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Title: The Telescope or the Kaleidoscope
Author: anonymous
Date: January 6, 2012
Language: en
Topics: Earth Liberation Front, violence, non-violence, motivation, anti-civ, anonymity, anarchist organization, insurrection, attack
Source: http://waronsociety.noblogs.org/

anonymous

The Telescope or the Kaleidoscope

“Our lives are at stake and we will not renounce any weapon that we can

use as our own.”

– Anonymous

In regards to the brief history of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an

organization which has brought much inspiration to the North American

context and drawn significant media attention, I would like to present a

few points in order to critique, clarify and highlight the ways the ELF

can be understood as a methodology instead of as an ideology. At the end

of this piece, a proposal is drawn out for anarchists to develop their

own actions separately in cells, groups or any informal structure they

see fit whether or not these are aligned with the “ELF guidelines”.

Obviously this is something that is difficult, because on the one hand

the ELF does exist as an organization but is also made up of many

dispersed cells and individuals. So the critique will follow the ELF

guidelines and not critique the individuals themselves.

An Ideology: Single issue and lobbying with dynamite.

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the

top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.

They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful

punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

– Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

The reasons that the ELF proposes for doing actions is something I would

like to question. These guidelines state:

To cause maximum economic damage to a given entity that is profiting off

the destruction of the natural environment.

To educate the public on the atrocities committed against the

environment and life.

To take all necessary precautions against harming life.

The guidelines are very similar to the goals of the ELF with one major

exception. The third of three guidelines states that one must take all

necessary precautions against harming life. The ELF considers itself a

nonviolent organization as no physical harm has come to a human as a

result of the group’s actions. This is by no means a sheer coincidence

but in fact a commitment to the guidelines. Individuals interested in

becoming active in the ELF need to follow the above guidelines and

create their own close knit anonymous cell made up of trustworthy and

sincere people. Remember the ELF and each cell within it is anonymous

not only to one another but also to the general public. So there is not

a realistic chance of becoming active in an already existing cell. Take

initiative, form your own cell and do what needs to be done to protect

all life on the planet![1]

Since they put the Earth before their decision as conscious

individuals,[2] a psychosis, a martyrdom complex for the Earth, begins

to develop. This is similar to how most of the left today functions, by

feeding a psychological need for self-justification in everyday life.

When for example activists put so much energy into certain types of

actions (petitions, lock downs, passive sit ins, etc.), for all the

right and justified reasons for doing so and not seeing the desired

results, they become hopeless in their own actions. I think it is

important to have a sense of individual intention and self-motivation,

rather than becoming blind to reasons for acting against the world

around oneself. By blind I mean not having the ability to not see beyond

the ways one is making decisions upon what actions to take and see the

cause and effect of those actions. This blindness constructs a martyrdom

complex similar to that of Sisyphus, who rolled the rock up a mountain

day after day. This tunnel vision is caused by focusing solely on the

theater of political affairs while neglecting the rest of life.

Having this type of perception about one’s own reality can create

something similar to what is called a “single issue campaign”. Only in

this case instead of doing tree sits like Earth First!, an individual or

a group is setting incendiary devices to call upon the “unjust actions”

of some company. When the company itself has no interest to change the

reasons that it exists, it purely becomes a moral battle between the

“just” and “unjust” – speaking truth to power when power has no interest

in listening. This becomes an endless pursuit for some sad form of

change.

The ELF in its FAQ’s claims to not follow a leadership or central

hierarchy, but an ideology. I would question the use of an ideology,

instead proposing the use of a particular methodology that is anarchist

in practice. Once an individual begins to believe in an ideology they

put it – the ideology – above themselves, acting only in accordance with

that ideology, weighing the rights and wrongs of a certain course of

action. This can be seen in the mentality of leftists, Christians,

Catholics, vegans and anyone who adheres to an ideology through belief

or action.

