john filiss-green anarchist

8/8/2019 John Filiss-Green Anarchist

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John Filiss

Interview with John Connor Of Green Anar ist

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General editor since 1995 forGreen Anar ist , undoubtedly one of the nest and fore-most anar ist publications in the world, John Connor rst discovered anar ism during the70s punk explosion. e 80s found him involved with the peace movement and animal lib-eration, and the 90s took him into squa ing, anti-racist activities, and Earth liberation. Moreimportant than where hes been, however, is where hes going. If anar y has any anceof realization, it will no doubt be due in some part toGreen Anar ist and its outspoken,well-spoken general editor.

How would you describe the current direction of Green Anar ist?

GA was originally intended to bring together different currents in the 1980s protest cul-ture. It had a Bre t quote on its masthead: e enemies of the people are those that knowwhat the people need. One of the founders, Ri ard Hunt, put an end to this eclecticism a era couple of years. In 1986, he excluded the others and imposed a rigid economic analysis.

is had the merit of being rooted in primitive affluence and did allenge fundamentals of

Civilization, but those involved in the Hunt years found themselves stu with recruiting andpromoting his line. By the end of the 1980s, most anar ist tendencies were as ideologised the ACF actually boasted of their platformism at this time. When some quirk led Huntto demand support for the Gulf War in 1991, he was ousted by the other editors peasantsrevolt and dri ed off into the far Right.

e remaining editors then began to pay more a ention to writers like Fredy Perlmanand John Zerzan and developing a green anar ism superceding Hunts economism. Duringthe 1994 Anar y in the UK festival, they met John Moore and Leigh Starcross, the start of the Anar o-Primitivist Network. GA then introducedanti-civ critiques of work, te nology,ideology, etc., to the European movement through themed zines and importing key texts.

During this review process, we naturally encountered Cama e and Collis On Organi-

zation. It crystallized our dissatisfaction with ideologized politics, then already being su-perceded by the direct action movement, groups like EF! , etc.. However, this le us witha problem: if ideology was the enemy, what role forGA? We saw our new role as negat-ing ideological ra ets by exposing their contradictions and compromises with Power, andalso facilitating resistance and resistance-thinking by listing actions that were happening andte niques suggested by readers for increasing their autonomy, and also by acting as a forumfor those involved to discuss them on a no censorship, no endorsement basis. We didntwant to judge the actions or discussion about them. Some have complained this broadeningof access toGA has reduced the quality of debate in it or given the oxygen of publicity to actsthat are just plain anti-social rather than revolutionary. It isnt our business to judge them its for readers to sort out amongst themselves in our pages and in their lives.

e authorities both those now running things and the wannabes in the movementthatd like to are evidently extremely upset by this approa , so I guess weve hit on aformula worth going on with for a while.

What nations of Europe appear to have the greatest interest in the topics and perspectives of Green Anar ist?

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We used to publish a contacts list in GA and the anar o-orthodoxy in UK used to hateit as it was so mu larger and more diverse than theirs. We stopped this last year becauseby that point we were si ened enough by other tendencies willy-waving to nd our ownintolerable. It was a bit of a relic of the Hunt era people dont have to be in our club toliberate themselves.

From the old contact list, Id say we have as mu support on mainland Europe as wedo in UK, remarkable given the language barrier. I think the reason for that is that, despiteover a decade of at erism, theres more repressive tolerance in UK. People thought the1994 Criminal Justice Act might be the end of a long tradition of polite dissent and civildisobedience in UK, but the CJA pre y soon proved unenforceable and that space remainedopen. Britain had its revolution earlier than most other European countries (way ba inthe 17 ) and thats le so mu longer for the revolutionary tradition to be recuperated bytrades unionism, etc.. I think more people have seen through that on the Continent than,for example, syndicalists here because those models are more o en tested on the streets of mainland Europe and found counter-revolutionary.

ere are two levels of interest in GA on the mainland. Generally, in Scandinavia andEastern Europe, interest is relativelysupercial veganism, animal lib, punk, all tied togetherby the sort of rights analysis popular in the UK in the 1980s and sadly still persisting. eyget the zine because it lists their actions and has the latest goss, but its really just aboutimporting the British direct action movement lo , sto , and barrel, complete with slogansin English! More promising are those in Germany, Italy and the Fire ief group in Turkeywho are trying to go beyond this, allenging the totality of Civilization in a coherent way.Its noteworthy that in these countries, repression is most extreme by the State in Italy andTurkey, and by the tail-end of the Le in Germany. is is a great shame as EF! GermanysDer Auel ( e Owl) was excellent in its re-analysis of the Frankfurt S ool. Weve receivedthe odd le er from the Invariance group in Paris, but our la of Fren has been a barrierthere so far.

Give me some ba ground information on the Gandalf Trial.

ings are ge ingho er for revolutionaries post-Cold War. Internally, the security forcesare looking for new targets to keep themselves in work and externally, theyre collaboratingmore with the ongoing formation of the European super-state, ex anging repressive te -niques and levelling them up.

