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Title: Fake Revolutions, Real Struggles Author: CrimethInc. Date: October 14, 2010 Language: en Topics: Serbia, revolution, recuperation, class struggle, interview, anti-fascism Source: https://crimethinc.com/2010/10/14/serbia-fake-revolutions-real-struggles
A tremendous amount of attention has focused on Greece lately. Looking
at the successful anarchist movement there, we can nurture utopian
visions to strengthen our resolve; but if we only consider apparent
success stories, we will not be prepared for the challenges ahead.
The entire Balkan peninsula is a sort of laboratory of crisis. Studying
it, we can discern some of the possible futures that may await us now
that North America seems to be entering an era of crisis as well. The
vibrant anarchist movement in Greece represents one possible future, in
which a powerful social movement establishes hubs of resistance. But
only a few hundred kilometers north Serbia shows another: a nightmare of
ethnic conflict, nationalist war, and false resistance movements in
which the anarchist alternative has sunk almost as deep as Atlantis.
The roots of the differences between these countries are hundreds of
years old, but we can identify some recent factors. Only a generation
ago, both were ruled by dictatorships: Greece by a US-based fascist
dictatorship that collapsed under pressure from rebellious students,
winning youth revolt the respect of the general population to this day;
Yugoslavia by a socialist dictatorship, in which Tito maintained power
by playing various groups off against each other. When the Berlin Wall
came down and the socialist government collapsed, the country was torn
apart by ethnic strife. By the end of the 1990s, Serbia was reduced to a
much smaller nation ruled by a nationalistic communist, Slobodan
Milošević.
On paper, what happened next reads like an anarchist fairy tale. An
ostensibly decentralized and nonhierarchical underground youth group
named Otpor (“Resistance”) carried out a propaganda campaign aimed at
rousing popular revolt, despite aggressive repression from the
authorities. After a rigged election, hundreds of thousands of people
converged on the capital and intense streetfighting ensued. An
unemployed vehicle operator, nicknamed “Joe” by his colleagues, drove
his bulldozer through a hail of bullets into the headquarters of the
state television station at the head of a furious crowd. Other
protesters set the Parliament on fire and violently wrested control of
the streets from police. The authorities surrendered, the government
toppled, and soon a former anarchist was prime minister.
In fact, organizers at the center of Otpor were directed by
organizations affiliated with the US government, from whom they received
millions of dollars. By ostensibly limiting itself to attacking the
established order, Otpor drew participants of all ideological
persuasions, while preparing the way for the implementation of
capitalist democracy. The entire event was carefully choreographed to
smooth Serbia’s transition into the neoliberal market. Afterwards, the
same model was exported almost anywhere a regime was not cooperating
with the US agenda; Otpor was followed by Kmara in Georgia, Pora in
Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus, MJAFT! in Albania, Oborona in Russia, KelKel
in Kyrgyzstan, Bolga in Uzbekistan, and Nabad-al-Horriye in Lebanon. In
each of these cases genuine local unrest was channeled into a proxy war
serving the interests of powerful outsiders. Yet most of the
participants must have felt that they were genuinely fighting for
liberation.
Ljubisav Đokić, the man who drove his bulldozer into the state
television headquarters, declared shortly afterwards that the uprising
had made no difference. Today Serbia is no closer to meaningful social
change. Nationalism and fascism are still rampant, the population is
more discouraged and apathetic than ever, and local anarchists are still
struggling to gain traction in an unfavorable social terrain.
All this suggests that anarchists in the US need to develop a more
nuanced understanding of social upheaval. Fixating on burning cars and
fighting police can obscure the important dynamics at the root of
events. The insurrectionist conviction that confrontations are
intrinsically desirable offers little insight into what counts as a
confrontation. Over and over throughout history, anarchists and other
rebels who mistook violent clashes for real transformation have served
as an expendable front line in essentially conservative revolutions. We
need to refine our analyses so that when we fight, our efforts cannot
serve our enemies.
