Today's Topics:
1. anarkismo.net: Flowers for the rebels who failed by Kate
Sharpley - KSL Rebellion in Patagonia by Osvaldo Bayer [Book
Review] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. afed uk: NO BORDERS, NO STATES, NO WARS! - RESISTANCE
BULLETIN #160 - Editorial (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
In Rebellion in Patagonia Osvaldo Bayer rescued this tragedy from historical oblivion.
‘The 1921 massacre of the rural workers of Patagonia is no longer a taboo subject,
mentioned as if it were but a legend.' (p467) Patagonia, in the far south of Argentina,
dominated by the livestock runs of large landowners, is a long way from Buenos Aires. It
may be a long way from where you are, but this is a story that resonates. ---- Rebellion
in Patagonia tells how the anarchist-organised rural workers strike in 1920-21 and win
historic concessions, after the army and reformist politicians opt for compromise. The
landowners are intent on destroying the workers' organisation and resist implementing the
agreement, which leads to the second strike (of 1921). The owners want a solution, one
that leaves them in full control. ‘If the military doesn't intervene, "there will be
nothing but ruins and desolation."' (p148 quoting La Nación) Why is there a problem?
‘"Outside agitators, the aftertaste of unrestricted immigration, profess doctrines in
which those who were once slaves will take the place of their oppressors."' (p121, quoting
La Unión) Class interests are sprinkled with patriotic rhetoric. Political pressure is
applied to the reformists. The army is encouraged - this time - to return things to
‘business as usual'. In other words, to massacre the strikers. Not simply to break the
strike, but to drown it in blood.
The Anarchists of the Workers' Society put their faith in solidarity that doesn't come.
They know which side the army are on. Not so the rural workers. ‘As far as they are
concerned, the real enemies are the police officers who beat them and shake them down for
the few pesos they have. But fighting the army, no, they don't want to get involved in
that. This is the moment when Antonio Soto realizes his biggest mistake: organizing a
strike that is absolutely anarchist in form - authentic, sudden, unexpected, impulsive -
without the support of a rank and file that understands the basic notions of human freedom
and its enemies.' (p267)
The killing isn't random. Once the strikers surrender (defeating your enemies is easier if
they think you're neutral!) the sorting starts. The army calls it ‘assigning
responsibilities' (p221). Anyone singled out as a strike leader is killed, usually after
being beaten. Strikers can have their lives saved by being claimed by their bosses. Given
power of life and death, some use it to save lives and some use it to settle scores: ‘The
commanding military officer himself admits that the judgements as to who was guilty and
who was innocent were made by the "ranchers and foremen."[...]Many accounts state that the
ranchers didn't just point out the "ringleaders" but also any peons that had been slightly
insubordinate or to whom they owed wages.' (p241) Beyond that, the unknown and unclaimed
only had hope, and not a lot of that. ‘The ranchers decided whose lives were to be saved
and if nobody claimed them they were executed or taken to prison. The same thing happened
to the men nobody knew, the migrant workers.' (p247, quoting Antonio Tiznao)
Bayer records the protest of the prostitutes of the La Catalana brothel (in San Julián)
who strike themselves: ‘Patient research has allowed us to discover the names of these
five women, these five whores who were the only ones brave enough to publicly say that the
perpetrators of the bloodiest massacre of workers in our history were nothing more than
murderers.' (p338)[1]And the protests spread. At first it's the anarchists but then, ‘When
La Vanguardia - the newspaper of the Socialist Party - learned that the dead included
Albino Argüelles, secretary-general of the San Julián Workers' Society and a card-carrying
party member, they began attacking[President]Yrigoyen and Commander Varela day after day.'
(p339)
Yrigoyen will say - and will keep saying - nothing. The government will refuse to
investigate. A compromise is arranged. ‘When the repression began, there were three
categories of strikers: the bad workers, who "died in combat"; the suspicious workers, who
were imprisoned in Río Gallegos after being punished and humiliated; and the good workers,
who were rescued by their employers.' (p366) The prisoners will be released: the task has
been accomplished anyway. ‘And what about Varela's argument that these people were
bandits, arsonists, thieves? Now, with one stroke of a pen, the judge admits that they
shouldn't have been arrested. What one hand writes is erased by the other.' (p373)
Commander Varela asks Yrigoyen to support him, to explain he was following orders. It
doesn't happen.
Since there will be no justice, inevitably the anarchists think about revenge. Anarchist
political violence has thrown up many remarkable characters. Just look at Simón Radowitzky
or Severino di Giovanni, both of whom Bayer has written about. Kurt Gustav Wilckens is
possibly the most remarkable and least fierce anarchist avenger. ‘He has never even been
to Patagonia, but neither has he received so much as five centavos in payment for the
assassination. His name is Kurt Gustav Wilckens. A German anarchist of the Tolstoyan
persuasion, he is an enemy of violence, but he believes that, in extreme cases, the only
response to the violence of the mighty should be more violence.' (p18)
Wilckens assassinates Commander Varela, ‘the butcher of Patagonia'. Wilckens is then
murdered in prison in a right-wing plot, which triggers massive protests and cements his
place as a working class hero. ‘If we hadn't personally collected the testimonies, flyers,
communiques, etc., we wouldn't have believed that, even in the most remote corners of the
country, there were people who felt the need to express their support for the anarchist
avenger and their anger at his murder.' (p433) Bayer follows the story to the bitter end.
Perez Millán Temperley, the killer of Wilckens, is given a light sentence and serves it in
a mental hospital - until he's killed in an anarchist plot.
Rebellion in Patagonia is not cheerful reading and might leave you asking ‘What can you do
but weep?' It reminded me of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.
But there was no quicklime: some bodies were burnt, many were just left on the pampas. It
was left to the local people to bury them properly.
Despite the brutality, this is a very humane book because Bayer is determined to bear
witness and writes with a clear grasp of what's at stake. It's also a model for writing
history from below. Starting fifty years after the events, Bayer interviews eyewitnesses
(strikers, neutrals and soldiers) as well as the children of victims and perpetrators,
visits the execution sites and sees the bullet-marked rocks for himself. He also makes
good use of the written record, like the flier that catches the moment when it's being
typeset: ‘While we went to press, we were informed that the bakers had just voted to go on
strike.' (p414)
When Bayer talks about illiterate workers, there's no sneer, simply admiration that those
who had so little would risk it all for an ideal. They strike to commemorate the execution
of the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer: ‘This is typically anarchist. Just think about
the riskiness of a strike in a place where jobs are extremely scarce, where all the bosses
know each other, and where nobody will hire a disobedient worker. And that these somber
men - peons, bellboys, and stevedores - would take such a risk on behalf of someone who
had died eleven years before in a far-off land. That these proletarians - most of them
illiterate - took such a risk to commemorate the founder of the Modern School!' (p480-1)
There is bitter irony, though, for self-serving lies: ‘It's strange that Paladino was able
to make a confession after dying, taking the time to accuse himself of being "one of the
most bloodthirsty."' (p330)
There's a very strong sense in Rebellion in Patagonia that the past has never gone away,
that the massacres are simply a dress rehearsal for Argentina's twentieth-century agony of
dictatorship. Bayer was forced into exile during the 1970s dictatorship and his books
(including the first version of this one) were burnt. So he not a ‘neutral' observer. But
he is a very perceptive one.
There's an awful lot to think about in this book. The rural workers were left to fight
alone. The ‘pure syndicalists' of the FORA IX will protest about the massacres, but not
too much. Bayer unpicks the nationalism used by the bosses, where the flag really is a
blindfold: ‘Without any need for a red flag, Patagonia was already internationalized - not
just by foreign landowners, but also because all of her raw material wealth was sent
overseas. In other words, the intervention of the Argentine Army did not occur to defend
the nation's interests, but to preserve the status and privileges of foreign companies and
to protect an unjust feudal regime that still chokes southern Argentina, slowly turning it
into a desert.' (p33)
Bayer isn't shy about condemning the killings carried out by Varela, but he doesn't ignore
the forces that used him: ‘It seems as if the responsibility of all those who owed
something to Varela, of those who benefited from his actions, ended with his death'
(p403). It's as if he's sowing seeds of doubt, asking the army if they're happy to be ‘the
tools of those who already had everything and still wanted more.' (p235)
Tragic though it is, Rebellion in Patagonia is written with style as well as heart:
‘we can imagine those two tiny Fords traveling through the desert, carrying eight madmen
drunk on the ideas of social justice and human redemption. What possessed three Spaniards,
one Pole, one Argentine, and three Chileans to set off through this wasteland to bring the
gospel of Bakunin to those illiterate, God-forsaken peons? They were crazier than any
characters dreamed of by Roberto Arlt, beyond the imagination of even Maxim Gorky. A
former stagehand, a stevedore, a mechanic, a former telegraph operator, three shepherds, a
former electrician, and a hotel valet go off to fight for social justice and human
redemption in the depopulated expanses of Patagonia. A shame that the conversations
between these eight messengers of dynamite and fury weren't recorded. If Jesus had
happened upon them in the desert, he would have shook his head sadly and told them,
"Brothers, you are exaggerating the teachings of the Gospel."' (p156-7)
Bayer's book is a memorial to them: ‘flowers for the rebels who failed' as anarchists like
to say, a tribute based not on a sense of nostalgia but a love of freedom. It's also a
reminder that the past is important: how can we change things if we don't understand how
we got where we now are? Finally, in a footnote, Bayer reminds us that some never gave up:
‘Here we should add a few words on the fate of Antonio Soto, the man who refused to
surrender at La Anita.[...]Soto remained faithful to his libertarian ideals until the day
he died, although he no longer acted on them publicly. Towards the end of his life, he
purchased a small hotel in Punta Arenas that became a gathering place for journalists,
artists, freethinkers, and Spanish Republicans. His body was accompanied to the graveyard
by a sizable entourage, led by the flagbearers of the Spanish Republican Center, the Red
Cross - of which he was a member - and the Galician Center. They were followed by student
groups, who honored Soto as the inspiration behind the first student strike in Punta
Arenas, which secured an increase in the meager pay of the town's teachers.' (p491-2)
Note
1, ‘Here are their names as they appeared on the yellowing pages of the police report:
Consuelo García, twenty-nine years old, Argentine, single, prostitute at the La Catalana
brothel; Angela Fortunato, thirty-one years old, Argentine, married, seamstress and
prostitute; Amalia Rodríguez, twenty-six years old, Argentine, single, prostitute; María
Juliache, Spaniard, twenty-eight years old, resident of Argentina for the past seven
years, prostitute; Maud Foster, Englishwoman, thirty-one years old, single, resident of
Argentina for the past ten years, a woman from a good family, prostitute.'
Rebellion in Patagonia by Osvaldo Bayer; AK Press/Kate Sharpley Library, 2016.[Originally
posted at http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/905rp9]
Related Link: https://www.akpress.org/rebellion-in-patagonia.html
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/29637
------------------------------
Message: 2
This issue contains articles about action against detention centres, anti-racist action,
migrant/refugee support centres, experiences from Greece, AF's pre-Brexit viewpoint, and
more. ---- Editorial ---- The ‘migrant crisis', the referendum about withdrawing from the
EU, and many conflicts past and present are all about artificial lines that divide groups
of people. ---- These borders are both physical - you are not allowed to cross from one
piece of land to another - and mental and imaginary - the idea that people of one side of
the line are fundamentally different from those of the other side. In this issue of
Resistance we focus on the borders between nation states. Governments have control over a
particular patch of land that is perceived to have some kind of common social and cultural
identity. The fact that humans have been migrants around the globe for thousands of years
seems to be forgotten as the nation creates this illusion of sameness in a group of people
that live within its borders. The state certainly doesn't treat all those people with
equal respect!
As anarchists we reject all borders except the border between the vast majority of the
world's population and the ruling class - the bosses, the bankers, the property developers
and all those with the wealth and power to exploit and oppress us. The ruling class
doesn't respect the boundaries that they impose on us: money goes all over the world for
speculation and tax evasion, corporations move production from one country to another in
search of the lowest wages, and shops are filled with products made on the other side of
the world. Inside the nation, they have erected borders on our land, excluding us from
more and more places. Land has long been largely privately owned in the countryside, vast
Highland estates, for example, and agriculture. But increasingly in the cities, land is
being privatised and effectively excluding anyone who isn't working or spending money.
In this issue of Resistance, we look at the fightback against borders and the ways in
which people are creating a spirit of internationalism and unity between the working class
against the ruling class.
Download the latest issue: Resistance 160 - special issue on migration
http://afed.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/resist160.pdf
https://afed.org.uk/no-borders-no-states-no-wars-resistance-bulletin-160/
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten