As usual, TAL makes the dry subject matter absolutely fascinating and entertaining, interviewing victims and perpetrators at every level of the travesty, and as they say:

We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money.

Listen to the show here, for free, by clicking on the ‘Full Episode’ link. For those looking for more details, another radio favorite of ours, Fresh Air, has some more perspectives here, and here. And of course, Wikipedia comes through with 12,000 words on the subject.

False Hope vs. Real Change PDF [3.2 MB]

CrimethInc. Far East will be including copies of this paper in orders. To obtain copies in bulk for distribution, email falsehopeorrealchange08@riseup.net.

From the release announcement:

False Hope vs. Real Change: An Anti-Partisan (Beyond) Voting Guide to the 2008 Elections argues passionately for direct action in the face of war, environmental destruction, militarized borders, and the alienation of American life—while exposing how politicians profit from these crises even as they claim to offer solutions to them. Beyond merely telling people not to vote, this colorful, engaging eight-page newspaper offers concrete examples of how to participate directly in resisting oppression and creating alternatives to voting. By responding directly to many of the reasons why people who are disillusioned or cynical about politics continue to vote, the articles explore how our most empowering options for participation exist outside of the ballot boxes. The writers examine the possibilities of direct action, collectives, mutual aid, and anarchy, analyzing their potential as tools to move beyond the constraints of voting, party politics, capitalism, and government. Highly recommended as a tool for explaining anarchist critiques of elections and voting, and for building momentum towards the 2008 Republican and Democratic National Convention protests.

For internet casualties who don’t have the attention span to read an actual text, here are the basic points:

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-We believe that mass mobilizations still have potential if we choose carefully when to focus on them. Successful DNC and/or RNC protests this summer could energize local direct action organizing throughout the US.

-In an era when most had deemed them obsolete, the so-called “anti-globalization movement” reinvented street demonstrations and used them to great effect. After 9/11, liberal and authoritarian groups hijacked that model and ran it into the ground with willfully ineffectual spectacles. Now that the antiwar movement has exhausted itself, there is once again a vacuum in the streets. If anarchists fill it with effective organizing, this could enable us to regain the initiative.

-Following the collapse of the antiwar movement, liberal hopes are pinned entirely on electoral politics, at a time when the discredited electoral system is attempting to rehabilitate its image—in part by co-opting grass-roots dissent. In this context, it is strategic for anarchists to focus on contesting the electoral spectacle itself, thus differentiating ourselves from the rest of the political spectrum and demonstrating an alternative for other disillusioned and disenfranchised demographics.

-Though it would be ideal for anarchists to emphasize both equally, we fear the RNC protests will be significantly better organized than the DNC, and offer a better bet for a successful mobilization.

-Though it is hardly original, the blockading strategy proposed for the RNC protests is currently the most promising option on the table, and we urge anarchists to plug into it. That means getting organized now, not simply showing up in St. Paul without a plan or affinity group.

-Based on recent precedents and the current national context, it seems that the authorities desire to avoid the brutal violence employed at the FTAA protests in Miami in 2003. Using such force against demonstrators at the RNC would frame the US government as repressive during an election that is intended to clean up its image. It would also embarrass the liberal local government of St. Paul, and spotlight anarchist resistance at a time when the powers that be hope to sweep all opposition into the Obama camp.

-In this context, the demonstrations in St. Paul need not shut down the RNC to succeed—they need only provoke a dramatic confrontation that foregrounds the anarchist critique. If we get tear-gassed in St. Paul, we’ve won. It remains to be seen whether US anarchists are currently equipped to accomplish this; but the answer to that question is partly up to you, dear reader.

For the reasoning behind these theses, read the full report.

Despite maintaining an extensive network of security cameras and a police force that is among the biggest standing armies fielded by any nation, the NYPD faces serious challenges in identifying the alleged bomber. At first, the press reported that a communiqué (“We Did It”) and “rambling political manifesto” had been sent to Capitol Hill claiming credit for the bombing. This proved to be a false lead; in fact, it was simply an unluckily-timed letter from a California liberal. Officials are now pointing to alleged anarchist involvement.

Let’s accept, for the time being, the hypothesis that this was an anarchist. You know how the old joke goes: how many anarchists does it take to break an army recruiter’s window in Times Square? One to blow it up, and 10,000 to put stickers on their bikes about how blowing stuff up is cool.

But seriously, folks, we’re distressed to report that such stickers are already in circulation, discrediting our movement and corrupting the next generation. Don’t believe it? We’ve tracked down copies of the offending sticker, which you can download here. If you still aren’t convinced, print the design out, photocopy it onto sticker paper (easily available from your nearest office supply store), and stick one up yourself—on a private surface you own, naturally—to simulate the sort of unconscionable vandalism that is taking place around the country right now. Isn’t that infuriating and outrageous?

Meanwhile, as New York politicians nobly decry the cowardice and irresponsibility of the bicycle bomber, the number of documented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq since the 2003 invasion is about to reach 90,000.

Anyway, be it hatchet job or principled journalism, here it is; the section about the convergence appears on page 62.

Critics say at least 68 deaths in Gaza in February and 62 in January are a disproportionate response to 3 Israeli deaths in a year.

Even if you don’t take into account the enforced disparities in living conditions, access to resources, and self-determination—when you compare the raw numbers, 130 Palestinians killed over two months to 3 Israelis killed over twelve, it’s hard to continue seeing this simply as a case of Israel defending itself.

Sadly, there are still some radicals who insist on that interpretation of events, against every indication. We’ve added a new text to the reading library, “Antinationalist Nationalism: The Anti-German Critique and Its All-Too-German Adherents,” addressing the way this perspective has developed in Germany. This article originally appeared in the third issue of Rolling Thunder and unfortunately remains relevant today.

The past three years have seen an unprecedented mobilization by the FBI against environmental activists, collectively known as the Green Scare, just as the severity of the ecological crisis brought about by industrial capitalism finally enters public consciousness. Who are the FBI targeting with this campaign? To what end, and with what results? What lessons can anarchists, environmentalists, and other freedom fighters derive from this phase of repression and resistance as it draws to a close?

An expanded version of this text appears in the new Rolling Thunder. We also direct readers to Briana Waters’ trial, at which a new chapter of the Green Scare is unfolding right now. Briana deserves all the support our community can muster.

The article itself is supportive, having presumably been written by one of Brad’s countless friends, and even mentions Rolling Thunder. Thanks to such shining examples of journalistic integrity as Rolling Stone, it’s possible for revolutionaries outside the United States to get coverage—albeit only a few lines a year and a half late—in the US media. All they have to do is hope some sexy, well-connected US journalist gets killed beside the countless anonymous locals whose lives are ended by US-backed repression.

Let’s keep Brad’s memory alive by supporting all those who still struggle for freedom, in Oaxaca and around the world.

To keep up with current events in Oaxaca, try narconews.com.

Download Text PDF [140k]

Rolling Stone: Issue 1044 Jan. 24, 2008
Anarchist Superstar: The Revolutionary Who Filmed His Own Murder (front cover)

HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH by Jeff Sharlet

The Martyrdom of Brad Will

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.

He was one of America’s fifty “leading anarchists,” according to Nightline, which in 2004 flashed Brad’s mug shot as a warning against the black-clad nihilists said to be descending on New York for the Republican National Convention. “Leading anarchist”—that was the kind of clueless oxymoron that made Brad laugh. Brad wasn’t a “leader,” a word he disdained; he was a catalyst: the long-limbed climber who trained city punks on city trees for forest defense in the big woods west of the Rockies, the smart guy you wanted in the front row when you gave your public report on the anarchist scene in Greece or Seoul or Cincinnati, even though he was also the dude who would giggle when he fumigated the room with monstrous garlic farts. In the 1990s, he’d helped hand New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a public defeat, organizing anarchist punks into a media-savvy civil-disobedience corps that shamed the mayor into calling off plans to sell the city’s community gardens. In the new decade, he became a star of Indymedia’s anti-star system, an interconnected anti-corporate press that lets activists communicate—directly instead of waiting to see their causes distorted on Nightline.

Brad seemed to be everywhere: One friend remembers him in Ecuador, plucking his bike from a burning barricade; another remembers him in Quebec City, riding a bike into a cloud of tear gas, his bony frame shaking with happy rebel laughter later while a comrade poured water into his burning eyes.

Now, Brad has become most famous for the final minutes of his last day alive, October 27th, 2006, in the capital of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He’d gone to document a massive strike blowing up into revolt against the government. His video camera peers through broken glass at a smashed computer; holds steady on a strangely peaceful orange-black plume rising from a burning SUV; crawls under a truck to spy on a group of… well, most people who watch Brad’s video on YouTube don’t know who they are. Cops, probably, though they wear no uniforms. Brad feints and charges toward them along with a small crowd armed with stones and bottle rockets, improbably chasing men toting .38s and AR-15s.

With two minutes left, Brad inches toward the door behind which he knows men with guns may be hiding. “Si ves a un gringo con cámara, mátalo!” government supporters ranted on local radio around the time Brad arrived in Oaxaca. “If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!” Then there are the last words heard on Brad’s video before he films a puff of smoke—muzzle flash beneath a gray sun—and his own knees rising up towards the lens as he falls, the cobblestones rushing toward him: “No esten tomando fotos!” (“Stop taking pictures!”) Brad didn’t hear.

He was scheduled to fly back to Brooklyn the next day.

