I. “This instant that won’t be forgottenSo empty when thrown back by the shadowsSo empty when rejected by clocksThis wretched moment taken by my tendernessStripped naked, naked of the blood of the wingsRobbed of eyes to remember the angst of yesteryearOf lips to scoop up the juice of the violenceLost in the tolling of frozen belfries.”
Category: Mayhem
Nihilist Romantics, by Paul Murufas
Four Meditations on Wild Reaction [Reaccion Salvajes]Note: The photograph below, and the quotes preceding each section of this poem, are from the first communiqué of Wild Reaction (RS), issued from Cuernavaca, Mexico in August 2014 and translated by waronsociety.noblogs.org in September.I”After a little more than three years of criminal-terrorist activity, the group“Individualists Tending toward the Wild” (ITS) begins a new phase in this open war against the Technoindustrial System… from now on the attacks against technology andcivilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction” (RS).”my new hero is the vanishing point: somewhere and nowhere all at once an internet modem in the mouth of a vacuum, a smartphone dipped in gold. dipped in diamonds. encrusted with priceless gems and introduced at half time of the superbowl the camera-man in a grip’s union panning wide: the new commodities the glamorous intellectuals a motherboard and a mainframe, a smartwatch a smart wrist a smart organ grown on a scaffold
A Nation of Snitches
A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate “acts of terrorism” by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and Black Bloc anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records, our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits and our criminal records. They store this information in government computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when the state decides to criminalize us.Totalitarian states record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they “have done nothing wrong” do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.Tyranny is always welded together by subterranean networks of informants. These informants keep a populace in a state of fear. They perpetuate constant anxiety and enforce isolation through distrust. The state uses wholesale surveillance and spying to break down trust and deny us the privacy to think and speak freely.A state security and surveillance apparatus, at the same time, conditions all citizens to become informants. In airports and train, subway and bus stations the recruitment campaign is relentless. We are fed lurid government videos and other messages warning us to be vigilant and report anything suspicious. The videos, on endless loops broadcast through mounted television screens, have the prerequisite ominous music, the shady-looking criminal types, the alert citizen calling the authorities and in some cases the apprehended evildoer being led away in handcuffs. The message to be hypervigilant and help the state ferret out dangerous internal enemies is at the same time disseminated throughout government agencies, the mass media, the press and the entertainment industry. “If you see something say something,” goes the chorus.In any Amtrak station, waiting passengers are told to tell authorities—some of whom often can be found walking among us with dogs—about anyone who “looks like they are in an unauthorized area,” who is “loitering, staring or watching employees and customers,” who is “expressing an unusual level of interest in operations, equipment, and personnel,” who is “dressed inappropriately for the weather conditions, such as a bulky coat in summer,” who “is acting extremely nervous or anxious,” who is “restricting an individual’s freedom of movement” or who is “being coached on what to say to law enforcement or immigration officials.”What is especially disturbing about this constant call to become a citizen informant is that it directs our eyes away from what we should see—the death of our democracy, the growing presence and omnipotence of the police state, and the evisceration, in the name of our security, of our most basic civil liberties.Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes us, often unconsciously, conform in our outward and inward behavior. It conditions us to relate to those around us with suspicion. It destroys the possibility of organizing, community and dissent. We have built what Robert Gellately calls a “culture of denunciation.”Snitches in prisons, the quintessential totalitarian system, are the glue that allows prison authorities to maintain control and keep prisoners divided and weak. Snitches also populate the courts, where the police make secret deals to drop or mitigate charges against them in exchange for their selling out individuals targeted by the state. Our prisons are filled with people serving long sentences based on false statements that informants provided in exchange for leniency.
Read more: Chris Hedges: A Nation of Snitches – Chris Hedges – Truthdig
On the Question of Technological Slavery: A Reply to Campbell and Lipkin
David Skrbina replies to a 20-year-late criticism of the Unabomber, and explains why we should pay more attention to the technology problem.
Source: On the Question of Technological Slavery: A Reply to Campbell and Lipkin
The Crisis of Civilization – Full Length Documentary Movie HD
Published on Mar 14, 2012
A dark comedy remix mash-up bonanza about the end of industrial civilization.
