Sabotage
1. (noun) Illegal act, usually violent, of interference, destruction, aimed at rendering unworkable production, civil or military installations.
2. (noun) Manipulation, acts aimed at the disorganization or failure of a business or project.
3. (noun) Material act aimed at preventing the normal functioning of a service
At times we would be led to believe that we live in a world of ghosts. Without body or form, they haunt our days and nights, trying to identify and control, our entire existence. They are called Economy, Nation, Politics, Public Good, State, Order. Nobody knows exactly what they are, why they exist and above all, no one agrees with what the other means by them. So, ghosts are elusive, extremely resistant to benevolent or constructive criticism as they say, because doted with an incredible capacity to absorb half-opinions, approximations and superficial criticism.
Power is constantly widening the abyss between these ideological concepts and the undeniable substance of exploitation, oppression, injustice, lack of freedom. Economics is spoken of as if it was something separate from the hours of stifling work we do, as if it was not the clothes we wear all manufactured by millions of slaves in a far-off country. We speak of Order without realizing that this concept, when applied to reality is, for example, thousands of dead immigrants at the borders. There is talk of Confinement, Punishment, Justice, but the speaker has rarely spent years in nine meters square.
By struggling we pierce this castle of ghosts, the lies that this society is based on. We see things in all their cruelty, in flesh and blood. Beyond the game of the deforming mirrors of ideologies. Beyond the professionals of discourse and specialists of analysis. We break the false separation between objective and subjective, feeling and reason, thinking and acting: our thoughts go with the rhythm of our hearts that give strength to our hands to act.
In our struggle, one of the weapons we have at our disposition, is sabotage. The illegal and destructive deeds of one acting in hostile territory, behind the enemy lines. Rather than engage in a frontal battle and succumb to the ultra-developed defenses of the system, we proposed sabotage to prevent the construction of the maxi-prison. To impair, undermine and destroy the inner workings of the machine that is about to build this prison horror: the companies that build it, the architects pencil in hand, the engineers that calculate the most economical and safe way to confine a human being, the banks and institutions that finance it, the politicians who acclaim and justify it. While power is preparing its waltz of ghosts with shots of discourse on overpopulation, security, Justice, sabotage brings out the materiality of all this maxi-prison affair.
In addition to preventing its normal functioning, sabotage spreads disorder in the ranks of the enemy. It cannot know where the next blow will come from. One moment it is the windows of an architect’s office that shatter overnight, another time a building of engineers is stormed during the day, and yet another flames ravage the construction site and equipment of prison constructors. Sabotage disrupts the enemy.
And it is by disorganizing it that it is unable to meet its goals, such as imposing a maxi-prison on Brussels. So, far away from us the politicos’ speeches, the journalists’ chatter, the legalist illusions of citizenist opposition, all hypocritical bla bla bla. Let’s sabotage the castle of ghosts.
Ricochets, Bulletin against the maxi-prison and the world that goes with it. No. 6, May 2015.
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