Recuperation

Look about the Internet, is it strange that all the old style European 'terrorist' liberation forces have websites now by or for them. The CCC funsters have their own at http://www.cellulescommunistescombattantes.be/ there are of course a number for the RAF/Baader-Meinhof, one such at http://www.baader-meinhof.com and for Action Directe http://www.action-directe.net.

I presume this means that they are now historical and we are seeing their abstraction and abnegation from currency.

But this is true I suppose, the terrorist today is the representative of some state (or an irredentist excuse for one), or some sad religious farce, their targets are the public, because obviously both the state and religion are irretrievably and absolutely opposed to the possible happiness and freedom of people.

The communist/anarchist vanguardist adventurers were never motivated by such hate, nor sought indiscriminate violence against the people they wanted, by example, to liberate. That which is used today, the bomb in a public place is relatively easy and uses brute force to punish and threaten a population. The radical Left of the 1970-1980s was never indiscriminate and targeted specific companies, institutions or people, a much harder task - one for which they got caught.

So is it OK now that we can recuperate them ourselves, now that Baudrillard has shown us that the time of ideology has permanently ceased, now we know they are a part of the past.

If the face of that filthy concentration camp commandant Che Guevara can be on numerous products can we use the most beautiful image of all, not as cliche but as iconography.


Can we celebrate them if only for this reason:

It doesn't matter if their choice for the armed struggle is
right or wrong - morally or empirically (politically or
strategically) - what matters is the fact that people had the
courage to act in consequence with their ideas and convictions,
in other words people had the courage to be free. Let's not
forget that those who have chosen to go underground in the
resistance are fully aware as an ever present probability that
one day they will be arrested, or possibly killed.

from here


Today there is no conceivable concept of liberation, we can imagine creating revolutionary events in everyday life, but they have all become subsumed within art. Art having replaced politics as the arena for ideas, think of the concept of the flash mob, the sudden eventuality of people coalescing for a purpose to detourn a space for a moment in time, 'a happening' as was the old term. We can all prank now like the yippies - but only now that the context is gone.