#pubdate 2025-11-11T01:39:59.431Z
#cover v-a-various-authors-atassa-1.jpg
#title Atassa
#subtitle Readings in Eco-extremism
#author Various Authors
#lang en
#date 2016
#authors Various Authors
#SORTauthors Abe Cabrera, Orkelesh, John Jacobi, Regresión, Lunas de abril, Ramon Elani, Hast Hax, A member of the Momento Mori Nihilist Sect, Seminatore, XXV//X, S., Anonymous
#topics eco-extremism, ITS, atassa, Little Black Cart, deplatforming, indigenous
#notes Originally published by Little Black Cart
** 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 narcocorrido, 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
by Abe Cabrera
Una salus victis nullam sperare saintcm. (The one hope of the conquered is to not hope for salvation.)
—Virgil, 17ic 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 Communique 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 ofa 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, Reaccion 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, Regresi6n, continued to be published out of Mexico.
By January of2016, new eco-extremist websites and even an extensive video documentary on eco-extremism emerged online. By the end of the month, the First Communique of the re-founded Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (Individualistas Tendiendo a lo Salvaje, ITS) was issued on the main eco-extremist website, Maldici6n 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 eco-extremists 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 eco-extremists hiding in plain sight who emerge with cold ferocity at the opportune time. The em-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 \vild 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 arc not for us, our thoughts do not make things: the things are therefor 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 docs 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 impe1fectly) 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 d01nestication.
*** 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 among 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 ofter 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 Communique 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-extren1ism carries out indiscrin1inate 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 anarchis1n 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. AH other manifestations of nihilism or egois1n 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 ran surrender, but whatever he does, he docs 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 eco-extremists is underlying 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 gleamed 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 ran reference the Selk’nam as well as the Mayas. They ran refer to the experiences of petty criminals as well as those of the large mafias: the Guatemalan gangs as well 11s the rigid organization of the Islamic State. That is to say, eco-extremists arc 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"
by 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
by 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 *Ultimo 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 communiques (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, "Izquierdismo," which I translated for the second issue of The Wildemist.
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 communique, which marked a drastic change in their discourse, as one can observe by reading the sixth, seventh, and eight communiques. Later, the suspicions were confirmed when ITS published their fullest critique of the indomitistas to date, "Algunas respuestas sobre el presente y NO del_fi1t11ro" (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 I 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' communiques, magazine, blogs, and texts. It seemed that even ifthere 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 communique from F.C. in the mail:
This is a message from FC ... 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’sphysical 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 oflearned 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 FC.'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 afrer 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 EC.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 sayin,'( this does not dismiss his arg11111e11t; as difficult .1s it is ji1r 111c to ,1Ck11owledge, I saw some merit i11 {hisJ reaso11i11g..."
Other reactions have been similar. Journalist and science writer Robert Wright famously stated, " There's a little bit ofthe Unabornber in most "I've never seen the likes of this'" said one criminologist, "‘Millions of people ... seem to identify in so111c ll'ilY 11'ith 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 011 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 ofMichigan, 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 Washi11,\!to11 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 liwd 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 ofyet, 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, 1w arc 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 Isuinatag, publications in Spain advocating Kaczynski's anti-industrial revolution. Other public representatives of the group include Atwnimos co11 Ca11tcla 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 etfort 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 statedjust 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 ofKaczynski'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 of paragraph 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 some day 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 tcdmics, 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.[30] 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.
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. 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 soml' vital differences between "freedom" and "wildness" that ITS touches on later in their communiques. 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 wolfstructure 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 em-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 Estos," 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 communique 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, ofall times, was the moment to act.
But ITS was never as enamored with the strict Kaczynski line as the indomitistas were. Their initial communiques 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 " domi11adora" (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 a11d grnerally 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 communiques 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 Reaction Sn/m/’c (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 communiques 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 communiques) for an elegant analogy: We, they write, arc 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 communique:
ITS’ explanations do not have of yfhitig of magicJantasy, or mysticis, because Wild Nature, like Tcc/1110/ogical Dominating Civilization, arc two aspects with great pro111i11enrc today, although they daily enlose Nature, reducing it to 11othi11g and to uncertainty.
For ITS, isntitra 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 q11alfy it, adore it, or idealize it would be tofall into irrational sacredness, which we arc rompletely against.
These views and their ditfrrences are elaborated slightly in an interview I conducted with an eco-extremist propagandist, published in the sixth issue of H1111ter/Gatherer. Ultimately, because the differences in metaphysical beliefs among em-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 \vith 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 \Ve 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 communiques.
