of Phoenicia, and thus a contemporary of the Greeks preparing to launch a commercial empire of their own.

Hesiod writes of five ages or generations of mortal human beings. The earliest, pastoral nomads who lived somewhere in the steppes and mountains, were

a golden race... And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief...
They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the
blessed gods.

These first ones are not altogether gone; they

roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist, and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds.

While still in the steppes, the communities of pastoral nomads were disrupted by agents of a Leviathan, and there appeared

a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body
nor in spirit... Zeus the son of Cronos was angry and put them away, because they could not give honor to
the blessed gods who lived on Olympus.

When the earth covered the disoriented second generation, there appeared those who federated against the disruptorers;

a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash trees; and was in no way equal to the
silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence;
they ate no bread, but were hard of heart like adamant, fearful men. Great was their strength and
unconquerable the arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs. They armor was of
bronze, and of bronze were their implements... These were destroyed by their own hands and passed to
the dank house of chill Hades, and left no name...

Then came the war chiefs praised by Homer, the

hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own... Grim war and dread battle destroyed part
of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus,
and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf of Troy...

Last comes the fifth generation, Hesiod's own, the victims and accomplices of wine and olive merchants, the Greeks at last initiated into the arts of Civilization by their Phoenician guides. Hesiod writes,

Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born
afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor by day, and from perishing by
night... Might shall be their right: and one man will sack another's city. There will be no favor for the man
who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil doer and his violent
dealing... Envy, foul mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one
and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis, with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the
wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of deathless gods...

Hesiod's remembrrance of things past gives him a power Moses had lacked: the power to remove his Leviathanic mask while still enmeshed in a Leviathanic web. We will call such a power "critical theory," an insipid name for it. This power will later be shaped into a dagger with two edges, but not by the Greeks to whom Hesiod gives it.

Hesiod's fellow Greeks turn their backs on the gift he so freely gives them because, at the very moment when he is reminding them of their Golden Age, the Assyrian Leviathan is swallowing the Greeks' Phoenician mentors and guides, and Hesiod's companions are preparing to hurl themselves into an octopus of their own.

* * *
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Makes me want to investigate this history for myself, how about you? & BTW, the beginning of each chapter is accompanied by a phat William Blake illustration. maybe i'll stick them in when I get a chance.

The Irrepresible Anarchists

haven't read it yet, but it's probly worth it. viva la resistance! (TM)
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The Irrepressible Anarchists
Federal Infiltration and Repression—What It Means, What to Do, What Not to Fear

The beast has been awakened—snarling—and wants to bite someone soon. We fear, not without reason, that it may be us. At this moment the Underground Armies of Barbarian Anarchists are getting scant attention. Still, we are on a very short list. We have recently been considered a genuine threat to national security. We have yet to be linked in any manner to the hijackers and their supporters, despite the obvious advantages that the reactionaries stand to gain by doing so. This will not last forever. We are being given a grace period, to rally around the flag and return to the fold, or else. They will connect the dots or create the dots to connect, and just because many of us are Americans does not mean we are safe.

Thus speculated the CrimethInc. Warbringer cell in After the Fall, an analysis published in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Granted, the FBI has not seriously attempted to link the domestic anarchist movement to actual Islamic terror organizations—that would be too much of a stretch, even for the geniuses who testified at Daniel McGowan’s detention hearing that CrimethInc. had published a book about Emma Goldman—but they have taken advantage of the climate of fear to equate sabotage with terrorism, initiating a new campaign against environmental and animal-rights activists. The grace period is over—in May, 2005, the FBI announced that it considers the Earth Liberation Front domestic terror threat number one—and the government hopes to use this opportunity to settle scores with the anarchist movement in general.

This has been coming all along, of course. Every generation that has succeeded in pushing its resistance past rhetoric into effective action has borne the brunt of state repression. There was no way the FBI was going to let the statute of limitations elapse on the old ELF arsons without charging someone with them [1]. Anyone who thought there could be eco-defense without eco-defendants hadn’t thought social struggle all the way through yet.

The first thing we must do in coming to grips with this assault on our community is recognize that it is not an aberration, but something totally predictable and normal—at least, normal in the context of the current absurd social order. Any effective struggle against the system of domination is going to involve arrests, investigations, and prison terms, not to mention violent attacks from both state forces and vigilantes. These are an intrinsic part of our job description as revolutionary anarchists, whatever tactics we employ on an individual basis. Just as it didn’t serve us to throw up our hands in dismay when the global context changed on September 11, alarmism can only hurt us now. Let’s calmly familiarize ourselves with the possibility that some of us are going to spend time in court and prison, while doing everything we can to prevent this and maintaining a realistic sense of the extent of the current threat.



The Story Thus Far

It is impossible to provide thorough or timely coverage of every aspect of this subject here, so we urge readers to consult these websites: ecoprisoners.org, www.greenscare.org, fbiwitchhunt.org, and especially http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/greenscare/. For basic context, we’ll present a short summary as of this writing, but please don’t stop here.

Most activists date the latest wave of repression, popularly termed the “green scare,” from December 7, 2005, when the FBI carried out a series of raids around the US. Further arrests and indictments followed until a total of fourteen people were charged with various counts of arson, destruction of property, and conspiracy in the oddly-named “Operation Backfire[2].” Of these, Joseph Dibee, Josephine Overaker, and Rebecca Rubin are thought to be in hiding outside the US, while William Rodgers allegedly committed suicide in his jail cell on the winter solstice. Stanislas Meyerhoff, Kevin Tubbs, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Suzanne Savoie, and Kendall Tankersley are believed to be cooperating with the government—i.e., offering to testify against others in hopes of receiving lighter sentences. The entire case of the FBI seems to have initially been based on the testimony of one heroin addict, Jacob Ferguson, so the decision of others to cooperate with the state is particularly troubling. Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, and Briana Waters are currently free on outrageously high bail[3], while Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block have been denied bail as a result of the testimony of informants. The trial is cartoonishly scheduled for Halloween, October 31, 2006.

