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zondag 29 januari 2017

Anarchic update news all over the world - Part 2 - 29.01.2017

Today's Topics:

   

1.  anarkismo.net: Occupying democracy by Ercan Ayboga - Farah
      Azadi (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   

2.  anarkismo.net - False hope, broken promises: Obama's
      belligerent legacy by Jakob Reimann - ROAR (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   

3.  France, Alternative Libertaire AL Decembre - policy,
      Belgium: The libertarian movement must rebound (2/2) (fr, it, pt)
      [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1



The replacement of democratically elected HDP/DBP mayors and local municipality workers by 
AKP appointees is a grave threat to democracy in Turkish Kurdistan and the larger region. 
---- Nursel Aydogan, painting by Janet Biehl ---- In the aftermath of the July 2016 coup 
d'état attempt in Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party 
(AKP) has dismissed, detained and in some cases imprisoned co-mayors from 51 majority 
Kurdish local authorities across South East Turkey (North Kurdistan), replacing them with 
appointees from the AKP. The majority of these co-mayors belong to the AKP's leading 
opposition parties, the People's Democratic Party (HDP) and its Kurdistan branch the 
Democratic Regions Party (DBP).

Mass layoffs and detentions of municipality workers, again a majority of whom were 
Kurdish, followed, alongside an occupation of the municipality buildings by the Turkish 
constabulary forces. Amongst the seized municipalities are North Kurdistan's de-facto 
capital city of Diyarbakir (Amed) and other politically consequential cities such as Van, 
Mardin, Siirt and Dersim. The capture and occupation of the local authorities is symbolic 
of a new phase in repression against the democratic opposition in Turkey, following the 
failed military coup in July 2016.

Despite spurious charges of links to ‘terrorism', the recent authoritarian moves by the 
AKP target the larger Kurdish freedom struggle. They have, to date, imprisoned over 6000 
HDP/DBP members, arrested over 2000 more people from the Kurdish youth movement, trade 
unions, social movements and NGO's, and suspended more than 12000 employees of the 
Confederation of Public Employees Trade Unions (KESK), the Left trade union that 
represents a majority of public servants across Kurdistan.

In September 2016, in the initial days of the AKP occupation, the DBP discussed how it 
should refer to the AKP mayoral appointees. It was decided that instead of ‘trustees' as 
described by the AKP, the DBP would use the word ‘appointees' and its corresponding word 
in Turkish, kayyum, to reflect the word's autocratic political and historical 
significance. The DBP also had to agree on strategies of resistance to, and interactions 
with, the occupying administration. A unanimous decision was made to engage in a passive 
resistance against the new appointees. This meant the DBP would reject any close 
cooperation or promotions offered by Ankara, though members would also not risk being 
easily sacked.

When 10 leading MPs from the HDP, including its co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen 
Yüksekdag, were imprisoned in November 2016, widespread protests erupted across Kurdistan, 
Turkey and the world. Yet, the occupation of local authorities across Kurdistan, an 
incendiary situation, and one that is far more perilous to democracy on the ground, has 
generated little response from the ‘mainstream' international community. The detention and 
imprisonment of elected local representatives and municipality workers, many left to 
languish in solitary confinement, must be considered as the crossing of a red line. The 
recent decision of the European Parliament over any further negotiations on Turkey's 
membership in the E.U. must be weighed in light of these provocations.

Militarised occupation of the municipalities

In the first stages of the occupation, special forces units seized the municipality 
buildings to search offices and confiscate files belonging to the administration. Police 
officers, laden with heavy weaponry, lined the corridors of all the municipality 
buildings; whilst plain clothes agents constantly moved throughout the building repeatedly 
entering and exiting offices as a means of harassment and intimidation.

After the seizure of the municipality buildings, Ankara sent their new appointees, who 
were instituted under heavy militarised guard. The Turkish state also implemented several 
bureaucratic measures that allowed municipality workers to enter their offices only under 
special circumstance and extensive state control. No one was allowed to enter the local 
authorities without an official ID, and full body searches became standard. The control 
and harassment also extended to workers' use of the internet with various websites 
blocked, and workers fearful of visiting websites that might be deemed oppositional to the 
Turkish state. Email is heavily monitored, and workers limit their communication to the 
minimum necessary to do their job.

In light of these measures, and averse to entering police occupied spaces, members of the 
public who had frequented the local authorities under the previous administration, soon 
stopped coming. Additionally, the police instituted new bureaucratic procedures that meant 
it could take weeks for anyone not employed by the local authorities to gain permissions 
to access the municipality buildings. Municipalities that had previously expressed an 
ethos that is decidedly welcoming and open to the public were transformed overnight to 
appear more like a prison.

One of the initial steps taken by the AKP-appointees was to remove the administrative 
staff and replace them with law enforcement officers. In Diyarbakir, the mayoral 
appointees gave municipality workers as little as a week's notice of the changes that were 
going to be instituted, and many workers had scarcely a day to clear out their offices. 
Municipality department heads were fired and replaced with loyal AKP supporters. 
Departments were then reconfigured with staff being moved between departments without 
consent as if they were pieces on a chessboard.

At the outset of the occupation, the AKP attempted to replace the elected city councillors 
with appointees in the local authorities as a means of gaining a political majority for 
their party. Yet this strategy was abandoned following the assassination of two appointees 
and the mass resignations that followed in their wake. There were also considerable 
dilemmas over governance, where opposing views on economic policy led to an impasse 
between the AKP appointees and the local city councillors over approval of city budgets. 
The stalemate resulted in the AKP simply ignoring their colleagues, and failing to convene 
meetings of the local councils. As the mayoral appointees rule by decree, rather than 
through policy generated by civil servants in specified departments, deputies remain 
largely disempowered and local governments unable to function. Repeated lawsuits have been 
powerless to change the situation with courts unwilling to challenge Ankara.

Earlier this month, the central Turkish government decreed that the more than 1200 
employees of the HDP/DBP municipal authorities (even from municipalities where no ‘new' 
administrators have been appointed) were to be permanently suspended from their jobs, a 
punitive decision that came without warning. Those who have been fired join the more than 
1200 others who have lost their jobs since September 2016, with a multiplying effect of up 
to 7000-10000 as municipality employees are often the sole breadwinners. The sweeping 
dismissals have been enormously successful in sowing fear amongst the general population 
of similar ‘retribution'. Whilst dozens of other municipality workers made the decision to 
resigned their positions in protest, not wishing to cooperate in any way with the occupation.

The autocratic measures taken by the AKP have been instituted in an attempt to either 
intimidate or mollify any opposition to its power. These actions should be understood 
within the context of Ankara's abject fear of widespread resistance in Kurdistan, and 
signal an ominous future for democracy in Kurdistan and across Turkey.

AKP's long term intentions

Local elections in Turkey will be held again in March 2019. The authoritarian actions 
taken by the AKP alongside active resistance of the Kurdish population in Bakur (South 
East Turkey / North Kurdistan) will ensure a short lifespan for the current regime. Many 
in HDP/DBP as well as the larger Kurdish freedom struggle have stated that until that day, 
rigorous self-criticism of the movement and its objectives will be considered.

Nevertheless, many fear that the AKP will utilise this time to destroy the social and 
cultural projects initiated under the HDP/DBP administration. Community projects, 
developed after years of discussions and experimentation, including Kurdish language 
schools, festivals and cultural centres, memorial-projects, after school programmes and 
community houses have been suspended across Bakur. In cities like Cizre, Diyarbakir and 
Silvan the systematic dismantling of projects commemorating those murdered, tortured and 
displaced in the Kurdish freedom struggle over the past forty years illustrates not simply 
the contempt of the current state towards its minority citizens, but how thoroughly its 
vacated any future possibility of peace negotiations over the so-called ‘Kurdish question'.

The Turkish military's bombing campaign in the summer of 2015 killed thousands and leveled 
dozens of districts across Bakur. To this day, cities remain in rubble with Turkish 
military and police forces refusing to allow family members to return to their homes to 
claim belongings, and a virtual blackout of the press covering any aspect of the ongoing 
hardships communities face in attempting to remain and rebuild.

Instead, the Turkish government has shamelessly seized upon the destroyed districts to 
force through neoliberal development ventures that will directly benefit Ankara. These 
projects, alongside the capture of the municipalities, are all part of AKP's larger aim of 
codifying its neoliberal and Islamist values and consolidating its power. Interweaving 
projects and resources with local politicians and companies close to the AKP will generate 
an incumbency that is perhaps less discernible but more hegemonic.

Across Kurdistan today, the Turkish state openly appears as an occupying power. Veneers of 
democracy or pluralism, though they have in reality never adequately characterised 
Ankara's relationship with the Kurds, crumble. The west's principle alibi for continuing 
its blood-soaked ‘special relationship' with ‘moderate Turkey' isn't on principle at all, 
it remains only for the purpose of averting the gaze of the world from the political 
catastrophe of its policy-less policy on migration. The callous short-sightedness of the 
west and its refusal to act now to prevent the possible integrants of a third world war 
jeopardises the safety of not only the Kurds, but people the world over.

The Kurdish freedom movement, though wounded, remains undeterred and unbowed. Even where 
the state has, for now, been able to appropriate all power on a local level and act with 
impunity, it has unequivocally lost all legitimacy. Its browbeating of the population who 
fear open protest on the streets, only signifies that the AKP is but a paper tiger that 
will soon fall.
Related Link: https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/ercan-aybo...cracy

Selahattin Demirtas, painting by Janet Biehl

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/29936

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Message: 2



When Obama received the Nobel Prize in 2009, the committee acknowledged his commitment to 
peace. He has since bombed eight countries. ---- Gigantic hopes were pinned on Barack 
Obama when he moved into the White House in 2009. Not just in the US, but across the globe 
people were simply fed up with eight unspeakable years of George W. Bush - with his 
nepotism, his belligerence and, yes, his sheer stupidity. The world was sick and tired of 
the "Cowboy from Texas." ---- And then there came this highly intelligent, charismatic, 
eloquent - black - civil rights attorney from Illinois and everything was set to change. 
"Yes We Can" infected the whole world. "Hope and Change" were almost physically tangible 
to many. Yet Barack Obama has bitterly disappointed the world.

DIALOGUE AND NEGOTIATIONS

In 2009, Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize - not for any concrete action but rather for 
his effusive optimism and, eventually, for his Yes We Can campaign. The Nobel committee 
acknowledged Obama's commitment to peace and admired his diplomacy-focused aspirations: 
"Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most 
difficult international conflicts."

Furthermore, the committee appreciated the fact that Mr. Obama had given people everywhere 
"hope for a better future." The president himself felt "deeply humbled" and considered the 
award a "call to action."

The outgoing president has since bombed eight countries, trumping his predecessor George 
W. Bush by two.

Bush infamously held his pathetic Mission Accomplished speech on an aircraft carrier, only 
a few weeks after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In October 2011, Obama finally declared 
the end of the war in Iraq and withdrew US troops from the country. While we shouldn't 
shed any tears over Saddam, pre-war Iraq was a reasonably stable country back in 2003. In 
2011 it was left behind by Obama as a failed state, a country in total chaos, deeply 
drowned in the bloodiest of violence. Today the country is a jihadist breeding ground par 
excellence. It is no longer possible to deny that the rise of the so-called Islamic State 
was a direct result of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And so Obama, in 2014, after an absence of 2.5 years in Iraq, set out to "ultimately 
destroy" the jihadist legacy of his predecessor Bush - first with air strikes, then with a 
few hundred special forces, and now with approximately 6,400 soldiers and private 
mercenaries back on the ground.

Similarly, in Libya in 2011, the US and its NATO allies France and the UK misused UN 
resolution 1973, which aimed to establish a no-fly zone, and turned it into a pretext for 
an illegal war of aggression against Muammar Gaddafi. This led to the overthrow of the 
dictator, who was sodomized and executed by a lynch mob in the streets of his hometown of 
Sirte.

With his push for regime change Obama not only violated International Law, but US law as 
well, since the mandate for his campaign in Libya had already been withdrawn by US 
Congress in June 2011. Again, Libya was a reasonably stable country - until then the most 
advanced in Africa - that was thrown into turmoil and a bloody civil war. The so-called 
Islamic State used this chaos to their advantage as a way to build up its third biggest 
troop contingent, after Iraq and Syria. Post-invasion Libya has degenerated into a 
melting-pot of terrorists from across Africa and the Middle East.

As in Iraq, Obama once again used the terror threat generated after the orchestrated 
overthrow of an unpopular dictator to establish a permanent US commitment: renewed arms 
shipments, conventional air strikes, illegal drone killings, and, since May 2016, even US 
troops on the ground.

In Yemen, Obama not only bombed the country on his own - both with conventional and with 
drone attacks - but since March 2015 Washington has also actively supported a Saudi-led 
coalition with intelligence, logistics and massive arms shipments in its illegal war of 
aggression against the Houthi rebels. More recently it was revealed that there are US 
troops on the ground in Yemen, and that for the first time the US not only attacked 
al-Qaeda members but bombed facilities of the Houthi rebels as well.

