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Title: About the Tarnac 9
Author: Anonymous
Date: December 2008
Language: en
Topics: France, prison, repression, Tarnac 9
Source: Retrieved on March 30, 2010 from http://www.non-fides.fr/?About-the-Tarnac-9

Anonymous

About the Tarnac 9

By now the facts are well known. On November 8 2008 a few metal hooks

put in the right place uprooted the electric cables of the railway in

four different spots, making a mess by blocking 160 high-speed trains.

On November 11 police raids carried out in different towns along with a

strong media coverage, led to the arrest of ten people who were

allegedly responsible for the sabotage. After 96 hours’ questioning,

nine of them were charged with ‘criminal association with aims of

terrorism’ and five of them were put in jail (three on the basis of

‘having contributed to causing damage’). On December 2 2008, two people

were still held in prison, one of them considered the ‘leader’ of the

alleged ‘association’. In January 2009 one of the arrested was released

with restrictions.

A massive presence of journalists during the very morning of the

searches and then the slander against the ‘anarchist-autonomous’ area

spread by the media over the following days demonstrate once again how

the media are an essential part of the ‘anti-terrorist’ machinery.

Craving for sensationalism, playing on personalization and digging in

the rubbish, these vultures never change: they are enemies in the

service of power. Even if there are still some naïve or idiotic people

who think that the media can influence ‘public opinion’, an imaginary

and therefore easily malleable concept, we will never be astonished by

the tortuous reasoning following which the enemy can be struck only if

you collaborate with it.

In the current climate of institutional lies we are witnessing the

progressive construction of the characters of ‘good’ and ‘bad’

‘terrorists’. The former, obliging grocers, members of agricultural

communities and good students, are the counter-part of the others, all

the others, those who don’t have adequate requisites or who, generally

speaking, refuse to show that they are good boys and girls when power

threatens them.

Not seeking the intervention of elected politicians, interviews and

chats on the existence or inexistence of ‘evidence’, many comrades have

been rotting in jail for months. They too are accused of belonging to

the ‘anarchist-autonomous area’ and (on the basis of traces of DNA) of

having set a police car on fire. Others, some of them ‘illegal

immigrants’, have been put in jail following the fire at the immigration

detention centre in Vincennes, on the basis of CCTV footage. Finally

others more are continuously accused of ‘criminal association’, from

Villiers-le-Bel to those guilty of trying to survive without having

regular jobs. A priori the former are not distinguished from the latter.

Unless we accept the categories set by power, the only one that defines

who is ‘terrorist’ and who is not; unless we accept the distinction

between ‘political’ and ‘social’ prisoners; unless we forget — starting

from the names of many support committees (for the 9 of Tarnac) — that

others were imprisoned before and maybe others more will be imprisoned;

unless we are ready to sacrifice, in the name of the ‘innocence’ of

some, all the ‘guilty’ who are captured every day (even if the concept

of ‘evidence’ belongs to the judges anyway). Unless we finally take some

advantages by helping power in defining a line between the ‘good’ and

the ‘bad’: between those who are willing to talk to the media and tell

their life and sometimes that of others and those who stay silent in

front of microphones, between those who are friends with professional

intellectuals paid by the State and those who despise all

specialisation, between those who exchange their opinions with elected

politicians during meetings and those who attack the sites of political

parties; in short, between those who talk with power and those who are

definitively irrecuperable, mad people who are obstinate in attacking

power instead of re-producing it (with its categories and hier-archies)

— a reproduction that naturally ends up strengthening it.

But let’s get back to the point. To be against democracy in favour of

free self-organization between individuals and against all

representative systems, does this mean being ‘terrorists’? To defend

sabotage as one of the many instruments of struggle without any

hierarchy, does this mean being ‘terrorists’? To fight without mediation

for the total destruction of the State and the Capital, in other words

to be anarchists in a little more coherent way, does this mean being

‘terrorists’? To have bad intentions, to maintain them and to write

about them, does this mean being ‘terrorists’? To find accomplices in

the struggle does this mean forming a ‘criminal organization’? In this

case, yes, one thousand times yes, we claim our passion for freedom in a

loud voice, with all the consequences that are involved. The same

passion that belongs to many unknown people who, far away from media

celebrity, struggle every day against dominion. In this world based on

exploitation, devastation of the environment, war and misery, it is not

considered criminal to stay inactive waiting for everything to collapse

or, in a more cynical way, to count the score and hope to be safe each

one by himself or herself, atomised in his or her own little cage.

Because democracy, this way of management of capitalism, is not the most

unacceptable of the systems. So far democracy has mainly proved its

failure: the world it dominates is still a world of submission and

deprivation. It is a system that gives the illusion of participation to

the management of the disaster, that is to say of one’s own

annihilation, by fomenting and then concealing the division into

classes, whose contradictions would be absorbed by permanent

concentration.

At the same time, the State is not a neutral instrument that regulates

the defects of the market. On the contrary it is one of the allies of

market, as demonstrated in this time of ‘financial crisis’ by the

massive injection of money in order to save banks and companies, whereas

the conditions of exploitation get harder and making ends meet is even

more difficult. Yes, we want to destroy the State and not conquer it,

because it is one of the pillars of this world of death like its jails,

its cops and its tribunals.

As for capitalism, if it is first of all a social relation without heart

or centre, it is up to each of us to fight it in its daily aspects. In

so-called ‘global’ economy, based on a continuous circulation, flow of

goods ( including human ones) is of crucial importance. It is therefore

natural that blockage has appeared in struggles of recent years, if not

to inflict hard blows, at least to lay the basis for new relations of

strength (from the struggle against the CPE to the railway workers’

strikes in France in February 2008, as well as in Germany in 2007, or

the struggle of Val Susa in Italy in 2005). The anti-capitalist critique

based on direct action and judged useless, obsolete or criminal by the

intellectual servants has been put into practise by many exploited in

their struggles, because it is they who experience capitalism on their

skin. The blockage of the TGV (through damage to the tracks or fire to

the cables like in November 2007) — this devastating machinery whose aim

is to increase the speed of the circulation of goods — has not happened

by chance but is the consequence of the common experience of recent

social struggles. Sabotage, moreover, is a widespread practise that

finds its reason for being in the very heart of exploitation, be it

carried out to steal time from the bosses or to cause damage against

oppression.

What power fears is not politically correct demos led by unions during

big events of inaction, on the contrary it is the spreading of

widespread and anonymous acts in the context of the permanent social

struggle, beyond all separatism.

As repression increases everywhere against the dissidents of democracy,

to repudiate one’s own past, ideas or even one’s own antagonism seems

the last sheet anchor offered by power. To refuse this blackmail is

therefore, beyond the worry of not harming anyone, a question of

integrity, one of the few things that the State can’t take away from us.

Whoever the authors of last November sabotages are, we proclaim our

solidarity with the action they did. At the same time, faced with

repression that claims to have dismantled an ‘invisible cell’, we don’t

care about mere support, which necessarily becomes exterior and relating

to what the ‘cell’ is supposed to be, but again we proclaim solidarity

against the State and all its hangmen.

Solidarity which, exactly like revolt, cannot be exclusive but must be

addressed to all those who struggle for freedom. If the innocent deserve

our solidarity, the guilty deserve it even more!

December 2008,

Anarchists in spite of everything.