The Southern Desert Correctional Center (SDCC) is located in open, arid desert, forty miles north of Las Vegas and just twenty-eight miles south of the U.S. nuclear test site at Mercury, Nev. Inmates joke that it will require but one significant mathematical mistake and we will all disintegrate and dissolve into desert dust. At night, a pack of coyotes, on their way to the institution’s garbage dump, pause at the prison’s perimeter, staring through the barbed wire at the even stranger creatures inside.
Two creatures held in contempt and scorned by society: coyotes and convicts.
DVD 88 minutes
In Punishment Park, political dissidents face citizen tribunals set up by the Nixon administration to try revolutionaries and antiwar activists. These are kangaroo courts in which a guilty sentence is predetermined. The defendants must choose between lengthy jail terms or three days in Punishment Park. Almost all choose the latter, entering a “game” with the object of reaching the American flag on the other side of 56 miles of scorching hot desert with no food or water, as police and military units carry out counterinsurgency exercises on them. The participants are told that they will be pardoned if they reach the flag. Continue reading Not the State’s Failure, but its Success→
For a moment there during the L.A. Riots there was jubilation as people showed they could take the streets back from the police, if only for a night or two. Poor people were able to attain things they could otherwise never afford. Capitalism’s excess products that forever waste away in the stores to be bought or always to be replaced by another on the shelf were liberated for use or for poor people to sell at swap meets for much more reasonable prices. Reporters on the scene were alarmed to see looters smiling and laughing. What isn’t fun about liberating free stuff from overpriced stores? People felt free. The crowd turning over and setting on fire the police car downtown was laughing, cheering and howling because they were having a blast and it was a crowd of mothers and their children, every race and age and every kind of folk you’d meet in this diverse city. Continue reading Preparations for the Next Riot→
“It is idiotic that those who have figured things out are forced to wait for the mass of cretins who are blocking the way to evolve. The herd will always be the herd. So let’s leave it to stagnate and work on our own emancipation (…) Put your old refrains aside. We have had enough of always sacrificing ourselves for something. The Fatherland, Society and Morality have fallen (…) That’s fine, but don’t contribute to reviving new entities for us: the Idea, the Revolution, Propaganda, Solidarity; we don’t give a damn. What we want is to live, to have the comforts and well-being we have a right to. What we want to accomplish is the development of our individuality in the full sense of the word, in its entirety. The individual has a right to all possible well-being, and must try to attain it all the time, by any means…” (Hégot, an illegalist, writing to the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux in 1903, on behalf of a “small circle” who shared his opinions.)
Parallel to the social, collectivist anarchist current there was an individualist one whose partisans emphasized their individual freedom and advised other individuals to do the same. Individualist anarchist activity spanned the full spectrum of alternatives to authoritarian society, subverting it by undermining its way of life facet by facet. Continue reading The “Illegalists”→
A Crime Called Freedom: The Writings of Os Cangaceiros, Volume One
by Os Cangaceiros
Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher
Eberhardt Press, 2006
168 pages. Paper. $6.00
For over two decades the anonymous social rebels collectively known as Os Cangaceiros blazed a trail of unfettered revolt across the European social landscape. They traveled the continent intervening in wildcat strikes, riots and other explosions of social tension and class violence, contributing what they could to the struggles of those with whom they found affinity. Continue reading In Praise of Unfettered Revolt→
There are moments when life seems entirely impossible. All the crazy dreams of rebellion disappear. The desire to revolt against the society of the civilized is lost to futility, the open but empty hand. All of the late-night laughter filled conversations, the meanderings and wanderings of those intoxicated with thoughts of adventure, begin to seem naive and empty. One comes to the conclusion that one is accomplishing nothing: destruction and creation seem equally without attraction. One abandons one’s own imagination and returns to the old trap of fear. The existential idiot occupies one’s head. Continue reading Against Amnesia→
Assassinations, massacres, rape, torture: these crimes committed on the soil of what was once Yugoslavia are not the acts of uncontrollable savages; of educationless brutes.
No doubt as children they respected the family order; are now more or less faithful followers of religions; earnest sports spectators; content with television. In a word, civilized folks; normal people doing what society expects them to!
Each crime demonstrates the success of diverse processes of domestication which have come to be grouped under the heading of Civilization. Continue reading How Nice To Be Civilized!→
(From “Anarchy: a Journal Of Desire Armed” , Fall-Winter, 1994-95)It is idiotic that those who have figured things out are forced to wait for the mass of cretins who are blocking the way to evolve. The herd will always be the herd. So let’s leave it to stagnate and work on our own emancipation (… ) Put your old refrains aside. We have had enough of always sacrificing ourselves for something. The Fatherland, Society and Morality have fallen (…) That’s fine, but don’t contribute to reviving new entities for us: the Idea, the Revolution, Propaganda, Solidarity; we don’t give a damn. Continue reading THE “ILLEGALISTS”→
