The Word From Struggle Street

Today, revelations have emerged that Facebook censored famous image ‘The Terror of War’ – otherwise known as ‘Napalm Girl’ – citing its policy of not allowing nude imagery. This move, called out by the Norwegian journalists who first posted the image, reminds me of attempts to censor brutal images from the Vietnam War during the conflict itself. These images were seen as particularly powerful by anti-war activists, while they were condemned as pornographic by the same governments who were inflicting the violence pictured. Recently, plenty of scholars have begun writing on the uses of images of suffering and violence by humanitarian organisations, so I have posted a condensed section of one of the chapters of my book Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals that deals with this question in Australia, and the troubled relationship activists had with what has been termed ‘the politics of gore’.

Eric Norden’s American Atrocities in Vietnam

This is a paper I submitted to the reader for A Regional Anarchist Convergence: Towards a Federation.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence.[i]

Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self -activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others – even by those allegedly acting on their…