The following month, Zachary Jenson, Lauren Weiner and Eric McDavid were arrested in Auburn, California for allegedly conspiring to commit actions on behalf of the ELF. They were set up by an FBI agent provocateur, “Anna,” who was sleeping with one of them; apparently she bought bomb-making materials and rented a bugged house for them. Apparently “Anna” had been traveling in anarchist circles since summer of 2004, attending two CrimethInc. convergences and a host of other events[4] (in the muddled words of FBI flunky Nasson Walker, “The s/he has provided information that has been utilized in at least twelve separate anarchist cases.”). Lauren was released into house arrest on $1.2 million bail, and subsequently pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the others—an infuriating development when her codefendants were starving in isolation cells. Two months later, the very night this article was finished, Zachary was reported to have just done the same thing.

In March, six activists associated with the animal rights group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, which has driven an animal testing corporation to the brink of bankruptcy, were found guilty on charges of using their website to incite attacks on Huntingdon Life Sciences and their business partners. Some of them face up to eleven years in prison for making use of their supposed right to free speech.

All the while, grand juries—secretive government interrogation organs established to gather information about alleged crimes—have been convened around the country, indicting anyone with connections to activist communities, jailing those who won’t speak, and nosing around for further leads in the war on dissent. FBI agents have announced that anarchist groups such as Food Not Bombs and Indymedia are near the top of their terror watch list. Whether or not anarchists are ready for it, we are now being targeted as public enemy number one.

Together, these various cases spell out a cohesive message: Don’t act, you will be caught. Don’t associate with dissidents, you will be framed. Don’t trust your comrades, you will be infiltrated. Don’t speak about others’ actions, you will be imprisoned.

This message is the most important part of the FBI campaign. Even with all the anti-terror funding in the world, they can’t infiltrate every anarchist circle and pin charges on every prominent activist. They hope that, by staging this massive display of force, they can intimidate the rest of us into silence and passivity, just as the excessive and unsustainable police presence at the FTAA protests in Miami November 2003 was calculated to put an end to the era of anarchist mass mobilizations by giving an inflated impression of the power of the state.



The Radical Response

The responses of the anarchist media can be divided into two basic camps. The first camp, exemplified by the more theoretical journals such as Fifth Estate, reacted by printing news about the arrests and charges followed by vague afterthoughts to the effect that one must not lose hope. It could be argued that publicizing repression without offering concrete proposals for how to respond assists the FBI in their work. To their eternal discredit, Anarchy: A so-called Journal of Desire Armed set the low-water mark for this sort of thing in implying that the current situation is simply the result of a “fetishization of security culture” in anarchist circles. Thankfully, more action-oriented publications and websites such as No Compromise and The New York Rat have provided practical information on how to support targeted activists through letter-writing, fund-raising, and solidarity actions. Sad to say, the current issue of Rolling Thunder falls into the former category, but we hope to remedy that next issue by sharing all the skills for prisoner and defendant support that are being honed in our community right now.

Participation in anarchist legal aid and prisoner support projects has increased over the past months, though not yet enough to exert a great influence over the course of events. This increase is ironic, given that a year ago some of those now targeted by the state were trying to figure out how to reinvigorate prisoner support in North America. The pivotal question now is whether or not anarchist organizers, so used to working in the limited context of their own communities, will be able to muster widespread public outrage over this witch hunt. Without that, this round may end badly for the accused, and that will encourage the authorities to initiate another roundup.



What Does It All Mean?

It is of the utmost importance that those currently being targeted receive the funding and community support necessary for the best possible legal defense. As on every other front, every inch should cost our persecutors as much as possible, whether or not we win individual battles. Good legal support has proven indispensable in keeping mass actions viable; for example, the legal defense and countersuits following the protests against the IMF meeting in Washington, D.C. in 2002 not only cleared hundreds of protesters of charges, but also tied the hands of the D.C. police for several protests to come. The struggle in the courtroom is not the postscript to the struggle in the street, but that struggle conducted by different means; it is not the end of the story unless we give up and make it so. The same goes for the struggle in prison, for those serving sentences: a community cannot foster long-term commitment to militant struggle unless it supports its prisoners of war; conversely, those prisoners have power to the extent to which their comrades outside maintain enough momentum to exert social and political leverage.

While we’re at it, let’s postulate a few other lessons from the initial phase of this wave of repression. First, every activist group should be prepared to be targeted, with resources (a lawyer, money, a network of potential supporters) and a game plan ready. Second, in times of increased surveillance and repression, we must be cautious without letting fear immobilize us. We’re powerful because we act, and because we’re connected to others; being frightened into passivity and isolation can only weaken and endanger us. Third, now more than ever solidarity means constructive criticism, not speculations (“That arson? I bet that was Alphonse—he’s into macho tactics”) or accusations (“She never does anything—she’s just a lot of talk”). You never know what situation a person is in: she might be a wanted fugitive who can’t respond to your thoughtless words without endangering herself. Likewise, “innocent” activists may be accused of others’ actions, and even go to prison for them; but this is the fault of the government, not on the ones who act, so long as they don’t stupidly put others at risk. Finally, much of the evidence in recent cases is based on informants wearing microphones into conversations. Activists should consider the possibility that even trusted companions could be wired; don’t ever reminisce needlessly over past illegal actions, don’t assume old cases are closed even after a decade of silence, don’t work with people you’re not sure you’ll trust ten years from now. Meet a person’s family and friends before joining in illegal activity.

And above all, DON’T TALK TO POLICE OR THE FBI. No matter what, it can never help you. They wouldn’t ask you in the first place if they didn’t need your help to ruin your life. Remember: “I am going to remain silent. I would like to speak with an attorney.”



The Enemy Within

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out…

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, to it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in the sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

-George Orwell at the bitter end of 1984

Brutal assaults from the state should come as no surprise. The most troubling aspect of this story is that some of those arrested—and even some who were not arrested, who are not even facing the threat of life in prison—have agreed to speak to the authorities, putting others at grievous risk.

Imagine the situation of an activist who has agreed to testify against her former comrades. All the experiences that made her an anarchist, from childhood on, come back to haunt her as she betrays her own values and commitments, siding with the bullies, the rapists, the snide executives and sadistic police. Whatever tremendous feats she has accomplished, whatever personal qualities she took pride in, now she will be remembered as a informant and must live with the knowledge that she is one.

In return for the potential of one day rejoining the defeated herd she fought so hard to escape, she must tell herself the same lies that once outraged her: that people are essentially selfish and untrustworthy, that complicity in injustice is inevitable and acceptable, that one can simply look out for number one in a disastrously unsustainable world. She does not even know how much leniency she can expect; the government can hardly let her off the hook when they’ve worked so hard to find her. On the other hand, as a snitch, she can be sure that if she goes to prison her fellow inmates will terrorize her. This gives the state even more power over her. Perhaps she considers breaking off collaboration, but to do so would only leave her isolated from all directions; the die is already cast. One can hardly imagine a worse position to be in.