Website http://crisisofcivilization.com Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/thecrisisfilm a film by Dean Puckett https://twitter.com/Deanpuckettfilm http://www.deaddeanfilms.co.uk
Listen to our response to some of the your comments here http://crisisofcivilization.com/podca…
Directed by Dean Puckett
Animations by Lucca Benney
Based on the Book by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed https://twitter.com/NafeezAhmed
Like the book on which it is based, the film consists of seven parts which explore the interconnected dynamic of global crises of Climate Catastrophe; Peak Energy; Peak Food; Economic Instability; International Terrorism; and the Militarization Tendency — with a final section on The Post-Peak World.
Featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, acrobats, super heroes, xylophones and much, much more!
END CIV Resist Or Die (Full)
Published on Mar 3, 2011
END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations.
Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”
Directors: Franklin Lopez
Language English
Studio: Mvd Visual
Release Date: 25 Jan 2011
Run Time: 75 minutes
Info: http://endciv.com
The Rising of the Barbarians: A Non-Primitivist Revolt Against Civilization
Anonymous
If we examine much of the current debate in anarchist circles surrounding civilization, technology, progress, green anarchy versus red anarchy and so on, we are left with the impression that criticism of civilization has only recently arisen within anarchist and revolutionary thinking. But this impression is false, and harmful for those of us with a revolutionary anti-civilization perspective.
In fact, a revolutionary questioning of civilization, of technology and of progress can be found throughout the history of modern revolutionary thinking. Charles Fourier posed his utopian socialist “Harmony” against the disharmony of “Civilization”. A number of the most radical of the Romantics (Blake, Byron and Shelly among others) were distinctly distrustful of industrialism and its utilitarian reason.
But we can bring things closer to home by looking at anarchists of the 19th century. Certainly Bakunin had no problem with industrial technology. Though he didn’t share Marx’s almost mystical faith in the capacity of industrial development to create the technical basis for global communism, he also did not see anything inherently dominating in the structure of industrial systems. In fact, his concept of workers taking over the organization of society through their own economic and industrial organizations was to eventually become the basis of anarcho-syndicalism. (This development, however, is based on a misunderstanding, since Bakunin quite clearly stated that this organization was not something that could be developed on an ideological basis outside of the direct struggle of the workers, but rather that it was something that the workers would develop for themselves in the course of their struggles. He therefore did not suggest any specific form for it.) Nonetheless, Bakunin’s appeals to the “unleashing of the wicked passions” of the oppressed and exploited were seen by many of the more reasonable revolutionaries of the time as a barbaric call for the destruction of civilization. And Bakunin himself did call for “the annihilation of bourgeois civilization” along with “the destruction of all States” and the “free and spontaneous organization from below upward, by means of free associations”. But Bakunin’s French contemporary, Ernest Coeurderoy, was less conditional in his rejection of civilization. He says simply: “In civilization, I vegetate; I am neither happy, nor free; why then should I desire this homicidal order to be conserved? There is no longer anything to conserve of that which the earth suffers.” And he, along with Dejacque and other anarchist revolutionaries of that time, appeals to the barbaric spirit of destruction to bring an end to the civilization of domination.
Of course, the majority of anarchists at that time, as in our own, did not question civilization, technology or progress. Kropotkin’s vision of communized “Factories, Fields and Workshops” or Josiah Warren’s “True Civilization” inevitably have more appeal to those who are not prepared to face the unknown than the anarchist critiques of industrialism and civilization that often offer no clear vision of what will be after the revolutionary destruction of the civilization that they hate.
The early 20th century, and particularly the great massacre known as World War 1, brought a major overturning of values. Faith in the bourgeois ideal of progress was thoroughly eroded and the questioning of civilization itself was a significant aspect of a number of radical movements including dadaism, Russian anarcho-futurism and early surrealism. If most of the better known anarchists (such as Malatesta, Emma Goldman, Mahkno and so on) continued to see the possibility of a liberated industrial civilization, other lesser known anarchists saw a different vision. Thus, around 1919, Bruno Filippi wrote:
I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, civilization is coming.”
