from Green Anarchist #66
The death of Carlo Guiliani during the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa shocked many people in the First world. Carlo was assassinated by the militarized police forces of the New World Order, whose outright fascist nature was made clear when Guiliani’s arrested comrades were forced to pay homage to Il Duce in words and song by the Italian security forces.
To the starry-eyed bourgeois activists in north America and Europe, Carlo’s death was a horrible travesty of justice against a movement to democratise global capitalism. To people in the South — the ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ lands — such assassinations are neither unusual nor unexpected. There has been a war raging over control of the Earth’s resources for a century (or more) and the fight to create a global corporate state — the New World Order, as proclaimed by Bush I, among many others — is only the latest phase, one which has claimed dozens (Mexico, India), hundreds (Papua New Guinea), thousands (Columbia, Nigeria), even millions (Democratic Republic of the Congo) of lives around the world. Sadly, it’s only when these deaths occur in the presence of First World media and other witnesses that they register any sort of reaction at all.
The stakes in this conflict are extraordinarily high.
On one side are the megawealthy who wish to preserve the protected enclaves of privilege and material ease industrial society creates for them. In their way are the other 7.5 billion people on Earth, who the ruling elite wish to cast aside to fend for themselves in the waste and ruin industrialism continues to make of the world. Limited privileges are, however, granted to the bourgeois and workers so they will tolerate the death dealt out to provide these privileges. For instance, the people of Africa being slaughtered to provide oil and cell phones for consumers. Will consumers in the First World give up gasoline and wireless communication devices in order to relieve the suffering of other, distant, dark-skinned people? Not willingly or they would already have done so.
Many of the people involved in the anti-globalization movement aren’t interested in or even aware of the plight of these other people. All they want is a better deal — a greater share of the profits raked in by the plundering of foreign lands. Their willful naiveté about how the post-capitalist world works is obscene. But to cut them some slack, there is an ongoing conspiracy by the shapers of society to prevent us from realizing the continuous efforts of the ruling elites to divide us so that we’ll gladly annihilate one another in order to maintain the illusions described as “capitalism” and “democracy”.
World War One was an effort by the ruling elites of the industrialized nations to divide the world into permanent have and have-not nation states and spheres of influence for the colonial powers. It also allowed them to crush the international solidarity rampant among the international working class, as demonstrated by the worldwide support for Sacco and Vanzetti. One of the war’s chief apologists, US president Woodrow Wilson, described it as an effort to make the world safe for democracy. What he actually meant was that the natural resources of the world would be made available for the benefit of the industrialised nations.
Their attempt was only partially successful, so the attempt was repeated in the war over fascism (WWII) and further refined during the subsequent Cold War. What the elite learned from their experiments were:
- propaganda campaigns could manipulate the people within industrialized societies to leap to their deaths unquestioningly, upon command
- a modern society will accept death camps, as long as “other [minority] people” were being exterminated
- no atrocity committed against a civilian population is inexcusable, especially if the media and government act like it never happened.
Having learned this throughout the course of the 20th century, the ruling elite were ready to implement the New World Order.
“I could see the clubs … at their work. Their ends were smeared with blood, and blood sprayed the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Sometimes I saw the policemen hopping up on the benches, continuing to strike blows from there or jumping back down on top the bodies below…”
This is not a retelling if the actions of Italian police in Genoa, but a description of an ongoing campaign of violence directed at the people of New Guinea by the police and military forces of Indonesia (from the West Papua Action Update #2).
INDIGENOUS PEOPLE FIGHTING FOR THEIR EXISTENCE
Most of New Guinea is populated by people who still live closely with the natural world as hunter-gatherers, herds-people, fishers and gardeners. Fed up with ‘development’ that threatened their ways of life, the tribal hillfolk rebelled.
In 1988, on the Papua New Guinea side of the island, the people of Bourgainville shut down the massive Freeport copper mine by putting away their pens and picking up guns. They’ve been waging a successful guerrilla war against the armed forces of PNG and their Australian cohorts ever since.
This inspired a similar attempt to drive civilization from the Indonesian side of the island. By the time the event described above happened, this effort had seen 50 activists killed and hundreds more arrested or disappeared.
No doubt more people are familiar with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, timed to coincide with the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Several hundred Zapatistas and their supporters have died in the low-intensity fighting that followed the uprising of the EZLN. Like the Free Papua Movement in New Guinea, the Zapatistas are fighting for the right of indigenous people’s self-determination and against ‘economical development’ dictated by global financial concerns. Meanwhile, oil extraction is fuelling two genocidal wars, one in Africa and one in South America.
The Ogoni people of the Nigerian delta have already lost their lands to Shell Oil. They fight now for survival as a people. A similar conflict is currently being forced on people north of Ogoniland as an oil pipeline and drilling is forced upon people and land from Chad to the Atlantic coast.
Plan Columbia will escalate Columbia’s civil war into regional instability to ensure that social and political chaos there is carefully managed so as not to interfere with oil extraction or the cocaine trade. The peaceful, cloudforest-dwelling U’wa people are doomed.
