Credits

Put me in your suitcase, let me help you pack

cause you’re never coming back,

no you’re never coming back — Devandra Banhart

Dedicated to Lisanne, for being brave and crazy enough.

We’ll always have Gulyaipolye.

Special thanks to all the people who opened their doors to me, all the people who brought solidarity alive when the going got rough, and to my family, for supporting me in these fiascos with love and hopefully not too much stress. Thanks to x, for the criticism that made these writings worthy of being a book, to Gabriel and Liza, for proofreading, and to Andrey (taipoint.org), for the beautiful website.

Photo Credits

John Gelderloos (watchtheicemelt.deviantart.com):

Bridge in “Header.” KyivBoardWalk in “My First Contact.” KyivCrane in “Wrapped in Fog.” Kyiv sky in “Snowballs.” CanViesGraffiti in “Desordenes Publicos.”

L:

Escribiendo in “Surviving.”

The author:

Laage der A in “Weet je waar een kraakpand is?” Noorderhavn Canal. Make Capitalism History in “Leaving Marks in a City of Glass.” Visserbrug in “Leaving Marks in a City of Glass.” Coca-Colonization in “Storming the Ghetto.” StencilGroningen in “Emergency Call-out for Mobilization.” Vimperk3 in “To Get to the Other Side (part 1)”. KyivfromRiver in “Olga Taratuta and Alex Grossman.” OkupayResiste in “...I wish I could stay longer...” BarcelonafromMontjuic in “...I wish I could stay longer...” BigBrother in “Libertad Provisional.” ReinaAmalia in “The Neighborhood Tour.”

The author’s father:

HorniBlatna4 in “To Get to the Other Side (part 1)”.

Vlasta:

KyivMexicoEmbassy in “Snowing Again.” KyivGitmoProtest2 in “Snowballs.”

Unai Risueño (www.unairisueno.com): kraakactie in “Action Tour Against the Squatting Ban”

Other photos are off the internet or by anonymous friends.

The Borderland

My last night in Denmark I sleep on a park bench in the borderland between anarchy and the state. There is no clear boundary line. A few dozen meters one way shoppers and commuters drive home and cops ticket people for crossing on red. A dozen meters the other way people organize their own lives and property relationships hold little sway. And there in the middle, in the falling darkness, my dreams pull the world into a black hole of such gravity the very particles of existence fly apart and reassemble themselves in impossible arrangements. Time curls up on itself, the past marches back before my eyes and the future turns around and presents itself in hindsight, the possible and the definite trade masks and mannerisms. Choices and their consequences mingle with lucid omens, impossible desires, and suppressed regrets.

Drops of moisture fall on my cheek. I open my eyes. It’s raining.

The park bench is hard, but I needed it this night. A jogger runs by in the pre-dawn glow. Behind him is a lake. In the lingering surreality of dreaming he seems like some underworld messenger, the boatman on the River Styx. Off to one side is a low grumble. I realize it’s the morning traffic of København, Denmark’s capital city. On the other side there is no evidence of automobiles or commuters. Only trees and tranquility and the dim outline of houses through the fog. That is Christiania.

This far north, this time of the year, it never gets dark for long. If the sky is still colorless, it must be early. More importantly, it’s starting to rain, and I have miles to go before I sleep. Kilometers, I remind myself, and roll out of my sleeping bag.

Christiania may be the most populated, established manifestation of anarchy I have experienced. It comprises an entire neighborhood in the city of København, and it has been squatted and autonomous since 1971. It used to be a military fort, but the government abandoned it and now Christiania holds nearly a thousand people building a life outside of capitalism and the state. I first heard about Christiania from some articles on the internet, and received the news with the same dull pleasure anarchists always feel when we read that anarchy is actually possible, in some faraway land or distant time. I almost didn’t come, except that I was following a little sign, the coincidence of meeting some Danish punks in Berlin who drew me a map showing the way to some friends I could stay with there. København lies several hundred kilometers from Berlin, which is a long way by bicycle, through shadowed forests in Brandenburg, over the rolling, golden hills of Mecklenburg-Vorpormmern, a ferry ride across the Ostsee, a long lonely bridge over dark waters to Vordingborg, short trees and squat cottages in Sjaelland...But I am here in Europe to learn about things like Christiania. Ultimately, it is revolution I am interested in. Not the shrines of revolutions past, but the seeds for revolution now, in the 21st century, when no sane person believes in revolution. When capitalism is destroying the planet; when genocide, racism and colonialism have continued for 500 years and counting despite all the ostensible solutions offered by the state; when the privileged countries the rest of the world are supposed to emulate are a wasteland of alienation and psychopharmaceuticals. Now, when revolution is least realistic and most necessary. There is nothing especially romantic happening in Europe, and in fact the historians of the state are attempting to write the ending of the autonomous movement and all other possibilities of bringing political revolt to the streets of this continent, while many anarchists themselves are concurring that history has moved on, that the age of squats, clandestine groups, streetfighting on May Day, is fading. But I think that the anarchists where I come from have a lot to learn from desperate attempts, especially in countries that, like the US, have no culture left besides that of the Market.

I had spent the last six years of my life in little ole Harrisonburg, Virginia, through the heady days of the antiglobalization movement — the protests and the struggles that seemed to be uniting the world against capitalism and the US empire — and then the deadening stupor of the War on Terror.

We had some successes, there in the Shenandoah Valley. Set up an infoshop, an anarchist social center. The authorities shut it down, we opened another one. Started the clichéd Food Not Bombs group to serve free food to the homeless population, and to enjoy a communal meal ourselves. Organized the first ever Virginia Anarchist Gathering, a Copwatch group, a prisoner support group. Some friends started a permaculture farm nearby with a Community Supported Agriculture program. It was pretty good, considering there were just a few of us. But we never could quite extend beyond that wall of isolation that seems to suffocate the anarchist movement in the US. And the whole time I had to sacrifice my wanderlust, my desire to see the world and learn new languages, in order to keep up with my weekly commitments. When there’s only ten anarchists in a town, it’s hard to take vacations. The stress mounts up. Best friends move away, others go complacent and try to turn the struggle into a social club with a radical façade. And the state is so powerful, eventually it becomes more attractive to create a perfected anarchist space, attacking the imperfections of your friends rather than attacking your bosses and governors. You become your own worse enemy. People prove themselves to be more valiant on internet blogs and local gossip circles than in the street, and those you trusted to watch your back end up sticking a knife in it.

Sometimes, in order to find your community, you have to find yourself first, and in order to clearly see the struggle you’re involved in, you have to look at it with new eyes, comparing it with a completely different situation in order to see what’s possible and what’s necessary. Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but move on and hope you’ve left some seeds behind. For me, this journey was a long time in coming, not only in terms of the dead end local activism had wedged itself into, but also in how long I’d been looking forward to a chance to go travelling. I had been working as a taxi driver two years to save up money for a yearlong trip. I spent it all to self-publish a book I’d written, but somehow the shoelace DIY distribution operation pulled through and I made the money back just in time. My first stop was Berlin.

Berlin

The 4th of July was a hell of a day to get out of the States. I’d originally planned my trip to last from May Day 2006 in Berlin to May Day 2007 in Barcelona, but I left late, and so it was another sort of holiday that marked my arrival. My older brother met me at the airport. Carl had been living in Berlin for two years, teaching English. At the end of the month he would leave to go to Palestine as a volunteer teacher, around the time Israel was bombing Lebanon. In the meantime I could stay with him in his little apartment in Moabit. The neighborhood shares the name with the huge prison that still holds some members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF: Red Army Fraction), an urban guerrilla group that attacked German capitalism throughout the 70s and 80s, placing itself politically somewhere between the autonomous movement and the Stasi. For this yearlong trip, I had only saved up enough money for the airplane ticket and some food — the lodging and transportation had to come free, so it helped that I had already had a place to sleep that first month while I figured out how to pretend I was a rugged vagabond. I also needed some time to refresh my German, which I had learned in high school and hadn’t used much since.

The wide, tree-lined avenues of Berlin echoed with a history of struggles that continue to resound today. The signs along Karl Marx Allee marked the locations of the barricades of 1848, the old path of the Wall was still traced across the cobblestone streets, and great hulking buildings draped with banners and graffiti testified to the survival of the autonomen. In the 80s and early 90s, neighborhoods like Kreuzberg were semi-autonomous zones, filled with immigrants, squatters, and punks, fighting to defend their streets against gentrification, neo-fascists, and police. Writers like Ramour Ryan and George Katsiaficas describe how every year the anticapitalists celebrated May Day with a massive battle against the cops and the luxury stores, even starting the previous evening, Walpurgisnacht, Witches Night. And the rest of the year was characterized by fights against neo-nazis, attacks against the authorities responsible for deporting Kurdish refugees back to Turkey, squatting and the organization of autonomous social centers, trashing bourgeois restaurants that drew yuppies into the neighborhood. And within these popular and militant neighborhoods, Marxist and anarchist armed groups like Rote Zelle, Rote Zora, 2nd of June, and Rote Armee Fraktion found hiding places and large bases of support.

Now Berlin is heavily gentrified. The working class neighborhoods in the center have become trendy and expensive. There are fewer squats and most of the remaining ones have been legalized, though the fact that they still exist in any form is a direct testament to how forcefully they were defended from eviction in years gone by. The May Day riots still continue every year, though they are shorter and less intense. And throughout the year the tradition of opposing gentrification by directly attacking the rich finds its manifestation in the burning of luxury cars. Every year in Berlin hundreds of shiny, expensive vehicles meet their fiery deaths. Sometimes these actions are claimed by the “Militante Gruppen,” often by no one at all.

