3 November 2024 – Anonymous submission:
“We know in our hearts what is right; we must have the courage to follow it. Now, Brave Hearts Forward!, Coward Hearts To The Rear!”
— Memories of Freedom, Animal Liberation Front
For thirteen months, the United States has subjected Palestinians in Gaza to an ongoing holocaust, and we in the belly of the beast have shackled ourselves into a state of paralysis.
A primary terrain of struggle beyond the battlefields strewn across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran is a place that receives hardly an ounce of the attention it deserves: our minds. Learned helplessness and a cacophony of limiting beliefs have prevented us from realizing our true potential as individuals and as a movement of organizations acting in strategic unity. The misguided and dangerous ideas in our heads have dampened our fire before we could ever leave our mark.
Some will claim that the material conditions or the correlation of forces in the United States are not conducive to a successful and effective deployment of militant direct action. That our strategies and tactics must be aimed at building capacity and organizing the masses of people in the imperial core into a formidable and self-reliant political force. To be sure, an effective strategy must be informed by its political objectives and consequences, both intended and unintended. War is a political maneuver by military means: make no mistake, we are at war.
Yet, some will state with the rigidity and dogmatism of a soothsayer that mobilizations and public advocacy must be prioritized over clandestine actions of any kind. That militant direct action is dangerous, foolhardy, and invites repression. That it prematurely escalates our struggle, is a mark of impatience, and can only and obviously lead to failure. That its practitioners will undoubtedly find themselves in a prison cell before long. That today is self-evidently not the time for a departure from our business as usual as activists and organizers. Some would even claim that the battlefields in Palestine are the only areas where decisive developments can be made; and yet, who is better positioned to strike and dislodge the innards of the imperial beast than those residing in its belly? How accessible is a Lockheed Martin plant to a child in Gaza or a resistance fighter in the West Bank?
Hogwash. This self-satisfying delusion is meant to justify what is, in reality, a firm and principled opposition to a diversity of tactics. It is but another form of respectability politics.
But it is more than this. We are the living byproducts of a culture that instills within us: defeatism, insecurity, anxiety, lack of confidence, limiting beliefs, an aversion to discomfort (both physical and psychological), an attraction to the path of least resistance, and biases of all kinds intended to reproduce the inertia and preserve the privileges that animate us as political beings in North America.
This is not a call to grab your nearest weapon and embark upon a suicide mission in the name of justice, but to activate your mind, think clearly, and envision what our world could look like if we tried something different.
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It begins with a decisive confrontation between the ears, isolating that part of our cognition that justifies our pursuit of safety and comfort above all else, and encourages us to surrender to our fears and insecurities without ever putting up a fight. These assumptions are more dangerous than a wrestling match with a grizzly bear:
- It can’t be done.
- You’ll never get away with that.
- Everyone knows that’s impossible.
- I could never do that.
These mind games are, in part, the intended outcomes of counterinsurgency and psychological disruption. Nearly all of our “accepted wisdom” is reinforced internally: the cop that needn’t be planted at your street corner every night, for he exists in your psyche at all times. And it affects the best and strongest among us.
In my experience, those moments when I and my comrades have been at our most impactful, our boldest and most daring, were not possible until we made the following realizations:
- It’s not as difficult as you think it is: For many of us, we look to our revolutionary heroes as larger-than-life agents of change. As strategists and tacticians with exceptional capabilities. We see daring operations and ambitious campaigns as the work of some force outside of us entirely. Alien. Fictional. For the James Bonds and Batmans of the world.
Underneath the smoke and mirrors created by mythology and hero worship lie the authentic ingredients of any bold action: focus, confidence, and determination. Our heroes (Sinwar, Hampton, Assata, Guevara) are mere human beings with a heightened sense of urgency and purpose. When you have a strong enough “why,” the “how” will take care of itself.
Members and supporters of the Black Liberation Army liberated Comrade Assata Shakur from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in November 1979. Today, we have a clearer understanding of the details:
The facility lacked outer walls or fencing of any kind. Former political prisoner and BLA member Sekou Odinga, a leading participant in the operation, has since remarked, “They took their security for granted. They didn’t even search people. They had metal detectors, but they never turned ’em on or used ’em. I just walked in and signed my [false] name.” On the date of the action, Sekou was waved through the reception area, and no one noticed the .357 Magnum nestled against the small of his back. One guard, an elderly woman named Helen Anderson, monitored the dormitory housing Assata. After a brief and uneventful hostage-taking of Anderson and another prison employee, Assata was driven away, transferred to another vehicle, and has lived the remainder of her days in Cuba.
No exchange of gunfire. No complex conspiracy. Through the course of the action, mistakes were made which didn’t impede the action’s success. The only difference between us and the comrades who sprang Assata from imprisonment: they refused to surrender to the assumption that what they were determined to do was simply not possible.
And the beauty of living in an age of immediate access to limitless information is that any skill, any form of training, any set of instructions, can be accessed and internalized with relative ease. We have no excuses. - A sober assessment of risk: Fear and avoidance of risk inform everything we do, not just as organizers and activists, but as human beings. We focus on negative, anomalous events and assign them priority and outsized focus in our minds. We fail at assessing probability and disregard statistical perspectives of true risk.
In North America in the 1980s and 1990s, an anonymous, decentralized network of activists operating alternatively under the banners of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front deployed a simple strategy with one central objective: destroy the property of corporations engaged in the abuse and exploitation of land and animals. The target was capital itself, guided by the understanding that capitalism is the enemy of all life on this planet.
Animal research facilities saw their test subjects removed and their laboratories burned down; cages opened on fur farms housing mink, foxes, and bobcats, with equipment and records destroyed by fire; whaling ships sunk to the bottom of a harbor in the dead of night; logging equipment in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest sabotaged and smashed to pieces; a ski resort in Vail, Colorado incurred $12,000,000 in damage by fire after proposing to expand into endangered lynx territory.
