On November 30, 2004, a bomb buried under two bags of sand went off, shaking the foundations of a hydroelectric tower near the Quebec-US border. Two years later, a car bomb decimated an oil executive’s car outside of his home, northwest of Montreal.
Read the rest of this article on the Vice website.
Convicted of the 1983 U.S. Capitol Bombing, and “conspiring to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the United States government through violent and illegal means”, Laura Whitehorn, an out lesbian and one of six defendants in the Resistance Conspiracy Case, spent 14 years in prison. “OUT” is the story of her life and times: five tumultuous decades of struggle for freedom and justice.
Produced by Sonja de Vries & Rhonda Collins; 2000; Color; 60 minutes; US; English.
Learn more about Laura Whitehorn here!
Arm The Spirit Ten Years On ...
A decade has passed since the first issue of "Arm The Spirit - For Revolutionary Resistance" was published. Ten years on and a new millenium is a good a time as any to reflect back and look at what we've accomplished with this project and where we hope to go. In the late 80s a small group of us had been doing solidarity work around political prisoners in the U.S., particularly around anti-imperialist guerrillas - the "Ohio 7" and the "Resistance Conspiracy Case" - who were on trial for seditious conspiracy and other charges. At that time there was a few magazines (Resistance, The Insurgent, Breakthrough ... ) that published documents from armed groups but they came out infrequently and some were in the process of ceasing publication (indeed none of them are around today). Also much of the solidarity work around the trials mostly consisted of a "right to a fair trial", denouncing repressive measures in the courtroom, etc. We wanted to do more than this in our solidarity work by focussing on the political aspect of the armed struggle by disseminating documents from the armed groups and other related material. So in June of 1990 we started with a small 4-page bulletin that quickly grew in size over the next few years.
The aim of 'Arm The Spirit' was never to place excessive political importance on armed struggle, even though the content of the magazine was largely comprised of communiques from guerrilla organizations and discussions about the aims and means of armed resistance. But we felt that there was a need, particularly in North America, for a publication which offered a forum for such information. Although most clandestine resistance in North America had been defeated by state repression by the mid-1980s, the armed left was still very much alive and well in Europe when ATS began publishing. Early issues of ATS, for example, devoted a great deal of space to the armed antiracist actions of the Dutch organization RARA, communiques from Germany's Red Army Fraction (RAF) and the Revolutionary Cells/Rote Zora (RZ), the Basque organization ETA and the Spanish guerrilla GRAPO, and so on. We wanted the left in North America to be informed about the actions by, the politics of, and the discussions within such movements. But of course, we also provided coverage of other forms of militant struggle, such as the squatters' movement and actions against biotechnology, for example, and we always placed a great emphasis on solidarity with political prisoners and prisoners of war.
In addition to publishing the ATS journal and occasional info-bulletins, we also published other materials on certain occasions. For example, when the Kurdish liberation struggle led by the PKK was at its peak in 1992-93, we published a separate "Kurdistan Solidarity Bulletin". We also produced pamphlets on various guerrilla organizations, such as the RAF and the RZ, to distribute at political events. Our ideas have always been much larger than our budget, however, and many projects never made it off our harddrive and onto paper. Such unfinished works include "Fire And Flames: A History Of The German Autonomist Movement", a book which we translated but were unable to publish. Several pamphlets as well were never completed, usually due to a lack of funds.
Without dwelling upon the collapse of the "real existing socialism" and so on, it goes without saying that the political situation changed dramatically during the 1990s. This had an effect on our publication as well, in that most of the movements which formed the bulk of our content in the early-1990s had either disbanded or disappeared by the mid-1990s. Most of the armed left in Europe gave up the fight, and scores of national liberation movements signed "peace accords" which brought guerrilla struggle to an end in many parts of the world. These changes, as well as our eventual shift to online publishing, brought about some changes in the work of Arm The Spirit.
ATS as an organization began utilizing email and the internet for communication purposes as early as 1992, and by 1995 we had established a basic web site and two online email news lists: ATS-L, a general news list for articles and discussions concerning left-radical political movements, armed resistance, political prisoners, and so on; and KURD-L, a list devoted specifically to the Kurdish national liberation struggle and the PKK. We are proud to say that we have consistently maintained both of these free news lists for 5 years now, with all postings archived and accessible on the web. Several hundred people are subscribed to these lists, with more subscription requests coming almost on a daily basis. (These online projects were made possible by the generous assistance of the comrades of the BURN! collective in California and the Etext collective in Michigan.)
It was never our intention to become solely an online information collective. There are many contradictions and limitations involved in using the internet, such as the lack of access by many groups and organizations outside the metropoles, not to mention the fact that political prisoners cannot participate online. But being consistently active on the internet for several years has helped us to establish new contacts and solidify others. And on some occasions, the effects of our work have been felt well outside the narrow confines of the radical-left. For example, immediately after the MRTA unit "Commando Edgar Sanchez" took over the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima in December 1996, in one of the most daring guerrilla actions of the decade, we immediately set up an English-language solidarity site, intending to provide news and updates on what we expected to be a very short-lived event. As the weeks went on, however, our site became an important source of information and attracted tens of thousands of visitors, "thanks" in part to exposure in the capitalist media (CNN, The Wall Street Journal, etc.). Now, of course, web sites devoted to revolutionary movements are all over the Net, but at that time such sites were still relatively new.
As ATS enters the year 2000, our aim is to continue on with our work as much as possible. We slowly have resumed hardcopy publishing, while at the same time maintaining our online presence. We are also looking forward to continutng our cooperation with other projects, such as Antifa Forum, a collection of groups providing information orr militant antifascism.
