Blame it on Fidel! – Julie Gavras

La Chinoise – Jean Luc Godard

The State I Am In – Christian Petzold

The Baader Meinhof Complex – Uli Edel

The Third Generation – Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecorvo

Inception – Christopher Nolan

The Angy Brigade: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group – Gordon Carr

Le diable probablement – Robert Bresson

…

The tower is being used in a study of the air quality in London, monitor pollutant levels above ground level, to determine the contribution to pollution made by different sources – including the long-range transport of fine particles from outside the city.

? http://www.wix.com/macornley/Post-Office-Tower

?

We no longer have a language for when the beast kills. Your police and armed forces are the designated machines, the shadows who carry tools of murder and the amnesty that accompanies this privilege. Your crisis-management of life is outsourced beyond the limits of the state to corporations, to mercenaries, to paramilitaries and other insurgencies claiming the dead word as their own. Your machine kills through bombing raids, tortures, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, London, Toronto, Tarnac, Mexico, Bolivia, Port-au-Prince. When it closes its borders, in its migrating prisons, quietly at its centre or within the din of its margins. In shoot-to-kill attacks on our streets. And you profit from them. And  from the beast’s transmutation of a life not worth living into a dead life, and from the resonance of the dead word: zombie-democracy.

Your Jack-in-the-box responds to us with your fantasy of crisis. But we do not believe your crisis to be yours and not ours; rather that your crisis does not exist. There has been no break, no rupture, we do not awake from a dream in order to look onto a bleak or bland new world but rather, as if in a dream, finding ourselves in media res, where there is no revolution and not even a continuity, but merely the moment and singular instance of the same economy, politics and facade.
Our crisis is defining, and we define it in free-fall. Everywhere where we had won our right to speak, you desire those places, to leave us with not a comma, not a full stop. Your Left and your Right tell us to build networks which surround power, which circumvent revenge, like a thousand mirrors in which we can only stare at each other but never the lens-grinder, the wizard of Oz. Your coldest sweat is that we are to begin discussing justice in our own words. You want us to discuss it in your language, and to fill the space between us with directions-aspirations-vectors, high towering finance and older and better golden bridges, under which run rivers of blood and toxic waste.
You speak of transitional justice or just peace. The transitional form of the disappearance of any state which is not capitalist is the nether world of failed states, zones of exception, regions, corridors – frontiers of your galloping digital exploitation. One wrong move and the beast you ride kicks you off. Your golden bridges are made of 1s and 0s. What you call peace is a desert which perpetuates the conditions that destroy life. What you call justice is the violent order of your own institutions. The people is no longer a name to invoke. Neither them, nor the mass, the proletariat, vanguard or class, but it is the people in the street who define words like justice. It does not come transcendently from the sky or mechanically from a box or by the auspices of a powdered wig.

We reject your metaphysical time of transition.

We claim your hold on violence, justice and peace.

You say there are different types of justice. Maybe three. Social justice, economic justice, political justice. Social justice cannot exist without economic and political justice. They are linked. We say: the claims for justice are many. There are thousands of voices and they all ask and work for justice, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, always without totalising unity. This is the weave of minimal justice.

We do not claim our actions. Two lie dead: Muggeridge and Komnenic. An act has been committed – and our commitment to it is profound. But the moment in which the crime is recognized is when a coming multitude will identify with it and claim it as their own. And in this instance, as soon as the crime is revealed, it passes over into so much more: not into a transgression, but an act of immanent justice, minimal justice.

To realise that there are many claims also shows that there is only one group who legislates for terror, who legalises their murders – yours. This group has expanded beyond even your own grasp; it expands into our institutions and common grounds, so that the hideaways of the intellectuals are no more than particulars in an ideal prison. The universities are barricaded not by the revolutionaries, but by the turnstiles of a society that only fears itself, and cannot look into the lens and find its enemies.

