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Title: Ultimatum Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: Harbinger, demands Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/ultimatum
Unless you grant our demands, from the close of the millennium at
midnight, New Year’s Eve, onwards,
the populace by a ruthless elite of advertising executives and other
psychologists, utilizing a constant barrage of propaganda upon all five
senses to maintain their power [1];
millions of human beings, converting them into useless trinkets,
pollution, tedium, and work-related injuries such as carpal tunnel
syndrome [2];
take their apathy and anger out on themselves and each other with
firearms, addictive drugs, and abusive relationships [3];
efficient ways [4];
jailed… branded terrorists by the real terrorists [5].
These travesties will continue without mercy or quarter until all our
demands are met. This is not negotiable. These are no idle threats.
Hell, all these things are happening right now, and have been for
decades.
horizons, that will give her the experiences she needs to discern
exactly what her greatest desires are. The important things cannot be
taught or explained. Go search.
simultaneously provide for the needs of others. Otherwise, every time we
take care of our own needs, we simply reinforce the system of scarcity
that makes others suffer—and it is in no one’s best interest that we
live in a world of mutual distrust and misery.
and emotional transaction. And while everything still belongs to the
hoarding exchangers (the “possessed,” we call them, those would-be
possessors), let theft, squatting, trash scavenging, etc. enable us to
begin this gift economy immediately.
fragments we receive as individual consolation prizes, and we need
social arrangements in which this control can be shared to everyone’s
advantage. It’s not just a question of being free to pursue our desires,
but even more so of being able to participate in the shaping of them—and
for that, we must share power over the world that does the shaping.
We have the guns for war. They are the simple, infectious pleasure of
breaking rules—the loneliness shared by prom queens and executives on
long business trips alike, both ready to abdicate their roles the
instant someone offers them a world populated by people rather than
chess pieces —the outrage rightly felt by anyone who has had to go
fruitlessly in search of a restroom through the crowded streets of a
city, who feels in his very gut just how out of place human beings are
in these new metropolises.
What we need is a new radicalism, one that can offer both the
opportunity to make a total revolution, and the courage to seize it, to
those who today make their revolutions only by halves: the middle-aged
adulterers and teenage elopers, the bank robbers and shoplifters, the
Peace Corps volunteers and block-burning rioters, religious mystics and
hikers of the Appalachian Trail, militiamen and members of Alcoholics
Anonymous, free software advocates and fired construction workers, and
everyone else who has everything at stake in the formation of a new
world and no idea how to get there. A radicalism that can join the cause
of the landless farmworkers in Brazil to the raw fury of the dilettante
anarchist vandal of the West, without any implications of charity work
or youth reform; one that can demand that we surpass the oppressive role
of art in this society, without denying or demeaning the solace the
solitary adolescent poet finds in it. One that can give real form to the
false promises of adventure implicit in “rebellious” rock music and
fashion… one that can integrate the needs of the violent young hoodlum
with those of the single mother, the art-school intellectual, and the
runaway child. One that can integrate the “violent” with the
“non-violent” resistance, showing that this is a false dichotomy, just
like the self/other dichotomy—and every other dichotomy.
[1] My mother started smoking when she was thirteen. She calculated that
she’s probably spent enough money on cigarettes to retire early, if she
had it back; but instead, we grew up with billboards advertising
cigarettes next to our school, and now my brother smokes too. It’s
finally illegal for them to advertise cigarettes on billboards, so the
same corporation has invested in other products, and other billboards…
[2] None of us ever got to know my grandfather—he was always so tired
when he came back from work that he didn’t talk. When he retired last
year, his employer gave him a watch. We still don’t know him… I guess at
this point all he knows how to do besides work is watch football on the
television, and drink.
[3] Two nights ago, my friend was raped at knifepoint by a boy who asked
for a ride at a party. She had been one of the only women I know who
hadn’t been raped or sexually abused yet. It’s very hard for me to let
anyone touch me anymore.
[4] My uncle became addicted to heroin after he was drafted to serve in
Vietnam. He finally fought free of the addiction, but now he’s dying of
Hepatitis B.
[5] My lover was making puppets for street demonstrations when the
F.B.I. and police stormed her building on a fabricated excuse. They
teargassed everyone at the door, and began attacking people at random as
they destroyed all the puppets (which the papers would later refer to as
“weapons”). When she tried to get between her friend and the policeman
who was beating her with his nightstick, she was beaten herself, and
then charged with six felonies for “assault.” The news networks are
celebrating the police for maintaining order in this city.