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Bring the War Home communique

BWH | 26.11.2004 12:59 | Anti-militarism | Globalisation | Social Struggles

This is a primer written by anonymous authors under the banner heading of Bring The War Home. It is a discussion piece about organising direct action against the occupation of Iraq and those who support it.

100,000 Iraqis are dead as a direct result of the US/UK led invasions. Without mincing words. Fallujah is destroyed. Mossul is on fire, and Baghdad isn't doing a whole lot better. Across the country water is contaminated, electricity is down and people are not getting adequate medical care or food. And when the troops leave (which won't be until at least 2006 according to Gen. Mike Jackson) the people living in Iraq will find their 'liberation' has come at the price of all of their social services and much of the country's infrastructure being 'liberalised' into Western corporations' hands. Most reading this already know this, if you don't you'd be well advised to check out the internet (iraqiprocurement.com for example) for resources and information on the capital carve-up that's going on behind the scenes.
If we want to stop this from happening, if we want to stop the occupation of Iraq - and we're powerful enough to do just that - then perhaps we should be discussing new tactics of protest. It was inspiring to be marching with 1,000,000 people through the street's of London, but was fundamentally unthreatening to those that we need to scare.
Marching from A to B then is clearly not the answer.
Nor - due to increased police surveillance and intelligence gathering - perhaps is setting up another public group advertising how militant we're all going to be, where we're specifically going to be militant, and when we're gonna be doing it.
Perhaps - as was seen recently with how GM crops were attacked - we need small groups and individuals to bring the war back to the corporations and the state departments who are profiting from all of this. Perhaps it's time we went back and reminded the military and RAF bases and remind them that if they're going to fuck over people in Iraq that we're going to try and enact some kind of payback.
In the past we've been very successful in covert campaigns against both corporations and the State. Just look at the mess Huntingdon Life Science is in now thanks to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), or how Bayer et al. have now - to all intents and purposes - had to give up on their dream of Genetically Modified crops, thanks to the pixies and fairies that come out to play at night. The Government doesn't particularly care about our voices (who else are we gonna vote for?) but they certainly care about the bottom line, and what the business community say, and economic damage is so effective because of the unstable business climate that it creates.
Grass roots, de-centralised, clandestine direct action by security conscious groups is near impossible to counter without a huge amount of money and time being dedicated to it. We are everywhere afterall!

We need to start reforming our affinity groups. Spending time with our friends plotting and planning our next action. Conspiring to both inspire and destroy. Educate and obliterate. And what if affinity groups communicate with one another. Can you imagine the mayhem we could create with just fifty people if they all simultaneously, decided to block every army recruitment centre in the South-East of England. It's often claimed that we have this sort of organisational skill, and we almost certainly do, perhaps it's time we started using our collective and individual power!

So who do we target? How do we target something as massive as the State or those corporations who profit off of war? Perhaps it's Leviathan-like size should be seen to our advantage rather than disadvantage. Every town has an army recruitment centre. Every town has a bank directly involved in profiting off this war. And everywhere has petrol stations.
The point is to encourage sustained affinity-group based direct action. The fact that this action is both satisfying and rewarding would hopefully enable it to start taking the shape of a popular anti-war campaign.
Spreading our ideas will help with this. Writing fliers, making posters, posting on message boards, sending communiqués to scare the Daily Mail, and word of mouth should all help to get our message out their and remind people that the government - and forces that keep it in place - are not as powerful as they like us to believe. We can start the job ourselves simply by talking to our friends, and writing our own pamphlets that outlines the basic idea of actions that we could take against the state.

It should be noted that our actions don't have to revolve around property destruction. Mass trespasses, lock-ons and even just fliers being handed outside army recruitment centres are all effective, especially since it's a way for people to take part without necessarily taking too great a risk. Perhaps it'd be wise to re-iterate that damage to human or non-human life should not be considered acceptable in our community.

Some tactics then that we might consider:
- Flyposting fliers and posters, around our communities and on business premises.
- Window breaking via. *ahem* a brick or other crude object.
- Redecoration of windows or brickwork by way of paint, graffiti or glass etching solution.
- Lock-ons outside buildings, or institutions so people can't get to work.
- Lock-ins by way of 'liquid metal', or glue being placed in a lock.
- Mass trespass on RAF bases.
- Occupation of Army recruitment centres and army barracks.
- Releasing the inner clown and becoming part of C.I.R.C.A (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army) and confusing the crap out of the old plod.

We need - as a community - to discuss more and new ideas, and ways in which we can end this occupation of Iraq. Equally we need to look at our collective history.

Most importantly though it's time to bring the war home.

BWH

Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. so... lets get started — activo
  2. a — a
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