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DIFFERENT EVERYWHERE
It’s an old story
and a long one, that every community creates its own outlaws. Those individuals
who, willingly or not, have not abided by the laws of the gods or the
authorities have always been banished. The difference that was burnt at the
stake by the Holy Inquisition is today constrained between the lines of
traveling papers or an expulsion order, when not enclosed in an asylum or a
prison. In contempt for those who would like to expel us or chain us up due to
one of those descriptions (“armed band”, “criminal association”) on which
unanimous preventative condemnation comes down, we will carry our difference
everywhere as individuals determined to subvert the rules of the community.
Over the past several years, one movement in the so-called
third world has been particularly successful in driving out western
colonialism. This movement is made up of people indigenous to the region in
which it is active and has gone a long way toward reestablishing local
traditional values as it perceives them while almost completely eradicating
western cultural influence. I am talking about the Taliban.
Of course, its perception of traditional Afghani cultural values arises
out of a fanatical Islamic faith. On this basis, women are forced to submit to
a most oppressive role that changes from day to day depending on the caprices
of the Taliban interpretation of the Koran. One day, they may be allowed
outside, completely veiled, to sell baked goods, as long as they take great
care not to flash an ankle or talk to a man. The next day, they may be banned
form selling, confined to the house and subject to punishment if they are seen
through a window. But, indeed, these are the old ways. Do we keep our mouths
shut at the whipping of women for flashing an ankle or appearing in their
windows at the wrong time simply because women’s liberation is a “western”
idea?
“It’s disgusting”
were the words Dee Hjermstadt, governing board president of the Recreation
Centers of Sun City West, Arizona, used to describe “public” sex at the
centers. It is doubtful that those taking part in the acts share her feelings.
What is particularly interesting in this case is that Sun City West is
not just any town. It is a planned community for people 55 years old and older.
Maybe what bothers president Hjermstadt is the age of these lovers. Certainly
they should know better; they should have outgrown such passions and desires;
they should have burned them out through years of labor and tedious
consumption. But instead these white-haired lovers pursue their desires, making
love in the pools, in the spas, on park benches and in parking lots, women with
men, men with men, women with women, as the desires flow.
Of course, Hjermstadt, the symbol of authority called in the cops to
help suppress this disturbing outbreak of passion. Puritanism is the necessary
adjunct to the use of sexual imagery to sell goods, an essential element of
capitalism. But for some, the energy of sexual desire recognizes neither the
laws against open sexual expression nor the social norms which dictate that
such desire should disappear with age. In such energy lies the potential for
revolt. And for those who grasp their desires as their own, life does not end
till they die.
AND PAY
HOMAGE TO THE WORKER
Among the many
idols that have miserably fallen into the dust, there is one that seems to
remain unassailable and unattacked. Work serves as the framework and armor of social
organization, consolidates it, aids in the maintenance and reproduction of this
society based on hierarchy and exploitation. To work means to produce
commodities (not only material) and to contribute to the social peace. Our
entire existence is stressed by work, by its rhythms and its needs: even our
rest, even our pleasures, even our so-called free time. Our mind is programmed
by work. Even those who are quick to declare themselves satisfied with the job
they do, perhaps making themselves useful and virtuous as volunteers, pay for
their privilege with domestication. Precisely thanks to its totalitarian
character, work is presented to us as
the only possibility we have of realizing ourselves, of having relationships;
it is imposed on us as the sole condition of life. To accept the inevitability
of work is the best way to perpetuate the state of survival and society. There
is no liberated work, no alternative work, no reduced work, not even when we
are fooled into carrying it out in a space that we have conquered. The chains
that bind us must be broken, even if they have been lengthened, even if they
have been lightened. Aware that indifference and detachment do not change
conditions, it only remains for us to intervene directly:
LET’S
DESTROY WORK!
—Canenero
A HERO OR
A VICTIM
Carlo Giuliani is
not a victim of police brutality.
He is another dead man in the fields of social war.
Carl Giuliani is not a hero.
He was a revolutionary who—with dignity—decided to resist violently
against whatever was oppressing him.
