22 September 2001
 

Dear Friends,
 

There is a great deal of new information on the Rouge Forum  www page at
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/noblood.html
 

This note contains a community building report, resistance efforts,
Resources for Educators, and a brief on terrorism and its history.
 

While it is important to watch the processes of the collapsing market, the
impact on working people (who are not part of the planned bailouts) and the
possible run on banks that could ensue (the market lost $14 trillion last
week), it is as important to wonder what it takes for people to decide to
live in different ways, beyond the rule of capital.
 

Last night, Friday, about 20 students and educators from San Diego stood a
vigilant watch, 7 p.m. to midnight, at the Islamic Center in San Diego. We
brought and shared food and conversation with one another and the people
who came to worship or to seek community. With signs, "Reason Not Racism,"
we drew an overwhelmingly friendly response from passers by­and a couple of
hysterical howlers.
 

We will return on Friday nights forthcoming. We know research says
anti-racist action can at least counterbalance the racism rising around us.
 The call to that action, "Reason Not Racism," will be linked to the Rouge
Forum web page tonight, as will a considerable list of material, including
a "Q and A" about war in the Middle East and Asia .
 

About 300 demonstrators, many with a lifetime of antiwar experience, joined
in downtown San Diego today, Saturday. The kind of community that almost
naturally came into being on Friday was never achieved on Saturday but
speeches and signs created an important  presence. Either action without
the other would be less powerful.
 

A more complete list of international resistance actions from the weekend
will go up on the No Blood For Oil section of the web site as soon as
possible. 3000 people were on the streets in London yesterday.
 

In San Diego, we are beginning a monthly film-video social, at my home. The
first gathering will be next Saturday, September 29, with the film, "The
Beast," the story of a lost Soviet tank involved in the last Afghan war.
People in other cities may want to follow suit. We will start at 7:30 p.m.
San Diegans, please RSVP. Clues on research and organizing from elsewhere
will be appreciated.
 

The National Security Archive is now compiling an extensive data base of
documents on past struggles in Afghanistan and the Middle East. NSA is a
research group, using the Freedom of Information Act and other
investigatory tools. At their web site, they have documents like the CIA's
reports on Usama Bin Laden and documents on the not-so-secret war against
the USSR. It is significant to note that the Northern Alliance, today's US
allies in Afghanistan, were distinguished from the Taliban in that the
Taliban did not deal heroin.
The documents are available at the following URL:
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/sept11/
 

Here is a link for those who wish to review an eery peek at the future. The
Hart-Rudman 21st Century Commission report written early this year.
 

http://www.emergency.com/2001/21stcentury_rpt.htm
 

The Hart-Rudman report is a pre 9/11/01 report about terrorism. Here is a
short paragraph of the history of the meaning of terrorism which is now
quickly evolving. Mainstream talk about terror recently avoided both the
"What is the history?" and the "Why?"
 

Terrorism is not just blowing things up. Terrorism has a long history. It
has never achieved meaningful change and  has instead been a powerful tool
of tyranny.. Let us look at its aspects. In philosophy and psychology,
terrorism is the ultimate individualism. The idealism (my mind constructs
reality) and the narcissism of the terrorist is now easy to see.
 

Terrorism seeks to replace a class conscious movement with a bomb, a plane,
whatever. Russia under the Czar's was a hotbed of terrorism.  Lenin's
brother was a terrorist, killed for his action
The last thing the terrorist wants is a mass movement able to unravel the
processes of tyranny, as the terrorist holds the mind of the tyrant, if in
mirror image. Terrorism is the open admission of hopelessness.
 

Bin Laden, if he is the guilty party (an there is reason to doubt) did not
fly those planes. Yet those who did, whose minds constructed a better world
for themselves in a death-act, differed only a whit. It is not odd that ben
Laden holds the selfish viewpoint of a class habituated by profiting from
the war of all on all. Still, someone flew those planes. What can we know
about them? The only thing that can be said with some certainty is: The
abused abuse, true of kids, true of terrorist kamikaze pilots.
 

Terror, disconnected from any mass movement that seeks rational answers to
problems in peoples daily lives, disconnected from the processes of daily
life that point to the exit from permanent oppression---that kind of
terrorism (a) never works, as the buildings can be rebuilt, sometimes at
good profit, and (b) because it usually rains hell on the people who the
terrorist claims to represent and offers the powers that be the chance to
suspend everything that workers may have won to the moment, (c) because the
dead king (or whoever) is merely a
personification of a process that must be understood to be beaten, and the
king always has a prince. In many cases, terrorism has been inspired by
police agents in the ranks of naive activists, as was the case of the FBI
directed Weatherman movement in the US.
 

One big country that has harbored terrorists: The USA. Cuban exile
terrorists, Vietnamese terrorists, Nazi terrorists (see "Blowback," by
Simpson), Rumanian terrorists, Latvian terrorists, Albanian Bali Kombitar
terrorists, Khmer Rouge terrorists, Guatemalan terrorists, El Salvadoran
terrorists, and then the local terrorists of the Klan, etc.
 

Here is a historical document about the nature of terrorism, written 90
years ago.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1909/tia09.htm
 

and here is a link to a book by a rich and respectable present day
academic, terrorist:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/11AYER.html?searchpv=nytToday
 

The latter is about Billy Ayers, who recently was forced to cancel his
speaking tour and the spectacle he hoped would help promote his book, which
winks at terrorism. Here is a quote from the NYTimes on September 11,  I
don't regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers said. "I feel we didn't do enough."
 

While his publisher Beacon Press, insists it has not withdrawn the book,
Ayers stopped his promotional tour. The publisher says he will resume soon.
 

Please remember the discussion listserv of the Whole Schooling Consortium
http://www.coe.wayne.edu/CommunityBuilding/WSC.html
 

No Blood For Oil Page