While I was there the city was calm, enjoying a warm July that brought everyone outdoors to sit alongside the canals, sunbathe in the parks, or bike to one of the nearby lakes to go swimming. In Berlin I saw an anticapitalist community far more developed than anywhere I had seen in the US, where community tends to be an abstract — an ideal or a pretty lie. But here there really was a liberated culture existing alongside the commercial one. Take a copy of Streß Faktor, the monthly booklet publicizing all the concerts, people’s kitchens, debates, film showings, presentations, and other events happening in the many social centers in the city, and you could find a way to partake in this community every day of the week, even if you were an outsider.

Perhaps the most common sort of event was the Volksküche — a people’s kitchen — a communal meal which is like a Food Not Bombs except they generally ask for a little money and it’s not at all service-oriented. Several times I went to the vokü at Köpi, Berlin’s most famous squat. It was over 17 years old at that point, though technically it’s an ex-squat, as the city legalized it years ago. The building is huge, and along one of its outer walls runs a bold declaration: Die Grenze verläuft nicht zwischen den Völkern sondern zwischen Oben und Unten. The borders run not between peoples but between above and below.

Köpi’s junky front gate and dirty, punk-strewn courtyard are hardly inviting, but such an aesthetic is a defense against gentrification. Few bourgeois people would want to move next door to such a place, and they certainly wouldn’t park their cars there. At first the people there seemed cold and unwelcoming, even to a fellow anarchist, and in fact the German movement has a reputation throughout Europe for being closed, suspicious, and arrogant. But in all fairness, the place receives a constant stream of visitors and radical tourists, so it doesn’t make much sense for the regulars to spend the time getting to know people they’ll never see again. And later in the month, at a presentation about the prison system, I met several nice people and even got invited to stay for the night so I wouldn’t have to bike all the way back to Moabit.

The radical community in Berlin contains many different circles and hubs that extend well beyond the punk scene and the squatters’ scene. My brother had found himself a niche at Baiz, an antifascist bar. This was another interesting phenomenon in Berlin and other cities in Europe: anticapitalist businesses. The idea was a bit jarring at first, but the logic has a certain appeal to it. A radical group of friends get together to start a bar, a restaurant, or a shop, in order to create a stable place to hang out and hold events, and to employ themselves without having to tolerate a boss. They’re not trying to sell revolution, just recognizing that until they abolish capitalism they’re going to have to pay for beer so they might as well be supporting a friend at the same time. This is not entirely alien to the US, but every example I know of back home that’s not a book store (for some reason that’s the one permitted exception) does not portray itself as a cultural hub within a revolutionary anticapitalist movement but as a cooperative or some other positive alternative project within capitalism. By being honest that they’re a compromise and not an end in themselves, and by availing themselves to a broader revolutionary movement that intends to go much further than the cooperative form, the spaces in Berlin seemed to have more potential.

Like many neighborhood bars, the people who drank together at Baiz were friends. It was a community hub. However this place was draped in red and black, and the back room was used for presentations and discussions. But not everything had to be explicity political. After all, community is what exists between meetings and protests, when people form friendships and share food. My favorite moment in this bar was the night when everyone crowded in to watch the final match of the World Cup and erupted in delirious cheers when Zidane lost the game for his team by headbutting the fascist Italian player who had provoked him with a racist insult.

The World Cup wasn’t all fun and games though. It marked a frightening milestone in the reemergence of German nationalism. Under the innocent alibi of “rooting for their team,” the World Cup had made it acceptable for normal Germans to fly their flag for the first time since they were waving a different flag entirely. And you saw it everywhere, draped from people’s balconies or attached to car antennas. The media had rigged a debate on the subject, and in the street you could hear people repeating what they heard on TV as though it were their own opinion, that this was the “good kind of nationalism.” At one antifascist march the protestors even yelled at people flying the flag from their homes, calling them nazis. I had to smile, imagining such a protest taking place in the US, where after September 11 you couldn’t spit without hitting a flag.

Sun and stormclouds play checkers in the sky over Berlin. My bicycle weaves the days and neighborhoods together as I travel from protest to vokü to film showings to the fussball table at the bar where tricky-fingered antifascists are waiting to hustle you. The passing time is filled with activity but empty of some deeper contact. Friendship and political affinity can take years to develop: will my trip through Europe be peopled by mere acquaintances? Am I here just to tour, to observe, to stay on this side of the glass wall and accumulate experiences superficial enough that they fit on a postcard? Or will I break through and enter a new world so completely that I lose the way back home? Somewhere down the road, someone is cracking open a door. Somewhere down the road, someone lights a match. My brother flies away, but he leaves me his bicycle to speed me down the road.

Ungdomshuset

In December 2006, a few months after I had left København, Denmark’s capital experienced the largest public disturbances the country had seen since World War II. And it all revolved around an anarchist social center, Ungdomshuset — literally, “youth house.” Denmark is a relatively prosperous country, most people aren’t afraid of going hungry or homeless, yet when the city government moved ahead with plans to evict and demolish the building, thousands of people put their lives on the line to fight back. For many of them, it was the only non-commercial cultural space they had — the only space where they were truly free. Perhaps they had gone to their first punk concert here years ago, maybe they were able to stay here a while after running away from an abusive home. Maybe they had never even come here but were glad that such a place existed.

Ungdomshuset was first and foremost a youth house but it did not suffer from a lack of history. From 1897, the building had been a Folkets Hus — a People’s House — integral to the radical labor movement. In 1982 it was given over to the youth group that formed Ungdomshuset. Once the city, which had come into ownership of the building with the decline of the labor movement, began trying to sell the property at 69 Jagtvej, the Ungdomshuset folks put up a banner reading: “For sale along with 500 autonomist, stone-throwing violent psychopaths from hell.” Perhaps some buyers were scared off, but fate spun out an insulting twist: a Christian sect bought the property and gleefully rejected all attempts at compromise, even turning down offers to buy the building.

Hundreds of punk anarchists came from across Europe to defend Ungdomshuset. Thousands of people barricaded the street or formed black blocs and marched on police lines. They protected themselves with masks and helmets, in violation of Danish law, and fought the police with rocks and molotov cocktails. The police beat protestors viciously, and admitted to using a potentially lethal form of tear gas. Three hundred people were arrested. Numerous police and demonstrators were injured. One protestor had a finger blown off by a teargas canister. Protests against the Danish government took place throughout the world, and arson or vandal attacks occurred against Danish consulates in Greece, Nederland, and other countries. The eviction would not come for some months yet, but people had shown the state — and more importantly themselves — what kind of resistance to expect. And it was not just young punk anarchists coming out in support. Although many so-called normal Danes were shocked by the rioting, thousands of others came out and participated in peaceful, candlelight vigils organized by Ungdomshuset supporters to create a diversity of resistance and broaden the possibilities for involvement. And many people from outside the movement, people we often presume to be alienated by violent resistance, took part in the riots themselves, glad to have an opportunity to vent their rage against the cops.

Police finally evicted Ungdomshuset on 1 March, 2007, and the city demolished the building five days later. The eviction was backed by a military helicopter and special forces who sprayed the entire building in a flame retardant foam to neutralize the molotovs. Supporters of Ungdomshuset rioted again, setting up burning barricades throughout the Nørrebro district and at Christiania, prompting the police to declare martial law in both these districts. Afterwards, police raided several addresses around the city, arrested the members of the legal support group, and rounded up a total of 690 people, including 140 foreigners, on the presumption that they posed a danger. Plainclothes police agents from at least four other countries were brought in to aid the repression. It was an instant of warfare, a rupture in the illusion of democracy and the tranquility we are supposed to believe in.

Aren’t I glad to have been a part of this? Ha. Comically, when I passed through Denmark I dismissed Ungdomshuset as a worthless place, not so long before it made history. I approached the brooding edifice on a day an event was supposed to be held, only to find the doors locked. Around back some punks looked at me like I was stupid and muttered a few unhelpful words, and I left. Fuck ‘em. It was clearly my loss, and I should have known that many things worth finding are not encountered on the first try. There is of course something to be said for friendliness, a trait that is sorely lacking in many circles. But in tackling the problem of isolation, a problem I had identified as one of the biggest obstacles to the anarchist movement in the US, I assumed the solution could be seen through a lens of accessibility. Was it possible that Ungdomshuset was not an accessible place for people outside a certain subculture, but could still inspire a fairly broad popular rebellion?

I don’t begrudge a space its subculture, and in fact every social space has its own subcultural norms and aesthetics, whether it admits to them or not. Since workers have been turned into consumers, there is no unifying proletarian culture anyway, and attempts to cater to mainstream culture only indenture us to the bourgeois values that infuse that culture and the corporate media institutions that shape it. We need, after all, a pluralistic revolution, which will be waged by a plurality of cultures in resistance. Myself, I probably would have been more comfortable, upon gaining entrance and acceptance, in punked-out Ungdomshuset than in hippy-infested Christiania, but I spent most of my time in the latter because that is where I was welcomed.

To what extent can a space tie itself to a single subculture while still being socially powerful? How can a group of outcasts be welcoming to others while maintaining their autonomy? And if a lack of accessibility is not the primary cause of the isolation of today’s revolutionaries, what is?

Leaving Christiania

By the time I packed up my bike, the clouds covering the sky over København were promising a storm. I was sad to be leaving after just a few days, but to really be able to participate meaningfully, I would have to stay months longer. For some reason I felt compelled to move on, and wasn’t too comfortable with the people who were putting me up. They were real friendly and welcoming, but all they did was smoke and party every day and every night. It seems to be a common problem of the autonomist strategy that once you occupy a place and set up a bubble of freedom, some people are going to be content just living free, acting like they have already won. I could sympathize.