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 in1perative" 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 nusses 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 Fu Future (see paragraphs 26-28), but where the indomitistas only put effort into extracting values and value priorities from Kaczynskis 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 em-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 ifwe 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, witho11t re,i,zard t;ir 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 huw 1nuch 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, em-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.92 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.93
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.94 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.95 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 c01npromising "radical" ideologies like primitivism or eco-socialism. No, this is anticivilization politic taken seriously: a fi.1ll 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 ctfcct 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-radicalisin in the 21st century.
** ITS: The Invisible Menace
Regresion #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 communique 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 Maldicion 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 ofblogs that once published eco-extremist communiques 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 communique taking responsibility for seven explosive attacks in April against universities and centers oflearning 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 hy a worker and then by the police. Nevertheless, it captured the attention of university and scientific circles, mainly hy reviving the trauma that they suffered in 2013 when the old ITS attacked the Chilean scientist Andres Aguila 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 ofQuilmes (onJune 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 he 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, Maldici6n 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 Mendez Salinas of the Biotechnology Institute of the UNAM in Morelos was shot in the head. This time, the modus operandi was different. Firearrns were not used, hut rather a silent and hidden weapon. One thrust into the armpit was enough for the Head of Chemical Services ofthe Chemistry Department to bleed out slowly.
The media coverage of this act was immediate. Al 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 hack. 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 em-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 homhs 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 afrer their unrelenting and surprising activity ofJune. 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 communique). 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 homb had gone off in front of the Conjunto Nacional Shopping Center in the center of Brasilia, the capital ofBrazil. The authorities in their first reports stated that it was a terrorist attack consisting of a homh 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 communique 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 communique 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 ofNoblogs 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 communique aimed at the administrators of Noblogs concerning their decision to close ME as if they were the adn1inistrators of Facebook or Twitter. In the communique, 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 communique they write:
The anarchist counter-information biogs, alternative servers, and the authorities of the countries ll'here we hal'e a presence may attempt to defame and silence us 011 the tueb. 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 lhey /cam of a ferocious act of indiscriminate arson in Chile, or an attack against the popul <1ce in Argentina, or when therumor 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 communique was signed by new groups adhering to ITS from the city ofTorre6n, Coahuila: The Cachiripa Fury Faction and the Pack of Coyotes Faction. On the 16th these newest ITS groups issued a communique taking responsibility for past attacks and one recent one: the mailing of perfume mixed with acid to the Director ofAdmissions of the Tee 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 ofthe Mountain, ofPeru, 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 Niiix Verde, Ninx Azul Cell, and chi chi Cell, in Mexico State, with the "Ecoextremist Circle ofTerrorism 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 esc1pes. 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 arc the accursed shadows that infiltrate the streets. I can sense that a patrol is right behind me in the empty street. A mix ofhappiness. 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 em-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 cliches. 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 lite, to lie to even those closest to us so as not to raise any suspicions. We make fun of the moralist conunentaries 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 ofour 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
#cgresion #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 chiefTha5uIJke Witk6 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 ofMontana 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 1 976, 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 ofTwo 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 ofthe 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 ofjune, 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 snull 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 ofJune 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 ofthe 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 ofminutes, the enemies were besieged and reduced. From atop the high hills, Crazy Horse's men screamed words ofwar. 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 he 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 oflife 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 he 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 he effective and carry out an attack unscathed, it is not practical to attack when the authorities rnight be aware of the danger. For example, every 8th ofAugust, the Monterrey Institute ofTechnology 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 ofmeans, 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
Rarnon Elani
War ... is a means to achieve ail individual goal: the deirrifr’s desire for glory, the warrior himselfis his own goal. TVill not to power but to glory.
Clastres
I am a spear that roars for Mood. Song ofAmergin
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 ofwar, 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 k11ow Clastres' words before we have ever heard them. The fire of the warrior flickers inside us all. De Castro: "One sometimes has thefeeling that it is neceesdry to read him [Clastres] as if he were an obswre pre-Socratic thi11ke1: " 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 expnience 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 matt r?{ war: he has long since been transformed into an entirely difcreiil 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 hum.anity 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 ma11. "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 dem.arcations 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 cclchmtcs the war machine... Goethe and Hegel arc old men 11cxt 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 othc1; just as it happened in the beginning of timc.”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 lastfrcc 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 ofseveral other women, she succeeds in dislodging him from the canoe. He bites her.
The sea as a smooth spare is a spec{fic problem of the war machine.