Is it possible that, as the police were disappearing activists and the
nation was teetering on the brink of revolution, the most worthwhile
thing Serbian anarchists could have hoped to accomplish was to involve a
few more people in their long-term networks? Bear in mind how difficult
it must have been to stay focused on such a seemingly trivial goal under
the circumstances. Or could anarchists have somehow taken the initiative
in the struggle against Milosevic, miraculously outflanking an
organization with millions of dollars of foreign backing in a nation
consumed with nationalist fervor?
In hopes of shedding more light on these issues, we’ve conducted this
interview with a former member of Otpor currently active in the Serbian
anarchist movement.
Serbia.
How did anarchists respond to the wars of that ripped Yugoslavia apart
in the 1990s? Did this early activity have any influence on the context
in which Otpor appeared?
Unfortunately, during the wars I was young and not involved in the
anarchist movement, so I can only tell you what I’ve heard and read from
older anarchists. Anarchists were involved in opposing the war
practically from the start of Yugoslav crisis. For many of them, then
very young and coming from the punk scene, this was the time to “get
serious.” Communication between anarchists across former Yugoslavia
continued throughout the conflicts.
One of the first projects, in the first half of the 1990s, was the
fanzine Over the Walls of Nationalism and War, started in Croatia.
Anarchists were involved in the wider antiwar movement, often
cooperating with antiwar groups like Women in Black (based in Belgrade).
During the NATO bombing of Serbia, one of the main sources of
information for people outside Serbia was the English-language anarchist
newsletter Zaginflatch (Zagreb Information Potlatch) providing firsthand
information from the Serbian anarchists and antiwar activists . Later,
lots of anarchists were also involved in campaigns against the draft. At
the end of the 1990s, meetings of anarchists from all over former
Yugoslavia were held in the Bosnian village of Zelenkovac. But as the
anarchist movement was very small in Serbia, their activities didn’t
influence, as far as I am aware, the context in which Otpor appeared.
How did you participate in Otpor or in other forms of resistance to
Milosevic?
I was very young when I started to be interested in politics and also to
do some practical political stuff. And although this was
“anti-government” politics it wasn’t radical in any way. Basically,
along with the majority of my friends, I was a kind of nationalist,
considering Milosevic to be a traitor and a “dirty Commie.” My first
practical involvement in anti-Milosevic politics started when I was
thirteen years old; it consisted of distributing leaflets and propaganda
and participating in local protests and demonstrations organized by
various opposition parties and student groups. I particularly remember
one leaflet my friends made in form of a WANTED poster to the effect
that Milosevic was wanted “dead and only dead” and that his crime was
“treason to the Serbian people.”
Then Otpor appeared and I was involved in the local group in my home
town of Zrenjanin. I was 16 years old and my friends and I were among
the youngest people there. Our activities mainly consisted of putting
posters and stickers on walls, graffiting the town with various slogans
and with the famous Otpor clenched fist symbol, and of course
participating in demonstrations. That was when police started to
routinely stop me in the street, search me, ask me idiotic questions… it
happened almost on a daily basis.
What were you doing on October 5, 2000? At the time, did you think that
a positive revolutionary change was occurring? What happened afterwards?
On October 5, 2000, I was in Belgrade, with my friends and my dad, in
front of the Parliament building among several hundred thousand people
in a cloud of tear gas, watching football hooligans storm the building
and people beating very, very scared cops who were trying to surrender.
I remember thinking that the worst was still to come as army helicopters
were flying over our heads. But then it was all over, and people started
partying with no police on the streets… a strange day.
Of course, with my political beliefs then, I joined the majority of
people in Serbia in believing that this was a positive change… and of
course it wasn’t. Two years later I moved to Belgrade to study, met some
anarchists, and soon my perspective on the world started to change
dramatically. I recently heard a British journalist speaking about his
political transformation, and although his change was completely
different from mine—he changed from a Trotskyist to a conservative—I
think that his metaphor is quite good. He said something about this kind
of radical change of perspective being like falling through a floor
which suddenly gives way beneath your feet, and falling so fast that
when you hit the floor below it gives way beneath you as well, and that
a huge number of things that you believed were not questionable suddenly
become questionable.
But my personal change coincided with the growing of apathy and
pessimism in the Serbian society and people, now twice betrayed, first
by Milosevic and then by the new government.