It was impressive, Christiania. An entire quarter of a city, living in anarchy, a self-made hodgepodge of gentle streets, unique buildings, lazy parks, and lively workshops. By the 80s the government was forced to recognize that Christiania was autonomous and they declared the area a social experiment. Now, real estate companies were interested in the valuable land and the city government was trying to take it back. For the first time in years, cops had started entering Christiania to carry out drug raids. A large part of the hippy enclave’s economy was based on selling hash. There were no laws here, but they collectively upheld a ban on hard drugs. They also made bicycles, their own houses, ceramics, and just led a relaxed life. What fascinated me most was its imperfection. Although life in an autonomous zone is a million times better than life under the direct administration of the state, it is not a utopia. There was still a necessity for rebellion within the microcosm of Christiania, and there were anarchists taking on that role, fighting against complacency and against the old-timers who owned houses there and exerted more influence, trying to move the economic relationships, many of which are still based on exchange and wages, further away from capitalism, and trying to organize resistance against the Danish government and the planned eviction. Unfortunately, the kids I was staying with were not among these activists, or I might have stayed longer.

The black clouds were loosing a steady drizzle that promised to get stronger. There was a faint hole in the clouds on the southern horizon, but the wind was blowing in to fill it. I too was going south, and I would have to race the wind to stay dry. I mounted my bike and left Christiania, going fast and steady down the road to the Rodbyhavn, where I could catch a ferry to Puttgarden in Germany. By the day’s end I had biked 180 kilometers. I found a stand of trees just outside the little town of Groβenbrode where I could write some letters and pass the night.

Adrienne Gernhäuser

Perhaps because American society suffers from such a strong case of amnesia, I find histories of resistance so intriguing. The Red Scare destroyed anticapitalist movements in the US, erasing them to a degree unparalleled in Europe, and creating a disconnect between present and past resistance, a lack of continuity and perseverance. Furthermore, the social fabric is made of such thin stuff, the real estate itself so impermanent, that physical and social markers of past rebellions do not remain. Looking at the morass of shabby duplexes in the town where I was born reveals no hint of the fact that it was a hotbed of immigrant Italian anarchists a century earlier. The industrial farms draped over the rolling hills around Harrisonburg emit not a whisper of the people who lived there before, who gave the Shenandoah Valley its name, nor of their brutal expulsion.

While travelling in Europe, I discovered a whole web of rebel stories, secret monuments, and reminders that struggle is eternal. Some of these histories dated back a century, others only to the last generation, but all of them could serve to inspire, inform, and fertilize resistance now. Like the US, Germany had its fair share of revolutionary groups in the 70s, driven underground by the state repression of anticapitalist movements. In the US, these groups were crushed and largely forgotten about, their members killed or imprisoned for life. In Germany, many people also fell to repression, but the story has not ended so conclusively.

As recently as late 2006, a member of one clandestine group turned herself in to police after decades living as a fugitive. Adrienne Gernhäuser was a member of Rote Zora, an armed German feminist group that carried out 200 bombings and other attacks between 1977 and 1995. Their actions targeted the commercial exploitation of women, nuclear power, genetic engineering, landlords, government restrictions on abortion rights, and so forth. Their statements called on other women to reject the passivity they had been schooled in and fight back against patriarchy and capitalism. Rote Zora took great care to ensure that people were not hurt in their bombings, though they did not restrict themselves to damaging property. On a few occasions, their sister organization Revolutionäre Zellen, with which they greatly overlapped, kneecapped kidnapped officials, such as an important judge responsible for deporting Kurdish refugees back to Turkey where they faced severe torture and death. They also carried out one assassination.

Rote Zora and the Revolutionäre Zellen differed from the more famous RAF in several key points. The RAF saw itself as a military formation fighting on behalf of the armed anti-colonial struggles in the Global South, whereas the former groups connected their actions more directly to domestic social struggles. Additionally, the RAF was Marxist-Leninist in its analysis and more dogmatic in its style, while the RZ were anti-authoritarian.

Gernhäuser, now 58 years old, admitted to participating in two attempted bombings, one of the Berlin Genetic Technical Institute and another of the Adler clothing company in Bavaria in solidarity with striking South Korean garment workers. Because of the widespread firebombing campaign that cost Adler millions of dollars in damage, the company gave in to the demands of their mostly female workers in South Korea. Adrienne Gernhäuser began trial in Berlin in April 2007, though the maximum penalty is a suspended sentence because of the time that has elapsed and the fact that she turned herself in.

Arriving in Hamburg

The storm I left behind yesterday in Denmark finally caught up with me in beautiful Lübeck. I was exploring the city center when the clouds unleashed a heavy, furious rain that soaked me and all my things before I could run back to the place I had locked my bike, along a canal west of the Innenstadt. Couldn’t find anywhere to stay in Lübeck, or in the suburbs, so I kept biking along until I was drowned in darkness and the city was lost behind me. A roadside map indicated an autobahn overpass ahead. I thought I might sleep under the bridge in case it rained again, but when I arrived it proved impossible to climb down there with my bike. I finally settled on a little bus shelter surrounded by farm fields and laid down in my wet sleeping bag on the concrete floor, with nothing to warm me but the bottle of wine the folks at the tourist information center had been kind enough to leave unattended. I was cold, wet, uncomfortable, and even worse: I was turning into some kind of caricature.

I woke up at the first sound of morning, afraid the proper German locals would see me sullying their proper little bus shelter and level me with a glare of sheer disdain, or perhaps call the cops. Still wet, I got on my bike well before sunrise and started pedaling hard towards Hamburg. By noon, I was sprawled out to dry in the delicious sunlight in a little park on Lübeckerstrasse.

Affenstrasse

My first night in Hamburg, I took the advice of an Italian punk from Köpi and made my way to the St. Pauli neighborhood and its bevy of sex shops, bars, and falafel huts, all plastered with the skull-and-crossbones stickers of the local soccer team with the famous anti-fascist fan club. At the epicenter of peeling layers of graffiti and wheatpasted posters, the bulk of them punk and antifascist, stood Hafenstraße, where I was told to look for a place to stay. Initially, led astray by the Italian’s accent, I was searching fruitlessly for “Affenstraße,” Monkey Street, which sadly does not exist. In half an hour at a punk bar surrounded by former squats I scored myself a room, for the remainder of the week no less, with some cheery Polish anarchists and their endearingly swine-like dog. That Monday morning was my first shower since I’d left Berlin 840 km earlier. Delicious.

I really wish that before I had come I had read the section in Georgy Katsiaficas’ The Subversion of Politics about the battle for Hafenstraße in the 80s. The city’s mayor had declared war on the squatters and announced the eviction of the Hafenstraße squats. There were major street battles which the police were unable to win, and arson attacks against commercial centers. The city gave up on its plans for eviction, and announced the legalization of the squats. If I had known this history I might have seen Hafenstraße through different eyes. Instead, I only saw that they hung out a lot at the bar and that we didn’t have much in common, so it was all I could do not to dismiss them as lazy punks, since after all they were nice people and they were open and hospitable enough to let a stranger with a different aesthetic stay in their house. From the US, I was used to a different way of doing things, in distinct activist groups that have scheduled activities and meetings that are open to newcomers. Whereas they didn’t seem that interested in me, politically, if I met a travelling anarchist in the US I would welcome them and look for common projects even if they didn’t dress like I did, and if they were from another country I would keep them up all night with questions. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the anarchist movement in a city could be so large that people could work exclusively on lines of affinity and ignore everyone else who seemed to do things a different way, or that travelling anarchists from other countries might be so common you actually get a bit tired of them. It may be a bit similar in New York or San Francisco, but certainly not in Harrisonburg, Virginia. In some ways I was the country mouse, come to the city.

It was a bit easier for me once I found Rote Flora, Hamburg’s main autonomist social center. Aesthetically it was the same as Köpi or Ungdomshuset: graffiti-covered walls plastered with posters and stickers announcing punk shows and occasional protests. A few beautiful pieces of spray-painted art, a few skulls-and-crossbones and other intimidating representations, a few broken bicycles, closed iron doors. But once I finally found out when they were open and how to actually get in — and this was no simple task — I found that, as a social center, they operated in a way I could pretty much understand, and moreover, it was a friendly place.

In the evening there was a bicycle workshop around back. Everyone was trading tools and parts, taking bikes to pieces and putting them back together. I couldn’t tell who was running the workshop and who was there to be helped: rather everyone was united by a love of bikes or a practical obsession with fixing them. The bike my brother had given me was quality. No sooner had I arrived then several of the workshoppers gathered around it, which made it easy for me to find someone to help me fix my brakes. I think he was glad just to be able to take apart such nice brakes and see them from the inside.

Up on the deck someone called out that food was ready, yes it was another vokü. I went upstairs to eat but the other people in the workshop only had eyes for their bikes. A tight crowd was gathered around the vegan meal, old people and young people, talking, laughing, drinking, and even asking strangers like me where they were from. Some folks seemed to know each other from way back, and others were there for the first or second time. Someone who worked with the social center told me a little about what they did: hosting art workshops, debates, discussions on the local social movements. They also put out a monthly magazine.

I was only at the beginning of my trip, but it already felt like such a long time since I had seen my friends and devoted my time to familiar political activities. Being there among friends, even if they weren’t my friends, warmed me all over, I didn’t want to leave. So after the vokü I stayed to clean the dishes and sweep the floor. Alas, not one of the apparent insiders asked my name or started a conversation with me. They were wrapped up in what seemed to be an interpersonal drama. Nostalgia: it felt just like a Food Not Bombs back home.

Four Storeys of High Culture

A Declaration of the Rote Flora to the Commercial Culture in the Schanzen District

Translation of an article that appeared in Zeck, the magazine of Rote Flora, no.133 July/August 2006 pp.5–6. Thanks to Filip for helping with some difficult words and inside references that only a Hamburger would know.