With this issue, the first in over 5 years, we had to make a hard decision of what to include. We easily could have filled a couple hundred pages but that was logistically impossible, so we decided to focus on a narrow selection of documents and information on and from European political prisoners and guerrilla organizations. In a way this is a return to our roots as we're the only group to be publishing this kind of material in North America. In particular we felt it was important to publish the RAF's final communique and related documents, as well as ETA's return to armed struggle. We hope to have another issue out by the summer and in it we'll publish material that we had to leave out of this one. This next issue will focus on political prisoners in the U.S., the guerrilla struggle in Colombia, the splintering of the Kurdish national liberation movement and several perspectives on the Irish "peace process".
We hope that our distribution and translation of news and political discussions is useful for the left in North America. Information is only power if it is put into use. If movements continually pass on their histories and their discussions, then we can avoid having to re-invent the wheel as new high points of political activity arise. Most importantly, we plan to continue to provide a non-sectarian forum for a variety militant movements and struggles, from a variety of perspectives and locations, based on the slogan "Solidarity Is A Weapon!".
Ann The Spirit - January 2000
It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the social world that conceives of social relations as relations of physical force and a "cybernetic" or semiological vision which portrays them as relations of symbolic force, as relations of meaning or relations of communication. The most brutal relations of force are always simultaneously symbolic relations. And acts of submission and obedience are cognitive acts which as such involve cognitive structures, forms and categories of perception, principles of vision and division. Social agents construct the social world through cognitive structures that may be applied to all things of the world and in particular to social structures... (Pierre Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field)
War in its literal meaning is fighting, for fighting alone is the efficient principle in the manifold activity which in a wide sense is called War. But fighting is a trial of strength of the moral and physical forces by means of the latter. That the moral cannot be omitted is evident of itself, for the condition of the mind has always the most decisive influence on the forces employed in War. (Clausewitz, On War)
... colonialism is a comprehensive system, operating on all social levels (economic, political, cultural), and is not a mere expression of military aggression, i.e., “violence” in physical forms.The above passages are all getting at the dual nature of power and counterpower. Despite the differences between the authors -- a 20th century French Marxist philosopher, a 19th century German military theorist, and a leading member of the Black Liberation Army-Coordinating Committee who passed away in 2008 after spending most of his life in prison -- they are all really touching on the same thing. The fact that liberation and oppression each exist physically and on the level of consciousness.
In most cases, colonial violence in armed/physical forms is preceded by unarmed and nonphysical forms of aggression, in the guise of traders, academics, missionaries—who seek not only to lay hold of the land and labor of the peoples, but also to lay hold of their minds, their customs, and their languages. These violent actions suppress, distort, injure, frustrate, infringe, profane and unduly alter the targeted peoples and their social orders, and cripple the people’s ability to resist and to regain their independence! (James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings, p. 199)
The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” (RAF, The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the struggle for Anti-Imperialist Struggle)Although perhaps overly optimistic, this is clearly a strategy of intervening on the level of consciousness.
July 2nd 2010
Last night an unimprovised explosive device was detonated at the Canadian Army Recruitment Center in Trois-Rivières (2 calls were made for it to be evacuated). Résistance internationaliste* is emerging from the shadows once again, to join with the historic popular opposition to the military practices and ideals of the Canadian State, to makes sure that the political, economic and military powers cannot carry out their indoctrination justifying their imperialist adventures with impunity.
The Canadian government is not satisfied submitting us to the mercantile oligarchy and handing over our resources, it demands that we go and enslave other peoples. It is not enough that we are subjected to the effects and dangers of natural gas exportation, we have to go and secure its pipeline (TAPI) on Afghan soil.
It is not enough that we are the docile hostages of oil and gas devastation, we have to join the Canadian navy to protect their looting in the Niger Delta. It is not enough that we serve as profitable guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry’s schemes, we have to go and protect the global opium supply provided the Karzai narco-government.
Because it opposes the jingoism being drummed up by Washington, the population is targeted by non-stop miserable propaganda framing the foreign occupation of Afghanistan as a civilizing mission. The apostles of “democratic values” and the “saviours” of Afghan women are soldiers in an army that contracts out torture and which covers up sexual crimes throughout its hierarchy, ostensibly in order to keep the sexual aggressors active abroad (bill S-3). “Our soldiers” are the same ones who, just yesterday, crushed the Métis people, who have suppressed workers’ mobilizations time and time again, who machine-gunned the Québecois opposition against conscription, who imposed the War Measures Act, who besieged an Amerindian community for the sake of a golf course, who overthrew the democratically elected Haitian government, and who, tomorrow, will impose on us the dictates of the market and fiscal submission.
The directors of the banks and the multinationals can pocket fortunes in their tax shelters, but we are the ones who are made to finance imperialist expansion. Five-billion-dollar tanks, eight-billion-dollar planes, fifty-billion-dollar warships and soldiers for five hundred thousand dollars a year, this means a majority of workers denied unemployment insurance, one in four households who have difficulty keeping a roof over their head, old-age with a miserable pension, a ton of children who are still not properly fed.
This operation against the recruiting center is our resistance against the army’s brainwashing, against the intensive solicitation of a younger generation that is facing the void of a demeaning society. We cannot surrender the monopoly of violence or the stage to the State (an orgy of repression at the G-20, supplying “explosives” to manipulated young people in Toronto, “fundamentalist” threats of officer Gilles Breault).
As for the soldiers in the Canadian Army, just to be clear, they are in no way “ours”, they belong to the one to whom they pledge allegiance like idiots, Her Majesty Elizabeth II.