To the communes of the world, to the communities of resistance: they want to fill the space between us, like a fluid. That space is what makes justice possible, that space is the here and now, not some vision of a just society or just peace in a transcendent and utopian future. The minimal justice we require starts from the individual and their responsibility to the collective. They can no longer hide behind their institutions. By putting individuals on trial, an exacting the conclusion of their crimes, we show how implicated institutions are in the masking of crimes, in the architectural facades of our present horror. Without mediation the acts of justice reveal the institution pushing to expand its remit and its power, its thirst for unimaginative transformation. And it brings it into relationship with other institutions: universities, the mechanisms of high finance, governments, corporations. The weave of minimal justice is the loose thread that undoes this tissue of lies.
With this in mind that we should abolish the term ‘transitional justice’. Too bureaucratic and too visionary, it is a cause for the oppressed and silenced. There is no transition to name or to move towards, only the immediate vigilant enactment. In its place we call on Global Transversal Justice. Our viewpoints are equally valid and unfinished, equally filled with the potential for insurrection, the rage of oppression. We are rooted in our particular struggles and we shift. It is in this shifting that we go over the space that separates us and our demands. Justice is not a gas which fills all volumes, but movement across the space of everyday life, our cities, our common being.

We must not allow the beast to succeed in its effort at hiding of the nature of its violence. Nor blind us to reading the events in slow motion. We watch the footage of our fallen comrades, we watch the video phones relaying our fallen enemies. The illusions of the religious are anathema to us, and their lies only perpetuate the dead word’s hegemony. But our own faith in solidarity cannot be shattered, and our camaraderie remains vivid and unbroken, like an obsidian mirror, which makes their images and trickery slide off its time-worn darkness.

We forgo this inhumane obsession with fighting oppression as if it were alienation and alienation as if it were oppression. The vigilant smash their televisions and clown in front of the police, when surely we should revert to our original tools: be clowns instead of bowing down to the television lights, and smash the agents of the institutional order. Take a brick out of the police station wall. Take the cogs of the institutional machines apart – name them with bullets. The vigilant against the beast are vigilantes. You cannot negotiate with capital, terror and inhumanity – only kick it till it breaks.

the case of Ejup Ganic – compare to Vuk Komnenic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejup_Gani%C4%87

UCL:
Social Cohesion report, January 2010
http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/files/1262710659_1.pdf

online forums re: radicalisation of students
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1130945&page=4

Caldicott inquiry
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1001/10012503
http://hurryupharry.org/2010/02/23/undiebomber-inquiry-is-a-bad-joke/

Samar Alami:
Rober Fisk in the Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-bomber-who-never-was-1187295.html

they have been released? – http://www.labournet.net/other/0906/samarjawad1.html

Freedom and justice campaign – http://www.freesaj.org.uk/

The attack – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_the_embassy_of_Israel_in_London

UK legal responses to terrorism – http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qw83CctTZtwC&pg=PA693&lpg=PA693&dq=samar+alami&source=bl&ots=4J1LkPysVH&sig=tNgxHLWPiTx6a7aOFs4v_tyAWLc&hl=en&ei=DP0RTOOXL4qy0gS-2JjxAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=samar%20alami&f=false

GUERILLA and TERRORISM

Leon Trotsky: “The Bankruptcy of Individual Terrorism”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1909/xx/tia09.htm

Carlos Marighella : “Minimanual of the urban Guerrilla” – inspiration for RAF etc.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-guerrilla/index.htm

Weather Underground

on the old days and TRC in USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYChtbO9SKI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvBcvSYuEL8&feature=related

WU communique

WU: “There are no innocent Americans”, “Bring the War home!”

FBI informant interview

Black Panthers on WU

RAF

A film clip of Ulrike Meinhof before she goes underground

Wikipedia on the Red Army Faction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

RAF Communique: “Urban guerilla concept”:
http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/71_04.html

Other RAF communiques:
http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/index.html

Baader Meinhof Compex trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psr2w76cd9s&feature=related

Silke Maier-Witt – former member and trauma psychologist in Kosovo
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/52/kosovo.html?page=0%2C0

IRA communiqué
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-BGLf8YJwU

Angry Brigade
Guardian 30th Anniversary with two interviews
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/feb/03/features.magazine27

Documents and chronology
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/AngryBrigade/

Critical overview at libcom
http://libcom.org/library/introduction-angry-brigade

GENERAL
Amazing resource by Stuart Christie with loads of videos, including a very good doc about RAF from BBC4:
http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBooksWP/?page_id=2

