The following is an interview with Azad, an American currently fighting for the revolution in Myanmar. Conducted via email over several weeks between August and September of 2024, Azad’s responses cover a wide range of issues related to the strengths and challenges of a “protracted people’s war.” These include the avoidance of ethnic and political schisms, the decentralization of guerilla combat, the confusions generated by counter-insurrection, and the complex geopolitical dynamics that all uprisings today will be forced to confront sooner or later as they approach the possibility of victory.
Álvaro Ibáñez: An Amazon Logistic Centre, in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), Spain, 2013. (ctxt)
Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Historical colonialism: extractivism of physical resources
The history of colonialism is a history of systematic depredation of territory. The object of colonisation is the resource-rich physical places that the colonialist West needed for its accumulation. The other object of colonisation is the lives of millions of men and women exploited in conditions of slavery in the territory under colonial rule, or deported to the territory of the colonising power.
Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632
In spite of the usefulness we think we derive from them, the sciences cannot make us happy, because man is a speaking being, who needs to express in words joy and pain, pleasure and affliction, while science, in the last analysis, aims at a mute being, which it is possible to know in number and measure, like all the objects of the world. The natural languages that men speak are, at the limit, an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalised and corrected, eliminating as “poetic” those redundancies to which, instead, we mainly pay attention when expressing our desires and thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Precisely because it is addressed to a dumb man, science can never produce an ethic. That illustrious scientists have unscrupulously carried out experiments on the bodies of deportees in the Lager or of convicts in American prisons in the interests of science should not, in this sense, surprise us. Science is in fact based on the possibility of separating at all levels the biological life of a living being from its relational life, the mute vegetative life that man has in common with plants from his spiritual existence as a speaking being. It is good to remember this, today when men and women seem to have abandoned everything they believed in, to entrust to science an expectation of happiness that can only be disappointed and betrayed. As recent years have shown beyond any doubt, men who look at their own lives with the eyes of their doctor are therefore ready to renounce their most elementary political liberties and to submit without limits to the powers that rule them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple and trite words we exchange, from the shout and laughter of joy or from the shock that makes us weep, we do not know whether from grief or from delight. Let us leave the scientists in the silence and solitude of numbers, let us watch lucidly and attentively so that they do not invade the realm of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can really satisfy us.
From Lundi Matin, #443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which by coincidence comes in the wake of our last post, the article by Miguel Amorós, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces may serve to raise – as we believe it does – further, fundamental questions.
We share Miguel Amorós’ essay, “What is Anarchism?”, not because we are entirely in agreement with it – that has never been an exclusive criterion of selection for us -, but because of the forcefulness of the argument, because of the need not to ignore the anarchist movement’s history when trying to understand anarchism, as Amorós defends, and because of the absurdity of so expanding the limits of anarchism, that it potentially comes to include everyone and every idea opposed to “excessive” authority.
Yet his insistence on defining anarchism exclusively “as an anti-authoritarian current of revolutionary socialism, the intellectual product of the incipient class struggle typical of capitalist society in the early stages of industrialisation”, as a formerly working class revolutionary theory and practice and the need for it to remain revolutionary today (even with the waning and dissolution of the working class, at least as it existed up until WWII), cuts too deep. And it does so because what Amorós dismisses as non-revolutionary – a “bookish”, purely ideological or theoretical anarchism, which is not anarchism, for him – , begs the question of what anarchist revolution is, for the history of the movement and the broader history of social movements points in no single direction.
To endeavour to divide the real anarchists from the pretenders on the grounds of true revolutionaries versus non-revolutionaries appears to us to risk falling into another intellectual orthodoxy, the very thing that Amorós faults non-revolutionary anarchists with.
When the far right perpetrates mass murder on the cusp of world war, comparing is not a provocation but a duty
Netanyahu seems greyer every day. A face caked in makeup, with dull eyes that sometimes carry the faintest of glints. Like a puppet.
Puppets are uncanny, tells us Thomas Ligotti. We know they only simulate life, but their wrongness still makes us look back at ourselves from the inside, raising dim alarm about that conceit we call a ‘self’.
Now imagine such a puppet, only it’s being double-fisted by two Judeo-Nazis.
The NOT BORED!journal collective has once again generously shared with us their tireless work of translating situationist and situationist inspired texts, for which we are grateful. On this occasion, it is a very recent piece (July 2024) by Raoul Vaneigem, dedicated to the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests of France, and the movement’s ongoing resonances.
What if old words like ‘genocide’ (and why not ‘colonisation’) were false friends? What if the new technologies that subjugate our emotions when we think we’re expressing them were also betraying us? And what if we ourselves were betraying the witnesses in this way? And how can we articulate more than snatches of truth when events take our breath away? This text is not an answer. No answer to the ongoing tragedy is a text.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely were too long If life did ride upon a dial’s point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour. And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, The First Part
Having to prove every day, every night, every moment, that we are being colonised, occupied, exploited, expelled, decimated and eradicated, and all of this well before a supposedly fateful date, having to prove again and again massacre after massacre, having to prove the devastating process of ethnic and cultural cleansing that began more than seven decades ago and continues unabated, that is the absolute tragedy, the tragedy of the Palestinians. Having to prove that you are being exterminated, having to prove it over and over again. Because no, ‘our’ images prove nothing, they are not ‘their’ images. ‘Nor are our words. Our dead even less so.
When I discovered the Freedom Press collection of Alex Comfort’s anarchist and anti-militarist writings, I’d already known him for 15 years as the author of The Joy of Sex. This pioneering couples’ manual, which featured ‘aesthetic’/’tasteful’ illustrations drawn from photos, spent more than 70 weeks in the New York Times bestseller top five and 11 in the top position. Generally and for its time, the book showed a remarkably liberatory and egalitarian approach to cis/hetero/sexuality based on play and gentleness. “The Joy of Sex was the anarchist manifesto that conquered 1970s suburbia—” wrote cultural historian Matthew Sweet, “a radical text that found a place on the shelves of millions of readers who didn’t know Kropotkin from Kermit the Frog.”
Anarchism was a general background to Comfort’s thinking, like water to a fish, in his own words. He was an early founder of both the anti-nuclear movement and the field of gerontology (old age care) and a writer of poetry, fiction and cultural critique. His life has long deserved the book Eric Laursen has finally given it, and Polymath is a pleasure to read. The title refers to a person “whose knowledge embraces a wide range of complex subjects and, more importantly, often calls on several of them at once to address complex problems.” Laursen is a great storyteller who excels at balancing taking you forward through Comfort’s life while moving between his diverse pursuits and ideas. I also learnt a lot from his discussions of the political and intellectual context.
Azad: The Revolution in Myanmar
From Ill Will (13/09/2024).
The following is an interview with Azad, an American currently fighting for the revolution in Myanmar. Conducted via email over several weeks between August and September of 2024, Azad’s responses cover a wide range of issues related to the strengths and challenges of a “protracted people’s war.” These include the avoidance of ethnic and political schisms, the decentralization of guerilla combat, the confusions generated by counter-insurrection, and the complex geopolitical dynamics that all uprisings today will be forced to confront sooner or later as they approach the possibility of victory.
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