AGAINST IMPERIALIST WAR
RÉSISTANCE INTERNATIONALISTE (RI)
* Formerly IRI (Initiative de résistance internationaliste)
2 juillet 2010
La nuit dernière, une charge explosive non improvisée a été activée au Centre de recrutement de l'Armée canadienne à Trois-Rivière (2 appels d'évacuation ont été logés). Résistance internationaliste* sort à nouveau de l'ombre pour joindre l'historique opposition populaire aux pratiques et aux idéaux militaristes de l'État canadien et pour s'assurer que les pouvoirs politique, économique et militaire ne poursuivent impunément l'entreprise d'endoctrinement justifiant leur aventure impérialiste.
Le gouvernement canadien ne se contente pas de nous soumettre à l'oligarchie marchande et de lui livrer nos ressources, il réclame qu'on aille lui asservir d'autres peuples. Subir les effets et les dangers de l'exportation gazière ne suffit pas, il faudrait qu'on aille sécuriser un trajet de pipeline (TAPI) en territoire afghan.
Être les otages dociles des sinistres pétrolières n'est pas satisfaisant, il faudrait joindre la marine canadienne pour aller couvrir leur pillage au Delta du Niger. Demeurer les lucratifs cobayes des machinations de l'industrie pharmaceutique n'est pas assez, il faudrait aller protéger l'approvisionnement mondial d'opium que garantit le narco-régime de Karzaï.
Hostile aux prétentions militaires insufflées par Washinton, la population est la cible permanente d'une propagande abjecte où l'occupation étrangère de l'Afghanistan est travestie en mission civilisatrice. Les apôtres des «valeurs démocratiques» et les «sauveurs» des femmes afghanes sont les soldats d'une armée qui donne la torture en sous-traitance et qui cache les crimes sexuels endémiques à tous les échelons de sa hiérarchie, vraisemblablement dans le but de garder les agresseurs sexuels en opération à l'étranger (projet de loi S-3). «Nos soldats» sont les mêmes qui, hier, ont écrasé le peuple métis, maté à mainte reprises des mobilisations ouvrières, mitraillé l'opposition québécoise opposée à la conscription, imposé la Loi des mesures de guerre, assiégé une communauté amérindienne pour un terrain de golf, renversé un gouvernement haïtien démocratiquement élu, et qui demain, nous imposeront les diktats du marché et la soumission fiscale.
Les dirigeants des banques et des multinationales peuvent empocher des fortunes à l'abri du fisc, mais c'est à nous qu'on impose le financement de l'expansion impérialiste. Des blindés à 5 milliards de dollars, des avions à 8 milliards, des navires de guerre à 50 milliards et des soldats à 500 milles par année, c'est une majorité de travailleurs et travailleuses privés d'assurance chômage, c'est le quart des ménages qui peine à se payer un toit, c'est la vieillesse avec des rentes de misère, c'est une multitude d'enfants qui souffre toujours d'insécurité alimentaire.
Cette opération contre le centres d'enrôlement est notre résistance au bourrage de crâne et au racolage intensif par l'armée d'une jeunesse confrontée au vide d'une société avilissante. Nous ne pouvons pas laisser à l'État le monopole de la violence et de sa mise en scène (orgie répressive au G-20, fourniture d'«explosifs» aux jeunes manipulés de Toronto, menaces «fondamentalistes» de l'agent Gilles Breault).
Quant aux soldats de l'Armée canadienne, que ce soit bien clair, ce ne sont aucunement «les nôtres», ils appartiennent à celle à qui ils prêtent bêtement allégeance, sa Majesté Élisabeth II.
CONTRE LA GUERRE IMPÉRIALISTE:
RÉSISTANCE INTERNATIONALISTE (RI)
*Anciennement IRI (Initiative de résistance internationaliste)
The following was written by André Moncourt and J. Smith, to provide some context for North American readers to the recent statement by some former members of the Red Army Faction. Moncourt and Smith are the co-editors and translators of The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History Volume 1: Projectiles for the People, co-published by PM Press and Kersplebedeb in 2009. For more about the Red Army Faction, visit http://www.germanguerilla.com
The events of 1977 that would come to be known as the “German Autumn” actually came at the end of a Red Army Faction offensive that had begun on April 7 of that year with the assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback, widely considered to be the state figure primarily responsible for the torture and murder of revolutionary prisoners.
The state’s initial suspects in this killing – Christian Klar, Knut Folkerts and Günter Sonnenberg – would all be arrested over the following years, and in each case would end up serving lengthy sentences: Sonnenberg, who suffered brain damage as a result of being shot in the head at the time of his capture, remained in prison for 15 years; Folkerts spent 18 years behind bars; and Klar was only released in 2008 after 28 years in prison.
In 2007, the thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn, claims by two former RAF members – Verena Becker and Peter-Jürgen Boock – led to the Buback case being re-opened. Boock had surrendered in 1981, and has spent the subsequent years playing the part of the “repentant terrorist,” always available to publicly condemn his former comrades, providing testimony (and dubious allegations) against them at the courts’ and cops’ behest. For her part, Becker was arrested along with Günter Sonnenberg following a shootout with police on December 28, 1977. Unbeknownst to most, including many who continued to provide support to her as a RAF political prisoner, by 1981 she was cooperating with the German secret police – the Verfassungsschutz or “guardians of the constitution.” (In fact, Becker being an informant was only publicly disclosed in 2009.)
It has recently come to light that Becker informed her handlers in the spring of 1981 that Knut Folkerts had not been involved in the Buback shooting (on the day in question he was traveling to a RAF safehouse in Amsterdam with a new RAF recruit). Of course, this made no difference to the state’s ongoing case against him, as a result of which he would spend years behind bars in connection with the assassination.
