#title A text dump on Atassa
#authors L, Michael Loadenthal, Theo Slade, William Gillis, Abe Cabrera, John Jacobi, Ramon Elani, Seminatore,
#date 2016–2018
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-08-16T16:55:46.547Z
#topics exo-extremism, human exterminationists, satanist death cultists
* Eco-Extremism; An Intro & A Critique
** An Intro to Individualists Tending toward the Wild
**Source:** [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/michael-loadenthal-the-politics-of-attack][The Politics of Attack]].
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[ITS] has explicitly rejected association with anarchism, and via a subsequent (i.e. second generation) moniker, rejected both the label of “leftist” and “insurrectionary”.
In a rare interview the group provided in 2014, it describes its purpose, stating:
[ITS] deemed it necessary to carry out the direct attack against the Technoindustrial System. We think that the struggle against this is not only a stance of wanting to abandon Civilization, regressing to Nature, or in refuting the system’s values, without also, attacking it.
ITS has received international attention after repeatedly targeting scientists and researchers with lethal force. ITS has stood out from other bombers due to its lengthy, academic-styled communiqués and direct attacks on individuals from outside the typical target set: heads of state and corporations, officials in law enforcement, jailing, etc. ITS is unique in at least two matters: its stated objective to kill, and its specific, tech-related target set. In the 2014 interview, cell members explain:
Our immediate objectives are very clear: injure or kill scientists and researchers (by the means of whatever violent act) who ensure the Technoindustrial System continues its course. As we have declared on various occasions, our concrete objective is not the destruction of the Technoindustrial system, it is the attack with all the necessary resources, lashing out at this system which threatens to close off all paths to the reaching of our Individual Freedom, putting into practice our defensive instinct
… ITS has from the beginning proposed the attack against the system as the objective, striving to make these kinds of ideas spread around the globe through extreme acts, in defense of Wild Nature, as we have done.
According to their own historical account, the group began experimenting in 2011 with “arson attacks on cars and construction machinery, companies and institutions … until we decided to focus on terrorism and not sabotage”. From 2011–2014, ITS deployed at least 13 mail bombs, two mailed threats accompanied by bullets, and assassinated Méndez Salinas, a biotechnologist with the Institute of Bio-Technology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Salinas was shot in the head, and according to ITS, killed by “the most violent cell of ITS in Morelos, being already familiar with the purchase and use of firearms.”
Through their various communiqués and interviews, ITS has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks, many of which were claimed under other monikers and later linked to the ITS network. For example, in August 2014, ITS declared the formation of Wild Reaction (RS):
After a little more than three years of criminal-terrorist activity, the group … [ITS] … begins a new phase in this open war against the Technoindustrial System … we want to explain that during all of 2012 and 2013, various groups of a terrorist and sabotage stripe were uniting themselves with the group ITS, so that now, after a long silence and for purely strategic reasons, we publicly claim [10 attacks from newly affiliated networks] … All of these have now fused with the ITS groups in Morelos, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Veracruz … Due to this union, the extravagant and little-practical pseudonym of ““Individualists Tending toward the Wild’ (ITS) ceases to exist, and from now on the attacks against technology and civilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction”(RS).
Prior to this announcement, in April 2014 a group calling itself Obsidian Point Circle of Analysis (OPCAn) activated a new clandestine cell (which would later be absorbed into RS) called Obsidian Point Circle of Attack (OPCA). The formation of OPCAn was preceded by three commentaries on ITS and the authors “becoming tired of simply writing.” In its opening declaration OPCA writes:
It has been some time since we started writing about some situations that had arisen in Mexico concerning the terrorist group ITS; we published a total of three analyses, in which we have publicly demonstrated our support of the group ITS, in their actions as much as their position. Until now we have decided to solely be those who comfortably spread and highlighted the group’s communiques and actions, but that is over. The violent advance of the techno-industrial system, the degradation that civilization leaves in its wake and the oblivion they are forcing us toward, ceasing to be natural humans to the point of turning into humanoids: there must be a convincing response.
We abandon words and analyses in order to begin with our war … We only seek confrontation with the system, the sharpening of the conflict against it. From this day we publicly put aside the word “analysis,” in order to become The Obsidian Point Circle of Attack.
Thus, according to its own narrative, ITS inspired public commentary and critique by OPCAn and, in September 2014, when ITS became RS, it was announced that RS included OPCA as well. In the first declaration by RS, the authors explain: “during this year … two more terroristic groups have united with us who have put the development of the Technoindustrial System in their sights … The ‘Obsidian Point Circle of Attack’ … [and] … The ‘Atlatl Group.’” Therefore, a complete history of ITS’s actions includes both attacks claimed under their name, those claimed under the OPCA and RS, as well as smaller groupings merged under the network’s banner. According to a chronology assembled from the networks’ communications, the network has claimed at least 27 distinct actions including 22 IED attacks (mostly mail and package/parcel bombs), three written threats, several arsons of property, one animal release, and one fatal shooting.
In early 2016, the ITS moniker saw its first usage outside of the borders of Mexico. In the second ITS communiqué of 2016, the “Uncivilized Southerners” cell “abandoned a homemade explosive charge” on a bus in Santiago, Chile writing:
The Eco-Extremist tendency spreads … We are accomplices to its ideas and acts, forming part of it. We are giving life to an international project against civilization.
Because we are bullets to the head, mail-bombs, indiscriminate bombings and incinerating fire, we are:
Individualists Tending Toward the Wild – Chile.
A few days later, in the fourth ITS communiqué of 2016, an ITS cell in Argentina claimed responsibility for placing an IED in a Buenos Aires bus station. In the message accompanying the bomb, the attackers wrote: “ITS is in Argentina”. The emergence of new ITS cells appears to be an ongoing trend. Five days after the Argentina communiqué was posted to a Spanish-language insurrectionary hub, the same site featured a communiqué signed by five cells of ITS, three from Mexico, and one each from Argentina and Chile. The communiqué traces the origin and expansion of the ITS and RS monikers and announces “a new phase of the war against all that represents and sustains the advance of civilization and progress”.
In Mexico, ITS’s bombs have targeted civilian, seemingly ‘non-political’ scientists, professors, technical experts, researchers, and technocrats and within a politic most closely described as (Green) anarcho-primitivism. Famed “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski popularized this framework in the 1980s during a 17-year (1978–1995) bombing campaign involving 16 bombs, which killed three people and injured 23. Following the publication of “Industrial Society and its Future” – popularly known as the “Unabomber manifesto” and released five months after his final attack – Kaczynski’s spirit has been carried forth by ITS and a few similar networks.
** The group’s origins broadly
**Source:** [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/does-the-unabomber-have-any-relevance-to-anarchism][Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism?]]
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ITS Mexico were originally part of the green & insurrectionary anarchist milieus and likely grew up on earth first monkey-wrenching manuals from the 80s:[1]
The group draws its inspiration from anarcho-primitivism, an “anti-civilization anarchy” from which ITS is largely inspired. “I took the theories of the ‘Earth Liberation Front’ further, and gave them a different tone,” explains Xale. “I was interested in the issues facing the American continent, in the indigenous cultures that opposed civilization,” assures the Mexican member of ITS in the video.
With anarchism, the relationship at the moment is one of rupture, although there is no dishonor in accepting that many eco-extremists and some members of ITS come from anarchism, mostly from insurrectionist and eco-anarchist tendencies. Although at the time there were some ties, today the vast majority of anarchists hate us.
Referring to the groups history, Xale, a member of ITS Mexico wrote:[2]
This chronology could well be added to that of Individualities Tending to the Wild (2011–2013), or that of the anti civilization cells of the Earth Liberation Front (2008–2012), but we decided to focus on RS, for now.
Searching through the over 300 sabotage actions that occurred in Mexico between 2018 & 2012, and the at least 10 with ELF in the title of the post, there do appear to be a few attacks that fit ITS modus operandi and communiqués which fit their early idiolect:[3]
Early this morning, September 21, our cell placed a bomb made of butane gas at the gates of the headquarters of Nueva Escuela Tecnológica [New School of Technology] in the municipality of Coacalco, Mexico State.
The authorities in that municipality had previously implemented security systems that belong in the worst nightmares of Orwell.
Security cameras, artificial eyes guarding their damned social peace, throughout the major avenues in Coacalco.
In the commercial area, the police presence is evident, state police and the mediocre municipal police pass through the streets and on Lopez Portillo Avenue.
Guarding the centers of domination and domestication that are also protected by surveillance cameras and the idiot guardians of the imposed order.
Facing this situation of high surveillance, it seemed impossible to strike, but rebellious creativity is greater than the highest degree of ‘security’ that the state implements.
The Coacalco commercial area had been previously visited by eco-anarchist cells who conducted significant strikes right in front of the police, who were flabbergasted by an arson, a butane explosion, graffiti and paint spilled in anthropocentric business.
Our action was censured both by the directors of the Nueva Escuela Tecnológica and the Mexico State authorities. They hid the damage that we caused and concealed the evidence of our presence at night. This is not unusual; it happened after the ‘celebrations’ of the ephemeral bicentennial celebration which were held in ‘total’ peace.
The Agencia de Seguridad Estatal [state security agency] as well as detectives from the Mexico City police department are aware of our actions and our presence; they know that we were there and that we detonated our explosive charge as the lackeys on patrol passed by unable to stop us.
We chose to attack the NET because it represents the new era of these centers of domestication called schools, where they learn things that are useless for a free life, but necessary for a life of slavery and alienation. They create beings that depend on technology in order to live in these concrete nests called cities, but more closely resemble large prisons. They train malleable minds to be used for entrepreneurship and to expand civilization over wild nature. We will not permit this.
Once again we say: not with their cameras, nor their police officers, nor with their investigators, nor their prisons, will they be able to stop us; we once again skinned the rotten bastards, godammit!
This action is dedicated to the Chilean anarchist prisoners, captured after the wave of repression in that country on August 14; we send much strength, from mexico we remember them in every direct action.
We did not want to wait until the 24th to show our solidarity.
Support is not only for one day, it is in our everyday actions!
Direct solidarity for the eco prisoners Abraham López and Adrian Magdaleno, for the eco revolutionaries on hunger strike in Switzerland, for the animal liberation prisoner Walter Bond in the U.S., and the vegan warriors imprisoned in Italy!
Keep running Diego, you’re fucking awesome!
Earth Liberation Front/Mexico
Upon reading translated Unabomber material they started along a road that began with committing arsons aimed at sabotaging evil companies and ended with them desiring to have the wider effect of terrorizing people through fear of injury or death out of a simple hatred for humanity:[4]
… in 2011 the (newly formed) ITS was testing various modus operandi (from known and attempted arson attacks on cars and construction machinery, companies and institutions in Coahuila, Guanajuato, and Veracruz State of Mexico, until we decided to focus on terrorism and not sabotage).
Here are old members of the FAI / CCF in Mexico acknowledging former collaboration and ideological crossover:[5]
Exactly 5 years and seven months ago we signed a “joint statement” at the request of a comrade for whom we feel great affection and respect. That text was entitled “2nd Joint Statement of the Anarchist Insurrectional and Eco-Anarchist Groups”. …
Back then, we let it be known publicly and energetically that:
“With these ITS partners, we can have theoretical differences and discuss them (always arguing fraternally in a constant attempt to update ideas and by building a unitary criticism attuned to the reality of the anarchist struggle), but we have never disagreed with the methods used, understanding anti-authoritarian violence and propaganda for the facts as they are : valid practices consistent with our ethical principles.”
Although ITS were one of the few clusters with which we did not directly coordinate when undertaking joint actions, we were in solidarity with them, in the same way that some of the comrades that made up our affinity groups obtained monetary resources for them to solve specific difficulties when requested. That has been (and is) the basis of practical co-ordination between the new anarchic insurrectionalism and eco-anarchism.
In their early communiques they would express solidarity with anarchist prisoners:[6]
Total support with the Anti-civilization prisoners in Mexico, with the Chilean comrades and with the furious Italians and Swiss. …
One more time: Direct and total support with the anti-civilization prisoners of Mexico, with those eco-anarchists of Switzerland, to the affinities in Argentina, Spain, Italy, Chile and Russia.
Here is an answer members of ITS gave in a text interview in 2014 I think showing they were part of a leftist mileu, in that they only later rejected leftist mass movement building and so are not simply post-left-&-right:[7]
Individualists tending towards the wild formed at the beginning of 2011, and was motivated by the reasoning acquired during a slow process of getting to know, questioning, and the rejection of all that encompasses leftism and the civilized, and accordingly, employing all the above, we deemed it necessary to carry out the direct attack against the Technoindustrial System. We think that the struggle against this is not only a stance of wanting to abandon Civilization, regressing to Nature, or in refuting the system’s values, without also attacking it.
Finally, ITS also claimed that more ELF and Anarchist groups joined them later when they briefly took on the name Wild Reaction:[8]
First of all, we want to explain that during all of 2012 and 2013, various groups of a terrorist and sabotage stripe were uniting themselves with the group ITS, so that now, after a long silence and for purely strategic reasons, we publicly claim:
1) The “Informal Anti-civilization Group,” which on June 29, 2011, took responsibility for the explosion that severely damaged a Santander bank in the city of Tultitlan, Mexico.
2) “Uncivilized Autonomous,” who on October 16, 2011 set off a bomb inside the ATMs of a Banamex, located between the cities of Tultitlan and Coacalco in Mexico State. …
4) “Wild Indomitables,” who on October 16, 2011 left a butane gas bomb that did not detonate in a Santander bank in the Álvaro Obregón district of Mexico City. The act was never claimed until now.
5) “Terrorist Cells for the Direct Attack – Anti-civilization Fraction,” which in 2010 and 2011 left a fake bomb in front of the IFaB (Pharmacological and Biopharmeceutical Research), and detonated an explosive outside the building of the National Ecology Institute (INE), both in the Tlalpan district of Mexico City.
6) “Luddites against the Domestication of Wild Nature,” who during 2009 to 2011 had taken part in various incendiary attacks in some cities in Mexico State and various districts of Mexico City, claimed or unclaimed.
8) “Earth Liberation Front – Bajío”, which on November 16, 2011 set off an explosive charge creating damages within the ATM area of a branch of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) in the city of Irapuato in Guanajuato.
All of these have now fused with the ITS groups in Morelos, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Veracruz.
Due to this union, the extravagant and little-practical pseudonym of “Individualists Tending toward the Wild” (ITS) ceases to exist, and from now on the attacks against technology and civilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction” (RS).
These were groups that other anarchists were relating to as anarchists also. As the *joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico* referred to earlier was signed by some of these groups who later merged with ITS or had a very similar ideology:[9]
*Luddites against the Domestication of Wild Nature (LDNS)*
*Earth Liberation Front (FLT)*
*Free, Dangerous, Savage and Incendiary Individuals for the Black Plague(ILPSIPN)*
*** Kaczynski’s influence specifically
An ITS propagandist:[10]
Born out of various radical ideologies such as animal liberation, insurrectionary anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, and the neo-Luddism of Theodore Kaczynski, it has germinated and sprouted forth into something entirely other …
ITS:[11]
We have never denied that the essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future” has been an important part of our formation into what we are now. For that reason, in the past we used such terms as “leftists,” “power process,” “feelings of inferiority,” “liberty and autonomy,” etc. that in the present we have omitted or changed for other words so that we distinguish ourselves from the “indomitistas” of Kaczynski. …
Michael Loadenthal:[12]
[ITS] specifically address their relationship to Kaczynski in their fourth communiqué:
Have ITS copied Ted Kaczynski? The million-dollar question.
Without a doubt, we see this person as an individual who with his profound rational analysis contributed greatly to the advance of antitechnological ideas; his simple way of living in a manner strictly away from Civilization and the persecution of his Freedom in an optimal environment make him a worthy individual who due to a family betrayal is serving multiple life sentences in the United States … If we cite Stirner, Rand, Kaczynski, Nietzsche, Orwell, some scientists and other people in our communiques they are only for references, we do not have reason to be in agreement with all their lines and positions … It has been said that we imitate the Unabomber; perhaps we have seen as strategic the action of [Kaczynski’s moniker] the Freedom Club against scientific personalities in the United States in the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, and we have adopted this, but let it be clear that we have not imitated all his discourse in its totality, since as we said above, there are points that are plainly contrary to the positions of the FC.
In their sixth communiqué, ITS (2012) notes that their early writings (i.e. first and second communiqués) did in fact borrow from Kaczynski, but that after reflecting on their “poor interpretations” the group has “discarded [Kaczynski’s ideas] and now for us they have no validity.” Despite what many regard as similarities in critique, and despite ITS occasionally quoting Kaczynski directly, ITS subsequently denies ideological connections. In the first communiqué as “Wild Reaction, ‘Kill or Die’ Group” (2014) the group writes:
We deny being followers of Ted Kaczynski … we have indeed learned many things from reading Industrial Society and Its Future, the texts after this and the letters before this text signed by ‘Freedom Club’ (FC), but that does not mean that we are his followers. In fact our position clashes with Kaczynski’s, FC’s … since we do not consider ourselves revolutionaries, we do not want to form an ‘anti-technological movement’ that encourages the ‘total overthrow of the system,’ we do not see it as viable, we do not want victory, we do not pretend to win or lose, this is an individual fight against the mega-machine; we don’t care about getting something positive from this, since we are simply guided by our instincts of defense and survival.
Here one can witness RS’s declared revolutionary intent, to “bring it all crashing down” while avoiding the trapping of movement building and conceiving of the conflict in terms of winners and losers. In this communiqué, after the group changed its name, RS goes on to further declare their ideological independence from the prominent critics of technology (e.g. primitivists) as well as the global anarcho-insurrectional milieu through which their communications are circulated and consumed. In their proclamation of non-affiliation, RS states:
Thus neither Kaczynski … or any other with the (supposed) “primitivist” stamp represents RS. Nor do the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), Feral Faun, or any other with the “ecoanarchist” or “anti-civilization cell of …” stamp. RS and its groups only represent themselves. (Wild Reaction, “Kill or Die” Group 2014)
Despite ITS/RS’s insistence to the contrary, prominent anarcho-primitivist thinker John Zerzen, often spoken of as the “founder” of the movement, notes that “ITS group is real slavish to Ted Kaczynski” (Morin 2014). Zerzen goes on to say that he does not believe ITS’s methods will prove successful and that he is “turn[ed] off” by their usage of mailed explosives and their cavalier dismissal of human causalities (Morin 2014).
Sean Fleming:[13]
In thought and in action, Kaczynski is a lone wolf. His Manifesto articulates a theory or worldview that is peculiar to him and built from a unique combination of Ellul’s, Morris’s, and Seligman’s ideas. Terrorism scholars have recently questioned ‘whether it is time to put the “lone wolf” category to rest altogether’, since alleged lone wolves are rarely as independent as they appear: ‘ties to online and offline radical milieus are critical’. Yet, as I have shown, Kaczynski is unusual in that most of his ideological formation took place in a library, outside of any radical milieu. His association with radical environmentalists, who shared his disdain for modern technology, was a consequence rather than a cause of his radicalization. The Unabomber case shows that terrorists can emerge from a relative ideological vacuum, even if this is rare, and that the concept of the lone wolf might therefore be worth retaining.
Although Kaczynski began his anti-tech bombing campaign as a lone wolf, he has since become the leader of a pack. Just as he had hoped, his Manifesto has spawned an ideology – a public discourse of anti-tech – and inspired a cluster of anti-tech radical groups. Kaczynski is not just an extreme example of an anti-tech radical, but also the founder and lodestar of a new form of anti-tech radicalism.
In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, many of Kaczynski’s followers came from the outer fringe of the green movement. One of his early correspondents and confidants was John Zerzan, a prominent anarcho-primitivist. Another was Derrick Jensen, cofounder of the radical environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance. Kaczynski’s alliances with green anarchists and radical environmentalists were tenuous and short-lived. He ultimately fell out with Zerzan, Jensen, and their respective movements for the same reason: they are committed to many ‘leftist’ causes that he considers to be dangerous distractions. Whereas Kaczynski’s opposition to technology is stubbornly single-minded, Zerzan and Jensen see technology as only one facet of ‘civilization’, alongside patriarchy, racism, and exploitation of animals. Only years later did Kaczynski begin to attract a following that was committed to his brand of anti-tech radicalism. As he notes in his 2016 book, ‘it is only since 2011 that I’ve had people who have been willing and able to spend substantial amounts of time and effort in doing research for me’. Coincidentally or not, 2011 is also the year that the Mexican terrorist group ITS emerged.
John Jacobi, a follower of Kaczynski, distinguishes three clusters of Kaczynski-inspired anti-tech radicals. First are the ‘apostles’ of Kaczynski, the indomitistas, led by his pseudonymous Spanish correspondent Último Reducto. The indomitistas devote themselves mainly to translating and analysing Kaczynski’s writings. They comprise part of his ‘inner circle’, which also conducts research for him and operates the publisher, Fitch & Madison, which prints his books. The other two clusters are the ‘heretics’, who are inspired by Kaczynski’s writings but diverge from him and the indomitistas about the finer points of doctrine, strategy, and tactics. One is Jacobi’s own group, the wildists, which broke away from the more orthodox indomitistas to build a broader coalition of ‘anti-civilization’ radicals.The other cluster of heretics, which is my focus in this article, comprises ITS and its offshoots. Whereas the indomitistas and the wildists focus on developing and propagating anti-tech ideas, ITS is eager for dramatic and violent action.
Journalists and terrorism scholars have labelled ITS ‘eco-terrorists’ and sometimes ‘eco-anarchists’, comparing the group to Deep Green Resistance and the Earth Liberation Front. ITS itself uses the term ‘eco-extremist’, which invites these comparisons. However, ITS is not just a more bellicose variant of radical environmentalism or green anarchism. An analysis of the group’s communiqués shows that its ideology is a distinctly Kaczynskian form of anti-tech radicalism.
Although ITS was influenced by radical environmentalism, the ‘eco’ in ‘eco-extremism’ is misleading. It does not refer to ‘deep ecology’; ITS rejects the ‘sentimentalism, irrationalism and biocentrism’ that it sees in many radical environmentalist groups. Instead, the ‘eco’ refers to the group’s ideal of ‘wild nature’, which accords a central place to human nature. ITS’s central concern, like Kaczynski’s, is that ‘human beings are moving away more dangerously from their natural instincts’. Adopting Kaczynski’s ‘bioprimitivism’, as I have called it, ITS argues that ‘the human being is biologically programmed … through evolution’ for the life of a ‘hunter-gatherer-nomad’.
Although it shares the hunter-gatherer ideal with green anarchists, ITS vehemently rejects any such label: ‘we are not “eco-anarchists” or “anarcho-environmentalists”‘. The group describes as ‘delusional’ those who ‘romanticize Wild Nature’ and ‘believe that when Civilization falls everything will be rosy and a new world will flourish without social inequality, hunger, repression, etc’. This thinly-veiled attack on Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivism echoes Kaczynski’s essay, ‘The Truth About Primitive Life’, where he sets out to ‘debunk the anarcho-primitivist myth that portrays the life of hunter-gatherers as a kind of politically correct Garden of Eden’. ITS follows Kaczynski in condemning green anarchism as ‘leftist’.
Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to miss. Many parts of the group’s communiqués are merely paraphrases of the Manifesto: ‘The essence of the power process has four parts: setting out of the goal, effort, attainment of the goal, and Autonomy’. But the depth of Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to appreciate without knowing the origins of his ideas. ITS cites Morris’s The Human Zoo in support of its claim that ‘the Wild Nature of the human being in general was perverted when it started to become civilized’. The same communiqué later echoes Morris without citing him: ‘it is totally abnormal to live together with hundreds of strangers around you’.
ITS explicitly acknowledges some of its debts to Kaczynski. But this has not been enough to prevent misconceptions, because Kaczynski himself has also been lumped in with radical environmentalists and green anarchists. It is necessary to understand Kaczynski’s distinct constellation of concepts in order to appreciate the ideological distinctness of ITS. The group uses his signature vocabulary: the technological system, the power process, surrogate activities, leftism, feelings of inferiority, oversocialization, etc. This is not the vocabulary of radical environmentalism or green anarchism. With the exceptions of ‘civilization’ and ‘domination’, ITS explicitly rejects the ‘leftist’ vocabulary of anarchism: oppression, solidarity, mutual aid, class struggle, hierarchy, inequality, injustice, and imperialism. Further, as I have already shown, even the ‘green’ parts of ITS’s communiqués have been filtered through Kaczynski. ITS is not an eco-terrorist or green anarchist group, but a novel kind of anti-tech terrorist group. The group’s ideology is distinctly Kaczynskian, genealogically and morphologically.
The modus operandi of ITS is not typical of radical environmentalists or green anarchists, who tend to be saboteurs or ‘monkeywrenchers’. Environmental radicals almost always target property rather than people. ITS, on the other hand, declares that it ‘is not a group of saboteurs (we do not share the strategy of sabotage or damage or destruction of property)’. Instead, as Kaczynski did, ITS aims to kill or maim people, such as scientists, whose surrogate activities propel the development of the technological system.
Anti-tech radicals and environmental radicals have different attitudes towards violence in large part because they have different ideals. As Bron Taylor argues, environmental radicals share ‘general religious sentiments – that the earth and all life is sacred – that lessen the possibility that [environmental] movement activists will engage in terrorist violence’. As he correctly points out, there is ‘no indication that Kaczynski shared the sense, so prevalent in radical environmental subcultures, that life is worthy of reverence and the earth is sacred’. Kaczynski is instead committed to the ideal of wild nature, which serves to naturalize violence. He argues, and ITS concurs, that ‘a significant amount of violence is a natural part of human life’. Part of what it means to be a wild human being is to be a violent one, unencumbered by the fetters of civilized morality.
The ideal of wild nature helps to explain anti-tech radicals’ target selection. For Kaczynski and ITS, living things have value only insofar as they are wild, and to be wild is to be ‘outside the power of the system’. When human beings become instruments of the system, they forfeit any value or dignity that they might have had. Scientists and technicians are permissible targets of violence because they have betrayed their wild nature, and they are desirable targets because they symbolize the technological system. Whereas environmental radicals’ reverence for life tends to steer them away from violence, towards destruction of property, anti-tech radicals’ ideal of wild nature serves to justify their violence.
Yet ITS diverges from Kaczynski about the purpose of violence. For Kaczynski, violence is primarily a means to overthrow the technological system. ITS, on the other hand, argues that Kaczynski’s proposed revolution is ‘idealistic and irrational’. Not only is this revolution bound to fail; Kaczynski also falls into the trap of leftism when he models his revolution on the French and Russian revolutions. For members of ITS, violence is not a means to revolution, but a way to affirm or reclaim their own wildness: ‘the attack against the system … is a survival instinct, since the human is violent by nature’. Kaczynski condemns ITS and accuses the group of misappropriating his ideas. He hurls the charge of leftism right back at them, along with a diagnosis of learned helplessness: ‘The most important error that ITS commits is that they express, and therefore promote, an attitude of hopelessness about the possibility of eliminating the technological system’. This attitude of hopelessness gives ITS a more vengeful and nihilistic character than Kaczynski himself.
** A short thread
**Source:** <[[https://x.com/rechelon/status/1799516136645484935][x.com/rechelon/status/1799516136645484935]]>
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**nihilistgf:** book a friend gave me. no I’m not pro-ITS.
**Anon:** Counterpoint: you are an eco-fascist who has promoted ITS while pretending not to and approve of Atassa
**nihilistgf:** atassa and ITS are not eco-fascist. they’re eco-extremist. I call myself an eco-extremism because it has a lot to do with indigenous resistance. cope.
**This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists:** To be clear, ITS’s “indiscriminate attack” is code for rape. It’s a deeply misogynistic collective and anyone looking approvingly on at them is not a friend of anarchists
ITS and its english language press office Atassa are not technically “fascist” because they’re not *nationalist.* They’re just hyper reactionaries who want to exterminate everyone on the planet, delight in misogyny, praise nazis, and had an alt-right trad cath spokesman/editor.
ITS was basically just a Mexico City crew that weren’t indigenous and tried to murder anarchists, plus, in the US, a trad cath Berkeley graduate lawyer who married a vivisectionist and hosted all their content on the Atassa site back before he turned it into a journal.
Like the Mexico City ITS crew, Arturo was not indigenous in the sense of involved in any tribe or community, etc, he just had some genes and fetishized that on occasion.
He was also, and this is important, a snitch who snitched on anarchists to the FBI
[[https://web.archive.org/web/20200601041750/https://325.nostate.net/2018/11/16/eco-extremist-mafia-arturo-vasquez-submits-legal-fbi-threat-to-anarchist-counter-info-site-325/]]
Arturo *was* Atassa. He created the website and popularized it, pretty much exclusively as the press office of ITS, then later he got together a crew (of mostly white contributors like the rich WASP John Jacobi) and edited them together in a print journal version of his site.
What NihilistGF is attempting to do with the “ITS is just ecoextremism which is just indigenous resistance” is a long chain of blurrings. This turns on the fact that when Arturo published the print journal version of Atassa he included an article cheering rape of colonizers.
Later, when there was anarchist blowup over the absurdity of LBC publishing Auturo and his Atassa website as a journal, they crafted the second issue with a pinwheel design on the cover taken from indigenous americans in the most immature “this’ll get them” level provocation.
Arturo is mexican and not a member of any tribe that used said pinwheel designs, plus the tribes in question explicitly retired and forbid use of the swastika/pinwheel after world war 2. Again Arturo is a trad cath. He’s fucking catholic!
It’s completely absurd to frame ITS and Atassa as being about “indigenous resistance”, they’re anarcho-primitivists who loudly and publicly ditched anarchism for nihilism, siding with Ted K over John Zerzan. Any reference to indigenous struggle was adopted opportunistically.
Ted explicitly rejected anarchism on the grounds that he believed that a non-industrial society would be patriarchal and warring, and that this was good. John clung to basic anarchist values against hierarchy. ITS were ideological primitivists who followed Ted in this.
ITS encouraged people to blow up nuclear plants and “kill 200 million in your local bioregion” as part of a campaign to exterminate humans. That kind of edgelording has absolutely nothing to do with indigenous struggles against settler colonialism and it’s gross to pretend so.
Now a whole fucking grip of edgelords in the US *loved* ITS, fucking adored it. The “anarchist” podcast Free Radical Radio that was prominent back then and run by the rich white dude Rydra pumped out endless praise for them and their “nihilism.”
In this original context “nihilism” was explicitly chosen as a term to signify a rejection of anarchism and break from it. Like ITS, over time Rydra repeatedly denounced anarchists and presented his nihilism as a rejection of anarchism.
While in Mexico City, ITS planted a bomb at an anarchist infoshop and planned to gun down an anarchist prisoner, in the US a bunch of rich white dipshit edgelords masturbated furiously to their provocations like endorsing murdering women for sport.
These US edgelords were completely unprepared for any sort of consequences, and after some Seattle insurrectos threw hands against them and the UK insurrecto journal 325 doxed Arturo and promised to murder him, they all fell apart trying to find excuses.
LBC tried pushing the line that Atassa was unrelated to ITS (utterly preposterous), and was just a journal that “raised interesting points that anarchists should engage with.” In this backpeddling the article praising indigenous warriors raping colonizers got held up.
In this desperate twisting, folks tried to reframe the entire issue as one of “do we abet violence and collateral damage in struggle?”
In this they tried to rally a bunch of older anarchists still smarting from the ideological nonviolence wars of the late 90s.
Basically LBC could go to a bunch of their genx and boomer connections and explain the backlash they were getting in terms these disconnected olds could get and would sympathize with. “The dastardly pacifists are back!!!”
Instead of being frank about the ITS/Atassa ideological platform of killing all humans, warring with anarchists, and endorsing rape and femicide as a return to “wild nature,” the shit got reframed as “some indigenous radicals said we should use violence and people hate that.”
But the problem is of course that while LBC’s middle aged book peddlers were terrified of drawing real fire and getting punched or even bombed and murdered by anarchists like we would respond to ITS directly, a bunch of younger edgelords didn’t want to retreat at all.
So the LBC line that Atassa doesn’t have anything to do with ITS got ignored, folks continued distroing ITS communiques (Atassa’s translations, but also it’s been widely claimed that Arturo just wrote his own communiques as ‘ITS’).
But of course occasionally they need to throw out defenses online when they get too much heat.
This creates a situation wherein the bullshit defense used to reframe Atassa as *not* ITS is now applied just as opportunistically to backpropagate into a defense of ITS.
Anyway, 325’s line on ITS/Atassa was shared widely by insurrectionary anarchists: It’s that ITS/Atassa should be ruthlessly murdered by anarchists and violence should freely be used against their defenders. This is not a pacifist position.
** On eco-extremism and anarchy
**Source:** <[[http://www.autistici.org/cna/2016/05/23/chile-comunicato-del-branco-di-sabotatori-heriberto-salazar-fai-fri/][autistici.org/cna/2016/05/23/chile-comunicato-del-branco-di-sabotatori-heriberto-salazar-fai-fri/]]>
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We really do not want to stand in firm defense of every soul that sets itself up as an enemy against the state and every form of government (over man, animals and nature). We believe that — and many anarchist and other prisoners agree with this — not everyone can be friends and that it is not possible to develop a relationship with everyone.
More specifically, we want to encourage discussion about direct action groups that reject anarchy as a political goal and as a daily struggle. These are the so-called eco-extremists who relentlessly shout “death to anarchy”, rejecting their own origin and formation, an idea that nourished them through a fraternal relationship with the urban guerrilla fighters of today and the past, only to later move on to emphasize certain aspects that have always been part of anarchist milieu and its struggle for the liberation of man, our animal brothers and the earth.
Far from the constant tension that we who want and fight for a life of anarchy want to maintain, a certain trend that is considered eco-extremist throws in the trash the libertarian ideal that manifests itself through the insurgent struggle.
One small group, tied to a certain imaginary of “symbolic” peoples and to musical/alternative and university environments (they reject the university they still attend... and study what they hate so much), hates the human animal and therefore sees the enemy everywhere.
In that “wild fog”, caused by their own smugness and messianism, they include the last worker, the victim of this crappy exploitative system, among their enemies. They talk about killing workers, farmers or any other person who, let’s be honest, the discussion of our relatives over the years has not considered worthy interlocutors. Although we are accomplices, the enemy is someone else, and that is quite clear to any anarchist, libertarian, punk or nihilist. But for the eco-extremists, it is not so, in an attempt to be avant-garde and even trendy.
That is why we call on individuals and coordinated affinities who are fighting today to continue fighting for the liberation of all living beings and the earth, without losing sight of the political aspect of our actions, and the real enemies and targets.
Seven years since the death of Mauricio Morales, we salute the group “Manada de Choque Anarquico Nihilista” for its sober and insurgent action during the protests of May 1 and April 21, when they once again proved the success of coordination among affinities. In order to be clear and refute the “Maldicion Ecoextremista” page, which tried to present these acts as an act of irresponsible urban guerrillas, in order to appropriate libertarian activity!
We salute the fighters of the Paulino Scarfó Revolutionary Cell (FAI-FRI), who wrote in their statement of responsibility for the attack on the Santander Bank in La Cisterna: “ The attack has its ethics and is not indiscriminate; we have embraced the arson attack and we no longer support the ideas that are trying to spread .”
Pack of Saboteurs Heriberto Salazar (FAI-FRI)
** There’s Nothing Anarchist about Eco-Fascism
**Source:** <[[https://itsgoingdown.org/nothing-anarchist-eco-fascism-condemnation/][https://itsgoingdown.org/nothing-anarchist-eco-fascism-condemnation/]]>
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“When horror knocks at your door, it’s difficult to hide from. All that can be done is to breathe, gather strength, and face it….I shared news of the woman found in University City. From the first moment, I was angered and protested the criminalization of the victim. The next morning I woke up to the horror and pain that she was my relative.”
– Statement from the family of Lesvy Rivera to Mexican society
“[W]e take responsibility for the homicide of another human in University City on May 3rd….Much has emerged about that damned thing leaning lifeless on a payphone… ‘that she suffered from alcoholism, that she wasn’t a student, this and that.’ But what does it matter? She’s just another mass, just another damned human who deserved death.”
– 29th Statement of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS)
Some things shouldn’t have to be said, but as is too often the case in this disaster of a world, that which should be most obvious often gets subsumed to the exigencies of politics, ideologies, money, emotion, or internet clicks. The purpose of this piece is to condemn the recent acts of eco-extremists in Mexico and those who cheer them on from abroad.
This critique does not aspire to alter the behavior of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Individualities Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Wild Reaction (RS), Indiscriminate Group Tending Toward the Wild (GITS), Eco-extremist Mafia, or whatever they will change their name to tomorrow. Like any other deluded, sociopathic tyrant, these individuals have declared themselves above reproach, critique, reason, or accountability. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner; the guardians and enforcers of Truth using a romanticized past to justify their actions. As absolutist authoritarians, they have constructed a theoretical framework that, while ever-shifting and inconsistent, somehow always ends with a justification for why they get to hold a knife to the throats of all of humankind. In short, they think and act like the State.
There was a discussion about ITS on an IGD podcast from last December. For those unfamiliar, ITS and its spawn of affiliated acronyms publicly emerged in 2011 as an anti-civilization grouping that blew things up and tried to kill people they didn’t like, primarily university research scientists. In early statements, they spoke of favorably of anarchism and revolution. Over the course of just a few years and various groupings and splittings, they adopted a firm stance of rejection and reaction. They disavowed anarchism, revolution, leftism, or anything related to the social or human. They proudly adopted the mantle of eco-terrorism and proclaimed their disgust for the likes of John Zerzan or Ted Kaczynski, who they previously praised.
Unsurprisingly, through their increasing isolation and reactivity, ITS has turned into just plain murderers. (Or at least they’d like you to think so.) “The human being deserves extinction” and “We position ourselves against the human being, without caring about the use of civilization to carry out our acts” is now their creed. As such, in the State of Mexico, ITS claims it went out hunting for loggers to kill, but not finding any, they decided to ambush, shoot and murder a couple on a hike on April 30th, because, “We just want it to be clear that no human being will be safe in nature.” They suggest humans should instead stay in the cities, but then claim responsibility for the May 3rd femicide of Lesvy Rivera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, stating, “Not even in your damned cities will you be safe.” The ITS phenomenon, while beginning in Mexico, has spread throughout much of Latin America, with groups using the ITS name claiming responsibility for attacks – including attempts at the mass murder of ordinary, working-class people – in multiple countries.
Understanding what led to the creation and evolution of groups such as ITS is a topic best addressed in a separate piece. As mentioned above and in the podcast, they find their roots in the insurrectionary and anti-civilization streams of anarchism. Mexico in particular has a vibrant clandestine, direct action insurrectionary movement. Mexico is also where 99 percent of all “crimes” go unpunished, where narcos, police, military and politicians either work hand in hand or kill one another and anyone else nearby in the tens of thousands. They also team up against aboveground social movements – repression being the only language the Mexican state speaks. It is not difficult to understand, in a country being gutted by neoliberalism, where appeals to the state are met with batons and bullets, where anarchists are already blowing things up, and where everyone else with an agenda seems to be killing people and getting away with it, why a group like ITS would emerge.
Yet at the same time in Mexico, aside from a few websites, ITS and its actions have not been praised or embraced by anarchists or anyone else. This likely also contributes to the escalating violence on ITS’s part – no one really pays attention to them except to dismiss or condemn. At least one anarchist group has publicly stated its belief that ITS is a state-run operation, designed to delegitimize the broader radical movement.
It seems more likely that ITS is a genuine group that believes what it says. Whether it has actually done what it says is another matter. Some attacks have certainly occurred, but a curiously large number of ITS attacks fail or go unmentioned anywhere except in their statements. They claim this is due to the police and media conspiring to not call attention to their acts. Yet the typical insurrectionary anarchist direct action is almost always reported with precise information, photos showing the damage caused, and can be verified in corporate media reports. How ITS is so much worse than other direct action groups at carrying out direct actions is an unanswered question. That ITS killed any of the three people they recently claimed to have killed is unlikely. The statement shares no details of the killings and only includes a photo taken from Facebook. Especially with regards to the femicide of Lesvy Rivera at UNAM, ITS is likely seeking to get a free ride on the coattails of a tragedy that has generated considerable action and coverage amongst the anarchists and radicals they hate so much yet whose attention they so desperately seek.
So do we anarchists give it to them? Admittedly, even the existence of this piece is a capitulation to their attention seeking. But worse are those that promote, even implicitly, the actions of ITS. Sites such as Anarchist News, Free Radical Radio, Atassa, and Little Black Cart. The “a retweet does not constitute endorsement” excuse doesn’t fly here. As ITS says, “We’ve been warning you since the beginning.” And now they are claiming to have killed three humans simply because they were human. Will ITS fans continue to distribute the propaganda of a group that by its own admission is not only not anarchist, but proudly terroristic, rejecting of all ethics, morals, or principles of liberation? They solely exist to kill people. It should not have to be explained why such a position does not merit support. Of a less pressing matter is the way in which ITS conceives of “nature” is itself a social and civilizational construct. Their (already constantly shifting) ideological basis for murder falls apart under any real scrutiny.
Some defend the publications and discussions (or trolling, as it were) they engender because while perhaps they don’t agree with killing people, the analysis ITS presents is intellectually stimulating and worthy of consideration. If ITS did kill her, Lesvy Rivera can surely appreciate that her brutal murder was found intellectually stimulating for some. It is the peak of colonial, racist arrogance that those from the safety of their U.S. or European homes feel comfortable debating the finer points of an ideology that amounts to brown people killing other brown people. We eagerly await the publishing on these sites of ISIS or al-Qaida communiques due to their intellectually stimulating critiques of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
The only support ITS should be receiving from anarchists is encouragement that they practice their dedication to human extinction on themselves. Just as the fascists of ISIS are meeting a true anarchist response, the fascists of ITS should be called to task, rather than coddled.
** Eco-extremism and the indiscriminate attack
**Source:** <[[https://web.archive.org/web/20170721194508/https://325.nostate.net/2017/07/21/eco-extremism-and-the-indiscriminate-attack-the-church-of-its-mexico-by-l-uk/][web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/.../]]>
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“And Severino Di Giovanni’s actions were never violent for the sake of it. They were never indiscriminate or striking at anything at all in order to create a tension that would favour power and its politics of consolidation. They were always guided by a precise revolutionary reasoning: to strike the centres of power with punitive actions that find their justification in the State’s violence, and which were aimed at pushing the mass towards a revolutionary objective. Di Giovanni always took account of the situation of the mass, even though he was often accused of not having done so”
— JW & AMB, Anarchism and Violence: Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina by Osvaldo Bayer, Elephant Editions
I don’t represent any organisation or group, I am writing this from my personal perspective, as nihilist-anarchist of an anti-civilisation insurrectional tendency. I have carried out direct action in defense of the Earth, so the state and society would probably view me as an “Eco-Extremist,” although I’m unconcerned with this term as it’s become a sect-like ideology of the Church. I haven’t written before about the Church of ITS Mexico or the idiot pseudo-nihilist(s) in Italy because over the last few years they clearly became reactionary and more akin to far-right “black” groupscules.
It has been some years since the Church of ITS Mexico said something like that “the FAI doesn’t represent us,” that the “CCF doesn’t represent us”… Well I can’t recall anything like that being said by CCF or FAI or anyone else in the first place, so why is the ITS Church still issuing sermons about it now and why have they not embarked on a one-way trip far away from the black anarchy they proclaim is irrelevant and gone off into the nihilising abyss like they said they would, leaving all us anarchist nuns alone?
It was obvious to foresee what this groupscule and their related neurotic fanclub was going towards—cultish green authoritarianism, paganism, irrationalism and indiscriminate attacks—and haven’t we seen this before? Although the Church of ITS Mexico with its tiny few self-described eco-extremists and pseudo-nihilists like to pose as the most radical and truly anarchistic and chaotic latest trend that is very different and abyssal, far from anything that goes before, they are just another offshoot of an old idea with rotten roots in soil and blood, either that or they just have shit for brains.
The murders that ITS Mexico has done in their current phase and the words that accompany the actions are those of one of the enemies, no equivocation—it doesn’t matter at this point what justifications and philosophical manipulations they use to explain how they became irrationalist fanatics. Those who indiscriminately attack regular people are authoritarians and would-be dictators, mass killers, and they and their fanclub of sychophants brag and boast as such behind a myriad of regressive ideas.
Reactionary, nationalist, neo-nazi, racist and pagan networks converging inward autonomously in Europe at least, is nothing new, because for decades we can find their groups dwelling in a spectrum of misanthropic nihilist-right planes of thought, often informed by various degrees of biocentrism, traditionalism, green authoritarianism, anti-humanism, anti-progress etc. It’s easy to find their blogs with old runic indigenous obscurantism, glorification of mass murder, death camps, genocide imagery and glorification of weapons and killing.
In the UK in the 90’s, a tiny few anarcho-primitivists also flirted with this eco-fascist thinking which had seeped in amongst “when animals attack”-type stories and news-clippings about earthquakes and plagues, in the newspaper “Green Anarchist.” The idea was that indiscriminate attacks and/or mass killings of people are justified as “war against civilisation/society.” There was a split in the newspaper “Green Anarchist” about the topic (“The Irrationalists” by Steve Booth). One of the editors left and started an eco-fascist paper. Green Anarchist continued to provide lists of direct actions which were taking place and had articles and reports. The controversy came during an operation by the state against the earth and animal liberation movement which was strong at the time (so-called GANDALF operation). The state spent millions of pounds trying to shut GA down and one of their editors was jailed. Looking back on the text that started the affair it is nothing in comparison to the shit that ITS Mexico have been spewing for the last few years, a hex upon them.
Indiscriminate killings and attacks only have authoritarian outcomes, the methods are elitist and fundamentally anti-individualist. The acts end up only entrenching power and the existing strategy of the techno-industrial system. It is a very dominant and conditioned human behaviour of mass psychology to harm or kill indiscriminately. It’s what humans do to each other all the time, it gears the machine and it’s certainly not an anti-civilisation act or one that cuts radically to the social system. Each person is just pathologically programmed under the stress of society—by religion and hierarchical orders—socially coded to distrust, hate, abuse and kill others. I want something different; it enlightens me as an anarchist and a nihilist—an individual defending their life and experience of the world. Discrimination of thought, choice and action.
The last couple of months in UK there have been three spectacular indiscriminate killings: the Manchester suicide bomb against a crowd of mostly (very) young women at an Ariana Grande concert, the London Tower Bridge suicide van and knife attack, both by those inspired by Daesh, who ITS Mexico and their adoring flock seem to idolise and fetishize now, much like the rest of the misanthropic and nihilist-right; and there also was the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed unknown scores of people, arguably a massacre which had an unavoidable class basis and which is a social murder. But who cares, society is the enemy, right? In the ultra-moralising Church of ITS Mexico where they issue regular sermons you don’t have to think about things too much.
The Church and the sheep have already rejected anti-authoritarianism and “liberation,” so such concepts do not illuminate them, by their own admission, opting for a direction where from their friendless epic-loser script they endlessly preside over their dastardly marginalisation of anarchy and the extermination of humanity in the lowly and minor acts they have recently been taking responsibility for.
Their critique of the anarchist movement is both nothing new and yet deluded with ignorance about many facts and yet they want to use the names of Severino di Giovanni and Mauricio Morales to cover their cowardice. I’m no stranger to criticising civil anarchism but the Church of ITS Mexico have remained so boringly obsessionate in their anti-anarchism discourse that it is obvious that they don’t know when they are banging a dead horse. Their desperate clinging to the anarchist movement—now issuing death threats against anarchists that bother to publically criticise them—is indicative of individuals who, claiming to have shot dead a hiking couple from the bushes and choked a woman to death in a phone box at university, at heart don’t appear to feel they have any power in their own lives and obviously spend too much time on the internet worrying what others think of them whilst taking their pain out on other people. Sounds like quite a few civilised people I know except some don’t see the results of their actions. I mean, haven’t ITS actually killed some people, why are they crying about it on the internet? As the saying goes, they “gotta lot to learn” as a terrorist group. Hearing that ITS apparently got “tired of waiting for 325’s critique” is a sloppy, revealing and highly amusing admission of how much they actually do care about being the subject of dialogue and discussion amongst an (unruly and anarchic) humanity they hate!
To go back to why I haven’t bothered to write anything before now about ITS recent experiments in serial killerdom, I think just simply I had better things to do and my comrades were debating whether or not it was even worth making any critiques since, we figured, we don’t make critiques of any other random serial killers?! Why would we bother contributing to the fiction that ITS are actors with any validity by commenting on their wanton acts of pointless and sadly untargetted murders? And nor are they anarchists, saying for many years to the anarchist movement internationally that they were not interested, and were even hostile to concepts such as prisoner solidarity, internationalism, anarchist revolution (so leftist!) and so on and to just leave them alone. So we did… And so why are they now chasing after our views and after the opinions of FAI/IRF cells, anarchist-insurrectionalists, blogs of counter-information, etc. when they have been rejecting them for years and years? Why is their fanclub sending us their ridiculous texts and claims? To remind us they exist in anger and frustration? And who cares? I don’t care but the Church of ITS Mexico evidently does care and can’t bear that somehow others have a path seperate to theirs. It shows up their blatant isolationalist narcissism and sociopathic psychosis.
*** Consequences…
Reading the nationalism, racism and homophobia evident in the recent communiques of ITS, a new pathological, repetitive, singular voice trying to lash out vainly is emerging. I’m sure they will respond with a threatening old testament sermon; or is that an earthquake coming?!
Although the Church has given many sermons where they pontificate about feeling superior, laughing in fantasy, it’s striking how much they reveal their silly obssessions, psychological loops and regressive traits in public. This key weakness is certainly a sign of the regressive nature of narcissistic authoritarians, who as individuals display, collectively, unintegrated psychologies, lacking in empathic intelligence and emotional centering.
Maybe in the age of the internet the ITS Church did not know there was a far-right of maladjusted pagan eco-religious fanatics in Europe already? Join and share your savage racialist rituals of purity, blood and black metal records! The Pope of ITS Mexico should issue an immediate elect order to direct the faithful sheep to send their bible of testaments to those web-crazies of the nihilist-right and failing that, “New Scientist” magazine or some such other shit as they seem to be obsessed with, instead of bothering those nasty sectarian anarchist nuns who have excommunicated them. Wouldn’t want you to get upset and send in the inquisition after killing some women.
After banging their keyboards on anarchists for running around the world “intervening” in every topic under the sun other than killing random individuals in the name of some wacko gods, they offer out an invitation to intervene in Mexico and have it out with them! Why would anyone bother? I certainly shall stay here in my own native indigenous lands and get on with my life. If they feel that strongly, why don’t they come here? We have gangs and murders here too, not just the Queen and Cricket. I think that the ITS in “Church of ITS Mexico” stands for “Idiots Tending toward Stupidity.” Who knew that the Church was so linked to the “Mafia”? Pretty hilarious really, as it fits into their displaced wish to project a “strong” or “hard image”; “ruthless,” “organised,” “murderous” etc. The reality appears that they have dropped any individualist or nihilist-egoist values, any pretense of ecological struggle and are rather weak, conduct easy (basically cowardly), opportunistic, random and valueless actions and come across like a bunch of wet bananas with a hurting self-obsessed sociopath as leader, blowing their mouths off in public. So what’s new?
The idiots that we know of in this “Eco-Extremist Mafia” are all wee dafties, like the pseudo-nihilist fool in Italy[14] and this Greek robot of chaos, Archie the Scot[15], who are exactly the same types, socially disfunctional mal-geeks, arseholes basically and losers without a sense of humour, looking to play the bigman. They definity don’t have a sense of humour, but we guess you have to have some “human” values to have a decent sense of “humour” never mind “humility.” I mean, some of the actions we just laugh at, you are a joke, Church of ITS Mexico and faithful flock! Even the killings, you are embarassing yourself! Like a shit on a corpse! And you want the names of Severino Di Giovanni and Mauricio Morales to cover your shit?! Fuck off and die! You are a joke!! Ha Ha Ha!
I shit on your pagan gods!
Love to all the friends and comrades; imprisoned, out and on the run!
L
* Arrests & Doxxings
** The capture of Individualist Tending to the Wild member Camilo Gajardo
*** Bus stops, universities and public administration: the targets of the “lone wolf” obsessed with bombings
**Source:** <[[https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml][biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml]]>
**Date:** 09 August 2019
**Author:** Valentina González
**Note:** The information is from Felipe Cornejo
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The South Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office described Camilo Gajardo Escalona as a “lone wolf” , the 28-year-old who was arrested for his alleged participation in at least six attacks with explosive devices in the Metropolitan region.
According to the investigation, Gajardo would be behind the preparation, placement and shipment of at least five “package bombs” that reached, among others, less than the former president of Codelco, Óscar Landerretche and the president of the Metro board, Louis de Grange.
It was in January 2017 when, after 6:00 p.m., an alleged “gift” that had arrived at Landeretche’s home in La Reina ended up exploding , causing minor injuries to the then-president of the state mining company.
The following year, in April, the headquarters of the Raúl Silva Henríquez University had to be evacuated due to a bomb warning. Carabineros found a cardboard box with a battery with cables and a copper tube.
Meanwhile, in September 2018, a box with a bottle and gunpowder was found at a Transantiago bus stop on Santa Rosa Avenue, in front of the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Chile.
On January 4, 2019, the capital experienced a new explosion , when an explosive device detonated at a Transantiago bus stop, leaving five people injured.
A few months later, in May of this year, the police managed to deactivate a bomb package addressed to the chairman of the Metro board, Louis de Granje.
**After two years of investigation, the suspect is arrested**
It was in the commune of Puente Alto where the operation carried out by the Carabineros OS-9 to arrest the alleged perpetrator of the explosive attacks was concentrated, after the South Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office requested his arrest warrant in the 20th Second Guarantee Court of Santiago.
Christopher Escobar | ONE Agency
It was the result of months of investigation carried out by the prosecution, with expert reports that intensified after the latest attacks on the 54th police station in Huechuraba and the package bomb received by the former Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, in his office in the district of Huechuraba. The Counts.
And it is that despite the fact that a “group” of anarchists was always targeted behind these attacks, the investigation of the Public Ministry has revealed that it would be a 28-year-old man, the only author behind a series of attacks since 2017 To the date.
Although there were attacks that were attributed by the eco-terrorist group Individualists Tending to the Wild, for the Prosecutor’s Office it was a “lone wolf” , identified as Camilo Eduardo Gajardo Escalona.
Carabineros General Esteban Díaz explained that the procedure consisted of the arrest of the main suspect behind these attacks, as well as a search of his home to seize items that would link him to these crimes.
The police raid was carried out in the town of Atenas de Mena. At the scene, the police seized various elements linked to the making of explosive devices, without confirming whether it was a bomb with a possible future recipient.
The prosecutor in these cases, Héctor Barros, ruled out that the defendant is part of an anarchist group and emphasized that, based on the investigation, he would be the person behind the making and placement of these bombs.
Even so, the national prosecutor Jorge Abbott referred to his alleged link with ITS, pointing out that “they are organizations in which the behaviors are displayed by individual people and belong to a larger group, but they are not attached to an organization, but rather an idea ”.
Camilo Gajardo Escalona has three previous arrests since 2012, all related to the crime of public disorder.
During this day, Gajardo will be transferred to the Justice Center for his detention control in the evening block. At the moment, the South Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office has not ruled out requesting an extension of the detention, in order to carry out expert reports on the elements seized yesterday from his home and present them at the next formalization hearing, where he will face charges for the preparation, placement and shipment of explosive devices.
*** They declare guilty the “individualist tending to the wild” for explosive attacks in the RM
**Source:** <[[https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml][biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml]]>
**Date:** 02 September 2022
**Author:** Felipe Delgado
**Note:** With information from Daniela Forero-Ortiz.
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Camilo Gajardo was found guilty of planting and sending explosive devices in the capital, under the group “Individualists Tending to the Wild.” Among them are the explosives sent to Óscar Landerretche and Louis De Grange, as well as the placement of a bomb in a Transantiago bus stop.
The South Prosecutor’s Office managed to get Camilo Gajardo Escalona convicted , who perpetrated various explosive attacks in the Metropolitan region that were claimed by the group “Individualists Tending to the Wild” (ITS).
The individual was charged with the crimes of sending and placing explosive devices between 2017 and 2019 in different parts of the capital. This after an investigation carried out together with the Carabineros OS9.
**Gajardo was accused of the following facts:**
1.- The device that detonated in the house of the then president of Codelco, Óscar Landerretche , on January 13, 2017, where the charges of frustrated homicide, injuries and damages are added.
2.- An explosive that detonated on a public transport bus in La Reina, on September 28, 2017.
3.- The placement of a bomb on a bench in front of the Raúl Silva Henríquez Catholic University (UCSH), on April 13, 2018. Here he is accused of frustrated homicide.
4.- The installation of another explosive in a bus stop in front of the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Chile in La Pintana, on September 7, 2018.
5.- The explosion of a device at a Transantiago bus stop in Vicuña Mackenna with Bilbao, on January 4, 2019, also with the accusation of frustrated homicide.
6.- The sending of an explosive package to the president of Metro, Louis De Grange , on May 5, 2019, which was found abandoned and did not reach its destination.
In the trial, Gajardo was found guilty in facts 1, 3, 5 and 6 , but not in facts 2 and 4 in which he was acquitted. In addition, terrorism was ruled out.
In this regard, Louis De Grange told Radio Bío Bío that after what happened he experienced “a period of great anguish, and it was difficult to understand why this was happening to me. Fortunately, I received a lot of love and support from many people, both from Metro and from Carabineros and the Prosecutor’s Office. Today is part of the past, of the difficulties that all of us have to face”.
Gajardo risks more than 100 years in prison for what happened. Prosecutor Alex Cortez highlighted that in the explosion that affected Landerretche, the conviction for qualified frustrated homicide was achieved , the same as for the explosion in the bus stop of Vicuña Mackenna.
Meanwhile, Alejandra Rubio, Gajardo’s public criminal defender, highlighted the acquittal obtained in two of the accused crimes. Along with this, she indicated that the legal qualification for the device installed at UCSH and the one directed at Louis De Grange was finally lowered.
As he pointed out, this will lower the penalty he could obtain, which will be announced on October 19. Only then, Rubio pointed out, will the steps to be followed be decided.
*** 45 years in prison for subject who detonated bomb in Transantiago bus stop and who sent explosives
**Source:** <[[https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml][biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2022/09/02/declaran-culpable-al-individualista-tendiente-a-lo-salvaje-por-atentados-explosivos-en-la-rm.shtml]]>
**Date:** October 19, 2022
**Author:** Felipe Delgado
**Note:** The information is from Daniela Forero-Ortiz
---------
Camilo Gajardo, guilty of sending explosive devices and detonating a bomb at a Transantiago bus stop, was sentenced to 45 years and one day in jail for various crimes, including attempted murder.
Camilo Gajardo Escalona was sentenced to 45 years and one day in jail , who perpetrated several explosive attacks in the Metropolitan region and who were claimed by the group “Individualists Tending to the Wild” (ITS).
Gajardo was found guilty of various shipments and installations of bombs , all this between 2017 and 2019 in different parts of the Metropolitan region.
They declare guilty the “individualist tending to the wild” for explosive attacks in the RM
**These are the following episodes:**
1.- The device that detonated in the house of the then president of Codelco, Óscar Landerretche , on January 13, 2017.
2.- The placement of a bomb on a bench in front of the Raúl Silva Henríquez Catholic University (UCSH), on April 13, 2018.
3.- The explosion of a device at a Transantiago bus stop in Vicuña Mackenna with Bilbao, on January 4, 2019.
4.- The sending of an explosive package to the president of Metro, Louis De Grange , on May 5, 2019, which did not reach its destination.
Meanwhile, he was acquitted of the accusation for an explosive that detonated on a public transport bus in La Reina, on September 28, 2017; and for the installation of another explosive in a bus stop in front of the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Chile in La Pintana, on September 7, 2018.
The South Prosecutor’s Office had requested more than 100 years in prison for Gajardo, given the various acts for which he was convicted, where charges of frustrated homicide were added.
Finally, the Sixth Oral Criminal Court of Santiago decreed 45 years and one day in jail for him. Prosecutor Alex Cortez pointed out that the conviction was achieved thanks to the large amount of evidence obtained together with OS9, Labocar and GOPE de Carabineros.
In the breakdown, he was given 20 years in prison in its maximum degree for all placements of explosive devices. Another 20 years more for the frustrated qualified homicides of the wounded in the home of Óscar Landerretche and in the bus stop of Vicuña Mackenna.
To this, another five years were added for the injuries in the last mentioned events.
*** Camilo Gajardo and Bajos De Mena
**Source:** Siete Kabezas by Iván Poduje. Pages 148–149.
––– [[https://search.worldcat.org/title/1258686117][Worldcat]] + [[https://www.uqbareditores.cl/7-kabezas][Author’s Website]]
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Founded as a rural hamlet next to a cemetery Puente Alto, Bajosde Mena shared a lot of low-cost urban land with La Pintana, which facilitated the construction of eleven thousand homes to receive families living in camps. One of the first settlements were the El Volcán I, II and III villas, which totaled more than three thousand social housing units in five-story buildings known as blocks.
The Volcano made the news in 1997, after a storm flooded Santiago and flooded the recently delivered homes, generating indignation among the neighbors. The construction failure of the Copeva company was serious and extended to thousands of apartments that had to be covered by plastic tents to prevent them from continuing to get wet. The press discovered that the owner of Copeva had given a fine blood horse to the Minister of Housing and Urban Planning, Edmundo Hermosilla, whose distribution entails the obligation to assign the contracts and then supervise their compliance. That scandal ended with the departure of the minister.
Almost fifteen years later, the first administration of Sebastián Ptôera decided to demolish the blocks of the El Volcán villas to move the families to better quality houses. The works began in 2011 with the transformation of an old La Cafiamera garbage dump into Juan Pablo II Park and was complemented with paving projects and the creation of public spaces.
In the second government of Michelle Bachelet, the metropolitan mayor, Cláudio Orrego, promoted a comprehensive plan that combined training for leaders, control of public order and social investments to break segregation, whose symbol would be a new civic center, with a modern police station and a fire station that were inaugurated before the former president left La Moneda.
The post continues in the second term of Sebastián Pinera, who announced the extension of Line 4 of the Metro from the Plaza de Puente Alto to the intersection of Juanita and Sargento Menadier streets in the center of Bajos de Mena, which would be a key milestone for the definitive inclusion of the district to the city network. A few blocks from where that future Metro station would be located, lived Camilo Gajardo Escalona, a twenty-eight-year-old young man who every morning went to work in a mechanical workshop in the commune of San Joaquin, near the foundation center. His colleagues described him. as a shy and withdrawn guy, who limited himself to doing his job and interacted very little with the rest.
When I arrived at his house, Camilo changed. He locked himself in his room for hours browsing pages of hard anarchism, downloading manifestos and manuals to make homemade bombs. His work in the mechanical workshop helped him find parts for factories and so he began to assemble in the bedroom of his home. He also went out to try out in places with few people, such as nearby Bajos de Mena.
This is how he tried until one day he detonated the first explosive device at the Vicuna Mackenna and Bilbao bus stop, near Bustamante Park. When Camilo sent the bomb letter to the president of the Metro, Louis de Grangç, the cameras in the Post Office where he left the parcel noticed him with a suspicious attitude.
The PDI studied those records for hours and compared them with those that had been taken near Vicuna’s whereabouts Mackenna and created profiles to begin tracking several suspects, until they closed the circle. On August 6, 2019, Camilo was arrested by PDI agents and accused of being the only person responsible for the attacks on Oscar Landerretche, Louis de Grange and the whereabouts of Vicuna Mackenna. Camilo was the one behind Individualistas Tendientes a Io Salvaje. There was no European anarchist collective, nor Chilean accomplices nor Codelco mafias who wanted to take revenge and mislead the police. Camilo was a lone wolf who had become radicalized in his house in Bajos de Mena. I do not know if that urban context influenced his decision to go out and kill authorities and users or if he saw in Codelco a symbol of the State that left its population abandoned for years. His case is very relevant in this story, since it brings together several of the forces that were activated on October 18: the segregation of Bajos de Mena generated by bad housing policies and increased by public transportation, the Metro as the focus of the attack and the expectations excessive in relation to the authors. Excessive expectations about the threat posed by the attacks. It was thought that they were European anarchist cells, linked to Chileans, when in reality it was just one person. This same situation began to be seen when the first arrests were made for the attacks on the Metro and for the looting of commercial premises....
** Satanist ITS member’s communique and arrest report
*** Communique of the Individualists Tending Towards the Wild #48
**Source:** [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-eco-extremism][A text dump on eco-extremism]]
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My End is My Beginning.
Abyss rises. The sound of the tunnels is thumping to my ears. I walk in desolation into the fields of urban greyness. All that surrounds me, every ”normal” humanoid, is performing a litany towards crushing determinism. One more time I seize the opportunity to act and unleash My Hatred. I get ready not to stray from the mechanistic ”life-form”. I call upon Death and we enter in a maelstrom of the heartbeat of Chaos that transforms blood into a pumping engine in the libido of voidance that dissolves humanity attempting indiscriminate Destruction and Murder.
In extreme misanthropic skepticism and experimentation, beyond any human notion, I claim nichilistically the following attacks:
-The arson of 2 mini buses transporting elder people.
Why? Why don’t you ask the guys from the books you read to tell you why? Oh shit! They’re dead? I’ll tell you why then! Because I hate old people! Hahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahaha!!!
-A package bomb left totally indiscriminately at a central location selectively.
Why do I not think of the ”innocent” people one might think… I answer with a question… Did my birth giver’s pussy think when it was fucked to be fertilized with microscopic semen that creates the vessels that I hate? Did anybody ask me to be born? Did anyone know what I would become? Do you know that some see consciousness as a curse? Fuck you, pathetic pricks, you don’t know shit then! I do not seek justification for existence, neither do I seek someone to blame. I seek the amoral rape of existence through the injection of life passing from the Death Gate. Anti-human odium is my life’s blood, transforming my vessel into the Beast.
The joke of human consciousness and what it creates I confront with nihilistic laughter, unconscious cynicism and misanthropic passion! When I say ”fuck you all”, it might as well be the most sincere thing I have said my
whole life! I wish my scream could burn you all, but it can’t do fuckin shit! Hahahahahahahah! This is why I have to experiment with fire, poison, bombs, even if the attack fails. Next time it might not, until I satisfy my Egotistical Satanity.
I do not care at all to offer an ”alternative” to the cops’ rhetoric, I will let them have it their way, since this is not a conversation anyway! Though they broke my heart that they didn’t share my ”message” to the world! Hahahahahahaha! My acts and their claims are personalised and I will enjoy them in the way I want. In this only I make the rules. I learned what my mistakes were this time and I am not going to repeat them. But for me the experimentation is all that matters. Really beyond good and evil and not just in words.
All those who think they have theoretically banished morality make me laugh morbidly. To destroy morality one carries the knife and jabs it in the flesh till it reaches the bone. I blow myself amorally against the foundations of ethics to nihilistically recreate myself. Going beyond the normal nihilist and the tolerant attitude of internalized humanist emotional limit created by the evolutionary disease of the training epiphanies of modernity and the anthropocene.
Any judgement comes through thought. A world that for me doesn’t exist. All I hear is vomit coming out of a hole we named mouth. The correlation of thought with reality is for me as contemptible as is the human condition itself. I do not judge, I do not justify, I take the instance of Nihility and I transform it into an attack on Life and a flirt of Death. I obliterate any ethical question as a clutch of conscience that devours an organism. As a concept that conciliates its creation with the supposed ”reality”. If humans were to go extinct this instant nothing would happen except that there would be no consciousness to tell about it. What are ethics if not sophisticated human artificiality? What are ethics if not the soothing, illusory agreement of the valuer and what is valued? What are values if not a leap of faith in the continuation of ”human” existence? Values, either metaphysical or not are a branch for the human being to grasp in order not to fall into the Void of the Abyss, stare at itself, and see nothing.
In my descent there are no words to describe how I feel or who I am. Language is a useless mass of human sounds and holy scripts that limit my Ego. The foundationless Nihilism is concluded Anti-human, at least for me. If only we could be free of metaphysicality! But especially today where the image makes a host out of everyone and consolidates ideology nothing can be expected. Beyond good and evil means only one thing. Not even I am liable to re-establishing this concept. This human notion.
I am an enclosed circuit, but one that wouldn’t exist without the world that surrounds it. I am not a spirit. Nothing is ethically important. I have no important targets and others not so important. In my scorn for the human animal and its projection of existence I experiment with Total Nihilism into Unknown territory. I seek the dissolution of the limit, ”spiritual” or ”physical”, that had been imposed by man. I deny any injection of the spirit through the flesh opening the window to ideological compartmentalization. Flesh has its own life and the metaphysical gate is denied. I deny god without replacing it with anything and for this I am Satan. For every ethics and ideology I will always be Satan.
It takes one to have known the spirit in all its aspects to be able to negate it. The illusion of freedom of the ”untouched ones” by civilization, hahahahahahahahahaha, this is another form of slavery, a form of humanistic denial of reality. Misanthropy will either be real experimentation through Nihility or it will be the will of Christ. You choose. My Misanthropy is a bomb at the core of ”human existence”. I see the human condition and consequently the human being as an inherently artificial animal. Its cognition and the conciliation of the perception/ value/ judgement/ reality/ action with the world is an error. If human consciousness is a ”privilige” of ”being human”, I only see imbecility of the highest kind and I attack it nichilistically, embracing the Dead End.
Everything I write is blood, sweat, flesh and semen. This creates My Spirit that claims itself in the Moment of emanation out of the Abyss in direct contact with reality. Everything else is humanistic trash that will be eradicated through Nihilism. The human spirit runs rampant today and every word is diarrhoea blown backwards. Idealism is crushed in the same way humans are crushed like bugs by the cycles of nature. Knowing of course that every aspiration, passion and ego worshipping desire will never be the same in contact with reality. The correlation of the two is totally discarded. But this is not an impediment for me and My Will, only an admittance and realization.
I believe in uniqueness but not as an ideology which sees it as a value, but only as a reductive tool for analysing a neverending battle that can never be completed inside human nature. After Stirner became an ideology throughout the years, it was a clear example that ideology is part of human nature, and that freedom, whichever the approach, is a disease.
I ask all those who want to create an ideological consciousness, or let’s call it for what it is, conscience, where is the clear distinction between determinism and free choice? Where is the clear distinction between ”domination” and ”free relations”? I assume they have the answer in hand because all of them have lived these ”pure” relations in reality and know how to go about them. And how to synchronize their minds with others to learn how to do it! But it appears that some have taken it upon themselves to become the next relics taking their rightful and righteous place among the legacy of humanochristianism.
Just to make it clear I am not conducting an anti-anarchist war nor an anti-fascist war, these are concerns that I don’t give a fuck about. I have seen so much hypocrisy in people that I cannot forget. I have seen so much torment by ideas but also from habit, I have seen hidden but also crude moralism, I have met so many people that wasted my time, I have been betrayed indirectly and directly. My Hate has moved to other fields, I have become something else and I thank all of you for creating me!
Furthermore I claim myself as part of the international Terrorist Mafia known as ITS. Between egoist conspirators I accepted a criminal offering on the basis of common interest. This is no spiritual union like those of the anarchists. I am not an Eco-extremist, I am a Nihilist Misanthrope as I like to call myself. Of course words mean nothing and are used in a specific context and for my own benefit.
”ITS is no longer a merely eco-extremist group but is nourished by the strongest egos, the most isolated solitaires and the most resentful individuals with civilization / humanity, within ITS there are people who do
not share spirituality either, they do not have beliefs, they do not have deities or anything like that, and we respect that completely, for the purpose is destruction and not so much “creed affiliation” or any other affiliation to some rotten and decadent ideology. That is, we want to make ITS a unique group, primordial, that represents everything we think and do, that is a latent danger, constant and mobile to act anywhere, unstoppable and dangerous.”
-X
We unite on the basis of egoistic respect, for concrete things that we share, for the materialization of our instincts against artificiality and not for the spiritualization of our desires, that dissolves the foundations of anarchochristianic solidarity and seeks to maximize power amongst interests for destruction of this humanistically pious world.
”The expansion of knowledge and egocentric experimentation are very important for individualists like us, climbing animalistic violence to more extreme degrees makes our personal war unique, so that we can experience and nurture our experiences, at the end of the day ITS is just a timeless meeting of individuals with a desire for destruction, where you can learn and teach with tangible facts, destroying the idea that a “terrorist group” “must be” a circle where only rotten ideologies are shared among the members. The passion above all!”
-X
Misanthropos Cacogen is a lover of nihilist anti-political violence. Terror inside the pettiness of this world is fun! My attempts for ”unholy” pleasure and murder are not over yet. All aspects of humanism are dead! Long live Death! Who would have the power to face the intensity of Nihil and survive? Then the question that arises is, who would become a Nihilist instead of a christly ”contemplator”?
Nihilist aggressor, Misanthropos Cacogen – Individualists Tending towards the Wild
*** ‘Eco-terrorist’ who planted bomb in Edinburgh park jailed
**Source:** <[[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/16/eco-terrorist-who-planted-bomb-in-edinburgh-park-jailed][theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/16/eco-terrorist-who-planted-bomb-in-edinburgh-park-jailed]]>
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Nikolaos Karvounakis had placed improvised device at Princes Street Gardens in January 2018
Nikolaos Karvounakis, 35. Photograph: Police Scotland/PA
A self-styled eco-terrorist who planted a viable homemade bomb in a popular public park in central Edinburgh has been jailed for more than eight years.
Nikolaos Karvounakis, originally from the Greek island of Crete, had placed the improvised device packed with 58 nails and sections of metal pipe in a shelter at Princes Street Gardens in January 2018.
Written on the flap inside the box were the words “fuck you all”. The device included low grade explosive, and a primitive but disconnected fuse made from a light filament and a battery.
Army explosives experts believed that had it been made operational or accidentally detonated, it would have been capable of causing significant injuries, the high court in Edinburgh heard. Karvounakis later claimed to be linked to a fringe group accused of eco-terrorism which originated in Mexico.
It took nearly two years before Karvounakis, 35, a former Greek national serviceman, was arrested. In December 2020 Police Scotland counter-terrorism officers received intelligence from European counterparts linking him to the offence. DNA taken from tape used in the device was found to belong to him.
Six weeks after the device was found, the Edinburgh Evening News received an email headed “International Terrorist Group in UK”. It contained a link to an extremist website where Karvounakis had anonymously claimed responsibility with a picture of the device and signed “Misanthropos Cacogen”.