Boys inYanomami society, Clastres observes, are "encouraged to demonstrate their violence and ag ressio11. Children play games that are eften brutal. Parents avoid co11soli11i< them.The result ef this pedagogy is that itforms 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 a11 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 ofslaughtering them all. Such acts are never forgotten and blood feuds are passed down through the generations. In a day with twenty-one hours ofleisure time, there are ample opportunities to cultivate animosity for one's enemies. As Clastres writes in his journal,
One late efternoon amo11g the Karolziteri, a storm breaks out, preceded by violent whirlwinds which threaten to carry away the roefs. Immediately, all ef the shamans position themselves along the tents, standing, attempting to push back tlze 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 ofwar! A thousand years ce 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 o_{ the social machine: the primitive social beini < relies entirely011 war, primitive society cannot survive without tvdY. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy o_{ the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-far-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 tear 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 "passio11ately devoted to war." To the Europeans, this love ofwar 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 wntiniioiisly eiiieixedfrom the infinite diversity qf 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 qf 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 ofThe 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 hmv to use them--produced the war and the warrior. Leroi-Gourhan writes," Tiiroiii,zhont the course 1!ftime, aggression appears as afundamcntal tidmiqtie linked to acquisition, and in the primitive, its initial role is hunrinagi,z 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 LeroiGourhan 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 11otfrom zoolc^i,zy butfrom sociolo;zy. " 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 ca1111ibal tribes, the goal qf 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 lt1arxist theory 4 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 productiveforces can take wing, these same produLtiveJmcs imtst.fi.rst exist at the start qf this process in the most extreme weakness, in the most total underdevelopment: lacking this, there would not be the least reasonfor 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 qf 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 emhodied in the idea of exchange. Herc we find Clastres pitted against his teacher Claude Levi-Strauss. For LeviStrauss, primitive war is the shadow side ofprimitive commerce. Communities are obliged to participate in systems of exchange. When these systems are successfol 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 ivcrs arc the outcome of unfortu11atc 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 arc 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 itselfwhile the spirit clings to its wounds. Anything but war! cries techno-industrial society and its spokesmen. But yet can we even say that con11 erce 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 c((J1adttacd sh ows that it is 11 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 u’ifhouf 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 e11terprise.
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 efprimitive 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 refusal’s refusal to run the risk of division, the risk of a power separatefrom 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 shadmvy presence of the body without organs in Clastres' analysis of the primjtive 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 ofterror. 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 bec01nes 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 ucry heing “war a,i.zai»st 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 ofbones. 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: "pri111itivc society .. cannot consent to universal pece whichaliena tes its.freedom; it ca 1111ot abandon itself to general war which abolishes its cqiialitys’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:
11 commumity never launches into a war adventure withoutfirst protecting itself by means df diplomatic acts—parties, invitations— efter which supposedly lasting alliances arefonned, 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}, hut so arc the benefits: they arc total, the women arcfree. " 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 ofwar 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 ofidentities 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 4war 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 exouomy, 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 ma11-a11i111al-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 qf 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 follows 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 enfhmcd 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 111e11 go to 1!'ar.fi'o111 time to time... some men go to war coHstaHt/y.” 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 ofwar 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 conununities 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 rhaq11e11os 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 ll'ith 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 chaque11os and Christianization in that context was impossible: "T/1e young Abipone are an obstacle to the progress ofreligio11. fo their ardent desirejor military glory and spoils, they are avidly cutting the heads l?{ the Spanish and destroyi11g their carts a11d thcirfields."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 te11 srnttcrbmined young mrn who undertook to ,l?O to war, which they did without anyone being able to stop thcm,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 11 1111111 l?{ war 1111d llt't a 111crch1111t, I luwe come to.fight and not to bargain; my gloro' is not in Ininginl? bark presents, but in bringing bark prisoners, and leaving, I can touch neither your hatchets nor your cauldrons; if you want our prisoners so much, take them, I still have eno ugh courage to find others; if the enemy takes my life, it will be said ill 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 arc enou'us," responded the young warriors. Clastres reports that they were no more than twelve.
Genghis Khan and hisfol!ml'ers 1 1Je1-c able to hold 011tfor a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the sameime maintainin,'< a smooth space 011 the steppesto whichthe 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 diaquenos, 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, hovvever, 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 societyfor-war, the will to war brings with it the refusal to bear children: "young women agreed to be the wives l!{ 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 ofviolence 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 pennanent 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 chaq11enos 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 ofa 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 accmnulated 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 ofToba 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 car/J exploit affomplished, 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 ofprestige, 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 ofwarlike 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 rhspondcd that it would be impossible for him to live !f he did not kill his enemiesSimilarly the French Jesuits among the Huron observed with horror that
sometimesan enemy, totally naked mid with 011/ya hatchet in ha nd, will even have the wnrage to enter the huts of a town at night, by himself th en, h aving murdered some of those h e fin ds sleeping there, to takejh;?ht for a TT defense l1,l?lli11st a Tu111dred a11d two hundred people who willfollow him one and two cntire 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 th us he fit!fi'llrd.”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 011 the glory attached to the title C?f 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 searchedfor theirji-irnds a11d ki11 among the dead, 'some still bleeding, a ll swiped & mutilated, mid smoked with, fire’ while shouts (if the murderers could be distinctly heard & their campfires seen to the east. Hundreds tf painted war dubs 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 (if this is a Iso re-wilding: to return to the primitive in a conflict inheritedfrom our ancestors; to put i11to practice tlze tactics that the ancients used but in our own conditions. In fact, the murder that ITS carried out also represents 'individualist re-wilding'. Tlze goal £if assassinating an UNAM employee was notjust to take him out and create negative reactions to this act, but rather with the same Jiw1 childhood onward.
