La Tarcoteca

La Tarcoteca

sábado, 20 de noviembre de 2021

The New Republic, “Were the Earliest Societies Anarchists?”

Source - The New Republic, “Were the Earliest Societies Anarchists?” – Agency By George Scialabba, November 1, 2021

Anarchism is the black sheep of political theories. A glance at its main tenets will explain why: the absence of a state or of representative government; politics as face-to-face relations within small groups; decisions by consensus; no authority; no leadership; no coercion, even of the obstreperous; and a deep suspicion of expertise as somehow subversive of equality. (Worst of all, perhaps: drum circles.) Most Americans find these ideas bewildering. Most senior academics, secret authoritarians that they are, find them abhorrent, even ghoulish, especially as applied to their own department.

Which is why the anarchist writer David Graeber, who died last year, was the black sheep of academic anthropology. As a popular and prolific assistant professor at Yale, he was thought to be a sure bet for tenure. But the department turned him down, with almost no explanation. It was universally assumed that Graeber’s anarchist principles, activist politics—especially his support for Yale graduate students trying to organize a union—and cheeky personality cost him the prize. (No doubt the department shuddered with relief at its near escape when he later became a leading interpreter and spokesman for Occupy Wall Street.) Offers from other departments trickled in—he ended up at the London School of Economics—and the huge success of his Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) must also have assuaged the bitterness. But the lesson had been delivered: Outspokenness was not costless. Outspokenness, however, was instinctive with Graeber, as was his extraordinary generosity to students and younger colleagues, who responded with extraordinary affection, even love.

His final book, The Dawn of Everything, a co-written study of the earliest forms of social organization, caps a large and variegated output. Debt, controversial but enormously erudite and startlingly original, was his best-known work, though his two explicitly political volumes were also bestsellers: The Democracy Project (2013), a chronicle of Occupy Wall Street, followed by a scathing critique of American society and politics; and Bullshit Jobs (2018), an acerbic history and analysis of pointless drudgery (an important theme in The Dawn of Everything as well). The Utopia of Rules (2015) gathered several celebrated essays, including “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All” and “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” He was on quite a roll in his last decade. But the above was not all he was doing.

In a moving foreword to The Dawn of Everything, Graeber’s co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeology professor at University College London, described their 10-year collaboration on “a new history of humankind”: a period when “it was not uncommon for us to talk two or three times a day. We would often lose track of who came up with what idea or which new set of facts and examples.… We got to the end just as we’d started, in dialogue, with drafts passing constantly back and forth between us as we read, shared and discussed the same sources, often into the small hours of the night.” It sounds idyllic—a form of collaboration much like those that he and Wengrow argue underpinned some of the earliest human societies.

There is a Standard Version of deep history, those long ages before writing (roughly 40,000­–12,000 B.C.E.), when humans left behind traces—suggestive but not definitive—of culture and technology. The Standard Version is a species of technological determinism, in which forms of society correspond to modes of production. There have been four main social forms, according to this theory: bands, mobile groups of a few families; tribes, of perhaps 100 members, moving a few times a year; chiefdoms, hundreds strong, centered in one place but with smaller groups occasionally moving away for various reasons; and states, with thousands of members, centered in cities, and with a central government more or (usually) less accountable to the populace. To each of these forms corresponded a mode of subsistence: respectively, hunting/gathering; gardening/foraging/herding; farming; and industry. Political forms followed a closely parallel evolution: egalitarianism, private property, kingship (often just ceremonial), and the bureaucratic state. Each of these stages was more productive and more civilized than the last, but also less equal and less free.

In addition to its pleasing symmetry, the Standard Version has a certain pathos that appeals to supposedly tough-minded scientists. Civilization is a stern fate, on this view: We can only attain modernity’s deepest satisfactions by giving up the mobility, spontaneity, and nonchalance of our free-spirited but immature ancestors. We moderns—and especially intellectuals, who grasp this painful dilemma most fully—become tragic heroes of a sort.

Graeber and Wengrow, however, are intent on blowing up the Standard Version in The Dawn of Everything. It was an understandable attempt to extrapolate from very limited data (and, in some cases, a less excusable attempt to retroactively justify Western colonialism). But in the last few decades, a mass of new evidence from archaeology and anthropology has appeared, leaving it all but unsalvageable. Again and again, among the Kwakiutl, Nambikwara, Inuit, Lakota, and innumerable others, from the Amazon to the Arctic Circle to Central Africa to the Great Plains, and in all periods from the Upper Paleolithic to the nineteenth century, archaeologists have discovered variety where the Standard Version predicted uniformity.