We remind all those who will try to build political careers on the blood
of our dead comrade, that he was one of those they call “provocateur” or
“hooligan”.
Carlo Giuliani doesn’t fit into their funeral orations or their
crocodile tears.
We don’t feel pity for Carlo. He died for something to which we have
dedicated our lives. For freedom…
Carlo will always live in the hearts of revolutionaries.
The struggle continues…
anarchist group
“Disobedience”
(Athens, Greece, July 27, 2001)
MOURNING FOR CARLO GIULIANI,
and
Separation
(excerpts)
Last week, July 27, 2001 a demonstration was organized in Belo
Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in solidarity with the
struggles in Genoa (G8 meeting), but it was especially called against the death
of Carlo Giuliani at the hands of the Italian police during these events in
Italy.
[…]
One thing that I see very clearly is that in our demonstration, we
didn’t focus on Carlo Giuliani as a martyr as we see in a lot of places
throughout the world. T-shirts, emotional slogans that portray Giuliani as a
hero only separate him from us.
Calling Giuliani
and calling ourselves demonstrators, activists, separates us from the world. We
all need, and are, much more than that! We need the revolution day-by-day, and
not with this separation. We must understand that when somebody dies in a
demonstration, it is we who have died. We must see that when someone is killed
or beaten by the police while going home after work only for being black, white
or lilac, it is one of us who has been beaten or killed! When we put an end to
this separation between demonstration and daily life (the space of revolution)
we will really be struggling against capitalism, against the G8 (against all
capitalist symbols) and against the already daily reformism with which a lot of
groups that claim to be of “the base”, “grassroots” and “autonomous” are
impregnated.
Without daily struggle/resistance and will for revolution we don’t have
radicality. The struggle is made day by day, and mournfully.
In solidarity,
EP
Coletivo Acratico Proposta
All the newspapers of July 21
said: “The antiglobalization demonstrations have their first death,” but we
say: we aren’t just against globalization, and, unhappily, we have deaths all
of our days.
THE
TECHNICIANS OF CERTAINTY
in the void, I myself a void.
I felt
like I was suffocating,
considering
and feeling
that
everything is void,
solid
void.”
—Giacomo
Leopardi
The metaphor of
“mental illness” dispossesses the individual of whatever is most unique and
personal in her way of life, in his method of perceiving reality and herself in
it; this is one of the most dangerous attacks against the singular, because
through it the individual is always brought back to the social, the collective,
the only “healthy” dimension in existence.
The behavioral norms that regulate the human mass become absolute, the
“deviant” act that follows a different logic is tolerated only when stripped of
its peculiar “meaning”, of the particular “rationality” that underlies it.
Reasons connect only to collective acts, which can be brought back, if not to
the codes of the dominant culture, to those of various ethnic, antagonist and
criminal subcultures that exist. The sharing of meanings, symbols and
interpretations of reality thus appears as the best antidote to madness.
Thus if one who suddenly kills his family is a lunatic, or better, a
“monster”, one who sets fire to a refuge for foreigners appears as a xenophobe
(at most, from the method, a bit hasty, but still within reason) and one who
slaughters in the situation of a declared war is nothing but a “good soldier”.
Thus, according to the classifying generalization that makes them all
alike, expropriating them of their lived singularity, lunatics are “ dangerous
to society”. Truthfully, one can only agree with this, certainly not because of
the supposed and pretextual aggressivity and violence attributed to those who
suffer psychiatric diagnosis (the
psychiatrists and educators of every sort are undoubtedly much more
dangerous), but because they have violated, knowingly or not, the essentially
quantitative codes that constitute normality. What is surprising is that after
long years of domestication there is anybody who does not respond to cultural
stimuli, if not quite automatically, at least in a highly predictable manner.
Unpredictability is the source of the greatest anxiety for every society and
its guardians, since it is often the quality of the individual; no motive, no
value, no purpose that is socially comprehensible, only an individual logic,
necessarily abnormal.
Defense from this danger is entrusted to the proclamations of science.