Xale,
"Hard Words:
An eco-extremist conversation"
It has been over 150 years since Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brt1maire o{Louis Napoleon reflected 011 hmv events occur in history, as it were, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.Yet it is arguable that to differentiate betvveen 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 ofpolitical change and societal collapse. The Creeks were a group of clans that had once inhabited a landscape oflarge 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 ofAlabama). 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 fanner 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 oflabor between men and women. In following matrilineal descent, all children born to a woman were automatically members ofher clan without any formal relation to the father's clan. The most important male in a Creek child's lite 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,WilliamWeatherford, 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, includingWilliam Weatherford (Shuck-Hall, 4). Nevertheless, increased intermarriage put a strain on the matrilineal kinship as a new metis (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 ofWilliam 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 oflife." 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 offorest for cultivation with stone axes and fire should not have them taken ;iway by a male interloper who marries into the clan (Waselkov, 6). Thus, to the people who did all of the agricultural work \vent 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 ofnew 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 intluences 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 oftowns 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 ofAmerica.
*** The Trade Trap
European influence was not strongly felt in the Creeks' territory until the late 17th century. While some tr:ide 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 1€>70. 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-andconquer 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, metis Creeks were assimilating into US society based on the European nuclear family and not the Creek sprawling matrilineal clan system.These new coininnnities subsisted and even thrived by practicing commercial agriculture dependent on slaves and livestock. The presence ofthese 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 ofland 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 peacett1l 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 agri-
cultural 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 andfearless 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 ofTecumseh's visit by the settler, Margaret Eades Austill, who had been a girl at the time of the Creek War:
One night efter a feaiful day, tlte Judiansfollowed usfor miles [and} we camped in an oldfield. Just as supper was announred, a most terrific earthquake took place, the horses all broke loose, the wagon chains jingled, and everyface was pale with fear and terror. The Indians came in numbers aro1111d us lookingfrightened, and grunting out theirprayers, a11d oft, tlte night was spent in terror by all but the next day some ef the Indians came to us and said it was
Tecumseh stamping hisfootfor 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, folly 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 vvm1ld 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 peacefol assimilationist Creeks from the town. Joel Martin summarizes the significance of the number eight in the Creek cosmology:
The symbolic significance of tit is timing would not have been lost on the Muskogees. As a multiple t?f the 11umberfour, the number stood for the cardi11al directions and all creation, the number eight was sacred. Moreover, e(1?ht days was the 11ormal length of time to perform the poskita or the Busk ceremony in important square grounds, including Tuckabatchee. Finally, the number eight was associated with tlze shaman's 'star.' Vcnus. During the time q{Venus's itiferior conjunction, the pla11et leaves its positio11 in the morning or evening sky, disappears for nine nngltts^ and eight days, and then reappears in the opposite sky. Sha111a11s consider this cycle to be emblematic £!{ their own passage to am/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 inte1frrence 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, tmvard the end of the Creek War, an observer reported that they had all been slaughtered and that "not a track qf a cow or hog tl'as to be seen in Creek country. " (Holland Braun, 15) Even agriculture was neglected, as Benjamin Hawkins observed when he wrote in a letter,'" 011c thin,\? Slllpriscs 11 e, they have totally neglected their crops and arc destroying every livi11g eatable thing... They are persevering in this mode qf destr11ction." (Martin, 142-143)
These practices also led to the abandonment of the towns altogether to re-found comnmnities 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 C!fprophets. The prophets then cirrled and danced around the chief'. Suddenly, the head prophet ‘gave a war whoop’ and attacked, killin,!!, as many chiefs as possible with war clubs, bows, and arrows. (129)
This episode is indicative of the primitivism ofthe 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 ofTecumseh:
Kill the old Chiefs, friends of peace; kill the rattle, the hogs, and fowls; do not work, destroy the wheels and the looms, throw away yourplot1,!!,hs, and everythin,,,z used by the Americans... Shake your war clubs, shake yourselves: yoti will frighten the Americans, their [fire]arms will dropfrom their hands, the ground will become a bog, and mire them, and you may knock them Ml 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 theWar of1812, 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 oflead, 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 ofAnglo-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 AngloAmerican 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 \\:hite 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 Liy 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 BBlood:The Creek War of 1813-1814, the prophet, Paddy Walsh, indicated that the fort would fall into their hands ifhe 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 chiefa 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 thatWeatherford 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 civili:ms 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 GregoryWaselkov put it," Now the p11r!fyin/.?, hlaze o_f tlze poskita (Busk) would rid the 11atio11 the apostate Creeks o_f 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 ths Shawnees among them, and contrary to their traditions, some c!f the Creeks severedthe limbs of the dead, tlzen 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 specialfate was reservedj(>r the women. The Indians stripped them naked, scalped both head and nether parts, then raped some withfence rails and clubbed all to death like small game. Those iuifortunate enough to be pregnant had their bellies slit open. Then the gliste11i11gfetus was snatclted out, cord still attached, and laid, still living, carefully by the mother’s side in horrible tableaux—in the case of Mrs. Summerlin 5 twins, on both sides of her. The indomitable Nancy Bailey met a similar end. When approached by an Indian who asked who her_f;1 1ily was, she reportedly pointed to a body sprawled 11earby and boldly exclaimed, 'I am the sister of that great man you have 11111rdered there.'At which the enraged Indians clubbed her to the ,1?ro111uf, slit oprn her belly, yanked out her intestines, and threw them onto tlte ground around lzer. (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 Mhis Creeks had killed their kinsmen at the Battlu of Burnt Com. Therefore clan retribution (sometimes referred to as blood law) was tlze immediate action that needed to be taken. Clan retaliation or revenge ofa members death—whether accidc11tal or not—was a long-standing social institution inheritedjiw11 the Creeks' 1\!lississippian ancestors.