From 1990, GA and groups associated with us were targeted by MI5 provocateurs to man-ufacture an eco-terrorist threat. One, Tim Hepple, wrote an ecotage manual recommend-ing assassination, articles in GA encouraging political violence, and supplied lists of fascistshoping this would precipitate a street war. An activist for Belfast Animal Rights, then aGAcontact group, was arrested by the Army at gunpoint on bomb arges thanks to one StuartMcCullo (this trial collapsed when the prosecution refused to produce McCullo in courtas a witness). Both claimed involvement in the Earth Liberation Front, a militant splinterof EF!UK. Both were exposed by independent anti-fascist resear er Larry OHara in 1933/4,

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but the institutional wheels were turning by that stage, media conduits accusing GA and theELF of everything from a plot to sabotage the Grand National using hang gliders to a mas-sive ip burglary at the Department of Transport! A er the propaganda came the SpecialBran raids, a whole year of them, 55 in all. Some of the questions asked were nuts GAeditor and ex-RAF engineer Steve Booth was asked whether hed sabotaged a live freightaircra that crashed at Coventry airport in late-1994 with the loss of six lives, and the Branalso investigated GAs supposed links to the Oklahoma City bombing! ey wanted to linkGAs editors and spokespeople for the ALF to a le er bombing campaign by the Justice De-partment (no, over here theyre animal lib militants), but by the time it rea ed the court,the State had decided it was easier to prove wed just conspired to report su actions. epress continued to report this Gandalf (GA-aND-ALF) prosecution as against a bomb plotanyway. As far as the State were concerned, legally and politically, it didnt ma er. In UK,inciting an act carries the same penalty as the act itself a potential life sentence in this case and MI5 were busy redening all subversion as terrorism. e idea was to criminalizethe direct action movement through us, giving the security forces a monopoly when it cameto representing it in the media.

e odds were massively sta ed against all the defendants. Under the conspiracy/incitement laws, thoughtcrime and the rules of evidence that applied in 16 century wittrials still apply in UK. You can be tried simply for your beliefs, your lifestyle, and thoseof people that may only know you at four or more degrees of separation. Furthermore,the normal burden of proof is reversed to establish your innocence, you must disproveprosecution conspiracy theory, whilst their interpretations are presumed to be reasonableinferences. Not only were news reports deemed incitement, but reviews of text publishedby others overseas, T-shirt slogans and even listing too many political prisoners on one page!

e most trivial associations were deemed evidence of conspiracy whod wri en le ers of support to ALF press officer Robin Webb in prison, whod a ended a meeting any defendanthad, or received a GA t-shirt through the post, all were raided and threatened with arrest forconspiracy. e State spent 4 million pounds on this prosecution; involved the RCMP, FBI,Italian and Finnish political police; rigged it so that the trial was heard in Portsmouth, homeof the Royal Navy and the court with the highest conviction and sentencing rates in UK; andhad a former NATO major general presiding and at least a third of the jury from militaryba grounds, despite the judge agreeing to exclude su individuals! Defense witness Darren

urston was deported on arrival in UK as an undesirable alien before he could even tes-tify. Judge Selwood blo ded defense motions and witness questions as a ma er of course,informed jurors he considered defendants guilty even as the defense case was being made,and spent 3 days at the end of the 12 week trial convincing the jury of the defendants

guilt. Of six arged, one was actually acqui ed and two others had their trials deferreduntil a year later, November 1998. Consistent withthe security forces gameplan, the judgedescribed the three GA writers convicted as terrorists and sentenced them ea to threeyears imprisonment, the same some squaddy whod strangled his wife and buried her underthe patio got in the same court a month previously.

During the course of the rst Gandalf trial, its implications dawned on the alternative

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press and the rst of many statements of solidarity and deance were drawn up in support of the defendants. Names came in from across the world including the Nobel laureates NoamChomsky and Harold Pinter, GA continued to be published as usual, and other alternativezines also started running deant direct action diaries, there were protests at British em-bassies in the Cze republic and New Zealand, tru s were burned and but ers forced outof business in UK. What nally forced the State to let the Gandalf ree go a er 4 monthsinside was the project of Amnesty International classifying them as political prisoners be-cause of the injustice of their trial. e rees release has severly undermined the viabilityof the Gandalf-2 trial, judge Selwoods career is now on hold, the Hampshire Special Branfronting for the Security forces are trying to shi blame and refusing comment to even theirown tame media, and the provocateurs are now ge ing a lot of embarassing a ention fromthe movement. Victory on this may be close, but we appreciate it will be only temporary Europeanization is continuing regardless and the security forces will still need to validatetheir new National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

While Green Anar ist was suffering the inevitable difficulties of the Gandalf Trial, and in particular need of a show of solidarity from all those concerned about freedom, you inexplicably came under a a by Stewart Home and FabianTompse in what appeared to be a clear a empt to undermine your support.Perhaps you can give me some sket of what occurred.

I think theres a danger of oversimplifying the Neoist Alliances campaign against GA. Itstarted before Operation Washington was even thought of, with an article by Stewart Homein the Independent, a yuppy broadsheet, a a ing the non-sectarian October 1994 Anar yin the UK festival. In it, he tried to pretend that Ri ard Hunt was still editing GA, eventhough wed actually booted him out three years earlier. When the Independent was askedto correct this error, Home anonymously circulated a series of phony leaets painting us aseco-fascists wantingGreen death camps &c., and then had the utzpah to accuse ourselvesand Larry OHara of spreading disinformation against him when allenged about this.

It later emerged that Home was the one associated with fascists, Ri ard Lawson and hiserrand boy Tony Wakeford, both formerly of the volkish nationalist Iona Collective. Homehad known Wakeford since their mutual involvement in the punk scene in the early 1980s Homes claim to the utopian tradition he gives a garbled account of in Assault on Culture and continued to sympathetically review Wakeford when he joined the National Frontand fronted one Holocaust-denying band a er another. From Iona, Lawson went on to theTransEuropa Collective, whi has now taken over Ri ard Hunts zine, Alternative Green.GA #36 was the rst to expose Lawsons involvement in TransEuropa andtheir early a emptsto court Hunt. is all made Homes agenda obvious he was trying to cover his arse byfalsely accusing GA of doing precisely what he was actually doing!

