Number 25
- “Terrorists” exposed as working for British state
- Paris rises up
- Whose future?
- The Dispossessed by Paul Cudenec
- Lies of His(story) by Rob los Ricos
- Heretical dreams of wildness
- What would an uncivilised world look like?
- Acorninfo
1. “Terrorists” exposed as working for British state
The British state’s direct involvement in terrorism has been exposed by an official investigation.
The 160-page report by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman, released on June 9, looks into the murders of six Catholic men watching football in a bar at Loughinisland, Co. Down on 18 June 1994, for which nobody has ever been prosecuted.
Ombudsman Dr Michael Maguire declared: “I have no hesitation in unambiguously determining that collusion is a significant feature of the Loughinisland murders.”
Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, said the findings were “deeply disturbing”.
Irish opposition leader Mícheál Martin said the victims were simply watching Ireland playing Italy in the World Cup soccer competition when they were ruthlessly gunned down by loyalist killers.
“The fact that the police, who were entrusted with protecting the community, were embroiled in collusion with the death squad responsible for the massacre is sinister and disturbing,” the Fianna Fáil leader said.
He called on the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, to apologize for and retract a statement she made in a speech last February, where she said it wasn’t the police or the British Army who “pulled the triggers at Loughinisland.”
Villiers had said that “a pernicious counter-narrative” of the Troubles was emerging whereby responsibility for acts of terrorism was being shifted onto the security forces “through allegations of collusion, misuse of agents and informers or other forms of unlawful activity”.
Martin said her comments were “misleading and hurtful given the details of serious collusion that have now emerged”.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams said the Ombudsman’s report was “just the latest exposing the depth of collusion involving British state forces and unionist paramilitaries”.
Paddy McCreanor, nephew of victim Daniel McCreanor, said: “Collusion is no illusion and collusion happened. The truth has come out and that’s all we ever wanted.”
The families’ lawyer Niall Murphy said: “This report is one of the most damning expositions of state collusion in mass murder that has ever been published.”
The coy phrasing in The Guardian’s report on the Ombudsman’s investigation illustrates the way the truth about the British state’s relationship with terrorism continues to be hidden from the British public and dismissed as some kind of crazed “conspiracy theory”.
Journalist Ian Cobain writes: “Senior loyalist paramilitaries who were employed as police informers at the height of the Troubles smuggled an arsenal of weapons into Northern Ireland that were then used in at least 70 murders and attempted murders”.
“Employed as police informers“? Paramilitaries employed by the police are nothing other than state assets, terrorists working for the British authorities. It’s as simple as that.
Continuing to couch the truth in careful, indirect language, Cobain writes: “While Maguire’s report stresses that many in the police have ‘worked tirelessly’ to bring the Loughinisland killers to justice, its damning conclusions will be seized upon by those who condemned Villiers’ comments, and who argue that security force collusion with loyalist terrorism was a central feature of the conflict.”
He adds that many in Northern Ireland are “unable to agree about the true nature of the conflict – or even the language that should be used to describe it”.
We would suggest that the appropriate language would include words such as “collusion”, “state”, “terrorism”, “deceit”, “lies” and “hypocrisy”.
Anyone keen to understand the “true nature” of the “Troubles”, which saw 2,618 people killed and more than 33,000 injured, might also want to look more closely at:
* Freddie Scappaticci, alias Stakeknife, the British agent who infiltrated the IRA to run its internal security and ordered 40 people to be murdered as security risks – presumably the wrong ones.
* Brian Nelson, the British agent who became the intelligence chief of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association – performing a similar role on the other side of the deadly maze of mirrors.
* The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, and the Maguire Seven – all people wrongly convicted of republican bombing atrocities. Or maybe we should put some inverted commas around “republican”, because if they’re not responsible, who knows who was really behind the outrages and why the British establishment was so keen to find someone to blame for them. Incidentally, the Birmingham bomb led to the 1974 Labour government passing the original Prevention of Terrorism Act.
* The Omagh bombing of August 15 1998, generally blamed on a republican splinter group. Suspicious minds have pointed to the fact that public horror at the attack, in which 29 people died, allowed Tony Blair’s government to rush through controversial “emergency” anti-terrorist legislation, in the form of the Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act 1998, less than a month later in September 1998. This allowed people to be convicted of belonging to a proscribed organisation merely on the say-so of a senior police officer, created an offence of conspiracy to commit offences abroad and generally prefigured more recent terrorist legislation. Helpfully, it included a clause giving “all crown agents immunity from prosecution under the legislation”.