Let us phase out the masked figure lobbing a molotov cocktail as the idealized image of revolt; there is a time for that, and the sooner it comes back around the better, but it is not the ultimate stage of struggle. Henceforth, when we think of resistance at its most courageous and romantic, let us picture someone like ourselves in an interrogation chamber, not masked but handcuffed, being threatened with life and death in captivity and still refusing to render herself and her fellows into her enemies’ hands.
Facing the threat of incarceration, we must redefine freedom and safety as factors under our control, not external circumstances. Freedom is not a matter of how many fences happen to be around you, but of following the dictates of your conscience no matter what. Safety is not the condition of being temporarily outside the grasp of your enemies, but of trusting yourself enough to know that your friends will never come to harm because of you and you will never become something you despise.



We Can Win: Success Stories from the Struggle against Repression

Not only is it critical to fight in the courtrooms as well as the streets—it’s also possible to win those fights. A brief look at our own recent history shows countless cases in which activists have beaten charges and even come out ahead in counter-suits. Such victories not only discourage our enemies from taking us to court, they can also provide needed resources for further organizing. Throwing up one’s hands in panic as soon as someone gets arrested is not only counterproductive, it’s also needlessly pessimistic. To offset the doomsaying of the inexperienced and easily demoralized, let’s reflect on a couple recent victories won by activists forced to fight within the legal system.

At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia summer of 2000, Camilo Viveiros and two others were beaten and arrested by a group of police that included John Timoney, then Police Commissioner of Philadelphia. Charged with numerous felonies (as a rule, you always get charged by the police for whatever they do to you) and demonized as violent extremists, the activists came to be known as the Timoney Three; Camilo himself faced more than thirty-seven years in prison and $55,000 in fines. They awaited trial for four years, while Timoney jet-setted around the world giving presentations on how to repress protesters and serving as Chief of Police in Miami during the FTAA ministerial in 2003. It seemed certain that anyone charged with assaulting someone in such a position of power was doomed to go to prison. Yet when the trial finally came, Timoney and the other officers made fools of themselves, offering wildly conflicting testimonies; after the defense presented a videotape that revealed the testimony of the police to be mere fabrication, the three were declared innocent of all charges. In an excellent article the March-April 2006 issue of the Earth First! journal, Camilo outlined the lessons of that trial for those currently facing government repression.

One of the most important trials of the preceding generation of environmental activism ended in an unconditional victory over the mendacious, murderous authorities. In 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were nearly killed by a car bomb while on a speaking tour to promote resistance to corporate logging. Rather than investigating the bombing, the FBI charged the two with making and transporting bombs. They also took advantage of the opportunity to carry out a nationwide smear campaign against Earth First!, and sent agents to create dossiers on over five hundred activists associated with the organization. To this day, it remains unclear whether the bombing was the work of freelance vigilantes or of the FBI themselves—in the weeks before it, FBI agents instructed the local police on how to make bombs exactly like the one that nearly killed Judi and Darryl. The charges failed to hold up in court, and the two initiated a counter-suit against the FBI and Oakland Police Department. Although the FBI managed to delay the trial for almost eleven years, during which Judi, who was crippled by the bombing, died of cancer, Darryl and others continued pressing the suit. Finally, in 2002, a jury found the FBI and Oakland Police guilty and ordered them to pay $4.4 million in damages.

When the struggle in the courtroom fails, there are always other means of resistance. On November 2, 1979, after giving birth in prison only to have her daughter taken away in less than a week, Black freedom fighter Assata Shakur managed one of the most impressive jailbreaks of the era. After almost a year in a West Virginia federal prison for women, surrounded by white supremacists from the Aryan Sisterhood prison gang, Shakur was transferred to the maximum security wing of the Clinton Correctional Center in New Jersey. There she was one of only eight maximum security prisoners held in a small, well-fenced cellblock of their own. The rest of Clinton, including its visiting area, was medium security and not fenced in.

According to news reports, Shakur’s escape proceeded as follows: Three men—two black, one white—using bogus driver’s licenses and Social Security cards requested visits with Assata four weeks in advance, as was prison policy. Apparently, prison officials never did the requisite background checks. On the day of the escape, the three met in the waiting room at the prison entrance, where they were processed through registration and shuttled in a van to the visiting room in South Hall. One member of the team went ahead of the others. Although there was a sign stating that all visitors would be searched with a hand-held metal detector, he made it through registration without even a pat-down. Meanwhile, the other two men were processed without a search. As these two were being let through the chain-link fences and locked metal doors at the visiting center one of them drew a gun and took the guard hostage. Simultaneously, the man visiting Shakur rushed the control booth, put two pistols to the glass wall, and ordered the officer to open the room’s metal door. She obliged.

From there, Shakur and her companions took a third guard hostage and made it to the parked van. Because only the maximum security section of the prison was fully fenced in, the escape team was able to speed across a grassy meadow to the parking lot of the Hunterdon State School, where they meet two more female accomplices, and split up into a “two-tone blue sedan” and a Ford Maverick. All the guards were released unharmed and the FBI immediately launched a massive hunt. But Shakur disappeared without a trace. For the next five years authorities hunted in vain. Shakur had vanished. Numerous other alleged BLA cadre were busted during those years, including Tupac’s step-father, Mutula Shakur.

In 1984, word came from ninety miles off the coast of Florida: the FBI’s most wanted female fugitive was living in Cuba, working on a masters degree in political science, writing her autobiography, and raising her daughter. She still lives there today.



Our Strategy from Here

This is a somewhat quiet phase of resistance in this country, as everyone waits out the end of the Bush presidency; we can afford to focus a lot of energy on benefit events, prisoner support groups, and public outreach. When things heat up again, we’ll benefit from having done this work, and in the meantime it offers us a rallying point.