Becker would eventually point the finger at Stefan Wisniewski, a former RAF member who was already serving a life sentence on separate charges, as the Buback shooter. She further identified Günter Sonneneberg as the driver of the motorcycle from which the deadly shots were fired and Christian Klar as the driver of the getaway car. Wisniewski, who never cooperated with the police, and who had never been charged with the killing, now faced the threat of new, serious charges.
On March 30, 2007, in a more than two-and-a-half hour telephone conversation with Michael Buback, the former Attorney General’s son, Peter-Jürgen Boock repeated these accusations. In light of these public allegations, in April 2007, current Attorney General Monika Harms filed to re-open the case. In 2008, former RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt along with Folkerts and Klar were all threatened with coercive detention if they did not provide information about the assassination – despite this, they all refused.
Nevertheless, a number of people, including Michael Buback himself, have expressed skepticism about Becker’s claims. Indeed, soon enough it became clear that much of the evidence pointed to Becker herself being the shooter: eyewitnesses described a small, agile person, probably a woman, firing the deadly shots; at the time of her arrest Becker was in possession of the submachine gun used in the shooting and a screwdriver from the motorcycle’s set; and it was Becker’s DNA that was found on the communiqué claiming responsibility for the assassination.
Matters went from bad to worse for Becker when police searched her home in August 2009 and found notes apparently ruminating on the Buback assassination. One read, “How am I to mourn for Herr Buback?” – a perhaps understandable sentiment that the BAW (the Federal Prosecutors Office) chose to interpret as an outright confession. Becker was arrested and held in remand until December 2009, when she was released on bail as a low flight risk (she has been living in her sister’s home in Berlin for twenty years, has no foreign contacts and requires a regular regime of medication).
In April 2010, twenty three years after the fact, Becker was charged as an accessory to the murder of Attorney General Siegfried Buback. Meanwhile, other former RAF members remain under investigation.
Shortly after these charges were laid, some former RAF members released the following document addressing these developments. The English translation was produced by the comrades in question. It provides an important counterpoint from some former guerillas speaking for themselves to the state’s ongoing uses and abuses of the “RAF boogeyman.”
A note regarding the current situation – by some who have been RAF members at various points in time
For three years now, state security and the media have been speculating on who exactly killed attorney general Siegfried Buback and industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer more than thirty years ago. Investigating agencies are trying to find evidence from other RAF attacks. As the last prisoners from the RAF barely emerge from prison, they are confronted with new prosecutions while others are issued testimony summons and threats of coercive detention. After the first wave in summer 2007 in the legal procedure against Stefan Wisniewski, a second attempt to elicit testimonies from us began late 2009 in the legal procedure against Verena Becker. Verena Becker was in the RAF in 1977. In 1983, we separated. Shortly, a court case will be started against her, apparently a prelude for further trials. Legal procedures against Stefan Wisniewski and Rolf Heissler continue to be pursued.
The apparent purpose is to obtain individual “recriminations”, i.e. to pressurize individuals to say who exactly did what. More than 30 years no-one really cared who was convicted for what. All that counted was to make us disappear behind bars. Suddenly, in 2007, with the media circus about “30 years after the German Autumn,” the “struggle for clarification” became the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Not enough that we have stated our collective responsibility for the attacks of the RAF. We should “finally” squeal in order to “give up the logic of conspiracy.”
What it is really all about is to pull down the debate on the history of armed struggle to the mere level of murder and violence. A level where contexts are torn apart and only dealt with in terms of criminalistics, so that no space whatsoever can be developed that would allow for considerations other than those determined in advance.
For some, we should “face” a “discussion” for which the conditions have already been fixed beforehand, with the aim of depoliticizing the RAF’s actions by personalization. Or, as the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung commented on this issue, “Soon, political motives in this war will not be recognizable anymore. (...) The individualization and privatization of German terrorism is its last stage. What’s happening with it at the moment, is a case of applied historiopolicy: of retrospective transformation of the political into the personal.” (24 April 2007)
We are supposed to “come to terms with history” on any terms but ours. We are to “draw a line” no-one else is prepared to join and whose prerequisites are not even negociable. It is again a major attempt to bury actual experience, to prevent true learning processes, to isolate the different struggles from each other.
That would finally be it. End of story. A story of which nothing remains but self-accusation and mutual denunciation.
What triggered the whole thing were the preparations for a campaign that was aimed at creating publicity for the planned racket in autumn 2007 and the film productions that followed. Between late 2005 and late 2006, contributors to Der Spiegel left no stone unturned to try and win us over for a tv-series directed by Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Stefan Aust. Something new was needed to feed the campaign. Anecdotes, gossip, chit-chat, to try and provide the whacked “contemporary witnesses” with some credibility.
As we know, this only resulted in the reprocessing of old “revelations”, but in the meantime Aust’s protégé Peter-Jürgen Boock was pushed forward to get hold of the “victims of the RAF”. Since nothing could be squeezed out of the “experts” and “crown witnesses” anymore, some politicians demanded in public that the last prisoners from the RAF be released only if they “name names”. By the end of March 2007, Boock used this opportunity to instrumentalize the son of attorney general Buback for his umpteenth culprit version. This time with the names of exactly those who had not yet been convicted for the attacks in question.
That was a real gift for the media, who immediately started the counting-out game. With an old police trick which simply turns the tables: in the end, sufficient denials would automatically lead to the real culprits. One day after a talkshow with Boock in late April 2007, Karl-Heinz Dellwo in a Panorama interview came up with the following: “I definitely know cases in which people were completely innocent and have done time for others. ” Asked if we should name names, he answered, “people must decide that for themselves.” Two weeks later Knut Folkerts stumbled into the trap and in an interview with Der Spiegel declared his innocence in the Buback case. For the Office of the Attorney General, the media fuss was sufficient to formalize legal procedures accordingly.