Of course: our dear civilization of which we are so proud. We have abandoned the free and happy life of the forest for this horrendous moral and material slavery. And we are maniacs, neurasthenics, suicides.
Why should I care that civilization has given humanity wings to fly so that it can bomb cities, why should I care if I know every star in the sky or every river on earth?
[…]
Today, the starry vault is a leaden veil that we vainly endeavor to pass through; today it is no longer unknown, it is distrusted.
[…]
I don’t give a damn for their progress; I want to live and enjoy.
Now, I want to be clear. I am not bringing all of this up in order to prove that the present-day anti-civilization current has a legitimate anarchist heritage. If its critique of the reality we face is accurate, why should we care whether it fits into some framework of anarchist orthodoxy? But Bakunin and Coeurderoy, Malatesta and Filippi, all of the anarchists of the past who lived in struggle against domination, as they understood it were not trying to create any ideological orthodoxy. They were participating in the process of creating a revolutionary anarchist theory and practice that would be an ongoing process. This process has included critiques of civilization, critiques of progress and critiques of technology (and often in the past these critiques were not connected, so that, for example, Bakunin could call for “the annihilation of bourgeois civilization” and still embrace its technological outgrowth, industrialism, and Marcus Graham could call for the destruction of “the machine” in favor of an unmechanized civilization). We are living in different times. The words of Bakunin or Coeurderoy, of Malatesta or Renzo Novatore, or of any of the anarchist writers of the past cannot be taken as a program or a doctrine to be followed. Rather they form an arsenal to be looted. And among the weapons in that arsenal are barbaric battering rams that can be used against the walls of civilization, of the myth of progress, of the long-since disproven myth that technology can save us from our woes.
We are living in a world in which technology has certainly gone out of control. As catastrophe follows catastrophe, so-called “human” landscapes become increasingly controlled and mechanized, and human beings increasingly conformed to their roles as cogs in the social machine. Historically the thread that has gone through all that is best in the anarchist movement has not been a faith in civilization or technology or progress, but rather the desire for every individual to be free to create her or his life as he or she sees fit in free association others, in other words, the desire for the individual and collective reappropriation of life. And this desire is still what motivates anarchist struggle. At this point it is clear to me that the technological system is an integral part of the network of domination. It has been developed to serve the interests of the rulers of this world. One of the primary purposes of large-scale technological systems is the maintenance and expansion of social control, and this requires a technological system that is largely self-maintaining, needing only minimal human intervention. Thus, a juggernaut is created. The recognition that progress had no inherent connection to human liberation was already recognized by many revolutionaries by the end of World War 1. Certainly the history of the 20th century should have reinforced this understanding. We look out now on a physically, socially and psychically devastated world, the result of all that has been called progress. The exploited and dispossessed of this world can no longer seriously desire to get a piece of this putrefying pie, nor to take it over and “self-manage” it. The reappropriation of life must have a different meaning in the present world. In light of the social transformations of the past few decades, it seems to me that any serious revolutionary anarchist movement would have to call industrialism and civilization itself into question precisely because anything less may not provide us with the necessary tools for taking back our lives as our own.
But my anti-civilization perspective is not a primitivist perspective. While it may indeed be inspiring to look at the apparently anarchic and communistic aspects of some “primitive” cultures, I do not base my critique on a comparison between these cultures and the current reality, but rather on the way in which all of the various institutions that comprise civilization act together to take my life from me and turn it into a tool for social reproduction, and how they transform social life into a productive process serving only to maintain the rulers and their social order. Thus, it is essentially a revolutionary perspective, and this is why I will always make use of anything in that arsenal which is the history of revolutionary theory and practice that can enhance my struggle. “Primitive” people have often lived in anarchic and communistic ways, but they do not have a history of revolutionary struggle from which we can loot weapons for our current struggle. Having said this, however, I do recognize those anarcho-primitivists who continue to recognize the necessity of revolution and class struggle as my comrades and potential accomplices.
