Niger.

 

     
      
They keep French electricity supply flowing.

Image courtesy of Dunia.

          Western media is pumping out the usual imperialist crap about the coup in Niger. All about restoring stability, and talking up military intervention to return democracy to the people. What was in place before the coup, was a stooge of the West who allowed the French state to continue plundering Niger of its natural resources. Niger is a very rich country with a poverty induced population. Among Niger's natural resources are Gold, Silicon, oil an estimated two billion barrels, then let's not forget Uranium.
         Niger supplies the EU with 24% of its uranium requirements, necessary for its electricity and nuclear weapons. It supplies 5% of the world's uranium production, this is something that Western imperialism has no desire to lose. So you can understand why the West is in such a tizzy about what is portrayed as a poor country. The country is rich but its population is poor. Despite the fact that Niger is possibly responsible for a large slice of French electricity supplies, in Niger itself, out of a population of 27 million only a fraction of those have access to electricity, approximately 18.6% according to World Bank data. The country is and has been plundered and pillaged by Western imperialism, mainly French. for centuries France has got very rich on the backs of the people of Niger. French imperialism, backed up by other Western imperialists and their puppet governments in Niger's neighbourhood will fight tooth and nail to keep that privileged position at the expense of the people of Niger. No matter if it has to spill the blood of the people it is proclaiming to protect.

They are helping make Western nuclear weapons.

                                              Image courtesy of African Volunteer.

         Western imperialism and other world domination groupings have to be destroyed, they live and grow rich and powerful on the poverty of millions of innocent people. Their final demise and the end of the capitalist insane economics is the only road to freedom and justice for all, and that better world that sees to the needs of all our people. How do we do it, I.m sure we have the imagination, the numbers and the power, all we need is the will of the people. To get their all I can offer is the words of Guy Debord.

       

"First of all, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions. Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones." (Guy Debord, 1957)

Visit ann arky at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

France, May-June 1968.

      To mark the 50th anniversary of the  1968 May-June events that shook France and reverberated throughout Europe, the Kate Sharpley Library have brought out a excellent pamphlet, written by a participating eyewitness at the time,  Flûtiste Le (the flute player). How have we moved forward in 50 years?

 Flûtiste Le:  The Anarchists in Paris, May-June 1968

       An anarchist eyewitness to the revolt of May-June 1968, Le Flûtiste ("the flute player") looks back on the highs and lows of Paris' student-worker rebellion. Topics covered include, student life before the revolt, the barricades of the Latin Quarter, the student and worker occupations and strikes and the part played by the anarchists in the upheaval.
      "Having been hit by a grenade and come under gas attack, I had made up my mind to join the demonstration at Denfert-Rochereau. ... First I watched as the head of the demo paraded past, made up of trade union bigwigs and their henchmen; then came heaps of more or less unknowns such as the Situationist Guy Debord whom I spotted on his own, just him and a friend. Then, all of a sudden, my eyes were treated to the unbelievable spectacle of a forest of black-and -red flags, with a sprinkling of black flags! ... The public's curiosity about and interest in anarchist ideas was born right there and then. Anarchy, which the Stalinists and socialists generally - not to mention the bourgeois - had declared a dead duck in the land of Utopia, was rising like the phoenix from the ashes! Its burial licence had expired, to the great annoyance of all those respectable folk."

This extract/review from Freedom Press:

        First of all, on the outbreak of the fighting in Paris, between 300-400 anarchists were attending the gala of the Federation Anarchiste that evening in central Paris on May 10th. Members of other groups were present on that evening, including the Union of Anarchist Communist Groups, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union and the anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT.These were on hand to reinforce the barricades that were set up that evening in the Latin Quarter, a culmination of weeks of unrest in the universities. To his credit Dany Cohn-Bendit of the March 22nd student movement used his megaphone to call for the taking over of the area. The writer describes this then anarchist as “hard to stick” as a person(more on that later).

       “Get this: what few leftwing or “leftist” students there were on hand tried to talk them of digging up the streets or building barricades and berated the barricade builders as “provocateurs”. They were promptly seen off…”

      The writer describes the lightning spread of barricades through the neighbourhood.”The clashes were violent in the extreme; many young people refused to give ground (to the police) and like out-and-out kamikazes, threw themselves into the hand-to-hand fighting”. He also notes that “local residents, outraged by the sight of the police brutality, sided with the students, tossing down buckets of water to dampen the effects of tear gas grenades and taking demonstrators into their homes”.As a result of the fighting and the vicious brutality the trade unions and left wing organisations were forced into calling a demonstration for May 13th. Over the coming days strikes broke out spontaneously around France.

         The leftists now attempted to hijack the movement, setting up literature stalls in the courtyard of Sorbonne university and token committees that they controlled.

The demonstration on May 13th brought out between 500,000 to one million people. The writer notes the “forest of red-and-black flags with a sprinkling of black flags”.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Society Of The Spectacle.

     Guy Debord (1931-­1994) was the most influential figure in the Situationist International, the notorious subversive group that played a key role in provoking the May 1968 revolt in France. "The Society of the Spectacle" (1973, 90 minutes) is Debord's film adaptation of his own 1967 book of the same name. As passages from the book are read in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features ("Potemkin," "Ten Days That Shook the World," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Shanghai Gesture," "Johnny Guitar," "Mr. Arkadin," etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, and news and documentary footage, including glimpses of Spain 1936, Hungary '56, Watts '65, France '68, and other revolts of the past. Inter-title quotes from Marx, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Tocqueville, and Debord himself occasionally break the flow, challenging the viewers to question their own relation to the film -- and to the society as a whole. San Francisco filmmaker Konrad Steiner has produced a dubbed version of this film using Ken Knabb’s English translation as read by artist/scholar Dore Bowen. Konrad also located and reinserted the original English-language clips from the many quoted films (which in Debord's film were mostly dubbed in French). This enables English-speaking viewers to pay full attention to the images instead of trying to follow subtitles, and thus better perceive the complex interplay between montage, image, and language through which Debord presents his theses.

 
(English overdub) The Society of the Spectacle (Final sound edit) from konrad steiner on Vimeo.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk