FAKE-ASS "ANARCHISTS" ARE BURNING BOOKS NOW! (You can't Make This Shit Up!)
A Report from the International Anti-Authoritarian Gathering in Switzerland
Saint-Imier 2023: anarchy sabotaged
by Paul Cudenec
Originally Published in the Latest edition of the Acorn Anarchist Bulletin.
The capture of the anarchist movement by pro-system imposters has long been a theme explored by this site, as well as by our comrades at Nevermore and The Stirrer.
So we were, in equal measure, intrigued and appalled to read accounts from comrades who had attended a big supposedly-anarchist event in Switzerland this summer.
A report from Fédération Anarchiste (FA) activists, for instance, states: “It is not our place to give a detailed account of the extremely violent events that took place over three days, which were marked by several attacks on the press table: the overturning of the table by hooded assailants, the theft of books, the throwing of coffee on the books on display, constant insults, threats and harassment, the facial injury of an activist from the Fédération anarchiste, and the burning of Hamid Zanaz’s books.
“And finally, on the last day, a demonstration was organised against the FA, with a banner reading ‘racism kills’”!
Greater detail is provided by two representatives of the French group PMO.
They explain that the event was held at Saint-Imier because it was here in 1872 that anarchists, including Mikhael Bakunin, Errico Malatesta and Elisé Reclus, gathered to form a new international resistance movement after splitting from the bureauratic pro-state socialists led by Karl Marx.
In 2023, Saint-Imier hosted 5,000 people identifying as anarchists, from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, the USA, Turkey, Belarus, Iran, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and no doubt elsewhere.
The festival, featuring a diversity of workshops and activities, was co-ordinated by the local group of the International Anarchist Federation.
While there was no official top-down organising, explain authors Tomjo and Mitou, any discussion deemed problematic was prevented from taking place by an invisible dominant tendency.
“This is how, for example, suspicions of links to ‘conspiracy theory’ prevented all discussion of the authoritarian response to an authoritarian virus – lockdowns, travel permits, QR codes, fines, vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, sackings etc – at this anti-authoritarian gathering”.
They report that those attending mainly consisted of three types: bearded anarchists, punks with dogs and those terming themselves “queers”, who were by far the largest group.
These queers are individuals – sometimes called postmodernist, intersectionalist, or woke – who have spurned old-fashioned notions of fighting the capitalist system in favour of struggling for the rights of minorities within that system.
They are fans of technological “progress” and, explain the authors, engage in a battle against “essentialism” that often serves as cover for the destruction of both language and thought.
These activists had their own queer campsite, queer lunches and queer parties and were subdivided into racial and biological sub-groups, such as “racialised” queers, trans, or “fat and queer”.
There was also a workshop at which people in “sexual transition” could learn how to inject themselves with hormones.
The gathering was patrolled by persons in fluorescent pink jackets belonging to “Team Care”, operating out of the “Safer Space”.
They were on the look-out for instances of what they described as “discomfort, conflict, harrassment or discrimination, whether sexist, transphobic, racist, exoticising, ableist, fatphobic, classist or any other act reproducing systemic discrimination”.
Comment Tomjo and Mitou: “The atmosphere at Saint-Imier is more about drawing up proscription lists and monitoring words and behaviour than about allowing the free expression of ideas and desires”.
As one example they cite the appearance on the walls of the slogan/order: “White hippies, cut your dreads off”.
For today’s terminally woke, the hairstyle favoured by anarchist “crusties” everywhere amounts to the serious crime of “cultural appropration”.
Team Care at Saint-Imier also rushed into action when a “trans woman” complained of a micro-aggression when someone reminded him that he was actually a man.
But, strangely enough, they didn’t seem too bothered when “queer” pseudo-anarchists verbally and physically attacked actual anarchists for not having the same opinions as them.
The trouble started on the first day, when someone noticed that the Groupe Kropotkine of the Fédération anarchiste, from Laon dans l’Aisne in France, was selling a book by René Berthier on the question of Muslim women wearing veils.
Woke thinking apparently considers that, simply because Berthier is a “white cisgendered male”, he has no right to express an opinion on the issue.
In an escalating series of events, books were stolen and burned, the stall overturned, and FA members physically attacked.
In their own report of the incident, the woke activists boast of having taken “direct action” against the books.
Retort Tomjo and Mitou: “As if ‘direct action’ was, per se, virtuous and just… While anarchist direct action targets the representatives and structures of power, the queers of Saint-Imier (and elsewhere) attack people without power.
“Are these queers anarchists? Even young anarchists? Today’s anarchists? Or are they rather anti-anarchists, the ultimate offspring of consumer society, whose personal whims have to become the law for everyone?
“This isn’t about youth, but about idiocy – and that has no age. Please don’t confuse the two. Just between us, there is no ‘generational conflict’. Perhaps a class conflict – we are not children of the technocracy and we don’t defend its interests – but most assuredly a political conflict.
“If the queers are offended by criticism of monotheistic religions, by people refusing to obey their injunctions on moral issues and by any denounciation of their totalitarian ways, at anarchist gatherings… then they’ve turned up at the wrong campsite.
“Or maybe it’s that they knowingly came as saboteurs, so as to get their hands on what little remains of anarchy and to subvert or destroy it, as they have done with other places and groups”.
Citing a 2022 article by academic Laure Murat, they discuss the way that these woke-interectional-postmodern queers systematically “cancel” left-wing intellectuals, feminists, anarchists and environmentalists who have the cheek to contradict them and to criticise the latest (bio)technological developments in eugenics, transhumanism and human reproduction.
They ask: “How can we thus not regard queers as agents (objective or subjective, little matter) of state and industry?”
Not really shocked anymore.
A lot of the traditional left from Amnesty International to cultural institutions to the political parties has been destroyed from the inside by Wokeism.
I remember a commentator (tongue in cheek) saying that Wokeism has been the most effective COINTELPRO program ever.
Nothing says 'anarchism' quite like telling people what haircuts they can and cannot have! 😂