Just before midnight, Monday Feb 25, we strolled over to the townhouses under construction on 24th and Norman in the Central District. After slipping inside, we set one ablaze. Oh what ease! Oh what fun!
Sustainable development is a myth that makes us sick. By furthering gentrification and ecological destruction, these buildings dress disaster up as progress, promising a "green" future that will never be.
Our attack was just one more opportunity to joyously reject the status quo. It was another attempt to shed the subjugated subjectivity forced upon us by Capital and the State. We act against civil society and its attempts at domestication. Fuck that shit.
Solidarity with Maddy, Kerry, and all the silent ones still facing repression by the Federal Grand Jury. We will not cower in fear. We will not remain docile in the face of State terror.
Now is the time to attack! Enemies abound. Weapons are everywhere.
Join us?
Some Anarchists
Comments
stuff in the neighborhood
http://vimeo.com/16745601#
*tidesofflame.wordpress.com
*tidesofflame@riseup.net
Wait a minute...according to this fourteen minute video from two years ago, there was once a restaurant/show space in the same neighborhood....
There's no apparent connection to this arson many blocks away, but just like...think about it, man.
Smoke some weed and think about it.
There are these shitty people in the neihgborhood, yuppies, some of them who are aspiring academics or in tech companies, snarky and nasty people, who didn´t like Hidmo and wanted it gone. Kind of like the people who kicked out Autonomia, the old anarchist social center. Anyway, the neighborhood is still being gentrified by young white proffesionals who sit around brooding about the scary people outside, but these snarky proffesionals can only write complaints or troll news sites. Usually they don´t understand they live in the CD, or even where it is or what it used to be or who still lives there. But, yeah, smoke some weed and think about it. Not a bad idea.
While you´re thinking, check this totally unrelated piece of information out:
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020384254_uniontwentythirdxml.html
I know the young proffesionals might not care what happened to Hidmo, but you all might care what´s about to happen to the blocks surrounding 23rd and Union.
*tidesofflame.wordpress.com
*tidesofflame@riseup.net
Now, doesn't that feel better than throwing links at people like a spambot?
http://keshek.tumblr.com/image/38168856466
*tidesofflame.wordpress.com
*tidesofflame@riseup.net
"After slipping inside, we set one ablaze. Oh what ease! Oh what fun!"
Is that what you are after? Nothing better than fun?
Fun is OK, but why not on your own expenses?
Incisive questions. I wonder if the authors of the statement went on to explain their motivations in any of the several sentences that follow the one you quoted. The world may never know.
I want to understand why you would build down someone's home. I sincerely hope you would never set fire to a home with people in it. My brother is soon to be having a child and I will be babysitting. Would you ever intentionally set fire to a home and kill children?
Those are nice strawmen you've built. Maybe it wasn't obvious, but this condo wasn't done being built yet. It wasn't anybody's "home" but a developers tool for gentrifying a neighborhood.
There seems to be a mess in your mind, and I'll help you clear that out:
- A bunch of shareholders who don't live in an unbuilt condo doesn't count for "someone's home". Corporations are not people.
- Anarchists are not after your children's life. They actually are fighting FOR life, and for a living. We are among the few who understand how your society is a morbid, deadly web of collaboration that kills, tortures or puts hundred of thousands innocent lives in confinement every year. The US government and its crony big corporations are champions of that ordinary massacre, domestically and abroad.
As to the question of "why", the communique made it quite obvious, didn't it?
Not really. I think this communique could have been way better. It insinuates a strong environmental motivation, but fails to explain how the "green" concept behind a lot of this new development is really a PR move by city planners to disguise their class war, their displacement of the poor out of this lovely vibrant neighborhood. Some people are sympathetic and willing to understand, but in my opinion it's time for us to make a clear, convincing presentation of the way WE see things going down.
The new juvie/retail space, the destruction of Yesler Terrace (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-twilight-of-yesler-terrace/Conten...), the fights we've had with city council. If we can make our side of the argument more accessible, we can stop a lot of the ill-informed reaction against us.
And just to illustrate my point, I've been talking to anarchists outside of Seattle about this arson story. They seem to think their are anarcho-primitivists running around Seattle trying to destroy everything. I told them I've never met any primmies here. I mean, sure I hate society too but come on...
First, I do agree with you that it would be nice if more original and well-crafted anarchist analysis of the situation in Seattle were written. Anyone could do this--including you--and submit it to PSA, and it will be published. But mostly people seem content to repost news articles from mainstream news sources. Too bad.
But, it would not necessarily be safe for the person who wrote this communique to go on at greater length. Someone is anonymously claiming credit for a crime that will be seriously investigated. The communique itself becomes a clue for law enforcement. It's not the place to write a persuasive analysis of gentrification which could be studied in terms of writing style, etc. It's not so difficult for anyone who wonders why an anarchist would destroy property or fight gentrification or this or that to look it up and find more analytical writings where anarchist have explained themselves, on this site and elsewhere. If you're not finding the particular analysis you want, write it.
Furthermore, who gives a fuck if anarchists from other places are worried about "primmies" in Seattle? As we all know, "anarchists" are often essentially uptight scenesters who love to complain about the bad other anarchists who give the rest of them a bad name, whether its communists, egoists, nihilists, insurrectionaries, lifestylists, primitivists, and on and on. The consistent subcultural moral panic about what other anarchists are doing or believing only reveals anarchists' own anxieties about their marginality.
Finally, everything has to be destroyed.
Expect original content from me in the future. I'm finally starting to become confident in my grasp on theory to do this kind of stuff. Anybody know about a possible successor to ToF being worked on?
I take your point about communiques as evidence. I'll keep that in mind.
There was this call out for submissions to a free print publication: http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/content/call-out-submissions , but I imagine that it won't exactly be a successor to Tides of Flame in that the political angle might be different, although still anarchist. Although I have heard a few people talk about starting up a new project like Tides of Flame, I have yet to see anyone actually start such a project, unfortunately.
Just 'cause you haven't met any "primmies" doesn't mean they don't exist. And if by "destroy everything" you mean "stop civilizationists from destroying the landbase we all depend on for some myth of progress", then yes, we are here. Who the fuck are these "anarchists outside of Seattle" that can't sympathize with the burning of a yuppie condo?
Howdy.
Is this not a prideful expression of power, this setting of a fire, capable of wild hazard and danger, billowing smoke into the air? This action is not merely justified by the long discredited "propaganda of the deed", but as an attack on civil society, broadly ideological, almost Maoist in devotion, where the rules no longer apply, conveniently. But the virtue of play cannot be simply used to do whatever one wants without regard for others. In what way are deep and meaningful ideas communicated to further the changes, which mere status quo businesses, and people with jobs, easily despised, fail to grasp, by the actions and words whose intentions seem less than true of heart. Freedom is built on taking responsibility all the time. Liberty is earned by doing right, not wrong, shedding light on the claim that there is no need for authority. Living life as theater is well and good, but by itself does not constitute thoughtful engagement, or magically transform the momentum of modern power, no matter how hard ones believes it to be true. We can transform ourselves, and those we love. But in the outer world, respect for others is he necessary form freedom should take, if we hope to co-create a new reality.
- thx. Fer listenin