At the October 1995 Anar ist Bookfair, nine months a er Operation Washington be-gan, Home collected together his smears and issued them as Green Apocalypse. In this, heclaimed that whilst GA was inciting, the cops had no interest in shu ing it down they

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could if they wanted. is while the cops had seized our computers and all available records,raided contacts and editors, bookshops and mail order customers, had lies printed about usin the national press, scared off our printer and tried to get our bank account closed as fund-ing terrorism! Curiously, according to papers that came to light during the 1997 Gandalf trial, undercover cops from OperationWashington visited the 1995 Bookfair on the word of acondential source but e ed out only two stalls, GA and the Neoists, the la er only toacquire Green Apocalypse

At the start of our 1997 speaking tour to raise awareness about the case, Homes Neoistsideki , Fabian Fu wit Tompse , put out another pamphlet, Militias: Rooted in White Supremacy . is ludicrously claimed not only GA were fascists, but groups involved with usin the Anti-Election Alliance su as Class War and the ACF, and even Bla Flags StuartChristie, once jailed for a empting to assassinate Franco! At least Fu wit was honest abouthis intentions: to undermine any lingering sympathy for GA, who are trying to mustersupport during their current court case. Whilst content to support freedom of spee forHolocaust Denier Robert Faurisson, Fu wit was opposed to defending that of anar ists.

Whilst the rst Gandalf trial was on and signatures for the Alternative Media Gatheringsolidarity statement were being collected, the Neoists held a meeting on anar o-fascismat the October 1997 Anar ist Bookfair and laun ed yet another pamphlet, Anar ist Inte-gralism. is argued all anar ists are fascists because Bakunin once supported pan-Slavism,a point almost as ridiculous as suggesting all anar ists are gay because he also once fanciedNe ayev! Home and Fu wit realized theyd severely miscalculated when they found thatthe only people that a ended their meetings beyond a few of their sad fans were not-yet- jailed Gandalf defendants and pissed-off members of Class War and the ACF. e Neoistsperformance was consequently long on mumbling, short on specics, and ended with Homemaking a beeline for the ba exit in his usual courageous manner.

Even a er the Gandalf three were jailed, Neoist a a s continued. On one occasion,Fu wit turned up at the February 1998 London Gandalf Supporters Campaign (LGSC) meet-ing to hand a leaet to Sax Woods parents, saying he hoped the prisoners rot in jail. Hewas, of course, shown the door.

In their a empts to undermine support for the defendants in the Gandalf-2 trial, theNeoists have been mu -aided by the anar o-workerists around AK Press. ey startedcarrying the Neoists smear pamphlets to spite GA, a er we helped expose their supportfor Paul Bowman and Tony White, assets of MI5 front zine, Sear light. Like US anar o-publishers, AK have excessive inuence in the UK anar o-scene, bankrolling syndicalistpublications like Bla Flag and the Solidarity Federations Direct Action, and having accessto others with even more money and power. e irony of these anar ists ba ing fascist

proxies against other anti-fascist anar ists is as lost on them this time as in the original 1994/1995 incident. Although calls by Edinburgh-based Neoist, Micah, for supporters to un-pledgethemselves from the various statements of solidarity and deance havent had one taker sofar, he did succeed in ge ing a May 1998 LGSC speaking tour through Scotland cancelled inthe run-up to the Gandalf rees appeal. Pro-Neoist Carol Saunders also thought it amusingto put Steve Booth next to Fu wit the one who said he should rot in jail at the

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1998 Anar ist Bookfair and pulled out of producing the 1998 Anar ist Yearbook when itseditor refused to list Fu wits Unpopular Books because, a er Anar ist Integralism, Fu witclearly had no place in it. Saundersandher ilk typify those anr ists more interested in powerthan truth, thoseprepared to use the Neoists as a barricade against the rising tide of DIYdirectaction politics that looks set to sweep them away.

Aside from the inferences drawn from the situation just described, as well as their being substandard writers with very li le to say, is there any direct evidence that Stewart Home and Fabian Tompse are government agents?

Just because the Neoists have acted in a grossly sectarian way that if anything will benet the State at the expense of the movement, it doesnt mean theyre State assets.Without proving direct collaboration between them and the security forces, the worst we canassume is that they are just useful idiots.

Of course, there is indeed proof of su collaboration, in the form of knowing thingsthey could only know from the Special Bran in Operation Washington or those closelyassociated with them. One of Homes 1995 leaets, e Sordid Truth About Stewart Home ,refers to only six people being involved in GA. At the time it was wri en, no one knewthat six of GAs editors had been arrested up until then during Operation Washington as JonRogerson, ex-projects editor, didnt let the rest of us know of his arrest until a month a erit. No one expect the cops involved in Operation Washington and Stewart Home, that is.Similarly, only two people have been mad enough to suggest connections between GA andthe Angry Brigade a group that ceased activity half a decade before GA was rst published and between GA and the Oklahoma bombing. e rst is Des Looney-Tunes omas,heading Operation Washington, and the second is Fabian Fu wit Tompse , in his Militiaspamphlet.

e latest copy of Homes zine, appropriately named Re-Action, produced just before theGandalf-2 trial in an a empt to demoralize defendants, includes a lot of personal informationabout independent anti-fascist resear er Larry OHara that could have only come from in-tercepts by the security forces, most likely through their proxy, Sear light. In a 1995 leaet,Green Anar ism Exposed, the Neoists expressed their support for Sear light and it recip-rocated the following year, approvingly referring Homes Green Apocalypse and to Home asan anar ist. Normally, Sear light hates anar ists, and both Home and Fu wit are onerecord as having described anar ism as stupid, so well leave it to your more informedreaders to dot the is and cross the ts here that is, a er noting that whilst Sear light haverailed endlessly against fascist music in the form of Blood & Honour, it strangely has hadnothing to say about that put out on Tony Wakefords lucrative World Serpent label