Revolutionary struggle against the civilization of control and profit that surrounds us will not be the reasonable attempt to take over means of production. The dispossessed of this world seem to understand that this is no longer an option for liberation (if it ever was). If most are not clear about precisely who or what is the enemy, most do understand that they have nothing to say to those in power, because they no longer share a common language. We who have been dispossessed by this world now know that we can expect nothing from it. If we dream of another world, we cannot express that dream, because this world does not provide the words for it. And most likely many no longer dream. They just feel rage at the continuing degradation of their existence. So this revolution will, indeed, be the release of the “wicked passions” of which Bakunin spoke, the destructive passions that are the only door to a free existence. It will be the coming of the barbarians predicted by Dejacque and Coeurderoy. But it is precisely when people know that they no longer have anything to say to their rulers, that they may learn how to talk with each other. It is precisely when people know that the possibilities of this world can offer them nothing that they may learn how to dream the impossible. This network of institutions that dominate our life, this civilization, has turned our world into a toxic prison. There is so much to be destroyed so that a free existence may be created. The time of the barbarians is at hand.
[…] May the barbarians break loose. May they sharpen their swords, may they brandish their battleaxes, may they strike their enemies without pity. May hatred take the place of tolerance, may fury take the place of resignation, may outrage take the place of respect. May the barbarian hordes go to the assault, autonomously, in the way that they determine. And may no parliament, no credit institution, no supermarket, no barracks, no factory ever grow again after their passage. In the face of the concrete that rises to strike the sky and the pollution that fouls it, one can well say with Dejacque that “It is not the darkness that the Barbarians will bring to the world this time, it is the light.” — Crisso/Odoteo
Retrieved on September 20, 2009 from www.insurgentdesire.org.uk
From Willful Disobedience Vol. 4, No. 1
MEETING AT THE DEAD END – NIHILISM, GREEN ANARCHY AND THE DESIRE FOR IMMEDIATE REVOLT
We are not autonomous, we are everywhere and everyone. We are looking to set an invisible trend that is already here, that abandons the shackles of subculture, identity and ideology, and finds comfort in the revolutionary discomfort we all feel. The suicidal are in control, destroying the land that feeds us, mediating our relationships with each other and all life on this planet, and establishing a global reality that efficiently forces all life to survival as opposed to living. There is unity in our cynicism, skepticism, and common contempt. There is unity in our neglected passions, malnourishment, and feared temptations. While there is also a division set in their very existence, there is a unity in these feelings. There are those who share these feelings, and those who look to silence them, deceive them, or murder and imprison those feeling them. ‘Fire to the Prisons’
Collected Writings of Ted Kaczynski – ‘Technological Slavery’ (USA)
Collection of writings by Ted Kaczynski. Full HTML transcripts can be found at Wildism.org.
Pages 432
Language English
Pages 432
Language English
You Can’t Blow up a Social Relationship… But you can have fun trying!
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
By Bob Black, 1992, AJODA #33
In 1979, four Australian anarchist and “libertarian socialist” organizations published a tract called You Can’t Blow Up a Social Relationship, presumptuously subtitled “The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism” — as if theirs was the only case against it and there was no case for it. The pamphlet has been reprinted and distributed by North American anarchist groups, usually workerists, and by default appears to enjoy some currency as a credible critique of terrorism canonical for anarchists.
In fact, the pamphlet is rubbish: incoherent, inaccurate, even statist. It makes sense only as an attempt to spruce up anarchism‘s public image. It clutters the question of violence and should be swept, if there is any room left there, into the trashcan of history from a perspective which is not pro-terrorist but on this occasion anti-anti-terrorist.
What makes the diatribe so wonderful is the way it refutes itself as it goes along. Opening with reference to obscure actions by Croatian fascists in Australia, the authors explain that the state uses right wing terrorism to justify the repression of the left. indeed, democracies “will even incite or conspire in terrorism to justify their own actions.” They cite “the famous American Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s” as “an archetypal case of the preparedness of the police to frame dissenters on charges of political violence.” Apparently the case is not famous enough for the authors to notice the duo was not framed for “political violence” but rather — as they proceeded to tell us! — for “robbery and murder.” The Haymarket case would have made a better example but is perhaps not famous enough. The lesson, if any, to be drawn is that one way or another, the anarchists are going to be screwed. Sacco and Vanzetti, like the Haymarket anarchists (except Lingg) did not “take up the gun,” they “engage[d] in the long, hard work of publicizing and understanding of this society” as the Australians propose. Why not throw a bomb or two? (As Lingg was preparing to do when he was arrested… showing that something like Haymarket was inevitable.)