How was Otpor organized?
Otpor had a quasi-non-hierarchical and egalitarian image. This was a
clever political decision in a period when the opposition political
scene was full of leaders who were considered to be incompetent in their
struggle against Milosevic. So, this group (and later organization) of
young people, primarily students, appeared with a seemingly new approach
to politics. Members of Otpor didn’t have any formal ranks in the
organization; they were only called “activists of Otpor.” But the truth
was that this was a highly hierarchical organization with a small
minority making all the decisions. For example, I don’t remember any
discussions with older members of Otpor in Zrenjanin. They just gave us
propaganda material and told us what to do with it, and we considered
this to be normal in a way. And of course Otpor was financed with CIA
money. All major decisions and all the proclamations were made by this
small minority as well.
Should we be suspicious of resistance groups that claim not to have
formal structures or hierarchies? Do groups have to be transparent to
the public, in order to deserve trust? How does this affect the security
of those who participate?
I do not think that we should be automatically suspicious of groups that
claim not to have formal hierarchies, because this is an anarchist way
of organizing, and I think that it is proven that this kind of
organizing is possible and can be very effective. The Otpor case, which
didn’t have anything to do with anarchism or any kind of radical
politics or anti-authoritarian organizing, doesn’t disprove this at all.
As far as transparency to the public (and therefore the state) is
concerned, I think that every case needs to be judged individually. In
my opinion, the most important variables are the local political
context, the type of political group, and what kind of activities you
engage in. Different regimes have different ways of dealing with radical
political groups; it is not the same to organize in Turkey or in Greece
as it is in Serbia.
How much were anarchists or radicals involved in Otpor? Were there other
resistance efforts going on at the time, or did it absorb all of them?
I am not aware if any anarchists were involved in Otpor, but I know
former members of Otpor who are now anarchists or close to
anti-authoritarian politics.
As I said, there was an antiwar and anti-nationalist movement in Serbia
long before Otpor appeared—but this antiwar and anti-nationalist trend
was a minority inside the anti-Milosevic movement in Serbia. And the
anarchists and radicals involved in the anti-nationalist part of the
movement were a tiny minority inside a minority. When Otpor appeared,
most of the resistance efforts carried out by young people were absorbed
by Otpor. The thing that is very important here is Otpor’s ideological
relation to the nationalist and conservative majority of the
anti-Milosevic movement.
In the ideological field, Otpor was also very far away from any kind of
anti-authoritarian politics. Basically, the ideology that Otpor
propagated was a form of anti-communism quite typical for that period in
Serbia (and today to a degree), which combined a conservative world
outlook, neoliberal free market ideology, cultural racism, elitism,
Eurocentrism, and nationalism. One of the typical ideological points of
Otpor’s program was that a war was taking place between two Serbias. One
was a backward, Asian Serbia—Turkish, communist, collectivist, and
pro-Milosevic—and the other was the forward-looking, modern, European,
pro-free market Serbia that would build a new elite to guide a united
nation.
How did the legacy of Otpor and the downfall of Milosevic frame the
context for radical organizing after 2000? How did it make it easier for
anarchists to organize, and how did it make it harder?
What is the legacy of Milosevic and his downfall and the ascension to
power of his supposed enemies, including elite participants in Otpor? As
I said earlier, it is a depressed and apathetic population. This is
caused by the continuation and intensification of economic poverty and
deprivation, the privatization of communal property, and state
repression and terror, but it also reflects the frustration of the
dominant ideological centers (nationalist, conservative, and fascist)
with the fact that the Serbian imperialist project has failed miserably.
So unfortunately this situation not only contributes to the development
of mass cynicism but also fosters new forms of fascism and right-wing
extremism.
The Otpor experience doesn’t help us much in anarchist and
anti-authoritarian organizing in Serbia today. We operate in different
circumstances and are in need of completely different strategies of
resistance; in my opinion, this means constructing of networks of
solidarity not only between radicals, but more importantly, between
ordinary people who are fighting their “small” local fights in their
factories, neighborhoods, and elsewhere. And based on this, creating an
anti-authoritarian movement in the future that is centered around
solidarity and mutual aid as its core values and principals.
When the Milosevic regime attempted to repress youthful opposition in
2000, this provoked a popular backlash. Did this delegitimize government
repression of radicals after the change of the government, as well?
Milosevic’s repression of his opposition did not delegitimize repression
of radicals or any other kind of dissent for that matter. Just recently
we had a case in which six anarchists from Belgrade spent six months in
jail for supposedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at the Greek embassy—the
damage was 20 Euro—for which they were charged for international
terrorism. After some public pressure, they are free now and the charges
are dropped, but the repression of Roma people and striking or
protesting workers is practically a daily event, with new laws making it
more difficult to organize strikes and protests.
The rationale is that Milosevic’s regime was illegitimate, dictatorial,
and communist, and that therefore the “revolution” of October 5th was
legitimate, but that dissent against this government is not legitimate
because the new regime is “democratic, pro-European, and accepted by the
western democracies.”
Compare and contrast the Serbian anarchist movement today to anarchist
organizing elsewhere in the Balkans, such as Croatia.
In both countries we speak the same language and share quite a lot of
the recent and not-so-recent history. So there are many similarities,
and anarchists from Serbia and Croatia have a long history of friendship
and cooperation. In both countries recent anarchism mostly originated
from the anarcho-punk scene. And as that scene was more developed in
Croatia, today anarchism is more present there then in Serbia.
This “punk thing” has always been an issue here. Personally, I find this
question boring and unnecessary. A lot of anarchists spend a lot of time
attacking the punk scene as “lifestylist,” not serious, and so on; in my
opinion this is senseless, because none of the anarchists coming from
the anarcho-punk scene claims that “punk” is their politics. Also, some
of the ex-punks are now “anti-punks”. I find this whole thing very
silly.
So the movement in Croatia is more decentralized, with more active
groups, better organization, and a few infoshops across Croatia while
there are currently none in Serbia. In my mind the reason for this is a
more developed anarcho-punk scene as a basis for the development of
anarchism. I am not implying that an anarcho-punk scene is necessary for
the development of anarchist politics, or that it is a necessarily a
good thing. Of course, we have many problems in this case, the classic
one being how to overcome subcultural isolation and connect to the wider
society. But I don’t think this problem is inherent to the punk
subculture alone. In a way, the old-fashioned “serious” leftists with
their own rituals are also a very closed group that has a lot of trouble
connecting with the rest of society as well. Maybe even more trouble!
In both Serbia and Croatia, we have one trend of anarchists organizing
in small affinity groups and another trend of anarchists trying to
develop anarcho-syndicalist unions but effectively being organized in
small affinity groups as well, at least for the time being.
In Greece, the anarchist movement didn’t develop from the anarcho-punk
scene, but from the radical leftist movement. Recently I spoke with two
anarchist friends involved in the so-called “social anarchist” part of
the movement in Greece, close to the Anti-Authoritarian Movement; they
told me that they consider it a good thing for an anarchist movement to
develop from a punk scene, like in Serbia and Croatia, because in their
opinion that makes a movement more open to new ideas. I’m not sure if
this is true.
What is the influence of the Greek anarchist movement in Serbia?
We maintain friendly relations with the anti-authoritarians from Greece.
Some of them participated in our annual Zrenjanin Antifascist Festival,
and they also organized a benefit event for ZAF in Greece. They invited
us to participate in an event they are organizing in Thessaloníki. We
are also discussing organizing some regional anarchist events together.
The situation in which the anarchist movement developed in Greece was
quite different from the situation in ex-Yugoslavia. Greece was ruled by
a right-wing dictatorship, while Yugoslavia had a “communist” regime,
and then later a former communist as dictator. These situations led to
very different outcomes: today in Greece they have probably the biggest
anarchist movement in the world, while in Serbia a lot of right-wing,
fascist (youth) groups have appeared, caused by the
re-traditionalization and fascization of our society that happened in
the 1990s. You can see this as a reaction to the “communist” and
“socialist” authoritarian regime.
Nevertheless, the experience of the movement in Greece is very important
to us. As is the building of wider Balkan networks of solidarity.
In a context of rampant nationalism, how can anarchists connect with
“the” people without tacitly approving nationalist politics?
We should not perceive “the people” as an abstract entity like “the
Nation,” but as ordinary people with their own local, everyday, “small”
but very important issues and problems. In that sense, a group of
radicals active in their local community is not something separate from
“the people.” When you have an approach like this you will always deal
with people who are not anarchists or radicals, and also with some who
espouse even nationalist or conservative views. But when you meet them
individually and personally, you can understand where they are coming
from better and they can also understand how your politics are different
from the politics of the politicians—and although maybe they won’t agree
with all your positions, they will understand them better. This doesn’t
mean we should be tolerant of nationalism—just the opposite!—but it
means that in order to build a social movement based on solidarity we
must engage with the local community and “face towards it.” Maybe this
sounds simplistic, but this is the way I see it now.
What relationships do different nationalist groups through former
Yugoslavia have to each other? Do nationalist groups in former
Yugoslavia focus more on fighting against each other, or against
radicals and immigrants? What can we learn from this?
Well, they hate each other, of course—not only because of the recent
wars but also because their nationalist identities are very much based
on hating each other. And the absurd but logical thing is that besides
their mutual hate, their world views are identical.
Croatia is not a less nationalist society then Serbia, but in a way
Croatian nationalists and fascists are currently less frustrated
(although I believe fascists are “frustrated” by definition) than their
Serbian counterparts, because the Croatian nationalist project was quite
successful: they succeeded in creating an ethnically cleansed
nation-state. On the other hand, Serbian nationalists and fascists are
intensely frustrated by the total collapse of their nationalist project.
So they turn their attention more to the “internal enemy”: LGBT people,
Roma people, antifascists, anarchists, and other “traitors.” Of course,
fascists always concentrate on the internal enemies, but less successful
fascists do this more then others, in my opinion.
For example, it’s relatively safe for anarchists in Croatia to stage
public events, but in Serbia you always need to think about potential
assaults by the Nazis. Also, Zagreb Pride is a successful annual event
despite fascists regularly organizing against it, but Belgrade Pride
hasn’t happened yet. On the first attempt to organize it we had real
lynching scenes in the streets of Belgrade, and last year it was banned
by the authorities because “they didn’t feel that they could protect the
participants.”
What strategies have worked in Serbia for building antifascist
resistance? Which strategies have failed?
After a lot of discussions with my friends, I came to the following
provisional conclusions.
One of the usual mistakes is to confuse “militancy” with radical
politics, that is to believe that mere use of violence against the
fascists means that your approach is politically radical. I already said
that I think engaging the local community is crucial: thus the “fascist
problem” must not be dealt with separately. If we connect the problem of
fascism with the wider problems of capitalism and exploitation, which is
not hard to do from an anarchist perspective because this is exactly the
point of radical anti-fascism, and especially if we connect it to local
manifestations of these wider problems, we create the conditions to
re-establish anti-fascism as an important part of people’s struggles
against oppression in general.
This does not exclude militancy, which is a necessity in combating
fascism. But if we put mere violence in the center of our antifascist
“politics” without a wider radical critique of capitalism and its
concrete consequences, we risk being perceived as one hooligan or
subcultural group fighting another—or even worse, as one group of
extremists fighting another—and thus, becoming alienated from the rest
of the society. And despite the use of violence being a necessity in
combating fascism, it is also good to remember that the use of
nonviolent radical methods is also essential in creating social
movements.
Of course, I think it is equally bad to try to present your anti-fascism
as “respectable” by refraining from violence and cleansing it of radical
elements to build an alliance with liberal anti-fascism. In Serbia, this
will produce the same results as I described above: alienation from the
wider society.
Serbia?
The first Serbian socialist, Zivojin Zujovic (1838-1870), was a follower
of Proudhon. Zujovic influenced the first Serbian socialist theoretician
Svetozar Marković (1846-1875), a central figure of the early Serbian
revolutionary movement. Marković was not an anarchist, but was
significantly influenced by anarchism, and his ideas contain libertarian
concepts. In the 1870s there was a large contingent of Serbian students
with socialist leanings based in Zürich, Switzerland. Among them there
were anarchists such as Jovan Zujovic, Manojlo Hrvacanin, and Kosta
Ugrinic who were in close cooperation with Bakunin. Bakunin took part at
the 1872 conference of Serbian socialists, and almost single-handedly
wrote the draft of the program of the “Serbian socialist party.”
