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Manifesto of solidarity with Venezuelan anarchists and social movements

IAF-IFA | 04.08.2007 16:44 | Analysis | Repression | Social Struggles | World

* The newspaper Tierra y Libertad, mouthpiece of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, published in edition 227 of June 2007 this manifesto of the International of Anarchist Federations (IAF-IFA; www.iaf-ifa.org) in support of those who in Venezuela today confront the bureaucratic capitalist project of the Chavez government as well as their social democrat and right wing opponents.


In the first three months of 2007, 23 popular demonstrations were repressed by the Venezuelan government and 99 activists were detained. This fact speaks of the growing unease as well as the criminalization of social struggle in this Latin-American country, in a reality masked by the propaganda and mystification of a regime that paints itself as the vanguard of ‘21st Century socialism’ with the support of different groupings and persons associated with the authoritarian left throughout the world.

However, those who are concerned with the real situation of the oppressed and exploited in Venezuela know the inconsistencies and contradictions of the populist government led by the militarist Hugo Chavez. Far from structurally advancing the reduction of inequalities and the increase of possibilities of social development, the government in power in Caracas continues to maintain one of the most unjust systems of distribution of wealth in the continent, further deepening the role assigned to the country by economic globalization as a secure and trustworthy provider of energy to the global market, with trans-national oil corporations as pampered partners and principal beneficiaries of the actions of the Venezuelan state. After eight and a half years of a government relying on high oil prices with the highest financial income in national history, the social results of Chavez’s politics are mediocre, the most notable being the apparition of a new parasitic bourgeoisie of the client state, the ‘bolivarian bourgeoisie’.

According to recent government reports and statistics, over 5 million workers, 46.5% of the labour force remain in the informal sector of the economy, 43% of workers receive a salary under the legal minimum wage, a little less than 200 dollars per month, 2.5 million people lack suitable housing, 18% of the population suffer malnutrition, the network of public hospitals displays needs and limitations of every type, 90% of the indigenous population live in poverty, more than 400 people die violently each year in prison and there is an average of 15 people assassinated every month by repressive organs of the state.

The Venezuelan government has maintained over the last five years an inter-class dispute with certain traditional sectors of the local bourgeoisie which, in the midst of a strong political-electoral polarization, has allowed the division, immobilization, and recuperation of the country’s social movements. Any critic of the corrupt, inefficient and wasteful official bureaucracy would immediately qualify it as being ‘at the service of imperialism’, and with the excuse of confronting possible ‘coup’s and ‘reactionary provocations’, they have announced diverse laws that penalize with greater vigour street actions and strikes in the basic state industries. These are part of legal mechanisms that since 2006 have been used against popular mobilizations which, trying to recuperate their own demands, demonstrate every week for the right to personal security, decent housing, work and decent working conditions. The response of the government has been with tear gas grenades, gunshots and arrests.

Faced with the deceitful polarization experienced in this country, and specifically as a response to the presidential mandate to dissolve previously existing parties and groupings in order to integrate them in to the single party of Chavism, with the acronym PSUV, diverse Venezuelan organisations are trying to create autonomous spaces for the social movements. Amongst these are the efforts of the anarchists who from separate initiatives, such as the publication El Libertario (www.nodo50.org/ellibertario) are building an alternative that is as removed from the social democrat and right wing opposition as it is from the capitalism of the Bolivarian state. This effort by the anarchists to construct alternatives and routes that are consistently autonomous implies risks: El Libertario, for example, must face a systematic campaign of recriminations and disrepute from fictitious groups paid for by the state, thus there is a growing harassment of anti-authoritarian activism.

This manifesto wishes to remind our libertarian brothers and sisters inside Venezuela, as well as the various grass roots autonomous organisations that they have our appreciation, support and solidarity. Our anarchist organisations and initiatives will denounce, in every way they can, the incoherence and demagoguery hidden behind the alias of the ‘bolivarian revolution’, activating the necessary support mechanisms in response to every government attack against the concrete aspirations of social justice and liberty of the Venezuelan people.

