Rolling Thunder issue number three / summer two-thousand six / a dispatch from the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective an anarchist journal of dangerous living We know what a boot looks like when seen from underneath, we know the philosophy of boots. Soon we will invade like weeds, everywhere but slowly: the captive plants will rebel with us, fences will topple, brick walls ripple and fall, there will be no more boots. Meanwhile we eat dirt and sleep; we are waiting under your feet. When we say Attack you will hear nothing at first. “Someday a real scum will come and wash all the reign o≠ the streets.” –Smedvig Rôbray The honorable orators, the gazettes of thunder, table of contents The tycoons, bigshots and dictators, Flicker in the mirrors a few moments Getting Started . And fade through the glass of death 3 Introduction: Where Revolutions Come From For discussion in an autocracy of worms 4 Return to the Valley of Glossary of Terms While the rootholds of the earth nourish the majestic people And the new generations with names never heard of Plow deep in broken drums and shoot craps for old crowns . Welcome. Commentary 6 Mission Accomplished: Why Bush is Counting on the Islamic The people will live on. Resistance The learning and blundering people will live on. And congratulations. They will be tricked and sold and again sold Brand News And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds, We’re delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, we know. 9 The Émigrés Strike Back: Making Mayday a Threat Again The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, 13 The Irrepressible Anarchists: Federal Infiltration and Repression You can’t laugh o¤ their capacity to take it. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 Testimonials manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and par- percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only 19 “Hey you! Stop!” The Arrest, Interrogation, and Trial of One Anti- This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers. There are men who can’t be bought. ticular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence War Activist once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but 24 Anti-Nationalist Nationalism: The Anti-German Critique and Its uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts even better at extinguishing it. In the darkness with a great bundle of grief necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million All-Too-German Adherents the people march. agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence. years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be 29 Report from the Hothouse: The Tomato Pickers In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change 34 The Craziest Walk Ever: A Tour of Washington, DC on September keeps, the people march gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted atten- everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species affiliation, ev- 11, 2001 “Where to? what next?” tion, your atoms don’t actually care about you—indeed, don’t even erything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, 41 Match-Strikers: A Personal Story know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal -Carl Sandburg, They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. primordial atomic globule” to sentient upright modem human has Features The People, Yes (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely 48 Languages of Legitimacy: The Legal System, Anarchists, and with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the Violence Against Women fine atomic dust none of which had ever been alive but all of which last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, 54 Interview from the Front Lines had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you. a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million Old News is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary 60 For Every Time I’ve Been Called Faggot: Queer Resistance from about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling Stonewall to the White Night Riots or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of deli- Comics And that’s it for you. cious sandworms. 64 Barcelona, June 2001: The World Bank Conference that Wasn’t Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been Recipes for Disaster because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal 74 Computer Security: IP Addresses form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of 79 Going to College to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed Art elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore— by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of 85 Borf Anthology and Interview and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life. stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected Eulogy Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material 96 . for Richard Williams, including a brief history of the United they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the Freedom Front them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, only possible sequence of hereditary no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things Reviews that make the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous combinations that could result 98 The Fine Art of Writing Reviews and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn’t actually ex- 101 Reviews, featuring Creating Anarchy by Ron Sakolsky, Begin to Hope ist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with by Regina Spektor, A for Anarchy, and The New World small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other —eventually, astoundingly, physical properties on which our existence hinges. There needn’t ac- tually be a universe at all. And . So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and all too briefly— 103 Activity Page: Ad Lib Polemic and Wheatpasting Poster and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what 105 Fiction: The Astrologer got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and 106 Catalog and CrimethInc. Shareholder Report smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a in you. Dream Alone, It’s Just a Dream . Is it hardship that drives people to rise up against tyr- What fuels insurrections, then, if not su≠ering or its anny? Can you count on people to revolt when things get alleviation? What inspires people to make dramatic changes too tough? in their own lives and the world around them? No, that hasn’t been reliable: when mere survival under We’re betting our bottom dollar it’s contradictions.