RHETORIC
Adrian Mitchell – To Whom it May Concern
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMCObgu_jc&feature=related

Harold Pinter – Nobel Prize Speech (Neruda – min 38.20; Death – min 46:25)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5779318336871023559#

more Adrian Mitchell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUreig0bNAA&feature=related

Justice in Second Life:
summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tXNw33vrS0

and the whole conference here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncGAjY67rH0&feature=related

Definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_justice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Peoples%27_Tribunal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal

SONGS
I’m a better anarchist than you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaAqKyllHog&feature=related

Land ownership; promotion (= development)

Historically the ownership of land has been an enormous problem for the development of capitalist economies – often presenting great barriers to modernisation, inhibiting investment, using local monopoly powers to suck out of local economies income which could otherwise have been used for productive investment. Sometimes the mere structure of ownership (small plots, complicated tenure) could prevent owners from developing easily, even when they wanted to. Occasionally there have been cases where forms of large-scale private land ownership have enormously simplified and helped development but the general rule is that landownership is a barrier.

In modern Europe we have seen changes which – to very varying degrees – have removed some of these barriers, usually by giving the state powers to acquire land and to service it for development, or to reparcel sites, or to acquire land if the existing owners do not develop it in the way (and at the time) required by some plan. The Netherlands and Spain seem to be rather advanced in this process, Britain rather behind.

While the land ownership system may vary from country to country, there is always some development or promotion function involved in any urban project. This may be a very simple function – as where a municipality builds its own school or a manufacturing firm builds its own factory extension.

But it can be quite a demanding and complex function, potentially including:

• conceiving of the possibility;

• finding a location;

• market research (for speculative projects) or consultations with future users, and feasibility studies;

• specifying the product, commissioning designers;

• obtaining permissions;

• finding investors, credit, state subsidies;

• contracting with, and controlling, builders;

• marketing the finished product in advance;

and often doing all these things fast – to minimise interest charges or (if the project is speculative) to catch what is thought to be a good price in the market.

[The agents which perform these functions vary enormously. Some industrial firms do it for themselves. Some banks and insurance companies have their own development divisions. Sometimes there are integrated firms which combine construction, promotion (and often finance too) as in France and Japan for example. Sometimes promoters become also property investment companies, holding on to their completed projects and becoming large scale managers as well as producers. And then there are the pure promoters - often very small firms with few staff and little capital - who specialise completely in getting projects together, completing them, selling and going on to the next. This could be the small speculator who builds one house a year or a large-scale operator like some development companies in the UK.]

Remember too that promoters / developers may be the same organisations as land owners or may be quite distinct and this may have profound effects on what gets built and on the flows of money and risk involved.

Perhaps the most important distinction to make here is between development which is speculative or not: speculative production is where, at the time when construction starts, there is no particular user of the building contracted to use it.

In some places speculative development is the dominant form; in others most building is done by or for clearly-identified users. This distinction often corresponds with the distiction between owner-occupation and renting of finished buildings discussed below under “use”.

But it is potentially a very important distinction for the location and for the design of buildings because speculative developers will tend to produce buildings of the type and location which they think will sell. They may be wrong so some buildings are under-used while people seeking buildings in some types and places may not get them. Also they may tend (with a few brave exceptions) to play safe – to congregate on the types, designs and locations for which they think there will be a steady mass of demand. In this case marginal locations will be under-supplied and unusual kinds of building will not be built.

WHOLE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/planning/information/texts/edwards8999.pdf

In a Freudian sense the tower is a phallic object. It is a status symbol that stands for power, domination, defence, control and transmission. All of these are in a traditional sense very masculine characteristics.

In the same line of thinking the bombing of the tower can be seen as an assault on the masculinity of an individual or state. A symbolic act determined to hurt pride as well as inflict damage. This is to be seen in the light of the still very dominant patriarchal society that we live in and have been living in for several millennia. (Did the tower have the same importance in matriarchal societies?)

The bombing or explosion in the same theoretical view can also be compared to very male activities. If one looks at war and sexuality, the simplest parallel is the rape and abuse of women as a traditionally longstanding and heavily used tool of conquest, alongside other methods and strategies.

