Panic!? Attack!?

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anon (not verified)
Panic!? Attack!?

Panic!?

Act for freedom NOW!
An overwhelming sense of urgency.
Above acting freely, your actions must be topical, and timely.
Anarchist action seems overburdened by a tacit deadline.
Each turn of the media cycle dictating the window of opportunity,
subject to a volatile public interest, fickle attention spans,
and memories as short as their imaginations.
Narrow time frames limit the horizons of possibility.
Forgoing depth of thought in favor of knee-jerk reactions.
Time stress induces burnout, time pressure induces blunders.
Forgotten is the anti-spectacular critique that leisurely bides its time,
and the anarchist urge to kill time, having the time of our lives.
Letting motives and consequences be afterthought,
so long you as act with haste.
So long as your attacks exfoliate infrastructure,
hastening its repair and modernization.
But if you sit idly, a litany of motives make their nagging appeal.
So long as you are unhappy, uneasy, unsettled.
Your inability to stop ecocide is expiated by eco-anxiety.†
Your inability to stop genocide is expiated by survivor’s guilt.††
Time has run out already many times before.
If a fight already lost is not a reason to surrender:
Why surrender to this affect and not another?

Attack!?

An unrelenting call of duty.
Explosive attacks and bombastic communiques,
a rhetorical stirring of passions
contrasts with the stillness of a sea of passivity.
Propaganda of the deed seeks to jar you out of your apathy.
As if giving a fuck would impede impending cataclysms.
Emotional appeal, manipulation, and blackmail.
Morality expects your actions and hostility as sacrifice.
If that doesn’t sound so nice, maybe one of its guises will suffice.
Is it now instead an ethics, a set of deeply-held values and convictions,
or a set of strong aesthetic preferences and passions?
More insidiously, is it disguised as arbitrary metrics of effectiveness
to guide avowedly amoral actions towards a revolutionary goal?
Machiavellian machinations predicating self-renunciation,
delayed gratification, and the ultimate sacrifice for a utopian horizon.
Instead of that, it is a fear of mortality--
of weakness, of lack of status, of irrelevance, of aging.
The inability to bear the dread of ill fate with grace.
A legacy of destruction seeks remembrance.
Seeking immortality via immolation, notoriety, or martyrdom.
Life-denying affirmation of a will.
Looking under rocks for lost causes to die for
hungry, cold, alone, and far away from home.
Like a shooting star burnt rapidly into a pebble
sending a ripple across a tepid milieu.
One could think of better things to do
than blowing up inside a dingy bureau.†††

Live freely & let evil live.

Lone wolves would not be so lonely
if they were as selfless and generous
with their affection, as with their aggression.
If they loved with the same reckless abandon
as they lash out against an uncaring world.††††

Terrorists paint the world in the drab palette of fear and dread
with mutilated screams, dismembered bodies, and rubble.
The holy war on terror feeds back off the panic they instill.
Integral to the loop, moral crusaders seeking to vanquish evil.

The part not said out loud about tolerating difference,
about abolishing policing, incarceration, and extermination:
No one will account for the disproportional indiscriminate hostilities
beyond the strictures of morality, and the excesses of lives without measure.
Good intentions fail against everyday cruelty and neglect.

In a planet rife with authoritarians, industrialists, capitalists,
and all sorts of bigots, fascists creep and they live among us,
free to run rampant and wreak havoc unless opposed.
Perhaps it's best they are evaded when possible,
lest opposition become a full-time job.
Only death could provide a release,
duty-bound until all are free.

Hate Watch binge hate-watches hate crimes
a calendar full of counterdemos.
Protests are mediated, counterprotests doubly so.
Demonstrations are at best self expression and catharsis.
Counterdemos are at their base shouting matches
that may escalate into street fights.

Love is an afterthought,
after the world is first split into hated enemies
the remainder affiliating according to affinity,
the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Neglected souls huddled for warmth
in the cold barracks of a common struggle.

When does organized self defense become
do-gooders persecuting of wrongdoers
right-thinkers persecuting wrongthink?
Moral entrepreneurs enforcing conformity to norms and punishing deviants.
Though many a thing maybe be cause for concern,
when has panic been of aid in addressing them?
When has freedom benefited from moral panics?
Witch hunts turn free spirits into folk devils
scapegoats used to fearmonger.

