autonomous alternatives to the statist quo
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A suspicious article in a suspicious-sounding newspaper by a suspicious-sounding journalist:
French couple cloaked in suspicion
Tu Thanh Ha
Globe and Mail
February 3, 2009
While visiting Quebec, pair covertly entered New York. What ensued has led to nine arrests on sabotage charges.
On a clear, cold day a year ago, a French couple visiting Quebec went on a clandestine visit to New York then sneaked back into Canada. However, their knapsack, transported in a car driven by a Canadian friend, caught the attention of suspicious Canadian border agents.
What happened that day sparked a probe that gained momentum after a bombing in Manhattan and ended when French police arrested nine people this fall and accused them of being behind a series of sabotage acts that disrupted the country’s TGV high-speed train.
Update : First with Faux News! “NEW YORK — Investigators believe the bicyclist who bombed the Times Square military recruiting station is a local man with ties to chaos-crazed anarchy groups, a high-ranking law-enforcement source said yesterday…”
A fiery debate has raged in France since. Were they subversives targeting key infrastructure? Or harmless lefties in a commune who were framed by a government keen on whipping up fears to bolster its agenda?
Among the defendants are the couple who visited Quebec - Julien Coupat, 34, and Yldune Lévy, 25. Authorities say Mr. Coupat is the group’s leader and have denied him bail. The others have been released pending trial.
“They call it an act of terrorism even though not a gun or a stick of dynamite were ever found. At no time was any life endangered,” Ms. Lévy’s father, Michel, said in an interview.
Mr. Coupat and most of the accused lived in rural Tarnac, in central France, where they were well liked by the locals after they refurbished a farmhouse and reopened the grocery store.
A court summary of evidence alleges the group is “connected to the anarcho-autonomist movement who want to destabilize the state through violent actions.”
There is a European resurgence of left-wing radicalism, said security consultant Eric Denécé, head of the Centre français de recherche sur le renseignement think tank.
“It’s a new generation with totally different views from their elders. Their reasoning is one of pure and total rejection of Western society,” he said.
In Canada, this kind of militancy occupied police and intelligence services until Islamic radicals gained more attention, said Senator Colin Kenny, who served on committees dealing with national security.
Mr. Coupat and Ms. Lévy covertly entered New York State from Quebec in January of 2008.
According to relatives, they didn’t want their photos and fingerprints in the hands of U.S. authorities. “They’re people who didn’t have the right passport, who reject biometrics and who wanted to see New York. That’s all,” Mr. Lévy said.
On the way back, on Jan. 31, their bag - which was being transported separately by a friend with a car - was seized by Canadian agents. Inside, they found a copy of Mr. Coupat’s driver’s licence, photos of Times Square, minutes of meetings and “subversive texts,” the summary of evidence said.
In March, a man threw a firebomb at a military recruitment centre in Times Square.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said investigators checked whether it was connected with the border incident. “That stop did take place in Canada. Some pictures of Times Square, including the recruiting station, were found,” Commissioner Kelly said at the time.
A police source said there is no evidence the couple is linked to the New York bombing. “It could be a coincidence.” But it had started a chain of events. “It was just like dominos,” the source said.
Mr. Coupat and Ms. Lévy were brought to the attention of French security.
For months, undercover agents tailed the couple. The evening of Nov. 7, they were followed as they drove around the Paris region, making what the court document describes as evasive moves to foil surveillance.
Near 4 a.m., they parked for 20 minutes near a TGV route. After they left, a search of the tracks found nothing.
But at dawn, a sweeper train sent ahead of passenger traffic snagged into a U-shaped bar hooked on the overheard wires. That and three similar sabotages elsewhere disrupted traffic for hours.
A German newspaper received a letter claiming the acts were in protest against the transport of nuclear waste between France and Germany.
The prosecution says the culprit was Mr. Coupat and his group, alleging he was the author of an anonymous book, The Coming Insurrection, that advocates sabotage and violence.
The summary of evidence says that Canadian authorities are ready to provide the French police with the documents they seized.
Canadian officials are keeping mum so far. A spokeswoman said the Canada Border Services Agency had “no public information on this file.”
The investigation is the responsibility of the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) led by the RCMP, she said. The RCMP will not confirm or comment on continuing investigations.
