New School Anarchists Shut Down Tom Ridge Homeland Security Talk The New School was founded by anti-fascist scholars and we like to think on this day we did some justice to their legacy. Today we shut down the Securing New York and the Nation: The Creation of the Department of Homeland Security event at the New School in solidarity with prisoners of the Green Scare, the victims of the War on Terror, prisoners everywhere, undocumented immigrants, and the anti-capitalists currently acting against the G20 in Pittsburgh. Tom Ridge was the first Secretary of Bush's Department of Homeland Security, formed in the jingoistic days following 9/11. As Department Secretary, Ridge was responsible for and complicit in the torture of detainees, the entrapment and harsh imprisonment of eco-activists such as Daniel Mcgowan and Eric Mcdavid, brutal raids on immigrant communities, the political manipulation of terror alerts, and countless other abuses. The youth of this nation have had the misfortune of growing up under 8 years of the Bush Administration, and we will not tolerate the presence of one of its central henchman in our community.

Class Wargames Communique 7 Comrades! Raise your glasses of champagne to mark Class Wargames' decisive victory on the cultural front: the launch of our film on Guy Debord's The Game of War. For the first time, the Situationist politics of this military simulation are carefully explained in sound and vision. After watching this movie, opponents of spectacular capitalism will understand the importance of studying The Game of War. By playfully competing against each other over its board, they are learning the strategic and tactical skills required for success in the deadly struggle against the global bourgeoisie. In our film of Debord's game, Class Wargames has divided these teachings from the battlefield into five sections: terrain, combat, cavalry, arsenals and lines of communication. Analyse their insights with great care, fellow workers. As the crisis of neo-liberalism intensifies, you will need this military knowledge to thwart the wicked schemes of bankers and bureaucrats. Remember well the lessons of socialist history: clever tactics and smart strategy are our most powerful weapons. In the early-1970s, Debord created his film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle by splicing together clips taken from other people's movies and then adding his own soundtrack. When social relations between individuals are mediated through images, this avant-garde technique of détournement acts as the proletarian antidote to capitalist monopolisation of historical memory. Quoting from the products of commercial cinema involves much more than recruiting glamourous movie stars and expensive special effects for audiovisual subversion. As Debord emphasised, these borrowed film excerpts are transformed in the editing process into a revolutionary critique of the spectacular misrepresentation of the human adventure. Torn out of its original context and carefully placed in a new juxtaposition, the cinematic propaganda of the class enemy can be turned against itself. The imagery of bourgeois ideology must be metamorphosed into the elucidation of Situationist theory. Expropriating the media expropriators is the premonition of cybernetic communism in the present.

Classwargames Communique Number 6 In the legend of the founding of the Order of the Garter, medieval England’s most prestigious military order, Edward the Third plays Chess with the Countess of Salisbury. Queens, bishops, rooks, knights and pawns would decide this battle of the sexes. Edward Plantaganet staked a King’s ransom, in the form of a ruby, for the Countess’ virtue. Checkmate – the domination of one sex over another. How different is Debord’s game from its illustrious predecessor! This time around, the two players are loving comrades not rival aristocrats. In their book of The Game of War, Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho take on the roles of South and North. This illustrative contest is a marital affair: the tabletop becomes an erogenous zone where the inventor and his wife face each other in libidinous combat. Foreplay begins with North’s fond caress of South’s western arsenal, which soon succumbs to oblivion. Responding to this advance, South runs his cavalry up North’s left flank, and then North invitingly shifts her balance eastwards. Seizing the initiative, South fondles the tip of North’s mountain range before engaging in a penetrative action which comes tantalisingly close to entering North’s central arsenal. But, in a sudden forward thrust, North counter-attacks, her forces enveloping South who – with one flank now fully exposed - lingers in a fort before retreating back into his own territory. Finally, experiencing the ‘little death’ of surrender, South’s army becomes flaccid and resigns – totally exhausted - from combat. The King and the Situationist had one thing in common: they were both beaten in a wargame by a woman. Yet, for the Countess of Salisbury, her victory was as much her undoing as a defeat would have been: the jewel in her possession being taken as proof of the yielding of her honour. Edward’s game of Chess was one of aristocratic domination, and led to the gesture of donning the Countess’ garter: the patriarchal symbol of the inner circle of the English elite to this day. In contrast, Alice’s victory over her husband was a cause for mutual celebration. In their Situationist wargame, competitive play stimulated psychological intimacy between the sexes. Winning or losing were equally pleasurable experiences. In both stories, the woman defeats the man in a simulation of military combat. But it is only in the account of The Game of War that the vanquished gladly shows his respect for the vanquisher. When Guy and Alice moved their pieces across the board, playing at war was making love by other means.

Cities and new wars: after Mumbai Saskia Sassen Open Democracy The Mumbai attacks of 26-29 November 2008 are part of an emerging type of urban violence. These were organised, simultaneous frontal assaults with grenades and machine-guns on ten high-profile sites in or near the central business and tourism district.Also in openDemocracy on the assaults of November 2008 in Mumbai: This has affinities with the asymmetric street warfare waged by the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a major central area of the city from (say) 9am to 5pm: the result is shuttered shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is open warfare, and the police rarely win - this is a challenge for which the police are not trained. After 5pm the gangs withdraw. It is often said that all of this results from inadequate policing or crime waves. But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and war - I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

"From the Acteal Massacre to the Merida Initiative" Rafael Landerreche Translation and footnotes by Kristin Bricker La Jornada, November 10, 2007 Las Abejas from Chenalhó is an organization that professes non-violent principles. Time and time again they've declared that they don't want revenge for the Acrtal massacre, but that they won't give up their demand for justice so that incidents like that don't happen again. It couldn't be a better time to review some tragic lessons from the Acteal case, since an agreement with the United States government known officially as the Merida Initiative is being cooked up right now.

Anti-War Protesters Close Down Recruiting Center in Twin Cities By Zac Farber, http://tinyurl.com/3m5cnv Eight Macalester students lashed themselves together with PVC pipes fortified by duct tape and chicken wire while two students used U-shaped bike locks to fasten their necks to the entrances of army and navy recruiting centers on Washington Avenue near the University of Minnesota campus. Macalester Students for a Democratic Society organized the March 27 event to protest the Iraq war, one week after its fifth anniversary. A crowd of about 100 people, most of whom voiced support for the protesters, gathered around the spectacle. Some, who were members of University of Minnesota's College Republicans, said the Macalester protesters were infringing on potential recruits' right to join the military.

South American Anarchists and Anti-Militarists Say NO to War * The threat of armed conflict involving the governments of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela has mobilized anarchists and anti-militarists across the continent, in words and in action, to repudiate what would be a monstrous aggression by state powers against our peoples. Below there are two documents that call for struggle against this evil. __Declaration of Latin American antimilitarists: We don’t need another war__

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)

tomdispatch.com

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Custodians of chaos

Kurt Vonnegut

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula forgunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

Is Iran Building Nukes?
An Analysis (Part 1)
William O. Beeman and Thomas Stauffer
Pacific News Service, Jun 26, 2003

Editor's Note: The Bush administration is turning up the heat on Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, but the authors say the evidence just isn't there. Part 1 of a two-part series.

President Bush declared on June 25 that "we will not tolerate" a nuclear armed Iran. His words are empty. The physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.

Iran is building a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The existence of the site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for more than three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.