From Lundi matin #478, 02/06/2025
The Oncléo Atelier presents a sound mash-up with Mahmoud Darwich’s “The Last Speech of the Red Man” (translated by Elias Sanbar), featuring W. Benjamin, D. Kopenawa, J. Genet, J-L. Godard, G. Deleuze, and a few bonus tracks from the Atelier.
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From Lobo suelto! (30/04/2025)
1- It is the first genocide broadcast live and direct, visible worldwide as it happens, and this marks a turning point, a milestone: the breaking of a moral pact that lasted eighty years, since the end of the Holocaust, and it was agreed that genocide was taboo, that it was wrong, that one could not be in favour of a genocidal massacre, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of a city, of a people. This was a felt consensus, at least in the West. Of course, the case of Palestine-Israel is also very peculiar in this regard, because Judaism is a Middle Eastern religion that, at the same time, constitutes a central root of the West. Borges: every Westerner has something Jewish and something Greek in them. Israel is the West in the East… (Could one of the reasons for anti-Semitic hatred be that we Jews deny Western purity as a negation of the East?)
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From the CrimethInc. collective 28/05/2025
From the Los Angeles Riots to the George Floyd Uprising
To observe the five-year anniversary of the burning of the Third Precinct at the beginning of the George Floyd Revolt, we have prepared a timeline tracing the trajectory of anarchist contributions to uprisings against the police from the Rodney King riots of 1992 to the uprising in Minneapolis in 2020. This story has never been told in full; we hope this cursory effort will help participants in tomorrow’s movements to understand the history that they are part of.
Needless to say, this is just one of many ways to tell this story. Countless historical threads converged in the George Floyd uprising. We could trace some of them back to the hip hop underground, others to gang truce mediation efforts, others to the Black Panthers. But this is one of them.
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From Fifth Estate #416, Spring 2025
On Jan. 1, 2024, the city of San Francisco sent New Year’s greetings to its beleaguered citizens with the cheery news that a suicide net had been installed under the Golden Gate Bridge thanks to funding from the California Mental Health Services Act.
Heralded as a “suicide deterrent system,” the supposedly solid rationale behind this marine grade stainless steel safety net, upon closer examination, turns out to be not so surprisingly full of holes. The erstwhile proponents of this costly $217 million bridge boondoggle have simplistically argued that if access to the material means of suicide are reduced, then deaths can be prevented. Just put up a net under the bridge to catch would-be suicides…presto, problem solved!
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He [Eichmann] was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality – of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963/1964)
How was | able to survive in Auschwitz? My principle is: I come first, second and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986)
Just before Ophüls drops me off, I ask him, after all he has learned about the venality of nations, whether he is as patriotic as he was when he was a boy, fleeing through this same landscape. “No,” he says. “I’ve come to believe that patriotism is a lie, and anyone who is a patriot is a fool. Even though I’ve been a French citizen since 1938, most of them still think of me as a German Jew. An axe-grinding, obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France and go on and on about the treatment of Jews.” (The Guardian, 24/05/2004)
It is perhaps difficult to imagine today how Marcel Ophuls’ 1969 film, Le Chagrin et la Pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity] could call down upon itself such censor and condemnation on the occasion of its limited release in France, in 1971. Ten years would have to pass before the country’s state television would be authorised to screen what originally had been meant for television. In the words of the director of the ORTF of the time, Jean-Jacques de Bresson, “This film destroys the myths which the French people still need”. And the central myth, in this instance, was a Manichean myth of the French people united, as nation, in resistance against the German Nazi occupation. (Le Monde, 17/05/2025)
And yet the depth and intensity of Ophuls’ documentary – a film that sought to explore the responses of the French people to German occupation and their reasons for tending toward resistance or collaboration, focusing on the Auvergne region and the city of Clermont-Ferrand, through interviews with those who lived in the region at that time – continues to resonate beyond strictly French national concerns, because it bears witness to a palette of individual moral reactions and ethical postures before the violence of extreme nationalism, by conqueror and conquered, the ambiguity and banality of motives, the plurality of characters and, finally, the impossibility of collective moral superiority or guilt, that are revealed in very similar situation anywhere.
In Ophuls’ words: “For 40 years I’ve had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French. Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?” (The Guardian, 24/05/2004)
Among his documentary films, after The Sorrow and the Pity, we find The Harvest of My Lai (1970), A Sense of Loss (1972) – on the Troubles in Northern Ireland –, The Memory of Justice (1973–76) – on the Nuremberg Trials, the Vietnam War, and the nature of war atrocities –, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), November Days (1990) – on the euphoria and uncertain future of German unification, Veillées d’armes (The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime) (1994), and an unfinished film, Unpleasant Truths – about the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, to be co-directed with Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan.