If one takes a more mystical approach toward the subject, the tarot card of the tower is an interesting reference (A tower on a rocky outcrop, a powerful bolt of lightning, one or two figures falling from the tower). It is seen as a relatively negative card, following the card of the devil. However it is always a matter of interpretation of mystical imagery, and what is interesting here as well is that tarot most likely originates from a female tradition of wisdom and thought.

It also has very real term parallels to more recent history, and certain images could be used in a modern deck to represent the card of the tower without a problem.

However both state or private acts of terrorism (on our towers), can be seen to follow ideological goals, that in the eyes of the perpetrator can be easily compared to this short interpretation of the meaning to the card:

“Disruption. Conflict. Change.  Sudden violent loss.  Overthrow of an existing way of life.  Major changes.  Disruption of well worn routines.  Ruin and disturbance.  Dramatic upheaval.  change of residence or job sometimes both at once.  Widespread repercussions of actions.  In the end, enlightenment and freedom.”

It is said that this card in its imagery might refer to the destruction of the tower of Babel, where a tower was build for the glory of man, and then destroyed by divinity. If one looks at this more realistically, it would be more likely the glory of the ruling elite, and the suggestion that the people should celebrate the glory of the elite. Especially in the current economic climate, and the looming crisis of the capitalist system the downfall fuelled by elitist greed is a relevant comparison and the tower as a symbol of cooperate money, and capitalism a relevant association.

Under the influence of landscape pictures, painted or captured by the camera, we learn to organize visual elements into a dramatic spatio-temporal structure. When we look at a country scene we almost automatically arrange its components so that they are disposed around the road that disappears into the distant horizon. Again, almost automatically we imagine ourselves travelling down that road; its converging borders are like an arrow pointing to the horizon, which is our destination and future. The horizon is a common image of the future. Statues of statesmen are put on high pedestals, and sculptors show the figures gazing farsightedly at the horizon. Open space itself is an image of hopeful time. Open space is cone-shaped: it opens up from the point where one stands, to the broad horizon that separates earth from sky.

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INLAND – SOURCE – CENTER – ORIGIN

Geological antiquity and human ruins contributed to the sense of temporal depth, but other psychological dispositions and impulses seemed to be at work. They can, perhaps, be described in this way. When we look outward we look at the present or future; when we look inward (that is, introspect) we are likely to reminisce the past. “Inland”, “source”, “center”, or “core” – these symbols of the exploration mystique – all convey the idea of beginning and of past time. Gonig up a river to its source is to return, symbolically, to the beginning of one’s own life; and in the case of the Nile, to the birthplace of mankind. “Center” means also “origin” and carries a sense of starting point and beginning.

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HERE/THERE – NOW/THEN

Space also has temporal meaning at the level of day-to-day personal experiences. Language itself reveals the intimate connectivity among people, space and time. I am (or we are) here; here is now. You (or they) are there; there is then, and then refers to a time which may be either the past or the future. “What happens then?” The “then” is the future. “It was cheaper then.” The “then” here is the past. Einst, a German word, means “once”, “once upon a time”, and “some day (in the future)”. Personal pronouns are tied not only to spatial demonstratives (this, that here, there), but also to the adverbs of the time “now” and “then”. Here implies there, now implies then. “implies”, however, is a weak verb. Here does not entail there, nor now then. As thomas Merton put it, life may be so cool that “here” does not even warm itself up with references to “there” The hermit’s cave is that cool.

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MYTHIC SPACE

Mythis space is commonly arranged around a coordinate system of cardinal points and a central vertical axis. This construct may be called cosmic, for its frame is defined by events in the cosmos. Mythic time is of three principal kinds: cosmogonic, astronomic, and human. Cosmogonic time is the story of origins, including the creation of the universe. Human time is the course of human life. Both are linear and one-directional. Astronomic time is experienced as the sun’s daily round and the parade of seasons; its nature is repetition. Wherever cosmic space is prominently articulated, cosmogonic time tends to be either ignored or weakly symbolized. In North America a cmmon cosmogonic motif among the Indians is that of the earth-diver, who brings up earth from the ocean, creating an island that grows steadily in size. This creation story, unlike cyclical astronomic time, finds no representation in cosmic space.

