Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 01:19:32 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexing Peter


 

Curiously enough, the thought crimes of which Ilan
finds me guilty have been expressed repeatedly on his
own -AT-infos site for months, by self-proclaimed
libertarian communists. Here's a couple of excerpts
from the anarchist journal 'Onward', which I am
pleased to say I discovered through -AT-infos.

Are you going to purge these guys too, Ilan? 

SH


"What can we put forward as a revolutionary program
against terror? 

[snip]

Solidarity with the Afghani people, in particular
material aid to RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan, which has been struggling in
clandestinity within Afghanistan and among Afghan
refugees for a democratic secular society, providing
education and health care. We must pose this as
clearly opposed to the US alliance with the
reactionaries of the Northern Alliance. 

Alliances with social revolutionary forces in the
Muslim and Arab world. The US and Israel promoted and
financed the creation of Islamic fundamentalism as a
strategic attempt to divide and divert the Arab masses
in Palestine, in the reactionary Arab regimes, and
elsewhere in predominantly Muslim societies. This is
well-documented. It happened in Palestine with Hamas,
in Iran with Khomeini, and in Afghanistan with Bin
Laden and the various mujaheddin factions (whether
Taliban, Northern Alliance, etc). We must seek out the
authentically revolutionary and anti-imperialist
forces in those societies, learn from them and build
solidarity with them. 

[snip]

Projecting a global vision of decolonization and human
liberation, a redefinition and redistribution of
wealth. This involves reasserting all the issues of
corporate domination, environmental devastation, and
domestic and international (neo-)colonialism that we
were raising prior to September 11, and that hold true
even more in its wake. Reasserting our people's
globalization movement, in which oppressed and
exploited people in all countries began to learn from
and about each other and to make common cause. War and
international relations are too important to leave to
the generals and diplomats. We must create a new
grass-roots, non-hierarchical "international." 

Developing methods of struggle that sink roots,
diversify and integrate our movement with popular
resistance, below the radar of state surveillance and
disruption. The empire's drive towards war and a
police state will clearly not easily be deterred and
we can anticipate that the arena for open, public and
legal struggles will be severely curtailed. 

We have to foster struggles for cultural and political
independence and transformation, for dealing with
protracted and growing economic deprivation, for
sustaining and building movements under conditions of
incarceration and intimidation. The class, racial,
gender and national contradictions that plagued our
society -- and our movement -- prior to the hijackings
and attacks did not vanish; in fact they will be
increasingly exacerbated by war and fascism. We have
to unite oppressed and exploited people on the basis
of solidarity and internationalism and to recognize
that white supremacy and identification with the
oppressor continue to be central obstacles to such
unity. 

Such a program is the only valid basis for opposing
the imperialist war."

from Michael Novick's 'Fighting the next war not the
last one', orignally on -AT-infos, online at the Onward
site at
http://www.onwardnewspaper.org/archives/4-2001/novick.html

"The occupation of Palestine has become an "issue"
that US radicals, many of whom have avoided due to its
"complexity," can no longer be ignored. Herein lies
possibility as well. We have never asked for
"uncomplicated" questions; we have asked for a
liberating justice for all. The insightful work of the
late Eqbal Ahmad, of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said,
among many, offers those of us critical of nationalism
and supportive of anti-colonial struggle meaningful
guidance. United States anarchists and the
anti-capitalist globalization movement must find ways
to talk about the complexities of nationalism,
particularly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial
nationalisms. We cannot engage in uncritical
(imperial?) denunciations of nationalisms ignorant of
context and meaning. 

We must be able to articulate what it is about the way
nationalism operates we oppose (the privileging of
certain voices/lives over others, essentialism,
dominating consolidations of power) while finding ways
to extend effective solidarity to anti-imperialist
movements across the globe. Dogmatic authoritarian
Marxists are certainly ridiculous quoting Lenin or Mao
as if they were self-evidently applicable for all
situations ("Just add Lenin!"). 

But if we as anarchists cannot put forth critiques of
nationalism beyond Emma Goldman's - bound in the
context of the turn of the century - we find ourselves
mired in a related arrogance and utter irrelevance to
which our locations as North Americans is central.
Contemporary feminist and anti-racist texts such as
Nira Yuval-Davis's Gender and Nation (SAGE
Publications, 1997), as well as classical anarchist
texts, offer us multiple, interrelated grounds upon
which to meaningfully argue against nationalism in the
context of struggling for a world of global mutual
aid, stateless socialism, and democracy. We must
imagine new ways to engage with anti-colonial
nationalisms, new ways of communicating why we oppose
nationalism."

from Globalization and Anarchism After 9/11:
Possibilities and Imagination from Reassessment 
By Eugene Koveos, originally posted at -AT-infos, now
online at
http://www.onwardnewspaper.org/archives/4-2001/after.html







===="Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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