The arrest of Christophe on 27 November [2009] marks a [new] stage in the mad governmental fit that one has modestly called “the Tarnac Affair.” His arrest situates the point at which this procedure only proceeds so as to save itself: they have indicted one more person in the sole hope of maintaining the others.

As part of the “first circle,” Christophe belongs to the small group of people with whom we discuss our defense. The judicial controls that would like, from now on, to prevent him from seeing us is one aberration too many. It is also a conscious attempt to disorganize the defense. At this point, when all notions of what is lawful are twisted, who could still demand that we continue to respect these judicial controls and this demented procedure? Absurd. There is no need to see yourself as above the law to ascertain that the law is beneath everyone. Besides, a society that maintains itself by means that are so obviously criminal has no business bringing charges against anyone.

Freedom under judicial control is the name for a sort of mystical experience that anyone can have. Imagine that you have the right to see whomever you like, except for those whom you love; that you can live anywhere except your home; that you can speak freely on the telephone or in the presence of unknown people, but that anything you say can, one day or another, be used against you. Imagine that you can do whatever you like, except for what you hold dear. A handleless knife from which one removes the blade more resembles a knife than freedom under judicial control resembles freedom.

You are walking on the street with three friends. According to the cops who follow you, “the four subjects headed in the direction of . . .” After months of being separated, you re-unite with someone who is dear to you. In judicial jargon, this is a “fraudulent consultation.” If you do not renounce the loyalty supposed by friendship, even when facing adversity, you are obviously part of a “criminal association.”

The police and their justice have no match when it comes to distorting what falls into their view. Perhaps, finally, they will only render monstrous that which, lovable or detestable, is easily understood.

If it is enough to not recognize oneself in the existing political organizations to be “autonomous,” then one must admit that we, the autonomous, are the majority in this country. If it is enough to see union leaders as sworn traitors to the working class to be “ultra-Left,” then the base of the CNT is currently composed of a series of dangerous ultra-Left cells.

We are deserting. We will no longer check in [with our supervisors] and we think it will be good to see each other again, as we have already done to write this very text. We do not seek to hide ourselves. Quite simply, we are deserting Judge Fragnoli and the hundred small rumors, the thousand miserable harsh remarks, that he makes about us to this or that journalist. We are deserting the kind of private war in which the Anti-Terrorist Squad would like to engage us by following us, “sonorizing” our apartments,[1] spying on our conversations, going through our garbage and recording everything that we might say to our families during our visits in prison with them.

If they are fascinated with us, we are not fascinated with them — whom our children, not without humor, now call the “thieves of toothbrushes,” because every time they aim their 9mm guns at us, they swipe all the toothbrushes for their precious DNA experts. They need us to justify their existence and their reputation, but we don’t need them. They must constitute us, through all kinds of surveillance and administrative procedures, as a paranoid grouping, we who who aspire to dissolve ourselves in a mass movement that, among many other things, will dissolve them, as well.

What we desert above all is the role of Public Enemy, that is to say, the role of [sacrificial] victim, which they have wanted us to play. And, if we desert, it is to take up the struggle again. In very similar circumstances, George Guingouin once said, “Instead of tracked prey, one must feel like a combatant” (Communist Resistor).

Everywhere in the social machine, this [desertion] explodes with a rumble and sometimes this rumble is so low it takes the form of a suicide. There isn’t a sector of this machine that has been spared from this type of explosion: agriculture, energy, transportation, high-school education, communications, research, college education, the hospitals, psychiatry. And each of these cracks add nothing, alas, if not a surplus of depression and vital cynicism — things that are quite valuable, in the final analysis.

Like the greatest number of people today, we are torn apart by the paradox of the situation: on the one hand, we cannot continue to live like this nor let the world, led by an oligarchy of imbeciles, run to its doom; on the other hand, any perspective more desirable than the current disaster, any idea of the practical route by which we might escape this disaster, has been stolen. And no one revolts without having the perspective of a better life, except for several sympathetically desperate souls.

This era doesn’t lack wealth; it is plagued by shortness of breath. “We must have time, we must have [more] time — intrigues of long duration.”[2] One of the principal effects of what one calls “repression” is to take time away from us (same with salaried work). Not only by materially taking time away from us — time passed in prison, time passed trying to get those in prison released — but also and foremost by imposing its own rhythm. The existence of those who stand up to the repression, for themselves and for their entourage, becomes perpetually obsessed with immediate developments. Everything leads to the short-term and what’s new. All duration breaks up. The judicial controls are of this nature; they have these kinds of effects. This is also good.

What has happened to us was not centrally intended to neutralize us as a group, but to create an impression among the greatest number of people, notably among those (and they are many) who no longer manage to hide the ill-will they have for the world such as it is. They haven’t neutralized us. Even better, they have neutralized nothing at all by using us in this way.

And nothing can prevent us from taking up our task once again, this time more widely, no doubt, than before: to re-elaborate a perspective that is capable of removing from us the state of collective impotence that strikes us all. Not exactly a political perspective; not a program; but [an analysis of] the technical and material possibilities of a practical route towards other connections with the world and other social connections, and this by being ready for the existing constraints, the actual organization of this society, its subjectivities as well as its infrastructures.

Because it is only through a keen knowledge of the obstacles to the upheaval that we will manage to clear the horizon. This will be a long-term task, and it doesn’t make any sense for us to pursue it alone. This is an invitation.

[signed]

Aria, Benjamin, Bertrand, Christophe, Elsa, Gabrielle, Julien, Manon, Mathieu and Yildune are the 10 people who have been indicted in the so-called “Tarnac Affair.”[3]

[1] Translator’s note: that is to say, by bugging their apartments with eavesdropping devices.

[2] Translator’s note: I have placed this sentence in quotes, as if it were spoken by “this era.”

[3] Translator’s note: in response to the publication of this statement, the District Attorney’s Office in Paris “asked the judges involved to verify the conditions of the development of these judicial controls” (a representative of the office, quoted in Le Monde, 4 December 2009). “If these obligations were not respected, the District Attorney will draw all the [proper] conclusions.” Those who disobey judicial control risk being returned to prison.

(Published in Le Monde on 3 December 2009. Translated from the French on 4 December 2009.)

Tarnac: Witness X and his rigged testimony

The police put pressure on Jean-Hugues Bourgeois and backdated the surveillance report of his interview so as to condemn Julien Coupat’s group.

A witness leaves the shadows. And this event is surely the most important new development in the investigation into the sabotage of the high-speed train lines that took place at the beginning of November 2008. While the Anti-Terrorist Police (SDAT) executed a new arrest in Tarnac yesterday,[1] the lawyers for the Tarnac Nine prepared for an examination of Jean-Hugues Bourgeois, a young farmer identified by “X” in the police’s surveillance report for 14 November 2008. “It is now established,” they wrote, “that Mr Bourgeois and witness #42 are one and the same person.”

Without saying anything further, Bourgeois confirmed it to Liberation. His deposition as “X” accused the Tarnac group of having had a project to “overthrow the State,” to “have little regard for human life,” and — in the case of Julien Coupat — to envision “having to kill.” Supporting the idea of a terrorist aim, these allegations were brought up again in the SDAT’s report and the District Attorney’s search warrants.

But on 11 November [2009], there was a new development. A TF1 [television] team interviewed Witness #42 on a wet country road, [his face] blurred, on a hidden camera. He declared having “no idea about anonymous testimony,” received on 14 November 2008 by SDAT officers. One of the functionaries explained to him that there was “a pile of information, intercepted mail,” that “wasn’t exploitable in a legal procedure,” and that were “in need of a signature.” Afterwards, the police added extracts from their dossiers to this witness’s deposition.

In shock. According to “the remarks of the anonymous witness,” “the entirety of his testimony, taken at 9 am on 14 November 2008, did not reflect his declarations,” the lawyers for the defense informed Judge Thierry Fragnoli in a letter. Witness X, “now identified,” has indicated that he “signed his deposition without reading it” and “participated in this deception under police pressure,” they claimed.

At the time, Bourgeois’s farm was the victim of attacks, and he was in contact with the police of Riom. On 12 November 2008, the warrant officer in charge of the case contacted him, while the surveillance of the people questioned in Tarnac was in course. The officer knew that Bourgeois including them among his friends and regularly saw them. The officer brought him to the Riom police station at around 8 am on 13 November. At the office, SDAT officers arrived specially from Paris awaited him. His interview lasted nine hours. According to someone close to Bourgeois, it was an ordeal. He came home in shock. As if he’d been the “victim of an attack.”

Beyond the possibility that the Tarnac group could threaten human life, the testimony of Witness #42 contained few precise facts. Those close to Julien Coupat “experimented with their territorial logic.” “They presented themselves as the most apt to destroy the world and reconstruct it anew.” One learned in Autumn 2007 that the group would be “completely closed upon itself.” The witness, who was among them a month earlier, saw no preparations for insurrection.

Manipulation. A factual incoherence mars the deposition of #42. The interview is dated 14 November. And the authorization from the judge for the necessary detention of “X” was delivered at 6:58 pm on 13 November. But Bourgeois was interviewed at 8 am on the 13th. The magistrate, in charge of the harassment campaign, came to see him. Moreover, Bourgeois was brought to Tarnac the next day. Two residents recall his visit. “Mr Bourgeois could not be in Tarnac at the same time that he was supposedly in the offices of the police’s intelligence division,” the lawyers for the defense pointed out. They demand the audition of these two SDAT functionaries, co-signatories to the testimony, so as to “cast light on the alteration of the date of the interview.” “The dossier is full of serious indications of manipulation,” says Mr William Bourdon, one of the attorneys. “Especially this testimony, which was the cornerstone of the accusation.”

Another contradictory detail has been discovered. In December 2008, officers from the SDAT once again contacted the farmer and asked him to bear witness again, but this time under his real name. A curious, inexplicable step. Was it taken to cover the tracks that led to the witness? On 11 December, a month after his testimony as X, Bourgeois was re-interviewed under his real name.

This time, he assured the SDAT that he had “never” been informed of “violent projects targeting the State” by the residents of Tarnac. On the contrary, he shared with them “a libertarian ideal that is not at all reprehensible.” He declares, “I advised them about their farm animals and harvests.” He says that Julien Coupat and a friend came twice to see his methods. Bourgeois knew no more than that about Coupat. “It is hard for me to believe that he is the one whom the authorities have presented as a terrorist,” he says. In his second interview, Bourgeois “said nothing that would lead anyone to suppose that a terrorist project was underway, and formally contradicted the so-called revelations made under the cover of anonymity,” the lawyers declared.

