Beneath The Surface.

        The media still put out picture that we, on the whole, are quietly accepting our new enforced "normal", with a "we are all in this together" spirit. Of course this isn't quite an accurate picture of what is happening on the ground, there is considerable discontent and anger bubbling just below the surface. People are starting to move a little further from the rules, there have been riots in various cities across the globe, prisoners around the world are rioting, migrants in camps are rioting, and beneath the surface there is a growing desire to break out of this enforced straight jacket. The latest flash point in Europe has been Paris, after an incident with the police in a Paris suburb.
      There has been four nights of riots in the suburbs of Paris, the police being the main target of the youth from these areas. The riots began on Saturday evening after an incident that people saw as a police officer deliberately injuring a young local motorcyclist. The suburbs of Paris and many other French cities are usually very poor areas with poverty being a way of life for many struggling families. This lockdown has cost many of the residents, already poor, to lose their incomes. In these areas there has always been tension between police and residents, this has been exacerbated by the extra police presence to enforce the virus lockdown. The authorities are concerned that this situation could escalate, and there is every possibility that it will.

 

Reports HERE,  HERE, HERE, HERE,  HERE, HERE,

Photo from Sky News

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If Only---.

 Paris.

       If only it was happening here in Glasgow, London, Edinburgh, Leeds, as well as Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Canberra, Washington, and all cities and towns across the globe, at the one time, then tomorrow might look a lot brighter.

Albania.

Thanks Loam for the link.

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Bloody Democarcy.

         From our daily bilge feed from our mainstream media, it would appear that all is fine and dandy in France, and the people are quietly getting on with their servile existence. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, the people of France are angry and showing it on the streets. It is over a year since the yellow vests started their mass protests, and they are still continuing, recently they have been joined by massive union presence on the streets, taking on the government for its unjust, corrupt, anti-worker and profit oriented polices. Of course France being a member of the phony democracy club, comes down hard with unleashed police brutality against the any form of dissent. 

     The following video is of one of the many protests happening on a continuous basis. This altercation took place at the corner of rue Jeanne d'Arc and rue du Gros-Horloge in the city centre at around noon local time on the 9th of January 2020.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1215252368381612033

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The Beauty And Magic Of Paper.

       It is a problem that hasn't gone away, how do anarchists get their ideas out to the general public? today there seems to be a tremendous emphasis on "social media", but to me that seems so distant and lacks that human contact. To gain your information you have to sit in front of a computer or pick up you mobile phone/tablet, and deliberately go to a particular spot on the internet dial, an isolated way of communicating, though a useful tool. I still believe that the paper in your hand, handed to another human being, is a much rich path to walk. It is a contact in real space, in real time, a possible kindred spirit. Who knows where that paper will end up, in whose hands. You give it to one, they take it home, a member of the family reads it, takes it and gives it to their mate, and so on.
      In Paris it seems that the plastering the walls with paper is back in fashion. The wall, the lamp-post, can be you 24 hours a day, quiet mouthpiece, shouting to those who care to look.

 This from Anarchist News:

Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris

[From the first issue of Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris. It’s been getting pasted up around the city in the past month. The biggest difficulty faced by anarchist counter-info projects is often distribution -- how to get texts into the hands of people who will be interested in them? Using posters as a way of distributing long-format texts has definitely been tried before, either by connecting to a website or by keeping things short enough to fit, but it's an interesting idea that's worth experimenting with more.]

Introduction:

“I spit on your idols, I spit on your gods, I spit on the homeland […] I spit on your flags, I spit on capital and the golden calf, I spit on all religions: they’re jokes, I don’t give a shit about them, I don’t give a damn. They only exist because of you, leave them and they’ll fall apart.
You’re resigned, but you’re a force — you don’t even know it, but you’re a force nonetheless, and I cannot spit on you, I can only hate you… or love you. Beyond all my other desires, I want to see you shaken from your resignation in a terrible awakening into life. There is no future paradise, there is no future, there is only the present.”
Albert Libertad, To the Resigned, 1905

An excerpt:

The party’s already over?