In addition to supporting our targeted comrades, we have to protect the infrastructure of our community. In Italy, where the brutal state repression of the past decade has succeeded in paralyzing many of those who bottomlined anarchist projects, police and fascists have been able to shut down some of the social centers, publications, and protest campaigns that formed the life’s blood of a vibrant anarchist movement. We must not allow that to happen here. The government will target those who are most active and visible; when one of us is immobilized by legal problems, it’s up to the rest of us to take up the slack. Our infrastructure is not just made up of formally organized groups; it also consists of and depends on our social networks and culture of resistance. If people cease to come together at politicized entertainment events and community potlucks, or cease to work through conflicts and share emotional support, that will be just as devastating as the loss of an infoshop or Food Not Bombs.

As for our proactive tactics, how should we adjust them in the light of this offensive? It’s worth pointing out that, with the exception of Rob Thaxton[5], no anarchist in recent memory has served more than a couple years in prison for participation in mass actions—this is impressive, given the high level of confrontation these have sometimes reached. It seems to be harder to make charges stick in mass action scenarios, perhaps because they involve so many suspects and so much chaos, and also because investigating them at great length would overextend the resources of the state. The police are forced to grab whomever they can—usually not people who had any major role in the actions—and charge them with crimes for which there is little evidence.

Ironically, in the wake of September 11th, anarchists backed off militant mass actions in fear that they would meet stiffer repression. Consequently, we have less leverage and morale—and we are still being targeted as domestic enemy number one! The FBI and the whole apparatus of repression are after us whether or not we skulk around in the shadows, so we may as well organize openly. If we’re all headed for court anyway, we have little to lose, and we stand to gain much-needed visibility and momentum. If enough of us stick our necks out, they can’t target us all, and the more people of all walks of life are familiar with our struggle the more allies we can hope to find. Now is the time to form accessible anarchist structures, to speak publicly about our opposition to capitalism and domination, to organize large-scale anarchist actions. Far from endangering us, this may actually make us safer.

As for those who prefer more covert tactics such as arson and sabotage, the clearest lesson of the current phase of repression is that the government is interested above all in mapping networks of resistance[6]. If you are not connected to the current pool of suspects, doing as your conscience dictates is no more dangerous now than it was a decade ago, provided you practice flawless security culture and pick prudent comrades who will never buckle under pressure. Indeed, as the trials of the current defendants play out over the coming months, we will be given valuable insight into how the FBI investigates crimes of this nature. This should, if anything, make it easier for activists to engage safely in militant direct action.
Our enemies are wrong to hypothesize that we can be frightened into passivity. If the prospect of living in a world of domination and despair was bad enough to catalyze us into action, think how much less appealing it is to be silent knowing our comrades can be taken from us at any time. As they escalate this conflict, we can only respond in kind.

In fact, the great majority of environmentalist direct action cases still remain unsolved. The FBI alleges that there have been over 1200 criminal acts carried out by underground activists since 1990, and 150 “eco-terror” investigations are still open.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a backfire is “a fire set intentionally to arrest the progress of an approaching fire by creating a burned area in its path, thus depriving the fire of fuel.” This seems to confirm that the FBI strategy to suppress dissent is based on the use of agents provocateurs and false allegations, as were COINTELPRO and other programs that ended up backfiring on them.

Daniel McGowan, for example, was released into house arrest on $1.6 million bail. Before his arrest, Daniel worked for a non-profit organization that helps women in domestic abuse situations navigate the legal system. In the rare circumstances in which abusers are arrested and charged (see the article on domestic violence elsewhere in this issue), how high do you think their bail is set? This is a classic example of the way the capitalist system works: violence against individuals is practically accepted, while alleged destruction of property is met with the stiffest possible penalties before even being brought to trial.

University of Miami sociology professor Linda Belgrave reports that “Anna” was in Florida posing as a medic at a protest on June 6, 2005; when an elderly woman who was apparently suffering from heat exhaustion approached her for aid, “Anna” offered her a sip of Gatorade, then declined to assist her further. The woman collapsed and an ambulance was called. If any doubt lingered as to whether the FBI is concerned about human life, their insertion of incompetent frauds into medic teams serving law-abiding protestors should settle the matter.

Rob just finished serving a seven year sentence for throwing a rock at a police officer during a Reclaim the Streets in Eugene, Oregon, June 18th, 1999.

In January 2006, a fifty-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of damaging over a dozen cars and two buildings at an automobile dealership in Newport, Oregon. The buildings were spray painted with the letters “ELF,” and two local news stations had received calls claiming the action in the name of the ELF. However, as reported by the Newport News Times, “Police could not establish any connection between MacMurdo and the ELF organization. It is believed his actions were retaliatory in nature and not any kind of political statement.” He was charged with criminal mischief and his bail was set at $32,500, a miniscule amount by eco-terror standards. What does a guy have to do these days to get charged as an eco-terrorist? Obviously, he has to have the right friends.

A Look at the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Magon

i haven't been following Oaxaca much, so getting a primer on the situation was very helpful for me. maybe for you too.
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Message: 4
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:42:23 +0200
From: a-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subject: (en) A Look at the Popular Indigenous Council of
Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Mag?n (CIPO-RFM) - the core of the struggle
To: en
Message-ID: <456EB58F.5090506@netvision.net.il>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

Liberty, Justice, Autonomy: Building a Magonista Reality
"When the People Have the conscience That they are stronger Than their rulers,
There will no longer be tyrants." -Ricardo Flores Magón
The Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM) is a
social and democratic organization formed by 26 indigenous communities in
Oaxaca, Mexico, comprised of about 2,000 members. They follow libertarian and
indigenous ways and customs. The CIPO-RFM is a grassroots movement whose members
work in their communities in the defense of human rights, on communal projects
and environmental conservation, and in the provision of basic social needs.
> A Past of Many Histories

About 60% of the approximate 3.5 million inhabitants of Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s
southernmost states, are indigenous. Many ethnolinguistic groups coexist in this
area, such as the Amuzgos, Chatino, Chinanteco, Chocho, Chontal, Cuicateco,
Huave, Ixcateco, Mazateco, Mixe, Mixteco, Náhuatl, Triqui, Zapoteco, Zoque and
the Popoloca. Like Chiapas and Guerreros, other southern states with large
indigenous populations, Oaxaca’s economy is based on agriculture and mired in
poverty. But Oaxaca is unique in how little of its land has been privatized,
making it the center of ongoing land conflicts: 80% of the land is still used
communally.