Until around 10,000 B.C., according to the eminent primatologist Christopher Boehm, articulating the scholarly consensus, humans lived in “societies of equals, and outside the family there were no dominators.” In such societies, where supposedly no distinctions of power or rank were observed in life, it seems unlikely they would have been observed in death. They were, however, and regularly. Rich burials—in unusually large graves or with ornaments, tools, textiles, or weapons, sometimes in profusion—have been found on every continent, often dating to millennia before social distinctions of any sort were supposed to have arisen in human societies. The egalitarian bands of prehistory, never solidly based on evidence, may soon disappear into myth.

Monumental architecture is more evidence against the standard evolutionary scheme. In southern Turkey, for example, there is an ensemble of 20 stone temples, about as large as Stonehenge (which dates from 3000 B.C.), with carved portraits of animals on the pillars. It dates from 9000 B.C. In Poverty Point, Louisiana, a network of enormous mounds and ridges stretches out across 400 acres or so. Constructed in 1600 B.C. (by moving a million cubic meters of earth), it may have been a trading center or a ritual center. Its builders seem to have been hunters, fishers, and foragers. Across Eastern Europe is a line of “mammoth houses,” enclosures up to 40 feet in diameter made of mammoth hides stretched over poles, constructed between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, obviously by at least part-time hunters. Every year, more very old monuments constructed by nonfarming, non-state people are discovered, making it harder to believe that such achievements are only possible, as the conventional wisdom has it, on the basis of agricultural surpluses and bureaucratic expertise.

Evidence of occupational variety at many sites calls for explanation: It seems unlikely that, at the same moment in a given area, one group consisted of full-time agriculturalists, another of full-time foragers, and another full-time pastoralists. It now appears that seasonality was very common, with groups changing not only their way of procuring food one or more times a year, but authority relations and other customs as well. Members of a North American Plains tribe, for example, were foragers and herders for most of the year, with very lax discipline both at home and toward tribal leaders. During the great annual buffalo hunt, however, the tribe became quite hierarchical; in particular, there were “buffalo police” who enforced norms of cooperation and distribution very strictly and even had the power to impose capital punishment on the spot for sufficiently grave violations. Most indigenous Amazonian societies had different authority structures at different times of year. Perhaps the best-known example is from the Arctic, where Inuit fathers exercised strict patriarchal authority in summer, while winter, lived more inside, was something of a saturnalia, with spouse-swapping and children running free.

By and large, anthropologists have not made much of seasonality. (Interestingly, most of those who have done so have been anarchist-leaning: Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Lowie, Pierre ­Clastres.) Graeber and Wengrow make a great deal of it.

Archaeological evidence ... suggests that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors ... shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states. With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in.

It is difficult for some—perhaps most—of us to attribute so advanced a political and philosophical consciousness to our remote ancestors. Perhaps, Graeber and Wengrow suggest, that is the problem: Our unshakable conviction that modernity spells progress and liberation prevents us from seeing that, in many times and places, premodern life was actually more rational and free.

Though combative, The Dawn of Everything is an upbeat book. Its debunking energies mainly go to refuting the conventional wisdom at its most discouraging. For example, anthropologists and archaeologists (like most everyone else) tend to assume there is an inverse relation between scale and equality; that the greater the number of people who need to be organized to work or live or fight together, the more coercion will be necessary. Cities represent a scaling up of population, and therefore, naturally, of mechanisms of control. And where did cities come from?

The conventional story looks for the ultimate causes in technological factors: Cities were a delayed, but inevitable, effect of the “Agricultural Revolution,” which started populations on an upward trajectory, and set off a chain of other developments, for instance in transport and administration, which made it possible to support large populations living in one place. These large populations then required states to administer them.

This conventional story is being undermined by new archaeological evidence, especially from the largest prehistoric cities, in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica. Those “large populations living in one place”—peasantries—do not show up until later in the histories of most large cities. Initially, besides farmers drawn to a fertile floodplain, there were equal numbers of hunters, foragers, and fishers, and sometimes very large ceremonial or ritual centers. What there don’t seem to have been, by and large, were ruling classes. The conventional assumption—amounting almost to a Weltanschauung—that civilization marches in lockstep with state authority seems to be tottering.