-

During the three weeks he spent in Mexico before he was killed, Brad would make fun of his half-assed Spanish by introducing himself as “Qeubrado” (”Broken”). He didn’t look it. Six feet two, with a frame broad as his father’s – a veteran of Yale’s 1960 undefeated football team— he was vegan-lean but ropy with muscle, “a little stinky and a lot gorgeous,” remembers his friend Kate Crane. Back during his twenties, when he’d bring a slingshot to demonstrations instead of a camera, he thought of himself as half-warrior, half-poet, a former student of Allen Ginsberg’s now specializing in crazy-beautiful Beat gestures recast in a militant mode— “sweet escalation,” he called it, protest not as a means to an end but as a glimpse of a world yet to be made.

By the time he got to Oaxaca, in the fall of 2006, he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a Brazilian filmmaker who has produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” In the end there was just a picture, his last shot, the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

“Yo d,” he wrote to Dyan neary, an ex-girlfriend, three days before he died, “jumping around like a reporter and working my ass off—been pretty intense and sometimes sketchy.” The governor of Oaxaca had sent in roving death squads, pickup trucks of paramilitaries firing on the barricades. The bodies were piling up. Brad was getting scared. “I went back to the morgue—it is a sick and sad place—I have this feeling like I will go back there again with a crowd of reporters all pushing to get the money shot— the body all sewed up and naked— you see it in the papers every day—I am entering a new territory here and don’t know if I am ready.”

Ready for what? Revolution? Blood? Brad had seen both before, in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil. Oaxaca was bigger, more exciting, more frightening. What had started as a strike by the state’s 70,000 teachers had exploded after the governor attacked the teachers with tear gas and helicopters. The federal government feared a domino effect, other states following Oaxaca’s example. In Oaxaca, every kind of leftist organization—indigenous groups, unions, students, farmers, anarcho-punks—came together in an unprecedented coalition and took over the city. The national government declared the entire state of Oaxaca “ungovernable.”

Brad knew what to do: Film it all. He’d send the tapes home, screen them in squats and at anarchist bookstores. Revolution is real, he’d say, here’s the proof. Burning tires, masked rebels stuffing rags into bottles full of gasoline, farmers with machetes; free kitchens, free medical clinics, free buses, commandeered by farmers and fishermen. At a street funeral, old women sing a radical anthem with their fists raised in the air; in a red tent at night a father pounds the silver box that holds his son. “La muerte as gobierno malo!” shout the mourners. (”Death to the government!”) “Viva Alejandro!” Alejandro García Hernández, forty-one years old, shot twice in the head by a group of soldiers who tried to crash through a barricade opened to let an ambulance pass. Brad wrote home, “And now Alejandro waits in the zocalo“—the city plaza—”he’s waiting for an impasse, a change, an exit, a way forward, a way out, a solution—waiting for the earth to shift and open—waiting for november when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song…one more martyr in a dirty war…one more bullet cracks the night.”

-

Kenilworth, Illinois, isn’t a town that raises radicals. A mile wide, tucked away close to the beach on the North Shore of Chicago, Kenilworth is the kind of place in which the wrong side of the suburb means houses cost only a couple of million dollars. There were four African Americans in the most recent census, and if there were any Democrats around when Brad was growing up, says Stephanie Rogers, a family friend, they kept quiet. “If Kenilworth wasn’t the absolute height of preppiness,” she says, “it was only because we were Midwestern. Kids would study that East Coast model, towns like Greenwich, Connecticut. That’s what Kenilworth wanted to be.”

Not the Wills. They didn’t follow anyone. “The Wills were achievers, and leaders,” says Rogers. For Brad’s three older siblings, that meant good grades, sports and student government, Brad was different. “We were all active kids, curious, athletic, and we would roughhouse and play ball,” says his sister Christy, a graphic designer who lives in San Diego. “Brad was less interested in those kinds of things.” He preferred science fiction and fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars, one of the few passions he shared with his all-American dad: Hardy, an engineer who owned a small factory, liked to imagine how other worlds might work. Brad liked to build them. He’d arrange miniature societies with his action figures, write modules for role-playing games. It wasn’t the monsters that enthralled him, it was the struggles between good and evil.

One of his favorite movies was It’s a Wonderful Life; lanky, amiable Jimmy Stewart provided a model for the way Brad would move through the world as he grew older, a Teen Beat-gorgeous geek–a dungeon master!—who was friends with jocks, preps, even Kenilworth’s tiny clique of stoners. With his feathered hair, his rugby-shirt collar standing proud and a broad smile sprawling beneath dreamy eyes, Brad looked like an extra in a John Hughes movie.

But he was slowly splintering away from the high-school-college-back-to-the-burbs loop that was the natural order of things in Kenilworth. “It was a struggle to open my life,” Brad would tell a Venezuelan newspaper years later. “I didn’t know much about the truth of the world, but little by little, I forced my eyes open, without the help of anyone.”

The Will children were expected to be athletes (Brad was a runner) and stick with an instrument. But one day Brad announced he was quitting trumpet to play guitar. Instead of joining clubs, he worked after school, as a flower-delivery boy, a library shelver, selling newspaper subscriptions. “Brad was perplexing,” says his mother, Kathy. “But he wasn’t a loaf.”

The one unbendable rule for Will children was college. His sister Wendy went to Stanford, Craig followed their father to Yale, and Christy went to Scripps College. Brad’s grades hovered between B and C, but after he aced his entrance exams he squeaked into Allegheny, a small school in western Pennsylvania. There he joined a frat, majored in the Dead and studied On the Road. Mostly he liked getting high, passing a pipe back and forth with his friend Matt Felix, an outdoorsman from New Hampshire who introduced Brad to the radical environmentalism of Earth First! That ethos of direct action and theatrical gestures drew Brad west when he graduated in 1992. He followed the hippie highway to Boulder, Colorado, where he began attending classes taught by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Even more influential than Ginsberg was Peter Lamborn Wilson, who under the pseudonym Hakim Bey was known for a manifesto called The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or T.A.Z., a study in “ontological anarchy” and “poetic terrorism,” and a guidebook to the life of Brad was beginning to lead. “What happened was this,” Wilson writes, “they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”

Wilson wasn’t offering an indictment so much as a prescription: “Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou“—crazy love—”neither selfless not selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels…” Brad was becoming one of Wilson’s wolfangels. “Very high-energy, extremely bright, not so well-controlled,” Wilson remembers of the student who talked his way into class because he hadn’t bothered to pay tuition. “Loose at the edges, reckless, you might call it courage. Manic sometimes, charming everybody.”

“Brad liked being in a hotbed of ideas,” says his mother, happy, at least, that her son had a job. She didn’t know that he stopped paying rent. “My crazy poet roomies fled the scene,” he later wrote of his accidental introduction to squatting. “I stayed and didn’t even have the phone number of the landlord.” that suited Brad—cash, he was beginning to believe, was a kind of conspiracy, a form of control he was leaving behind. He wanted to write poems, but even more he wanted to become one, a messy, ecstatic, angry, sprawling embodiment of Wilson’s manifesto.

His first attempt came one summer when 50,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist men’s movement called the Promise Keepers descended on Boulder, distributing a pamphlet called “The Iron Spear: Reaching Out to the Homosexual.” Brad wasn’t gay, but he decided to reach back. The Naropa Institute’s lawn abutted the Promise Keepers’rally ground, so Brad put on a show: He married a man. He recruited Wilson to perform the ceremony and a poet named Anne Waldman to play his mother. Another student was the bride, in a white satin gown complete with a train, and Brad scrounged a suit and tie. “I actually am a minister in the Universal Life church,” says Wilson. “I married them in full view of the Promise Keepers.” Then Brad kissed the bride, a long smooch that provoked one Promise Keeper to hop the fence to find out whether he was really seeing two men making out. Brad declared the stunt a victory when the fundamentalist decided to stick around, apparently convinced that poets throw better parties than Promise Keepers.

That was Brad’s idea of politics and poetry at the same time: a party and performance. But Brad didn’t care for stages. He wanted the show to run 24/7. From Boulder he moved to West Lima, Wisconsin, a half-abandoned town that had become an “intentional community”—a commune—called Dreamtime Village. Dreamtime was like a surreal version of the town Brad had grown up in: There was a post office, a school building, little Midwestern houses and almost no rules. Then, in the summer of 1995, Brad became interested in the stories he heard from a group of New York squatters on a road trip. When they headed back east, Brad hitched a ride.

“I moved to the big shitty as Giuliani-time kicked in,” he wrote in an essay for an anarchist anthology, We Are Everywhere. In New York, at least, anarchists were concentrated in a few dozen squats, buildings abandoned at the nadir of the city’s grim Eighties and rehabbed by whoever wanted to live rent-free. It was illegal, of course, which was part of the attraction for Brad—just living in a squat was a form of direct action, defiance of all the rules about property and propriety. Brad found himself an empty room in a squat on East 5th Street, home to around sixty “activists and destructionists,” in the words of Pastrami, a yoga teacher who befriended Brad. They hauled water up from fire hydrants and wired an electricity from a streetlight. Next door they cleared the trash out of an abandoned lot and turned it into a garden with a pear tree. They shared it with their Puerto Rican neighbors, eventually winning over even the nuns of the nearby Cabrini seniors home—their response to the squats went from one of horror to prayers for the wild but lovely young creatures who ate the trash and the toxic soil of the city. This was the life Brad had been looking for.