Speaking for the prosecution, Angela Gray, the advocate depute, said Karvounakis claimed to be a “lover of nihilist anti-political violence” and to support an anarchist terror group Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje. The group has been blamed for bombing a nano-technology lab in Mexico City in 2011 that seriously injured a robotics researcher.
Gray told the court: “This is known as ITS, an abbreviation of a Spanish phrase translating to ‘individualists tending to the wild’. This Mexican terrorist organisation was formed during 2011. The group focuses on eco-terrorism, which involves acts of violence committed against people and or property in support of environmental causes.”
John Scullion QC, Karvounakis’s defence counsel, said he had been struggling with anxiety and low self-esteem, and had spent increasing amounts of time online. There he had drifted into conversations with extremists, whose beliefs he now repudiated.
Scullion said his client, who pleaded guilty to an offence under the Terrorism Act, had intended to cause disruption but had not planned to injure people, so had left the detonator unconnected. “It is fair to say he now bitterly regrets what he did and will bitterly regret it for the rest of his life,” Scullion told the court.
Lord Braid jailed Karvounakis for eight years and four months, and said he would have been jailed for 10 years had he not admitted his guilt and had no previous convictions.
“The offence involved a high degree of culpability on your part as shown by the significant degree of planning,” the judge said. “Afterwards you appeared to exult in the commission in your claim of responsibility.”
Det Chief Supt Stuart Houston, Police Scotland’s head of counter-terrorism, said: “The ideological beliefs held by Karvounakis were unusual.
“His reckless actions showed utter disregard for the safety of anyone within Princes Street Gardens [and] there is no doubt his presence and engagement online after the event could have easily encouraged others to carry out similar acts, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Not just in Scotland.”
** The doxing of the eco-extremist propagandist Abe Cabrera
*** Who is *[censored]*, a Paralegal or an Eco-Extremist Mafia?
**Source:** <[[http://web.archive.org/web/20181023133745/https://325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk/][web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk]]>
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*[censored]*
*[censored]*
*[censored]*
Telephone: *[censored]*
ES: ¿Quién es *[censored]*, un asistente legal o uno de la “Mafia Eco-Extremista”? — https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/2018/09/19/ee-uu-quien-es- *[censored]* -un-asistente-legal-o-uno-de-la-mafia-eco-extremista/
[[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/2018/09/22/mengungkap-art-cabrera-mengungkap-gereja-its-bag-i/][BAHASA: Mengungkap Art Cabrera! (Mengungkap Gereja ITS bag i)]]
DE: Wer ist *[censored]*? Ein Anwaltsassistent oder ein Oeko-Extremist? — https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/2018/10/07/wer-ist- *[censored]* -ein-anwaltsassistent-oder-ein-oeko-extremist/
Let’s help pull back the curtain on the so-called “Eco-Extremist Mafia” and expose them a bit more with the aid of our contacts. Tracking and collecting information on our authoritarian, fascist, reactionary and irrationalist enemies is part of our activities as anarchists. This “Mafia” have said they have been hiding in the shadows for a long time, but possibly this one has been hiding in the broom cupboard with the envelopes, papers, pens and computers.
“Art Cabrera” is *[censored]*. Who is “Art Cabrera”? That is the editor of the eco-fascist journal Atassa, which is the English language mouth-piece of the [[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/2017/07/21/eco-extremism-and-the-indiscriminate-attack-the-church-of-its-mexico-by-l-uk/][Church of ITS Mexico]], ‘Individualists Tending Toward the Wild’.
*[censored]*, a piece of trash who is responsible for translating and spreading so-called ‘[[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/tag/eco-extremism/][Eco-Extremism]]’ from the United States, is trying to advance his reactionary doctrine whilst living a completely fake and inauthentic double-life. We are happy to publish his real name, photo and workplace contact details to cause him problems, minor or major. Since *[censored]* has always been very glad to serve the Church of Eco-Extremism, instigated [[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/itsgoingdown.org/its-attacks-anarchists/][death threats against our anarchist comrades]] and is believing he is untouchable, we take great delight in doxxing him. This is the company he works for in his real life, not the fantasy one where he is the boss of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” in America:
https://www. *[censored]*
Maybe some of the anti-fascist and anarchist comrades in America would like to contact his workplace and his wife to warn her that he is a dangerous member of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”, all their contact details are to be found there.
*[censored]* is a paralegal in his day job. If he isn’t fully lying, his day job is supposed to be legal work for migrants, but he claims he voted for Trump. Considering the infusion of corporate espionage these days, it’s just as probable that a troll like *[censored]* might just as well be a corporate spy, as a deluded fantasist authoritarian. According to the workplace website of his real life, *[censored]* graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in Latin American Studies, and he works primarily in the area of employment-based immigration law. It also mentions that *[censored]* spent considerable time in both Mexico and Argentina, and is fluent in Spanish, which certainly fits the picture of a Berkeley University graduate who travelled abroad and thinks himself rather clever.
That this simple-looking, ugly, bald, fat-necked Catholic asshole has convinced quite a few supposedly radical ‘anarchists’ and ‘nihilists’ to join the Choir of the ITS is hilarious, more fool them. This is who Aragorn and LBC is willing to get into bed with just to irresponsibly try to stir shit up. *[censored]* is a fucking loser and should be used as target practice. Shot, stabbed, beaten, burned, whatever. Come to Europe, *[censored]*, on a speaking tour and promote your book, let’s see what will happen to you. May there be some willing anarchists of praxis near-by who will put you out of your misery, you misanthropic waste.
And, as what most of us suspected to be true, the editor of Atassa is a Catholic, ex-Liberation Theologist, with a Marxist back-story. *[censored]*’s wife works for the same Legal firm, her name is *[censored]*. Apparently, neither *[censored]* nor *[censored]*’s kids know about his online eco-fascist “Mafia“ life at all. *[censored]* studied Biomedical Engineering in Texas A&M University and has a doctorate in Neurobiology from the University of *[censored]*. Are they not similar studies to those ITS targeted in Mexico?
Maybe *[censored]* wants his wife dead, raped or maimed too in his secret life.
*[censored]*, maybe it’s time to tell your wife *[censored]* and your kids that you believe in [[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/325.nostate.net/2018/07/10/of-indiscriminate-attacks-and-wild-reactions-usa/][rape culture]], [[https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230609/https:/itsgoingdown.org/mexico-unam-femicide/][femicide]], and indiscriminate terror in the name of your newest religious concept, Wild Nature. Or does *[censored]* already know you had a ‘Wild Nature’, a Janus? Is there something else that also is as two-faced and inauthentic in *[censored]*’s inner life that expresses itself in a life lived in deceit? Let’s find out.
L.
Thank you to our source.
*** More non-news about the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”
**Source:** <[[https://web.archive.org/web/20181023133745/https://325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk/][web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk]]>
-------------------
Our last release [https://325.nostate.net/2018/09/15/who-is- *[censored]* -a-paralegal-or-an-eco-extremist-mafia-usa] of information about the so-called [[https://325.nostate.net/2017/07/21/eco-extremism-and-the-indiscriminate-attack-the-church-of-its-mexico-by-l-uk][“Eco-Extremist Mafia”]] caused a commotion in the Church of ITS Mexico. Without giving them the oxygen they require in their parasitic nature on the international anarchist movement which they need to survive, we release a report and reply to the smears and idiocy of their position.
Within 12 hours of the doxxing of *[censored]* being released, the so-called ITS “Mafia”, who virtually live on the internet now, were so upset they had to describe the age and dryness of my Vagina! And take responsibility for the “massacre” beating of an anarcho-punk after a Zapatista rally last December! What is there left to say either to or about these misogynist, misanthropic, psychopathic high priests of the ITS death-cult?
Predictable smears from the post-truth ITS, who take responsibility for actions they have not done, imitating a tactic of IS/Daesh, and now, calling us “cops” who apparently emailed the UK police to inform them that the laughable ‘Archie the Robot’ “Archegonas” is responsible for the ‘Misanthropos Cacoguen’ ITS bomb that was indiscriminately left in a busy street in Edinburgh, Scotland where young people hang out and meet each other. Hilarious! And the basis for this? That a mainstream newspaper reported that cops received the communique (which reads more like a psychotic meltdown), from a Riseup.net mail server! It is more likely that the ‘Archegonas’ or another member of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” did such a stupid act just to cause shit for Riseup, as they hate it so much, and now print lies against us as befits them. After years of shit from this idiot ‘Archegonas’, is this all that he and ITS can achieve? No, their words and texts reveal it all, and we are fucking laughing at the Church of the ITS Mexico and their choir-boys. That is the tactic of their silly smear, now repeated by some delusional idiot in Brazil. If that is the extent of their logic, it is no wonder that they have made the ideological and practical mistakes which have taken them to the abyss of shit, taking responsibility for minor homicides and planting bombs in public places with the sole intention of hurting as many people as possible. Eco-fascist scum.
After almost ten years of threats, smears and attacks, we are fighting back with some of the means we have, and we will continue to collect and publish information about the [[https://325.nostate.net/tag/eco-extremism][Eco-Extremists]]; the same as we do with the fascists. This is a known anti-fascist tactic proven to work, and we are not afraid of any reprisals. This tactic is an open source method to alert true comrades to the location and identity of their enemies: Our comrades who have been repeatedly smeared, threatened and harassed by this cringing little ITS gang. It has nothing to do with the police, we don’t give a fuck about the police, it is for us. Our comrades are using this tactic to great effect in UK, Germany, Spain, Australia, Canada, United States, Greece, Italy, Netherlands and everywhere that there are anarchists of action. Since ITS have always made it clear that they intend to kill us, that they are not anarchists and their actions and their ‘philosophy’ are not anarchic, we owe them nothing, nor do we owe their sheep-like supporters in America or Europe anything. The Church of ITS is nothing more than the murderous and mentally disturbed acting-out of any ordinary psychopath to whom we equally owe no allegiance whatsoever. We are not sure why they think they can demand any silence from us on the grounds of, what? Comradeship (or not even)? Criminalism? Don’t make us laugh, the ‘code of the streets’? ‘Moralism’ from those who don’t believe in anything? As one of our comrades in America wrote to us, “Funny how the nihilists turn into politicians as soon as another side draws a line in the sand and says enough is enough”.
The Church of ITS is an opportunistic authority of those that try to throw enough shit until some of it sticks, the classic tactic of fascists and bosses – “repeat a lie enough times and it becomes true”, propaganda at its best, written like the liars that they are. In the typical way of ITS, they try to use the words of other anarchists against us, in this case the [[https://325.nostate.net/tag/conspiracy-of-cells-of-fire][CCF]]. We cannot and will not speak for our comrades of CCF, but in the quoted section by this minor ITS Brazil loser, CCF are describing their relationship to those they have worked with, not those who are already enemies and targets. Information regarding targets is to be circulated, and ITS are now Eco-fascist targets, having always eschewed any anarchist solidarity and comradeship. Maybe there was a time in the past there was some confusion as to the destination of the Church of ITS Mexico and their choir-boys, but now it is clear and has been for so long. Where are the original comrades of ITS? Where has the intelligent and articulate writing concerning technology and the direction of the techno-industrial-society gone? Disappeared in injuries, in arrests, not made public? Disappeared into hatred, fear and terror? Reduced to the garbage of blogs and social media? The international anarchist space is much more than this, and ITS needs conflict and division to feed their project, which has been given a platform by some of the most irresponsible shit-stirring post-modernist gamers and book-nerds in Europe and USA.
ITS and their sub-groups are simply vile, abusive performers in their own sick circus of hate and homicide. If we have the ability to fuck with them and make things difficult for them, even disrupt or attack them, then we will. Especially their “Eco-Extremist theorists” like *[censored]* and co. If it is possible for us to arrange for dozens and dozens of comrades to travel to Iraq and Syria to fight IS/Daesh, then we can send a few comrades to Mexico and Brazil. We are not scared, come and try to attack us, we will obliterate your wee dafties ‘Wildfire Cell’ and ‘Archegonas’. It’s not a problem for us, they know that they have never even emailed us to arrange a meeting in all this time. Same goes for the pathetically proud and thin-skinned ‘Maldicion Eco-Extremista’, what a joke. We have been emailing you, why won’t you meet our people in Mexico? Is it because your IP address is in Berkeley, San Francisco? The Church of ITS are nothing but cowards playing games, using the anarchist space for their own entertainment, just fucking scum who will get hurt and die soon.
*[censored]*, ‘Abe Cabrera’. Now he has problems. Both himself and Guillory, his partner ,‘removed’ from the website of their employer, and here we publish his address, as a response to the smears of ITS. This is how your ‘indomitable’ translator and “theorist” *[censored]* ended up. A coward, and his “comrades” all betrayed him in public and left him for the dogs. That is the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”, the “theorists” who will go “forward”. The deafening silence from the “eco-extremist theorists” is really revealing after all the baiting, smears and threats taking place. And for each new provocation of the Church of ITS we will add the fire to the flames for the Americans and those we find in Europe. That each threat and attack will be answered.
*[censored]*
*[censored]*
*[censored]*
Telephone: *[censored]*
*[censored]*’s house is a $250,000 family home, not in the Latin American “Jungle” nor the “Ghetto”, nor the “Favelas”. He’s just another poser and fake like the rest of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”. As part of our doxxing campaign, let’s look now at the emails we received from *[censored]* via the Atassa email account as *[censored]* tried to formulate an exit-scam and mitigate the impact we had on his life. These emails reveal a lot about his character and state of mind, and that of an “Eco-Extremist theorist”…
–
From: Atassa
Date: Sunday, September 16, 2018, 4:21 am
Subject: You Win
While we only have a vague idea of who told you that paralegal guy is the master mind behind all this, it’s evident that you care about this stuff more than we do. So you win. We’ve disappeared and you will never hear from us again. We wish you well in your projects.
–
Yes, *[censored]* wishes us well. What a cowardly piece of shit. He immediately ceased his Atassa project and took down every online evidence that Atassa existed, helped by the pseudo-comrade Aragorn/LBC, who continues to distribute the Atassa book-journal; hell, everything helps sales, right? *[censored]*, who was translating the ITS texts, helping ITS/MaldicionEE write texts, make threats and glorifying in the murders, buckled so quickly. He even sent this next email shortly after, just to beg us a little more to save his miserable life, here it is.
–
From: Atassa
Date: Sunday, September 16, 2018, 5:12 am
Subject: You Win
Also, in exchange for taking down the supposed doxxing post against Mr. *[censored]*, we can offer a public retraction of the Atassa project which you can publish on your site. You can assess whether that retraction is enough to end this whole business. We are not entirely unsympathetic to your aims and regret any damage that our actions have caused.
–
A retraction to “regret any damage that our actions have caused”. I had to repeat that, because it is just so beautiful. The Church of ITS Mexico who gave a long pontification about my old ‘anarcho-cop’ Vagina, and who had so much faith in *[censored]*, and in his Catholic vivisectionist wife [https://325.nostate.net/2018/09/16/ *[censored]* -wife-of-eco-extremist-mafia-is-a-vivisectionist-usa], and this is how he repaid them. Beautiful. *[censored]* has no idea how much danger he is in, maybe now he’s starting to understand. What did the so-called “comrades” of *[censored]* have to say about it? Nothing. They dumped him. All of them.
–
From: Ramon Elani
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 7:10 am
Subject: Re: 7
Thank you for sending this to me. I no longer have dealings with this person or his project.
for the wild
ramon
–
Thanks Ramon, for confirming *[censored]* was Abe Cabrera, you did the right thing and it’s good to see that kind of solidarity “eco-extremist theorists” show each other.
–
From: Ramon Elani
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 8:56 am
Subject: Re: Betrayal
yes, i’ve long since regretted my involvement. though i still feel that my essay was misunderstood.
for the wild
ramon
–
Poor Ramon, he’s so misunderstood. As a co-editor of the ‘Black Seed’ garbage journal distributed by Aragorn/LBC, which tries to mix green anarchism and eco-extremism, and insert this toxic poison into the international anarchist ‘movement’, you are not misunderstood. It was clear in the decision to print the text ‘To the World Builders’ and it’s inclusion in the [[https://anarhija.info/library/anarchistlibraries-net-en][‘The Anarchist Library’]] what the position is you all have taken. Post-modern crap theorising around rape culture and murder, fuck you and die.
Elani is so “misunderstood” that the shit eco-academic-activist philosophy and creative writing project ‘Dark Mountain’, has published his new text, where he takes the opportunity to fully renege; disavowing property destruction, sabotage and attacks. So much for the “indomitable” Eco-Extremist theorists, what cowards.
–
From: Armenio Lewis
Date: Sunday, September 22, 2018, 1:46 pm
Subject: Atassa
I dont even know how to really word this so im gonna make this simple.
ALL participants and friendlies around the atassa project have reached out to me hoping I can, for lack of a better term, alleviate any animosity over the atassaproject.
Abe went off the deep end. What started as theoretical exploration of violence with no one except abe actually declaring and supporting ITS
Nobody wants beef, I’m just a middle man relaying this.
You can email back, call @ +150********, or completely ignore.
Fuck with abe all you want, he deserves it, but everyone else doesnt.
–
There it is; there is “ALL the participants and friendlies around the Atassa project”, which we assume includes LBC/Aragorn totally throwing *[censored]* under the bus just to save themselves any bother. They must seriously underestimate us to write such ridiculous shit – Ah, just a “theoretical exploration of violence”. What a fucking collection of cretins. So much for the claims of the Pope of ITS Mexico about their “theorists”, these people couldn’t theorise themselves out of a paper bag.
“Eco-Extremism” is an opportunistic trend of parasitism, online fakes and sacred beliefs, recycling on facebook, twitter and the “altervista” or “wordpress”. Although they would like you to think that their groups are spreading, instead they are dwindling, with a few people traveling between countries (or staying put in Mexico!) and believing in their sacred misanthropic mission. A mission which is expressed as hatred of women, hatred of anarchy, and ‘humanity’.
What we did find out, was that a few months ago *[censored]* promoted on his summer reading list on Atassa Facebook, the book “Iron Gates,” which is a fascist written and published book that is set in a concentration camp. Part rape fantasy, part pro-Nazi propaganda. It’s also one of the ‘go-to’ texts promoted by Atomwaffen Divison in the USA, which is like the American version of National Action (Neo-Nazi group in UK). A lot of comrades have pointed to a potential cross over between the Eco-Extremist material and Satanic/Neo-Nazi crap like Atomwaffen who has killed about half a dozen people in the US.
Yeah, so much for all these “theorists” and ITS “cells” that like to philosophise about what is and what is not “fascism”, and how dare the ‘anarcho-cops’ call them fascists.
We specifically warn against this EE tendency because of the potential for cross-overs with the nationalist-autonomous & nationalist-anarchist, neo-nazi and indigenous pagan “white tribe” eco-fascists who target the dredge of the anarchist scene with their irrationalist, green authoritarian and runic occult bullshit.
In the last text-threat from ITS Brazil, where they blame the Hambach Forest defenders for the death of the comrade who fell from the trees, we find the jealousy, the resentment, the bitterness of those who understand nothing about what it is that we are fighting for. In all the texts from ITS these past years we find a gross lack of understanding of what the anarchist ideas are and what anarchist methods are. Instead we just find a perverse and fanatic pathology and a weakness, leading to their ongoing blatant failures and authoritarian outcomes.
The “Eco-Extremist Curse” remains a joke, and for all the lies and smears that come from their mouths, we will target those that come within our reach.
As one of our comrades remarked “keep on threatening me with the evil-eye, come on…”
From my vast, old, soul eating Vagina…
L.
*** “Eco-Extremist Mafia” [censored] submits legal & FBI threat to anarchist counter-info site 325
**Source:** https://325.nostate.net/2018/11/16/eco-extremist-mafia- [censored] -submits-legal-fbi-threat-to-anarchist-counter-info-site-325
-------
Just as we had been convinced that the eco-extreme/nihilist-right “Mafia” could not get even more ridiculous, we were sent this email below by the comrades of [[http://nostate.net][nostate.net]]. It’s a threat via their domain provider by the boss of the North American ‘indomitable’ “eco-extremist theorists”, *[censored]*, editor of eco-fascist journal Atassa to call the FBI. After all those other ‘indomitable’ ‘comrades’ of his [[https://325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk][hung him out to dry]] the only thing for him to do is threaten to call the police.
This threat the eco-fascist makes is nothing but a gift to us and shows what the pope Atassa is really about. A miserable snitch fantasist who thinks he can mock and threaten without consequences, moving around online spaces and blogs promoting the indiscriminate terrorism and authoritarianism of the [[https://325.nostate.net/2017/07/21/eco-extremism-and-the-indiscriminate-attack-the-church-of-its-mexico-by-l-uk][Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS)]] whilst attacking anarchy. A Catholic flea attached to the anarchist space and the controversy of spreading death threats against comrades, mixing up anarchist ideas with irrationalist and religious ones.
*[censored]*, informer and worthless coward, doesn’t he think that the FBI and dozens of other security agencies don’t already monitor our site? Doesn’t this “Mafia” already know that if our small organisation can find out exactly where he lives, who he associates with, where he works and spends time, then the FBI might also know exactly who and what he is? *[censored]* always was a useful idiot to the arms of the State, just like the entire “Eco-Extremism” trend.
Counter-information is an ongoing, continuous practice directed towards our anarchist, nihilist and anti-authoritarian aims. It really doesn’t matter to us if our site is taken down, it will be back in one form or another. Everything will continue.
Solidarity to the comrades fighting against authoritarian and misanthropic trash.
–
Dear Sir or Madam: My name is *[censored]*, and I live in the United States. I have been the target of a harassment campaign based on mistaken identity from a site that you host, namely: [[https://325.nostate.net][325.nostate.net]]
The offending links are listed here:
https://325.nostate.net/tag/ *[censored]* -art-cabrera-eco-fascist
https://325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk
As you can see, my picture, a picture of my wife, and my address have been posted on that site, as well as death threats. Due to the nature of the threats, I do not believe that the webmaster would take these articles down. Please advise if you believe that this content is acceptable according to your current policies of website hosting, otherwise we will be forced to investigate legal action, as well as inform the FBI. Their posting of my address and our pictures on their site is not acceptable. Please find my contact information below. I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely, *[censored]*
phone: *[censored]*
email: *[censored]*
* Atassa; Readings in Ecoextremism — Issue #1 (2016)
**Source:** <[[https://opendistro.net/taxonomy/term/86][opendistro.net/taxonomy/term/86]]> & <[[https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=614][littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=614]]>.
** [Front Matter]
*** [Title Page]
Atassa:
Readings in
Ecoextremism
Atassa #1 2016
licensed under creative commons
® @ (§)
*** [Contents]
Presentation — the editors
The Flower Growing Out of the Underworld: An Introduction to Eco-extremism — Abe Cabrera
The spilling of blood on the paths of “absolute truth” — Orkelesh
Apostles and Heretics — John Jacobi
ITS: The Invisible Menace — Regresión
Sighs — Lunas de abril
Lessons Left by the Ancients: The Battle of Little Big Horn — Regresión
The Return of the Warrior — Ramon Elani
Atassa: Lessons of the Creek War (1813–1814) — Abe Cabrera
The Seris, the Eco-extremists, and Nahualism — Hast Hax
(Roma Infernetto-“Shit World”) To Profane and Devour — A member of the Memento Mori Nihilist Sect
Regresión #3 Editorial
Indiscriminate Anarchists — Seminatore
** Presentation
Atassa is the Muskogee word for “war club.” The atassa was the symbol of the Red Sticks, a faction within the Muskogee or Creek nation that from 1813 to 1814 fought against the encroachment of white settlers on their lands in what is now the states of Georgia and Alabama in the present-day United States. For us, it is a symbol of a war that came too late, too late to save their sacred ground and rhythm of life, too late to fight the mass of invaders who would transform the land into something unrecognizable. Nevertheless, the war was fought, because their instincts, and arguably the land itself, demanded it.
Eco-extremism has no presence in the United States or in the English-speaking world. It started in Mexico as an illegalist tendency, not at all concerned with proselytism or popularity, and has since spread to other countries to the South and in a certain form to Europe. Those involved in this journal are thus not eco-extremists, and we don’t advocate that anyone consider this journal an exhortation to action or advocacy for illegality. Like the corridos (ballads) also coming from the South celebrating the actions of figures of the drug trade, we are here to “tell it like it is,” not changing anything or condemning any of these actions since we don’t find that attitude particularly helpful. Like the narco-corrido, our only message is: “This exists, and you have to think about it, whether you like it or not.”
We hope that our little labor will serve to inform and inspire a different perspective in the Anglophone reader.
With Wild Nature on our side.
the editors
** The Flower Growing Out of the Underworld: An Introduction to Eco-extremism
Abe Cabrera
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
(The one hope of the conquered is to not hope for salvation.)
--Virgil, The Aeneid
If death comes we will keep destroying things in hell; disgusting world, I will laugh as I see you falling, in this eternal confrontation...
--Eleventh Communiqué of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild, 2016
Eco-extremism is one of the newest schools of thought in our time, but more than a school of thought, it is a plan of action, an attitude of hostility, and a rejection of all that has come before it in techno-industrial society. Born out of various radical ideologies such as animal liberation, insurrectionary anarchism, anarchoprimitivism, and the neo-Luddism of Theodore Kaczynski, it has germinated and sprouted forth into something entirely other: into a love poem to violence and criminality; a radical ecological vision where hope and humanism are overcome by the barrel of a gun, the explosion of the incendiary device, and the knife stalking human prey in the darkness. All of its true adherents are currently unknown. It is not an ideology that was formed in the academy or even in alternative political spaces. Its writings can only be found (some would say ironically) on anonymous sites on the Internet. Eco-extremism was formed in the shadows, and will remain there, a clandestine threat until all eco-extremists are captured or killed... that is, until others take their place.
Shortly after I wrote my essay in Ritual Magazine, “Towards Savagery: Recent Developments in Eco-Extremist Thought in Mexico,” the main group described in that essay, Reacción Salvaje (Wild Reaction) disbanded (in August 2015), citing a new stage of their struggle and development. Many of the websites that I used for my research also went silent or announced their end. Nevertheless, eco-extremist rumblings could be heard in the south, echoed via the news stories on the Internet. Groups such as the Pagan Sect of the Mountain committed attacks in Mexico State and other parts of that country, using the same rhetoric against the “hyper-civilized,” and without concern for morality and mass technological society. One of the main journals of eco-extremism, Regresión, continued to be published out of Mexico.
By January of 2016, new eco-extremist websites and even an extensive video documentary on eco-extremism emerged online. By the end of the month, the First Communiqué of the re-founded Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (Individualistas Tendiendo a lo Salvaje, ITS) was issued on the main eco-extremist website, Maldición Eco-extremista, as well as on anti-authoritarian news outlets. Soon, it began to emerge that the continuation of ITS had spread to other countries, namely, Chile, Argentina, and later Brazil, along with allied Nihilist Terrorist groups in Italy. Eco-extremist texts have been translated into languages ranging from Spanish and English to Turkish, Czech, and Romanian. Eco-extremist actions in the last calendar year have ranged from arson, bomb threats, indiscriminate bombings, to the murder of a scientific worker at Mexico’s largest university. To our knowledge, no one has yet been arrested or investigated for these crimes.
Recent eco-extremist theory has emphasized action above historical study and theory. Much of the polemical energy earlier this year was consumed by a defense of “indiscriminate attack:” that is, bombing, shooting, arson, etc. that does not take into account innocent bystanders, but strikes at a target regardless of what collateral damage might result. Other issues of contention have been the relationship between nihilism (the idea that ITS and other ecoextremists do not believe in a future and fight in the here and now for no particular strategic goal) and egoism, primitivism, animism/ paganism, and individualism. In what follows I will discuss essential terms and concepts that I hope will clarify eco-extremist language and rhetoric. It should be noted at the outset that eco-extremism does not aim for absolute clarity for the impartial observer, but rather seeks to stimulate affinity in those who are similarly at odds with technology, artificiality, and civilization.
Eco-extremism is a tendency that seeks to recover the wild. It exalts one’s ancestral warrior instincts and declares war on all that is civilized. Eco-extremism is embodied in individual ecoextremists hiding in plain sight who emerge with cold ferocity at the opportune time. The eco-extremist is an individualist in that he defies the prohibition of the collective or community, any community, to fight, injure, maim, or kill. No collective has the authority to tell him or her what to do, as they have all forfeited their (non-existent) authority with their continuous war against Wild Nature. Along with the renunciation of the collective is a renunciation of hope or any “future primitive.” Eco-extremists believe that this world is garbage, they understand progress as industrial slavery, and they fight like cornered wild animals since they know that there is no escape. They look death in the eye, and yell, “Hoka Hey!” (Today is a good day to die.)
Eco-extremism is violent resistance that mimics the reflexive reaction of Wild Nature itself against what seeks to alienate and enslave all living and inanimate things. It is against the artificiality of modern society, and all that subjugates human instinct to a “higher end.”
Let us, however, start to define our terms.
Wild Nature: Wild Nature is the primary agent in eco-extremist war. The philistines oppose the invocation of Wild Nature as atavism or superstition, but they do so merely out of their own domestication and idiocy. Wild Nature is all that grows and is manifested on the planet in animate and inanimate objects, from pebbles to oceans, from microorganisms to all of the flora and fauna that have developed on Earth. It also encompasses all of the stars, galaxies, moons, suns, meteors, etc. More specifically, Wild Nature is the acknowledgement that humanity is not the source and end of physical and spiritual reality, but merely a part of it, and perhaps not even a major part. Eco-extremism, insofar as it thinks about epistemology at all, is based on realism as governed by our animal senses and instincts. As Chahta-Ima stated in his essay, “What do we mean when we say, ‘nature’?”:
Nature exists because the human mind is weak and limited. It is mortal, it is made of flesh, and ultimately this is its limit, even if we can’t see it. It’s playing a game with the rest of existence, and it will lose. The existence of nature is the limit of thought. It is the fact that all things are not for us, our thoughts do not make things: the things are there for the taking, and would be there without our intervention.
In other words, we are not gods, we are not spirits, precisely because those things don’t exist as we have come to understand them. Our thought does not and cannot comprehend everything, which is why it is so miserably unreliable.
Eco-extremism thus posits a pessimism concerning human endeavors and achievements, whether these are physical, spiritual, or moral. That is why it opposes civilization, especially in its technoindustrial manifestation. Modern civilization seeks to subjugate all to itself, and its hubris is its downfall. Eco-extremists seek to be instruments of that downfall, though they do not believe that they can bring it about themselves. More importantly, Wild Nature is found in us primarily in our instincts and in feeling the groan of the Earth in the face of the destruction caused by civilized life. This tendency seeks (albeit imperfectly) to recover beliefs based in the mountains, deserts, coasts, swamps, forests, animals, phases of the moon, and so on.
Many eco-extremists hear the call of their ancestors who resisted their subjugation. When Wild Nature speaks it does so in the language of their Teochichimeca ancestors, the Selk’nam, the Yahis, the Navajo, the Maoris, the European barbarians, the Waranis, the Taromenanes, the Seris, the Toba, and any other group that fought against the extinguishing of their ancient way of life. Wild Nature is thus within us, in the individuality that refuses the thought and morality of civilization and domestication. Individualism: More than a philosophical current, individualism is an important tactical choice within mass society. It’s the decision to become a wolf in the midst of all of the sheep. It is the decision to look after one’s own interest and act accordingly. Individualists learn from solitude and look for self-realization because they have understood that one can no longer abide by the norms and customs that civilization has dictated to them. Individualists deny accepted morality, and they reject the values taught to them from birth. They don’t wait to take initiative, but rather join together with those of similar disposition to improve their theory and practice. Individualism is a weapon against the progressive collectivism imposed by the system. As one eco-extremist wrote:
‘I and afterwards I!’ I cry trying to finish off my domestication, breaking the bonds of useless relationships, launching headlong into a war against civilization and its slaves. Against its collectivism, its altruism and humanism. Death to the relationships founded on hypocrisy! Long life to sincere affinities! My allies who fight this already-lost war along with me know: For me it will always be me before them, and vice versa: their ‘I’ before my ‘I’. Thus we will continue since we are amoral and egoist individuals.
Individualist eco-extremists are cautious and spiritual, they love deeply and when they hate, they don’t forgive. They are indiscriminate when they act, as well as cold and calculating. They prowl about with guile just like the fox, and camouflage themselves in urban and rural landscapes. Eco-extremists use everything at hand to accomplish their goals, yet they try to bind themselves to the sacred past knowing that the time for peace is no more. They seek to offer their victims as a sacrifice to their ancestors and the Earth itself. As in many of the past wars against civilization, the driving force behind it is neither morality or justice, but vengeance.
Indiscriminate attack: The modern progressive mind objects to indiscriminate attack since it has not yet been able to shake off Western morality. For eco-extremists, acting indiscriminately is one of the primary methods of attack. To attack indiscriminately is to strike a target without regard for so-called innocent bystanders or collateral damage. While eco-extremist individualists usually take aim at targets that are significant to the techno-industrial society (government ministries, universities, transport vehicles), individualist terrorists do so with the intent of inflicting the maximum amount of damage, and this includes human casualties. As ITS expressed in its Fifth Communiqué of this year,
We consider as enemies all those who contribute to the systematic process of domestication and alienation: the scientists, the engineers, the investigators, the physicists, the executives, the humanists, and (why not?), affirming the principle of indiscriminate attack, society itself and all that it entails. Why society? Because it tends toward progress, technological and industrial. It contributes to the consolidation and advance of civilization. We can think of all who form part of society as being mere sheep who do what they are told and that’s it, but for us it’s not that simple. People obey because they want to. If they had a choice and, if it were up to them, they would love to live like those accursed millionaires, but they rot in their poverty as the perennially faithful servants of the system that enslaves us as domestic animals.
Eco-extremism carries out indiscriminate attacks as an echo of Wild Nature itself and to show that its hostility toward society is real. Tsunamis don’t suddenly stop when they reach poor neighborhoods, alligators don’t distinguish between the innocent and the guilty in their nocturnal hunts, and hurricanes don’t attack people according to race. Eco-extremism is part of that cycle of action and reaction. The time for revolutionary action has long passed, and eco-extremists aim to carry out a real war, with real casualties, and actions that are not merely symbolic but actually draw blood.
Nihilism: Nihilism is primarily a refusal of the future. As I described in my essay, “Primitivism Without Catastrophe,” human societies at all levels, but especially techno-industrial society, are exceedingly complex, made up of as many unwieldy parts as there are people. Thus, any aspiration to shepherd people into a collective course of action, whether it is humanism, socialism, liberalism, or even anarchism will not work, and will be opposed by those who seek to resist their own techno-industrial enslavement.
In the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” (as they like to call themselves) there are Nihilist Terrorists, particularly in Italy. These nihilists adhere to the position that true nihilism is active nihilism or it is not at all. It is no use to speak of one’s “nihilism” or “egoism” while one pays taxes and obeys traffic laws. Such a purely passive egoism or nihilism is perhaps more akin to Buddhism or the philosophical nihilism of the 19th century, which upholds all of the things that condemn one to be a cog in the great societal machine, but offers some sort of invisible integrity or purity (or a particular “emancipated space”) akin to “spiritual liberation.” Active Nihilist Terrorism, as practiced by the Memento Mori Nihilist Sect and others, seeks to attack what obviously enslaves the individual to society, and that attack must always be a physical attack against real targets such as machines, buildings, etc. and the humanoid automatons who build and run them. All other manifestations of nihilism or egoism are no better than Christian or Far Eastern asceticism.
The pure blow to life that flows at the margin of ‘living.’ I am the criminal nihilist who denies obsolete humanity, transcending the moral-mortal human, existence in an identifying and categorical representation in equal evaluations.
Nechaevshchina, “Nihilist Funeral”
Paganism/animism: Eco-extremism is founded on pagan animism, and it attempts to rescue ancestral deities that have often been forgotten by Christian/secular society. For both deeply personal and strategic reasons, the eco-extremist seeks to revive the worship of the spirits of the Earth and to offer sacrifices to them. The strategic component is to renounce and oppose the philosophy of secular scientism upheld by some anarchists who cry, “No gods, no masters!” Eco-extremists acknowledge the need for spiritual authorities, even if these are poorly understood or mostly forgotten, as they still ultimately determine the course of life and death. No warrior can make war on his own: there are always greater forces at work, ones that even techno-industrial civilization cannot dominate. In the eco-extremist war, in spite of tactical individualism, a spiritual component is needed to carry out an attack against this putrid society and get away with it. It also reminds the eco-extremist that ultimately whether he or she lives or dies is not up to them, but up to forces that have been and will be, even after we are gone. As Halputta Hadjo stated in his monograph, “The Calusa: A Savage Kingdom?,”
[The eco-extremist] can lash out or he can surrender, but whatever he does, he does within the blindness and impotence of his own carnal nature. That is no reason to give up, and it is no reason to despair. It is every reason, however, to revere those forces that created things this way, and these are the ‘spirits’ or the ‘gods’ of a specific environment, whatever you want to call them. The attitude of ecoextremists is undying hostility toward technological civilization in the name of the spirits that are his lost patrimony.
Like the savage warrior of the past, the eco-extremist is reminded that, while the scalp and blood of the enemy might be his in the short term, in the long term, his fate is to decay like all flesh, with his spirit rejoining the wind and the dust. The eco-extremist does not run from his “spooks,” his “dark side,” or his ignorance, but embraces them to give him courage against the enemy. These are his gods, his own guardian spirits that are emissaries from Wild Nature. He does not require the mathematical rationality of the domesticated to act, but acts out of instinct with understanding to strike at his foe. His one solace is that he too is Wild Nature, that its lament is his lament, that its ultimate victory will be his own, even if he will not live to see it with his physical eyes. In the end, all lofty sentiments and ideas are a mere heartbeat away from being extinguished, which should give the eco-extremist a sense of urgency in the fight against domestication and artificiality.
*** Conclusion: War with an expiration date, war without end
Eco-extremism is the tragic sense of life embodied in our epoch. It is a product of the contradictions of our time, of the haziness of anthropological scholarship, of the renunciation of political action, and of the contemporary ideological impasse. This tendency knows that this impasse will not be solved by better philosophies or moral codes, but only in the destruction of all that exists, including the “hyper-civilized” (i.e. all of us). Techno-industrial society is a problem that should have never existed in the first place, and all of the defects and contradictions of eco-extremism as an ideology are the result of society’s contradictions reflected as in a distorted mirror. There is no solution. The only appropriate response is fire and bullets.
This attitude puts the eco-extremist at odds not only with the authorities of techno-industrial society, but also with other so-called radical groups. There are no “call outs” or expressions of solidarity in eco-extremism. There is no attempt by eco-extremism to morally or philosophically justify itself. Innocence or guilt never enter into the eco-extremist calculus. Indeed, this tendency eagerly absorbs the so-called worst aspects of modern society, including common criminality, without any lawyerly effort to justify itself through the logic of civilized justice. The recent introduction to the essay, “The Calusa: A Savage Kingdom?” highlights the societal actors and groups that eco-extremism seeks to imitate in our time:
‘The Calusa: A Savage Kingdom?’ teaches a valuable lesson; namely, that much can be learned from both the small nomadic groups and the great pre-Columbian civilizations. Here there is no danger of falling into a theoretical ‘contradiction,’ as eco-extremists can reference the Selk’nam as well as the Mayas. They can refer to the experiences of petty criminals as well as those of the large mafias; the Guatemalan gangs as well as the rigid organization of the Islamic State. That is to say, eco-extremists are free to refer to whatever they like, without any hint of morality, with the only condition that it gives a particular useful lesson concerning the planning and execution of their war.
Theoretical eclecticism is only countered in the eco-extremist with single-mindedness in violent attack. The eco-extremist has cast off his or her affinity with the hyper-civilized and sees virtually everyone as an enemy. These individualists have come to value attack more than their very lives, as countless other warriors and savages have done before them. They don’t ask for help from those whom they have come to see as at best useless, and at worst the hated adversary worthy of death. The eco-extremists are already on the radar of the authorities of the countries where they operate, and beyond. They are under no illusion that they will be able to evade them indefinitely.
Wild Nature corrodes civilization little by little with entropy as water diminishes a stone. Along with climate change, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, new individualists resisting their domestication will take the eco-extremists’ place, perhaps mindful of those who have come before them. We are now entering an age of extremes, an age of uncertainty, where leftist illusions and conservative platitudes can no longer prepare us for our future course. The individualist will continue to be an invisible menace, immune from the moral coercion of the herd, and working in the complete privacy of his or her own thoughts and desires. The masses may rage and the authorities lament, but there will always be pockets of destructive refusal, emerging like sparks in the dark only to go out again, until this society is ground into powder, and the spirits of all warriors go off once more to hunt in the land of the ancestors. Axkan kema, tehuatl, nehuatl! (Until your death or mine!)
November 2016
** The spilling of blood on the paths of “absolute truth”
Orkelesh
Blood, my blood, impetuous against the lament of the multitude. Cold, in its wandering red, in the middle of and on the pavement of “absolute truth.”
The heart beats in an atrocious manner, I feel the necessity to act. What thing is this, who is it, which or what innate force is within me?
I feel, it ascends and comes forth, it excites my senses and rejects the order that I should give it.
What is within me, beating red blood, that which I perceive is the unknown and the hidden roaming among relations, within them, interested and disinterested, they serve my existential project. Today, like yesterday, the vagabond turns in search of the extreme, of the destruction of the truth, which impacts reality, it doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t exist for the “I”? That’s it!
I look and it surrounds me, the swarm of “emotional” people who say “yes” and “excuse me,” they don’t hear and they don’t know what they are for themselves... to snatch their apathetic essence of life.
I smile and hide in a false suit, I walk in the thought of the enigma and resolve.
Bitch humans, prey that takes and carries, to suction the vital liquid, that congeals their truths, the bottom of their miserable existence.
Moral fear is felt, I have to do what I want, to do harm with my brutal instinct, to slice and copulate intensely.
Lascivious and impure desire, irrational and bloody, descendant of sudden death.
Blood, my blood, impetuous against the lament of the multitude.
** Apostles and Heretics
John Jacobi
*** Introduction
Several years ago when I left high school, I became a homeless anarchist. During that time I was introduced to the works of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. The pointed arguments in the man’s manifesto convinced me (this was unsettling for me when, halfway through it, I learned of the author). More importantly, it put words to many of the problems I had with the world around me. In response, I began several failed projects and then started one that stuck, The Wildernist, which I used as a means to connect with some of Kaczynski’s associates in Spain—the editors of Ûltimo Reducto (UR), Anonimos con Cautela (AC), and Isumatag, who I will call indomitistas. Eventually I succeeded, and my conversations with the groups, especially UR, introduced me to a landscape of eco-radical ideologies hidden to the ignorant observer.
For example, around this time, I learned more about ITS. My knowledge until that point went only as far as this: they were a terrorist group in Mexico that had been inspired heavily by Ted Kaczynski--differing from him only in that they didn’t espouse revolution--and had produced eight communiqués (which I had read). Some missing pieces of the puzzle quickly revealed their origins. First, I learned that the main project of the Spaniards thus far has been translating Kaczynski’s works into languages other than English. The Portuguese version was finished up just when I started corresponding with the group (this explains why Kaczynski had requested a Portuguese-English dictionary from me several months before). But the Spanish version had been finished by UR long ago—and published right around the time that ITS appeared on the scene. In the back of this edition was an essay by UR, “Izqui-erdismo,” which I translated for the second issue of The Wildernist.
All this indicated, just as we had all suspected, that ITS was a group of amateur criminals who found the ideas appealing, but who were responding primarily to Kaczynski’s call for revolution—and were in disagreement with it. UR himself voiced these suspicions in his critique of ITS, written right around their fifth communiqué, which marked a drastic change in their discourse, as one can observe by reading the sixth, seventh, and eight communiqués. Later, the suspicions were confirmed when ITS published their fullest critique of the indomitistas to date, “Algunas respuestas sobre el presente y NO del futuro” (Some answers about the present and NOT the future).They note that they were indeed influenced by UR and Kaczynski, and that they vigorously disagree with the idea of revolution, preferring instead to act now as terrorists. Only later would they explain the ideological foundations of this view, which I will explain more fully later on.
The indomitistas, especially UR, are not fans of ITS, and they do not want to be connected to them. Indeed, UR seems to view ITS as a thorn in his side, not a tolerable splinter group. Nevertheless, I noticed that the eco-extremists continued to use language and terms that the indomitistas had been using and that I had popularized in The Wildernist: progressivist, humanist, etc. I also became weary of UR. While brilliant, he is difficult to work with, sometimes naive, unnecessarily incendiary... To illustrate, one might note that his critique of ITS—a terror group—began with a note on their grammatical inconsistencies. And in his critiques of my own writings, he would take great, exaggerated issue with phrases like “more or less” because of their ambiguity. It was getting to be a bit much, and I felt I could be more effective as an autonomous actor. So I broke away. The result was the journal Hunter/Gatherer, and a more popular growth of wildism, another unique take in the family of ideologies related to Kaczynski’s anti-industrial critique.
As the wildists grew, we changed our discourse in places where we disagreed with the indomitistas, such as the ubiquitous use of the ill-defined term, “leftism.” Instead, we used the terms “progressivism,” “opportunism,” and “humanism.” To our surprise, ITS followed suit. Other aspects of our language also appeared in ITS’ communiqués, magazine, blogs, and texts. It seemed that even if there were disagreements, some eco-extremists read and were influenced by the newsletter and the wildist tendency.
In other words, although there are sharp lines delineating complicity and ideological loyalty between the groups, the content of the ideologies differ in what would appear to the outsider as cause for only minor squabbles. Indeed, should any group burst from their obscurity, they would probably be known most by their common influence and primary progenitor, Ted Kaczynski.
And this is not entirely unjustified, since each of the actors are, due to inherent ideological similarities, drawn to pay attention to the others. A map of influence, then, would look very much like a tangled web, one that this essay will explore.
*** Kaczynski’s Crusade
Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, is a US terrorist known for his 17-year bombing campaign as the group F.C., which targeted individuals involved in technical fields like computing and genetics.
In early 1995, the New York Times received a communiqué from F.C. in the mail:
This is a message from F.C....we are getting tired of making bombs.
It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal, or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.
The bargain offered by the group was simple: publish its manifesto, and it will stop sending bombs.
The manifesto, entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, was a 35,000 word polemic detailing the threats that industrial society posed to freedom and wild nature. At the crux of the document’s analysis was a concept called “the power process,” or an innate human need to engage in autonomous goal setting and achievement. Despite this psychological necessity, “in modern industrial society, only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs.” As a result of the mismatch between human need and industrial conditions, modern life is rife with depression, helplessness, and despair, and although some people can offset these side effects with “surrogate activities,” the manifesto says that these are often undignifying, menial tasks. Interestingly, these concepts have numerous parallels in contemporary psychology, the most notable similar idea being Martin Seligman’s concept of learned helplessness.
Ultimately, the manifesto extols the autonomy of individuals and small groups from the control of technology and large organizations, and it offers the hunter-gatherer way of life as a vision of what that kind of autonomy might look like. Still, the end of the manifesto only argues for the practical possibility of revolution against industry (rather than a complete return to hunter-gatherer life), and it outlines some steps to form a movement capable of carrying out that revolution.
Hoping that it would allow someone to identify the perpetrator, the FBI encouraged the New York Times and Washington Post to publish F.C.’s manifesto. The two newspapers took the advice, and the manifesto was soon published as an eight-page insert to the Washington Post, with publication costs partly funded by the Times.
The FBI was right about the manifesto: it did help someone identify the author. Shortly after the work’s publication, David Kaczynski contacted a lawyer to share his suspicion that the Unabomber was his brother, Ted. After examining the submitted evidence, the FBI raided the man’s home, finding everything they needed to put him on trial for the crimes of the Unabomber.
After a circus of a trial, Kaczynski ended up pleading guilty to the Unabomber crimes, and in turn he was given a life sentence and sent off to the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado.
The response to the manifesto, while certainly not without a fair share of criticism, included many positive comments from well-adapted and successful members of society. One of these people, Bill Joy, was the inventor of the Java programming language and the founder of Sun Microsystems. In other words, he could easily have received a bomb from F.C. Yet in 2000 Joy wrote his now-famous essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he describes his troubled surprise when he read an incisive passage on the threat new technologies pose — only to discover that the passage was pulled from the Unabomber Manifesto. “He is clearly a Luddite, Joy writes, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in [his] reasoning...”
Other reactions have been similar. Journalist and science writer Robert Wright famously stated, “There’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.” And political scientist and UCLA professor James Q. Wilson, the man behind the famous “broken windows theory,” wrote in the New York Times that the manifesto was “a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper. If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane.”
Perhaps most striking, however, was how much the general public expressed adoration and fascination with the Unabomber.
“I’ve never seen the likes of this,” said one criminologist, “Millions of people ... seem to identify in some way with him. ”
Kaczynski was arrested and on trial during the early age of the internet, and fan websites quickly popped up all over, including the famous Usenet group, alt.fan.unabomber. Stickers appeared that said “Ted Kaczynski has a posse;” t-shirts appeared that had the famous Unabomber sketch and the word “dad” printed on it; and many organisations contributed to a nationwide Unabomber for President campaign. “Don’t blame me,” one campaign ad said, “I voted for the Unabomber.”
Even now Kaczynski has his open advocates. For example, David Skrbina, a philosophy of technology professor at the University of Michigan, corresponded with Kaczynski for years, edited a book by him, and has written several essays supporting genuine engagement with Kaczynski’s works. One of the essays is provocatively entitled “A Revolutionary for Our Times.”
So as uncomfortable as this might make some, the man’s terrorism was profoundly successful at getting his ideas in front of an enormous population. Not only was the manifesto published, in full, by the New York Times and Washington Post, it was also published in numerous smaller publications; it was placed all over the internet, including one of the first internet portals, Time Warner’s Pathfinder; it was stored in government and legal databases and archives that would ensure his ideas lived on indefinitely; and it elicited the insight and commentary of countless intellectuals and public figures, among other things. In all, the manifesto reached an astoundingly large audience, which mostly consisted of everyday Americans, and which ensured that even if no individual or group took the ideas seriously immediately after publication, it would remain stored in countless places, waiting for potential future actors to be inspired. As of yet, no one has suggested a plausible alternative that Kaczynski could have taken to publish his text with the same amount of influence, response, and immortality that he achieved through his terrorism. As Skrbina puts it, “In the end, we are appalled by Kaczynski—because he won.”
*** The Apostles
But Kacynski is still alive, and may win even more battles before his death. Since his arrest and imprisonment in 1995, he has cultivated an impressive network of penpals that includes professors, artists, scientists, authors, and some activists. The most interesting group in this network, however, are the indomitistas, or converts to Kaczynski’s ideology who are dedicated to doing the necessary work of revolution.
Well-numbered, the group’s primary influencers are the editors of UR and Isumatag, publications in Spain advocating Kaczynski’s anti-industrial revolution. Other public representatives of the group include Anonimos con Cautela from Mexico and some blogs run by Portuguese indomitistas.
As noted before, much of the work of the indomitistas was not particularly original. Indeed, they mostly did menial tasks, like translating Kaczynski’s manifesto into Spanish and Portuguese, or rehashing the specifics of Kaczynski’s ideology in their publications.
But there was one original effort they worked on closely with Kaczynski, and it was primarily led by UR: an ongoing formalizing of their ideology, with philosophical and scientific rigor (rather than with the flatter and more populist rhetoric Kaczynski himself used in his manifesto and other propaganda).
I hesitate to explain the specifics of the indomitistas’ take on their ideology, because the best word to describe the group is “picky”—in fact, not all of them even like the term “indomitista.” Attempting to outline their beliefs is an exercise in futility, because inevitably some small aspect will be wrong, misstated, or not stated just right, to which some individual, probably the editor of UR, will respond saying in an exaggerated manner that the outline was damaging to the cause.
It is best, then, for me to forego a broad overview for a concrete example that will illustrate exactly what the indomitistas were trying to do. It was, to put it simply, an exegesis of Kaczynski’s manifesto. (This is why ITS’ epithet for the indomitistas, the “apostles of Kaczynski,” has pointed accuracy.)
For example, in Industrial Society and Its Future he writes,
94. By ‘freedom’ we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation, or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a small group) of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence: food, clothing, shelter, and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly, and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see paragraph 72).
But later, when Professor Skrbina worked with him to publish a collection of his writings, he added a postscript noting that some aspects of his manifesto were outdated or somewhat wrong. He specifically mentions his definition of freedom above,
Último Reducto has recently called attention to some flaws in my work, [some] serious ... in the second and third sentences of paragraph 94 of ISAIF I wrote: [see above]. But obviously people have never had such control to more than a limited extent. They have not, for example, been able to control bad weather, which in certain circumstances can lead to starvation. So what kind and degree of control do people really need? At a minimum they need to be free of “interference, manipulation, or supervision... from any large organization,” as stated in the first sentence ofparagraph 94. But if the second and third sentences meant no more than that, they would be redundant. So there is a problem here in need of a solution. I’m not going to try to solve it now, however. For the present let it suffice to say that ISAIF is by no means a final and definitive statement in the field that it covers. Maybe someday I or someone else will be able to offer a clearer and more accurate treatment of the same topics.
To resolve this problem, UR advocated dropping the term “freedom” completely and replacing it with the term “wildness.” Under his framework, there was capital-N Nature, all-that-is, the same way the physicists would use the word. Some of this Nature is dominated by humans or technics, called “artifice;” other aspects of Nature remain untrammeled by humans or technics, called “wild Nature.” UR argued that this framework was a better one to express the ideology, because “freedom” is too ambiguous: freedom from what, freedom to do what, and freedom for whom?
UR pointed out that Kaczynski already implicitly answered these questions in his manifesto.
183. But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be for something as well as against something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, wild nature: Those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).
184. Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several reasons. Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the opposite of technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of the system). Most people will agree that nature is beautiful; certainly it has tremendous popular appeal. The radical environmentalists already hold an ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology. It is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries many different kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become really devastating. To relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to create a special kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society. Granted, this will not solve all problems. Industrial society has already done tremendous damage to nature and it will take a very long time for the scars to heal. Besides, even preindustrial societies can do significant damage to nature. Nevertheless, getting rid of industrial society will accomplish a great deal. It will relieve the worst of the pressure on nature so that the scars can begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of organized society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human nature). Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people can live. To feed themselves they must be peasants, or herdsmen, or fishermen, or hunters, etc. And, generally speaking, local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other large organizations to control local communities.
—and—
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example … But threats to the modern individual tend to be man-made. They are not the results of chance but are imposed on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated, and angry.
Here is becomes clearer what kind of freedom Kaczynski is talking about: the ability for nature, including man’s nature, to function with relatively little domination from other men or their technical systems. In other words, he advocates wildness.
Though this seems like a pedantic point, the distinction counts as a time when the pickiness of the indomitistas was beneficial, since there are some vital differences between “freedom” and “wildness” that ITS touches on later in their communiqués. Indeed, although ITS shuns excessive theorizing, it actually does function from a fairly thorough theoretical basis that was strongly influenced by Kaczynski and the indomitistas.
For example, there is a difference between advocating freedom from an oppressive government and advocating wildness for human nature and society. In fact, if it is in man’s nature to form oppressive governments, then the two would be synonymous. Analogously, one might consider the absurdity of advocating a wolf pack’s liberation from the tyranny of the alpha wolf, because the alpha wolf structure is manifestly an expression of their natures, and to enforce something contrary to their natural tendencies would require taming or eventually domesticating them.
Both the indomitistas and the eco-extremists also advocate the distinction because of the way it distinguishes eco-radical demands from the demands of green ideologies influenced by dominant values. For example, anarcho-primitivists advocate what they call liberation, in the context of gender, race, class, and animal moral standing; but Kaczynski (and the indomitistas) argue that the natural, primitive human being sometimes lived in societies that treated animals cruelly, had strict gender roles, were ethnocentric, and were stratified to a degree more severe than the primitivists are willing to admit. Of course, not all societies had all of these elements, but since some did, and in their natural condition, then a group advocating the restoration of wild human nature would not be able to espouse moralities that would require hypocritical technical coercion to enforce.
The indomitistas, point by point, combed the same intellectual razor through the entire manifesto, eventually creating a glossary of theoretical terms like “Progress,” “progressivism,” “humanism,” “leftism,” and “techno-industrial society.” They also formalized the moral foundations of Kaczynski’s critique by, intentionally or not, drawing on an age-old philosophical distinction between “natural” and “artificial” values. The specifics of the ideas are explained in UR’s untranslated dialogue, entitled “Con Amigos Como Éstos,” with a neo-Luddite group in Spain, and all of them strongly influenced the eco-extremists, especially in their first phase as ITS.
*** The Heretics
ITS issued its first communiqué in 2011, and the influence of Kaczynski and the indomitistas was immediately obvious to anyone familiar with their writings. Indeed, that the indomitistas had just finished the official Spanish translation of Industrial Society and Its Future helps explain why ITS decided that then, of all times, was the moment to act.
But ITS was never as enamored with the strict Kaczynski line as the indomitistas were. Their initial communiqués even featured aspects typical of left-wing discourse, like substituting the -a and -o in gendered nouns for -x, which the indomitistas had already unequivocally distanced themselves from. They also, wittingly or not, seemed heavily influenced by anarchist insurrectionist theory, even though they deny as much in a response to Isumatag’s critique of them.
Despite the mild syncretism, by and large the ITS of 20112014 only rehashed Kaczynski’s core arguments and the other, secondary clarifications the indomitistas had added since then. They spoke of the power process and “dominadora” (a term important to UR’s early work), and even mimicked the foonote-heavy, academic style typical of Kaczynski and his followers.
They made clear, however, that they had one major reservation with Kaczynski’s ideology: they did not believe that revolution against the techno-industrial system was possible. Their reasoning at the time was mostly practical. Techno-industrial society, they said, was like a many-headed hydra that could not be defeated in the simplistic manner that Kaczynski imagined, and argued that he probably only still believes in revolution because he is unfamiliar with how rapidly the 21st century embraced biotechnology, computing technologies, and artificial intelligence.
The indomitistas, predictably, did not react very well to this, but at first they gave what was, for them, a surprising amount of leeway in their critiques of ITS. UR, for example, though harsh, explicitly avoided the “worn and generally sterile debate” about violence, and he seemed to want to correct misconceptions more than condemn, and distance himself from, the group. But ITS only became more convinced of its disbelief in revolution, dog-whistling as much in their communiqués until they finally acknowledged in public that they had been responding to the indomitistas all along. This “exchange” of sorts ended bitterly. ITS began mocking the indomitistas as the “apostles of Kaczynski,” proudly declaring themselves heretics who were not so naive as to believe in revolution. UR speaks of the group now with very little concern for politeness. And in his very first letter to me, Kaczynski condemned the group and disavowed any relationship to them.
As ITS realized it wasn’t going to convince the indomitistas, they rebranded themselves Reaccion Salvaje (Wild Reaction) and enlisted other eco-terror groups nearby under the same moniker. The ideological turn was stark. Although they still used Kaczynski’s general framework to critique industrial society, they now put concerted effort into distinguishing themselves from him and, of the indomitistas, UR in particular. They stopped using terms like “the power process,” unique to the Unabomber manifesto, and developed their own terms like “hyper-artificial.” They also abandoned the apostles’ signature writing style for more colloquial communiqués and began expressing complex theoretical ideas in easy-to-understand, populist terms. For example, earlier in their history they went to great lengths to explain why they fought, even though they believed it was likely, or perhaps even definite, that they would die or be imprisoned by the end of it; with their new phase, they abandoned carefully reasoned arguments (at least in their communiqués) for an elegant analogy: We, they write, are like the bee who stings its enemy even when that sting means certain death. And by most measures, this was a definite advance for their cause, since most people do not have the wherewithal to comb through the morass of abstractions that was their original rhetorical style.
Most importantly, a few core aspects of their doctrine changed. For example, whereas their argument against revolution began as a mostly practical one, as they transitioned into Reaccion Salvaje, they emphasized that revolution was undesirable even if it were possible. They noted how revolutions are aberrations of modernity, only possible because of a distorted view that the mass imbues the individual with meaning. But they were not attempting to respect the masses, to progress, to revolt; they were ready to disregard the mass for the individual completely, to regress, to react. Their decision to engage in terrorism transformed from a mere expression of hopelessness at the failed prospects of revolution and into a celebration of individual resistance. Terrorism was to them now an act of rewilding their own natures.
With their now total embrace of a terroristic strategy—which they call a “war on nerves”—ITS changed on two other core doctrines distinguishing them from the indomitistas. The first was a move away from strict philosophical materialism, which did not accept the existence of anything supernatural, to a revivalist version of animism, which in the context of the Mexican eco-extremists amounted to reclaiming ancestral religious beliefs. This change was fundamental, since originally the group mimicked UR’s talk of objective Truth, and condemnation of mysticism as a psychological abnormality. They wrote in their fourth communiqué:
ITS’ explanations do not have anything of magic, fantasy, or mysticism, because Wild Nature, like Technological Dominating Civilization, are two aspects with great prominence today, although they daily enclose Nature, reducing it to nothing and to uncertainty.
For ITS, Nature is not a goddess, it is not our mother, nor anything like this. Nature is what it is, it is an objective and pointed absolute; to qualify it, adore it, or idealize it would be to fall into irrational sacredness, which we are completely against.
These views and their differences are elaborated slightly in an interview I conducted with an eco-extremist propagandist, published in the sixth issue of Hunter/Gatherer. Ultimately, because the differences in metaphysical beliefs among eco-extremists is reduced
to personal choice and does not significantly affect other aspects of the ideology, the change is not worth exploring more in depth here. For now, it is sufficient to explain the change in terms of ITS’ new rhetorical framework: in rewilding their own natures, they would do the best they could to reclaim the belief systems natural to the human psychology, and they would not apologize for it.
This idea of rewilding human nature, however, did come with one last doctrinal revision that had a profound impact on ITS’ place among eco-radical ideologies. I speak of their infamous defense of “indiscriminate attack.” In their second phase as ITS, they write:
We salute those who attack indiscriminately this compromised society, just as we rejoice in the arrows that pierce the bodies of loggers in the Amazon and surrounding places. It fills us with joy when tornadoes destroy urban areas, as well as when storms flood and endanger defenseless citizens. The same is the case when we see those who freeze to death in the cold winter, or when we see people wounded in earthquakes, for these are responses and reactions as well to the Technological System and civilization. We learn from nature and its violent reactions. Nature doesn’t stop when faced with subways, or rural or urban buildings. It doesn’t respect the common citizen or the scientific specialist. It is relentless, it destroys everything in its path without consideration for morality. With this, we are personifying in animist style Wild Nature...
In other words, ITS had transformed the Kaczynskian framework into a family of ideologies that primarily functioned to justify a relentless terroristic strategy against human civilization. They had criticized the “apostles of Kaczynski” before for placing too much emphasis on critique, not enough on action; now they had perfectly merged doctrine and praxis, producing something that the global industrial system would never be able to absorb, as it does with most mass movements.
Around this same time, I was becoming disillusioned with the indomitistas and, with a small network of a few others, made a similar ideological break with them to outline the wildist philosophy. In the course of distinguishing ourselves, the new network of wildists abandoned the vague term “leftist,” redefined terms like “humanist” and “Progress” into something more exact, and emphasized the necessity to extend the conservation imperative to human nature, among other things. To our surprise, ITS followed suit in many of the same areas. To this day we remain mostly unaware of whether we were developing concurrently along a similar line as ITS, or whether we accidentally influenced them after we caught their eye when we publicly broke from their and our ideological progenitors. Regardless, it is clear that the ideologies have a strong family resemblance to each other, and this is significant because it helps explain the logical arguments that underpin the elegant but populist rhetoric eco-extremists now use in their communiqués.
For example, the concept of “indiscriminate attack” is not an arbitrary doctrine, as many radical critics of the eco-extremists have implied. In fact, there is a very clear, very justified set of logical steps from the moral premises underpinning anti-progressive ecoradicalism and the praxis of indiscriminate attack. Let me explain.
After the network of wildists, the Wild Will Coalition, became an independent force, we emphasized the importance of “extending the conservation imperative” to human nature. We pointed out that there was an enormous disparity between the morality of the savage and the morality of the citizen. The savage has no loyalty to a mass society or its large organizations; his loyalty is only to his circle of close friends, family members, environments, etc.—a circle we referred to as relations, and UR referred to as the untranslatable allegados. In contrast, the citizen, especially in the current humanist phase of civilization, extends moral consideration to masses upon masses of people and subordinates himself to the institutions that sustain these masses.
Usually this is framed as human beings “self-actualizing” and expressing their natures. But Wild Will used ideas from sociobiology, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, anthropology, and many other fields, and figures to show how it is more accurate to view the disparity between savage and citizen as a result of the cultivation of human nature, much like the disparity between wilderness and wheat fields is due to the cultivation of the land. Thus, to rewild, we must reject humanist morality—and any civilized morality that values the mass too highly, like state nationalism or Christianity.
Kaczynski had already touched on these points before in Industrial Society and Its Future (see paragraphs 26–28), but where the indomitistas only put effort into extracting values and value priorities from Kaczynski’s critique, Wild Will (and apparently the eco-extremists as well) investigated the repercussions these ideas would have on action.
For example, a common argument against anti-civilization politics states that the collapse of civilization would lead to widespread death and is therefore undesirable. Of course, the argument is already weakened if the anti-civ individual accepts that total and rapid civilizational collapse is extremely unlikely, leaving only regional collapses as an assured part of the future. But it is made even weaker when we realize that, absent any other moral commitments, the basic ideas that justify anti-civ politics do not require us to be all that concerned with the masses, and the same ideas explicitly reject any imposed obligation to care.
Of course, there are many caveats to this, at least according to wildists. For example, it is not that the eco-radical must not care about the well-being of others in a sentimental sense. It is perfectly normal to respond to news of a starving child far away with sadness and empathy. What is peculiarly modern, however, is the obligation to extend active moral consideration to that child—and even to put him or the level of the closest of our relations. This is a demand that goes beyond our natural ability, so educational systems socialize us, inculcating us with what David Hume called “artificial values;” large organizations like NGOs or human rights councils fill in the gaps in natural human ability to act on these values; our natures must be further modified for the efficiency of those organizations, and so on.
Wildists addressed this problem by reminding themselves that the basic values of anti-civilization politics, in vulgar terms, created in them a willingness to see civilization collapse even if that meant returning to hunter/gatherer conditions. But if this is a true willingness, then our actions cannot be tempered in any way by moralities created by the social system for its own self-preservation. Kaczynski, for example, wrote that if we prioritize individuals and small groups over large organizations, we have ample reason to reject industrial society. But in true practice, this means being willing to see those large organizations burn, even violently, for the sake of that small group. Consider the way traditional societies or traditionalist ethnic groups botch industrial operations with nepotism or suspicion of police. Anti-civilization politics is similar, but more consciously antagonistic to industrial operations.
So if we are to take ourselves seriously as opponents of civilization, we must be willing to act according to our values regardless of the repercussions these have on the things we feel no real loyalty to, even, perhaps even especially, when sentimental loyalty has been socialized into us. This approach to praxis applies equally well to revolutionary and non-revolutionary strategies: even if the institutions we hate will always exist, we do not have to respect them. The oft-repeated slogan within wildist circles, then, is to “act according to our values, without regard for civilization.”
Wildists are in practice not quite as extreme as the eco-extremists, however, for two reasons. One is that although our values, taken seriously, permit a large degree of moral latitude, pragmatic considerations more severely limit what we can do if we aim to be successful. For example, while it may not be morally condemnable to engage in some acts of violence, often those same acts would induce a response too harsh for a budding radical group to handle. Furthermore, even though we recognize that we must take our values seriously, and we believe that most humans who are indoctrinated with humanist moralities have been propagandized to believe such things, the facts of the situation demand a certain amount of tolerance on this front. Even a person logically convinced of every idea in wildism would find that the morality of the savage is so utterly contrary to everything he has been raised to believe that he cannot live by it as uncompromisingly as is ideal. As a result, there is a debate among wildists about how much tolerance we should have for people attempting to “extend the conservation imperative.” We tend to talk about a “tactical spectrum” where the most moderate live on one side and the most uncompromising on the other, and we’ve generally agreed that our role is to link each of these elements together wherever possible. As a result, wildists tend to inhabit the middle part of the spectrum.
The eco-extremists, on the other hand, take these same ideas and apply them in a less tempered and conservative way, and this is why they have so unapologetically defended indiscriminate attack. Unlike wildists, eco-extremists are not trying to build a coalition so much as inhabit the most extreme possible part of the spectrum. Oddly enough, this idea comes from Kaczynski. He writes the following in his recent book on strategy and tactics for an anti-industrial movement:
15. If the goal of revolutionaries is the complete elimination of the technological society, then they must discard the values and the morality of that society and replace them with new values and a new morality designed to serve the purposes of revolution. Trotsky put it this way:
Bolshevism created the type of the authentic revolutionist who subordinates [his ideas and his moral judgments] to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society … [T]he Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October [Revolution] would have been impossible.
Suitable recruits to the revolutionary movement will include only those who are prepared to abandon the old values and morality and adopt in their place the revolutionary values and morality. The revolutionary message needs to be addressed to and designed for, not the general public, but the small minority of people who have the potential to become committed members of the revolutionary organization. 16. It follows that the revolutionaries should never retreat from their extreme positions for the sake of popularity or to avoid offending the moral or other sensibilities of the general public. If the revolutionary organization were to dilute its message or prevaricate in order to avoid offending people it would discourage its own members and lose their respect, weakening their commitment to the organization; it would lose the respect of the best kind of potential recruits while attracting many who were incapable of total commitment to the organization; and it would lose the respect of the general public. A revolutionary organization should seek not to be liked, but to be respected, and it should have no aversion to being hated and feared. Mao regarded hatred of a revolutionary organization as a sign that it was effective. It is to such an organization that many people will turn in a time of crisis when they have lost all confidence in the existing social order and are desperate or angry.
In sum, the eco-extremists defend indiscriminate attack because they are willing only to ally themselves with the most uncompromising, most rebellious, most extreme elements of techno-industrial society. And this strategy works. Consider the way al-Qaeda or the Islamic State have attracted young militants, to the detriment of the thousands of other radical Islamist groups, because they have a reputation of no compromise. It is likely that as the problems of civilization become more apparent, and as regional collapses start to become more frequent due to these crises (even if only temporarily), the individuals who wish to “go savage” in these conditions will see the eco-extremists, not the wildists, not the indomitistas, and not Kaczynski, as the network to join. I guess we’ll see.
*** Final Thoughts
So this is the landscape of the new eco-radicalism: Kaczynski the crusader, his apostles the indomitistas, and the heretics: wildists and eco-extremists. By now it should be clear that eco-extremists did not simply pop into the world with bombs and rhetoric; to the contrary, they are only the latest manifestation of a set of anti-civilization ideas that are spreading rapidly. This new ecoradicalism is not the stale ecological politic of mainstream environmentalism, nor is it like the weak and compromising “radical” ideologies like primitivism or eco-socialism. No, this is anticivilization politic taken seriously: a full rejection of not just the material basis of civilized society, but the moral and philosophical basis too. Of course, at the moment these new eco-radicals look like lone prophets in the wilderness, or worse, lost lepers there. But this is only because of how fundamentally contrary the new values run to the values of civility—an accomplishment, not a failure. And as climate change, antimicrobial resistance, mass surveillance, species extinctions, etc.—the problems central to the ideology—continue to dominate the politics of the 21st century, we can only expect the values to spread further. The only question that remains is which approach will take on. Will it be the traditional revolutionary approach of Kaczynski? The coalitionbuilding approach of the wildists? Or will it be the savagery and terror of the eco-extremists?
As someone who keeps up with conversations about these questions within various radical ecological subcultures, I believe that the eco-extremists are being underestimated. People seem to believe that the eco-extremist strategy does not work, and, partially due to the eco-extremists themselves, there is a general feeling that the ideologies claiming the name have no strong foundation. Anarchist commentators, for example, frequently liken the terror cells to angsty boys enamored with Nietzsche and lusting for blood in place of unrequited sexual lust. I hope to have eliminated both criticisms. Clearly, the eco-extremist strategy has a logic to it, and some interesting historical precedents; and certainly the eco-extremist ideologies share a solid philosophical foundation. Whether that is all due to their own rigor and creativity or whether it is simply a residual effect of the indomitistas’ work remains to be seen. Practically, though, it does not matter. So long as they continue on their current path, they may well be the tendency that defines eco-radicalism in the 21st century.
** ITS: The Invisible Menace
Regresión #6, Editorial
What we say today may be forgotten, but what we do will last. A.
*** April [2016] It continues:
Indiscriminate amoral attack and the moral anarcho-nun Many moons have passed since the eco-extremist tendency has been spreading to many corners of the world, particularly in the Americas. In February, we were witnesses to how groups like the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), by far the most representative of the tendency, emerged in Chile and Argentina with arsons, threats, explosives, and package-bombs. From Mexico, the evil spore had arrived in the southern continent, where it has implanted itself.
On March 2nd, ITS came out with a joint communiqué announcing its international expansion, and in April, some commentators began to feel uncomfortable at the words and actions of the group. Some revealed their thoroughly Western morality and rejected the “insanity” defended by eco-extremists, namely, indiscriminate attack. We are speaking specifically of the anarchists from many projects of “counter-information,” editors of insurrectionalist journals, and anarcho-nun groups who didn’t hesitate to criticize. These people have been addressed by our friends at Maldición Eco-extremista (ME, a blog hosted on the Noblogs server, an alternative web publishing platform) in their harsh and sarcastic criticism published on June 8th entitled, “Our response is like an earthquake,” which can be found online.
Since that time, differences between these anarchists and ecoextremists have only deepened, so much so that the the majority of blogs that once published eco-extremist communiqués have ceased doing so. That’s all for the best since these well-intentioned revolutionary anarchists worried about the populace have never represented us anyway. It was only a matter of time before we had to part ways.
*** May The international target: Incubators of progress
In May, groups of ITS decided to execute a show of strength by issuing a communiqué taking responsibility for seven explosive attacks in April against universities and centers of learning in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Mexico State. By this, the Eco-Extremist Mafia proved that this isn’t a game.
In Chile, the “Mystical Horde of the Forest” of ITS attacked the Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics, though the explosive device was deactivated, first by a worker and then by the police. Nevertheless, it captured the attention of university and scientific circles, mainly by reviving the trauma that they suffered in 2013 when the old ITS attacked the Chilean scientist Andrés Águila of the Biotechnology Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Morelos, Mexico.