“They hear an awful lot of barking and only occasional bites,” Mr. Kenny said. “The theory is that it’s better to listen to all of the barking, even if some of it does not turn into reality.”
[site of the US support committee for the Tarnac 9]
Unmentioned in Ha’s article is the existence of a state agency known as ‘Alliance Base’:
…a joint antiterrorist cell of the CIA and the French secret service… put in place after the events of 9/11 by French President Jacques Chirac and the President of the United States, George Bush.
According to the Washington Post (Help From France Key In Covert Operations: Paris’s ‘Alliance Base’ Targets Terrorists, Dana Priest, July 3, 2005), the Alliance Base cell was installed in Paris in 2002 to fight Al Qaida (the name Alliance Base being a literal translation of an Al Qaida cell). Great Britain, Germany, Canada and Australia are participating nations as well… The goal: analyze transnational movements of presumed terrorists and launch operations to spy on them or capture them. Official documents from the Ministry of Defense prove that the project has been in operation since April 2002.
Despite their disagreements on the war in Iraq, France and the United States have not ceased, since 9/11, from collaborating in the fight against Islamist terrorism. The DGSE (Directorate-General for External Security) as well as the DST (counter-espionage) has “regular bilateral relationships” with their colleagues in the CIA and the FBI.
See also : Cheese-eating surrender monkeys vs. very fast trains : Free the Tarnac Nine! November 25th, 2008 | “Your heads are full of rubbish because you have read too many books.” December 19th, 2008 | So Frenchy So Chic January 5th, 2009 | The War Against Preterrorism: The ‘Tarnac Nine’ and The Coming Insurrection January 17th, 2009
Meanwhile, in Russia, Russian authorities aren’t just imprisoning anarchists as terrorists — although they do that too — but murdering them.
Two political killings rock [sic] Russia
Ellen Barry
International Herald Tribune
February 2, 2009MOSCOW: The mourners who gathered in a Moscow square, hopping and shivering against the bitter cold, grew still as the angry voice of the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov echoed over a public address system. “I am tired of meeting my acquaintances in crime reports,” Markelov said in a speech recorded last November but replayed on Sunday. “We need protection from fascists, from the mafia, from those security services that simply serve them,” he said. “We understand well that no one but ourselves will offer us protection. Not God, not the czar, no one. There is no one left but ourselves.”
…
Aleksandr Grigoriev, 23, a member of an anarchist organization, said he knew eight people who had been killed for their political activities.
“I blame the authorities for these killings, not because they failed to protect us, or because they carried out the killings,” said Anna Karetnikova, a leader of the Anti-War Club. “I blame the regime because it is impossible to establish civil society here. The death of each person creates a gap in the ranks of civil society. The authorities have made it so that it is profitable to kill.”
In light of the BBC’s continued refusal to air the Disasters Emergency Committee aid appeal members of the UK section of the International Solidarity Movement, have decided to utilise the BBC’s Portland Place Broadcasting House building as the backdrop for a public projection of the appeal.
Israeli and international corporations are directly involved in the occupation: in the construction of Israeli colonies and infrastructure in the occupied territories, in the settlements’ economy, in building walls and checkpoints, in the supply of specific equipment used in the control and repression of the civilian population under occupation.
See who profits:
http://www.whoprofits.org/
During occupation no worker has injured. Factory guards did not resist seriously. The situation is controlled by yesterday elected workers council. The police has not yet appeared near the building.
At this moment the council is meeting in the former cabinet of a technical director. Leonid Nimchinov, the chair of the workers council, says that these events must be widely spread and calls workers from other plants throughout Ukraine to display solidarity and support each other. In the near future he is going to address this call to workers of Lviv Bus Plant and other factories.
The main demands of protesting workers:
- payment of wage arrears (near 4.5 million Ukrainian hryvnias);
- nationalization of the plant without compensation to its owner;
- the state-secured plant’s production distribution – high-quality farm machinery
In case of ignoring their demands workers are ready to turn to the toughest forms of protest.
Background: on February 2, 300 workers of Kherson Engineering Plant started protest action against non-payment of wages since September 2008 and actual destruction of the plant by its owners. During one of the previous meetings with the workers Ms. Pugacheva, the alternate director, said that the owners were not going to save the plant. “Why did you stick to this plant so much?” she said. The workers hold a meeting near the entrance and elected 5 representatives to the Workers Council and its chair Aleksey Nimchinov who will lead the future struggle and negotiate on behalf of the workers.
