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THE REAL ENEMY
We are told it's a war against terrorism. But wouldn't this mean precisely a war against that threat of indiscriminate violence designed to impose some group's political will? Yet in the night the warplanes rain their fire down upon Afghanistan. But Bush assures us that the US is a friend of the Afghani people and that the bombs were carefully aimed at selective targets. Like the ones in Yugoslavia that hit not only the Chinese embassy, but hospitals, residential areas, a refugee train and a suburb of Sofia, Bulgaria, a hundred miles away? Or like in Iraq, where the number of civilians killed by US bombs was in the tens of thousands as such "military targets" as children's hospitals were hit? Given the history of US military activity over the past four decades, any aerial bombing by the US is a threat of indiscriminate violence. Already, after two days of bombing the US military has killed four UN workers and destroyed one of their offices in its "selective bombing".
In the meantime on the home front, the pacifists beg the government to use the "other means" for dealing with this matter, while the government increases its police powers. What the pacifists haven't questioned is the real significance of this war. As usual they are so worried about the form, that they ignore the content. Within the first week after the September 11 attacks, Bush had formed a new executive body, the Home Security Council. The government has increased the legal monitoring of private communications. Since the government has broadened the meaning of terrorism in such a way that it could include any sort of direct action, we can expect harassment, raids and intimidation against radicals of all sorts. And the threat of having one's home ransacked in the middle of the night by armed thugs--no matter what their proclaimed reason--is a terrorist threat. This sort of activity has already been going on in the Northwest for years in an attempt to suppress radical environmentalist and anarchist activity and it is certain to spread.
Put simply, indiscriminate violence is the hidden threat behind all state power. In a real struggle against terrorism, the real enemy is the state.
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NEITHER THEIR WAR NOR THEIR PEACE
Against the myth of unity
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WORK AND P(L)AY: the true face of patriotism
Since the attack of September 11, the praises of hard work and American productivity have been flowing from the mouths of media pundits and politicians. How could it be otherwise, since the economic effects of the attacks were so immediate? People may have needed time to think about what happened, to try to figure out all that was behind these fatal events and to weigh and come to an understanding of their own feelings, but the nation and the economy needed a return to business as usual?soon to be bolstered by the war that has been set in course. After all, there's the media to tell people what they are thinking and feeling, and it's simpler that way--the range of thought and emotion can thus be kept within acceptable parameters that don't threaten the social peace or raise questions that may expose us to too much reality. Already these events blew back the veil a bit more than ruling class would have liked, but the machinery of propaganda was immediately put into effect and flags were already hanging from windows of homes and businesses in profusion by September 12. The patriotic fervor was in full effect.
But the true face of patriotism took a few days to reveal itself. Even those in power had to recognize the necessity of a little time for recuperation for the most sensitive. First came the calls for American unity in the face of tragedy, then the hymns to work as a patriotic duty and finally the call to "enjoy ourselves". But in case we should misunderstand this last call, Bush specified: go to Disney World, to sports events, to concerts, movies, restaurants, all the myriads of wonderful entertainment at a price that will keep the economy healthy and keep America working.
But one must never question what she is working for. He should ignore the fact that American corporate and state interests have been behind much of the terrorist activity of the past twenty years. Especially since this might make it all too clear that the world of work and of consumer p(l)ay is, quite precisely, the world of terrorism, because it is the world of domination and exploitation that has always maintained its existence through violence and the threat of violence, through murder, theft, war and pillage.
After these attacks, it is understandable that people want to fight against terrorism, but this fight will have to be a fight against the ruling class as a whole, and this leaves no place for nationalism or patriotism. Rather it is the revolutionary struggle of all those whose lives are stolen through the daily terror of this society against the order of work and
p(l)ay, against the state and capitalism.
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SOCIAL WAR BY OTHER MEANS
I believe it was Clausewitz who said that war was simply politics carried out by other means. I think that the reverse is a truer expression of social reality. Politics is simply the social war carried out using less bloody means. If we consider that it is always the ruling class and its lackeys who call for social peace, demanding that the exploited and excluded refrain from violence in dealing with their social condition, it becomes obvious that social peace is simply part of the strategy of the social war. For this reason, the peace movement must be rejected as a way of dealing with the current American call for war.
The peace movement is based on an ideology of nonviolence, a pacifist moral stance that ignores the reality of social relationships. Rather than examining real relationships of power, of domination and exploitation, it simply demands that the state continue to carry out its functions, but without violence, without bloodshed. But what are those functions? Are they not the maintenance of order, the protection of property, the enforcement (selective, of course) of the rule of law? And such activity could only be necessary if there are those who find that this social order does not meet their needs, does not offer them the lives they desire, puts them in the position of having to choose between resigned acceptance of often unbearable conditions or defiance of the rules and a constant battle of wits or arms against the dominant world. But these excluded ones did not begin this social war. The ruling class has always used violence or the threat of violence to lay claim to all of our lives. If the democratic regimes have managed to create a more sophisticated method of participatory domination, this does not change the fact that behind the ballot there is always the bullet to guarantee the maintenance of social peace, which is thus clearly the public face of the social war that keeps most of us passively in our places?even claiming to be content with this obedience that is called freedom. So whether the state goes about its activities peacefully or through blatant violence, it is still carrying out the policy of the social war that keeps us in our place.
In this light, the pacifist protests become a farce. The demand that the American state and the states of the rest of the world carry on their current "war against terrorism" peacefully assumes that the state should indeed exist, and thus that the violence implicit in the present social order should continue--the violence that kills millions daily whether from starvation like in northern Africa and numerous other places, from poisoning by pollution and processed foods, accidents on the job, new, increasingly virulent diseases, the spiritual desolation of the culture of the market or the bullets of the state's uniformed guard dogs. The current "war against terrorism" is nothing other than the continuation of the daily policy of low level terror used by the state to guarantee we stay in line. It matters little whether the state uses bloody or bloodless means. The result is the same: our lives are not our own and we die, sooner or later without ever having really fully lived. Opposition to the current war can only make sense as opposition to the entire social order from which it has arisen. Such opposition cannot spring from a movement dedicated to nonviolence. Pacifism ultimately serves the state's ends by making us blind to the nature of the state. Against the violence of terrorism, the violence of war, the violence of the state, it is necessary to embrace revolutionary violence--the complete upheaval of all social relationships that maintain the institutional violence of those who rule us. We want neither their war, nor their peace, but their destruction.
AGAINST PACIFISM,
AGAINST MILITARISM,
AGAINST TERRORISM,
AGAINST THE STATE
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contact
For the complete October 1 and October 15, 200l issues in paper contact:
venomousbutterfly@onebox.com
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