Primal war

LIKE LIGHTNING AGAINST A HOLLOW LIMB:

THOUGHTS ON PRIMAL GUERRILLA WARFARE, PT 1

-Kevin Tucker

PLEASE NOTE: This is not an argument for or surrounding the reality
of collapse, anarcho-primitivist critique, questions of wildness, or
what a post-collapse world may look like, you'll find that elsewhere
(much of which I've discussed in some depth in Species Traitor 4).
This is explicitly meant to lay out and explore tactical questions
for those who recognize civilization as their enemy, its collapse as
inevitable (regardless of how long `inevitable' might be), and that
action must be taken against it.

I've never been involved in guerrilla warfare. And I've never wanted
to be.

I have no innate hunger for violence or for a life on the run
or any lust for the warrior imagery. I have, however, had to come to
terms with the situation that we are currently facing and the
direction we are heading in. That is, the direction a dying
civilization is taking us in.

In short, I have come to realize that this civilization, like
all before it, is going to collapse. Being a global civilization
driven by a massive technological infrastructure, it just means that
this collapse is going to be equally massive and leaving the
civilized infrastructure with nowhere new to spread and exploit. The
technological lifeblood of this civilization is running thin with
the looming end of cheap oil and a complete lack of substitutes as
social, physical and ecological catastrophes climax.

The collapse is happening.

The collapse of civilization is a process rather than an
event. Like civilization, it is not something external. It is not
something happening to us or around us. It is our reality and it is
a necessary process. Whether we like it or not, this is happening
and it will continue to get much worse before it gets better. And
I'm afraid of just how much worse it is going to get.

When I talk about civilization, I'm referring to a totality:
that is the concrete structures of the city and countryside as well
as the mentalities that create and maintain them. In response, I've
put forward the idea of a primal war: a war against the
domestication process and civilization itself. This is not
necessarily the physical thing that we associate with war. There are
no battlefields, there are no armies. Primal war is about overcoming
the mentality of the domesticators, realizing the primal urges that
they have curbed, returning to wildness, and confronting the
physical aspects of civilization.

I've been somewhat vague about what I think primal war means,
and intentionally so. I have no faith in revolutions or similar
types of movements. If this is going to be something sincere, on a
personal level, it must come from within. I can give my take on
everything, but I'm not offering a party line or agenda.

At least that's the limit for a grand vision of how things
might turn. But considering the larger context of collapse, there
isn't the optional luxury of being vague. Primal war is about being
proactive. It is about accepting our place within civilization and
its demise and acting on it rather than practicing routine and
preparing while we wait for the dust to settle. It requires
agitation and confrontation, not only on a rhetorical or
psychological level, but on a physical level as well.

I have never wanted to take on a dying civilization, but am
left with little other option. For the sake of ourselves, our
bioregions, communities (future if not present), and wildness, an
undesirable situation brings about undesirable responses. At some
point, we are going to have to fight, both defensively and
offensively, against this civilization and its remnants.

I am not a military or strategic expert. I am not a scholar of
guerrilla war or resistance movements. I am not a technician or
mechanic. My intent here is not to write a text book for primal
guerrilla warfare, but to give some direction for others to take
further. That is in terms of both defensive and offensive action.
I'm offering an evaluation of past guerrilla activities and their
relevance or irrelevance to where we are headed.

This is critique and application for those who, like myself,
fear and welcome the collapse, and are no longer content to merely
sit on the sidelines.

GUERRILLAS AND PRIMAL GUERRILLAS

What links primal guerrilla warfare and more typical guerrilla
warfare is a matter of tactical approach.

Guerrilla warfare is not standard warfare. It is not engaged
on battlefields. It is not equally sized and armed forces taking
each other straight on. It is the way that a smaller, less armed
force takes on a larger or more established military or state power.
For the most part, it has been the tool of revolutionaries and
counter-revolutionaries worldwide. And it is this connection to
revolution which has dictated exactly how and what kind of targets
and activities make up that guerrilla warfare.

We'll start with the revolutionary guerrillas.

Perhaps no other revolutionary guerrilla has made a name for
themselves like Che Guevara. To a degree, it's a well deserved
position. The role of guerrilla warfare in the Cuban revolution was
pivotal in the larger chain of events. Based on his experiences
there, Che would write the formulaic textbook for undertaking
guerrilla warfare in a broader sense. Unfortunately for him, that
formula didn't prove to be universal: he died while playing it out
in Bolivia.