And throughout this impressive body of work, Ophuls’ films are powerfully political without falling into simplistic ideological arrogance. Ophuls is far too sensitive to and conscious of the fragility of human commitment to assume the role of incorruptible judge. Yet, from the plurality of those who speak, as selected and arranged by Ophuls, an ethical criticism of a situation does gain form, a criticism animated by the simple and profound desire for justice.
Marcel Ophuls died this last May 24th. And we continue to celebrate his art.
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What I most want my pictures to do is to lead to reflection and then action. The revolution only comes through evolution.
Sebastião Salgado (British Journal of Photography, 24/05/2025)
“I photographed the world”, Sebastião Salgado once said. And we could add that he photographed the world from the perspective of those at it’s “periphery”, from the vantage point of its exploited and marginal territories, its labourers, its poor, its refugees, its indigenous, its children, and finally, from “nature” itself, endeavouring always to become a part of those he photographed, for as he would also, to be a photographer was a way of life, of sharing lives, of being with those he photographed. (The Guardian, 08/02/2024)
The vastness and density of his work makes any selection of presumably representative photographs of his work difficult, if not absurd. Our modest effort in a reading of his photographic essay Genesis was already an exercise in humble interpretation. And now, with his death, it is obviously for each to explore the worlds that he endeavoured to share.
Below, to acknowledge and celebrate his work, we limit ourselves to publishing some of his own reflections on his time with us.
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From Lundi matin #475, 13/05/2025.
Walter Benjamin said somewhere that salvation will come from children. But what if children are starved, murdered?
Then every hungry, murdered child will come back to haunt this world and shatter it. All disordered, they will accomplish something great, something innocent for the air, taking revenge on death in the guise of life: humanity.
Let it come, let it come, the time of the assassins of the assassins.
It began with the cries of children, it will end filled with their laughter.
And it will be the Flood and the Cataracts that will see Israel fall: from heaven to earth. Though slower than lightning. And all the theology buried, dust returned to dust! And all the prophecies with it. For only he who falls breaks. And only he opens himself to the fugue that breaks.
– What the devil! Who would have thought that grace meant falling?
Atelier Oncléo
Alors chaque enfance affamée, tuée, reviendra hanter ce monde pour le briser. Toutes désordonnées, elles accompliront quelque chose de grand, d’innocentant pour l’air, en se vengeant de la mort aux apparences de vie : l’humanité.
Qu’il vienne, qu’il vienne, le temps des assassins des assassins.
Cela commença sous les cris des enfants, cela finira plein de leurs rires.
Et ce seront Déluge et Cataracte, qui verront Israël tomber : du ciel à la terre. Quoique plus lent que l’éclair. Et toute la théologie enterrée, rendue au sol ! Et toutes les prophéties par cette dernière. Car seul qui tombe se fend. Et seul s’ouvre à la fugue qui se fend.
— Diable ! Qui l’eût cru, que la grâce : c’était la chute?
From Ill Will (10/05/2025)
Other languages: Türkçe, Français, Español
I
Wealth above, and death below: in recent history this arrangement has proven to be remarkably tolerable. Everyone of course is aware that ever more people are immiserated and discarded, that ever more of the Earth is destroyed. But for the better off, the very worst is kept at a very comfortable distance, and life more or less maintains its rhythms. Guards and maids arrive as scheduled to patrol and clean, investment portfolios flash to life and fall to rest as global markets open and close, and Amazon packages show up on doorsteps miraculously, in only hours. Misery, suffering, and death do enter into view, and at times there is even the lingering sense that this life may only remain possible because of the way those lives continue to be depreciated and at times disposed of, but it all appears to stay quite removed and detached, shining always on the other side of the screen.
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Certes, le goût de la vérité n’empêche pas la prise de parti./Of course, a taste for the truth does not preclude taking sides.
Albert Camus, “Actuelles I, Le journalisme critique”, Combat, 8 septembre 1944
Octavio Alberola is an anarchist militant, strongly committed at the time to the anti-Franco libertarian struggle, who remains active in the struggle for a better world, keeping anarchist reflection alive.
The images that the national and international media transmit to us almost daily, of happy crowds strolling through festivals and fairs or filling concert halls, theatres, cinemas, stadiums and beaches on all five continents, encourage us to believe that humanity is living in times of great prosperity and peace. Yet never has its survival been as threatened as it is today. Not only because of the madness of war which, in addition to continuing to sow death and desolation, may end up causing a nuclear apocalypse, but also because of increasingly deadly viral pandemics and climate change which may make the Earth an uninhabitable planet.
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Zionism is a war machine
From Lundi matin #478, 02/06/2025
If you have never read the dialogue between Gilles Deleuze and Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar, entitled The Indians of Palestine, it is available here. In this vein, we have received these brief comments on the ongoing genocide, based on the concept of the war machine developed by Deleuze.
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