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Anarchist isn’t so much a singular ideology as a set of overlapping philosophies, and Brad wanted to explore them all. He’d haunt the anarchist store Blackout Books, in New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, and then he’d disappear for days into volumes he had bought, borrowed or even dumpster-dived, his long, bony hands cracking the spines of old lefty tomes and the quickie compilations of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico who was fast becoming the new model for anarchist panache. he read Kropotkin, the early-twentieth-century Russian biologist who gave to anarchism its core idea of “mutual aid,” the simple but radical premise that cooperation, not competition, is the natural condition of humanity, and he worked with movements like the Ruckus Society, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, leaderless networks of activists who put anarchist ideas into action through confrontational tactics—Brad was expert in the construction of “sleeping dragons” and “bear claws,” both methods of locking yourself down in front of a bulldozer or in the middle of a city street. The point wasn’t a set of demands but the act of disruption itself. In Brad’s world, action—direct, local, unfiltered—mattered more than ideology. In theory, anyway. In practice, the anarchist factions often succumb to purist notions, refusing even to speak to comrades they consider co-opted. Not Brad. he was tight with anarcho-primitivists, who view language itself as oppressive, and social anarchists, who write books and build schools. “He was the least sectarian person I ever met,” says Dyan Neary. “That’s what made it easy for him to introduce people to ideas. He was just sort of user-friendly.”

He had a sharp side, too. “Brad did his fair share of alienating people,” says Sascha DuBrul, who like Brad had migrated from Dreamtime to the Lower East Side. “He was so loud and outspoken, and he wasn’t always a big listener.” At the 5th Street Squat, he’d “talk really loud” about his building skills, but then, friends say, he wired his room incorrectly, resulting in a small fire. The fire didn’t threaten the building, but it gave Giuliani an excuse to tear it down. “When they came for our building,” Brad wrote, “there weren’t any eviction papers, and they came with a wrecking crane. I snuck inside, felt the rumble when the ball pierced the wall. I was alone. From the roof I watched them dump a chunk of my home on my garden…When it was all over: a rubble heap.”

“I almost feel like he wanted to die up there, he felt so guilty,” a friend told The Village Voice. Afterward, Brad undertook a freight-train tour of America, riding in boxcars from city to city, speaking to activist groups about Giuliani’s crackdown. “Brad got incredibly fucking riled up,” remembers DuBrul. “He was on fire, his hands were shaking.”

“He had a certain innocence,” says Stephan Said, a squatter and folk singer Brad admired. “What led him to his death was at the same time what made him so endearing.”

In 1998, Brad went out west to join Earth First! activists for a “forest defense,” which for Brad would consist of spending the summer on a platform built high up around the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir in Oregon, an anarchist retreat from the laws down below. “I called it the Y plane ‘cause you’re up, up, up off the rules of the X plane,” says Priya Reddy, who’d become one of Brad’s best friends that summer. “The only rule you really have is gravity. It’s homelessness in the best sense.”

A city girl, Reddy–in Oregon she took the name Warcry, a not-so-subtle response to “hippie-ish” tree-sitters like Julia Butterfly—didn’t know how to climb, so at first she provided ground support, hiking from tree to tree in the murky green light, taking orders for supplies. Brad had a different concern. “I dropped a piece of paper,” he called down on her first day. “Could you find it for me?”

Warcry looked into the branches. The voice’s source, 200 feet up, was invisible. So was his piece of paper, fallen amid the thick ferns of the forest floor. When she found it, a folded-up scrap, she took a peek. A battle plan? No; a love poem.

The woods were noisy with the music of the tree-sitters. CDs and tapes of Sonic Youth, Crass and Conflict blasted full volume. The most popular song seemed to be “White Rabbit.” After Warcry heard it for what seemed like the hundredth time, she took a stand. “Why are you people playing White Rabbit over and over again?” she demanded. “You don’t know?” came the answer. “It’s a warning.” White Rabbit meant the cops, spotted by Brad or another tree-sitter from their perches far above, were on their way.

Soon Warcry worked up the courage to join Brad in the trees, spending three weeks on a neighboring platform. She brought a video camera. One day loggers brought down a giant within fifty yards of Brad’s and Warcry’s video, but you can hear his raw scream: “Fuuuck!” The tree settles, and Brad shouts at the loggers below. “How old do you think that tree was? How old are you?” It was a question he might have been asking himself—up in his treehouse, there were times he felt like a child, powerless to respond.

-

What set Brad apart from so many radical activists was that throughout it all, he remained close to his family, the buttoned-down Republican Wills of Kenilworth. When he was jailed for nearly a week at the WTO Seattle protests in 1999, one of his chief worries was getting out in time for his mother’s sixtieth birthday, which the Wills planned to celebrate in Hawaii. When he made it there, he didn’t tell them what had really gone down. “He didn’t want to burden us,” says his mother.

That’s how Brad kept his truce with where he came from. In 2002, when he and Dyan Neary were hopping freight trains from the Northwest to New York, he insisted they take a detour so that Neary—who goes by Glass—could meet his mother. Glass tried to talk politics, telling the Wills about South America coca farmers blasted into extreme poverty by U.S.-funded crop-spraying. Brad’s mom looked confused: “But, dear, how do you think we should deal with the cocaine question?” It wasn’t meant as a question.

“Later, I was like, Oh shit, they don’t really know what you’re doing, do they?” Brad giggled, proud of his ability to move between worlds.

The two had met shortly after 9/11, their first date a six-hour walk around Ground Zero. Brad was thirty-one; Glass was twenty, tall and skinny with big curves and big eyes and a smile like Brad’s, wide and knowing. But she was stunned by New York’s transformation from go-go to grief to warmongering. “What the fuck happened to my city?” she thought. They decided it was time to get out of town.
There were two complications. The first was monogamy. Brad didn’t believe in it. All right, Glass said, no sex. Brad suddenly discovered an untapped well of fidelity. The other problem was thornier: Brad was about to become a father. The mother was a French woman with whom he’d had a brief relationship while she was visiting New York. A month later, she called to tell him she was pregnant. Brad loved kids, but he’d sworn he’d never bring one of his own into a world he considered too damaged. Brad flew over to visit.
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked. “We can raise the child together.”

“I’ll help you out with money,” he said—a major commitment, given that he lived on food he found in dumpsters—“but I’m not moving to France.”

When the woman had the baby, her new boyfriend adopted him. That seemed to Brad like an ideal solution—he loved the family he already had, but he wasn’t looking to start one.

“He wanted to experience revolution,” says Glass. “He wanted to live that every day.” They spent much of the next two years in South America, returning to New York to raise funds by taking temp jobs–Brad was a lighting grip—and throwing all-night benefit parties. In Brazil, they worked with the Movimiento Sin Terra, landless poor people who’ve squatted and won rights to more than 20 million acres of farmland. In Buenos Aires, they joined up with a movement of workers who’d reclaimed factories shuttered by Argentina’s economic meltdown. In Bolivia, they met a radical coca farmer named Evo Morales who would soon become the country’s first indigenous president. This wasn’t the East Village, Brad realized, or a tree platform in Oregon. There was real power at stake.

Now he had a mission. He wanted to show American activists how to join the fight wherever they could find it, or start it. Video, he determined, was his best medium. In 2004, he scraped together $300 for a used Canon ZR 40 and headed back south, this time on his own. He was ready to start telling stories, ready to become a reporter.

In 2005, in a central-Brazilian squatters’ town of 12,000 landless peasants called Sonho Real (”Real Dream”), Brad filmed a police attack that resulted in two dead and twenty “missing.” Brad was the only reporter on hand. He hid in a shack, filming, and waited for the worst. The cops found him, dragged him out by his hair and beat him to a pulp. Then they smashed his camera and arrested him. “The U.S. Embassy refused to do anything,” says Brad’s friend Miguel. “They said, Yes, we know, but he is not an important person to us.” But his American passport still carried weight with the Brazilian police. They let him go. He’d managed to keep his tape hidden; soon, it would be broadcast throughout Brazil, a perfect example of Indymedia in action.

But it didn’t seem like a victory to Brad. “I feel like I am haunted,” he wrote to his friend Kate Crane. “I keep seeing a thin woman’s body curled up at the bottom of a well, her body in a strange position—I can’t escape it.”

-

The Mexico to which Brad traveled in early October 2006 seemed like a nation on the verge. Of what, nobody could say. But something was about to break. It was an election year, and a new force in Mexican politics, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appeared certain to win the presidency. Vicente Fox, the Bush clone who had deposed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, was constitutionally forbidden from running again. His anointed successor was Felipe Calderón, an angry bully obsessed with oil and secrecy, the Dick Cheney of Mexico. On July 2nd, Mexican television declared the race between Calderón and moderate Andrés Manuel López Obrador too close to call, and the next morning Mexico’s electoral authority made Calderón the winner. Only they hadn’t counted all the votes. Two million Mexicans poured into the streets to protest. Calderón’s only hope was to seduce the PRI, his right-wing party’s traditional enemy, into a coalition against the leftist PRD. In exchange for the PRI’s support, he promised that his party would bail out the PRI’s cash cow: Oaxaca.

Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in a poor nation. In 2004, the PRI installed as governor a rising star with a reputation for electoral fraud named Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Ruiz was a cash machine, skilled at milking the state to kick funds up to the national party organization. What he wasn’t so good at, it turned out, was keeping a lid on the discontent that has been rippling across Mexico since the Zapatistas marched out of the jungle in 2004.