In other words, the “unhealthy” gesture, the creator of which is not
responsible, remains as a consequence of an external misfortune that could
strike and give rise to thousands of people like him. The mechanism is
therefore well contrived, a gesture deprived of meaning, of an underlying will,
becomes innocuous, and it is easy to neutralize it, along with its creator,
behind the alibi, which is “social” as well, of the cure.
The psychiatric diagnosis comes down on the individual like an axe,
amputating her language, his meaning, her life paths; it claims to eliminate
them as irrational, senseless; the psychiatrist behaves before them with the
liquidating attitude of one who transforms the experiences of life into
malfunctions of the psyche, the emotions into a malignant tumor to be removed.
Psychiatrists, as technicians of certainty, are the most efficient
police of the social order. Reality, like the meaning of existence, has clear
and unequivocal boundaries for these priests in white shirts; their mission: to
“return” those who have gotten lost venturing onto the winding paths of
nonsense “to their senses”.
If the police are limited, as is claimed, to beating you, the
psychiatrist demands to hear you say, “Thank you, I am well now” as well.
The focal point in the discussion is not in the four walls and the bars
of the asylum, nor in the electroshock and constraint beds, nor in bad as
opposed to good psychiatry, but in “psychiatric thought” itself, in the form of
thinking of anyone who addresses himself to different subjects with the
clinical eye of diagnosis, always looking for the symptoms of a pathology in
them, in order to annul the difference with a “therapy” that brings them back
to being more like us.
If the real purpose of the “new places” of psychiatry was that of
stimulating creativity, individual
growth, liberating communication and developing the capacity for relations, they would not be “psychiatric” or
“therapeutic/rehabilitative” places, but probably ideal places for everyone,
places of freedom. The problem is that these places are nothing but ghettoes in
which one does not find individuals interacting on the level of mutuality, but
rather two “categories” of persons in asymmetrical positions: the professionals
and the clients , the healthy and the diseased, those who help and those who
are helped; in these places, the healthy try to persuade the diseased that what
they did and thought up to that time was wrong, or rather “unhealthy”, and
through the “joyful” method of the encounter group, of dance, theatre and
music…lead them toward the binaries of normality.
The “autonomy” and “self-realization” about which these democratic
operators flap their tongues are exclusively their own and, to them, it is
necessary to conform in order to be able to leave the healing enclosure.
Psychiatric medicine itself, as analgesic (anesthetic) for the mind, is the sign
of the attempt to block every development, every pathway however painful at
times, that an individual puts into action as a reaction to that which
oppresses her. Without mystifying this process, this moment of “crisis”, that
is not necessarily a pathway to liberation, the fact of the matter remains that
the answer of power is generalized narcosis, collective stupefaction, that
renders us static and tranquil, anchored to our placid misery.
—Marco Beaco
The world
is full of cowards
they want
you to be cowardly
miserable
modest well-behaved
spit in
their faces
shit down
their throats
world of
the violated
lice of
life
phantoms
of the sanctuary
of work
protected
servants of the law
perverted
by god
transmitted
appearances,
alien,
dispossesses,
unfortunate,
bitter
bile,
people
bitter with repressed froth
back bent
prostituted
your
strength, your strength
sold in
another’s interest
police,
repressed
repressors
resentful
frightened,
confined
remember!
that house is not yours!
They can
always enter
lock the
doors and shutters well
you might
have committed a crime
look out
look out for the police
are you
sure you haven’t done wrong?
look
around
circumspect
perhaps
the taxes
or
something else
you have
not perhaps killed someone
you think?
Is that
car
yours? Are
you sure?
You are
not committing a theft?
Is that
woman yours
and won’t
she be unfaithful to you?
And won’t
you be unfaithful to her?
And is
that child really yours
bred in
the womb?
Watch out
someone might denounce you
where have
you put your license
and
identification card booklet
and
passport health card
work card,
money, legal,
fiscal,
postal
are they
not perhaps counterfeit
forged
from another
watch out
boy
cautious
delicate
not allowing
anything to shine through
remember
that house
that house
is not yours
he
shudders attentive
to
creaking sounds
cracks
shadows murmurs
sighs
squeaks
the police
might enter
from one
moment to the next
or we
could do it ourselves,
—Federico