We will not be free until the last imperialist is hanged with the guts of the last theocrat
A common exhortation, repeated after the bombings in London, is that we should not try and make political points in response to a tragedy. Leaving aside the hypocrisy which usually accompanies these calls, they say something interesting about the exhorter’s attitude to politics: politics is seen as extrinsic from actual life, that is, as something that could not be affected by the murder of 54 people. But if you think of politics as immanent to human existence, the idea of not having a political response to something like the London bombings is just nonsense: politics _is_, fundamentally, the attempt to prevent this kind of suffering.
All of which is a preliminary to quoting this piece, which a few of us wrote in the Edinburgh Indymedia Centre on that Thursday two and a bit weeks ago:
As the sun sets on the day of the London transport bombings, the
mainstream media are already reporting the bombings as though the G8
policies are part of the solution to the problem of terrorism rather
than one of the root causes of it. They ignore the fact that the G8 is
made up of the main perpetrators of political, military and economic
violence in the world today.The victims of today’s London bombings and the victims of attacks in
Iraq exist in a shared condition: they are the civilian casualties of a
war between neo-liberal market fundamentalists and religious fanatics.
So are the everyday victims of poverty. Neither side in the war has the
least interest in the casualties created. One side recruits its troops
from the slums of Atlanta, Manchester and Detroit; the other recruits
from the slums of Riyadh and Karachi. The troops and cheerleaders on
both sides serve only their masters, never themselves.The mainstream media has already started to project itself as though it
is our collective voice: as always, this voice has an immediately
emotive, nationalist, and even racist impact. It sells papers and
commercial time, but does little to advance understanding about what has
happened. If these events appear to have come out of nowhere, it is
because the media has totally failed to anticipate the consequences of
British attacks on the Muslim world, or to dwell on the likely response,
preferring instead to wrap itself in the flag, or act as “embedded
journalists” for the military.What goes largely unreported is the violence used in occupying foreign
countries and managing the global economy. This violence supports the
pursuit of profit through exploitation rather than social justice
through self-management. Violence against the citizens of London is
denounced hysterically; violence against the citizens of Iraq is a
problem only when not perpetrated by British or American forces. The
violence that maintains the sweatshops producing our consumer goods and
privatizes natural resources passes without comment. Violence against
anti-G8 demonstrators and the many who resist its policies around the
world is praised.We know that the walls created by anti-terror legislation are
ineffective in protecting anyone from terrorist attacks; we also know
that this legislation can be very effective when used against social
movements fighting against this system of violence. This has has been
illustrated by the use of “anti-terrorism” powers to stop and search
demonstrators, to criminalize minority communities, and in the massive
show of force to prevent people protesting against the G8. The media
and the pigs react to our movements for justice and democracy as if we
were terrorists, when it is the case that our movements are the ones
trying to effectively counter systemic economic, political, and military
violence.We will continue building alternatives as a movement to this endless
system of violence and, as Indymedia, we will continue to help the
voiceless find their voice.
There’s also a good statement from some Greek anarchists, and the CNT statement on the Madrid bombings is still just as relevant.
23 comments
Leave a comment
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I think if you’re trying to sound grown-up, referring to our police service as “the pigs” does little for your cause.
Comment by Marty @ 7/27/2005 10:19 am
Marty: It is quite interesting that you noted first the use of the term “pigs”. When writting this we did wonder how many people will make it to the last paragraph. There is a good reason why I think it should not be changed.
Power cannot be challenged by sounding “grown-up”, nor by being reasonable. It can only be challenged by building strong social movements commited to change — it is my belief that they must be from the people that have most to gain from change. Some people called them ‘working class’, but one can be less dogmatic and just say it is those who wake up every morning hating to go to work, and other days hating that they have no work. Believe me to those people (let me just say ‘us’ for the sake of brievety) the term ‘pigs’ is very natural.
The fact that you object to the term pigs just shows that you have not been on the wrong end of a policeman’s stick, like most people in the UK have at some point. A similar situation occurs when some people, who invariably have not been in prison, object to the term “screws” being used to describe the guards. I have met no one who has gone through a jail objecting to it.
So the real question is: who do we want to talk to? The politicians? the guardian readers? The advertising executives? My school teacher or priest? They would of course all object to the term ‘pigs’. I do not care about them and if this can keep them away from my politics, I consider it a good thing! The rest will find it just refreshing that someone can write what they think and say all the time.
