by Those from the Friday Discussion, January 2013
counterinsurgency – PDF
Dear fellow travellers in struggle,
With this letter we want to pick up some of the questions that came up in the discussions on counter-insurgency at the antimilitarist camp against the GÜZ.1 First we’ll look at the instrumentalization of victims – in this respect, we like to present to you a very informative text about the war in Darfur, which can be read as a kind of blueprint of a strategy of legitimization in the war on terror. Moreover we will talk about collective memory, about our shared knowledge of those who step up to become our enemies, about their changing and yet old familiar strategies – as well as about our own perception of them, which is also undergoing changes that lead to different assessments and consequences. The pending question above the particular aspects of this letter was posed by a comrade right at the start of the discussion on Friday: „What do you want from US then?“ We like to take up this question as central thread, as it shows that we succeeded, despite bumpy moments in the presentation, to put into focus what we think is the crux of the matter, if we really want to stop the war.
To develop and keep up a dual-track strategy, that, simultaneously with the attempt to understand and to fight the ongoing war in all its actually atrocious existence, always taking as the point of departure our own life in wartime, a point of departure as completely personal as it is collective. To come to a realistic evaluation of our possibilities to act, we think it is necessary to acknowledge that which we have not chosen: That we are in a state of war everywhere in the world, even if the international division of labor distributes suffering unequally. The acknowledge of this point should not to be mistaken for a self-righteous „Yes to war!“ combative bathos, which despite feeling less helpless nevertheless gets stuck in a twisted understanding of our situation, swapping the places where power and powerlessness are to be found in our lives in a confused manner. Put rudely: Those ruling us don‘t give a shit which fantasies of omnipotence we devote ourselves to, regardless of whichever fantasy we like better, be it the pose of the wise prophet of peace or that of the apocalyptic nihilist warrior. Both serve the function to shift our desire for self-determination to spheres far out of our reach, while we can barely face up to even the most tiny changes in our everyday life.
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