Clan members in these circumstances mould seek out the offenders. Based on ancient customs that existed before European rontart, upon their capture clan members mould tic the prisoners to a pole and would encourage them to siing a war song while being tortured. After the prisoners expired, clan members would remove the scalps and cut them into pieces. Thrn they wo11ld tic the pieces to pine tUJ(f?s and lay them atop the roa 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 ofTohopeka on the Tallapoosa River. The Battle ofTohopeka is also known as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on account of the horseshoe shape ofthe 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 wdl 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,Jarkso11la11d: PrcsidrntAndrewJackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross and the Great American Land Grab, comments on the irony of creating such a f()rtification 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 traditionahists broke with tradition. Possibly hoping to protect women and children from the white horsemen, they performed a fatal initiation of the white man's art ofwar. If c01ifronted bya s11periorj(1rce, they would be trappedfora massacre as surely as the white settlers at Fort J\llims.
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 ofthe 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 otf 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 etfect until the Cherokee warriors, eager to engage their ancestral enemies, plunged themselves into the river and swain 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: Jack Jackson was impressed: 'The camage was dreadful,’ he wrote... Not only was the destruction of the Red Clubs apocalyptic, but it lasted jive hours or 11 ore until 111'.J!hifall, and, in some parts ather, the 'en ds ’are reel /y tire 'iiicaus' projected and amplified into a monstrous and logical (om lusion. Et’cn if the Apache chief‘ had ronsmjJted every warrior andforccd thci11 to fight, even ifsome of the warriors hadn't nm off and become seotits hunting their own people for the white army, even, if they (o/ild have held off the US Armyfor a few more years, they ti'oidd no t have done so as Apach es, or as the people that they always were. Here it mould be somethinl{ akin to, 'in order to save the city, 1/le had to destroy it.' Or better, in order to prevent the city from being planted in the land qf the Apache, they had to become the city in civilized reasoning. And they knew what that mea11t: slavery in o11cfor111 or anothCI'. They affepted the consequences of their refusal, even !f 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 Choctavvs 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 ofthis 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 compro1nise 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 ofWild 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.) Rolwpnka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 2012.
Inskeep, Steve.Jackson/and: Preside11t AndrewJackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and the Great A111erica11 Land Grab. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
Martin, Joel. Sacred Revolt: The JVlusko,gees' Strugglefor a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1 991.
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 Co11q11eri11g Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War ef 18 13-1814. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 2006.
Weir, Howard T. III. A Paradise ofBlooT: The Creek Tt'ar 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 Tiburon 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 \Vere generally filled with a generous amount of animism. For example, the story of Hepetla (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 fod 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 ofKino Bay; but they were later found and slaughtered save for a few young warriors who escaped to Tiburon 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. Tiburon 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
Tiburon Island
107 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 ofAustralia 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 communiques 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 prin10rdial. Let us learn then from the Seris. Let us learn the warlike and extremist defense of the wild. Let us become animals, and rn.ay 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!
109
** (Roma Infernetto" Shit World") To Profane and Devour
m member of the Memento Mori Nihilist Sect
A 11ilzilistfrag111rnt that I dedicate to a "dead " enemy
For me.
Kneel before me.
You will stretch out and elongate yourself in a fat 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, affiicted 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 lifr 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 ofmy 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 oflife."