Yours, Manos
Comment by manos @ 7/27/2005 11:27 am
I liked what you wrote a lot. It is clear and easy to understand, unlike a lot of stuff I read on here which seems to me be to be such high theory that it is counter-revolutionary. If I can’t understand it [and I am studying sociology at one of the best universities in the country] then I don’t see how other working class people can.
Comment by Laura K @ 7/27/2005 1:29 pm
“The fact that you object to the term pigs just shows that you have not been on the wrong end of a policeman’s stick, like most people in the UK have at some point”
I don’t *object* to it - I just think it sounds a bit naff, and your appeal may be broader if you dropped it. Anyway, it’s you’re little statement, not mine, so you can say what you please.
I wouldn’t assume anything, Manos. As it happens, I have been stopped by the police several times, but I have never been assaulted by them or arrested.
I would like to see some statistics to back up your assertion that “most people in the UK have at some point been on the wrong end of a policeman’s stick” as I find it a little hard to believe.
Comment by Marty @ 7/27/2005 4:48 pm
Apologies for the typo, BTW (”your” not “you’re”)
Comment by Marty @ 7/27/2005 4:50 pm
Can I just say, in response to this post’s title, ‘68er phrases are all very well, but what do you mean by “weâ€?, and what do you mean by “freeâ€??
Or is it just (just!) a cool slogan.
Comment by Alistair @ 7/27/2005 4:56 pm
Thanks, Laura. I should probably put more effort into making stuff here more clear; I suspect right now a number of posts only make sense to me, not because they’re incredibly high theory, just because they’re badly explained.
I thought it was a Spanish Revolution slogan, rather than a ‘68 one. Anyway, ‘we’ is the global proletariat; ‘free’ is a bit trickier, but I’d probably say it means something like, ‘able to exercise our collective powers under our own direction’.
Comment by Tim @ 7/27/2005 5:29 pm
Are you part of the global proletariat Tim? What an extraordinarily broad church it is if you are. Can I be in it too?
I don’t understand what you mean by “collective powers”. Or “under our own direction” for that matter. How does that work?
Oh, I can see the point of trade unions and workers cooperatives and that. But if you want a piece of capital why not just buy some shares?
Comment by Alistair @ 7/27/2005 7:13 pm
Hi again Marty — I appologise, since I did not mean to antagonise you. I should have clearly used the term ‘one’, since it is what I meant instead of ‘you’. My insight on the feeling of your random citizen does not come from statistics I am affraid (even though 5% of the population will go through prison in their lives, so that gives you an estimate of those arrested, stopped and searched, chassed * their friends and family that hear about it), but by living though the scened pictured in this video:
https://video.indymedia.org/en/2005/07/118.shtml
Always yours, Manos
Comment by manos @ 7/28/2005 12:10 am
this was a brilliant post.
I’ve always wished that more mainstream media would recognise that various distinctions from the mainstream operate in parallel fashion and thus to speak from any margin encourages solidarity with voices from other margins. It would make it so much easier, then, to have a foot to stand on when speaking to most daily news watchers. It would also encourage people in all disparate parts of the “movement” to coalesc and work together instead of fracturing and imploding, which is what i see more frequently in north american activist politics at the moment.
The black bloc doesn’t speak to the marxist leninists doesn’t speak to the queer groups doesn’t speak to the environmentalists doesn’t speak to the vegans doesn’t speak to the anti-consumerismists doesn’t speak to the bike brigades doesn’t speak to the culture jammers and on and on and on.
I keep thinking feminism’s the thing that’ll tie it all together, but so far thats been a dud as well.
Comment by elise @ 7/28/2005 3:52 pm
i assumed it was a 68 slogan myself, or at least loosely based on the telegram sent by the situationists to the chinese government. but it seems likely given the wording that the situationists actually altered an old spanish slogan, replacing “theocrat” with “bureaucrat” and such.
Comment by geo @ 7/28/2005 4:42 pm
Hi Guys,
Interesting discussion here- anyone object to me sticking in my glib twopence worth?