The RAF was dissolved in 1998, based on its assessment of the changed political situation globally. The fact that it was its own decision and that it has not been defeated by the state, obviously remains a thorn in the flesh. Hence the eternal lament of the “myth” yet to be destroyed. Hence the political and moral capitulation demanded from us. Hence the attempts to finalize the criminalization of our history, upto the mendacious proposal of a “Truth Commission”. Whereas the search for those who are still underground, the smear campaigns in the media and the legal procedures against former prisoners continue, we are expected to kowtow publicly. As, in all these years, it didn’t work by “renunciation”, we are now to denounce each other. Save yourself if you can.
None of us has testified, not because of any specific “agreement” among us, but because it is a matter of course for anyone with a political consciousness. A question of dignity, of identity – of the side we once took.
Not to testify is not a RAF invention. It has been an experience of the liberation movements and guerilla groups that it is vital to provide no information whatsoever when in custody, in order to protect those who continue the struggle. We have the historical examples of the resistance against fascism. Whoever seriously wanted something politically over here has reflected on these and learned from these. In the student movement, the refusal of testimonies was a widely understood necessity when its criminalization started. Ever since, militants in various contexts have been confronted with the question. For us within the RAF, it has just as much been a necessary condition that no-one testifies. There is no other protection – for those in prison, for the group outside and for the illegal space as such, its movements, its structures and its relationships.
But also like this. We don’t testify because we are no state witnesses, not then, not now.
Through all these years, despite “screensearch” technologies, the highly armed state security apparatus hasn’t been able to obtain a reasonably comprehensive picture of our movements. Even those who, under the pressure of isolation, smear campaigns and blackmail, broke down and were used as “crown witnesses”, could not contribute to completing the picture. The bits and pieces put together by state security agencies haven’t been very useful for general counterinsurgency purposes. They have no clue of the approach, the organization, the traces, the dialectics of an urban guerilla in the metropolis. And there is no reason to help them out on this. The RAF’s actions have been discussed and decided collectively when we agreed. All of us, who in a particular period have been part of the group and shared these decisions, obviously have the responsibility for these as well. We have stated this several times, and the way we relate to it doesn’t change by the fact that the RAF is history.
The RAF’s collective structure has been attacked right from the start. It was not supposed to exist, it had to be old school, authoritarian relationships, “officers and soldiers”, ringleaders and followers. Those were the compulsory terms for the police, for the propaganda, and those are their terms today. The judiciary, however, considering itself at the “forefront” against “state enemy number one”, was lacking evidence in court due to our lack of collaboration. Its solution was the “conspiracy” paragraph 129/129a, with which everyone could be made responsible for everything. That’s what the verdicts have been based on, partly, and criminalistic details were only used to suppress political contexts.
In contrast, testimonies which we sometimes provided in the trials against us, during the years of prison, have been determined collectively, as a possibility to say something against the worst shithouse propaganda. For us it was hardly of any importance what the state security’s or judiciary’s attributes and constructions consisted of in detail. We were in prison because we started armed struggle over here, and our interest during the trials in court was, at best, to convey the contents and aims of our policy. A policy of attack in the metropolis which understood and determined its praxis in the context of struggles worldwide for the liberation from capitalism.
If anything remains to be said, then with regard to this policy.
May 2010
Part One
you can watch the video via youtube, and then afterwards the next one should come up as an option - or you can continue down in this blogpost though that may be hard on computers with slow connections
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Q&A; Part One
Q&A; Part Two
Q&A; Part Three
Levasseur Forum Inspires Police Protest
Participants and audience members at a Thursday night forum held at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass entitled “The Great Western Massachusetts Sedition Trial: Twenty Years Later” encountered satellite news trucks from across the region, bomb-sniffing dogs, and hundreds of members of law enforcement and their supporters standing vigil with protest signs emblazoned with slogans such as “UMass Supports Terrorism Recruitment.”
The dramatic scene climaxed a week of twists and turns in what was originally planned as the closing event of the UMass Libraries’ annual “Colloquium on Social Change” at which Ray Luc Levasseur was scheduled to speak.
Levasseur, one of of the Ohio 7, was a leader of the United Freedom Front, a radical group active in the Northeast in the 1970s and 80s. Levasseur served 18 years of a 45-year prison sentence for his role in a series of bombings which were described by Elizabeth Fink, one of last night’s panelists and an attorney for members of the Ohio 7, as “acts of sabotage.”
Fink differentiated sabotage from terrorism, which she said is legally defined as “random acts of violence against a civilian population.” Fink stated that “Terrorism never works; violence never works,” and remarked that acts committed by members of the UFF were “stupid.”
The focus of last night’s protests outside the event was the 1981 killing of New Jersey state trooper Philip Lamonaco by Thomas Manning, also a member of the UFF. Manning remains in prison for that crime, which he committed during a traffic stop. Levasseur was not on the scene of the trooper’s shooting, nor charged in connection with it.
The trooper’s widow, Donna Lamonaco, and law enforcement comrades in attendance maintain that Levasseur is a terrorist who should be held responsible for Manning’s death.
When police groups protested to Governor Deval Patrick and the UMass administration a week ago about Levasseur’s planned appearance, the UMass Libraries cancelled the event.
Levasseur had been scheduled to discuss the Springfield-based 1989 10-month sedition and racketeering trial in which he and other Ohio 7 members were defendants. Neither Levasseur nor his co-defendants were found guilty of any charges at that trial, in which Levasseur represented himself.
In response to protests from UMass alumni, students, faculty, and others who demanded that the University “honor academic freedom and free speech,” several other campus departments stepped into the breach to sponsor and relocate the event.