The perfidious and shameless manner in which the Obama administration peddles falsehoods 
about its military misadventures is exposed particularly when looking into its activities 
in Syria. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Obama has supported 
different rebel groups in their fight against Bashar al-Assad. "Non-lethal aid" quickly 
gave way to the supply of heavy military equipment. Among the groups favored by the US 
there have been elements of he Free Syrian Army that later defected to ISIS or to 
al-Qaeda, taking Obama's arms and money to their new masters.

Since September 2014, the US Air Force has been launching air strikes against ISIS troops 
in Syria. Obama, however, has repeatedly uttered the mantra that there would be "no boots 
on the ground in Syria." Yet when US ground forces were eventually deployed to Syria - 
initially a few dozen, then hundreds - the government was so bold as to simply deny 
Obama's previous promises: as the spokesman of the State Department put it, "there was 
never this ‘no boots on the ground.' I don't know where this keeps coming from." Obama has 
actually been publicly quoted saying precisely that on at least 16 occasions.

THE RULE OF LAW IS OVERRULED

But that's not all. Every Tuesday, known as "Terror Tuesday," a list of terror suspects 
from around the world is submitted to President Obama by his intelligence advisors. As 
former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden ostentatiously admits, quite often the entries 
do not even have names, but are based solely on metadata, like which SIM card is calling 
whom, when, and for how long.

Once a week, Obama signs this so-called "kill list" - leading to the extrajudicial 
execution of foreign and even US citizens through the president's dramatically expanded 
drone program. The bitter irony herein is self-evident: the studied constitutionalist 
Obama is acting as prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time, thus abandoning the 
separation of powers - the cornerstone of a constitutional democracy.

Since the beginning of the US drone program in 2004, up to 8,000 people have been killed 
by drone strikes. The vast majority of them were authorized by Obama himself, and a few by 
his predecessor George W. Bush. Most victims were located in Pakistan (up to 4,000), 
Afghanistan (up to 2,300), and in Yemen (up to 1,300), plus around 400 more in Somalia.

In full knowledge of the consequences, Obama authorized the execution of people who often 
happened to be in their family circle or in public places when the drones struck. Time and 
again, the US has bombed wedding parties, as well as, most cynically, a funeral ceremony 
of drone victims. As an act of retaliation, the children of alleged terrorists are also 
killed by drones. As former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once so despicably 
declared, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father."

The proportion of civilians killed in drone strikes is inevitably extremely high. In 
Pakistan, for example, only 4 percent of casualties were confirmed al-Qaeda members. 
Because of this blatant injustice, drone killing are widely regarded to be the main 
recruiting tool for new terrorists. This is Obama's legacy: he has made the illegal drone 
war the norm, and firmly entrenched it as an integral part of the "War on Terror."

THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

So far, we have discussed seven of the eight countries attacked by Obama. The eighth 
country is the Philippines. In 2012, a US drone killed 15 people in the country, thereby 
further escalating the ongoing conflict between rebel groups and the government in Manila.

If we include cyber warfare in our list, we could even add Iran as a ninth country. In 
fact, from the very outset of his presidency, Mr. Obama waged an "increasingly 
sophisticated" cyberwar against the civil nuclear program of Iran, thus becoming the first 
president in US history to use "cyberweapons to cripple another country's infrastructure," 
as The New York Times reported in 2012.

Seven of the eight countries physically bombed by Obama are predominantly Muslim. The 
Philippines is the exception, but the 15 people killed there were all Muslims. Clearly 
this track record sits very uncomfortably with Obama's carefully crafted image as a 
reconciler of religions. Just in February he made his acclaimed speech at a mosque in 
Baltimore.

Obama certainly did not initiate America's ongoing war on Muslim countries - he is merely 
following a decades-old US tradition in that respect. But what Obama has done is to make 
the so-called "clash of civilizations," which has long been a staple of foreign policy 
hawks in right-wing Washington think tanks, socially acceptable to liberals, normalizing 
it to an extent that would have been unimaginable under someone like George W. Bush. This, 
too, is his legacy.

THE VISION OF A NUCLEAR-FREE WORLD

In his history-making speeches in front of the Siegessäule in Berlin in 2008 and in Prague 
in 2009, Obama proclaimed his goal of a "world without nuclear weapons," an announcement 
that was followed by frenetic applause: "Yes, we can!" In his policy plan, he extensively 
addressed the issue of nuclear disarmament. To the Nobel Peace Prize committee, this point 
was extremely important - the announcement of his award specifically invoked his "vision 
of a world without nuclear weapons."