An anarchist is not a paragon of truth and virtue.
An anarchist lives freely and lets evil live.
A lived tension without haste for release.

May you be a survivor, not a spent bullet casing, or a warmonger.
May fear and hatred never cloud your motives and steal your initiative.
May a sense of duty or moral calculus never lead to sacrifice again.
May attack and revenge only exist as self indulgence, never as self renunciation.
May a sense of urgency never mess with your own timing and sense of rhythm.
May your pursuits be for their own sake, never in the service of panic.

For words and deeds of different kinds
beyond the flattened realm of text and tactics.
May you spend less chastising those you hate,
than lavishing those you love.

Notes:

† ‘Desert’ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert

†† ‘Blessed is the Flame’ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame

††† ‘Thinking about Mikhail Zhlobitsky’ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikola-dziadok-thinking-about-mi... But also Mauricio Morales and many others.
While words are not enough to dissuade those who have chosen death, often anarchist rhetoric opts to give the final push, rather than hold them back. As if to say, the problem is not self-sacrifice, but that not enough people are doing it.

†††† https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/new-study-reveals-na...
“We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars – trillions of worlds wandering alone.” As above, so below; our anarchist galaxy is home to more unknown passersby, vagabonds, hermits, and recluses, than those few who burned brightly, and those whose lives revolve around them.

Nonexistent zine from Panic! distro

Cover image: https://anokchan.org/index.php?q=post/view/1012

anon (not verified)
"and lets evil live"

Hums.. been always over the fence on the matter. That's very debatable, as state/police repression, people (including you) getting abused or extorted, animals getting tortured and many other shit humans do can easily pass as "evil", but I wouldn't let it happen, or at least not while trying to stop it. Would you, really?

Ishkah
Same, hopefully it's meant in

Same, hopefully it's meant in the sense of not seeing all evil in the world as an emergency to loose your life over immediately trying to stop.

So, acknowledging evil will always exist in an interpersonal parochial way of 'abusers will enjoy spending time around abusers' and so we won't ever have the time to invade every home to disrupt every mutually toxic relationship filled with micro-aggressions.

Or, the daoist message about it being good for people to have the capability to know what doing evil would look and feel like, in order for doing good to be meaningful.

anon (not verified)
given this line "Integral to

given this line "Integral to the loop, moral crusaders seeking to vanquish evil." i took it to mean you have to decide for yourself the point where you will let it be since its not humanly possible for someone to vanquish it and it would entail a moral crusade. but it does make sense to intervene in things within your sphere of influence where you're compelled to act by empathy or necessity

Ishkah
Very cool. I like the

Very cool. I like the footnotes too, offering a glimpse into what was motivating your creative writing.

Andre Breton (not verified)
Choose Life

Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors are purer
Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles of cold flame
Instead of these overripe stones
Choose this hear with its safety catch
Instead of that murmuring pool
And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time
Instead of that marriage blessing wedding my forehead to total vanity

Choose life
Choose life with its conspiratorial sheets
Its scars from escapes
Choose life choose that rose window on my tomb
The life of being here nothing but being here
Where one voice says Are you there where another voice answers Are you there
I’m hardly here at all alas
And even when we might be making fun of what we kill

Choose life
Choose life choose life venerable Childhood
The ribbon coming out of a fakir
Resembles the playground slide of the world
Though the sun is only a shipwreck
Insofar as it resembles a woman’s body
You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory
Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm called your hand

Choose life
Choose life with its waiting rooms
When you know you’ll never be shown in
Choose life instead of those health spas
Where you’re served by drudges
Choose life unfavorable and long
When the books close again here on less gentle shelves
And when over there the weather would be better than better it would be free yes

Choose life
Choose life as the pit of scorn
With that head beautiful enough
Like the antidote to that perfection it summons and fears
Like the makeup on God’s face
Life like a virgin passport
A little town like Pont-à-Mousson
And since everything’s already been said

Choose life instead
[Andre Breton]

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-articles-from-ma...

Irvine Welsh (not verified)
Choose Life. Choose a job.

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

[Irvine Welsh]

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