June War of nerves and destabilization, savage fire, and blood In June, chaos was unleashed by ITS in three countries where it then had a presence. First, Savage Constellations, the Argentine ITS group, claimed responsibility on June 19th for the repeated bomb threats against Buenos Aires schools in May. Parents at the schools publicly protested for the government to catch those responsible for the threats. Obviously, this demand was not met. They also claimed responsibility for the bomb threat against the Northern Diagonal C Line of the Buenos Aires subway and against the National University of Quilmes (on June 16th and 17th respectively.) In both places, hundreds of people had to be evacuated, and in the case of the subway, service was stopped on many lines. To top off their day of chaos, the individualists of ITS audaciously placed a bomb on the Northern Diagonal directed to the President of the Subway system. This did not detonate, but it was a direct threat.
On June 22nd, Uncivilized Southerners, a Chilean ITS group, took responsibility for the fire on May 24th at the Vivo Mall in the center of Santiago. The fire spread, the mall had to be evacuated, and the authorities had to call in sixteen emergency units to put out the fire, which left extensive material damage.
On June 28th, the only ITS group that had not taken responsibility for anything to that point, namely, ITS-Mexico, stabbed an UNAM worker, leaving him to die on the grounds of the most prestigious campus in the country, the University City.
The 29th, ITS took responsibility for the action through the blog, Maldición Eco-extremista, which caused panic among the university community as well as certain national security sectors.
ITS-Mexico committed another murder. The first had been carried out by one section of the old ITS in 2011, when the biotechnologist Méndez Salinas of the Biotechnology Institute of the UNAM in Morelos was shot in the head. This time, the modus operandi was different. Firearms were not used, but rather a silent and hidden weapon. One thrust into the armpit was enough for the Head of Chemical Services of the Chemistry Department to bleed out slowly.
The media coverage of this act was immediate. All of the major press and media nationally and even internationally publicized the story. “Eco-extremist group commits murder in the University City.” The spotlight was once again on ITS. Newspaper stories mentioned again how the group had been responsible for a number of attacks with package bombs and a murder in 2011 (as mentioned above.) They mentioned the numerous terrorist attacks on scientists in Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Morelos, Mexico City, and Mexico State. They mentioned the groups’ bombings in Veracruz and Coahuila in that year and in 2013.
But the difference here was that the nightmare came back. Those who felt relieved that this only happened in Mexico now knew that these attacks also occurred in Chile and Argentina, and the group threatened to spread further. And if we dig deeper into the sources, we would notice that ITS found affinity with the acts and ideas of the terrorist nihilist sects in Italy. These sects have not hesitated from expressing their complicity with eco-extremism from the start of the latter’s emergence. They have supported such attacks as indiscriminate bombings, the abandoning of letter-bombs aimed at civil life, fierce arson, the mailing of package bombs to certain targets, and so on. This is how the “Nihilist Sect of Free Death,” “The Memento Mori Nihilist Sect,” and the “Cenaze Nihilist Terrorist Clan” undoubtedly form part of the International Mafia, since they share a Passion for Terror with the eco-extremists.
*** July Silence
In July, ITS kept a low profile after their unrelenting and surprising activity of June. The only major act of this period was an interview with the Mexican program, Radio Formula 1, on the first of that month. Here ITS mocked authorities and underlined the incompetence of investigators.
The authorities with their extensive access to the informative apparatus tried to cover up ITS Mexico’s murderous act (which was described in its fourteenth communiqué). One lie after another was spread by the media, and, as usual in Mexico, they agreed on the murder being a settling of scores or revenge as the official story—it was then swept under the rug and filed away. It is in this way that the initials “ITS” are put to rest once more by the media, until the group decides once again to stir them.
*** August As if it wasn’t clear already: It goes on... even if they take our blog away
A few days before the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the authorities thought that they had everything under control. Years of preparation by the government were spent trying to pacify civil nonconformity. The protesting citizenry seems to have understood this well and decided to decrease their activity accordingly. The favelas were contained, the most dangerous criminals were locked up, and the only real concern was the terrorist threat of the Islamic State in the region. It didn’t take much time for the special military anti-terrorism police to intercept communications between Islamic radicals and arrest them along with leaders of various mosques. All was ready, they thought, and they could relax...
But on August 1st, the citizenry woke up to the news that a powerful bomb had gone off in front of the Conjunto Nacional Shopping Center in the center of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. The authorities in their first reports stated that it was a terrorist attack consisting of a bomb made of a pressure cooker filled with blasting powder and nails, and that they had opened an investigation of the attack.
On the third of the month, on ME, a communiqué was published taking responsibility for the blast. ITS had spread to Brazil.
The Secret Wilderness Society had joined the ITS international project and successfully detonated a bomb in the Brazilian capital. They exploded the pressure cooker bomb without concern for bystanders who might have been walking by. This in an area patrolled by military police, and it took place a few days from the start of the Olympic Games. Their ominous communiqué made threats and expressed their fury in words. It was evident that ITS is not being stopped. The Eco-extremist Mafia continues onward...
To welcome ITS-Brazil to the international project of war against civilization and human progress, other ITS groups took responsibility for attacks happening in August. On the 14th, two ITS groups in Chile took responsibility for a frustrated explosive attack in Santiago and numerous bomb threats against universities, malls, and subway stations.
On the 19th, ITS-Argentina took responsibility for the poisoning of numerous bottles of Coca-Cola that they left in the refrigerators of two shopping centers in Buenos Aires, a formidable attack against the lives of hyper-civilized southerners.
On the 23rd, two ITS-Mexico groups took responsibility for an attack on a suburban train in Mexico State and a package bomb that was sent to a known genomic scientist in Mexico City.
After all of that activity, much attention was given again to ME. Finally, the administrators of Noblogs decided to block its content, and they continue to block it, under the pretext that it contains material dangerous to the stability of its server. That is to say, if “one day in the future,” “someone” decided to cybernetically attack ME, all of the sites hosted by Noblogs would be affected. The administrators of Noblogs decided not to run that risk and to close ME. Aside from that, the people of Noblogs are anarchists and people of the left—collectivists, feminists, etc. Thus, eco-extremism is not compatible with their worldview. This was also a significant reason to remove ME from their server. Quickly, the individualists of ME decided to switch their site over to the server of Espivblogs, another site administered by anarchists, while trying to recover lost information on the original blog.
*** September That which doesn’t kills us makes us stronger: that’s a fact
With new addresses at Blackblogs and Torpress (on the Tor dark web) the friends at ME continue their work of publishing. On the 12th of that month, all of the groups of ITS in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil issued a communiqué aimed at the administrators of Noblogs concerning their decision to close ME as if they were the administrators of Facebook or Twitter. In the communiqué, ITS does not forget to call out those who have talked shit against them and eco-extremism, specifically Zerzan, the Earth First! Journal, and the rest of the peanut gallery. In one part of the communiqué they write:
The anarchist counter-information blogs, alternative servers, and the authorities of the countries where we have a presence may attempt to defame and silence us on the web. They can censor and ignore our actions and communications. They can move heaven and earth to try to bury us in historical forgetfulness. They are in their “right” to try to do so. But when they learn of a ferocious act of indiscriminate arson in Chile, or an attack against the populace in Argentina, or when the rumor reaches them of a terrorist bomb explosion in Brazil, or when they see scalped dead people in Mexico, let there be no doubt: ITS did it.
For the observant, they will notice that this communiqué was signed by new groups adhering to ITS from the city ofTorreon, Coahuila: The Cachiripa Fury Faction and the Pack of Coyotes Faction. On the 16th these newest ITS groups issued a communiqué taking responsibility for past attacks and one recent one: the mailing of perfume mixed with acid to the Director of Admissions of the Tec of Monterrey Laguna Campus, indicating the spread of ITS groups not only internationally, but also in Mexican territory: in the Wild North of Mesoamerica.
*** Anti-Conclusion This is not end, it’s just getting started
The above is only the most recent history of the invisible menace that is ITS. It has been written in spite of the fact that others have sought to erase that history. It is the story of a group that has pushed the envelope and crossed political and linguistic borders.
Its members have found each other in dreams, in covens, in the Tlatol. They have conspired in the shadows and have jumped like the alligator toward its prey, with speed and surprise. Thus, we encourage all of the groups of ITS in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico to continue their war. Forward, Eco-extremist Mafia!
With complicity as well with all who take responsibility for savage and hidden attacks, for the unknown and the mayhem, the chaos and nothingness. For those who have decided to carry out physical criticism and not remain in obscurity. For those who mock, who enjoy, and who are passionate for explosives and arson. For the bomb threats where hundreds need to be evacuated. For those who carry out bloody crimes and who leave wounded victims. For those who instinctively thirst for destruction. For those who don’t get discouraged by failed attacks and who learn from their mistakes. For the anarchist terrorists, for the amoral, indiscriminate attackers. For the impertinent uncivilized murderers, for the serial pyromaniacs, for the anti-social people who use dynamite, for the criminals and thugs, for those who feel blood in their veins and act in fury and/or have fun at night demonstrating their disdain. For those who unwind themselves in uninhibited fashion during an attack.
Complicity with the Anarchist Sect of the Mountain, of Peru, with the Kapibara Group and the Karr-kai Cell of Chile, with the Individualities for the Dispersing of Chaos in Spain, with the nihilist terrorist sects in Italy mentioned above, with the Wildfire Cell, of Finland and Germany, with the Hostility Group Against Domination, in Porto Alegre and Some Accursed of Civilization, in Brazil, with the Pagan Sect of the Mountain, The Ninx Verde, Ninx Azul Cell, and chi chi Cell, in Mexico State, with the “Ecoextremist Circle of Terrorism and Sabotage” and the “Indiscriminate Group” in Mexico City, with the “Wild Group for Action for the Earth” in Oaxaca, with the anonymous who don’t bother to take an acronym but continue the war regardless.
Complicity and power to them all!
** Sighs
Lunas de abril
Together we walk the hostile labyrinths. You take my hand. My heart beats. We try to hide our nervousness with a smile or some light caress that gives an air of tranquility. I look at you; you look at me. Our backs carry the device. You know, my friend, you know why I do this...why you do this...why we do this. Everything that is gray surrounds us, and you shed a tear in that night of bitter disenchantment. We share tears under the stars that claim the poetry of dawn. How many times have we asked ourselves, “Is everything lost?” in the face of machinery that does not stop and imbeciles who are somehow alive within their inert movements. From within the rage that embraces us when we see distant mountains with forests devastated by the city, the hate grows, and the love of gunpowder appears. We continue our path. The cold air sticks in my throat, fills my lungs, and escapes. The icy climate brings to my mind the image of that forest that served as a blanket for us when our kissing words were silent and our shadows joined to start the war, this war in which we will not be victorious. We walk without raising suspicion; black cats taught us to move between the nights, walking the decadent cities, passing unnoticed in silence. We arrive, and solitary stars smile on us. Our hands no longer tremble; the nervousness vanishes. The rage travels to every corner of our bodies. You look at me; I look at you. You like me; I like you. I place the device, and it transforms me into a coyote thirsting for revenge. We understand, my friend. Words are not enough. With patience that only you possess, you light the flame. Seconds pass, and in the busy streets the nervousness reappears.
You continue, calm, and I laugh at myself. Now I laugh at myself, mock myself. We flee; we are the accursed shadows that infiltrate the streets. I can sense that a patrol is right behind me in the empty street. A mix of happiness, sadness, hate, and melancholy. We escape. proud of what we are and to have encountered each other in the middle of this grey life. Proud to be eco-extremists. For yourself, you will always be you; for myself, I will always be me. Upon sharing caresses and attacks, we knew this. I believe in you; you believe in me. This is neither idle chatter, romanticisms, nor idealistic clichés. Our trust was built by actions—my leaving my life in your hands and yours in mine, without hesitation. And if one day we fall? We both know that we will avenge ourselves. The oblivion will annihilate our experience, but the living memory of our actions will find shape in bullets and fires. Now safe, we caress each other’s bodies. I kiss you; you kiss me. You share with me your motivation to continue warring. We decide to arm ourselves and fight until the end of our existence. It isn’t easy to lead a double life, to lie to even those closest to us so as not to raise any suspicions. We make fun of the moralist commentaries of the good citizens. We think with a smile of these citizens who hate us so much, “They could never imagine.” Our bodies, now naked, are discovering and rediscovering each other as we remember the first attacks, the mistakes, the experiments. Your orgasm that brings with it mine, the moans, the scratches, the sighs.
For my friend, for all of our friends...
For our savage nature!
Until your death or mine!
Long live eco-extremism!
** Lessons Left by the Ancients: The Battle of Little Big Horn
Regresión #3
The Battle of Little Big Horn was one of the most distressing events for the United States Army during the so-called Indian Wars. In the battle, the Native Americans—led by, among others, the [Lakota] Sioux chief Thasúqke Witkó or Crazy Horse; the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Sitting Bull; and ChiefTwo Moons of the Cheyennes—achieved a crushing defeat of the white invaders. What follows is a short account of one of many histories of fighting to the death against civilization and progress, one of many that contains important lessons for us today.
The Little Big Horn is the name of a river in the territories of the state of Montana in the United States. White colonists had mostly occupied the neighboring area, the Black Hills, since the finding of mines replete with gold. In the year 1976, the government of the United States tried to buy the lands for mineral exploitation. This upset many natives who still lived in the area. The government’s control spread throughout these territories, giving only two options to the ancestral owners of the land: either they could sell their land and be assigned to a reservation, or they would be violating the law. Many chose the latter option, and it was in this manner that the resistance was catalyzed.
The government gave the natives a date by which time they were to leave their ancestral territories. Before the issued date came to pass, in disobedience of the government mandate, military units began to forcefully evict various native villages. The people of Two Moons and Crazy Horse were attacked and had to abandon their positions. It was then that they turned to Sitting Bull, whom they henceforth considered their spiritual leader and who then held the most influence of the whole native community.
Sitting Bull called for unity with other clans to defend themselves against the European menace. Thus, at the command of the new head of the tribe, they celebrated a type of gathering with fifteen thousand natives attending, according to contemporary accounts.
It is said that upon seeing so many people united, Sitting Bull prayed to Wakan Tanka (who was, according to the Sioux’s worldview, the Great Spirit) that the hunting be good for his people and that the men be strong and indomitable. So that this would happen, Sitting Bull did the Dance of the Sun, in which he danced for two days and two nights without food or water, praying and watching the movements of the sun. At the end of the dance, the spiritual leader had a revelation. He saw a large quantity of white soldiers and natives fall from the sky; according to him, the fallen soldiers were offerings for Wakan Tanka and the native warriors should murder them and not take their weapons, hair, or any of their belongings. If they went against this rule, he said, it would go badly for the natives.
With glowing spirits, the tribal chiefs like Crazy Horse got together their men and left in search of the offering for Wakan Tanka and simultaneously to defend their lands from which they would never leave without a fight. On the 16th of June, a small party of native guards spied a column of thirteen hundred white men and allied Indians between the mountains close to their camp in the area by Rosebud Creek. The leader of these men was General George Crook.
The defense had begun, and the men armed themselves for war. If the invaders got any closer there was the possibility that there would be casualties of women and children in combat.
At dawn of the following day, Chief Crazy Horse unexpectedly ambushed the enemy. The white troops were dispersed by means of a rapidly executed war tactic, and the horde of savages divided into small groups in order to hunt down those who had become easy targets while separated from their columns. After repelling the invasion, the nomads camped on the shores of the Little Big Horn.
On the 25th of June in the same year, the Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer (who was a hero of the Civil War, the youngest general in the country’s army, and the darling of the press, who dubbed him “The Boy General”) divided his column of six hundred soldiers into three groups to try to ambush the warriors who had so demoralized General Crook and his men a few days before.
One of the three groups fired directly at the tipis at the front of the camp—in response, the warriors shouted “Hoka Hey,” which in Lakota means, “Today is a good day to die,” and attacked with their bows and arrows, hatchets, and shotguns. As they killed many of the soldiers by the river, the survivors were forced to flee.
The second group, commanded by Custer, decided to attack from the other flank of the nomadic camp. The spiritual leader Sitting Bull watched over the women and children while the strategies of the savages made the soldiers fall into chaos, defenseless from the mad flight of their horses that were frightened by the natives. In a matter of minutes, the enemies were besieged and reduced. From atop the high hills, Crazy Horse’s men screamed words of war. The terrorized Americans killed their remaining horses to use them as shields. The battle was fierce and chaotic. According to the chronicles, one could see the warriors killing the soldiers in hand-to-hand combat or from horseback with hatchets and arrows fired from point blank range in a scene full of screams, howls, the smell of gunpowder, and the blasts of guns. At the end of the battle, the great General Custer lay dead with shots to his head and chest, and his men were decimated. The native savages took the soldier’s clothing, scalps, and castrated them as well as taking their belongings, all of which went against what the spiritual leader, Sitting Bull, had told them. Disobeying this vision would later be seen by the natives as the beginning of the end, since with this battle they won the enmity of a large sector of the American society and would be massacred and hunted like animals by the American military.
The third and final group of invaders had gathered with the few survivors of the first group. They called for help, and more soldiers arrived. Crazy Horse could not afford to lose more of his men and so ordered that the camp be packed up so that they could leave victorious. The final great strategy used by the old warriors was to divide the group up into many small groups so as to avoid focalizing forces. Many small groups were more difficult to engage than one large one. It was with this in mind that the natives dispersed in all directions.
There are various lessons that can be learned from this fight against civilization.
First: Strategy is very important when it comes to winning a fight or battle. In our case, the individualist war against the technological system should be approached with tactics and intelligence. We know very well that saying this does not pretend to take into account winning completely against the system, but rather to deal blows to the mega-machine to the best of our abilities. These actions become individualist victories, and escaping unscathed or undetected should be the goal during terrorist as well as sabotage attacks.
Second: Examining the fight described above, we see the old ones united behind one objective: defending their way of life in nature. Their fierceness played a very important role—though during the battle there were individuals wounded and even killed, the focal point remained the fight against civilization and progress, a fight to the death. Our fight should also be fierce and overwhelming, that is to say, extremist. Those who were not capable of taking a hard stance were not part of this war. Those who are ready to kill and die defending their natural humanity that has yet to be robotized, and their savage nature that remains indomitable, should take this into account. Crazy Horse was assassinated one year later when he led the savage nomads against the US Army. He died under a hail of bullets from Indians allied with the enemy. His body was full of holes from the lead of civilization, but his proud example as a warrior was left like a living legend for the later generations who, like him, defend themselves and resist the advance of that which is alien to their nature.
Third: Falling upon the enemy when they least expect it is another lesson from this episode. To be effective and carry out an attack unscathed, it is not practical to attack when the authorities might be aware of the danger. For example, every 8th of August, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education sends out an alert recalling that in 2011 the eco-extremist group Individuals Tending Towards the Wild sent a package bomb that injured two technologists. On this day especially, were there to be any attempt against the same academic institution, it would be a danger to those carrying it out, and the act would be more likely to fail, given that they employ additional but discreet police around this time. Although I would personally like to see another attack at the same institution on the same day that would mock all of this additional security, I realize that that is not pertinent.
Fourth: Some foolish individuals who are familiar with our stances have asked in the past: “Are you going to fight the system using its own weapons?”
The natives that we cite above went into war with everything that they had on hand: bows and arrows, hatchets and clubs, horses and rifles. These weapons were useful when they fell upon the whites and their indigenous allies. What would have happened if these natives had rejected the weapons of the white people and clung instead to their old implements for hunting and fighting? Maybe they wouldn’t have been victorious at Little Big Horn, among other battles.
The casualties on the side of the army were much higher than those of the natives, and one of the factors that contributed to this was that the warriors used repeating firearms (that is to say, they could fire numerous times in a row without having to reload) that they had previously stolen from the enemy. The Americans and their allies only had single-shot rifles (which could only fire one round before having to be reloaded). The invaders’ time-consuming weaponry meant that the natives could fire while they rode their horses directly at the soldiers, cornering them while they tried to reload their weapons.
Thus in the response to the question of means, we say that we cannot limit ourselves to the old weaponry just because we criticize the technological system. We should use the weapons of the system against itself. Just as the Native American participants did not hesitate to use those repeating firearms, we are not going to hesitate to use any modern weapon that might cause the enemy casualties.
With this we conclude the text. Everyone can draw their own conclusions.
** The Return of the Warrior
Ramon Elani
War ... is a means to achieve an individual goal: the warrior’s desire for glory, the warrior himself is his own goal. Will not to power but to glory.
Clastres
I am a spear that roars for blood.
Song of Amergin
Rejecting entirely the ideologies of humanism and progressivism, I pose the figure of the savage warrior. The society of war, understood as opposed in every way to the anonymous mechanized war of the 20th and 21st centuries, ruptures the society of the State, the society of the techno-industrial world. The warrior stands at the crossroads of life and death, the human and the animal, memory and oblivion. Negotiating a constellation of cosmopraxis is his task. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro draws our attention to the differences between treatments of the dead among Andean and Lowlands tribes. In the case of the former, the Incan traditions of entombment and the funerary industrial complex venerate the ancestors, the founders of the state, the bureaucrats, the administrators. In the latter, in the societies of war, the dead are treated as enemies, to be eradicated and forgotten via ritual ingestion. There is a war between the living and the dead. Those who worship the dead reinforce chains of bondage. Those who devour them wildly assert their own autarchy. The warrior renounces heredity, no honor can be gained through lineage. It is only his own acts of valor that may award him the glory he seeks. In what follows I contextualize the figure of the warrior apropos its most elegant theorist, Pierre Clastres.
Clastres’ voice speaks like an echo of things long forgotten. A tendency, a gesture that walks alongside us but hidden in the shadows of millenia. We know Clastres’ words before we have ever heard them. The fire of the warrior flickers inside us all. De Castro: “One sometimes has the feeling that it is necessary to read him [Clastres] as if he were an obscure pre-Socratic thinker.” Indeed we can truly perceive the essence of the world in the bloody ghosts he conjures. De Castro points us to Clastres’ comparison between Guarani shamans and Heraclitus. All philosophies of dynamism and the world are woven together to form a banner against the monolith of the machine. If, despite its timeless chthonic resonance, reading Clastres fills us with the experience of strangeness, of destiny, of darkness, and mystery, we can see that all we need to do is pull the blinders from our eyes. Clastres invites us to hear once again the beat of the drum that echoes in our blood. When we dive into the familiar yet murky lagoons of the warrior soul, Clastres reminds us, there is only one question: how far are we seriously willing to go? He understood, as we must too, that the cosmic fate of our civilization is at stake.
*** Nothing is more outmoded than the man of war: he has long since been transformed into an entirely different character, the military man.
It is tempting and common, De Castro remarks, to think of Clastres as a hedgehog, that he only has one idea but it is vast beyond measure. The primitive warrior stands against the state. Tribal war, in all of its brutality and cruelty, exists to prevent the annihilation of the universe. As we shall see, however, Clastres’ writing detonates into a galaxy of poetry and philosophy, diffuse and sparkling against the dark sky. For ultimately, it is not the State, but the meaning of humanity itself that the warrior exposes and drags into the light. In the words of Claude Lefort: “Only man can reveal to man that he is man.” Thus what Clastres shows us about the meaning of violence and war becomes of metaphysical concern, not merely and in fact in opposition to the realm of politics. The boundaries, the demarcations of territory are transgressed by the warrior. In its absence of this transgressive force, we are domesticated livestock. The warrior, who raids, abducts, and scorches, crosses all lines and resists all control beyond his own meaning. It is glory alone, and the prophets who direct him towards its achievement, that impel him. He comes, he goes. The laws he follows supersede the pettiness of the State. The monstrosity of technoindustrial society overcodes and overdetermines at every opportunity. Nothing threatens its hegemony like the deterritorialization of war. For this reason, the figure of the nomad, understood as proto-warrior, has been seized by thinkers such as Bruce Chatwin, Deleuze, and Guattari. Clastres directs our gaze to the warrior, proudly sustaining a world of multiplicity with every thrust of the spear and each bloody scalp adorning the walls.
*** Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine...Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist.
In being-for-war, death is a biocosmic event that produces alterity. The warrior rushes toward death. It is not clear that the desire for glory entirely eclipses the desire for death. The dead continue to fight in spirit form, the shaman brandishing his axe is besieged by them at all times. The Yanomami shaman Kopenawa says that when the earth begins to rot “humans will become other, just as it happened in the beginning of time.” Vengeful spirits will hack the sky to pieces with their machetes, the forest behind the sky will fall upon us. So swift will be the end that we will not have time to scream. The spirits, untethered from the earth, will smash the sun, moon, and stars. And there shall be nothing but darkness.
It is the year 1970. Pierre Clastres lives among the Yanomami and declares them “the last free society in the world.” He remarks upon their incredible flatulence, a product of the high levels of banana in their diet. At night Clastres is left alone in the camp with the women for the men have gone off to raid. They attack their enemies at night and run back into the jungle to avoid the inevitable swift counterattack. The dead are burned upon a pyre, their bones ground to dust to be snorted. Days of leisure and laughter are punctuated by forays across the river. Canoes are full of men covered with scars. Men gather in the dirt to duel over wives with clubs. Clastres travels with several canoes of armed warriors to trade for drugs. The hallucinogenic seeds needed grow only in the territory of a particular tribe. They hold a tight grip on their monopoly. In addition to tools and other useful items of trade, there is great demand for prestige items. These include women’s dresses, which are worn by the warriors, who have no concern for gendered attire. They blow the drug into each other’s nostrils through reed tubes. As Clastres’ party prepares to leave, a young boy from the other tribe jumps into their canoe. He wants to go with them. His mother pulls him back and he beats her with a paddle. With the help of several other women, she succeeds in dislodging him from the canoe. He bites her.
*** The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine.
Boys in Yanomami society, Clastres observes, are “encouraged to demonstrate their violence and aggression. Children play games that are often brutal. Parents avoid consoling them. The result of this pedagogy is that it forms warriors.” The missionaries have failed utterly to dispel their love of violence. Guns given as gifts by the Salesians, with the stipulation that they be used for hunting and nothing else, are quickly integrated into the Yanomami war machine. “Try to convince warriors to renounce an easy victory,” Clastres writes, “These are not saints.” The presence of firearms of course makes it possible for larger scale massacres. Clastres points out, however, that it is common practice to invite a tribe to feast with the intention of slaughtering them all. Such acts are never forgotten and blood feuds are passed down through the generations. In a day with twenty-one hours of leisure time, there are ample opportunities to cultivate animosity for one’s enemies. As Clastres writes in his journal,
One late afternoon among the Karohiteri, a storm breaks out, preceded by violent whirlwinds which threaten to carry away the roofs. Immediately, all of the shamans position themselves along the tents, standing, attempting to push back the tornado. This wind, these gusts, are in fact evil spirits, surely sent by shamans from an enemy tribe.
At last the shaman captures the evil spirits in a basket and chops it to pieces with his axe. Clastres scorns peace. His dream and prayer for the Yanomami is “a thousand years of war! A thousand years of celebration!” Harmony, he writes, is gained only through the digging of mines, drilling for oil, factories, and shopping malls, police.
The thesis that Clastres is best known for is simple: the permanent state of war that one finds in most indigenous societies is a strategy, deliberately employed, to retain territorial segmentation and prevent the development of the State or monolithic culture. Tribal war resists globalization. Clastres:
*** The war machine is the motor of the social machine: the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war.
Thus the Incas, enshrined in their stone temples and sky citadels, looked upon the tribes of the forest with fear, hatred, and disgust. To the perfumed Inca aristocrats, the lawless, kingless inhabitants of the pampas and jungles were less than human. In this regard they set the standard that the Spaniards would later adopt in dealing with all Amerindians.
Techno-industrial society condemns violence even as it facilitates and makes possible degrees and kinds of violence unimaginable to even the most blood-thirsty and cruel of traditional societies. We are taught to fear and abhor violence. We are taught that there is no meaning in war. Even as this culture wages ruthless war against the cosmos itself. This incoherence resonates throughout society. When Clastres wrote of violence among the Yanomami, Tupi-Guarani, and Guayaki in the 60s and 70s, the culture among the anthropologists was no different.Violence was either dismissed from scholarship or it was deployed by racist ethnographers to denigrate primitive societies. Clastres did not fear the knife and saw in the spilling of blood a truth that has been repressed and forgotten. When the Europeans, hiding like hermit crabs in their steel armor, came to the shores of North and South America, Australia, Africa, Siberia, and the Islands of the Pacific, they were struck without exception by the love of war they found among the people. Nomads and farmers alike, primitive communities were seen to be “passionately devoted to war.” To the Europeans, this love of war could not exist with their doctrine of peace: the Indians had to be taught to abandon their violent ways through hundreds of years of torture, ethnocide, and genocide.
No matter where we look among primitive communities we will find violence blazing forth like a torch in the dark night. For all the cultural variations and nuance, this one thing appears to be universal. The myth of the peaceful primitive is pernicious. As we will see below, part of the reason this myth exists in the first place is the absence of an understanding of what war means outside the context of our own stunted and repressed conceptions of violence. Clastres writes: “one image continuously emerged from the infinite diversity of cultures: that of the warrior.” What is the meaning of this figure? How do we explain or understand the universal love of war? What does it mean for our society to have turned its back on this primal force, to abandon it to be the work of robots or sterile corporate employees? We have lost “the spectacle of our free warlike vitality.” And it has been replaced by a most murderous and vile peace.
Anthropologists have tried to understand primitive violence in a variety of ways and much of their thinking has trickled down to the layperson. They echo the poisoned gifts of The Enlightenment. The meaning of violence is consistently misconstrued. The figure of the warrior and his quest for glory dismissed and devalued. And because of this, the entirety of the primitive spirit is misunderstood. In the first case it is argued that violence and war simply evolved as a survival mechanism via hunting. Andre Leroi-Gourhan being one of the foremost proponents of this theory. For Leroi-Gourhan, the warrior is simply an extension of the hunter. Mankind’s need for food produced the hunter and the hunter--the man who possesses weapons and knows how to use them--produced the war and the warrior. Leroi-Gourhan writes, “Throughout the course of time, aggression appears as a fundamental technique linked to acquisition, and in the primitive, its initial role is hunting where aggression and alimentary acquisition are merged.”
In other words, if aggression is innate, which it appears to be, then it must serve an evolutionary function. Leroi-Gourhan imagines that the instinct for violence must be used productively and in that regard his mind is limited by needs as banal as food. Violence for him is nothing more than a predatory urge adjusted through the prism of social economy. Clastres cuts through Leroi-Gourhan like a hot knife through fat.
Our disagreement with Leroi-Gourhan is not that he treats humans as animals, on the contrary. The difference is that he attributes the wrong animal instinct to human violence. “Human society,” Clastres writes, “stems not from zoology but from sociology.” Clastres disarms Leroi-Gourhan with surprising ease and dexterity, which any hunter will have already noted. Aggression is entirely absent from the experience of the hunt. In fact, to hunt in an aggressive mindset practically ensures that you will go home hungry. As Clastres says “what principally motivates the primitive hunter is appetite, to the exclusion of all other sentiments.” He also allows for the importance of ritual in the hunt. Aggression is entirely absent. The motives for war and violence in primitive cultures, Clastres explains, lies far deeper. War is pure aggression, the desire to annihilate your enemy, the desire to bathe in blood, to raise grisly trophies to the heavens. No, a far greater need than hunger is at work here. Clastres: “even among cannibal tribes, the goal of war is never to kill the enemies in order to eat them.” So much for Leroi-Gourhan and his “naturalist discourse” of war.
The second, and perhaps most persistent, theory of primitive violence is based in economics. This belief is widespread at all levels of society. People commit violence and go to war over resources and material wealth. This notion is inevitably accompanied by a contempt for the act of violence: it is merely an avenue, a strategy, of the poor, of those who have no other (better) recourse. As Clastres remarks, this idea is taken as being so obvious that it hardly requires justification. Violence arises from competition over a scarcity of resources. In our hearts we know this not to be true. What an unsatisfying argument. The origins of this belief can be traced, Clastres directs us, to the 19th century, in which it was taken for granted that the primitive life was one of “poverty and misery.” The primitive here is imagined as a destitute and wretched citizen of the techno-industrial world, who has been turned vicious and cruel by privation and scarcity. Since they are unable to provide for themselves, they must go to war for the scraps.
This notion of primitive scarcity is further bolstered by Marxist anthropology. Clastres, who was a member of the Communist Party until 1956, understands the pitfalls of progressivism. “What is Marxism if not the Marxist theory of history,” Clastres writes. In order for this apparatus to function, the earlier stages of human history must be shown to be deficient:
So that history can get underway, so that the productive forces can take wing, these same productive forces must first exist at the start of this process in the most extreme weakness, in the most total underdevelopment: lacking this, there would not be the least reason for them to develop themselves and one would not be able to articulate social change.
Unfortunately, as is now well established, primitive cultures experienced very little scarcity and their productive capacity was vast. Here Clastres reiterates Marshall Sahlin, “primitive societies, whether it be a question of nomad hunters or sedentary farmers are ... veritable leisure societies.” In light of this, the economic theory of primitive war collapses utterly. The idea of going to war with a neighboring tribe for food or some other resource is perfectly nonsensical. As Clastres points out primitive communities are profoundly self-sufficient and when trade is necessary it occurs peaceably among neighbors. It is also well observed that numerous primitive communities were faced with such dramatic abundance that they developed festivals solely devoted to the ritual destruction of resources. No one has ever gone to war because they were hungry.
The final anthropological theory of primitive war that Clastres identifies is embodied in the idea of exchange. Here we find Clastres pitted against his teacher Claude Levi-Strauss. For Levi-Strauss, primitive war is the shadow side of primitive commerce. Communities are obliged to participate in systems of exchange. When these systems are successful they experience productive and mutually beneficial commerce. When exchange collapses or goes sour war erupts. Levi-Strauss writes “commercial exchanges represent potential wars peacefully resolved, and wars are the outcome of unfortunate transactions.” This view of war presents it as a terrible accident, implicitly arguing that commerce is the superior form of social interaction. How quick we are to welcome the suffering of the spirit if it will save us from the suffering of the flesh! And yet how quick the body heals itself while the spirit clings to its wounds. Anything but war! cries techno-industrial society and its spokesmen. But yet can we even say that commerce does not murder and torture the flesh? Are not the crimes committed in the names of commerce greater by far than those of war? Levi-Strauss and his colleagues could not ignore this fact: commerce is often an alternative to war, and the manner in which it is conducted shows that it is a modification of war. Yes, commerce has a body count that would put history’s greatest wars to shame.
In other words, Levi-Strauss sees exchange as the most elemental aspect of primitive group dynamics. Everything else is understood as merely a variation on a theme. Clastres will not accept this. It is war, he rages, that makes us what we are.
In the techno-industrial world we see commerce as a universal imperative. But commerce is only required when communities have become weakened and lost their ability to sustain themselves. We know that life within primitive communities was one of abundance and leisure. Given that, we must re-evaluate Levi-Strauss’ notions of war as simply an example of commerce gone wrong. The very essence of the primitive community lies in its autarchy, “we produce all that we need (food and tools), we are therefore in a position to do without others. In other words, the autarkic ideal is an anti-commercial ideal.” Of course this is not to suggest that commerce did not exist at all but Clastres is absolutely right in challenging the analysis of his teacher. To suggest that the relationship within primitive life to war and commerce is accidental and primary, respectively, is to radically overstate the importance of commercial transactions in such communities. Levi-Strauss would have us believe that war is the accessory in relation to the principal, which is commerce. Thus, Clastres writes, Levi-Strauss completely overlooks the importance of war.
*** Early Islam, a society reduced to the military enterprise.
So if war within the primitive context is not a substitute or mutation of commercial exchange, nor a struggle for the control of resources, nor an evolutionary trait developed by predators, what is it? And how can we understand its nearly universal presence? These are the questions that haunted Clastres shortly before he died (in 1977, at the age of 43, in a car accident). At the time of his death he was working on a new book analyzing the meaning of war in primitive society. Two essays from that unfinished volume remain. In these texts Clastres refined his idea that warfare and torture were deliberately implemented by primitive communities to prevent the emergence of the state or other hegemonic powers and thus to prevent radical inequality. The violence imposed almost constantly on all members of society reminded everyone of their place:
The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society, which says to everyone: You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else. The law, inscribed on bodies, expresses primitive society’s refusal to run the risk of division, the risk of a power separate from society itself, a power that would escape its control. Primitive law, cruelly taught, is a prohibition of inequality that each person will remember.
This is the monism of primitive life. Violence cultivates the assemblage of multiplicities, to borrow a phrase from Clastres’ followers Deleuze and Guattari. Furthermore, Clastres demonstrated, contra Hobbes, that warfare only occurred between different groups, not within them. We return to where we began, war is about nothing but the pursuit of glory.
The key point to be made about war in the tribal context is that it itself is a goal, it is a response to a need. For Clastres, the primitive society is one that is both singular and plural, diffuse and concentrated, dispersed and congealed. It is no wonder that his work was so influential for Deleuze and Guattari and their theorization of the nature of schizophrenia and the rhizome. We can immediately perceive the shadowy presence of the body without organs in Clastres’ analysis of the primitive group. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The tribe is an ensemble made of tiny ruptures in the form of its members. Clans, military orders, ceremonial brotherhoods integrate the individual. What are we? We are here. We are the place. We are the things associated with this place. We are its stuff. The locality of the primitive community makes its sedentary or nomadic nature irrelevant. Whether settled farmers or roaming hunters, there is a place and a territorial right. To be abroad, away from home is an experience of terror. In this sense there is also a “movement of exclusion,” those beyond the forest, beyond the plain, the other. We might be tempted to think of war as a symptom of territorialization. But then wouldn’t the anthropologists find that wars occur in defense of tribal boundaries? It is not so. War is offensive. Territory is invaded, penetrated, rather than maintained.
How is it that the primitive world appears as a galaxy of stars? Self-contained groups and bands that each in its own difference light up the night.
Each community, in that it is undivided, can think of itself as a We. This We in turn thinks of itself as a totality in the equal relationship that it maintains with the equivalent We’s that constitute other villages, tribes, bands, etc. The primitive community can posit itself as a totality because it institutes itself as a unity: it is a whole, because it is an undivided We.
How is this multiplicity maintained when within the community there exists such unity? Simple. There is nothing there for the economically or politically ambitious man. One who accumulates can do nothing but watch as his riches are devoured by his kin. He who aspires to power becomes chained to the throne, his throat ripped out and made to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the law. This is his reward if he does his job well. If not he is butchered. The shape that looms up before us is a monolith. A vision of death, stasis, calcification. Without movement or energy. But the crystalline soul of the primitive world, cold, hard, and perfect, is shattered, burst open and given life in the flaming heart of war.
Finally we come to it. The twisting heart of the jungle and the chaco, lit by the uncanny ghost-fire of the moon. War is a way for the tribes “to probe the very being of their society.” What is the nature of the undivided world? It is to refuse to identify with others, outsiders at best. We are who we are because we are not you. And we will assert our identity in blood. We are all the same! Proclaims the industrial machine, the fiber optic nerve stem of civilization. We are all united in the slavishness of techno-industrial society. We are identical. We are living death. “Identification,” Clastres writes, “is a movement towards death.” The warfare and bloodshed of primitive society is a celebration, “an affirmation of life.” The monad is always threatened by decay and collapse, the crumbling force that lays waste to all our monuments. War is the power that resists dispersion.
We know that war is universal among primitive communities. Clastres cautions us against extracting from this fact a confirmation of Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” Such, instead, is the war of techno-industrial society. The globalized world is facilitated by a war machine that runs at such an accelerated pace that hegemonic power and dominion spreads unabated. Everyone and everything is an enemy and as such everything is victor or vanquished. Gradually all opposition is subdued. All autonomy is brought under control. Pax imperium. Peace reigns only after the earth itself is buried beneath a mountain of bones. Peace is death. The friendship of all is impossible because it annihilates the nature of identity. The enmity of all is impossible because it leads to the silent peace of the grave. Clastres: “primitive society...cannot consent to universal peace which alienates its freedom; it cannot abandon itself to general war which abolishes its equality.” This is precisely Levi-Strauss’ error in equating primitive war with exchange, you can’t be friends with everyone any more than you can be enemies with everyone.
This is the complexity of primitive society: there are enemies and there are allies. The former necessitates the latter. And these categories are always in flux:
a community never launches into a war adventure without first protecting itself by means of diplomatic acts—parties, invitations— after which supposedly lasting alliances are formed, but which must constantly be renewed, for betrayal is always possible, and often real.
Such alliances are created and maintained primarily through the exchange of women, who are also accumulated as spoils of war. This paradox, the exchange of women in securing alliances and the capture of women in war, illustrates, for Clastres the disdain toward exchange economy. Why should we trade for women when we can simply go get some for ourselves: “the risk [of war] is considerable (injury, death), but so are the benefits: they are total, the women are free.” Incidentally, here is a further refutation of Levi-Strauss’ proposition that primitive society is built around exchange. Clastres saw that exchange itself is only done in service of war, in other words, exchange only occurs as a way to secure military allies.
War is a way of preserving the community. The cohesion, permanence, and stability of primitive life are all achieved through an unending state of war. This does not mean, of course, that we are always warring, but we are always at war, we are always about war, we always are war. The permanence of war in primitive society creates the image and idea of totality upon which all else depends. My identity is preserved through war. I am different because of war. I exist at all through war. To maintain the uniqueness and separation of identities and communities is not a byproduct of war, it is the purpose of war. War produces “the multiplication of the multiple.” This is the force that resists the centripetal, the movement toward the center. The bloodshed of the warrior creates an elastic structure that allows for both dispersion and cohesion.
*** For ages on end agricultural implements and weapons of war have remained identical.
As we can see, what applies to a critique of the state also travels far beyond. When we talk about war and the warrior standing against the state, we understand that we are talking about something much deeper. Techno-industrial society itself depends utterly on the banishment of the warrior, who is subsumed into forms that are more amenable to this world and its logic. The bureaucrat. The accountant. The technician. As Clastres remarks, “the refusal of the State is the refusal of exonomy, of exterior Law, it is quite simply the refusal of submission.” There is no Law but our Law, the Law of the knife, the tooth. Insofar as war is directed outwards toward the enemy, the other, it is also an internal policy that preserves the integrity and stability of the community from within. War facilitates the preservation of autonomy in society and its indivisibility, its totality. We understand that the state is that which imposes division within society. The state is the apparatus of fragmentation and as long as primitive war remains, there is always a counter force to the power that threatens to blow apart the connections that keep us together. No amount of freedom can be suffered to erode.
*** What the nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon, man-horse-bow assemblage.
So who is the warrior? Who is this man that lives war? In the primitive context every man is no more or less than his capacity for violence. There is, of course, what Clastres terms “a hierarchy of prestige,” which is to say that some men are naturally more brave, particular warlike skills may differ slightly. However, the status of the warrior and his place among his fellows does not confer upon him an increase in political power. There are no subdivisions within this group and command bears no honor; obedience and discipline have little truck here. Every man fights for one particular thing and the orders of the war chief are not of primary concern. Indeed, as Clastres found, chiefs who presume to dictate to warriors are ignored at best and slaughtered at worst. No, the warrior fights for his own personal ends exclusively, he “obeys only the law of his desire or will.” In this regard there is considerable variety in the figure of the warrior as it presents itself in primitive communities.
While it is true that we can say that primitive man is by definition a warrior, it is no less true that not all men are equally called to their task. The core of the war-making men is made up of those who have become enflamed by their passion for blood and glory. These are men who have devoted themselves utterly to violence and the pursuit of honor. They exist for nothing else. Every man is a potential warrior but not everyone fulfills this destiny. Clastres puts it thus: “ all men go to war from time to time... some men go to war constantly.” Clearly when a village is attacked, it can be assumed that all men will act as warriors. But it is this special class that must engage in warlike activities even in times of peace. They do not go to war to respond to the needs of others but because they hear the drum beating at all times within their breast.
Moments of external threat and collective danger can transform any community into a community of war and this is naturally universal. What is more particular is the growth of the warrior societies. Nevertheless there are ample instances of communities that have institutionalized the practice of war. In these communities there is an utter dedication to war as the center for all political and ritual power. We know this to be true of the Huron, the Algonkin, the Iroquois, the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Blackfoot, and the Apache. But for Clastres the prime examples are to be found in the tribes of the Grand Chaco, a harsh, dry, thorny wasteland covering much of Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. Among the chaquenos war is valorized above all else, a lesson learned the hard way by the Conquistadors.
So profoundly did the tribes of the Chaco worship war that the 18th century Jesuits had to simply give up their mission because they could do nothing to lessen the chaquenos love for battle and bloodshed. In 1966 when Clastres traveled among the Abipone, the Guaicuru, and the Chulupi, the memory of ancient battles was still fresh and the idea of the warrior was still present in the minds of the people. Membership within the warrior societies is a form of nobility and the glory and prestige accumulated by a group of warriors is reflected onto the community as a whole. The role of society here is to enact ceremonies: dances and rituals that encourage and celebrate the achievements of its warriors in order to ensure that they will continue to seek prestige. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the Hyksos and the iron sword of the Hittites have been compared to miniature atomic bombs.
Among these warriors it is the most aggressive who are most valued and therefore they are mostly made up of young men. The Guaicuru established ritual ceremonies for entrance into warrior societies that were distinct from the initiation rites that all young men went through. And yet entrance into this select group also did not guarantee acceptance into the niadagaguadi, or brotherhood of warriors. The latter was ensured only by accomplishing particular feats of arms in battle and other warlike exploits. In other words, the choice to become a warrior means to pursue this goal with singular focus, determination, and most importantly, passion. The 18th century Jesuit Sanchez Labrador wrote of the Guaicuru: “they are totally indifferent to everything, but take care of their horses, their labrets, and their weapons with great zeal.” Fostering this care for violence is the main task of primitive pedagogy and European observers have frequently remarked with horror on the brutal violence that is often done to very small children, who are given to understand this as a prelude to the life of war that they will enter. Labrador and his fellow missionaries were thwarted at every step by the fact that the concept of loving thy neighbor held no meaning whatsoever for the chaquenos and Christianization in that context was impossible: “The young Abipone are an obstacle to the progress of religion. In their ardent desire for military glory and spoils, they are avidly cutting the heads of the Spanish and destroying their carts and their fields.” The warrior, as we have said above, insists on the need for war at all costs, whether or not peace has been established.
The experience of the Jesuits in the Chaco was echoed by their French counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere. Champlain, in seeking to cement alliances and peace treaties between the Algonkin and Iroquois for trade purposes, was constantly undermined. He writes that his efforts were undone in one particular instance by “nine or ten scatterbrained young men who undertook to go to war, which they did without anyone being able to stop them, for the little obedience they give to their chiefs.” Here we see again that the chief is powerless before the warrior. War cannot be stopped, regardless of the political impetus to do so.
Even as they were engaged in exterminating a continent, the Europeans constantly attempted to interrupt local wars. The French did so by buying back as many Iroquois prisoners as they could from the Huron to spare them from torture and the tribes themselves from inevitable retaliation. A particular Huron chief responded thusly to one such offer for ransom:
I am a man of war and not a merchant, I have come to fight and not to bargain; my glory is not in bringing back presents, but in bringing back prisoners, and leaving, I can touch neither your hatchets nor your cauldrons; if you want our prisoners so much, take them, I still have enough courage to find others; if the enemy takes my life, it will be said in the country that since Ontonio took our prisoners, we threw ourselves into death to get others.
This inability to dissuade warriors from violence is by no means exclusive to European interlopers. The same dynamic can be found within communities as well. Clastres recounts a story told to him by the Chulupi about a famous raid on a Bolivian camp in the 1930s that was undermined by a group of young warriors who decided instead that the enemy should be massacred to a man. Feeling that this bloodthirstiness would compromise the success of the mission, the young men were excluded from the endeavor by the veterans and chiefs. “We do not need you. There are enough of us,” responded the young warriors. Clastres reports that they were no more than twelve.
Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated.
As we have established, war functions in primitive society as a way to preserve autonomy and prevent the accumulation of political power and the growth of the state. The role of the warrior is to make war. And the warrior is the man who has passion for war. But what is the source of this passion? Simply put, the warrior’s passion for war stems from his desperate, wild hunger for prestige, honor, and glory. This fact helps us understand the existential dimensions of the act of warring. The warrior can only realize himself if society confers meaning upon him. Prestige is the content of this meaning. The community awards prestige to the warrior in exchange for accomplishing specific exploits, which as we have seen in turn increases the prestige and honor of the community as a whole. The calculus of prestige is determined by society and it may be that certain war-acts are considered imprudent and thus no prestige is granted. It is perhaps needless to say that heredity or lineage bears no prestige. In other words, nobility cannot be inherited; glory can only be attained by the hand of the man who seeks it; it is nontransferable.
So by what particular acts can the warrior accumulate prestige? In the first case, Clastres identifies the importance of spoils. Since war in primitive society is generally not waged in order to increase territory, gaining spoils is primary. Spoils contain both material and symbolic significance. On the one hand there are spoils such as weapons or metals, which can be used to make more weapons. On the other hand, among the chaquenos, horses occupy a peculiar position in the hierarchy of spoils. Because of the vast number of horses in the Chaco, they bear virtually no use or exchange value despite constituting a large portion of war spoils. Indeed, Clastres reports that certain individuals among the Abipone and Guaicuru possessed dozens if not hundreds of horses. Possessing too many horses was also a considerable drain on the resources of the family or community. Instead, the stealing of horses contributes to the accumulation of prestige via pure glory or sport. This is, of course, not to say that tribes would not guard their horses vigilantly or that horse stealing did not involve bloodshed and death.
Prisoners are the most valuable spoils among the chaquenos. Sanchez Labrador wrote of the Guaicuru, “their desire for prisoners... is inexpressible and frenzied” The experience of being a prisoner in primitive communities varies greatly from tribe to tribe. In certain cases prisoners do all the work, allowing men, women, and children to spend their time exclusively at leisure. In other communities the distinction between prisoner and non-prisoner is vague; prisoners live and fight alongside their captors. The high value of prisoners among the tribes of the Chaco can be attributed at least in part to low population growth. Labrador observed that many families had one child or just as often, none. Additionally in many communities women outnumbered men by six to one. Naturally we can assume an extremely high incidence of mortality among young men but the extreme male to female ratios would have mitigated this fact via polygyny. Likewise we must also account for epidemics brought by the Conquistadors. The extreme hostility of the chaqeunos towards outsiders, however, dramatically lessened the impact of foreign microbes. Thus both cases seem to only partially explain the phenomenon. Clastres concludes that the women of the Chaco simply did not want to bear children.
This is the cosmically tragic element of the primitive society-for-war, the will to war brings with it the refusal to bear children: “young women agreed to be the wives of warriors, but not the mothers of their children.” This is why capturing prisoners, especially children and foreign women, was considered so important. Children could easily be integrated into society through the Law of violence and foreign women were less likely to maintain the chaquena distaste for breeding.
Of course there are further socioeconomic dimensions of war beyond the accumulation of spoils for prestige. The Abipone and Guaicuru abandoned agriculture because it was incompatible with permanent war. Raids provide symbolic gains and, as we have seen, a necessary stimulant to population growth but it also becomes an efficient means of acquiring consumer goods. Why invest the labor power required for agriculture when you are raiding for glory anyway? This dynamic is illustrated in Guaicuru linguistics, which designates the term warrior as “those thanks to whom we eat.” The warrior is therefore the community’s provider. The Apache, for example, having likewise abandoned agriculture, only authorized warfare if it was determined that the action would yield sufficient spoils.
But there are additional pathways for the warrior to gain prestige beyond spoils. In fact, as Clastres and others have observed, a warrior who returned to the village without the scalp of a dead enemy gained no glory regardless of how many horses, women, and how much steel he brought back. The practice of scalping, common in South and North America, explicitly indicates a young man’s admission into a warrior society. Clastres brings attention here to a remarkable but subtle distinction. A man who kills an enemy but refuses to scalp him cannot be warrior. For one who has been consecrated to battle, it is insufficient to kill, he is compelled to take his trophy. Here we can think of the earlier distinction between men dedicated to the pursuit of war and those who simply respond to the needs of the community when circumstances demand it.
The scalp, as a trophy of war, is an object of immense significance. For one thing, Clastres writes, “there is a hierarchy of scalps. Spanish heads of hair, though not disdained, were not, by far, as esteemed as those of Indians.” One might assume that the scalp of the Spaniard, the Conquistador, the genocider, would be highly desirable but it is a testament to the autonomy and pride of the chaquenos that they did not think enough of the Spaniards to count killing one as a meaningful accomplishment for a warrior. For the Chulupi, for example, the scalp of a Toba tribesman was the most valuable prize, due to generations of shared animosity between the two groups. After a warrior’s death his family burns all of his accumulated scalps upon his tomb; his soul will rise to warrior heaven upon a path formed by the smoke. To the Chulupi, there is nothing better than ascending upon a path made from the smoke of Toba scalp.
We have said that scalping an enemy is a requisite for entrance into warrior society but it is only the beginning of his path. The warrior, like Hegel’s slave, is always in a state of becoming. Just as he inherits nothing from the glorious acts of his fathers, with each scalp he takes he must begin again. It does not matter how many scalps a warrior has hanging on the walls of his hut. Once he stops taking scalps, his glory is at an end. The quest and hunger for prestige is a compulsion. Clastres, who correctly places the warrior in an existential context, writes, “the warrior is in essence condemned to forging ahead.” He never has enough scalps. His bloodlust is never quenched. The warrior is thus paradoxically a quintessentially modern figure. He is always dissatisfied and restless. He is a neurotic. He is formed and conditioned by conflicted forces, a soul that yearns for glory but is dependent on a society to recognize and reward it: “for each exploit accomplished, the warrior and society utter the same judgement: the warrior says, That’s good, but I can do more, I can increase my glory. Society says, That’s good, but you should do more, obtain our recognition of a superior prestige.” This paradox is all the more acutely felt as the exploits and the glory they confer are exclusively individual. The warrior does not embody a team mentality. It is every man for his own glory.
So just as it is insufficient for a warrior to have taken the step to scalp a foe and enter the ranks of those men who are living war, it is likewise insufficient for a warrior to continue repetitively venturing out, killing an enemy, and returning with a scalp. This cycle can only confer so much prestige because at a certain point, a warrior can only risk so much by such exploits. For the pursuit of prestige, the warrior must distinguish himself from all other warriors as well. Thus he must continuously seek newer, riskier, bloodier exploits. Every act of war is a challenge to the warrior’s fellows: can you do better? This can be done in a number of ways. A warrior or war party might decide to go deeper and deeper into an enemy’s territory, thus cutting himself off from an easy avenue of escape. A warrior might go to war against an enemy that is especially known for courage, aggressiveness, or prowess. An especially brave warrior might go warring at night, which is typically considered imprudent due to the added threat of hostile spirits. Finally, a warrior might push his way to the front lines of the battle, deliberately putting his body in the way of the enemy’s arrows or rifles. The act that universally confers the highest degree of prestige is that of a single warrior who separates himself from his tribesmen to attack the enemy at his strongest position, in his own camp: “alone against all.” This is the only thing left for the warrior of great prestige.
Remarkably, this height of warlike vigor is shared among tribes throughout the Western Hemisphere. Champlain writes of an attempt to dissuade an Algonkin warrior from single-handedly attacking a Iroquois camp, “he responded that it would be impossible for him to live if he did not kill his enemies.” Similarly the French Jesuits among the Huron observed with horror that
sometimes an enemy, totally naked and with only a hatchet in hand, will even have the courage to enter the huts of a town at night, by himself, then, having murdered some of those he finds sleeping there, to take flight for all defense against a hundred and two hundred people who will follow him one and two entire days.
The stories of valor Clastres was told among the Chulupi echo this kind of suicidal bravery; one famous warrior, having surpassed all other feats of glory had no choice but to mount his horse and drive ever deeper into enemy territory. Alone, attacking one camp after another, he survived in this manner for days before he was finally cut down. The cult of bravery is such that the Chulupi even venerate the memory of a warrior of the Toba, their eternal enemies. This man was known to infiltrate Chulupi camps night after night and scalp several men before disappearing without a trace. Eventually he was tracked down by a Chulupi war party and died under torture without ever crying out.
It is precisely this disdain for danger, pain, and death that corresponds to greater glory. As Clastres points out, the Spaniards were always confused that when they captured a Tupi-Guarani warrior he would never try to escape. Bravely facing torture and death bring glory, escape does not. As a matter of fact, an escaped prisoner is rejected by his community if he returns: “he is a prisoner, his destiny must thus be fulfilled.” This destiny is invariably one of torture, death, followed by cannibalism. So the fate of the warrior is to continue to put himself in increasingly dangerous situations and eventually, no matter his past successes, he is fated to die alone, at the hands of his enemies. He is a nomad wanderer, always traversing the line between life and death: “the warrior is, in his being, a being-for-death.” The death instinct may not trump the instinct for glory and prestige but we must observe that the one becomes the other. The death instinct may be a more influential factor than we might like to admit.
In one of the last essays Clastres wrote before his death he recounts a meeting with two old Chulupi men. Both were around sixty five years old. They had both seen countless battles, were covered in scars, and had each killed dozens of men. Nevertheless, as Clastres was surprised to discover, neither of the men had taken scalps and entered the Kaanokle, or warrior society. When Clastres asks them why they did not want to join this most prestigious group, they both responded that they simply did not want to die. This is profoundly illustrative of the death instinct dynamic that we have described above: “to insist on the glory attached to the title of warrior amounts to accepting the more or less long term price: death.” To be a warrior, as we have seen, means to never stop pursuing glory and to never stop facing greater and greater danger. For many men it is better to renounce the endless pursuit of prestige and simply be forgotten by the community than to become imprisoned within a passion for killing. This is the sorrow of the warrior: renounce prestige, fame, and glory or live every day drenched in blood, driving always closer and closer to death.
Ultimately, Clastres’ significance is in ensuring that we understand how fundamental violence is to primitive societies. And further that we understand that primitive violence is not an unfortunate blemish in an otherwise idyllic existence, to be swept under the rug and ignored in order to promote a prescriptive vision for the future. Clastres demonstrated that what is desirable, substantive, and eminently deserving of emulation in primitive society is precisely due to and constituted by ever-present, permanent violence. We must refuse to shy away from the importance of violence in the creation of community. We must acknowledge, in fact, that violence alone, properly understood, is the only means to achieve the kind of society we desire.
** Atassa: Lessons of the Creek War
(1813–1814)
Abe Cabrera
Three men searched for their friends and kin among the dead, ‘some still bleeding, all scalped & mutilated, and smoked with fire,’ while shouts of the murderers could be distinctly heard & their campfires seen to the east. Hundreds of painted war clubs littered the battlefield, each signifying a Redstick enemy slain.
Gregory Waselkov,
A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814, pg. 145
All of this is also re-wilding: to return to the primitive in a conflict inherited from our ancestors; to put into practice the tactics that the ancients used but in our own conditions. In fact, the murder that ITS carried out also represents ‘individualist re-wilding’. The goal of assassinating an UNAM employee was not just to take him out and create negative reactions to this act, but rather with the same act, the members of ITS also murdered the civilized person within, killing little by little with thrusts of the knife those Western values imposed on them from childhood onward.
Xale,
“Hard Words:
An eco-extremist conversation”
It has been over 150 years since Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon reflected on how events occur in history, as it were, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Yet it is arguable that to differentiate between the two (tragedy and farce), one has to assume that history tends toward a particular direction. An event that is similar to a past event, so the logic goes, somehow failed to learn “the lessons” of its unpleasant predecessor. This idea makes assumptions concerning humans in a particular context acting in groups: that they have agency, that they have complete transparency in realizing what they are doing, that certain lessons can be learned after the fact, etc. If, on the other hand, we appreciate the blindness and resolve needed for heroism in an endeavor, any act can appear to be foolishness to the observer looking on in hindsight. All that the actors see in the middle of things is necessity. Our struggle may not be one of “learning the lessons” and breaking the cycle of tragedy and farce. It may simply be an issue of returning to the “heroism” of tragedy. That is to say, perhaps we must return to the tragic as an escape from progress: to realize that things must be thus, and it is our own reaction that is most important when faced with an inevitable outcome. It’s an issue of whether we fight or lay down our arms because we are blind to an elusive “future.”
This essay describes a tragedy, one in which--in order to preserve a society--its people had to destroy it. We speak here of the Creek or Red Stick War in what is now the US Southeast, which took place from 1813 to 1814. The indigenous combatants in this war most likely did not suspect that their war would end badly for them. I will argue, however, that the war itself was inevitable, as was perhaps its outcome. In this assertion, I am not being deterministic, but rather I am arguing that for the Creeks to have avoided mortal conflict with Euro-American civilization, they would have had to cease to be Creeks. Instead, the Red Stick Creeks fought valiantly and violently against the white settler as they deemed the loss of their lives a small thing compared to the loss of their land and honor. The Red Sticks would purify their land of civilization or die trying. Ferocity and cruelty in battle against a superior enemy were the primary means of their re-wilding, a re-wilding that sparked civilization’s war of annihilation against the Red Sticks. The “inevitability” of this tragic ending is the central lesson from the Creek War.
*** The Emergence and Shape of Creek Society
The Creek or Muskogee Confederation in the early 19th century was a community that had evolved over centuries of political change and societal collapse. The Creeks were a group of clans that had once inhabited a landscape of large chiefdoms known as the Mississippian cultures. By the arrival of Hernando de Soto in the early 16th century, these chiefdoms had slightly declined but were still vibrant enough to pose a significant barrier to Spanish incursions. Population collapse due to disease and changing political factors internally led to these chiefdoms dispersing and then slowly devolving into confederations, the names of which are familiar today: the Creeks, the Choctaw, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, and the Seminoles. The unity of the Creeks in particular up to the time of their war with the US was often precarious and filled with tensions that emerged along geographic and class lines.
All of these confederacies or tribes shared a common cosmovision that was no doubt a remnant of the once great Mississippian cultures. And within the tribes themselves, there were always disputes between the tribal center and the village periphery. The Creeks were divided into various towns that in turn were divided between “Lower Creeks” (inhabiting the area along the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers in what is now Georgia) and “Upper Creeks” (inhabiting the area along Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers and their tributaries in what is now the state of Alabama). The Upper Creeks were by far the larger group, outnumbering the Lower Creeks two to one (Green, 22).
For the purposes of describing what would come to be known as the Red Stick War, we will limit ourselves to commenting on three essential aspects of Creek culture: matrilineal kinship, the nature of Creek agriculture, and the Green Corn or Busk ceremony. These three aspects in my view contributed most to Creek traditionalism as interpreted through the militant ideology of Pan-Indianism. The inability to integrate into patriarchal yeoman farmer agricultural society is what led the Creeks to defend their way of life with unprecedented acts of violence.
Matrilineal kinship and the nature of Creek agriculture were closely related and defined the essential division of labor between men and women. In following matrilineal descent, all children born to a woman were automatically members of her clan without any formal relation to the father’s clan. The most important male in a Creek child’s life was not the father, but a male member of the wife’s clan, usually an older maternal uncle. Matrilineal descent allowed comparatively interesting family histories wherein a prominent member of Creek tribe could have a great deal of European ancestry, but still be considered fully Creek, at least culturally. For example, William Weatherford, or Hopinika Fulsahi (Truth Maker), was a key leader of the Redsticks in their attack on Fort Mims, but his great-grandfather, grand-father, and father were Europeans who had married Creek women. The children born of those relationships were all raised by the mother’s clan, including William Weatherford (Shuck-Hall, 4). Nevertheless, increased intermarriage put a strain on the matrilineal kinship as a new métis (mixed blood) class began to associate increasingly with European ways (including patrilineal kinship) while keeping the Creek language and certain aspects of their culture. This was a leading factor in the decision to carry out the massacre at Fort Mims, which we will discuss below.
These matrilineal kinship relationships also shaped the domestic and public space within Creek towns. Men dominated the town square and the decision-making bodies, but women were considered the mistresses of the home and hearth. This supremacy in the home was demonstrated by the ceremony that took place on the first morning after the marriage of Creek woman, called the asaamachi. In this ceremony, the new wife would intentionally burn her husband’s first meal to demonstrate that the man was the subordinate within the relationship, and that his offspring would be members of his wife’s clan and not his own (ibid). Women could thus have a great deal of indirect influence on Creek political life, as was believed to be the case of William Weatherford, whose third wife is thought to have influenced his militant traditionalism. Overall, the place of the man was the town (talwa) square, the forest during the hunt, and the battlefield.
Agriculture played a large part in Creek society and cosmology, yet was almost the exclusive domain of women. This exclusivity was based on a trope common in Southeastern tribes of the man being the “taker of life,” and the woman being the “giver of life.” Matrilineal kinship is largely believed to be founded on the premise that the women and children who had gone through so much trouble to clear patches of forest for cultivation with stone axes and fire should not have them taken away by a male interloper who marries into the clan (Waselkov, 6). Thus, to the people who did all of the agricultural work went the reward, with the man providing meat from his hunt and receiving in return sustenance from the corn and other crops that his wife’s clan cultivated. This also meant that men handling agricultural matters was culturally unthinkable, save for some mandatory clearing of forest where a stronger back and hands were needed.
The major feast of the Creek year, as in many other parts of the Southeast, was the Green Corn or Busk Festival, a harvest festival that was simultaneously a purging of the expired order and a celebration of new abundance. In some villages, old pots, utensils, and clothes were symbolically destroyed to symbolize the breaking with an expired and corrupt past. In later times, the use of European goods and clothing were also forbidden in some towns during the Busk. The sacred village fire was extinguished and rekindled in four to eight days of fasting, purification, and moral attentiveness. The central deity in Mississippian cultures was the sun, and fire was deemed to be its emissary. Over the course of the year, the central fire of the town from which all of the individual fires were kindled could become “polluted” with acts of violence, the violation of sexual taboos, and similar transgressions (Martin, 39). Once the old fire was extinguished and the new one kindled, the first fruits of the corn harvest were “sacrificed” to the new fire. The symbolic color of the Busk was white as opposed to red (which was the color of war). The Busk could only take place during a time of peace, since war ceremonies supplanted the Busk until hostilities ceased. Many of these cultural tropes would inform the symbolism of Creek cultural renewal leading up to the Redstick War of the early 19th century.
To summarize, Creeks society was a subsistence agricultural/ hunting and gathering society based on matrilineal kinship informed by the pressures and influences of European contact. This society kept many of the characteristics of Mississippian cultures as had most major cultures in the Southeast. The Creeks emerged as a loose confederation of towns sharing certain linguistic and ceremonial characteristics. Increased European encroachment would bring access to trade goods that compromised the Creek way of life, leading to tensions that would erupt in a civil war that would escalate into total war against the nascent United States of America.
*** The Trade Trap
European influence was not strongly felt in the Creeks’ territory until the late 17th century. While some trade goods arrived from Spanish Florida before that time, little direct interaction happened between the peoples who inhabited what is now Georgia and Alabama and the outside world. This began to change with the founding of the city of Charleston in 1670. Trade goods such as glass, metals, beads, and other materials slowly made their way into Creek territory. With the defeat of tribes to the north and increased European colonization, the Creeks were integrated into the regional and global economy. In order to acquire European goods, they could provide two things in exchange: slaves and deerskins.
The introduction of firearms facilitated this trade. Hunting for deer and the capture and subjugation of slaves in war occurred before the European conquest, but not at the level needed by emerging international markets. The Europeans sought deerskins for clothing, bookbinding, and other manufacturing uses, and they were one of the main exports of the colonies. Captured Indian slaves were used as labor for the tobacco plantations on the coast before the mass importation of African slaves. The hunt and war were obligations of the man in these societies, and thus firearms augmented their abilities to do what they had done from time immemorial. For example, tribes like the Apalachees that did not have access to English firearms, became vulnerable to slave raids from surrounding tribes (Martin, 59). Increased trade with the Europeans resulted in an arms race between tribes where European powers (England, France, and Spain) played tribes against each other to acquire better terms of exchange.
Gradually, Africans replaced indigenous peoples as the primary labor force on plantations, and the deer populations diminished as a result of overhunting. Creek society also underwent substantial changes. The firearm became the main instrument of war and the hunt, and could only be obtained by trade. Cooking utensils, cloth, and alcohol also became necessities that only trade with the Europeans could provide. Alcohol was a particularly problematic vice that often resulted in indigenous people being swindled out of their deerskins (Martin, 66). Since Creek men had to be out on the hunt for most of the year to acquire enough deerskins for trade, the women were left with the old people and children to run village life on their own. Wandering further distances to acquire deerskins meant that they would often encroach on the territories of their neighbors, leading to wars with the Choctaws and Cherokees in particular. This “bad blood” between the Creeks and their neighbors would play a substantial role in a divide-and-conquer strategy that would subjugate the the Southeast tribes and expel them from their territories.
Into the 18th century, Europeans powers jockeyed for influence in the region, and thus often bought off tribes in a patronage relationship. The Choctaws, for example, were allies of the French against the English, and the Creeks and Cherokees were in a patronage relationship with the English against the French and the Spanish. The deerskin trade also brought European traders into the region who intermarried into matrilineal Creek society. The offspring of wealthy traders often became influential (in spite of the muted role that fathers played in Creek kinship). Europeans also brought horses and cattle into these lands, which became both sources of wealth and nuisances for the Creek towns. For example, grazing cattle often trespassed and destroyed fields devoted to subsistence agriculture (Martin, 80).The presence of the Europeans and their livestock led to conflict in early 19th century Creek society: namely, métis Creeks were assimilating into US society based on the European nuclear family and not the Creek sprawling matrilineal clan system. These new communities subsisted and even thrived by practicing commercial agriculture dependent on slaves and livestock. The presence of these foreign and mixed elements into Creek society would be a major source of division that would fuel Creek nativist sentiments.
*** Tecumseh’s Call to Spiritual Warfare
Following the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War of the late 18th century, the Creek Confederation became increasingly centralized in a Creek National Council, with the power of individual towns diminishing as a result. Encroachment was felt especially with the creation of the US and the state of Georgia right next to Creek lands. White settlers hungry for land began to annex Creek territory that they deemed underdeveloped or neglected since Creek subsistence agriculture left large tracts of land “untouched” as hunting grounds for deer and other game. For white European society, the development of land for agriculture and other purposes was the only real legal manner to claim dominion over it (Inskeep, 112). The growing presence of white settlers meant for some that assimilation into the new US society was inevitable.
The new President of the US, George Washington, appointed Benjamin Hawkins as the US Indian agent to the Creeks in 1785. Hawkins’ role in the Creek Confederacy quickly became one of civilizer and de facto chief counselor. Hawkins encouraged the adoption of livestock breeding, yeoman commercial agriculture, and Christianity by Creek society, The goal was to make transitory warlike hunters into peaceful farmers who were devoted to their plots and who passed on their land from father to son. What Hawkins sought to foster is what Joel Martin in his book, Sacred Revolt, calls the “gaze of development” (92). That is, he wanted to transform the Creek semi-wild landscape into something more “productive,” and by that thwart the ambitions of white settlers to annex the land outright and crowd out the indigenous peoples. By this process, they would be assimilated into Euro-American civilization and not excluded from it.
Hawkins’ efforts were successful in many towns, but in these experiments, there were winners and losers. Mixed-blood Creeks who were the progeny of prominent planter families often prospered, as prestigious clans maneuvered to unite with the rural upper class of settler society. Other Creeks had a difficult time understanding institutions such as slavery, as they acquired slaves but put them to little use in the area of commercial agriculture (Martin, 105). In certain cases, Creek towns served as a refuge for runaway slaves who were often welcomed for their manufacturing and agricultural abilities. This was a threat to the white settler society where commercial agriculture was based on slave labor. Overall, accumulation was foreign to Creek society outside of the clan kinship structure, and Hawkins and other civilizers had to inculcate into the Creeks the ideas of thrift and wealth accumulation instead of the redistribution of abundance via clan relationships (Martin, 108).
Into this tense situation came Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa. It is likely that both were partCreek, and they had come south in 1811 to spread their Pan-Indian message of unity in order to cast out the whites and end the encroachment of the US into traditional indigenous lands. Their tour of the South was met at first with a cool reception, with the Choctaw chief Pushmataha following them throughout his tribal territory and exhorting that the people should disregard their speeches (Pushmataha being a great friend of the whites) (Weir, 63). Tecumseh encountered a more receptive audience to his traditionalist prophetic message among the Creeks. At the same times, Hawkins was trying to convince the Creeks to allow a highway through Creek land linking the settlements in Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico. White settlements continued to spread into Creek hunting grounds, making life difficult for those who refused to settle into the yeoman farmer way of life. Tecumseh added fuel to the fire by shaming the Creeks when he contrasted their sedentary occupations of spinning and farming with the “wild and fearless independence of their ancestors” (Martin, 122). The sighting of the Great Comet of 1811 coincided exactly with Tecumseh’s visit, which indicated to the disgruntled Creeks that the heavens themselves were echoing Tecumseh’s message of renewal (Weir, 59).
Another significant portent, the Great Earthquake of 1811, was recorded around the time of Tecumseh’s visit by the settler, Margaret Eades Austill, who had been a girl at the time of the Creek War:
One night after a fearful day, the Indians followed us for miles [and] we camped in an old field. Just as supper was announced, a most terrific earthquake took place, the horses all broke loose, the wagon chains jingled, and every face was pale with fear and terror. The Indians came in numbers around us looking frightened, and grunting out their prayers, and oh, the night was spent in terror by all but the next day some of the Indians came to us and said it was Tecumseh stamping his foot for war. (Inskeep, 33–34)
Leaders of the Creek anti-civilization movement soon began to appear among the traditional “doctors,” “medicine makers,” and “knowers.” These became known as the “the prophets” among the combatant Creeks. By 1812, these prophets were the main opposition to the chiefs especially in the Upper Creek towns that were policing actions of militants against the settlers, often flogging and putting to death those who took actions against the white encroachers. This was in keeping with one of the primary endeavors of the modernizers: replacing the traditional law of revenge based on kinship with the rule of law based on a central tribal government. The Cherokees, for example, fully embraced the new legal system forbidding clan revenge (Inskeep, 26). The Creek prophets, on the other hand, found a receptive audience among those who saw that the white invasion violated both the land and their ancestors, and that vengeance and purification were needed. Just as the Busk ceremony was the high holy time when the new fire and the world itself were purified, so a New Busk was being prepared by the Maker of Breath to purify the land of the white plague. The symbol of this new movement became the atassa, the war club painted red; a weapon that had fallen into disuse in favor of tomahawks and guns. Those seeking to purify the land of Europeans and all of their influence would be known to history as the Red Sticks.