A couple of odds and ends that might help readers decide whether the Neoists collab-oration with the security forces is just an alliance of convenience or rather more: (1) Homehas appeared repeatedly in the national media commi ing credit card fraud in his DecadentAction persona without being prosecuted, and (2) his latest hoax is to circulate anonymousleaets presenting the current highly effective campaign against genetic engineering in UK

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as a product of religious mania. Similarly, a few years ago, he a empted to ridicule OpenEyes expose of the zapping of a retired Kentish couple, Antony and Margaret Verney, a hor-ric incident that could have caused vast embarassment to the security forces. His a emptto trash Anar y in the UK in the run-up to the passing of the 1994 Criminal Justice Acthas already been mentioned above. Is there, perhaps, a pa ern here and who do you thinkbenets?

e US has a level of free spee whi , if hardly perfect, is far beyond what is seen in most of the rest of the world. One reason for that, I feel, is that there is a pre y high respect for the value of free spee by participants across the political spectrum, and even groups whi are very mu at odds will support their oppo- nents ability to give their perspective without governmental obstruction. Unfor- tunately, I get the impression that Europeans are generally less open-minded inthis regard, and more supportive of governmental oppression of the opposition.Is this a fair statement?

Youll have seen from my account of the Gandalf prosecution that we dont exactly havea 1 Amendment over here! ere is talk of European laws incorporating a right to freespee , but I suspect that in practice this isnt going to be worth the paper its wri en on, just like the UN Charter.

e disgraceful behavior of the Neo-creeps aside, Im not sure you dont underestimatehow suspicious revolutionaries are of State intervention though. eres a lot of very stronganti-racist legislation over here most obviously the Race Relations Act but amongst eventhose militant anti-fascists that are hostile to anar ist traditions, there is no willingness toresort to the law because its recognized that fascism is just another aspect of racist, impe-rialist society. In one incident I know of, there was a murderous arson a a on a Somalifamily and the anti-fascists preferred to investigate it themselves rather than take what theyknew to the police. What happened around Stephen Lawrence just goes to show how futilethatd have been anyway. Trotskyite and liberal groups that do call for stronger legislationor police action are regarded with contempt as collaborators, grasses and diverters of revo-lutionary effort.

I think the la of open-mindedness is within the movement itself. Even GA has to carrya note saying le ers from fascists and other bigots and piss-takerswill be binned, thoughwe will note their arrival. is isnt because we think su le ers are likely to be so sophis-ticated and persuasive that publishing them will turn all our all readers into fascists, etc.,but because any brea of no platform principles is likely to lead to hysterical denuncia-tions from elements of the movement who have less condence about their ability to argueagainst the far-right than we have. At the turn of the 1990s , the militant animal lib magazineArkange l accidentally published the address of a far-right front group Greenwave. Hysteri-cal denunciations followed and, on the no censorship, no endorsement basis Arkangel wasfounded on to deal with sectarianism within the animal rights movement, these were pub-lished alongside a le er from Greenwaves fuhrer, Patri Harrington. e result was that

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the anti-fascists abandoned Arkangel to the far-right rather than defeat Harringtons shoddyIm veggie too arguments. What savedArkangel was the imprisonment of its editor, KeithMann, as a result of Operation Igloo on arges including incitement. is created a break incontinuity and a new, more censorious line under a new editor. As someone of mixed raceparentage, Keith Mann was violently opposed to the far-right whereas the rumors againstArkangel were started by Sear lights Paul Bowman, later to collaborate with race a a erTony White and Leeds C18 pseudo-gang.

Although I think its safe to say that the censoriousness around anti-fascism is mostpsy otic and its not as if Jean Barrot hasnt said it before me Im sure youre as sadlyfamiliar with the vegan police in Amerika as we are here. Its mainly as a result of themthat the workerists present lifestylists as obsessed with trivialities of language and personalpractice, though their obsession with PC and aping the crappiest aspects of working classculture just mirror this. A few years ago, someone wrote a pamphlet,Animal Liberation: Devastate to Liberate or Devastatingly Liberal? , suggesting vegan police be treated the sameway as any other police, and he was qui ly denounced as a Special Bran stooge and sexualinadequate without them even bothering to nd out who he was! ey ose denunciationover dealing with the criticisms raised, whi means their ideology isnt equal to making afree society. Radical feminists also have a pre y bad reputation here but post-Greenham,most of those still le are off asing legislative routes and remaining feminist advocates of sexual freedom are explicitly anti-censorship, if worryingly liberal.

Over here, people are easily whipped up over trivial and articial scandals as so few canbe bothered to nd out where rumors come from and if theyre true. Given the treatment BobBla has received over the Hogshire affair, I hardly think the idiocy is exclusively European.In this ma er, I can see exactly the same deference to an informal hierar y of patronageIve seen regarding the AK clique over here, and am amazed people have learned nothingsince the Processed World business, where so few stateside would publish Bla s on-targetcritique of PW that he was forced to staple it to telegraph poles!

Your thoughts on the Unabomber and Industrial Society and its Future.

e rst thing I want to say is those that sat on their arses doing nothing to ange societywhile denouncing someone pu ing his life on the line taking on the whole State, those thatdid nothing to defend Ted Kaczynski a er his arrest, those people are scum! ey arent evenworth pissing on.

