Monday protest at Mexican Consulate, Starhawk's Sat. Report

The phone number of the Mexican Embassy in Washington DC is (202) 728-1600. Please call!

OUR DEMANDS:
1) Unconditional freedom for all the political detainees
2) Drop all charges
3) No more harassment, torture, beatings or arrests
4) Proper medical treatment for injured detainees
5) Safe passage home for all activists

So let me see if I understand the situation at hand:

Starhawk goes down to Mexico, and gets some kids all worked up with her star power and ideology. She doesn't, however, prepare them for the forseeable consequences of their actions. She then leaves them to the wolves. (Did she indeed have no clue about Mexican authorities? How is her Spanish? What exactly was she there to train them to do? The whole proposition is dubious at best. Not to digress...)

The wolves indeed pounce on the kids and proceed to eat them, and we are now to come to the rescue, with money and organizing, because of the irresponsibility of her self-righteousness? To mitigate the quite forseeable consequences of her misguided actions? To absolve her cluelessness? We might be able to mitigate or end this little nightmare sooner, but we can't undo rapes and fractured skulls. We are also supposed to move on reaction here, and feel bad to boot.

May I humbly suggest it is time for a rethink of strategy, as this does not represent a functional organizing model (if it ever did). Good morning America: Some people have no commons to reclaim. Some have no rights to fall back on. It is the height of imperial arrogance to assume our organizing models fit other people's needs, let alone convince children in those circumstances to follow our organizing paradigms.

Next time, she should bring the Mexican kids here, to teach dumbass yanks how to survive the typical third world prison experience. From recent publicity on US Army tactics, they might not be so far off the mark, nor so far from home.

It's obvious we don't have a clue here. On the other hand, as long as we're not allowed to debate anarchist leadership because the official line is that it doesn't exist, these kinds of tragedies will continue to plague "our" "movement."

Maybe Carlo Guiliani wasn't a hero, maybe he was just another stupid, fucked-up, tragic mistake of shitty anarchist praxis.

People in Mexico -- including young people -- have been demonstrating in a variety of ways over a variety of issues since long before Starhawk was born. They have suffered various forms of repression, including mass murder of students and others in 1968 and 1971. The present generation of Mexican youth activists knows about those experiences.

While Starhawk, along with thousands of others, may have had some influence on some aspects of their thinking, it's absurd to believe that her influence determined if or how they would demonstrate in Guadalajara. Nor was the brutality they have suffered a predictable consequence of their actions. If such repression were the norm in Mexico, a lot more people would have taken up armed guerrilla struggle by now!

This idiot who wants to blame Starhawk for the police violence against our comrades in Mexico also blames Carlo Giuliani's murder on "shitty anarchist praxis" without saying what praxis, other than sitting at one's computer typing nasty put-downs of activists, would avoid such tragedies.

I can see why the fool chose to remain anonymous. That way, after he becomes an object of justified contempt for writing such nonsense, he can just go on to do the same thing again under another non-name.

Denial - not just a river in Egypt.

Aaron says:
> People in Mexico -- including young people -- have been
> demonstrating in a variety of ways over a variety of issues since
> long before Starhawk was born. They have suffered various forms
> of repression, including mass murder of students and others in
> 1968 and 1971. The present generation of Mexican youth activists
> knows about those experiences.

Aaron, it's funny you should mention the bourgeois student uprisings of the late 60s (having nothing to do with events elsewhere??), and not the indigenous-peasant uprisings of the early 90s. Some folks on our side got their asses shot at the height of the former, and the latter happened in the context of death squads and torture as routine policies. So who's got something to teach whom? And that leaves aside all the EZLN fetishism of the US left... nice try at plugging that hole in Aaron's logic, ness. Noticed.

Aaron says:
> While Starhawk, along with thousands of others, may have had
> some influence on some aspects of their thinking, it's absurd to
> believe that her influence determined if or how they would
> demonstrate in Guadalajara. Nor was the brutality they have
> suffered a predictable consequence of their actions. If such
> repression were the norm in Mexico, a lot more people would have
> taken up armed guerrilla struggle by now!

Well, that's a semi-sized hole in the entirety of the logic of revolutionary thinking.... at least in America (and arguably Europe, at least in the west). If current practice is working so well, where is the revolution? Either things are that brutal, and people aren't rising up in what you consider adequately revolutionary activity, or things aren't that brutal and your critique of the system is just hype.

Either way, is the current revolutionary critique of power relations, and the organizing strategies we craft in response to it, functional or not? If not, maybe it's time to look at, among other things, our leadership practices.

Aaron says:
> This idiot who wants to blame Starhawk for the police violence
> against our comrades in Mexico also blames Carlo Giuliani's
> murder on "shitty anarchist praxis" without saying what praxis,
> other than sitting at one's computer typing nasty put-downs of
> activists, would avoid such tragedies.

Oh but I did, Aaron. You chose to willfully ignore it, just like the system does of your critique.

> I can see why the fool chose to remain anonymous. That way,
> after he becomes an object of justified contempt for writing such
> nonsense, he can just go on to do the same thing again under
> another non-name.

Where to start?

First: The anonymous bit is a critique of the medium. I have my reasons to remain anonymous, like so many others around here. I may be an agent or a troll or whatever self-important fantasy you want to believe, in which case, little lost. But what if I know what I'm talking about? Wouldn't we be fools to ignore our own failures? (nessie, can I get an amen?) You don't like it? Get indymedia to change its posting policies, or go make yer own public comment site with any rules you want.

Second: the "blaming Starhawk" bit: well, okay, Aaron, is her leadership effective or not? Next question: may it be critiqued, or is radical leadership to be unaccountable? See, the left wants it both ways: it wants to create change, and is glad to take at least some credit when good things happen. But when fuck-ups happen, just watch them bail on the locals, and leave the innocents holding the bag.