[sidebar]

“I was at the end of my rope.”

The farmer who anonymously testified against Coupat was pressured, a victim of harassment.

“There are moments when one is vulnerable, and there are people who are paid to recognize those moments,” Jean-Hugues Bourgeois confided to a friend. The 30-year-old farmer, a resident of Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne (Puy-de-Dome), had lived with threats for six months before testifying in the Tarnac Affair. His horses were killed, his barns burned and grape-growers were suspected of wanting to drive him off his land. In June, he himself was questioned for “denouncing imaginary deeds” on the basis of a handwriting analysis. “There is no objective fact that allows anyone to say that he himself had killed his horses, burned his barns and his hay,” insists his lawyer, Mr Jean-Louis Borie.

Originally from the High Alps, Jean-Hugues Bourgeois came to the Combrailles in 2006. It was humid terrain, surrounded by woods. He built a cottage and a greenhouse, and put up a caravan and a procession. He hollowed out a pond. Friends came from all over. “In the evenings, they would remake the world here,” remembers Michel Message, a farmer from near-by. “Since the land wasn’t good for much, I proposed to give him half of my property.” An extreme Left militant as an adolescent, Bourgeois was in contact with autonomes who participated in the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa and Geneva. His sister belonged to the Longo Mai network of cooperatives and introduced him to organic agriculture. He settled down and started a horse farm, constructed a little cheese-making operation, and held a position at the CIMADE[2] in Clermont-Ferrand.

Pistol. In the village of Tarnac and the Goutailloux farm, one hundred kilometers away, he discovers among them a friend, formerly of Longo Mai, who is living there. Bourgeois sells the friend horses and loans him a goat.

On 31 March 2008, anonymous people attacked his horse stalls during the night. In the enclosure that he himself built, ten horses are killed by pistol shots. [Michel] Message, his friend, cursed the judge who suspected Bourgeois of being the perpetrator of these crimes: “A judge who tells lies such as this: I would put him into a herd and try to kill just one, [then] he would see how things go!”

For the press, Bourgeois became “the harassed organic farmer.” An association was formed. The Confederation of Peasants supported it. But the bad blows continued. “The people from around here never managed to understand that one could help a young person,” Michel Message explained. “They would say: ‘If Message doesn’t inherit the land, it is ours!”

Iron bars were planted in the fields to puncture the wheels or break the harvesters. An anonymous letter threatened to rape his 8-year-old daughter. Two fires destroyed his reserves of organic hay. At the beginning of October, fire ravaged Message’s barn: 35 tons of hay and 10 tons of grain belonging to Bourgeois went up in smoke. “Mr Bourgeois was crushed,” said a neighbor. In shock, he decided to leave for Britain in December 2008. “I told him that, if he remained in the country, one would have found him at the end of a rope,” Message confided.

DNA. In the spring, when a militant from the Parisian National Front was implicated by a trace of DNA on one of the threatening letters, Bourgeois’ handwriting was analyzed. “The expert believed that the anonymous letter in the form of a coffin had probably been writing by you,” said the judge at Riom, Bruno Meral, who admitted that the pen used “not allow a complete comparative examination.” Bourgeois rebelled, and complained about the court’s level of expertise. The judge indicted him. “Nothing prevented you from going to the barn and lighting it on fire yourself,” he declared. Pushing the investigation forward, the judge took interest in Bourgeois’ scholarly dossier. “At the age of 14, you declared that you’d made small explosives and set small fires,” the judge remarked. “You later declared you wanted to be a chemist or terrorist . . .” Bourgeois protested: “I was only 14!” The investigation was dead.

[1] Translator’s note: see statement from the 11 November Support Committee concerning the arrest that took place the previous day.

[2] Translator’s note: an ecumenical service that helps foreign immigrants.

(Written by Karl Laske and published in Liberation, 25 November 2009.)

At a press conference on Wednesday at the National Assembly, several deputies and three lawyers for the nine people indicted in the Tarnac Affair denounced “an affair of State, “a criminal procedure under the cover of [fighting] terrorism” and a State that is “more and more opaque.”

Francois Hollande, Socialist deputy of Correze, has estimated that one “must close the case.” “Nothing in the alleged facts qualify as terrorism and there is nothing that makes prolonging the investigation necessary,” he affirmed, considering that “this affair has been a fiasco.” It has been “an abuse of provisional detention,” added Andre Vallini, a Socialist deputy from Isere, who spoke of “flight in the face of power and Justice” and an “affair of State.”
[Opaque vs myopia, everybody wins!]

Questioned about things in Tarnac, Correze, the nine people close to the sphere of influence called “anarcho-autonomous” by the police were indicted in mid-November 2008 in this affair, the qualification of which as “terrorist” has been debated. Five of the nine are suspected of having participated in acts of spite against the SNCF [high-speed train] lines.

Among the nine, Julien Coupat, presented as the leader of an “invisible cell,” has been charged with association with criminals related to a terrorist enterprise, damage committed in relation to a terrorist enterprise and leadership of a terrorist group. He was released and placed under judicial supervision at the end of May. He has always proclaimed his innocence.

The lawyers for the nine indicted people noted “a singularity that one doesn’t find in any other similar dossier. Mr Thierry Levy[1] doubted “the authenticity of the testimony” and found the conduct of the police “suspect.” He said, “One wonders if they haven’t fabricated, forged these items, to give consistency to facts that do not exist.”

At issue is a surveillance report, dated 8 November 2008, by a member of the Anti-Terrorist Police (SDAT). In it, Julien Coupat and his wife were supposedly seen, at night and for 20 minutes, on foot near one of the high-speed train lines that had been targeted. “At the end of seven months, this is the only piece of evidence that the elite of the French police have found concerning the Tarnac group,” said Jeremy Assous.

“This would mean that an iron bar weighing 2.5 kilos had been resting upon one of the wires for 20 minutes, after someone climbed five meters to put it there,” Mr Assous said. The lawyer for Julien Coupat explained that “it is impossible to get within 25 centimeters of these wires without being electrocuted immediately.” According to him, “even agents from the SNCF require 45 minutes to replace such a wire.”

“A simple visit to the presumably sabotaged areas would allow Judge Thierry Fragnoli to see that Julien Coupat and his companion couldn’t have been there and that the SDAT’s surveillance report is a fake,” Mr. Assous declared. For him, “the police weren’t there and they invented everything.”

A witness known as X also confounds the presumed terrorists. “Ridiculous,” says Mr William Bourdon. This witness “affirms having been manipulated” and “wasn’t interviewed on 14 November 2008, as the dossier says, but on 13 November,” the lawyer declared. “He was re-interviewed on 11 December and his declarations on that date contradicted his previous ones,” he said, denouncing “a collection of manipulations and false evidence.” The lawyer alleged that “People have been detained on the basis of his testimony.”

On Tuesday, a new suspect was questioned in Tarnac in the framework of this affair.[2] The questioning of this 33-year-old man shocked the politicians, who remarked that he ran Tarnac’s grocery store and had two children, four and six years old. The man who was questioned had already been placed under judicial supervision at the end of 2008 in the framework of this same investigation.

The lawyers for those indicted claimed that “the SDAT was using the logic of the riposte.” They laughed that, “by questioning the loyalty of the investigators, they risked a new round of questions.”

[1] In 1984, he served as Guy Debord’s lawyer in his successful attempts to sue various French newspapers for defamation of character concerning their lies about the murder of Debord’s friend, Gerard Lebovici.

[2] See the Support Committee’s statement concerning the new arrest.

(Associated Press, 25 November 2009.)

This morning at 6:30 am,[1] the Anti-Terrorist Police (SDAT) allowed themselves to undertake a new arrest among those “close” to the indicted. Judge Fragnoli almost brought us to tears last week when he boasted in the pages of Liberation that he would proceed in this case with all the “humanity” of which he is capable. This morning he again once showed the finesse that we have come to recognize in him: 15 wise-asses from the SDAT to break down the door and aim their weapons at two children, 4 and 6 years old, in their beds. All that just to question someone who had already been arrested on 11 November 2008, based upon the most fantastic elements of the case, which they have had in their possession from the very first day.

Obviously we understand what is at work here. While the two central elements in their accusations, namely the fabrications concerning Julien and Yildune and the witness “X,” have largely been sewpt away by recent revelations, the sad clowns continue their flight ahead, using pretexts that are always more laughable to create a diversion. One notes that it was in fact Judge Fragnoli himself who declared to the journalists that he would not make a reconstruction of the so-called night of sabotage. Thus, he definitively seems to what to cover up what each day a little more seems to have been fakes created by the SDAT. We wish him good luck; he’ll need it.
[Serious!]

In this pathetic attempt at diversion we once more see what anti-terrorism permits and permits itself. As when, during the last two waves of arrests, friends of the indicted were arrested in broad daylight on the street and forced to submit to 96 hours of observation and this pressure and humiliation. This democracy maintains itself any way it can.

We interpret this new attempt at intimidation as the only response that Mr Ragnoli could find to the collapse of his case. We bet that the weeks to come will permit us to definitively have done with this farce, and his career.

Soutiens au inculpes du 11 November
24 November 2009

[1] Translator’s note: The day before several lawyers for the suspects and various Left legislators were to speak in front of the National Assembly. In a communique, they protested against the use of anti-terrorist laws that have been “diverted against political activists.”

Two autonomes from Berlin and another from Hamburg received summons to
appear as material witnesses on 16 and 17 July, respectively, in the
so-called Tarnac Affair. They were summoned to give testimony against
nine comrades (the “Tarnac 9″) in the framework of a major series of
investigations in Paris. In November 2008, nine people were arrested
in France on the basis of anti-terrorist laws following the sabotage
of the railroad network when nuclear waste was going to be transported
during a strike by French railroad workers.

Demonstrations were organized in Berlin and Hamburg on the occasion of
the summons.

In Berlin, the 50 people who met before the French Embassy were
surprised to see a yellow, high-spirited ape the height of a human
being — an orangutan — with a placard against the transport of
nuclear wastes attached to it ass. The orangutan joined in the
demonstration and, in a clearly female voice, spoke up. A quarter of
an hour later, while preparing to leave the demonstration, the ape was
arrested. Perhaps the sensible reader won’t be surprised: under the
disguise was one of the witnesses. She was taken to the headquarters
of the federal police for the Tempelhof region, where she was detained
for several hours. The participants in the demonstration took the same
route to support the people who had been questioned.