“If they want to kill our teachers,” Oaxaqueños declared after Ruiz’s police killed several striking teachers on June 14th, 2006, “they should kill us all now.” From that day on, Oaxaca City was in open revolt. “Con Ulises’pelotas, yo haré los huevos fritos,” women chanted in the streets. (”With Ulises’ balls, I’m going to make fried eggs!”). It was as if Louisiana’s poor converged on New Orleans, shoved aside the political hacks and ran the city themselves for months, even as National Guardsmen drove around shooting into houses.

And yet the American press ignored Oaxaca. That made it a perfect story for Brad. Friends tried to talk him out of it. “The APPO”—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, in effect its revolutionary government—”doesn’t trust anyone it hasn’t known for years,” Al Giordano, the publisher of a report on Latin American politics called Narco News, told him. “They keep telling me not to send newcomers, because the situation is so fucking tense.”

“I think I will go,” Brad wrote back. When he showed up at an Indymedia headquarters in Mexico City en route to Oaxaca, they told him his white skin would make him and anyone standing near him a target.

“You’re treating me like my mom,” Brad said. “What are you made of? This is what it’s about. This is the uprising.”

John Gibler, a radical print journalist with deeper roots in Mexico, remembers Brad showing up in Oaxaca City’s central square, a tall hipster American with a fancy camera—Brad had sunk his life savings into it—that made him look like a professional. “The media painted a picture of a gung-ho idealist who didn’t know which way was which, but the guy was not clueless,” says Gibler. “That first day I said, Hey, Brad, you wanna come along to the barricades tonight?” He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t wait to get out there, but people are getting killed. I need to get a feel of the place. Walking around at night without that is not a smart move.”

He found a place to sleep (the floor of the headquarters of an indigenous-rights group) and a place to stash his videotape—he’d learned from Brazil that a hiding place was a requirement for an Indymedia journalist lacking the protections of a big news agency. He ate with the APPOs, as the protesters were called, marched with them, slept on the ground beside them on hot evenings. He told them about his politics before he asked about theirs. He laughed a lot, his ridiculous guffaw. Slowly, the APPOs began to trust him. Brad was on the inside of what Rolling Thunder, an anarchist rag back in the States, would call “the closest our generation has come to seeing an anarchist revolution.” Mexican authorities evidently agreed—they were preparing to make an example out of Oaxaca.

-

Brad’s footage on October 27th begins on a suburban street, strewn with rocks and sandbags, a pillar of black smoke rising in the background. Minutes before, there’d been a battle, paramilitaries with automatic weapons versus protesters with Molotov cocktails. Brad zooms in on a silver van consumed by flames. Then he cuts back to the crowd, old men in straw hats, teenagers in ski masks, big mamas with frying pans. They begin to shout. “the people, united!” Bullets pop from a side street, and the fight careens onto a narrow lane of one-story buildings. “Cover yourselves, comrades!” someone shouts. The protesters advance car by car, lobbing Molotovs that bloom from the blacktop. The sky darkens, bruised blue over green trees. A dark-skinned boy in a black tank top kneels and aims his bottle-rocket bazooka. Bullets are cracking. Brad remembers a war photographer’s maxim: “Don’t get greedy.” That’s when you get killed. He turns of his camera.

When he starts shooting again, the protesters are crouching outside a white building in which they believe a comrade is being held prisoner. They batter the door, darting out into the open to deliver drop kicks. “Mire!” Brad shouts. (”Look!”) From down the street, more gunfire. Brad runs. Next to him someone is hit. “Shit!” Brad shouts. “Are you OK, comrade?” someone asks. Brad zooms in on an old woman fingering her prayer beads.

Then the final footage played around the globe half a million times: a red dump truck used as a barricade and a battering ram, a wounded man led away, gunfire answered by bottle rockets. “Diganle a este pinche wey que no este tomando fotos!” somebody shouts. (”Somebody tell this fucking guy to stop taking photos!”) Brad keeps shooting. He steps up onto the sidewalk, his camera aimed dead ahead. The compañeros are crouching; Brad rises, a pale white gringo above the crowd.

“I watch this, and I say, Brad, stop! Don’t do this!” says Miguel, the Brazilian filmmaker. “I ask myself if he really knows where he is. I ask myself if he knows he can die.”

Bang–a bullet hits Brad dead center, just below his heart, exploding his aorta.

“Ayúdeme!” he screams. (“Help me!”)

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” someone says. (“Take it easy, take it easy.”) A photographer gives Brad mouth-to-mouth, and he gasps and opens his eyes. There are last words, but nobody knows what they are; the men who rush him to the hospital don’t understand English, and Quebrado has forgotten how to speak his mind.

-

His old girlfriend Glass was in Hawaii when she heard. She’d been e-mailing Brad a lot. She missed him, and it seemed like he missed her too. She’d been in New York right before he’d left for Oaxaca, and they’d gone on a pub crawl. He’d had a girlfriend with him, but in the pictures from that night it’s Glass on Brad’s arm. The day he died, she was sitting in a park, singing songs she learned from Brad. She sang the anarchist anthems, then Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo Lullaby.” Most of all she wanted to sing his favorite, “Angel from Montgomery.” She tried to hear Brad’s voice. He’d be John Prine, she’d be Bonnie Raitt.

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to/To believe in this living is a hard way to go.

“I have to e-mail Brad,” she thought. “This is so great!” Then her phone rang. “This is Dyan, right?” a stranger’s voice said. “Can you call Brad Will’s mom? He’s hurt.”

“What? How?” The stranger wouldn’t answer. “I’m not calling his mother until I know what happened,” Glass said. The stranger gave Glass another number. She dialed. “I was told to call this number about Brad?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s been confirmed,” said the voice on the other end, another stranger.

“What’s been confirmed?”

“Oh, he’s dead.”

All Glass remembers after that is screaming.

-

In Oaxaca, the APPOs combed Brad’s long hair and dressed his body in white. They draped a gold cross around his neck and laid him in a coffin. There were no fiery speeches, just weeping. Then-president Fox used the death of the gringo as an excuse to invade Oaxaca with 4,000 federal police. The U.S. ambassador, a Bush crony from Texas, blamed the violence on schoolteachers and said that Brad’s death “underscores the need for a return to law and order.” In the coming months, the APPO would be crushed; Calderón would slam through a Mexican version of the Patriot Act, allowing police to tap phones and make arrests without warrants or charges; and, this past fall, the Bush administration proposed a $1.4 billion military aid package for Calderón’s regime, ostensibly to fight drugs and “terrorism.”

And Brad’s killers? It seemed like an open-and-shut case—a Mexican news photographer had even taken a picture of the men who appeared to be the shooters, a group of beefy thugs in plain clothes charging toward Brad and the APPOs with pistols and AR-15s. The Oaxaca state prosecutor, a Ruiz loyalist, grudgingly issued warrants for two of them, police Commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar and Abel Santiago Zárate, known as “El Chino.” But at a press conference two weeks later, the prosecutor announced a new theory: Brad’s murder had been a “deceitful confabulation” planned by the APPO. In this version of events, Brad was only grazed on the street. The fatal bullet was fired point-blank by an APPO on the way to the hospital—a physical impossibility, according to the coroner. No matter. At the end of November, a judge set the suspects free.

Last March, Brad’s parents traveled to Mexico to request that the investigation be turned over to federal authorities. They won that fight, only to be fed the same story with a half dozen variations. Believability wasn’t the point. “In political crimes in Mexico,” notes Gibler, who came to act as the family’s translator, “there’s an impeccably neat history of immediate obfuscation and destruction of evidence. The authorities immediately flood all discussion with conspiracy theory. There’s a tradition of exquisite incompetence, so that later only speculation is possible.”

The Wills are not, by nature, speculative people. At age sixty-eight, Hardy is a solid, fit man with white hair worn in a boyish curl. He still drives more than an hour each way every day to his factory in Rockford, Illinois. Kathy Will bounces like a loose electron around the Wisconsin lake house in which they now live. Designed and built by Brad’s great-grandfather, the home is a mansion of broad, dark cypress beams, spotless, disturbed only by neat stacks of documents, arranged at the great oak dining table, like settings for a seminar on Brad’s achievements as a boy, Mexican politics and ballistics.

It’s on this last matter that the case still turns. If the Wills are ever to be able to say, “This is what happened, this is how Brad died, this is the man who killed him,” they must determine what sort of bullet killed him and where, exactly, it came from. The initial coroner’s report said the bullets were 9mm, which would rule out the .38s carried by the cops Brad filmed. But a re-examination of the evidence has revealed that the bullets were .38s after all. Hardy shows me a photograph of them, two squat slugs hardly dented. “They only passed through soft tissue,” he says. But from how far away? The government says Brad was shot nearly point-blank. The Wills are certain he was shot by the policemen at the end of the street. Proving that, they believe, may start the wheels of justice turning. I’ve come bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days: a frame-by-frame analysis of Brad’s last minute made by his friend Warcry, who has entrusted me to act as her courier.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Hardy. We gather in a TV room. “That’s it!” Hardy exclaims. There, on the left side of the screen, above the hood of the red dump truck, in the green of the trees, a tiny white starburst appears, expands, drifts like smoke, visible for a fraction of a second, blown up into giant, pale pizels—very possible the bullet that’s about to hit Brad.

“Should we watch it again?” Hardy asks. Kathy’s head drops, and she backs out of the room. Rewind, pause; Brad falls down, over and over. “Yes,” says Hardy quietly, “this is what we need.”

He’s excited, his face flushed. It’s 11:30 at night. I call Warcry; she’s up, waiting for the Wills’ response. Hardy wants to see a still she’s isolated of a man who appears to be holding a sniper rifle, more potential evidence for a long-distance kill shot. “This could really change everything!” Hardy says. We gather around his computer in his study, a dark room filled with hunting trophies and memorabilia from Hardy’s Yale football days. I pull up the image, a man in a yellow shirt at a distance, a long gun barrel rising above his left shoulder. Hardy sighs. He walks over to a well-stocked gun cabinet, removes a rifle and turns around, posing perfectly as the man Warcry believes is his son’s killer.

“It’s not a sniper rifle,” he says, looking at the gun in his hand. “It’s a carbine.”

The puff of white smoke is the best piece of evidence they’ve seen in the year since Brad died, but they still can’t explain how he was shot twice at long range by such a clumsy old weapon. Hardy slumps into a seat in the corner, thinking of one more theory—one more chance at certainty—dashed.

Kathy brings us tea. Like Brad, she has soft, sleepy eyes and a broad smile. “I like talking to people,” she says. “I’ll talk to anyone. I guess that’s where Brad got it from.” Hardy is exhausted, but Kathy sits up, watching Brad’s old videos—Brad fleeing tear gas in Miami, bullets in Brazil. Hardy was always the skeptical one, shielding his wife from the ways of the world, but now it’s Kathy who’s gaining a worldly wisdom, grasping the roots of her son’s political discontent. She still doesn’t get the politics, tsk-tsks when she sees Brad sitting in front of an upside-down American flag—a crisp Stars and Stripes snaps on a pole outside the house, and there are three bands of red, white, and blue stones on her finger. It’s not anything that Brad said that has changed her point of view. It’s what the Mexican government says, the lies they told her to her face.

“It’d be laughable if they weren’t serious,” she says. “What they’re really telling me is that Brad was there for a very good reason. Believe me, I didn’t want him there. But he was absolutely right. He was right about all the injustices. I didn’t know it then. I really didn’t know. I know it now. In spades.”

One of the most common clichés about radicalism in America is the myth that it’s all about the parents, activists rebelling against or proving themselves to Mom and Dad before they settle down and become Mom or Dad. That wasn’t what Brad Will was doing. Had he come through that fire-fight on October 27th, 2006, he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother. Instead, he’d tell her about the great Mexican food he’d had, and she’d say that the lake was flattening in the cold, that soon it would be frozen, that maybe when he came home for Christmas he could go ice-skating. His footage likely would not have been seen outside activist circles in the United States, the echo chamber of the already persuaded. Yet the bullet that killed him ended up broadcasting what he had learned far beyond his usual channels, all the way back to where he’d begun. With Brad’s death, knowledge came to Kathy Will. It was the most awful kind of knowing: a new understanding of the world as it is, almost blinding her to the glimpse she had caught, maybe for the first time, of the world as Brad had imagined it could be.

“The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself,” writes Hakim Bey in the long and wild poem that turned Brad Will on to those possibilities, “an invisible golden cord that connects us.”

This just in from our friends in Bulgaria. We thought it was worth sharing here as an Eastern European counterpoint to the article about squatting one’s workplace that appeared in the first issue of Rolling Thunder.

This story starts a little before the end of my last term in the university. I’d spent four really crazy years in the students’ hostels in the well known “Students’ Town” in Sofia. The end of the term was coming and my life in the students’ hostel was about to end, too. I had to find a new place for living very fast if I wanted to stay in Sofia. I thought over a lot of options for renting, but all the rents were very expensive for me. I was working for a web page at that time. The job was pretty nice—I used to write news and concert reports, prepare photos, and do kind of a primitive book-keeping at the office. The best thing was that I had one or two free weeks every month and I was able to travel all around the country during this time, but the bad thing was that my salary was very low. It appeared that if I wanted to rent a lodging I had to find more “serious” and well-paid job. For me this was like putting a chain around myself and working the whole month only to get enough money to pay my rent and food, and hopefully to save some money to enjoy the weekends. I didn’t like this idea at all, because I didn’t want to sell my leisure time for a wage.

Then a great idea dawned on me. I thought of squatting my workplace. My boss was living abroad and he was staying in Bulgaria only for some periods of time. I had nothing to lose, so I decided to try it. The office was an attic with two rooms and an anteroom. I had little baggage in Sofia at that time, because my future was unclear and after I left the students’ hostel I was sleeping at the homes of my friends. With my backpack, I was like a snail with my home on my back. So I quietly moved in my office and hid my stuff in a cardboard box.

I was sleeping in my sleeping bag on the floor. The summer had just started and the weather was hot. The bad thing about the office was that there was no bathroom. There was only a toilet and a sink with cold water. I though this was no problem for me, because I had grown up in a village and we used to heat up water in buckets to take a bath. But I had an unpleasant surprise during my first such bath at the office. The catch-water drain was obstructed and I experienced a little flood. I tried to unclog it but then I understood the neighbors on the floor below had blocked it up.

Bad shit. Hot summer, a lot of sweat and no place to take a bath. I started going to my friends’ home to take a bath. I also invented new way of taking a bath: I would heat a bucket of water, moisten a t-shirt, and use it to get wet. Then I soaped myself and washed away the soap with the wet t-shirt—very carefully, so as not to flood the toilet again.

The other problem appeared when my boss was in Bulgaria. Sometimes he stayed late at night at the office and I had to wander the streets until he left. I also had to wake up early in the mornings because I didn’t want to be caught sleeping at the office.

And so, living illegally, the summer ended and the autumn came. I was wondering if I wanted to continue this way of life or quit. I had a conversation with my boss one day. We had a good relationship and I had been working for him since we put the page on the net. I told him my story and that I didn’t have a place to sleep. He allowed me to continue sleeping at the office, but told me not to do foolish things there.

I didn’t abuse the trust of my boss, but when he was abroad I gave shelter to some traveler comrades who had no place to stay in Sofia. We also started to use the attic as a rehearsal hall and an underground recording studio. With two other agents from the Katarzis collective, I formed an acoustic anarcho-punk band. Guitars, flutes, percussion, and powerful lyrics about resistance and a better life filled the attic. We also made a lot of preparations for protests: banners, posters, leaflets, and zines. The office became really a magical place. I was full of enthusiasm and was living my days of war and nights of love.

Then the winter came and the weather got cold. I had the luck of finding a spring mattress in the street—it was already very cold to sleep on the floor. I didn’t want to put on the heater, because I would have to pay part of the electricity tax. I had to sleep with 2 sleeping bags, 2-3 blouses, pants, and wool socks during the coldest nights. This was real hard core shit, but my blood was boiling with anger. I was lucky—the winter was short.

I thought then that nothing could stop me after the things I’d been through. The spring and the summer passed with the same passion in my heart. But then I started to get sick of life in the capital. Big city, big shit. I managed to save some money in spite of my low wage and decided to tear up the chains around my life. I had wanted to do more activist work, so I quit my job and left Sofia.

I do a lot of things now: I write and distribute anarchist propaganda, my friends and I have started to organize some events together, I try to help the people around me with what I can, I travel a lot, I do a lot of skateboarding, yoga and some physical exercises, and I also have planned a trip around Europe to visit anarchist communities and eco farms. In general I do what I want to, but I feel some nostalgia about my life in Sofia and especially about my life in the attic. A lot of memories, good and bad, make me sigh with a smile on my face for the good old times. Those were magical days and nights up there—my revolution in the attic.

On December 21, Operation Backfire cooperating defendant Darren Thurston released a lengthy statement presenting the history of Operation Backfire as he sees it and laying out what he apparently considers to be extenuating circumstances connected to his decision to inform. He insists that he does not condone snitching, but claims that he didn’t share any information that was harmful to others; unfortunately, as Thurston has chosen to withhold from the public both his plea agreement and the debrief documents that detail his cooperation with investigators, it’s impossible to verify this claim.

In contrast, non-cooperating Operation Backfire defendants have made their plea agreements public in their entirety. Thurston explains that he has not done the same because in his case the materials “were not completely indicative of my cooperation and would be easily misunderstood by the majority of those who would hear about them,” but as his cooperation is already a matter of intense controversy, it could hardly make matters worse for him to follow their example.

At the conclusion of his statement, Thurston offers “his closest comrades” a limited apology for his decision to inform, admitting it “set a bad example” but placing responsibility for his choice on others’ shoulders: others cooperated first and made the case “unwinnable,” the government divided communities by spreading rumors, activists abandoned and vilified the cooperating defendants before they’d even decided whether or not to cooperate, and so on. He also casts aspersions on non-cooperating defendants without ever specifying which ones he means, and on their legal support groups as well. If this is not a matter of passive-aggressive self-justification but of serious concerns about their conduct, he owes it to the activist community to be more explicit.

Thurston states that Operation Backfire defendants were facing “guaranteed life sentences” until they cooperated. In contrast to those who attribute the considerably shorter sentences the non-cooperating defendants received to the vigorous efforts of their defense teams, he credits his partner and fellow informant Chelsea Dawn Gerlach with helping to arrange merciful plea agreements for the non-cooperating defendants—an account that is sure to be controversial. He also mentions uncritically that by the time he and Gerlach were able to communicate after their arrests, she had already informed to the government not only about his involvement in the actions for which he was charged but also about a great deal of other illegal activity he had participated in.