IAF-IFA
- e-mail: secretariat@iaf-ifa.org
- Homepage: http://www.iaf-ifa.org

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just my take on things

06.08.2007 08:43


Celebrating Diversity


When I was a little boy I was taught that it is bad to lie. I was taught that it is always better to tell the truth, even if that sometimes puts one at a disadvantage. For example, if my mother asked me, "Bill, did you eat all of the cookies in the cookie jar?" and I had done it, I knew that I was supposed to say, "Yes, mother, I did," even though it might mean a whipping for me.
I believe that I was taught this pretty well, because I always felt guilty, I felt very bad, when I lied to avoid some unpleasantness or to gain some advantage. Actually, I usually told the truth, and as I grew up I admired and respected people who had the courage to be truthful when it was disadvantageous to them.

But as I grew up I also learned that life is a complicated business, and that sometimes it isn't easy to decide what is right and what is wrong. For example, suppose one is in a war: is it right to lie to the enemy? In a war there will be situations in which the disadvantage in telling the truth is not just to oneself, but also to one's people. Should one put the obligation to tell the truth above the obligation to protect one's people?

I thought about that one for a while. I decided that while there may have been, in the past, wars between gentlemen, where being truthful even to the enemy was the right thing, being truthful to the sort of enemies one was likely to encounter today could not be justified.

That decision moved me onto the rather slippery terrain of situational ethics. After the Second World War a lot of people skated pretty far out onto the thin ice of that terrain: they decided that what is right and what is wrong has no absolute meaning at all, that it all depends upon the situation one finds oneself in at the moment. They went much further in that direction than I was willing to go. As a practical matter, they abandoned ethics altogether, although they probably wouldn't agree with that assessment. From my point of view, for right and wrong to have any meaning in the moral sense, they must have the same meaning at least most of the time. One might be justified in making occasional rare exceptions -- in time of war, for example -- but most of the time one must have ethical rules which don't change to suit the situation or the crowd one happens to be with at the moment. If one has one set of rules when one is with Christians, a different set when one is with Jews, a third set when one is in the company of homosexuals, different sets of rules for Democrats and Republicans, and so on -- then from my point of view one should be looked on as an unprincipled or unethical person.

This drift away from a generally agreed upon definition of right and wrong to the sort of extreme situational ethics one sees in public and private life today has been a natural consequence of the increasing degree of "diversity," of inhomogeneity and chaos, in American society since the Second World War. That is one more reason why we must return to a homogeneous society if we ever want to have a moral society and a moral government again. People who tell you that we can have both morality and at the same time diversity of the sort the government and the media are pushing just don't know what they're talking about.

I don't know whether or not you've been around homosexuals enough to get a feeling for the generally different attitude toward life which prevails among them. It's not just that they have different sexual practices: they are a group which has abandoned completely the absolute ethics that I grew up with, and they have adopted instead the view that whatever feels good at the moment is good. It's a totally hedonistic view of life. Personally I wouldn't care what homosexuals thought or how they behaved, if they lived in a separate society of their own. Unfortunately, they don't, and I see homosexual ethics rubbing off on a lot of otherwise normal people. This has become an especially severe problem since the government and the media have declared homosexuality to be socially acceptable. In cities like Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the heterosexual yuppies invite homosexual yuppies to their cocktail parties and vice versa. This explains, I think, why the yuppies around Bill and Hillary Clinton -- and I'm talking now about the heterosexual yuppies -- don't see anything wrong with the fact that the President of the United States exposes himself to female employees and asks for sex, runs around with cocaine dealers, invites Chinese gangsters to sleep in the White House in return for large envelopes full of cash, and lies continuously. That's the sort of world these yuppies live in. It's a pretty degenerate, depraved sort of world, where anything goes.

Most of the time we ordinary people out beyond the beltway don't hear about the degeneracy and the depravity in which these people are immersed. The media cover for them. The Jews in the media understand that many of us still operate by the old rules and that we would be shocked if we learned the details about what goes on in the world of the Clintonistas. So ordinarily they don't tell us about the details.

