Received 24/04/2018
No more shelter
Nothing seems to be able any more to halt the path of war. When the popular revolt in Syria shifted towards a prolonged civil war, the massacres, devastations and exodus exceedingly surpassed what we are simple able to conceive. The listings of those killed renounced since a long time to make the daily adding. Hundred, two hundreds, four hundreds, seven hundred thousand dead… Three, four, six millions refugees… Thousand, fifteen thousand, thirty thousand air strikes… The slaughter is happening on scales beyond the reach of our minds. Nevertheless, they are very real.
The revolt in Syria has become a wasp nest of international interests (USA, Russia, Iran, Israel, Turkey, France, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia…) where allegiances and agreements fluctuate during the course towards the final abyss. Everything seems to point towards an unavoidable further extension of the war, when another corner will be turned, shifting from indirect clashes between the powers involved in the Syrian war towards open confrontations, with unforeseeable consequences, but which will come at the prize of hundreds of thousands of dead. Thus shall be shaped the new world in which we will soon wake up, a world different from the one of the Cold War, different from the dominion of a global watchdog with democratic accents guaranteeing the peace of the markets with military operations in singular regions. The invasion of Afrin by the Turkish Army is maybe but a prelude of the coming extension of the war on an even more vast scale.
We are faraway now from the uprisings which shook up whole countries right at the moment when the global capitalist restructuring affirmed itself ever more clearly. Those uprisings, their cries of revolt and freedom, have often been suffocated in blood, opening up the path towards an acceleration of militarisation, a multiplication of military intervention, with also many consequences inside of the war waging countries. If the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in Europe have brought a bit of these “faraway wars” and of the capitalist devastation to the step stones of Western democracies, if the sporadic Jihad attacks rang the sound of indiscriminate attacks – à la guerre comme à la guerre, war is war – in the streets of European cities, the spiral in which the world is getting caught up will bring us straight down on the path of proper external and internal war, leaving no one sheltered any more. The war which is brewing day after day will shape the world of tomorrow. And the anarchists in all this? Will they still be around, crossing the ordeal by fire in this world of tomorrow? Nothing seems less sure, as we are already, let’s speak plainly, terribly late, terribly behind. We are still looking towards yet another social movement against some new law as if it inaugurates a new wave of subversion, we fight against this or that project of dominion but without including these valuable fights in a more vast, more international framework, we still gape a bit when even our publications or our spaces get in the firing line of the very democratic anti-terrorist justice. We play in the margins they granted us, rather than on the fields we shaped and conquered ourselves by force and conviction. It’s not the matter to stress the urgency of things, but rather to have a lucid and critical view on where we really are. The world is going up in flames, the massacres are sowing the hatreds of tomorrow, the fairy tales of a world made of participatory and inclusive technologies reveal themselves every day more for what they truly are: control and more control. And we in all this? Nothing, or very little. If there’s always time to shut the door, as someone said, let’s at least try. Try, starting from our anarchist ideas, rejecting the war of the powerful, rejecting the peace of the markets, raising our eyes towards the sole emancipation that isn’t announcing new oppression: social revolution which razes to the ground the vestiges of authority, the mentalities of obedience and submission. Would aiming for social revolution not be absurd in these times where all revolutionary perspective seems so distant? Maybe, but these are not any more times for minced words, and neither for possibilist or nihilist proposals who reflect but all too much the world of today: realism or nothing. For anarchists, who want everything, immediately and much more, a proposal is needed, clear, lucid and courageous proposals. The ideas are there, matured throughout the centuries, often severely put to the test, sometimes deepened and often neglected, but they are there. Destruction of all authority, ware against all power and all slavery, freedom for all. Our weapons are also there: sabotage, decentralised direct action, attack without mediation, creative imagination rather then programmes. Our methods also exist: individual action, affinity groups, punctual coordination, asymmetric “guerrilla fights” rather than militaristic war, informal self-organisations and revolutionary solidarity. Starting from there, yes, even in times where the world is on the path towards the abyss, we have something to say, something to do, something to propose.
The skies might darken, death might roam, but we do not want in any case to renounce our anarchist proposals, here as elsewhere. Let’s love them, let’s defend them, let’s fight for them. It is not sure there will be a second chance.
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