Here is how anarchists sound when they speak the language of the state:
“Around the world the word ‘terrorism’ is used indiscriminately by politicians and police with the intention of arousing hostility to any phenomenon of resistance or preparedness for armed defense against their own terroristic acts. Terrorism is distinguished by the systematic use of, violence against people for political ends.”
A usage which is indiscriminate when police- and politicians resort to it is presumably discriminate when, one sentence later, anarchists do it. By this definition, violent revolution is terrorism; even if it involves the majority of the population. Indeed collective self — defense, which the authors elsewhere imply they approve of, is the systematic use of violence for political (among other) ends. By way of added inanity, the definition leaves out the unsystematic assaults by individuals acting alone — Czolgosz‘s assassination of McKinley, Berkman’s wounding of Frick — which everybody has always agreed are fairly called terrorism. These Australians are not speaking proper English and it’s not a difference in dialect either.
Having adopted a pejorative nonsense definition of their subject, the authors proceed to silly it further. “Just as the rulers” — and, as we see, certain anarchists — “prefer the word ‘terrorist’, terrorists prefer the description ‘urban guerrilla‘ as it lends them a spurious romantic air.” The authors explain that urban guerrillas are terrorists (just like “the rulers” say), but rural guerrillas are not: ’Especially in rural warfare these people can use non-terroristic armed action. This usually involves armed clashes with the police or army.” So an armed attack on police stations in a village is guerrilla warfare, but an armed attack on a police station in a city is terrorism? Do these anarchists think the police care how populous the locality is that they are killed in? Do they think the general population cares? Who’s beingromantic here? These guys are romanticizing peasants because they have never met one and maligning urban intellectuals like themselves because they know their own kind.
What, according to these tacticians, rural guerrillas can do is not all of what the successful ones actually do. The Vietcong were based in the countryside but carried out assassinations, bombings, and expropriations in the cities too. Guerrilla warfare is by definition opportunistic and elastic, wherever it happens. The fact that rural guerrillas can (and do) “use non-terroristic armed action” does not mean they don‘t also use terroristic armed action, such as the village massacres of the Khmer Rouge or Sendero Luminoso.
Lexicography aside, what‘s really put ants in these anarchists pants? The pamphlet has nothing, really, to do with terrorism as such. Instead it‘s a critique of urban armed struggle by mostly nationalist and/or Marxist-Leninist outfits in the ’60s and ‘70s: the IRA, PLO, RAF, SLA, etc. Understandably these leftists (as they repeatedly identify themselves) do not want to be confused with these terrorists, but surely their discrepant ends mark the distinction much more clearly than their often identical means? Most Marxist groups, they admit, denounce terrorism in favor of party-building and propaganda, pretty much what the Australians call for. The Red Brigades had no harsher enemy than the Italian Communist Party. Then again, maybe the Australians exaggerate their differences in method (all but ignoring the long history of anarchist terrorism) because they do not differ so much programmatically from the Marxists. They keep making puzzling remarks such as “a democracy can only be produced if a majority movement is built.” Typically, this generalization is false — that was not how democracy came to Japan and West Germany — but regardless, why are anarchists concerned to foster the condition in which democracy, a form of government, is produced? Or did the “libertarian socialists” slip that in?
“Terrorism does not conflict with such ideas” as authoritarianism and vanguardism, they say. Well, there are a lot of ideas terrorism doesn’t conflict with, considering that terrorism is an activity, not an idea. Terrorism does not conflict with vegetarianism either: Hitler was a vegetarian and so were the anarchist bank robbers of the Bonnot Gang. So what? In other words, even if the authors make an anarchist case against terrorism (they don’t), they haven’t made a case againstanarchist terrorism, which means they can‘t excommunicate the anarchist terrorist and usurp the label for their own exclusive use. Which seems to be what this all comes down to.