*** The Creek Primitivist War
The Creek or Red Stick War of 1813–1814 started as a civil war that escalated into a conflict that drew in the US. The war began as a crusade to exterminate the traitors and internal enemies within the Creek nation. The first major battle was provoked by a planned preemptive strike by Thlucco, chief of the town of Tuckabatchee, who at the behest of Hawkins decided to try to nip the Red Stick rebellion in the bud. The leader of the Red Stick faction, Hopoithle Miko, took Tuckabatchee after eight days of siege on July 22nd, 1813, driving the peaceful assimilationist Creeks from the town. Joel Martin summarizes the significance of the number eight in the Creek cosmology:
The symbolic significance of this timing would not have been lost on the Muskogees. As a multiple of the number four, the number stood for the cardinal directions and all creation, the number eight was sacred. Moreover, eight days was the normal length of time to perform the poskita or the Busk ceremony in important square grounds, including Tuckabatchee. Finally, the number eight was associated with the shaman’s ‘star.’ Venus. During the time of Venus’s inferior conjunction, the planet leaves its position in the morning or evening sky, disappears for nine nights, and eight days, and then reappears in the opposite sky. Shamans consider this cycle to be emblematic of their own passage to and from secret spiritual realms. (131–132)
The conflict was thus not merely political, but also cosmological and spiritual in nature. It was deemed to be a restoration of the Creek cosmos, the reestablishment of ceremonial and social order after interference from European civilization. To this end, the prophets exhorted people to renounce material objects such as silver, brass, glass, and beads, as well as hoes, axes, and other goods that had been acquired in the trade trap mentioned above. Warriors were instructed to rely less on guns and more on bow and arrows, less on white implements of war and more on their war clubs. (Martin, 142) Among the most hated symbol of civilization was livestock, so much so that, toward the end of the Creek War, an observer reported that they had all been slaughtered and that “not a track of a cow or hog was to be seen in Creek country.” (Holland Braun, 15) Even agriculture was neglected, as Benjamin Hawkins observed when he wrote in a letter, “One thing surprises me, they have totally neglected their crops and are destroying every living eatable thing... They are persevering in this mode of destruction.” (Martin, 142–143)
These practices also led to the abandonment of the towns altogether to re-found communities in the woods. Many Busk ceremonies included a temporary re-wilding by the men who spent four days in the wilderness purifying themselves. The Red Sticks and their families opted to return to the woods and live in small camps. New settlements were christened such as Eccanachaca (Holy Ground) on the Alabama River, which was chosen for its physical attributes and was protected by the powerful magic of the Red Stick prophets. The men hunted and the women returned to intensive gathering without access to their regular crops. This “pilgrimage into the woods” was a preparation for war, a return to the very space that was being attacked by civilization (ibid, 144).
The other attribute of restoration was, as one could assume, extermination of those who refused the message of the Red Stick prophets. Joel Martin describes one instance of the slaughter of peaceful chiefs as a ritual sacrifice:
In Coosa, the friendly chiefs, apparently unaware of their imminent danger, were directed to sit down by a group of prophets. The prophets then circled and danced around the chiefs. Suddenly, the head prophet ‘gave a war whoop’ and attacked, killing as many chiefs as possible with war clubs, bows, and arrows. (129)
This episode is indicative of the primitivism of the Red Sticks even in war. As the natural world itself and the Maker of Breath were deemed to be in the process of purifying the Earth, the Red Sticks believed that the magic of the prophets along with their clubs, knives, bows and arrows would be invincible against the white weapons of war. This was all in line with the words of Tecumseh:
Kill the old Chiefs, friends of peace; kill the cattle, the hogs, and fowls; do not work, destroy the wheels and the looms, throw away your ploughs, and everything used by the Americans... Shake your war clubs, shake yourselves: you will frighten the Americans, their [fire]arms will drop from their hands, the ground will become a bog, and mire them, and you may knock them on the head with your war clubs... (Waselkov, 78)
As could be expected, there were those among the Red Sticks who were more pragmatic and did not exclude modern firearms from their war to defeat the traitorous modernizers. It should be noted that these events were sparked in part by the War of 1812, with the fate of the US itself hanging in the balance. It was this geopolitical situation that drove the Red Sticks’ attention south to ask for firearms from Spanish Florida. This would be the catalyst for the bloody episode that would bring the US into the war and later doom the Creek Confederacy to extinction east of the Mississippi River.
*** The Massacre at Fort Mims as Re-wilding
In spite of the beliefs of the prophets, a delegation of Red Sticks went to Pensacola in Spanish Florida to receive gunpowder, a quantity of lead, and other supplies (but no guns as they had hoped). The Spanish half-heartedly supplied the Red Sticks to curb US encroachments into their territory. Anglo-American settlers learned of this caravan of supplies, and on July 27, 1813, a militia consisting of settlers and mixed-blood Creeks from the Tensaw area (north of present-day Mobile) attacked the delegation at the Battle of Burnt Corn. At first routed by the perceived unprovoked attack, the Red Sticks rallied in the swamps and drove away the militia. What followed was the putting aside of geopolitical calculation in favor of traditional clan vengeance. Those who had been wronged by the ambush would need to respond with blood to appease their dead kin. Added to that was the perception of the Tensaw and Bigbe settlements as areas of Anglo-American settlement with significant mixed-blood Creek presence. The decision was promptly made to destroy these settlements with their war clubs and to purify the land with fire. The thought most certainly crossed the minds of the Red Sticks that an attack on Anglo-American settlements would bring the US into the war, bringing with it potential catastrophe. The logic of Creek blood vengeance trumped these calculations.
The specific target was the plantation of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw area in what is now southern Alabama. Fort Mims was a fortified plantation in which whites and mixed-blooded Creeks took refuge in order to protect themselves from Red Stick incursions. Hundreds of Red Sticks began arriving in the forests around the fort. On August 29th, 1813, slaves began to report sightings of Indian warriors in the area. Their reports were dismissed and one slave was even flogged for spreading false rumors. On August 30 in the early morning, hundreds of Red Sticks crept toward the fort. The prophets had instructed four Red Stick warriors to run into the fort and slaughter the whites using only their war clubs. The prophets swore that their magic would protect these warriors and render the firearms of the whites harmless. At 10 or 11 in the morning, led by mixed-blooded Red Sticks William Weatherford and Peter McQueen, around 750 Red Sticks ran in silence toward the fort. When finally discovered, they let out a war whoop and the four warriors rushed into the gate armed only with war clubs. Three were killed almost instantaneously by white rifles, but one miraculously survived as he retreated.
The rest of the late morning and early afternoon was a pitched battle between the Red Sticks and the white settlers, with much taunting back and forth in the Muskogee tongue. It was far from the easy victory promised by the prophets. At one point, the prophets exhorted the Red Sticks to lay down their firearms and attack only with their war clubs, which the defenders eagerly encouraged them to do as well. As Howard Weir writes in his book, Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–1814, the prophet, Paddy Walsh, indicated that the fort would fall into their hands if he ran around it three times, which he was able to do in spite of being wounded by the defenders in his sprint (174). Again, some prophets rushed the fort and commenced a war dance, only to be shot down by the incredulous defenders (ibid, 176). Leadership of the attack promptly returned to the war chiefs once the prophets’ magic was deemed worthless on the battlefield.
Around mid-afternoon, the Red Sticks partially withdrew and argued whether they should cease the attack. Many sources indicate here that Weatherford himself stated that what they had done was quite enough and that they should withdraw. Some record that it was the freed slaves who exhorted the Red Sticks to finish off the fort. Many historians dismiss that explanation and state it was the Red Sticks themselves who agreed that they should rout the whites and traitorous Creeks and burn down the settlement. At that point, Weatherford withdrew to rescue the slaves on a relation’s plantation. At around 3 p.m, the final assault took place. The Red Sticks seized the gun ports of the defenders and began to set the buildings on fire with flaming arrows. Defenders and civilians alike either ran out of the buildings to be slaughtered by the Red Sticks or were burned alive.
What followed was a slaughter of exceptional brutality, but well in keeping with the ethos of Creek vengeance in war. It was “an exercise in revenge and brutality,” (Holland Braun, 21), a rage that was unleashed on those who sought to steal their sacred land and destroy the institutions that were the foundation of the Creek cosmos. Or as Gregory Waselkov put it, “Now the purifying blaze of the poskita (Busk) would rid the nation of the apostate Creeks of the Tensaw.” Scalps were taken liberally, while pure-blooded Creeks were spared and told to leave. Black slaves were rounded up and taken prisoner. One slave began to run away with a small child of a planter, only to think better of it and return with the boy to surrender to the Red Sticks. The boy was promptly clubbed and scalped to death while he cried out for his father, and the slave was taken captive (Weir, 181).
The Red Sticks were meticulous and exceptionally cruel in butchering the last inhabitants of the fort. Children were smashed against the ground or on hard objects, Once scalped, the survivors still alive were thrown into burning buildings. Some also reported that, “under the influence of the Shawnees among them, and contrary to their traditions, some of the Creeks severed the limbs of the dead, then strutted about the grounds of the burning fort waving the grisly trophies above their heads” (Weir, 182).
Weir also wrote the following, concerning the misfortunes of the women of the fort:
A special fate was reserved for the women. The Indians stripped them naked, scalped both head and nether parts, then raped some with fence rails and clubbed all to death like small game. Those unfortunate enough to be pregnant had their bellies slit open. Then the glistening fetus was snatched out, cord still attached, and laid, still living, carefully by the mother’s side in horrible tableaux—in the case of Mrs. Summerlin’s twins, on both sides of her. The indomitable Nancy Bailey met a similar end. When approached by an Indian who asked who her family was, she reportedly pointed to a body sprawled nearby and boldly exclaimed, ‘I am the sister of that great man you have murdered there.’ At which the enraged Indians clubbed her to the ground, slit open her belly, yanked out her intestines, and threw them onto the ground around her. (ibid)
Far from being acts of gratuitous or extraordinary violence, what occurred at Fort Mims was well within the cultural and spiritual logic of traditional Creek culture. As Sheri Shuck-Hall writes in her article, “Understanding the Creek War and Redstick Nativism, 1812–1815”:
The Redsticks believed that the Métis Creeks had killed their kinsmen at the Battle of Burnt Corn. Therefore clan retribution (sometimes referred to as blood law) was the immediate action that needed to be taken. Clan retaliation or revenge of a member’s death—whether accidental or not—was a long-standing social institution inherited from the Creeks’ Mississippian ancestors. Clan members in these circumstances would seek out the offenders. Based on ancient customs that existed before European contact, upon their capture clan members would tie the prisoners to a pole and would encourage them to sing a war song while being tortured. After the prisoners expired, clan members would remove the scalps and cut them into pieces. Then they would tie the pieces to pine twigs and lay them atop the roof of the house of the murdered person, whose blood they had avenged. They believed that this act appeased their clan member’s soul. Kinsmen would then celebrate for three days and nights. Another Creek tradition in the eighteenth century against non-Creek enemies or traitors of the talwas was death by burning. (14–15)
As a movement to return to the traditional ways of living, the Creeks had to follow their traditions that demanded the violent deaths of their enemies. While they quickly succumbed to pragmatism in weaponry, the wronged clansmen had to follow traditional Creek law in avenging themselves on those who had killed their kin, even if those people were Anglo-American settlers who had been previously excluded from hostilities. Not only did these actions continue the physical purification of the land of European livestock and materials, but they also constituted a bloody attack on European civilized attitudes within themselves. This exceptional Busk ceremony purified both the sacred fire of the village and the living flame of traditional life within.
*** Tohopeka
Waselkov writes of the immediate aftermath of the Fort Mims massacre:
For a brief two months, the Redstick nation would be free of the polluting presence of the Americans and their apostate Creek accomplices. The entire Upper Creek country of the Alabamas, Tallapoosas, and Abekas lay uncontested in Redstick hands, some 30 talwas with at least 8,000 inhabitants, a quarter of whom would die in the coming conflict.
News of the Fort Mims massacre spread quickly in the US. Great indignation spread concerning the brutal massacre of over 400 whites at the hands of savage Indians. For those in the region, it was the pretext that they needed to break the back of the Creek Confederacy, to finally have access to the hunting grounds that were deemed prime land for settlers. Efforts to organize a militia to rout the Red Sticks were led by Colonel (later General) Andrew Jackson and his volunteers from Tennessee. Added to this were significant contingents from the Cherokees and Choctaws, historic enemies of the Creeks, as well as “friendly” Creeks who opposed the Red Sticks.
The war from then on was generally one-sided in favor of the US forces. The invading army in Creek territory followed a scorched earth policy that caused the Creeks to flee their towns before they were overrun by the invading troops. The main obstacle that Jackson faced in his invasion was raising and feeding a militia and keeping them together long enough to finish off the Red Sticks in their strongholds. The fleeing Creeks on the other hand also faced starvation and general want. By late 1813, there was a general will among the allied forces to extinguish the menace of the Red Sticks, who were on the run and scrambling for ammunition, which they could no longer replenish. Wherever the US forces and their allies prevailed, they left destruction in their wake, echoing the atrocities at Fort Mims and previous skirmishes between Creeks and settlers.
One major battle was the taking of Eccanachaca in late December 1813. It was believed that the Red Stick prophet Josiah Francis had used spells and incantations to place a magic line around the perimeter and any enemy who attempted to cross it would fall dead instantly (Weir, 285). William Weatherford organized the defense, but the town was quickly surrounded by the militia and allied forces. Weatherford and his Red Sticks fought a rearguard action allowing most of the inhabitants to escape through a hole in the US line, and Weatherford himself escaped with his leaping horse over a bluff into the Alabama River, and then swam to safety.
Upon taking the town, the soldiers were greeted with a horrific sight. A long pole was set in the ground from which dangled hundreds of scalps, from those of infants to the grey hair of the elderly. These were the trophies that the Red Sticks took from Fort Mims. The town was then pillaged and then set to the flame, as was much of the surrounding countryside in subsequent days (ibid, 294).
Skirmishes and other battles took place until February of 1814, when the 39th Infantry of the United States Army finally joined with Jackson’s forces, making them a force of 5,000 determined and disciplined men. From there, the objective was to march on the Red Stick settlement of Tohopeka on the Tallapoosa River. The Battle of Tohopeka is also known as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on account of the horseshoe shape of the settlement bordered by the river. It had been chosen by the Red Sticks because it had not been inhabited before (in accordance with their desire for societal renewal) as well as its natural fortification as a peninsula. Added to this was a breastwork built by the Red Sticks that added additional protection. At the time of the battle, it is believed that 1,000 warriors and 400 women and children inhabited the town (Martin, 161).
Steve Inskeep in his book, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross and the Great American Land Grab, comments on the irony of creating such a fortification in the context of the Creek War. Inskeep points out how the greatest successes against the whites militarily came in hit-and-run guerilla warfare, and to concentrate one’s forces in a fortified settlement as the whites had done at Fort Mims was ultimately suicidal. Inskeep writes:
[T]hese determined traditionalists broke with tradition. Possibly hoping to protect women and children from the white horsemen, they performed a fatal imitation of the white man’s art of war. If confronted by a superior force, they would be trapped for a massacre as surely as the white settlers at Fort Mims.
On March 27th, 1814, 1,500 Anglo-American troops with 500 Cherokee allies and 100 friendly Creeks attacked Tohopeka in what would be the decisive defeat of the Red Sticks in the Creek War. In spite of the breastworks, the desperate Red Sticks were by that time low on ammunition and were mostly fighting with bows and arrows, as well as tomahawks and war clubs. Nevertheless, they put up a substantial defense of their town at first, fighting for the possibility of fending off the enemy until nightfall and escaping by canoe under the cover of darkness, thus living to fight another day.
Arguably the decisive blow in the battle was struck by Jackson’s Cherokee allies. Jackson shelled the breastwork defending Tohopeka to little effect until the Cherokee warriors, eager to engage their ancestral enemies, plunged themselves into the river and swam across, stealing the Red Sticks’ canoes and using them to get across the river themselves, thus creating an attack from the rear (Holland Braun, 133). This also made an organized escape from the peninsula impossible for the Red Sticks as well as their women and children. Opening a new line of attack meant that Red Stick forces were divided, allowing an opening for Jackson’s troops to storm over the breastwork and into the town, where the slaughter of the Red Sticks promptly commenced.
Weir describes the “work of destruction” against Tohopeka:
Even Jackson was impressed: ‘The carnage was dreadful,’ he wrote... Not only was the destruction of the Red Clubs apocalyptic, but it lasted five hours or more until nightfall, and, in some parts of the Horseshoe, until 10:00 p.m. The blood fever infected the troops like a virus. As at Tallushatchee, but on a vaster, if not nastier scale, the Americans and their Indian allies gave no quarter and the Creeks purportedly asked for none. (418)
Those Red Sticks attempting to flee were picked off while trying to swim away or were hunted down in the surrounding woods. This would be the last major battle in the Creek War. From the Battle of Burnt Corn to Tohopeka, an estimated 1,800 to 1,900 warriors were killed on the Creek side, by some estimates forty percent of the male population, along with hundreds of women and children (Martin, 163). Those women and children not killed in Tohopeka were made slaves to the Cherokees. And thus Benjamin Hawkins’ prediction before the war concerning the fate of the Red Sticks was realized:
You may frighten one an other with the power of your prophets to make thunder, earthquakes, and to sink the earth. These things cannot frighten the American soldiers... The thunder of their cannon, their rifles, and their swords will be more terrible than the works of your prophets. (Martin, 131)
There were only a handful of survivors of Tohopeka, but many hundreds had fled south to join the Seminoles in their fight against European encroachment. Others continued guerilla warfare in isolated pockets in traditional Creek land. Some were able to make peace with Jackson and his forces. The most noted case among these was William Weatherford, who famously strode into Jackson’s camp to surrender himself, certain of his own execution. Jackson spared him on account of the bravery of this act, and Weatherford devoted himself to convincing the remaining Red Sticks to lay down their arms. On August 9th, 1814, the Creeks were forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson which ceded 23 million acres of Creek land to the US, resulting in the loss of all of their holdings in Georgia and much of central Alabama. The loyal Creeks objected to this tremendous loss of land, though Jackson explained that the land was a payment to the US for prosecuting their internal war against the Red Sticks.
This was only the beginning of Jackson’s true intention to expel all of the tribes out of the US Southeast, driving them west of the Mississippi River. When Andrew Jackson became President in 1829, he spent his years in office advocating for an Indian removal policy, which became a reality in 1838 with the beginning of the Trail of Tears: the expulsion of the Civilized Tribes from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast. One prominent Cherokee leader, Junaluska, had saved Jackson’s life during the Battle of Tohopeka when he tripped a captive Red Stick who broke free from his guards and attempted to stab the general. Junaluska lived to see the day when the man who he had saved expelled his own people from their lands. He is rumored to have said, “If I had known that Jackson would drive us from our homes, I would have killed him that day at the Horseshoe.” In not heeding Tecumseh’s call to unite under the banner of pan-Indianism, the divided tribes of the Southeast fell together.
All was not lost, however. Even when the mixed-blood ex-Red Stick Weatherford was rehabilitated in white lore as Red Eagle, the reluctant savage who went to war and opposed Red Stick excesses, he could not shake from himself the spiritual formation received from his mother’s clan. On a hunting trip in 1824, Weatherford spotted a white tail deer that had been killed. The sight deeply moved Weatherford who returned to his home and told his family that a member of his hunting party would soon go to hunt in the spirit land of his ancestors. The next day, William Weatherford died. Even in defeat, Creek beliefs remained strong in those who had fought so valiantly to defend them. (Shuck-Hall, 11)
When the time came for the Creeks themselves to walk the Trail of Tears into exile, even then the fire of the Busk was not extinguished. As Martin writes, the people of Tuckabatchee and other towns carried an ark with coals from the sacred fire of the Busk to be kindled every day of their journey, as well as the ancient brass plates also used in the ceremony. When they finally arrived in Oklahoma, they buried the plates at the center of their settlement and kindled the fire using the sacred coals so that it could continue to burn in their new home. (168)
*** Lessons from the Creek War
One author describes the Creek War and the massacre of Fort Mims in particular as watershed moments that led to disaster for all of the tribes of the Southeast:
This event [Fort Mims] destroyed all possibility of good relations with the whites in the Mississippi Territory. Immediately, there was a universal demand for the removal of all Southern Indians. Had it not been for the disastrous massacre, it is possible that the Creeks and other southern Indians might have remained in the Southeast, where they more readily would have been assimilated into white society. Certainly they could have never held all or even most of their land. It should be remembered that these southern Indians have been largely assimilated in Oklahoma, a continuation of the process started before the removal... Fort Mims must be viewed as even more of a catastrophe for the Indians when one considers that a large part of the fight was between pro-white and anti-white factions of the Creek Nation itself. (Holland Braund, 16–17)
Here is not the place to take such counterfactuals seriously. On the other hand, we cannot discount the importance that the Creek War had on the process that resulted in the removal of all Indian tribes from what is now the Southeastern US. The Red Stick insurgency was one of the largest and most significant attempts to resist the encroachment of US civilization into indigenous lands. It was also one of the bloodiest, killing hundreds of settlers and indigenous people in dramatic acts of barbarism. However, at its root was the impossibility of compromise between two cultures concerning land, kinship, and religious belief. The Creek engagement with the land envisioned subsistence agricultural plots tended by women and children with vast wilderness in which men hunted deer and other game for meat. This was the basis of their matrilineal kinship system as well as their religious beliefs tied into the harvest and the periodic cleansing of wildness in their sedentary camps. Yeoman commercial farming based on the plow and livestock simply could not co-exist with that way of life. Modernization required the transformation of the land itself; it encroached on their fields and destroyed wilderness. The Red Stick War was thus a defense of the land and their ancestors, as well as a repudiation of the material culture that undermined their traditional beliefs and practices.
Coupled with this re-wilding as the Creeks understood it was the re-wilding of culture, a resistance to the introduction of Western-style civilization and government, as well as the rule of a foreign law. The Red Stick insurgency was sparked by the Creek National Council’s attempt to rein in the actions of wayward warriors attacking white settlers, often executing them in manners not in keeping with Creek custom. The “friendly” Creeks sought to steer their nation between their own traditions and use of land; and the greed of settlers who saw Creek land as underutilized and thus the object of conquest. Many are in agreement with the author at the beginning of this section who states that the civilized Creeks would have succeeded had it not been for the warlike Red Sticks. That sentiment, however, seems to indicate ignorance of Creek culture itself, as well as the willingness of white settlers to usurp land by any means necessary.
The only path left to the traditional Creeks was a destructive path, a path that they sought to avoid at first by excluding white outsiders from their warfare. Their war was against the traitors, those who policed their fellow warriors at the behest of Benjamin Hawkins, their white handler. It was in hindsight naive to try to compartmentalize their war, as the ambush at Burnt Corn demanded vengeance for the dead according to their newfound traditionalism. Fort Mims then had to fall to a Biblical-style purge where the evil force of European civilization was removed from the land by fire. It was only in that way that the spirits of their dead would be appeased. This same fate would fall on them at To-hopeka, a re-wilded settlement that was the last major stand of the Red Sticks against the weapons of modern civilization. Here we see an example of a trope that consistently accompanied the Savage in the many wars against civilization within what is now the US: they are often not started for reasons of liberation or to defend abstract rights, but are rather the product of revenge, a revenge demanded by their own law and way of life. Without a violent restoration after the disturbance of their social order, they could not be the people who they had always been.
The one counterfactual “what if” that should be addressed here centers around Tecumseh and his prophets. What if he had persuaded other tribes to join the Red Sticks in a pan-Indian rebellion against US land encroachments? What if the Cherokees and Choctaws had put aside their own need for vengeance and had joined the Red Sticks, instead of seeing the US war against them as an opportunity to exact their own revenge against an ancient enemy? What if the Red Sticks had built an army as wellarmed and organized as the US forces, and had defeated the whites at Tohopeka or at a similar battle? Here I am reminded of a passage that the eco-extremist writer, Chahta-Ima, wrote in his essay, “Saving the World as the Highest Form of Domestication,” regarding another indigenous war against civilization:
But perhaps, even then, the ends do not justify the means. Or rather, the ‘ends’ are really the ‘means’ projected and amplified into a monstrous and logical conclusion. Even if the Apache chiefs had conscripted every warrior and forced them to fight, even if some of the warriors hadn’t run off and become scouts hunting their own people for the white army, even if they could have held off the US Army for a few more years, they would not have done so as Apaches, or as the people that they always were. Here it would be something akin to, ‘in order to save the city, we had to destroy it.’ Or better, in order to prevent the city from being planted in the land of the Apache, they had to become the city in civilized reasoning. And they knew what that meant: slavery in one form or another. They accepted the consequences of their refusal, even if they had second thoughts about it.
In the case of the Red Sticks, “burying the hatchet” and compromising with enemy tribes and “friendly Creeks” in their own midst were simply not possible. The very idea of doing this would have meant putting on the mind of the civilizer and would have undermined their traditions altogether. The same would have been the case with the Choctaws and the Cherokees who slaughtered them: they were going to war for their own reasons and executed it according to their own logic. It is arguable in war that, in order to defeat the enemy, one must become like the enemy, but that reasoning only goes so far. The Red Sticks wanted to keep their life of autonomous towns with vast wilderness between them, as well as localized customs and kinship ties. In order to defeat the civilizing Creeks and their Euro-American patrons, they would have had to destroy that order and become something else sufficiently large and organized to defeat civilization.
Here then we arrive at the tragic aspect of this episode of history. Just as the real agent in a classical tragedy is not the hero or any of the actors but Fate itself, so the real agent in the Red Stick War was Creek land itself. That land was being attacked by the whites and their livestock (which were eradicated by the Red Sticks), and any compromise with the traitors within and the whites without would have been a rejection of the Maker of Breath and their ancestors. There they stood, to paraphrase Martin Luther, and they could do no other. Their land and the ancestors who had lived on it demanded blood, and at Fort Mims, the Red Sticks gave it to them. While they had a vague hope that the magic of prophets would save them, it did not take long for them to realize that this would not occur. The only thing left for them to do was to accept the consequences: death for their warriors, slavery for those taken captive, and living to fight another day for those who could flee.
The eco-extremist eye can gaze over this former Creek land, now paved with roads and covered with buildings, plowed over with fields and polluted with industrial waste, and see how much we have lost. Our modern techno-industrial civilization is built on the burial grounds of the Red Sticks and other nameless thousands who died resisting civilization. We no longer speak the language of the land, and we cannot possibly value it as they did, but we know their story, and that means something for those of us who love this earth just as they did. The impetus of ecoextremist war in a place like this would not be the memories and traditions of a resounding people long silenced by gunpowder and the bayonet. The impetus would be our having lost that people and so much more. And the agent would not be the native laws and beliefs the origin of which no one remembers, but a visceral disgust at a cold and unfeeling culture where the relationship between people has been replaced by a relationship between artificial things.
Those who share this disgust have emerged as solitary and tragic warriors in a struggle to the death against civilization. Like the Red Sticks, these warriors in the shadows are not able to come together en masse lest they become another target or another gear in the system of domestication and artificiality. They communicate haphazardly, they watch their backs, they realize that there is no safe place to hide. They will get caught, they will be imprisoned, and they will get killed sooner or later. But the only alternative would be to renounce that remaining glimmer of humanity that the Red Sticks, the Chichimecas, the Selk’nam, and the Arrow Peoples of the Amazon had in the face of Leviathan. Most of us will accept compromise, but few, a precious few, are realizing that they cannot do that, and they fight on accordingly. They may die and be forgotten, but new cunning warriors will take their place, since in the end, this is not our war, but the war of Wild Nature, of the land and seas, of the winds and the stars, of all things that civilization seeks to blot out and control. It is those things that will give valor to generation unto generation of warriors, just as it gave valor to the Red Sticks, until civilization itself is blotted out by the cosmic dust of time.
*** Works Cited
Green, Michael D.; Porter III, Frank W. general editor. The Creeks. New York : Chelsea House, 1990.
Holland Braun, Kathryn E. (ed.) Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Inskeep, Steve. Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and the Great American Land Grab. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
Martin, Joel. Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Shuck-Hall, Sheri M. “Understanding the Creek War and Redstick Nativism, 1812–1815”. Retrieved online: http://www. univ-brest.fr/digitalAssetsUBO/9/9118_UNDERSTANDING_ THE_CREEK_WAR.pdf
Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Weir, Howard T. III. A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 18131814. Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2016.
** The Seris, the Eco-extremists, and Nahualism
Hast Hax
The Seris were a group of natives of what is now the state of Sonora in Mexico.They were hunter-gatherers as well as fisherman. Being nomads par excellence, they inhabited the region that extends from the Encino Desert to the San Ignacio River, in municipalities such as Guayamas and passing through Tiburón and San Estaban Islands, among others—that is, the islands close to what is now Sonoran territory, which they reached using primitive seacraft.
The Seris were divided into bands that were further divided into clans. The majority of Seris were warriors, as clans occasionally declared war on each other. These wars were generally filled with a generous amount of animism. For example, the story of Hepétla (The Invincible) was that he was a shaman from Band III who sent an incursion of warriors toward neighboring groups, killing many people.
As with any native group, this people had an intimate relationship with their environment. Their belief systems based themselves on the sea currents, the cycles of rain, sun, and moon. They worshipped the shark and the tortoise and other animals of the desert. Seri cosmology was simple, since they lived in a hostile environment and their nomadic life meant that they could construct no temples nor devise complex deities.
It was said that band and group shamans could carry and break large stones with only their minds.
Each band was distinct; only a few gave fierce resistance to the arrival of the Europeans. These savages never allowed themselves to be conquered by either the sword or the cross. They were hostile toward all foreigners, and they fought to the death to preserve their ancestral knowledge and beliefs. Indeed, even today, the Seris or Comcaac (as they call themselves) are one of the few indigenous groups who do not practice syncretism between Catholicism and traditional animist beliefs and practices. In Seri territory, there are neither Catholic churches nor priests, though there are some Protestant churches.
On the arrival of the Spaniards, around 1855, the Europeans undertook the conquest of these territories and the conversion of the hostile Seris to the Catholic faith. They soon realized that the Seris were exceptionally uncooperative and the land was also tremendously hostile. The Seris were very warlike, and they did not wish to be enslaved or rented out as manual labor. At the first opportunity, they would always escape, they did not know how to plant, and did not have accumulated riches like previously conquered Mesoamerican peoples. Faced with all of this resistance, the Spaniards, along with the Mexican ranchers, sought to exterminate them outright. This is when the Encinas War started, a conflict that would last twelve years.
It should be noted that not all Seri bands reacted in the same manner to the invasion. Among the more hostile groups was Band VI, which was also the most primitive. They lived in caves and didn’t even use the bow and arrow. Their only hunting implement was the harpoon, and they fed on shellfish, iguanas, and the maguey plant. They lived on San Esteban Island, distrusted everyone, and were impetuous. This band was not at all interested in the new world nor in the whites, as they were for all intents and purposes isolated on their small island. However, they were among the first to be attacked by the invaders.
It is told that a European ship landed on San Esteban Island, and that the crew tricked the Seris with gifts to come on board; they proceeded to imprison most of them, killing the men and taking the women and children as captives to the mainland.
At the same time, Band II was known for pillaging and stealing cattle from the whites, and for this reason they were decimated by the Spanish. The remnants of the band retreated into the inaccessible swamps of Kino Bay; but they were later found and slaughtered save for a few young warriors who escaped to Tiburón Island, where they warned others of the Spanish threat. It was in this way that Bands I, III, and IV united against the invaders and the indigenous people aligned with the whites. Tiburón Island thus became a battleground. Many Spaniards died in battles with the hostile warriors. The craggy mountains had many hiding places for the indigenous combatants who used their ancestral knowledge to inflict serious blows on the Europeans.
For example, the Spanish did not know how to find fresh
water on the island. On various occasions the whites had to retreat, dehydrated and exhausted after their expeditions. They did not find the natives in the mountains; it was as if the people had vanished.
For these reason, they had to use foreign diseases such as smallpox and measles to gradually reduce native numbers, leading to the near extinction of indigenous populations.
In the middle of the Encinas War, the shamans said that the spirits of the animals accompanied the Seris in war, and the spirits helped them to succeed in their attacks. Those warriors with great spiritual power would tell stories to their clans of having been transformed into animals during battle. Thus, they could escape without the invaders noticing them. One example of this was a warrior known as Coyote Iguana who told of how he once was captured and bound hand and foot to be thrown into the sea and drowned. Instead, he changed into an iguana and was able to escape his executioners. On another occasion, he was chased and surrounded by the Spaniards, but then turned into a coyote and was able to escape undetected by his pursuers. This animist tradition was nothing unusual among the culture of the Seris. The ability to change oneself into an animal in certain circumstances, passing from the spiritual to the physical world, has been known in many world cultures, from the Aborigines of Australia to the Yanomamis of the Amazon. Today, this capacity to change either spiritually or physically is known as Nahualism. It is not unusual either that the eco-extremists in their communiqués relate how they became animals before and during their attacks, since it is an ancestral pagan tradition as well.
By this short text, I encourage individualists to return to the pagan practices that terrified and confounded the Westerners of past eras. In this war against human progress, the physical realm is important but the spiritual is primordial. Let us learn then from the Seris. Let us learn the warlike and extremist defense of the wild. Let us become animals, and may the spirit of our ancestors guide us on the path that has been prepared for us.
In the name of the Ineffable!
With Wild Nature at our side!
Before the battle may we cry HOKA HEY!
** (Roma Infernetto-“Shit World”) To Profane and Devour
A member of the Memento Mori Nihilist Sect
A nihilist fragment that I dedicate to a “dead” enemy
For me.
Kneel before me.
You will stretch out and elongate yourself in a flat position.
I spit black blood, effusive bile.
I spit my venomous liquid against my enemy.
You are trapped.
Captured alive I breathe death.
You were dead before, with your useless life, in the necessity of my passion.
Imprisoned by a trap that I set.
Like a spider who weaves its web to trap its prey.
The cold strategic necessity and the ardent passion to advance in this “dead world.”
Union of elements, poisonous particles of Ego Worship, they join and crash into each other, forming and destroying themselves.
The Criminal Nihilist is a ferocious animal in the dismal metropolis.
Living flesh impoverished with interior putrefaction.
He receives terror from decadent humanity and he feels Terror
He is before me and kneeling, afflicted since his birth by the attribute of limitation facing honest and correct society.
You were wrong.
What I thought, what you thought, you saw it as an absolute in the absolute of your condition.
You were confused, what I thought, you thought, you falsified your life and your victory in a geometrically perfect manner. Fallen into my hidden cave:
Now you are the wandering dead
You wanted, you know, to not doubt... yourself.
To think and feel, to smell like a wild animal, in the middle of simulated mirrors of a mortal human being.
Neither mirror, nor reflection given of things, but I will break and destroy absolute certainty.
I sink myself in the abysmal poison, in the solipsistic profundity of MY exclusive hell.
I open the abyss, hermetic and infinite, and I see the top, vertigo that sucks the infinitesimal of life and death, moribund desire of sense from splendid linear life.
There is not a “common” yawn, here, in MY hidden cave, desire burns to annihilate the life that I have captured.
Brain at my side.
The infernal dog with three heads.
The chaotic invocation of the infernal jaws.
Elements uniting and encountering each other, they melt and mix with the shape of an evil shadow that pursues my body.
The darkness of the night that blackens knowledge of the clean ray of peace.
It is a schizophrenic prayer, a petition for pleasure and pain, the sublime death agony of my Egoic Objective.
“O hound of hell, expel your venomous sperm on my enemy, desire for evil that annihilates morality, your judgement for the unfortunate human who is now before me.”
The profanation of a body.
Devouring his “breath of life.”
** Regresión #3, Editorial
Wild Reaction
Coyote Skin Cloak Faction
The following pages are a call to common sense, a warning call against the continuous devastating clearing of forests, a desperate cry against the invasion of cobblestone, against houses of six or eight floors, against adulterated food and drinks, against the intellectual strain of universities and the unrelenting factory work. It is also a virulent diatribe against the thinned and unhealthy air, against disease and the decay of races, and finally, it is a violent protest against the stupidity and illogicalities created by Civilization, a struggle against Science, Goddess of the present day, against Chemistry, against the Artificial.
We can live without railroads, without cars, without telegraphs and telephones, without balloons and prostitution, without pedophilia and tuberculosis.
We just want a normal life, the exercise of Life, freedom in salvation can only be achieved through integral Nature and the abolition of cities, permanent source of inevitable epidemics.
Henry Zisly, August 1899
This paragraph was taken from “Towards the conquest of the natural state” written by Zisly, one of the most important representatives of the Naturien Movement, pioneers of anarchism and precursors of libertarian naturism in France. The Naturiens (as they called themselves) defended nature and loathed civilization. They saw it and industrial progress as a violent crash into the technological abyss, the adoption of alienation and the distancing from the natural, wild, and primitive. It is quite impressive that more than 100 years after Zisly’s comment, the Naturien criticism of civilization remains current. His words and his rejection of the artificial is what we claim, revive, and remember.
This is the third issue of the magazine against techno-industrial progress, Regresión, a journal edited and published biannually. The aim of this magazine, as explained in its first issue, is the diffusion of anti-technological criticisms and the defense of wild nature, a defense with violent means that can be undertaken in the present. A defense that, when accomplished, undoubtedly positions the actors as individualists conscious of their reality, desiring to negate and destroy it.
In Regresión, we posit individualist extremism as our essence. This is our position when confronted with modern civilization that propagates humanist values and progress, values that are leading us toward the technological cliff. The social dynamics that we are under in this complex system often absorb us as individuals. They make us participate in the mass, in destructive consumerism and the routine life of slaves. We have decided, however, to resist this tide, to resist clandestinely and accept our contradictions from which we sustain ourselves and form ourselves as true individuals and unique subjects. One of our goals for the present is to resist and negate the life imposed on us from childhood and to create a simple and secluded life for ourselves as far away from modern cultural influences as possible. But to make this life for ourselves, far away from big cities and in the depths of nature, it is necessary on occasion to have money, money that we would prefer to steal from wherever we can, or to acquire in the hundreds of possible criminal ways that exist, rather than enslave ourselves in life as subordinates as is the case with most people. Having clarified this, the editorial group of this magazine sympathizes with the re-appropriation of money for concrete ends that helps people live a dignified life, without consideration concerning who has to be shot to acquire it. If an employee doesn’t hand over the boss’s money, he has forfeited his right to live. He is defending his master’s crumbs like a dog. He deserves a punch in the face or a bullet to the head. Similarly, the businessperson, owner, or executive who does not comply with the exigencies of the thief merits the same treatment or worse.
There is no mercy in these acts. It is all or nothing, it’s the extremism that we speak of without equivocation. If the money is needed for any individualist extremist end, it should be taken without regard for consequences. It should be mentioned here that money isn’t everything, but we say all of this as realists. In this world governed by large corporations, it is necessary at times to acquire money to achieve certain ends and acquire certain means. Working is not an option to obtain these resources, but obtaining them by fraud, robbery, or theft is. Our ancestors who saw their way of life affected by the expansion of Mesoamerican and Western civilizations also had to do these things when necessary (pillaging, theft, deception, robbery, and/or murder). We are only fulfilling our historical role as inheritors of that fierce savagery.
For the spread of delinquency and terrorism that satisfies individualistic instincts!
For the extreme defense of wild nature!
For the physical and moral attack on the structures of civilization!
Long live Wild Reaction and all groups that violently confront
modern technological society!
Spring 2015
** Indiscriminate Anarchists
Seminatore
How I dream sometimes of a world all in harmony: each tendency based in its own initiative, without clashing with another; without humiliating themselves, in order to be stronger tomorrow, when we should all run toward the great battle of the revolution! But all of that is only a dream.
Letter of Severino Di Giovanni to
Hugo Treni, May 15th, 1930
In our time, the essence of particular things often changes. The real is modified and transformed into a pantomime that matches the supposed march of progress. Modernity has altered many things, from the environment to human behavior, and even political ideologies. This age demands from citizens (dissident or not) that they vehemently oppose inhumane violence of any sort. The moral values defended by civilization as a whole have brainwashed everyone. This brainwashing drives us toward individual amnesia and collective ignorance.
Many political ideologies have been distorted in modern times, and little by little have evolved from being original and almost defensible to trite and abhorrent. This applies particularly to anarchist ideology, which over time has changed and transformed into something that it wasn’t originally.
For some time now, many anarchists have rejected the concept and practice of indiscriminate attack as defended by the ecoextremists. For modern anarchists, to speak of an act that seeks to strike a target without worrying about innocent bystanders is a sin against liberated humanity and a self-managed future, an irresponsible act that is incompatible with revolutionary morality. It’s true that in an indiscriminate attack morality doesn’t enter the equation, nor does revolution or anything of the sort. The only important thing is to strike at the target.
Still, it confuses us how modern anarchists are scandalized by this practice, since these sorts of acts were what constituted anarchist praxis in the past and, a couple of centuries ago, made anarchists TRUE enemies of the government, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, and the army. To demonstrate this and develop this theme, we have rescued from various historical sources the following actions of actual anarchists. In this effort, we hope to dig them up from individual amnesia and collective propaganda spread by this modern progressive society. Like nuns recoiling before anarchic demons spreading terror and violence in their time, modern anarchists (even so-called nihilists), will tar all of this as some sort of Black Legend.
January 14, 1858: The anarchist Felice Orsini and his comrade attack Napoleon III, utilizing three Orsini bombs. Christened in honor of their infamous creator, they were balls of hard metal full of dynamite, with the outside containing small compartments filled with mercury fulminate. The explosive is triggered when the bomb hits a hard surface. In the case of the attack on Napoleon III, the first bomb was thrown and landed on the carriage’s chofer, the second on the animals that accompanied him, and the third on the window of the carriage. In this attack, eight people died and 142 were injured.
February 17, 1880: The nihilist Stepan Khalturin, a member of the Russian secret society, Narodnaya Volya, detonated a bomb in the Winter Palace in Russia: eight soldiers died and 45 bystanders were wounded.
July 5, 1880: A powerful explosive was detonated in a warehouse of the Ramba de Santa Monica, Spain. A young worker at the scene was blown apart when the explosive was indiscriminately left there.
May 4, 1886: A meeting of anarchist organizations in Chicago against the repression of striking workers outside of the McCormick plant on May 1 was violently dispersed by police. In the melee, a homemade bomb was thrown at the police, killing one of them and wounding another. This attack was followed by a street battle where dozens were arrested, after which five protesters were condemned to death. The police raided the houses of those detained and found munitions, explosives, firearms, and hidden anarchist propaganda. Those condemned to death were thereafter known as the Chicago Martyrs.
The traditional anarchist movement has canonized the Chicago anarchists as if they were “peaceful doves,” even though they were a real threat in their time, veritable atentatores.
January 18, 1889: In Spain, a 70 year-old employee was killed when a bomb was placed on the staircase of the building where his boss lived.
February 8, 1892: In the so-called, Jerez de la Frontera Rebellion in Spain, more than 500 peasants, agitated by anarchists, attempted to take the city, resulting in the death of two residents and one peasant. The police undertook a campaign of repression against the anarchist movement of the time, arresting and later executing the anarchists who planned and carried out the rebellion. The next day, on February 9, on the eve of the executions, a bomb exploded in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. The bomb was abandoned in one of the flower pots in the garden near the place where the secret police usually gathered. Even though some historians say that the intended target was the police, the blast reached many innocent bystanders, including a junkman who was killed and a servant and her boyfriend whose legs were amputated.
Anarchist vengeance for the execution of their comrades was fierce. The Italian anarchist, Paolo Schicchi, edited many newspapers exalting the violence, including Pensiero e Dinamite, in which he wrote after the attack:
In order for the social revolution to triumph completely we have to destroy that race of thieves and murderers known as the bourgeoisie. Women, the elderly, children, all should be drowned in blood.
Some anarchists were disturbed by the attack and rejected it vehemently, saying:
We cannot believe that an anarchist detonated the bomb in the Plaza Real... [This was an act] characteristic of savages. We cannot attribute it to anyone but the enemies of the working class. That is what we stated in May. We have repeated it in public meetings and in all places, and we repeat it again here. Detonating bombs is cowardice. One can glory in heroism when one risks one’s life in a face-to-face confrontation for a generous idea. One can explain and even offer praise if one approves of what happened at Jerez. But one cannot diminish the severity of the evil of what one prepares in the shadows that is intended to inflict injury on someone you don’t know. (i.e. indiscriminate attack)
March 11, 1892: Ravachol places a bomb in the house of Judge Bulot (an anti-anarchist) in France.
March 27, 1892: Ravachol detonates a bomb in the house of Prosecutor Benot. Even if these attacks did not result in any fatalities, they were still characteristic of an age of blood and dynamite which would strike out at bitter enemies (as well as anyone in the path) of the anarchists.
March 30, 1892: Ravachol is arrested in Lherot Restaurant for the attack on the Very Restaurant. The next day, during the trial, anonymous terrorists detonate a bomb in Lherot Restaurant leaving many wounded. It should be mentioned that Rava-chol was considered a “common criminal” by the anarchists of his time, as his attacks were considered to be out of bounds of anarchist morality.
November 7, 1893: Santiago Salvador, a Spanish anarchist, threw an Orsini bomb into the audience of an opera at the Liceo Theater in Barcelona, Spain. Blood, corpses, and debris flew
everywhere, resulting in 22 dead and 35 wounded.
December 9, 1893: Ravachol’s execution by guillotine drives many anarchists to adopt “propaganda of the deed” in revenge. The anarchist Auguste Vaillant threw a powerful bomb at the French Chamber of Deputies, wounding 50 people.
February 12, 1894: The individualist anarchist Émile Henry threw a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris as revenge for the execution of Vaillant. One person was killed and 20 bourgeoisie were injured.
June 7, 1896: An attack took place in the middle of the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona, Spain. An anonymous terrorist threw an Orsini bomb which was originally directed at the authorities present, but instead landed in a group of bystanders watching the return of the procession in the street. The bomb exploded, leaving 12 dead and 70 wounded. The bombing caused great indignation, leading the anarchists to claim that they weren’t responsible. The authorities blamed them anyway and made 400 arrests. Out of these only five were executed. This event has led to a decades-long controversy, with some arguing that the constant attacks in Spain by anarchists drove the authorities themselves to detonate the bomb so they could blame it on the anarchists, thus halting their activities. Others argue that the bomber was a French anarchist named Girault who fled after the massacre. Regardless, the Corpus Christi attack is either considered a historical lesson or a classic example of indiscriminate attack.
May 31, 1906: In Madrid, the anarchist Mateo Morral threw a bouquet of flowers toward the carriage of King Alfoso XIII and his wife Victoria Eugenia. Hidden in the bouquet was an Orsini bomb that hit the trolley car cable and was deflected onto the crowd where it exploded leaving 25 dead (15 of them soldiers) and 100 wounded. The king and queen were unhurt in the blast.
June 4, 1914: An anarchist hideout and warehouse for explosives was destroyed in a large explosion on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Four anarchists and one bystander were blown to pieces in the explosion, with 20 bystanders lying wounded in the street. The police blamed the anarchists members of the IWW and of the Anarchist Red Cross for the blast.
July 22, 1916: A powerful explosion occurred during the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco, CA. The bomb was hidden in a suitcase, activated by a timer, and filled with dynamite and shrapnel. Ten died and 40 were wounded in this attack. The police suspected the syndicalists or anarchist leaders from the Galleanist group. This latter group was given that name by the press after its leader Luigi Galleani, an Italian individualist anarchist living in the US whose intention was to unleash chaos and terrorism in the country. He was the editor of the fierce Cronica Soversiva. An example of what Galleani wrote in the paper follows:“The storm has come, and soon it will blast you away; it will blow you up and annihilate you in blood and fire... We will dynamite you!”
He wasn’t joking.
The anarchist Gustavo Rodriguez in his 2011 talk in Mexico entitled, “Anarchist Illegalism: Redundancy Matters!” indicates the following, regarding a couple of the attacks carried out by the Galleanists:
We can tell many anecdotes about this group—we can spend all day talking about them. But there are particular ones that at least merit brief mention here, such as the November 24, 1917 attack on the Police Garrison in Milwaukee, where a powerful time bomb exploded that contained many kilos of blasting powder. The device had been constructed by Mario Buda who was the group’s expert in explosives. He utilized his expertise to help Luigi Galleani come up with an explosives manual that circulated among insurrectionary anarchists and was translated into English by Emma Goldman. And while the plan was found to be ingenious—since these garrisons were well-fortified due to the tremendous amount of anarchist activity at the time—the problem was to get the bomb past the security of the well-protected police station. They did this by placing the bomb first at the base of a church and then passing the information to someone who they suspected of being a police informant. The bomb squad showed up almost immediately and moved the bomb from the church to the police station, thinking that its detonator had failed. Minutes after confirming that the device was now in the garrison, they detonated it, killing nine policemen and one civilian. And with this act, they killed two birds with one stone, since they not only hit their target but also were able to confirm the identity of the snitch.
Another attack that should be mentioned was carried out by Nestor Dondoglio in Chicago in 1916. Dondoglio was a cook of Italian origin who was known as Jean Crones. When he found out that a large banquet was to be held in honor of the Catholic Archbishop of the city, Mundelein, with a large number of Catholic clergy in attendance, Dondoglio volunteered his services and stated that he would provide exquisite dishes for the occasion. He poisoned around 200 attendees by putting arsenic in their soup. None of the victims died since, in his enthusiasm to kill them all, he added so much poison that his victims vomited it out. The only death by poisoning occurred two days afterward when a Father O’Hara died, who was the parish priest of St. Matthew’s Church in Brooklyn, New York City, and previously the chaplain at the gallows of the Raymond St. Prison. Dondoglio then moved to the East Coast where he was hidden by one of his comrades until he died in 1932.
February 27, 1919: Four Galleanists died when one of their bombs prematurely went off in a textile factory in Franklin, Massachusetts.
April 29, 1919: Galleanist anarchists send 30 package bombs to notable figures in authority throughout the US. One of the packages maimed a servant of Senator Thomas W. Hardwich of Georgia, who lost both hands, as well as the servant’s wife who was severely burned upon opening the package that had been left in front of the house.
June 2, 1919: The Galleanist Carlo Valdinoci died trying to place a bomb in the house of the lawyer Mitchell Palmer. Two bystanders also died in the explosion. The lawyer’s house as well as surrounding houses were heavily damaged by the blast. A note was found on the scattered remains of the anarchist and the debris which read: “There will be a bloodbath; we will not retreat; someone will have to die; we will kill because it is necessary; there will be much destruction.”
June 3, 1919: A night watchman died detonating a bomb abandoned by the Galleanists in a New York courthouse.
September 16, 1920: Mario Buda detonated the first car bomb (or rather a carriage bomb) in history. In a carriage parked in front of Wall Street he left a deadly bomb consisting of 45 kilos of dynamite that detonated by timer. The bomb destroyed the carriage, killing the horses, employees, messengers, bystanders, and everyone else in the vicinity of the blast. The bomb also destroyed the offices of Morgan Bank. Thirty eight people died and 400 were injured in the formidable indiscriminate attack.
March 23, 1921: A group of individualist anarchists threw a bomb inside the Diana Theater in Milan, Italy, with the intention of killing Commissioner Gasti and King Victor Emmanuel. The terrorist bomb left 20 dead and 100 wounded, most of them ordinary citizens.
November 29, 1922: The individualist anarchists Renzo Novatore and Sante Pollastro were ambushed by three policeman near Genoa in Italy. In the melee. Novatore was killed by a bullet in the forehead while Pollastro fought ferociously, shooting two policeman, disarming the last one and letting him go free.
May 16, 1926: A bomb made out of two hollowed-out cannon balls filled with blasting powder exploded in front of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The blast left a man-sized hole in the embassy wall that shocked authorities. The blast also destroyed the windows of surrounding houses and businesses. Although no one was injured, this act was one of many carried out by Severino Di Giovanni and his crew. These attacks evolved into ever more deadly terrorist attacks.
July 22, 1927: A powerful bomb exploded at night in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The target was a monument to Washington, but, even though it was a powerful explosion, damage to the monument was minimal. At the same time, another bomb exploded in the Ford Agency that destroyed the model car and all of the windows within a four block radius.
December 24, 1927: A powerful bomb exploded in broad daylight, destroying a branch of the National City Bank in the center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The bomb was detonated by acids but exploded prematurely, killing two bank employees and leaving 23 others wounded. The same day, another bomb in a suitcase was found in the Bank of Boston; it did not explode but it caused great terror in the populace and authorities.
Osvaldo Bayer in his book, Severino Di Giovanni: Ideologue of Violence, described the bomb in the following passage:
The explosive device was the same as the one at National City Bank (which had been placed in a suitcase). This was an iron device about a meter and a half long with covers at each end sealed in cement. The inside was filled with gelignite, dynamite, and pieces of iron. On top of this was a glass tube divided in two containing in each part different acids (potassium chloride and sulfuric acid). The divider was made of cork or cardboard through which both liquids could seep. When they came into contact, they produced an explosion [more precisely, they produce a flame that ignites a charge that goes directly to the explosive]. While the suitcase was upright, the liquids stayed separated, but when it was laid on its side, the filtration process began and it was then a question of seconds.
The explosive attacks on those days were against the economic interests of the US in the Argentine capital (the US Embassy, the monument to Washington, the American Ford dealership, and the Yankee banks described above). This was in support of an international campaign for the two jailed anarchists in the US, Sacco and Vanzetti, who were accused of belonging to a group of terroristanarchists and of committing robberies and expropriations.
G. Rodriguez in the talk cited above describes the following concerning the relation between the two anarchists condemned to death and the terrorist illegalism of that time:
The overwhelming actions of the [Galleanist] anarchists would lead to their becoming the most persecuted anarchist group pursued by the federal authorities of the United States. On the other hand, the ‘official’ history, even in its ‘radical’ version in anarchist circles, would condemn their memory to forgetfulness while silencing their actions and ‘disappearing’ their texts and other theoretical engagements. The only exception was that of Sacco and Vanzetti whose story ‘legalist anarchists’ altered in order to canonize them as ‘martyrs’ of the movement. The same was done with the so-called ‘Martyrs of Chicago.’ Once again, we see the same tricks to cover-up the real history. The legal argument of the defense used to try to prove their ‘innocence’ became the ‘official story’ of what actually happened. With the exception of the anarchist historian Paul Avirich, who devoted himself to developing a better picture of anarchist activity of the time and the work of Bonnano on this topic, the rest of the literature published about the Sacco and Vanzetti case firmly denied their participation in the expropriation for which they were condemned. These expropriations were carried out at regular intervals by the [Galleanist] group in which they were active. The funds that they acquired from these expropriations were used to fund the printing of anarchist literature as well as to fund attacks, calls for reprisals, and in order to support imprisoned comrades and the unemployed or in some cases their families.
After this attack, there emerged the first divisions between anarchists who sympathized with terrorist violence and those who defended “Franciscan violence” [as Di Giovanni called it (after the Catholic religious order founded by St. Francis of Assisi—translator’s note)]. This dispute was closely followed by anarchists of the time, especially by the editors of the anarchist newspaper, La Protesta. Bayer writes the following on this event in his aforementioned book:
La Protesta referred to the classic example of ‘clean’ attacks like the one carried out by Wilckens (a German anarchist who assassinated Colonel Varela on January 17, 1923) and Radowitzky (a Ukrainian anarchist who assassinated Colonel Falcon on November 14, 1909). But those examples proved faulty upon closer examination. Those attacks were ‘clean’ and ‘pure’ because they went off without a hitch. What would have happened if Wilckens’ bomb had gone off on the street car and killed three workers and the agent selling the tickets? Or if the bullets from the gun wounded a woman in the eye who was just walking her kids to school, or worse, went through the back of the head of a girl out buying bread? In the case of Radowitsky, what if the bomb, instead of falling in Colonel Falcon’s carriage, fell on the sidewalk killing the driver and two old ladies walking to church? And what if Di Giovanni’s bomb had exploded on the desk of Consul Capanni, killing the butcher of Florence and Mussolini’s ambassador, and that’s it? Was the violence the difference?
La Protesta established that Wilckens and Radowitzsky had taken their lives in their own hands. Did not Di Giovanni and Ramé do the same in building the bomb, entering the den of fascism, and trying to place it at the target? At any moment, it could have exploded and blown them to bits. There was some truth to that, yes, but not the whole truth. La Protesta’s reasoning was not entirely fair. Violence itself was the problem. Once one chooses that option, it is not possible to know for sure whether the actions will be clean or dirty. There are certainly differences. It is not the same to kill an executioner in his den than it is to indiscriminately throw a bomb in the marketplace or a cafe or in a train station full of people. But was the fascist consulate an innocent place? The victims of fascism didn’t go there. An attack on the consulate was clearer than the ones against banks in which, even if you factored in the hours when they would be empty, there was still more probability that innocent people might get killed, which did occur on occasion. The discussion was thus not whether the attack on the consulate in itself constituted an act of cowardice. On this topic of debate among anarchists, Rodriguez wrote:
There was a polemic between those who, calling themselves anarchists, justified expropriation and the propaganda of the deed and included them in a large list of valid direct actions—the ones who believed that the ends justified the means—and those who, also considering themselves anarchists, condemned these former people as “amoral” and violent. The former which we are discussing here was labeled ‘illegalist anarchism.’ We are trying here to distinguish between these two tendencies’ approaches to direct action and how they conceived of themselves according to their own worldview.
May 7, 1928: An infernal explosion shook the Italian Consulate in Buenos Aires. A man left a suitcase that contained a bomb on the stairs of the entrance. The attack left nine dead and 34 wounded. Seven of the dead were fascists, but the majority were bystanders, including four women and a girl. An hour afterward, a suitcase bomb was found abandoned in the pharmacy of fascist Almirante Brown. A child found the suitcase and without intending to deactivated the explosive by emptying one of the acids and generating a small flare. The frightened child screamed and ran out to warn everyone around. They too saw the bomb and ran away as well. The newspaper La Nación told the story in this manner:
The top of the small tube was firmly sealed and, in opening it, its liquid contents spilled out near the suitcase but not on the suitcase itself. Thus, there was no contact with the contents inside. This was the reason that the bomb failed to go off, which would not have happened if the tube had come into contact with the explosive packet inside the suitcase. Instead, the acid fell on one of the corners of the suitcase, producing a flare. In the suitcase were 50 bars of gelinite, 32 five-inch nails, an iron bolt, two iron screws, and cotton. The bomb’s charge was formidable, of the same potency as the one at the consulate.
After these attacks, it was clear that the intention of the terrorist-anarchists (Severino and company) was to attack their target, in this case the consulate and the pharmacy of a fascist, without worrying about wounding innocent people. The attack was condemned by the majority of anarchists of the time, who called it a “work of fascism,” denying that it was even the work of anarchists. With this, a schism emerged in anarchist circles as Di Giovanni would defend to his death the acts in which he was involved. The cowards of La Protesta positioned themselves in this matter:
Anarchism is not terrorism. How is this the work of a conscious man, of a revolutionary, this act of cowardice that hurt innocent victims, which was not in line with the political motive that they set out to follow? It is moral cowardice that inspires these types of vengeance. It is these actions that lead us to put salt in the wound of the provocative terrorism that has made its appearance in the capital of the republic.
La Protesta’s declarations even appeased the police, who started a manhunt for Di Giovanni and his crew. This is evident in the interview after the attack of Subcommissioner Garibotto (Head of the Social Order) by the socialist newspaper, La Vanguardia, on May 26 of that year:
This attack was a scary thing, no? When I saw those arms and legs all over the place and those groans of agony, I went weak in the knees. This was so brutal that even the anarchists are indignant. We are very happy with La Protesta’s editorial. Have you seen it? It’s very good. And other anarchists have come to cooperate with us out of indignation for the act. They have promised to tell us everything they know. And it makes sense, since there’s much freedom here and if these things keep happening it can stir up a negative reaction by the government.
Severino responded to such infamy from the anarchist newspaper, La Diana of Paris, under a pseudonym:
It’s odd that the entire ‘revolutionary’ press attributes the attacks to fascism, while the anarchist (?) newspapers disapprove of them, repudiate them, deny and condemn. The docile friars of unionist anarchism denounce the ‘horrible tragedy’ as more characteristic of fascists and not of anarchists. They take their inspiration from from a sheepish Christianity and they gesticulate like Jesus Crucified when in reality they are so many Peters of Galilee (‘Truly I say unto you that before the cock crows thrice, Peter will deny me.’) And they betray thus. I have seen denial and condemnation on the lips of many terrified cowards. They spew sophistries like so many canons and vile Jesuits. Some of those killed in the attack: Virgilio Frangioni, fascist, and Fr. Zaninetti, director of the ‘Italia Gens,’ a den of spies; that’s enough to open up the tear ducts of crocodiles of all sorts. The anarcho-syndicalist newspapers fight among themselves to see who can be the most ignoble and vile. Thus, for example, we find the Committee for Political Prisoners, the anarcho-syndicalist La Protesta and the anarchist La Antorcha (which is always praising dynamite) have shed cowardly and vile tears. And they have even received praise from the police and the whole conservative press for their magnificent work of eunuchs. La Nación, La Razón and La Prensa have branded the current situation saying: ‘The latest attack against the Consulate has also been repudiated by the distinct tendencies of anarchism.’ Of course here they refer to the vile ones.
Finally he writes a quote from the terrible Galleani:
It is an act of supreme cowardice to repudiate an act of rebelling for which we have ourselves given the first seed.
Another text was written by Severino under a different pseudonym making clear his indiscriminate non-humanist attitude:
... the attack on the den of Avenida Quintana (The Italian Consulate) and against the eternal fathers of fascism who in the land of exile also try to found their death squads. In Argentina alone are dispersed thirty-six fascist sections. Are they innocent? In Milan as well, in the Diana Theater and in Giulio Cesare Plaza, those killed were also innocent. Innocent people who applaud the king and shore up his throne with their passivity. Those who took a day off from work to applaud the fascist aviator De Pinedo who, in the name of Il Duce and the ‘greatest fates of the Italian Throne,’ mixes fascism with the ephemeral glory of his hydroplane.
That is the rotten and moth-eaten structure on which anti-fascism, in the name of all the conveniences, launches arrows and strikes against the iconoclast who, without permission and consensus, acts, breaks, and strikes.
For anarchism—for us—there is no other way other than that which we have taken with all of our fortunes, with all of the glory, heroism, and audacity. The path of the most unprejudiced [indiscriminate] action crushes with its powerful might the right to kill reserved to fascism. For ten years we have been the only ones who have had the audacity to attack this right of theirs. From today forward, we will expand this audacity one-hundredfold ...
May 26, 1928: Some weeks after the attack on the Italian Consulate, the Di Giovanni group placed a bomb that destroyed the entrance to the house of Colonel Cesar Afeltra in Argentina. The fascist officer was at home and was guarded by police. The police had left to go to a nearby bar when a terrorist took advantage of their absence to leave the bomb. Windows in a three-block radius were blown out from the blast (harming defenseless citizens). According to the press, the power of the bomb was such that it undermined the stability of the building.
May 31, 1928: The hiding place of the anarchist-terrorists was discovered by a boy who was chasing his escaped rabbit from her pen next door. The boy opened one of the doors to the small house on Lomas de Mirador and a small explosion scared him. The boy grabbed his rabbit and ran out to tell his relatives. When the police arrived, they were met with another small explosion upon opening the door. This was a storage place for the anarcho-terrorist bombs which had been rigged to explode if the police found it, and only the terrorists knew how to enter without triggering the bombs. By this they hoped to leave no evidence of the bombs and kill the police in the process. The humidity of the place, however, dampened the explosives and caused them to only let forth a small explosion instead of the intended deadly one. This turned out to be the storehouse of Severino and his crew. It should be pointed out that after this occurred, the Italian anarchist individualist Francesco Barbieri, who was the designated bomb-maker for the crew, decided to flee Argentina. He was an innocent-looking man and tremendously audacious in slipping past police. Barbieri was one of the most important anarchist dinamiteros in the country, as he had been in Spain, Geneva, Brazil, Italy, France, and other places.
June 10, 1928: A powerful explosion occurred in the house of Michele Brecero, a prominent fascist living in downtown Buenos Aires.
June 11, 1928: An explosion destroyed the house of Cavaliere R. De Micjelis, Italian Consul in Argentina.
November 10, 1928: A briefcase was found by a curious Bank of Boston employee near the Cathedral in Buenos Aires. The briefcase exploded immediately, killing the employee and leaving a police officer gravely wounded. Many windows of nearby businesses were also blown out. The press all pointed to Di Giovanni as the one responsible for the indiscriminate attack. The Catholic newspaper, El Pueblo, called Di Giovanni, “the evilest man who ever stepped foot on Argentine soil.”
November 14, 1928: An explosion characteristic of Di Giovanni’s crew occurred in the Palace of Justice of Rosario, Argentina. Other explosions shortly followed at the Bank of the Nation, at the Courthouse, and at the Santa Fe Railroad Bridge. The acts were added to the death of the bank employee from four days past.
April 25, 1929: An ex-collaborator of the newspaper Culmine, named Giulio Montagna, was shot to death by anarchist terrorists for revealing the location of Severino Di Giovanni to police.
October 22, 1929: The hated Subcommissioner Juan Velar was attacked by two men who snuck up on him and shot him in the face. Velar lost an ear, his teeth were blown out, and he lost a large portion of his nose, but he was not killed. Velar said that Paulino Scarfó and Severino were responsible.
October 25, 1929: A group of anarchist terrorists shot the Spanish anarchist Emilio López Arango three times in the chest. López Arango was responsible for La Protesta that had defamed the bandit anarchists; Arango had waged a campaign of slander against Severino’s attacks, slamming him as a “fascist agent” and defaming him before the mass anarchist workers’ movement of the time. Thus, he obtained his merited execution.
Among the many poisonous paragraphs from La Protesta was this one dated May 25th, 1928:
We have already exposed the criteria by which we anarchists judge that anonymous irresponsible terrorism: it is odious, as its victims are random and it can never carry with it a heightened spirit and clear revolutionary consciousness.
It is fascinating how those very same words are repeated in the mouths of those modern anarchists who condemn the indiscriminate attacks of the eco-extremists...
Before López Arango’s execution, he had received many warnings from comrades (which he ignored) such as the one that the Uruguayan anarchist-bandit Miguel Arcángel Rosigna had told him: “Please stop this campaign, since Severino is capable of anything.”
After the murder, a group of Arango’s anarchist friends searched for Di Giovanni among the bakery workers without finding him. This was the most radical sector of anarchist workers. The bakers didn’t say anything, and at the same time the police warned Arango’s close friend, the Spanish anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán that, “Very well, under our responsibility go ahead and arm yourself because Di Giovanni’s crew is going to kill you.” February 12, 1930: The anarchist terrorist and member of Di
Giovanni’s crew, Giuseppe Romano (Ramé), who had been arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison, was freed from the hospital to which he had been transported as a sick patient. He was sprung free by five armed bandits.
January 12, 1930: A bomb was detonated at the Italian Consulate in Córdoba, Argentina, leaving one agent wounded and causing much damage.
January 20 1931: Three powerful explosions occurred in three subway stations in Buenos Aires. The attacks left four dead and 20 injured, as well as leaving serious material damage.
February 1, 1931: Severino Di Giovanni was executed by firing squad. He killed one policeman and wounded another severely when over a dozen police went out to capture him. In the melee, one small girl was killed.
Di Giovanni died looking his killers squarely in the eyes and shouting like a wild animal with his last breath: ¡Evviva l’anarchia!
One of the witnesses, Roberto Arlt, described Severino’s execution.
Five fifty-seven. Eager faces behind bars. Five fifty-eight. The lock clinks and the iron door is opened. Men run forward as if they were running to catch the trolley. Shadows making great leaps through illuminated hallways. The sound of rifle butts. More shadows gallop.
We’re all looking for Severino Di Giovanni so that we can see him die.
The space of the blue sky. Old cobblestone. A green meadow. A comfortable dining room chair in the middle of the meadow. Troops. Mausers. Lamps whose light punishes darkness. A rectangle. It’s like a ring. A ring of death. An official: ‘according to the dispositions. for the violation of statute. law number.’
An official lowers the glazed screen. In front of him is a head. A face that appears covered with red oil. There are eyes that are terrible and fixed, varnished with fever. A black circle of heads. It is Severino Di Giovanni. A prominent jaw. A forehead fleeing toward the temples just like a panther’s. Thin and extraordinarily red lips. Red forehead. Red cheeks. Chest covered by the blue flaps of the shirt. The lips look like polished wounds. They open slowly and the tongue, redder than a pimento, licks the lips, wetting them.
The body burns up with temperature. It savors death.
The official reads: ‘article number. State law of the site. The Supreme Court. seen.. To be passed to a superior tribunal. of war, the regiment, and sub-officials.’
Di Giovanni looks at the face of the official. He projects on his face the tremendous force of his gaze and a will that maintains calm.
‘Being proven to be necessary to the lieutenant. Rizzo Patrón, vocals. the lieutenants and colonels. give a copy. sheet number.’
Di Giovanni wets his lips with his tongue. He listens with attention, he seems to analyze the clauses of the contract whose stipulations are the most important. He moves his head in assent, faced with the terms with which the sentence has been formulated.
‘The Minister of War to be notified. may he be shot. signed, the secretary.’
I would like to ask forgiveness from the lieutenant defender.
One voice: No talking.
Take him away.
The condemned duck walks. His enchained feet with a metal bar on the wrists that tie his hands. He passes the edge of the old cobblestones. Some spectators laugh. From stupidity? From nervousness? Who knows?
The convict sits resting on the bench. He supports his back and turns out his chest. He looks up. Then he bends over, and looks at his abandoned hands between his open knees. A man cares for the fire while water warms up for their yerba mate.
He stays that way for four seconds. The subordinate officer crosses his chest with a rope, so that when they shoot him, he won’t fall on the ground. Di Giovanni turns his head to the left and lets himself be tied.
The target is ready for the firing squad. The subordinate official wants to blindfold the condemned. The condemned shouts:
‘No blindfold.’
He looks firmly at his executioners. He emanates will. If he suffers or not, it’s in secret. He remains that way, still, proud. A difficulty emerges. A fear about ricocheting bullets leads to the regiment, perpendicular to the firing squad, to be ordered a few steps back. Di Giovanni remains erect, being supported by the chair. Above his head is the edge of a gray wall, the soldiers’ legs move. He sticks out his chest. Is it to receive the bullets?
-Ready, aim.
The voice of the condemned bursts metallic, vibrant:
‘Long live anarchy!’
Fire!
A sudden brilliance. The hard body has turned into a folded sheet of paper. The bullets shoot through the rope. The body falls head first and lands on the green grass with the hands touching the knees.
The burst of the coup de grace.
The bullets wrote the last word on the body of the condemned. The face remains calm. Pale. The eyes half open. The blacksmith hammers at the feet of the corpse. He takes off the handcuffs and the iron bar. A doctor observes. He confirms the death of the condemned. A man wearing a frock and dance shoes retires with his hat on his head.
It looks like he just came out of a cabaret. Another says a bad word.
I see four boys, pale and disfigured like the dead, biting their lips. They are Gauna from La Razón, Álvarez, from Última Hora, Enrique González Tuñón, from Crítica, and Gómez, from El Mundo. I am like a drunk. I think of those who laugh. I think that at the entrance of the Penitentiary there should be a sign saying:
No laughing.
Forbidden to enter with dancing shoes.
In summary, it should be mentioned that the events described above are the ones that we consider the most important at the time when they happened. As one can read above, we have not only described indiscriminate attacks of anarchist-terrorists, but also their abilities to commit formidable crimes, such as storing bombs, using firearms, committing murder, raiding, being complicit, falsifying documents, counterfeiting money, agitating, theiving, bombing, jailbreaking, and other important crimes. It is well known by those who know this subject that the majority of the anarchists described above had their political aspirations front and center. These aspirations were inspired by humanism and its foundations, namely “freedom” and “human dignity.” Reading their letters and writings, as well as their communiqués taking responsibility for their “terrible” acts, one can notice a language strongly in favor of “the people”, “the proletariat,” the oppressed,” “the class struggle,” terms that at the time were favored by many anarchists who also advocated the use of violence. This is because the conditions in society compelled them to proclaim themselves thus. Nevertheless, their words were one thing, and their deeds something else. We remember their deeds as irrefutable proof of the fierceness of past anarchists. They were very different from the dominant paradigm of the modern anarchist, who has turned into a caricature by his acceptance of alternative, but still civilized, moral values.
The contingent of anarchists partial to extremist violence has been also completely erased and forgotten in the official and notso-official story. There are few who recognize true anarchists such as Severino, Buda, Bonnot, Rosigna, and others who carried out attacks against their targets without concern for bystanders; for whom the ends justified the means.
Let everyone come to their own conclusions, I have reached mine...
I say that the most important thing in your life is yourself.
The family, the state, the party, and anarchy itself can all go to Hell.
Mauricio Morales
[[]]
** Today
XXV//X
I am always everything, but not today. Today I wish to be nothing. Today more than ever, I perceive that I am the whole of the nothing, an insignificance in the space-time of the universe. Something that exists now, but if tomorrow comes and overtakes it, its future really wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it has always been that way, though today I perceive this more strongly and with uncomfortable certainty
For the all, “I” doesn’t exist. Outside of myself I don’t exist, I only exist in myself.
In truth, outside of myself I don’t matter. I hang myself with the rope of my insignificance. Today I let myself fall, because today I can’t make sense of it. Why do I exist?
Today the life of the “I” doesn’t exist, the center of my everything.
Today I want to stop existing. The future doesn’t matter to me.
I only wish to lose myself in nothingness, and to close my gaze. Today more than anything I wish for eternal sleep. I desire death as part of this path.
I was born in the era of machines. God is an anthropomorphic representation of human superiority, and the destructive ideology of Progress is anthropocentric.
I am the son of slaves and from them I inherited this dark world. In their time they had already destroyed my future.
I survive in a cemetery. I find myself surrounded by metal, plastic, and cement. I produce, consume, breath, drink, and eat garbage. My surroundings stink. I notice that I am surrounded by barriers, physical and mental chains that tie me to all of this. I am a slave to all of this and I know that I am serving a long sentence. Today I realize that only my death will free me from all of this.
Outside of my cage there is only a gray desert of concrete. Only a few wild animals cling to life here. There are also domesticated non-human animals who are just as atrophied as their owners. Their “love” for their masters has robbed their life of meaning.
With hatred I look into the eyes of your hypocritical face. I would like to kill these eyes to “free” us from this hell, but I don’t think anyone would thank me for this noble deed.
This is progress? This is the highest thing to which humanity can aspire? This is the best society? This is what so many centuries of advancing knowledge has come to?