But his death says more about the nature of guerrilla warfare
and revolution than what his book alone can say (which does have
some finer points, which we will return to). For revolutionary
guerrilla warfare to be successful, you need that larger revolution.
The role of guerrilla warfare is not to topple the state on its own,
but to get things moving and to expose the weaknesses of the state
to the general population enough for them to unify in opposition to
it. Simply put, you need mass support or you'll fight an all too
bloody battle well beyond any point for potential success (Thinking
here particularly of the remnants of the Shining Path in Peru and
FARC in Columbia, both failing to gain much support as their
unending wars drag on turning increasingly to terrorizing indigenous
and peasant populations into joining their ranks on par with the
state.).

The situation in Cuba was ripe. You had a standing
totalitarian government whose oppression was unquestionable, clearly
cut class divisions between the rapidly modernizing state and racist
tourism industry and the wider Cuban populace, blatantly corrupt
funneling of outside disaster support for recent earthquakes which
shook the island nation: a situation which brewed not only contempt
for those in power, while leaving the promised life of modernity
just close enough to see and feel, but not enough to grab. Though
largely unsuccessful in a strategic sense, the first actions of the
Cuban revolutionary guerrillas drew attention to an underlying
current and exposed not only the hope and anger that many felt, but
a glimpse of what could happen.

Though a number of key revolutionaries at this point were
communists, the revolutionary propaganda was not. Fidel's early
stance was liberal populism, like many of the Latin American
revolutionaries. And that was the face of the revolt that people
were seeing. Che was one of the communists, as all of Cuba would
become within a couple years of the revolution. The `success' in
Cuba was just one victory for communist sympathy throughout the
Latin American populace who largely has and still feels the brute
force of colonial turned imperial pressures rarely broke down class
barriers.

So you had some support in Bolivia; peasants, urban poor and
college students like in Cuba. But there was more, Che was unable to
predict that the goals of the communist resistance were no more
appealing than the goals of the state to the native Kayapó
population whose support he was naively counting on. And they had
good reason, communists embraced the same modernity that the
democratic and totalitarian (for all they can be separated)
governments dangled before the people. Indigenous, largely self
sufficient populations have rarely had much interest in revolutions
because modernity runs against what they know and feel. They've
almost always wanted one thing: to be left alone.

Not enough solidarity and the revolt failed.

Primal guerrilla warfare has more in common with the goals of
the Kayapó, the highlanders of Papua New Guinea, and other earth
bound societies world wide: we want to be left alone. That doesn't
mean allowed to live, or given the right to live, or given the
chance to purchase our freedom/s, and it certainly doesn't end on
reserves or reservations. To be left alone means to live in the way
that humans have lived for millions of years: without work, without
technological systems, without governments, and as part of a wider,
sane environment.

In the world of modernized civilization, this isn't about
personal desires, it is about anti-political aspirations. This life
is antithetical to civilized existence which must spread, must
devour, and must destroy the earth. While it exists, we can never be
left alone. We cannot live with factories, power plants, mines, oil
spills, tree farms, fur farms, concrete, and microwaves. And even
though all of these things are killing us and dropping the chances
of human survival rapidly, they cannot be stopped through the system
which creates them. You can't end civilization through politics. No
one is going to vote out electricity.

And most people are going to give up the system that is
killing and enslaving them.

That is a basic reality that we are going to have to come to
terms with. That doesn't mean there's no point in talking with
people or anything like that. There is always plenty of common space
between two beings for making a connection. With most it comes
through a hatred of work, with others it comes through an interest
in becoming self sufficient, there are all kinds of different
frustrations people have arising from an innate feeling that there
is something wrong with the world we're being sold.

These channels are what revolutionaries count on being able to
tap. This is what they must do to be successful. Intents dictate
action. To reach the people, actions taken must be strategic in the
same way that propaganda is created. Any attacks on the state are
done to try to weaken those holding power, not the State itself:
that level of political and social institutions that bind an
urbanized society together. They need the infrastructure in tact,
because they plan on using it. As far as classical Marxist thinking
goes, this is a matter of social evolution that the capitalists
create a level of industrial society that is intended to be turned
over to a socialist state and then the communist utopia.

This is where primal guerrilla warfare parts ways.

