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Towards Another Uprising
At the end of 2010 an individual act of despair in the town of Sidi Bouzid ignited a daring, enraged, and joyful upheaval that travelled through North Africa into the Middle East and beyond. People defied the oppressive systems they had been immersed in for generations and came together in the streets to topple the political elites at their helm. The authorities, at first stunned by this courageous spirit that they couldn’t understand, then unleashed a cynical and brutal response.
This defeat is still being inflicted on the people in the region, and is also felt all over the world by those who stood in solidarity with the uprisings but were mostly unable to overcome their powerlessness as the uprisings were massacred.
The horrors in the region during the last decade are many. To name some that stick most in my mind: Sisi has turned back the clock in Egypt to military dictatorship with the material support of the US. The regimes in the other North-African countries are paving over any sign of freedom while being coaxed by European countries to shut down the immigration routes over the Mediterranean. Without the murderous military campaigns of Hezbollah and the IRGC in Syria, Assad wouldn’t have survived the uprising. The Iranian regime itself brutally oppressed three different uprisings in the country in the last decade. Most people in Lebanon are in a daily struggle for survival because of the greed of its political leaders while mobs at the orders of Hezbollah beat down street protests. Early on in the uprisings, Hamas, who has shot political opponents in broad daylight on the streets of Gaza, culled attempts at an uprising by rounding up protest organizers and threatening them with murder. Leaders in the region understood once again that they can use any means against the populations under their control without real push-back from outside. Indifference, cynicism and opportunism trump moral appeals, and strategic alliances are always in play. The world churns on. For those of us who have not looked away, how can we not see a connection between Assad bombing Syrian cities into obliteration and Netanyahu razing Gaza?
This defeat is still being inflicted on the people in the region, and is also felt all over the world by those who stood in solidarity with the uprisings but were mostly unable to overcome their powerlessness as the uprisings were massacred.
The horrors in the region during the last decade are many. To name some that stick most in my mind: Sisi has turned back the clock in Egypt to military dictatorship with the material support of the US. The regimes in the other North-African countries are paving over any sign of freedom while being coaxed by European countries to shut down the immigration routes over the Mediterranean. Without the murderous military campaigns of Hezbollah and the IRGC in Syria, Assad wouldn’t have survived the uprising. The Iranian regime itself brutally oppressed three different uprisings in the country in the last decade. Most people in Lebanon are in a daily struggle for survival because of the greed of its political leaders while mobs at the orders of Hezbollah beat down street protests. Early on in the uprisings, Hamas, who has shot political opponents in broad daylight on the streets of Gaza, culled attempts at an uprising by rounding up protest organizers and threatening them with murder. Leaders in the region understood once again that they can use any means against the populations under their control without real push-back from outside. Indifference, cynicism and opportunism trump moral appeals, and strategic alliances are always in play. The world churns on. For those of us who have not looked away, how can we not see a connection between Assad bombing Syrian cities into obliteration and Netanyahu razing Gaza?
The authors of “Towards the Last Intifada” (Tinderbox #6) don’t acknowledge these experiences of the last decade. Instead, they propose to join the opposing side of an American geopolitical alliance (keeping true to American centralism in their own way). According to them, the Axis of Resistance shows the path forward for anarchists to struggle against empire. This article seems to confound resistance with ‘the Resistance’. That is to say, they collapse any form of resistance from people in Palestine, and more broadly in the region, into a particular representation, adopting an umbrella term used by states, militaries, para-state/para-military organizations to describe their own activities. The authors of the article warn anarchists against being too sensitive to hierarchy – as if that is the only aspect of ‘the Resistance’ anarchists might find difficult to accept.
It is now a year after the bloody incursion of Hamas into Israel. Apart from discourse, the accomplishments of the Resistance so far are: Hezbollah has launched ineffectual rockets that have only inflicted significant damage on a Druze village, Iranian leaders are busying themselves with making appeals to the West to reign in Israel, militias in Iraq attacked a couple of US military bases in the country early on and then fell silent, while only the Houthis seem to have taken Nasrallah’s “Unity of Fronts” seriously. They succeeded in disrupting global shipping routes and have carried out some unexpected aerial attacks on Israel. In the meantime, Israel has wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah, drops bombs on Lebanon on a daily basis, has regularly bombed sites in Syria without retaliation, and commits executions in Tehran. The Axis of Resistance and the Unity of Fronts are mere slogans that obscure the strategic dealings among political, authoritarian organisations and states with their own (often differing) interests. It’s delusional to see it as something else. And Israel is calling the bluff of ‘the Resistance’ with an exponential military escalation.
