...And Then They Came For the Anarchists

Transfered from old site

On Friday, 27 September 2002, in Washington D.C. the state declared war on us.
 

 
Make no mistake, we’ve been engaging in pitched battles for quite some time now. Until now, the West Coast radicals have faced the most severe and overt repression and surveillance from the federal authorities. Anarchists and forest defenders in that region regularly must deal with infiltrators, grand juries, and lengthy prison sentences. Same is true for our brothers and sisters in Long Beach, California and elsewhere in the West. The list goes on.
 

 
But these attacks on the anarchist movement are not unwarranted. Anarchists have of course been engaged in a low-intensity war to eliminate the very state that seeks to eliminate it, but the state refuses to acknowledge or declare its intentions… until now.
 

 

 
THE DAY THEY DECLARED WAR ON EAST COAST ANARCHISTS
 

 
On the September 27th People’s Strike (a day of resistance against the IMF, World Bank, and the capitalist state), organized chiefly by anarchists, local DC police in cooperation with federal authorities, systematically surrounded, arrested, and brutalized any gathering of people on the streets. Six hundred forty-nine people forced onto buses and paddywagons. What followed was a slow and dehumanizing process of humiliation, surveillance, and imprisonment. All buses and paddywagons drove to a police recruitment and training facility. After several hours handcuffed on the buses, the arrested were escorted inside where they were forced to remove shoelaces and belts to ensure a zero suicide rate. Address books were seized, photographs taken, fingerprints taken, and names and addresses, for the most part, divulged. The facility was crawling with law enforcement forces from several agencies: DC Metropolitan Police Department, U.S. Marshals, Joint Fugitive Task Force, Chicago City Police, the Secret Service, and the FBI. Those who gave their names had their information “processed” while they were all forced to wait in a large basketball gymnasium with their wrists tied to their ankles. Dozens of hours passed before all were released, and all but six charged with a minor offense (i.e.- failure to obey). Over a hundred arrestees continued jail solidarity, not giving their names, and were shipped to city jails.
 

 
A day of anarchist action: 649 arrested and charged with a token offense. DC MPD and FBI computers ready and waiting for hundreds to come through. Fingerprints, photographs, names, address, and whatever other information people may have volunteered now in the FBI database. The following day of the large permitted liberal rally and march – only 8 arrests. Do the math. It is no surprise to anyone upon reflection that the FBI, wanting to document East Coast radicals and anarchists, ordered the DC Police to apprehend any gathering on the streets that day, on grounds of national security. A systematic, surprise attack on anarchists, a deliberate escalation, and a new level of fascist repression. 600+ anarchists fingerprinted, questioned, and photographed. *Nothing less than an open declaration of war.*
 

 

 
IT’S A LITTLE TOO LATE TO WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN
 

 
They recently declared war on Arabs and Muslims who now must shut up or face (infinite) detainment.
 

 
They have declared war on the poor, offering nothing but crumbs and the wretched politics of trickle-down economics. The homeless flood our streets, hopeless and powerless in a fortified city where wealth, or more importantly, space, is guarded by the big guns and cameras of the state and the propaganda-filled cops in the heads of everyday people.
 

 
They declared war on black folks long ago, murdering Fred Hampton, bombing the MOVE house in Philadelphia, imprisoning members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, assassinating Dr. King and Malcolm X, recently convicting H. Rap Brown, and historically enslaving them for hundreds of years. At the cutting edge of today’s newest tactics in police brutality, many black folks face a daily struggle to survive: neighborhoods under attack and half their friends and families locked up by the state.
 

 
They declared war on the communists in the ‘50s and haven’t let up since.
 

 
Perhaps the longest running war is against the indigenous populations of this land. Ninety-eight percent of its inhabitants strangely absent and left out of the white man’s textbooks. Of the remaining 2% who choose to fight for the last remnant of dignity and for the dream of self-determination upon decrepit Indian reservations (concentration camps), they are shoved into cages and deemed enemies of the state.
 

 
And now, they are coming for the anarchists.
 

 

 
GET THE FUCK IN THE STREETS
 

 
To my fellow anarchists:
 
There is much work to be done on a personal and community level in the homes, workplaces, and shelters – for this is where we can begin to deconstruct the state’s threat on the invaluable relations between us. But we must not leave the streets, for this is where the enemy (fascism) thrives, and unless it is contested in the streets, we will complicitly degenerate into a state of hell on earth.
 

 
To those who merely talk of revolution:
 
You are impotent. Yes, you are the intellectuals and college liberals. Were not fighting for you to study us. In fact, we are not fighting for you at all; we are fighting *against* you and the pacification you engender. You talk of revolution as if it simply unfolds. No. People like you and me *make* it unfold. You and your buddies in CNN are rivals in the race to spectacularize us, and in turn, anesthetize yourself. So get the fuck in the streets before they militarize your universities and we topple your statues.
 

 
To those who "study the issues":
 
You “don’t know enough about the issues”? There is always more to know. There is always a little longer to wait. The time is never right. You think the World Bank and IMF and your own fascist government are doing the best they can for the poor in the third world? Look around you. Look at the people sleeping on the street. Better yet, look at your own miserable life. Do you really think you run your life? Universalize your frustrations of powerlessness and now tell me how you think about staying home, watching the TV, and fussing over how those hooligans were smashing “your” city up.
 