(excerpt from a poster seen in the streets of Paris these past months)

       We’ve had a good time running through the streets these past months, trying to subvert our existing lives and these modern, sanitized cities, these showpieces of capitalism and the society of control.
       We didn’t give a shit about this law, just like the results of a presidential election or of a football match, because we don’t want to work, period. We don’t accept our exploitation, whether or not its facilitated by this law.
      So why wait for the next “movement” to have fun, when all we have to do is to continue what we started these past months? Why should we each return to our own isolation, submerged in the various alienations that distract us from our self-destructive boredom and loneliness, when we’ve seen that so many of us want to attack the existing world? This society tries to break us down a little more each day, and to frighten away those who have decided they can no longer accept this comedy, no longer blindly follow the union march and the marching orders of good citizens, no longer accept states of emergency, or, for that matter, any states at all.
       We have discovered, or rediscovered, what it means to run across the pavement, to play in spaces where policing controls our every movement. We knew that this society of misery depended on our servitude, and our fear of cops, but we’ve learned that we are strong enough to overturn it, that they can’t prevent us from playing like wild children who destroy everything they pass.
       We’re off to such a good start, let’s not trade any piece of the present for a fictional tomorrow, and let’s not surrender anything of this moment for the winds of the future!

Solidarity with all those arrested these past months!

Read the full article HERE:

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

"We Ask For Nothing, We Are Taking It All".

        Only those unfortunate souls who glean their information from the babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, see the system as working fine, but with odd and rare blips of some sort of “crisis”. They live in the smoke and mirrors of the propaganda fog produced by that mouth piece of the system, that wonderful illusion creating machine they call “The Media”. Cast your eyes towards the real world, and you see a different picture. You see poverty, deprivation, brutal wars, and state violence, a world awash with inequality and injustice, you also see a system in its death throes. However, you also see resistance, resistance to this continuous exploitation of the many by the few. Across the globe people are rising up and not demanding change, but creating change, you can’t demand freedom from a system that is built on, and can’t survive, without power and authority, you have to take it. There can be no compromise between capitalism and justice, the are totally incompatible.
        From Russia to Canada, from Norway to Mexico, people are waking up to the fact that they hold the power, all they have to do is use that power, they now realise that capitalism is not the only game in town, it was not created in tablets of stone by some deity, it was man made, and can be man destroyed, for people to have justice and freedom, capitalism must go. However, the beast will not go quietly, it will not relinquish its power and privileges without a fight, it will use every dirty trick in the book backed up with raw brutal force. That's the price of justice and freedom.

 This from Act For Freedom Now:

         These last two months (March-April) the streets of major cities in France have been transformed into fields of resistance, where mass protests and clashes are taking place in the framework of the general strikes which are against the new labour legislation of the government. Barricades, luxury cars and police cars burnt, cops and undercovers beaten, banks smashed, people masked up with stones in their hands, are some of the images that prove to us that in every corner of the earth the war against the state and capital still rages and that nothing is over…
       “We ask for nothing, we are taking it all”, “No insurrection without fire”, “Destroy wage slavery” etc, are some of the chants from the black bloc and the anarchist groups that clash and express their
refusals in the street. As was expected, all that’s taking place could not be without the labour leaders and reformists who speak of provocateurs, liken the black bloc with the fascists, condemn the violent practices against the state and at the same time have relations with the police. Because, fortunately or unfortunately, pacifists and deniers of violence – whose existence clearly favors the rulers – are a global phenomenon. The time is near when they will get what they deserve.
          At the same time, the forces of oppression use plenty of teargas, brutally beat protesters and arrest people. In a nutshell, they do everything under the orders of their superiors in order for them to protect their bosses and the peaceful citizens-subjects. It is more than obvious now that the economy is collapsing, resulting in it showing its real face: Hunger wages combined with wretched working conditions, that contribute to an inhumane middle ages-like work environment, where the worker is the modern slave on the production line. At the same time, repression intensifies and strengthens, in order for the police-state in the streets to become a daily routine and for whoever seeks the attack on the world of authority to hesitate to take action.
End the false dilemmas. Whoever chooses inactivity, chooses their chains. The moment is now, the place is here. From the streets of France to the alleyways of Chile, from the mountains of Mexico to the avenues of Athens. The whole world is a field of unrest! 