By the FBIs own account, FC brought Amerikas postal and air transportation infras-tructure to the verge of paralysis around the time of the 1995 LAX hoax. Most humiliatinglyfor them, it took the Feds almost two decades and $100 million to cat Ted Kaczynski andwhen they brought him to court, hed got enough guts to expose his trial as a farce. I see li lepoint demanding anything of our oppressors, but most publicly and humiliatingly the Fedswere forced to meet terrorist demands and grant FC the full oxygen of publicity. is, initself, exposed how vulnerable and easily held to ransom Amerikas te nocratic elite orthe li le Ei mannspreparing the Brave New World, as John Zerzan calls them is. Ive

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my reservations about FC but ask their critics what theyve done in comparison. e onus ison those criticizing FCs targets or methods to suggest be er targets or methods, or else alltheyre doing is replicating the arguments of the Feds.

My main reservation about FCs campaign, as suggested above, isIndustrial Society and its Future the sword was denitely mightier than the pen in this case, but by pu ingdemands around this through the media, the terror felt by our oppressors was incidentallymagnied. On the Manifesto Ive the same opinion as Fire ief in Turkey beyond itsreductionism andma ismo, itspraise for GATT andelitist a itudes to consciousness-raising,etc., it does allenge te nocracy in a fundamental way difficult to turn aside from and thisis its saving grace. I think a particularly severe weakness is FCs ignorance of the primitiveaffluence thesis, leadingto the power process byway. Idhope that faced with the Manifesto ,anti-ideaologues would take the same a itude to it as Raoul Vaneigem said to take to anyother tract: loot the supermarket of ideologies, take only what is useful to us, what pleasesus!

What are general sentiments towards the Unabomber amongst radical and Greenmovements in Europe?

Im not sure whether this story belongs here or above, but you might be interested toknow how I got hold of the text of Industrial Society and its Future and what happened toit therea er. A comrade in Class War that later joined me in the Ted Kaczynski DefenseCampaign (TKDC) got the text off the Net and forwarded it to me via one Micah of SpunkPress and more recently of the Neoist Alliance. I got it out as a pamphlet by 5 November1995, Fireworks Night over here. is was the Manifestos rst publication in pamphlet form,certainly months before the human vermin at Jolly Roger Press, at a sixth their price and withthe communiques, etc., thrown in for free! I wrote to Ted K. suggesting he collect his royaltiesoff Jolly Roger, just to tea them for taunting him when he was awaiting trial. We put theManifesto out through our mail order service and street-sold it for years, once in front of theHigh Court when Keith Mann was up appealing his incitement conviction, whi was takingthe piss somewhat

Why I think this story belongs here is as it was primarily through GA that the Europeanmovement encountered the Manifesto and had to take a position on te nocracy. e work-erist old guard qui ly recognized that it allenged their reduction of Civilizations totalityto capitalism albeit just with its own reductionism but rather than simply a nowl-edge this, they opted for evasion. Hilariously, many identify with the le ists FC denounces,revealingly assuming criticism of them equated with criticism of women, Indians, etc.. Aswe all know, le ists just parasitize other peoples struggles, using them to magnify their ownpower rst and foremost. Anyway, Neoist Fu wit was wholly typical of the old guardistsin denouncing FCs supposed fascism and comrade Micah was qui to fall into line be-hind him, despite his earlier role. A milder version from theFreedom group was to insist theUnabomber is not an anar ist for advocating social over political revolution. To this day,they refuse to publish le ers pointing out that by this same logic, Freedoms founder Peter

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Kropotkin is not an anar ist either! It was predictable this sort would continue to wallowin their rut.

More promising was reaction from the new wave DIY/direct action movement a er theManifesto did its rounds at Newbury. e pacist uffies tried to divert the struggle againstte nocracy into their usual passive protest n photo-opportunities direction, forming theNew Luddites. is group appropriated Kirkpatri Sales Rebels Against the Future as atext more palatable than the Manifesto, but it fell apart in under six months. More mili-tant eco-activists and animal libbers got involved in TKDC and our pi et of the AmerikanEmbassy, but more important was a general perception in su circles that the road-buildingprogramme, geneticengineering, etc.. were te nological phenomena and this critique movescloser that a lot closer to allenging Civilization as a totality. I never cease reminding themthat FC was rst to target Monsanto Flvr Savr tomatoes, the company being used as a returnaddress on one of the 1995 parcel bombs.

e Unabomber has spurred one of the deeper divisions in memory amongst var-

ious anar ists and radical ecologists. More accurately, perhaps, it has brought up issues of actualizing our goals in the real world whi anar ists in particular are not always fond of discussing, and some differences of opinion were inevitable. Your thoughts on the division, and the perspectives it has brought up for analysis and debate.

To murder Dr. Johnson, Id say the prospect of an imminent FBI kno on your doorconcentrates the mind wonderfully. Believe me, debate is hardly as intense outside the US.I recall that a er I had a le er published inFi h Estate a couple of years ago, I received anhysterical 15 page le er from some ake in Rhode Island terried that my mere mentioningof FC would get an FBI hit squad sent to his door. As his le er also mentioned that he hadnteven told his next door neighbor that he was an anar ist, it was hard to take this clownsconcerns seriously!

As in the UK, there are those in the States who denounced FC simply because their poli-tics is superseded by them theShadow hilariously had Ted K as an agent of the CIA on therather thin basis of press reports of a bogus yearbook entry! Others su as Slingshot werequite frank about their fear of repression outweighing all other considerations as if allauthentic revolutionary action doesnt provoke State reaction! But were talking a workeristold guard here, not worth breath. More signicant are reactions amongst radical environ-mentalists and the US anar o-primitivist milieu, rather closer to FCs area of concern andmore likely to be on the receiving end of FBI a entions.