I. What the Schanze Has Lacked until Today Is Obvious, According to the Press: Culture

Reading the future in the grounds left at the bottom of overpriced Macciatos hardly reveals a cultural milestone in this desolate wasteland between Altona, St. Pauli, and Eimsbüttel, which now receives that which was so long missed. Now everything will finally be different, now the Schanze too gets neat dance-cafés for seniors, sewing courses, family brunches with live music, and, we mustn’t forget, the long pined for meditation classes. Naturally we’re talking about the promised “Culture House 73” soon coming to Schulterblatt 73 and with it hip jazz sessions, readings, comedy, lectures (about whatever), theater, concerts, and — brace yourselves — tada! live football on video projectors. Finally, culture!

At least the Hamburg Morgenpost and the Springer’sche Abendblatt were unanimous in their respective 22- and 23-02-2006 editions, that with the new bar and restaurant of Pferdestall Kultur Inc. in the until now empty building at Schulterblatt 73 next to the Rote Flora, the dream of a visible neighborhood culture project in the Schanzen district could finally be realized. While the Abendblatt, under the headline “A Chance for the Schanze” (we recall that this slogan was already in play within the framework of the drug debate), fantasizes over a promised development that would assign itself the task of culturally stimulating the district, the Mopo has already gone a step further, projecting a triumph for Business Führer Falk Hoquel and his project. In fact, Pferdestall Kultur Inc.’s project might be a great step forward in the development of the Schanzen district as a Party Mile and a lucrative zone for commercial bars and pleasure spots. The Piazza Project 2001 blew the opening whistle, and now, right in time for the World Cup (“football on video projectors”), the Abendblatt has announced the end of the days “in which around Schulterblatt more is protested than consumed.” It couldn’t be said better.

It fits the idea of urban planning, under the authority of the STEG since 1989, if the opening of a commercial restaurant and leisure spot under the name of “Culture House” can be posed as an addition to neighborhood culture. But it also bespeaks the depressed state of public consciousness in this neighborhood that no criticism has been formulated of PK Inc.’s obvious swindle.

II. STEG: Godfather with Tradition

In this situation, one cannot accuse the STEG of not remaining true to their political line. The ostensibly “gentle urban renewal” that the STEG wants to accomplish, as official urban planner of Hamburg since 1989, has mainly taken the form of a silent reconstruction of the Schanzen district from an alternative scene neighborhood at the end of the ’80s to an “in” quarter with fashion boutiques, bars, high rent antique apartments, and also trendy mortgaged apartments. The in-this-context formally proposed neighborhood participation has exhausted itself in “round tables” and public comment processes that mainly just give the nod to long-decided political proposals. The STEG has consequently known to keep itself outside of all city development conflicts in the last years, instead playing a role of neutral mediation (most recently, in the closing of the Fixstern and the remodeling of the Wasserturm ). The chief goal of the STEG was above all not to contradict the political programs of the city council or districts, which is to say, the interests of the investors.

III. Student Start-Up: from the Campus to the Schanze?!

It’s no surprise when STEG’s Julia Dettmer appears as the advocate for PK Inc. The behavior of the company is more than noteworthy. PK Inc., which has entered into a nonprofit partnership with the university, faced a need to stimulate student culture on the university campus in closer cooperation with the Asta student culture commission. Therefore they ran, among others, the Ponybar, next to the Abaton cinema. For this reason the university marketing firm is a company of PK Inc.

Meanwhile PK Inc. has monopolized the operation of the university event hall with their “hip events,” and set itself in direct competition with the smaller, self-organized student cafés at the university. The highly demanded cultural offerings of the Ponybar exhaust themselves these days in televised football, childrens’ books on tape and hip DJs. PK Inc. has since spread out from campus with the opening of the gallery “14 Dioptrien” and its investment in the Astra bar in January of this year.

And now that PK Inc., under the direction of Business Führer Falk Hocquel, is embarking on another commercial project in the neighborhood of the Rote Flora, one might wonder if anyone is privately enriching themselves with university subsidies?

The PR strategy for achieving these plans, for which even TAZ and Scene Hamburg have placed themselves alongside the Abendblatt and Mopo as the uncritical executors, functions according to a relatively see-through pattern. Offerings for children, families, and pensioners will be indiscriminately presented as a profile, as if anyone could earnestly believe that in Schulterblatt 73, senior citizen dances, family brunches, or neighborhood-oriented youth activities will regularly take place, beyond a few superficial events to keep up the alibi. Instead of this we believe there will be up to ten events a week, but these will be marketed to yuppies.

This formulation recalls the former promises of the Schlachthof Project on Feldstrasse in the mid-90s. The STEG also proclaimed then that a neighborhood culture center would be created for the Karo district, but in the end it has become a poorly run concert hall after the STEG got rid of all the neighborhood-oriented initiatives.

When in public opinion culture has its place only under pure economic interests and neoliberalization holds more and more force in the mediation of culture, then nothing stands in the way of the growing stupefaction of society. Finally then nothing will be protested, only consumed. Congratulations.

IV. The Downfall of Noncommercial Neighborhood Culture

Without question the current development in the Schanzen district is merely the consistent continuation of the neoliberalization of all aspects of society. Perfectly according to plan, the neoliberalized Schanzen district meets an economically molded student milieu in an amusement park almost totally cleansed of junkies, dealers, and the homeless.

In social and cultural spheres, usefulness — or, more exactly, demand — is woven together more and more with the principles of capitalist value: only those with money can use it. Claims to an equal share of public life, expectations of equal opportunities and equal rights in society are only valid for those who can afford it. Concomitant with this is the replacement of state-guaranteed employment, through rigid budget cuts, with a reference to the now politically desirable “charitable” social and cultural work.

A “culture project” like that planned at 73 Schulterblatt is the beginning of the end of a neighborhood culture oriented to the common good. When the so-called “Culture House 73” can be presented so far indisputably as an addition to “neighborhood culture,” that is the downfall of a notion of culture that falls short even by the minimal standards of Hamburg’s cultural authorities.

V. The Future is Here

Parallel to the discussion of “internal security” and the drug scene, the Schanzen district has also been placed under the rubric of public interest through intensified restructuring and investment plans. As the new information economy firms progressively establish themselves in the neighborhood and the Messe expands, the Schanze can make an attractive starting offer for the upwardly mobile in the international real estate competition. The neighborhood possesses these and other winning factors. Schulterblatt gained a chic plaza (which is one-third privatized and lies in the domain of the respective bar owners). The Fixstern has been closed, because in a Party Mile there’s no more space for facilities to help drug addicts (recall what the STEG previously proposed: banish the Fixstern to Lagerstrasse ).

No shopping streets, no event rooms without cameras and security service. Social and racist criteria for who belongs and who doesn’t ever more comprehensively determine the movement of individuals and accessibility in a literal sense. The debate over video surveillance in the Reeperbahn shows the direction the Schanze is headed as well.

Here another consequence of the gentrification process becomes clear. The effort to clean up the Schanzen district is based on a massive exclusion. Those who no longer fit into the image of the Schanze as an attractive neighborhood for pleasure and consumption must go. Above all the homeless, drug users, drug pushers and the people with dark skin who are all assumed to be pushers; all but a folkloric remnant have been successfully disposed of through chicanery, racist police controls, arrests, persecution, and expulsion.

In the long-term, all those who cannot afford the rising rents — another consequence of the no longer creeping gentrification process — will be forced out of the Schanze and other inner city areas. And also those whose rent contracts expire and who receive the option to buy their apartments will have to leave the neighborhood for lack of capital. Even those who celebrated the restructuring methods used to gentrify their neighborhood face the same problem of rising rents and now may have to pack their bags. Anyone who doesn’t have enough money in his pocket and can no longer maintain is no longer desired here.

But it doesn’t matter, because finally in the Schanze, nothing will be protested, only consumed.

Plenum of the Rote Flora, May 2006.

Between the Weser and the Ems

Lonely days of biking past stubbly fields, rivers and canals, land stretched flat and low towards the elusive sea, which suggests itself in the salty air and drunken earth though it hides far beyond the horizon. I navigate from one village to the next with a compass and list of waypoints copied out the night before. Bike all morning in a serene trance digesting dreams and birdsongs, roadside visions, tender thoughts of friends; stop around noon to fill up on bread and apples and cheese. I cycle through the afternoon heat with angry strokes, pushing past the fatigue and soreness, cursing cars that cut me off or fill my lungs with smoke, reviewing all the failures, all the disappointments of the year gone by, and finally by evening fall into a sort of peace that floats through the last twenty kilometers and does not transcend the pain and weariness but forgives them, knowing they’ll be back

There’s something to be said for solitude in an isolated world. Alienation does not necessarily build walls between us and others, so much as damage our ability to relate. Alone on the road, far from anyone I know, I am left with the sounds of the world the thoughts in my own head, no matter how much distance I put between one night’s dreams and the next. What I get to know most in this shifting world is myself. Maybe that will be a good place to start to find others.

Sometime late in the glimmering of twilight, I reached Bremen. One of the punks in Hamburg gave me the address of a friend of his. When I showed up on her doorstep that Friday evening she invited me in before I even had a chance to ask if I could stay, then proceeded to feed me, show me the old town, and take me to the main anarchist social center, also a former squat now legally owned by its activist tenants. I was taken in by such a feeling of welcome and possibility, I thought about staying longer, but something I could not explain in any rational way was pushing me on. I was not ready to stop yet. So the next morning I packed up my bike again, eased my protesting fundament slowly back onto the seat it spent most of its days pressed against, and rolled out over another bridge, another river, more fields, into another unknown. She had drawn me a map out of town, but neither she nor anyone else had any contacts in Nederland. Lacking any particular reason, I was heading to Groningen, with no plan other than to try to meet folks when I got there. But it was another two days away.

That day I almost made it to the border. I ended up resting my bones in Leer, a small city nestled in the crook of the Leda and the Ems, watching a gibbous moon rise over construction to the sound of swallows and crows. The border was a dozen miles away, but all day I had to convince myself I was still in Deutschland. The old folk in Ostfriesland speak a strange dialect, its own language really, and everywhere the accents, the spelling, the architecture were all different. Old buildings still bore inscriptions in either Friesen or Plattdeutsch, and I could hardly understand it. The differences are dwindling with time, or more accurately under the onslaught of a homogeneous culture that blares forth everywhere from the same TV screens. But for now it felt like a different country, and without the state, without the imposition of borders and the concomitant homogenization it would be a different country, one of many, each flowing seamlessly into the next.

“Weet je waar een kraakpand is?”

Maandag, 7 Augustus

Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Groningen, where I had some faint notion to spend a month, gain some appreciation of the anarchist movement in the country, and try to learn Nederlands (the word “Dutch” is actually a bastardization of “Deutsch,” which means German, whom some time ago the English evidently mistook for Nederlanders). Right as I was biking into the city I suddenly began to wonder why exactly I thought Groningen was the city to find anarchists in. I didn’t know anyone there and had never heard the place being mentioned in connection with radical activity. All around me I saw a thoroughly mediocre city startlingly devoid of radical graffiti and plastered propaganda. Hold on a second, why the hell did I come here? Even a solitary spraypainted circle-A would have flooded my heart with joy, and in fact my first glimmer of hope, the first good omen, came from the sight of an Anti-Fascist Action sticker stuck boldly to a lamppost on Hereweg. Little did I know that the person who had placed it there would later give me a tour of all the city’s squats. At the time it was just a little sign that somewhere in this city, hiding amongst the shoppers and students, was one of my kind.

By now the routine of scouting a new city had become automatic: memorizing the main thoroughfares and looking for squat symbols, signs of political life, parks with hidden places I might sleep in at night, places safe and dry to lock my bike, dumpsters, cheap internet cafés, places to get water and go to the bathroom. After hours of fruitless searching I finally decided to join, if only temporarily, the 21st century, get on the internet, and look for mentions of social centers or squats in Groningen. I soon got an address for Oude RKZ: once a hospital, then a squat, and now an alternative residence for some 300 retired hippies, lefties, punks and sundry others.

An acquaintance I made there permitted me to put down my sleeping bag in a storage room for the night, and pointed me towards a protest in support of asylum seekers happening the next day in the Grote Markt, where I introduced myself to a rapid succession of people that in the span of four hellos and three minutes landed me with floor space at a squat just west of the center.

What exactly is a squat?

A squat is a vacant building occupied by people who for a variety of reasons do not respect the property rights of the absentee owner, and either openly or covertly take up residence therein. Once inside they fix up the decaying building, hence the connection of the squatters’ movement with the DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. They often hang a banner with some concise “fuck you” to established order, or cover the façade of the building with graffiti of varying aesthetic and political content, perhaps also peppering the surrounding neighborhood with the squat monogram to point the way to travellers. In Nederlands, the word is kraakpand, in Deutsch besetztes Haus and in Español casa ocupada.

Squatting, in Nederland, is legal in buildings that have been abandoned at least a year. There are a number of loopholes, and to the business-sympathetic ear of the courts and police who retain sole power to interpret the concept, “abandonment” takes on a startling degree of metaphysical complexity. In other words, liberal Nederland deals with the potentially insurrectionary phenomenon of squatting with a strategy of legalization, a permissive release-valve that tolerates discontents creating their subcultures in buildings truly abandoned by capitalists, and forces resistance, from those squats the powerful wish to retake, into disarming legal channels. To defend your squat, you don’t pick up a brick the honest, old-fashioned way — you need to get a lawyer. Property owners have also taken up the tactic of establishing anti-squats by renting out vacant, squat-vulnerable apartments to people willing to sign away all their rights in return for a rent as low as 20 euros a month. Owners have no obligations to anti-squat tenants, and they can kick them out with a couple weeks notice. In Groningen and other cities in Nederland, many of the best buildings that would otherwise be available have been filled with anti-squats.

The opportunistic socialists in Nederland have come to the defense of anti-squats. In Groningen for example, they are known to dramatically squat a big building, co-opting the enthusiasm of the youthful participants; they win publicity for themselves as humanitarians by moving students, poor, or homeless people into the building; and then they pressure them all to sign an anti-squat contract and trumpet it as low-income housing. It’s not unheard of for them to stage-manage the whole thing with the owners from the get-go. This sort of action is great for the owners, and it opens a back door to destroy Nederland’s progressive housing rights, creating the reality that poor people must surrender all their housing rights in exchange for a cheap place to live, which the speculators can maintain as flexible properties because at any moment they are able to kick out the tenants and demolish or sell the building.

Despite Nederland’s progressive laws, owners commonly win eviction processes against squatters, and then the police come to kick them out. Other times, owners skip the courts and hire goons to attack squatters with crowbars. Not too many years ago, squats in Groningen were defended forcefully. The high point was in 1991, when the city evicted the Walters-Noordhof Complex, a huge squat near where the university library stands today. All of Boteringestraat was covered in burning barricades, rubble, and riot police, where now shoppers stroll past yuppie stores consuming above all their illusion of social peace.

In Germany, squatting is less legal, hence the term “former squat” used so frequently in reference to the occupied dwellings in that country. If they do not want to retake a particular property by force, the government or property owners can bring it back into the pale of legality by making the attractive offer to the rogue tenants to purchase or rent the building for an extremely low amount, “legalizing” it.

In the US, there has never been a countrywide squatters’ or autonomous movement as has existed in Europe. The only squats I knew about in Virginia were either covert, or “permission squats” allowed by the absentee owner. Housing and building-use codes seem to be stronger tools in the US for preventing any unorthodox use of buildings. It certainly would be much harder in the US to run a squat bar and sell alcohol to raise money. Some of the key squats on the Lower East Side during New York City’s squatting heyday were evicted because they were “not up to code” and supposedly presented a danger to the occupants. Not that we have to pine for irretrievable days of glory or covet Europe’s fabulous squatting movement. These days, squatting seems to be a growing phenomenon in the Rust Belt, where municipalities do not have the money to demolish all the condemned buildings in the largely abandoned cities.

Here in Nederland, the center-right government in power was proposing a law to illegalize squatting, sparking a number of protests, mostly around Utrecht and Amsterdam, and also a number of raids by police, who had just forcibly evicted a large squatted farm in the center of the country, in the week I arrived. In Amsterdam a large squat was repeatedly evicted and reoccupied. Elsewhere a squatted castle was stormed by police. The occupiers resisted, though I was told they were hippies and didn’t put up a good fight — no catapults, crossbows, boiling oil, or anything like that.

Vrijdag, 11 Augustus

The guy I was staying with, Joop, lived with a friend, Jan, at 31 Taco Mesdagstraat, in a small squatted apartment just above a pizza place. We hit it off easily, going on long walks, dumpster-diving for groceries, discussing economics, media, radical propaganda, and similar themes. After getting to know me for a couple days, they invited me to stay there the whole month I was in Groningen. I was considering going on to Utrecht, but Joop described the anarchist movement locally as experiencing a decline. I’m a sucker for hard cases, so I decided to reject the big city syndrome and stay on to help them with a few projects, and to explore this smaller, less exciting city and its fascinatingly apprehensible routines.

Three days a week there was an open air market on the Vismarkt, and you could skip vegetables. Outside the city center were a few supermarkets with generous dumpsters. And you could use the internet for free at the university, if you could get a password. It would be pretty easy to provide for myself this month. I felt immediately comfortable there, and satisfied with my new home after days on the road. I used to think it was impossible to make real friends in less than a year, but as my friends back home seemed increasingly distant with each meager email, I was amazed by how quickly I could become close to new people I met, brought together by hospitality and a shared struggle. It wasn’t enough to hold off a heavy nostalgia, but it did make living worthwhile.

A week after we met, Joop, Jan, and a friend of theirs took me out for my birthday. We saw The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s latest film, a brutally honest chronicle of the struggle for independence in Ireland. People can desire freedom so strongly they will sustain torture or take a life, and at the threshold of victory they can suddenly begin to doubt themselves and sell the revolution short. I wonder, if we ever get that far, will we miss these calm days of powerlessness?

Noorderhaven Canal

Sunset over Noorderhaven canal. Orange fire fights to find gaps in the algae-green carpet lying atop the water. Weather-worn houseboats moored on both sides have been there since before the first photograph, some of these same boats since before the first television commercial, and they will be there still after we’ve torn all the advertisements down, or they’ll be turned into floating billboards by some wallflower of a man regarded as a genius in his field.

She Shows Me

She shows me the piece of metal on the string around her neck. It’s the inside of a lock she broke open on one of her many squat actions. Her nose crinkles as she tells me how she got it. “Look, here, and here,” she points out the marks a crowbar left on the door frame two years earlier. And on the wall, stenciled spraypaint demanding: “Make Capitalism History.” This too has a story. : when Bono inserted himself at the head of the antiglobalization movement under the slogan “Make Poverty History,” local anarchists went out into the night to cover the walls with their response.

We’re taking a tour of Groningen’s former squats, a dozen of which my new friend helped to occupy. Her forest-colored eyes flare as she talks of battles with goons sent by an owner to clear the squatters out, in more militant days removed by only an intractable year or two, a glass wall of history for me to peer through.

The day is long and the city is under our feet. We abandon ourselves like children on an empty playground, walk through rainshowers, help ourselves to free chocolate and wine from a supermarket, and sit on a park bench laughing at the sad, dripping festival tents and their failed gaiety. Often we’re so close our arms brush, and I bite my tongue and hold back my sighs with all my strength.