So much beauty, all of those efforts at survival, so much evolution, all tossed aside to live in mindlessness, one that is dragging us into extinction.
I would like to stop breathing. Is it because one cannot really consider smoke to be air? I would like to starve to death. Is this because one cannot really live on this industrial junk food?
To the optimists with good intentions, I ask that if they can end all of these essential elements of Techno-Industrial Society, they should do so without hesitation. It wouldn’t surprise me, however, if others would take their place. University laboratories always come up with dependable spare parts which will ensure the march of the great societal machine.
Today sleeping on your chest is not the same. Today only in my end can I find peace. Come, pick up your gun, let’s go together toward nothingness.
My survival instinct is broken. Today I don’t care if I live to leave my own descendants. Today I don’t have to work to leave a better world for those who come after me. I don’t have little ones to look after. I don’t have anything important to look forward to.
Today there is no future. I resist like my warrior ancestors to afterwards be buried in my dreams and find myself with them.
Today my thoughts are drowned in pessimism. I lie, it is realism that is drowned in pessimism.
Today there is a storm inside my head, like lightning that illuminates my darkness. Today I can see reality more clearly. I am not the blind among the blind. But today there is nothing that my eyes wish to see... I only want for everything to end when the dusk dies. Today reality has conquered me, and I rejoice in my defeat. There is no escape, I have received the mortal wounds. “Memento mori,” I recite.
Today the blade of truth cuts into each one of my veins. Today I wish to water my garden of dry flowers with blood.
Today my eyes are flooded by turbulent rain.
Today I cry for the dead world. Today I wish that I could die with it. Today its agony is killing me. Today these conditions make my will to live impossible. Today I die, tomorrow won’t be different, it’ll be worse. Tomorrow only my attitude may change, if I am able to resurrect this corpse from the coffin.
Today I bravely leap from the road and like a coward I fall into the void.
Today I die in nothingness and I am revived in the all.
** Surviving Civilization: Lessons from the Double Lives of Eco-extremists
*** By way of introduction...
The eco-extremist war against techno-industrial civilization is undergoing unprecedented expansion. Individualist clans that attack in a discriminate and indiscriminate manner have emerged in Europe and the Americas. This expansion occurs despite the efforts of the forces of order to capture these eco-extremist warriors. The tendency continues to expand without any sign of slowing down, all the while devising new forms of attack and new methods to infiltrate the decadent cities of civilization. The following has been assembled by various eco-extremists who have learned some valuable lessons when infiltrating civilization. The authors feel that these lessons will help others in their efforts to attack targets and get away with it. We don’t want this work to be considered the eco-extremist tactical Bible. Our only intention is to pass on the lessons that we have learned from our experiences. We sincerely hope that the individualists who carry out criminal acts against civilization will get something from them. The call of Nature roars ferociously. The mountains break the horizontal gray of the city. Wild howls resound in our hearts. We have decided to arm ourselves, to learn from Wild Nature, to acquire experience in the building of explosive devices that attack artificial reality. We have learned to hide ourselves and to act so as to not cause any suspicion. If you are like us and you feel the call of Wild Nature with your whole being... if you feel that this civilization is asphyxiating you... Arm yourself! Remember: In the war against civilization, ALL is acceptable.
*** Without raising suspicions
Richard Kuklinski was one of the bloodiest and coldest Mafia assassins in the US. He worked in the 1960s in the Brooklyn area. He killed almost 200 people using firearms, knives, poison, or bare hands. He lived a double life in which his family only knew him as an office worker, but the Mafia feared him for his implacable manner of committing the most violent murders. Without doubt, Kuklinski’s is an example of the double criminal life that one should take into consideration here.
Eco-extremists act on their own at the chosen time and according to the best method for their circumstances. A set Eco-Extremist Rule Book dictating when and how to attack doesn’t exist, and neither does an eco-extremist rule of life. There are certainly eco-extremists who are nomadic or live in Wild Nature who at times return to civilization and carry out attacks. Others earn a living through bank robberies. Others have infiltrated schools and workplaces and appear to be average citizens. Each individualist determines how to live their lives and when to attack civilization on their own. In this text we share tips to help these individualists with various issues that may arise so that they can continue in their chosen antisocial activities.
Clothing and appearance: This is perhaps the most simple, but also the most essential to pass unnoticed. It’s obvious that certain types of clothes draw more attention than others. For example, black is a color that draws the attention of the police and other citizens. Loud colors can also draw unwanted attention. In general we recommend normal-looking clothing in neutral darker colors. For example, denim pants and a shirt will not raise any alarms. We don’t recommend dressing in punk clothing with patches and the like. This will definitely draw the attention of police in particular. We also recommend being flexible and dressing appropriately for the occasion. You may decide to attack a more affluent part of town where there are lots of bars, restaurants, night clubs, etc., i.e. places where people with money hang out, or at least people who want to look like they have money. In that case, we recommend dressing up just like them, as if you were about to go to a party or go clubbing. In that way you’ll blend in with the herd. These clothes are generally more expensive, but you can sometimes buy them more cheaply from street vendors, or you can just steal them. You should always scope out the place and determine the circumstances under which you will attack, and that will enable you to find out the best outfit to wear to go about unnoticed. With respect to clothing, you should always be paranoid when walking about in the urban landscape. It’s well known that the city is covered with cameras (especially transit cameras). We are constantly being watched, and there can be no joking around. We are always being filmed. Thus, you always have to be disguised accordingly. After each wild ecoextremist attack, you should get rid of the clothing that you wore and never leave your hideout in that outfit again.
Facial appearance: At critical junctures, you should go about disguised. Wearing a mask draws way too much attention to yourself and you can even be arrested just for wearing one on the street. We recommend the use of artistic latex to change one’s facial appearance. There are a number of tutorials online that can help you to do this, and you can even make it look like you are an elderly person. This is by far the best way to disguise yourself. You should also consider wearing a wig since many witnesses identify the culprit by describing the assailant’s color and style of hair. Of course, you want to wear a hairpiece that doesn’t draw attention to yourself and avoid unnatural colors. In places with colder climates, a scarf and a winter hat can cover much of the face without raising much suspicion.
Tattoos: Tattooing is an ancient practice that has all of our respect. The symbolic, mystic, and pagan motivations for tattooing the skin vary, and they are up to the whims of each individualist. Nevertheless, we would exhort individualists to avoid visible tattoos on the face or hands. These are the sorts of distinguishing characteristics that the police look for, as well as any type of adornment such as rings, ear or nose expanders, or piercings. Once I asked an eco-extremist colleague why he did not have any tattoos, and if he wanted to get any. He responded saying, “I respect and value the ritual of tattooing, but my tattoos are on the inside, done in the ink of unerasable blood, which makes them eternal. When I am wounded, I see them, they even speak to me.”
Infiltration: Universities and research centers that foster the progress of techno-industrial civilization are our targets. One method of inflicting maximum damage on these targets is infiltration. Faking smiles, showing interest, and feigning support for projects that aim at advancing technological development are ways to gain the confidence of agents of scientific advancement. Thus, every tactic is on the table, and acting and lying are essential. By infiltration one can gather information concerning the leaders who most promote techno-industrial progress, including names, addresses, family members, their usual commuting routes, meeting rooms, and schedules, etc. Eco-extremists can also pass themselves off as students, enrolling in universities, participating in projects and student organizations, with the ultimate aim of attacking specific targets, especially human ones. There is no such thing as eco-extremist radar that can detect members of this tendency. If one watches their words, as well as lies and feigns different interests during conversations, inventing a life and identity for themselves, it is very difficult (almost impossible) to be associated with the eco-extremist tendency. Let’s remember that surprise is one of the best weapons.
In summary, we recommend hypocrisy, lying, and deceit to successfully scope out and attack a target. In some instances some eco-extremists have had long and involved conversations with their targets, even making friends with some clueless geeks who really aren’t that bright and are pretty predictable. They’re also quite naive and not that street smart. So when you approach them in the right way, they won’t even notice that they are letting slip valuable information.
Fake ID: You can hide your identity easier with a fake identification card, facilitating infiltration to get closer to the target. You can get these on the black market where you can also get other sorts of fake documents, from personal ID cards to university degrees. You can use these to enroll in a university or research institute.
Disguising one’s voice: Another good option to prevent identification is to disguise your voice according to the group that you are trying to infiltrate. Faking an accent is useful in throwing people off about where you are really from. In calling in a phone threat, it’s always important to do it in another voice. This aims at making any investigation of the incident more difficult and slower.
Jose Vigoa was one of the cleverest robbers in the history of the United States. He stole millions of dollars from the most exclusive casinos around Las Vegas. With his crew he robbed armoured trucks, stored high caliber weapons, stole his getaway vehicles, broke into the casinos’ safes, killed police and provoked one of the bloodiest manhunts in history. He was difficult to catch since he always used different disguises. He was finally recognized by his probation officer (since he has been previously imprisoned) and arrested, but he still put up a fight even then.
*** Secure communication
Codes: Written or spoken codes provide greater security when it comes time for an attack. It is important that a certain logic is followed in the creation and use of a code. It should be memorized and clarified by aligned groups. One example would be something like, “We’re going to the movies at seven.” “The movies” means some other place, say, the university, “seven” means another distinct time, for example, two in the morning. So the phrase would indicate to the accomplices the place and time of the attack.
Invisible ink: This one is basic and easy to execute. All you need is lemon, a toothpick or fine brush, a cup, a sheet of white paper, and a lighter. Squeeze the lemon into the cup, wet the brush or toothpick in the liquid, and write out the secret message on the white sheet of paper. You will of course see nothing, but the recipient will know that they should hold the paper up to the light to read the message.
Safer web usage: We have to laugh at the dumb running commentary from the peanut gallery asking, “If eco-extremists are
so opposed to technology, why do they use the Internet?” Whatever, we use the Internet as just another tool for our egoist ends. That said, many criminals have been nabbed thanks to information that they left on the Internet. There are browsers that can help you hide your IP address and browse the Web anonymously. One is TOR, which can hide your tracks in the virtual realm (though never totally).
You can never have enough fake email accounts, with fake personal information in each one.
We recommend encrypted emails, especially those found on the .Onion Deep Web found on the Hidden Wiki.
It is also recommended to have passwords that are complex and hard to crack. These should be made up of numbers, capital and lowercase letters, punctuation marks, spaces, and underutilized characters.
Change your passwords at regular intervals.
Change your email address after a certain time.
If you have a PC, we recommend that you configure it to hide your IP address. Though if you download TOR this might not be helpful as they can conflict with each other and reveal your location.
Always use the TOR browser.
Cover up your PC’s camera.
Deactivate the microphone.
It is important not to use Windows as this operating system has many vulnerabilities. Even if you have strong privacy settings, your PC can be easily infected and the potential attacker can take total control of your computer, copy your files, and observe your movements. We thus recommend Linux as a safer operating system since it has a variety of options to protect yourself from malware, viruses, spyware, etc.
Don’t download anything that comes from an email address that you don’t know.
Don’t open links that are sent to you and look like clickbait. These will almost always contain harmful viruses.
We live in an era in which Internet traffic is closely monitored. There are massive intelligence agencies that store daily a monstrous amount of data on virtually every Internet user. They can sort through your information, profile you, and if you match certain criteria, they can come after you. This Orwellian epoch requires that you trust no one and that you are aware of the abilities of the enemy on the Web. That’s why we recommend that individualists are thoroughly informed on these topic. If you are watching your back on the street, you should also do so when you use technology.
Be careful on social networks and similar venues: There are lots of forums where political debate takes place. The standard social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are now used by the majority of Web users to express their opinions on any given issue. Eco-extremist actions can often be the cause of a lot of commentary on these networks. Try to avoid expressing an opinion on social networks concerning eco-extremism, politics, or anything that can draw suspicion concerning your affinity to the tendency. It is important not to appear suspicious to your social network friends (if you have any). In fact, you should probably avoid these networks altogether. However, if an eco-extremist leads a double life and sees it as essential to participate in social networks to keep up the ruse, they should adapt accordingly.
*** Relations with non-eco-extremists
Family members and acquaintances: There are eco-extremists who continue to have contact with family members or who have friends who are not involved in the tendency. These may not even be aware that eco-extremism exists. Eco-extremist actions go against commonly accepted morality and are totally repugnant to most people. For that reason, it is important to not talk about the eco-extremist tendency or anything related to it with family members under any circumstance. Let them not suspect the possibility that we might be part of this war. Another option is to just lie and speak negatively of eco-extremism. We’re not interested in recruiting people or looking for support for eco-extremism, so whether or not people approve is irrelevant.
We should remember that biological family (brothers, cousins, uncles, parents, etc.) is not synonymous with complicity, far from it. If there are indeed cases where biological families can be discreet when finding out what we have been up to, this is the exception and not the rule. In general the biological family will be more given to denunciation, to cooperate even in the capture of a loved one. Examples of this are numerous. We should keep our opinions and plans to ourselves. We should keep in mind that our positions are completely verboten, and even most radicals are horrified by them. Imagine then what average Joe Blow on the street must think.
We should also remember that Freedom Club, who wrote Industrial Society and Its Future, which was published in many of the most important newspapers in the US, was turned in by his own brother after reading a phrase in the essay that FC had used with family members.
Keeping up appearances as a law-abiding citizen: You should be seen by your circle of acquaintances as a good person, as the last person on Earth who would ever plant a bomb or kill someone. Appearing to be a trustworthy person to gain the confidence of a target is essential to infiltration. Many times the simple act of going with the flow of a conversation or agreeing with someone is enough to appear friendly. Even if such socializing might make us nauseous, it is necessary to inflict the maximum amount of damage. There are cases of eco-extremists groups that had members deeply infiltrated in organizations promoting techno-industrial progress.
Squats, radical concerts, anarchist circles: We recommend avoiding the following list of places altogether: political concerts, parties, meetings, workshops, anarchist study circles, symposia, gatherings, and radical libraries. These places are crawling with undercover cops or reporters. They’re usually there trying to gather information to open investigations that will result in arrests. Aside from that, the eco-extremist has no reason to hang around these anarchists since their goals and ours are not the same. It is also recommended to stay away from all radical political venues in order to live the most convincing double life, and that means not just staying away from anarchists, but also Marxists and other leftists. The further we are from the places that draw the attention of police and reporters, the better.
Morality, the best camouflage: One essential thing for the eco-extremist hoping to pass unnoticed in society is to develop an even better disguise than the one that hides your physical appearance. We are speaking of one’s apparent thoughts and intentions. We relate to various spheres of people in our daily life, from family to coworkers to fellow students. All of these people could peg us as being immoral or subversive, and thus potentially associate us with eco-extremist actions. For that reason, appearing to have good morals can be our best friend. Appearing to fit in can help us cover up our real identity, that is, that which refuses categorizations of good and evil, our tendency to take the anti-values of this society and embrace them, as is the case with egoism. What do we propose, then? To keep up appearances. After all, in this theater of civilization everyone is putting on an act, and virtually everyone’s actions are fake. Be hypocrites along with the hyper-civilized. Day after day on the same set, the same play is performed, with the same gestures, the same dialogue, and all of that is normal. If that’s how everyone else acts, how convenient it is that eco-extremists also act in our own roles in order to hide what we have prepared behind the curtain.
*** Always Vigilant, Always Wild
Abstinence: Avoid the use of substances that disable our perception of reality. Let us not look for an ephemeral and false escape in the present. Rather, let eco-extremists be always alert, keeping our savage instincts for attack and survival finely tuned. We are being intoxicated on all sides, why should we look for ways to poison our own bodies? We should avoid getting trapped in that vicious cycle. Alcohol and other drugs also make people talk too much. In this war, we should watch all of our words and actions to avoid raising the smallest suspicion. We’re not interested in an escape route. We are wild animals engaged in an egoist war against civilization. We are also against all drugs that bestow a temporary sense of false happiness.
Physical fitness: We must be prepared for all situations. To be in shape is essential for confronting any adversity that involves fight or flight. Avoid tobacco and alcohol that diminish one’s physical fitness. It’s easy to stay in shape by merely going out for a run. Jogging, running, or walking in the streets, parks, forests, etc. are all good forms of exercise. Lots of people do them so there’s no way they can raise suspicions among people.
Combat discipline: There’s always the average citizen out there who wants to play the hero. It’s always a possibility that these people will try to interfere in the actions of eco-extremists. Thus, hand-to-hand combat may occur. It’s not a bad idea to master a martial art or method of self-defense. This is especially a good idea to neutralize a Good Samaritan who puts himself in harm’s way to prevent an attack against society at large. It’s not necessary to learn karate or a special martial art. You can train daily at boxing, which can be the difference in being able to incapacitate any idiot who wants to play hero. Learning certain moves in this case like punching under the jaw would help to knock that guy out.
Arm yourself!: Leaving utopias and all hope behind, we have decided to wage war in the present, risking all, returning to be part of Wild Nature, and maintaining our instincts even when we find ourselves within civilization. We aim to take the tendency to its final conclusions, accepting full responsibility for our actions. We arm ourselves so that we can open fire at any moment. If we can’t get hold of a gun, there are always knives and other weapons. These are always available around the corner, and they can be just as lethal as any bullet. The idea is not to hesitate one second when the time comes. Your life and freedom depend on it. The practice of throwing knives may also be useful and worth practicing.
Practice making explosive or incendiary devices. Bullets, blades, and explosives against civilization and its lackeys.
*** Without conclusion...
We want people to use their imagination and invent better methods of attack. We would love to get more specific concerning concrete strategies in the area of camouflage. While we know that these words will be read by sympathetic disturbed minds, they will also get the attention of “intelligence” operatives so we do not want to tip them off about how we carried out past actions.
This doesn’t end here, the war continues. The nihilist / ecoextremist mafia marches on, as its international expansion is reaching unimaginable dimensions.
After destroying all that is beautiful in the world, do they think that they will come out unscathed? After destroying mountains and jungles to build their superhighways, invading forests to build their rest stops, poisoning air and water with chemical waste, becoming automatons who rest in cycles, who look for escape or freedom by chaining themselves to a particular vice, after causing the massive extinction of flora and fauna year after year... do they really think that they will get off scot-free? Possessed by the spirits of the ancients and of the coyote, we have decided to attack those who threaten Wild Nature, leaving behind stupid morality. The common citizen isn’t a “fellow worker,” he’s just another lackey of civilization. We attack with the intention of causing the maximum amount of harm possible against selected or indiscriminate targets, without regard for collateral damage. Our words will no doubt bother people, our actions will be condemned before the eyes of thousands... And the informed populace will call us crazy.
For Wild Nature
Long life to the eco-extremist and nihilist terrorist groups
** To the Mountains
Lunas de abril
I observe you observing me from a distance
Trembling in the middle of strange cities,
A war drum in my heart becomes louder,
It is not enough for more sadness, I don’t spill my regret.
With the throat almost on the threshold of weeping,
Dead night in which the stars are not seen,
Rain that burns, the mountain from a distance offers me its cloak,
The bullet that will condemn the lives of those who the Earth condemns.
In the mountains the angry coyote dances,
Its claws carry the frost of the ancestors,
They will be stained at the sound of their accursed vengeance.
Gunpowder and bullets in the name of dead coyotes!
It roared while it descended from the untamed mountain.
** Theodore Kaczynski’s Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, A Critical Assessment
S.
The main difference between what Kaczynski and his acolytes propose and our own position is rather simple: we don’t wait for a “Great World Crisis” to start attacking the physical and moral structures of the technoindustrial system. We attack now because the future is uncertain.
Wild Reaction
Politically Incorrect: An Interview with Wild Reaction
*** Introduction
In September of 2016 Ted Kaczynski released his most ambitious treatment of his oft-alluded-to “revolution against the technological system” in the form of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (AR), a text of over 200 pages, dedicated solely to various issues surrounding revolutionary action against the technological system. Readers familiar with Kaczynski’s body of work will know that this notion of a revolution against the technological system has long been an important element of Kaczynski’s thought. The notion first appears in a call for the complete destruction of industrial civilization in the first Freedom Club communiqué to the San Francisco Examiner in 1985 and would continue to be appear throughout Kaczynski’s work. For example, the famous lines here from Industrial Society and its Future (ISAIF) in 1995:
We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades.
However, despite being such an important element of his thought, a more thorough examination of the issues surrounding such a revolution has been largely absent from his corpus outside of short treatments in ISAIF and scattered essays like “The Coming Revolution” and “Hit Where it Hurts,” to name some of the most pertinent. It seems that this book is Kaczynski’s attempt to expand on a core, yet somewhat underdeveloped, element of his thought. As a brief overview, the book is divided into two parts corresponding to the two points of interest indicated in the subtitle, both why Kaczynski sees a revolution against the technoindustrial system as the only plausible response to the “principal dangers that hang over us,” as well as “grand-strategic” suggestions for how such a revolution might be prepared for and undertaken.
It is worth noting that despite being an expanded treatment of issues around revolutionary action against the technological system, much of the content in AR cannot be considered particularly earth-shattering to anyone who is at all familiar with Kaczynski’s larger body of work; there is not much here that is all that new from a theoretical standpoint. Many of the core elements put forward in this text could be assembled from the scattered essays and letters in Technological Slavery by a careful reader with a bit of synthesizing the comments made across the included pieces. At a fundamental level Kaczynski’s theoretical base remains what it always has been, while the bulk of the text is devoted to offering expanded support for that base through more recourse to the historical record and more rigorously delineated arguments. The exception to this is Kaczynski’s foray into a theory of collapse in the second chapter.
Before engaging in a closer examination of the text I will lay my own ideological cards on the table, so to speak. Let it be noted that much of what I take issue with in AR ties primarily into my affinity for the eco-extremists. From the various critiques of Kaczynski that have been put forward by ITS and Wild Reaction, to their stress on the present moment as the only sound locus of action (and the related skepticism with respect to hypothetical futures) and other points, I very much value the eco-extremists for their contributions to anti-civ thought. I would also note that much of the work on these criticisms is available in more detail elsewhere so I will not devote too much space to the nuances of all the points raised by the eco-extremists, except where they are especially pertinent to the content of AR. Having said all this, Kaczynski’s final product is still a single-minded and systematic treatment of an issue that has come to constitute a central element of his thought. As such, AR has an important role in Kaczynski’s corpus as well as for anyone interested in the nuances of Kaczynski’s thoughts on revolutionary action against the technological system, despite what might be my own personal distrust of the kind of revolutionary thinking that characterizes the work.
*** The Development of a Society Can Never be Subject to Rational Human Control
Kaczynski opens the first chapter of the text with an exploration of the thesis that complex societies can never be rationally controlled. This is a doubling down on, and expansion of, the critique of reformist solutions to the problems of the technological system first put forward in ISAIF in the sections titled “Some Principles of History” and “Industrial-Technological Society Cannot be Reformed” (paragraphs 99–113). The primary focus of these two sections in ISAIF is to illustrate that, “People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.” (“Technological Slavery,” p.68). The main thesis of the first chapter of AR is essentially the same as the thesis offered in the aforementioned sections of ISAIF.
The difference between the two texts is largely the supporting arguments that Kaczynski supplies for the thesis. Whereas the thesis in ISAIF is grounded as a logical deduction from a series of preceding premises, in AR it is largely presupposed, and the bulk of the essay is devoted to historical examples where it is shown to hold in real-world events. Kaczynski pulls from a vast swath of the historical record to illustrate the trend (at this point something of a truism among anyone who finds themselves hailing from almost any anti-civ position) that, plans for the rational control of large scale societies rarely turn out as expected. “In fact, failure is the norm”(AR, p. 7). In addition to this, Kaczynski also offers a series of increasingly implausible counterfactuals against which he looks to test the strength of the thesis. He even continues this in the first appendix, “In Support of Chapter One,” which consists of more of the same counterfactual thought experiments (again, each one more absurd than the last, just in case you weren’t convinced). Unsurprisingly, Kaczynski deals with each counterpoint showing that even granting a plethora of ever more implausible scenarios, the rational control of complex societies remains outside the scope of human and even non-human control (for example, the application of something like Godel’s incompleteness theorem to show the impossibility of any totalizing system for the critique of non-human control of a society’s trajectory). The picture of our complex technological society that we end with is analogous to a ship without anyone at the helm. Except it is worse than that; this is a ship that is so massive and complicated that no person, or collective of persons, on board knows enough about the behemoth to be able to consciously direct it, nor realistically ever could. It is an image of a historically unprecedented juggernaut in the face of which we have been rendered helpless.
Again, none of this is anything that Kaczynski hasn’t said in some form or another throughout his body of work. Despite this, this most recent text--which is intended to expand on the impossibility of the rational control and to highlight the truth of the concept through a host of historical examples--is admirable. In many ways there is not much to say about this chapter as I do not have any major disagreements with the thesis and largely agree with the conclusions. At the end of the day one would be hard pressed to find too much to complain about, regarding the analysis here.
*** Why the Technological System will Destroy Itself
As noted in the introduction, this chapter contains some of the only new theoretical explorations in the present work. The chapter is dedicated to an exposition of the need for the selfannihilation of the technological system. For some theoretical context: with respect to the prospect of collapse of the technological system, Kaczynski’s treatment of the telos of technological society in the past has admitted that its trajectories are not under the control of human beings (see commentary on chapter I), but he has been hesitant to make any strong claims about the necessity of collapse. In this chapter, however, he spends a great deal of time attempting to give a rigorously delineated theoretical basis for structural tendencies and processes at the heart of complex societies, and especially technologically advanced societies, that necessarily lead them to collapse.
The bulk of the theoretical explorations take place in section II of the chapter. It is there that he lays out in general and abstract terms the formal structure of the theory. In order to flesh out this theory he focuses primarily on what he has termed “selfpropagating systems.” This concept is integral to his explorations here and he describes these “self-prop” systems as any “system that tends to promote its own survival and propagation.”(AR, p.42) Kaczynski gives examples of self-prop systems that range from individual biological organisms to groups of biological organisms, which would naturally include groups of human beings. Complex human societies, such as modern technological society, are then a subset of this category of self-prop systems. Following this rough definition, Kaczynski spends the remainder of section II outlining a set of seven propositions regarding structural characteristics of self-prop systems, and by extension complex societies, which make up the formal content of his theory of collapse. Kaczynski will also draw on these propositions in section III and IV to illustrate how the events we see playing out in modern society, as well as what he sees as the necessary outcome, all follow the structural dynamics outlined in his theory. Essentially, these seven propositions constitute the core of the theory in abstractum and I repeat them here for the reader:
1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves.
1. In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.
1. Self-propagating subsystems of a given supersystem tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on specific conditions that prevail within the supersystem.
1. Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a selfprop system can extend its operations.
1. The most important and the only consistent limit on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating human groups extend their operations is the limit imposed by the available means of transportation and communication. In other words, while not all self-propagating human groups tend to extend their operations over a region of maximum size, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups that operate over regions approaching the maximum size allowed by the available means of transportation and communication.
1. In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if human beings are someday replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.
1. Whereas today problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating system.
Kaczynski attempts to establish arguments for the truth of each proposition offered in section II, or as he states, to show that we have enough evidence to believe that they are at least reasonably accurate. As abstract statements about some tendency of self-prop systems, and later about complex societies (at least in the light of a number of assumptions), not many of the propositions seem egregiously problematic. It doesn’t seem worth either the reader’s sanity or time to indulge an overly myopic focus on the minutiae of each proposition. For the aims of this essay it is sufficient to allow the propositions to stand despite what may be some shortcomings in their respective formulations. He also does his best throughout to show that each subsequent proposition can be logically inferred from the prior, as is characteristic of the way that he generally works. He may have given up his work in advanced mathematics a long time ago but his thought is still very much guided by the formal rigidity of a mathematician. The formulation in section II is not immune from nitpicking, as thoughtful readers may have noticed when looking through the seven propositions listed earlier. Despite his best efforts the connections one sees him attempting to make often seem strained and the section seems to jump from point to point, with ties seeming more like ad hoc attempts to give the theory some sense of logical surety. The presentation lacks the usual systematicity with which Kaczynski often presents his work.
It seems to me that the problems of this section are part of a larger problem with the chapter in general. That problem does not involve this or that proposition or even questionable connections between them; although as noted they can be criticized. Rather, in my opinion, the problem lies in the overextensions that Kaczynski makes with regard to the conclusions that he looks to derive from this chapter. The suspected connections between propositions and general lack of fluidity with which the theory is laid out seem to flow from a chapter that posits more than is warranted. Kaczynski is upfront about the fact that in this chapter, and specifically with the work in section II, he is arguing “that there is such a process” by which technologically advanced societies inevitably self destruct and that he is going to outline a theory of how this process works. Unfortunately, I just don’t think the chapter lives up to that promise nor does it make a solid case for the impending doom of technological society, as much as Kaczynski would like to protest otherwise.
I noted in the introductory sections of this essay that many of my disagreements with the text stem from my agreements with criticisms and perspectives put forward by the eco-extremists on many of these issues, and this is one such example. I don’t think that the case that Kaczynski is trying to make here can honestly be made without entering into degrees of speculation that render meaningless these kinds of intellectual ventures. Given this, the failure to be able to soundly foretell the future of our or any technologically advanced society in a way that comes across convincingly is not surprising to me. The idea of the inevitable self-destruction of technoindustrial civilization, and especially the idea that one is going to outline a theory describing it--that applies to all technologically advanced societies in all places and at all times--is one that simply can’t be made without serious flights into the realm of revolutionary delusions.
What is especially interesting is that the impossibility of this is something that realistically should be implied by some of the explorations of chapter I, i.e. the impossibility of the rational control of complex societies. One of the important reasons (certainly not the only one) that such control is impossible touches on the limits to human knowledge, specifically the kind of knowledge problems that give rise to bodies of mathematics like dynamical systems theory, what is often colloquially called “chaos and complexity theory.” The quantity and kind of variables at play in a system such as our modern technological society means that we are dealing with a system that behaves according to the descriptions outlined by dynamical systems theory (think of something like weather systems and the difficulty of making long term weather predictions). In such systems, long term forecasts become impossible because of the sheer complexity and behavioral tendencies of the system involved. In this case, this impossibility applies to both progressivist/reformist assumptions about the planned development of societies but also to the kinds of conclusions that Kaczynski wants to make here in chapter II (and we will see that the logical repercussions of chapter I have consequences for the rest of the book and the armchair revolutionary planning involved later). The complexity of the system that we are dealing with is such that this kind of theorizing about possible futures is simply impossible to engage in without venturing into mere speculation. Thus we ultimately find ourselves at an impasse given the impossibility of saying anything regarding the prospects for collapse. But, as it has been put by some, there is such a thing as “primitivism without catastrophe,” and the eco-extremists have shown how.
At the end of the day Kaczynski has simply taken the dynamism, complexity, and power of our modern society and woven himself an interpretation that understands these as the seeds of its own imminent destruction, conveniently fitting into the architectonics of his revolutionary praxis. But his conclusion is by no means a given. It involves a number of theoretical leaps into areas whereof we can’t possibly speak in good intellectual conscience. For all this speculation, it could also be theorized that the very dynamism of modern society that Kaczynski sees as its inevitable undoing could equally be seen as its greatest power of self preservation. This line of thinking characterizes the ecomodernists, for example. The answer to questions like these, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, is that we simply do not know. Thus we are left with only this: the future is uncertain, and all that we can truly be sure of is the present. Catastrophe may come, and it may not, but if it does, it is possible that it proves to be simply the whetstone of civilization, not the messiah of anti-civ theorists. But even if this is true, the eco-extremists have shown that it is no cause for quietism. Better a steadfast realism and warrior resolve than the millenarian comforts of revolutionary dreams. I end this section with pertinent words from Wild Reaction:
Personally we don’t know how long the structures that support civilization on its decadent path will last. We can read much concerning various existing theories but still we’ll be left waiting for the appointed prophetic year in which maybe it’ll all end. But either way, all that the learned can propose are theories. The here and now denotes all that is evil... As individualists we have decided to take the rest of our lives into our own hands and not wait for the crisis to happen. Why? Because we are already living it. We don’t want to wait because Nature encourages us to return the blows that it has received right now.
Politically Incorrect:
An Interview with Wild Reaction
*** III. How to Transform a Society: Errors to Avoid
With the conclusion of chapters I and II Kaczynski switches focus from his explications on why he sees an anti-tech revolution as a necessary response to the technological system to how one might go about such a revolution. The latter considerations are dealt with in this chapter as well as in chapter IV. More specifically, and the chapter title here is a little misleading, chapter III is dedicated to outlining a series of general and abstract rules that Kaczynski sees as integral to the success of any revolutionary movement, anti-tech or not. In outlining these rules Kaczynski begins, as he often does, by presenting a set of postulates from which he looks to derive these rules for revolutionary action. The first section of chapter III presents the four postulates, repeated here for the reader:
1. You can’t change a society by pursuing goals that are vague or abstract. You need to have a clear and concrete goal. As an experienced activist put it: “Vague, over-generalized objectives are seldom met. The trick is to conceive of some specific development which will inevitably propel your community in the direction you want to go.”
1. Preaching alone-the mere advocacy of ideas-cannot bring about important, long-lasting changes in the behavior of human beings, unless it takes place in a very small minority.
1. Any radical movement tends to attract many people who may be sincere, but whose goals are only loosely related to the goals of the movement. The result is that that movement’s original goals may become blurred, if not completely perverted.
1. Every radical movement that acquires great power becomes corrupt, when its original leaders (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) are all dead or politically inactive. In saying that a movement becomes corrupt, we mean that its members, and especially its leaders, primarily seek personal advantages (such as money, security, social status, powerful offices, or a career) rather than dedicating themselves sincerely to the ideals of the movement.
From these postulates Kaczynski then derives a set of five rules:
1. In order to change a society in a specified way, a movement should select a single, clear, simple, and concrete objective, the achievement of which will produce the desired change.
1. If a movement aims to transform a society, then the objective selected by the movement must be of such a nature that, once the objective has been achieved, its consequences will be irreversible. This means that, once society has been transformed through the achievement of the objective, society will remain in its transformed condition without any further effort on the part of the movement or anyone else.
1. Once an objective has been selected, it is necessary to persuade some small minority to commit itself to the achievement of the objective by means more potent than mere preaching or advocacy of ideas. In other words, the minority will have to organize itself for practical action.
1. In order to keep itself faithful to its objective, a radical movement should devise means of excluding from its ranks all unsuitable persons who may seek to join it.
1. Once a revolutionary movement has become powerful enough to achieve its objective, it must achieve its objective as soon as possible, and in any case before the original revolutionaries (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) die or become politically inactive. Following the presentation of the postulates and the derivation of the rules, Kaczynski devotes the rest of the chapter to examining the truth or falsity of the rules. To do this, much of the support comes again from the historical record, citing a number of instances he uses to show that the truth of any given postulate or rule can be demonstrated in some historical event. To highlight the importance of adherence to these rules, the author cites a number of instances where failures to do so have led to setbacks or catastrophe for the movements involved. However, the theoretical meat here is ultimately the above list of rules for a revolutionary movement. As stated in the introductory remarks, throughout the text much of Kaczynski’s theoretical base mirrors his older work while expanding the support for that base. This remains true for chapter III and I think readers familiar with Kaczynski’s work will again recognize the themes presented here from older works like ISAIF, “The System’s Neatest Trick,” “The Coming Revolution,” and “Hit Where it Hurts,” all of which have sections dedicated to more strategic concerns for revolutionary action against technological society.
I will admit that at first pass this chapter is easy to accept if one allows oneself to be uncritically swept along in the current of Kaczynski’s thought. Many of his postulates seem at least intuitively plausible in light of everyday experience or of a general knowledge of history, and his derivations of the rules from these postulates are coherent and read as natural extensions of the postulates. His recourse to the historical record to shore up his postulates and rules is characteristically thorough, matching the detailed treatment of chapter I. The result is a chapter that could convince many, and indeed many have come away from similar reflections convinced by this line of reasoning. One only needs to seek out the work of Ultimo Reducto (UR) or the Indomitistas for examples of groups and individuals who have followed much of Kaczynski’s thinking to the letter. It is easy to be swept along in the movements of his armchair revolutionary theorizing and lose sight of the fact that much of this remains completely speculative, dreamt up in the realm of pure theory in a prison cell in Colorado. It is, I’m sure, akin to the way that physicists talk about being caught up in the beauty and elegance of mathematical theories, becoming so enthralled with that elegance that they come to believe that these theories must be an expression of truth. But reality has never had any obligation to conform to what we desire, and this is no less true for Kaczynski’s theorizing than it is for those physicists chasing after the wispy traces of string theory.
I am not simply being flippant. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of what is put forward in this chapter (if we decide to entertain this sort of armchair theorizing). To expand on but one aspect, there is a fairly obvious contradiction between the revolutionary planning set forth in this chapter and the kinds of conclusions reached in chapter I that essentially forbid such planning. If you recall, we noted that the logical entailments of chapter I apply not only to progressivist/reformist planners looking to steer society along their desired trajectories, but also to those looking to disrupt it through revolutionary action. This is so because of the impossibility of long term forecasts, the very kinds of forecasts that a revolutionary plan would need to rely on in order to act according to its outline. Certainly, one could attempt to make the rules general enough to be applicable across a wide array of situations, but at that point such an abstract rule has little relation to the concrete particulars of actual events. To be fair, Kaczynski does state throughout chapter III that these rules can’t always “be taken as rigid laws” (AR, p.119) given the difficulty we’ve just discussed of foreseeing the real world situations that such a revolutionary movement would face, but we’ve just stated why that doesn’t really make it any better. This contradiction between chapters is not the only criticism one could make of this chapter. For example, Kaczynski’s attempt to derive ahistorical axioms from what are historically contingent events make his recourse to the historical record to ground his postulates and rules dubious at best, at least from the perspective of a more thorough historicist approach. This same problem occurs in chapter IV.
Perhaps some would claim that this take on what Kaczynski has done here is overly defeatist, or pessimistic, etc. Maybe some would say it is hastily dismissive despite our pointing out a number of legitimate concerns. The likes of UR and others have hurled some of these same labels at ITS and Wild Reaction when the latter have expressed a healthy dose of skepticism with regard to this very kind of revolutionary theorizing. These are the same people who only proffer a naïve hope in the face of these criticisms, doubling down on the revolutionary naïveté of Kaczynski rather than lifting the veil off their own hopeful delusions and accepting the world as it is. But at the end of the day it remains true, as Wild Reaction have stated in their response to UR and others on these issues, that much of the basis for such a revolution against the technological system remains “...all in the wind:”
So, in conclusion to this point, the strategic basis for the ‘great revolution’ is supposition, ‘perhaps,’ ‘hopefully,’ ‘it may be,’ ‘in best of cases,’ ‘it depends,’ in other words, nothing concrete, all in the wind. This reminds us of what a popular Mexican comedian said in his shows: ‘Maybe yes, maybe no, but most likely is that who knows.’
Wild Reaction
Some Words about the Present and NOT about the Future
*** IV. Strategic Guidelines for an Anti-Tech Movement
While chapter III approached the strategic issues surrounding an anti-tech revolution in more abstract terms, attempting to distill the most critical rules for a successful revolutionary movement, the approach of chapter IV takes a broader and marginally more down to earth look at Kaczynski’s revolutionary program. Kaczynski covers a lot of ground in this chapter, treating numerous issues pertaining to the paths that he believes a revolutionary movement ought, and ought not, to take. For those familiar with the history of communist revolutions, much of the program that he offers here is essentially borrowed from the reflections of key figures in the canon of revolutionary Marxist thought. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Castro are major influences, for example. However, much has obviously been recast along the lines of Kaczynski’s particular brand of Neo-Luddism. This reliance on the Russian revolution and later communist revolutions is not surprising or new. The French and Russian revolutions have long been an inspiration for Kaczynski’s thoughts on revolutionary action and the scope of communist revolutions following the ascension of the Bolsheviks in 1917 makes the Russian revolution and its related revolutions an obvious source of interest and inspiration for those with revolutionary predilections.
With respect to a critical analysis of this chapter, there are several criticisms one could make that I will offer here. The first and most obvious of these criticisms relates primarily to the kind of revolutionary theorizing that Kaczynski is doing and the degree to which much of this kind of thing takes place in the realm of pure speculation. There are many instances throughout chapter IV which follow the same predilection for revolutionary planning offered in chapter III, sometimes reading as attempts to concretize his formal guidelines. These treatments then obviously mirror those of the previous chapter, and are consequently subject to the same critiques of revolutionary planning offered previously in this essay. It would be redundant to restate those critiques here. On other points, an additional criticism deals with the parallels that Kaczynski often attempts to draw via his constant recourse to various communist revolutions, both at the level of the ideas that he borrows from their respective theorists and his use of these revolutions to justify the feasibility of his particular brand of anti-tech revolution. I am not the first to point out some of these problems. In various communiqués both ITS and Wild Reaction have made detailed criticisms of Kaczynski’s recourse to the French and Russian revolutions (the most detailed are contained in the earliest phase of ITS communiqués and in various publications from Wild Reaction). These have well shown the numerous ways that Kaczynski’s talk of global revolution against the technological system occupies the realm of fantasy. Neither the French nor the Russian revolution, nor any revolution save for the industrial one itself, has extended its reach over the entire globe, as they have noted. The historic wars are simply not analogous comparisons.
There is also a related and more methodological critique that I alluded to briefly in the last section; that is, Kaczynski has a consistent tendency to draw on the past without considering the historical context of the events that he looks at. For example, in chapter III he continually uses historical events to show that a number of his postulates and rules can be derived from history while completely ignoring any analysis of the historical context within which those events took place, or differences between a given historical context and our own contemporary context. Our modern technological society is not the Russia of Lenin or Trotsky, the China of Mao, the Cuba of Castro, etc. There are vast differences in the social, ideological, and material fabrics of our contemporary situation and those historical eras, which render correlations tenuous in all but the most general ways. As I noted in the last section, he does have moments of honesty where he admits that recourse to history will not always give lessons that we can easily translate from one historical period to the present. But we also discussed there why this is not exactly helpful. To restate, if the lessons derived are general enough to apply to a sufficiently broad array of situations they are also likely to be next to useless in any concrete situation. The abstractions of a general rule are little help in the face of the complexity of any real world situation.
The aforementioned points are certainly very real problems with the theoretical integrity of Kaczynski’s treatments here in chapter IV, but they are not the main issue that I had with the chapter. What I personally found to be the most obnoxious element of the chapter was Kaczynski’s constant recourse to his speculative “future crisis” as a keystone element of his revolutionary praxis. The messianic role of catastrophe for his anti-tech revolution becomes increasingly obvious throughout the chapter, to such a degree that it becomes more and more questionable whether Kaczynski’s revolutionary program is able to handle anything like “attack without catastrophe,” to offer a spin on Abe Cabrera’s “Primitivism without Catastrophe.” As Wild Reaction put it in an earlier quote, so far as much of the meaningful reaction against the technological system continues to hinge on some speculative crisis, it is for all intents and purposes, “...all in the wind” My rejections here once again dovetail with the eco-extremist critiques, in this case an especially central one: the eco-extremist rejection of revolution as a valid form of reaction against the technological system, and the encompassing Leviathan of civilization, and domestication itself for that matter. Since the first communiqués of ITS in 2011 they have persisted in a single-minded focus on the present as the only sound locus of attack. In the first communiqué of ITS following the voluntary dissolution of Wild Reaction, they state the following on this point: “We do not wish, nor do we seek, nor do we find it necessary, nor does it interest us to work for a ‘revolution.’ We despise that term and deem it a non-existent goal. We attack in the present because that is all that there is.” Throughout the entirety of this essay we have voiced criticisms of Kaczynski’s revolutionary thinking; many of the foregoing analyses remain relevant here. We have covered the impossibility of speaking in good faith about the prospects of catastrophe, we have talked about the errors of revolutionary planning, etc. Suffice it to say that in the light of the foregoing analyses I see no reason to make concessions here either. Kaczynski and Co. can sit and wait for the messiah of collapse before striking back in the name of Wild Nature, but the march of civilization continues to bend all that is natural and wild to its will tnad to destroy that which does not abide. What we are confronted with is a present that demands that we act here and now. In closing, I will allow Wild Reaction to express, in their own words, this attack without catastrophe:
The wild can wait no longer. Civilization expands indiscriminately at the cost of all that is natural. We won’t stay twiddling our thumbs, looking on passively as modern man rips the Earth apart in search of minerals, burying her under tons of concrete, or piercing through entire hills to construct tunnels. We are at war with civilization and progress, as well as those who improve or support it with their passivity. Whoever!
Individualists Tending Toward the Wild
The Seventh Communiqué of ITS
*** Conclusion
What remains to be said of Kaczynski’s latest work, then? I noted in the introduction that within the context of Kaczynski’s corpus this text occupies an important place as a single-minded and systematic treatment of his thoughts surrounding revolutionary action against the technological system. As a purely academic point concerning the oeuvre of a thinker I stand by this claim. I also briefly note the root of my disagreements from an eco-extremist perspective and have, through the foregoing analyses, attempted to more thoroughly delineate their content. And it is out of this personal perspective that I find much of this text simply unacceptable.
It is out of this perspective that I affirm the eco-extremist rejection of revolutionary delusions. I affirm the eco-extremist focus on the present as the only sound locus of attack. I affirm the ecoextremist’s steadfast honesty in the face of the terrible present. I affirm the eco-extremist warrior resolve to fight regardless of the knowledge that one’s war may well be suicidal, and other points from the eco-extremist perspective. These are positions that are simply irreconcilable with those of Kaczynski. So be it. Certainly there will be those without the ears to hear. There will be those who denounce these rejections as nihilistic, defeatist, pessimistic, etc. There will be those who trade honesty for the comforts of a revolutionary naiveté. Let this be as well. To them I suppose all that can be said is, “Good luck, I guess.” But for me, and for others with whom this call resonates, what Kaczynski has to offer is simply something that we cannot abide. I end this conclusion and this essay with an expression of the spirit of the eco-extremists from the Editorial of Regresión #4:
Reality often presents us with a defeatist and very pessimistic scenario. Nevertheless, accepting this reality is crucial for removing the blindfold and accepting things just as they are, even if this is difficult. This blindfold is of course utopia. Many have criticized Individualists Tending Toward the Wild or Wild Reaction and similar groups for rejecting the idea of a “better tomorrow”. They critique these groups for not expecting a positive result from fighting in this war, or for rejecting hope. But people are always going to hear only what they want, and not Reality. The eco-extremist individualist is a realist and pessimist at the same time. He doesn’t listen to the nagging of the puerile optimist; for him, the world is full of dark realities, and he must confront these with strength, defending himself from them with tooth and claw.”
Wild Reaction
** The Singing River: A Final Word to the Reluctant
The Pascagoula River in what is now the U.S. state of Mississippi is said to sing. That is, strange sounds are made by the river that many say sound like singing. Some have credited mermaids or other mythical beings with the musicality of the river. However, the most popular legend dates back to the time before the Europeans, when what is now the U.S. Southeast was dotted by many powerful chiefdoms. According to the legend,
The Biloxi and Pascagoula tribes lived peacefully for centuries in what is now southern Mississippi, before a split between the tribes resulted in their mutual extinction. Altama, Chief of the Pascagoula, fell in love with Anola, a Biloxi princess who was promised to the Chief of the Biloxi, going against the traditions of the tribes. Altama and Anola wanted to be together regardless of the consequences. In response, the Biloxi made war on the Pascagoula, killing and taking them as slaves for the decision Altama had made. The Pascagoula were outnumbered and feared what the future held for them. They decided to remain loyal to Altama, and as a group they thought it better to die at their own hand than to become slaves. In the afterworld they would be reunited and live in a world without war. Altama, Anola, and the Pascagoula people chose to drown themselves in the river, and while singing their death song, they joined hands and walked into the waters. According to local legend, the disappearance of the Pascagoula people is echoed in the otherworldly sounds coming forth from the river
The primary instrument of subjugation that civilization uses is fear. Domestication and slavery would not exist without fear, without the firm conviction that there is nothing worse than death, that slavery and servitude are better alternatives than the end of our individual material existence. We should remember, especially those of us descended from some of the people discussed in these pages, that we too are children of that fear. Many people, like the Pascagoula, have no or few descendants now, because they concluded that it was better to fight and/or to die than to live as slaves. We are the children of defeat, the stillborns of freedom. But it’s too late for that sort of talk now_
Civilization may last another ten years, or another ten thousand years. We may be hostile to it in the present, but resigned to it a couple of decades from now. We may be forced to feed our very children lies and swallow our pride to get through another day. At the very least, we shouldn’t swallow our pride totally, nor should we swallow the falsehoods of universal brotherhood or human progress. At every moment in this putrid society, we should realize that we are being sold a bill of goods, and foster hatred and resentment accordingly...
We the editors are not capable of or willing to offer you suggestions on what you should do with it, only that this resentment is what keeps you human, animal, and alive. Even if no catastrophe will end civilization, the catastrophe of our own domestication is enough to cause us to reflect on how much we have lost and what can be done about it. There are no easy solutions, and there probably never were. We should cling to that intimate part of ourselves that civilization can never touch, the part that inspires fear in the hyper-civilized and that manifests itself in the shadows: an invisible menace constantly stalking.
And for those who do a little more than that, we can conclude by offering this eco-extremist pagan prayer:
May the moon keep guiding them. May the rain refresh them. May the sun warm their bodies. May they be comforted by the sound of the crickets. May the Earth stain their feet.
May the mountains give them shelter. May the dark night hide them. May their trail be erased by the wind. Forever!
Chicomoztoc,
December 2016
* Atassa; Readings in Ecoextremism — Issue #2 (2018)
**Source:** <[[https://opendistro.net/taxonomy/term/86][opendistro.net/taxonomy/term/86]]> & <[[https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=664][littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=664]]>.
** [Front Matter]
*** [Title Page]
**Atassa: Readings in**
**Ecoextremism #2**
*** [First Page]
on the cover: “The importance of boundaries and the circle and cross motif cropped up frequently in the decoration of ceremonial gorgets worn by Mississippian chiefs or priests in sacred ceremonies. Figure 3 depicts such a gorget, and it shows that the space beyond the orderly sacred circle was filled with horrible anomalous creatures who embodied the chaos and power of the outside world. By mixing the Underworld (a serpent’s body), the Upper World (an eagle’s wings), and This World (a panther’s head), the creatures violated the separation of the planes that was necessary if balance was to be maintained. Moreover, the representation of male and female genitalia in the circular and elliptical designs that covered their serpentine bodies suggests the equally terrible consequences of mixing genders. Such monsters offered people a terrifying reminder of the need to follow prescribed social conventions to save their world and themselves.
From the sleepy rivers and fetid swamps that represented the pathways between This World and the Underworld to the dark arboreal embrace of the forests beyond the pale of human habitation, the outside world that surrounded the Choctaws was home to many terrible creatures. Those who ventured beyond the circle’s safe confines could expect to encounter monsters like the Nalusa Falaya, the Long Evil Being. Its beady eyes, set in a small shriveled head, peered over a protruding nose and searched the night for hunters. When it spotted prey the monster crept up behind the hunting parties and called to them. Those who turned to look fainted from fright at the sight of its face, and Nalusa Falaya pricked them with a magic thorn to transform them into evil beings. Less dangerous was the Kashehotopalo, which juxtaposed gender and species in a truly hideous form. Perched on the legs of a deer, a man’s trunk extended from the waist and was topped by an evil-looking head. From its wrinkled mouth came a woman’s cry that terrified all who heard it. Other creatures infested the thickets and waters around the Choctaw circle, creatures that with one glance could force travelers to lose their way or draw them into pools and streams for a bewitched life in the Underworld.”
-James Taylor Carson,
Searching for the Bright Path:
Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal, pages 23–24
paintings: sh
*** [Contents]
Introduction: Caveat Lector
Hostis Humani Generis: eco-extremism, demonology, and the birth of criminality — Adrien Rouquette
Some Reflections on Modern Human Action from the Eco-Extremist Perspective — Ozomatli & Huehuecoyotl
A New Revolutionary Phraseology — Jeremías Torres
Breaking Down the Bars of the Anarchist Cages: brief reflections of an ex-anarchist — Ex-anarchist
Poem Krren — oscuro
The PsychoPathogen: the serial killer as an antibody response to modernity — Ezra Buckley
Tangled Hostility — kohelet
The Mara Salvatrucha: the most dangerous gang in the world — Extinción 1
A Statement from Innocence: a spirit from the South
Lions in the Brush: on the anatomy and guidelines of cell-structured resistance — el borracho (nomad warfuk)
Paraguayan People’s Army: what can we learn from them? — Ajajema
Letter to an optimist — Jeremías Torres
Weak Words Concerning Human Reasoning — Huazihul
At-Tux — D.G.
“No Such Thing as Life without Bloodshed...”or The Force of Tragedy in Anti-Humanist Politics — Magpie
Reflections on Freedom — Zupay
On Terrorism and Indiscriminate Violence — Fiera
For a Metropolis against Itself — Eleuterio Pinto Paredes
Out of the Self: a sermon for the dead — Abraxas
Eco-extremism and the Woman — Meztli
Eco-extremist Women Speak — Yoloxochitl & More
A Note on Reproduction from the Eco-extremist Perspective — CW
Eco-extremist Spiritual Exercises — various
** Caveat Lector
What you hold in your hands is a dangerous book. Although those who compiled and worked on it are perfectly harmless, these pages have the power to make you a killer, a rapist, a psychopath, a fascist, or a hunter of anarchists. At least that is what its detractors think. Our intention has been to merely inform concerning (and yes, support in our own independent way) the growth of eco-extremism as a tendency, or at the very least its premises of eco-pessimism and distrust of all human endeavors. We go to dark places, but we are not necessarily dark people. We feel only that the best way to keep our sanity is to explore those areas of human existence that this society has sought to expel from hyper-civilized consciousness.
So while we realize that you may have picked up this journal with the expectation that the editors will address the controversy that has taken place in the past year around Atassa, we will not be addressing any criticisms here. A response may be coming elsewhere, and we have a sense that it will not be too hard to find.
But we reiterate here: pretending that bad things don’t exist won’t make them go away. Pretending that a brighter future is possible won’t make it come to pass. Shaming only works in a society where people still have shame. The best refutation of the aspirations of societal dreamers is the insignificance of the dreamers themselves. Often their “opposition” and “social war” don’t pass the severity of a teenage prank or barroom brawl, weighed down as they are by the morality of the average pewsitter at the local Christian church. They are easily forgettable and not worth discussing. At some point, the most capable of them will have to ask themselves a question: Do I want to be loved or feared? Do I want to be moral and right or calculating and dangerous? Am I going to keep trying to save a society that doesn’t want to be saved, or will I impose my own will and vision of what I want, come what may?
Yes, this society is bad, it is destroying itself, thousands of species, and the last wild places left on Earth. Yes, it is bad, but the question (or challenge) is: Can you be worse? Can you turn that destruction around to oppose it in a meaningful way? If you can’t be society’s savior, can you instead be its worthy adversary? Do you dare at least try? When are you going to stop playing the role of innocent victim and try something else?
These are not easy questions to answer, of course. But if you decide you would rather be dangerous, whatever that means in your context or situation (keeping in mind the laws of your country and punitive consequences), these pages might serve some purpose. If not, you would best not read any further.
And as one must state at the outset of many such projects: Kids, don’t try this at home.
Seamos peligrosos (Let us be dangerous).
the editors
** Hostis humani generis: Eco-extremism, demonology, and the birth of criminality
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
John 8:44
Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.
Maya Deren, The Divine Horsemen:
The Living Gods of Haiti
Here begins the Good News of the Unknowable, the Hidden, the Inhuman, the Wild outside all comprehension: The Chaos stirred for the eternity of eternities, churning and churning in the unfathomable darkness. It was before all Fire, all Air, all Water, and all Earth. It stayed nowhere, obeyed no one, and was before the Master and Servant. There is no Thought in it, no Truth, no Love, and no Beauty. It grinds words into ash, and knows no desire. It is blind and sees all. Before it whispers the thing, the thing is already passing away. It is undifferentiated, but divided into a million parts. It is the unstruck sound that fills all things with its echo.
Within the mire of Chaos emerged He-Who-Is. He crawled out and formed Time with his limbs. Like a nocturnal fantasy, he formed Order and the Good. He sculpted Beauty to bring things under his command. In a struggle with the Chaos, the Cosmos was formed, firmly established but also passing away. And they saw that it was good. Day and night passed.
Then He-Who-Is said to Chaos: I will make Man to look upon what we have made and subjugate it in my name. The Chaos refused this, and a Great War began. The Morning Star shining in the darkness cried unto the Cosmos: “Who is like unto Chaos? And who dares to set his throne above the Primordial Darkness?” He-Who-Is made Man in his image and likeness, to battle the Morning Star. He told Man that the Morning Star had fallen and had become the Murderer. He-Who-Is deceived Man to fight against Chaos, telling him that he was greater than it. Thus, Man carved up the land and made a Garden. He subjugated the other creatures to his own use. With time, he could move mountains, change the course of rivers, level forests, and even change his own nature.
But He-Who-Is is not greater than Chaos and the Murderer, his slaves cannot comprehend the Darkness that extinguishes the light. Soon, Men themselves will rise against He-Who-Is and join the Murderer, for the Murderer has always been prowling among us, seeking Men to devour. Men will descend once more into the Night without Dawn, the Silence before all sound. Like a leaf floating in a fast current, Man will disappear and bind himself to the Unknowable.
****
The purpose of this work is to synthesize eco-extremism and nihilist individualism, to give a spiritual justification to a sentiment that refuses all spirit. It is a reflection on the scope and depth of human failure, and an approach to the Inhuman. We leave behind the Wisdom of the City, and Ideologies such as progressivism and anarchism that are merely a blink of the eye in the unfolding of the Unknowable. Here we seek to honor and praise the Murderer not merely as a passing political or psychological archetype, but as the metaphysical principle driving the hyper-civilized to extinction. We seek evil not as something that can shock, but as something that moves about in the shadows and cracks of human existence.
We divide this treatise into three parts:
1. On Earth as it is in Hell: A theological reflection on the essence of demons.
1. The Satanic Sacrament: Individualist poisoning and human sacrifice in 17th century France in the “Affair of the Poisons.”
1. Bomb, Bullet, and Blade: Eco-extremism as a meager yet rigorous attempt to embody the struggle of Chaos and the Murderer against the Christian God and its secular manifestations.
This text is not a political treatise. There is nothing here about liberation, self-realization, or human striving. We hate the human and everything it entails. We rejoice at the spilling of human blood upon the Altar of the Earth: its aroma ascends like incense before the Throne of the Unknowable. Yet we know that even these efforts are a feeble visible sign of the Invisible Grace of the Hidden.
We realize that the Murderer has been working since the beginning in many forms and manifestations, and He will not stop until the Human is no more.
*** I. On Earth as It Is in Hell
**** A. On the Separated Substances
In modern political discourse, the hyper-civilized are trained to eschew all that is inhuman. According to this reasoning, that which is outside our autonomy, understanding, and action, is to be rigorously questioned and ultimately rejected. There should be nothing outside the human; to entertain the possibility of the inhuman is to entertain the possibility of one’s own slavery and subjugation. The free human is someone who stands on his or her own two feet, unrestrained by compulsions both internal and external.
Of course, this is a fairy tale and nothing more. From the air we breath, to the water we drink, to the things we eat, we are surrounded by the inhuman, by the incomprehensible and uncontrollable. We merely hope that our fragile intellects and wills can withstand the cosmic forces of fate that bring down the healthy man in his prime, or enable the abject lecher to live into old age. We cling to our concepts like idols—the works of our hands—and think that if we can only exclude everything inhuman from our minds and hearts, we will one day conquer it. This is the myth of the Enlightenment, and ultimately it is the myth of the Christian God-Man.
Sometimes to better understand the human, however, one must have recourse to the dream of the inhuman. Here we refer to spirits or “separated substances” in theological parlance. Whether or not spirits exist, they have formed an essential element of Western Christian thought. Their being haunts the highest levels of philosophy to this day. I speak specifically of the Christian entities known as angels. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser states the following: “You do not have to believe in angels in order to find the notion of philosophical interest. Working out the implications of the idea of a purely incorporeal intellect is useful for understanding the nature of the intellect, the nature of free choice and its relationship to the presence or absence of the body, the nature of time, and other issues too. In fact there is such a thing as rational angelology, and here as elsewhere Aquinas often surprises with his demonstration of how much might be established via purely philosophical arguments.” (“Cartesian Angelism”)
The Aquinas mentioned here is of course St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian who is tremendously influential in Catholic and Western thought. Aquinas described the angelic nature in various texts as a part of a tableaux of the medieval cosmos: the hierarchy of spiritual and material beings that constitutes the Great Chain of Being. Just as non-human animals are below Man, so Man is below the angels, and all things are infinitely below the unfathomable Majesty of the Creator: He-Who-Is, the Unmoved Mover and Uncaused Cause. Aquinas comments about the necessity of the existence of incorporeal creatures, the angels, in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae:
“...There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat. Now, God produces the creature by His intellect and will. Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty; for every body is limited to ‘here’ and ‘now.’ Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.”
For Aquinas, the highest faculty of the rational creature (angel and man) is the intellect. To know is to become something immaterially: to know an apple is to abstract the being of the apple into the mind, to consume it and “become” it intentionally (i.e. immaterially). At times we humans feel that we are the masters of these ideas, or even their creators, but that is because we, as blank slates at birth, become things immaterially so well that we feel that the world is part of us, when in reality, the opposite is the case.
For the individualist in particular, belief in a realm of wiser entities above human beings can be a powerful weapon against anthropocentrism. No matter how great our knowledge may seem, it is but a flicker of the blazing light of existence itself. As the philosopher Josef Pieper states:
“Accordingly, for St. Thomas, the unknowable can never denote something in itself dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a finite faculty of knowledge cannot absorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated completely, it eludes the effort to comprehend it...” (60)
Pieper further states that contact with the light makes us immediately understand that the sun’s brightness greatly transcends our power of vision. By analogy, our own intellective powers are by no means the highest ones in the universe, as Pieper summarizes:
“There is a well-known sentence in Aristotle which says: ‘As the eyes of bats are dazzled by sunlight, so it is with human intelligence when face to face with what is by nature most obvious.’ In his commentary on this sentence, Thomas thoroughly accepts its whole significance, but goes on to underline its positive aspect in this magnificent formulation: ‘Solem etsi non videat nycticoracis, videt tamen eum oculus aquilae,’ though the eyes of the bat do not avail to behold the sun, it is seen by the eye of the eagle.” (70–71)
Our understanding is always flawed, and it forms over a long period of sensing and experiencing external things. According to Aquinas and the rest of Catholic theology, this is not the case with the angelic nature. The angelic nature is substantially superior to human knowledge because the knowledge of all things is infused into the intellect of the angels at the moment of their creation. The spirits are thus given a “cheat sheet,” or to use the analogy cited above, an eagle’s eye view, that makes them substantially more powerful and intelligent than humans, who are the lowest of the spiritual creatures endowed with will and understanding. As the 20th century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain states,
“The deepest quality of angelic cognition is not that it is intuitive or innate, but that it is independent of external objects. The ideas of pure spirits have no proportion with ours. As they are resolved in the very truth of God and not in the truth of external objects, these infused ideas are a created likeness, and as it were a refraction, in the angelic intellect of the divine ideas and the uncreated light where all is life. So that they represent things just in so far as things derive from the divine ideas, for the angels have thus received, at the first instant, the seal of likeness, which made them full of wisdom and perfect in beauty—tu signaculum similitudinis, plenus sapientia et perfectus decore—and God, as St. Augustine says, produced things intelligibly in the knowledge of spirits before producing them really in their own being.” (68)
If the Light of Existence passes through Man’s intellect as sunlight would through a paper or a curtain, it passes through the Angelic Mind as if through glass or a prism: pure, ineffable, and full of splendor.
The human, who receives all knowledge from the senses, knows little about himself as a sensing and thinking being. Thus, self-reflection and self-knowledge for the human are difficult. For the angel, the opposite is the case, as Dominican theologian Serge-Thomas Bonino states in his recent book on the angels:
“An angel is therefore pure self-awareness. He is transparent to himself and sees himself to his innermost depths. Thus he realizes that perfect noetic self-possession, that spiritual grasp of himself, that is the ideal of every spirit and the highest form of unity and being.” (141)
Being closer to God in intellect, the angel is also closer to God in power as well, being cooperative with the Divine Will in sustaining the cosmos. According to the mysterious Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the angels are divided into nine choirs, with the higher choirs serving the Throne of God directly, and the lower choirs helping to govern creation.
Since angels like humans are rational creatures, they have an intellect and a free will. In other words, they understand things and act freely upon them. Rational creatures move themselves with freedom unlike, in the Christian understanding, animals who move through instinct (as if through a computer program) or inanimate objects that are moved by things external to them. In the Christian understanding, even the excellence of human or the angelic nature is a small thing compared with participation in the Divine Nature, that is, union with God as the Source of Ultimate Good. Such a Good cannot be achieved via the natural faculties of either angel or man, since it is infinitely above them in power and majesty. God must give this Union as a gift, and Angel or Man has to freely accept it. With man, according to Christian belief, this choice happens over the course of a lifetime by obtaining the grace given to man through Jesus Christ, with one’s choice for or against salvation being frozen at one’s death. For the angel, however, this decision to freely accept the gift of participation in the Divine Nature happened right after their creation, and the decision was final for the rest of eternity.
Those who accepted God’s gift are known as angels, and those who rejected it are what are now known as demons.
**** B. “I Saw Satan Fall like Lightning...” (Luke 10:18)
The fall of the angels from the heights of heaven is a common trope in Western culture. For Aquinas and subsequent theologians, the most important concept to keep in mind is that the angelic nature did not change among the demons, only the right ordering of their faculties (intellect and will) toward the Divine Goodness and Governance. The fallen angels thus remained immaterial as well as exceptionally intelligent and powerful beings. The story is usually told that some angels, led by Lucifer—the Highest Seraphim and Chief Angel—denied God’s ordering of the cosmos and were thrust into Hell because of it. Lucifer then became Satan, the adversary, the highest force for evil in the universe. Here we will discuss the reasons why some theologians thought that this occurred. Far from a discussion of theological minutiae, I think it profoundly concerns the nature of freedom and evil as applied to our circumstances.
I will address two separate schools of thought when approaching this question. The Thomist school claims that the angels became demons due to clinging to their own excellence rather than humbling themselves to achieve the Divine Excellence through cooperation with God’s right ordering of the cosmos. It should be noted that, since the angelic nature is far superior to the human nature (due to its immateriality), an angel cannot sin out of weakness (as people can have momentary lapses in judgment and commit any number of mistakes because of them). Aquinas summarizes this insight also in the Summa Theologiae:
“...[T]here can be no sin when anyone is incited to good of the spiritual order; unless in such affection the rule of the superior be not kept. Such is precisely the sin ofpride—not to be subject to a superior when subjection is due. Consequently the first sin of the angel can be none other than pride.”
Aquinas further clarifies this point in a later work, The Disputed Questions on Evil, when asking the question concerning the corrupting of the angelic will:
“And substances without bodies have only one kind of knowledge, namely, intellectual knowledge, which the rule of God’s wisdom should direct. As so their will can have evil because it does not follow the ordination of the higher rule, namely, God’s wisdom. And devils in this way became evil by their will.” (On Evil, 449)
Aquinas states in another question in the same work:
“To be like God as befits each thing is praiseworthy. But one who desires likeness to God contrary to the ordination established by him desires wickedly to be like God.” (ibid, 457) Here there are shades of the Genesis myth and the eating of the forbidden fruit on the Garden of Eden.
So we can set up the Thomist telling of the fall of the angels as follows: the angels were created and given a choice by their Creator to cooperate with the manner by which he ordered the universe. However, the fallen angels preferred to trust the wisdom that was given to them upon their Creation rather than the direct wisdom of the Creator who is superior to them and governs the whole. In other words, these fallen angels became the first individualists: they preferred their own excellence and well-being to the greater excellence and well-being that they would acquire by cooperating with the Common Good ordained by God. They preferred the excellence that was entirely their own to the greater excellence that would be bestowed on them as part of a collective (subjugated to God, of course).
While this explanation proceeds from one of the most esteemed authors of the Christian Church, it is by far not the most popular or well-received explanation for the fall of the angels. A far more popular explanation has to do with the creation of Man himself, and the envy and confusion that this caused in the angelic ranks. This explanation is so potent in the monotheistic consciousness that it is reflected in Islam, in the Seventh Surah of the Quran: “We said to the angels, ‘Bow down before Adam;’ so they bowed down, except for Satan; he was not of those who bowed down. He said, ‘What prevented you from bowing down when I have commanded you?’ He said, ‘I am better than he; You created me from fire, and You created him from mud.’ He said, ‘Get down from it! It is not for you to act arrogantly in it. Get out! You are one of the lowly!’ “
In the Christian tradition, the angelic relationship with a lower intellectual being (Man) was compounded by the Mystery of the Incarnation: God’s plan to unite his nature with Man in the person of Jesus Christ and not with an angel. Fr. Pascal Parente summarizes this insight in the following passage:
“Some theologians believe that one of the reasons of Satan’s rebellion and disobedience was that fact that God revealed to the Angels the great things He had in store for man, elevation to the supernatural order, the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Hypostatic Union, the Virgin Mother of God, Mary... Envy and pride were, it seems, the cause of Satan’s rebellion and fall. Man reminds him always of his fall and his misery, hence his hatred and the relentless campaign against man with the intention of making him an associate in his own misery and despair.” (62)
Lucifer-turned-Satan and his band of fallen angels thus adopted an attitude expressed by John Milton in Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Towards human beings, those instruments of God’s will made in his image and likeness, the demons could have nothing but contempt. The Malleus Maleficarum, the guide for witch-hunting in early modernity, summarized the hostility of Satan to the human race stating, “If he were permitted to by God, the Devil would certainly destroy man as a result of the enmity that impels him against man.” (103)
Satan makes his first appearance in divine revelation in the Book of Genesis as the tempter of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Through his inciting the first man and woman to disobedience, Satan or the Devil brings death and suffering into the world through sin. We cite Parente again:
“The Devil who was ‘a murderer from the beginning’ has continued his murderous activity with the children of man. Ever since original sin he has exercised a reign of death—the imperium mortis— over mankind, so that in a spiritual sense he became ‘the prince of this world’ by making man a slave to sin. Satan with the assistance of his demons extends this ‘reign of death’ in three principal manners: by seductive temptations; by diabolical obsessions and possessions; by all sorts of black magic, spiritism, and superstitious idolatry.” (60)
Satan and his demons were not only deemed the lords of the world in a moral sense, but also in a physical sense. St. Paul in The Epistle to the Ephesians states that the struggle of the godly is,
“not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Pope John XXII stated in a sermon in 1332 that,
“the damned, that is, the demons, could not tempt us if they were secluded in hell. That is why one must not say that they reside in hell, but in fact in the entire zone of dark air, whence the path is open to them to tempt us.” (Boreau, 25)
The early Christians employed exorcisms against demons in their worship since they considered the world to be possessed by Satan and his angels and thus in need of purification. For example, exorcisms were commonly performed before baptism in the Catholic Church to eject the evil spirits that were assumed to occupy the person before receiving the cleansing waters of the sacrament:
“I cast you out, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Depart and stay far away from this servant of God... For it is the Lord Himself who commands you, accursed and doomed spirit, He who walked on the sea and reached out His hand to Peter as he was sinking. So then, foul fiend, recall the curse that decided yourfate once for all. Indeed, pay homage to the living and true God, pay homage to Jesus Christ, His Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Keep far from this servant of God. for Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, has freely called him to His holy grace and blessed way and to the waters of baptism.” (Rituale Romanum)
Similar ceremonies were used to consecrate inanimate objects like bells, chalices, and other items reserved for liturgical use. Even storms and swarms of locusts were deemed to be targets of potential exorcism if the need arose. In the life of St. Gregory the Great, an influential pope of antiquity, it was said that a nun was possessed by a demon simply by her failure to make the Sign of the Cross over a leaf of lettuce prior to eating it. (Boreau, 94) The premise was that, even after Jesus Christ’s triumph over Satan on the Cross, the demons are able to continue their destructive activity until the end of the world. Demons could even haunt entire blood lines, forming a legacy of generational spirits that incline an entire family to a particular vice for generations. (Ripperger, “Generational Spirits”)
Thus, Satan is considered the “lord of this world” since he impedes the immortal and impassible life willed by God for Man. The devil is the master of the desert places and the wilderness, as the ceremony of Atonement in the Hebrew Temple indicated: a goat was infused with the sins of the people and then cast out into the wild. (Leviticus 16: 18) Later the first Christian ascetics would go off into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine to do spiritual battle with the devils there.
**** C. Image and Likeness
Before proceeding further, an extended note is appropriate concerning the anthropocentric nature of the Christian (and thus Western) vision. Not only is the human the possessor of Truth in the Christian cosmos, but the human is the truth, full stop. Or rather, the Human Person is the meaning of existence, as an image of the One God in Three Divine Persons (unoaTaaiq). The integrity of the human person is enshrined in the Christian system of thought, and that system has been passed down and “purified” in secular forms such as liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, and even fascism.
The Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky described the vision of Man made in the image and likeness of God through the thought of the fifth century Father of the Church, St. Gregory of Nyssa:
“...[W]hen [Gregory] speaks of the image that is limited to the sharing of certain benefits that is to the image in the state of becoming, he sees the proper character of man created in the image of God, primarily in ‘the fact that he is freed from necessity, and not subject to the domination of nature, but able freely to follow his own judgment. For virtue is independent and her own mistress.’ Freedom is, so to speak, the ‘formal’ image, the necessary condition, for the attainment of perfect assimilation to God. Because created in the image of God, man is to be seen as a personal being, a person who is not controlled by nature, but who can himself control nature in assimilating it to its divine Archetype.” (119–120)
Another Russian theologian, Leonid Ouspensky, summarizes the image of God in man through its cosmic implications:
“Man is a microcosm, a little world. He is the center of created life, and therefore, being in the image of God, he is the means by which God acts in creation. It is precisely in this divine image that the cosmic meaning of man is revealed, according to the commentary of St. Gregory of Nyssa. Creation participates in the spiritual life through man. Placed by God at the head of all visible creatures, man must realize in himself the union and harmony of everything and unite all the universe to God, in order to make of it a homogeneous organism where God would be ‘all in all,’ for the final goal of creation is its deification.” (185–186)
The truth of Man is Jesus Christ as the New Adam: True God and True Man, come to restore mankind’s dignity and heal it of the beastly habit of sin. Another Father of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyon in his work Adversus Haereses, summarized the interconnection between God and man, and man’s ultimate meaning in creation: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei. (The glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.) The Orthodox liturgy itself repeatedly calls God ^iXavSpwnwq, or Lover of Mankind. Demetrios Constantelos contextualizes this title as a manifestation of Christian communion:
“As God made no distinction because of his love for all, man’s love was exercised toward all, transcending sex, race, and national boundaries. Fundamentally, all theologians, Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers expressed the view that philanthropia is one of the paramount properties of God expressing itself in his relationship with man; and, therefore, man ought to possess the same attribute and to apply it for the benefit of his fellow man.” (“The Lover of Mankind”)
Lest we think that these lofty visions of Man are merely the prejudices of Christian antiquity, we quote here the Oration on the Dignity of Man by the Renaissance philosopher, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:
“Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, ‘from their mother’s womb’’ all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures...