But while the number of nuclear warheads worldwide was dramatically reduced from its peak 
of more than 70,000 in the 1980s to just over 15,000 today, with both Russia and the US in 
possession of about 7,000 each, the lion's share of this disarmament took place 
immediately at the end of the Cold War.

During his presidency, Obama has only minimally reduced the US nuclear stockpile. Even 
George W. Bush kept his word and halved the US nuke arsenal. Added together, Bush Sr and 
Bush Jr dismantled a total of 14,801 nuclear weapons, while Obama managed to dismantle no 
more than 507.

"It's a funny thing," Hans M. Kristensen, the luminary of nuclear disarmament research, 
says: "the administrations that talk the most about reducing nuclear weapons tend to 
reduce the least." President Obama has decommissioned fewer warheads than "any 
administration ever."

But it gets worse. When assuming office in 2008, Obama pledged that he would "not 
authorize the development of new nuclear weapons." Then, in 2014, he announced the largest 
single item in the US budget for the coming decades: a jaw-dropping $1 trillion to be 
spent on a mammoth program to "modernize" the US nuclear arsenal. To put this in 
perspective: this means the US will spend roughly $4 million on nukes every hour - for the 
next 30 years.

The particular danger with this "modernization" of America's nuclear infrastructure, the 
New York Times remarks, is that "the upgrades could allow a future president to rapidly 
expand the nation's atomic forces." With the megalomaniacal and unpredictable Donald Trump 
soon in the Oval Office, this danger looms especially large.

Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by 191 countries including the 
United States, obliges the signatory countries to pursue "effective measures relating to 
cessation of the nuclear arms race" and to "complete" nuclear disarmament. The milestone 
UN Resolution 1540 of 2004 reaffirms again that all member states are to "fulfil their 
obligations" to disarm all weapons of mass destruction. Obama's trillion-dollar nuclear 
armament program blatantly violates both of these international treaties.

During the Cold War, there was a trend towards ever larger, more apocalyptic nuclear 
bombs. Under Obama's administration that trend has been reversed with the development of 
so-called mini-nukes - small atomic bombs capable of destroying strategic targets instead 
of entire cities. One of the heads of Obama's modernization plan called mini-nukes the 
"more ethical approach." The misanthropy underlying this statement is difficult to bear. 
Reducing the size of nuclear warheads actually removes some of the deterrent in using 
them. Due to their small size, US generals have fantasized that the use of nukes is "no 
longer unthinkable." This, too, is Obama's legacy.

WAR HAS LOST ITS INDECENCY

There is no denying that Obama has made some positive achievements in his foreign and 
security policies during his tenure. In some fields he has actually advanced the US and 
the whole world. Here the nuclear deal with Iran comes to mind, which I have previously 
called "one of the most important global diplomatic agreements of the young century."

Obama also pursued the normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba and, after almost 
90 years, he was the first US president to actually travel to the Caribbean country - a 
historic milestone.

But at the same time, Obama has failed to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo; he 
has presided over the intensification of military tensions with China in the Pacific 
region; he holds a shameful record on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and his management 
of the Ukraine crisis has been disastrous, contributing - together with his intervention 
in Syria - to the emergence of a frightening new Cold War scenario, involving the largest 
build-up of US troops in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

All of this clearly goes to show how Obama blatantly squandered the opportunity to pursue 
peace, and instead has handed down the very opposite: a world of escalating conflicts and 
tensions. Obama may have started out with good intentions, but as John Pilger so 
strikingly put it, "his most consistent theme was never change - it was power."

In a classified CIA analysis published by WikiLeaks in 2010, the Agency bemoaned the 
waning support for war among the population of America's European allies. After eight 
miserable years under Bush, the Global War on Terror desperately needed paint job. Obama 
arrived as a godsend. With the Nobel Peace Prize laureate as commander-in-chief, America's 
perpetual state of war lost its indecency. It was even raised up a notch under the 
illusion of progressiveness and wrapped in an aura of necessity.