The Agricultural Revolution is another key element of the Standard Version: a swift and mostly complete transition from mobile, egalitarian, healthy foragers, relatively few in number, lacking the concept of private property, and living on wild resources, to farming populations, numerous, sedentary, class-stratified, disease-ridden, and producing a surplus of food. The consequence, as noted above, was cities, and the inevitable concomitant of cities was states. But this turns out to be far too neat. As recent evidence shows, many populations took up farming and then went back to foraging. Many foraging communities were far more authoritarian than farming communities. And in quite a few places, the transition from foraging to farming took thousands of years. It may be necessary to rechristen the Agricultural Revolution as the Agricultural Slow Walk.

Prehistory, Graeber and Wengrow insist, is vastly more interesting than scholars knew until recently. And not just more interesting, but more inspiring as well: “It is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of several bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.” “Carnival” brings to mind Occupy, which, along with this book, testifies to David Graeber’s admirable energy, imagination, and love of freedom.

For all its historical and theoretical brilliance, The Dawn of Everything does not wholly vindicate the anarchist philosophical framework in which the argument is set. Graeber and Wengrow do not exactly preach anarchism, but the moral of their long and immensely rich study is clear: Relations of authority are the most important and revealing things about any society, small or large, and no one should ever be subject to any authority she hasn’t chosen to be subject to.

Who could disagree—as long as it’s understood that accepting citizenship in a democratic polity means choosing to be subject to its authority? This is a window on a long-standing quarrel between anarchists and their less glamorous political cousins, socialists and social democrats. As one of the latter tribe, I confess that The Dawn of Everything did get a rise out of me now and then. For one thing, nearly everyone to the left of Genghis Khan has a sentimental fondness for the European Enlightenment—it’s where the critical spirit found its voice. Graeber and Wengrow think it’s vastly overrated. Enlightenment thinkers weren’t particularly original, they write; their political ideas came mostly from China and from Native Americans. The proof is that Leibniz and Montesquieu praised the Chinese civil service and recommended it to European rulers while Native Americans who visited Europe impressed the philosophers so much that many of them put the visitors into their philosophical dialogues.

Native American political thought is certainly impressive, and Graeber and Wengrow expound it superlatively well. Still, no one has claimed (as far as I know) that Europe got from Native Americans the ideas of habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, a free press, religious disestablishment, or a written constitution with enumerated rights; or that Adam Smith got from them the idea of labor unions, free education for workers, or income redistribution, all of which he argued for in The Wealth of Nations (though few conservatives have noticed). Perhaps the American left should take a break from trying to subvert the Enlightenment until the American right stops trying to roll it back.

Graeber and Wengrow’s second foray into socialist-/social democrat–baiting is more surprising. Equality, the cherished ideal of most leftists past and present, seems to them a theoretical and strategic dead end, a mere “technocratic” reform. They dismiss, even mock, equality as a goal:


To create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 percent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wrangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.

Equality is not only an unworthy goal; it is not even an intelligible one: “it remains entirely unclear what ‘egalitarian’ even means.” Does it? It seems clear enough to me: a society with a Gini coefficient below 0.2 (Graeber and Wengrow persistently and annoyingly disparage the Gini coefficient, our best quantitative measure of inequality); universal free health care; universal free preschool and public higher education; equal per-pupil expenditures in primary and secondary school; a Universal Basic Income (maybe); enforcement of labor law (the nonenforcement of which has destroyed American unionism); enforcement of tax law (the nonenforcement of which is a trillion-dollar annual gift to the wealthy); all adult citizens automatically registered to vote; exclusively public funding of elections; transparency mechanisms, including a vastly expanded Freedom of Information Act; and accountability mechanisms, including recall, at all levels. If that’s not an egalitarian program, why not? And if Graeber and Wengrow wouldn’t regard it as well worth fighting for, why not?

I think I know why: Because, unlike in grubby, soulless social democracy, people in true communism (for example, the indigenous societies of the Northeast Woodlands before the European invasion) “guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life—or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other.” That is the anarchist ideal. Well, what is the purpose of the socialist/social democratic reforms I just proposed except to guarantee everyone “the means to an autonomous life” in an industrial society? “Industrial society”—there’s the rub. Is anarchism feasible in a society of any considerable size or complexity, where coordination, authority, and expertise are essential? How much of mass production, technological innovation, cheap paperbacks and CDs, and the rest of our accursedly seductive late-capitalist way of life do we want to walk back? And how do we do that without starving or stranding or inciting to rebellion the hundreds of millions of hapless humans trapped into dependence on cars, air travel, supermarkets, and single-family houses? Few contemporary anarchist writers have addressed these questions squarely, and none satisfactorily.

Still, socialists and social democrats have a very large blind spot of our own: the ideology of progress. Believing that democracy and technology advance together, that representative institutions and scientific rationality will reliably and permanently vanquish ignorance and want, and that the historical record demonstrates all this, we can’t account for historical regression (like contemporary right-wing populism in Europe and the United States) or precocity—outstanding political virtue or imagination among peoples with few material attainments. Anarchists, free of this intellectual baggage, need not tie themselves in knots to explain these “paradoxes” of progress.

Labels, clearly, are an aid to misunderstanding. Surely it is not necessary to choose between freedom and equality, much less to disparage those who make the opposite choice. If an anarchist believes in freedom, and a socialist believes in equality, what is someone who believes in freedom and equality? A wise person and a useful citizen.

sábado, 22 de mayo de 2021

Spain ‘at War’: Strategic dispute against Morocco over Saharawi Blood Phosphates

By Pablo Heraklio Published KAOS Source La Tarcoteca 4.5.2021 translation thefreeonline 

Juan Carlos I will go down in the Annals of History as one of the worst and most abject monarchs of an era. He killed his brother, took his father away from the crown, was involved in the death of his cousin, plotted several coups in his country, many others abroad, orchestrated the GAL [1] (state sponsored death squads) together with military groups, decorated all the Dictators he could [2], also torturers and murderers, trafficked in arms and used his position to defraud his personal fortune, doing more service to Switzerland than to Spain.


He let us enjoy a wonderful state infested with fascists in the high military, police, judicial, political and business commanders, where war criminals went unpunished and were amnestied without trial; avoiding the recognition or compensation of the victims [Amnesty Law 1977 (3)].

This infestation became the current ruling oligarchy, which was later joined by representatives of the various international corporations.
 

But that was not the worst at all. His narrow-mindedness and personal greed place the Spanish oligarchies in the midst of an international conflict that is getting bigger and bigger every day.

45 years ago Juan Carlos I « Swap the former colony in exchange for being able to keep the crown – canarias-semanal. [4]» 2021. Now Spain is involved in the Sahara War for control of the Blood Phosphates.

In Morocco [5]a geopolitical conflict is underway for global food security, as important as the control of oil reserves. Maybe more.

“Three countries, China, the United States and Morocco control 67% of the world phosphates total, with Morocco 15%” – Ecología Política [6] Political Ecology 2012. Part of the phosphates exploited by both Morocco and the USA are plundered from Western Sahara.

The dust of these lands naturally fertilizes large areas of the planet, other continents, from the Amazon to Europe or Africa. The concentrated salts of fertilizers pollute aquifers and land, generating wastelands, dead water, and requiring constant chemical rectification. Thus, the very functionality of global ecosystems is also at stake.

https://file.ejatlas.org/img/Conflict/resource-extraction-in-boucra-western-sahara-updated-by-julie-snorek-7-nov-2016/WasternSahara_phosphate_bucraa.jpg


International Military Conflict

A conflict no longer commercial, but open military; but silenced by what have already been called Blood Phosphates, started on Nov 4, 2020 with the declaration of the State of War of the Polisario Front [7].

In this war we are seeing actors like the USA, France, Israel, China or Spain pushing political and military pressure. Beyond gas and oil is the business of world fertilizers, potash, phosphates, nitrogen compounds in Saharawi lands.

Behind the fertilizers is the entire transnational agrochemical industry [8], the Big-Agro: Cargill, Monsanto, Nutrien, Northwach, Paradeep Phosphates, Ballance-Agrinutriens.