Youll know that one of Live Wild or Die s editorial groups had to go on the run a er the

FBI accused them of inciting FC through their Eco-Fu ers Hit List. Fair play to them and to those that replaced them, reprinting the List in the most recent LWOD with GilbertMurrays name crossed through! is makes nonsense of the no one in the radical environ-mental movement is calling for violence line that the Earth First! Journal crew inheritedfrom Judy Bari before her untimely death. She had the best of personal reasons to dispar-age bombings, but denouncing everyone more militant than yourself as a provocateur is just

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plain wrong. eyre fussed that FC will be used to whip up violence against the open civildisobedience tactics theyve pushed as EF!s house style ever since the Foremanistas split, buteco-activists have been killed on su demos with no more provocation than just being thereand the State and the media didnt give a damn. e only way theyre going to stop this never mind make revolution is to show Earth rapers is that our lives arent as eap asthey think by deterring them ourselves. Heresy though it may sound to satyagraha cultists,there are times when the public are more offended by nonviolence than by violence, andthere are times when violence is necessary regardless of public opinion. ey dont realizethe contempt people feel for those that set themselves up to be passive victims, refusing todefend themselves or those near to them. Like FC, I suspect a lot of this self-sacricial ethicis rooted in self-hatred probably another reason why they dont want to deal with issuesraised by the Manifesto .

Whats going on in US anar o-primitivism is rather less facile. Despite Fi h Estates long record of opposing political ra eteering, I dont think Watsons motives in a a ingthe Formanistas in 1990 were any purer than Book ins. Both regard radical environmental-ism as a constituency and since Book in published his stupid Social Anar ism or LifestyleAnar ism, its come to a head-to-head over another, old-guard social ecology vs. newsocial ecology. Watson hopes to pi up on all the disillusioned libertarian municipalists,liberals and le ists that gathered around Book in, as he has John Clark. As FC is unpalat-able to them, Fi h Estate have denounced FC. is suits Watson ne as he can also denounceall anar o-primitivists more revolutionary than himself, su as John Zerzan and Anar ymagazine, for supporting FC. Whats missing here is why they are more revolutionary thanFi h Estate precisely because theyre prepared to accept armed struggle has a place insmashing Civilization. For over a decade,Fi h Estate have been selling out to pacism andmysticism, andby posing the supercession as some una ainably distant goal (mu as GeorgeWoodco did anar ism in the 1960s), theyre opening the way to reformist tinkering withthe system, with endless recuperation of their community projects or the easy crushing of any that cant be recuperated, Osage Avenue-style. As FC themselves put it, revolution iseasier than reform.

Although political anar y has never existed outside of primitive societies, many anar ists (if a decreasing number) continue to feel that anar y can be realized within the connes of a te nological society. Some even feel that te nology furthers the prospect for anar y and its realization. Your thoughts?

Youve got to laugh, havent you? Bob Bla once said that the anar ist critique of voting was just a special case of the anar ist critique of organization. e same is true of te nology. ats just a special case of the critique of organization too. Pro-te types tryto evade this by refusing to distinguish between tool use and te nology, between the slavegang and its spades and the army and its spears, despite Lewis Mumfords key distinctionbetween using tools and becoming them drawn the be er part of a century ago! By acceptingte nology as organization, they have to accept a horizontal division of labour that means

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alienation will never be ended in te no-industrial society however it is administered. Mumore upse ing for them is that to administer, regulate and coordinate this horizontal divi-sion of labor, there has to be a vertical one between managers and managed, a class division.

ese types o en accuse GA of having no class analysis, precisely because our class analysisposes a more fundamental allenge to the existing social order than theirs does. ey re-ally are on the horns of a dilemma: if they want the diversity and complexity of productionthat they use to sell their post-capitalist utopia, they need a worldwide and production anddistribution infrastructure. But to have su an infrastructure, they need tier a er tier of del-egates, somehow supposedly accountable to the base. How they reconcile this with theircritiques of the oligar ical tendencies of established trade unions or oxymoronic represen-tative democracy beats me by treating it as no more than an article of ideological faithnot to be thought upon, no doubt. Certainly, I was amused to note debating this with oldguardists that those at the top of their informal anar o-hierar ies defend delegation andrepresentation whilst those that arent always manage to fail to understand what Im arguing thus the way of things is preserved!

To goon with this class analysis, theres also the small ma er of the international divisionof labor. ose that see te no-industrial society as a cornucopia arent the ones stu in theelds and mines and steel mills, the ones on the bo om of the productive pyramid and getvery li le ba for it. Because of horizontal division of labor (specialization), theyre likely toremain there a er the revolution because given the opinion of doing something else, theywill and the whole pyramids going to come tumbling down. Of course, they dont need tobe told this its just common sense that by taking ba your own time, youre be er ableto sus out be er means of survival than sweating for some boss. In wre ed Uganda, peopletook to uprooting cash crops for export and replacing them with their own for subsistence,thus absenting themselves from the international economic order. eres more food in Rus-sian gardens now than Russian stores, so how longs that country going to hold together as aviable entity? In Brazil, the MST, described by some as the most important social movementin the world today are doing pre y mu the same thing. Im not arguing for agriculturehere as an end in itself Im pointing out how the most oppressed are making revolutionthemselves by recovering autonomous means of living. ose arguing for te nological so-ciety are arguing against these people. If they claim to be arguing for the working class,then theyre voiding that term of any worthwhile meaning. Many will say that you cant justwalk away from Civilization. Paradoxically, the revolutionaries Ive tou ed upon above areboth central to production and peripheral to the worldwide te no-grid socially and geo-graphically. Equally paradoxically, Civilizations control is both cruder and weaker there its easier to see an enemy, to want to free yourself of it as well as to actually do so. e

more that break away, the easier it is for others to in the future as well revolution on theperiphery. Deeper within Civilization, there are others marginalized, movements of refusaland resistance, counterculturals, stigmatized and oppressed groups, etc., who nd it so diffi-cult to leave (except through the illusion of culture) that a a is a be er opinion. Because of the intense division of labor, ea isolated from but dependent on another, te no-industrialsociety is uniquely vulnerable to a a one thing leads to another, just as ghting one

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oppression in a evolutionary manner leads you to ghting oppression as a totality. Smashingthe infrastructure of control will force everyone to be free, to make what they can of thepieces.