** Regresion #3, Editorial
Wild Reaction
Coyote Skin Cloak Faction
The following pages are a rail to rommon sense, a warning call against the continuous devastating clearing afforests, a desperate cry against the invasion of cobblestone, against houses ofsix or eight foors, against adultemtedfood and drinks, ageinst the intellectual strain of unil'ersities and the 1111rcle11ti11gfactory work. It is also a l'irulent diatribe against the thinned and unhealthy air, against disease and the dewy ef races, 1mdji1111lly. it is a tJiolent protest axai11st the stupidity and illogicalities created by Civilization, a strug le against Science, Goddess of tlze present day, against Chemistry, against the Artificial.
We can live without railroads, without cars, without telegraphs and telephones, without balloo11s a11d prostitution, without pedophilia and tuberculosis.
We just want a normal life, the exercise of Life, freedom in salvation can only be achieved through i11t1xral Nature a11d the abolition ef cities, permanent source ef i11el!itahle 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 rememher.
This is the third issue of the magazine against techno-industrial progress, Regrcsio11, 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 Regresi,)11, 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 ofi:en absorb us as individuals. They make us participate in the mass, in destructive consumerisn1 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 san1e treatinent or worse.
There is no mercy in these acts. It is all or nothing, it's the extremisrn 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 hy the expamion 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 ofwild 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
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 oppose vehemently 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 they have evolved from being original and almost defensible to trite and abhorrent. This applies particularly well to anarchist ideology. With time it has changed and transformed itself into something that it wasn’t at its origins.
For some time now, many anarchists have rejected the concept and practice of indiscriminate attack as defended by the eco-extremists. 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. This would be 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 compiled the following list of events that is the true history of actual anarchists rescued from various historical sources. 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 14th, 1858: The anarchist Felice Orsini and his comrade attack Napoleon III, utilizing three “Orsini bombs”. These were christened in honor of their infamous creator, and they were built using a ball 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 17th, 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 5th, 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 4th, 1886: A meeting of anarchist organizations in Chicago against the repression of striking workers outside of the McCormick plant on May 1st 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 18th, 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 8th, 1892: In the so-called, “Jerez de la Frontera Rebellion” in Spain, more than 500 peasants attempted to take the city under the agitation of anarchists, 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 the anarchists who planned and carried out the rebellion. The anarchists were later executed.
The next day, on February 9th, 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, among others.
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 11th, 1892: Ravachol places a bomb in the house of Judge Bulot (an anti-anarchist) in France.
-March 27th, 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 30th, 1892: Ravachol is arrested in Lhérot Restaurant for the attack on the Véry Restaurant. The next day, during the trial, anonymous terrorists detonate a bomb in Lhérot Restaurant leaving many wounded.
It should be mentioned that Ravachol was considered a “common criminal” by the anarchists of his time, as his attacks were considered to be out of bounds for anarchist morality.
-November 7th, 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 9th, 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 12th, 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 7th, 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 four hundred 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 31st, 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 which 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 4th 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 22nd, 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 forty 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 United States whose intention was to unleash chaos and terrorism in the country. He was the editor of the fierce Cronaca Sovversiva. 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, such as the November 24th, 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 27th, 1919: Four Galleanists died when one of their bombs prematurely went off in a textile factory in Franklin, Massachusetts.
-April 29th, 1919: Galleanist anarchists send 30 package-bombs to notable figures in authority throughout the United States. 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 2nd, 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 3rd, 1919: A night watchman died detonating a bomb abandoned by the Galleanists in a New York courthouse.
-September 16th, 1920: Mario Buda (an anarchist of Galleani’s crew) detonated the first car bomb (or rather a carriage bomb) in history. He left a deadly bomb consisting of 45 kilos of dynamite that detonated by timer in a carriage parked in front of Wall Street. 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. 38 people died and 400 were injured in the formidable indiscriminate attack.
-March 23rd, 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 one hundred wounded, most of them ordinary citizens.
-November 29th, 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 Sante fought ferociously, shooting two policeman and disarming the last one and letting him go free.
-May 16th, 1926: A bomb made out of two hollowed-out cannon balls filled with blasting powder exploded in front of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The blast left a man-sized hole in the embassy wall which 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 being ever more deadly terrorist attacks.
-July 22nd, 1927: A powerful bomb exploded at night in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The target was the 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 24th, 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 United States in the Argentine capital. (The United States 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 United States, Sacco and Vanzetti, who were accused of belonging to a group of terrorist-anarchists 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 17th, 1923) and Radowitzky (a Ukrainian anarchist who assassinated Colonel Falcon on November 14th, 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 the way in which they conceived of themselves according to their own worldview. “
-May 7th, 1928: An infernal explosion shook the Italian Consulate in Buenos Aires. A man left a suitcase which 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 26th 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 26th, 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 31st, 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 10th, 1928: A powerful explosion occurred in the house of Michele Brecero, a prominent fascist living in downtown Buenos Aires.