Under Section 55 of the Penal Code, the second witness refused to
respond to the questions of the judge and was freed after 16 hours,
without any charges being made against him. The person arrested during
the demonstration then had to be heard.

The two German judges and the four French judges were surprised to see
her in her ape costume. Under this accoutrement she wore only her
underwear and the functionaries preferred their witness to be wearing
yellow and somewhat ruffled fur, rather than being half-nude. And so it was
in that state that she faced the astounded judges for two hours and
refused to make any declaration whatsoever.

Such is the narrative of a successful action that can serve as an
example of how to refuse to give in to a judicial proceeding. It is
always fitting to give an appropriate response to governmental
theater.

[The following text was read aloud at the demonstration at the French Embassy]

The Franco-German atomic mafia: cut the connection!

The repeated breakdowns at the nuclear power facility in Kruemmel,
reported in today’s newspapers, emphasizes what has been obvious for
decades to the German and French anti-nuclear movement: atomic energy
is not controllable! The fight against the use of atomic energy,
against the construction of nuclear power plants and the mining of
uranium (in Canada, for example) — a fight conducted at many levels
and by different means — is a fight against a technology that is
dangerous to life itself.

Nuclear energy policy at the international level

Franco-German cooperation in matters of nuclear energy is
distinguished by a very long tradition. Ever since the 1970s, German
atomic wastes have been treated at the processing plant in The Hague
before being transported via CASTOR[1] to Gorleben. It was also 30
years ago that Siemens began collaborating closely with French
industrial groups to develop and build nuclear power plants. The
enterprise of the French State, EDF, is the principal actor in EnBW,
an enterprise based in southern Germany that manages many nuclear
plants.

Despite many breakdowns and accidents at French power plants, such at
those at Tricastan last year or the recent ones at Kruemmel, which is
near Hamburg, the industrial groups and the [two] governments have
pursued costly endeavors and have even extended the utilization of
atomic energy, despite its dangers. Thus, the French nuclear group
Areva has constructed new reactors in France and China; the German
group EON has constructed one in Finland; and RWE is responsible for
the construction of a Russian model in Bulgaria. In this framework,
the security of the population is secondary. The priority of the
capitalists is to secure their profits. In Bulgaria, the reactor is
situated in a region that presents important seismic risks. For
decades, all sorts of radioactive and toxic materials have been
deposited at the “burial” site in Asse, though it is publicly well
known that the infiltration of water into this site has rendered it
inappropriate for such usage.

In Bulgaria as in Asse, it is as clear as source water that the
politicians and the scientists of the nuclear industry have been
bought. And this business is well worth the cost for the Franco-German
nuclear mafia: the operation of 17 German power plants earns a
[yearly] profit of more than 200 million euros for the four German
groups in the energy sector. To get that money, the nuclear industry
– not just in Europe, but everywhere in the world — thinks little of
human life. Nevertheless, it isn’t the criminal energy [technology] of
the industrial groups that is prosecuted by the Franco-German justice
system. No, one instead criminalizes people because a few hooks were
thrown over the high-tension lines of the rail network as a way of
finally stopping the madness of the nuclear mafia.

International resistance pushes the authorities out of the woods

In November 2008, while German nuclear wastes were being sent via
CASTOR to Gorleben in Lower Saxony, protest and resistance actions
took place in France and Germany. Many demonstrations, blockades of
railroads and sabotage of the lines in Germany and France caused
damage exceeding several million euros. More than a thousand trains
were delayed. It was only thanks to a police operation of exorbitant
cost, and after more than 20 hours of delays, that the convoy reached
the intermediary storage site at Gorleben, which is nothing other than
a well-ventilated potato barn.

In Germany, signal-switches were put out of service. In France,
sabotage of the high-speed lines spread chaos throughout the
week-end[2] traffic of the SNCF. Many trains were halted; more than a
thousand were delayed. The cause: two metal hooks suspended from the
high-tension line that separates the car from the electrical line. In
a communique drafted in German and sent to the newspaper Taz, the
actions in the two countries were explained in the following manner:
“Because we have had enough, we have directed our anger against the
network that transports nuclear wastes.” Shortly afterwards, a great
wave of searches and arrests swept through the small [French] village
of Tarnac and other places. Nine people were arrested; some of them
were kept in provisional detention for months.

The French authorities and a portion of the media spoke unrestrainedly
of “terrorism” and established a link with the on-going investigations
against a so-called “anarcho-autonome sphere of influence,” which was
the label under which the French State had made many arrests in France
since January 2008. These investigations originally centered on
actions against detention centers, participation in the opposition to
the “reform” of education (which is very strong in France), and
demonstrations against the presidential election [of Nicholas
Sarkozy]. In this context, a small book — of which one of the
indicted people is suspected of being a co-author — was also causing
a commotion. Entitled The Coming Insurrection, this book spoke of
rebellion against a present that is as unreal as it is disappointing,
and launched an appeal to get prepared concretely for an imminent
revolt. The authorities reacted to this book with much nervousness.
They signaled the alarm because men and women were creating
international networks to oppose atomic, climatic and capitalist
madness, along with all that it imposes. What we consider to be pure
necessity, the adversary calls “terrorism,” an “International of
revolt,” and the actions of brutal rioters.

In Italy, shortly before the summit of the G8 (the powers resolved to
decide global policy amongst themselves), two comrades were imprisoned
for attempts to sabotage railroad lines with hooks. They, too, were
suspected of belonging to an “International of revolt” that includes
35 other people. We salute them, as well as all those who do not want
to allow any respite!

The investigation in France continues. All the people concerned have
been released from jail, but remain subject to very strict
obligations, such as having no contact with each other, assigned
residences, etc, or they will be subject to re-arrest. The date of a
trial still has not yet been set.

Franco-German friendship against Franco-German Investigations

The French authorities leading the investigation into the “Tarnac
Affair” and the sabotage of rail lines during CASTOR transport
obviously intended to pursue their investigations into Germany. Two
autonomes from Berlin received summons from a judge to be heard as
material witnesses in the framework of a series of French
investigations. At the beginning of the year, a report by the French
anti-terrorist police on the “Tarnac Affair” already mentioned these
two people. The passage in question evoked the practice, largely used
in Germany, of using hooks to sabotage nuclear-waste transportation.
The German authorities informed their French colleagues of an on-going
investigation called “The Golden Hooks,” which had, among others,
incriminated the two people summoned to be heard today. Another must
soon appear in Hamburg. The two anti-nuclear activists from Berlin
will make no declarations. They do not desire to furnish the
authorities any information whatsoever that might help the
investigation into anti-nuclear resistance and those whom one dresses
up as members of a criminal gang because they fight against a criminal
policy. We invite you to accompany the two people to the court in
Tempelhof Damm. We will seize the occasion (which is not freely
offered to us) to make our solidarity with the comrades from Tarnac a
part of this day of judicial testimony in a Berlin that is still too
calm.

Show your claws to the system, here, there and elsewhere: they will
not pass! Our solidarity against their repression! Our struggles
against their politics! Solidarity!

[What the Ape said before her arrest]

“I am what I am”: such is the last offer of the publicity for this
world. It took decades of development to arrive where we are today. A
pure tautology. “I am what I am.” My body belongs to me. I am me, and
you are you, and something isn’t right.

From whatever perspective one looks at it, the present offers no exit.
We are all in agreement about the fact that things can only get worse.
“The future has no future”: such was the wisdom of an era that, in its
perfect normality, reached the level of awareness of the first punks.
Finally!

We are here, at the sides of our friends, whose hides the French
State, under the label of an “anarcho-autonome sphere of influence,”
wants to have. And two of us must help them?! As material witnesses?!
But they will not go along! Never! We are here in front of the
[French] embassy because we have a message to transmit, but not to the
State, nor to the justice system. Our message is to our friends and
all those who feel connected to them. What binds us together is not
addressing ourselves to the dominant politics, not criticizing it, not
wanting to help it make itself better in any way. We want to abolish
it and, along with it, the entire destructive administration of the
world, because this is our life, and we will reconquer it.

Like our friends, we know what everyone knows and yet no one wants to
speak truthfully about: this will not continue as before. This global
order, based for 500 years on the murder and pillaging of humanity and
nature, is rushing straight for the wall: economically, ecologically,
socially and mentally, that is to say, at all levels.

One need no longer agitate oneself or produce proof. The proof itself
has long ago become a commodity, an end-in-itself that preserves the
system, a strategy that avoids all the logical and ethical
consequences. With the media ceaselessly revealing the same terrible
destinies, and the public ceaselessly showing itself to be capable of
acting as if it has just discovered (as if for the first time) the
horror of drowning refugees, bombarded towns, climatic catastrophe –
to briefly become terrified, to assure itself of the fatality of the
situation and its own powerlessness, before returning to its affairs
in complete calm — no one can seriously doubt that all this will
remain possible for much longer. It will explode!

It will explode!

And suddenly there are “dangerous books” once again. One of them, The
Coming Insurrection, is at this moment the object of attentive reading
by a part of the French security forces. In the reactionary quagmire
of the United States, this book has aroused indignation of the highest
order.[3] Such books speak of breaks with the everyday, apocalyptic
ambiance of finished-off modernity and the combat for our life. To
have done with the wheezy activism of the traditional Left and,
furthermore, to begin to revolt today.

The Coming Insurrection begins with the castrations that keep us in
the choir of those who sing themselves hoarse on the high notes of the
psalm “There is no alternative.”[4] But the book does not persist in
its representation of misery. If it describes misery, it is, on the
contrary, to permit ourselves to recognize ourselves in it, to
recognize in it our own experiences and our wildness. Where The Coming
Insurrection is concerned, it is not a question of explication, but
resonance. To find and develop a shared language that is no longer
compatible with the commando. Whoever finds him or herself in the
emptiness that is described, and wants to put an end to it, is invited
to continue to reflect upon the manner of ending misery.

The Coming Insurrection constitutes a practical and strategic
position. It takes as its target the internal fragility of the regime,
which is hidden by all of power’s forces. Despite an apparent
stability, the regime continues to depend — today, as yesterday — on
the motivation of the workers and on the failure of any wrenches to
fall into the gears. The regime’s vulnerability at this level has
grown over the course of the last few years. It resides in the
elevated cadences of just-in-time[5] production, energy and
transportation networks, and flows of information.

It is a question of recognizing one’s own strengths in the weaknesses
of the adversary, of reflecting on the possibilities of escaping from
this runaway train [cet appareil en roue libre] so as to engage
ourselves, together, in something better. To create links between
combative groups and keep ourselves from reproducing the errors of the
past. They know the necessity of constructing proper structures for
the preparation of acts of sabotage. Because the supermarkets can only
be pillaged as long as there is something inside them; the carrot is
as necessary as the fist; the combat against what exists must be
accompanied by practical research into a radically different
existence. Combative groups recognize in liberty the spinal column
that reciprocally joins them together.

Groups link up, groups that want everything now and that clearly
refuse all procrastination. We recognize, as a condition, the fact
that we live at the heart of a global social war in which we must take
a position, one way or another. Then why not dare to make a new
departure? Why not try to organize our lives together on this planet
in a way that each person can have something? More seriously: Is there
still any argument in favor of the conservation of the failed
experiment that is capitalism?

Compared to the determination with which the indigenous communities
blockade the thieves of natural resources in Peru; compared to the
cold threat of French workers to blow up their bankrupt company if
they do not obtain retirement funds; compared to the realism of riots
without demands (and not only riots by poor youths in the metropolis);
compared to all the managers of the crises of the Empire, with their
dry words of encouragement, which are already as obsolete as the
bearers of the powdered wigs of the Ancien Regime — one can only
deplore the fact that they are so well armed.

Nevertheless, the coming insurrection will perhaps be the least bloody
of all the foreseeable possibilities.

[1] CASTOR stands for “Casks for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive
Materials.”

[2] English in original.

[3] Glenn Beck’s coverage of the book on FOX News.

[4] English in original.

[5] English in original.

(Unsigned, published on-line in French on 29 July 2009. Translated by
NOT BORED! 2 August 2009. Footnotes by the translator.)

It is sometimes by an apparent chance that makes one believe that there really does exist a “spirit of the age”. Thus, the appearance of a book on the “Internal Enemy” by Mathieu Rigouste at the same moment when “the Tarnac affair” was in the news, leaves the thought that a real popular uprising, for those who want to contain it as for those who place in it their hopes, is in the air. Invited to Tarnac to present to us his research, the author brought us some thoughts on the theory of revolutionary war that involves a good part of the “cadres of the Nation”. If we have contributed to diffusing this work, it is as much to show that the preventive war of counter-insurrection is truly a practical and theoretical reality, as it is to give certain clues to all those who envisage derailing this war machine.

The colonial roots of counter-insurrection: Indochina, 1946-1954. The French military who tried to safeguard the colonial empire of France were bypassed by events. The techniques of crowd control that they could have utilized up until WW2, in the face of a clearly identified enemy, were checked by an untraceable form of anti-colonial revolt, where the actors were disseminated amidst the mass of the colonized population. Undiscoverable, the presumed terrorists could hit everywhere, only to dissolve back once more into the largely supportive population. It was thus necessary to react, invent, and experiment with techniques other than that of frontal combat, with a sentiment of urgency all the more powerful as the Cold War hit its peak, and as the military theorists were convinced that the hand of Moscow was hidden behind all forms of insubordination. Relying on historical antecedents, but also on a creativity not devoid of zeal, they began to utilize certain techniques: it was a question of finding one part of the enemy that was the politico-administrative organization, supposedly the spinal column of subversion, the structure of which was to be destroyed; on the other hand, systematic propaganda and psychological action upon the population, as well as the use of industrialized torture on the prisoners, to make each and every one lose their interest for insubordination. Sure of total support from a colonial state attached to “defending the free world” against “communist subversion”, the generals who guided these operations had free reign for testing techniques the better to defend the French empire- whatever the price.

Thus, even though paid for by defeat, the war in Indochina had permitted the refinement of a doctrine of revolutionary war which shortly thereafter found its place in the heart of institutes for military studies (such as the Institute for Higher Studies in National Defense [IHEDN]). Taught to military figures, but equally to owners of the media, the military industrial complex, and high ranking judges who were invited to participate in seminars, and in this way to ministers who regularly received reports- in brief, all the “cadres of the nation”- the new doctrine permitted the circulation of what they called “defense theory”. The nation is considered as an organism that must be immunized against the menaces of dissolution that eat away at it. The army is here the source of an “immunization theory” which it has precisely to function to defend the national “body” politic. The diffusion of “defense theory” into the population, relayed by all the cadres formed to this end, is thus a manner of bringing the population to immunise itself against the intervention of a protective army. An army that on its side, develops to the end of combating subversion (“cancer“) a coherent ensemble of techniques to conjure a revolutionary menace.

The resume made by Mr. Rigouste is eloquent: 1)The colonized populations are the centers of proliferation of revolutionary subversion 2)Information gathered must reveal the appearance of parallel hierarchies, which can be supported, destroyed, or replaced 3)Terror permits the adversary to hold the population, it is necessary to re-appropriate these principles 4)Designating interior subversion permits the population to be lead into supporting and participating in repression. 5)Psychological action permits the control of representations of the population and psychological war fools the adversary. The army must be the surgeon of a gangrenous society. 6)The military-police cordoning of the urban terrain constitutes a radical surgical act to purge the subversives and immunize the colonized population. 7)Reasons of state justify the state of exception and militarized surveillance.

Theorized and taught, the doctrine of counter insurrection continued at the same time to nourish itself on French colonial wars, particularly in Algeria. A new stage was thus reached during the 1957 “Battle of Algiers”. Confronted by a city-labyrinth in which subversive elements could move about and hide themselves with an uncontrollable ease, the military created what they called the “technique of urban protection”, namely that -a number was attributed to each house – the population was carded in its entirety, each one being the object of a summary of information on their job, their habits, their activities- the city was cordoned off with barbed wire and barricades, constituting so many checkpoints that permitted the control of the smallest movements-and last, diverse operations of “disappearances” and of torture were effected against anyone who was suspected of harboring bad intentions. In a parallel fashion in the 50’s, the doctrine was exported to diverse international colloquiums, for example into Nato. In the U.S., this doctrine would be immediately applied, notably against the Black Panthers.

Importing revolutionary war into the metropolitan space: After the colonial terrain, relayed by military theorists who had applied it there, the doctrine imported itself into the metropolis. In France, it was forbidden following many attempted coup d’etats (in 1961 and 1962) by its principal theoreticians (the future cadres of the Secret organization of the Army [OAS in french], but it remained studied in military institutes, and its heritage remains visible in the techniques of maintaining order. It’s in this manner that the leftists of the 60’s were designated as “chienlit”, and thus an action was taken to teach the populace to immunize itself against the leftists. At the same time, the security techniques multiplied, the media stations were held under control and the subversives expelled. But it was above all a few years later that the practices of counter-insurrection reappeared with force.

An old student of IHEDN, Giscard D’Estaing, put in place the plan Vigipirate applying the counter-insurrectional model: classed in part secret defense, this plan aimed as much to cordon the urban terrain as to immunize the population and diffuse among them the spirit of security. Later, another old student of IHEDN, Mitterand, chose to rehabilitate the generals who had attempted the coup d’etats under De Gaulle, and by this to give a new legitimacy to the doctrine. The affair of the “Irish of Vincennes” in 1982 inaugurated in France the practice of “media-police montages”: a concerted action between the media and the police permitted the preparation of a designated enemy for the populace, the diffusion of descriptive details about this foe, and, after a few months of recitation, to proceed with collective arrests.

The doctrine of revolutionary war seems to henceforth appear as a pure technology of the state, apolitical, leading simply to the maintenance of order in a population all at once menacing and menaced. The doctrine was, however, shaken by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Deprived of their principle justification in the designation of an internal enemy, the theoreticians of counter-insurrection recovered very quickly, using the “theory of new menaces”. The new doctrine always advocates the non-distinction between the subversive and the enemy, the interior and the exterior, but it adds to this the existence of gray areas, spaces of an incomplete control which serve as the terrain for the premise of subversion. And above all, the enemy from now on has multiple faces: suburban youth, leftist subversives, radical ecologists, diverse independence fighters, and above all, foreign populations. These last, constituted as “French suspected of questionable allegiance” have thus been made the object of many mediatic campaigns since their invention as a problem, and of many police interventions, and justifying at the same time by the fear that they are supposed to inspire, an ever-growing mobilization of the population.

Human Rights Watch numbers 17 media-police montages in the 90’s in France, of which the two most memorable concern such “enemies” as Khaled Kelkal, the name of the Algerian accused of the metro bombings in Paris in 1995, and who was killed by gendarmes in front of TV cameras- the affair in which the #1 and #2 in the DST have since admitted were commanded by the Algerian secret service…in the shape of an operation of psychological war; and the affair of the “Chalabi network”, which lead in 1995 to the arrest of more than 300 people of which many passed years in provisional detention to end finally at the quasi-total acquittal of the detained.

New menaces, the reinforcement of Vigipirate, psychological action…in step with the time, “defense theory”  became “security theory”: the theory no long posits the population faced with an exterior enemy, but facing a new enemy from within which everyone must mistrust, and against which a permanent military-police presence is indispensable. Since 9/11, the techniques have hardly evolved, but the urgency imposed by the “Global War on Terror” has, in passing, permitted the acceleration and intensification of actions of preventive war, all the while multiplying security laws.

The internal enemy, today: One can largely resume things thusly: elaborated in the course of colonial wars, the doctrine called revolutionary war (or counter-insurrection) has since been imported into the metropolis while adapting to the context of the age. The “thought of security” has a clear lineage, and the theories that have issued from it have very concrete practical applications on the techniques of maintaining order, at the national level first, but equally and more and more, at the international level.  The dominant representation is henceforth at a quasi-global level that of a singular society placed under the threat of internal subversion disseminated amongst the population, and which must at all costs be contained and prevented by the States.

In France, the two most ancient interior enemies, who have been the object of very elaborate actions of counter-insurrections, are the “savages of the suburbs” and the “illegal immigrant”. These two types constructed by “security theory” are supposed to be an antisocial force, sometimes aided by foreign powers, who menace the integrity of the nation which must protect itself. It is, in the terms of the state, a “low-intensity war” that has been led against them already for twenty years. ”Low intensity war”, that is to say one employs the methods of war in a time of peace. Thus, faced with the amplitude of the riots in 2005, it was the theory and the military figures who were solicited to the end of reestablishing order. A “technique of urban protection” of which we spoke of previously, was employed on this occasion for the first time in a metropolis: checkpoints, cordoning, and carding of the population. The military mobilized were the same who, a few months earlier, had assured the defense of French interest in the Ivory Coast (see the affair of the Ivory Hotel, an affair that was paid for by 64 deaths among the rebels). The possibility of having to use guns to keep down the rebels was envisaged with the greatest seriousness, and the military was finally mobilized to that end. And if finally its above all the CRS who were put in the foreground of the scene, the employment of technique or military material in their action was frequent (drones, flashballs, protection equipment).

In such a context, one understand better the ideological reasoning of the “Tarnac affair”. One can in effect observe, across this prism, the putting into place of a counter-insurrection operation with the intention to designate a new type of interior enemy: the anarcho-autonomous. To that end, in 2007, the first descriptions of this “new menace” began to circulate in the media. In 2008, the mediatic interventions multiplied, and the first arrests where held in a new context, attacking a supposed “French anarcho-autonomous movement”. At the same time, a certain Alain Bauer, security counselor of Michele Alliot-Marie and besides a boss of an important international security company, passed around examples of The Coming Insurrection, alerting the responsible figures of national security of the danger represented by these authors. In June 2008 all French judges received a service note inviting them to inform the Anti-Terrorist Bureau (SDAT) of all affairs that could be linked with the anarcho-autonomous movement. Then in November, after a year of mediatic preparation diffused against the new enemy, came the time for the “police-media montage” of Tanac, which permitted the public designation of the supposed representatives of this menace, and to give some principle characteristics: young, white, cultivated, mistrusting cellphones and suspecting police shadowing, living occasionally in groups…After many months of preparation, the population is in this way made to see their new enemy, against which the State is posed as the savior who intervenes preventively against a group launched on a dangerous path. That this action was balanced by a burning failure matters very little. The fact that it was irony which stood out against this paranoia of the state does not change the fact that the structures which give shape to its phantasms are really present. The plan Vigipirate has passed to red for many years (cordoning of territory and security theory), the gendarmerie is in the process of passing under the responsibility of the Minister of the Interior (army/police fusion), the general carding of the population advances slowly (Edvige and its cousins, student id cards, internet surveillance, biometrics), arrests follow, psychological action is constant, whether it be in the media or in all the places where one calls for the vigilance of the citizens against a supposed menace, the fight against the interior enemy is internationalizing, and its techniques are changing. . .

The state appears for better or worse, at all levels, to be leading a preventive offensive against all that could oppose the dominant order, combining the permanent drilling and mobilization of populations, and war operations of low intensity to assure itself of protection against the “subversive cancer” that corrodes it. Associated with the arsenal of anti-terrorist laws, which offer a legal frame for the state of exception necessary to apply this military theory, this ensemble of measures offers a structure more and more operational for putting down all eventuality of revolt. If we add to this certain recent information on the actuality of this paranoia, there is much to be unquiet about: on one hand, the same Bauer who cultivates “defense theory” at the summit of the State is about to put into place a “National Security Council” that would reunite all the bosses of the military-industrial companies, ministers, or owners of the media; on the other hand, one knows that a note has been sent to retirees and reservists of the national gendarmerie, demanding them to hold themselves ready to mobilize as of next June 30. . .

Thus, unease. But as M. Benasayag said in an interview diffused by numerous committees, “Unease, it’s what makes you move, what makes you act”. It’s not by fear or anguish which paralyzes and incites to replace something as stronger or more protective- above all in the context of the state, which poses as savior, since it is the same one that diffuses this anguish.

We thus face a disturbing machine of preventive war. But for one part, all machines have failures, bugs, and dysfunctions. And for another part, they also all have weak points. The question is now to succeed at discovering these, and to derail this machine. Some ideas? If the machine rests upon psychological action to diffuse anguish, we can stop trusting it; if it rests upon our collaboration, we can refuse it our complicity; and if it counts on the discretion of its real intentions, we can also put these in the light. . .

As well you will find here a text written after the Berlin police was sent to the house of one of these comrades to steal her handwriting for a comparison with a letter found with one of the people in the Tarnac proceedings. The attempt was not successful so far.

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The connection you desired is permanently disrupted

In the middle of June two autonomous received mail from the court in Berlin. In juridical support of the Grande Instance de Paris they are ordered to speak out as witnesses against nine comrades in some french proceedings. What is it all about?

November 11th 2008 a large scale razzia took place in the french village of Tarnac. Ten people were arrested under terrorist suspicion, meanwhile all of them are out, but face strict bail conditions. They are said to have formed »Invisible cells« and put socalled hook claws – Hakenkrallen – into the overhead power lines of several TGV trainlines. In the following a lot of trains were not running and damage done ran into the millions. Nearly simultaneously there noumerous arsons on train signals of the Bahn AG occured in Germany.

A communiqué written in German, send amongst other places to the german Newspaper taz, relates the actions in both countries to the nuclear Castor transport, that was on its way to Gorleben at the time: »Because we are fed up with it, we directed our anger against the transportation network of nuclear waste this morning.« Meanwhile, in french publications neither police nor media or the accused themselves connect the sabotage to the resistance against nuclear waste transports. Instead, the actions were clearly seen in the light of growing social tensions. Again and again a book is mentioned that one of the accused is said to be one of the athors.

»The coming insurrection« speaks about rebelling against a triste and unreal present and calls to concretely prepare for the revolt that will inevitably take off. The nervous reactions to the acts of sabotage, the inflationary talk about terror and the massive media hype all nurish the impression, that the organs of state security and the political class agree to this thesis – and start to fear for their quietness a little bit accordingly…

Now, where do we come into play here? Why this leaflet? The two comrades from Berlin that were ordered to speak out as witnesses now were mentioned in a police report of the french investigators in the Tarnac proceedings by the beginning of the year already. The respective paragraph describes the occasionaly widespread practice in Germany to sabotage nuclear transports with hook claws. It also mentions investigations the german police lead 10 years ago (the files are closed today, the proceedings never made it to the courts) that got a bit famous under the working title »Goldene Hakenkralle«- investigations that were amongst others directed against the two ordered as witnesses.

We will use this not completely free chosen opportunity to send messages of solidarity from the much too quiet Berlin to the comrades in Tarnac at the day of the order. Join us!

Thursday. July 16th 11 o´clock at the french embassy, Pariser Platz

After this groundbreaking spectacle we invite you to drive to the court with us and do what people in this society so often do: say nothing together.

But we do send greetings of solidarity to the two comrades that were arrested in Italy some days ago for sabotage using hook claws. Together with other 35 persons they are said to belong to an »Insurrectional Internationale«.

Here and there and everywhere: They will not get through!

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[Berlin] Serialized Novel „hook claw“

Today: Provincial criminal police searches the house of a witness and yet doesn’ t search it

What happened so far: November 2008 | Castor season | abrupt standstills of trains in France and Germany | spectacular arrests under terroris laws in France | exorbitant media hullabaloo | politicians try to present the threat evolving social war puts to their position as the world being threatened by the anarcho-autonomous movement – insurrectional intentions, dangerous books | few are scared – instead union demonstrations end in streetfights, bossed are taken hostage | in June the last of those incarcerated gets out of prison under strict bail conditions | is Sarkozy losing his teeth?

The next stage in this play of bureaucratic tristesse is set in Germany. In Berlin and Hamburg people were called to witness summons.

http://de.indymedia.org/2009/07/255507.shtml
http://de.indymedia.org/2009/07/255811.shtml

On July 16th 2009 the french investigators wish to talk to Berlin autonomous, a day later to a comrade in Hamburg. A dearest wish obviously that cannot wait. Alraedy in the evening of the 7th eight offizers of the Berlin police stand in front of the house of our friend intending to search it. They want to capture handwriting specimen of hers to compare it with a letter found with one of the comrades accused in France, and – as they assume and want to prove – signed with her name.

At this point we have to disappoint you: This letter does neither contain the long desired magic words that will enable us to free us from those in power without any bloodshed, nor is it a fiery call to get rid of them right away tomorrow morning in a bloodbath. It is a letter that speaks of the joy to come across companions in other parts of the world, of exchanging ideas and inspiring each other, a longing soaked in reality that is expressed in the greeting „love & peace & petrolbombs“. A letter between comrades, so to speak.

Back to Instanzia: The handwriting specimen were not taken that day, as the room of our friend was not found, as she was not at home, and as her housemates did not show the slightest will to help the authorities. Perfect. Immidiately after this happened an evening discussion about solidarity with the militant group ‘mg’ offered the possibility to inform interested circles.

Retrospectively we came to the conclusion that this house search was an extraordinary soft one. We think that it proved to be advantageous at least in this case that we do not adhere to the standard in polit-circles to have little plates with names at the doors of our rooms: Why to contribute to a smooth process for the cops? Also, having NO nameplate can mean different ways to deal with the situation, actually it is the missing plate that allows for self-determined action in the very course of the situation. It still is possible to decide within a collective house that it is perfectly ok, if people who do not want to be affected by the search for different reasons immidiately point the respective room to the police. A nameplate is in no way more binding than what the people in the house say. The important thing is to talk about what people want to see happening in case of the police searching a collective place, how they think and feel about it. Without nameplates the decision remains with us, what we want to tell the cops in which way at what time.

To sum it up: Wrong rooms, nothing confiscated, everything is fine.

That’ s all for now. Find out how the story will further unfold live and in color on Thursday, July 16th 2009 at 11 o’clock in front of the french embassy in Berlin.

While the government warns that right-wing extremists could be domestic terrorists, and The New York Times, says I could incite those crazy conservatives to violence, the extreme left is actively calling for violence!

As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.

The dangerous leftist book that could spark this is “The Coming Insurrection.” This is a call to arms for violent revolution, authored anonymously by a French group called the Invisible Committee who want to bring down capitalism.

This started in France and spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience.

Now it’s coming here. The book comes out in English in the U.S. in August. I have one of the first English copies.

The book was written after riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005 tore the country apart, and that was before the economy really got bad. This is the anti-”Common Sense,” where I call for peaceful protest.

This is a book of revolution. Remember this is not from the right, you know the radicals that everyone is so worried about in government. This is from the far left. Let me share a bit:

“Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary.”

The French government was so freaked out they arrested nine people believed to have written “The Coming Insurrection” on charges of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity” for allegedly sabotaging train lines in France.

When I first heard of this book it was in The New York Times book section. A group had organized an unauthorized reading of “The Coming Insurrection” at a New York City bookstore. When they were shooed out of the store they went to Starbucks and so on. Not exactly terrorist activity; more of a curiosity.

But it gets a little more creepy when you look at this: One of those leaders arrested in France Julien Coupat was held for six months and just released this May. According to a story in The Globe and Mail back in January of 2008 while visiting Canada, Coupat and his girlfriend sneaked over the border to visit New York City. According to relatives, they didn’t want their photos and fingerprints in the hands of U.S. authorities. Why is that? (By the way are our borders protected yet?)

Remember the media will tell you the right is the one to be feared. They do everything they can to tie any random nutjob shooting to conservatives. “The shooter was a fan of ’24′ — ’24′ starred Jon Voight — Jon Voight is a conservative!”

But this is a call for violence. Here is more:

“It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight.”

The synopsis of the book describes it as “an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe… a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to spread anarchy and live communism.”

A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it’s coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fear for their future — taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The communist party of Japan says they are getting 1,000 new members a month.

This book has not even been released in this country yet. It has been passed hand to hand and via the Internet, much like the pamphleteers in pre-revolution America. Thomas Paine was one of them. He issued a call to arms. I am not doing that. You are an idiot if you start shooting people — all that does is delegitimize the cause. Be like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King.

But people on the extreme left are calling people to arms. I am not calling to ban this book, but you should read it to know what is coming and be ready when it does.

— Watch “Glenn Beck” weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel

By COLIN MOYNIHAN.

They arrived at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in small groups on Sunday afternoon, proceeding two and three at a time to the fourth floor, where they browsed among shelves holding books by authors like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger.

By 5 o’clock a crowd of more than 100 had gathered. Their purpose: to celebrate the publication of an English translation of a book called “The Coming Insurrection,” which was written two years ago by an anonymous group of French authors who call themselves the Invisible Committee. More recently, the volume has been at the center of an unusual criminal investigation in France that has become something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians.

The book, which predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture, was inspired by disruptive demonstrations that took place over the last few years in France and Greece. It was influenced stylistically by Guy Debord, a French writer and filmmaker who was a leader of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who encouraged the Paris protests of 1968.

In keeping with the anarchistic spirit of the text, the bookstore event was organized without the knowledge or permission of Barnes & Noble. The gathering was intended partly as a show of solidarity with nine young people — including one suspected of writing “The Coming Insurrection” —whom in November the French police accused of forming a dangerous “ultraleftist” group and sabotaging train lines.

As a bookstore employee announced to the milling crowd that there was no reading scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s recent introduction: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”

A security guard tried to halt the unsanctioned reading, but the man continued for about five minutes, until the police arrived. The crowd, mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including some graduate students, then adjourned, clapping and yelling, to East 17th Street. There they formed a rebellious spectacle, crowding into shops and loudly shouting bits of political theory, to the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.

When the French publisher La Fabrique first issued “The Coming Insurrection” in 2007, it received comparatively little attention. But among those who did take notice were the French police, who began monitoring a group of people, mostly graduate students, living in the tiny mountain village of Tarnac in central France.

Last November nine of those men and women, ages 22 to 34, were arrested and accused of “associating with a terrorist enterprise” and disabling power lines that left 40,000 passengers stranded for several hours on high-speed trains. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutors’ office said that one of the nine, Julien Coupat, was believed to have written “The Coming Insurrection.” He has denied being the author but told interviewers in France that he admired the book.

The government eventually released the group — who have come to be known as the Tarnac Nine — pending further investigation, with some opponents of the official action accusing the police of carrying out arrests without sufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, the book Mr. Coupat was accused of writing has developed a small but devoted following. Dozens of anonymous translators have posted the text on Web sites. And Semiotext(e), a Los Angeles publisher that specializes in works by French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, published an English-language edition of the book at the end of last month with a print run of 3,000.

Hedi El Kholti, an editor at Semiotext(e), said that the book’s winding up as a key part of a controversial case added to the historical value of its message.

“Everyone is dancing around this notion that publishing a book can take you to jail,” he said recently by telephone. “That a book is an element that can involve you in a trial.”

The slender text is part antimaterialist manifesto and part manual for revolution. The writers expound at length on what they see as a diseased and dehumanizing civilization that cannot be reformed but must, they contend, be torn apart and replaced. To that end the authors direct their readers to sabotage authority, form self-sufficient communes and learn how to “support a conspiracy against commodity society.”

Like the authors of “The Coming Insurrection,” most of those observing its publication on Sunday night refused to identify themselves by name.

“The book is important because it speaks to the total bankruptcy of pretty much everything,” one man said after the group left the bookstore. “We’re living in a high-end aesthetic with zero content.”

Inside the Sephora cosmetics shop on East 17th Street, the crowd chanted, “All power to the communes,” as security guards wearing black T-shirts ordered them back outside. A few minutes later the cry was taken up again as the group marched into Starbucks on Union Square West.

Emile Olea, 28, a customer at the coffee shop who was visiting from San Diego, closed his laptop computer and gazed at the crowd.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “But I like the excitement.”

French authorities on Thursday authorised the release of Julien Coupat, who has been detained for more than six months on suspicion of sabotaging high-speed train lines, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Julien Coupat, 34, was arrested by anti-terrorist police in November 2008 and his lengthy detention without charges being filed had become highly controversial.

His arrest was part of a wider swoop on members of what Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie described as an “anarcho-autonomous” movement that had been under surveillance by domestic intelligence services for months beforehand.

Coupat, the last of the 10 suspects arrested in November to remain in custody, has always said he was innocent but he is still under investigation for organised, terrorism-related destruction of property.

Under the terms of his release, he will have to stay in the Paris region and surrender his passport and identity papers.

The failure to secure any convictions after a highly publicised raid by hundreds of police has proved embarrassing to the government, which has been accused of whipping up terrorism fears to justify tough new security measures.

In a written interview with the Le Monde newspaper this week Coupat described his detention as a “petty revenge which is quite understandable given the means that were deployed and the extent of the failure.”

Q. How are you spending your time?

A. Very well, thank you. Chin-ups, jogging and reading.

Q. Can you recall the circumstances of your arrest for us?

A. A gang of youths, hooded and armed to the teeth, broke into our house. They threatened us, handcuffed us, and took us away, after having broken everything to pieces. They first took us into very fast cars capable of moving at more than 170 kilometers an hour on the highways. In their conversations, the name of a certain Mr Marion (former leader of the anti-terrorist police) came up often. His virile exploits amused them very much, such as the time he slapped one of his colleagues in the face, in good spirits and at a going-away party. They sequestered us for four days in one of their “people’s prisons,” where they stunned us with questions in which absurdity competed with obscenity.

The one who seemed to be the brains of the operation vaguely excused himself from this circus by explaining that it was the fault of the “services,” the higher-ups, all kinds of people who want [to talk to] us very much. Today, my kidnappers are still free. Certain recent and diverse facts attest to the fact that they continue to rage with total impunity.

Q. The sabotage of the SNCF cables in France was claimed [by someone] in Germany. What do you say about that?

A. At the moment of our arrest, the French police were already in possession of the communique that claimed, in addition to the acts of sabotage that they want to attribute to us, other simultaneous attacks in Germany. This communique is inconvenient to the police for a number of reasons: it was mailed from Hanover, drafted in German and sent to newspapers in the Outer Rhine area exclusively; but it is especially inconvenient because it does not fit the framework of the mediatic[1] fable about us: a small nucleus of fanatics bringing the battle to the heart of the State by hanging three iron bars on the cables. From then on, they took care to not mention this communique too much, either in court or in the public lie.

It is true that the sabotage of the train lines lost much of its mysterious aura as a result: now it would be a matter of simple protest against the transportation of ultra-radioactive nuclear wastes to Germany over railroads and denunciations (made in passing) of the great rip-off known as “the crisis.” The communique concludes with a very SNCF-like “We thank the travelers on the trains concerned for their understanding.” What tact there is among these “terrorists”!

Q. Do you recognize yourself in the phrases “anarcho-autonomous circle of influence” and “ultra-left”?

A. Let me resume what I was saying. In France, we are currently living through the end of a period of historical freezing, the founding act of which was the accord reached in 1945 by the Gaullists and the Stalinists to disarm the people under the pretext of “avoiding a civil war.” The terms of this pact can be formulated thus: while the Right will renounce its overtly fascist accents, the Left will abandon all serious revolutionary perspectives. For four years, the advantage of Sarkozy’s clique has been the fact that it unilaterally took the initiative by breaking this pact and renewing “without apologies” the classics of pure reaction concerning the insane, religion, the West, Africa, work, the history of France and national identity.

Faced with a power at war that dares to think strategically and divide the world into “friends,” “enemies” and “negligible quantities,” the Left remains frozen, as if sick with tetanus. It is too cowardly, too compromised and, more than anything else, too discredited to offer the least resistance to a power that it doesn’t dare treat as an enemy and that, one by one, snatches away the sly devils [les malins] among its ranks. As for the extreme Left (Besancenot, for example): whatever its electoral results, and even if it has emerged from the groupuscular state in which it long vegetated, it hasn’t a more desirable perspective to offer than Soviet gray that has been slightly retouched in Photoshop. Its destiny is to deceive and disappoint.

Thus, in the sphere of political representation, the established power has nothing to fear from anyone. And certainly not the union bureaucracies, which are more corrupt than ever and now importune power [for help]. They do this, they who have danced an obscene ballet with the government for the last two years! In such conditions, the only force that can put a check on the Sarkozy gang, its only real enemy in this country, is the street, the street and its old revolutionary penchants. During the riots that followed the second part of the ritualized plebiscite of May 2007, only the street knew how to rise to the occasion. In the Antilles, during the recent occupations of companies and factories, it alone knew how to make another voice heard.

This summary analysis of the theater of operations was soon to be confirmed in June 2007, when the intelligence agencies published — under the bylines of journalists working under orders (notably for Le Monde) — the first articles bringing to light the terrible peril that is placed upon all social life by the “anarcho-autonomes.” To start, one attributed to them the organization of spontaneous riots, which, in so many towns, saluted the “electoral triumph” of the new president.