Alongside Russian, Italian, and other anarchists, some of these
anarchists, including Hrvacanin and Ugrinic, participated in the Bosnian
insurrection against the Turkish occupiers in 1875. The leader of this
revolutionary contingent of insurrectionists was the Serbian socialist
Vasa Pelagic.
Later, followers of Svetozar Marković divided into a reformist Radical
party including some former anarchists like Jovan Zujovic (who became
minister of education in the Serbian government in 1905) and the
revolutionary wing led by Mita Cenic (1851-1888), another non-anarchist
influenced by anarchism. He was in fact a Nechayevist Blanqist: he knew
Nechayev personally, and thought that true socialist ideal lies in the
synthesis of Blanqui’s and Proudhon’s ideas.
By the beginning of the 20th century the Radical party had completely
transformed from a revolutionary group into a reformist party and
finally into a conservative party, as Cenic had predicted. Between 1905
and the beginning of the First World War, thanks to the influence of
Kropotkin’s ideas and anarcho-syndicalist efforts elsewhere in Europe,
new anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist groups and papers
appeared. A group of anarcho-syndicalists was also active inside the
Serbian social democratic party.
The most prominent figures among the non-party anarcho-syndicalists were
Krsta Cicvaric and Petar Munjic. Munjic was also the Serbian delegate at
the 1907 anarchist conference in Amsterdam. Sima Markovic, one of the
prominent members of the “party” anarcho-syndicalists (the “direktasi”),
later became general secretary of the Communist Party. The
anarcho-communist group was called Komuna.
All these groups worked and communicated with anarchists in the
Vojvodina region (then part of Austro-Hungary, now of Serbia), where the
Serbian anarchist Krsta Iskruljev operated, and also with anarchist
members of Young Bosnia, the organization that assassinated Franz
Ferdinand in 1914, as well as with Slovenian, Croatian, and Bulgarian
anarchists. After the First World War, many of these anarchists became
communists in the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia; others became
reformist socialists or even nationalists, like Cicvaric. Those who
remained anarchists—such as the painter Sava Popovic, killed in 1942 by
the Gestapo in Belgrade—were quite isolated.
After the Second World War and as a result of the largest antifascist
insurrection in Europe, a socialist Yugoslavia was formed and soon broke
its ties with the Soviet Union. In the 1960s there was some renewed
interest in anarchist ideas, especially after the 1968 events in
Belgrade and Zagreb. The Praxis group of Marxist humanist dissidents
also appeared during the 1960s. Some of the theoreticians of the group
had written quite positively about anarchism, and some anarchist books
were published. One of the younger people from Praxis, Trivo Indjic, was
an anarchist, and later Zoran Djindic, a younger person close to the
Praxis group, also considered himself to be an anarchist. Filmmakers
connected to the Yugoslav “black wave” cinema at the time, such as
Makavejev, Stojanovic, and Zilnik, also espoused anarchist views. In
that period, Left dissidents—Marxist humanists and some Trotskyists and
anarchists—mostly moved inside closed discussion groups without any kind
of contact with social movements. As in the Eastern Bloc, “social
movements” were practically nonexistent.
When the Yugoslav crisis broke out in the 1990s many of these people
converted to other ideologies such as nationalism or liberalism. In
1990, the former anarchist Djindjic joined some other Praxis members in
founding the pro-capitalist Democratic party; within a couple of years
he became the leader of the party. After October 5, 2000, he became the
prime minister of Serbia, until he was killed by organized crime/secret
police/nationalist elements in 2003.
Meanwhile, Indjic and a few other people from his generation joined some
younger people in the Belgrade Libertarian Group. They were one of a few
small anarchist groups that appeared in the 1990s; others included
Torpedo in Smederevo, Kontrapunkt in Kraljevo, Crni Gavran (Black Raven)
in Smederevska Palanka, and GLIB in Belgrade.