The authors’ treatment of anarchist terrorism is shallow, deceptive, and incomplete. If their definition of terrorism as systematic political violence was meant to dispose of many embarrassing assassinations, bombings, and bank robberies by verbal sleight of hand, they are smarter than they seem, but they’re really just changing the subject (political violence) to an artificiality of no practical interest. They are talking to themselves with no claim to anyone else‘s attention. More likely they aren’t articulate enough to say what they mean.
To state the obvious, anarchists have practiced terrorism in the “Australian” sense collective politically motivated violence directed at persons — for over a century. The bungled anarchist insurrections in Italian towns in the 1870s involved gunfire with the carabinieri. Soon these local revolts became recurrent features of peasant anarchism in rural Spain. By the 1890s the anarchists were killing heads of state all over the Western world and if they were not delegated to do so by authoritative anarchist organizations, does that not sever the link between ‘terrorism’ and ‘vanguardism’?
The authors allude to Stalin’s bank robberies but not to those of the Bonnet Gang or Durruti. More recently, the noted Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonanno has pled guilty to bank robbery. They ignore Berkman’s attentat against Frick, Dora Kaplan’s attempt to assassinate Lenin and Stuart Christie‘s aborted attempt to assassinate Franco. Some of these, certainly the last one, involved conspiracies and thus should be ‘collective’. To equate anarchists with bomb throwers is grossly unfair. To ignore anarchists who were bomb-throwers, often at the cost of their lives, is dishonest and despicable.
What about the Spanish Revolution? The anarchist armed groups, it is said, “drew much of their specific justifications” — what they are, we are never informed —“from the Spanish revolution and war and the urban warfare that continued there even past the end of the Second World War.” Yes, exactly, the urban guerrillas- the terrorists — had some “specific justifications,” valid or not. Which is just to say nobody takes up the gun without reasons, a conclusion as banal as it is evasive.“For our argument the civil war in Spain is exemplary because the slogans ‘win the war first’ was used against politics, to halt the revolution and then to force it back under Stalinist dominated but willing republican governments.” This is asinine coming and going. It equates falsely what the Aussies call ‘politics’ with what the Spaniards made, ‘revolution’. For the wimps Down Under, politics means alternative institution building (presumably the usual leftist stuff, constituency lobbying, food coops, etc.) plus propaganda. For all the Spanish revolutionaries it meant far more, and it certainly included taking up the gun. The revolution no less than the war was done with the gun. When Durruti and his column occupied the town of Fraga and executed 38 police, priests, lawyers, landlords etc. that was politics, that was revolution, and that was political violence. That was, to hear some people talk, terrorism. That was anarchist revolution also. If that upheaval is exemplary what is it an example of pray tell?
It is true that anarchist violence has often backfired and never won any lasting victory. But this is but to say that anarchism is a failure to date. Anarchist propaganda is a failure. Anarchist organizing is a failure (vide the IWW). Anarchist schooling is a failure. If anything, anarchists have accomplished more by violence than in any other way, in the Ukraine and in Spain, for instance. The fact is anarchists have not accomplished anything by any means to compare with their leftist and fascist and liberal rivals. Their propaganda, for instance, has not come close to the efficiency of propaganda by Nazis, televangelicals, and Fabian Socialists. Their institution-building (touted by the Australian consortium) amounts to nothing but anarchists bagging granola in food coops or supplying warm bodies for demonstrations claimed by Stalinists or Green yuppies or whomever. Anything they can do, others do better. Could it be that anarchism itself scares most people away, stirs up their fear of freedom such that they seize upon media spoon-fed slanders like ‘terrorism’ as excuses for looking the other way?
My purpose has been limited and negative, merely cutting some weeds, not planting anything. If anarchists have an image problem — and it they care — it attaches to their anarchism, not to their occasional terrorism. The Australian anarchists seem to have been most concerned not with an anarchist approach to so-called terrorism but with assuring their government they are harmless. To their everlasting shame, I’m quite sure they are. An anarchism that wants to be anything but harmless to the state and to class society must deal with terrorism and much more in another, more radical way.