The goal of the `attacks' that I'm calling primal guerrilla
warfare are not to slow a particular government down, but to destroy
the base of it and any other potential government. In this way, the
term `warfare' might be more misleading. As we'll see, there is
every reason to believe that at some point, physical confrontation
with other people may be inevitable, but people are not the targets
here: things are. More to the point, our targets are the kind of
things that make electricity (the new opium of the masses and iron
fist of the state) possible.

In terms of guerrilla warfare, this isn't particularly new
thinking. Nearly every revolution of the past century has made
strategic attacks on electric distribution systems. But strategic in
a more immediate sense, such as the way FARC regularly disables
outlying power substations so that they can rob banks and loot other
necessary equipment. They're not out to permanently disrupt electric
networks. There are exceptions too: knowing full well that the
entire reason the Middle East was colonized, cut up, redistributed
and been the focus of war over the past century in a half is
over `resources' (though now almost exclusively oil), Iraqi
insurgents have taken to burning the precious oil fields and
reserves in the Gulf. They realized that the costs far outweigh any
benefits.

The real connection here is with counter-revolutionary
guerrilla warfare. That is when outside governments, like the U.S.,
don't think highly of the political and economic implications of
successful revolutions in places like El Salvador. And, in turn,
directly support and train Contra forces to make sure that the
government never is able to assert itself in that initial transition
period. These attacks largely take the form of sabotage on the
economic and political lifelines of any state. That means digging up
chunks of major roadways, blowing apart railways, taking out power
stations, substations, and vital cables, cutting off major ports,
keeping down phone lines and other communications networks.

They attack these things in a way that revolutionaries don't,
because they can. They have the funding and ability to bring it all
back online. Revolutionaries typically don't. They know that any
state needs these things (at least currently), because they need
them as well. And this is the leverage states have against
revolutions and just one more reason why it is easier to disable the
whole system than to take it over and go from there.

I can't overemphasize this point. This is the underlying
distinction between primal guerrilla warfare and any other type of
guerrilla warfare. And the implications of this will only become
clearer as we look further into the underlying motivations, applied
technical skill and knowledge and enactment of primal guerrilla
warfare.

THE NATURE OF PRIMAL WAR

Primal war certainly didn't begin with me. The term may be new, but
the emotion and rage of being confined to an external order goes
back to the rooting of domestication.

Regardless of what you call it, it is there. For most of us,
it comes out as hatred of work, or of school or laws. It's the drain
of spending your waking hours doing things that make self
sufficiency nearly impossible, or the feeling of having to wake up
for someone else. Or it's like when you get your paycheck and utter
a thank you when the money was already used up to pay for bills and
food weeks ago. There is a choking feeling of never being able to
get out of debt: a debt that binds us to jobs in stores, factories
and kitchens just as it bound our ancestors to turn fields of crops,
tear down ancestral forests, dig canals, and wipe out their
neighbors.

Powerlessness has become our ancestral heritage and
pathological bondage.

In wildness, there is no true control. You can't control everything
that can and will happen to you. But this is lack of complete
control is not like the powerlessness we feel. All beings do things
that have strong effects on the lives of others. That is the nature
of being, living and existing. You don't have complete control, but
nothing has complete control over you.

Domestication, by its nature, changed that relationship.
Though only in minute and sometimes frivolous ways during its long
inception period, the very word: to make for domestic use, implies
the violence of breaking a wild spirit so that it can be turned into
controlled fodder. That applies to domesticated humans as much as it
does the plants, animals and environments that have been brought
under this perceived realm of domination.

And it turns inwards. When our world has been put in terms of
control, we can only see it that way. We respond to the lack of
control we have over our lives as a whole and embrace the minor
choices we can make as a sign of our control. We become
psychological predators: embracing the carrot dangled before our
eyes and waving our piece of it before others as an example of our
level of control.

A part of the rewilding process means coming to terms with our
lack of control. And rather than seeing this as the powerlessness we
feel in the hierarchy of civilized society, using this as a vantage
point to understand that wildness is not about a Darwinian battle
for survival or the dialectic of nature, but about the flow of
energy.

That is cooperation rather than competition. And that is the
underlying distinction between civilization and wildness.

Flow has long been an essential part of martial arts. It
applies the basic principles of wildness to understand and better
utilize the human body and then spread outwards. The rigorous
training is meant to condition and imprint the muscles with certain
types of movement, but beyond this, the underlying element of nearly
every form of martial arts is that you cannot control what movements
your opponent/s will make, but when you see how their energy flows,
you can redirect it and use it against them.