No doubt Thurston experienced a more frightening period of months following his arrest than most of us can possibly imagine. But this alone cannot justify a decision to inform; the fact that other defendants did not do the same shows that other options were possible. In his statement, he talks about “healing our movements and making them stronger,” but that can only occur on the foundation of a commitment to unconditionally and transparently refusing to inform on each other; any supposed solidarity that does not proceed from this premise is a sham that will crumble beneath the first onslaught of government repression. Addressing the question of what constitutes acceptable conduct is not infighting and backstabbing, but an essential element of healing and strengthening our communities. As Thurston points out, we should not take the state at its word as to who is informing—but now that he has signed a sealed agreement to inform, the burden of proof is on him to show the limits of that informing. Those who read Thurston’s statement should not take his analysis—or any analysis, including this one—at face value, since the perspectives of everyone who comments on Operation Backfire are inevitably colored by their own motives; the question is which motives are most likely to facilitate a useful analysis.

Thurston is in a difficult place, but there is still much he can do to facilitate the healing and strengthening of which he speaks. He can start by disclosing the full texts of his plea agreement and cooperation debriefing, and accepting complete personal accountability for his decision to inform. The state can do anything to us—isolate us, threaten us with life sentences, even, in some extremes, turn our loved ones against us. The only thing it cannot take from us, upon which any anti-authoritarian struggle must be founded, is our determination to abide by our principles come what may, thus retaining our freedom and dignity. Individual heroics cannot win a revolutionary struggle—only supportive communities can do that; but we can only form such communities by personally standing by our commitments, regardless of what other individuals do.

We can commend Thurston for the actions he once took in defense of animals and the environment, but the most important round of struggle takes place not in the streets but in the interrogation chamber—it is there, when the commitments and trust that form its backbone are put to the ultimate test, that a struggle lives or dies. The courage of all who refuse to assist the state demonstrates that such a struggle can live—that, in fact, it does live.

While we are about to release a book to be followed shortly by a new issue of our journal, it will be some months before we are able to debut any new free material. In the meantime, Fighting for Our Lives is still available free of charge, individually or in bulk.

In the fall, there was a secret cafe at Station 40. I worked as a server with my housemates, carrying amazing food through a crowded room of friends watching performers in a burlesque show. It was one of those nights where all the familiar faces that you haven’t seen for a while appear, and everyone has an expression like “Why don’t we all hang out like we used to anymore?” When things were almost over, I ran into Darci—an old friend I’ve known off and on for almost six years. She’s the kind of friend who’s unpredictable in that way that’s almost always incredibly exciting, but which would probably become frustrating if she were a bigger part of my life. We caught up on where we’d been, what our hopes were, and everything that had gone wrong for us since we last saw each-other. She introduced me to her friends Chelsea and Tracy, and invited me to come back over to the East Bay with them for a party.

So we got on the BART, and I sat down in one of the bike seats with Darci–our bikes resting on our legs–while Chelsea and Tracy sat down in the bike seat on the opposite side of the aisle.

I looked down and noticed a copy of Fighting For Our Lives on our seat. I picked it up and asked “Hey, is this yours?” to the people who had just gotten up and were on their way out. They looked at me, shook their heads, mumbled something, then disappeared out the door. I showed it to Darci, saying “Can you believe that I just found a copy of Fighting For Our Lives on the seat? There are probably more copies of these than people in the world.” She looked over and asked “What is it?”

“Wait, you’ve never seen this?” I replied. She shook her head.

I held it up to Tracy and Chelsea across the aisle, “Have you guys seen this before?”

“Nope” they both responded.

I handed it to Darci, and she opened it to the “Overture” on the first page. She read the first aphorism loudly and enthusiastically to Chelsea and Tracy across the way: “We dropped out of school, got divorced, broke with our families and ourselves and everything we’d known!” She paused, and I jumped in to read the next aphorism aloud: “We quit our jobs, violated our leases, threw all our furniture out on the sidewalk, and hit the road!” We read a few of these back and forth, then realized that we were probably being obnoxious and stopped. I looked up, and noticed that everyone on our half of this very crowded BART car was looking at us in silence. One guy sitting a little ways away broke the silence and spoke up: “Keep reading!”

So Darci and I read the entire overture back and forth. I ended up reading the last bit pretty enthusiastically: “I’m speaking, of course, of anarchists … When we fight, we’re fighting for our lives!” And at that, almost everyone on our half of the BART car suddenly broke out into loud applause. Some people even cheered. Some stood up to clap.

A middle-aged guy walked over and asked “What was that paper you were reading?” “Oh, it’s a CrimethInc. paper called Fighting For Our Lives. Have you heard of CrimethInc.?” “No, I haven’t.” “Well, they have a website - crimethinc.com.” “I need to write that down, I don’t think I’ll remember it,” he said while fruitlessly patting his pockets.

I reached into my pocket, but instead of a pen, all I found was a sharpie marker. I opened it and wrote “C R I M E T H I N C . C O M” across the length of his forearm in big letters. He smiled and thanked me. As he walked away, I saw another guy walk up to him, look at what I’d written on his forearm, take out a pen, and write crimethinc.com on his own hand as well.

Spontaneity always has a way of surprising you by being more effective than calculated planning ever could.

Inveterate comrades and enemies—

It’s been a full three years since our last outlandishly ambitious project, and you may be wondering what became of us. Sure, we started a magazine and did a couple Green Scare benefit projects, but that hardly compares to the high-water mark of our activity in the past. Have we finally accepted that we will not change the world? Are we out of ideas?

We’re excited to report that over the past year, while we seemed to be slowing down, we were actually preparing a new wave of activity—which will commence at the end of this month with the publication of our next book. The projects we are about to debut are by far our most ambitious yet… but first, let’s discuss what happened last time we initiated a wave of activity.

Remember the bitter and messy controversies of 2001-2003? Every CrimethInc. project that appeared was greeted by thoughtless accolades and torrents of abuse. CrimethInc. was a herd of trust fund brats bent on draining all content from the anarchist movement, an army of wastrels wrecking radical institutions from one coast to the other, a bunch of street thugs determined to endanger peaceful protesters, a single sexist middle class white boy who had apparently never heard the word “privilege” before. The defenses this slander provoked from the party faithful were often just as off-base. All you had to do was say the word “dumpster” and the aspersions commenced flying.

There are several ways to interpret all this negativity. Maybe it was the inevitable turn to infighting that followed the decline of the anticapitalist movement, or the consequence of a new influx of inexperienced participants into the anarchist struggle, or backlash from stodgy veterans who feared they were being outshined. Perhaps it’s inevitable that those who offer themselves to the public as a projection screen receive every kind of unconstructive criticism and misdirected praise.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tempest in a teapot—a waste of energy. Those who wished to pull us kicking and screaming from the stage of history only made us more notorious; people who had much more important things to do were dragged into the fray; and we, who wished to use all our time and creativity to contest hierarchy, squandered them defending ourselves from fellow would-be revolutionaries. Internal critique and debate are essential to building communities of resistance, but name-calling and misinformation are equally disabling.

Let’s hope it’s easier to discuss this now that the smoke has cleared and tempers have cooled. Stalwarts who were as loath to accept us into the anarchist fold as we were to join it have now become our friends; others are at least resigned to putting up with us. We’ve learned a great deal, no thanks to all that drama, and perhaps everyone else has, too. Who knows what drama awaits us ahead—such is our doom, having chosen this path. But while there’s still time, here’s one more effort to clarify our basic goals, lest our new efforts again be mistaken as attempts to hijack The Anarchist Movement or glorify ourselves at everyone else’s expense.

Our essential project is to nurture anti-authoritarian consciousness and desires outside the traditional sites of workplace organizing and identity politics. This does not mean we consider those sites unimportant, or that we wish for everyone to prioritize the sites we have chosen based on our own specific circumstances and means. We’re not convinced we have the most or only effective approach; on the contrary, we are grateful others are undertaking other experiments in other settings—it frees us to focus on the ones we’ve chosen.

If we have any criticism to offer our comrades, it is only that we seem to have been so much more successful in our context than some of them have in theirs. This is strange, given that other contexts should lend themselves to a hundred times more activity than ours does—we’re hardly reaching every potential dropout and rioter, but we fear we are doing better at this than others are at spreading anarchist commitments to the entire working class. We leave it to them to sort out how to improve their efforts, and hope our modest achievements can spur them to more impressive ones.

But this is not a contest. If you feel what we’re doing is a mistaken use of our apparently inexhaustible energies, please offer useful criticism, while trusting that we’re best situated to know what makes sense for us. We are revolutionary anarchists determined to bring about the seizure of the means of production and the abolition of all hierarchy, not bourgeois “lifestylists” as our foes have disingenuously charged. Friendly, constructive criticism will greatly aid us in being better allies to others who desire the same things. The best way to approach this is by making suggestions as to how we could better work towards our professed goals that take into account our capabilities and preferences.

The constructive critiques we’ve received thus far have been instrumental in improving our efforts. Unfortunately, there are still many things we would like to focus on that we are not yet equipped to do justice to; if we remain silent on some topics, it is generally because we feel others are doing a better job than we could. We ask that comrades interpret the many glaring absences in our activities simply as endorsements of others’ efforts—and work to make up for our omissions where they see fit.