There is no ethical equation toward the understanding of how “we as

society need to change capitalism”, where by acting in accordance with

the state and one’s morals we see how things can become equal within the

sphere of exploitation. To play within the ethical debate is to place

oneself in a position of making compromises with the state and capital,

using ethical and moral positions. This can be seen in this quote from

the ELF’s facts:

“Anyone seeking to create actual positive social and political change

must reflect on past attempts throughout history to learn what worked,

what didn’t, and what can be taken to aid in the current pursuit. A

refusal to make this reflection is also a refusal to make an honest life

commitment to the cause of justice and protection of life on this

planet.”

What and where is this “justice” coming from? Is it justice we are

actually seeking? Justice implies a universal morality that everyone

shares. Is it instead a matter of vengeance against civilization for

denying one the ability to live a life one chooses?

We return to the use of methods rather than an ideology. A method can be

defined as “a procedure, technique, or way of doing something,

especially in accordance with a definite plan.” Hence one does not

submit to an ideology of protecting the earth, but sees ways and courses

to attack what surrounds them – these being the technique or practice.

Once an individual or a group can become unhinged from the trap of

ideological thinking and self-justification, their desires become in

accordance with the interests and aims.

A Name: Calling oneself a thing?

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, –”

– Anonymous

The ELF is referred to by the Department of Homeland Security[3] [4] as

an organization, which classifies them as a thing with a name or single

like-minded identity. In a time of widespread revolt or flourishing

milieu it can be useful to have a name in order to communicate why an

action was taken and tie it to the continued presence of a certain group

or set of ideas, especially to differentiate amongst many tendencies

existing within a specific context. However, by taking on a name, a

group becomes an organization and becomes reified. It begins to be

understood as a thing, an entity in and of itself. This further

facilitates identification by authorities who begin to chart and map the

movements of an organization or group in order to see where and how it

moves, how it functions, what language it uses (environmental,

anarchist, communist, etc). Not all investigations are carried out in

this way (for example, in the Bombs Case in Chile and the Marini Trials

in Italy, anarchists were framed as members of fictitious clandestine

organizations), but the naming of oneself as a thing does make it easier

for the state to repress the milieu as a whole. It’s easy for the state

to comb through the different groups that exist or existed at a

determined period of time and go through arrest documents or do outright

surveillance (the surveillance and subsequent arrest of the members of

Direct Action in Canada can be a perfect example of this). Inevitably

they find those who are more above ground and interrogate them about

those specific activities, hold them under false pretexts and send in

infiltrators to groups who try to establish long-term relationships.

Although they don’t know whose entirely involved these practices can

eventually lead them to identify suspects.

There is no panacea to repression – it will exist as long as action is

taken against the current world. It is only a matter of how deep

relationships are rooted in commitment, honesty, and revolutionary

courage between those who are partaking in different actions, which will

directly correlate to refusal to cooperate with the state. It is worth

noting that the ELF as a whole did not consider itself anarchist or

revolutionary; it originally spawned from the environmental group Earth

First!.

With this in mind, what if a group decided to not give itself a name?

Making it harder for the cartographers of power to draw maps, where the

longitude and latitude were unable to be connected, diffused and

multifarious actions constituted themselves as a thing. Rather than one

decisive group with a name, similar to the cellular structure proposed

by the ELF, but on the basis of revolutionary activity against the

current world.

Violence and Terrorism?

The ELF is critical of the use of violence and harming individuals.[5]

They state this in their FAQs[6] section, in which they give examples of

other kinds of actions individuals and groups have taken throughout

history. In this point they lack a critical assessment of these

different groups, their motivations, and the intentions of their

actions. The Boston Tea Party, Suffragette Movement and Gandhi did what

they did on the basis of a certain interest to change the existing order

through illegal means in some hope for positive change. Essentially

these references reinforce an interest tending toward social change, an

interest in altering the existing order, not destroying it in its

entirety. This position is leftist, not anarchist. Again they constantly

referred to this in their referential use of abolish, rather than

destroy.[7]

Violence is a necessary tool for anarchists, one that must be constantly

thought about and processed, especially for revolutionary individualist

anarchists taking an offensive position aimed at the destruction of the

current world and its existent order. This violent methodology should

not be blind to a critical eye, rather it should be honed in through

various actions, inflicted directly or indirectly against an enemy. This

means that one cannot just go out right and say that one “wants to

ensure that all of the time life will be taken into consideration”. This

statement in and of itself does not take into consideration the war we

find ourselves amidst, nor does it consider the positions that others

like our enemies, “the people”, etc, take in relation to our position

against them. We have to consider that there will be casualties at some

point, and have already been casualties. We have many enemies (the

judges, lumber companies, the police, scientists, politicians,

biotechnologists, the left, the right, etc.) and to not harm them would

be due to our own pacification.

If and when we choose to act violently (as defined by the state), we

will be called terrorists. There is not doubt about it and it is part of

the state’s larger strategy of isolating groups and individuals that

oppose it, to fabricate a hostility and an ‘other’. The state creates an

enemy of “the people,” the community, or whatever massified term the

state uses to distinguish itself and those who identify with it from

others.

The Conscious Individual and Self-Motivation

“courage to never yield or submit”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Anarchists at times fall into a very limited view of acting upon their

ideas. They build an organization by constantly waiting for this or that

moment, yet when its capacity to act is finally reached, what each

individual wants is largely misunderstood. Federations, collectives,

organizations, and any other large formations are structured in such a

way that individuals give up their own agency and desires for a set of

guidelines or an ideology. Anarchist individual self-motivation is the

ability to consciously understand one’s own desires, intentions, and

motivations for acting. Rather than under the banner of a large

formation or ideology, actions are taken on one’s own or with other

individuals with an informal group who know what they want and why they

desire to act together during a certain time period. This requires

friendships and relationships that are trusted, understood and

long-lasting (the topic of security is left out here because it is such

a complex subject, maybe to be visited at another time), rather than

political relationships built on an assumed affinity and polite

platitudes. These friendships come together and are shaped by

mutually-developed histories, individual aims, and intentions. This does

not mean one has to act with the same four people all the time, but that

there are many relationships one can share which have the ability to

come together to act.

Attacking different institutions and mechanisms of power is a leap, one

that must be taken if one is interested in seeing this world destroyed.

Each attack can be easily played out in one’s head and their physical

capacity to act in the most immediate sense, but this leap is a constant

evaluation. A question of how to do such things in each instant, a

collection of experiences of acting within differing situations that

help one gain confidence and courage. Again, these are specific

experiences, experiments and practices such as setting fires, throwing

rocks through windows, building barricades, scouting for exit and

entrance routes, the location of the police, doing research on the

placement of different targets within a geographical area, etc.

Opening up an illegal plane of existence

“My daughter raises the smooth

brass kaleidoscope

and watches

as coloured glass slivers

conspire together.

New worlds create themselves before her eyes.”

– Anonymous

Through all the critiques I have tried to flesh out specifically about

the ELF as a loose network of cells, I would like to make an open

proposal to all anarchists critical of the ways anarchists currently

engage in North America who desire to see the current world of

Capitalism, the State and Civilization destroyed immediately on an

international level.

As anarchists, especially the individualist tendency of this milieu,

conscious of our own decisions to partake in a practice of refusal and

continued attack, we have every method at our disposal. We have the use

of different kinds of weapons: fake ids, improvised explosives, guns,

disguises, accomplices, safe houses, robberies, etc etc. (manuals for

all of which are readily available online).

It is not very easy to take a step in this direction or realm of

actually living in an unchained and free way, and it has not been seen

in sometime in the North American context. It is a great leap, but a

leap nonetheless, for which some may be ready, but others may not. This

should not deter solidarity and support in the most specific ways

possible towards those who choose to this path.