The CIPO-RFM formed in late 1997 out of a conglomeration of anarchist, Marxist
and indigenous organizations. One of its forerunners was the Magónist Indigenous
Movement, an anti-capitalist group which formed in the 1980s in response to
agrarian conflicts and social repression in Oaxaca. This group took inspiration
from Ricardo Flores Magón, an indigenous Oaxacan revolutionary, libertarian, and
a key figure in the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

From 1892 onward, Magón and his followers became “the most active opposition to
the Díaz regime at the time, participated in strikes, launched militant
uprisings, and tirelessly propagated their views,” primarily through their
newspaper Regeneración. Magón stressed the importance of indigenous people
forcefully defending their communal lands within the overall revolutionary
struggle—and the necessity of a social revolution to guarantee their autonomy.
According to the CIPO-RFM, Magónism can’t be reduced to the ideas of Magón
himself: it includes their historical heritage as indigenous people, and the
heritage of all the men and women of Mexico and worldwide who have contributed
to the struggle.

Strategy and Practice

“We may not be heroes, guerrillas or revolutionaries here, but we do build our
dreams.” -The Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Magón
(CIPO-RFM)

The CIPO-RFM´s slogan is “liberty, justice, autonomy,” and its mission is to
help the people and the workers organize themselves freely, regardless of
membership in the organization. They implement sustainable projects of means of
production, services, and commerce. They develop alternative media, including
radio stations, internet, and television. The CIPO-RFM frames its activities in
terms familiar to all libertarians: mutual aid, self management, free
association of communities, solidarity, equality, direct action, and the
rejection of the state and electoral politics. All these ideals, interpreted in
their own cultural context, are a reality in Oaxaca.

The CIPO-RFM respects the EZLN in Chiapas, but has opted for the use of peaceful
rebellion, preferring not to give the state an excuse to engage in open military
repression. The CIPO-RFM does not believe that revolution will be spontaneous,
but that it is a slow and carefully planned process of organization. It rejects
the state and political parties, and is always looking for ways to work with all
other organizations, communities and people who are willing to struggle for the
liberation of their people. The group is a member of the International
Libertarian Solidarity network.

There is a clear process for a community to enter CIPO-RFM. First
representatives of the group are invited for a general presentation, in which
they explain the benefits and risks of joining. After this initial introduction,
a workshop is given on the topic of the importance and necessity of
organization. A second workshop analyses different forms of struggle, stressing
the importance of a libertarian and Magónista organization. During a third
workshop, the community diagnoses its problems and discusses possible solutions.
Participants are encouraged to make connections between the problems in their
own communities and those of other communities. In a final workshop, called the
Basic Council, the community formally decides to join the CIPO-RFM. A work plan
is elaborated, and a commitment to struggle is agreed upon.

The CIPO-RFM supports its members in the solution of agrarian problems, in
protecting and recuperating communal farmland and forest. Here the idea of “Land
and Freedom” is materialized in the form of communal property. The land belongs
to the community and to those who work on it: the families who work the land own
their harvest.

This idea of self-management goes beyond working the land, extending to the
field of politics. Important decisions are made collectively, in community
assemblies. All representative posts within the CIPO-RFM are assigned by the
assemblies, and are unpaid, recallable positions.

The Magónistas are currently developing communal schools with an indigenous and
Magónist focus, staffed by indigenous teachers. They offer occupational
workshops for young people, study groups, and workshops promoting and spreading
their cultures, languages, and traditions.

The communities practice mutual aid in two main aspects: barter and the tequio.
Money has little importance internally: it is mainly used to obtain goods from
outside the communities, and comes from the sale of hand-crafted goods in the
cities, and from indigenous people who have emigrated. The tequio is communal
work. For example, when a mill needs to be built, everyone works on that
specific construction for free, as it will be a benefit for them all.

In many of the communities, participation in the tequio is also mandated as a
penalty for social offenses. The Magónist concept of justice is to benefit the
community, as contrasted with the concept of justice expressed by the
kidnapping, humiliation, torture, capital punishment, forced labor and exclusion
of the prison system.

The organization puts into practice concrete measures to ensure the full respect
of the rights of women, youth, and ethnic minorities. The struggle against
machismo is a key element for the Magonistas. They promote a culture of respect
for women in every space where they are present—in the community, organization,
schools, unions, etc. The group also offers women assistance for education,
defense of their reproductive rights, and training in skills such as
handicrafts, baking, farming, and radio. Women are represented in all posts of
responsibility, and also organize workshops in the communities to combat
patriarchy. The result of these efforts can be seen in women’s leadership in
environmental struggles, such as the fight against genetically modified crops.

University researchers have discovered that between 20 and 60 percent of
traditional corn varieties of the CIPO-RFM’s communities are now contaminated
with modified genes from imported US corn. The CIPO-RFM rejects the use of
chemicals or pesticides, and use only techniques which improve traditional
agriculture maintain self-sufficiency in food production.

They mobilize against destructive free trade agreements—the Free Trade Area of
the Americas, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Plan Puebla
Panama—in order to maintain their way of life, their customs and traditions.
They view the imposition of capitalist free trade as a means of turning them
into wage slaves, destroying their biodiversity, exploiting their land and water
for industry, and patenting their medicinal plants for the profit of
multinational corporations.

The revolutionary strategy of the CIPO-RFM is to protest against the genocidal
and repressive forces of the state and capitalism, but at the same time, to
create counter-institutions which meet the political, economic, and social needs
of the communities. In the political sphere they have created directly
democratic assemblies; they have formed cooperatives to meet their economic
needs; and they have developed a range of social projects such as the women’s
anti-patriarchy workshops, an indigenous center in Oaxaca City, and educational
programs.

Repression

“The solidarity of others is our own defense.” - Praxedis G. Guerrero, Puntos
Rojos (1906)

The CIPO-RFM explains that what hurts the government most is that “we will put
an end to their economic and political institutions, we reject their salaries,
private property, the state, and political parties.”

Even though the CIPO-RFM has a policy of peace and coexistence and rejects the
use of violence to resolve conflicts, their history has been marked by
persecution and repression. Since the creation of the organization in 1997,
there have been 212 people detained, 47 kidnappings, 103 raids by the military,
police and paramilitaries in the communities of the organization, 500 arrest
warrants, 22 people tortured, and 277 serious injuries.

Some of the cases that stand out are the detention and torture of 106 indigenous
people on April 18, 1998, and kidnapping and torture of 46 indigenous people on
January 1, 2002. The CIPO-RFM has organized protests, direct actions and
sit-ins, demanding the release of their members. In order to build an external
solidarity movement, members of the CIPO-RFM have toured Europe in 2001 and
Canada in 2005 giving presentations and holding conferences.

