Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a worldwide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational coroporations. Empire is everywhere things are working. Everywhere the status quo reigns.
We were born inside the catastrophe and with it we have drawn up a strange and peaceable relation of habitat.
In “traditional societies” isolation was the harshest sentence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is now the common condition.
But what is most striking… is not the arrogance of the empire but the weakness of the counter-attack.
The quotes above are from a book titled The Call, last week I played a benefit for it’s alleged authors. They are often called the “Tarnac Nine” after their home of Tarnac, a quaint village in France’s most remote & least populated region. Flowers line the hamlet’s empty cobblestone streets, in every way it seems the least likely place to start the coming insurrection. But that’s not what the French state thought when they sent 350 paramilitary police on a raid in November of 2008.
They are accused of writing a pair incendiary books (The Call, The Coming Insurrection), and some acts of sabotage. They state’s case is weak, and futher undermined by a sympathetic French public that has seen this raid for exactly what it was: a PR stunt by the Sarkozy regime. Le Monde even gave the defendants a full page editorial to write whatever they like. Imagine for a moment the New York times giving an op-ed page to some accused insurrectionary terrorists. There has been very little media on the Tarnac raid in the anglo press, although this below is a gem-
Maybe it has something to do with revenge?
Remember back when the world’s leaders couldn’t plot in peace, when any meeting of the powerful was marred by the racket of helicopters, exploding tear gas canisters and shouts of the multitude? The vengeance of the state toward this rebellion has arrived, nearly ten years after the high-water mark of our collective resistance. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but it’s more likely that the current global wave of repression is arriving tardy because of the torpid velocity of police investigations, compounded by a lack of evidence, or in many cases even a significant crime.
Maybe I’m too cynical or paranoid. It could be true that the French state is so naive & delusional they they honestly believe that these peeps were on the verge of fomenting a violent revolution.
In any case it’s important to support the accused. Although it’s even more important that others pick up the torch, figuratively and literally. ¡Venga jaleo!
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as long as french people will have enought red wine and semlly cheeses there won’t be any revolution on seight.
seriously, the book is interesting but it’s only interesting… it’s not even a manifesto, the ideas are really light, we are far from Guy Debord and situationism. but i agree with you when you ask if the state is so naive that they think those 9 could set an insurection with their book. in their case i think that government knew they were making a mistake, but anyway they decided to strike hard and blind. at the time it was a good occasion to communicate against left and ultra left and to legitimate others aspects of their policies. that’s what sarkozy does best : starting counterfires and despising people
Glenn Beck’s appropriation of that book’s message is startling for its subtlety. He tells his viewers to buy it and read it as victims/targets of its words, thereby getting drawn into an overall feeling of misguided rage. Then he tells these folks that they are martyrs and doves, like MLK and Gandhi. Not to mention the way Beck dry fucks Thomas Paine…