An Arab proverb portrays society as a ship, the privileged on de and the rest in thehold. e proverb warns that those on de had best share their water with those below orelse, maddened by thirst, theyll break through the hull and sink everyone. ough skewed,this is a useful analogue. e old Marxist dictums about extraction of surplus value holdtrue and should be obvious to anyone that thinks about them. Why then is a revolt notgeneralized? I think because those in the hold are told theres always a ance theyll beallowed onto the de if only they behave. Were talking embourgeoisement here thosethat dont strive for be er jobs for themselves or for their kids via a be er education thanthey had so far down the pile that they fall into the periphery. By commodifying everything including their identity workers are individualized and made competitive and insecure.Of course, they can never buy enough and what they buys not worth it anyway, but in theprocess they come to think that living any other way will be a kind of suicide, a destruction of their manufactured identities. Anar o-orthodoxys traditional tacticof tail-ending reformistindustrial demands is therefore obviously doomed as a revolutionary strategy, just anotherway of saving Civilization.

e proverb is skewed in the assumption that if the ship sinks, all will drown, and thatthe water beyond the hull is undrinkable rather than sweet, abundance for all denied throughconditions of articial scarcity imposed by those on de . Ive returned to the proverb herebecause its original meaning here is the one put out by orthodoxy, as above. ey ask whatsto be gained by giving up te nology? when theyre really thinking about what theyll losecommodity- and power-wise. eir whole thing is about keeping as mu of the means of production as possible, as if that wont force people ba into exactly the same roles, exceptwith anar ist rhetoric. e more of the system thats preserved, the more difficult itll be toget rid of the rest. Years ago, an old Stalinist was boasting about a riot at a car plant he wasa shop steward at: ey smashed up the canteen but le the line alone. ats where theirpower is. If that was the case, why were they rioting? It was a mark of their domesticationthat they didnt destroy what made them most dependent on the system, what had stolenaway their lives. No doubt the shop steward helped inculcate this a itude, their traditionalrole. John Zerzans Who Killed Ned Ludd? is excellent in contrasting this domesticateda itude with an older millenarian tradition about refusal and sweeping away a whole worldthat only enslaves us. Liberating ourselves from that should be enough in itself, but what wegain by this is an end of commodied identity andseparation, a return to the abundance of theproverbial sea, to unalienated Oneness between ea other and Nature. Ill take authenticity

and self-determination over any tru ful of te no-industrial trinkets.How would you compare anar ism and its adherents in Europe with those inNorth America? eir viewpoint, their approa , etc

I suspect Im as informed about the US anar o-scene as you are with the European one,so when I holdupmy mirror to Amerika, dont expect to be impressed! Without going into the

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more obscure anar o-fauna and ora, I think differences are more a ma er of degree andkind, not least because most US anar ism is European import. Anar ist communism andsyndicalism, obviously, but even a supposedly native tradition like pragmatic individualismhas its roots in grand ol William Godwin.

I think these differences of degree arise out of history. Amerika was Civilized only re-cently, and the last genocides associated with that have not long passed from living memory.

e frontiersman mentality has had effects as diverse as an ongoing reverence for wildernessand a hostility to communism that meant anar o-orthodoxy never recovered from the Redscares during and a er World War One and the CP hardly got enough grip to carry suanar ism with it into the la er half of the 20 century. Class issues are mu confused withthose of race, slavery in Amerika not being that historically distant either. As Empire be-came Commonwealth, UK became as ethnically diverse as the States, but there was a senseof citizenship and belonging, of return to the Mother Country, that I think is absent in theAmerika. Certainly, we couldnt have an AIM here or a panopoly of Bla liberation groupslaying claim to one English country or other as homeland, probably because UKs colonialwars were generally played out by the 1950s. In UK, genocide is something that happensoverseas, a former colonial problem. is mentality allowed the war in Northern Ireland torun for 25 years without people on the mainland ba ing an eyelid. It was the same mentalitythat started 4m Irish a century ago. at Amerika is still an empire, with its somewhat con-tradictory ideology of rugged individualism and te nical expertise, means that theres morespace for the sort of analysis Perlman put forward in Against His-story, Against Leviathan!than there would be in Europe.

One import you can alk up is Earth First!, though because there is no wilderness leon this crowded island, EF!s focus in UK is mu more on social/anti-te nological issues.Aside from a few animal lib groupies, people dont give mu of a toss for deep ecology here theres not the same nature/culture dualism that so marred EF!USA. eres some surprisethat there isnt more of an anti-industrial focus Stateside. Britain may have been rst intothe Industrial Revolution, but you had the American Hitler Henry Ford, his assembly linesand, before him, the disassembly lines of the Chicago slaughterhouse on whi they weremodeled.

Any books, authors, or projects whi you feel are of value but whi have beenoverlooked by radicals in North America?

