A decade of dissent: against corporate dictatorship

In the second part of my retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit, I look back on its content in 2016. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

Resistance to the industrial system’s endless assault on our lives and our world was at the centre of the second year of Acorn bulletins.

We reported, for instance, on the ZAD land occupation at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France which was spearheading determined opposition to plans for a new Nantes airport – including a 60,000-strong demo which some friends and I were able to attend.

We explained: “Since it was established in 2008, the ZAD at NDDL has become much more than an eco-protest camp.

“It is a symbol of resistance, an autonomous zone where the cops stay away and people are able to experiment with different ways of living, growing their own food, baking their own bread, publishing their own newspaper, running their own radio station and, most recently, setting up their own library”.

The airport threat was eventually seen off, as indeed was the oil drilling opposed by the Leith Hill Protection Camp in Surrey, England, which The Acorn visited, as well as continuing to report on the struggle against fracking across the UK.

We remarked that the attempts of the British state to impose this Blitzkrieg industrialisation of the countryside against the wishes of the public was one of those moments when “the fog suddenly lifts and a large number of people see that they are not living in the green and pleasant land of a benign democracy at all, but in the concrete and razor wire prison camp of a corporate dictatorship”.

Another of those moments was, of course, to occur four years later!

The Acorn carried news of a proposed sell-off of public downland in East Sussex, anti-nuclear protests in Bure, France, the “No THT” campaign against high-voltage power lines in the French Alps, the anti-mining struggle in Germany’s Hambacher Forest, indigenous resistance to dam-building in Malaysia, the NO TAV campaign against the high-speed rail line threatening the Italian Alps, and the massive battle against the thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline being built to carry fracked oil across North America.

We warned about the threat of transhumanism and quoted activists who had targeted the Google HQ in Germany to highlight its involvement in the sinister phenomenon as declaring: “Transhumanists are convinced that the way out of a world which they have decisively destroyed is the transition from human to machine”.

But at the same time we were increasingly aware that many supposedly “green” campaigners were not interested in trying to halt the destruction wrought by the global mafia’s “development” bulldozer.

We lamented: “The absurdities of the mainstream ‘environmentalist’ movement were tragically plain to see around the tepid COP21 mobilisation in Paris”.

And we added: “It is a worrying trend of our times that too many environmentalists are taken in by the lie that ‘alternative’ energy sources and techno-fixes are all that are needed to save the world, rather than the destruction of the entire money-based industrial capitalist system that is choking it to death”.

The Acorn ran several pieces by Rob los Ricos, an American anarchist famously jailed following a Reclaim the Streets festival in Eugene, Oregon, on June 18 1999.

He urged: “Let us prepare ourselves to turn our backs on this civilization of mass destruction and make something magical, something incredibly beautiful and nurturing.

“If we don’t, the human race will be gone, and we’ll have lost everything. The next couple of decades will determine our collective fate, for all time”.

Meanwhile, we continued to include reports on the same groups and causes as in 2015, plus news of an anarchist summer camp in Austria, anti-gentrification protests in Berlin and opposition to the G20 in Hamburg.

We were also greatly interested in the Nuit Debout occupations and associated protests sparked by the Loi Travail (labour law) in France.

We observed that it was “quite clear that the hated reforms are being violently imposed on the French people at the behest of the global financial elite”.

As one statement from protesters explained: “What is being born here has little to do with the labour law. This law is just the tipping point. The one attack too many. Too arrogant, too blatant, too humiliating. The surveillance laws, the Macron law, the state of emergency, the stripping of nationality measures, the anti-terrorist laws, the penal reform project and the labour law all add up to a system. It’s one big project to bring the population to heel.

“Everyone knows that what makes a government retreat is not the number of people on the streets, but their determination. The only thing that will make a government retreat is the spectre of an uprising, the possibility of the loss of total control”.

And we published a first-hand account from a participant in the April 28 protest in Marseilles.