Travelling and living are hard, lonely things.

Action Tour Against the Squatting Ban Begins with a Squat in Leiden

Translated from an article on Netherlands Indymedia, with invaluable idiomatic assistance from L

Activists have just occupied the office building on the corner of Stationsplein and Schuttersveld in Leiden. The building, which is located right near the infamous hole of the speculator Van de Putte, is on a long lease with Bonavella Holding B.V. from the same speculator. The squat-action, which also signals the start of an action tour through the whole of Nederland, addresses the role speculators like Van de Putte play, and also the planned squatting ban of the Balkenende II cabinet. The activists intend to continue holding actions during the rest of the week, and in one week’s time to turn the dilapidated building into a social center or free space in which the Multipleks, among others, can have a new space for all its current projects.

The Action Tour in Different Cities

The renewed attack against the squatters, which Minister Dekker has insisted on in the House of Commons for about a month and a half, has been answered in the previous weeks with a number of actions, large and small. After banners appeared on squats through the entire country, beginning this month the Dam, Amsterdam’s main square, was occupied by activists. Woonstrijd!, which surprised the Minister the previous year with an action-week at her villa resort in Wassenaar, today begins a continuation of this protest with an action-tour through different cities in the whole country.

Minister Dekker and Her Principles

Minister Dekker’s attack was aimed at the ideology of squatters: with the disappearance of the problem of vacant buildings, the ideological basis of squatting also disappears. This identification of squatting exclusively with the problem of vacancy is actually an attempt to annul the diverse motives that people have to squat and the various actions and initiatives that are undertaken by squatting groups. That squatting is also a part of a social struggle against the housing crisis and for the conservation of subsidized housing for the poor is totally ignored by the Minister. Moreover, the Minister has prattled lightly, from her villa, about the absolute and principled protection of ownership. In current juridical practice, squatting rests on the assessment that in some situations the right to housing outweighs the absolute use-rights of an owner who, please note, does nothing with his private property. The absolute protection of ownership desired by the Minister lines up with what speculators have achieved through underhanded means for years: to have housing and commercial space at their disposal in as flexible a manner as possible, so that they make robust profits off them. Usury profits at the expense of many small shopkeepers and above all the tenants.

Duke of Dilapidation Van de Putte

The argument that squatting is outdated, and that a squatting ban is therefore inevitable, becomes clear particularly from the practices of Sir Ronnie van de Putte. With over 30 years of speculation under his belt, the “work” of this “project developer” still has not come to an end. After this slumlord left hundreds of houses to fall into shambles in the second half of the 70s, used goon squads [i.e., to beat up squatters] and illegally demolished apartments, especially in Amsterdam, he hasn’t stopped terrorizing society through his ruthless acquisition of property. And through an extremely obscure and mercenary chain of businesses that, among other places, end in Curaçao, the ex-“Slumlord of Amsterdam” can easily escape prosecution.

In Leiden, Van de Putte is well known due to the yawning hole (which is now screened off by what is known in Leiden as “the shame-strip”) in front of Central Station. It doesn’t stop there. Elsewhere he is known for a crater in Noordwijk, a scandalous stain on Oisterwijk, and a collapsed building in Sluis. And everywhere the story is the same: no municipalities can take action against the speculator. Although the municipality of Leiden has been talking since the beginning of 2002 about dispossessing Van de Putte’s vacant lot, there’s not much to be seen in the way of actual results.

Because the project developer has held the Leiden office building in a long-term lease since 20 March, 2003, he threatens to take over large parts of the neighborhood around the station. This is an even greater danger since the municipal council changed the lease terms for city grounds in a way that favors developers.

Social Center and Free Space

Leiden has just as little protection as other villages and cities from people like Van de Putte — people who make everyone’s social concerns and the personal lives of multitudes subordinate to their exclusive proprietary interests. The newly squatted building stood empty for the better part of many years and, consistent with Van de Putte’s track record, was already considerably advanced in its decay and headed towards eventual demolition. In response to this drawn-out drama, something needs to be done now. During the Leiden action-week, we will clean up this considerably destroyed building and construct a free-space there. The neighborhood around the station in Leiden can surely use some spicing up. Ultimately, the intention is to get a spot in the squatted building for the projects from the Multipleks, such as an open source internet project, a food-café, cinema, and a bakfiets workshop. Numerous new initiatives will be developed as well. Finally, a group of people will also come to live in the building. In the rest of the week, more actions will follow. Van de Putte out of the city! Squatting lives on!

The Martini Tower

The church tower

is the tallest building in this flat city.

They used to let people to the top

and charge them for the view

until one pragmatic local

threw himself off

and hit the cobblestones

in front of the German tourists

drinking in their cafés

on the market square.

Citizens Afraid, Government Happy

Translation of an article in the Dutch anarchist magazine Buiten de Orde, no.19 issue 2.

Present day Dutch politics is ruled by the codeword “Muslim terrorism.” Laws are changed, civil rights are trampled, and prohibitions are applied. But we’re not familiar with any Muslim terrorism in Nederland. A brief examination of the how and why of the existing Muslim policy.

The Beginning of “Muslim Terrorism.”

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim terrorists have been talked about in politics and in public space. From that date a discourse has developed in which citizens are deluded with the frightening prospect of Muslims taking power. “Western democracy” is said to be in danger. As an answer to the attacks America invaded Afghanistan at the end of 2001. In 2003 Iraq followed. Both wars were and are supported by the Dutch government. First Nederland maintained that it supported the war “politically,” and it was later revealed that in secret it was giving practical support in the form of Dutch commandos and F-16’s from the Royal Airforce. The Dutch government pumped an enormous amount of budget money into these wars.

Who Are the Dutch Muslim Terrorists?

Muslim terrorists are not said to exist only in faraway lands. We also have them in Nederland. The group of people pushed forward by the Dutch state as an organized Muslim group with the goal of carrying out terrorist attacks was the Capital Group. One of the people supposed to belong to this group was Mohammed B., who killed Theo van Gogh. After this murder the entire group was arrested and locked up for varying periods of time.

What Has Happened in Pursuance of the Supposed Presence of a Terrorist Group of Muslims in Nederland?

Politically: Politicians have painted a picture of a great danger that threatens our Dutch democracy. Against this danger hard measures had to be taken. There was talk of an emergency situation, in which civil rights (such as privacy) would have to make way for the national well-being.

In the Press: Certain stories were reinforced and exaggerated. The media functioned as a mouthpiece for politicians. Through newspapers, magazines, TV and internet, over the past few years the picture has been constructed of a situation that has “gotten out of hand,” and that poses a danger for Western society and freedoms.

Juridically: Because of the emergency situation that rules our land, politicians began initiatives to change the laws. It was maintained that due to the protection of civil rights, the struggle against Muslim terrorism was being frustrated. For everyone’s safety the Dutch citizens had to surrender a small piece of their rights. Here follows merely a small number of examples from laws that were changed after the appearance of the struggle against terrorism.

The law on mandatory identification (29:218): the requirement to bear and show a valid identity card for all people residing in Nederland. Adopted in 2003.

Expansion of the possibilities for the investigation and prosecution of terrorist crimes (30.164).This bill expands the ability of police and the courts to take action at the earliest possible moment to prevent terrorist attacks. With this bill the government can intervene sooner in the case of a major threat. The use of these special investigative powers no longer requires the reasonable suspicion that a punishable offense is being committed. Mere indications are sufficient. Adopted in May 2006.

Increased ability of the intelligence and security services to investigate and take measures against terrorists and other dangers in relation to national security (30.553). That means among other things the introduction of mandatory data distribution and uniform automated databases. The bills intend to help increase the efficiency of the various branches of the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) and the Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD). Adopted in October 2007.

Though this is just a small sample from many possible examples, we can draw a number of conclusions. First of all state control over private matters has intensified and the state has greatly expanded its mandate for control. All data can be examined and the secret services have secured many more opportunities to do so. Secondly the state no longer needs to justify arrests with the suspicion (or even just the presumption) of a punishable offense. Nowadays they need only point the finger. This means that any individual could be arrested at any moment and the state need not even give a substantial reason.

It’s not only easier for the state to carry out arrests now, but also prosecutions. Trial can be delayed for longer; where the maximum wait used to be 90 days, it’s now two years. In other words, with just a vague suspicion, without any accusation based on actual facts, a suspect can sit in jail for two years without trial.

The end of these changes to the law is not yet in sight. Even more serious, it seems like it’s barely begun. Thus people who “incite hate or violence” can be taken out of action more easily. The cabinet is also looking for ways to make “glorifying or praising serious crimes” a punishable offense. The writing of this article that you are now reading would also be a crime, under this law.

How was the Capital Group judged juridically?

For three and a half years we were hearing that the Capital Group was a terrorist cell of radical Muslim fundamentalists with the goal of carrying out attacks and killing people. Recently the Den Haag court announced that the Capital Group was not a terrorist organization (there was no talk of a criminal organization with a criminal intention). Now it’s not as though we as anarchists put much value in the judgment of judicial power. This will always be devoted primarily to protect the interests of the ruling class. The significance of this judicial verdict, however, lies in what it reveals about the objectives of the politicians. You might think that we can now breathe freely, because there is no Muslim terrorist organization in Nederland! Moreover, the anti-terror laws can be revoked: but the politicians are sending out the opposite message. Among others the CDA and VVD were displeased by the verdict. Instead of recognizing that the Capital Group was no terrorist organization, the CDA and VVD advocated a sharpening of the anti-terrorism legislation. Such a reaction demonstrates that the governing parties don’t have the intention of letting factual information be tested by a judge, only that the fiction of Muslim terrorism remain in place.