After 2000, Indjic became the Serbian ambassador to Spain; both the
Belgrade Libertarian Group and GLIB disbanded. Kontrapunkt also
disbanded and reassembled again in Belgrade; it still exists today as a
completely different group, maintaining an alternative media website.
Torpedo also disappeared. Some people from Torpedo and the GLIB later
joined the Maoist Partija Rada (Party of Labor).
In 2002, the ASI (Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative) was formed, and later
the DSM (Another World is Possible) collective. The ASI is the Serbian
section of the International Workers’ Association, and DSM was close to
People’s Global Action; they organized a PGA conference in 2004 in
Belgrade before eventually ceasing to exist.
Anarchists from Novi Sad are mainly active inside AFANS (Antifascist
Action of Novi Sad). For a while the group Freedom Fight, which works
closely with some Serbian workers groups, was close to anarchist
politics and published the Balkan edition of Z Magazine. After 2000,
Anarhija/blok 45 publishing initiative also appeared; they publish books
that are not sold but distributed based on the principles of gift
economics. Some of the newer groups include Antifa BGD, Queer Belgrade,
Antifa Zrenjanin, and Zluradi Paradi, which has already translated and
published about fifty anarchist pamphlets.
In a civil war, rival factions often seek assistance from foreign
governments; the latter, of course, have agendas of their own, and what
might have appeared a simple local conflict becomes a tangled
international intrigue.
Once upon a time, when the governments of different nations generally
perceived themselves to have distinct interests, open warfare was
relatively common. As individual nations consolidated themselves into
blocs held in check by other blocs (see Mutually Assured Destruction),
proxy war increasingly replaced open conflict. The Cold War between the
United States and the Soviet Union, for example, was largely fought by
proxy on battlefields such as Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, and
Nicaragua. Afghanistan was one of the last of these, and subsequent
hostilities between the mujahideen and their one-time sponsors
illustrate the hazards of proxy warfare.
One cannot understand the history of resistance without taking into
account how many movements and organizations have received foreign aid.
For example, after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990,
it came out that the Red Army Faction, West Germany’s longest-running
armed resistance group, had been funded, equipped, and sheltered by the
notoriously repressive East German Stasi, despite the ostensibly
conflicting agendas of the RAF and DDR. Likewise, the Serbian group
Otpor, known for mobilizing grass-roots resistance to the regime of
Slobodan Milošević that culminated in the storming of the capital
building and the offices of state television, received millions of
dollars from organizations affiliated with the US government. The
countless copycat groups that appeared afterwards across Eastern
Europe—Georgia’s Kmara, Russia’s Oborona, Zubr in Belarus, Pora in the
Ukraine—could be seen as youth movements struggling against repressive
governments or as front groups for foreign powers, depending on one’s
vantage point. Even when they did represent genuine local movements, it
was easy for their enemies to portray them as pawns of Western corporate
interests.
Since the end of the Cold War, international conflicts are no longer
framed in binary terms; instead, they manifest themselves as a global
majority attempting to rein in a “rogue state” such as Iraq or North
Korea. Rather than openly contending for ascendancy, governments are
working together more and more to deepen and fortify the dominion of
hierarchical power. Statist and state-sponsored revolutionary struggles
are less common than they were forty years ago—in a globalized market,
they’re too messy and unpredictable to be worth the trouble. It follows
that the revolutionaries of the future will probably have to do without
government backing.
This is not necessarily for the worse. State sponsorship is at best a
mixed blessing, even for those who don’t oppose state power on
principle. In the Spanish Civil War, a classic example of proxy war, the
Soviet Union backed the communist elements of the Republican forces,
while Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco; when Stalin had to appease
Hitler to serve Soviet interests, he forced the Spanish communists to
sabotage their own revolution, taking down the anarchists and the rest
of the Republicans with them. Lacking sponsorship of their own, Spanish
anarchists were at a tremendous disadvantage—not so much against the
fascists as against their own supposed allies. When the lure of foreign
funding no longer exists and all the governments of the world band
together to put down uprisings, anarchists will come into our own as the
only ones capable of revolutionary struggle.