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Money, Oil And The End Of The World As We Know It.

 

From subMedia TV:

      This we bring you a recap of the COP21 climate clusterfuck in Paris, with Jim Hansen’s reaction to the historic non-agreement and 350.org’s condemnation of comrades who defied the protest ban. Over in Greece we look at the yearly riots that commemorate the police murder of Alex Grigoropoulos. On the music break, deceased Greek anarcho MC – Killah P with “I Won’t Cry, I Won’t Fear” Our featured interview is with three brave comrades who managed to stop the flow of dirty tar sands oil to the entire eastern seaboard of Turtle Island, with three bike locks and some egg sandwiches.

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For The World To Live, Europe Must Die.

      We are all human, and in the sea of sorrow at the suffering that occurred in Paris on Friday 13th. November, it is difficult to focus on the bigger picture, we are overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of the dead, wounded and traumatised.  We feel it greater because of the close proximity, we feel less for similar suffering far away, Iraq for example, but it is a small world. The traumatised, weeping parents, family and friends is repeated across the Middle East on a daily basis, but our mainstream media doesn't cover it in the same manner.

       I don't believe "evil",( a word I detest) pops out of a bottle from nowhere, it usually has a history, a birth somewhere in the past. Short term memory will never solve the problem, we have to look a lot deeper into the past, the seeds were sown somewhere at some point. 

     I found the article, For the World to Live, "Europe" Must Die. by Russell Means, brings clarity to this whole question of violence, placing it firmly in an historical context. 

      “The only possible opening for a statement like this is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate thinking": what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” -- Russell Means (in a 1980 speech)

       The following are two rather large quotes from his article, however, the whole article is well worth the time it takes to read.

       The deaths of hundreds of people in a third world country evidently do not send the world’s press into high alert. In fact, while 500,000 Iraq children died [UNICEF figure] as a result of U.S. bombing of Iraq’s power generation, water purification and sewage processing infrastructure compounded by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions/embargoes of essential food and medical supplies to Iraq, it was given coverage but not the sort of frantic coverage given by ‘terrorist attacks’ in the U.S., Britain, Spain and most recently France. It is hard NOT to compare this lack of empathy to third world citizens to the cultural genocide inflicted on indigenous peoples of North America by European colonizers.
       The attention given to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, that Means and Churchill refer to as; ... ‘some people pushing back’, and, ... ‘chickens coming home to roost’, .. are treated as one-offs, and are not viewed by the Western press or Western leaders as part of a ongoing conflict that began with 15th century European colonization. Instead, they are portrayed as coming out of nowhere for 'no reason' [why would anyone attack innocent others?] as if they are pre-shocks that warn of an imminent Armageddon.
        In the wake of the attacks in France, yesterday, Barack Obama’s comment was;
      Once again we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. This is an attack, not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and universal values that we share.”
     ‘Once again’, ... we see Western world leaders pull out the binary ‘good versus evil’ framing, characterizing the colonizing powers and their supporters as ‘good’ and ‘innocent’ and as ‘victims’, ... while those people ‘pushing back’ are characterized in this binary framing, as ‘evil’ and ‘guilty’ and as ‘offenders’.
      Few people can help but think about themselves and their own families undergoing such horror, whether watching helplessly as their children die in the terrible conditions in Iraq arising from infrastructure bombings and embargoes, or whether slaughtered quickly and suddenly in shootings and bombings in Paris restaurants and concert halls.
       Strife is inevitable and war is hell, but pulling out this logical and moral reference framing, which Nietzsche euphemistically terms ‘a great stupidity’, amounts to such blatantly obvious denial that it can only amplify the radicalizing of some increasing fraction of the millions of those who ‘dream of pushing back’ but who, in the larger fraction, remain committed to less violent remedial paths.
     Western leaders are ‘scientific thinkers’ and their discursive reasoning is based on logical assumptions adopted by science, such as;
      “Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past.” — Poincare, ‘Origin of Mathematical Physics’
     Such simplification, termed ‘economy of thought’ by philosophers of science, is very convenient when one has gained the position one now has through a program of global domination via colonization [military appropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples] and cultural genocide. It is a scientific concept reinforced by the Enlightenment European view of man as an ‘independent reason-driven being’, a ‘human being’ that is fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour.
      So, look out, push back people, because the statute of limitations on prosecuting colonizer and sovereigntist atrocities expires before it starts, and where there is push-back, those who push back violently will be judged fully and solely responsible for ‘their evil and offensive behaviour’ against the ‘innocent colonizing powers and their innocent, victimized constituents’.
      This essay is NOT aimed at justifying push-back retribution in Paris, New York, London, Madrid and elsewhere. There is no support in it for Western moral judgement based retributive justice. This essay is a commentary on the hypocrisy of Western leadership and the pathetic façade of holier-than-thou innocence coupled with sternly self-righteous commitments to ‘rid the world of evil’. The physical reality of our natural experience is NOT binary; i.e. if we are to be honest we must “embrace in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon” and thus connect the authorship of the push-back to colonizing powers who have been spring-loading the pushers-back for a long, long while.--------