* Constant suspicions of the involvement of the British state in sectarian killings, which still won’t go away, even though its focus switched suddenly to a new “war on terror” just as the “Troubles” were declared over. Questions have been asked about state involvement in the deaths of Rosemary Nelson, loyalist Billy “King Rat” Wright, catholic Robert Hamill and RUC officers Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan.
In 2012 Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to admit that the level of state collusion uncovered by a report into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane was “shocking” – though the report predictably concluded there had been “no overarching state conspiracy”. No, of course not.
A massive and dramatic day of resistance to the neoliberal Loi Travail was staged in Paris and across France on Tuesday June 14, with scenes in the capital described by witnesses as like a “war zone”.
An estimated million people marched in Paris, with the back end of the protest still waiting at the start of the route when the front had arrived at the destination. 1.3 million were on the streets across France.
The Paris march was led by the biggest autonomous bloc that has been seen in the city for several decades, with a strong international anti-capitalist participation.
It was attacked repeatedly and brutally by police using all the militaristic weaponry at their disposal – not just the usual batons, tear gas and grenades but also two water cannon, used in Paris for the first time.
Protesters responded to the police attempts to split the march with much determination and hails of stones.
Near the Duroc metro station, scene of some of the fiercest fighting, windows of the France’s overseas territories ministry were broken and its walls covered with graffiti – it was renamed the Ministry of Colonies.
Other buildings, from banks and estate agents’ to Starbucks were also targeted.
There were said to have been 58 arrests. The authorities ridiculously claimed only 40 people were injured, of whom 29 were supposedly cops and only 11 protesters! In reality, hundreds of protesters were hurt, many seriously, according to activist website Paris Luttes.
Levels of police violence and the cops’ utter contempt for the welfare of injured protesters are well illustrated by this shocking video.
After the main march, protesters regrouped in the evening for further unauthorised protests, which were again attacked by cops – notably the fascistic plain-clothed thugs of the “Bac” (“Anti-criminal brigades”).
This was the biggest turn-out yet against the Loi Travail, but still the state refuses to change its neoliberal course (see below). Instead it is now threatening to ban future protests if there is no “guarantee” that property and people will not be threatened.
This is unlikely to deter the resistance and more days of action and strikes are already being planned. Watch this space and follow us on Twitter for updates.
The real agenda behind France’s hotly-contested new labour laws has been helpfully spelled out by the country’s leading right-wing rag.
Le Figaro dedicated its front page and a special inside section on June 1 to the Loi Travail and the massive social struggle against it.
And the coverage makes it quite clear that the hated reforms are being violently imposed on the French people at the behest of the global financial elite.
It quotes the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, as saying the labour laws are the “minimum” that other European states expect of France, pointing out that other states have successfully imposed even harsher neoliberal measures.
It is clear that the massive scale and determination of the rebellion has left France’s capitalists rattled. You can almost see the blue blood boiling between the lines in Le Figaro‘s reports and comment.
It condemns the “violence and absurdity” of the social struggle and “this France where people can attack a police car with a metal bar, where a backward-looking trade union with a Marxist ideology can halt the trains, the metro, the ports, the airports, the oil refineries; where repeated demonstrations can degenerate into pitched battles.”
Nowhere does Le Figaro show any concern for the future of the French people affected by the laws – instead it merely whines about the effect of the protests on the tourist trade and the Euro2016 football, the reputation of the country among the global financial elite and the reaction of the “investors” – the capitalist sharks who are hoping to profit from the increased exploitation of the French workforce.
“France has lost its attractivity,” it moans. “Worse, it is becoming a country that people leave, from which they emigrate. Foreign investors are running away and we have lost count of the number of its children, graduates or not, who have left it. In search of a job, of a less harsh tax system, of lower levels of bureaucracy, of an attractive entrepreneurial freedom. In short, in search of a country which faces towards the future”.
It adds that France has become a “country of the past”, stuck with “archaic” acquired rights for workers, “incapable of modernising itself” and “with neither future nor horizon”.
These repeated mentions of the word “future” illustrate one of the big lies of the capitalist system. Note that Le Figaro doesn’t talk about “a” particular future which it would like to see come about, but “the” future!