Shortly before the program was scheduled to occur, the U.S. Parole Commission reversed course from its earlier decision to grant Levasseur permission to attend, and forbade him to travel to Massachusetts for the event—a change of position which Massachusetts Fraternal Order of Police, through President Arnie Larson, took credit for having influenced.
Event organizers responded by assembling a panel that included attorneys from the sedition trial, two members of the trial’s jury, and Levasseur’s former wife, Pat Levasseur, who in the 1980’s served three years and four months of a five-year sentence for harboring her husband as a fugitive.
Pat Levasseur described how the milieu in which she came of age influenced her. She described growing up in a town with a racist climate within a patriotic family that included a father who had been a World War II veteran and a brother who had served in Vietnam. She recounted being deeply affected by the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Kent State students, and believing that the U.S. government was lying “when Nixon told us the war [in Vietnam] was over and it wasn’t.”
“We got angry,” she said, “and we got educated.” According to Pat Levasser, this anger led members of the UFF to carry out illegal acts intended to protest and disrupt U.S. government and corporate support for both apartheid in South Africa and corrupt governments in Latin America.
Pat Levasseur acknowledged there were “lots of mistakes in judgment. You could fill a book or two at least.” When asked specifically about whether she felt sympathy for the family of the NJ state trooper, she replied, “Of course. It’s tragic. I’m sorry it happened.”
In the wake of widespread and volatile on-line discussions and irate and hostile calls and emails reportedly received by UMass event organizers in the week leading up to the program, the more than 200 audience members listened attentively and remained civil throughout the 90-minute event. People who had hoped to hear the talk were turned away peacefully when the auditorium reached capacity as the event neared starting time.
During her statements, sedition trial juror Barbara Hubbard (a remedial reading teacher in South Hadley at the time she was selected), recalled the judge giving instructions to her group. “Do not do violence to your conscience,” she quoted him as saying.
Both groups—those who protested the event as a travesty and an insult, and those who endorsed it on grounds of free speech and academic freedom—seemed to want to stake claim to this principle at Thursday night’s forum.
November 10, 2009
For Immediate Release
A talk and forum on “The Great Western Massachusetts Sedition Trial: Twenty Years Later” will be held on Thursday November 12 at 7:15 p.m. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in School of Management Room 137. Participants will include Ray Luc Levasseur and members of the 1989 Springfield sedition trial defense team.
The sponsoring UMass departments and organizations do so because of their commitment to free speech and academic freedom.
Sponsoring departments include:
- Communication Department*
- Economics Department
- History Department
- Department of Languages, Literatures, and Culture
- Social Thought and Political Economy Program
- Sociology Department
- Sociology Graduate Student Association
- Student Government Association Executive
- Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program
The event is also sponsored by the following non-profit community organizations, foundations, and businesses: the Rosenberg Fund for Children, Food for Thought Books, Vermont Action for Political Prisoners, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.
Several UMass departments have added their support to this event in the name of protecting the cherished American values of freedom of speech and academic freedom, which they believed to be threatened by the decision to cancel the event under pressure from a variety of outside organizations. Sponsors’ support for this event should in no way be construed as an endorsement of Levasseur, his political beliefs, or any of his past activities.
For further information, contact sedition.trial@gmail.com.
*In the service of instructing student reporters, the Journalism Program in the Department of Communication does not sponsor political guests and is not co-hosting Levasseur's visit to UMass.
From today's Counterpunch, this report on a recent spate of ELF-style anarchist bombings in Mexico:Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City
An unprecedented wave of anarchist bombings here and in provincial capitals has Mexican security forces on red alert. Beginning September 1st, bombs have gone off once or twice a week regularly as clockwork, taking out windows and ATMs at five banks, torching two auto showrooms and several U.S. fast-food franchises plus an upscale boutique in the chic Polanco district of this conflictive capital. In each case, the Anarchist "A" has been spray-painted on nearby walls along with slogans supporting animal liberation demands to stop prison construction, and calls for the demise of capitalism.
The serial bombings are the first to strike Mexico City since November 2006 when radicals took out a chunk of the nation's highest electoral tribunal, blew a foreign-owned bank, and scorched an auditorium in the scrupulously-guarded compound of the once and future ruling PRI party. The 2006 attacks came in the wake of a fraud-marred presidential election and federal police suppression of a popular uprising in the southern state of Oaxaca and were claimed by five armed groups, most prominently the Democratic Revolutionary Tendency, a split-off from the Marxist-Leninist Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) which itself bombed a Sears outlet in Oaxaca City in 2006 and PEMEX pipelines in central Mexico in 2007.
Anarchist cells that claim to have perpetrated the recent explosions take pains to distance themselves from the Marxist bombers.
In vindicating a September 25th blast at a Banamex branch in the rural Milpa Alta delegation (borough) of Mexico City during which the rebels claim a half million pesos were immolated, "The Subversive Alliance For The Liberation Of The Earth, The Animals, & The Humans" (in that order) charged that the U.S.-owned bank promoted "torture, destruction, and slavery. "Our motives are to stop these bastards and let them know that we are not playing games."
Bank video cameras captured the images of three hooded and black-clad young bombers. On October 1st, 22 year-old Ramses Villareal, a student activist, was arrested by federal police and charged with "terrorism" in connection with bombings at several of the banks. He was released the next day after violent protests by young anarchists in Mexico City.
The September 25th Banamex blast was not the first time the bank has been targeted by "terrorist" bombs. In August 2001, heavy duty fireworks broke out windows in a "cristalazo" at three southern Mexico City branches to protest the sale of Banamex, Mexico's oldest bank, to Citigroup, the New York-based banking group that has been so devastated by the financial melt-down that it recently put Banamex back up for sale.