Sahrawi sands are transported around the world and treated in a thousand ways to obtain the fertilizers that are consumed by intensive agriculture from Murcia, Huelva, Castilla y León or Aragon to Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia, Egypt, India or China, affecting thus to the food security of these countries, and hence its geopolitical importance …

The size of the contest

This is the size of the contest, that the USA has sent its Sixth Fleet.
It has taken the Canary Islands as a control point for exports from the Mediterranean and North Africa. It is already maneuvering and showing his mastery of the area:
“Some maneuvers by the US affect air traffic with the Canary Islands – Canarias” 3.3.2021 [9]
«Threat from the United States and Morocco to Spain- Voltairenet.org» 16.3.2021 [10]

They knew something.
The USA has a base on the Moroccan-Saharawi border, the base of Tan Tan, from 2008, to the north:
“The US opens its new military base in Tan Tan, just 300 kilometers from the Canary Islands” 2008 [11]

Since 2012 it has used the Canary Islands as its western drinking trough:
“The Island [las Palmas] will serve as a logistics base for the United States and its allies to intervene in the Sahel – La Provincia” 2012 [12]

To close the southern clamp they plan to control the area with the building of a new base to the south of the area:
«Competition heats up for NATO Sahel compound contract – 04/07/2021 – Intelligence Online» 2021 [13]

France maintains a large contingent to the east in Mali, central Sahara desert, to ensure control over the uranium mines, fertilizers and the northern Sahel, despite popular protests.
“France’s Impressive Military Deployment: More than 30,000 Military in Five” Spheres “of Influence” 21.1.2021 [14]

Morocco has been a faithful ally of the United States since the times of Hasan II and provides american corporations with natural resources plundered from their own people and from the Saharawi. It is both an ally and a competitor of Spain:
«Morocco offers the US a base to close Rota: Mohamed VI gives facilities to the Americans» 2020 [15]

At this stage of the war, Spain provides arms to both Morocco and the Polisario Front while negotiating with Mohamed IV [actual king and ruler] the future of the companies that will exploit potash and phosphates. Everything in its place:
“Spain declared war on the Saharawis by selling and giving arms to Morocco in full offensive in Western Sahara” 3.5.2021 [16]

Russia is not so affected since its agriculture is extensive and moves towards its Siberian districts. China is an interested party, but for now it does not seem to speak, although sooner or later it will be affected. Everyone has a plan.

Transnational extractivism, the new Colonialism

The interests of Spain are very clear:
«The ships and companies that plunder the phosphates of the Western Sahara occupied by Morocco>> Sahara Press Service 2018 [17] and «“Spanish companies exploit the riches of Western Sahara – eitb.eus” 11.18.2021 [18]

They represent European interests and stand against Moroccan interests; and of the Sahrawis.

As you can see, the damn Ibex35 [spanish stock market] is the hand that rocks the cradle. Here are some infamous protagonists: Abengoa / Javier Benjumea, Acciona / JM Entrecanales, Gamesa-Siemems / Andreas Nauen. Although also others less known as FMC Foret/ Mark Douglas-Javier Carratalá, Jealsa / Elena Chamorro, EuroPacífico, Granintra / Luis Jimenez Chirino, IsoFotón / Carlos Zambudio Jimenez, Ership / Gonzalo Alvargonzalez Figaredo, NETMAR / Ángel Riva Fierro, Meripul / Conrado Merino Inyesto or Troulo among many others.

Construction, fishing, energy, agrochemical; and military: Expal (explosives) / Jose Luis Urcelay Verdugo, MAXAM (explosives) / Urcelay himself with Juan Carlos García Lujan, Instalaza / Leoncio Muñoz BuenoMBDA (missiles) / Eric Beranger, SAPA (artillery) / José María Berasategui Liceaga , Indra (electromechanical) / Fernando Abril-Martorell .

All of them share a set of crossed interests far beyond the monetary, strategically, since the control of trade in the area and access to low-priced food that interests countries such as Germany, France or the USA is at stake. .

Not separately, but together and under pressure from third parties they are capable of moving the Spanish state machinery to force a deployment of military forces in the area.

 

Silent conflict, Spain in a proxy war

What is going to happen in the coming years in Morocco and the Sahara, in competition for natural resources, affecting Algeria, Mali and even Tunisia, is a direct result of the process of decolonization and recolonization in the making.

This colonizing process in Spain was called the Empire and the decolonizing Decadence of the Empire. This new recolonizing movement will be called Disaster.

The interests of Spain, of its oligarchies, are once again trans-Mediterranean and open conflicts are envisioned with the sending of troops in the medium-long term. 

Spain, the exploiting businessmen, yearn for phosphates, at the strategic mandate of the European powers, whose access was cut off due to the puerile Rogue Maneuver.

If the Sahara had been duly decolonized, Spanish companies would calmly exploit those resources and get a great geostrategic prize, maintaining a defensive and containment stance against Morocco.

Which would have given him access to other types of contracts and perks, such as exchanges for fishing, agricultural or hydrocarbon quotas. An Ace in international negotiations.

The loss was not only billion dollar, it was strategic, comparable to losing the Strait of Gibraltar. This can be understood by even the most fanatical fascists [supporters of the king, who make the deal with Hasan II].

Too much power for one person. Due to the clumsy and greedy maneuver of the robber Bourbon, the Spanish oligarchies, representatives of international powers interested in the fight - just look at the composition of their directors boards -, they come themselves into conflict with Morocco; with the USA rolling as the referee.

Now they have to adopt an offensive posture instead, which implies strain and depletion; decrease in profits and assumption of losses of all kinds.

For this they need military support and justify interventionism:
–Arm both Morocco and the Arab Republic of the Democratic Sahara SADR,
–Promote conflict and mutual aggression. At first, the objective is to contain the conflict in the two countries but maintaining the threat of an extension to the neighboring countries.
–Training squads to interrupt the exploitation of resources, threatening to force the intervention of third parties; meaning EU-NATO.

Spain delivers armaments to Morocco, a poisoned gift. Spain will provide arms in exchange for commodities and money, bleeding both adversaries. For this, it is essential to increase the tension between the fighters; which usually involves attacks in both countries, possibly using some fraction of Al-Qaeda / Stay Behind network.

This rearmament will be strategically counterproductive in the future. But who cares, if by now the quarterly balance works out. 

Spain, the breadbasket of Europe, has the support of the EU, and when the time comes it will play its card with NATO, which gives it an advantage.

If this war has not transcended to the public, it is on the one hand due to the media lock, since the same companies that invest and finance the mass media are those that invest and finance the Agrochemicals and plunder companies mentioned above: armed banks [19] such as BBVA, Santander Bank, LaCaixa Bank; the own Ministry of Defense of Spain; international investment, hedge and venture capital funds such as Black Rock, Vanguard, Capital, JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway.

And the policy of professionalized recruitment, which transforms the state army into a mercenary army at the service of these oligarchies; that covers any military intervention with a cloak of opacity and impunity. We are in the silent conflict phase.

When will we see an open conflict?

In other words, how is a casus belli generated? Attacks and terrorism. How is a war morally fueled? Fascism. The rise of fascism in Spain [20], France, Italy, Germany, is not accidental. This Recolonial situation did not occur in the decades of the 80s or 90s.

The conflict that today is in its initial phases will worsen; we do not know the specific terms and times. But we can intuit how it will happen: All wars have three phases: pre-war or preparatory, confrontation or operational, and post-war or outcome. The first one already has happened and we didn’t even know about it.

Since war was declared by the Polisarian Front we are in the operational phase and we can expect several events:
1-We know that right now the government of Pedro Sánchez is involved in the preparatory phase of supplying arms to both parties. This escalation is essential. Fait Accompli.

2-As we have seen in Syria, Libya, Yemen or Iraq, the intervention of the powers is limited to air and maritime control, while land operations are delegated to local militias/ irregular armies. The conflict can continue set like this for years, allowing a comfortable plundering of resources.
-The next intervention would be the sending of training commands and training of military cadres that promote war operations between both countries. Surely they are already underway in the various academies and training camps.
-Then after air and customs control; a phase in which the United States has already entered and which will accompany Spain from Rota and Las Palmas. Developing.

It should be followed by the increase in skirmishes and military assaults in the SADR. Later in Morocco and Mauritania. Finally in Europe. The worst geostrategic decision, a door for Popular Revolution.

3-The milestone will be the leap to public opinion. Possibly the first attack in Spain, either under a false flag or a real one, or against Spanish interests abroad.

When it happens, all the corporate media will vomit their usual infoxication in unison.

This will be the signal to authorize direct intervention. This could be the worst geostrategic decision made by the Spanish oligarchy since the Sahara Exchange.