Under the NWO, armed forces can sweep into countries and forcefully take whatever they want, literally, over the dead bodies of the local people. They’ve successfully demonstrated this in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A rare mineral used in wireless communication devices — solton — is being extracted from the DRC for First World corporations by the invading armies of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the mercenary forces of UNITA, a Cold War terrorist army from Angola. They are also helping themselves — and transnational corporations — to diamonds and coffee. No one knows how many Congolese have died during this invasion, which began on 1997. Conservative estimates are 3 million. The actual toll could be much higher, which would put this war on a par with the worst violence during African colonisation and the slave trade. We’ll likely never know how many people have died in this war because, quite frankly, most people in the First World aren’t interested.
Despite the horrors being inflicted upon people in South America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands, there is hope for us all.
The people of New Guinea want nothing to do with globalisation and may success in smashing the nation states trying to impose economic development upon them. The Zapatistas have demonstrated the effectiveness of organising communities with a combination of analysis and rifles. It was the influence of the Zapatistas that led to the international street festivals against the institutions of the NWO.
More recently, the people of Bolivia disrupted the daily continuity of life in their country to demand an end to IMF economic plans, such as privatisation of their water supply.
As I write this , plans are being made in India for a similar on-going uprising by a coalition of people’s movements. Among their demands are:
- Cancellation of India’s IMF / World Bank debts
- Human rights protection for women
- India out of the WTO
- Exxon and Monsanto out of India
- Farmland for agricultural families living in villages, not corporate farms
There have been dozens of lives lost in this struggle already as indigenous and poor people in India resist development and corporatisation of their lives and lands, and for an end to the dalit (‘untouchable’) undercaste’s repression. The people of India are poised to turn their society on its head in order to shape a better future for themselves and their descendants, just as the people of Bolivia are doing.
Now that the war to implement the NWO has been brought violently to us in the First World, how will we react? Some of the anti-globalisation protesters have no interest in giving up their private automobiles and cell phones, and will co-operate with the forces of economic order and power against those of us willing to act in solidarity with the struggles of distant peoples: we face common enemies in this fight for our lives. The peace and justice professional activists will denounce as insurrectionaries for being violent, even as people around the world are being massacred to sustain consumerist lifestyles. Rather than diminish our activity, however, we must go on the offensive.
The ‘Welcome’ column of the ‘00 issue of Resistance, the paper of the Earth Liberation Front’s press office, states:
The only problems I can find with actions like these (ELF) are that they aren’t happening frequently enough, and at severe enough levels
The same issue quotes Black Liberation Army fugitive Assatas Shakur on its cover
…not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance, to oppression is to serve the oppressor, no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out
Carlo Guiliani was not the first casualty in the revolt against the NWO. Rather than mourning or being frightened by his passing, we should be inspired that the NWO cannot co-exist with our desire for life, and resolve that we will be the ones who survive this conflict!
Post-S11 Postscript
With the resistance to the NWO having grown from 50.000 people in the streets of Seattle to 300,000 in Genoa, the plans of the elite were in danger of coming unraveled. Something had to be done — quickly. How about starting an unwinnable, perpetual, religious war? First World people have already accepted a genocidal campaign against the Iraqi people, in which millions of civilians have been starved, bombed or otherwise killed by a combination of air strikes and economic sanctions. Today (19/09/01), the UN announced that 5 million Afghani people are in danger of starving to death in the immediate future. Unless, of course, the US military and its Afghani allies slaughters them first.
The media focuses on the atrocities perpetuated against the US — live on TV, even — and continues to remain silent about the genocidal warfare against the peoples of Columbia, New Guinea, the DRC, etc. Meanwhile the US government can exponentially increase its policy of robbing the taxpayers to give to the rich corporations, even as these same corporations throw hundreds of thousands of workers out the door.
This is George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare come true; a perpetual war raging through central Asia to keep the excess population occupied and / or terrorised, and give the governments an excuse to repress their domestic opposition.
What I have to wonder is why did the US give the Taleban government $43 million in May ‘01, knowing they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, who was already wanted for bombing US embassies in Africa and blasting the USS Cole?
this was archived by the anarchist library, thanks so much!
From the Jungles and Mountains of West Papua
“We are fighting to free West Papua from modern civilisation, nothing else. The most important thing is to free West Papua. With this motivation, we stay in the jungle, even though we face a lot of problems and obstacles. The important thing is to get freedom for West Papua. This is the story of why we are fighting in the forest or why I myself joined the OPM.
I am a native Papuan, and I have the right to live on this land. But other people who have no right on this land come and take over this land, while the native is forced out from our own land and chased into the jungle. This is my own nation and my own land. Why should I be chased from my own land?
I will die. My next generation with my hair, my colour of skin, my language, my culture, my arts and dance that characterise this land all will disappear forever. The Papua land, the one of the most beautiful lands on this earth. This land is our heritage, the Papuans, with its population of about 1 million people. It is the western part of the second biggest island on this earth, lies on the north of Australia. Four centuries ago, we Papuans enjoyed what is called “freedom”. Then came the colonialism era, starting with the colonialism of the British, then the Dutch, (Japan), and now the Indonesians. These have caused us to loose our freedom. We want to destroy the Indonesian neo-colonialism. To force Indonesia to return to their home country and leave us free from them, and we will live in our own land called West Papua.”
Ambros Aminin, OPM Regional Commander.