It used to work this way back during the Vietnam war too. The Jews would organize a big demonstration in Washington, and I'd go downtown to observe, because I was interested in the types of people who were participating, how the demonstrations were organized, and so on. And I'd see the demonstration led by a bunch of New York Jews carrying a big, red banner which stretched clear across the street and had big pictures of Marx and Lenin and the words "Revolutionary Communist Party" on it. And there would be hundreds of people scattered among the demonstrators carrying Communist Viet Cong flags. And then I would watch the television coverage of the demonstration on the evening news, and I would be amazed. I would ask myself, "Is this the same demonstration I saw this afternoon?" The news cameramen would manage to miss completely the big Revolutionary Communist Party banner and the Viet Cong flags. Instead they would focus on some woman pushing a baby carriage with a baby in it. What was clearly a pro-Viet Cong demonstration they called a "peace" demonstration, and the coverage of it was sanitized, so that the folks out in Kansas or Iowa watching on television would get the impression that the demonstrators were mostly just ordinary people like themselves.

And the controlled media do a similar job of sanitizing their coverage of the lives of the rich and powerful -- so long as those being covered are Politically Correct, of course. But sometimes there's a slipup. That's what happened at a big party for the rich and powerful in San Francisco a while back. On May 3 a man named Jack Davis had a birthday party for himself and invited all of the political bigshots. Davis is a well-known political fixer and campaign consultant in San Francisco, and so the mayor came, the sheriff came, and so did all of the other top politicians and media bosses.

Davis is a homosexual, and his party reflected this. There was a male striptease show, semi-nude men in leather paraphernalia and tattoos wandered about, and various sex acts took place in full view of the guests. Then a pair of performers put on a sado-masochist act. It would take me far beyond the bounds of decency to describe in detail what they did to each other, but it ended with one of the performers taking off his pants and bending over while the other used the neck of a whisky bottle to perform an indecent act on him.

To homosexuals this sort of thing is all great fun, and the Politically Correct heterosexual yuppies of San Francisco have learned to regard it as "normal" and take it in stride. But someone new to this sort of thing had been invited to the party by mistake and found it so shocking that he risked being considered "homophobic" -- in San Francisco that's as bad as being a "racist" or an "anti-Semite" -- he risked being considered "homophobic" by describing to some media people he knew who weren't at the party what it had been like. So, the story started coming out, and the media people who had been at the party had to say something about it and pretend to be shocked in order to protect their image in the eyes of the not-so-rich and not-so-powerful citizens of San Francisco. Then the sheriff, the mayor, and the other politicians who had been at the party had to pretend to be shocked too, in order to cover their asses, if you'll pardon my expression. Eventually the Sunday Times of London carried a full account of the party in its May 11, 1997, issue.

The whole thing was like the story by Hans Christian Anderson about the emperor's new clothes. If the newcomer hadn't popped the balloon by saying, "This is disgusting and depraved," everyone else would have kept on pretending that everything was fine. As it is, although the San Francisco Chronicle felt obliged to say something -- after the whistle had been blown -- most Americans outside the San Francisco area still haven't heard about this party. The media bosses decided that it wasn't newsworthy. No point in getting the folks in Kansas and Iowa riled up.

Of course, most of the private parties thrown by the rich and degenerate in Hollywood, New York, or Washington don't have a homosexual theme. San Francisco is a special place. But the degeneracy nevertheless has permeated the whole stratum of Politically Correct yuppie society. In particular, the Clintons and the people around them are of the same sort as those at Jack Davis's San Francisco birthday party: the same sort of politicians, the same sort of media people. They are people with hedonist ethics, the ethics of homosexuals.

So what should we old-fashioned people, who still believe in right and wrong, do about this situation? Even though there are more of us than there are of them, we can't afford to do what many of us really are itching to do. The people on our side still are too divided, too disorganized, and too confused for that to be successful. We must not depart from a policy of legality and non-violence at this time.

We know that a society without a soul, a society without a strong moral basis, cannot long survive. Indeed, we can see this society unraveling almost month by month. But we must not just sit and wait for the cleansing fire. There must be something left after the fire in order to build a new society. We have a responsibility to do whatever is necessary to guarantee this. Our morality must not be just a passive morality, which keeps us from doing what is wrong. It also must be an active morality, which leads us to do what is right. It must be a morality which leads us to plan, to prepare, to build, to preserve -- and eventually to fight.

In planning, in preparing, in building, we must understand why we have this problem of moral decay, of moral breakdown, in our society now. Our ancestors in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Germany, and in the other parts of Europe from which they came brought to America a common morality which was many centuries old. Why this sudden collapse during the past 50 years or so?