-June 11th, 1928: An explosion destroyed the house of Cavaliere R. De Micjelis, Italian Consul in Argentina.
-November 10th, 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 14th, 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 25th, 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 22nd, 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 25th, 1929: A group of anarchist terrorists shot the Spanish anarchist Emilio López Arango three times in the chest. López Arango was responsible for the anarchist paper 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 through 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 12th, 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 12th, 1930: A bomb was detonated at the Italian Consulate in Córdoba, Argentina, leaving one agent wounded and causing much damage.
-January 20th 1931: Three powerful explosions occurred in three subway stations in Buenos Aires. The attacks left four dead and twenty injured, as well as leaving serious material damage.
-February 1st, 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 it looks like 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 their storing bombs, using firearms, murder, raids, complicity, falsification of documents, counterfeiting money, agitation, theft, bombings, jailbreaks, 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 which at the time were favored by many anarchists who also advocated the use of violence. This is because the conditions in which they arose as individuals in that 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 not-so-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 spacc-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 ofmyself I don't exist, I only exist in myself.
In truth, outside of myself I don't matter. I hang myselfwith 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 ofmy 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 etforts 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 ofTechno-lndustrial 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 ifl 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 oftruth cuts into each one ofmy 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 cco-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. Ifyou 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 yourseln 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 oflife. 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
Richard Kuklinski 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 a bout 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 tattooiny., but my tattoos are on the inside, done in the ink of unerasable Whirl, which makes them eternal. Wizien I am
ounded, I see them, they evc11 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-extrernist 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 rec01 end 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 offake 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 fr0111. In calling in a phone threat, it's always important to do it in another voice. This aims at nuking 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 bis 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 ofa 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, " lf cco-extremists are
so opposed to tffli11ology, why do they use the lntemet?"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 anonymDusly. 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 nude 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.
Ifyou have a PC, we recommend that you configure it to hide your IP address. Though if you download TOR this might not be helpfol 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 recom1nend Linux as a safer operating system since it has a variety of options to protect yourself from malware, viruses, spy ware, 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. Ifyou 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 ofWeb 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 h;ive 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 Sodiety 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 flmv 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 reconunended to stay away from all radical political venues in order to live the most convincing double lite, and that means not just staying away from anarchists, but also Marxists and other leftists. The further we are from the places that dravv 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 em-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 \Vith 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 ofreality. Let us not look for an ephemeral and false escape in the present. Rather, let em-extremists be always alert, keeping our savage instincts for attack and survival finely tuned. We arc 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 ;md 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 ofpeople 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 ofWild Nature, and maintaining our instincts even when we find ourselves within civilization. We aim to take the tendency to its final conclusions, accepting fi1ll 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 I 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 afi:er year. .. do they really think that they will get off scot-free? Possessed hy 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 ofstrange 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 ofthe 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 »i/lA11ti-Tcrlz Revolution: Ullzy 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 communique 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 F11t11rc (ISAIF) in 1995:
We ther^fore adFocate a 1wol11tio11 against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of thole nee; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning afew 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 as" as well as '"grand-strategic" suggestions for ho sucha revolution might be prepared forand 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 Tcr/1110/ogiral 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 ofAR. 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 ofhis thought. As such, AR has an important role in Kaczynski's corpus as well as for anyone interested in the nuances ofKaczynski'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.
*** I. 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 ofAR 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 oflarge scale societies rarely turn out as expected. "In iacth failuee 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 ofsomething 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 nrnch 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.
*** II. 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.
2. 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.
3. Self-propagating subsystems of a given supersystem tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on specific conditions that prevail within the supersystem.
4. Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a selfprop system can extend its operations.
5. 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 ofmaximum 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 conununication.
6. 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.
7. Whereas today problems oftransportation 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 oflogical 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 specific1lly 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 \\'e 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 ofsocieties 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 fotures 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 rn^eans 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 ho11' long the structures that support civilization on its decadent path will last. r,ve can read much concerning various existing theories but still we'II be /eft waiting for the appointed prophetic year in which 111aybe 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 tl'e have derided to take the rest ef our lives into our own hands and not wait_for the crisis to happen. Why? Because we are already living it. Wc don’t want to wait because Nature encourages us to retum 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 ofany 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 amceh'e of some specific development which will inevitably propel your community in the direction you want to go."
2. Preaching alone-the mere advocacy ofideas-cannot bring about important, long-lasting changes in the behavior of human beings, unless it takes place in a very small minority.
3. 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.
4. 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, dear, simple, and concrete objective, the achievement of which will produce the desired change.
2. 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 \Vithout any further effort on the part of the movement or anyone else.
3. Once an objective has been selected, it is necessary to persuade son1e small n1inority 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 itselffor practical action.
