FE Note: We are publishing this essay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. It is a substantially revised version of two articles written in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (“The Israeli Massacre — Peace in Galilee?” and “Latin American Terror: The Israeli Connection”) that appeared in the Fall 1982 Fifth Estate (now out of print). Both were written by David Watson for the special edition which included Fredy Perlman’s “Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom.”
* * *
When the founder of organized zionism, Theodor Herzl, proposed to create a European Jewish state in the Middle East as “an outpost of civilization as o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
David Graeber had a hypothesis. The anthropologist grew up working-class in New York, and while his scholarship garnered accolades, he’s never felt at home in the world of academia. From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some confessed they actually didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week working and the rest browsing cat memes.
Graeber developed a suspicion that this was rather common and, in 2013, wrote an essay for Strike! magazine, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It was just a hypothes... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
DURING the month of September, 1920, a widespread occupation of Italian factories by their workforces took place, which originated in the auto factories, steel mills and machine tool plants of the metal sector but spread out into many other industries — cotton mills and hosiery firms, lignite mines, tire factories, breweries and distilleries, and steamships and warehouses in the port towns.
But this was not a sit-down strike; the workers continued production with their own in-plant organization. And railway workers, in open defiance of the management of the state-owned railways, shunted freight cars between the factories to enable production to continue. At its height about 600,000 workers were involved.
This movement bl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
[ed. – We present this interview, conducted early last year by the Spanish-language site A Las Barricadas, releasing it now in what may or may not be last days of Donald Trump’s U.S. presidency. Intended for those of us viewing events on that continent from afar, this provides a good look at the dynamics set off after the 2016 election and ongoing struggles which have led to wide-spread social unrest (the return of the anti-police riots that the interviewee notes below had subsided at the time of this interview) and looming threat of civil war that the so-called “United States” now face.]
We spoke broadly with Peter Gelderloos, activist of North American origin based in Spain. Peter is the author of numerous a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“I do not weep at the world–I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
– Zora Neale Hurston
“What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.”
– Albert Camus, The Rebel
“I go over my own escape routes all the time. To survive in this state, you have to think like the French Resistance.”
― Tim Dorsey, writing about Florida in The Stingray Shuffle
Everybody pretends this is Florida in the 30’s, the 50’s, the 80’s. Nobody wants to stare into the ugly mess we’ve become or the horrible future that li... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Any theoretical term is an implicit statement about human nature. Anthropologists tend to be uncomfortable with this fact but it is nonetheless true. Even if one were to make a statement as apparently innocuous as “ritual can take many forms in many places,” one is still asserting that “ritual” is a meaningful cross-cultural category, implying—as pretty much any anthropological discussion of ritual invariably does imply—that we can assume all human beings have engaged in some kind of ritual activity at some point or another, that ritual is an inherent aspect of human sociality, even if there’s no scholarly consensus whatsoever as to what, precisely, a ritual is or what it says about us that we are a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A succession of meetings have been held during the past month to protest against the infamous sentences of death and imprisonment passed upon the Chicago Anarchists. The largest of these meetings, held at South Place, Oct. 14 was organized by a representative committee of English Socialists-Anarchist an Democratic. A resolution declaring our comrades' condemnation to be an attack upon freedom of speech and public meeting, of vital concern to the working classes all over the world, was enthusiastically and unanimously passed by a crowded audience of English workers. The speakers were the Rev. Stewart Headlam chairman) of the Guild of St. Matthew, William Morris of the Socialist League, J. Blackwell of the Social Democratic Federation, Annie ... (From: AnarchyArchives.)
Twice a day, every day, about 25 US-made Humvees carry about 175 nervous Mexican soldiers toting US-made M-16 automatic rifles and heavier weapons through the Zapatista village of La Realidad. La Realidad is the headquarters of the military leadership of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The troop convoys have become a fact of life for the residents of La Realidad, including the many refugees from the village of Guadalupe Tepayac who were driven from their homes by the Mexican Federal Army in February 1995. In early October the Federal Army soldiers built a new military encampment on the banks of the Rio Euseba on the other side of La Realidad. This new encampment is the latest stage in the military encirclement of the Zapatist... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on Thursday, August the 15th, 1969, 400 soldiers from the Prince of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment took up positions around Derry city. Why they arrived has been the subject of myth making and distortion for the last 25 years. The myth is a simple one, that the function of the British army in the 6 counties is to preserve the peace, to keep apart fanatical Catholics and Protestants who would otherwise tear each others throat out at the first opportunity.
It is a myth, which like all good ones, incorporates elements of the truth. After the last months few need to be reminded of the vicious actions of the loyalist death squads. But despite this grain of truth it is in fact a distortion, even a lie. Far from the aim... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
First of all allow me to remark how touched and honored I am to be put on the same list as James Mooney, who I’ve always admired, and Edmund Leach, who may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career. Leach for me always been a model of intellectual freedom.
I hadn’t heard that Dimitra Doukas hasn’t been given a proper job and am outraged to hear it; the fact that she hasn’t it seems to me also answers the question with which the essay ends, of why US anthropology didn’t foreseen Trump, since her work is specifically about using ethnographic tools to understand right-wing populism. I was myself writing about similar issues—in Harpers, since Anthropology didn’t ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Revolt Library 
Anarchism 
