WARTEMPO
[I feel the need to apologize for the rambly feel of the piece, I’m still trying to find stability here and there, here being the words and there being everything around them.]
CW for discussion of trauma, ecological anxiety and war. Stay safe.
I don’t think I’m the one you should be listening to about war.
This war or War in general really.
Causes of War
By Jack S. Levy, William R. Thompson
Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles
By Errico Malatesta
The Shaman Speaks of War: Ales Kot Interviewed
I’ve never lived under siege. Not that experience of war should be a prerequisite for discussing the Thing™ but even on the theoretical plane I’m not much of a war connaisseur. (working on it)
The wars that affected me can only be felt in the internalised trauma of ancestors and family, passed down and complexified by difficult lives, trying to hold onto themselves. My grandfather and grandmother making my father and his sister into what they were. My grandfather and grandmother making my mother, her brothers and sisters into what she is, what they are.
I don’t have tools to help me speak of what they went through, only that they tried to escape, I understand.
But to touch is to be touched, always. Then, War is never away but within, like trauma, as trauma.
I’m not in a country under siege but my country of residence pays and is paid for war, the french state paid for Turkey’s weapons until its hand was pressed, the french state fights and fought for land, the french state pays and paid for weapons. As states do. Even if you don’t go by an anarchist understanding of violence which designates not only the direct use of force but also its “diplomatic” threat as well as inaction/the negation of help in the face of violence, you could agree that France is not a peaceful nation.
My hands are as bleeding as the hands of immigrants’ kids in the settler country can be (and even less, I know some who have fewer than I) and as bloody as the hands of settlers’ kids in the “safety” of Empire can be. And I don’t feel shame, because shame is useless, a fake emotion. I do feel wounded and responsible though, even if I didn’t have a choice.
This is not a consensual society after all.
Just like we won’t have a say in our governments’ decision to involve themselves in matters of war, people have been making decisions on our behalf for as long as someone(s) seized power over others, doesn’t mean it has to be the normative order, just that It Is, right now.
Decisions are made for us, through us, every day and every hour; these decisions take shape in the choices we’re given between two or three different products, between different candidates, between options that are always enclosed in a larger structure, a larger game. Our horizon is restricted to what is manageable, what is profiteable, what is measurable.
All the systems we live within are non-consensual but they do rely on some axial positions: people and groups at key-junctures, if they were to disappear, retreat or stop, these systems would be untenable but as always : as their power/salary depends on them not fledging/“understanding” the urgency of the situation, how could they yield ? They can’t and if they could they still wouldn’t.
But I might just be preaching to the choir if you’re reading this. What I’m trying to get at is that we’re not in peace time, perhaps we never have. Even away from the front we eat food produced on stolen land with tools owned by rulers who get fat on our flesh, Land stolen from itself as well as land stolen from its curator-societies (in the case of america and other indigineous lands), tools that’re becoming their own wielders, or maybe the workers are just being made invisible
, as always.
I am not muslim anymore yet I still feel kinship to the people, I still get shivers when I hear adhan and I still know my suwar, I just don’t believe nor do I practice.
As I donate and try to amplify voices materially
and keep close the ones I know and love right here next to me, I also want to let my muslim and non-muslim (alike) brothers, sisters and kins in Iran and the Global South know that my heart is with them.
War is not the business of nations, these are just flags being waved, the desire for belonging used up and exploited, phantasms.
War is the extension of diplomacy, not its failure. Because diplomacy is also the domain of power, an aptly disguised theater of cohersion and accumulation.
War is the business of investment and (sometimes primitive) accumulation, war is simply power playing with itself, raging onto itself. tearing at its own shape. War, like any crisis, is just a good business opportunity.
A game.
Now more than ever it is essential to cherish the loved ones we have close-by as well as the ones we’ve left to drift away.
I’m at the beginning of my second decade on this earth, and I know I won’t get to see most of the world’s wonders because they’ll be wiped out by systems and projects that started before me and which might outlast me and my family and my comrades in struggle. I have no way of knowing revolution will occur or increase under my time, I have no way of knowing things will get better and so far I’d be more enclined to believe the contrary.
I guess suicidal ideation prepared me for this, feeling things won’t get better and knowing there’s no way to know if they will get better but still going, because none of this is acceptable and all of it is temporary, because we don’t just deserve better, we need it.
After all, this was never about what we earned, this was always about what we needed : just the need for a decent life.
Where do we go from here ? Not forward but within and outward, because we need to understand what we're becoming as much as we need to reach towards the others, the abandonned and the meek, all of them lonely people and all of them strange people and all the "normal" people who don't let out that they're waiting to die.
We need to understand the within of what's happening;
So what's happening within ?