But what if you’re the sort of critic who has nothing constructive to offer? In that case, you’re welcome ignore us—if you really think we are a scourge that must be eradicated, don’t give us free publicity. If you absolutely can’t resist stooping to attacks, please don’t sic novices on us who can neither read nor spell, who build and tear apart straw men the way others play with toy soldiers. If such screeds must be written, we request the task be entrusted to Wayne Price from NEFAC, whose intelligent analyses have impressed us—though Wayne obviously has better things to do, as all of you should.

It might also be a good idea to double-check the accuracy of statements before printing them—when making claims about the demographics and nationalities involved in CrimethInc. activity, for example. It beggars belief that people who cannot even be troubled to do a Google search feel entitled to brush off not only the efforts of hundreds around the world, but also the possibility that they even exist—in the course of purporting to represent their interests, no less!

For our part, we don’t aim to “represent” anyone. We understand that, given our disproportionate access to the media, many would like to see us tell their stories or focus on their chosen issues, but we maintain that it would be a mistake to saddle any publisher with the responsibility of even-handedly representing the entire anarchist milieu. To take on this task would only trap us in a role we could not possibly fill—that no one could ever fill, if our critique of representational politics is correct—and effectively prevent us from filling any other role, as well. We are anarchists—we believe in self-determination, not representation, and the only way to secure that for all is to radically decentralize the means of expression. This demands the abolition of mass media as we know it, including most of the formats we have used thus far—not collectives like ours becoming mediators that choose who gets to speak and for how long. In the meantime, we renew our offer to assist anyone with the process of self-publishing.

Likewise, we’re not interested in attempting to capture reality—we’re not theorists who think we’ve worked out The Truth and have to explain it to everyone else. As far as we’re concerned, such a thing is neither possible nor desirable, and purporting to do so only entraps a person in endless debates with subscribers to other Truths. Anarchist theory as a cockfight with our critiques as extensions of our egos does not interest us. That kind of ideological sparring doesn’t seem to aid the participants in bringing about their own liberation—unless reactionaries are correct that one can recognize a zone of freedom by the pointless internecine warfare going on within it. Worst of all, it tends to reduce the discussion of anarchist possibilities to private grudge matches carried out in an inaccessibly abstruse jargon few can—or desire to—understand.

Our sole aim, our raison d’être, is to create situations that have liberatory potential. That is the purpose of all the books and posters and convergences. In and of themselves, they are worthless, irrelevant—but if they enable people to live moments of freedom, whether individually for instants or together over the course of decades, then we have succeeded. We ask to be judged by this criterion alone.

Appendix: Evasion’s Biggest Fan

The following is a true story, though you’ll have to take our word for it as we are not authorized to name the protagonists. A certain dedicated class war anarchist, who distinguished himself in local organizing and mass mobilizations around the turn of the century, was among that era’s most outspoken critics of CrimethInc. projects. In his chapter of a well-known anarchist federation, he told his comrades that it was up to them to fight CrimethInc. for the future of the anarchist movement.

Years later, he admitted to one of us that he’d secretly obtained a copy of Evasion when it was published in book form and, though he considered it politically execrable, became obsessed with it. He’d bought it to study the propaganda of the enemies of the working class, but it turned out it was one of the most thrilling action stories he’d ever read! Worse yet, he passed it around to friends, and they all had similar reactions—they became a sort of secret reading group, since they had to hide their passion for the book from their anarcho-communist comrades. At one point they even got themselves into a messy situation trying to imitate the narrator of the book, when they attempted a heist from a grocery store without abiding by any of the security tips that pervade CrimethInc. literature.

The ex-worker to whom all this was confided found it perplexing, to say the least. In his view, Evasion was not particularly well-written or exciting; the humor compensated for the lack of plot and character development, but the subject matter was positively banal. The point of printing it had been to undermine materialism and timidity in a readership infected with bourgeois values, not to produce a great work of literature—let alone offer a universal model for anarchist struggle, as the anti-CrimethInc. camp framed things. The class war anarchist’s urgent inquiries as to when an Evasion sequel might be published were amusing—wasn’t this the same person who had decried the book with such vitriol?

This is a funny anecdote, but at second glance it reads like heavy-handed allegory. Human beings are attracted to forbidden things; nothing is more seductive than transgression. The class war anarchists in question, doubly bound by the repressive property laws of capitalist society and the moral and theoretical prescriptions of their organization, could not help but be drawn to Evasion—just as the dropout who had helped publish it regarded it as utterly mundane. Because they never dealt with the political implications of their fascination with the book, their lives remained comically divided into competing sectors: permissible versus impermissible, responsible versus pleasurable, public versus private.

Such divisions are redolent of the Protestant morality that has propped up capitalism for so long. If the class warriors had been able to affirm the excitement they experienced in reading Evasion and find ways to make their political work similarly seductive to others, would that not have been better for everyone? Far be it from us to argue that embracing CrimethInc. literature is the solution to every class war anarchist’s difficulties—the point is simply that it doesn’t pay to heap up prohibitions and antagonisms. We would like to see more overcoming of divisions in the anarchist community generally, in hopes that it will help us ultimately bring down capitalism and Protestant morality alike. It is in that spirit that we initiate our new round of activity.

A Bulgarian organizer and ‘zine publisher describes current anarchist projects in his country, discussing how Really Really Free Markets work in an eastern European context and addressing the local relevance of CrimethInc. texts from the United States. Contacts are included for those hoping to connect with anarchists between Sofia and the Black Sea.

Describe your group: how many people are involved, how long have you been active, how do you make decisions together? What projects have you been involved in?

I am part of 2 groups. The one is called “Anarchosaprotiva” (AnarchoResistance). It is based in Sofia and now we are something like 6-10 people. The group has been active since 2001. I joined this in 2004. We have a meeting every week. We don’t have any particular scheme to talk and make decisions.

It’s more like a friendly conversation and when we have ideas to do some action all of us should agree and get consensus about the thing, but everyone is free to do whatever he/she wants outside of the group. The group used to publish a monthly leaflet called “Anarchosaprotiva” as part of the Bulgarian anarchist newspaper “Svobodna Misal” (Free Thought). Now there are a lot of changes in the newspaper which is published by FAB (federation of the anarchists in Bulgaria) and this supplement is stopped being publish in the newspaper. The group has done a lot small protests actions against the militarization and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We and our Greek friends from Anti-Authoritarian Movement Thessaloníki organized a No Border Camp in Bulgaria and No Border Actions in Greece to support the freedom of movement and the illegal immigrants jailed in a illegal detention center in Venna (Greece). Some of us also have been part of the Food Not Bombs group here in Sofia which lasted for 6 months but now is dead. We have also done some creative anti-elections actions and took part in a lot of ecological protests. We put out some anarchist leaflets and distribute them during protests, concerts and at some video screenings that we organize.This year we also organized 2 times a Free Festival (Really Really Free Market).

I am also part of another group based in Razgrad. It’s not an official group. We are just a bunch of friends that do some small local actions. We are 5-6 people. The best thing is that we have started organizing this Free Festival since last year. Now a lot of people are enthusiastic by this idea of free sharing. We are very happy that we opened an Infocenter in Razgrad. It is open once a week for a couple of hours. We are a little dependent on the owners of the building. It is some school center project but the people running this place are very nice and gave us 1 big room to put literature and movies and we organize video screenings, presentation and music concerts there. My other side project is this Katarzis zine. I started doing it 2 years ago inspired by CrimethInc. I translated some texts and then got the idea to put them together, so this is how everything started. Now some people have started to help me. we write news about actions in Bulgaria, interview anarchist bands and write some our texts.

Which anarchist communities outside Bulgaria do you have the most interactions with and influence from? Greece, the US, Turkey, other places?

Maybe the most interactions we had with Anti-Authoritarian Movement from Thessaloníki (Greece), but we also have connections with a lot of anarchist groups around Europe. Now we get in touch with People’s Global Action network and will try to organize local Balkan network amongst the activist communities to share information, ideas, to support each other and to do some international action together. We have been influenced by the anarchist communities all around the world, but for most of us the biggest influenced is the CrimethInc. Collective.

How many of the projects you carry out in Bulgaria are based on formats (such as the Really Really Free Market) that you have imported from other contexts, and how have you adjusted them to fit the context in Bulgaria?

We have started with 2 projects based on such “formats” and one is now dead. Some of us were part of a Food Not Bombs group in Sofia. The idea fitted for the context in Sofia, because it is big and developed city following the western pattern. Bulgaria is also part of NATO and spent a lot of money on military actions and support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan so it was good idea to do such kind of actions. There are also a lot of homeless people in Sofia and we decided to help them in someway and to distribute antimilitaristic and vegetarian propaganda at the same time. We were collecting food from 2 big markets and from a couple of restaurants and bakeries. We managed to build good infrastructure and we did actions every Sunday for near six months, but then the summer came and most of the people hit the road and when the autumn came we were very few left, organized 3 more actions and then everything died. The other project based on such a “format” is this Free Festival we have started doing since last autumn. We have heard about this initiative in the USA and thought this was great idea and could be started here in Bulgaria. I think this is a universal model and could be put into action everywhere all around the world. In some countries there is this consuming way of life and the people could share the things they don’t need instead of throwing them; in other countries which are undeveloped there isn’t an excess of such kinds of goods, but the people could share other things like food, skills, songs, any kind of art, etc.… I think this is one of the best examples of what anarchy in practice is.

In what ways is it different to hold a Really Really Free Market in Razgrad or Sofia than it is to hold one in the USA?