With this fable of “anarcho-autonomes,” one has sketched out the profile of the menace to which the Minister of the Interior is docilely committed to give a little flesh and a few faces by organizing targeted arrests in mediatic police raids. When one can no longer contain what overflows, one can still assign it a case number and incarcerate it. Thus, the case of the “rioter,” in which the workers of Clairoix, urban youths, student blockaders and anti-summit demonstrators are dumped pell-mell — this is certainly an effective move in the current management of social pacification — permits the State to criminalize actions, not existences.[2] And it is indeed the intention of the new power to attack the enemy, as such, without waiting for him to declare himself. Such is the vocation of the new categories of repression.

Finally, it hardly matters than no one in France recognizes him or herself as “anarcho-autonomous” or that the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than inoffensive volumes of Marxology. Moreover, the recent fortunes of the term “ultra-left,” which have permitted some journalists to catalogue the Greek rioters of last December without striking a blow, speak to the fact that no one knows what the ultra-left was nor even that it ever existed.

At this point — and in the anticipation of outbursts that can only be systematized in the face of the provocations of a hard-pressed global and French oligarchy — the utility of these categories to the police must no longer be debated. Nevertheless, one cannot predict whether “anarcho-autonomous” or “ultra-left” will finally carry off the favors of the Spectacle and relegate a totally justified revolt to the inexplicable.

Q. The police consider you the leader of a group on the point of tipping over into terrorism. What do you think about that?

A. Such a pathetic allegation can only be the work of a regime that is on the point of tipping over into nothingness.

Q. What does the word terrorism mean to you?

A. Nothing allows one to explain why the Algerian Department of Intelligence and Security, suspected of having orchestrated — with the knowledge of the DST[3] — the wave of attacks in 1995, is not classed among the international terrorist organizations. Nothing allows one to explain the sudden transformation of “terrorists” into heroes in the manner of the Liberation, into partners suitable for the Evian Accords, into Iraqi police officers and “moderate members of the Taliban,” according to the most recent sudden reversal of the American strategic doctrine.

[It means] nothing, if not sovereignty. It is the sovereign in this world who designates the terrorist. He who refuses to take part in this sovereignty will take care not to respond to your question. He who covets a few crumbs will comply [with the question] promptly. He who doesn’t suffocate from bad faith will find instructive the case of the two ex-”terrorists” who became the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the Palestinian Authority, respectively, and who — to top it all off — were both given Noble Peace Prizes.

The fuzziness that surrounds the designation “terrorist,” the manifest impossibility of defining “terrorism,” does not affect several provisional lacunae in French law: terrorists are at the source of this thing that one can define very easily: anti-terrorism, for which “terrorism” forms the pre-condition. Anti-terrorism is a technique of government that thrusts its roots down into the old art of counter-insurrection, so-called “psychological warfare,” to be polite.

Anti-terrorism, contrary to what the term itself insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, but is the method by which one positively produces the political enemy as terrorist. By means of a wealth of provocations, infiltrations, surveillance, intimidation and propaganda; by means of the science of mediatic manipulation, “psychological action,” the fabrication of both evidence and crimes; by means of the fusion of the police and the judicial; and by means of the annihilation of the “subversive menace” by associating the internal enemy, the political enemy — which is at the heart of the population — with the affect of terror.

In modern warfare, the essential aspect is the “battle for hearts and minds” in which blows are permitted. The elementary procedure here is invariable: individualize the enemy so as to cut him off from the people and from communal reason; display him in the costume of a monster; defame him, publicly humiliate him, incite the vilest people to heap their spit upon him; encourage hatred of him. “The law must be utilized simply as another weapon in the arsenal of the government and, in this case, represents nothing other than a propaganda cover to get rid of undesirable members of the public. For maximum efficiency, it would be suitable that the activities of the judicial services are tied to the war effort in the most discrete fashion possible,” advised Brigadier Frank Kitson (former general in the British Army, theoretician of counter-insurrectionary war), who knew something of the subject.

Once is not a pattern: in our case, anti-terrorism has been a flop. In France, one isn’t ready to let oneself be terrorized by us. The prolongation of my detention for a “reasonable” period of time is petty revenge, quite comprehensible due to the means mobilized and the depth of the failure; as comprehensible as the petty fury of the [intelligence] “services,” which since 11 November [2008] have through the press attributed to us the most fantastic misdeeds and stalked our comrades. How this logic of reprisals has seized control of the minds of the police and the small hearts of the judges, this is what the cadenced arrests of those “close to Julien Coupat” will have had the merit of revealing.

It is necessary to say that certain people are using this affair to extend their lamentable careers, like Alain Bauer (a criminologist), for example; others are using it to launch their latest ventures, like poor M. Squarcini (the Central Director of Domestic Intelligence); while still others are trying to rehabilitate the credibility that they’ve never had and never will have, like Michele Alliot-Marie.[4]

Q. You come from a very well-to-do background, which oriented you in another direction. . .

A. “There are plebes in all classes.” (Hegel).

Q. Why Tarnac?

A. Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you, I fear.

Q. Do you define yourself as an intellectual? A philosopher?

A. Philosophy was born like chatty grief from original wisdom. Plato already heard the words of Heraclitus as if they had escaped from a bygone world. In the era of diffused intellectuality, one can’t see what “the intellectual” might make specific, unless it is the expanse of the gap that separates the faculty of thinking from the aptitude for living. Intellectual and philosopher are, in truth, sad titles. But for whom exactly is it necessary to define oneself?

Q. Are you the author of The Coming Insurrection?

A. This is the most formidable aspect of these proceedings: a book integrally versed in the case histories of instructional manuals, in the interrogations in which one tries to make you say that you live just as described in The Coming Insurrection; that you protest[5] as The Coming Insurrection advocates; and that you sabotaged train lines to commemorate the Bolshevik coup d’Etat of October 1917. Because this idea is mentioned in The Coming Insurrection, its publisher was questioned by the anti-terrorist services.

In French memory, one hasn’t seen power become fearful of a book for a very long time. Instead, one had the custom of believing that as long as leftists were preoccupied with writing, at least they weren’t making revolution. Assuredly, times change. Serious history returns.

What founds the accusation of terrorism where we are concerned are suspicions about the coincidence of thought and life; what founds the accusation concerning the association of evil-doers is the suspicion that this coincidence couldn’t have been the result of individual heroism, but communal attention. Negatively, this means that one does not suspect any of those who sign their names to so many fierce critiques of the system of putting the least of their firm resolutions into practice; the insult is strong enough. Unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and this whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially repressive [policiere] character of the author’s function.

On the other hand, I am a reader. Re-reading it, just last week, I better understood the hysterical bad temper that, from high up, motivates the State to hound its presumed authors. The scandal of the book is that all that figures in it is rigorously, catastrophically true and it does not cease to prove itself true, little by little, each day. Because what proves itself, under the outward appearance of this “economic crisis,” this “collapse of confidence,” and this “massive rejection of the ruling classes,” is indeed the end of a civilization, the implosion of a paradigm, namely, that of the government, which rules everything in the West — the relations of beings to themselves no less than to the political order, religion or the organization of business. At all levels of the present, there is a gigantic loss of mastery that no word-games [maraboutage] by the police will be able to remedy.

It is not by skewering us with prison terms, microscopic surveillance, judicial supervision and prohibitions upon communication because we might be the authors of these lucid findings that one will make what has been found disappear. The characteristic of truth is that it escapes, barely enunciated, from those who formulate it. Governments: it doesn’t accomplish anything if you send us to jail; quite the contrary.

Q. You’ve read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Does this analysis still seem pertinent to you

A. The prison is indeed the dirty little secret of French society, the key to and not the margins of the most respectable social relations. What is concentrated in the prison is not a pile of wild barbarians, as it pleases some people to think, but in fact the ensemble of the disciplines that weave together so-called “normal” existence outside. Supervisors, the canteen, soccer games in the courtyard, one’s use of time, divisions, camaraderie, fights and ugly architecture: one has to have been in prison to take the full measure of the carceral in the school, the “innocent” schools of the Republic.

Envisioned from this impregnable angle, prison isn’t a pit [repaire] for society’s failures; instead, current society is a failed prison. The same organization of separations, the same administration of misery through shit,[6] TV, sports and porno reigns everywhere else, but much less methodically than in prison. To conclude: these high walls only hide from view this truth of explosive banality: there are lives and souls, entirely equal, who drag themselves along on both sides of the barbed wire, and because of it.

If one avidly tracks down the testimonies “from the inside” that finally expose the secrets that the prison conceals, it is done to better to hide the secret that the prison is: the secret of your servitude, you who are reputedly free, while its menace weighs invisibly on each of your gestures.

All of the virtuous indignation that surrounds the black hole [la noirceur] of French prisons and their suicide rates; all the crude counter-propaganda of the penal administrators who bring on camera the disciplinarians [des matons] devoted to the well-being of the detainees and the metal-plated directors who are concerned with the “meaning of the penalty”; in sum, all of the debate on the horror of incarceration and the necessity of humanizing detention is as old as the prison system itself. It is part of its efficacy, which permits the State to combine the terror that the prison must inspire with the hypocritical legal status of “civilized” punishment. The little system of prison-based spying, humiliation and violence [de ravage] that the French State uses more fanatically than any other State in Europe isn’t even scandalous. The State pays for it a hundred times over in the banlieus, and this, from all the evidence, is only a beginning: vengeance is the hygiene of the plebes.

But the most remarkable imposture of the judicial-penal system certainly consists in pretending that it exists to punish criminals when, in fact, it only manages illegality. Any boss — not just the boss of Everything — any president of a general council — not just the President of Hauts-de-Sein — any cop knows that illegality is necessary for the correct performance of his or her trade. In our time, the chaos of the laws is such that one would do well to not seek to make the laws respected too much and the drug enforcements agents [les stups] should stick to regulating trafficking and not repressing it, which would be social and political suicide.

The discussion is not — as the judicial fiction would have it — between the legal and the illegal, between the innocents and the criminals, but between the criminal whom one judges suitable for prosecution and the criminal whom one leaves in peace, as the general powers of society require. The race of the innocents was wiped out long ago, and the penalty is not what condemns you to justice: the penalty is justice itself; thus, it isn’t a matter of my comrades and I “claiming our innocence,” despite what is ritualistically repeated in the press, but trying to derail the hazardous political offensive that these vile proceedings constitute. These were some of the conclusions to which the mind is brought by re-reading Surveiller et Punir in prison. Of course, one isn’t suggesting, given what the Foucaultians have done with the works of Foucault for the last twenty years, that they should spend some time in jail.