Israel’s massacres in Gaza, with the material support of the Western countries, are relentless. The apartheid regime in the West Bank and Israel has been built up for decades, leaving almost no oxygen to breathe for those living under its control. Faced with this bleak reality and an overwhelming powerlessness to put a stop to it, anarchists may be looking for an effective resistance (or rather, as it appears, an image of one). But if we want to fight against oppression, we can’t be content with any opposition. Choosing to join one authoritarian, militaristic system against another will not put an end to the horrors of this world – neither in this conflict nor in any other. It is neither inherently defeatist or a sign of privileged indifference to refuse to take sides between warring groups and states. That conclusion can only be reached if we would reduce reality to simplistic representations. Instead, by being open to complexity and specificity, anarchist action can be a liberating endeavor. It is here that we can find affinities, build relationships on a different basis, and muster the strength and courage – or perhaps, humility and passion – to attack. Anarchists find their effectiveness when they can undermine and destroy oppressive systems. We will not find it in a military prowess which, at the end of the day, produces more oppression and misery. And so those that have a spirit of their own and a memory of past rebellions will fight for another uprising.
From the northern coast of the Mediterranean, with a heavy heart and a soul on fire
Early October, 2024
It is now a year after the bloody incursion of Hamas into Israel. Apart from discourse, the accomplishments of the Resistance so far are: Hezbollah has launched ineffectual rockets that have only inflicted significant damage on a Druze village, Iranian leaders are busying themselves with making appeals to the West to reign in Israel, militias in Iraq attacked a couple of US military bases in the country early on and then fell silent, while only the Houthis seem to have taken Nasrallah’s “Unity of Fronts” seriously. They succeeded in disrupting global shipping routes and have carried out some unexpected aerial attacks on Israel. In the meantime, Israel has wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah, drops bombs on Lebanon on a daily basis, has regularly bombed sites in Syria without retaliation, and commits executions in Tehran. The Axis of Resistance and the Unity of Fronts are mere slogans that obscure the strategic dealings among political, authoritarian organisations and states with their own (often differing) interests. It’s delusional to see it as something else. And Israel is calling the bluff of ‘the Resistance’ with an exponential military escalation.
Israel’s massacres in Gaza, with the material support of the Western countries, are relentless. The apartheid regime in the West Bank and Israel has been built up for decades, leaving almost no oxygen to breathe for those living under its control. Faced with this bleak reality and an overwhelming powerlessness to put a stop to it, anarchists may be looking for an effective resistance (or rather, as it appears, an image of one). But if we want to fight against oppression, we can’t be content with any opposition. Choosing to join one authoritarian, militaristic system against another will not put an end to the horrors of this world – neither in this conflict nor in any other. It is neither inherently defeatist or a sign of privileged indifference to refuse to take sides between warring groups and states. That conclusion can only be reached if we would reduce reality to simplistic representations. Instead, by being open to complexity and specificity, anarchist action can be a liberating endeavor. It is here that we can find affinities, build relationships on a different basis, and muster the strength and courage – or perhaps, humility and passion – to attack. Anarchists find their effectiveness when they can undermine and destroy oppressive systems. We will not find it in a military prowess which, at the end of the day, produces more oppression and misery. And so those that have a spirit of their own and a memory of past rebellions will fight for another uprising.
From the northern coast of the Mediterranean, with a heavy heart and a soul on fire
Early October, 2024
For more information:
https://actforfree.noblogs.org/2024/10/21/...
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What we did on 7 October 2023
For a year now, every person on the planet who is not indifferent or excluded from the general forms of information, when they hear this date, they automatically associate it with a specific event of historical significance. And yet, all this time, apart from the Palestinian resistance, only the NATO imperialists and their subordinates have been referring to this date, in the terms of counter-revolution, the narratives of “counter-terrorism”, in order to exonerate the genocide of a revolted people.
The testimony of resistance creates in immediate time the continuity of living memory, relaying and extending the power of revolutionary experience. Against this experience stand the narratives which take a distance from the testimony of the resistance subject, as well as the silence that, like a threateningly insidious command, objectively established, attempts to eliminate the historical intrusions of those revolutionary initiatives that are subversive for the rulers’ order.