I think there isn’t a big difference. Maybe the only difference is the living standard of the people. So while you could find a stereo system or a computer at a USA Really Really Free Market, this is almost impossible at a Bulgarian Really Really Free Market. The people here share mostly old clothes, shoes, books, music CDs, and toys. We try not to limit the event to be only a free market for products, but as a free zone where everyone is stimulated to take part, to play, to dance, to live a free life. And the good of this event is that everyone contributes to it. We only give the idea and set the date about it and the people come and do it.

Do you feel the public response to Really Really Free Markets is different in countries that used to have a “communist” government than it is in countries that have always been openly capitalist? Or is the relation to property the same?

I don’t think that there is big difference in the public response. Bulgaria was under “communist” government 40 years and the last 17 years of “democracy” have opened the door to unrestrained capitalism. So most of the people in Bulgaria have started to behave like the others in the Western world.

You mentioned taking some influence from CrimethInc. In the United States, some people criticize CrimethInc. by saying that the ideas associated with it are only relevant to middle class people in wealthy countries, that poor people outside the USA can have no use for them. Looking at this question from Bulgaria, what is your perspective on this critique? What have the responses been to the texts you’ve translated? What have people found useful and what has not been useful? How have you changed things to make them more useful, or decided which things to focus on when picking things to translate?

Maybe it’s true that most of the CrimethInc. tactics are not relevant for poor countries. For example, dropping out in a way of quitting your job and make a living by dumpster diving is extremely hard and almost impossible in Bulgaria. I agree with the idea of not supporting the capitalist system at all but sometimes and especially if you are alone it’s almost impossible to be out of this system and you need to work in order to survive. But I still think that if you live collectively with close-minded friends you could arrange your life in an alternative way. Most of the Roman (Gypsy) people in Bulgaria are kind of drop outs and they are still alive and exist somehow. This critique on such kind of CrimethInc. tactics exists here, too. Even some anarchists from FAB (Federation of the Anarchists in Bulgaria) blame us that we are fake and pseudo anarchists following the “modern” Western anarchism, that we are some kind of hippies and distract the attention from the main enemy which is “the state and the capital.” So we are also being criticized and have some conflicts even in the anarchist circles. But on the other hand I see that a lot of young people are interested in the projects we do. Most of the people like the zine we do and I think that the most inspiring thing is this romantic anarchism. In the beginning the zine was only consisted of translations from Days of War, Nights of Love and Recipes for Disaster. Some of them were not useful for the situation in Bulgaria, but it’s always nice to get some new ideas. We try to put these ideas into action and to change them to suit for the situation in Bulgaria.

Food Not Bombs was one of these projects. It’s possible to do it in Sofia because it’s a big city, but sometimes we were not able to collect enough food so we had to buy some stuff. We wanted to organize a Food Not Bombs group in Razgrad too, but it didn’t happen. It’s kind of impossible. We were looking for leftover food at the market but it’s almost nothing for us. So we decided to try this Really, Really Free Market and it has suited perfectly for this small town. First—the idea is great and the people are likely to share, second—nothing interesting happens in Ragzrad and event of this kind attracts a lot of attention, even the local media was interested and supported us. We were also looking for a place to squat and do an infoshop, but there are very few abandoned houses, which in most of the cases are almost destroyed. So we got in touch we some institutional organization (a school center) and asked for a place. They liked the idea for an alternative infocenter and gave us a hand. So we have this infocenter now, we are a little dependent on the building owners and could not do whatever we want in there but for now this is the best project we have done.

What are the best ways anarchists in North America can support the projects of anarchists in the Balkans?

Sometimes even an encouraging word is enough to make you feel better and continue the fight. When we are desperate the only thing that help us to not give up is to know that we are not alone, that there are other people like us around the world fighting for a better life. I am not sure what are the best ways anarchists in North America could support the anarchist projects in the Balkans. Maybe first we have to get in touch and get to know each other, to exchange information and ideas about the projects we do, to share books and other propaganda materials.

Please give a list of projects and groups in Bulgaria that could be useful to anarchists in the rest of the world, with contact information for each one.

Infocenter “Ecotopia” – this is an alternative information center based in Razgrad. It has a reading space and library with various anarchistic, environmental, anarchafeminist, animal rights, subcultural etc. materials. The place is open for video screenings, discussions, concerts, exhibitions, etc.… so anyone who is passing nearby get in touch: infocenter.ecotopia@gmail.com
Autonomous anti-authoritarian group “AnarhoSaprotiva” – this is an anarchist group based in Sofia. www.aresistance.net; aresistance@riseup.net

Katarzis zine – this is a zine with news from the local anarchist scene, some texts about everyday anarchism, environmentalism, animal rights, anarchafeminism, practical tips and interviews with music bands: katarzis@riseup.net

www.music.a-bg.net – this is an online zine focused on the DIY scene with a lot of information about actions, music, animal rights, practical tips, etc. . . sfti.diy@gmail.com

www.a-bg.net – this is an anarchist portal of FAB (Federation of the Anarchists in Bulgaria): fab@a-bg.org

Thanks so much!

Thank you, too!

In solidarity,
xITSOx

While snow was still on the ground in our small college town, rumor began to spread that the 2007 CrimethInc. convergence was going to take place in our Athens, Ohio. Excitement, worry, and disgust swept through our small radical circles. While many were consumed by other projects through the winter and spring, the convergence took the back burner in our lives. When May and June rolled around, we realized it was time to kick it into high gear. Nervous phone calls and emails were shared and panic set in. Two hundred radicals were to invade our town and we had nowhere to put them! Enlisting all the local support we could find, we set off to find land. Anxious folks across were trusting us to find the perfect place, it was June and we hadn’t started looking. We began researching State land, intentional communities, and finally private land. The key to finding land for the convergence was spreading the word as far and wide as we could and exploring every option we had. We came upon the perfect piece which was a nice farm plot with an owner who lived across the entire country. The care taker was happy to let us use the land for a little work trade which would also benefit the convergence and our word that it would be drug and alcohol free space.

The majority of the organizing was by done by few, who with more foresight may have organized a larger group to help with planning and avoided unhealthy stress. The planners had never been a part of a previous CrimethInc. convergence, nor were we familiar with the workings of the movement. Thanks to some direction, advice and recommendations from past organizers we were able to put our priorities in order quite fast, not to say stress or confusion were averted due to the tardiness in beginning the planning.

After securing our land, we began to mow the overgrowth, designate places for workshops, camping, and toilets. Simple construction of structures followed. Toilets were dug, the kitchen started to come up, and the area was mapped. With less than 2 weeks to the convergence, a group of out of town guests showed up to help set up. We continued working on the site and gathering a stock pile of supplies. Many supplies were provided by folks from out of town: including food coming in from around the state and the country. Amazing locals were going to supply stoves and kitchen supplies, tarps, tents, and daily supplies of water to our 200+ gallon tank. With less than 2 days to go, frantic organizing meetings started. When the night before the convergence rolled around everyone in town who had anything to do with the convergence was working on some aspect of the project, and a last minute meeting took place at our community center.There, with a large group of out-of town participants, we finalized last minute working groups and bottom-lined such things as final mowing, toilet construction, child care, cooking, cleaning, activities, spaces, security, and the library.

The day the convergence started everything started coming together. Last minute work was being done all over the site as people started flooding in from all over the country. The camping area was still too small, but fortunately there was a huge path hiding in the woods which would house most of the tents. The toilets we had dug were not going to be sufficient for all the shit, but more would be dug. Many chores were left to be bottomlined, but we hoped people were coming to be participants in this convergence.

One of the hardest parts of arranging the convergence was in the monetary supplies it would take to support shuttling people to and from the convergence, and lots of other little costs that were to add up over the course of the convergence. We suggest a benefit of some type before hand to cover these costs. Another was the large amount of work falling upon the shoulders of a few. Prior planning or the formation of nation-wide and local working groups or possibly an encounter with previous coordinators and current organizers could prove invaluable to future planners. The small interaction we had with our town was based upon urban games such as capture the flag and a direct action simulation and an impromptu parade following these activities. This perhaps wasn’t the best way to stage the only interaction with town as it left many people alienated from the two hundred guests in town.

Another major point of stress was the blowback from the impromptu parade due to some poor planning. A show was scheduled following the parade in the space which was also our re-direct point and the hub of CrimethInc. in-town activity. As participants were pepper-sprayed, and rumor of a raid floated through the crowd, bands from and around the country were left high and dry with a bad taste for the CrimethInc. crowd when their show was cancelled. We spent the next days cleaning, getting comrades out of jail, attending court, breaking down camp, and discussing what had just swept through our town. The convergence consumed the radical community of Athens for a month. Most were pleased with what their energy went into and how the convergence played out. Others, having worked for months, were happy to have something else on their plate. All of us were relieved to have time to breathe. While the convergence certainly was a positive thing for many locals it proved to be a difficult venture, certainly something to meditate on before committing to. It wasn’t the first time a large radical gathering had taken place in Athens, but it had been some years before that the last national group of radicals had visited for more than 2 days.

Recommendations for future convergences:

A national encounter between previous organizers, current planners, and those who wish to help direct activities to consider how the next convergence will be structured, including discussion of 2007 CrimethInc. convergence follow-up questions.

A benefit in advance!

Under the Big Tent:
Discussion Questions following the 2007 CrimethInc. Convergence in Athens, Ohio.

We humbly entreat anyone who was involved in the convergence to read this and offer their own perspectives in the comments for this post. Thank you!