I’m with Marty on the Police as ‘Pigs’ reference. When people use it I am reminded of Rick in the Young Ones and his hope that the ‘People Who Don’t pay their TV Licences Against the Nazis’ group will shake up the University’s Anarchist Society.
I can see and empathise with some of what’s behind the statement, the dubious practical usage of the anti-terror laws, the notion that if you’re not really behind the capitalism shin-dig it’s best not to try and export it as the model and the idea that there is a lot of economic violence in the developing world that most of us fat westerners give tacit consent to through buying cheap H&M t-shirts. Fair enough. We could argue about processes of industrialisation and the like, but I wouldn’t have the evidence.
The G8 as the root causes of terrorism? Really, How? By being part of the capitalist hegemony? I accept that consistently holding back democratic groups during the cold war helped Al-Queda-esqe dogma to spread, but that’s the fault of us not being pro-liberal democracy enough surely? The theology of the terrorists is about as anti-capitalist as you can get.
I refute the idea that modern liberal capitalist societies are even comparable in their fundamentalism to religious fanatics. We’re an open society, they’re closed.
Canada is part of the G8, do they perpatrate a lot of military and political violence? I had rather assumed the Canadian argument could not beat a girl’s hockey team.
Comment by Jake @ 7/28/2005 4:55 pm
Of course Canadian ‘argument’ should be ‘army’. I’ll re-read my posts in future.
PS. I thought the title of the post came from Trotsky, with ‘imperialists’ and ‘theocrats’ replacing ‘capitalists’ and ‘bureucrats’ in the original.
Comment by Jake @ 7/28/2005 4:58 pm
canadian “peacekeepers”, in such places as Somalia, have tortured and killed their “prisoners” with about as much glee as the Americans at Abu Ghraib.
We are part of the G8 and we by no means have clean hands. Canada, at this moment, sends more troops to reinforce the imperialist armies in Afghanistan. If you think we aren’t on someone’s bad list, think again. While I am not convinced that this will lead to a “terror attack” on our own soil, I do not think we ought to be held up as a particularly peaceable or benign nation.
Comment by elise @ 7/28/2005 5:58 pm
elise, just wondering, were you bothered about the torture and killing in Abu Ghraib when it was done by Ba’athists? The domination of Shia by a Sunni minority… was that a-ok?
Were you bothered about the imperialist Taliban in Afghanistan?
This “imperialism” thing: it’s rather tedious. As long as people aren’t all exactly the same and as long as people are able to form alliances, power will be exterted on the weaker by the stronger. Frankly, I’d rather empires were built whose subjects had freedom of association, speech etc. And yes, you can argue that America hasn’t promoted that in the past. Fair enough. What if it was to do so? What if it already is?
Which empires, exactly, do you object to?
Comment by Alistair @ 7/28/2005 6:06 pm
i’m not entirely clear on how criticising one regime is by default showing support for another. thats just a red herring.
Comment by elise @ 7/28/2005 6:09 pm
elise, it’s not. My argument is that power and oppression is everywhere, but criticism is limited to certain suspects - the US, UK, G8 in general. That’s something that should at least be looked at. Why were there no large demonstrations against Saddam Hussein? Why are there none against Mugabe or Kim Jong-il? Or against the various despots around the Middle East. You can hate George Bush for a lot of reasons, but he was democratically elected (this time at least).
Comment by Alistair @ 7/28/2005 6:35 pm
Hi Alistair — there are many reasons to focus dissent against the advanced (industial) capitalism. First of all it is the dominant model or exploitation and domination, that tends to spread around these days. Sure! I have no problems condeming feudalism, patriachy, casts, religious fundamentalism (which is doing rather well these days), fascism (which I only see as a form of capitalism anyway), slavery, pathetic local dictators and tyrans, … but at the end of the day I cannot see them becoming again the hegemonic political system. Capitalism (imperialism, empire, … whatever you like calling what the G8 represents) is hegemonic right now, and in order to make progress beyond it we need to criticise it first.
Secondly this is the condition I live under. Everyday I wake up and go to work to get my pay at the end of the month; I wait for the weekend to wash my clothes and phone my mum; I walk the streets and see a million starbucks before I get to the small cafe; the guy that serves me there looks tired; I also see clothes shops and think I should become cool one day; the girls don’t look at me and I know why. That is my world and in order to change it, so that it is not so grim, I simply must smash capitalism :-)
To use another 68 slogan: the revolution, you do it for yourself.