Complex trauma enabled or accentuated
by the social-media-retraumatisation engine : we’re all witnesses to the persistence of loss
and we get to live it from far away, except if one lives in Australia, California, Kashmir, Indonesia, Sudan, China, The Phillipines and many many many others. (and that’s only the ones affected by climate catastrophes)
Solastalgia creeps in, first world problems. But a first world that’s realising that the ranking is flawed and a lie, an obvious lie. Solastalgia slips into the comfortable life of firstworlders, letting them know that touristic vacation destination they've been to a few years earlier has been wiped out by a tsunami; solastalgia reminds them of the fact they'll never get to see that secret lake in that forgotten island they were sure no one’d heard of but is actually pretty well-known in instagrammer circles for being a tourist trap, it's wiped out too.
Within lies either an attempt at denying the horrors of the everyday or a catastrophisation
of current potentialities: murphy's law pathologised, "things will always go bad" becomes a deeply engrained belief, a law of the mind, that restricts both the horizon of possibilities and the potential for action, because if you can't do anything right why try at all?
Then, one starts to act again but with the knowledge that it's all futile, and after some time one even forgets about the horrors and the Doom, and maybe things will be alright after all? Any mention of ecological catastrophe either triggers a panic attack, a dissociative incident or just a retreat away from it, unreality is a safe haven : this isn't happening, i'm not here.
This is the within of a catastrophe from afar : the damage that happens inside the spectator of the horror. It's complex because it’s repeated, and it repeats because one can be a faraway witness of catastrophes without risking their own life, though the sense of safety one feels at being “away” is just one rug-pull away from shattering when one is reminded thatall of this is happening on the same planet.
A catastrophe that is lived directly, as an actor/victim and not as a spectator, will either close one’s Within to them (fight-or-flight-or-freeze) or will shatter it. It’s a trauma that is less likely to complexify itself because its victims have less chances of physically surviving these catastrophes and thus less chances of being repeatedly traumatised, them being under siege. Doesn't mean they don't or can't though, and it is obviously imperative that they get the help they need.
Then, what is to be done.
What is to be done?
Truthfully any strategy or plan I lay out here will be made with specifics and generalities drawn from both my and my comrades’ experience. It’s up to you to build your strategies, practices, movements, tools, because what has been done before is not a blueprint.
I can’t know your place and its history and necessities like you do, I can only point at some basic generalities such as : We don’t have money-power we have people-power but that power is simply not organised, it’s volatile and unfocused but once it comes together it can move mountains, with the right tools the strenght of a people is greater than any of its constituants ;
People have needs, these needs should be fulfilled not (just)because of a moral or religious incentive to do so but because fed people work better, live better lives, write better books, make better art and can help others be(come) better.
A world where mutual aid rather than hierarchical movement becomes the basis of the “social contract” would not just be more egalitarian and fulfilling, it would be more interesting; a fungus is more interesting and active than a pyramid, but that’s besides the point.
What is to be done ?
My sympathies lie towards anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial, anti-ableist notions of militancy, lots of against but what am i for ?
I argue that to effectively battle against the forces of, not just entropy but, capture of capital, territorialization, commodification, state-control, whatever you want to call them, it is imperative to build communal power at the level of localities, horizontal methods, and to build solid bridges between the different communities (or a federation if you prefer).
(decentralisation and non-hierarchical governance as features of organisation do pose the problem of time in decision-making, I will talk about anarchism and time in the future)
I don’t think small, autonomous, insurrectionalist groups have a long future in a pre or post-collapse society (i don’t think they do either), they’ll either be wiped by stronger private or state (para)military forces or will fall back into affinitaristic relations which generally end up splitting these kind of formations at the first sign of serious “misconducts” (ie: cases of abuse and assault) because it’s hard to stop working with your only friends and family when they’ve done something horrible but it’s harder to still work with them, knowing they could and probably will do it again: that’s the conundrum of these isolated, affinitaristic groups.
The most successful of these formations will be temporary, anonymous and probably disappear within days of effective actions, letting successors take the mantle. They probably won’t be as effective as they’d like.
Obviously I still see these as more successful than anyone shaking their fist at @donaldtrump on twitter.
There’s no way to will ourselves out of this situation, there’s no book to read that will make our problems disappear, theory is good, necessary even but it can’t replace action: just like diplomacy is part of the method of violence, theory should feed action and vice-versa : symbiosis.
What is needed is practices, enough knowledge. We know things are bad, what we need is the knowledge that things can go better and how to make them so. In doing we’ll learn about the outcomes :
Two of the longest running social movements in France are still going, the longest strike since 1995 and the longest serie of mass protests since public memory, both happening at the same time.
It’s both exhilarating to witness-live and frightening as fuck.
“Everything is horribly brutally possible”
Indeed.
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Join an org, join a union, practice self-defence, stop using facebook/twitter, find the others, don’t wait, don’t hope, don’t despair, desire something else.
PS: don’t talk to cops