It will coincide with a period of internal instability/ ecological transition that we are already experiencing due to the accumulation of crises to which would be added the diversion of funds to the military. It would fill the barracks and factories of impoverished people; and flowers at cemeteries. Reigning fascism.

Finally, the hard repression of the protests that arose against would arrive, posing scenarios more similar to those of the Melilla War of 1909 than to those of No-to-Iraq War in 2004 [wide spread riots instead of pacific prostest].

It will be the moment of disaster, because It will mean not a government, but a domination of fascism as we have not seen since the days of Franco’s raids. The burning, volatilization, of resources would suppose the gradual dysfunctionality of the State, with all that this implies.

Let’s hope we’re wrong, but the scenario is very possible; the national oligarchies are very scared. The Germans too. The crown of Juan Carlos will cost Felipe VI many more deaths. Will he hold on?

From an objective point of view, the Sahara War is part of the struggles to maintain the Capitalist-Oil system, characterized by: cheap energy, centralization of production, intensivism and industry on a world scale.

In the new context of shortage of high-density energy, hydrocarbons and plastics -peak of oil- Capitalism-Post covid19, it will mean that the less energy for transport will reduce the intensity of the production and distribution of goods.

This push for a decentralization of production, including food, and de-scaling of industry; deglobalization and the creation of new economic blocks. The importance of the world’s phosphates may have a peak, but it will diminish in the long run, and a military adventure would only serve to waste resources that would otherwise be used for a much more lucrative rearrangement.

But of course, this decentralization supposes a net loss of power, to which the aforementioned companies and governments are not willing. We are seeing the last throes of an old system that breaks down, and in a big way.

The reality is stubborn, the more they insist on their military adventures, the faster their fall will be, because the faster they will lose supports, burn their resources and increase internal resistance to the putrescent regime; and sooner we will approach to our revolutionary moment. [21]

They won’t stop until they destroy the planet.

_____
Notes
[1] https://diario16.com/juan-carlos-i-fue-el-primero-que-tuvo-en-sus-manos-el-acta-fundacional-de-los-gal/
[2] https://www.publico.es/politica/espana-revisado-condecoraciones-dictadores-entregadas-juan-carlos-i.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_1977_Amnesty_Law
[4] https://canarias-semanal.org/art/30422/a-45-anos-de-la-entrega-del-sahara-juan-carlos-i-canjeo-la-ex-colonia-a-cambio-de-poder-mantener-la-corona
[5] https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-51283951
[6] https://www.ecologiapolitica.info/?p=3757
[7] https://www.elespanol.com/mundo/20201114/peligra-fuego-sahara-marruecos-polisario-desempolvan-armas/535697845_0.html
[8] https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/no-ti
[9] https://www.canarias7.es/canarias/maniobras-afectan-trafico-20210303142630-nt.html
[10] https://www.voltairenet.org/article212431.html
[11] https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/417799/0/canarias/base/militar/
[12] https://www.laprovincia.es/canarias/2012/09/13/isla-servira-base-logistica-ee-10505682.html
[13] https://www.intelligenceonline.com/corporate-intelligence/2021/04/07/competition-heats-up-for-nato-sahel-compound-contract,109656234-art
[14] https://abcblogs.abc.es/tierra-mar-aire/internacional/francia-despliegue-militar.html?ref=https%3A%2F%2Ftarcotecacounterinfo.blogspot.com%2F
[15] https://www.elespanol.com/espana/20200705/marruecos-eeuu-rota-mohamed-vi-facilidades-americanos/502700238_0.html
[16] https://www.ecsaharaui.com/2021/03/espana-le-declaro-la-guerra-los.html
[17] https://www.spsrasd.info/news/es/articles/2018/02/17/13599.html
[18] https://www.eitb.eus/es/radio/radio-euskadi/programas/graffiti/detalle/7643887/empresas-espanolas-explotan-riquezas-sahara-occidental----/
[19] http://www.bancaarmada.org/es/prensa/notas-de-prensa/856-la-campanya-banca-armada-denuncia-en-bilbao-que-el-bbva-es-el-banco-de-espana-con-mas-inversion-en-el-negocio-de-la-guerra-y-que-aumenta-su-financiacion-en-las-armas-nucleares
[20] https://kaosenlared.net/una-treintena-de-militares-y-politicos-utilizaron-las-puertas-giratorias-para-aterrizar-en-empresas-armamentisticas/
[21] https://tarcoteca.blogspot.com/2020/12/de-la-crisis-permanente-y-el-colapso.html