This has always been the deception behind the capitalist myth of “progress” – that the increase of industrial exploitation is in some way welded to the passing of time itself, rather than being a specific direction that society happens to have taken.
Taking any other path has always been to attempt to “return to the past” or to “turn the clock back”, rather than moving forward in time to a non-industrial future.
Now the same trick is being used to scrap what few rights the population have managed to accrue for themselves over the last 200 years of industrial capitalism.
By equating “the future” with increased capitalist exploitation, and by dismissing resistance to that exploitation as “absurd”, Le Figaro reveals a totalitarian mindset in which even the possibility of a different vision of tomorrow is denied.
When this totalitarian attitude is enforced with violent policing methods to crush dissent, the resulting society is plainly far from being the “democracy” that it laughably claims to be…
4. The Dispossessed by Paul Cudenec
“I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls”. These were the words of Parra-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Yamparika Comanches. For his people, as Dee Brown explains, “land came from the Great Spirit, was as endless as the sky and belonged to no man”.
Here, surely, is an unchanging truth. Land is the surface of the Earth, which is billions of years old. How can it be said to be “owned” by transient individuals of one particular species temporarily populating its surface? And yet the huge majority of human beings born today find themselves denied the natural right to live and breathe freely on the planet on which they are born – of whose living substance, indeed, they are part.
The shocking depth of this dispossession is difficult for us to fully understand, from our limited perspective inside the very pit of this reality. It is also hard for us to grasp how we have slipped to this low point and how we have stayed there for so long. It is not difficult to imagine, of course, that there once might have been greedy, violent men (perhaps women, too!) who wanted to grab land for their own selfish use and exclude others. But, first, there must have been the idea that, contrary to the oldest traditions, land was not simply part of nature but could “belong” to somebody in particular.
Before the greedy men could desire to own it for themselves, there must have been a novel conception of land as being “ownable”. How did that happen? And then, once they had made their move and claimed an area for themselves and their kin, why did everyone else, the majority after all, let them get away with it? How did their theft become permanent? Crucially, at what point was their theft no longer seen as theft? At what point did it appear to be right and proper – so right and proper, in fact, that any attempt to undo this original theft would itself be considered a crime?
Ultimately, we are talking here about the origins of authority, which cannot be separated from the idea of land – the abstract notion of authority backs up the possession of land and thus wealth, while the possession of wealth provides the physical resources to enforce that authority in its real incarnation. How did Authority (with a capital ‘A’), as a force in its own right, come to pervert human society in this way?
We will consider its metaphysical aspects later in these pages (Chapter 10), but for the meantime all we need to know is that somehow, tragically, the land thieves got away with it. Over the centuries, people forgot that the land once belonged to nobody – could belong to nobody – and accepted the twin lies that not only did it indeed belong to somebody, but also that the persons who “owned” the land did so fairly.
For the full piece, which is the first chapter of Paul Cudenec’s book The Stifled Soul of Humankind, go to https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2016/06/07/the-dispossessed/ or see this pdf.
5. Lies of His(story) by Rob los Ricos
What do we know about the past? Mostly what we’ve read in books. How much should we trust this stuff? What if it was all make-believe? What if actual historic events have been jumbled in time and location, repeated as fact in several places, over centuries? How would we know?
There have been dissident scholars in the past, over several centuries, who have pointed out that kings of different countries – with different titles and names – were in fact the same person. There are scholars from the 19th century into contemporary times who believe that the stories we’re told in daily and Sunday schools have been so convoluted as to make more than 1000 years of history irrelevant; a fantasy presented as reality in order to indoctrinate people into submitting to lives of servitude.
To grasp these possibilities as anything more than paranoid conspiracy, I have to ask the reader to keep historic events in mind in a particular era, during which humanity was enslaved by ruthless, savage raiders from Eurasia, for the enrichment of their aristocracies. This time includes the seizure of the commons in England, the discovery of 4/5ths of the world by the Christian kingdoms, the obliteration of cultures and civilizations worldwide, and ends with the inquisitions, which wiped out generations of accumulated folk wisdom, libraries, and the living memories of people who had seen some of the other land’s actual cultures, prior to their destruction.