The 2001 bombing was attributed to the little-known Armed Revolutionary Front of the People (FARP.) Three brothers, students at the UNAM, and the sons of EPR founder Francisco Cerezo (not his real name) were subsequently imprisoned on "terrorism" charges - the attacks took place just days before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington purportedly carried out by Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda group. The Cerezo brothers were imprisoned for eight years and have only recently been released from federal lockup.
The September bombings and associated property damage also singled out Mexico City and Guadalajara offices of the European bio-tech titan Novartis that, along with Monsanto, bears responsibility for spreading genetically modified seed throughout Mexico's corn-growing belt and contaminating native species of maiz. Auto showrooms in the two cities were also on the business end of Molotov cocktails September 18th and 26th - seven luxury automobiles including a Hummer were torched at Auto Nova in Guadalajara.
An Internet page documenting the Guadalajara bombing included communiqués from Jeffrey Luers AKA "Free", who is serving ten years in Oregon for burning up 21 SUVs on a Portland lot. "Free" is accused by the FBI of being an associate of the Earth Liberation Front, eco-"terrorists" that the U.S. Justice Department has elevated to the top of the Terrorist Hit Parade, alongside Bin Laden. The initials "ELF" were reportedly spray-painted on the burnt-out showroom walls.
Messages from the bombers were posted to the Total Liberation website (www.liberaciontotal.entodaspartes.net) that is dedicated to "the dissolution of civilization" and serves as an international bulletin board for notices of similar sabotage by anarchist cells around the world such as the U.S. "Burn Down The Jails!", Latin American autonomous cells of the Animal Liberation Front - an ELF offshoot, and the Greek anarchist movement that ravaged Athens this summer.
"Our fire illuminates the night!" waxed poetic one anonymous Mexican anarchist interviewed on the Total Liberation site. "We have lost all fear of spending the rest of our days in prison", perhaps a reference to the Cerezo brothers and Ramsis Villareal. Groups claiming bombings and other successful acts of sabotage take fanciful names infused with poetry, bravado, and black humor: "Luddites Against the Domestication of Wildlife", "Espana Signus Francescos" (thought to be a reference to San Francisco of Assisi, the patron saint of animals), and "Autonomous Cells of the Immediate Revolution - Praxides G. Guerrero."
The historically obscure Guerrero was the first anarchist to fall in the landmark 1910-1919 Mexican revolution whose centennial will be marked in 2010. Praxides G. Guerrero was felled by a "bala ciega" (literally "blind bullet") during a guerrilla raid on Janus Chihuahua in May 1910, six months before Francisco Madero officially called for the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz in November of that year to launch the Mexican revolution.
Only 28 years old on the day of his death, Guerrero was a young partisan of anarchist superstars Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon. "Praxides translated the theory of anarchism into practical action," writes anarchist historian Dave Poole. In a recent e-mail, John Mason Hart, author of the definitive study "Anarchism & The Mexican Working Class", concluded that if Guerrero had survived, the Mexican revolution would have looked more like the contemporary neo-Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas than the fratricidal bucket of blood it became.
As a writer, Praxides G. Guerrero's prose has all the impact of an anarchist bomb. In "Blow!", the revolutionary imagines himself as the wind: "I steal into palaces and factories, I blow through prisons and caress the infancy prostituted by Justice, I force my way into army barracks and see in them an academy of assassination, I am the breath of the revolution…"
It hardly seems a coincidence that modern-day anarchists struck in September, "the patriotic month" when Mexicans celebrate the declaration of their independence from Spain in 1810, the bicentennial of which, along with the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, is on deck in 2010. President Felipe Calderon has budgeted billions of pesos to mark the twin centennials even as Mexico is mired in a bottomless recession that has driven millions of workers into the streets. Ironically, the Calderon government has reportedly contracted a Hollywood production outfit with the very anarchist brand-name "Autonomy" for $60,000,000 USD to mount centennial "spectaculars" - in 2008, "Autonomy" staged the spectacular pageant that opened the Beijing Olympics.
In invoking Praxides G. Guerrero's hallowed name, anarchist bombers appear to be celebrating the vital role their ideological forbearers played in the Mexican revolution, the first great uprising of the landless in the Americas and an immediate precursor of the Russian revolution.
Anarchism in Mexico dates back to the first days of the republic when in 1824, North American followers of the Welsh utopian socialist Robert Owen unsuccessfully sought to establish colonies along the border in Chihuahua. In the 1860s, anarchism doing business as "mutualism" (i.e. working class solidarity) took root in the burgeoning Mexican labor movement - mutualism's most significant representation was the House of The World Worker (Casa de Obrero Mundial") that flourished during the early days of the revolution.
As the Mexican revolution crested at the turn into the 20th century, anarchism gained an early foothold. Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon's newspaper "Regeneracion" ("Regeneration") was passed from hand to hand and widely read by those who sought the dictator's overthrow. Repeatedly imprisoned by Porfirio Diaz, Ricardo and Enrique fled to the U.S. where they clandestinely continued to publish "Regeneracion." The anarchist duo was pursued by both Diaz's agents and U.S. immigration authorities and forced to flee from city to city (San Antonio, Los Angeles, S. Louis.) Imprisoned for violating the 1917 version of the Patriot Act, Ricardo Flores Magon died in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in 1922 under mysterious circumstances that suggest he was strangled by prison guards for flying a Mexican flag in his cell. A century after the Mexican revolution, a handful of campesino organizations in the Flores Magones' native state of Oaxaca continue to incorporate the brothers' names in their struggles.
During their ill-fated sojourn north of the border, the Magones forged links to U.S. anarchists. The IWW - the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies - which preached anarchism on the street corners of the American west, are said to have been the organizing force behind the miners' strike in the great Cananea copper pit in Sonora during which a score of workers were massacred by the Arizona Rangers - Cananea is considered the seedbed of the Mexican labor movement. The celebrated Chicago anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre contributed to Regeneracion and raised bail money for the Flores Magones. In 1911, Joe Hill, the renowned Wobbly organizer and bard, rode with the Magonistas in a failed expedition to liberate Baja California.