Why do the authorities want the fear of Muslim terrorists to remain high, whatever the cost?

In a society that traffics in fear, politicians can set themselves and their institutions up as the defenders of the people. It is thus necessary that the citizens believe in the “actual” danger, that they fully trust the authorities, and that they themselves are happy to enjoy such protection. The feeling of fear must be so deeply rooted that people are prepared to give up basic human rights for the good of the “security situation.” Also the many millions that will be spent on war in the Middle East must be legitimized to the people. It just doesn’t sound good to say that the goal of the war is to conquer a land with large oil reserves.

The creation of a sphere of fear isn’t anything new. This tactic has been around for years. Think for example of the “Red Scare” in America. There the fear of communists after the Russian Revolution and in the fifties was cranked up and exploited to such an extent that all sorts of laws could be introduced and undesirable people could be silenced and estranged.

One of the characteristics of this tactic is the selection of a suitable group of people to get it started with. This must be a group of people whose experiences are far removed from the people in the country in question; a group against whom there already exist many prejudices that can be encouraged and multiplied. In the case of the “Red Scare” this was the communists, and now the Muslims have been chosen for this role. In short, the authorities profit from a total climate of fear. To keep this climate in place and to fuel it, they will do anything to exaggerate situations of terror and to let them develop in a controlled manner.

Summing up...

Within the period of fear the legal system is transformed and military operations are executed. The admission (years later) that the reasons for these happenings and interventions were fictitious is unimportant for the authorities. After all, the damage has already been done.

Firstly the military intervention has already taken place and the Dutch state has already participated in the murder of many thousands of inhabitants of Iraq and Afghanistan. Secondly we see that the transformation of the legal system is a well advanced project.

Once these projects are completed, the emphasis on Muslims will fall away. Then it will be apparent that they were only used to garner public support on racist grounds for the projects in question. Afterwards the transformed and newly created laws will be utilized to increase the repression against anyone who criticizes the system. So we see once again that the state does not want to protect us, but rather to come up with false pretenses in order to oppress us, to control us, and to exploit us

“First they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Muslim. (...) Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Leaving Marks in a City of Glass

Groningen was a solidly bourgeois city, though the surrounding province is the poorest in Nederland and constitutes the country’s socialist belt. Nonetheless, one noticed little sense of conflict, which was typical for a society that prided itself on compromise. The city center was a well organized ballet of bicycles and buses, open air markets and cute little stores, student fraternities and restaurants. The few cars in circulation unfailingly came to a stop by the time a pedestrian put her foot down on the crosswalk. Serene canals spiraled around the center, remnants of the city’s defense system from centuries before. Groningen’s current defenses were less obvious, though they ruthlessly blocked the paths to insurrection and, like the ring of moats once had, shaped the city itself. At the middle of everything were the shops. The city guards were the advertisements, babbling to us incessantly from every wall. The welfare state and the externalization of poverty allowed by neocolonialism meant that the wealth gap was minimal, and nearly all Groningen’s inhabitants were offered tidy lives of consumerism with all their needs apparently met. The conscientious citizens could buy organic at the eco shop, or subsidize starving Third World peoples by purchasing their arts and crafts from the humanitarian store. Progressives could join the Labor Party, dissidents could join the Socialist Party. One could criticize this closed system, but the means to spread that critique were prohibited. A soft but firm array of laws against postering, stickering, handing out flyers, and so forth meant that the public relations and advertising companies who could afford it were the only ones able to sculpt the mental landscape on a large scale. It was a nearly perfect propaganda bubble.

Joop and I talked long and hard about how to reach out to people under these circumstances. He was a methodical thinker. A few minutes into any conversation he was likely to say, “So if I understand you correctly, your hypothesis is that...” With the meager means before us, we proposed to change the surface of the world we lived in, allowing signs of the subterranean resistance to register in people’s consciousness. There needed to be some counterinformation, an urgent writing on the wall, disputing the image of the world created by advertising and corporate news. And the illegality of the medium itself would add to the message. A stencil spraypainted on a wall is a sign that people are going outside the sanctioned channels to communicate, and that they are willing to break the law to do so. It is a sign, however slight, of rejection and discontent. Enough angry, subversive, critical writing on the wall attacks people’s illusions about the stability of the world they live in and the degree of democratic consensus. The police view this from the other side, through the Broken Window theory: signs of disorder in the environment signify to people that disorderly behaviors are possible.

Wheatpasting posters and putting up stickers were two other media easy to use. Posters and sticker paper provided an attractive medium but the costs added up unless you could find a place to do free shopping or printing; however I think if anarchists gave up drinking, smoking, buying music, or any other vice, they would find it affordable. In Groningen, the authorities had made it illegal to walk around town with poster-paste, so the police don’t even have to catch you in the act to give you a ticket. It seemed the safest time was early Sunday morning, when the cops were exhausted from a busy night, and there were plenty of other people on the street but most of them were drunk and bleary-eyed, unconcerned about what other people might be doing. We made one poster directed at the very consumerism that seemed to be the local population’s most debilitating pastime. Bearing a photo either of an armed column of Zapatistas, a Pakistani mob trashing a McDonalds, or Nigerian militia members with a kidnapped European oilworker, the poster was framed with the words: “You shop for happiness while the victims of your consumption fight for freedom.”

Joop and I supposed another step was creating opportunities for new people to get involved. Groningen was a university town and school was starting around then, so at the last minute some of us put together pamphlets and banners and tabled at the student orientation, pretending to be a university club. From there we advertised a few events: a Food Not Bombs, a film screening, and a presentation. A week later, a smattering of Groningen anarchists cooked up a meal under the aegis of Gratis Eten, Groningen’s Food Not Bombs. From Laage der A, the city’s largest squat, we wheeled the food out to the Grote Markt on a bakfiets, and served free food to about a hundred people, standing out quite noticeably amidst the bustle of shopping. There are lots of critiques and internal discussions regarding the Food Not Bombs tactic — serving free food in public — as a response to poverty: whether it recreates dynamics of charity, whether it is effective at getting new people involved and under what circumstances. But in the center of a busy shopping district, the format offered different possibilities. Here it was a minor interruption of capitalism, a demonstration of different economic relationships: that you can share things and enjoy public space for free. It caught people’s attention. Some seemed scared, others were attracted, and a few people even stayed and talked — about world hunger, capitalism, anarchy, and other topics that our presence and our flyers brought up.

A couple days later, a city-sponsored festival in the park was interrupted by a minor act of guerrilla theater. In the thoroughfare between two different venues, with no stage in sight, suddenly appeared people in costume, people growing coffee, going on strike, a soldier beating them down, George Bush greedily gathering the coffee and trying to sell it to the people in the crowd, the farmers putting on ski masks and fighting back. Then someone walked through the crowd that had gathered and passed out flyers announcing the upcoming screening of a film about resistance to globalization. Meanwhile, someone playing his own role came up and informed us that we weren’t allowed to make a skit in the park, and he would call the police if we stayed there. With all the people crowded around, there were all sorts of possibilities where the play could have gone from there!

Throughout this month, Joop was producing a documentary on journalism, examining the mythology of the press and critiquing their actual practice. We were constantly having long, electrifying conversations on the topic while cutting out stencils or walking around the city. Sometimes we talked a bit too much. Early one Sunday morning, immersed in debate, we suddenly noticed that on the other side of the the storefront window, which we were redecorating, a man was approaching us at full speed. We took off running just as the door opened and the shopkeeper burst out, cursing and yelling. There might be bike cops or plainclothes cops around any corner here in the shopping district. We took the first side street to throw the shopkeeper off our trail, and after getting out of sight of any witnesses we turned a corner and slowed to a walk. I took off my outermost layer of clothing so I wouldn’t fit whatever description the zealous shopkeeper might be calling in to the police. My heart was racing. I wondered what would happen to me if I were arrested in another country. Once we got far enough away to feel safe, Joop and I discussed what had gone wrong. The answer was simple: it was Shopping Sunday. The one Sunday of the month when stores were open, to encourage people to overcome their tradition of not buying things one day of the week, and to ease a transition to an American-style 24/7 consumer economy. The shopkeeper was in his store because he was getting ready to open it for the day. We doubled over laughing. On the way back home we picked up where we left off in our conversation about journalism and communication.

For me it all came back to the question of isolation. How do we break on through to the other side? In the past months I had seen radical scenes in three different countries, each like a petri dish growing different strains of bacteria in a different solution. What would come to seem an obvious conclusion was starting to occur to me: that the isolation that plagues the anarchist movement is not caused by internal factors. So far I had seen anarchists exhibiting a huge range of behaviours from inclusive and friendly to hostile and cliquish. These made some difference in terms of how accessible a particular group was, how comfortable I felt as a newcomer, and how good the group’s relations were with other pre-existing groups of different political stripes. But in all places people still spoke of the same isolation and I noticed it myself. Later, in southern Europe, where social life still thrived in the streets, I would see that the isolation was not as strong, though in some places it seemed to be growing.

This isolation is caused by the mass media and the social structure of capitalism. Anarchists today are isolated because everyone today is isolated. The difference is that most other people are not reaching outside their cliques to build relationships of solidarity and mutual aid. The local bingo hall or church might draw a bigger crowd than the anarchist book club, but at the edge of that crowd lingers the same silent void. Alienation is the condition we all share in common. And while anarchists seeking to abolish capitalism have to overcome alienation and build strong communal relationships, the so-called anarchist ghetto, in the meantime, isn’t all bad. Ghettos open space for autonomy. They are cauldrons in which outcasts can brew their rebellions, or in which they can stew indefinitely, if they choose to remain complacent. The Warsaw ghetto was the site of the greatest insurrection against Nazi power, and ghettos in the US are hotbeds of radical culture and anti-state sentiments.