After all this had cleared the slate, so to speak, Christian monks began writing much of what we think of as recorded history. Many supposedly ancient documents do not survive today in any form older than this period. As mentioned above, entire libraries were burned over the years. And during the inquisitions in Europe, many books – a much rarer commodity in those times – were burned as well, oftentimes along with the owners and authors. Some fields of science, particularly related to medicine and healthcare, are only now recovering this knowledge in the West. Mostly by learning from the few folks traditions that have survived into modern times.
To further obfuscate what is presented as historic fact, the calendar system used by the West has been “adjusted” several times. There are many, many instances of astronomically aligned stone circles, all over the world, that still accurately depict the passage of time and the cycles of the seasons. This means that thousands of years ago, people could accurately track time, but hundreds of years ago, the calendar had to be “adjusted.” What went wrong? My first guess would be religion.
To read the full piece go to https://roblosricos.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/lies-of-hisstory/
6. Heretical dreams of wildness
We few began as wanderers in this wasteland, this wasted land, this land laid waste. Going through the motions every day, our hands passing over the assembly line, the steering wheel or the keyboard almost without our conscious awareness, as if ghost limbs.
We tell – or are told – the same story again and again of how we come to be here, of how we have ‘progressed’ into this age that clings to us like cellophane. Yet what is it, this thought which flashes unbidden across our minds while we submit to the bosses orders, or when we pass the clearcut forest?
Where does it lead, this chain of feelings we could allow ourselves to follow, hooked on the tailwings of the swooping swallow, or that draws us to a mountain or seashore? Why is it that our fingers twitch, curl into fists, become ours once more, when the newscasts and adverts blare, when the landlord knocks, when police approach?
Who are they, those friends whose company seems incommensurable with the hollow commodities, the acquisition of which keeps us apart; those voices who dare to challenge these values and way of life; those who tear away at this suffocating skin which has been grafted onto ours, bringing their heretical dreams to life again and again as feral beauty, bombs and beating hearts?
How could it be, that those moments could stretch on and on, while restrictions and categories peel away to fall as so much compost for the conspiracy of dandelions blooming atwixt the cracks, from an Earth we have learned to embrace once more?
Gather your strength, the reply from our bones counsels. Your fight seems to have begun for anarchy, for wildness.
This text appears at the beginning of the latest issue of the green anarchist zine Return Fire.
The contents include an extract from the latest cover story of Italy’s eco-insurrectionary periodical Terra Selvaggia, on ‘The Advance of Urbanisation’ and the cracks opening in the concrete. Annie Archet tells a life-story of evading identity, in Portrait of the Invisible Woman in Front of Her Mirror. Also: The Intensification of Independence in Wallmapu, John Severino’s poignant reflections on a project within an indigenous Mapuche community; The ‘Wild’ as Will and Representation, about commodified and alienated approaches in the urgent need for land reconnection; and Sean Dunohoe’s polemic against the Close Supervision Centres within the British prison system.
The zine also takes a retrospective look at some Global Flash-Points of insurgent activity in the months following their last volume. To Create & Maintain Their Wealth and ‘Sensuality, Magic & Anarchist Violence address gendered and speciesist domination through reviews of Silvia Federici, Arthur Evans and Jason Hribal.
7. What would an uncivilised world look like?
A new documentary film about finding hope for the future in our broken industrial world is touring the UK this summer and autumn.
“wetheuncivilised, A Life Story” follows the filmmakers as they speak to grassroots activists alongside the pioneering voices of Satish Kumar (editor of The Ecologist), Polly Higgins (ecocide lawyer), Bruce Parry (explorer), Martin Shaw (founder of School of Myth), Jewels Wingfield (ecofeminist), Mac Macartney (founder of Embercombe), Simon Fairlie (editor of The Land), Peter Owen Jones (clergyman, presenter), Glennie Kindred (author and artist), and the late Patrick Whitefield (permaculturist). On this quest, they take with them a question – what could an uncivilised world look like?
The website includes a quote from Joanna Macy on the struggle that lies ahead for those who care about the future of life on this planet.
Says the activist and writer: “Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great adventure. In all great adventures there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say ‘It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.”
Tour dates currently advertised are:
Frome (Sat 18 June), Glastonbury Festival (Thu 23 June), Yeovil, nr Tinkers Bubble (Sun 26 June), Horncastle (Thu 30 June).
