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4WW [Big Noise Films] Available over Bit Torrent"Fourth World War", a lavish production (on a shoestring budget) including footage from Mexico, Canada, Korea, Plaestine, Argentina and South Africa has recently been released on DVD, but is also available for download over the net. You can find a torrent version here, or a copy on FTP here. If you are using FTP make sure to use a client that can restart a download in case of interruption. Subtitles are available in french and italian from the link for the FTP above. Below you'll find an interview with a member of Big Noise Films, Rick Rowley (the other being Jacquie Soohen) which was printed in the NY Indypendent last year.
Indypendent: What is the Fourth World War? Rick Rowly: We first heard the term ‘Fourth World War’ from the Zapatistas in 1996. It’s a conflict that transcends the logic of states. It is a war without a singular enemy or fixed battlefields. There are not two sides in the Fourth World War. It is a system at work everywhere violently reorganizing our lives.In some places the system works with bullets and bombs, in others with hunger and neglect, in others it isolates us in terror and turns us into accomplices in this global violence. There is no longer any distinction between combatants and noncombatants, no “outside” to this war. Our only choice is to stand with the men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in its violence.
Tourism participates in and depends on this capitalist logic of distance and alienation. It simulates and sells connection to some authentic other while keeping it all safely outside of our selves and our borders. The Fourth World War makes itself vulnerable to the word of the other. It does not claim to penetrate an indigenous “heart of darkness,” to condense and contain the truth of 500 years of struggle, but looks for points of resonance and connection. It asks viewers to allow themselves to be wounded and changed by the things they see and hear. It invites them to read themselves into this story as participants rather than observers.
It would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. It was produced in and through a global network of movements that has never existed before – movements that share a common language of resistance and a deep feeling of interconnection. Even though two of us shot 90% of the images in the film, it was only made possible by a network of independent media activists that numbers in the tens of thousands.
We are only allowed to see people in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan through the cross-hairs of a military machine. We see the war shot from the noses of bombs. We hear it narrated by generals. There have been other moments of global uprising – 1968 saw the Tet offensive in Vietnam and uprisings in Algeria, Prague, Paris, Chicago, Mexico City and beyond. But there is something special about this moment. There is a self-consciously articulated feeling of connection in the street that feels new. The difference between some of the movements in the film and groups like the FARC or Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is about their tactical relationship to the State.
If anything characterizes movements today, it is anachrony – the simultaneous presence of groups and tactics representing a dizzying diversity of moments and interests. This diversity is a strength, and movements working to seize state power are an important part of who we are. The Zapatistas say that the priviledged form of struggle during the Cold War was revolutionary nationalism – from Vietnam to South Africa to Cuba and Nicaragua to the Black Panthers and Young Lords. In contrast, the movements they are a part of today are globalist and autonomist. A painful lesson of many movements in the last few decades has been that state power is not enough to defend against global capital. Without the power to redraw economic and social geographies individual states can be isolated, bought off, undermined from the outside or invaded and destroyed.
We’re still fighting over what the meaning of September 11 was. It ripped a hole in the narrative of what it means to be an American, what our place in the world. The media tried to fill it with war, patriotism and violence. There’s another possiblity. It could be a moment when we became a part of the global community, with a connection to the people around the world who’ve been living with extreme violence for a long time. Radicals we met in South Africa say that apartheid was not defeated through elections or through a decisive military engagement. Apartheid was defeated by making it unworkable on the ground through thousands of collective acts of rebellion and dissobediance. Elections and marches by themselves can’t stop this war. The lesson of the massive february 15 demos was that the system can ignore global public opinion. Protest must be part of a broader movement that can make this war unworkable on the ground as well. Between the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the Genoa, Italy protests of 2001, and Seattle for lots of us in movements to fit every struggle in the world to fit everything into one template. Since 2001, not just the attacks in New York – but also the uprisings in Genoa and Argentina, it became difficult to maintain that analysis. How the world resistance deals with this is being figured out right now. |
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