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Consider the sense of an “inside” and an “outside,” of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space. People eveywhere recognize these distinctions, but the awareness may be quite vague. Constructed form has the power to heighten the awareness and accentuate, as it were, the difference in emotional temperature between “inside” and “outside”.

[...]

The courtyard house is, of course, still with us – it has not become obsolete. Its basic feature is that the rooms open out to the privacy of interior space and present their blank backs to the outside world. Within and without are clearly defined; people can be certain of where they are. Inside the enclosure, undisturbed by distractions from the outside, human relations and feelings can rise to a high and even uncomfortable level of warmth. the notion of inside and outside is familiar to all, but imagine how sensibly real these categories become when a guest – after a convivial party – leaves the lantern-lit courtyard and steps through the moon gate to the dark wind swept lane outside. Experiences of this kind were commonplace in traditional Chinese society, but they are surely known to all people who use architectural means to demarcate and intensify forms of social life.

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He still owns 23,000 acres of land and prime central London real estate. But what land in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia exactly does he own? I don’t know, do you? Incidentally, the duke receives £209,000 in EU farm subsidies for Woburn abbey (now a safari park). This amount was cut from £380,000 in 2007 (source here).

More reading:

The 1st Duke

Obituary for the 14th Duke in the Times and the Telegraph and Independent

The current duke dines and his official website

In the 2009 list of richest people in the UK, he came up from 173rd (in 2008) to number 103. Details here.

And of course, insane superstitious theories link the 7/7 bombing to him.

FREEDOM – OPEN AND CLOSED SPACE

Space is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world. Space lies open; it suggests the future and invites action. On the negative side, space and freedom are a threat. A root meaning of the word “bad” is “open.” To be open and free is to be exposed and vulnerable. Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed. Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values. Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom. In open space, one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space beyond acquires a haunting presence. A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the boundedness of place and the exposure of space. In contrast, the claustrophobe sees small tight places as oppressive containment, not as contained spaces where warm fellowship or meditation in solitude is possible. An agoraphobe dreads open spaces, which to him do not appeal as fields for potential action and for the enlargement of self; rather they threaten self’s fragile integrity.

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SPACE AS A RESOURCE – SPACE AS NEED – LEBENSRAUM – OLD TESTAMENT

Space is a resource that yields wealth and power when properly exploited. It is a worldwide symbol of prestige. The “big man” occupies and has access to more space than lesser beings. An aggressive ego endlessly demands more room in which to move. The thirst for power can be insatiable – especially power over money or territory, since financial and territorial growths are basically simple additive ideas that require little imaginative effort to conceive and extrapolate. The collective ego of a nation has made claims for more living space at the expense of its weaker neighbors; once a nation starts on the road of successful aggrandizement it could see no compelling limit to growth short of world dominion. For the aggressive nation as for the aggressive individual, the contentment that goes with the feeling of spaciousness is a mirage that recedes as one acquires more space.

Space, a biological necessity to all animals, is to human beings also a psychological need, a social prerequisite, and even a spiritual attribute. Space and spaciousness carry different sets of meaning in different cultures. Consider the Hebraic tradition, one that has had a strong influence on Western values. In the Old Testament, words for spaciousness mean in one context physical size and in others psychological and spiritual qualities. As a physical measure spaciousness is “a good and a broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus, 3, 8). Israelites were concerned with the size of the promised land. They could not themselves take up arms and enlarge it at their neighbors’ expense, but God could sanction their venture. “For I will cast out nations before you and enlarge your borders; neither shall any man desire your land” (Exodus, 34, 24). Psychologically, space in the Hebraic tradition means escape from danger and freedom from constraint. Victory is escape “into a broad place.” “He brought me forth into a broad place; he delivers me, because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18, 19). In Psalm 119 the language of spaciousness is applied to the intellectual enlargement and spiritual freedom of the man who knows the Torah. “I will run in the way of thy commandments when those enlargest my understanding” (verse 32). On the spiritual plane, space connotes deliverance and salvation.

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