Q. How do you analyze what has happened to you?

A. Enlighten yourself: what has happened to us, to my comrades and I, will also happen to you. This is the first mystification by power: nine people are prosecuted in the framework of a judicial proceeding against an “association of evil-doers in connection with a terrorist enterprise,” and they must be particularly concerned by these grave accusations. But there is no “Tarnac Affair,” no “Coupat Affair,” no “Hazan Affair” (Hazan published “The Coming Insurrection”). What there is, is an oligarchy that is very wobbly and becomes ferocious like any power when it feels itself to be really threatened. When his views no longer elicit anything among the people other than hatred and scorn, the prince has no other support than the fear that he inspires.

What there is before us is a bifurcation that is both historical and metaphysical: either we pass from a paradigm of government to a paradigm of living, at the price of a cruel but deeply moving revolt, or we allow the instauration at the planetary level of an air-conditioned disaster in which — under the yoke of a “simplified” management — an imperial elite of citizens and marginalized plebeian classes coexist. Thus there surely is a war, a war between the beneficiaries of the catastrophe and those who are accustomed to a less skeletal idea of life. One has never seen a dominant class commit suicide willingly.

The revolt has conditions, but not causes. How many Ministries of National Identity, lay-offs, raids of those without proper papers or those who are political opponents, young people beaten up by the police in the banlieus, and ministers threatening to deprive diplomas from those who dare to occupy their schools are necessary before one decides that such a regime — even if installed in power by an apparently democratic plebiscite — has no reason to exist and only merits being brought down? It is a matter of sensitivity.

Servitude is the intolerable thing that can be tolerated indefinitely. Because this is a matter of sensitivity and this sensitivity is immediately political — not that it wonders “Who should I vote for?” but “Is this incompatible with my existence?” — it is, for power, a question of anesthetizing the response [to the second question] through the administration of ever more massively distracting doses of fear and stupidity. And there where the anesthesia no longer works, this order, which has united against it all the reasons for revolt, tries to dissuade us by stuffing us into a small, tight-fitting [ajustee] terror.

My comrades and I are only a variable in this adjustment. One suspects us like so many others, so many “youths,” so many “gangs,” of having no solidarity with a world that is collapsing. On this one point, one doesn’t lie. Fortunately, this heap of swindlers, impostors, industrialists, financiers and prostitutes; this entire Mazarin’s court full of neuroleptics, Disney versions of Louis Napoleon, and Sunday shows that grip the country for an hour lack an elementary sense of dialectics. Each step that they take towards total control brings them closer to their fear. Each new “victory” with which they flatter themselves spreads a little further the desire to see them defeated in their turn. Each maneuver that they figure comforts their power ends up rendering it detestable. In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.

(Published in Le Monde on 25 May 2009 and translated by NOT BORED! 27 May 2009.)

[1] There is no adequate English equivalent for mediatique, which not only refers to the media, but to the spectacular, as well.

[2] There could be typos in or words left out of the original French. The context suggests that the case of the “casseur” allows the State to criminalize existences and actions.

[3] The French FBI.

[4] Minister of the Interior.

[5] vous manifeste can also mean “demonstrate” and “reveal yourself.”

[6] English in original.

“We are all iron bars,” announces the banner in front. Because this is what is at issue.[1] And this insupportable slogan: the everyday routine [le train train] must not be derailed. Move along, there’s nothing to see here! As if! There are things to see. First of all, there are the nine people who, since this past 11 November [2008], have been subjected to a State that is surpassed, powerless and incapable. Repression in perspective, its indictments resemble a farce, a bad farce, a tragic farce.

So what? At the moment that soldiers fill the train stations and cops intervene at schools, can we regard with indifference the militarization of public space? Can we let this government use anti-terrorist provisions to muzzle activists with impunity? Can we let ourselves be ridiculed by their loud and populist speeches? Can we hear the disappointment of the foreigners whom they ceaselessly arrest, lock up and deport from its borders?

In this world turned upside-down, in which the rich are given what is taken from the poor, will we suspend the order of things if, somewhere, we help someone who is without proper identification papers? [Yes,] by becoming the iron bars that sabotage the vile ambiance that reigns, the grain of sand that jams the machine, the bug[2] that renders so many things possible. And also by noisily manifesting our disgust with this squalid power. This is what is at issue. When we want to create more acceptable ways of living, they become afraid and overwhelm us. And, indeed, it is youth — not as [biological] generation, but as spirit [elan], as dynamic — that they lock up. Move along, there’s nothing to see here!

Thus, it is a question of sabotaging the everyday routine. And so Monday’s march took on the aspects of an enthusiastic and joyful carnival that has not forgotten its tradition of contestation. A carnival held to vomit [out] those who govern us, scorn us, kill us. A masked carnival. Because nothing justifies the idea that the cowl is only reserved for the agents of the SDAT[3] and the disciplinarians of the ERIS[4] whose task is to beat up prisoners. A noisy carnival, because the anger displayed, the rage that inhabits us, is hardly satisfied with muffled indignation at the growing number of injustices. And so enthusiastic and joyful that we exhausted ourselves singing out our solidarity! And one must see the smiling faces that know that here is a weapon much more powerful and livable than the “Every man for himself” of this degenerated world. This past Monday evening, under the storm of a world that stinks of the billy club and poverty, it was a parade that faced the prison. The final gesture of defiance by a libidinal power — faced with several messengers from the CRS[5] and in the great revolutionary tradition — was to set off fireworks in front of the prison. This was a working-class [populaire] pyrotechnical display to recall our support for Julien [Coupat] and all prisoners. Because this festival was also theirs, and also because — wall by wall, stone by stone — it will be necessary to destroy all the prisons.

No truce, no rest! By refusing to interrupt the instruction in progress, by maintaining Julien’s detention, the judges persist in obeying only the phantasms born from sick and putrid minds. This anti-terrorist and pro-security delirium must end. Immediately.

(Written by the Support Committee of Limoges, “in response to several odious commentaries in the local media” concerning the demonstrations of Monday, 11 May 2009. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 20 May 2009.)

[1] The iron bars that were allegedly used to sabotage the high-speed trains in France.
[2] English in original.
[3] The Anti-Terrorist Under-Directorate.
[4] The Regional Intervention and Security Teams set up by the Minister of the Interior, Dominique Perben, in February 2003.
[5] The French riot police.

It is a failure. We haven’t feared “anarcho-autonomous” terrorists weaving international networks. This invasion — so brutal and crude — by the political police has pushed us to put our bitterness into words, to leave our isolation.

The day after the arrests, support committees sprung up like crocuses after the thaw. Without consultations or slogans, the contagion spread: concerts, debates, meetings, evening performances. . . . Everywhere the support has brought together dozens, even hundreds of people.

It is a failure. Perhaps it was too crude. No one has wanted to believe that those who one accuses of having disconnected the TGV were bloody brutes who fomented terrible attacks. The Tarnac affair has been a trigger. Because we had forgotten that this is how one treats political enemies, forgotten that some radical intentions can officially lead to your jails. We did not know that those who in your eyes represent such a great danger could be isolated in a fantastic “circle of influence.” Instead, we have felt — from many places, epidermically — that something was not right. And if these arrests revealed a will to terrorize, it does not come from those who were indicted. There was a strange resonance everywhere that one evoked the affair that concerns us here.

And we feel that this support exists — not only in the number of signatories to a petition — but also in the amused eyes of the passersby who [think they] see an altercation between the police and a group of young people (thereby secretly desiring that the latter have the upper hand); in the mischevious eyes of the one who, at the office, consults an anti-social pamphlet that is hidden in a manager’s manual; in the discreet gesture of the administrator who conceals the texts that would justify his or her expulsion from the country; in the determination of those who sequester their bosses, who practice the requisitioning of goods; and in the tension that systematically shows itself at every public demonstration. The “Tarnac Affair” is a prism in which one can read the era and the struggles that traverse it. One considers the more discreet arrests that have followed with less indifference. One sees more clearly what ends the anti-terrorist laws serve. And what ends databases [le fichage] serve, and what it costs to want to be removed from them and what it costs to accept being subjected to them. What was diffused in the air was crystallized there in such a way that it has become very difficult to not takes sides.

One better grasps a government’s need to invent the figure of an interior enemy during such an explosive era. And one divines by filigree the unavowed nightmare of a system that has lost its footing: one in which the citizens of yesterday stop playing the game, defy the established order and organize themselves accordingly. There are, finally, legends in which we have ceased to believe along the way. From now on, how can one not feel oneself close to the rebels who have taken seriously the necessity of organizing themselves collectively? In this era in which what is best distributed is bitterness and the feeling of missing out on life, how can one not feel a complicity with those who have sought to extricate themselves from the ambient sadness and to struggle against its causes?

How not to perceive in their defiance the echo of that which we all feel? Without the arrests of 11 November [2008], The Coming Insurrection perhaps would never have been read — in any case, not collectively and no doubt not in a perspective that is so obviously practical — as if all the discussions, actions and meetings had perhaps never taken place.

We feel the force and the joy that there is in sharing our doubts and anger, and we see forming the “gangs” that your recent laws have not managed to dissolve. We see how the arrests — made for more or less useless reasons — reveal the panicked reflex of a perturbed power. They no longer dissuade anyone. Other people are still in prison for reasons similar to those of the Tarnac defendants. Some have been returned to prison for not scrupulously respecting the prohibition to not see each other. The legal surveillance, the forced dispersion of all the friends who have organized themselves, increases. Your prisons and all those that you can construct will never suffice to lock up all those who leave your norms behind. And wherever we are, solidarity is woven. In this period of crisis and trouble, we are only one voice in the chorus of those who no longer accommodate themselves to piecemeal reforms [rabibochages]. In all sections of the territory, in all segments of the people, adhesion to the system is in tatters. Disaffiliation becomes a practical route everywhere. And so much the better.

In what you wanted to inflict on the “Tarnac 9,” nothing consoles us as much as ascertaining that, for you, more threats arise (and from all sides) than those threats that you have believed you have conjured away. It is no longer due to incomprehension that we feel that we must retrace the thread of this affair. But understanding the logic at work doesn’t appease us. It only makes us angrier. The indictments must be lifted, just as the anti-terrorist, anti-gang, anti-mask and anti-assembly arsenal that aims at breaking all effective solidarity must be defeated. During the entire month of May, in each town in which they exist, the support committees will multiply their initiatives. On 8 May, public meetings will be held so that the question of knowing how to react to the situation that is made for us can be posed everywhere. There aren’t nine people to save, but an order to bring down.

(Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 13 May 2009.)