I've already pointed out that as we moved from a homogeneous, essentially European or White society in America before the Second World War to a multiracial, multicultural chaos today we were bound to experience a certain degree of moral confusion, of moral disorientation. But we also must note that during the past 50 years or so the mass media have had an unprecedented degree of influence on manners and morals in America, and during that same period the mass media in America have been almost entirely under the control of people whose ancestors did not share the morality of our ancestors.

The mass influx of Jews into America began toward the end of the last century. By the early part of this century they were buying up American newspapers and magazines as fast as they could. Then they began moving into radio broadcasting. In the 1930s they virtually took over Hollywood. After the Second World War, when television first began having an impact on the thinking of Americans, Jews were in total control of this new medium. The children of the 1960s were raised on television. The television receiver was their baby-sitter, their foster parent, their teacher. And what television taught them was that their ancestors were exploiters, imperialists, and bigots: an obnoxious, pushy, self-righteous, and hateful bunch of people who stole America from the peace-loving, inoffensive Indians. Television taught them to despise their own traditions and folkways. Television began to instill in them a sense of guilt for being White: a sense of guilt for being better off than non-Whites, for being more successful, more creative, and more civilized than the inhabitants of the non-White world. Then gradually, subtly, slyly at first and more and more boldly and arrogantly later, television began teaching them the new morality, the morality of hedonism, the Clinton morality.

We are fortunate in being able to see some of the consequences of this new morality now, to see some of its effects on our society. In a sense we are even fortunate in having this new morality in the highest levels of our government, where it is especially conspicuous. Most of all, we are fortunate that it has infected only a minority of our people, an especially susceptible minority, and that the healthier majority are beginning to react strongly against it.

Very little of this reaction can be credited to those who traditionally have been the guardians of morality in our society: namely the leaders of our churches. They have, almost to a man, sold out to the enemy, sold out to the corrupters of our people. They have eagerly participated in promoting multiculturalism and multiracialism and the acceptance of homosexuality and of moral relativism generally, in the hope of getting a pat on the head from the masters of the media. No, when the healthy elements of our people have rejected this new morality, it has been an instinctive reaction, rather than anything taught them by today's churches.

The media really are the key to this problem. It is they which have undermined the old morality, promoted the new morality, and also taken the primary role in destroying the homogeneity in which the old morality was at home and brought about the social and racial chaos which is congenial to the new morality.

If we are to have more than an instinctive and uninformed reaction to what the media have done, if we are to have a rejection of the new morality which is not only instinctive but also is informed and organized, then we must have media of our own.

American Dissident Voices broadcasts and Free Speech are just a small start toward what we must build. We must build our media to the point where we are able to talk with all of our people. We must do much more than just inform them about what is going on in the world today. We also must help them to understand that their instincts in rejecting the Clinton morality are healthy. We must teach them to have faith in their instincts. And then we must begin restoring the knowledge of our traditions, the knowledge of our roots, which they were robbed of by the controlled media. We must build again in our people self-confidence and a sense of purpose. Eventually we must be able to bring our people to the point that when they hear what goes on at one of these Politically Correct yuppie parties in Washington or San Francisco or anywhere else, they won't just be shocked and disgusted but also will be determined to put a final end to it: to root these people out of our government and out of our media and to make it impossible for them to exert their evil influence on our children or on our society.

That's a big job, a really big job. But it's a job that must be done. I believe that together we can do it. I believe that more and more people will join our effort to get the job done, because the disgust with the Clinton morality is growing and spreading. More and more people, even though they don't understand all of the things we've talked about today, know that they're fed up with what's going on. What we have to do now is help all of these people understand. I'll do part of that work, but you must do part too. I'm counting on your support.



for more on this topic see;

www.sfimc.

www.transbaynessie.org

one of many


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IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

Irrelevant nazis fuck off!

06.08.2007 12:46

Is it just me, or does someone seem to have replied to a (not especially brilliant) article about anarchists in venezuela with a very long homophobic and anti-semitic rant? If so, um, what? Why? Could someone get rid of this crap?

Very confused


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This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

"nessie"

13.08.2007 21:52

This is a forgery, one of many. For some idea how often nessie's name gets forged, Google "nessie indymedia forgery" and see what comes up.

 http://tinyurl.com/2tcga5

this is a forgery


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