Always yours, Manos
Comment by manos @ 7/29/2005 1:36 am
Everyday I wake up and go to work to get my pay at the end of the month; I wait for the weekend to wash my clothes and phone my mum; I walk the streets and see a million starbucks before I get to the small cafe
Manos, dude, that sounds terrible. How do you cope? :)
I vaguely see your point about condeming capitalism because its the hegemonic political system, and if you believe that all power, terror and oppression flows from capitalism then fair enough.
However, isn’t saying “I cannot see them becoming again the hegemonic political system” a bit of a cop out?
I can’t imagine the oppressed of Iraq, Kosovo or Darfur being particularly comforted by us saying ‘we probably won’t intervene, actually guys, largely because we don’t see a chance of the horrific regimes you live under becoming hegemonic”. Basically, until we think theocratic dictatorship and genocide could be on the cards in Watford, we’ll carry on sticking it to that terrible Bliar, Bush and other elected representative democracies.
‘the revolution, you do it for yourself’ - I couldn’t agree more. Carry on walking past Starbucks and avoiding trendy clothes, convince enough people to agree with you and you’re there. And isn’t that a great advantage of the freedom of choice in liberal democracies?
Comment by Jake @ 7/29/2005 10:21 am
Sorry Manos - I couldn’t resist…
“the girls don’t look at me and I know why”
Is the idea that in the socialist utopia hot chicks will lower their standards in a noble spirit of egalitarianism? If I missed this out when reading Marx and Lenin, I want the references forwarded and I’ll sign up immediately. If not, I will carry on believing that the best chance of finding loose women lie in liberal capitalist democracies.
Comment by Marty @ 7/29/2005 4:28 pm
Marty! If capitalism wasn’t so all encompassing and crap then people wouldn’t HAVE to have the latest clothes/hair/body shape/height and EVERYONE would be attractive, rather than those that can afford to buy the latest clothes/hair/body shape/height[??!] OR those that naturally fit the bill OR those that have enough time on their hands to persue such matters. I’m not sure how this would happen but IT WOULD! I AM SURE! I HAVE NO PROOF, BUT I AM SURE! Also people wouldn’t call women who are as sexually active as men “loose” anymore!
Comment by (Hyper) Laura K @ 7/29/2005 6:16 pm
“politics is, fundamentally, the attempt to prevent this kind of suffering”
I’m concerned that your politics is entirely reactive, if not rhetorical. You rely on tragic world events not as some kind of rescue service does, reacting as soon as the alarm bells ring and going to work on the world with practical improvements- but as fuel for an intellectual exercise and for what amounts to your religious belief. You need disasters to allow you to write punchy little “manifestos”, where the goals are predetermined and immobile, and the motivations are retroactively tagged onto the arguments.
However, your “work” is not dangerous not for its ludicrous fundamentalism (the tenets of which certainly seem to operate according to some parallel reality), but for its middle class arrogance that it speaks with a working class voice, and for its shamelessly crowbarred self-defined “relevence” in any crisis:
“The media and the pigs react to our movements for justice and democracy as if we were terrorists”
I mean. Please.
Comment by Andrew C. @ 8/3/2005 7:06 pm
Here is the real history of the quote which you used as the header for this note: it is sloppy translation of a slogan from the May 1968 Paris student rebellion which, in turn, was one of many pastiches of a quote from the atheist French priest and revolutionary Jean Meslier (1664-1729)– who wrote that that the
world’s liberation would only be achieved when “the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priestâ€? in his multi-volume “Mon Testaament,” the subtitle of which says it treats “Of the
Vanity and Falseness of all the Divinities and All the Religions of the World, to be addressed to my Parishioners After my Death to serve Them as a Testimony to Truth.”