Zig Zag, Glastonbury (Fri 1 July), Steward Community Woodland (Sun 3 July), Totnes Transition Town Film Night (Tue 5 July), Landmatters, Devon (Wed 6 July), Embercombe, Devon (Sat 9 July), Buddhafield Festival (Mon 11 July), Feed Bristol (Sat 23 July).
Stroud (Mon 1 August), The Big Green Gathering (Tue 2 August), The Northern Green Gathering (Thu 11 August), Off-Grid One Planet Community Festival (Fri 12 August), Wirksworth, Derbyshire (Sat 20 August), Belper (Tue 23 August).
Permaculture Convergence (Fri 2 September), Sheffield (Thu 8 September), Lancaster (Mon 12 September), Burnside, Cumbria (Wed 14 September), Glasgow (Fri 16 September), Findhorn (Sat 17 September), Nairn (Thu 29 September), Edinburgh (Thu 29 September).
Newcastle (Mon 3 October), Alandale (Wed 5 October), Leeds (Sat 8 October), Shrewsbury (Fri 14 October), Tywyn (Sun 16 October), Hampshire (Sun 30 October).
People are invited to set up a screening in their local community, and use it as an opportunity to bring people together – think skill sharing, talks and workshops during the day, perhaps bring-a-dish dinner, followed by a showing of the film and a community-led discussion/circle gathering in the evening.
First-hand accounts of struggles in Kurdistan feature in a new book by Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson. Struggles for Autonomy in Kurdistan, published by Corporate Watch, tells of the efforts to create a new society which are taking place in Bakur and Rojava – the parts of Kurdistan within the borders of Turkey and Syria. The setting up of local assemblies and co-operatives, as well as radical women’s and ecological movements, are rapidly gathering momentum in Kurdistan. The book gives a simple introduction to democratic confederalism, the idea that has inspired many of those involved in these movements. The book also compiles accounts from Kurdish people who are oppressed by the state of Turkey and profiles some of the companies that are complicit in their repression. The interviews give suggestions of how people outside of Kurdistan can act in solidarity. Buy the book or download it for free at https://corporatewatch.org/publications/2016/new-book-struggles-autonomy-kurdistan
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UK supporters of the ZAD protest camp at Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes in France have now set up their own website at https://network23.org/ukzad/. They say: “We are an autonomous group helping organise UK solidarity with la Zad and to help resist if and when an eviction attempt is made. Initial plans are to arrange a trip to la Zad some time in the summer and to organise a rapid response for UK people to get to. Email ukzad[@]riseup.net or use the contact form on the site”.
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A District Judge has refused to allow the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to appeal against the acquittal of eight anti-arms trade activists who were charged with blockading the DSEI arms fair in London last September. The CPS application to appeal was refused on the basis it was ‘frivolous’ and ‘misconceived’. On April 15 2016, eight activists were acquitted on the basis that they were seeking to prevent greater crimes such as torture and the mass indiscriminate killing of civilians in places such as Yemen, Kurdistan, Palestine and Bahrain. See Acorn 24 and update.
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The key study that justifies the UK Government’s claim that fracking is a climate change ‘solution’ is based on serious scientific errors, says a new report in The Ecologist. Adds the article: “Not only has the Government failed to correct them, but it is now delaying the publication of a new official report that would reveal the truth – that fracking is considerably worse for the world’s climate than coal”.
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“A major political summit, one of the biggest in the geopolitical calendar, and pretty much the only mainstream journalists who show up are inside the conference, bound by the omertà of Bilderberg… Decades of making it difficult for the press to report on the summit has led to a profound reluctance on the part of the media to bother trying”. So writes Charlie Skelton in his informative series of articles on the 2016 Bildberg Conference in Germany, published on The Guardian‘s website. And it wasn’t just the media who didn’t show. Where were the thousands of anti-capitalist protesters outside, furious at this secretive gathering of politicians, bankers, arms dealers and business people? Ah, yes, of course, Bilderberg is just a “conspiracy theory“…
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An anarchist summer camp is being held in Austria this August. Organisers say its aim is to bring people together and strengthen cooperation within the left and anarchist movement across borders. They say: “Our goal is to build up a network for cooperation and action that lasts longer than the camp itself. You neither need to be part of a political scene nor know anything about theory to participate at the A-Camp. Everybody who identifies with emancipatory and anti-authoritarian ideas is invited”.
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Acorn quote: “Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall be equal”. John Ball, Speech during Peasants Revolt, 1381
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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