This month it will become illegal to photograph the police.
Seriously!
On the 16th of Febuary this year the police get the power to arrest, with the threat of ten years in prison, anyone seen photographing them, or more specifically any one who ‘elicits or attempts to elicit information about (members of armed forces) … which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.
Which is just as catch all as every other piece of anti-’terror’ legislation that has beenpassed in the last 7/8 years. So now if you, or anyone else, takes a photograph of the police assaulting people/acting an inappropriate manner you are quite likely to get arrested and threatened with jail time!
Shower of bastards.
Full story here.
I criticize modern feminism quite a bit on this blog, but I swear it is tough love talking. The philosophy generates so many interesting critiques when it is not in bed with state power, as it were, that it’s a damned shame to see it succumb to statist domination. (I think I may have just derided feminism for being promiscuous. That shouldn’t be problematic at all.)
Nonetheless, I was planning to give the battered wife analogy a rest today. But then I read recent Dr. Peter Breggin’s blog post condemning electroshock, apparently prompted by the shocking of 55 toddlers aged 4 and under in Victoria, Australia during 2007-2008. Here he describes the discovery of electroshock’s brain-disabling powers:
Electroshock “treatment” was discovered in the 1930s in a slaughterhouse in Italy. Before being killed, hogs were knocked out by a jolt of electricity to the head and brain. If they weren’t slaughtered, after a while the animals awoke and were able walk around on wobbly legs. Two Italian psychiatrists learned about this phenomenon and immediately tested it on an involuntary patient. The patient wasn’t knocked out by the first jolt and struggled from the table screaming “Murder!” The doctors gave him a bigger jolt. When he awoke, he was docile and no longer complained. A miracle treatment was born and the two psychiatrists became famous.
Why in the world would medical doctors be so excited about a jolt of electricity that knocked out a hog without killing it? This was the era that originated lobotomy–slicing up, burning or poisoning the highest centers of the human brain. It was also the era that originated insulin coma therapy–putting patients into a coma with overdoses of insulin that destroyed brain cells in great batches throughout the brain. Doctors were looking for new ways to inflict controlled damage on the patient’s brain without completely destroying its function.
Wait for it:
Shock advocates have proven impervious to science and to public criticism. Like men who beat their wives and abuse their children, shock doctors escalate their violence when criticized. Like other abusers, criticism by itself will not stop them. Shock treatment must be banned.
The state—this time its psychiatric component—is again characterized as an abusive husband. I’m starting to see a pattern here. It’s a wonder that so many libertarians are blind to private patriarchy’s resemblance to the public patriarchy of the state.
Some feminists have long recognized that psychiatry is often used to control women. Some libertarians recognize that it has been used against the more vulnerable segments of the populace, meaning nearly every demographic at one time or another. Although women, minorities, and the poor seem to be the usual targets of psychiatric abuse, even white male geniuses are not immune (see my earlier post, The Death of David Foster Wallace is a Libertarian Issue). And even the libertarians sometimes recognize that women are disproportionately victimized by psychiatry. As Thomas Szasz writes in “Psychiatry: A Branch of the Law“:
The history of mental health laws and of standard psychiatric practices illustrates that psychiatric confinement has nothing to do with psychiatric treatment. In 1851, the State of Illinois statute specified that “married women … may be received and detained at the hospital on the request of the husband of the woman … without the evidence of insanity or distraction required in other cases.”
In other words, men could dump unwanted wives at the loony bin, Henry VIII-style, but without actually removing their heads, or even making a convincing case that those heads were screwy.
So, again, I am struck by how much radical feminism can resemble radical libertarianism, or anarchism, even though the two often seem hostile to one another. As Sally Kempton famously wrote, “Woman’s liberation is finally only personal. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” It’s stunning how literally this applies to the contemporary psychiatric state.
Also see this blog post, ECT and Feminism.
Posted in Anarchocapitalism
I’m back from San Diego but too sleepy to blog about it now. But a friend pointed me to this pic on Facebook; clearly I’m kindly attempting to assist David Gordon in some way.
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