This is Obama's belligerent legacy.
Related Link: https://roarmag.org/essays/obama-legacy-war-conflict-peace/

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/29916

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Message: 3



The Belgian libertarian movement suffers from a lack of transmission of the militant 
tradition. After the first phase last month, following the long section of the collective 
Alternative Libertaire Brussels. ---- In addition to suffering from a hostile political 
environment, Belgian anarchists are confronted with a memory vacuum. Each generation must 
more or less start from scratch without benefiting from the advice and legacy of the 
previous generation. While this may have advantages, such as renewing doctrine and 
adapting it to present times, it mostly gives the impression to militants that anarchism 
suddenly springs up before it disappears, In us a volatile character and unsuitable to be 
a stable revolutionary posture. ---- We can go back a long way to understand this. Belgian 
anarchists were very present in the labor movement at the end of the nineteenth century 
and at the beginning of the twentieth century. As in France, they organized themselves in 
particular around newspapers and then within the trade union movement - during the 
execution of Francisco Ferrer in 1909, for example, the houses of the people of the 
Hennuyer basin were covered with black flags. Some experiences of alternative communities 
have even been attempted near Brussels, mixing self-management, economic solidarity, 
vegetarianism or even nudism. But already at the time, Belgium was very dependent on its 
great neighbor to the south and even the rest of Europe. Land of exile, it welcomed many 
foreign anarchists who came to take refuge, especially in Brussels, following the adoption 
of scoundrel laws or the various revolutionary actions carried out in Spain or Italy.

The anarchists Berthe Faber, Francisco Ascaso, Emilienne Morin, Buenaventura Durruti in 
the ponds of Ixelles

Personalities such as Elisée Reclus or Buenaventura Durruti have had a lasting influence 
on Belgian anarchism; In the same way as hundreds of strangers whose names have not been 
preserved but who have followed the same path and broke the bread with their comrades from 
beyond Quiévrain. At the crossroads of the European revolutionary circles, Brussels 
paradoxically knew few striking figures, in the sense that they perpetuated themselves in 
the Belgian imagination and memory; We can quote Ernestan or Émile Chapelier. This 
"absence" can also be explained by the difficult transmission of the revolutionary memory 
of which we are suffering today - Belgian anarchists would find it difficult to name the 
names of some of their ancestors.

Ernest Tanrez, "said Ernestan. Theorist of libertarian socialism and an important figure 
of Belgian anarchism.

As in many other European countries, the First World War permanently weakened the 
movement, making many anarchists disappear into the trenches and prisons. Although the 
Belgian government has always repressed the revolutionary movements, the war has provided 
it with radical means to weaken its "enemies from within" - a situation we still know 
today with a state of emergency. The next generation, that of the interwar period, was 
bled by the Second World War and, for obvious reasons, by the German occupation. It is 
above all from that moment on that a cycle of flood and recession takes place. Even 1968, 
which also strikes Belgium, will not allow a lasting re-establishment of an anarchist 
movement whose last representatives of the golden age died in the early 1970s, without 
really meeting and passing on the torch to the new and new Libertarians.

Bridging the Past

Today, anarchists are mostly young or have come to anarchism late. The oldest, notably the 
sixty-eight, have shut themselves up in "festive" versions of the rebellion or have 
completely abandoned the revolutionary ideal. We can not count on the transmission of a 
memory of the struggles, the strategic and theoretical experiences that have been carried 
out before us. This memorable nothingness is moreover not the prerogative of anarchists, 
the popular memory, if it exists, lack of channels to be diffused and to remain alive 
through its reincarnation in the present.

Libertarian Day, Brussels, 24 March 1984
This is precisely the question of how it is transmitted: the world of Belgian publishing 
is moribund, but even if it was as alive as in France, the book does not seem to be the 
best way to transmit memory . We are very far behind on computer mediums, such as videos 
or mini-documentaries, which are very effective in reaching new generations of activists.

The role of a group like that of Alternative Libertaire Brussels is not only to rebuild a 
public space of Francophone Belgian anarchism but also to pick up the thread of memory. 
Its perpetuity will ensure, for the future libertarians, anchorage in the course of the 
history contestant in Belgium, an impression to participate in a momentum that transcends 
the years. By also trying to exhume the history of the Belgian anarchist tradition, we can 
lay bridges to the past and inspire our predecessors. We hope that, in the future, 
anarchism is not only a political solution that emerges every ten or fifteen years, but 
rather a revolutionary project of transformation of society, permanently present, with a 
knowledge of its past and a perspective For its future.

Thibault (AL Brussels)

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Belgique-Le-mouvement-libertaire

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