And a little further on:

       Meanwhile, global media rushes to support the bald-faced political pitch of ‘good and evil’ on each eruption of push-back violence. Nevertheless, in the intervals, even mainstream media opinion-shapers such as BBC’s Adam Curtis are making documentaries such as ‘Bitter Lake’, advertised quote/unquote as; “How Western leaders' simplistic "good" vs. "evil" narrative has failed”, and how Western political leaders have come to recognize that the source of their power has shifted from rallying people onward and upward towards a Utopian society, to defending people against a global decline and free-fall towards a horrific Dystopia.
       What is unfolding is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s predictions. Nietzsche, in the 1890s, suggested that it would take two centuries for ‘Europe to die’ in the very same sense that Russell Means intends it; to suspend this ridiculous pretense of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ as binary realities; i.e. to restore intuition and harmony-seeking to their natural precedence over reason and morality.
      He didn’t say how it would play out, exactly, other than that there would be “devaluation of the highest values”; i.e. ‘good and evil’ ‘truth and falsehood’, morality and reason.
      Both are already looking pretty shabby on Friday, November 13th, 2015.

Read the full article HERE:

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Blek Le Rat.

         Another interesting episode from Circled A Radio:

       Blek Le Rat is a French street Artist known as the father of stencil graffiti. He has earned this title through years of spray painting unforgettable figures on walls across the globe. In the early 80’s he became one of the first street Artists in Paris, known for his iconic rat stencils. His stencil technique has since been adopted by some of the biggest names in graffiti and street art today.

Listen HERE:

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A NEED FOR A DEBATE.

Food for thought from AdBusters:

Dear occupiers, jammers, dreamers,

        Three years after the May 1968 uprising that swept the world, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault observed that a key strategy of power is to “appear inaccessible to events.” Power, Foucault argued with a nod towards 1968’s failed insurrection, acts to “dispel the shock of daily occurrences, to dissolve the event … to exclude the radical break introduced by events.”

       Forty years later, in light of Occupy, Foucault’s observation still strikes home. Despite achieving the impossible at unprecedented speed – sparking a global awakening, triggering a thousand people’s assemblies worldwide, and giving birth to a visceral anti-corporate, pro-democracy spiritual insurrection – Occupy is now struggling through an existential moment. Our movement has been dealt a blow: our May 1 and follow-up events have been dissolved by power; the status quo has shown itself to be far more resilient than many of us expected.

         Now a passionate debate is emerging within our movement. On one side are those who cheer the death of Occupy in the hopes that it will transform into something unexpected and new. And on the other are patient organizers who counsel that all great movements take years to unfold.

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