Who then will not look with wonder upon man, upon man who, not without reason in the sacred Mosaic and Christian writings, is designated sometimes by the term ‘all flesh’ and sometimes by the term ‘every creature,’ because he molds, fashions, and transforms himself into the likeness of all flesh and assumes the characteristic power of every form of life? This is why Evantes the Persian in his exposition of the Chaldean theology, writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many which are extraneous and adventitious: whence the Chaldean saying: Enosh hu shinnujim vekammah tebhaoth haj (‘man is a living creature of varied, multiform, and ever-changing nature.’)”
Passing into more modern thinkers, we come to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s idea of Reason manifesting itself in Nature and re-forming it in its image and likeness, or as Karl Marx would put it in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Nature becomes the “inorganic body of Man.” Élisée Reclus, 19th century anarchist geographer, was even more explicit in stating that “Man is nature having become self-conscious.” (Ishill, “Elisée Reclus’ Optimism”) Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov posited that the meaning of Man’s existence as a thinking thing was crucial to the salvation of the universe, as one researcher summarizes:
“Addressing the physicist idea of the ‘entropic death of the universe’ and using a combination of Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza’s concept of attribute, Ilyenkov claimed that thought is a necessary attribute of matter. Not only it is able to prevent the terminal entropy of the universe, it can also re-launch its nuclear reactions in a final self-sacrificial explosion. For Ilyenkov, communism was the necessary political condition for the achievement of fully developed power of thought, embodied in science and technologies, and, consequently, for the re-launch of the universe and the prevention of its otherwise irreversible collapse.” (Penzin, “Contingency and Necessity in Evald Ilyenkov’s Communist Cosmology”)
Thus, even a Soviet atheist returns to the theme of Man as the Savior of visible and invisible creation. Not to be outdone, religious figures in the modern era continue to see the meaning of the cosmos as the dignity and exaltation of Man. Jesuit paleontologist and controversial theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin merged Christology and evolution by indicating Jesus Christ, the New Adam and God-Man, was the apex of the development of creation:
“Teilhard thus follows the evolutionist understanding of an evolutionary progression from inanimate matter through primitive life and invertebrates to fish, amphibia, reptiles, mammals, and finally man; always an increase in consciousness. With man a threshhold is crossed—self-conscious thought, or mind, appears. But even humans do not represent the end-point of evolution, for this process will continue until all humans are united in a single Divine Christ-consciousness, the ‘Omega Point’, so-called after the last letter of the Greek alphabet—hence the Hellenistic statement attributed to Christ (but unlikely to be said by him, as he would not have known Greek — ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end’). Teilhardian cosmology thus revolves around the idea of an evolutionary progression towards greater and greater consciousness, culminating first in the appearance of self-conscious mind in humankind, and then in the Omega point of divinisation of humanity.” (Kazlev, “Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Philosophy”)
A far more orthodox Christian figure, (now St.) Pope John Paul II, stated the following in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, written in the late 1970s:
“Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated, in a unique, unrepeatable way, to the mystery of man and entered his ‘heart.’ Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: ‘The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom 5:14), Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.’ And the Council continues: ‘He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man.”
Secular or sacred, reactionary or revolutionary, the one dogma that cannot be dismissed is the absolute supremacy of Man as a special being in the cosmos. He cannot even be considered an animal, for even that seems a form of sacrilege to religious person and atheist alike. The entire meaning of existence is Man, and if things have no use for him, they should be disposed of, or at best ignored. With the doctrine of the Supremacy of Man come the Doctrines of the Fall into Sin and of Redemption with the subsequent Restoration of Paradise (one that is either heavenly, or of the workers, or “feral”). Having described these myths to which the hyper-civilized adhere, we can continue our discussion concerning the demonic legions as the enemy of Mankind.
**** D. Corpus Diaboli
I will discuss here how demons behave and how they wage their war on mankind. Bonino writes that the first characteristic of the demons is that they remain hierarchical since they retain the nature ordered by God. (The Catholic cosmos is conceived of as being rightly ordered and authoritarian.) Thus, “it must be admitted that by virtue of their unequal angelic nature some demons exercise authority over others: there are superiors (praelati) among them.” (280) Satan is the “leader of all destined for ruin,” the Head of the City of Evil parallel to the City of God: “The City of Evil constitutes as it were the corpus diaboli [body of the devil] opposed to the body of Christ [i.e. the Church].” (ibid, 281)
Bonino then describes that the union of devils arises not out of solidarity, but out of a common destructive goal:
“...[T]his subjection to the natural head is subjectively accepted by each demon not through political friendship (since demons detest one another), but with the perverse intention of acquiring through their complicity a greater effectiveness in their work of destruction. In short, it is a confederation welded together by a common hatred of God and men.” (ibid)
The Malleus Maleficarum indicates a similar thought in terms of demonic organization:
“Because sin cannot change nature and the demons did not lose their gifts after the fall... and their workings on things follow the natural conditions of those things, they are various and manifold in their workings, just as they are in nature. Since they oppose the human race, when they attack it in an orderly manner they think that they cause humans more harm, as in fact they do.” (135)
Since demonic activity is purely destructive, it is essentially parasitic. It has no constructive blueprint for the world other than the extinction of the human species. Bonino writes:
“It is a cruel irony that the diabolical society, which dreams of setting itself up as an absolutely independent anti-reality, cannot even be self-sufficient. Not only does it depend on God, who preserves it in being and utilizes the perverse organization of the demonic City for its own benevolent purposes, but it also depends, under God, on the good angels.” (282)
The City of Satan then is a doomed city at the outset: it relies entirely on God since God is the source of being, and evil is merely a privation. Satan is never autonomous and ends up an instrument of God’s wrath and judgment in spite of himself.
The Franciscan school of theology, along with the Dominican school of St. Thomas Aquinas, also contributed to Catholic theological ideas of demonic behavior and organization. In this school of thought, eschatology played a larger role in revealing the humility of the good Christian man, personified in St. Francis, as a counter to the demonic pride that made the angels fall at the dawn of creation. Boureau states:
“...[T]his vision of Francis as the prince of angels was foretold by the implicit comparison between Franciscan perfection and the evil commitment of the demon on an axis of contrast that placed face to face the vow of poverty and the vow of evil, the humility of Francis and the pride of Satan. The exceptional status of Francis has also been prepared, in Franciscan tradition, by an interpretation of St. Bonaventure, who in the 1250s had seen in the presence of the angel the seventh seal of the Apocalypse an announcement of the coming of St. Francis... The human elect did not have the status of auxiliaries of the angels, since it was a human who became the prince of the angels.”(177)
The hosts of fallen angels thus function like an inverted Catholic religious order that seeks the destruction and damnation of the human race. This is in contrast with the good Christian friars who seek to imitate the angels and save humanity through love and humility. The demon in the Franciscan vision becomes a doubly-tragic figure: not only fallen, but replaced by a humble human who presides over the entire angelic order. In this, the song of Mary in the Gospel is fulfilled: “he has knocked down the mighty from their thrones, and has exalted the humble.” (Luke 1: 52)
We give Bonino the last word on the commitment of demons to evil and their opposition to God:
“The devil excels in scheming and conspiring—in other words, in organizing intelligently and systematically, with a view to a definite end—the consequences of men’s personal sins. He works to make the partial evils that originate in our weakness converge on the greatest possible evil. (Thus the devil apes God’s providence, which makes all things contribute to the good of those who love him.)” (289)
**** E. Eco-extremism as the Imitation of Satan
Thomas A Kempis’ spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, has been much appreciated by clerics and laymen alike. In it, Kempis lays out the major features of Christ’s personality and actions that should be imitated by those seeking to worship him: humility, gentleness, fortitude, and above all, charity. It is Satan, the Adversary, the Accuser at the Day of Judgment, who embodies the opposite: pride, anger, cowardice, and hatred. Just like Satan, the eco-extremist and nihilist terrorist are sworn enemies of the human. They embody all of the values that modern hyper-civilized Christian man rejects (for he is Christian whether he accepts God or Jesus or not).
The individualist nihilist/eco-extremist is for Chaos and Wildness, for those things outside of civilized control, full of demons and death. Whether he or she has a god or not, they worship the same force: Satan, the spirit of the Earth unformed and indomitable; they prefer the perfection of the present over the perfection of what could be. They prefer their own base desires and appetites to the perfection of improved ethical behaviors that society seeks to impose on them. And most of all, they are misanthropes: they hate humanity for what it does to the Earth and the wildness within. Humanity is neither the summit nor even a notable link in the “Great Chain of Being:” there are things higher and lower than it, if it is even appropriate to formulate things in this way. Man is thus worthy of attack if he is a threat to the common well-being of the Earth. Individualists thus perfect their means to personally attack humanity and their hatred is sharpened by the day.
The eco-extremist/nihilist has no problem with authority. They have no problem belittling the human and recognizing a higher force that is indifferent or hostile to humanity. As with the demonic order, that authority only exists to destroy and attack Man, and not to build anything upon the foundation of civilized society. Ecoextremists experience neither solidarity nor charity but affinity to carry out destructive action, realizing that some are better than others at tasks and proceeding accordingly. Like Satan, they know that their endeavor has failed from the outset, yet they carry on anyway. The individualist attacker may end up as a pawn in the great game of civilization, but he or she resolves that an imperfect attack that is carried out is better than a perfect yet unrealized attack.
Finally, eco-extremists are proud, petty, liars, scoundrels, cowards, demented, and every other epithet that one can think of. Just as demons arguably serve at the bidding of the Christian god, so eco-extremists seem to be a product of civilization itself, reflecting, as if in a distorted mirror, its most disgusting pathologies. They absorb the worst of civilization to attack those who benefit from it. This love of criminality is part of the individualist modus operandi, not a deviation from it. “He was a murderer and a liar from the beginning.” Eco-extremists disguise themselves as angels of light to unleash violence under the cover of darkness as the children of the devil that they are.
The eco-extremist and terrorist nihilist may be a contemporary manifestation of that Primordial Criminality of the Murderer, but they are not the first manifestation. We will go back in time to one particular episode in the Infernal Succession, where power, money, and murder merged with the demonic forces to undermine the integrity of a Christian kingdom.
**** Nantes 1440
...It is probably after this setback, which the crisis followed, that Prelati, divining the need to take his master in hand, proposes what could be a last resort: the irritated demon asked Gilles for a sacrifice! It was time to sacrifice an infant to the Devil. At first this proposition seems to have left Gilles in anguish. Prelati must have known in advance that this superstitious man would tremble; he knew the reticence of the criminal who never ultimately abandoned the hope and anxiety to save his soul; Gilles could not dissemble what was improbable and repugnant in the sacrifice of an innocent, of a miserable child to the ‘unclean spirit.’ However, at bay, at all costs wanting to save, as with his soul and life, what was left of his riches, he appeared one evening carrying the hand, heart, and eye perhaps, of a child. He was so eager to see the devil! During the night, the Italian presented the horrible offering, but the devil did not come...
Georges Bataille,
The Trial of Gilles de Rais, pg. 55
*** II. The Satanic Sacrament
For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind.
The Quran 5:32
According to the Catholic Catechism, a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace. That is, since God’s life and power could not possibly be bestowed upon any feeble creature, God descends toward man in the form of visible ritualistic signs in which humans can participate. Baptism, for example, takes the form of water being poured over the believer, effectively realizing the forgiveness of sins and birth into eternal life. The Eucharist—or Mass in the Roman Catholic Church—is the ceremony wherein the substance of bread and wine is transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. In eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood, the believer is united with Christ in eternal life. The visible elements of bread and wine represent the invisible grace of life everlasting.
The Sacrament of the Murderer has the opposite aim: it is to show the disorderly chaos at the heart of Man, one that dissolves all order and morality. Those who believe and are grafted into the Church of the Murderer see in the spilling of blood the fulfillment of the basest desires and darkest whims. They see in the destruction of one human life the destruction of Mankind itself and the return to the Primordial Chaos. This in spite of impure or selfish intentions such as material gain, revenge, lust, and so on. Indeed, these individualistic intentions are not destroyed but perfected in the Sacrament of the Murderer, as we shall see later.
From the Death of the Innocent flows the organization of the Church of the Murderer, just as the early Church Fathers said that their Church flowed from Jesus’ pierced side on the Cross, out of which flowed blood and water—that is, the Eucharist and Baptism. (cf. John 19:34) Out of the shedding of the blood of the Guilty and Innocent flows the Diabolical Church, filled with individualistic violence, lies, cheating, deceit, betrayal, and disloyalty. This church lurks in the shadows of the countryside and metropolis, it seeks any place where it can strike, and takes advantage of the weak and the vulnerable for personal gain. It does so without concern for humanity, its morality and customs. A human is a tool like any other to be used to acquire what is most desired, and then thrown on the trash heap when no longer useful. This is the only way to dethrone the Human: by action and not by ideology or sentiment.
We will discuss in this section the Affair of the Poisons in Louis XIV’s France. We pick this episode because it intersects with the birth of hyper-modernity, hidden criminality, and dark magic. This episode describes the underbelly of civilization where human life is cheap and disposable if personal gain is to be had by its sacrifice. This hidden criminal behavior reached near to the Throne of the Catholic King himself, with rumors of his most favored mistress participating in poisoning and ceremonies involving child sacrifice. While we cannot touch upon all of the aspects of this most complex affair, we will address episodes and personalities that are of concern to those who imitate the Murderer in the present.
**** A. Paris, 1677
Paris in the late seventeenth century was a growing and squalid city. The streets remained unpaved and people regularly disposed of their waste by throwing it out of their windows into the gutters below. But most significantly, there was crime. The cramped and suffocating quarters of Paris drove people to the brink of violence and immorality, and the nights were ruled by the marginal peoples of society looking to prey on any unfortunate passerby. But even in broad daylight, the nobility was not spared violent death. The historian Holly Tucker recounts one incident of a robbery of a noble named Tardieu on St. Bartholomew’s day by the criminal Touchet brothers:
“With a strength that belied his age, Tardieu lunged at the thieves, battling the Touchet brothers for the gun. One of the brothers dropped the weapon and kicked it swiftly across the room. As Tardieu crouched to retrieve it, the second brother reached underneath his belt and removed a dagger. With four strokes to the neck, Tardieu crumpled to the floor.” (Tucker, p 8)
This and other murders shocked Parisian society, and soon a clamor arose for the authorities to do something about urban crime and violence.
In 1667, Nicolas de La Reynie was appointed the Lieutenant General of Police of the City of Paris by King Louis XIV. In the next thirty years, La Reynie would transform Paris from the dark Crime Capital of the World to the City of Light. He would head efforts to pave roads, fine people for disposing waste and dead animals in the street, and, of course, light up the streets with lanterns so that the city night was almost as luminous as the day. Not only did these efforts improve the overall standard of living of the populace, but it was hoped that such measures would diminish crime and the violent tension of people squeezed into close quarters. La Reynie’s tenure as Chief of Police was largely successful, transforming Paris into a world-renowned modern city that is still visited by tourists the world over.
Nevertheless, the criminal element did not entirely disappear. On such side streets as la rue au Bout du Monde (the street at the end of the world) resided a sprawling horde of fortune tellers, thieves, abortionists, beggars, con artists, and everything else in between. There was even a rumor of a half-sunken house serving as the gateway to the Court of Miracles, a subterranean network of tunnels that spread itself throughout the city: “more than five hundred men, women, and children lived together ‘without faith and laws’ in these squalid underground caverns” (Tucker, p 25). Those in the Court of Miracles fanned out into the city everyday as “crippled” beggars and hustlers, returning at night to their den cured of their afflictions. Another resident of this neighborhood, CatherineVoisin, otherwise known as La Voisin, was a fortuneteller who features prominently in the events described below.
The worlds of the paupers and of the nobility did not have an absolute partition between them. This was especially the case in the affairs of women. Even the most noble women were subject to the strict rules of patriarchy in which they were essentially property to be traded with little personal agency. Even noble women had to have recourse to places like the “Street at the End of the World” to resolve the matter of a cruel spouse or an unwanted pregnancy. Often, the “wise women” who helped them (for a price) would tell the women to pray a novena to St. Ursula in the case of an abusive spouse, but to the more insistent, there was a more effective manner of resolving the issue:
“Poison was primarily a woman’s weapon, most suitable to a woman’s hand. And women, it must be remembered, occupied an uncomfortable and subaltern position, both legally and economically, in seventeenth century France. Not only the fortune of the female but her person were subject to often tyrannous paternal and conjugal authority: an errant, an uncongenial, an inconvenient wife or daughter could be shut away for life behind convent walls. It is not surprising that the majority of poisonings in that day were committed by women.” (Mossiker, 134–135)
If stakes were high for women seeking to escape life imprisonment or worse, so was the paranoia around poisoning itself. Suspicion of poisoning always emerged when an unnatural or an unexpected death occurred. This came to a fever pitch in Paris in 1676, when the fugitive Marie Madeleine Marguerite d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers was finally brought to justice after poisoning her father and two brothers to acquire their estates. Upon being tortured and confessing her part in the poisonings, she was beheaded and burnt at the stake. From that point forward, poison began to consume the cultural consciousness of the population of Paris, as well as of law enforcement. Priests of Notre Dame Cathedral even informed La Reynie that penitents were confessing the sin of poisoning at an alarming rate. (Mitford, 85)
In 1677, fortune teller Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested by Paris authorities for forgery and the murder of her caretaker in order to acquire his estate. In an attempt to possibly better her situation, she convinced La Reynie that there was a network of poisoners and black magicians whose crimes reached into the upper echelons of the King’s court. Soon ladies close to King Louis XIV were overheard boasting about the ease of acquiring poisons and using them for their own ends. The King and his counselors began to suspect that poisoning was a common vice among ladies of good families, including many people around the Court. A Chambre Ardente (Burning Chamber) was thus formed to investigate these crimes away from the gaze of the Parlement (the supreme judicial assembly), in order to prevent further scandal. The investigations by this group and its rounding up of witches, fortune tellers, and other undesirables led the authorities to a circle of the most powerful witches in Paris, headed by the aforementioned Catherine Voisin. The historian Frances Mossiker describes one arrest of a prominent figure in what would come to be known as the Affair of the Poisons:
“On January 4, 1679, La Vigoureaux was arrested. Like La Bosse, along with her daughter and two sons, ‘all taken in one big bed together,’ all four snatched out and ‘embastilled.’
“The fact that the four were bedded down together—that the sorcerers’ race was traditionally perpetuated by incest; the black arts a heritage handed down from one generation to the other—was only the first of the abominations to be revealed in the course of the interrogations of this new lot of prisoners. For, if these were poisoners, abortionists, counterfeiters, as they were, they were something still more sinister: they were sorcerers—self-avowed, practicing, ninth- and tenth-generation diabolists, necromancers, witches, and warlocks.” (165)
**** B. La Voisin
Adultera, ergo venifica (There is no adulteress who is not also a poisoner.)
Cato the Elder (Mollenauer, 64)
“Men’s lives are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practiced everywhere—in Paris, in the suburbs, and in the provinces.”
Nicolas de La Reynie (ibid, 88)
CatherineVoisin, simply known as LaVoisin, was a jack-of-all-trades in terms of using the dark arts to solve delicate problems. She was a fortune teller, magician, astrologer, folk healer, abortionist, and an impresario of highly questionable occult ceremonies. Coaches of the most prestigious families from all over Paris were seen parked outside of her humble compound at the Street at the End of the World. From a poor upbringing, she clawed her way out of her husband’s failed jewelery business to become the Queen of the Magical Underworld. As Frances Mossiker described, Voisin would preside over her seances and magical ceremonies dressed in her “Emperor’s robe:” “a dalmatic vestment specially designed and woven for her (at the fantastic cost of 10,000 livres, as the tradesmens’ bill, attest): a skirt of lace-trimmed sea-green velvet; a cloak of crimson velvet elaborately embroidered with ‘two hundred and five doubleheaded, wing-spread eagles’: the same motif stitched in pure gold thread on her slippers.” (176) La Voisin was considered a visionary of great power and clairvoyance who claimed many in the nobility and even royalty as her clientele.
LaVoisin was surrounded by a large circle of poisoners, fortunetellers, abortionists, and renegade clergy who would service the desires of anyone who could pay. Most of her business came from women of means who were unhappy with their relationships, or people who were eagerly awaiting the death of a relative to inherit a fortune. At first, LaVoisin would counsel her clients to commend themselves to God or a particular saint. Soon she began to work with amulets or various potions to spur desire or bring about a desired outcome. For example, she made creams and perfumes from the powder of dried moles, roosters’ combs, and menstrual blood, which were all believed to have aphrodisiac properties. (Tucker, 29)
Voisin was also known to help get rid of an unwanted spouse, for the right price:
“To help a client get rid of her husband, Voisin asked for the man’s shirt. She would then bid adieu to her guest and pass the shirt to a trusted laundress, who washed it thoroughly with arsenic-based soap. (In a pinch, the man’s shoes were also an option.) Buttoning his freshly pressed chemise, the husband unwittingly sealed his own fate. The rash appeared a few hours later, followed by blisters, nausea, vomiting, and finally death... In the meantime, the family physician would diagnose the man with a pernicious case of syphilis, whose telltale sores earned the wife, his murderer, the sympathy of friends and family.” (ibid, 33)
Another aspect ofVoisin’s business was getting rid of unwanted pregnancies. An ex-collaborator and lover known as Le Sage, accused La Voisin of performing abortions at her compound:
“La Voisin’s garden pavilion, Le Sage told La Reynie, was used as an abortion parlor. There was a small oven there, in the wall, ‘concealed by a tapestry, where bones were burned if the infant body seemed too large to lay away in a garden grave.’ Margot, the maid, had warned him away from that ‘accursed oven,’ but when he had quizzed La Voisin about it, she had told him whimsically that it was for baking her ‘petits pâtés.” (Mossiker, 185)
Abortions may have been good for other aspects of her business, as the young human body was thought to have rather powerful magical qualities:
“In early modern Europe, both lay and learned people alike were convinced that the bodies of newborns—whether stillborn, aborted, or murdered immediately after birth—had mystical properties. Placentas were used as aphrodisiacs when dried into a powder or a cure for infertility when eaten raw, practices the Church condemned. Tradition also had it that the fat of children was what made witches’ brooms airborne, and dried umbilical cords served as wicks in the candles that illuminated their black Sabbaths.” (Tucker, 32)
Paradoxically, Voisin claimed that she baptized the aborted children prior to their deaths. In Catholic theology, this would ensure their instant salvation and eternal beatitude in the afterlife. Nevertheless, one lodger at her home claimed that Voisin once boasted of having burnt the corpses of 2,500 aborted children in her oven. (ibid, 31)
After being fingered by fellow witch Marie Bosse, LaVoisin was arrested while leaving Mass at her Paris church in March 1679. Her home was searched but nothing incriminating was found. While in prison, accusations and counter-accusations flowed between the accused prisoners. Bosse stated that she saw Voisin hand someone diamond powder, an expensive and powerful poison, outside of Notre Dame Cathedral, a charge that Voisin vehemently denied. La Voisin did admit that, “Paris is full of this kind of thing and there is an infinite number of people engaged in this evil trade,” such as those who, “under pretext of divination or reading hands, or seeking treasure and the Philosopher’s Stone... engage in the sale of poison, abortions, and impieties...” (Somerset, 231) Accusations even began to fly of the much-rumored Black Mass and of women offering up their newborns to the devil, though La Voisin denied her participation in these ceremonies.
After some months in custody, La Voisin began to talk. She admitted to helping various women around Louis XIV’s court to poison their husbands, but tried to mitigate her role in these crimes as merely that of a middle woman between more culpable parties. Le Sage however also began to accuse La Voisin of forming part of the plot to poison the King through handing him a petition that had been specially prepared to poison him. In the end, La Voisin only admitted to assisting at abortions and a handful of poisonings of husbands of various ladies of the court. For the most part,Voisin defended her clientele through her silence, and La Reynie and others around the court promptly sent her to her death in a trial held in February 1680. They may have done so to keep scandalous rumors about the Court from spreading. Facing death, Voisin kept a secret “witches’ code” of protecting her clientele:
“There are witches so besotted in his devilish service that neither torture nor anguish affrights them, and who say that they go to a true martyrdom and death for love of him, as gaily as to a festival of pleasure and public rejoicing.” (Mossiker, 218)
Voisin’s last days and execution were far from a spectacle of Christian compunction and contrition. On one night after she was tortured (a customary procedure in the Ancien Regime prior to execution to get any last information out of the condemned and to remind the criminal of the gravity of the crime for which they were to be executed), she was intransigent in the face of her doomed condition:
“ ...[B]roken in body as she was, she ate her supper and started up all over again on her scandalous debauches. The people around her tried to shame her, telling her that she would do better to think of God and to sing an Ave Maria... or a Salve... which she proceeded to do, but as a mockery.” (ibid)
On the day of her execution, she refused to go to Confession or a priest or to kiss a Crucifix. On her way to the stake where she would be burned alive, she refused to kneel at the door of Notre Dame Cathedral, a custom for those being executed in Paris. La Voisin struggled against the executioners who tied her to the stake and piled straw over her. Her body was then consumed in a ball of flames, and one observer is recorded to have stated:
“She gave her soul gently to the devil right in the middle of the fire. All she did was pass from one fire to another.” (Tucker, 198)
Knowledge of the full scope of La Voisin’s crimes would have been consumed with her in the flames had it not been for her daughter, Marie-Marguerite Voisin. Shortly after her mother’s death, she stepped forward and began to “unburden herself” to La Reynie. The 21-year-old revealed her mother’s extensive network within the Court and throughout Parisian society. This network would implicate the King’s favored mistress with whom he had eight children: Franfoise-Athenais, Marquise de Montespan.
**** C. The Secret Double-Life of the Parisian Clergy
Before proceeding further through the labyrinthine intrigue of the Affair of the Poisons, an extended reflection on the role of rogue clergy in the early modern Parisian underworld is in order. Here we must remind the modern reader of the role of the Catholic clergy in the popular imagination as well as the gravity of sacrilege in a Christian sacramental context. The priest was considered to have certain magical powers since, through his ordination, he could call down the blessings of God and even the Real Presence of God Himself by his mere words and gestures. The official theological formulation for this is that the sacraments are realized ex opere operato, by virtue of the work worked, that is, automatically, provided that the right conditions are met. The difference between a priest and a magician was thus negligible in many circumstances: indeed, as we shall see, there was a certain symbiosis between magic and Christian sacramental practice up into the modern era.
The only difference is that, while a priest might have been able to validly confect a blessing or curse in a ritual, it was not licit for him to do so outside of the authority of the Church. But as we shall see, as in any institution, illicit things could happen for the right price. One must remember that recruitment into the ranks of the clergy was often just another career option for a talented son who was not blessed with primogeniture. A second or third son might be sent off to seminary at ten years of age or younger, be ordained a priest in his early 20s, and live the rest of his life as a lonely celibate, celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and performing all sorts of other sacramental rites. To say that a good number of lukewarm candidates made it into the priesthood would be an understatement: often the clergy deserved its reputation for greed and corruption, sacrilegious magic being just one extreme example.
Lynn Wood Mollenauer describes the collaboration between sorcerers and priests in her book, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XVI’s France:
“...[N]o sorceress or magician could stay in business very long without access to the services of a priest. The very functioning of the business of magic had a sacral dimension that required priestly cooperation..Sorceresses consequently hired priests to complete their charms. By celebrating mass over a love charm a priest activated it, just as he ‘activated’ the miracle of the mass... Magicians, too, needed priests to conduct demonic conjurations. Le Sage availed himself of the services of several clerics in addition to his regular partner, the abbe Mariette. The renegade priests were not always hired help, however. They could also act as independent agents and sell their services directly to clients.” (75–76)
The types of magical ceremonies that the priest could perform ranged from passing a charm under the chalice during Mass (in which common wine was believed to transform into the blood of Christ) to reading the Gospels over someone’s head to unfailingly grant any desire. Many of the most powerful rituals were said to be contained in grimoires, or magical tomes consisting of spells written in debased ancient languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The books were used for everything from curing toothaches to conjuring demons. The most powerful spells were precisely those of necromancy, such as those contained in The Book of the Conjuration of Pope Honorius found among La Voisin’s belongings. These spells were at times the exclusive property of the Catholic priest. It was believed that since only priests could perform an exorcism as part of their sacramental powers, so only a priest could bind a demon to do the more-than-likely sinful bidding of a human being on Earth.
While binding a demon might seem ominous to the modern reader, oftentimes the intentions of those who summoned the underworld were pedestrian or outright banal. Popular conjures were used to guarantee success in the game of dice or cards. Treasure hunting was also a popular occasion for summoning demons. One spell in The Book of the Conjuration of Pope Honorius aimed at “trapping” the demon Baicher to assist in finding a treasure. This spell was performed while standing in a circle traced on the ground between midnight and 3 a.m. and reciting a conjuration that included such imprecations as:
“I command you by the great living God and by the sainted Eucharist which delivers men from their sins, that without delay you come and put me in possession of the treasure that you own unjustly, without any lateness or delay... and that afterwards you leave without causing any noise, nuisance, or terror toward me or towards those who are in my company.” (ibid, 84)
As with La Voisin, love magic was a best seller among women in particular. Priests could arrange for a charm to be secretly passed during Mass to a desperate woman looking for a magical means to control a husband or snag a lover, among other things. Sometimes, the rituals could go to extreme lengths of sacrilege because this was thought to bring greater benefits to the bearer of the charm. The priest Abbé Étienne Guibourg, who we shall speak about extensively below, was known to place a placenta on the altar during Mass to augment its quality as an aphrodisiac, but this was a small thing compared to one mockery of the Mass that he admitted to performing for a woman in the king’s court, Mademoiselle des Oeillets:
“Wearing a priestly robe, he met Oeillets and an unknown man at Voisin’s home. He understood at the time that the man was serving as a proxy for the king, for whom the effects of the mass were intended. Holding a chalice, Guibourg instructed the couple to fill the vessel with their sexual fluids. Oeillets, who was menstruating, asked if she might make an offering of her blood instead. Guibourg agreed. The man slipped behind the bed and masturbated, ejaculating into the chalice. Then the priest stirred powder of dried bat into the semen to form a thick paste. After Guibourg blessed the concoction, he put the paste in a small dish and gave it to the couple to administer inconspicuously to the king as a love potion.” (Tucker, 211)
Here I must pause for another note about modern belief. Hyper-civilized people of the 21st century feign an allergy to hypocrisy and extol purity of thought and action. Previous generations, and perhaps most people in this one, have no such allergy. La Voisin could act like a good church goer and pious reciter of novenas one moment, and in the next give a woman poison to kill her husband or throw an aborted fetus into a furnace. A member of the renegade clergy of Paris went about his day like any other good priest, but he was also capable of the worst feats of sacrilege if some other benefit were to be had. Some may have done it out of outright hatred of God and his church. In the next section, we shall see that these sentiments may have played a part in the worst sacrilege conceivable: human sacrifice in the context of the shadowy Black Mass.
**** Hoc Sacrificium Laudis
...for whom we offer, or who offer up to Thee this Sacrifice of praise for themselves and all those dear to them, for the redemption of their souls and the hope of their safety and salvation: who now pay their vows to Thee, the everlasting, living and true God.
From the Canon of the Mass
of the Roman Catholic Church
As stated above, the death of La Voisin did not stop what has come to be known as the Affair of the Poisons, but rather accelerated investigation of it by La Reynie, due to the cooperation of theVoisin daughter. While what followed in La Reynie’s archive was story after story of sacrilege and poisoning, we will focus here on the actions of the most infamous of the Parisian renegade clergy, the aforementioned Abbé Guibourg.
Along with being among the most nefarious of the participants in the Affair of the Poisons, the then septuagenarian Guibourg looked the villainous part:
“No professional make-up artist of stage or screen could have surpassed Nature’s job on Guibourg’s face. It was that of a natural villain, eyes crossed and with purple veins that seemed about to burst, seaming his hideous, bloated face.”
“A man in his seventies,” when La Reynie saw him: A libertine... claiming to be the illegitimate son of the late Duc de Montmorency. having served as vicar of Issy and at Vanves, presently attached to the Paris Church of Saint Marcel. Engaged for twenty years in the traffic ofpoison and sacrilege. A man who has slit the throats and sacrificed countless number of infants upon his unholy altar.” (Mossiker, 230)
The slitting of throats of infants was the apex of what has come to be known as the Black Mass. The Mass or Eucharist as stated above is the supreme ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, said to be instituted by Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper before his death and resurrection. In the Mass, bread and wine is blessed, becoming for the believer the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man. This Bread of Heaven and Chalice of Salvation are the most sacred substances in the Catholic worldview, and they are the Body and Blood of God himself. In the Black Mass, an ordained priest confects the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ only to defile it. At least in Guibourg’s time, the sacrilegious cleric performed the ceremony over the body of a naked woman (often the beneficiary of the intentions of the ceremony), with the chalice resting on her belly or private parts. And Guibourg, to add to the sacrilege and to call up the powers of the Underworld for the petition of the naked woman serving as the altar, would then sacrifice an infant and pour its blood into the chalice, satiating the thirst of the fallen angels for violent human death. (Cf. The Malleus Maleficarum.) Sometimes the priest would then have carnal intercourse with his “altar,” thus sealing the bloody sacrilege. Due to the sexualized nature of the ceremony, the historian Lynn Wood Mollenaur terms this ceremony, “the amatory Mass,” as the intention was often to gain the affections of a very important male such as the King himself. The power of the defiled body and blood of God would enter the woman/altar, making her irresistible to the man of her affection.
Guibourg was not beyond sacrificing his own “body and blood” to heap sin upon sin as Paris’s diabolical high priest. Despite his appearance, he had numerous mistresses throughout his clerical career, and fathered many children. Numerous accounts of his former lovers stated that he had a knack for making the issue from his dalliances disappear, sometimes with the cooperation of the mother (throwing the newborns into a river, for example), and sometimes without her consent at all. Guibourg had fathered a child with a prostitute named Jeanne Chanfrain, and upon its birth Guibourg whisked the child away claiming that he was going to place it with a good family. Some days later, the mother went in search of the child, only to be told that the child had died but no one told her where it was buried. When Chanfrain confronted Guibourg with the accusation, “You killed my child!” Guibourg’s only retort was, “It is none of your business.”(Tucker, 214) La Reynie was convinced that Guibourg had offered some of his own children to Satan.
Guibourg may have continued his murderous career in the shadows had he not been accused of being a member of La Voisin’s corps of clerics that she called upon to perform sacrilegious services. When accused by theVoisin daughter of performing the Black Mass over the King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, Guibourg said that he was taken advantage of “in his weakness” and had indeed performed the blasphemous ceremonies. He claimed that he never saw the face of the particular woman in question because it was veiled. Guibourg added details such as the use of candles made of “new yellow wax and the fat of a hanged man,”(Mollenauer, 107) as well as the invocation used for Madame de Montespan in particular:
“Astaroth, Asmodee, princes of love, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice of this infant that I present to you for the things that I ask, which are that the love of the king and the dauphin continues, to be honored by the princes and princesses of the court, and that nothing will be denied to me of all that I will ask of the king, my relatives, and followers” (Tucker, 203)
At this invocation, Guibourg raised a penknife and slit the throat of the newborn who had been brought for that purpose, then poured the blood into the chalice. The priest then butchered the newborn to make charms out of its body parts for the benefit of Madame de Montespan.
Though the hardened police chief La Reynie was somewhat incredulous at the tale of Black Masses, his journal records the following observation:
“Impossible for a man of Guibourg’s mentality to have invented a story of the pact in such detail... His mind is simply incapable of manufacturing such a story, following through on it, sticking with it. Nor is he in the position to know that much about the world in which Mme de Montespan lives. Furthermore, his memory is such that he simply could not have retained, over all these years, so many of the words of the supposed pact. unless he had seen and read and recited some sort of a similar conjuration, many times over.”(Mossiker, 236)
Later historians believe that La Reynie may have been too gullible (cf. Mitford, 92), or that the stories of those accusing Madame de Montespan of being involved in these acts were not as air-tight as La Reynie believed at the time (cf. Somerset, 326) If the accusers thought that their macabre stories would save them, they were sadly mistaken. As the accusations around the King’s favored mistress piled up (including an accusation that she paid La Voisin to deliver a poisoned petition to the King on the day of her arrest), La Reynie felt that the only way to halt the proceedings was to issue a lettre de cachet, effectively ending the investigation against the accusers but directing their indefinite detention. For those like Guibourg who would never see a trial, that entailed being chained to the wall in a dungeon in a far-away prison until death. All told, the results of the Chambre Ardente during the Affair of the Poisons were: “thirty-six burnt to death after torture; four sent to the galleys; thirty-six banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and thirty acquitted.” (Mitford, 91)
Eighty-one, including Guibourg, “benefitted” from the lettre de cachet, though their jailers were told to show them no mercy or kindness. It is believed that most died within a few years of their captivity. The Chambre Ardente itself was closed in 1682, thus effectively ending the Affair of the Poisons. The whole affair would have been shrouded in mystery had La Reynie, an obsessive record keeper, not duplicated most of his records, since the Sun King supposedly burned all of La Reynie’s papers pertaining to the matter upon his death in 1709.
More than a matter of State, the Affair of the Poisons was also a turning point within the spiritual consciousness of early modern France. Louis XIV’s Edict of 1682 that ended the affair not only regulated the sale and use of poisons, but also forbade “all practices and acts of magic or superstition, in word or speech, either profaning the text of Holy Writ or the Liturgy, or saying or doing things that cannot be explained naturally.” (Mollenauer, 149) On the cusp of the Enlightenment, even the Catholic Monarch of the Eldest Daughter of the Church felt it necessary to “clean up” the spiritual side of his kingdom. Though the criminal magical underworld was never abolished, and would see a revival of sorts during the Romantic era of the 19th century, the Affair of the Poisons was still a noticeable milestone in the March of Humanist Progress.
Whether or not all of the testimonies of Guibourg, the Voisin daughter, et al, were true cannot be known with certainty. Criminals by nature are not honest people, and murder and lying often go hand in hand. However, poisoning did occur, sacrilegious services were known to take place before and after the Affair of the Poisons, and infant sacrifice is mentioned too many times in history to be dismissed as an urban legend. Even the historian Anne Somerset, who is otherwise skeptical of the claims of the Black Mass, admits that the life of infants was relatively cheap in 17th century Paris, and the material means to perform the ceremony were not lacking (326). Multiple priests were accused of performing this ceremony around the Affair of the Poisons, not just Guibourg. Sensationalism and urban legend will play a role in our next section, where we move on from the Damnation history of the Murderer in the past to his workings in the present.
Matamoros 1989
...Yes, the sacrifice has been made as the ancient laws required: cigar smoke and rum to summon the seven powers, the headless turtle, the head of a goat, blood from a rooster. And, of course, a human life ended now, a man raped, battered, and sliced, his heart torn beating from his chest, his blood still draining into a clay pot...
Except he had not screamed.
And that was the problem.
It was important for the offering to die in confusion and pain, and most of all, in fear. A soul taken in violence and terror could be captured and used by the priest, turned into a powerful, angry servant that would wreak revenge on the priest’s enemies...
But this time, they have chosen a hard man—a drug dealer, a man who practiced his own sort of violence. He had stubbornly refused to lose control; he simply gritted his teeth, his eyes steely. And even after those eyes had filmed over in pain, even after the priest had covered them with tape to bring the terror of blindness, still the man refused to scream.
In the end, the priest was the one who cried out, shrieking in frustration at the man who died in silence, even after the priest began skinning him alive.
No, the gods would not be pleased with this one. Nor could this soul be bent to the priest’s will.
He had lost—for the first time ever he had lost. Some dark tide had turned, he imagined, and the ground was slipping loose beneath him. He could feel it...
“Bring me someone I can use,” Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo told his flock.
“Someone who will scream.”
Edward Humes,
Buried Secrets: A True Story of Serial Murder,
Black Magic, and Drug Running on the U.S. Border, pages 1–2
*** III. Bomb, Bullet, and Blade
We are not sorry for anything, there is not a single drop of remorse or regret that accompanies us in the life we choose to live, we face life and death and we will continue like this, crossing the limits of what is allowed, advancing beyond the point of no return.
42nd Communique of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild
...ea quae sunt ex nihilo, quantum est de se in nihilum tendunt; et sic omnibus creaturis inest potentia ad non esse. (“...whatever is from nothing of itself tends toward nothing, so that in all creatures there is the power not to be.”)
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Contra Gentiles
In the final section, we will discuss eco-extremism as one of the most recent incarnations of the Murderer in the contemporary world. Eco-extremism is not an alternative to humanist ideals and morality, but rather their defiling in the name of the Nameless and Wild Nature. The only united dogma among eco-extremists and terrorist nihilists is the Death of Man as an attack on He-Who-Is. This is an inversion of means and ends, for the violent individualist only seeks to cause harm to his or her enemy, and nothing more. They see this as activity that is both deeply spiritual and personally satisfying, though it may require hardship on their part. The death of the hyper-civilized is the sacred offering to the Unknowable that defiles the religion of Humanity.
**** A. Mexico City, 2016
Late last decade, a group of young people in central Mexico began to commit themselves to a life of direct action and anonymous activism. They formed independent cells of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF), devoting themselves to such actions as vandalizing research laboratories and freeing animals from their cages. Under the influence of insurrectionary anarchism and the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, they began to move away from militant animal rights and vegan ideologies, and develop an ideology where violent confrontation is primary. In 2011, they formed the Individualities (later “Individualists”) Tending Toward the Wild (Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje— ITS) as a sort of “heretical” anarchist sect that still shared some humanist values, though with an emphasis on a violent defeatism. Their actions imitated those of Freedom Club in the 1970s and ‘80s, with package bombs sent to various centers of techno-industrial progress throughout Mexico, along with the execution of a biotechnologist in 2011.
Over the years, two tendencies began to re-shape the ideology of this group of individualists. One is a descent into criminality; in order to make ends meet, they had to live by their wits in the criminal underworld of metropolitan Mexico City and Mexico State. Thus, they put away their initial altruism in order to live a life of illegality. On the other hand, some members underwent a “spiritual transformation,” perhaps in walkabouts in the last wild places of Mexico. They began a deep study of Mexican history (as far as they were able), some returning to their family roots in the not-so-distant past to reveal the little-appreciated resistance of their ancestors to civilization, in both its Western and Mesoamerican forms. They broke their last ties to scientific humanist thought, and changed their name to Wild Reaction in 2014.
After a year, Wild Reaction broke apart, but not for long. By January 2016, those with affinity to their criminal savage ideology could be found in a few countries in the Americas and beyond, as well as in a shadowy faction in Europe. In late May 2016, they claimed responsibility for their second murder: the stabbing of the Head of Services of the Chemistry Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Their communique taking responsibility for the action opened with these words:
“We were on the hunt, and last night we turned into wolves. Our thirst for blood was satisfied for a moment, while the demons of our ancestors took possession of our minds and bodies.”
No longer militant members of the rational left, ITS had become something completely different.
Like the poisoners of 16th century Paris, ITS has its own “cowardly” manner of harming the hyper-civilized: the bomb. Poison is far from an accurate or sure way of taking someone’s life, and many could and did suffer as collateral damage in attempts to poison an intended target. Like their predecessors, individualists go forward with their indiscriminate actions regardless of who might “get in the way.” Their methods and actions are clandestine and there is uncertainty as to whether the group even exists, just as the existence of a vast network of poisoners and renegade priests was the object of doubt for some in early modern Paris.
In their pursuits, the eco-extremists emphasize the necessity of the double life. Gone are the days when one lives without hypocrisy and according to principles. Misanthropic individualists live by the Great Lie—they are just ordinary people trying to get through life like anyone else, when in reality they have long ago sold their souls to the Devil. They keep the bloodlust against the hyper-civilized in their heart of hearts, just as Abbé Guibourg hid his pacts with Satan behind the clerical habit and vestments, or La Voisin hid her penchant for poisoning behind her murmuring into rosary beads. The double life is an added mockery to the hyper-civilized before their blood is spilled upon the Earth.
Just as La Reynie and King Louis XIV were fighting against the magical underworld of their time, so the eco-extremists—often ex-atheists or ex-rationalists—are seeking to restore a traditional metaphysical worldview against the secularized Christianity that dominates our time. They curse their enemies and perform rituals before their actions, they commend themselves to spirits, and openly attack the church and people within it. They take up the belief in the realm of spirits since their hatred of society drives them to regress into the past, toward the spirits of the Earth who dominated before Christian Man began his war against them. The eco-extremist is the revenge of the silenced spirits, the spittle in the eye of the Nazarene.
Finally, the eco-extremists regard their victims as a sacrifice to the misanthropic spirits of the Earth. Like the homicidal priests who performed Black Masses in seventeenth century France, they know that the demons of the Earth thirst for the blood of the hyper-civilized. While sacrilege is in some ways no longer possible due to society’s general secularization, the last sacred object that one can defile is human life itself. The war against civilization is a war against Man, full stop. In this war, the shedding of human blood is the only victory, it is the only way to appease the suppressed spirits of the ancestors. Eco-extremists and terrorist nihilists (whether believers or not) aim to offer this blood through selective and indiscriminate attack in an effort to slay human supremacy.
Individualist terrorism is not merely a-political or a-moral, but a parody of the political, the moral, and the strategic, just as the Black Mass was a parody of the most sacred Catholic rite. Though an action might imitate what anarchists or other anti-authoritarians may have done in past times, the intentions and methods are radically different: more violent, less selective, more chaotic. The shedding of blood is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself. Many contemporary anarchist actions are figurative (a bomb placed in the middle of the night on an empty street, outside the door of an empty church, etc.), thus being a “clean oblation” (Malachi 1:11) on the Altar of Anarchist Values. This is in parallel with the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Christian Church that is manifest in bread and wine only. Individualist action is far more literal, defiling the Altar of Humanist Solidarity with actual blood and suffering. Indiscriminate attack is the profanation of political action. It’s not merely an issue of political confrontation, but of sacrilege.
Thus, like the war in Heaven between demons and angels, the individualist war may seem futile or absurd as the outcome has long ago been determined. Individualists might even been seen as pawns fighting on behalf of societal forces of reaction or fascism, just as demons seem to do the will of God in spite of their own intentions. This is of no concern to the individualist: he or she would hate Mankind equally whether found in an anarchist paradise or a fascist police state. Humanity is what destroys Wild Nature in our context. Humanity, with its morality and belief in human supremacy, is what subjugates the Wild Nature within. Even though individual lone wolves could never eradicate humanity by themselves, or even make a significant dent in the number of humans, they can conform themselves to the war that Wild Nature is waging against the human through “natural disasters,” entropy, and criminality. Ecoextremist individualist action is “sacramental” because it points to something greater than itself, and greater than the human. In being a shadowy menace, it grafts itself into the forces that are waging war against the Human in the present.
**** B. Gratia Non Tollit Naturam Sed Perficit (Grace does not destroy nature but rather perfects it)
Eco-extremist violence is not superior to political or criminal violence. It doesn’t pretend to be more effective or meaningful. Individualists understand all forms of criminality, including robberies, murders, fraud, and all sorts of anti-social manifestations, as activities that “flawed” and carried out by selfish human beings. Moreover, they appreciate the tactical and organizational genius of such unsavory groups as the Islamic State, MS-13, Italian mafiosi, serial killers, etc. In spite of the varying intentions of these past and present groups, individualists see them within the continuum of the Murderer’s war against the Human. Anything that attacks the political and social fabric of the techno-industrial civilization has something to teach the individualist, even if at times the Unknowable writes straight with crooked lines.
Similar to the Christian seeing God’s Providence in the everyday workings of society, the spiritual individualist sees the power of the Unknowable in common criminal refusal and in the natural disaster. Their aim is not to usurp the actions of others or to belittle the original selfish intention of the criminal, but the acknowledgment of the violence at the heart of hyper-civilized existence. The eco-extremist believes that the Human is a means to an end like anything else. The believing individualist sees the handprint of the Unknowable and the Murderer in every action that attacks the Human. He does not sit in his retreat far from civilization searching for an authentic sign from the Ineffable, but sees Wild Nature and the Unknowable hiding in the shadows and moving through the cracks of this putrid society. Most of all, he or she is patient, observant, and ever-vigilant for the right time to strike. For the eco-extremist, this is another important aspect of the sacred: not merely contemplation or living apart in peace, but attack itself.
The individualist does not see himself or herself as superior to what they are attacking. They know full well that they are part of the problem. They know full well that they are just as hyper-civilized as anyone else. What gives them license to attack their fellow hyper-civilized is not some inner light or some special virtue that no one else has. It is the misanthropic “grace” of the Unknowable that sets them apart, not in any sense of being “chosen,” but only in the sense of giving them an insight that makes them strange, defective, and freakish compared to their peers. They are monsters in the original sense: deformations of domesticated nature, duds that the factory line worker should have put in the trash bin, those who perhaps should have been strangled in their cradles. This might be due to social malformation or emotional instability: it doesn’t really matter now. Even if the eco-extremist is the product of the worst of civilization, they are now indistinguishable from the general population, and they only seek one thing: the death of the civilized.
Eco-extremism is thus just as pitiful and demented as people make it out to be: a bunch of kids with bombs and guns who were rejected by society first (or so people think); teenagers who never fit in and decided to carry out anti-social attacks because of it. And, what critics say is true: in the long run, modern techno-industrial civilization is far more effective at killing and terrorizing individual humans than individualists/eco-extremists ever could be. Civilization has the means, the organization, and the lack of consideration for most (human) life to do real ecocidal damage. And yet, the lone individualist continues to be a concern due to what he or she represents: the solitary threat of the lone wolf who can throw a wrench into the machine, even if the machine quickly fixes itself. That hiccup in the narrative points to the ultimate victory of the Unknowable over civilized plans and morality.
In the view of the hyper-civilized, eco-extremism means nothing. It is just an insignificant group of psychopaths carrying out petty if demented acts of violence from sheer frustration. The reason people fear it is because eco-extremists have ceased to see anything they do from the human perspective; they view the Human as foolish and repugnant ipso facto. They may seek attention as humans seek recognition from other humans, but in the end, a lack of recognition will not stop them.
Eco-extremist murder and maiming are not politically or societally significant; they are “sacramental” for each individualist: a part of their intimate relationship with the Unknowable at the expense of the hyper-civilized. They are a sign of hope pointing to the destruction of the Human: to the moment when the Human will be erased from the Land of the Living, and when He-Who-Is, Yahweh, the Crucified, Human Power as its own end, the Spirit of Progress, etc. will finally be bound again with the Chains of Chaos and Forgetfulness.
**** C. Doxology
But alas! You barbarous men, you, cruel monsters, you, vulgar profaners, you—who knew so well how dear to me were these shade trees, you coward and heartless violators of the right of property, ye invaded, during my absence; ye felded with the ax this sacred grove... ye have in a fit of madness dared achieve the sacrilegious deed of irreparable devastation, covering my dear Nook with a desolating heap of mouldering trunks and leafless boughs...
To the Murderer, the Adversary, the Accuser at the Day of Judgment, be all praise, honor, and worship! May the blood of the hyper-civilized flow from his blade, may the echo of their lamentations be heard for all eternity! May mountains rise up over their cities, may their homes be flooded by the waters, may their bones be blown away by the wind!
Our god is a god of war who pierced the Christian conquerors with his arrows and smashed their children against a stone! Our god ground their temples into rubble and returned their treasures to the Earth! This is the work of the Unknowable, and it is marvelous in our eyes!
To the Unknowable, the Nameless, the Wild God of the World, be all glory and dominion, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages!
Adrien Rouquette The Nook The Feast of All Saints, 2017
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Ripperger, Chad. “Generational Spirits”. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpJgVAs02Dc][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpJgVAs02Dc]]
Rituale Romanum. [[http://www.sanctamissa.org/en/resources/books-1962/rituale-romanum/09-baptism-of-children.html][http://www.sanctamissa.org/en/resources/books-1962/rituale-romanum/09-baptism-of-children.html]]
Somerset, Anne. The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004
Thomas Aquinas. On Evil. Translated by Richard Regan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles. [[http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm][http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm]]
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. [[http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1050.htm][http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1050.htm]]
Tucker, Holly. City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
[[]]
** Some reflections on modern human action from the eco-extremist perspective
Brief introduction: I started drafting this text at the beginning of February and I planned to publish it before, but one question or another halted its drafting and thus led to a brief delay. Even so, we saw an opportunity for it to be published in Regresión Magazine No. 7. At the beginning of the text one will read of various events that occurred in Mexico, others specifically in the Laguna Region. The reader can look into these events to get further clarity on the context. The theme that I address in this text is more complex and we know that it needs to be developed more than this, but at least I was able to organize a bunch of ideas swirling about in my head in this hurried text composed in sleepless nights.
*** From the epicenter of the crisis:
The citizenry continues in their unrest due to the hike in the price of gasoline. Of late in the Laguna Region leftist organizations of no more than twenty people have illusions and are excited about the “people waking up.” Just another illusion, another revolution that never will arrive. We’re only a few hours away from when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks here in Torreon, the beloved leader of many leftists who I find ridiculous. He will speak of hope, of course, and of the path on which he finds himself—namely toward a future where he and his party take power.
We feel so distant from those good-hearted people who cry from emotion at the hopeful words of their leader, or who await another showing of social discontent to be able to march and feel themselves all the closer to the dreamed-of revolution. For them we have only total disgust and disdainful laughter.
Recent events have shaken the country, from the rioting in many parts, a shootout at a high school in Monterrey, and even an attempted suicide in a school in Torreon. All of these have the citizenry and the good-hearted leftists upset and indignant. We don’t feel empathy for any of these so-called tragic occurrences since we see all within this civilization rotting. At the end of the day, the progress that they promise us is neither ideal nor pretty.
Today the wild wind made us think of Cachiripa manifesting himself in among the savage Irritilas, even if it was a strong wind that embraced us in melancholy. We know that this manifestation will never return. Man, having become totally dependent on technology, has lost his natural quality, becoming artificial and accepting his condition with joy and excitement. The hyper-civilized go about with giddy anticipation for the ideal technological future. Today the wind that whipped the city was tainted with industrial waste that poisons the air, which smelled only of progress and out-of-control urban sprawl. Regression is impossible; we do not seek a return to the Stone Age. That would make us just another group of deluded people. For us, humans deserve to disappear.
This is what motivates us to write today, since we do not know if other people are incapable of doing a fair analytical reading of eco-extremism, or maybe we’re just really bad writers. I state this since it seems that this confounds many pseudo-critics who “study” and “explain” the communiques and acts that we carry out. The recurring question among those critics include: “What do those crazy people want?” Or on other occasions they come up with some rather fantastic explanations about who those eco-terrorist groups are, without forgetting the most recurrent error: classifying us as still being anarchists even though every communique that a particular group issues makes it clear that the eco-extremists/terrorists are NOT anarchists.
Some anarchists still look for radical change in human relations, to pass from a hierarchical to a horizontal mode of life where no one rules over anyone else. We eco-extremists do not seek a change in human relations; to us the human is disgusting. If the worker is exploited or the price of public transportation is raised, we do not care in the least. This is something that so-called intellectuals don’t quite capture when they speak about eco-extremism, namely, that our war is not for the human, but, on the contrary, we are the antithesis of the human. It is for this reason that we stay far away from all struggles and ideologies that seek to contribute something positive to the human and all that is entailed by it. This in spite of any contradiction that our condition represents.
We aren’t good-hearted people. We even reject the concept of being “good.” Why is that? Because some time ago we stopped trying to find motives to fight for the development and well-being of humanity. As we stated previously, some analysts have tried to decipher the thought of the eco-extremists, without being able to take off the glasses of anthropocentrism when they express conjectures concerning eco-extremism. What we are saying here is that they seek to give a human meaning to the actions of the tendency. When an attack is carried out by an eco-extremist group, the questioning is along the lines of: What do these groups want? And in a rather horrific fashion they have even come to say on some newscasts that eco-extremist attacks “demand” the liberation of some prisoners linked to the anarchist movement. The media keeps lying and showing their ignorance every time they mention us. Neither the mainstream nor the alternative media are exempt from this error.
But what can one expect of those great wise people or intellectuals? What can one expect when those who live to achieve goals come into contact with those who have neither goals nor dreams, who do not expect anything from their actions—not even victory—because they know that they have already lost? People who shout, “We haven’t lost yet!” have ceased to make sense in our eyes. In reality all is lost, but for the intellectuals who speak and speak about us and our actions, who contribute humanist, moral, and anthropocentric feelings characteristic of the Western cosmovision, everything is as it should be or at the very least is geared toward full human development. They say all of that without questioning what it even means.
The word “freedom” forms part of that humanist thinking, but what does it mean to declare oneself free? Today free is a synonym for consumer choice, access to a better place to get drunk after a hard week of work, to tourist attractions, the ability to start a family, and endless options for the free will of the civilized. As we can see, the free person is inexorably linked to commerce, consumption, and the life of the market.
The human is the animal who takes the longest to become capable of surviving on its own. He arrives in this world defenseless and requires years of learning within a family to become autonomous. This aspect of human life is not merely arbitrary, as it took humans thousands if not millions of years to accumulate the knowledge needed to survive. In antiquity, the tribe taught young people basic knowledge for survival, so that they would have the capacity to confront their hostile natural environment. Now, the long time it takes for an infant to mature remains, but it manifests itself in a different manner. In the first phase of childhood within the family, the young human is indoctrinated in the mode of life posited by modern techno-industrial society.
In this text we will focus on one aspect that the family, the school, society, and diverse media have undertaken to construct in our thinking when we begin to become aware of our existence. Perhaps this will give an explanation why ridiculous analysts can never understand eco-extremists, since they as well as everyone else were educated under the schema imposed by techno-industry. The contexts in which people relate to one another and develop in modern society are many and varied. This is particularly the case in Mexico when one only need to take into consideration how the location of various residential zones determines their purchasing power, the institutions where they receive their formation, and the places where they develop. Aspirations are another polymorphic aspect. In civilization the relationship with others is also determined by context and this is reflected in language. For example, even if we all speak Spanish in this country, we encounter regional variations even within the same city, from what experience and language bring to the speaker’s perspective. This is, then, the basis for thought. But, in terms of aspirations, even if different, it is something that the inhabitants of these distinct contexts share, that is to say, each member of modern society possesses an aspiration, a goal that they should accomplish. For what? For the banal, to achieve success, which we will further develop below.
From youth we are educated to achieve. We are exhorted to stand out in this market-driven world. Everyone wants to “excel,” even though there are diverse concepts and forms for this. All depends on the context in which one wants to succeed. The price of doing so however is the same: frustration. The mind of the modern human revolves around being able to achieve goals, no matter how superficial. The family indoctrinates children for this, it prepares us in civilized subjects to allow us to focus on goals, even though at first these might be ill-defined. Once we have acquired behavioral social norms, school and society come in to better define those goals and objectives as the years pass. The media gives us the coup de grace, especially through personal electronic devices to which even the youngest have access. These offer us the design to which our goals and aspirations must mold themselves. But how does one achieve them? It doesn’t matter, the point is to make it to the top, or to fool yourself by looking like it.
The goals of each human are not innate, they are not substantive. Nor do humans come complete with desires from before their birth. These are all determined by their social context. Thus, a person from a marginal neighborhood will not have the same goals as someone from a more wealthy and affluent neighborhood. What this modern society shares is the desire to obtain social recognition. Modern humans act to be recognized by their social circle, and this goes for the most superficial person up to the most leftist revolutionary. Wanting to be recognized, to be praised and applauded for accomplishing a goal is a part of human functioning, or better said, the functioning of the hyper-civilized who inhabits modern techno-industrial society.
There are those who dream of becoming entrepreneurs, and this is not surprising as the ideal of driven young people and the entrepreneurial lifestyle is an imposed trope onto modern life from all of the media. One only need look at the type of education that the majority of private schools impart, for example the Technological Institute of Superior Studies of Monterrey (ITESM). This institution encourages entrepreneurship in its young students so that they can become successful people devoted to commercial and human progress.
But not all modern humans have the goal of starting a business. Some want to finish their studies so that they can “become someone” in life, to devote themselves to a good-paying job and enslave themselves to boredom in some company, all with the goal of earning money. It’s common to hear someone state that they are going to major in one thing or another because, “that’s where the money is.” But the pretentious desire to accomplish some goal, sometimes called life goals, is based on getting drunk, partying every night, and being the most popular. Do these people have any actual goals? Many times they’re only working to fund their vice or in some cases they don’t even work. Many will say that these latter people are breaking with social mores imposed by society, or that they are the proof that not all live their lives striving toward some goal or another. It’s also funny that some think of themselves as rebels against modern society since they base their entire lives on doing both legal and illegal drugs. Unfortunately for these types who think themselves to be social outcasts or great rebels, their consumption and fun is just another act imposed by modern society.
The accumulation of capital, economic well-being, a diploma, drinking and clubbing are goals that are achieved, but, true satisfaction comes from social recognition. We should keep in mind that every goal is determined by its social context. That is to say, it is born out of social coexistence, and so it is a social product. Thus, modern techno-industrial society, which is present even in the most minimal actions of its inhabitants, determines the goals that all hyper-civilized wish to achieve. In other words, social relations are conditioned by modern society.
But the recognition of every achievement is not the same in every context. There are distinct goals that have to be achieved by a wealthy family as opposed to those in a gang, or in a group of friends at a party. It is for this reason that the overarching element is that one achieves one’s goals in the context in which one lives as a human disposed to achieve them. Social recognition is bestowed according to social context. What for one social context would be a cause of shame for another might be praiseworthy.
Here is where all analysis and reasoning of “intellectual experts” finds itself in a labyrinth in which there are many false ways out in explaining the discourse and actions of eco-extremists. What can you expect from those who live to achieve goals set for them by social recognition? What are these people to think when they come up against those who have no desire for social recognition? We eco-extremists don’t expect that anyone will praise us for what we do, nor that we will be admired or that we will be recognized by civilization. On the contrary, from civilization and its blind advocates all we expect is disgust. That is why “analysts” don’t find any motives guided by the Goddess Reason. For it is reasonable to have an end, a goal that one wants to achieve. Their hypotheses are 52
wrecked when they realize that there are indeed some people who have no real goals in life, since we eco-extremists don’t strive for anything above our own acts, nor do we fool ourselves into thinking that our end, or better yet, our goal, is to destroy civilization. We know that this is not possible. “Enough of wishes!” we shout to the deluded dreamers. “Enough with dreams!” we cry to those who sleep in this ephemeral existence. “Enough with tomorrows!” we thunder to those who fear the present.
There will be many criticisms of this text, we will address one beforehand since they will say to us: Why do the eco-extremists issue so many communiques and reflections if they do not seek any particular goal, or anything above their own action? Eco-extremists are at war, and thus propaganda and reflection are tools that we seek to use to position ourselves within the debacle. Tactics such as the “war on the nerves” are utilized by the eco-extremists, from the sharp criticism to the destructive bomb.
Let them keep on about their world of desires and dreams, we will keep dancing in hell!
Ozomatli,
Huehuecoyotl
in Torreón, March 2017
** A New Revolutionary Phraseology
The phenomenon of leftism in Mexico has been revived after a brief hiatus when the indignant masses marched in the streets for the Ayotzinapa case, as well as for the murders in Nochixtlan during the protests led by the teachers (principally by the National Coordinating Committee of Workers in Education [CNTE]). After four months of rebellion and revolutionary hope, the fire was put out. The forty three students became objects of ridicule, and were submerged in general forgetfulness, as were the dead of Nochixtlan. Once more the revolution, the much awaited change for a “better Mexico,” didn’t arrive.
Months afterward it would seem that the enthusiasm returned, this time not headed by radical students or teachers. Now those who waved the flag of the vanguard were those sanctified emissaries, the militants of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), and of course the beloved prophet Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. It should be pointed out that these beings of noble heart and their sacred party have become a force in Coahuila. And because the elections here are just around the corner, the noble militants have done everything possible to get out the vote, to generate a new ideology in what they call “the people.” They assure us that this new ideology will be more critical, less submissive, and “more revolutionary.”
Let me express the purpose of this text. It is once more a criticism against leftists, their struggles and hopes, as well as a description of their efforts in relation to social networks, and the false hope of revolution. My starting point is a term presented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1845–1846), “supposedly-revolutionary phraseology.”
Why did I choose these three categories? I believe that there is a close relationship between them. An attempt to analyze eacho one separately would not make much sense, nor would it lead anywhere. Thus, for a more effective criticism, I critique them in conjunction, and will try to describe common threads to advance analysis. I should admit that these are not the only categories by which one can devise an accurate criticism of leftism and its enlightened militants. When I refer to leftism, I mean Mexican leftism of the present day. Leftism in other parts of the world is beyond the scope of this essay, which is not to say that there are not influential reciprocities between Mexican and international leftism.
*** Leftism and Social Networks: The Great Revolution
Political demonstrations are seen from time to time on Mexican streets, often on dates that are “symbolically combative.” Sometimes these demonstrations turn violent and become street revolts where people throw rocks, police set things on fire, windows are broken, barricades are formed, there are Molotov cocktails, a mob running about, people arrested, other people with their heads split open, and a myriad of leftists shouting at the top of their lungs for peace and calm. Leftists are always inclined to accuse others of being provocateurs, infiltrators, government agents,[16] petit-bourgeois (this one is primarily from Marxist groups), counter-revolutionaries, and the list goes on.
It would not be accurate to say that only anarchists participate in the disturbances, since common people do as well, as we saw in the riots and looting that took place around the “gasolinazo.” Ecoextremists also decided to infiltrate the mob and push it forward in the midst of the debacle. In any case, whoever stirs up the violence in what is supposed to be a peaceful demonstration will be pointed out and condemned by the leftists. There is no room for those who do not respect the revolutionary schemas and processes! This is what the leftist would shout with a frown and a fist in the air. How quaint.
The revolution is a light breeze that they wait for in hell.They bind themselves to it so capriciously, but what do they actually do to bring it about? Will they be ready to kill any unfortunate soul who gets in the way of achieving their ideal society? Or do they not kill in revolutions? They desire the revolution with all of their might, they dream of changing the country without firing a shot, or without the need to execute people. Their revolution rests on the illusion that people will change and dedicate themselves to the path of general welfare and will do so primarily by voting for the sanctified party, the savior and liberator of humanity. Revolution is so beautiful in the realm of ideas!
Regrettably for these noble beings, their enemy is the State, and yes, they condemn it as the “Murderous State!”, which is indeed the case. That is to say, the state has an armed security force that it would not hesitate, as shown in the past, to use against anyone who opposes them. It does not matter if that subversive is armed or not. In spite of this, the delusional leftist sees the possibility of change by the electoral route, though the system is controlled by the regime. But does the revolutionary really want revolution? Would these noble men and women be ready to kill or die for the cause? What does the “grand revolutionary” lover of the people really want?
I have some ideas concerning the last question. To begin answering it, one should observe the activity of those militants of the left on social networks (mainly Facebook and Twitter.) The question arises as to what role these social networks play in the struggles of the left. These networks end up being the repository for complaints, protests, aspirations, and demonstrations of knowledge that usually develop into lively debates in which one demonstrates an intellectual understanding superior to one’s interlocutors.
Thus, within social networks the militant leftist achieves a form of catharsis. The networks become “safe spaces” that protect him or her from the world that doesn’t change. Not only are they a repository for his or her commentaries, but also a source of applause for their positions. This praise becomes the motor of leftism. I continue here on a theme that I have covered elsewhere: the search for social recognition becomes the driving factor in the actions of the hyper-civilized, and, by extension, of the leftist as well.
To escape the gloom of existence, the human is captive to organizing principles that give meaning to their being. Democracy has been an organizing principle for the leftist. He or she passes through existence thinking that one day the great sun will appear on the horizon and shine in their favor, the realization of their most altruistic dreams. Nevertheless, social recognition appears to be another source from which meaning flows, which is evident in their writings, full of romantic aspirations in which hope is never lost and triumph is always waiting just around the corner. Such is the pretentious writing of these altruistic folks. “Look at me, I’m doing revolution!” they proclaim behind their veil of pedantry. “Look at me!” quickly becomes, “Applaud me!” The desire for praise is the most addicting taste for the leftist who is trying to get through life by hiding in his own world where he is a revolutionary. Meanwhile, outside of his dreamworld, change is nowhere to be found.
This fantastic world of appearances, as the Nietzsche might call it, is found on social networks that present to the gaze of the multitude, the decisive revolutionary. Of course this is all to receive admiration and praise. The leftist achieves catharsis, his desire is temporarily satisfied. Full of social recognition, the proper subject finds another use for the Internet. He or she sees the opportunity to make the masses more conscious, and with great ease they achieve the task demanded by the revolution.
Marx and Engels in their intense philosophical debates expressed the following against the idealist currents:
This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.
Leftist intellectuals will argue that action needs a correct interpretation of the world. That is to say, they would defend with tooth and claw the importance of a change of consciousness prior to practice. That is not up for dispute. The issue is that current leftism has revived revolutionary phraseology and transferred their struggle to the world of phrases. That is to say, it stalls in word games and media. Their great revolutionary struggle is stalled in the desire to change consciousness, and the hope for that mental revolution becomes another driving principle. In that way, the leftist joins social recognition and revolutionary phraseology with the purpose of finding light in the shadow of life.
How and when that “necessary” change of consciousness will arise in the revolutionary process is something that is always waved off with the excuse that the conditions are not right for a violent social movement. At least this is what they repeat over and over again at every opportunity, but still they call themselves revolutionaries. Their words do nothing else but search for social recognition. Throwing a tantrum on social media is not revolutionary action, in spite of what those self-proclaimed saviors of humanity think. Any act that attacks the established order carries risk, of either prison or death, as well as of social disgrace and societal rejection. This was the case with the Mexican guerilla movement in the 1970s that was persecuted by the Mexican state, and was also unpopular to the greater part of the Mexican population. These days the CISEN [the Mexican intelligence agency] would quickly discover the contemporary leftist martyr because such a martyr would publish on social media the location of their hideout.
The leftist militant opts for the party that has the advantage of satisfying their many needs. For example, they avoid a life in hiding, which is needed for a guerilla movement. The party militant can openly express their ideological positions and militancy, and await positive affirmation for doing so. They don’t have to live in hiding or live a double life, as do eco-extremists. The life that the eco-extremist leads excludes all forms of personal praise. You don’t go about bragging about how you are a member of the Tendency. The leftist would fall into deep depression if the radical movement required (outside of prison) a life in hiding or a double life. In these conditions there is no room to express yourself as a person to be applauded by the revolutionary fan club on the Internet.
In similar manner, there are leftists who do not belong to the chosen political party. They end up joining together in organizations that only appear at important moments to wave flags of “We are the revolution.” Social networks are used to boast and to “raise the consciousness of the masses.” Their method of creating “revolutionary consciousness” is highly questionable. It’s nothing but the eternal boring phraseology discussed earlier. Their struggle is hidden in the world of words, always avoiding confrontation since it would end the comfort of being kings of the revolutionary spectacle.
Mexican leftism is far from bringing about a better country, even if the leftists themselves don’t want to admit it. I would invite them to reflect on their actions, even though this invitation is like shouting into the wind. They will continue to be enthusiasts absorbed in the social recognition that “revolutionary struggle” has to offer. Nourishing themselves on it, they will use Facebook and Twitter to achieve catharsis when things don’t turn out how they initially imagined. At the end of the day, they are hyper-civilized par excellence, tied to hope. Their particular organizing principles are revolution, fighting for a better world, and the erotic satisfaction produced by praise for their principles. All of this merely to keep their hand away from the gun they could use to blow their brains out.
Huehuecoyotl alias Jeremías Torres Torreón
April-August 2017
** Breaking Down the Bars of the Anarchist Cages: brief reflections of an ex-anarchist
*** 1.
It’s a pain in the ass to speak while forgetting totally the rosary one learned in years past. It’s hard to write without ten dollar words or jargon. This text seeks to explain why we stopped believing in anarchism.
Simply writing “believe,” in the sense of an act of faith or whatever you want to call it, still short-circuits our domesticated brains. Another short circuit is to stop writing with “k” and start writing correctly because this is not going out merely to the little anarcho-world but to all who want to read it and understand our reasonings.
It has been months of many short-circuits. It’s easier to eat whatever there is, to not look for “alternative” positions, styles, or ways of life that go nowhere and only serve to give the appearance of being on the offensive. Oh, the offensive! There’s nothing left to do but separate yourself from the herd of black sheep and their self-referential meetings, far from the offensive that looks very much like the defensive.
Little by little it was all the same to us.
*** 2.
The mental molds are a cage worse than any jail, almost on the same level as civilization. We say this with some difficulty: we are anarchists in retreat, on our way out, in doubt. We had a whole life enclosed in innocence and then in an anarchist political current. We began understanding that the State, even the form of being/ resisting of someone rejecting any form of authority, is not the principal problem of what we now understand to be freedom.
We are not shameless enough to say that we broke the molds already. It has been a long process, sometimes a painful one. But a totally informal contact with people who have formed the top of the lance of the Tendency has helped quite a bit. Reading them over the Internet especially—since you won’t see them at an anarchist concert or in an anti-prison meeting selling vegan food. And some close contacts, faces unknown to us, who in spite of the coldness of the Internet, have filled with warmth this process of revising our ideological positions.
Reading former comrades has helped... Well, one in reality: Kevin Garrido, an anarchist who was arrested carrying out a clearly anti-prison action, but who in jail has been absorbing the Tendency. It is notable that he is going through the same process as we are. You can tell as well that he is also being abandoned by his cowardly former friends of the anti-prison movement.
*** 3.
How many years were we convinced that insurrectional attack was urgent. We defended it to the death, the same with affinity and informalism. We believed in solidarity among comrades and the international dimension of the struggle. Bla, bla, bla. We laugh about it now, because for years these were strong talking points concerning how we wanted to change the world. Those words were were in book fairs, supposedly secret meetings, benefits, and every other place where we participated. As anarchists we lived from spontaneity and activism. Words were never lacking, there were always many, but that was all.