4. In order to keep itself faithfol to its objective, a radical movement should devise means of excluding from its ranks all unsuitable persons who may seek to join it.
5. Once a revolutionary movement has becon1e 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 ofKaczynski'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 ofthe 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. Ifyou 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 nuke 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 Ill that these rules can't always "be takrn as rigid laws" (AR, p.119) given the difficulty we've just discussed of foreseeing the real world situations that such a revolutionary move1nent would face, but we've just stated why that doesn't really make it any better. This contradiction betwebn 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 pessi1nistic, etc. Maybe some would say it is hastily dismissive despite our pointing out a number oflegitimate 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 naive hope in the face of these criticis1ns, doubling down on the revolutionary na"ivete ofKaczynski 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 poi11f, the strategic basis for the ‘great revolution’ is supposition, ‘perhfps,’ 'hopefully,,' 'it may lie,’ 'in best cacases,’ 'it depends,’ in other words, nothing concrete,all in the wind. This reminds us c!f what a popular l\!lexica11 romedian said in his shows: 'Maybe nos, 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 to 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 conm niques both ITS and Wild Reaction have made detailed criticisms ofKaczynski's recourse to the French and Russian revolutions (the most detailed are contained in the earliest phase of ITS communiques and in various publications fromWild 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 l!{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 ofKaczyiiskitr treatments here in chapter IV, but they are not the 111a i11 issuethat I had withthe chapter. What I perso11a lly found to be the most obnoxious element ofthe chapter wasKaczynski's yo11sta11t 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 enwmpassing Lclliathan ofyillilization, a11d do
mestication itself for that matter. Sin(e the first cwmmuniqucs of ITS in 201 1 they haw persisted i11a si11istate the following on this point: "Mice 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 ita non-existentgoal.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 rennin 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 otWild 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:
Thewildcanwaitnolonger.Civilizationexpandsindiscriminately at the cost ofall that is natural.We won't stay twiddling ourthumbs, looking on passively as modernmanripstheEarth apart in search ofminerals,buryingherundertonsofconcrete,orpiercingthrough entire hills to construct tunnels.We are at war with civilization and progress,aswellasthosewhoimproveorsupportitwiththeirpassivity.Whoever!
Individualists Tending Toward the Wild The Seventh Communique of ITS
Conclusion
What remains to be said ofKaczynski'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 sta11d by this claim. I also brit:fiY note the root of 111y disagreemen ts ji-om an eco-extremist perspective and have, thro11,sth the foregoi11.st analyses, attempted to more thoroughly delineate their conte11t. And it is out ofthis personal perspective that I.find 11111d1 ef this text simply unacceptable.
It is out ef this perspective that I af r111 the cw-extremist rejection of revolutionary delusions. I iljriii the eco-extremist focus on the present as the only sound lorn_; (?f attack. I qffir111 the ecoextremist's steaclfast honesty in theface qf the terrible present. I qffirm the eco-extremist warrior resolve to _fi.f?ht regardless qf the knowledge that one's war may well be suicidal, and other points from the eco-extremist perspective. I71csc are positions that are simply irreconcilable with those ef Kaczynski. So be it. Certainly therewillbethosewithouttheearstohearTherewilb ethose who denounce these rejections as nihilistic, defeatist, pessimistic, etc. There will be those who trade honesty for the comforts of a revolutionary naivete. 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 rcsomtes, 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 ofRegresion #4:
Reality often presents us with a defeatist and very pessimistic scenario.Nevertheless,acceptingthisrealityiscrucialforremovingthe blindfold and acceptingthingsjust as theyare,evenifthis is difficult. Thisblindfoldisofcourseutopia.Manyhavecriticizedlndividualists TendingToward theWild orWild Reaction and similar groups for rej ectingtheideaofa"bettertomorrow'' They critiquethesegroups for not expecting a positive result from fighting in this war, or for rejectinghope.But peoplearealways goingto hearonlywhatthey want,andnotRealityTheeco-extremistindividualistisarealistand pessimist at the same time. He doesn't listen to the nagging ofthe puerile optimist; for him, the world is full ofdark realities, and he mustconfrontthesewithstrength,defendinghimselffromthemwith 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 niver....
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 offreedom. 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
I have looked at civilization from the mountains, preferring to go deeper into them rather than step once again on the concrete. I have felt relief from having finished building a shelter, and resting my tired feet in the evening calm. I have been surrounded by fireflies without doubting for a second that I too am an animal on this Earth. I have walked on the paths where my Teochichimeca ancestors trod. There I have found obsidian arrowheads, one that perhaps entered the body of an invader, wounding or possibly killing him. But without a doubt, it was shot by my ancestors, and by mere coincidence it has come down to me. Ibis made me feel 'chosen' to honor their memory and continue that warrior instinct. This is what I have done.
-Editorial, Regresion no. 5