Showing posts with label Tactics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tactics. Show all posts
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Tactical Briefing For A Week of Living Without Dead Time - An Anarchist's Guide To 'Flyposting'
"It's time to highlight the perversity of a system that has brought us to the zero point of systemic collapse."
Courtesy of Adbusters, the journal of the mental environment, who are calling for "Carnivalesque Rebellion" from November 22 until the 28th... "A sudden unexpected moment of truth, a mass reversal of perspective, a global mindshift – from which the corporate/consumerist forces never fully recover."NOV 22–28, 2010
Day 1: The Awakening
Day 2: The Divestment
Day 3+4: The Meme War
Day 5+6: The Plunge
Day 7: We Rest
We have nothing to lose and a whole new world to gain!
For instance...
In 2008, an activist calmly climbed a three meter barbed wire fence and entered a high-security power plant in the UK. S/he sabotaged a turbine which disabled the power plant for four hours. The Guardian estimates that this single act reduced the UK's total climate change emissions by 2% for the day. The activist, who has never been identified, left a protest message before escaping.Your imagination is the limit.
There are dozens of actions that a solitary activist can do during the Carnivalesque Rebellion: passing out flyers, wheatpasting, billboard jamming, paint bombing, hacktivism, spoofing electronic road signs...
Between November 22-28 the whole world will light up with seven days of Carnivalesque Rebellion!
Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred ... think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, cut up their credit cards in big box stores and pull off theatrical stunts that provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will drop stink bombs in strategic locations and engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.
In all, millions of people around the world will walk out of their schools, offices and factories for a week and live!
To pull this off, we need to learn from the failures of the recent G8/G20 protests.
A few sensational and spectacular acts of violence (police cars on fire, window smashing) will not provoke the kind of global mindshift that our world so desperately needs. And neither will sitting at home yelling at our screens.
If our Seven Days of Carnivalesque Rebellion are to succeed we’ll need a plethora of actions that cannot be dismissed as petty acts of vandalism, that genuinely challenge the power of megacorporations, that make people think about the climate tipping points now descending upon us and that highlight the perversity of a system that has brought us to the zero point of systemic collapse. [Read the first in a series of tactical briefings]
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Lookit ALL Those "Injuns"! - The Comanche and the Taliban... What The Indian Wars Tell Us About The Taliban, Stephen M. Walt
"...it is a sobering fact to realize that despite its clear interest in victory and its clear advantages in numbers, wealth, and technology, it took the United States nearly four decades to finally defeat the Comanche. If you are seeking a similarly decisive victory in Central Asia, therefore, you'd better be prepared to stay there in strength for a long, long time."(Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University and co-wrote The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy (2007) with John J. Mearsheimer)
(The Comanche courtesy of Wikipedia)
The Comanche and the TalibanBy Stephen M. Walt
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
One of the most enjoyable books I've read in the past year was S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches. It's a terrific, gripping story, and I learned a great deal about aspects of U.S. history of which I was only partly aware.
In brief, the book tells the story of the U.S. effort to subdue the Comanche, the most powerful Native American tribe on the Great Plains. It was a bloody and fascinating struggle, in part because the Comanche proved so hard for the far more numerous and technologically superior Anglos to defeat. If you grew up with a John Ford/John Wayne/Randolph Scott view of the Old West, this book will be something of a revelation. And the saga of Quanah Parker himself, a Comanche war chief whose mother was a white woman kidnapped in 1836 at the age of nine, and "rescued" many years later (when her son Quanah was twelve years old), is itself a heart-rending tale of cultural conflict and personal tragedy.
As much as I enjoyed the book, I couldn't help but read it with the current war in Afghanistan in mind. In both cases, a numerically superior, wealthier, and more technologically advanced United States confronts a tribal adversary fighting on its home ground. And in both cases, the U.S. government faces an adversary that is cunning, ruthless, and by our standards even backward or barbaric.But as my late colleague Ernest May used to warn, when you make a historical analogy, it is a good idea to make a list of the ways the two situations differ, instead of just invoking the similarities.
So lest you think that the ultimate victory of the U.S. government over the Comanche heralds a similar victory over the Taliban, consider the following differences between the two situations...
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