The silence about the world-changing initiative of October 7 is an irrevocably guilty readjustment of the narratives that then equated, in their capitulated consciousness, the revolution with the counter-revolution, describing two monsters in contrast to which the metaphysical “good” evaluates itself. Of course, this need to disassociate oneself from the inevitably violent revolutionary rupture into the standstill of history, is an expression of subservience to the militaristic and ideological totalitarianism of capital. Has the ideological obliteration of October 7 and of the organized armed Palestinian resistance produced a struggle? Yes, it has produced a protest movement against the NATO war machine, demanding the appeasement of the monster we aroused on October 7.
Not by coincidence, the idealistic protest has had zero effect on the progress of the war.
If we speak from the point of view of the resistance today, we have a responsibility to speak through the living presence of October 7. How can we advance the revolutionary struggle by forgetting its historical achievements? How can we fight today, if we put a lid on what the resistance is achieving as we speak? Speaking through the resistance, its entire concurrent and historical experience speaks right here. Revolutionary testimony always has the tone of speaking in first person. It may, for the sake of accuracy, use third person for acts in which the bearer of the testimony was not directly active, and third person for general statements, but the voice of the testimony participates in a collective subjectivity that permeates the Earth and history. Third person interpretations, with the veneer of some third way or no way to freedom, comprise, in the here and now, counter-revolutionary fatalism with political assertions. Even before we talk about the actual struggle, in opting between first or the third person for doing so, lies the conflict between revolutionary popular testimony and counter-revolutionary domination. October 7 has shed plenty of light on the historical/evolutionary wall, after breaking through the wall of the imperialist-colonial prison. The political subjects who stayed behind the breach cannot speak from the perspective of the resistance (literally and not because of a supposed prohibition by revolutionary ethics). Those who broke the barrier did it for all of us. Anyone who wants to escape from the capitalist theocracy to be in the revolutionary flow must break down the walls he/she maintains.
Before October 7, for years, Palestine was finished for the imperialist metropolis, and also for the left and the anti-authoritarian movement. The m-l (tn: Marxists-Lenininsts) and a part of workerist libertarian Marxism that continued to refer to the Palestinian resistance were considered obsessive and dated. In current time, the international line of struggle was unable to go further than denouncing the apartheid in terms of liberal humanism.
On October 7, dead Palestine returned in terms more revolutionary than ever before and shook up the Earth. Gaza was a closed field of genocidal terror because its people had chosen (or tolerated, it doesn’t matter) the government of a party that resisted the colonialists. On a different scale of size and time, Gaza’s resistance, the breaking of the wall and the subsequent razing Gaza to the ground, is reminiscent of the organized escape of Red Army Jews from the Sobibor extermination camp 80 years ago. Despite the success of the operation, very few survived at the time. The Nazis then dismantled the camp, to erase from history the point of revolutionary breach of the Holocaust. And today the losses are not counted in numbers, but the resistance has been victorious from day one.
October 7 demonstrated that the way out of the historical zionist and imperialist program of extermination of the Palestinian people, can only be revolutionary. The terrible technocratic scarecrow of imperialist domination collapsed as its colonial base was breached and exposed to resistance, for the first time radically. On October 7, the Palestinian resistance launched an organized mass offensive and took over the military bases and fascist settlements in the area of the frontal zone where the wall was breached. It was an operation of military neutralization, i.e. focused on neutralizing the enemy’s military power. The capture of colonists, which in social terms is a perfectly just and lenient means of resistance, was the link in the chain of the revolutionary battle. It was publicly demonstrated by numerous documents and testimonies from the colonists themselves that the resistance operation not only did not have characteristics antagonistic to its liberating political purpose, but was carried out with discipline in the use of the minimum necessary force.
The first reaction of the colonial army was to implement the standing order to exterminate the captured colonists, but also those who simply were present in places occupied by the Palestinian guerrillas. Combat helicopters and tanks bombed and burned down their own settlements, as well as many from the obscene rave party, in order for the colonialists to avoid negotiating from a position of weakness. The cannibalistic directive demonstrates that the state prefers to exterminate the last, most sectarian and discriminating shred of its humanity in order not to lose a single shred of its power.
For bourgeois ideology, as for its set of laws in particular, the preemptive, blind extermination of its own citizens and soldiers is an unspeakable crime, a taboo , because whatever contradictions and exceptions it invokes, it thoroughly abolishes its axiomatic foundations, both in the historical and logical dimensions. Despite the overwhelming documentation of the widespread application of this directive, the liberal and leftist zionist opposition has been unwilling to do anything more to defend its own colonial community against a self-destructive political regime, other than peaceful protests. The imperialists, their transnational institutions and their humanitarian organizations have legitimized the taboo by imposing absolute silence. This alone shows that the bourgeoisie consciously prefers and remains ready to exterminate all humanity rather than give up its power. Once again in history, it crudely demonstrates this.