Despite their margination from the revolutionary mainstream, Magonistas fought in the armies of Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, and Venustiano Carranza although they were often singled out as troublemakers and executed by revolutionary firing squads.
The anarchist flame in Mexico would never have survived without the solidarity of Spanish exiles. Spanish anarchists played a critical role in the formation of the House of the World Worker and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) anarchist fighters and thinkers were offered sanctuary from Franco's fascist hordes in Mexico. Spanish anarchists founded the Social Reconstruction Library in downtown Mexico City, an invaluable repository of anarchist archives.
The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in 1994 signaled the second coming of Mexican anarchism. The EZLN's rejection of dependence on the "mal gobierno" (bad government) and its insistence on collective action and the creation of autonomous zones in the southeast of that highly-indigenous state inspired collectives of young anarchists, often clustered around the National Autonomous University or UNAM. Anarchist activists spurred the 1999-2000 strike against a tuition hike at the National University. Ski-masked, so-called "ultras" with tags like "El Mosh", "El Gato", and "The Devil" drove the student struggle to sectarian excess and a clampdown by the federal police that resulted in 700 arrests.
The uproar at the 1999 Seattle conclave of the World Trade Organization was the first explosion of the anti-globalization movement in which anarchists would play a pivotal role. Black clad youth basked in the media spotlight in Seattle but property damage against franchise chains like Niketown by the self-named "Black Bloc" purportedly animated by the writings of U.S. anarchist guru John Zerzan, offended mainstream anti-globalization groups like Global Exchange whose founder, Medea Benjamin called for their arrest. The Seattle uprising was first plotted at a 1996 anti-globalization forum staged by the Zapatistas on the fringes of the Lacandon jungle.
The death of Black Blocker Carlo Giuliani under the guns of the police at the 2001 Genoa Italy G-8 summit had deep scratch in the Zapatista zone where a clinic has been named for the anarchist martyr at Oventic, the rebels' most public outpost - the Giuliani family has contributed an ambulance.
Mexican black blockers went into action at the 2003 WTO fiasco in the luxury port of Cancun. Armed with Molotov cocktails, shopping carts filled with rocks, and home-made battering rams, the anarchos threatened to storm police barricades but spontaneous peace-making by indigenous women protestors helped avoid bloodshed and the black-clad militants decided to burn down a local pizza parlor instead.
Bloodshed was on the agenda at a 2004 Ibero-American summit in Guadalajara when then Governor Francisco Ramirez Acuna (now president of the lower house of the Mexican congress) unleashed his robocops on an anti-globalization rally. Young anarchists were beaten into the sidewalk like so many baby harp seals and dragged off to gaol where police torture continued for weeks. Several block blockers were held for nearly a year despite the outcry from the international human rights community.
Anarchist collectives in Mexico City are not universally unruly. La Karakola, a collective that swears allegiance to Zapatismo and non-violence, would just as soon dance as toss rocks at the cops. Anarcho "squats" take over abandoned buildings - the "okupas" modeled on those run by Barcelona activists pop up in unlikely neighborhoods such as the squat house under the towering Torre Mayor, an 88-story skyscraper on swanky Reforma boulevard.
Punky anarchist fashion - black clothes, studded leather jackets, piercings, exotic hairstyles, and a written language in which "k's" replace "c's", is popular with dissident big city youth and on display Saturday mornings at the Chopo Bazaar and evenings at the Alicia Forum where punk meets anarchism. But most anarcho "fashionistas" are not bombers - it's a struggle to slip a ski mask over a Mohawk.
2006 seems to be the year that anarcho fury at the destruction of the planet took wings - the earliest postings on the Total Liberation page date from then. The first actions were little publicized and dismissed by police and the media as vandalism - destruction of pay phones installed by Telmex, owned by tycoon Carlos Slim, the richest man in Latin America, is a popular sport. Sabotage peaked in 2008 when 129 actions were recorded, most of them non-violent such as the liberation of slaughter house-bound chickens and the reconfiguration of bull ring signage transforming the Toluca Plaza de Torros into a "Plaza of Torturers."
One exception was the torching of a leather expo in Leon Guanajuato, the shoe and boot capital of Mexico. On October 2nd, the 40th anniversary of the 1968 student massacre, fast food franchises were Molotov-ed in the capital's old quarter and 13 anarchists arrested. Fake bombs were subsequently planted at MacDonald's, KTC, and Burger King in ten provincial cities.
The September wave of bombings was a defiant step upwards but not by much - the "bombs" were primitively fashioned from butane tanks used by plumbers to solder pipes and detonated by bottle rockets. All bombings occurred during early morning hours to avoid human casualties although some stray dogs and cats may have been singed.
Despite the lack of lethal intent, the bombings have riveted the attentions of numerous security forces, particularly the CISEN, Mexico's lead intelligence agency which is reportedly spread thin trying to keep tabs on plans by clandestine guerrilla bands ranging from the Zapatistas to the EPR to foment armed uprising during the 100th birthday party of the Mexican revolution to which all Mexicans, regardless of ideological persuasion, have been invited.
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John Ross' monstrous "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption In Mexico City" will hit the streets in November (to read raving reviews from the likes of Mike Davis and Jeremy Scahill go to www.nationbooks.org.) Ross will be traveling Gringolandia much of 2009-2010 with "El Monstruo" and his new Haymarket title "Iraqigirl", the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation. If you have a venue for presentations he would like to talk to you at johnross@igc.org
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