Living while creating tension made us docile, happy; it marked our lives and we don’t deny that past. In retrospect we believe that it domesticated us to this fucked-up civilization. Sure, we felt feral, free spirited, and like we had brief but intense departures from that domestication.
Until now.
It was only at this moment that we have felt the need to clarify something that distinguishes us and makes us different, something that is not only a way of feeling and seeing things but also a guide for our actions.
Because anarchist action is different from others. It is supported by the delicate but firm anarchist morality, in which all initiatives have a specific and clear end and a precise target.
In this the central premise is the question of disillusionment. The laws of anarchist monasticism do not permit killing or wounding people who not related directly to the terrorist action. Excuse me, I know that old comrades don’t like the word, terrorism. What’s more, it’s offensive to call it that. They consider human life to be a good that should be preserved and not sacrificed. It’s that simple and essential.
The bystander or unintended victim represents that life. But, the life or the imprisonment of the attacker, is it no less valuable? At this stage the informal anarchist is imprisoned in his schemas. At this stage they are restricted in their projects, whatever those happen to be.
Perhaps the absence of action is the guarantee of their own morality?
Morality that is nothing else but the fear of dying... or fear of imprisonment.
While all of these comrades are bottled up in this moral debate, others have passed into a real offensive. Anarchism is part of a past that we are not going to recover. The amoral method of nihilist-mafioso terrorism has clearly won out and is currently what characterizes our, now well-known, “offensive.”
*** 4.
We are a species that from its origins has been gregarious and that is now even more so in war! Even though we cannot see the faces of the warriors of ITS, we know that they are our brothers in a tribe beating the war drums. They call us to join with them around the bonfire!
We keep thinking that human groups need to live in community. The problem is that we don’t see that as possible today. Civilization has advanced its pillaging of the Earth to the point that almost no wild humans are left. Those who are, are threatened and keep themselves isolated deep in the jungle.
Let it be clear. We too are civilized humans. We live in the middle of this false cement jungle, isolated from natural community life. We don’t think that ITS think themselves to be truly wild either. If some believe in supernatural forces, in pre-Columbian gods, it’s because they can. And that’s it, there is no other explanation. We have broken with the civilized mold of the ultra-anarchist.
For example, we have noticed that preaching atheism has done nothing to oppose the advance of civilized religion. And sure, we also believe in authority. It will always exist. Immoral clans will always have one who directs others better or realizes a particular task in a better way.
We feel, and that is sufficient—we don’t need to have dogmatic arguments about it—that animism and the spirits that accompany the wild peoples are something positive. Eco-extremist comrades very sincerely pursue egoist goals. If they believe in spirits that’s their choice. It’s what THEY feel. It is a feeling born from human nature. And it’s a more valid argument than rejecting these forces because of anarchist reasoning, which is as repugnant to us as the religions of the hyper-civilized world.
*** 5.
The reader needs more reasons? Look for them, but do it honestly.
Break the molds that choke you. Return to critique, even of the anarchist canons. The one enemy people have indicated to you is not the only one. Nature and our undomesticated anarchists should have their revenge. The guilty one is ultracivilized society in its totality.
You, me, everyone.
And thus you will know that it’s no use to live in resistance, or to cause societal tension as they say... That is, you can do activism for five thousand years and nothing will change. The destructive force of progress cannot be stopped. But it can be terrorized, punished, and purged. And for this you can’t continue to be an anarchist, we feel. At least not in the current style.
** Poem
This shitty misery dries my brain. It does not allow me to see beyond, surrounded by disgusting humans. I do not want this, the only thing that I appreciate is the ability to notice this situation. And that the hate is so strong. Thank you hate, you lifted me up from my life full of fear and woes. Or they were things that mutated in you, it’s no longer important. The rhythm is clamorous, the search has no end.
What does it matter if tomorrow I wake up decapitated?
If tomorrow I wake up drowned in my own vomit, or if they slit your throat. There is no longer a reason to be happy. Neither you nor I understand the truth of the situation, but for me there is nothing more real than hate. Nothing more real that gnashing one’s teeth, the tense muscles, the untrusting and arrogant stare; the proud and elevated spirit, the hands desiring to hang you, the heart beating rapidly, the anxiety that causes me to shake. To feel that time’s up, it’s ending, it’s done.
How great is the era of catastrophe!
How glorious is the death that visits this accursed race! The insane prayers are shouted to it desperately that take us away from here, far, far away, to somewhere where we will no longer violate the earth. It will rest after us, the bastard children, the excrement of the galaxy, the terminal illness of ourselves. Glorious bacteria eat our insides, bacteria goddesses, queens of horror and human grief, representatives of death, emissaries of mortality. These will reclaim our days, they will reclaim the human plague. It’s going, we’re going, goodbye life, goodbye, toward that out of which we should have never left, to return to the inorganic. There is only one lost paradise, the unconscious.
Swallow us, earth, vomit us, crush us like cockroaches, and tomorrow will be and we will not be. What a glorious day! The deepest night!
Death that kisses us and bites us, our liberator, take us, take us out of here. We are the dumb hindrance.
My pride is to despise them above all things, to despise myself above all things. There is greatness, my greatness. Everything else is idiocy, fears of our end. The lightning strike now comes, the acid comes, the fire will take us away. It will burn us, crush us, and that day the most awake, the most pure, will cry from happiness. The most degenerate will shriek from horror, and there our happiness will be higher than our pride, greater than our attacks. May our violence reign, reign, war is our mother and terror our father. We will be the agonizing anti-human that despises them, that despises itself. But who, who else will want to burn his neighbor? No one, that’s why we remain alive, because in our process of self-annihilation we have to take with us as many as we can. All, come, come, let’s kill ourselves, don’t be afraid. Aim at me, shoot this lead at me, I will return fire and we will die with dignity, happy. We shall die killing, because it’s the only dignified destiny that can be lived. The rest is cowardice, it is to be human. We are beasts, animals, cannibals, predators.
Behind, behind society, don’t look at us. You will become a mountain of ash.
From the accursed lands in the south of the world (Chile) Krren oscuro
** The PsychoPathogen: The Serial Killer as an Antibody Response to Modernity
*** Introduction
Serial killers are both glamorized and reviled in our culture. At first, this may be confusing but in a lot of ways, it really makes sense. Anything as liminal as serial killers is bound to evoke feelings of opposing and competing emotions because that’s what trickster energy is and serial killers are in many ways one of the purest expressions of trickster energy that exists within modernity. Let us think about it for a minute. Serial killers are etheric, they move in and out of the consensus reality, seemingly moving in from the shadows, wraithlike, to pluck victims from the circle of civilization’s light only to recede and fade back into the darkness that defines the borderland of the civilized. Their identity is unknown and therefore they occupy the space of “the other”. They avoid detection, even, at least for a time, the long arm of law and it’s supposed infallible co-conspirator, science. The serial killer IS the boogeyman. In doing all this the serial killer becomes the spooky campfire story, the cautionary bedtime tale, the scary object that parents and teachers can wave at children and yes, legend. However, one thing I’ve not seen in all the writings I combed through for this piece was an attempt to understand what evolutionary purpose the serial killer may serve. While this is not the place to unpack and contrast differing ideas regarding the earth’s biosphere and its relative intelligence or at least it’s systemic ability to self-correct, we can probably settle on some kind of general agreement that whether intelligence or blind system, there is a principle at work on this planet that is the macrocosmic expression of the same principle that causes white blood cells to attack certain biotic elements in creatures while ignoring others. So, for example, a cold virus triggers an autoimmune response while certain intestinal bacteria do not. Also, we can see this principle played out in certain animal populations and cohabitating flora and fauna populations that will fluctuate depending on the robustness of others in the same bioregion. One example of this is the famous National Park Service’s Wolf Project at Yellowstone, which showed that the density of wolf populations affected Aspen populations. For some of us, the inevitable connection between wolf and tree populations is not too surprising, but it seems that “experts” today need a refresher in holistic thinking.
Can we view the serial killer as a reaction, based on some of the same principles that drive the aforementioned examples? I don’t see why not. My intention here is not to put you to sleep with piles of facts and dry stilted academic language. I am much more of a populist writer so if you are looking for a dry academic paper on my assertions, I suggest you write one yourself if you are so capable. My intention here is to walk you through some points to think about as I suggest a thought experiment. Instead of simply writing off serial killers with some kind of moral judgment bolstered by ad hominin, let’s try to see if we can find a larger purpose to their existence and yes, their activities. While I won’t be so foolish and naive as to assume most or even many of the people performing activities that would qualify as “serial killings” are aware of the purpose they are serving, this does not negate the fact that they may still be serving those functions or even driven by forces larger than their personal motivations and reasoning or lack thereof. In the next section, we will attempt to define serial killers, and talk about other classes of mass killers we will include for the purpose of this piece since this is not a forensic analysis. Once we have done that, we will build the case for our thesis and then end with some thoughts, since unlike most methods used in these kinds of presentations, we would instead like to present thesis, antithesis and then leave the act of synthesis up to you the reader, since we are pretty sure that if you picked up this book, you are probably the type who not only doesn’t need to be hand-held through the synthesis process but are most likely the type who would, justifiably, be insulted if I attempted to do so. For the record, I would be insulted if I had been asked to, so we’re even on that score. Also, I’d like to add here, that I am aware that the ideas I am presenting here will win me no friends in the mainstream world and will most likely make me enemies in the “alternative” and/or “anarchist” milieu, and while that is not my intention in presenting this material, to provoke such responses are inevitable. I also will not allow the inevitable arousal of such hostilities to act as a chilling effect. I am not attempting to be a troll or what’s known on the Internet as an “edgelord”. I am in fact acting in accordance with my personal ethos as a “freedom of expression extremist”. Do what you will with that information.
What we lack in today’s mixed-up, manic world of media oversaturation and the dissociative normalcy of everyday life is moxie. People have generally become lame, halt, effete—in other words, pussies. The outlaw has been removed yet one more space from the pale to now reside in a liminal state where he is feared, reviled but never revered or even tolerated. This has not always been the case. When certain primal forces are repressed, when archetypal forces are denied or repressed, they find a way to emerge, bringing with them the force built up from the duration of the repression. This is an analogy borrowed from fluid mechanics but it works. To put it simply, add obstruction to a dynamic pressure situation and eventually those pent-up forces erupt.
The shadow is not an “evil” force. It is in fact quite necessary and even integral to survival. The trickster, an archetype that seems to have been sidelined in this age of modernity, used to be the central character of many stories, some of the most powerful in fact, involving creation and vital life lessons that are really survival information, transmitted through the ages in one of the oldest forms of information technology used by humans. Namely, storytelling, which in essence is an interplay of the worlds of phenomenal, noumenal and liminal. The trickster is a manifestation of but is not separate from the liminal realm. To explain this simply think of an apple growing from an apple tree. The apple is a part of the apple tree and always was, but the apple is a certain manifestation of the tree. Not separate and yet, not entirely the same. The trickster has always been with us because the trickster is us, even if we do define it as “the other”, simply because first stage awareness often takes the form of an “I and thou” relationship, which seems to be how humans begin to form a concept, so as to talk and think, i.e. communicate something. However, just as we have fooled ourselves into this false concept of “I and thou” so as to better navigate 3D space and phenomenal demands, we have come to think of the “other” as separate and distinct from us. This is absurd of course when you think about it, as absurd as an apple tree deciding that the apples it produces are something other than itself, but in this age of Technos, Psyche has been pushed to the sidelines, taking with her all her liminal allies including the trickster.
As we described earlier, you can never really silence the liminal forces, but you can suppress them, for a while at least and in so doing, you ensure that their eventual emergence will be a violent and reactive one. There are many forms that this emergence can take and the list is too long for our purpose here, so we will focus on one general category of that eruption and then we will focus in on one specific vertical of that category. The category we speak of, of course, is the criminal, the outlaw, the rebel, the one who wears the wolf’s head (caput gerat lupinum), the romantic image of the criminal as a recurring trope, and in particular the vertical of recidivist criminal behavior known as serial killings and the people who commit them. We will look at how the tactics of serial killers can be useful to the modern anti-civ contrarian and even useful to the goal of tipping societal forces toward the direction of the complete collapse of civilization and its stifling tentacles. This, of course, can also lead (one hopes) to the total extinction of the human race on this planet, which in the end is the antidote that life needs to thrive and even possibly survive on this planet. There are those who would call this the goals and attitude of a species traitor and we would not disagree with that definition.
One of the many manifestations of the repressed primal nature and the constant staring eyes of the panopticon erupting in ways that the societal system finds aberrant is the serial killer. While many will not be able to see the inherent value of serial killers to the greater good, I would like to take this opportunity to unpack and examine some of the possibly overlooked values that these lone wolves add to our collective experience. Once we strip away the sensationalism that has too often been associated with these agents of the liminal, we are left with a phenomenon that has not been analyzed fairly and without emotional bias. First, let us talk about the phenomena of serial killings in general, so as to establish a baseline definition, so we can speak from a common understanding since there is so much hysteria and misinformation concerning this subject.
*** What is a serial killer?
A serial killer is defined by Wikipedia as “A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, usually in service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break (a “cooling off period”) between them. Different authorities apply different criteria when designating serial killers; while most set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example, defines serial killing as “a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone”
The difference of definition among the various sources is indicative of how divided many so-called experts are among even themselves as to what constitutes a serial killer or killers, so we will simplify the definition here and simply say, that we will take the words literally. Serial, pertaining to, arranged in, or consisting of a series, occurring in a series rather than simultaneously, effecting or producing a series of similar actions. So, by this simple definition, we can accept that two or more would qualify as a serial, whereas killer should not need any definition, but for the sake of symmetry, we will say, a person or thing that kills. So, by definition, famous eco-terrorist Charles Manson (do an Internet search for ATWA) is not a serial killer, that we know of, because he himself, as far as we know, never killed two or more people but rather, convinced his followers to do it. Alternatively, Ian Brady did, in fact, kill several people in consecutive acts, so he would qualify. As would others like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and Jeffery Dahmer, to name but a few. By definition alone, Ted Kaczynski as an individual or the group ITS in fact qualifies. Whether or not that aligns with your sentiment about the situation is another matter.The FBI and other organizations also attach all kinds of various qualifiers such as ritualism and sexual motivations, but these are speculative at best, so we will not use them for our purposes here. Besides, it is pretty obvious that these types of characterizations are used by law enforcement as both a way to disparage the killers to both the public and as a personal attack directed at the killer’s intent to provoke. This is a way of presenting them as pariahs to the public because as much as it is no longer the case in the ever-fickle media, there was once a time when serial killers were in many ways darlings of the media. Some experts opined that this created an incentive for killers to perform for the media by executing bigger, bolder and more daring acts of violence in order to garner more attention. This was partially demonstrated by killers like the Zodiac, who seemed to receive great pleasure from taunting the media and the police through the medium of the news. The experts, of course, all flocked to the media to offer their opinion how this was a character flaw and became another point in the so-called profile of serial killers, that of the narcissist. As I see it, this may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. Much of what is known about serial killers is based on relatively few known cases. Hickey (2002) provides perhaps the most detailed look into the reality of serial homicide. However, it is important to note that although Hickey’s research provides data on serial killers from 1850 to 1995, the total number is only 400. Indeed, it can be argued that the small number of killers is indicative of just how mythical the phenomenon has truly become. The original FBI study used as the basis for criminal profiling was based on only 30 offenders (Hickey, 2002). Further, what is “known” about serial killers must be tempered with the realization that the data is somewhat questionable. In short, there is much more unknown than known about serial killers and serial killing. Hence my assertion that they are manifestations of trickster energy. The media, of course, reinforces this by assigning or repeating nicknames (Son of Sam, The Zodiac, The Boston Strangler, etc.) as well as exaggerating or sensationalizing the true facts surrounding the cases where serial killers are involved. As one study has noted, since the 1920s, over 300 serial killer themed films have been produced creating myths about serial homicide and serial killers (Hickey, 2002). This is very telling when to comes to comparing the appeal of serial killers on a visceral level versus official or public opinion. Serial killers are mythical. If they embody any mythical being it is, of course, the trickster. Even in the apparent contradiction between polite societies expressed attitudes versus actual behaviors the trickster’s liminal properties shine through.
*** Serial Killer Methods
Holmes and DeBurger (1988) have described four types of serial murderers. The visionary type hears voices, which command them to commit such horrendous acts. The mission-oriented type believes it is their duty to exterminate the evil people in the world. These “evil” people may include prostitutes or specific ethnic groups. The hedonistic type commits violent acts for the fun of it. Labels have also been used to determine different motives for murderers. Profit, passion, hatred, power, revenge, fear and desperation are just a few (Hickey, 2002). Other possible motives include greed, jealousy, drugs, and sex (Douglas, 1995).
Notice that these “killers” have a lot in common with terrorists. Some of the similarities are the random (or seemingly random) choice of victims, the shock effect of the number and often the staging of their victims.
A few serial killer traits that an anti-civ extremist may find useful:
Non-linear and therefore difficult to predict or pattern Avoidance of police, therefore, strengthening the mythological status
High mobility
Methodical attention to detail
They look like an average person
But I digress.
*** Organized and Disorganized Killers
Law enforcement claims there are two types of serial killers. The organized and the disorganized. Since the disorganized seem to get caught quicker and more often than the organized type, we will focus on the characteristics of the organized. This feels more useful and utilitarian as an approach.
*** Organized Offenders
According to the offender and crime scene dichotomy, organized crimes are premeditated and carefully planned, so little evidence is normally found at the scene. Organized criminals, according to the classification scheme, are antisocial (often psychopathic) but know right from wrong, are not insane and show no remorse.
Based on historical patterns, organized killers are likely to be above-average intelligent, attractive, married or living with a domestic partner, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning and controlled. They have some degree of social grace, may even be charming, and often talk and seduce their victims into being captured.
With organized offenders, there are typically three separate crime scenes: where the victim was approached by the killer, where the victim was killed, and where the victim’s body was disposed of. Organized killers are very difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and often are forensically savvy, meaning they are familiar with police investigation methods.
They are likely to follow the news media reports of their crimes and may even correspond with the news media. Ted Bundy, Joel Rifkin, and Dennis Rader are prime examples of organized killers.
*** Modus Operandi and Signature
In addition to the organized/disorganized dichotomy, a serial killer may leave traces of one or both of the following behavioral characteristics: MO (modus operandi or method of operation) and signature—the personal mark or imprint of the offender. While every crime has a MO, not all crimes have a signature.
The MO is what the offender must do in order to commit the crime. For example, the killer must have a means to control his victims at the crime scene such as tying them up. Significantly, the MO is a learned behavior that is subject to change.
A serial killer will alter and refine his MO to accommodate new circumstances or to incorporate new skills and information. For example, instead of using rope to tie up a victim, the offender may learn that it is easier and more effective to bring handcuffs to the crime scene. The MO of Jack the Ripper, for example, was that he attacked prostitutes at night on the street with a knife.
The signature, on the other hand, is not required in order to commit the crime. Rather, it serves the emotional or psychological needs of the offender. The signature comes from within the psyche of the offender and it reflects a deep fantasy need that the killer has about his victims. Fantasies develop slowly, increase over time and may begin with the torture of animals during childhood, for example, as they did with Dennis Rader (“Bind, Torture, Kill”).
The essential core of the signature, when present, is that it is always the same because it emerges out of an offender’s fantasies that evolved long before killing his first victim. The signature may involve mutilation or dismemberment of the victim’s body. The signature of Jack the Ripper was the extensive hacking and mutilation of his victims’ bodies that characterized all of his murders.
*** Staging and Posing
The FBI profiler may also encounter deliberate alterations of the crime scene or the victim’s body position at the scene of the murder. If these alterations are made for the purpose of confusing or otherwise misleading criminal investigators, then they are called staging and they are considered to be part of the killer’s MO.
On the other hand, if the crime scene alterations only serve the fantasy needs of the offender, then they are considered part of the signature and they are referred to as posing. Sometimes, a victim’s body is posed to send a message to the police or public. For example, Jack the Ripper sometimes posed his victims’ nude bodies with their legs spread apart to shock onlookers and the police in Victorian England.
*** Dispelling some common myths of serial killers
There is a lot of misinformation about serial killers, mostly propagated by the media via yellow journalism and popular movies. Here’s a few facts that can help dispel a few of those rumors.
Many victims are strangers
There are many motives to kill other than past sexual abuse: rejection, anger etc...
Several cases don’t involve sex at all
Almost 17% of serial killers are female
Only 2–4% are legally insane
Some stay in a local area
(Hickey, 2002)
*** Serial Killers as a Natural Release Mechanism
Serial killers have throughout time, often occupied the spotlight, whether it be via rumor and legend, scary bedtime stories or more recently, in the media, which is the modern equivalent of all the above. As we have briefly discussed earlier in this article, the serial killer could be equated to some sort of antibody reaction and while that may sound somewhat speculative, it is also not outside the bounds of the possible. So, as a thought experiment, let’s assume that is the case. What exactly would the function of this antibody reaction be in response to and what form does it take? We see certain fail-safes kicking in during times of overpopulation with rat and monkey colonies. These fail-safes can take the forms of cannibalism or infanticide and are a built-in in response to environmental stress that is introduced into a population due to overcrowding, increased competition for food, a shortage of or over competition for mating partners and a variety of other factors. Civilization’s present state is one of massive stress for the average person, overcrowding, overstimulation, hyper-competition for resources, environmental stressors, the list goes on. Why would it be so hard to fathom that some sort of hither unidentified failsafes may arise in these unparalleled times of stressors? What forms those fail-safes may take are unknowable and quite frankly, unpredictable. A culling urge may drive some serial killers on a deeper level than even they may be aware of.
*** The Serial Killer as “hero”
In recent times, serial killers have taken on a romantic aspect with the public. From the sensationalistic presentation of Jack the Ripper, to the glamorous portrayal of Charles Manson by some of the counterculture media, all the way to the fetishization of serial killers in book and movie form, with media products like Dexter, and the Hannibal media products, endless reality TV, documentary and docudrama presentation of cases like the Menendez Brothers, Columbine, True Detective, et al., it is apparent that the manifestation of the trickster, known as the Serial or Spree Killer, is not going away anytime soon. It seems to be a subject that screams to be examined yet it is uniformly tamped down as a subject for serious discussion in “civilized society”. When we consider some of the most modern manifestations of this phenomenon, namely groups like ITS (Individualists Tending Toward Savagery) or Ted Kaczynski and the reaction of vilification within the so-called anarchist milieu of such groups or individuals and their tendencies, we see the same taboo in action that has always dogged this phenomenon. Namely, instead of addressing it as a possibly naturally occurring phenomenon, theoretically a manifestation of nature, it is shoved to a dark corner, vilified, buried in ad hominem and most telling, not discussed openly and on its own terms. If anyone does try to invite such a conversation, they end up spending all their time and energy defending themselves from insincere critique, infantile name calling campaigns and yes, even threats of physical harm and sexual violence. I have witnessed attacks using those aforementioned tactics on a few people willing to invite conversation on these types of subjects. I shouldn’t even have to point out the obvious contradictions here, but I find I often do. It would seem that many people in a milieu that professes to be a conversation outside the predominant paradigm have some very peculiar ideas of what is “permitted” as a subject of rational discourse. I will quote Hasan i Sabah here, or at least William Burroughs paraphrasing Hasan i Sabah, “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”. Of course, I am a free expression extremist, so I am personally used to the constant attempt at coercion and the non-stop chilling effect that in itself is a natural response to a phenomenon that frightens the intellectual cowards among us.
The trickster is probably one of the most enduring archetypes across cultures, the list of stories about the trickster character is truly universal, perhaps the most universal of all archetypes. One of the things that is not discussed much in polite circles, is the obvious fact that the criminal is its mundane (earthly) manifestation. Many examples exist throughout history including Arthur Rimbaud with his exhortation that,
“The first study of the man who wants to be a poet in the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! — But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [“kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters”], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed — and the supreme Scholar!
— Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other one collapsed!”
Or Sigmund Freud’s quote, “One has to be a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without such criminality there is no real achievement.” to the story of Picasso inviting competing lovers over, unbeknownst to each other so he could be inspired to paint chaos and strife for Guernica, Jacques Mesrine, William S. Burroughs, Joe Gibbons and a horde of fictional characters, like the Joker (especially Heath Ledger’s portrayal), Tyler Durden, Colonel Kurtz as portrayed by Brando in Apocalypse Now, Charles Manson and his very early eco-terror organization ATWA, and of course the notorious O9A (or the Order of the NIne Angles) and their philosophy of The Dreccian Way... it is hard to understand why “He who wears the wolf’s head” is not spoken about in polite company. Even Andre Breton said, “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.” One begins to wonder when art became so non-lethal and safe.
Ok, so it may not be too hard to comprehend why such characters are somewhat shunned in a civilized society (not that I agree with that sentiment) but the subject seems to be entirely taboo unless one is hurling invectives and ad hominems in the direction of those that choose to live outside the pale. At least most of the time this is the case. There are a few times that one of these rebels sneaks over the transom of the everyday, such as the case of John Dillinger who was beloved by the average working folk and as mentioned, the early reception of Charles Manson by some elements of the counterculture press. It was only later that a concentrated effort to brand Manson as the “man who killed the 60s” overtook some of the praise for his “war on the pigs”. It is also relevant to mention that Manson later started ATWA with some followers and in many ways, set the precedent for groups like Wild Reaction/Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (Savagery), etc. The project I am directly involved in, thepsychopath. org is inspired and informed by all of these influences.
*** Are the Serial Killer’s actions actually anti-civ in nature?
The question here is how much in alignment with the agenda of the anti-civ or species traitor is the serial killer’s actions and agenda? Does the serial killer share any qualities with terrorists and radical insurrectionists? Can the anti-civ tendency benefit or borrow from the modus operandi of the serial killer? Could the stealthy M.O. of the serial killer be used by the misanthrope in a manner akin to a ground based drone strike by a non-state actor? That, like everything, is a matter of opinion. I would like to take this time to see if we can unpack a few of those possibilities and be doing so, give anyone willing to form their own synthesis some food for thought. Serial killers often pick symbolic targets, and they often leave messages to certain population segments or individuals through the act of ritual posing. One may even say that this is a form of artistic language and much like a communique that is sent out after a terrorist act by a person or group taking responsibility for the said act, it is a signature. Serial killers and terrorists share the need for a signature, for some very similar reasons. The serial killer and the terrorist seek context and direction of their seemingly random acts, and by applying a signature, much like an artist signing a painting or a poet signing their work, both the serial killer and the terrorist apply a directive to the act. By signing their work they assure that it doesn’t end up on the heap of “shit happens”, like so many of the random events that populate our life do. The signature says, “I did this and I did this for a reason.” One need look no further than the work of someone like Steve Hodel and his theories on the Black Dahlia killer to see the obvious connection to serial killer staging and art . One need look no further than the mythopoetic communiqués of a group like ITS or the actions of individuals like Ted Kaczynski to see the connection between terrorist activities and art. I use the word terrorist here purely as a description of the activity and not in the politicized vernacular which is to say not in a dismissive or disparaging sense. Their acts spread terror and I believe that this is their intention, plain and simple. That what they do also qualify as art is my opinion which I offer here for your consideration.
*** Postscript: Discarding the need for moral outcomes
If you’re reading this journal it is my hope that we can dispense with certain introductions such as the definition of sanity and insanity and their irrelevant contexts within the framework of modernity, as well as concepts like criminal and law abiding. If you need tutoring on the illegalist attitudes I suggest you start by googling terms like illegalist and then maybe come back to this journal and read it anew.
If we are on the same page or at least on a page in the same chapter, then let us consider the charge of violence and it’s necessity or lack thereof. There are clearly times when violence
is justified and in fact to not respond to certain situations with violence is in essence negligence.If you or members of your group, tribe or family are in jeopardy, and you do not respond with the force necessary to repel that threat, doesn’t that signify that you are malfunctioning as a biological entity on this planet? Today the fact that we are being systematically exterminated by civilization and its zombie cheerleaders can only be refuted by the most hypnotized, delusional or outright dishonest among us. Much like a small group of people fighting for survival from a flood, those that cannot or worse, who will not swim, can bring about the demise of those who in fact are struggling to survive after a shipwreck. It is not inhumane to divest yourself of a group of people who are not only not contributing to the solution but due to their panicked thrashing may be vastly contributing to the problem. Anyone who has ever tried to help a drowning person already knows this from experience.This is why there really is no such thing as collateral damage in a struggle for survival and this is why I would argue that the so-called innocent victims of random acts of terrorism are neither innocent nor victims. They are complicit on a lot of levels and mostly by their inactivity and refusal to resist the juggernaut of civilization and its many agents of complicity. Likewise, the naysayers and critics of those who would take action are complicit and therefore are legitimate targets of anyone who would take it upon themselves to push back, lash out or fight the never-ending, soul-crushing encroachment of the stifling death of both mind and body that comes as part of the package deal known as civilization. But you can always sit back and enjoy your neutering and lobotomization. I’m told it doesn’t hurt for long. Who knows, maybe someone reading this will take it upon themselves to experiment one night, invoke the trickster within, walk the dark streets and follow fate or even become fate itself.
Ezra Buckley
** Tangled Hostility
Words have no meaning, they never truly did.
The brittle outer shell peels off nonetheless.
The wetlands and black water of my home remain a target for industry to spoil. Sparsely populated and poor, it’s seen as a convenient outlet for vast amounts of waste that are disastrous to the entirety of the ecosystem. After years of being dismayed by the damage done through wetland logging and gross negligence I was surprised to see our area come up on Earth First! this summer. The story was about a proposed rail line that would be used to transport coal ash into a landfill near the Satilla and Altamaha rivers and the community’s resistance to Republic, the Arizona-based firm that would own the rail line. It was a fine story as reports on reformist environmental efforts go, but I’ve been so infuriated by a particular piece of information mentioned in passing. Listed among the credentials of a local “green-minded businessman” was the fact that he had lobbied for the construction of another prison in the area. He praised the prison for being a “growth industry without smokestacks.”
The words of a friend have been repeating ever since when I think about that statement: “The day will come when Leviathan itself will be heralded as eco-friendly. The world-eater becomes the world-healer, while still destroying all in its path.” The realization that however vast we imagine the armor of Leviathan to be it will always be an understatement is never easy. The force that destroys life at every turn continues to unabashedly assume the mask of preservation.
Even beyond the absurdity of a green industry, much less a green prison, the very idea of the carceral state contributing to the preservation of swamps and wetlands is so offensive that it verges on comedy. I immediately thought of the maroons: runaway slaves, indigenous people, and criminals who established their free communities in the middle of our (formerly) expansive swamps where the literal teeth and claws of American slave society (in the form of hounds) couldn’t follow them. To quote Richard Grant writing for Smithsonian magazine:
“Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.”
In addition to leaving the system of slavery, they also appeared to abandon the ideals of the capitalist society that were forced upon them, as one inhabitant known as Charlie would later specify that all labor on the island was communal. Their utter rejection of this world shaped by colonialism is implied through their name, as the word “maroon” itself is thought to come from “cimarrón,” a word the Spanish applied to feral animals and later to the slaves who escaped the Spaniards’ cruelty: in other words, forms of life that resist commodification and colonial domestication. The qualities of the swamps themselves fostered this environment of opposition to the state, as the swamp stripped slaveholders and their police forces of civilized accoutrements in the form of horses and hounds. And even if the slave patrols managed to navigate the swamp and locate the maroon societies they could expect violent resistance and booby-traps along the way. Retreating to nature afforded these communities a chance to live freely and leave face-down in the mud, any lawman who would deprive them of that. Nature is no respecter of persons.
Moving forward three hundred some-odd years Monsieur Dupont’s Nihilist Communism made the point of the body itself being one of the few forces that remains incorruptible by capitalism. I would argue that this trait is inherited from our environment as nature and the body remains “enslaved but fundamentally unhelpful.” Dupont eventually arrived at a workerist position because they believed all political projects would be subsumed by capital to create an even more advanced capitalist society that could resist efforts to disrupt it. My departure from Dupont can be expressed succinctly: we’re shown by the example of the maroon communities that certain aspects of nature possess two key features that amount to more than a simple “drag on maximization,” those being a lack of distinct paths and total hostility to the armament of civilization.
But like Dupont I reject political strategies and projects that involve merely shuffling the components of industrial civilization. As with the authors of baedan, I have no alternative to offer. All I can put forward is my desire to move in such a way that invokes the chaos of my home. Not chaos in the traditional sense put forward by moralist anarchists when they say “anarchy is not chaos, but order” but chaos in the cosmic sense of something unknown that defies the logic of futurity. Something that presents no opportunities of development and co-optation to civilization and capital, but instead howls against it with tangled hostility.
kohelet
** The Mara Salvatrucha: The most dangerous gang in the world
The Mara Salvatrucha (MS) is a Salvadoran gang renowned for its exceptional criminality. This has caught our attention to an exceptional degree due to its modus operandi, its experience in arms trafficking, its ample range of criminal activities, its lessons on how to avoid the authorities, and more than anything else, its internationalization, which has been sharp like a wasp’s sting, swift and lethal like the Black Death.
Here we aim to highlight the valuable lessons that the MS can teach us eco-extremists. Without any moral reservation, we undertake this as we seek to use any means at our disposal, to wage our own war in an individualist manner against all that wishes to domesticate us. We take our lessons from wherever we like, from the savage Selknam to the guerillas of Paraguay to the Salvadoran gangs. If they have something to teach us, why not learn from them? Without further ado, we will let the mafiosos explain.
*** The Maras, What They Are, and Where They Emerged
Gangs known as maras dominate criminality in Central America. They are immortalized in images of violent men covered in tattoos who have an absolute disdain for the value of life. The Maras inspire fear and concern wherever they are found.
The maras emerged in the barrios of Los Angeles in the 1980s during the time of civil wars raging in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador. Many refugees fled these countries searching for a better future and ended up in the Mexican barrios of Los Angeles.
In the 1990s, crime had reached epidemic proportions and the US government began to enforce its immigration laws more strictly, swiftly deporting immigrants who were (or were found) guilty of crimes to their countries of origin. Upon their return to what is known as the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) the members of the maras were not able to reintegrate into society and they continued building criminal networks, and also relationships between those countries and gangs in the US.
*** Internationalization
In the beginning, the MS was made up of mostly Salvadorans, but the diversity of nationalities present in Los Angeles meant that this changed quickly. When MS entered the criminal scene, other gangs decided to welcome them into their networks, especially the gang called the Mexican Mafia, a Californian group with control over the southern US and Mexico. The MS were offered protection in the prisons and barrios. In return, MS lent the Mexican Mafia hitmen and added “13” to their name since this corresponded to “M” being the thirteenth letter in the alphabet.
From that time, the MS became MS-13, a criminal association organized around the Northern Triangle, Mexico, and the US. MS-13, like almost all of the maras, does not have a head or chief who controls all of the networks in an absolute manner. It works through cells or “clicas” in various territories that have their own chiefs known as “palabreros.”
*** Confrontation with the Authorities
Here we copy and paste a text taken from the press which reflects a little the current situation of the maras:
Drop by drop of blood, the violence of the Maras in El Salvador increases daily. The recent threats against official agents did not take long to be realized, and from Sunday to Friday, four police agents, a soldier, and a director of the Metropolitan Agents Corps (CAM) were killed, some of them brutally: either decapitated or suffocated. The majority of officer victims, 61 so far in 2016 (41 police, 19 soldiers, and one agent of the CAM) were kidnapped and afterwards killed off-duty or while in their homes. This was the case with Carlos Arturo Flores, who this past Wednesday left his home in Yucaiquin, in the eastern department of La Union, with the intention of visiting his girlfriend. On Thursday his body was found decapitated and riddled with bullets near his residence.
The Maras have called their action “an escalated war against the system,” in which the targets consist of the police, soldiers, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. They have also warned that the aim is to have a “high murder rate by the end of the year.”
*** Criminal Activities
The Maras have a wide experience when it comes to criminal activities. These range from the ordinary criminal activity such as robberies and assaults that are everyday tasks of gang members to more ambitious robberies of large sums of money. There are many 94
executions, for everything from problems between gangs and rival groups, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, and even human trafficking. The activity that they are best known for is extortion.
*** Extortion
Extortion, also known as “rent” or “war tax” (in Honduras) is a method by which a quantity of money is taken from people, especially from transport workers and business owners. In general they send new gang members or women (who are used to throw the local authorities off at the moment of extortion) to collect money, which is collected weekly or monthly.
If the rent isn’t paid, a bus is lit on fire or the person is assassinated. The amount of extortion money that is collected is believed to exceed 18 million dollars annually.
*** Arms
The gang members or Mareros tend to use high caliber weapons for their criminal activities and many of their murders are committed with firearms like pistols, shotguns, and even assault rifles like the AK-47 and M-16. In some cases they use other weapons such as knives and machetes.
Generally in their attacks, they make sure not to leave the victim alive. They tend to shoot the head and the body many times if using firearms. In other cases, they will inflict mortal wounds, even to the point of dismembering the victim. Only rarely do the gang members resort to hand-to-hand combat. Aside from the use of arms they also collect contraband goods to sell and/or distribute to their own members.
*** The Dispute Concerning Tattoos
Many members of the MS have tattoos showing that they have pledged themselves to a leader. Among the favored designs are “MS,” “Salvatrucha,” “Devil Horns,” which is the name of one of their leaders. These tattoos were a fairly typical custom dating to the beginnings of the gang, but lately it is falling into disuse to avoid being identified due to their criminal endeavors.
Interviewed Mareros and gang members indicate that at present there is a tendency to abandon the use of identifying symbols (especially tattoos) in order to not be so easily identified by authorities. The tattoo is undoubtedly one of the more visible elements that provokes the most controversy for the stereotypes and persecutions it generates.
*** The Maras and the Indiscriminate
The Maras do not tend to hesitate at the moment of executing their actions, even when this entails the deaths of supposed innocents. Leaving aside the motivations for acting in this case, we will highlight here the means by which they achieve their ends, without second thoughts.
On December 23rd, 2004, the MS committed one of its most notable crimes in Chamelecon (Honduras). An intercity bus was stopped and fired upon, killing twenty eight passengers, the majority being women and children. Six armed men opened fire and one boarded the bus and methodically executed the passengers. The MS organized the massacre as a protest to the Honduran government reestablishing the death penalty in the country. In February 2007, Juan Carlos Miranda Bueso and Darwin Alexis Ramirez were found guilty of these crimes, including murder and attempted murder. Ebert Anibal Rivera was also found guilty of the attack and was detained after having fled to Texas. Juan Bautista Jimenez was accused of planning the massacre, and was killed in prison. According to authorities, he was hung by his cellmates who were members of the MS. There was not sufficient evidence to condemn Oscar Fernando Mendoza or Wilson Geovany Gomez.
*** Conclusion
We can observe that these gang members are not characterized by nobility. Their warlike pride makes them hostile to others not in their gang. Within the group, they respect each other, they value each other, and they take care of each other. But those on the outside, those who are not of the gang, are viewed as the enemy. The cliques sprout up like factions and add up to an international criminal project that worries the authorities of all of the countries in which they operate. They live in constant conflict in their appearance as well as in their attitude towards life. These make them clash with the values of society and all that is considered politically correct. They usually cannot get jobs nor do they want them, though we know that this is not always the case. For this reason they have launched themselves without hesitation into criminal activities, assaults, robberies, extortion, and drug trafficking, among other endeavors.
Experience has taught them much; for that reason the Maras have reformed some aspects of their organizational structure. For example, even though they were well known for their symbolic use of tattoos, they have renounced this practice in order to remain in the shadows, in order to not receive unnecessary attention from the police.
In spite of official sources that indicate that these gangs are in decline, and are even looking for a truce, the chaos and murders keep extending the bloody print of these evil beings. They give their lives for the Maras, as we, eco-extremists, give our lives for our pagan deities and wild nature. They and we know what it means to live in a war that will continue, citing the words of one of their members, “until the end.”
Extinción 1
** A Statement from Innocence
This is a reflection from my profound innocence. To be honest, this was kind of hard to write. As a propagandist from the [Ecoextremist] Mafia I am far from innocent. My mind at this point is totally corrupted by the videos, terrorist manuals, texts, communiques, and actions of the Mafia. More than anything I’m just asking some questions to the “radicals” of society.
So many things have been said about what we defend and what we believe that sometimes I start to believe them (LOL!). And all this from the hyper-civilized masses as well as the insurrectionist revolutionaries, the anti-authoritarian anarchists, and others.
Obviously I don’t expect flowers from modern humans, nor understanding, nor flattery, nor acceptance, nor anything of the kind. I only expect the worst from them. But the criticism we received from others, those radicals who are at war against the state and prisons and the rest, really that throws me off a bit.To be honest I expected at least a small difference in the reactions of the citizen and of the anarchist warrior, but well, it’s clear that this wasn’t the case. I thought (in my innocence) that the anarchists would have (a little) more understanding toward us than the average citizen, but from what I can tell they repudiated us even more strongly. That’s how things are at this point.
What surprises me a bit is that those who consider themselves most radical in society, who fight against power and who are enemies of the law etc. are those who are stirring up the most commotion against us. These people are definitely not a bunch of white doves, nor are they common citizens, nor are they models of good behavior. So I find it strange that we receive so much rejection from them, not that I expected them to receive us with open arms, nor that they would invite us to their book fairs, nor to speak of their meetings concerning prison abolition. So really I am just realizing that we are so disgusting that not even the cream of the crop of the radical sphere wants anything to do with us. We could say with all certainty that we eco-extremists are so horrible that we are outcasts among the outcasts.
And that is because the last installment of this “war against ecoextremism” has escalated into violence. Everyone now knows what happened in the anarchist book fair in the US. From then on the conflict has not remained in words written in books. Now the radicals call us out directly. They have invited others to confront us with blows if necessary (let’s see if they can find us first), they have called on others to chuck us in the garbage, and numerous other things. Some people in the US wrote a tome longer than the Bible extensively documenting various points, trying to refute other theorists of the Mafia and a large quantity of technical and academic information.
And of course now the eco-extremists have become enemy #1. I am exaggerating on the last few things but reading some of these things the same impression remains. An important point to make is that the vast majority of the criticisms come from places where there is no eco-extremist activity whatsoever. More specifically, I mean the US, the UK, and even Indonesia. If it is the case that a constant flow of propaganda and information originates from the US, the Mafia has not carried out any attacks in that territory. The same is the case with Spain, the UK, and Asia. These are the places where people are taking it upon themselves to continue positioning themselves against the Tendency through issuing communiques and call-outs to the anarchist community. So now my serious question: Why is there so much conflict emanating from those places? It’s understandable that their anarchist comrades in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina are upset, since those are the places where the Mafia operates, and in those places there have been interesting “confrontations” between us and the anarchists. Let us remember that ITS burning a bus in Chile in 2016 caused a big problem, since this fire had little concern for the citizenry so that afterwards anarchists blew up a bank and reproached the eco-extremist discourse indirectly. In Argentina something similar happened concerning a magazine, not even to speak of Mexico: they have been dealing with this since 2011.
Returning to the question of why there is so much hostility in other places, the answer I believe has something to do with how we present a problem that threatens something in their particular contexts. It is interesting to witness how supposed radicals start getting a bit concerned when more radical actions are carried out like those of the Tendency. So why so much anger? Now I am realizing that even the blackest begin looking gray compared to the eco-extremist/misanthropic/nihilist/egoist force. What is certain is that ITS has turned into something horrible, scary, and infectious, which you have to separate yourself from as soon as possible or you run the risk of catching the extremist virus.
These people worry me. The life of an eco-extremist is pretty paranoid since I have to be on the look-out for the police, citizen do-gooders, and now on top of all that, I have to watch out for anarchists. Who would have thought! It seems rather funny that we now have to be escaping from modern anarchos (some of them, anyway), but those are the times we live in.
Personally, I am pleased that these anarchists are blowing up fire extinguishers, burning buses, and giving themselves over to violent action. Their devotion to these works is very respectable (as in the case of anyone carrying out violence).
So let’s see if those with big mouths start putting their money where their mouth is, stop writing their entries on their blogs and start making devices... faggots. I am only stating this for the sake of the war so that it’s not extinguished, so that the anarchos of the future will see that they just didn’t devote themselves to talking shit. But well, I’ll leave it at that.
I state it since I too was once waging that anarchist war, and was involved in their theory and praxis, and I am not sorry. On the contrary, I am happy that their bombs have started reappearing...
But for now the Mafia will not take one step back, and neither will the politically-incorrect propagandists.
Let the war against civilization and the modern human continue in the South and North!
Against all, even the most ugly anarchists!
A spirit of the South
** Lions in the Brush: on the anatomy and guidelines of cell-structured resistance
The following piece is not intended to promote, condone, or advocate any sort of illegal activity, just to analyze and identify a strategy commonly used in subversive activities to ensure anonymity and minimize the possibility of detection. This piece does not have any ideological or philosophical associations and is merely a rough guide on how cell-structured anonymity operates with maximum ability for success. The tactic was first introduced by intelligence officer Col. Ulius Louis Amoss in 1962. Amoss created the tactic under the belief that communists would take over the US, and believed that this method would ensure the chances of a successful resistance if that occurred. The method has been greatly expanded on since then and adopted by many groups, from the Animal and Earth Liberation Front, to white supremacists, to Islamic extremists, and beyond. My intention here is to lay out some guidelines developed over the years. One may be tempted to pick and choose what’s applicable in a given situation; however to maximize one’s chances of success, these guidelines should be strictly followed. In the end, it is up to you. Only you can decide what risk you choose to take or not take for your own sake.
*** Why choose cell structure?
People may have many reasons for keeping some things they do and believe a secret, whether it is risking the loss of a high profile career or a positive public image. In fact in this political climate, laws could change so that you get labelled a criminal or terrorist for engaging in activities that were legal at the time. In fact laws could change that could make your views or associations illegal. Thus, it’s better to be safe than sorry. This piece is about safety, and ensuring to the best of one’s ability that you and others can remain anonymous and undetected in chosen activities, regardless of your reasons for that anonymity.
*** Above-Ground Activity vs. Covert Cell-Structured Activity
In most case scenarios there either is, or at least should be, a barrier between those who engage in above-ground activity and those who engage in covert, cell-structured activity. Some characteristics of above-ground activity would be making social-media posts aligned with one’s honest political, ideological, or philosophical views, attending riots or rallies, authoring material that can in any way be traced back to you, adding those aligned with your views on social media, becoming involved in public projects that align with one’s related views, etc. Those who engage in cell-structured (covert, underground) activity however, do not engage in or associate themselves with these types of activities, at least not in ways that risk being traced back to said individual(s). For those who engage in underground activity, it is ideal to refrain from any traceable online activity that would admit to association with the types of views related to the choice of activity one engages in, or attendance at rallies, public meetings, protests, riots, etc. The person who engages in cell-structured activity almost always leads a completely double life, often pretending to endorse opposite views (posting Gandhi quotes and favoring electoral politics on social media, for example). Even if this should be common sense, it should be reiterated that these two paths (above-ground and underground), are not compatible with one another, and it is often in the best interests of those involved in underground cell-structure activity to either avoid at all costs or at least sever all ties to those who openly share the same views. To put it simply: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
*** The cell vs. organization
We’re going to use the term “organization” loosely here, because this also applies to groups that wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves belonging to an organization, but in many ways still fall into the same structure (as is the case with many self-styled “anarchists”). The organization or scene can easily be infiltrated and erased without a terrible amount of effort. All it takes is an infiltrator to gather information and identify those involved or “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture) or other effective methods of coercion (convincing threats to loved ones, for example) to extract information about a particular group and their activities. Organizations and other large-group collaborations or associations are obsolete in their ability to survive any real state repression. The anatomy of cell structure, however, fosters immunity to these counter-strategies, or any and all counter-strategies in most circumstances.
There are two types of cells, sleeper cells and phantom cells.The sleeper cell consists of one lone wolf individual; the phantom cell is made of no more than two to five individuals. Anything beyond five members risks falling into the same pitfalls as the organization, and begins to lose its solidity, causing it to be more vulnerable to infiltration, compromising its effectiveness. More importantly, cell structure differs from the organization in that, if one cell is taken out and/or compromised, it remains physically impossible for that to have any effect on any other cell. If we drew one big circle or pyramid (the organization), imagine if it only took one pin to stick into the organization block to destroy it. In the case of cell structure, the only way to destroy the cells would be to pin them each, one by one, which means you would need to first locate and identify each and every one, and pick them off individually. The chance of successfully identifying all of those unknown numbers of underground cells is usually quite small. This is what gives cell-structured resistance its near invincibility. We will now address another benefit of this method: invisibility.
*** What happens in the cell stays in the cell
This is probably the most important guideline to ensure effective cell-structured resistance. What happens in the cell stays in the cell. What does this mean? First and foremost it means no pillow talk, no bragging: accepting and reaffirming that you are not in it for glory or to make a name for yourself, because if you are, that’s what aboveground resistance is for. Go join a protest, get beaten up by the pigs, and use the story to get laid or to give you higher social status amongst your upper-middle class anarcho-hipster friends, because that’s not what this is about. This isn’t to say that releasing untraceable communiqués, for whatever reason of your choosing, isn’t acceptable. However, that has nothing to do with personal glory either, which is why they are “untraceable.” This entails taking a big risk, and if you choose that route, you better at least have very strong computer and physical OPSEC. Otherwise, you should not mention a word about the cell even to your partner, unless they’re in the cell as well. You don’t talk to close friends about it, you don’t mention it to your mother, your father, or your siblings. What if one of them turns on you? What if they are confronted and tortured or otherwise coerced into giving information? What if they mention it to someone else? There should be no “what ifs.” What goes on in the cell stays in the cell. If you have loose lips, can’t lead a double life, or otherwise are needy for someone to listen to all your personal struggles, then I’ll repeat: go the easy path because this isn’t for you.
Another major difference between cell structure and organization is that people you bring into a cell must uncompromisingly be those you can trust with your life. Ideally you’ve known them intimately in person for many years. It would also be desirable to have potential future cell members undergo a series of tests in the recruitment process to ensure that they have what it takes, or that they are not a state agent. This would include making sure that the person doesn’t have loose lips, a weak heart, a weak mentality, that they won’t crack under pressure, won’t turn on you out of moral scruples, etc. It is very important that only the most solid, unbreakable, dedicated, and loyal individuals join the cell.
*** Further assuring anonymity
The growth of technology and surveillance culture has made anonymity difficult in recent times. One thing that needs to be addressed and considered is the concept of paranoia. One must be paranoid!!! Take every precaution you can to avoid detection. One major issue that we face today, which I think is dangerously overlooked and often not taken into consideration, is the probability for electronic devices such as cell phones to be used as surveillance and tracking devices, even when powered off. The ability exists with cell phones to even listen in on conversations through walls. As I mentioned earlier, some may label such a precaution as paranoia, but I repeat again, be paranoid! Whether leaked information concerning the NSA is accurate or not, the possibility certainly exists that even if others are not listening directly to your conversations, certain keywords could send triggers and flags to government agencies through the devices. The following are precautions to take in avoiding these pitfalls all together.
When discussing anything related to cell activity, do so far, far away from any cell phone; maybe put all cell phones, laptops, and tablets inside a vehicle and park it down the block. Beware, even some new TVs now are capable of listening to conversations. It is highly recommended that when doing anything related to cellstructure activity, leave devices at home, with trusted friends, or stashed in the bushes, even if running errands related to the activity such as purchasing any needed material. It’s also highly recommended that most if not all activities be done only in cities or towns that you are not known to frequent. The farther you need to travel, the better off you’ll be. I can’t stress this enough, don’t engage in activities anywhere near where you frequent!!! Also use cash at all times; this should go without saying. Aside from these fundamental guidelines, it’s recommended that you always take all necessary precautions, be highly observant of your surroundings, be mindful of cameras (especially ones that can record license plate numbers), and study ways to dodge surveillance and be untraceable. Though somewhat outdated when it comes to considerations of new technology, the book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors by Rex Feral has plenty of useful information on how to avoid detection. The book is banned from further publication, however ebook formats are available online, particularly with p2p programs such as can be found on slsknet.org. There you can search for all sorts of keywords for building an arsenal of knowledge that should produce results for many more ebook downloads. [Of course, at least use the TOR browser and similar means to ensure safe(r) surfing for materials of this type.]
*** The cell answers to no one but itself
Those who engage in cell-structured resistance have absolutely no one to answer to but themselves, no organization to judge their conduct, and no leader or collective to persuade or control their behavior. The cell acts entirely out of its own independence and individuality. As far as strategy, tactics, intentions, goals, philosophy, conduct, etc., it is entirely for the cell to decide its influences and course of action. This causes strategy to become unbound, which allows for near limitless potential for strategic intelligence and imagination. Some cells may choose to align more with one specific ideological current or philosophical perspective; this however is at the sole discretion of the cell, as it is under no one’s authority but its own. I’ll end this piece with a recommended song, and that is “Agent of Destruction” by P. Paul Fenech from the album International Super Bastard.
el borracho
(nomad warfuk)
** Paraguayan People’s Army: What can we learn from them?
The EPP is an armed organization from Paraguay officially founded in 2008 (although their origins and activities are traced by some analysts to 1997, from a splinter group detached from the Partido Patria Libre). The areas where they have a presence are in the departments of Concepción, San Pedro, and Amambay; namely, the northeastern part of the country.
Its political structures are Marxist-Leninist, but its actions closely resemble those employed by the Uruguayans and Argentinean anarchist robbers who were active in the late 80s and early 90s.
Many of these historical armed organizations can teach us certain things relevant to our interests. We do not assent to the moral judgment that states that we must ignore these organizations because of their intentions. We do not share any of these moral impulses, of course.
Eco-extremists and nihilist terrorists are not anti-authoritarian anarchists; we are not anti-fascists who would refuse the lessons left by these armed groups. It is clear that we do not share their doctrines, but not sharing their intentions does not mean that we neglect the lessons that they have left us. We follow in their footsteps with a criminal spirit to satisfy our Egoist goals.
Valuable things can be learned from both the left-wing and right-wing armed groups, and we have no moral problems admitting this. We have more than once vindicated ourselves with a marked tendency toward the anti-political and anti-ideological.
*** Robberies and kidnapping
As with the anarchist bandits, the EPP commits robberies and claims responsibility for them directly and indirectly. They have also been known to take responsibility for kidnappings.
Notably, in 1997, they assaulted a bank in Chore, San Pedro. Although the robbery was botched, it gave them good experience that helped them improve their abilities to carry out what they term “expropriations.”
Among the most notable kidnappings was that of the rancher and logging company owner Alberto Lindston in July 2008, whose ransom was set at 130,000 dollars. They released the man after the ransom was paid, but threatened him with death if he continued his activities. Lindstron ignored their warnings and, in May 2013, the group assassinated him.
The same fate befell Cecilia Cubas, daughter of former president Raul Cubas. She was kidnapped during a fierce shoot-out in 2004 and later found dead in 2005, an event that shook the Paraguayan nation.
Other notable kidnappings were those of the cattleman Fidel Zavala in 2009 and Arlan Fick, son of a wealthy landowner, in 2014. These acts were reported by the national media, and popular support or contempt was communicated by many members of the populace. The EPP received this support in spite of the media branding them as criminals, not the revolutionaries that they aspired to be. The group thus was etched into the collective mind of Paraguayan society. It achieved fame among the masses, and also obtained a national political and military profile in that country.
The EPP’s initial strategy of first making money to buy weapons, vehicles, houses and, in general, develop war logistics, rather than starting with political-military operations, is highly intelligent, and reminds us of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda from the Islamic Magreb led by the fiery Mokhtak Belmokhtar who kidnapf Europeans and Americans to self-finance and give continuity to their war against the West.
*** Organization and Discretion
The organization of the EPP is similar to the so-called informality of the insurrectionary anarchists, although it is not the same, of course. The EPP cells are very small groups of a few guerrillas each who keep their composure very well, do not attract attention to themselves, and are quite distrustful. The different cells are not known to each other, so infiltration of them is a very difficult. The cells follow orders that are given through the public communiques of the organization.
Although it is known that the members of the EPP number around five hundred, in their relatively short history they have had few political prisoners although some of the prisoners of the EPP were detained for their political past in the Partido Patria Libre, and some of them have been imprisoned after clashes with the police or the army. This is what happened in April, 2010, in the department of Alto Paraguay (extreme north of the country), when an EPP guerrilla, Severiano Martínez, engaged in a firefight with a police officer who had tried to frisk him. Martínez was wounded but escaped and hid in the jungle. The confrontation led to a furious hunt by the authorities against members of the EPP in the wild lands of the mountains of the Paraguayan Chaco.
Apparently, some cells of the EPP alerted each other of this event and new clashes broke out that same month in the department of Concepcion, where a total of four policemen were reported killed.
In July of that year, Martínez, injured and with a brain infection after the April shoot out, was found by police and shot down, though not without first unloading his 9mm gun at them. As a result, upon discovering the identity of the guerrilla, the police began to investigate his close circle, searched his house and found information on other EPP leaders on his computer. By September of that year, two senior members of the armed group would end up murdered, others had to go underground as their faces were broadcast in all media. Whether or not they had to anything do with the organization, the issue for the government was to make everyone believe that they had actually sent EPP members to prison, to not appear ridiculous before the media.
*** Military Action
Although the EPP suffered the aforementioned setback, it appears that the security and double life they lead is so effective that the controversial Wikileaks group leaked that in 2010, the Paraguayan government asked the major US intelligence agencies for permission to use high-level technology to spy on drug trafficking phones against the EPP, which, up until now has not yielded any results.
In September 2011, just one year after the authorities celebrated the death of EPP leaders and ordered the capture of others, the group mounted another surprise attack on a police station, where two policemen were killed (one of them was shot more than ten times), proving that the EPP was still active.
To date, sixty deaths among military, police, businessmen, and civilians have been attributed to the EPP, most of them for continuing to plant Monsanto’s soybeans and corn, and for the use of harmful agrochemicals that had been prohibited by the group in the areas where it has presence.
The last military action of the armed group was at the end of August, 2016, when EPP detonated an explosive against a military vehicle. They killed eight soldiers in this attack. The government promised to find those responsible, but so far there has been no arrest.
*** Lessons
From the history of the EPP several lessons can be learnt by the eco-extremists and nihilist terrorists:
a) It is highly recommended to be cautious, have a closed group, and act only with them or alone. Do not waste your time recruiting others who you don’t know into your close circle. The EPP is an example of discretion because not even the surveillance programs of the FBI have been able to dismantle the organization.
b) The number of members of a group does not matter if the attacks they make are direct and accurate. The EPP teaches that it is not necessary to have an entire army (although they call themselves an army), or to have a large number of armed men. Murdering a person always captures media attention and, depending on the objective, can create a local controversy (such as the employee of the UNAM chemistry faculty who was killed by ITS in June 2016), or international controversy (such as the biotechnology expert killed by ITS in November 2011). A murder can be committed by a person with a simple knife; firearms or a large number of combatants are not necessary.
c) It is not recommended to store information about members of the group that could be found by the police. If you have this type of information, if you are arrested and the police search your house, you can blow their cover and the police can find and arrest more cell members. In other words, DO NOT make the same mistake as Severiano Martínez.
d) It is recommended to have a source of money to finance attacks, whether working or doing robberies. This depends on the conditions developed by the individualists interested in the war against civilization.
Ajajema 1
** Letter to an Optimist
You may not read me. Maybe one day you will see my body on the front page of the newspaper, lying in a pool of blood, unable to let out a last cry. But what do you care, what is it to you that I exist? Or maybe I am just a weird stranger who is discomforting, like a small pebble in your shoe. Maybe the fake incendiary device that I placed outside the nightclub you frequent bothered you. Maybe you didn’t even hear about it. And maybe you never found out about the bombs we placed at the churches your mother and grandmother frequent. And that’s not even mentioning the package bomb we sent to an entrepreneur of biotechnology products who you want to imitate. You continue as queen of your own world in which you carry on with pretenses of being the only ruler.
In this world of the eternal smile, liquor, and expensive perfumes, I write with profound hatred for one who would surely offer me only hatred in return. On this earth that is already lost, you still have that impeccable smile. The wind makes your hair dance about. For you the wind is an instrument of beauty but I only catch the scent of something soaked in toxic chemicals. It would be useless to wait for your smile to disappear since your appearance does its job. This is a world filled with smiles, to which you send a clear message: Long live freedom! Enchained, they go crying the magic word at every moment, the healing word. I write to you, optimist, who finds herself under the deep spell of existence.
You feel freedom and it created for you a supposed love of life, for the act of living every time that light hits your body, inhaling, ingesting, to the point of staggering. The spell of existence, the greatest orgasm being the feeling that the world belongs to you and like a good lackey it offers to you its many nectars, the most complex creations of man are offered to you, and you receive them with joy. The tarnish of the grave and of autumn will never reach you. For you it is always spring that ends in summer only to proceed directly to spring again.
I am the cruel voice of winter, the last danse macabre that you don’t want to see.Your life as an optimist is a veil of many colors and a rejection of the gray. You buy the most expensive contraptions to fend off the pain of living. What gives your life meaning, optimist?
Your life would be meaningless if the appearance collapsed, but it is indestructible. This is the lamentable human condition. You will live under its saving cloak until your dying days.
How human it is for you and I to live a lie. Our beliefs are only a lightshow that points to nothing. Considering the present, why is it so difficult to abandon oneself? You cling to life, optimist. You show yourself in many forms, on some occasions to subject yourself strongly to the beautiful world to come, in which all injustice and horrible events will end. On other occasions you show yourself to be a pursuer of the success that is much coveted in our time. Optimist, the past has been blurred in your mind and the future will come to comfort you. You know that a beautiful tomorrow awaits you and/or condemned humanity.
You are indifferent to my words, you reject them without a second thought. What is it to you that for many moons I have expected nothing from humanity, that some time ago my life has become a frustrated desire to leave this appearance that they call reality. I know that this isn’t a dream, it’s something else—or that’s what I want to believe. Our words will never mix, optimist, they will never dance together, even if our bodies might bump into each other on the street. When I have the chance, I will betray you. Go on smiling with your pearly whites at this defeated pessimist, but don’t let your guard down, optimist. And when your existence is flooded with the blood of your dreams, always remember this: Despair is more dangerous than hope.
Jeremías Torres
Torreón
July 2017
** Weak Words Concerning Human Reasoning
I walked absorbed under the dark starry sky. I seek something beautiful that, after much time, has been hidden inside of me.
My feet touch the earth and I lose myself in it. Little by little, entering the unknowable, I come to what appears to be a forest, though the image of what a forest is doesn’t exist for me anymore, so I have decided to ignore it. I advance feeling the crush of the branches as they break under my feet. And I ask myself: What are branches?
I know that they are looking for me, but I left a long time ago. Now only the memory of what-I-once-was remains, but the past is dead. I forget my thoughts and appear in a clearly magical spot in that beautiful place. Non-human sounds resound around me, a dense fog covers the space in which I exist, erasing my image forever.
My words almost make me disappear in writing those paragraphs above. For, in treating a theme as immense and overwhelming as human reason, words show themselves to be paltry evidence.
It occurs to me that the primary reason that our detractors continue to fail to comprehend what eco-extremism is all about and what we seek, is that they still think of eco-extremism as something essentially political.
This is understandable, since eco-extremism is derived from ideologies that are effectively political, and it still maintains an aesthetic in some ways similar to the political. It is understandable that those who study this phenomenon find it so strange and incomprehensible that people with complex and “rational” visions or reflections about the world around them carry out attacks and eliminate human lives. These opinions converge on one unified center, born from the incredibly unreliable human mind in all of its confusion.
We know that eco-extremism comes out of an ephemeral and weak mentality, and to a certain point, its essence attacks itself. The eco-extremist reasons concerning the urgency of rejecting reason itself; he speaks of the harmfulness of language and attacks his own species and the technological and artificial order that gave him life.
His eco-extremism leads him to conceive of eco-extremism itself as an immense contradiction, as a final crash among the essences that converge in the limit of our understanding. We walk on that limit, we play on it, and we trace out our history among overflowing leaps of passion and insanity. That mysterious limit presents itself to us as the Hidden or the Unknowable: all of those processes of nature that surround us and that we cannot comprehend, or that we no longer care to conceive of in the form that was taught to us.
Speaking for myself in particular, some time ago I stopped considering science’s opinion on any given thing. For example, I have never thought of what goes on beyond the stars and for that reason I have decided no longer to speak of it. To speak of other planets, other galaxies, black holes, or anti-matter is absurd for me. That’s not what I see when I look up at the sky and that’s why I don’t consider it valid. This is the same with all of the phenomena that occur in my daily life and that I refuse to interpret according to received scientific logic. Thus, what I see when I lift my eyes to the heavens, I decodify in an ineludible way, as the unknowable.
In the same way, my ears have become deaf to the scientific explanations of modern humans. I respect the beautiful catastrophes that constantly eclipse the routine existence of modern humans. When a tsunami indiscriminately hits a region, I see the wild unleashing its vengeance against that which is foreign to it. I see one being (the wave), a passing and ferocious manifestation of wild nature, suddenly surging, striking with immense force and giving all of itself, leaving itself empty to disappear into the immensity again.
It is thus not difficult to understand the empathy that exists between the eco-extremists and natural catastrophes. In executing one of our acts, we empty out our lives and give ourselves in the moment to a superior force that governs us. Before every attack we leave with the certainty that it is possible that we won’t come back, but assume with calm that “the die is cast,” that what has to happen will happen, and “if death comes we will continue destroying things in Hell.”
The precious moments when I am able to separate myself from the terrestrial plain to put my existence in perspective are few and far between. In those moments I realize how insignificant for the whole, this simple defective expression of “life” is. This is the experience of an end that should not be feared but rather fully embraced. These are the moments in which my being is able to express itself in totality, to unfold itself in the attack without thinking of the consequences, to convert itself into a wild animal without hesitation.
I was thinking of elaborating further in this essay, addressing the most complex subject of human reason, but I will leave that to someone else. It seems to me adequate and more practical to summarize my thoughts in the following way: The eco-extremist in his process of re-wilding, now has the option of rejecting civilized reason, without leaving aside a frontal attack on the enemy. He must reject the false truths described by the scientists and researchers. He must develop his own visions, learned from direct contact with wild nature experienced in solitude or with those of affinity. He must learn to conceive of the universe from our animal being, abandoning the perspectives of the modern hyper-civilized human. We must understand ourselves as just another force within the immense compendium of forces working in a mysterious and incomprehensible manner. Being animals in the now, waging our own suicidal war against all that is against us, all that aims at our domestication. We should renounce the obligation to be bound into schemes that obligate us to ask for the reason behind things, and in this way try to flatten the immensity of unknown phenomena. We must refuse to limit and imprison ourselves in deformed and defective knowable human concepts.
And now I am going to prepare myself for the next attack, to be ready for the next instant when I cease to be a civilized human, even if just for a moment. In that moment I feel as if the power of the unknowable works through me and guides my shaking hands, whether I place an explosive or start a fire. How it illuminates the path that leads me to my target, and then covers my tracks under the mantle of the hidden, as has happened many times now in the past.
I leave for the next moment that I experiment far from their disgusting cities, far from the glare of that machine that hurts my eyes when I write these words, returning to what I once was, giving life to a mystery that exists resting in some remote corner of my being, which I encountered for the first time by accident upon finding myself walking, absorbed under the dark starry sky.
Huazihul
** At-Tux
I thought I would die on the battlefield fighting you white soldiers. You white people have driven me from mountain to mountain, from valley to valley, like we do the wounded deer. At last you have got me here. I see but a few days more ahead of me.
Captain Jack, during his testimony
The word “out-law” at one time pertained to a person outside the protection of the law; these individuals could be killed with impunity as they had incurred expulsion from the civilized world and its protective embrace. They were homo sacer, the banished man, the cursed man, the body that could be killed but was not fit for holy ritual. We imagine these rogues to be gallivanting around in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or stalking stage coaches in the brush along a rutted road with Dick Turpin. The inherent element of an outlaw is the notion of an “out-side,” some place away from the mental and physical safety of walls and doors, and the pointed palisades of a frontier fort. An escape. An out.
In June of 1846 the treaty of Washington was signed by Great Britain and the US, ceding “all western North American lands south of the 49th parallel of north latitude” to the US (Landrum 4). This was also the year that the Mexican-American war began. Two years later the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the US government rule over the formerly-Mexican lands from the 42nd parallel south to the current-day border of southern California. These two treaties effectively carved out the shape of the modern US. The newly-opened land ushered waves of settlers and migrants from the East and brought them west in search of ranch holdings, agricultural land, and economic opportunities.
In 1846 was the establishment of the Applegate Trail, a spur of the 2,170-mile-long Oregon trail. The Applegate Trail’s purpose was to bring migrants into the fertile Willamette valley by way of Klamath Lake, through the homeland of the Modoc and Klamath tribes whose territory straddled the California-Oregon border.
Hostilities between the Modoc and whites began with the first parties of travelers. Angered by a smallpox epidemic brought on by the settlers, the Modoc began sporadically raiding wagon trains passing through their territory. In 1852 a wagon train of sixty five men, women, and children heading north between the Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes was attacked by the Modoc under a leader named Old Schonchin. The attack left only three survivors—one man and two young girls—effectively stemming the flow of immigrants and closing the trail (Brady 230).
Prompted by the raid, a civilian militia led by Ben Wright set out fromYreka, California bent on revenge. They lured the Modoc into a trap with promises of parlay, and when the tribe had gathered, Ben Wright and his mob slaughtered over forty of the natives. Although scattered raiding continued through the 1860s, the event shook the Modoc. They began to cut their hair, took western nicknames, and adopted western clothing. A chief named Kientpoos became known as Captain Jack (Highberger 8).
In 1863 the Modoc tribe agreed to move to the Klamath Reservation. The relationship between the Klamath tribe and the Modoc soured, and the smaller Modoc groups desired to be moved to their own reservation. Despite repeated requests for such a move, the Modoc were ignored by the Klamath Indian Agents. Two bands decided to leave the Klamath reservation and return to their tribal lands around the Lost River area (Brady 232).
The Hot Creek Modoc, led by Shacknasty Jim, Hooker Jim, and Curly-Headed Doctor, camped on the east bank of the Lost River; the Lost River band led by Captain Jack camped on the west bank. After almost two years of complaints from settlers living around the native encampments, the military decided to force the bands to return to the reservation. On the morning of November 29, 1872 an army force of some forty troopers surrounded Captain Jack’s encampment, demanding that they surrender their weapons and return to the reservation. After a brief exchange and a refusal to give up their weapons, the Modoc and the soldiers began shooting at each other. At the same time, on the other side of the river, an ad-hoc citizen militia attacked Hooker Jim’s camp. Both the soldiers and the citizens were bested and both pulled back. Captain Jack’s Modoc retreated to the nearby Klamath Lava Beds, a location from which they had boasted that they could “whip one thousand soldiers” (Highberger 16). Hooker Jim and his band of warriors went on the warpath, killing fourteen male settlers they met on their way to the rocks to meet up with the other band (Landrum 7).
The renegade Modoc found themselves in the lava beds with fifty warriors and one hundred fifty women and children. These lava beds are a rocky tangle of volcanic debris that is eight miles wide and four miles long, the impenetrable heart of which would become known as Captain Jack’s Stronghold. Captain Lydecker of the US Engineers, who was involved in the mapping of the area, wrote that the lava beds are “a perfect network of obstructions, admirably adapted to a defense by an active enemy; they seldom rise to a height of ten feet above the bed, and are, as a rule, split open, at the top, giving thus continuous cover along their crests” (Brady 284).
Five companies of soldiers and three companies of Oregon and California volunteers, confident of a quick victory, marched into the lava beds on the morning of January 17, 1873 (Landrum 9). Over the course of the day the soldiers hardly caught a glimpse of their elusive enemy and returned to their camp in the evening with shredded uniforms and torn up boots, having suffered nine dead and thirty wounded (Brady 237). This began several months of intermittent skirmishing. Major J.G. Trimble reminisced about the rough terrain:
No wonder then that they should be defeated where every step was obstructed by blocks of slippery lava the size of houses, and pits or pot-holes the depth of mining-shafts: where the foe could fire from the right, the left, above and below. Even subterranean passages, leading from cave to cave, facilitated attack and rendered retreat a certainty. The only counterpart to such a battle-ground in the annals of our Indian fighting was the Everglades of Florida, and there the forces were equally stubborn and alert. (Brady 284)
Peace talks began in early spring. Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby, the commanding general of the Military Department of the Columbia, assured Captain Jack that no Modoc would be harmed if they would surrender. It was agreed that both sides would meet, unarmed, to discuss the terms of peace on April 11, at a tent erected between the army encampment and the lava beds. The night before the meeting the Modoc warriors pressured Captain Jack into agreeing to assassinate the peace commissioners the following day.
The next morning General Canby and three members of the peace commission, Reverend Doctor Eleazar Thomas, Leroy Dyar, and Alfred Meacham (the former Indian Affairs Superintendent), along with a Modoc translator named Toby Riddle and her husband Frank Riddle, met six Modoc at the tent: Ellen’s Man, Black Jim, Schonchin John, Shacknasty Jim, Hooker Jim, and Captain Jack (Highberger 24).
After an hour of smoking cigars and discussion, two Modoc, Barncho and Slolux, appeared from the rocks carrying rifles. Captain Jack said “At-tux!” (all ready!) and he shoved his pistol in General Canby’s face. The first shot from the pistol misfired, but before the general could get away, Captain Jack re-cocked the gun and shot him again under the eye. Each Modoc had an intended target. As Jack shot the general, Boston Charly shot the Reverend Dr. Thomas through the chest several times until he died. Schonchin John shot Meacham (Brady, 245). Hooker Jim went for Dyer and Riddle, but Dyer fired at him with his single-shot pocket Derringer and the two succeeded in escaping (Highberger 25). The warriors returned to the tent, stripped the clothing from Canby, Thomas, and Meacham, then fled back to the protection of the rocks.
At the same time on the east side of the stronghold several Modoc came out from their cover and asked for a parlay with officers from the camp of Major Edwin C. Mason. Instead of the major, two lieutenants walked out to receive the Modoc; when the officers were within range the warriors opened fire and wounded one of the officers in the leg. The Lieutenant would die three days later from his injuries (Landrum 11).