One year later, how many of those who profess solidarity with the Palestinian people, who hasted to reproduce the counter-revolutionary propaganda about massacres and rapes, have apologized? What do they say today about the unspeakable torture, the shootings of pregnant women and children at the hands of their mothers and the rapes committed by the entire colonial army, systematically, with a political program and general consent from its fascist state? They are silent, if not continuing to belittle the crime of colonialism and thus protect it by equating it with the “crime” of armed resistance.
The revolutionary operation of October 7 had a horizon far beyond the first invasion; it was not a leap without a tomorrow. The resistance was ready for a long war, knowing the automatism of the arrogance of the zionists and imperialists and their excessive savagery. The breach of the colonial fortress was the necessary provocation for the spiraling down and collapse of the colonial army and subsequently of the entire colonial formation and imperialist planning, within the organized resistance trap, the Gaza fort. The capture of colonists was not intended to prevent counter-revolutionary counter-attack. Could the experienced Palestinian resistance invest in a conservative war measure? The captured colonists were the symbolic point that chained colonial arrogance to the trap. In the ultimate place of exclusion where the crucial battle has been fought for a year, the resistance stronghold stands defiant and the Palestinian people strong, the colonial system has been humiliated and its fascist polity has collapsed in a rapid dynamic of disintegration. The resistance holds the initiative, October 7 continues. Those who froze behind the broken wall have nowhere to stand today.
The Palestinian resistance of October 7, revealing the unlimited inhumanity of the imperialist system and its zionist gendarme, has awakened the broadest movement of internationalist solidarity of the last decades and especially the broadest solidarity in the history of the Palestinian struggle. The liberal fundamentalists who in October ’23 were whitewashing the road of zionist genocide by proclaiming that the Islamification of the resistance has isolated it from international solidarity, were proved wrong. In order to denounce the present resistance, an attempt is made to gentrify its history. If the Palestinian resistance is today capable of carrying out purely military operations and showing clemency to the butchers of its people, it has done so because, when it was necessary to take roots politically, surrounded by ruthless tyrants, it took up the responsibility of the provocation, with hijackings, the attack on the zionist mission of the Munich Olympics, etc. The whole history of the Palestinian resistance was condensed to a new level on October 7 and is moving forward with courage and faith until liberation, having once again dispelled fatalism. Memory is as vivid as the act of resistance. So today we inhabit the rift that we opened on October 7.
As a comrade said 30 years ago, bringing to an assembly the example of our relationship with the Palestinian resistance, if you are traveling by plane and there is a hijack, you cannot say, “I am an anarchist, I am with you, let me get off”. We will go all the way together. As RAF taught us with its martyrs, the flight to the capitalist metropolis takes off from the ultimate places and in the ultimate ways.
EVERY DAY AND EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 7
PALESTINE, KURDISTAN, INTIFADA SERHILDAN
The Lebanese communist revolutionary, George Ibrahim Abdallah has spent 40 years in the captivity of the imperialists. On the 7th of October 2024 the french state will examine a new demand for his release, which is pending since last year. If on the 7th of October the french state does not release Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, it will have effectively taken responsibility, with the participation of its left wing, for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the terrorist antisocial attack against Lebanon.
From the streets, the guerrilla forts and the prisons we shout, FREEDOM to the unrelenting sun of resistance Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
September 2024
I know Hamas has been repressive, but can we be specific about which incidents are being referenced here, & why the even bloodier repression of the Palestinian Authority in the same time period goes unmentioned?
"Hezbollah has launched ineffectual rockets that have only inflicted significant damage on a Druze village"
I am genuinely confused as to where the writer is getting their information. Did they just forget about the evacuation of 100,000 colonists, the hundreds of wounded or dead troops, & the repeated targeting & disabling of intelligence & surveillance outposts? The incident they refer to is just the one Israeli state media has the most interest in broadcasting. I don't think it's necessary to ignore this damage to make the argument that Hezbollah aren't anarchists.
Besides this, it would be interesting to see critics of anarchist support for the "Axis" or Hamas in particular actually engage the positions of Palestinian anarchists: https://intimitescriminelles.noblogs.org/?p=61