After nearly two decades, more than $100,000,000 in damages had been assessed and the number of activists captured and imprisoned could be counted on one hand. Disciplined security practices kept law enforcement at bay for years. These clandestine elements worked in tandem with a robust grassroots movement which continued to offer public advocacy, education, and mobilizations, a holistic and complementary approach to weaken a multifaceted, systemic target. At the time, the FBI declared this movement one of the nation’s top domestic terrorism threats.
After more than a thousand such actions and hardly a lead to be found anywhere, one highly-visible apprehension of a handful of activists in the mid-2000s effectively neutralized this movement. Ninety-nine percent of ALF and ELF participants did what Abbie Hoffman characterized as the first duty of a revolutionary: get away with it. Today, this movement is self-contained, not from a sober assessment of risk, but out of an abundance of caution. - Disregard the opinions of others: Debating on the internet is among the poorest uses of our time and energy. Revolutionaries must be obsessed with the outcome and effectiveness of their actions, completely unconcerned with the latest iteration of discourse.
To reach our potential, we must be irreversibly committed to our mission. Tune out the noise and ignore everyone who tells you that your sense of urgency is misguided. - Work smarter and make it count: With the proper amount of leverage, a $40 budget can produce $1,000,000 in damages. One strategic action can halt a business in its tracks for days, weeks, or permanently. Every single individual in the Palestine solidarity movement, no matter where you are, is within a day’s drive of a major manufacturer of weapons and technologies produced for the zionist entity.
What can we learn from the following?
Although there are only five so-called prime defense contractors to the Pentagon [Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics], the web of companies in their supply chains is vast, intricate and fragile.
…
The big five defense contractors are all interlinked. Each supplies the others on various programs, and all have their own suppliers, meaning a problem for one is a problem for all…. “If you have one company, one facility, that is knocked offline for whatever reason, there’s often little or no option to replicate that elsewhere.”
…
Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman make rocket motors to propel the GMLRS [guided missile systems deployed in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere] in Camden, Arkansas, and Rocket Center, West Virginia, respectively. They are the only two providers of rocket propulsion systems in the US. [source]
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Earlier this week a group of people sabotaged Gastops’ factory in Ottawa, the only place in the world where engine sensors are produced for Lockheed’s F-35 combat jets … We cut the wiring inside all of the heat pumps on the Gastops roof, locked them out with official Ministry of Health and Safety lock-out tags, shut off the gas, broke the handles for their systems, and cut the lines to their backup communication system on the way out. [source]
This intelligence can be found hiding in plain sight, often in the pages of major media outlets. We’re afforded the opportunity, if we choose to see it and seize it, to fight smarter and to imagine our impact on a realizable, finite scale; not as an infinite struggle against an abstract enemy a thousand times larger than ourselves.
Find the weak links in the chain and attack them. - Stop begging and make it so: There’s a vast difference between demanding and imposing. When we ask for Congress to heed our demands, we’ve begun on the wrong foot. Any demand made without an enforcement mechanism is little more than a polite request and an exercise in futility.
Are we begging for an arms embargo, or will we impose one ourselves? This isn’t a matter of semantics, false bravado, or wishful thinking. It is a mindset. It informs the very essence of our theory of change and determines our entire orientation toward power: who has it and what can be done with it.
Let us do for ourselves what we know will not be done for us.
Consider what we mean by direct action: a refusal to beg for our children to be fed; instead, the development of a Free Breakfast for Children program. Do we see the difference?
Appealing to Company X to cease its criminal operations is not an expression of our power, nor does it convey the seriousness of our opposition.
Direct action means decommissioning that building and bringing their activity to a halt, today. We are totally and completely unconcerned with anyone or anything that stands in our way. This is a capability we possess, despite what you’ve heard.
Remember, at all times: factories producing weaponry for the zionist entity serve no other purpose than to profit from the suffering and misery of Palestinian men, women, and children. There is no reason, not one, for these structures to remain standing. - Use your emotions to your advantage: The imagery emerging from this livestreamed holocaust is grotesque and incomprehensible. How often do we scroll through social media and read some variation of: I do not know how to process this or go on living a normal life. I am numb. I am scarred. I am outraged.
It is imperative that we harness these feelings into ruthless, steel-eyed determination. This energy must become our fuel, pushing us forward, away from nihilism and toward the defeat of our enemies. Shock, horror, and grief are the first steps toward forging an unshakeable commitment to deliver justice in the here and now. This energy must transform us into an unforgiving, immovable force. The human spirit carries limitless potential, but the way we express our pain must be disciplined and focused intently on producing concrete changes in our reality.
The defeat of capitalism as we know it, and the task of transforming ourselves into a new and radically different humanity, requires patience. The long arc of struggle is unavoidable; we do not place undue value on short-cuts or quick and easy victories. Neither individual heroism nor spontaneous, anarchistic outbursts will lead us to victory.
Nevertheless, to ignore the potential energy and tactical advantage contained within clandestine, autonomous action is a grave mistake. Some will read this as an indulgence in recklessness or adventurism. Disagreements made in good faith ought to be engaged with sincerely, so we may reach a higher level of unity and, if not agreement, at least mutual respect and understanding. Disingenuous excuse-making ought to be disposed of promptly and ignored with rigor. The task at hand is to guide ourselves with a theory and strategy of clandestine action fit for our present conditions. Today, we have neither.
It is far past time for committed anti-imperialist forces in North America to diversify their actions, craft this strategy through practice, and heed the wisdom of seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson: the sooner begun, the sooner done.