About the author. Pablo Heraklio is a social activist and active member of spanish CNT. Its decane blog https://tarcoteca.blogspot.com/ is commit with counterinfo, alternative media, political analisys, communication and translation of fair news into spanish.

miércoles, 5 de mayo de 2021

International solidarity Call: May 7, at the Colombian embassies

"The antimilitarist movement calls for all international solidarity for this Friday, May 7, at the Colombian embassies in every country in the world The message will be clear: For the dismantling of ESMAD and against the repression of the Colombian people #contagioantimilitarista


miércoles, 3 de marzo de 2021

Call for solidarity with #RuymánLibertad, anarchist repressed, tortured and persecuted by the Spanish state for housing the poor 24.3.2021

Source - Call for solidarity with Ruymán Rodríguez, anarchist repressed, tortured and persecuted by the Spanish state for housing the poor - Green Anti-Capitalist Media 3.3.2021 by GAF London


We are publishing an statement sent to us by GAF London as well as a translation of the one released by Federación Anarquista Gran Canaria. You can see the amazing work the FAGC does by listening to our recent interview with one of them. Please remember that Green Anti-capitalist Media simply publishes what we receive and we don’t necessarily endorse or condone any of the opinions it contains.

Here is the statement by GAF London followed by the translation bellow.


We’ve translated an statement published by the Federación Anarquista Gran Canaria (Gran Canaria Anarquist Federation) where they detail the political persecution of their member Ruymán Rodríguez, who is facing false charges to cover up the brutal violence they inflicted upon him as part of a ploy to repress the radical housing movement in Gran Canaria. The FAGC he’s part of has been involved in a very successful social movement for housing in Gran Canaria and has helped hundreds of families left abandoned by the state. Like any other threat to its legitimacy, the state couldn’t allow this to continue unchallenged.

This happens as the protests for the political incarceration of Catalan anti-fascist rapper Pablo Hasél continue. And in fact just as it’s announced that 8 anarchists have been arrested accused without evidence of participating in the burning of a police van during these protests. This is clearly a move against the whole of the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement, which they seek to use as the scapegoat to try to smother the flames of revolt spreading all over the Spanish state after years of pent up rage for the many injustices the people have suffered under it.

It’s also difficult not to notice the significance of this happening only a day after we remembered the anniversary of the death of Salvador Puig, an anti-capitalist killed by the Francoist regime in what became the last death sentence in Spain to date, precipitating the end of the dictatorship soon after. As we can see, the transition to democracy made little difference in stopping the political repression or solve any of the issues accosting the people. Rather, it has allowed for the crimes of the dictatorship to go unpunished and for all the institutions that create misery for the people, such as the guarcia civil that tortured Ruy, to continue operating unchallenged. This is the nature of democracies: a more stable and cunning form of domination.

We therefore cannot see this as anything else but the continuation of the campaign of social warfare states wage against their people to keep them under their rule. This war is always takes place unilaterally by the state even when there’s not significant opposition to it, but it escalates as soon as its subjects attempt to fight back by abandoning the useless calls for civility and non-violence, the meaningless gestures, marches and electoral aspirations. The arrival of the “most progressive government in the history of the democracy” in Spain has done nothing to stop this. And in fact, it has allowed it to continue more efficiently and brutal than ever by buying the support of parts of the left with electoral promises of representation.

It’s in this context that we call on all members of the international anarchist, anti-authoritarian and antifascist movement to extend their solidarity to Ruymán Rodríguez and the FAGC as well as to everyone else suffering the repression of the Spanish state. Just as they ramp up their campaign of violence, so must we increase the intensity of our fight for freedom. Messages and shows of solidarity are needed, but also actions that target the state and its institutions. No matter in what part of the world you find yourself, our enemy is the same. And any threat to one of its parts affects the whole. Let them feel the fear of those who won’t bow down to their violence.

Solidarity with Ruymán Rodríguez!

Solidarity with the victims of state violence!

Burn down the prisons, free all prisoners!

#RuymánLibertad

#FreeRuyman

– GAF London