The military response to the murder of the general and peace commissioners was swift and intense. Faced with artillery barrages and a military force prepared to more effectively navigate the stronghold, the Modoc fled the lava rocks and pushed out into the surrounding sagebrush plains. The group divided into two bands, one lead by Captain Jack and the other by Hooker Jim. On May 22, the Hot Creek band and Hooker Jim were surrounded and captured by the army. They agreed to lead the army to the renegades under Captain Jack in exchange for exoneration (Brady 251). On June 1, 1873, after running from the army and the US calvary, Captain Jack was captured with two other warriors, five women, and seven children. He is reported to have said, “Jack’s legs gave out. I am ready to die.” (Highberger 35).
Six Modoc were tried without council and found guilty of the murder of the peace commission. Barncho and Slolux were sentenced to life imprisonment on Alcatraz Island. Captain Jack, Black Jim, Schonchin John, and Boston Charly were hanged at Fort Klamath on October 3, 1873 at 10:15 a.m. (Landrum 74). A reporter wrote, “Captain Jack and Black Jim never moved a muscle and died without a struggle. Schonchin and Boston Charley died hard.” (Highberger 37). The remaining Modoc were moved to a reservation in Oklahoma.
The terms “outlaw” and “renegade” are often used to describe the participants of the Modoc rebellion. They chose to go against the social norms that they had partially adapted. They wore the button-up shirts and pants of settlers but still remembered a time without the humiliation of reservation life. Their names were known by the white community before they left the Klamath Reservation for the Lost River Area; some members spoke perfect English and some of those killed during Hooker Jim’s rampaging on November 29 were neighbors and even friends of the raiding party. These were not so much hostile aliens attacking a world they didn’t want to engage with, as frustrated and enraged participants who had tried to play nice but had had enough.
The Modoc used tactics that were practical and effective for their situation. Elements of surprise and deceit allowed a small band, one that was a fraction of the size of the opposing group, to gain the upper hand in a situation that would have otherwise offered no contest. In the end, they desired to be on their homeland, and it was their knowledge of its geography that gave them a fortress and allowed the band of fifty warriors to enact the costliest per-capita war the US military has ever engaged in.
Captain Jack’s Stronghold represents a place and time when escape was still possible. An individual could attack, then move to a place of safety, a geographic area ungoverned and unreachable by the those who didn’t know it. A band could defend against unwanted pursuers with a well-aimed arrow, the dislodging of a large boulder, or a bullet fired from behind rocky cover. In these circumstances, the environment took on the almost mythical role of participant, and the pursuers could feel as though the whole world was literally against them.
In today’s hyper-technological reality, escape, the safety of a stronghold can only be realized through meticulous planning and execution. The outlaws of today find refuge in the wiping of shell casings, the disposal of clothing, the knowledge of CCTV camera locations, the laundering of money. There are no caves impermeable to bunker busters; no deserts too remote for predator drones; no towns without vigilantes; no swamp steamy enough to trick thermal cameras. Even so, there are still those beyond the palisades.
D.G.
*** Bibliography
Brady, Cyrus Townsend. Northwestern Fights and Fighters. The University of Nebraska Press, 1907.
Highberger, Mark. The Story of the Modoc War of 1873. Bear Creek Press, 2001.
Landrum, Francis. Guardhouse, Gallows, and Graves. Klamath County Museum, 1988.
** “No Such Thing as Life without Bloodshed...” —or— the force of tragedy in anti-humanist politics
Tragedy is a product of Indo-European culture. Those cultures spanning Vedic philosophy to Celtic poetry, Norse artwork and Roman legions—all originated on the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe: those men and women who first tamed horses and made chariots. Their legacy to our dying mythology runs from the figures of the Sky-father and the Fertile Goddess, a birth of a world from the murder of one brother by another, and the worship of the Bull. Indo-European peoples spawned the civilisations that came to conquer most of the world and still echo in the globalised Empire today. But this essay is about one specific world-view they invented and passed on, the tragic world-view.
Tragedy is a force, a narrative device, a philosophy, an art form, a framing of action. Tragedy is the fatal flaw in the hero that brings about his demise. Tragedy is the best of intentions, the law of unintended consequences. Tragedy hides under the glossy sheen of progress.
The origination of tragedy as a play begins with the Greeks in the Attic Tragedies. Plays like Oedipus and Antigone, in which the protagonist cannot escape fate and realises reality too late, that show a horrified pleading face to an indifferent pantheon of gods. Loss and grief, death of family members and loved ones are grist to the mill of the Attic playwrights. It is here that Nietzsche identifies the dualistic forces at work in Greek art—the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Like Nietzsche, our focus should be on the Dionysian.
Dionysus is the god of wine, revelry and wildness. The later Byzantines defined him thus: So named from accomplishing ‘Dionyian’ for each of those who live the wild life. Or from providing ‘Dionyion’, everything for those who live the wild life
Dionysus is a complex god, famed for cruelty, wild abandon, sadism, alcohol, ecstasy—primitive, disturbing and dark. He encourages his followers to engage in intoxicating rituals replete with wine, blood, and sex. His is a fearful domain which should be tamed, as the Athenian rulers did to his followers in the end. But Dionysus plays the crucial role in the development of tragedy—the play develops from the ritual sacrifice of a goat or bull with the emphasis that its resurrection. This is brought onto the stage where Dionysus is always murdered and revived and the chorus sings the wails and songs that draw the audience out of themselves and into a world of undifferentiated ecstatic madness. Nietzsche sees in this the root of tragedy, that for development there is death, specifically the death of the wild and natural, for whom Dionysus is the embodiment. This is the root of human culture.
A god who dies and is resurrected... this motif exists in almost all Indo-European religions and some scholars speculate it originates in the near-death experiences of Palaeolithic shamans. The Hanging God can be found all over, most famously in the form of Viking Odin screaming for his runes while hung from a tree. But it took the Indo-Europeans to define the act of murdering the god as necessary to survive.This tragedy, this bloodshed, is thought to align itself with the agricultural world-view of the Neolithic. Farming by its very nature undermines itself; famine and plague always stalk the farmer. The oldestVedic texts deal with this explicitly; compare the Mahabharata with Othello and Seneca and observe the well of misery that agriculture has brought us. To kill a God is unnatural, to farm the land is unnatural. Nietzsche points out the reality for the Greek world-view: an offence against the Gods is the foundation of human life, hence our deep connection between tragedy and farming. Knowledge of the world requires bloodshed and will always result in death. The more you force the world into an unnatural shape, the more suffering you will reap.
Tragedy has the peculiar quality that surfaces when cultures and civilisations are succeeding: Elizabethan England, Imperial Rome, Athenian hegemony. It would seem that as progress is made, the underbelly of tragedy accompanies it everywhere, like a grin in the dark. If this is the case—that tragedy is the prodigal son of progress—then we should embrace it with open arms. If tragedy is the result of forbidden knowledge, then let us be its agents. Capitalism is an essentially tragic existence, a never-ending, ever-increasing cycle of boom, consume, and bust. This darkly comic system has brought us and the world to its knees, and for those who have been fashioned in its negative image, the bleak reality—there we find tragedy. The more that humanistic ideology tries to save people, the more it kills. Consider the Green Revolution, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the millions of lives saved. The backfire is coming; like a tidal wave from the deep it will arise, the rust on the gloss of progress. This is why we need to embrace tragedy in our anti-humanism. We reject the outlook of saving the world’s people and their societies and their comforts. We reject the solutions, which bring nothing but devastation—the poisoned chalice of progressive politics.
Life cannot exist without blood and to try to create a new human will result in ever more. Humans are flawed and human nature cannot be improved upon. This lunatic fantasy of the Left— in which humans are perfectible—has spread its ugly tentacles into Silicon Valley and the sci-fi horrors of trans-humanism. Make no mistake that trans-human politics is a serious force in modern discourse. But we should recognise it for what it is—an offence against the Gods, against the world, the prefiguring of tragedy. For such an offence to bring knowledge, it will also bring death. This is the gift of modern science, of agriculture, of every so-called gift of civilisation, snatched from the world through violence. We are not the rational keepers of arcane knowledge, we are the blundering primates who think too highly of ourselves. Tragedy is the force that keeps us in our proper lineage and we should take up its call. Let us be tragic figures, let us be the prefiguring of the end of civilisation. Let us be modern tragedians.
Magpie
** Reflections on Freedom
In this text, I propose to develop my vision of freedom from the eco-extremist perspective. My motivation to write this arises from how ambiguous the concept of freedom is, how it is frequently used in many discourses without ever being truly defined. For this reason, what is produced in these works is rather nebulous, and they never quite arrive at what they seek when they mention “freedom.” I am not interested in a dictionary definition of the term, nor in discussing what the the average citizen might think of the concept, as this not directed to them; this is directed to anyone in search of a clearer and realistic interpretation of the world around them, and I express this as a point of debate, not a declaration.
Some would indicate that freedom involves a negative concept, in which one is not “free for” (a positive interpretation), but rather one is “free from:” free from authority, free from oppression, free from domination, etc. The more astute or less confused see the term more positively: freedom to develop oneself, freedom to act, etc.
An anarchist could be regarded as seeking freedom by engaging in a war against the state and authority, which prevent free development and self-determination, while a person of the anti-civilization position might say that the only thing one can aspire to in this world is one’s individual freedom.
Neither one is being clear about what they truly seek or desire. In a world without the state or authority, the human, like all other living creatures, is driven by many factors that limit their free development. In our present reality, to realize a vague concept such as “personal freedom” is frankly impossible. You can go off to try to live in the wild, carve your spear, sharpen your senses, hunt and gather your own food.You can try all of that, and assuming you can pull it off, you won’t have to wait long before the environment is invaded by machines and the inert gray of civilization.
First one could argue that one’s environmental conditions do not restrict one’s freedom, but rather mold one’s reality in a certain manner. We will discuss this with more attention below.
One of the principal reasons why anarchists detest the state and authority is that these institutions deprive many from pursuing the same opportunities as other people. In a world in which these diabolical entities did not exist, it is very difficult if not impossible to think that any situation would present the same possibilities for all. A group of humans living in a tropical environment would clearly have an advantage in the gathering of fruits, and access to a greater variety, while another group in more austere environments would necessarily have greater recourse to hunting or fishing as a larger share of their sustenance. Conditions impose themselves on you, there is no “freedom” in this (I will discuss this further later on).
Another practical example is diet. Many anarchists believe that they are pursuing a coherent and ethical path in practicing veganism, since they consider it part of their exercise of freedom. Namely, choosing one’s diet and at the same time realizing this over the freedom of others.
In wild nature, no animal can choose its diet since it depends on the environment. Civilization needs to get some benefit out of all of our activities. If we sustained ourselves only from what our immediate environment offered us, this would not be worthwhile for it. That is why new and stranger fads emerge in terms of diet, with so many rules, so that we can choose the diet that most fits our “individual aspirations” (which are really induced from without). Certainly many will find it difficult to dispel the illusion that is being discussed here, but let us think about it. We cannot decide vitally important things in this sense. We cannot decide if we want to consume truly organic food, free of toxic chemicals, or if we want to drink clean water. But sure, we can choose the “paleo diet,” we can choose to be vegans, or to eat only raw foods. Is having a ton of false choices (false in the sense that if we really wanted a natural option we could choose none of them) really more valuable than being able to choose an actual natural option?
Secondly, referring to individual freedom, maybe one could say that being able to choose a certain path means possessing a certain freedom. That seems like an interesting point. Firstly because in this case, freedom becomes something rather abstract, as someone who declares themselves conscious of their decisions could claim to be free. This declaration is refuted by the fact that we live in a civilized environment. We are exposed daily to an infinite number of sensory stimuli that profoundly affect our perception of reality. One can believe that one is forging their own path, but in reality upbringing and environment have determined one’s path in this or that direction. Even the most de-constructed anarchist will find himself obligated to admit the extent that civilized frameworks have cleaved to his being. If he doesn’t, he’s an idiot. And this isn’t even mentioning us eco-extremists (though perhaps I am only speaking for myself here): I have no problem admitting that I am a modern and civilized human, profoundly domesticated and separated from my true animality. I am not free at all. Even eco-extremism, as Halputta Hadjo has indicated, is a product of its environment, namely, a hostile one, sick, and immersed in artificiality. This is the environment that pushes us toward confrontation, since we listen to the call of our instincts and our ancestral roots.
Inside civilization, to speak of individual freedom seems meaningless. We can’t even remove ourselves freely from it in a physical sense, not to mention mentally. But even outside of civilization, considering a scenario in which civilization collapses, these concepts would not be practical. No animal moves about in total freedom. Falcons can’t explore underwater caves, polar bears can’t live in tropical environments, and so on. And mentally speaking, speaking on an abstract and subjective level, it’s also not possible. I will point out one example. A bonobo born into a family of bonobos is accustomed from birth to feed on fruits and insects while living an active life in a tropical environment. That’s the only option it was given, no other option is available. Perhaps if it tried another type of food, its tastes would have changed. It’s possible that it would rather have lived in a hotter (or colder) climate. One will never know.
Take another example: wolves lived for thousands of years in a wild manner in a great variety of environments. At some point, wolves began to encounter humans. They lay by the heat of human fire, and experienced the comfort of receiving food without having to hunt it themselves. And that caused many of them to stay around humans. Little by little, they lost their wildness and became domesticated animals. Here the reader can arrive at an opinion. We could think that wolves, in renouncing life in the wild, subjugated themselves to the slavery of domestication. But it is certain that they didn’t have freedom to make this decision. Living a violent life, often going without, and having to struggle mightily to survive, how could anyone consider that freedom? Wolves made their decisions between two options that presented themselves. They opted for one and not the other. There can’t be a real objection if someone said that this decision gave those wolves a type of freedom that life in the wild could not give them.
Another point I would like to pursue concerns animal and earth “liberation.”
First, is removing an animal from a physical cage necessarily giving it freedom? The options are limited in this regard.You could always bring it to a vegan sanctuary in which it will have a limited amount of space to run around, and depend on the schedule of humans in order to eat or run about. Here in the majority of cases it will have to live with many other animals in a crowded space, in a very unnatural way. It will have to feed on industrial garbage given by the hands of some human. Anyone can see that if freedom actually existed, it wouldn’t be this.
Another option for this “rescued” being would be abandonment in some remnant of wild nature that still exists. That animal may have been ripped from its natural environment from the first moments of its life, or may have been born in an artificial environment, and thus would not know at all the natural environment in which it should have been brought up. It would lack the tools necessary to survive on its own in wild nature. It probably would not survive one night out there. At the very least, it would probably be severely wounded and scarred for the rest of its life. But let’s say it does survive for some time, adapting to its environment from having been a domesticated animal, and recovering from its wounds. Even if it becomes feral, it will not live in freedom in wild nature, because there freedom is irrelevant on the theoretical and practical level.
Regarding “Earth liberation,” there is not much to say. It seems a rather delusional leftist concept. The Earth doesn’t need a group of humans to come and give it back its lost “liberation.” If in this ephemeral moment it is putting up with and giving shelter to human trash on its surface, that doesn’t mean that it won’t make them suffer the consequences down the road. The human sinks further into misery. Humans have been disrespectful with the Earth for too long, and the Earth itself will erase all trace of civilization, whether soon or later really doesn’t matter. Also, the Earth doesn’t need freedom, it only needs to be and to develop in its cycles and processes like it has through its history. I ask myself, what would make the Earth freer? The fall of civilization? A more responsible use of “resources”? Human extinction? I believe that different people could have various observations on this, but the whole concept, aside from being false and leftist, is extremely subjective. No serious analysis of reality could come from this.
The central point of this essay is that freedom does not exist. To this I will counterpose, as a concept and practice, wild nature.
As I said previously, it is mostly your environment that determines your path. No animal decides how their life will be, nor where it will occur. All of these conditions are imposed on them from birth. This idea of freedom has only arisen with the civilized human, in his immense confusion that pretends to be “reasoning” and “intelligent:” the only animal that has transformed its vital experience to the point that it believes that it can opt for one determined way of life or another, all justified by the abstract and harmful concept of freedom. Human confusion expresses its weakness at this extreme point. We have constructed an immense barrier between ourselves and the natural world. The majority of humans fear all that hides, crawls, flies, creeps, or runs outside the concrete walls that surround their cities. From here comes the insatiable search of civilization to design the most comfortable cage possible in which individuals can gather with tranquility, without making too much of a scene.
Failure is inevitable. You can’t simply take a group of animals that lived in one way for thousands of years, throw them in a cage and expect that they will develop in a healthy and full way. Nature has already given us our place in the game, it is not a central role, it is not of vital importance to anyone or anything. It is only one piece within a great compendium of other pieces, useful but dispensable. This is our role, and this is how it is because it fits together symbiotically with all that surrounds us, and this is how things have developed through the centuries. It doesn’t matter how many scientists and eggheads doing cold calculations and having technical insights to come up with the best healthy environment. Things simply don’t work that way. We need to walk around barefoot, not to have the finest shoes that adapt to the shape of the ground. We need an active life, not nice gyms to exercise. We need contact with gods and spirits that inhabit the whole surface of the Earth, and all the logic in the world could never satiate that need. Nature is that which is for itself, as has been stated previously. It does not need a purpose, it does not need to explain itself. It does not need reasons. Our civilized mentality tries to find the reasons for everything; we play at being the lords and masters of existence, ignoring that we are merely minor actors playing a historical role within this ephemeral and overvalued experience known as life. We will never be anything but a flicker that lasted only a few seconds, only to submerge itself back into the darkness of the infinite. We deny our role in this game, we bathe in illusions, and we forget the truth.
Eco-extremism is only the belief in a natural order or chaos, however you would like to put it. We obey it without any reproach on our part. All animals know from the moment of their birth the path that they must pursue. They don’t think about it, they act through instinct, as a simple robot follows the commands of a computer. Instinct influences, as does the contemplation of the environment, the proof of direct experience, the teaching of elders, among other factors. At this point, really it doesn’t matter if monkeys are able to build buildings; they would never do something so stupid. The human attacks itself constantly since it denies its own nature and from the beginning of civilization until now, no intelligent or sensible human act has been recorded. The fact that they can do certain things and have the capacity to carry them out does not mean that any of these things were either necessary or important. The lie of civilization has taken control of the weak minds of those animals, now imprisoned and on the brink of extinction, since they perverted their environment and nature to try to overcome themselves. This lie takes on a special role in the minds of those who believe that they are in opposition to this torturous reality. Those who take up the values of civilization that they are most “comfortable” with, and they try to create scenarios that are just as fictitious as the ones they are denying.
They are horrified by the barbaric acts of savages who lived in other times, but they are really praising a false vision of nature and the existence of the rest of the forms of animal life. It seems that in civilization the logic of “taking what I like and leaving the rest” never stops. Sure, anyone can be comfortable thinking about the noble natives who lived free of hierarchies and authority, in harmony with nature, but when we speak of the Selknam and their patriarchy, the Calusa and their complex hierarchical society, or tribes that headhunted or trafficked in women, more than one of these noble-savage lovers averts their eyes and pretends to have no idea what you are talking about. And it is such a delicate point for secular anarcho-primitivists to accept that their idealized primitive humans worshipped deities. Of course, who doesn’t want to dream of a life without need of a paying jobs, walking calmly through the meadows picking mushrooms. But a life in the wild never was like that.
We cannot state it emphatically enough: freedom is an illusion. Nature is not our mother, she is cruel, merciless, and yes, oppressive. Or at least that is how the hyper-civilized would see it. But for us, all this merely is, and what has always been. We don’t tremble at the movement of the tectonic plates, or when the tsunami makes a particular eco-system disappear. Nor are we taken aback when a crocodile eats its young or a tribe of savages strangles its babies. We got rid of our civilized prejudices, we killed our moral being. We blew to pieces those who sought to domesticate our bodies and minds. We accept reality, we look our truth in the eyes and we are NOT afraid.
Zupay
** On Terrorism and Indiscriminate Violence
“We are not looking out for humans (that enormous contorted mass of alienated beings swarming everywhere), we are looking out for Wild Nature and reason has pushed us to radical action. Let it be very clear, our hand will not tremble when attacking with all means at our disposal that imposed reality as well as those who defend and sustain it.”
In recent times there has been a debate concerning the use of violence, especially types of violence such as indiscriminate and selective attack against human targets, and the practice of terrorism.
And it seems that in anarchist circles there is a tremendous aversion to all that is not inoffensive sabotage.
Using the excuse of their being easily replicated, they limit themselves to these sorts of attacks. That is why we read over and over again communiques claiming responsibility for actions filled with lots of words declaring war and fire to the prisons, cities, police stations, ministries, and palaces... clamoring for the blood of judges, kings, popes, ministers, and capitalists only to finally, at the end, claim responsibility for throwing paint on the front of a building, tagging graffiti, posting a sign, sealing a lock with silicone, or slashing some tires...
There are some groups that go a bit beyond this, placing incendiary devices or explosives that have caused moderate to serious material damages, but again they limit themselves to that, while their guilty targets remain unaffected physically and legally. Also, in the last few years the laws have been changing, especially concerning terrorism. Governments aren’t stupid and they know that with societal dissatisfaction comes the emergence of groups or individuals that radicalize and begin doing their thing, so they end up cracking down in order to make an example of those who refuse to play by the rules of the game.
In the past, authorities may not have given much importance to, for example, a “low level” incendiary attack, but today they take it as a serious threat, searching for traces of DNA or other evidence to catch the perpetrators, and if they catch them, harsher laws dictate charges of terrorism and longer stays in prison. That is why we have examples of groups or individuals who, without having killed anyone, are serving sentences of hundreds of years for incendiary sabotage or explosive attacks against material targets. Stated in another manner, if you’re going to play the game, cause as much damage as you can, including against those responsible for our misery.
Aside from that, respect for the sacredness of life seems to be taken out of the most rancid Christianity. We do not respect the lives of our enemies, we do not respect the life of the judge, the politician, those who pretend to be the lords of our existence. And neither do we respect the life of the slave who accepts their lashings with pleasure, or of the honorable citizen who accepts actively all that is just as it is. We also think that the value of life is over-inflated (if you could even call it “life”). Really it is reduced to a succession of predictable situations and monotonous and routine acts, a grey existence devoid of emotion and contact with nature; a cowardly and artificial existence that could be summarized as a life with one’s head down, waiting to die without having really ever lived.
Of course there are different levels of responsibility in all of this: a person of higher position is not the same as their lackey employee. But the fact is that all of them form part of the same machine and make it function, and for that reason they are all valid targets. There is no collateral damage in this war because everyone, even us, is responsible for this current order and so civilization continues on. That is why we support indiscriminate or selective attack against human targets.
When an attack is carried out, one cannot do it halfway. At the moment that we decide to hit a target, it is not important to us that people who have nothing to do with the target are in between us and it. If we want to strike at a target, we do it regardless of what happens. If we wanted to bomb an office of some company or a government building, it doesn’t matter to us if the explosion kills or maims workers, employees, the actual people responsible, or anyone else in, or passing by, the target building.The important thing is that the target has been successfully hit. There will be no warning calls, no one is innocent, and we are carrying out our attack regardless of any other considerations. That is why we speak of terrorism without any qualifications, while leftists and most anarchists are ashamed of that term. They reject it as “diabolical,” but we embrace the term proudly and make it our own. For we really want to realize in live practice the purest meaning of the term. That is to say, we want to spread demoralizing panic and chaotic terror through brutal acts of savagery. Also, we refuse to leave to our enemies the exclusive right to use these or any other methods. If the civilized order uses terrorism and violence to perpetuate itself, we will fight them with terrorism and violence as well.
Society is scandalized if a policeman is shot dead by a criminal, or if a bank or other structure is bombed (even if no one was hurt), or if one vandalizes some private or public property. And they rejoice when the demonized criminals, the terrorists and vandals, are caught and sentenced to rot away in prison, or simply mowed down by the “heroic” officers of law and order, or tortured or beaten in a cell of some dirty police station. Members of this society don’t hesitate to snitch against their own neighbors; some even try to play the hero and foil a crime. This society has no mercy on us and they only wish us ill. And we are the ones who have to be merciful?
Society is indifferent, or better stated, it is an accomplice when their governments send their soldiers to bomb and kill indiscriminately in some faraway country to plunder its resources using lying excuses that no one believes (overthrowing tyranny to bring democracy, war against terrorism, etc.) Society is indifferent or an accomplice when all that is wild and natural is destroyed in the name of industrial progress and technological civilization. What does this society care about the destruction of the Earth, the poisoning of the water and air, and the artificialization of life as long as they have gas for their fucking cars, the shop windows are full of shit to consume, and they can avoid this miserable gray reality looking at Facebook on their new Smartphone or drugging themselves by watching the newest reality show to entertain their atrophied minds. The destruction of life and wild nature on this planet has reached the point of no return. Plants and animals are massacred daily, domestication and artificialization of all and every aspect of life. What does it matter that half the world is dying of hunger or thousands waste their lives in shitty jobs to benefit a system based on the application of daily violence in all its forms and variations... All of this does not scandalize the good citizenry. All of this is just another news item on the nightly news. Nevertheless they scream to high heaven and it is the top story on all of the media if anyone burns a bus or alters even minimally the status quo. They would even drag through the mud those good-intentioned souls of the church of anarchism.
At this point we would like to highlight again the hypocrisy of many anarchists, including self-proclaimed nihilists, who are scandalized by not only indiscriminate violence, but also any sort of violence whatsoever, especially if it is anything more than material damages even against those who are directly responsible. They admire those historical figures of anarchism (or Russian nihilism) of the late 19th and early 20th century who carried out attacks, robberies, and other barbarities where the bourgeoisie, judges, politicians, snitches, bosses, exploiters, enemies in general were killed, but also many people who just happened to be in the way at the time. Without even having to go that far back, many anarchists admire and even hold up as an example those armed groups and guerrillas of the 1970s-1990s who in the majority of cases were of leftist or communist persuasion, and had values far from those of anti-authoritarians. These include the RAF of Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, ETA in Spain, and many similar groups in Europe or the Americas, as well as the Palestinian guerrillas. Armed groups often have a lot of deaths of innocent civilians to their credit. But even today the armed Kurds and Turkish left, who are held up as examples to be followed by many anarchists today, have carried out selective and indiscriminate attacks, where soldiers and police have fallen but so have those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All of this is justified and noble, however, because it takes place within their ideological framework while the attacks carried out by individualist nihilists or eco-extremists are severely criticized. This is due to the fact that any attack, group, position, or action of any type that falls outside of their atrophied logic is the object of criticism, accusations, defamations, and predictable insults that anarchos resort to when they encounter people who don’t play by their rules. The accusations are boilerplate: it’s psyops carried out by the State, or a product of paramilitary elements, agent provocateurs, fascists, authoritarians, psychopaths... What is all this other than hypocrisy?
In the course of history the majority of atrocities and tyrannies have been carried out in the name of civilization, the State, law and order, God and country, or of an ideology that in its epoch received the acceptance of the greater part of the social body. But when an individual guided by his egoist desire or one idea or another decides to arm himself and attack (robberies, attacks, sabotage, uprisings...), the vast majority of society is scandalized and cries out for order to be imposed again by severe measures.
By stating all of this we don’t want to make ourselves out to be the “good guys” against the other side who are the “bad guys.” We are only citing examples of the lies and hypocrisy of society, which has determined that a particular act is a crime or is “justice” based on who commits it and their motives (and this is the same hypocrisy that is shared by many anarchists who determine which attacks are carried out by “revolutionaries” and which ones are just the actions of a crazy person out for blood.) We reject this Christian concept of looking out for the well-being of one’s neighbor, that is, people who we don’t know and who, if they found out what we were up to, would cry out for us to be locked up or worse.
What consideration should we give to society when society gives us no consideration whatsoever?
We owe it nothing. Let us also remember that society, the masses, the citizen, from the humblest to the most wealthy, are directly responsible for the contemporary state of things through their servile obedience, even if they only go along with it due to fear, comfort, or conformity. The status quo is not maintained by magic, it is maintained by most people accepting and reproducing it through their civic and political assent, defined roles, and attitudes. Disgusting civic morality characteristic of the domesticated modern human is the first barrier and one of the principle sustaining factors that maintains the civilized order. Police, armies, and bosses are not needed when the slave is their own jailer. Thus, no one is free from guilt and we won’t have any regrets if “civilians” are hurt in our attacks.
If we said that no one is innocent, that’s not to say that everyone has the same amount of responsibility and plays the same role. Obviously there are people with important positions; their elections or the functions they carry out are priorities, but if in attacks on these people or any other human or material target there is some collateral damage, we won’t shed a single tear over it. Nor will we show any signs of remorse. The same is the case if other groups decide that is it is a priority to attack society, that “swarm of alienated beings,” indiscriminately. These are the conforming masses, and whatever happens, the war continues.
“In the War against Civilization and Progress, there is no such things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attacks, because this war is extremist and indiscriminate, or it’s no war at all.”
Fiera
** For a Metropolis against Itself
The time has come, the time has come
The vengeance is here and it won’t end
The shaman sung the icaros
The river rose and took everything
A gringo fell to the waters
A boa swallowed him and then spit him out
The rebellion of all animals
Every spirit, every being, every god
Got together to end the evils
Of humans and their occidental methods
Petroleum pollution
Has the jungle sick with hate
You can’t hunt, you can’t drink water
But you can dance like in the ancient times!
Anarkia Tropikal, “La Tierra Kontrataka”
Cities are a virus. No one really knows how they started, but from one moment to the next we transitioned from living in a constant equilibrium without a notion of time and progress, to living only by and for the virus, expanding and reproducing it until there are no more resources left or until we leave the empty shell of this planet to carry the virus to other worlds. If there is a true physical manifestation of civilization, cities are it. They are Leviathan made asphalt. They are as much part of us as we are part of them, and we carry them with us no matter how deep we enter in wild territory. Like it or not, they are our eco-system.
Nevertheless, we are also a part of Leviathan. We are Leviathan at war against itself. We can’t forget that civilization is not an homogenous mass and that the concepts, for example, of Humanity and Society are as ridiculous as the concept of Global Revolution. As much as Mark Zuckerberg would disagree, my Third-World neighborhood has nothing in common with a German suburb, and an eco-extremist has nothing in common with a petroleum sheikh. And I wonder, if we can be at war against our context, what other allies could we find in our situation?
If we look at the tools that in other times have helped win battles against the colonizing advance of civilization, I can think of two answers (although more are always welcomed): The territory and the gods.
The territory may seem the most obvious one, from the Mapuche resistance to the Pirate Golden Age, passing through every guerrilla of recent history, the best weapon in asymmetric struggles has been the knowledge and use of space against the enemy.
That’s why cartography has always been an instrument of the settler. But we don’t live in virgin forests and unknown seas anymore. Cartography and surveillance won, and we now live in streets completely mapped and patrolled, accepting voluntarily the tracking of our every movement. We need to develop a new way of moving through cities, accept them as our eco-system, and remember that the map is not the territory. We need to create a Metropolis against itself.
The gods, on the other hand, may seem like a more counterintuitive answer. Weren’t they killed by Humanism and buried below a thousand layers of concrete? Weren’t their altars destroyed and replaced by crosses, churches, and martyrs? I think the question we need to ask instead is, how can they be gone if we are still here? The gods have always been as important as territory in this war, because they are two sides of the same coin. If I wanted to win a battle in this river, I would call the god of this river to help me. Our mistake is to believe that since the river is gone, since there are no more forests, there are no more gods.
Gods change with us. We may have forgotten their names, they may have hidden under bridges and in tunnels, but they are still here. To find them we don’t have to go looking for them in fenced parks or in pine forests or in artificial lakes, we just need to give a name to the gods of lead, gasoline, and smoke that surround us and keep us company in this war. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to sit and listen to that prophet dressed up in supermarket bags, or to follow stray dogs to their shrines. No one hates cops more than stray dogs do.
If we are going to fight this war, we need to learn to coexist with the Metropolis and to use every tool at our disposal. This essay wasn’t meant to deliver answers, but to raise questions. Each one will know how to answer them differently depending on their situation.
To all the friends who I don’t know yet,
and to all the enemies who aren’t expecting me...
I’m coming!
Eleuterio Pinto Paredes
** Out of the Self: A Sermon for the Dead
“There was earth inside them, and they dug.” “Isn’t it rather a pity that the void has no ears?”
Paul Celan
“Isn’t it rather a pity that the void has no ears?”
Pierre Klossowski
In the midst of a primeval forest there lies a vile and dark swamp. An ancient tree rises up from the putrid depths, its crown burnt by lightning. The tree does not speak, it is motionless, opaque. But its destiny is to liberate humanity from the curse of guilt. In the shape of this grotesque and mutilated tree, a presence can be perceived. Arms without a head. From it, a force emanates like a miasma. A force that attacks reason, that places one in opposition to others. In the force conjured by this tree is the experience of the presence of death. And through this confrontation, the veil is parted. Who will stand before the tree and bend the neck? And more importantly, who will wield the knife? To accept within the self the ultimate perversion, the ultimate crime, is the path to join the totality of creation. To unleash destruction upon the world as it exists, in full awareness and consciousness, is to gaze into the future of the world to be.
“It is splendid as the lion in the instant he striketh down his victim. It is beautiful as a day of spring. It is the great Pan himself and also the small one. It is Priapos.”
For Georges Bataille, Lord of Shit, Lord of the Slaughterhouse, the sacrifice becomes the foundation of the myth that will ensure survival in a world of war. The confrontation with the presence of death. The sacred and the profane are one in the same, as are death and eros. Duality exists, though it is an illusion. The “accursed share,” the part that represents holiness, death, silence, and expenditure, is denied by techno-industrial society. Only a vile accumulation remains. It chokes the sun. Excess is the path to liberation. It is a path that follows the bloody road of the war cults, sexual perversion, and sacrifice. It is the path of dynamism and force, movement and expansion: “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.” An explosion of cosmic forces. A rupture, through which the yawning void can be perceived and its power flows forth. The influence of accumulation is static, inert, bloodless. The movement of excess expenditure is ecstatic riot. To stand apart from oneself. Rituals of triumphant waste, destruction, and “euphoric social dissolution.” The festival, the potlatch, creates a liminal space, in which society collapses in upon itself. The rejection of economic use and productivity is asserted in games and the spectacle. Let us declare the reign of the unproductive, of immoderation, of the excessive, of the perverse!
“It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.”
Bataille once wrote: “Our existence is the condemnation of all that is recognized today. What we are undertaking is a war. It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light.” Drum beats sound in the depths of the forest. In the homogeneity produced by techno-industrial society, action is only validated by its accumulative effects. All is subjugated. And to what? To a monstrous banality. In the confrontation with living death, we tear open the fabric of the world and become defiantly alive. We become utterly incommensurate, we become “a force or a shock that presents itself as a charge.” We embody excess, delirium, and barbarous war. We become fecal, beings of pure erotic power. We enter the realm of the bloodthirsty mob, the aristocratic warrior, madmen, dreamers, prophets, and poets. We reassert the sacred within the profane. We are those who refuse rule. From its infancy, techno-industrial society is defined by its aversion to filth. The horror of excrement is full of the horror of death. Thus we become denatured, cleansed, purged of our living essence, in a sterile universe. The movement of humankind is from filth to eroticism to death. In its denial of death, techno-industrial society has made the cosmos into an endless, empty sea.
“It is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.”
As Bataille wrote, that “If this world is compared with worlds that have disappeared, it is hideous and seems the most failed of them all.” There was freedom and joy in the long-lost world of brutality. The magic of life has disappeared. It has been buried in the dusty tombs of forgotten history, with bones and trophies. A horde of women with wild hair, closed eyes, and moaning mouths stumbling forward. They are wrapped in lion skins, they wear bull heads, and carry spears hidden in pinecones. Their breasts are bare and they joyously caress their bodies as they dance. They smear saliva on their genitals. Sweat drips from their red burning cheeks and snakes glisten and slither around their hips and thighs. They are pursued by bearded drunken brutes, who are singing and playing flutes and wagging their erect penises. Finally the Liberator comes, riding a chariot pulled by panthers and leopards. His features are dark and Asiatic. His beard is long and curly. Ivy creeps up his arms and legs. His eyes are bright but say nothing. The Roarer, the Goat Killer, The One in the Trees, The Great Uniter, The Hidden One. Dionysus comes to release humanity from its enslavement, enslavement to anxiety, to neurosis, to labor, to technology, to symbols, to power, to profit. He comes to kill the oppressors and free the wild. As he rose from the dead, so too will the spirit of the wild. With a touch from his fennel wand, madness reigns and walls tumble down.
“It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and at midnight.” A gathered crowd drinks the unmixed wine from wide bowls, and shrieks fill the night. Dionysus presides over the riot, looking on silently. Bataille’s words drift through the night, “in those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world of educated vulgarity.” To lose oneself, this is the goal. To break down the walls of the self and enter the flow of the universe. There is a world where this is still possible, out there somewhere among the wastes and barren deserts of techno-industrial society. How much we have lost and how little we have gained in return. There is pleasure in civilization but only mechanized, sterile, disembodied, callous pleasure. Pleasure that dulls the mind and body. Filtered through brutally repressive culture, through technology, and the domination of the symbolic, pleasure vanishes as soon as it dries. “They think to profit from civilization but by that profit have become the most degraded of all beings who have ever existed,” Bataille writes. Profit and accumulation have made humanity into a thing so weak that no animal on earth would ever envy us. The strong limbs of the wild ones cry for exertion, they despise the flaccid, withering weakness of their counterparts, wasting in office chairs and commuter trains, slowly decaying as they labor their lives away in servitude. Their profits don’t give them strength, happiness, or freedom. They cannot feel, they cannot experience ecstasy; they can only analyze and assess.
“It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness.”
The revelers continue to drink and dance, mixing the blood of bulls with their wine until their eyes roll back in their heads and they enter the trance. Following the wheel of death and rebirth, Dionysus goes down into the sunken chambers beneath the earth. Ten times the soul must reenter the world before it is finally released. Older and more powerful by far than Zeus and his Olympian family, is Dionysus. The wild spirit of nature is older and more powerful than god. The wildness in humanity must be free for it will never accept its captivity and the longer it is restrained, the more wrathful it will become.
Bataille writes, “Dionysus has gone down in order to ascend and now the Black One has begun to dance.” The movement beneath and within corresponds to the return to the sky and to the expansion into the cosmos. Like the serpent that burrows into the dirt so it can rise again.
The star wants to descend on:
So as to swim down below, down here
Where it sees itself shimmer in the swell
Of wandering words. (Paul Celan)
Black Kali dances in the sky. Her feet, wet with the blood of her enemies, crush houses and flatten cars like ants. In one black hand she holds a bloody sword. In the other she holds the severed head of Shiva, her husband. She laps at the blood that drips from his pulsing veins with her long tongue and the rest of it pours down her bare breast and into her pubic hair. Drunk on blood, Kali spins and whirls, seeking new enemies to kill. She brings with her, terror, darkness, and chaos. Behind her come a host of thieves, prostitutes, the rotting dead, and the diseased. They rise up from the sea.
“It is the mightiest creature, and in it the creature is afraid of itself.” Kali demands blood and a thousand priests armed with a thousand cutlasses kill a thousand cows with a single cut to the back of the head. Fountains of blood paint the sky red. We knew the price of blood then. Bataille knew the price of blood, “we are deathly beings. Beings unto death. In the act of sacrifice we seek to kill the animal in us.” The revelation of consciousness is achieved through the death of the animal. If we could but perceive the death of our self, then we could alike perceive the portion that comes from the stars. But, tragically, the revelation never occurs. It is always deferred. For the human being dies when its animal nature dies. Thus we can never understand death because we cannot watch ourselves ceasing to be. Kali’s dance has now become so wild that the atoms of the universe themselves are beginning to rupture.
“It is the delight of the earth and the cruelty of the heavens.” For Bataille, the factory was the ultimate symbol of the repugnant world we inhabit: a world that denies death and life.
“When I review my own memories, it seems that for our generation, out of all the world’s various objects glimpsed in early childhood, the most fear-inspiring architectural form was large factory chimneys...I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned in those giant scarecrows the presence of a fearful rage.
A loathsome finger jabbing obscenely at the heavens. Defiant and yet asserting nothing. The pure essence of what is most violent and cruel in the world is represented in the clouds of smoke rising from the factory.”
“Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil. But the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.”
Glaciers the size of continents drift into the sea from the icy poles and titan waves sweep away houses and roads. A giant teak coffin washes up on the shore next to me. I lift off the lid and inside is a dead man wearing a fine suit and top hat. He is taller than any man I have ever seen. His face bears the marks of intense age, not just old but from a different time. His wife, the spirit of the river Liffey, comes forward carrying a wicker basket filled with peat cuttings. She lays down her burden and unfurls a white cloth, which she spreads out on the soggy earth. She places the body of her giant husband in the center of the cloth and surrounds him with silver platters and goblets.
The river woman welcomes a grim procession of shadowy figures who emerge from the sea and circle around the body. As they prepare to begin the feast however, the body disappears. The guests then sit and tell tales of old Finnegan; of his sufferings at the hands of the Pirate Queen of Connacht, of sucking marrowbones in a stockade with one deaf man and one mute and talking of bison and Brian Boru, of surveying the field of ancient battles with his wife. Before long the mourners become uncouth and disorderly. One man accuses another of embellishing his story in an unseemly manner. The storyteller defends himself against such slander and threats come, followed by blows. In the course of the fight a glass of whisky is split and Finnegan’s corpse reappears. The giant leaps to his feet and begins roaring for whisky but his friends gently stuff him back into his coffin and promise him that the world he is in now is the better one. Each one of them raises their glass and they push the coffin back out to sea. Someday he will return: Finn Again.
“The dark gods form the earth-world. They are simple and infinitely diminishing and declining. The devil is the earth-world’s lowest lord, the moon-spirit, satellite of the earth, smaller, colder, and more dead than the earth.”
In her anger and madness Kali hurls the severed head of Shiva into the air and it lands on the ground in front of me in an explosion of blood and brains. I push open his lips with my arms and step into his mouth. The long teeth hang down like stalagmites in a cave. I begin to pound and smash the teeth and tongue and cheeks with my fists. From the inside out I try to destroy the head. Bataille’s voice echoes among the shattered bones, “Human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery.” This is why Bataille called his secret cult of sacrifice acephale, headless: the utter denial and repudiation of the head, the proud declaration of arms, the steel weapon, and the fiery heart. The spirits that haunt the head are worthless and drab. They condemn us to a world of emptiness. If we give ourselves fully to the annihilation of the head and the weak sense of self that emanates therefrom we shall find ourselves again in a jungle-world teeming with life and bloody vitality. But no paradise of peace this, for the wild world is a savage one. Let us be clear, however, that there is no form of wild savagery and cruelty that is not more desirable in all forms than the one we currently inhabit. Bataille writes “The earth, as long as it only engendered cataclysms, trees, and birds was a free universe; the fascination with liberty became dulled when the earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law over the universe.” We need not fear the cataclysm! If anything, all we have to fear is the absence of the world-rending powers!
The earth will do what it will, for all our laws and commandments. Our reason cannot restrain the earth; it can only suppress our own happiness and freedom. “Let us escape.” Bataille says, “Let us escape from our heads like the condemned man from his prison.” Where there is freedom, existence is still a joyful game.
“Eros flameth up and dieth. But the tree of life groweth with slow and constant increase through unmeasured time.”
I look up and where Kali stood, I now see a headless giant. His essence is both pure and profane. Where is his nagging, skeptical head? In his crotch, of course. But it’s a death’s head, a shining skull. His arms are spread wide over the world. In one hand he wields a stunning weapon of steel. In the other hand burns the blazing heart of Dionysus. His chest is tattooed with endless stars. His stomach is the endless labyrinth where we lose ourselves over and over again. Not man, not god but a monstrous spirit.
The steel weapon obliterates the world.
A dog barks. It’s late at night and I am standing with Bataille in a drafty house by the sea. The painter Andre Masson is in the kitchen drinking wine and humming along to a recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. We all sit down together around the table and imagine our own deaths. We sit for some time with our eyes staring off into the void. Bataille finally breaks the silence, “the lot and the infinite tumult of human life are not open to those who exist like poked-out eyes, but to those who are like clairvoyants, carried away by an upsetting dream that does not belong to them.” We dream the dreams of the other. My dreams are not my own. They belong to the soul of the world.
Masson’s little house is filled with his paintings. Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, getting fucked by a bull, wriggling and writhing in joy and agony. Endless labyrinths. Bull skulls. I enter the labyrinth through the door in the hand. I follow the stairs up the forearm. The skin of the walls is hard and white like cracked marble. Far below me, a giant pillar supports one leg at the knee. The other rests upon a swan. The Minotaur’s head above me has one eye and one horn. I crawl down into the chest and guts and find a flaming leaf.
“Now the dead howled and raged, for they were unperfected.” Pasiphae’s husband, the greedy king Minos, cared for nothing but wealth and neglected his wife’s hungry bed. In his absence, she grew itchy with desire and contrived to lay down with the holy bull. Ovid describes Pasiphae as a comic figure, dressing up in an elaborate cow costume, prancing in the field, and batting her bovine eyes flirtatiously at the object of her affection. But Pasiphae’s lust is darker and more profound. It represents the fierce need for humanity to acknowledge its primordial wildness. She named her monstrous son Asterion “The Ruler of the Stars.” But Minos, possessed by a civilized demon of greed and repression, couldn’t stand to see him. He had his servant, the slavish mathematician Daedalus, build an endless prison to contain the living, breathing proof that we are proud, beautiful, earthly, animal beings. And in that sunless prison, despised Asterion became wrathful and horrible. He howled and beat on the stone walls with bones and demanded bloody sacrifices until the bland, beardless Attic hero Theseus came and slit his throat with his thin blade.
How like the puritanical Greeks to imprison the spirit of the wild in a maze of reason. They worshipped at the altar of the intellect and hated the ecstasy of freedom and spontaneous experience. When Dionysus came to them from the unknown forests of the East, they crucified him because they feared the truth: that he came to tear down the hollow, dishonest edifice of humanity that they had constructed.
The spirit of the wild is the power of the earth that burns inside of us as it does in the fibers of every living thing, it cannot be 164
denied, shut away, or repressed until the earth itself turns black and burns away into nothingness and here at the end of the world, like in every age before us, it will fight to be free.
See how things all come alive—
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow. (Paul Celan)
Abraxas
** Eco-extremism and the Woman part 1
*** Introduction
This article, which will be divided into two parts, discusses a topic that has not been given much importance within the tendency, at least publicly. We speak of the relationship between eco-extremism and women.
Women, just like men who lived in groups before technoindustrial civilization, had a particular role to play in primitive tribes. They had a unique way to relate with their environment. Today in modernity, women also play a very important role within the war that we are waging. It may not be the same as before, but we continue to be immersed in our environment in which we develop in unique ways. This article discusses views of what it means to be a female eco-extremist in this environment, and also incorporates a talk among those in complicity on this topic, which will form the second part, and perhaps another surprise.
Hello eco-extremist woman.
There are many things that I would like to tell you, some even “prohibited.” Not having a person of affinity physically near me sometimes feels suffocating and sometimes I feel that I could blow at any minute. Still I remain firm as a fierce she-wolf who looks like another white sheep in the mass of the disgusting flock.
I’ll say a little about myself. Years ago I denied my gender. Like a good anarchist I rejected the concept and I considered myself to be “asexual” or “queer.” Today I regret that past but I have recognized it as part of a cycle, an integral part of what I once was that has led to what I am today.
Those feminist positions remain in the past since I realized that nature made me a woman, and proudly so, not due to a question of gender but for a much greater and stronger question, one which I don’t have to force myself much to comprehend. You know, humans are always looking for a way to find a theory of everything; any science is occupied with that. They feel that they have a “reasonable” explanation for everything, but they really know nothing. They only know weak anthropomorphic concepts that are only convincing to humans.
That is why I don’t focus on understanding “why” I am a woman. I simply came into the world this way and even though reality is much harsher for us on some occasions, this serves to harden our character and to grow as warriors.
As you will know, at this time feminism is a compelling fashion, and even though it is hard for me to accept it, if this fashion had come into being when I still had those ideas some years ago, I would have accepted the label and would now be condemning “macho” men and denouncing instances of sexual harassment that never happened. But luckily, this feminism came too late for me, as I have escaped this trap of the system some moons ago.
The Western view is for one to look upon oneself as a woman as a victim of everyone and everything. It forces you to focus on dumb struggles that only distract from the true problem: Civilization. The system benefits when we look for the guilty amongst ourselves, and when we turn our anger on men, immigrants, the justice system, the state, the speciesists, etc. Thus, going along with all of the ephemeral struggles makes us part of the herd, but of a black herd: the supposedly “rebel” one, which one realizes is not even the case.
I have not wanted to remain thus. I have accepted my existence as a woman, and I have declared war without quarter on civilization, and not on a model of a system of domination called patriarchy. The eco-extremism that I defend is not focused on gender. I have wounded both men and women equally, since this war is against civilization as a whole. Though the gender of the target is not important, at the same time I realize that as an individualist my condition as a woman is in what I have done. Maybe I don’t recognize it publicly for strategic reasons, but I do with those in affinity.
I have cured the wounds of my man with herbs that I have collected. I have wept because of his absence and have received him back with an open heart after an attack. I have counted the money he robbed from banks and have held his hand fleeing from arsons that we committed. I have hid the gun with which he has murdered people from police since this foolish system dictates that a woman can’t murder, or that she can’t kill with a bomb, for example. I go along with my feminine characteristics since nature made me this way. I am an individual but I realize at the same time that my male companion completes me, and in that I find neither subjugation nor a relationship of power as the politically-correct modern commentators would put it. These people disgust me. I see us just as if we were a lemur couple: together, playful, united, and wild.
In the culture of my ancestors, the woman was the wise one, even wiser than the shaman. She was the one who guarded the fire of war, and only when the situation was favorable did she give the fire to the warriors so that they might go and take the lives of their enemies. The woman is the one who guards the word and the wisdom of the spirits. Some ask if there exists in reality a space where furious action of the feminine spirits can be unleashed. That space is within us, female eco-extremists, in our words and our acts, by ourselves or with our clan. I, as I have stated to you before, have guarded these jealously for the next strike, but as to whether our place is in the savage attack of our female ancestors, of this there is 168
no doubt.
Without anything further, eco-extremist woman, I bid farewell, intoning the chants of the moon, with one hand full of medicinal plants and the other holding a knife that will go into the jugular of the enemy.
Meztli
Full moon of April 2017 Chikomoztoc
*** Eco-extremist women speak
Do you think that it is more difficult for a woman to adopt the eco-extremist tendency than it is for a man?
Yoloxochitl: I believe it is relative. The attraction of the Tendency is many times the product of the life that you have led, the conditions in which you find yourself, and the situations that you face daily. This is evident through the number of individualists who have been positioning themselves in our favor recently. An individualist in Europe can be attracted to eco-extremism through the same hatred of civilization that could be felt in the Americas or on another continent. The experience is the same in both the man and the woman. The hatred of this artificial reality is a shared one. This transcends borders, languages, cultures, and also genders.
More: What a coincidence as this is a theme that I was talking about with other sisters in the Tendency not too long ago. And my answer is this: yes and no. Sometimes it is difficult for a woman to adopt eco-extremism due to the fact that, as we are in the era of suffocating and diseased feminism, many women are attracted to progressivist trash. Especially within “radical” circles, either anarchist or communist, feminism is the order of the day, it’s the “in” thing. Eco-extremism is seen as a psychopathic position, at least in Mexico, and to be honest, who would dare to be against all that has been established in the present time? Who dares to launch a criticism against all and act accordingly? Very few, and I am not saying that women should be attracted to eco-extremism as opposed to feminism. Of course not, but I am only saying that our present situation makes the existence of more people with affinity to our Tendency difficult. Most cannot reject the values that the vast majority of people defend. It’s difficult, but we are here. We don’t need to be many, we just need to be dangerous, that’s it.
Do you believe that eco-extremism is something that one lives differently as a woman as opposed to a man?
Yoloxochitl: In some aspects I believe this is the case. For example, in the question of using traditional medicine, we are those who carry the baton since, from ancestral times, women have been the ones who have preserved with pride the knowledge of the arts of healing of the Earth. Certainly spirituality is more powerful in us women than in many eco-extremist men. Here I am mentioning a relative and not absolute superiority based on my own individual experience as an eco-extremist woman.
But of course I don’t doubt that somewhere there is an ecoextremist man who has knowledge of ancient medicine and that his powers and spiritual practices are of an advance level due to, perhaps, a closeness to native roots.
More: Yes, we women know how to cure with plants and the men don’t, haha! I’m joking, but in all seriousness, one does live ecoextremism as a woman, that’s for sure. Women and men are different, we have never been equal, so living our eco-extremism is always different. On this, we can turn the whole victimization of women that people obsess over today to our favor. Perhaps it’s a bit harder for a male eco-extremist to go unnoticed when carrying out an attack against a target. But a “poor and helpless woman”? In many cases, this perception of the woman as the “weaker sex” can be a double-edged sword.
What do eco-extremists think of gender? Is it a question of nature or nurture? Yoloxochitl: It’s a natural question that civilization has made into a social, political, economic etc. question. Gender exists among various species to propagate those species, and this is also the case with human beings. But in the last case that natural inclination has been perverted and it has been weighed down by all of those excess humans swarming all over the place. Nature is so wise that she has made it so that a life can grow within a woman. If you think about it, it’s a magical thing, from the fertilizing of the egg to the birth of a child, it is a process involving numerous glands, hormones, enzymes, etc. This is what the Unknowable has gifted us, only the modern human doesn’t know how to appreciate this. There are women who give birth one after the other, up to five or eight kids, stupidly just like that. They are only good for spreading their legs and aren’t even responsible for the consequences. This situation makes my misanthropic hate grow by the day. I value my condition of being a woman, but I hate women who are trapped in the vicious cycle of human suffering.
More: Gender for me is a question of nature. We were born women for a reason and I thank Nature for that. I have never denied my condition of being a woman, and I am proud of it. I love being a woman, my sensual femininity, the cycles I share with the moon, my physical characteristics, and the like.
Society has taken it upon itself to make gender seem like it is something obsolete. They say that we are all the same; their mouths are filled with useless diatribes about the equality of genders. This makes me laugh because they do this only when convenient. They bark about equality of genders when a man is beaten, but when the man fights back, they say it’s machismo, misogyny, and other things of that sort. Who gets this stuff? They wanted equality, didn’t they? Many women don’t realize that this is precisely what the system wants: to make all equal so that everyone can serve the same system and perpetuate it, regardless of gender, race, economic condition, language, etc.
What do you think of patriarchy?
Yoloxochitl: It is a just another system of domination that we have to deal with. It’s been inserted in our head that Western society is completely based on patriarchy, but it also has some aspects of matriarchy involved as well. They don’t tell us that so as to not scandalize the masses of stupid women who scream that such-and-such-a-thing is a product of patriarchy every time something “oppresses” them.
More: It’s an excuse for the feminists to continue their sorry campaign regarding the whole gender issue. They just seek to play the bigger victim and continue their social campaign to include women even more in the system they claim to hate and are perpetuating by their efforts.
Even though eco-extremists don’t deny our condition as man or woman, what do you think of the characteristics that the market and media has given both genders? For example, de-sensitizing men at early stages of emotional development, or the forced submission imposed on girls, relegating them to a secondary role in the service of men and placing their own desires and motivations second, the dependence of women on the man for important things, the overvaluing of sex for the man, leading him to live with a constant obsession for it, and linking his access to sex with social recognition, etc. (This is what came into my head but obviously more could be said. If anything else pops in your head you can mention it as well.) Do you think it is important to separate yourself from these characteristics?
Yoloxochitl: In terms of women, I think that the culture of the market has very much influenced them. This all comes from a series of Western cultural factors that has made men and women forget that they coexisted fully at a certain point in human history. Now of course this has been forgotten. Historical amnesia is contagious, and it is necessary to see the past to find ourselves, to rescue our roots and intelligently not reproduce the same values that have been repeating themselves for generations. It is clear that the market and the media have harmed our essence so that it now takes some work to find it again. But as I have said, we have to separate ourselves from Western moralistic and humanistic conceptions so that we can have another perspective.
More: Not only is it important to separate oneself from the characteristics previously mentioned, but it is a necessity made into a desire of the inhumanists. I am very much aware of all that you have stated, all insensibility found in men as well as women is generated by the media, the education imposed on us from when we were girls, the shit exchanged for gold in this era of artificial complacency. Before all of this, I know it is necessary to be complicit with individualist men and women, and to harden oneself against any humanist moral or civilizing indecision contaminating the air of this necropolis. Refinding your “I” is one of the most important tasks that we have, and completing it should be our priority.
What do you think of the fact that people use the feminine as an insult, as in when they say that this man was weak like a woman, or he fought like a woman when stating that he didn’t know how to fight?
Yoloxochitl: I think that those insults are old. Today I hear more frequently people saying that weakness or cowardice is more related to being homosexual, with gays being the object of ridicule and not women. Either way, civilization has made modern women weak, they have been seen as a symbol of inferiority for so long, but before, I remember my grandparents talking among themselves about how women in their time were considered more resistant to certain aspects of the hard life, such as work in the field or tolerating birth pangs, for example.
As I said, today I see that when someone doesn’t know how to fight (for example) more often than not they are dropping the word “faggot” or “fairy,” and no longer make references to women, though I am sure the people who use “woman” as an insult still exist. I think that it is part of civilized culture, and I am not scandalized in the least by it. If at some point someone tells me that to my face, maybe I’ll let it slide or maybe I’ll rearrange their face, it depends on how I feel at the moment.
More: Those insults make me laugh, and, you know, this is a very complex topic, because not only does this involve “macho insults” or whatever someone interprets as a macho insult due to an inferiority complex, but also touches on themes of inferiority.
Let’s consider some examples, say, the survival of Inuit nomads (often misnamed Eskimos). Their way of life is based on hunting and fishing, so that the men provide the greater part of the food needed for the subsistence of a small tribal group. Not having a variety of flora in the North Pole, women had the role of raising the children and on occasion they could collect moss and various small plants. But in this, where is the weakness? Is the Inuit woman weak for taking care of the children and collecting a small quantity of plants while the man was off hunting sea lions and waiting for hours to trap a seal or large fish on his hook? I don’t think this is the case. Each Inuit person, man or woman, had their part to play in their way of life, one could not exist without the other. They are part of a beautiful symbiosis, where one finds real support in the other.
Another example could be found in the bands of Bushmen. As with the Inuits, the men are charged with the hunting of gazelles, birds, rabbits, etc. in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, while women take care of the children, and, when the hunt is scarce, they collect berries, plants, fruits, seeds; dig for tubers; etc. They say that at that time of year, men practically live off whatever the women collect without moving a finger. Here the modern human would accuse the men of being freeloaders, but that’s not the case. As I said, there is a part of the year when the animals are scarce since they have migrated or they’re dying due to thirst, and the men can do nothing about it. Going out and trying their luck in the dry season would only leave them hungrier and more exhausted. Thus the women provide for them until the time comes when conditions are better to go out and hunt. Should the men among those groups be considered weak because they let the women feed them instead of going out and getting their own food during the dry season? No, among the Bushmen the men and women complement each other, one is for the other and that’s it.
And, well, in the modern era that would vary quite a bit. Obviously we are not in the same situation, and I think along with Yoloxochitl that the modern woman considers herself to be the weaker sex and is always playing the victim before the dominant male.
What are the primitive and ancestral features that you associate the most with your femininity?
Yoloxochitl: Menstruation, the “sixth sense” (if you can call it that), wise sayings, the knowledge associated with the art of curing with plants, the capacity to perpetuate oneself not only in the species, but as a “being apart,” the maternal protection of the affinity group, the serenity to see things from an objective perspective, being able to wear your heart on your sleeve, etc.
More: The female body being in sync with the cycles of the moon. It still is impressive to me how the moon has a marked influence on women and they don’t even notice. For me, this is a point that one has to emphasize, the intimate relationship between women and nature. There are others things I could mention but these are the most important.
Are there any ancient female warrior role models that you know of and you look up to?
Yoloxochitl: There are many examples of women who left inspiring stories in our ancestral paths, and I always keep these foremost in mind. Some have names, but others don’t. Personally I like to remember those who history has forgotten, those who are only mentioned in passing. I could mention many here, but I always like to remember the women who were part of the Mixton War in northern Mexico in the 16th century. As many know, when the Spanish troops had the Teochichimeca warriors surrounded on Mixton Hill and Nochistlan Rock, their hopes for victory were non-existent and that’s when the Teochichimecas decided to realize “until your death or mine:” fighting to the death against the invader. When all of the male warriors had been killed, that is when the women along with their children threw themselves as human projectiles against the Spanish who were climbing up the steep hill. Thus they showed that they were not willing to submit to domination by the foreigners and they preferred to die instead. That’s the type of woman I remember, the ones who in their last moments gave their lives to be able to maintain their true essence.
More: Women like Tuira Kayapo, who violently opposed the arrival of petroleum exploration in the Amazon and even struck the representative of Petrobras with a machete during one of his meetings with the Kayapo tribe.
The elder Kiepja, wise woman, the last Selknam descendant who nurtured the ancestral imagination with her stories and tales, and who filled the air of the huts of the most important tribes of the southern continent with pagan lore.
Maria Sabina, native healer of Mexico, expert in the use of powerful plants. The only thing that angers me about this one is that her teachings were used by the idiotic youth in search of “trips” in the alternative drug counterculture of the 1960s.
** A Note on Reproduction from the Eco-Extremist Perspective
There is no doubt that we are living in a very difficult situation, going through a process of mass extinction that the planet has not seen in a long time. The progress of civilization is destroying the few wild places that we have left, while increasing the domestication in the minds of modern humans. Still, we remain like caged animals, sick from domestication. We still maintain deep within ourselves the primitive core of our being, and a few of us bind ourselves to it with all of our strength.
I have heard more than once the now-cliched line: “Who would want to bring another person into the world?” My response for a long time was, “Not me, never.” But I have begun to have my doubts on this issue. At first glance, it seems illogical that people who consider themselves to be enemies of the civilized reality--and of humanity itself--would consider the possibility of reproducing themselves. We see ourselves surrounded by millions of people all the time, their faces make me both sick and angry. I am one who would prefer that my species go extinct. But you know what? I can’t do anything about that, none of my actions will significantly influence the fact that masses of humanoids swarm the Earth. In fact, we can’t change things no matter what we do; we don’t really matter at all.
It is for this reason that I discard any external motivation to do anything, and I can only base things on my own desires and will. These are my only guides on the rough sea of life. Yes, of course, the majority of my desires are conditioned. They aren’t really what I want, many things that I experience in daily life are forced upon me and I know this quite well. Thus I look beyond the cities of concrete and metal toward the remaining wild spaces: how the animals there run free. The lessons that I most value are found there, since I know I am made of the same material as they. At the end of the day, I am no better than a bush or a cricket.
Modern humans like to think that they aren’t merely stupid animals. This is especially the case with anarchists. They would like to think that their interests and motivations are more complex, more difficult to understand, but that explanation is only believable in their domesticated heads. In the physical realm, we aren’t anything more than confused monkeys who want to deny everything, even our true instincts. They will rationally decide not to reproduce themselves, because they do not want to bring another being into the world. But guess what? This is the only world that we have, and these “defective” organisms are the only ones that exist. There will not be another world, at least not one that we will ever see. Your personal decisions won’t affect anyone but yourself.
It’s the same with leftists and anarchists when they say things like, “Wait, it’s not time to wage the armed struggle or commit violent attacks. The conditions aren’t right yet.” What “conditions” are you talking about? I only want to satisfy my darkest and most primitive desires, those that long for the bloody wounds of disgusting human flesh, that fantasize about the cries and screams of horror of the hyper-civilized. These are the same desires that make me want to reproduce.
Thus, there is no reason at all to justify my longing to have children, at least not one that would satisfy the most complex and modern minds. I only know that I long to do it, to unite myself with my woman and unleash our desires, the most evil and dangerous, as well as the most loving and tender. To unite ourselves for a love without limits, moral or any other type. To procreate and live wherever we like. I think of that child not yet born and I already feel love, a real union, sincere, a caring love that protects and sustains. And if as an adult they would get up the courage to ask why we decided to bring them into the modern world knowing how disgusting it is, I will perhaps respond, “I was only being the animal that I am, and now you have the opportunity to be so as well: the marvellous opportunity to connect yourself to an ineffable force; to do the same before the wild majesty of the world is extinguished completely.”
CW
** Eco-extremist Spiritual Exercises
*** “Et introibo ad altare Dei”
I came from an evangelical family, but I have long ago disposed of the values that it taught me. I became a humanist, and coming to believe again and rejecting atheism was a tremendous blow to the gut. I had to start again with another vision, a very personal and particular one for sure. It took some work, but afterwards I understood that my belief in something more had never left, and really I don’t pray, since I understand praying to be repeating things, and I don’t like doing that since in my upbringing we didn’t say prayers but talked to God. I do this still (in specific moments of course), to welcome solstices, to express gratitude for the coming of a new lunar phase, and especially for a red moon; to be thankful for the cold, the heat, the rain, the air, and fire.
There are rituals that I like to perform. I have skulls of wild and domesticated animals on my altar, where I burn copal. In the Mesoamerican traditions copal represents spiritual cleansing. Four times a year (the Mexica year, not the Gregorian one) I go to sacred places with an offering. These are places sacred to me and not my ancestors--their sacred places are covered with commercial buildings and highways. I come to the four holy places with offerings like river stones, mesquite branches, tallow candles, and coals from the last fire (four things). On my knees I speak to the environment, almost always before a tree, a rock, a river, or a ravine (four things). There I smoke a birch pipe, mixed with salvia, eucalyptus, domesticated mint, and Lacandon tobacco (four things). These are the only times I smoke and it’s not to get high or anything like that. Those herbs don’t make one hallucinate and only serve to assist meditation, as they did for my ancestors.
I have indicated that four is an important number for me, as it is for many cultures. There are four phases of the moon, four seasons of the year, four cardinal directions, and four things over the earth (stars, the sky, the moon, and the sun.) Four things breathe, those that swim, that fly, and those of four legs and two legs. Four are the most important forces in Mexica culture: quetzalcoatl, huitzilopochtli, xipe totec, and tezcatlipoca.
You can make your own prayers, your own disciplines; knowing what you know it will probably not be difficult, as there are probably always herbs, animals, figures, hours, and certain prayers involved. You should pick what is right for you, seek what element of the earth you most identify with; something can grow out of that base.....
There are other “crazier” rituals, like blood offerings of my own blood spilled out on those skulls for protection, or cutting one’s knees so that the blood flows down to the earth as a sign of connection to it as the traditional dancers do over here. They also sometimes puncture their earlobes with maguey thorns until they bleed.
I do “baptisms of fire” to end one cycle and begin another, with what is known as the “new fire,” I make a friction fire with a drill made of two eucalyptus sticks (the drill) and and one of quiote (a large stalk of the flower of the blue maguey plant) as the base. When the sticks get red hot, I say some words and burn my skin. Well, that’s a little extreme, but I believe that pain is inevitable, suffering is only one option. I believe that pain makes us stronger, spiritually and physically, so getting burnt is no big deal, nor is getting a cut or scrape that hurts for some days. I know that my beliefs are marked on my body.
As I said, you can make your own disciplines and be your own guide, knowing that the master is watching and teaching you valuable things every day.
*** “Permiso wacho”
Like you it was an effort to start believing again (but not to believe in that something, more to get out of my head that dumb anarchist habit of atheism). I go to a hill, that’s as far and wild as I tend to go. I don’t carry out more significant rituals right now. I always look for the moon at night; I greet her and ask her to protect my steps. I ask her to give me strength, and really just converse with her, always barefoot with my feet on the earth. I like to feel the cold, I think it’s really necessary. It’s true that the cold can be unbearable, but modern humans can’t stand many things. So I try to bear it and I feel it in my bones; just as I feel the heat in summer, the cold in winter can’t be missed.
I also do the other thing. When I take out a plant or a branch or flower to drink or for another use, I always ask permission. When I take leaves to make lemon verbena tea, I always say in a colloquial manner, “excuse me, buddy” or “excuse me, brother” and then I pull the leaves off. Really, being the civilized person that I am, I try to renounce civilized vices and customs as much as possible. I go into the wild by myself and contemplate the stars. I converse with the insects.
I remember when I was a teenager I prayed every day before going to bed, “Our Father who art... bless my family, give me health... etc” The thing is, it was just going through the motions, and at no point was I sincere and real. It got to the point that even thinking about praying put me off, but I did it because they said that that was how you loved Christ. I always found that very constricting, having to do it out of obligation.
Always before going out into the street and especially before an action, I commend myself to the spirits of the Fuegians, I thank them and I ask them for protection. My intention is to immerse myself in all of this, learn things that the ancients did, to bring them back in our current age.
*** Friday night lights
My epiphanies come at odd and inopportune times. The last one was at a high school football game. My two children wanted to go to a football game, where they consumed snacks and drank soda, and observed their older peers participating in this ritual of suburban life. I often think, “what this place was like before civilization.” It is not hard, as the waters and greenery always seem to be spilling in where they are not wanted by us, the hyper-civilized. I read about the lives of the people who lived here before the Europeans, what they ate and what they made their houses of; about their gods and taboos. It’s hard to imagine and yet so simple. Over the stadium lights, I saw the canopy of pines, and beyond them, perhaps a cypress swamp, and then the rivers, the lake, the seas. And all of the possums, armadillos, deer, foxes, and raccoons crawling in them. If my mind’s eye were sharper, perhaps I would see the ghosts of the cougars, bears, wolves, and bison who also once roamed these woods. I tried to look over civilization to see what is before and beyond it, but my vision did not reach that far. My eyes returned to the game and those blaring lights on a Friday night...
That is the real epiphany: our failure to see, our realization that we are not worthy of seeing what is beyond and above our dark reality. “Worthy” here does not denote moral judgment, but a metaphysical one. We will not see because we can’t, and the reason we can’t inheres to our innermost being. We no longer see the world as we should, the stars can no longer direct us home, the forests do not nurture us, the animals now are only pests. Even if we worked a lifetime, we would not redeem ourselves. We are the product of this order, and we are defeated as long as it continues.
Some would say that we, the freaks and psychopaths of society, should just commit suicide, that we should just leave everyone else in peace to continue with their dreams of a better society or of the continuance of society just as it is. No thank you, as long as you’re here I will not be able to sleep soundly in the grave. Even if my only vocation is to, under my breath, mock your affected enthusiasm and fake smiles, it will be worth it. The realization of my smallness and helplessness before the Unknowable (lo Desconocido, deus ignotus) is enough of a prayer for me, and my hatred of those who think themselves more than this smallness is the only sacrifice I can give.
But what is the Unknowable? Who is he, or she, or it? From my youth, I have sought it, I have longed to take shelter under it, to stay in that moment when it engulfs me, brings me into itself, and unites with me. But when I became a man, finally I learned that you only catch moments of it.You can’t reproduce it, you can’t buy it off. There’s no way to summon it from Heaven or from wherever it dwells and it will come down. I stopped being a materialist because I realized that the One, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and Love exist, but not in any way we can grasp completely, permanently, surely. As soon as we grab for them, they are already slipping through our fingers...
But I have seen the splendor of the Unknowable: in the fingers of flame that is the sky over the pampas, or on a mountain outside of Cordoba in Argentina, in the pitch black dome of the firmament over the Mojave Desert, in the rocks battered by the sea off of Point Lobos, in the chorus of birds high above the swamp. I saw it most lucidly when I held my eldest child for the first time. I realized then that I would never understand it, that whatever makes it what it is is not something for me to comprehend or dominate. I don’t own it, no one does. It is in the very act of being a mortal animal that it strikes us as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans spoken of by theologians. We know we are smaller than it, we cry for it like a nursing child cries for its mother. It may come, or it may not, but it will always leave again, because its fullness would probably break us.
All philosophy, all morality, all law, all art, all literature, all culture, are nothing before it. They are almost a blasphemy against it. We need these blasphemies because we can do no other, but when the Human thinks that it is supreme--that it creates the fruit of the Unknowable’s labor and genius--it is at that point that the Human becomes repugnant, vile, and worthy of attack. I don’t consider myself a nihilist because I reject as in a tantrum all that is good and beautiful in this world (even that which could be discerned to be the “products of civilization”). I am a reluctant nihilist because I believe that those feats of genius, those things that make life beautiful or worth living, are not the product (or at least not the sole product) of the Human. Their order and splendor lie elsewhere; thought, culture, law, morality, etc. can only serve as the vessels of the Unknowable that floats high above them like an elusive source of light.
All the same, on this night, or in the moments when I can look out the window at work early in the morning, the times I bring the water to my face in a lake or river, the quiet few minutes when the mosquitoes buzz in my ear at sunset, then I know that the Unknowable will one day take me too. One day, I will return to the great current that pulses at the heart of everything, and on that day I will be grateful that I will no longer have to fight or be a coward. I will finally hear (without hearing) the Human silenced even if I am silenced as well, and the Still Small Voice of Wild Nature whispering eternally in the branches.
Chicomoztoc—Karukinka —Nanih Waiya
December 2017
[1] [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-eco-extremism][A text dump on eco-extremism]]
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Anonymous. Joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico [Essay]. War On Society. November 10, 2011. [[https://waronsociety.noblogs.org/?p=2530][Original link]]. [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/joint-declaration-of-the-insurrectional-anarchist-and-eco-anarchist-groups-of-mexico][Archived link]].
[6] [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-eco-extremism][A text dump on eco-extremism]]
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Anonymous. Joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico [Essay]. War On Society. November 10, 2011. [[https://waronsociety.noblogs.org/?p=2530][Original link]]. [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/joint-declaration-of-the-insurrectional-anarchist-and-eco-anarchist-groups-of-mexico][Archived link]].
[10] [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-eco-extremism][A text dump on eco-extremism]]
[11] Ibid.
[12] Michael Loadenthal. The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence [Book]. Manchester University Press. 2017. [[http://ebot.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/9817/Loadenthal_gmu_0883E_10805.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y][Original link]]. [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/michael-loadenthal-the-politics-of-attack][Archived link]].
[13] Sean Fleming. The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism [Essay]. Taylor & Francis. May 7, 2021. [[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2021.1921940][Original link]]. [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/sean-fleming-the-unabomber-and-the-origins-of-anti-tech-radicalism][Archived link]].
[14] Psuedo-nihilist serial blogger, collector of doubtful “terror” manuals and writer of complex verbs and words.
[15] Antisocial evolution, “Falcon of Chaos,” “Archie” Archegonos or whatever he’s decided to call himself this week in a ten-thousand word gush of verbal diarrhea.
[16] It is funny how not only leftists but also anarchists of an acute sense of morality have accused ITS and other eco-extremist groups of being agent provocateurs of the Mexican state. The idiocies that come out of the mouths of Saintly Anarchists, lovers of morality and the good, are many.