“The crowd surged down the road and through a gate leading to the railway sidings and on to the main railway line close to Marseilles St Charles station. Planks, tyres and other objects were dragged on to the rails and set on fire. 400 protesters were on the line. The infrastructure was well and truly blocked”.

We stressed in our round-up of worldwide May Day action: “Although the people, the tear gas and the police batons were all very real, the day is a symbolic annual incarnation of a battle that goes on for 24 hours a day, 52 weeks of the year.

“This is the battle between us and them, between the exploited and the exploiters, the peasants and the squires, the workers and the bosses, the have-nots and the have-too-muches”.

But there were more signs of acornic frustration at the limits of the UK-based activist milieu with which we were still largely identified.

For instance, we wrote in March: “The British state is a ruthlessly violent criminal organisation that will stop at nothing to push the interests of the rich elite that owns it.

“This plain and unpleasant fact should always inform the thinking of anybody who dares to stand up to the system – and yet, all too often, activists slip into a naïve liberalism that simply cannot cope with the grim truth”.

We added in April: “There is no point in trying to reform the system by removing the parts which are corrupt, because the whole thing is rotten to the core. It is, in itself, nothing other than corruption!”

In particular we bemoaned the way that fear of being contaminated by “conspiracy theories” was severely restricting analysis and understanding on the so-called “left”.

Referring to the research of author Robin Ramsay, we recalled: “When elements of the ‘radical’ Right in the USA started criticising the US-dominated military-industrial complex, or ‘New World Order’, in the 1980s and 1990s, some on the Left turned and ran”.

We were pleased to work with Gianfranco Sanguinetti – a Situationist comrade of Guy Debord – in translating and publishing an article he wrote about the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, which explored “the masquerade ball, the shadow theatre, the fool’s game, the showmanship, the dramatics and the ‘mainstream’ narrative”.

We also had questions to ask about the “terrorist” attack in Nice, France, and we noted that the British state’s direct involvement in terrorism in Northern Ireland had been exposed by an official investigation into the murders of six Catholic men in 1994.

Continuing the state terrorism theme, we carried a report on the “Na i Ffair Arfau Caerdydd” campaign against the Cardiff Arms Fair, where exhibitors included BAE Systems, the world’s third largest arms producer, which “supplies Israel with the tools to wage war on the Palestinians”.

And we investigated the activities of globalist politician Baroness Cox, an admirer of the Israeli state and, in Craig Murray’s words, “a prominent supporter of organisations which actively and openly promote the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza”.

We reported that one of the most sinister of these organisations was Jerusalem Summit, whose website declared two decades ago that the idea of a Palestinian state must be “removed from the international agenda” and that “the de-legitimization of the Palestinian narrative becomes a vital prerequisite to any comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian issue”.

The Acorn also drew attention to attempts by Zionists to have all criticism of Israel treated as offensive “anti-semitism”.

“When activists from London Palestine Action carried out some subvertising on the London tube last month, putting up posters criticizing Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians, Israeli politicians described them as ‘anti-semitic’ and ‘inciteful’.

“Oxford University Labour Club’s support for Israeli Apartheid Week was also classed as ‘anti-semitism’ by right-wing Zionists given a platform by The Guardian“.

Making the connection with the smears against Jeremy Corbyn, we concluded that the “anti-semitism” smear was being used as a general ideological weapon against the system’s enemies.

And we noted that this phenomenon was already in evidence in 2003 when a certain Roger Cukierman labelled the anti-globalisation movement “an anti-semitic brown-green-red alliance”.

If opposing globalisation and its industrial development is “anti-semitic”, what does that tell us about the entity behind globalisation and industrial development?

At the time we described Cukierman simply as a “French Zionist banker”, but I think it would be useful to add a little more information on him, direct from Wikipedia.

“He served as the President of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF) and is Vice President of the World Jewish Congress.

“From 1963 to January 1999, he worked at the Edmond de Rothschild Group. He served as its chief executive officer in France from 1993 to 1999”.

[Audio version]