Meslier spent his entire adult life s a country priest in a
small village in the Champagne region of France. His three-volume “Mon Testament,â€? published only after Meslier’s death, was a revolutionary socialist and utopian communist call for the leveling of all inequalities, commencing as a categorical imperative with the exposure of religion’s lies as the “opium of the peopleâ€? long before Karl Marx. Meslier went to gret lengths toinsure this extraordinary manuscript’s survival, so it wouldn’t be suppressed by the authorities of church and State when he was gone. Having willed all his worldy goods to his poorest parishioners, before his death Meslier resorted to what we would now call samizdat, carefully copying — with a quill pen, by candlelight — four complete versions of his 2000-page manuscript, which he deposed in safe hands. It circulated under the table until Voltaire — who had read it three decades earlier and plagiarized from it — chose the
moment of his own greatest battle with the Catholic Church to published a bowdlerized version of Meslier. Meslier’s “Mon Testament” was influential and admired in the French Enlightenment; Diderot, too (to whom many dictionaries of quotations erroneously attribute the “entrails” quote — also borrowed freely from Meslier while rarely giving him credit. Meslier also became popular among the revolutionary democrats of the liberal Russian
intelligentsia in the early 19th century, who made French their second language — Pushkin nodded to Meslier when he wrote an 1819 quatrain that says, “with the entrails of the last Pope, we will strangle the last Tsar” (this was one of the poems that got Pushkin sent into administrative exile in South Russia by the Tsarist police).
Meslier was also much admired by 19th century American free-thinkers — extracts from Meslier’s “Testamentâ€? were published in the U.S. in 1833 under the title “Common Sense,â€? and again in 1878 as a book entitled “Superstition in all the Ages,â€? a version republished many times (both taken, unfortunately, from the bowdlerized Voltaire edition, which had excised much of Meslier‘s
revolutionary politics).
Marx much admired Meslier, and quoted him. And when the Bolsheviks came to power, and a stela to the â€?Heros of Libertyâ€? was erected on Red Square, Meslier’s name was inscribed next to that of Spartacus. The rediscovery of Meslier began with the May 1968 student-worker rebellion in France, which adapted many of Meslier’s revolutionary formulations to its own purposes. Another version of the “entrails” quote — and this one actually was from the Situationists — called for “the last sociologist to be strangled with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.”
A synthesis of Jean Meslier’s life and thought will appear in the American socialist review NEW POLITICS in January 2006 under the title, “A Gramscian Under Louis XIV.” This forthcoming essay,translated from the French,is written by the brilliant young (46)philosopher, my friend Michel Onfray, the prolific author of some 30 books,a libertarian socialist and anarchist, and a self-described “Nietzschian of the left.â€? Onfray’ s philosophical project is to define an ethical hedonism, a joyous utilitarianism, and a generalized aesthetic of sensual materialism that explores the brain’s and the body’s capacities to their fullest extent —
while restoring philosophy to a useful role in art, politics, and everyday life and decisions. All this presupposes, in Onfray’s philosophy, a militant atheism and the demasking of all false gods. Onfray’s essay on Meslier is the first major synthesis in modern times by a world-class intellectual of Jean Meslier’s work and life , and is part of the forthcoming third tome of Onfray’s projected six-volume “Counter-History of Philosphy.”
Michel Onfray, who is quite well-known in France and is a frequent guest on literary TV chat shows there, is the son of a manual laborer and a cleaning woman. A professor of philosophy for two decades,he resigned in 2002 to establish a tuition-free Université Populaire (People’s University) at Caen, at which Onfray and a handful of dedicated colleagues teach philosophy and other subjects in which they were supposed to have no interest to workingclass and ghetto youth. The Universite Populaire, which
is open to all who cannot access the state university system, and on
principle does not accept any money from the State, has had enormous
success, and — based on Onfray’s book “La communauté philosophique:.
Manifeste pour l’Université populaire (2004) , the original UP now has imitators in Picardie, Arras, Lyon, Narbonne, and at Mans in Belgium, with five more in preparation. Although many of Michel Onfray’s books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Portugese, and even Chinese and Japonese, and he has a growing following in Western Europe and Latin America (particularly in Brazil), not a single one of his 30 books has as yet been translated into English. I am trying to remedy that situation by arranging for U.S. publication of Michel’s latest book, “Traite d’atheologie,” which was a best-seller when published in France in the Spring of 2005. Until those plans are finalzed, however, I would urge all who are interested to mark their calendars for next January and read Onfray’s essay on Meslier, which will be available online at http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/default.htm And anyone interested in learning more about Michel Onfray’s work may, if they read French, consult his website at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/michel.onfray/
–Doug Ireland
Comment by Doug Ireland @ 8/19/2005 7:24 pm