This is as important of an exercise as it is a lesson. And
with our limited ability to see wildness on its own terms, this will
have to be a vantage point for our discussion.

I'll get into the importance of martial arts as training in a
later section, but flow is about more than fighting, it's about
looking differently at the way the world interconnects and that is
applicable on every level. By applying this to the nature of
technological civilization, it helps to understand how it carries on
and where its weaknesses are (a lesson indigenous resistors have
been successful in pushing on). This understanding is essential to
the process of rewilding. It has been said that you can survive off
of primitive skills, but the ability to live in wildness comes
through primal knowledge and primitive life ways as a holistic
approach rather than just having a hammer stone instead of a hammer.
And the same goes for applying this in your personal life: it is
about understanding the nature of powerlessness rather than just
looking at where control lies. It is about understanding what it
means to be up against a system that is both psychological and
physical.

Taken together, this is an entire way of approaching the world
rather than just a laundry list of what is good and bad. And it is
about efficiently targeting that system. Revolutionaries, never
questioning the issues of control have only sought to reassert their
power the only way they know it: be it reclaiming their labor, or
their land (usually meaning their farms), or through religion. You
take back your labor, but you still have to work. It's a never
ending cycle, and one that fails to recognize the source of that
innate feeling of unease about the direction our lives are heading.

And in this sense, revolutionaries only replace one philosophy
with another. They put all their trust in the world that lies
awaiting and the assurance that the Revolution will change
everything. But rewilding, the anti-domestication process, is not
something proscribed or some path to follow. It is about
establishing connections on a personal and unmediated level. There
are skills and words that can give direction, but it's not about
waiting for the Revolution or Insurrection to create or unleash
something within: it is about finding that here and now.

You can't touch wildness, but you can feel it. It's something
knowable. Communism, socialism, and anarchism, like Islam, Buddhism,
Christianity, and Judaism, are ideas that we believe in time will
prove themselves true. You wait, you act and you're either wrong or
your not, but these are causes. These are matters of belief rather
than experience (or, in the case of religion, dictated experience).

The nature of primal war lies in these feelings and
experiences, not just the ideas of them. Like anything, there is
always the risk that this becomes rhetoric rather than genuine, and
certainly with some people it has. But the real difference lies in
the attainable nature of wildness. It creates a known conviction
unlike a known belief.

But most of us have never known what its like to live among a
wild community. We haven't had that experience, at least not with a
wild human community. But the steps are there and with growing
strength, they are being taken. It's part of the larger process.

And, as I said earlier, that is a process that goes back way before
us.

Primal guerrilla warfare is no more recent than primal war.
That is in terms of reality instead of terminology. We can look
immediately towards the type of resistance earth based societies
have taken against colonizers and the armies of expanding states.

Largely, the concepts of conquering and complete annihilation
have no point of comparison in indigenous societies. They don't have
that created competitive drive that fills mass graves. What
colonizers were doing was often not seen for what it was because it
was so unthinkable. But, this was not always the case. There was
never a completely successful case of conquering without resistance.
And where that resistance laid, though only a footnote in history,
it was hardly insignificant.

As we'll see in more detail in the next section, the very
nature of a wild life puts everything in place for would be
guerrilla warriors. Hunting is about stealth, evasion, tracking, and
stalking. Making your own tools makes you less likely to be wasteful
and pushes you to practice aim under any number of circumstances.
Foraging and trekking make you more aware of your surroundings and
give a deeper insight into the nature of ecosystems.

These are just a few general elements of the awareness that
spread from necessity and the flow of wild living. But more to the
point for our purposes here, all of this comes together in a
spiritual sense. That's just the way humans have interpreted our
relationship with our bioregions and communities. And a part of that
is a sense of being defined not by territory or boundaries or
something external, but between the complete interconnectedness of
beings: the realization that we are not an isolated Self in
competition with the external Other. Life is wound up with
community, both human and non-human.

When you understand life in this way and have this kind of
connection, you wind up with primal warriors who fight in defense of
what they know rather than over ideals (like the spread of Democracy
and Freedom, for example). This is heart and soul, not fodder. And
this is an incorruptible desire to remain wild. And this is the kind
of spirit of resistance that has been nearly universal when it comes
to the defense of indigenous societies against this global empire.

This is the spirit of primal war. And this is something no
revolutionary could ever understand.

FROM - anarchistnihilisttheory@yahooNOSPAMgroups.com