Members have been displaced from their communities for fear of being jailed or
murdered; hundreds are currently living in the US. Members such as Raúl Gatica
and César Chavez García have had to flee as a result of constant harassment and
assassination attempts.

Not surprisingly, the government of Vicente Fox has increased the number of
soldiers and paramilitaries in Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca. In the early months
of 2005, following the election of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz as the new Oaxacan
governor, there was a serious deterioration in the social and political
situation, particularly in regard to indigenous peoples’ political rights.
Evidence of this deterioration is the political crimes, inter-community
conflicts, detentions, and criminalization of social struggles.

The most recent attacks include the imprisonment of various CIPO-RFM members for
opposing repression and land theft in San Isidro Aloapám. As of December 2005,
15 of them still remain imprisoned. Also, since July 2005, the community of
Soledad, Sola de Vega, a village with a CIPO-RFM majority, has been surrounded
by state-aided paramilitaries, who are blocking the entrance to food and medical
supplies, and have orders to kill any CIPO-RFM members who try to pass.

The CIPO-RFM makes it clear that it does not want to transform the world by
being in power. Its members believe that true power comes from the collective,
from the community; therefore they promote and develop the organization of the
people. Free association, direct democracy, autonomy, mutual aid, and collective
work are the base of their daily lives, and ground their perspective of the
liberation of their people and all others around the world who suffer under the
modern forms of domination.

=========

Diana is a Spanish anarchist living in Boston. She works with children and is a
member of the Boston por CIPO-RFM collective.

=========

Our Crime Is Defending Our Rights: Interview with a Magonista

NEFAC-Boston has been working with Boston por CIPO-RFM, a solidarity group
seeking to organize support for the autonomous indigenous villages in Oaxaca,
Mexico in the face of harsh state and paramilitary repression. A number of CIPO
members have emigrated to the US, giving us the opportunity and privilege of
speaking with them directly about the situation in their communities.

NEFAC and the CIPO-RFM are both member organizations of International
Libertarian Solidarity, a network for solidarity and mutual aid among
“anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, revolutionary syndicalist, and clearly
anti-Statist, non-party aligned social organisations which run along libertarian
principles.”

This spring, we sat down with a former member of the CIPO-RFM organizing
committee, who is now living in the US and working as a farmworker and baker.
Over a delicious meal and a few bottles of wine, we learned more about the
remarkable project taking place in Oaxaca.

NEA: Tell us about yourself.

My name is Alfonso, and I’m from the community of Plan de Zaragoza Nuyoo, in
Oaxaca.

In my community, we have problems because of the tricks of the government. They
come to our communities looking for votes, and then they forget about us. They
promise us many things, such as food, schools, roads, hospitals and medicine for
the people, but they don’t come through with it.

For those reasons, we joined the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca – Ricardo
Flores Magon, the CIPO-RFM. It’s the house of the poor that struggle for
justice….

Involved with the CIPO-RFM are currently 30 communities of the peoples:
Chatinos, Mixtecos, Chinantecos, Yucatecos, Zapotecos, Triquis, blacks and
mestizos…. We decided it was the best way to organize ourselves, because the
government didn’t help us with the problems that we have.

Together with other communities, that have the same problems with agricultural
issues, and with compañeros that have been murdered, the government up until the
present time has done nothing…. They have exploited the forests, the water,
animals…

NEA: Since your community has been involved in the CIPO, what successes have
been achieved?

The government has given only a few things: a little bit of shelter, but nothing
complete.… They have built small bridges, only very small ones. But what we want
resolved are the agrarian problems, which are more related to justice...

And respect for women, children and elderly people. And that people recognize us
for our customs, and ways of living, and ways of thinking. Because we don’t
believe in the same things as the government.

NEA: What are the agrarian problems in your community or others?

Murdered compañeros, people who have been tortured by the government, who have
been kidnapped …. The paramilitaries are stealing the wood, taking away the
water, other things…. Agrarian problems are when they rob us of our parcels of
land…. They’re also trying to sell our culture, our language, our community
dances, and our traditional clothing.

NEA: What do you use the land for?

To plant corn and beans[FOOD IN GENERAL: corn, beans, coffee, onions, herbs,
garlic, et al]. They’re communal lands; they are free lands. And what we want is
that they don’t steal it, that the government doesn’t take it—because where
would we go if they took it from us?

NEA: Where do the people who join the paramilitaries come from? Do any of them
come from your communities, or do they come from elsewhere?

They come from other communities. They have robbed, but always the government
directs them, and pays them, and they come into our villages under the orders of
the government, and commit these acts in such a way that it doesn’t appear that
the government does it.

We call them paramilitaries because they have arms, they are from villages….
Half of them are indigenous, and the other half are just people from the PRI who
support the paramilitaries.

We have made our struggle, but non-violently. There are no communities in which
there are paramilitaries and CIPO members...

Our weapon is our voice, and we use animals. We use rats, pigs, cockroaches, so
that the government pays attention to us. We go directly to the buildings where
the authority works in, offices and things, and put all the animals in there.

One time we put four rats and four mice in a government office. People were
screaming and jumping up on chairs. The next day, the press reported that there
were several hundred! The intent was to get the government to listen, to heed
us. We succeeded in getting some building materials—but no progress on the big
repressions.

We do those things, and our crime is defending our rights, defending our
communities. The government wants to make us sound like we’re the murderers,
we’re the criminals, but it’s not that way.

NEA: Are friends and comrades of yours in prison right now?

We have two members that are in jail right now, in Etla prison. One is called
Joaquín Pérez, and the other one is Juan Alavez, and they’re from San Isidro
Aloapám. Their only crimes have been to defend their forests, and defend their
communities, and defend their water. And those are the only crimes, or the
reasons, that they’re jailed.

NEA: You’ve spoken about your community. We’re curious to hear about how you
became involved.

When I was 15, I moved from my community to Oaxaca City to study, because on the
land there’s no work. Or there is work, but there’s no money, and you can’t
support yourself. So I moved to the city out of necessity, and there I started
to learn Mixteco again, and I started to learn about Plan de Zaragoza, and I
said well, my people are my people, and I have no reason to abandon them.