 
To the cops:
 
Fuck you. One day, a real rain is gonna come.
 

 
To all our brothers and sisters who hesitate to join us in the streets because they’ve never “protested” before:
 
Take us by the hand and together we’ll burn our way out of this world and into a new one *we* create. And, oh yeah, we’ve got your back.
 

 
By all means, just get the fuck in the street. Our lives are at stake.
 

 

 
THE BLOSSOMING OF THE U.S. ANARCHIST MOVEMENT
 

 
Windows smashed, lovers kissing while plastic handcuffs made their hands swell beyond recognition, strangers embracing to heal wounds fresh from a brutal baton charge, smoke bombs launched at police, bottles picked off the ground and hurled at approaching cops, riot helmets covered in spit, masked white college kids disobeying the non-violence guidelines on Saturday and kicking Mercedes and limos about to run over their friends. Black and Latino brothers and sisters who dared to mask up and run the streets knowing full well they run a more serious risk of repression. (And a special thank you to the black brother with the ski mask telling a pig just how he felt when cornered against a crumbling Citibank window. Your passion lives on in my heart.)
 

 
Realizing the importance, necessity, and excitement of militant tactics, we have grown in size and in heart. We continue to learn (albeit slowly) from our street-fighting experiences what is possible and to never give up on the impossible.
 

 

 
WE ARE ALL CRIMINALS
 

 
The state’s criminalization of dissent lands many of us prison. This is no reason to stop fighting, to be intimidated by the state. We must fight harder and smarter, hitting them where it hurts, and not merely just hitting them. And for god’s sake support your brothers and sisters who are locked up.
 

 

 
A SOCIETY OF SUSPECTS
 

 
They’ve got us looking over our shoulder to see who’s following us, wondering if the person next to us is a government agent or informer, suspecting our closest friends of collaborating with the authorities, writing emails in coded language, refusing to talk on the phone, and using aliases.
 

 
This is not the USSR. This is present-day America.
 

 
They have attacked the very thing that keeps many of us going – our friends. They have attacked the social relations between ourselves. Perhaps we were too busy deconstructing our relationships to those in power; and the powerful, realizing the growing threat to their existence, have assaulted the very fabric of our everyday lives.
 

 
“When you are a worker, you have nothing to do in everyday life with Yeltsin, Landsbergis, or Gorbachev, but rather with the cashier at work who pays you little, and with the cashier at the shop who takes a lot from you, and even peeps into your passport. We worry much more about changing *those* relationships, than about the relationships between Yeltsin and Gorbachev and Landsbergis.”
 
- February 1991, Statement from SMOT (Free General Workers Union) in Moscow, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union
 

 

 
ON THE MEDIA AND ITS USELESSNESS
 

 
The FBI and Local Law Enforcement Agencies around the world have targeted Independent Media Centers, while Indymedia reporters on the street continue to be singled out and arrested. Meanwhile corporate media mysteriously avoid arrest, or if not, they are mysteriously released without charge long before we are. Mysterious, eh?
 

 
They continue to attack our media. We must now commence our assault on theirs. For the media (perhaps even the media we do control), in its promotion of spectatorship, must be destroyed so that the possibility to stay neutral (the typical, “I don’t know enough about the issues”) and to stay at home is annihilated. Let us pick sides, and only then can fascism be dealt with for what it is. So let us dream of the day when we can walk on the streets without CCTV cheering us on, can turn on the TV only to watch it explode, and run riot in the street, pulling fire alarms as we go, making people spill into the streets to pick sides in a fight where cameras are nowhere and life is everywhere.
 

 

 
WE WILL WIN
 

 
Continue to hollow out the empire by empowering ourselves and our communities, but remember the empire’s shell will not execute itself. In fact, it will protect its shell with all the guns and propaganda at its disposal, insulted deeply that anyone has tried to hollow it out. Until the courthouses and capitols are looted and squatted, and police stations burned to the ground, freedom remains a myth.
 

 
Let us not convince ourselves that the state is stronger than it is. If this weekend can teach us anything, it is that the state is scared and vulnerable. The anarchists are one of the few groups who are openly fighting in the streets and our numbers will not alone topple the Bush regime or capitalism. But this means nothing. Discontent grows alongside fascism. Dockworkers shutting down West coast ports, Palestinian activists in Montreal disrupting a scheduled Netanyahu speech, black youth rioting in Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and America’s other urban centers, College fans taking the streets overturning police cars, Phoenix street kids throwing horse dung at police who moved in to protect a gentrified neighborhood, anti-bush demonstrators in Portland, bank robbers escaping with wads of cash, Arabs and Muslims hiding their friends INS snatch squads, and anti-war protestors defying marginalization by taking to the streets.
 

 
Let us not fall into a dogmatic, marginalizing anarchist trap. Let us instead rejoice in the forces of insurrection and be there on the streets alongside our brothers and sisters when they declare “Enough! Let’s escape this mess” – when a new society is born and when this empire falls.