You expect Ill mention John Moore and I will. Some think hes just derivative of FredyPerlman because hes studied him so closely, but his pamphlet, Anar y & Ecstasy (1989),gets right inside the skin of Perlmans ideas of about Leviathanic armoring, particularly hisessay On Ecdysis. John uses literary theory to try and yield up meaning barred to himby politico language his analysis of anar y vs. anar ism vs. aos from Miltons myth,Paradise Lost , is particularly effective. In his second pamphlet,Love Bite (1990) whi Fi hEstates literal minded-reviewer didnt understand, despite being sent up a follow-up le erof explanation his struggle against language goes even further as he tries to get inside

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primitive consciousness. I dont think he necessarily succeeds the fact John turned towriting ction and pre y mu ction only a erwards suggests a limit had been rea ed but its su a brave a empt that it rewarded the effort of reading.

eres also William Goldings Inheritors . A friend once said, Ive never understoodhowsu a stupid man can write su clever books, but here his usually intrusive Christianity isturned on its head, the myth of the Fall indicting humanity as genocidal destroyers of primi-tive, authentic consciousness. e book ends with a short, scientic-sounding account of thefossil remains of one of its key aracters, a doomed Australopithicene, its brutal externalityemphasizing our loss. What Golding does well here, as all agree, is write in a language of immediate sensation perhaps a view out of Civilizations prisonhouse.

In terms of projects, I dont know whether I should plug Reclaim e Streets (RTS) here.On the one hand, almost everyone that should know about it does already, and on the other Ithink its run into a kind of limit where it cant generalize the street partybeyond very limitedtime and space, and that risks it qui ly serving the same recuperated function as Carnival,a safety valve to blow off excess steam. Good things about it include its now-focusedness,whi does a lot to strip away role and the self-sacricial a itudes typifying dull Le istmilitancy, and perhaps even point towards a new, revolutionary sense of community. eressomething celebratory about a good street party, far beyond the liberalism of the averageSexual Freedom Coalition parade. Its simultaneously refusal, not just of the car but of itsculture and all that implies for modern Civilization, and in numbers that have temporarilyparalyzed cities. e need to defend street parties has blown away uffies with considerablymore good humor than debate around, for example, anti-fascist street activities. I do worry,however, about its willingness to dene its own meanings an important part of it as thisinvites others to impose theirs. Its surprising how something apparently so robust is actuallyso fragile. Cultural commentators are predictable recuperators, li le be er than journalists,but even cruder are the workerists who come to street parties as there are no big demos topeddle their papers at anymore. ey busily try to convert something spontaneous and aliveinto something ideological and dead, telling party-goers the real struggle lies elsewhere, atthe point of production. ey cant help it rather than recognize their own revolution hasfailed, they try diverting whats superceded it, too.

Friends of People Close to Nature (FPCN) are also worth a plug. Arguing these people,they are anar ists, FPCNs Hartmut Haller zips round the world helping the last remainingtribal people to resist Civilization, with surprising success. e Hazda of central Africa, forexample, successfully booted big game hunters off their traditional land and returned to thebow. eyre prouder of living this way than wearing shoes or taking anything else fromCivilization. Hartmut told them hed be ba again when theyd burned the last ur and

s ool. Hes spent years dodging across one African border or another helping tribal kidsescape s ool. Hes been condemned by some anthropologists for showing some tribal peopleEurope, probably because their strident anar ism has proved profoundly embarrassing toSurvival International-type mission Indians usually preferred at international conferenceson indigenous peoples, etc.. Hartmut does this because he knows that far from being over-awed by Civilization, his hunter-gatherer mates hate it theres nowhere to hunt and the

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people are all crazy and they have mu to tea us in terms of a perspective from outsideCivilization.

What are some future themes we can look forward to from Green Anar ist?

We really prefer readers to suggest core themes to us GA is a forum for their discus-sions, a er all. e next issue will be on Wildness & Wilderness. eres a very long pieceby one of Marcuses last students, Glenn Parton,Humans-in-the-Wilderness , but I was sur-prised by how mu else was about how compromised by Civilized values the movement isand this made me realize how mu further we still have to go. I share Alfredo Bonannosdespair at these ideologues.

Were also planning an issue on the Millenium only one ance to do it in 1,000 years,a er all! I remember during 1984, there was the odd TV program on about how Orwells1984 hadnt come to pass in UK this at the height of the Mines Strike that broke the baof old-style socialism in UK! Currently, theyre not even bothering with that treatment, justselling the Millenium as a big party where we can buy lots of goodies at their theme park inGreenwi and the pubs will be open 36 hours non-stop. e movements Fu the Mille-nium is totally obvious and reactive, su an invite to passivity that its as mu a part of thisspectacle as opposition to it. What were a er is tapping into millenial angst and hopefullyeven the rejectionist fervor that red the radicals of the English Revolution. A friend saidsocialist-rationalist ideology isnt equipped to cope with that, but capitalist-rationalist Civi-lization has accommodated it and its current Civilization perfectly well for centuries, asthe poverty of Fu the Millenium demonstrates. We felt it could do with a real allenge,from whats really going on under the surface

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T A LOctober 1, 2010

Anti-Copyright.h p://theanar istlibrary.org

Author: John FilissTitle: Interview with John Connor Of Green

Anar istPublication date: Unknown

Retrieved on December 12, 2009 from h p://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/connor.htmis interview with the editor of one outstanding anar ist publication originally appeared in the pages of

another, Anar y: A Journal of Desire Armed (C.A.L., P.O.B. 1446, Columbia, MO 652051446. Sample issue $6,4 issue subscription for $16).

john filiss-green anarchist

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