This isn't a problem because we like our leaders, or because I have a bad attitude about it. It's a problem because people get hurt, and then a lot more people avoid us and anything like what we're doing, like the plague we come off as. Is that not a problem, Aaron? If not, then where are the revolutionary millions? I would suggest they're doing their best to avoid a) state violence and b) your leadership, in roughly that order, and with the understanding that the latter is a quick way to the former.

That's not blaming you for state violence. It is blaming the milieu for spectacular failures to forsee it, when one should know better, and to adequately prepare innocent activists for the full ramifications of its realities. The original post, to which my critique responds, is a textbook case in point.

Finally, this isn't about me, and your ad hominem attacks, holistic defensiveness, and consistent changing of the subject all amply demonstrate you unwillingness, or inability to address the issue of the failure of revolutionary leadership. I re-invite you to address it or step down.

I maintain that the solution is as simple as the problem. We need to stop acting like cultural imperialists, jet-setting around the globe from trouble spot to trouble spot, looking for the next riot to instigate and bail on. Instead, we should seek to learn from our brothers and sisters on the ground in other cultural contexts. They're surviving this shit every day. They don't need our help finding the violence of the state. We do need their help understanding it so we can more effectively reverse-engineer it and thereby start to know how to deconstruct it without getting a lot of people killed.

A little humility would go a long way. The revolutionary rock star model is, by now, a patent failure. "Hey kids! You go to jail, the hotshot organizer goes back to America! Whaddaya say?"

And by the way, if Starhawk can't be held accountable for the results of her leadership, let alone her actions, how can you turn around and say the President (for example) should be, or any given CEO? Accountability of leadership is integral. The anarchists are really really bad at this, because they're in denial about having leaders at all. That's a problem. Have a look at it.

PS: Thanks for the backhanded compliment, nessie. Just curious, is your agreement with Aaron about the nature of the messenger ideologically-driven, or is it relationship-based?

but the problem festers

starhawk's silence will, in fact, protect her.

as it does most anarchist leadership.

kids, when nessie comes to lead you off with all this infrastructure hoo-hah (or whatever), just remember, he'll bail on ya when the going gets tough, and leave ya to twist in the wind without him.

he has a survival imperative, as a very important revolutionary, you know.

nothing personal-- it's an ideological imperative.

nessie: "As an analyst, I’m very effective. Time and again, I see right to the heart of the problem."

Except when you don't. And in those cases, your blissful disconnect from reality means ten brass bands playing simultaneously couldn't get your attention.

Such as the when you let Wendy Campbell flush her overt antisemitism into SF-IMC for a year and then slapped me down every time I called you out on it.

Then, when you finally got around to throwing her off your site for being an antisemite, you had to pretend that the post you banned her for was somehow very, very different from the ones I'd been pointing out all along. Except it wasn't.

"This is primarily because I use sound methods, chief of which is to reason collectively whenever possible."

You call your authoritarian, ex-cathedra methods "reasoning collectively"? Joseph Heller's turning over in his grave.

@%<

A post about Guadalahara has become a flamewar about Nessie and antiSemitism. Where ae people supposed to talk about real issues when every thread ends up on the same topic?

Okay, I'll butt out.

@%<

Anarchist leadership exists, and thrives in and is protected by the silence of denial that it even exists. This makes the movement weaker and it should be questioned. The contents of the original post in this thread illustrate why. I said so. Nessie, grand inquisitor of various purities, came riding to the defense of the orthodoxy, doing his usual issue-shifting, selective ignorance and thick ridicule thing to try to resilence the question. Expect more where it came from, its got decades of momentum behind it as an MO.

The results are apparent enough. Insofar as it goes, Nessie like Starhawk is another "anarchist" leader (perhaps the quotes preserve the proper tone of irony that chitchat in text sometimes obscures), and as such, is corrosive and should be challenged.

It is our local bad luck that he's been given the status by his local community such that the question leaks into every other, even remotely related, conversation. But the alternative is silence and a perpetuation of the status quo, which seems to me, clearly enough is intolerable.

Notice we haven't heard a word from Starhawk since "her" original post. Maybe she'll write us a book, or better yet, write one for those kids in GJ that she misled.... er, misprepared. Or better yet, write them a revolutionary fantasy book, and send them the money. Now that might do something to help them.

"The results are apparent enough. Insofar as it goes, Nessie like Starhawk is another "anarchist" leader (perhaps the quotes preserve the proper tone of irony that chitchat in text sometimes obscures), and as such, is corrosive and should be challenged."

It's funny, cause I work on anarchist projects in the bay area and have never worked with either of these folks nor have I been forced to follow their leads. Perhaps you mean celebrities. There's a big difference. Either way, you have a pretty shallow interpretation of what the anarchist community looks like.

the idea that leadership must entail force and is never a voluntary arrangement is an ideological position that happens to be wrong.

however people get their position in anarchist circles, many lead with that position. there may be many leaders, and little coercion, and that's all well and good-- as long as those who lead are accountable to those who follow them and to their wider community somehow.

but they're not, because the circle-a people are in denial about leadership generally, and so leadership problems particularly and their ramifications.

the original post is an example of the result. don't just move on reaction, go back and read the thread.

denial, it's called. and it looks ridiculous from the outside.

I agree with your comment, but wonder why you have to end every comment with an snide patronizing insult that seems designed to enflame whoever you are arguing with. Sure this "shouldnt be about you" but in every argument it quickly becomes about you since you move the discussion from an argument about ideas to a personal level.You are smart know a lot about various issues, so its a shame to see your arguments with people always degenerate the way they do.

certainly orwellian. certain latter day would be despots would be right proud of ya. and small town bigots.