This proposal is to be an immediate wager on an offensive in the

continual war that surrounds every one of us, individually and

collectively, whether we consider ourselves anarchists or not. We are

part of the existing order; a giant prison with loose and open cells

surrounding us. We make conscious choices to continue amid this

miserable life (work, school, family, etc) of alienation and imposed

exploitation on an international scale.

This proposal is not for a “front” of the organized masses, but for a

diffused and open network of cells across North America and

internationally. Cells that are not fighting on a militarist front nor

see themselves as the “people’s army”. This has nothing to do with the

masses being on one’s side, but with the ability for conscious

individuals to activate themselves on a plane of existence that is

continually practiced in all its composed elements. Similar to the

FAI-IRF (Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary

Front), an open network that is anarchist and anti-authoritarian in

nature, except without a name. Communiques only released on an as-needed

basis when it is necessary to do so, with actions that speak for

themselves. Choosing the most critical targets of the existing order.

From defensive to offensive: A metaphysics of refusal and attack

“As our desire to create our lives as we see fit, to realize ourselves

to the fullest extent, to reappropriate the conditions of our existence,

develops into a real project of revolt against all domination and

oppression, we begin to encounter the world with a more penetrating

eye.”

– Wolfi L.

With this in mind, we as human beings are also vessels, political

vessels, conscious and always evolving in the plane of war against the

existing world of capital, state and civilization. To negate the cause

and effect of our surroundings is to limit oneself to a life of misery

as a commodity, to the subjugation of all life, to the domination of

time by a sedentary existence, to a society that needs one more human

cog to speed itself up, to a civilization that imposes the domination of

capital within all social relations. To say we are political vessels is

to not just stroke a pen upon paper, but to acknowledge that our

everyday lives are a melding of ideas with practices and practices with

ideas. To put it another way, to experiment with the hypothesis and

wager of what is called life.

Attacking from an offensive position means actions should be rehearsed,

understood and gone through many times so that if a plan goes wrong, a

group or cell would have the ability to change its movements and tactics

very efficiently and quickly.

An offensive position does not wait for our enemies to make a move

before attacking them. This means not waiting for someone to be killed

by the police and then reacting to it, nor waiting for some crisis in

capitalism to strike a group of people and then trying to push the

iceberg out of the water. These situations and points do have certain

social implications to act within, and provide an opportunity to

generalize anarchist methods and illegal practices on a much more social

scale that is not isolated to any specific group. But the offensive

position is not always social; while the actions themselves may have a

social resonance to a specific situation, they can come from an

anti-social place of offensive attack, one that is not predetermined nor

understood as such a reaction to the state or capital. An attack that is

made instead by studying (through the use of different anonymous

research technologies – phone books, computers, etc) of the

already-existing networks of exploitation and domination in which one or

a group of individuals can select a decisive point to hit. This is where

the use of the ELF as a method comes in: small cells with an interest in

attacking aspects of the civilized order, on the basis of a common

hatred of civilization, not based on a common ideology. In its practical

sense this means sabotaging railroad lines, destroying electricity

infrastructure (telecommunication lines, fiber optics, electrical power

lines, cell phone towers or any other unsecured electrical target left

open), bombing government buildings or companies that are identified as

targets by our individual research.

With this offensive position we must also have the strength and courage

to carry on in our individual motivations and intentions. Even if we are

carrying on alone, and desire to do so. Understanding when and where to

attack our enemies (whether physical or psychological) within the places

they reside. To put it another way, this is when we are able to put down

the telescope and our limitations based on ideological containers, and

open up our field of vision to the colorful world of the kaleidoscope,

where the expansive potential of possibilities arise.

This piece is dedicated to:

Conspiracy Cells of Fire

The Informal Anarchist Federation

The International Revolutionary Front (Chile, Italy and elsewhere)

The Black International

Tortuga

Individualists Tending Toward the Wild[8]

The eco-prisoners of the United States