This is when I discovered that the community was already with the CIPO-RFM.
Before the people didn’t know anything—they hadn’t even paved the road, there
weren’t any markets, or schools. But when I got back, the community had advanced
at least a little bit. And there was a women’s program of growing organic
vegetables.

We’ve achieved these kinds of projects not just in my community, but in
different communities helping each other out, through guetza, which is basically
a Mixteco word for mutual aid.

When I came back, people in my village were talking about CIPO, and were saying,
“Let’s get this going, because there’s no reason for us to allow the government
to continue coming into our community and taking advantage of us.” CIPO doesn’t
try to trick the people in the communities with things like clothes, a kilo of
rice, a liter of cooking oil. No. It’s simply to come together, and to work
together.

International visitors have come to CIPO and given workshops about different
skills, like clothes-making, community radio, computers, and silkscreen
printing. They have also taught us about their countries of origin.

And training for women—but I’m not familiar with this. There’s a part of the
CIPO-RFM called the Women’s Area. They are in charge of setting up talks and
holding workshops. It is recognized that women can do just as much, and more,
than men. The voice of women is valued in the CIPO.

NEA: Can you tell us a little more about the organization and decision-making
that happens in CIPO communities?

There are no leaders. We don’t command each other. We only hold assemblies, and
we all decide with each other, not one person alone. We make decisions through
the base councils, under the authority of the people. Also, we carry out
decisions through the organizing junta [organizing committee].

In the communities, no one is looking for power; no one wants to be the boss of
anyone else. There is agreement that everyone respects each other, and the
people decide upon their representatives...

NEA: What are the assemblies talking about and deciding?

In these assemblies, we talk about the problems that are facing the communities,
such as the lack of potable water. Other things discussed here are projects with
cows, what will be done with them, or also projects with bees. We decide who is
going to be in charge of those. So those are the little things that we discuss.

NEA: What do the representatives do?

The delegates of the organizing junta live in the CIPO house, which is in Oaxaca
City. The delegates of the base committees are the ones who actually live in the
communities.

When it’s necessary—maybe once a month, or every couple months—there are what
are known as “councils of the councils,” where all the different base councils
come together, along with the organizing junta, and they meet about the problems
they have. After those meetings, the people from the base councils go back to
their own communities and report about the “councils of the councils” to all the
CIPO members.

NEA: Who is on the organizing junta?

The organizing junta is made up of one or two delegates from each community, so
it’s 30 or more compañeros. Their post as delegate lasts three years…. They deal
with problems in the communities, because all of them have many problems. And
sometimes they go as delegates to other countries, when they’re invited.

The organizing junta are there on their own accord—they do their work
voluntarily. They don’t receive pay for their work. To provide for this, there
is mutual aid: while the people participate in the junta, there are people who
take care of their land, and we take up collections to provide for their
expenses….

NEA: We’ve heard about the tequio, and that it’s used for both collective
projects and as a sentence for when people do something wrong. How does that
work?

The community elects one person for a year who will be in charge of checking out
what needs to be done, like if the road has to be repaired.

An example of the tequio is when everyone joins together to harvest the corn, or
the beans. So they harvest it together, and they sell it. The money that they
get for it, they use to pay for the electricity and other things. It helps us to
buy pencils, and white paper to use on the computer, for example.

And regarding the sentences for infractions, in our communities, there aren’t
murderers. Among the worst things that happen in our communities are that
someone might use violence against women, to assault another member of the
community. And when this happens, we lock up the person, and sometimes we make
them pay for their crimes in money. There are houses that work as jails, and
they’re made out of adobe or stone. They stay there for 24 hours, or they’re
asked to pay a small fine....

There’s the example of a Zapoteco community, in which the sentencing for
wrongdoing, like for hitting a member, is to work on the tequio. Sometimes it’s
for a week.

NEA: And who decides how much time that person is going to be working on the
tequio?

The people. The community. As it is a custom; you have to respect the custom of
the community. So in this community, the example was given, the community
decides how long the person will be working on the tequio for that sentence. In
my community, we have the jail that people have to stay in for 24 hours. In
other communities, sometimes they have to work in the tequio, and that might be
to help build a road, or to take care of the cows, or bulls, or goats….

NEA: Are the people who founded the CIPO still active in the organization?

They’re still around, and they help with training other members, things like
teaching them how to read and write. Through different types of skills, like
making flyers or pamphlets, asking them questions, telling them stories...

I just finished my 3 years on the organizing committee, helping to raise a
little bit of money for them to use in the CIPO house. Because the government
doesn’t give—we don’t ask the government for any money, because we know that
among brothers we can accomplish what we need to accomplish. We only ask that
the government fix the problems they’ve caused….

NEA: Can you tell us a little more about the CIPO House?

The CIPO House is a house of the indigenous peoples, who through their struggle
have given bits of the materials that they have. Some give things like cement,
gravel, sand, and other materials that are necessary to build the house… We’re
close, but it’s not completely finished. This house is a tequio, a voluntary
tequio without any pay… we’re dreaming of having a large house with a very large
yard so that we can live together with people from other countries, so that the
house will be for everyone.

The organizing junta is there. And every week two different members of different
communities come to guard the House. They answer the phone, and take messages,
and they receive the guests who come to visit the House. They also cook the food
that is offered to visitors. When the week ends, two new [guards] arrive....

NEA: Tell us more about your work on the organizing junta.

My work on the organizing junta involved going to the different communities and
visiting compañeros, and doing different tequios, or just going to see what’s
happening... It’s part of our work to go to the communities and have small
discussions, to talk about what’s going on in Oaxaca, and if there have been any
improvements, or there have been advances, or no advances, or problems.

The work of the organizing junta is also to go and train compañeros, teach them
other kinds of work…. We don’t explain by going and carrying papers, because the
people, they haven’t studied… it’s difficult for them to understand. What the
junta does is capacity-building, from children to—it doesn’t matter the age. We
have games to make people understand, explaining using large drawings…

Aside from that, if a compañero arrives from another country, the junta has to
talk to the community, tell them that the person is going to arrive, because if
they don’t have authorization, they can’t come to the communities…. or, they can
come in, but no one’s going to pay attention to them.

We have to give the name of the foreign person, so that they know who he is,
what he’s about, and then he’ll be welcomed in warmly. Sometimes people come to
do projects with the community. For example, a Spanish woman taught people in
Plan de Zaragoza to do bakery work.

NEA: Are many non-indigenous people involved in the CIPO?