Hopefully all anarchists realize that we will never be able to communicate our ideas through the mass media, nor should we want to use such an authoritarian technology that turns billions of people into spectators — recipients of what an elite group determines to be news — and invades their trustingly opened minds to transform them into a market for advertisers. All the mass media, including the news media, are moralistic, and above all they tell stories. The vast majority of stories they tell do not lead people to believe in a world of mutual aid, self-organization, horizontal networks, solidarity, or resistance to a system of deliberate and thoroughly constructed domination. The manner they receive these stories does not train people to tell their own stories, to talk back, to investigate their world, to meet their neighbors, or to create a network of collective information. It trains them only to be consumers.

Storming the Ghetto

While many anarchists are trying to leave the ghetto, the wealthy are always trying to recolonize it. They have the Midas Touch, and everything they possess becomes a dead thing. But the ghettos to which they expel the outcasts and rebels stew and bubble with life. Innovative, rejuvenating, they give birth to new cultures and feed resistance eternal. Then the artists and hipsters move in, trying to capture that vitality, and then the investors, trying to profit from it, and they bring the police with them, and development, and death. It happened to Hamburg’s Schanze and is advancing on St. Pauli; Berlin’s Kreuzberg was lost this way; and in Groningen the process is so far advanced that it has devoured its own history, leaving no sign that things were different once. In the US all the major cities have their own stories of vibrant ghettos lost to gentrification, with the added racial dimension of ongoing colonialism.

Even little Harrisonburg knows the score — at least those who care to remember do. The black neighborhood used to be right next to the downtown, right along North Main Street. But in the 50s the town elite smelled the changing winds rising off the civil rights and black liberation movement. Like hundreds of other towns and cities, they applied for federal urban renewal grants and bulldozed the entire black neighborhood in the name of fighting poverty. The people were moved wholesale “up on the hill,” along with the Jewish cemetery, which was also uprooted. The only business remaining in the original neighborhood after that act of ethnic cleansing is Kline’s Dairy Bar, a white-owned ice cream shop. Now it’s all stores and restaurants.

Nowadays, the new black neighborhood is one of the poorest in the city, and by far the most heavily targeted by police. I didn’t learn any of this until some friends and I started working with black activists from that neighborhood to start a Copwatch group. Many of the residents supported our group and shared our understanding of the criminal justice system and the police as racist and controlling. Yet despite some commonalities, such cross-racial collaborations are rare. Usually the authorities need only rely on the racialized fear of crime to prevent these connections from ever occurring — I knew many white people who would never go up on the hill.

It reminded me of a similar dynamic in an entirely different situation. Miami, 2003, the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas — “NAFTA on steroids.” The Black Bloc had attacked the security fence surrounding the summit site, and was being steadily rolled back by police. Files of crazed riot cops advanced and the anarchists, nerved by weeks of psychological warfare waged by the pigs and a few intense days of terrorism during the summit, kept backing down. Our side would construct some hasty barricades and throw a few things to keep the cops honest, but it was all done in retreat. Not that this was the worst idea; many people caught by the pigs were brutally beaten or repeatedly tasered, and some of those arrested were tortured or raped. Intentionally, the police forced us back into the black neighborhood — the feared ghetto. The all-white cops smirked from overpasses, commenting: “those black folks are going to tear you up!”

On the contrary, hundreds of neighbors leaned out of windows to give us raised fists, faces beaming as they watched us fight back, however meekly. I thought of all the faces that were missing. My friend Earl was from this neighborhood. I met him in prison a year earlier, and he was still there, on drug charges. We had also found common ground in our fight for dignity and survival against the prison system, and backed each other up several times. It seems that the strongest relationships of solidarity are to be found in the ghettos themselves, yet too often anarchists try to communicate with an imaginary, non-marginalized public whose opinions are created by the mass media.

As the day went on, police snatch squads directed by helicopter took their toll on the diminishing crowd and it became apparent to everyone that we were being hunted. The ghetto was probably the safest spot for us. Some people were invited to hide in the apartments of locals. After a friend and I made an escape through a hole in the fence, a guy came up to us and offered to give us some of his clothes so that we could blend in. Every other day of the year, this army of police was pointing its guns at them. The cops had projected their racist fears onto us, and though their predictions did not come true, they weren’t without reason. For centuries black people in the US and around the world have been brutalized and exploited to a degree few white people know. Slavery still exists. The wars of colonialism are still being fought. One day, hopefully soon, there will be shit to pay. All the people who stand on the side of the pigs, the prison wardens, and the bosses will have to answer. If they go peacefully, they face at best a radical change in their place in society, which up until now has rested on the backs of others. If they do not go peacefully, they still have to go, by whatever means necessary. But there is no clear line in the sand. Everyone knows where a cop stands, but what about the rest of us? In the jails and the ghettos, people turn snitch, trading their dignity for privileges . In Harrisonburg, college kids, without knowing it, stand on the graveyard of the black community, waiting in line to buy ice cream.

Emergency Call-out for Mobilization and Declaration of Solidarity

translated from Nederlands

Protest on the initiative of refugees in the deportation center at Ter Apel.

5 June, 2005, 13:30, Ter Apelervenen

The refugees being held right now in the deportation center (DC) Ter Apel want to SELF-organize a demonstration on Sunday, 5 June at 13:30 at the deportation center on Ter Apelervenen, against the injustice they have been subjected to as hostages in a years-long asylum process. There is a petition in their name filed by GreenLeft and the Socialist Party (SP) Ter Apel/Vlagtwedde to seek the protection of the refugees and permission for the protest.

The first contacts between the refugees and people in solidarity were made on Saturday, 14 May, after a spontaneous solidarity action from the Pinksterlanddagen (anarchist camp) in Appelscha. In the meantime many more people and organizations have affiliated to support the protest of the refugees in DC Ter Apel. The refugees and supporters see the action on 5 June as a warm-up for the Refugee Alarm that will take place in many more regions of Nederland on 6 June from 12:00 to 13:00. We want to ask you to sign on to and distribute the attached call-out from DC Ter Apel as soon as possible, to help mobilize people on 5 June, and to arrange buses and cars for transporting people to Ter Apel. From Groningen it takes two hours with public transportation to arrive in the neighborhood of the DC.

Call-out for the protest from the refugees in the Deportation Center Ter Apel

“Against the foreigners policy that leads to our exclusion or expulsion and the psychological torture and apartheid regime we experience.”

We, residents of the deportation center (DC) Ter Apel, experience not only the situation here in DC Ter Apel, but also in the rest of the foreigners policy as psychological torture and as an apartheid regime. We want to make this recognizable by organizing a petition action against the DC, but also by organizing a protest at DC Ter Apel on 5 June at 13:30. We do this with the support of individuals and organizations who still take human rights seriously. Upon arriving in Nederland we were viewed as untrustworthy and treated as such. From the very first moment the power of the IND (Immigration and Nationalization Service) and the Dutch authority was placed precariously over us, leaving us to feel insecure and anxious. Through fear we were forced to make statements that were not true. The location, the fences, the cameras and the (armed) patrols at the application center, and especially at the expulsion center, make us afraid. We experience Ter Apel as a prison. In the AZC’s (Asylum Seekers Centers), after years of strong repression, we have gotten used to outright physical violence against us, which out of fear we may not talk about. We cannot experience this treatment as anything other than racist.

Already these experiences make not just us, but above all our children, earnestly sick. Many of us develop — if we did not already have them — great psychological problems and don’t leave our rooms any more. Our children must share all this with us and threaten to break down. Despite the fact that we cannot return to the countries we come from, many of us, often in vain, have already cooperated with our return — insofar as it is possible. But this means that via Ter Apel we almost always land on the street in an illegal existence or in a refugee prison.

Gladly we call on all social and political organizations to come see and openly condemn our human rights-violating situation here in DC Ter Apel. Further, we call on everyone to protest with us on 5 June against the current expulsion- and exclusion- policy, in particular at DC Ter Apel, and against the foreigners policy that is unleashed upon us.

All of us have been imprisoned between 4 and 16 years, through no fault of our own, in what we experience as a racist asylum procedure. We also have the right to a humane existence. Residency rights for everyone!

Stop the psychological torture and bureaucracy against refugees

No person left on the street without resources, no one is illegal

Domela Nieuwenhuis and Appelscha

In Friesland, a northern province with its own language, there is a small village outside the city of Drachten called Ureterp. L told me how way back in the day there was an anarchist group in tiny little Ureterp, and between them all they managed to get a pistol, which they took turns religiously guarding and cleaning. One day, while a member of the group was cleaning the gun he shot himself and died, after which the whole group was discovered. We wanted to visit the cemetery where he was buried in a sort of pilgrimage to tragicomedy, but couldn’t find his name.

A more famous anarchist in Friesland was Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, a contemporary of Pyotr Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. Instead of going to Ureterp, we visited his museum in Heereveen. Although he was not much of a direct actionist, for such a peaceful, compromising society he was considered a rabble rouser, an ex-priest who put his writing and speaking to use in the service of anti-militarist, worker, atheist, and socialist causes. He made an impression that has lasted long after his death in 1919. He frequented the village of Appelscha to talk to workers, and even today there is still an annual anarchist gathering in that town, extending directly from the tradition of anarchist groups he inspired there. I got to go to the gathering in May 2007, when I happened to be back in that corner of the woods. A group of us biked to Appelscha from Groningen, 40 kilometers away. In the village there’s a trailer park and campsite occupied by anarchists year round. Every May, they host the yearly gathering. Anarchists from all over Nederland came and set up book tables, put on workshops, and made big meals together.

I was pretty amazed by the diversity of ages among participants, with plenty of old folks and lots of children, about 300 people total. Well beyond simple childcare, there was a fully