The Russian state is trying to conquer Ukraine. The same Russian state that supported the suppression of the Belarusian freedom movement and only a few weeks ago used tanks to put down the revolt in Kazakhstan. Putin is trying to extend his autocratic rule, crushing any rebellious or resistance movement inside and out. But when now all Western democrats sing the defense of freedom and peace in one chorus, this is an orchestrated hypocrisy: the same democrats now invoke peace whose “peace operations” aka. wars of aggression, drones, bombs and occupations enforce colonial relations of power and exploitation, supply dictators and torturers with weapons and are directly or indirectly responsible for massacres of refugees and insurgents.

The holy peace in Europe, which in any case has not existed as advertised for 70 years and which has always meant war in the global South – through proxy wars, through arms supplies, through borders and colonialism. If the West is fully behind Ukraine, it is because it is an ally. Both sides of this war disgust us: instead of positioning ourselves on one side of this war, we oppose all state armies and their wars – we abhor not only their massacres, but also their blind obedience, nationalism, stench of barracks, discipline and hierarchies. So, if we oppose any form of militarism and state, it does not mean that we think it is wrong to take up arms. If Ukrainian anarchists now choose to defend themselves at gunpoint – themselves and their neighbors, not the Ukrainian state – then we stand in solidarity with them. But an anarchist position against war – even against an imperialist war of aggression – must not degenerate into defending a state and its democracy – or becoming a pawn of it. We do not choose the side of the lesser evil or that of the more democratic rulers – because these same democracies are also only interested in their own expansion of power and are also built on repression and imperialism.
Continue reading Against War and Military Mobilization – Preliminary Notes on the Invasion of Ukraine →

On Sunday 27.02.2022 about 60 people met for an anarchist rally in Arivati Park/Neuer Pferdemarkt Hamburg to take to the streets againstthe war in Ukraine and all militarism.

Banners (“Stop war!( in Russian) -Against the war in Ukraine! Against any war! Against any militarization!) were hung up and a speech was given. An anarchist anti-militarist poster was distributed and a solidarity photo was taken for the anarchist comrades in Ukraine.

Continue reading Hamburg: anarchist interventions against all wars, borders and states →

Italy – Don’t join, sabotage

“It is easy to hit uniformly flying birds.”

Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

One thing is sure.  Social peace is increasingly becoming a minefield of disasters. Two years of “war on the virus” did not pass unscathed. War metaphors are never neutral or by chance. In the face of the Enemy, it is necessary to close ranks, speak with one voice and isolate the deserters – as they cannot be shot. Confinements, drones over cities, forests and beaches, a NATO general as extraordinary Commissioner for the Emergency, curfews, green passes, bans on demonstrations in city centres, truncheon blows democratically distributed among logistics porters and any group of dissidents who try to approach an institutional building or a TAV tunnel: the sequence is neither accidental nor improvised. As the streets fill up with uniforms and cameras, bodies must be captured with no exception by the techno-industry and its miraculous products.

The language of power and its TV acrobats is becoming increasingly brutal – we need a Bava Beccaris, you’ll turn into green sludge, let’s organize separate carriages, only those who deserve it will get free treatment…- while the “antagonistic” language finds itself disarmed, forced to defensive premises (if anyone claims that Draghi expresses the interests of international financial capital, they will immediately add that this is not a conspiracy theory view…). Such a condition of submission – and of communication of war, as a technocrat in the mood for clarity put it – seems the ideal context for the international use of the military to bring a piece of Afghanistan inside Europe. Russian army exercises on the border with Ukraine, images of anti-atomic bunkers and voluntary enlistments in Kiev, NATO troops in Romania, Latvia, and the Black Sea. Who can rule out that from diplomatic manoeuvres and threats they will not move on to weapons? The boundary of the interests at stake is jagged. The very expression “Atlanticist and Europeanist camp” in no way defines a homogenous camp because NATO goals break up more or less explicit or unsayable political and economic balances in Europe (regarding the German and French States and not only). The Italian government itself servilely collaborates with NATO manoeuvres, by deploying fighter-bombers in Romania, tanks in Lithuania and aircraft carriers on the Black Sea, but the capitalists of ENEL, ENI, Banca Intesa and Unicredit continue to do business with their counterparts in Moscow. Nobody wants a USA-Russian clash, but States do not go where they want to go but where their power and the structural dynamics of domination and profit on which they are based take them. In the infinite variables, however, there is one constant factor. War – as a set of means that devour their alleged ends – always needs social peace. Therefore it won’t be with refined geopolitical analyses that we will stop the winds of war but by breaking up the home front, sabotaging national unity, making the danger of defeatism be felt. Continue reading Italy : Don’t join, sabotage →

In part of the Mapuche areas, namely the four provinces of Bío Bío, Arauco, Malleco and Cautín, the Chilean state declared a state of emergency on 12 October following the offensive of the struggle groups, which are multiplying land occupations and attacks on forestry interests. This has meant an increase in police roadblocks to prevent people from moving around and, above all, the occupation of the territory by armed forces who have come to reinforce the cops and carabinieri on the ground to protect the resource exploiters. Today, January 27, this state of emergency (called Estado de Excepción Constitucional) has just been renewed for the eighth consecutive time since October by the Parliament, setting its new expiry at February 24.

In an assessment of the first 100 days of this state of emergency at the beginning of January, President Piñera’s government boasted that nearly 56,700 checks on people and vehicles had been carried out in these two regions and 140 people had been imprisoned, resulting in a 44% drop in the number of “incidents of rural violence“. However, one cannot but notice that despite the heavy military occupation, the incendiary attacks, shootings and barricades against the cops have not at all stopped, officially going from 108 in the previous hundred days (July-September) to 89 since October. And even the arrival of the new left-wing leader, Gabriel Boric, who won the Chilean presidential election in December (he will take office on 11 March), has not changed the situation.

Continue reading Chile: the Mapuche struggle continues under a state of emergency →