Well, in the CIPO house we’re all equal. We don’t put any compañero aside.
Indigenous or not indigenous, people of different religions—Catholics,
Evangelicals, others—all of us are equal. We don’t make distinctions. We’re all
brothers and sisters. The non-indigenous treat us well, just as we treat them
well.

NEA: Can you tell us about your experience coming to the United States?

Well, necessity obliged me to come here. Many other members of the Indigenous
Council have immigrated to the US. Crossing the border is very risky, because
Immigration is on the borders. As necessity obliges us, we cross, come what may.

Crossing the border is very sad, because you suffer thorns on your skin, and
because you don’t have enough food. There’s no water. In Mexico there is no
work—or there’s work, but very little, very low paid: ten dollars for a whole
day. That’s why we go, out of obligation we cross the border. We know it’s
dangerous…

Sometimes we stop at ponds where cows drink, and even though they’re really
dirty, we drink from there, because we have no other place to drink from. To
CROSS the border is to CROSS with fear. Whenever you see something, you have to
hide under the bushes. In the desert it’s hard to find brush to get under.

To cross you have to walk 2, 3, 4 days, or 5 nights…. Entering Arizona is sad
too. There’s a house that the coyotes have…. a tiny house, very hot, where there
is little food. And crossing all the way from the border to get there, you
always travel worried, or cautious. We came and got picked up by a car or van.
Then we had to crouch really low, or sometimes be on our side for a really long
time.

NEA: What was it like getting to the East Coast?

We didn’t know anyone, no one to ask for even a little bit of money. It’s hard.
But God is very great in that way. He helps us a lot, helps the immigrants… We
arrived at a field, we stayed in a house. Even though it was cold, there was no
other option.

And the other compañeros, the ones who have bad luck, are arrested by
Immigration, and jailed. They’re sent back to Mexico. They take their
fingerprints as though they’re criminals.

Other compañeros, when they’re detained, when they arrive at the Mexican border,
they have to answer all these questions, like “what did you go there for?” “What
did you want to do over there?” They always make fools out of them. They know
well, but they always ask…. “Who’s your guide?” Always with bad language…. “Go
back to your village, you got nothing to do here.”

NEA: I want to ask you about your experience being politically active here in
the United States. What are you involved in, and what’s your impression of the
immigrant movement, and other struggles, in the United States?

I’d almost like to think that here you could make a better life, but that’s not
true. We’re suffering the same in the field from the chemicals, the pesticides…
that affects us a lot. I got involved with another organization...

In many states, there is the problem of detentions—the police are detaining
immigrants without any crime committed. The police come and ask us for a lot of
different documents that they know we don’t have... [they] ask the person to
show their papers, or their driver’s license, but that person doesn’t have the
driver’s license, because they don’t have the papers to be here.

And... wages are really low, and so you end up working a lot for very little
money. So it’s the same thing, here or there. The organization supports the
workers. It explains to us what the effects of pesticides are, and contaminants,
and things like that. They also hold talks on the land, about sexually
transmitted diseases, about AIDS. They’re asking the US government to give out
cards that will allow immigrant workers to have driver’s licenses.

NEA: Are the other people in the US from the CIPO organizing at the farms they
work on?

Well, it’s difficult, because many of us work different hours, and some of us
work 12 hours a day, and we only work 6 months a year, so it’s hard to get
together. Some get up earlier, some later, so it’s hard to get on the phone to
say hello.

We continue talking with other people about what’s going on with us, through
CIPO-RFM, and also because our experiences are very similar to the experiences
of others. It all seems to be similar from North to South.

It’s the same in all the states. They have the same problems with Immigration,
and police… If any of us get sick, we have bad experiences with doctors in the
hospitals. They don’t understand us, and they don’t attend to us like human
beings. There are good-hearted people here who help us, and drive us to the
doctors, and explain how things work, as we don’t speak English. But it depends
on luck. Not everyone is like that.

NEA: What are the next things that you would wish, or hope, to see happen in the
US?

There’s a lot I’d like to see happen, but there are a lot of people here! I
couldn’t really answer that question, because there’s so many people from
different countries, it’s not just Mexicans here.

NEA: For Mexicans, then...

That we could get some kind of permit that would allow us to come in and out of
the country, because we don’t come here to rob, we just come here to work. Not
just for the Mexicans, but for everybody, because I think people from other
countries come here to work, they don’t come here to… they’re not terrorists,
they’re just hard-working people.

NEA: What do you hope happens next in Oaxaca?

I would like the government to resolve all the conflicts for the members of the
CIPO, and that there be no more conflicts or assassinations…. And that they stop
persecuting our members…. and imprison the murderers.

To maintain our independence from political parties, to not ask for permission
of the Party or of rich people. The government should support the people who are
sick, because it’s difficult: in a lot of the communities there are no
hospitals, and so these people have to travel maybe up to ten hours to get to a
hospital, and then sometimes they die.

There should be education for all those who want to study, they should provide
schools, drinkable water. To have electricity and telephones, which some of the
communities still don’t have. And for those members who have nothing, that they
have some kind of housing.

And that they stop stealing our culture.

NEA: How do you feel the CIPO-RFM’s struggle is going?

The government has wanted to get rid of and be done with the CIPO. They go to
the communities that are part of the Indigenous Council, they offer them maybe a
kilo of rice, or building materials, and the people are not educated and don’t
understand what the government is trying to do. In the CIPO, we don’t cast the
people who collaborate with the government aside. We continue to work with them,
and educate them, so that in the end they figure it out. And we hope they
realize what’s happening, and return to work with the CIPO...

So we win and we lose, things go up and down. But the CIPO always keeps on,
lives, and doesn’t give up. Even though the government continues to imprison us,
and persecute us, our voice will not get quieter.


========

This interview was done by Dawn, MJ, Dominic, and Diana: two members of
NEFAC-Boston and two members of Boston por CIPO-RFM and the Jericho Movement.
Many thanks to BD for additional translation.

========


This essay and interview is from The Northeastern Anarchist #11 (Spring/Summer
2006)... which also includes essays on Especifismo, Organizational Dualism, the
Quebec 'national question', participatory economics, and much more!

The Northeastern Anarchist is the English-language magazine of the Northeastern
Federation of Anarchist-Communists (NEFAC), covering class struggle anarchist
theory, history, strategy, debate and analysis in an effort to further develop
anarchist-communist ideas and practice.

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