BEZNA #2

(Apocalypse & Protests) March 2012 Kafkamachine Akseli Virtanen The Carnival, the Spectacle and the Non-event Veda Popovici What can we do with an Apocalypse? Florin Fluera The imaginary child and the queer vampire apocalypse Mihai Lukacs Survival architecture in the global slum Candidatul la Preedinie Ninja Bugeicho tefan Tiron You make friends in darkness and wake up with monsters next to you Arnold lahter About safety and heroism in activism Ciumafaiu The Hebrew Spring Roi Alter Jos Basescu drawing by Brynjar Bandlien Foto Paradis Garaj

Kafkamachine
Akseli Virtanen KAFKAMACHINE arouse in the midst of the marvels of financial economy and crises of Europe, when the precariousness of immaterial labour defines our every day, financial capitalism exercises its arbitrary power and forces us to continuously exploit ourselves and our friends while cynicism, depression and detachment from others have become important means of ones survival. After the economic collapse, there seems to be nothing that holds Europe together anymore. Except our fear and apatheia. Just like in the Greek myth about the beginning of Europe, the (financial) Bull is raping Europa maiden again in (Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Spain...). And there is nothing we can do, there is no solidarity, no place or time for a creation of community, of collective subjectivity. The old political practices have totally lost their operationality. KAFKAMACHINE is made out of loosers, sad figures, dark souls, cynical opportunists and depressed princesses. We are not tough or heroic, we are soft and feeble. We dont march or demonstrate. We have difficulties in getting up from the bed. More, we are dependent on each other to see this. We are molle people, the future of cooperation. There may be some self-sarcasm in this introduction, but only to express that there is no heroism in the exhaustion and disillusionment we are all experiencing at the moment when seeking a way forward together is necessary but without any one being able to guide the way. The cognomen of the film is n-1, the one that disappeared. There is no other ground but the broken one. We have difficulties in believing what

is happening to us, because nothing seems to happen. We are tired of being ourselves because the self-evidencies of our lives don't work anymore. We know they don't, even if we still try to pretend that they do. We need reinvention of ourselves, but have no strength or appeal for it. That is why we all sound like dj vu. The realm of possible at our disposal is exhausted. How do you build a way back to the possible? How do you invent a way out when there is no way out? How does a group of depressed opportunists do things together? KAFKAMACHINE is an organizational experiment on cooperations to come.

The Carnival, the Spectacle and the Non-event A three-step strategy of making us harmless
Veda Popovici 2012. We are in the time of the Carnival. Bucharest is covered in a thick layer of snow. It is now gradually melting to reveal the same, old status quo. The Carnival The last weeks of January have seen intense, sometimes violent antigovernmental protests in Bucharest and throughout the country. Multitudes that seemed for the last two (to twenty) years almost completely idle, emerged as a new subjectivity, capable of social unrest, capable of projecting fear in authorities. This possible fear was expressed by unjustified repeated violence, abuses and offensive discourse. The peak of violence were the days of 14th and 15th of January when these angry multitudes clashed with the special riot brigades of the Jandarmeria. With these events the mass protests clearly became a catharsis for the multitudes. The following days saw an exacerbation of this cathartic experience: a carnival. This great grandmother of the spectacle is the paroxysmal consumption of all sinful activities. The carne vale is a time when eating meat and indulging in poorly tolerated activities of the flesh becomes normality. All logic is inverted, all cultural habits turned upside down. Borders between class, gender and age are blurred. It is the great gift of the multitudes to themselves: catharsis of all logic, all normality, all oppression. In the cathartic chaos of the carnival masks become identities and real identities

become masks. It is a time when everybody can let go of their everyday mask, of their everyday position, his/her identity and suspend all that is permanent, unavoidable, indispensable and natural. The carnival tempts you to look beyond what is apparent, what is seamlessly unchangeable. It is as though all things could end tomorrow. The rebellious carnival of Bucharest suspended logic: anything could happen, intense passions were put into play and big risks were taken. This lasted not more than one week, 7 days of suspension of all predictability for the individuals part of this newly discovered multitude. Imagination irrupts, people stage funerals for the political regime, walk around with cut out chicken legs and dead rats on sticks. Horror and grotesque meet in a gore imagery of political change. What was formerly idleness, passivity and political sleep & sheep transforms into the voluptuous desire for death. Multitudes breaded in the logic of the TV spectacularity subjectify themselves as the producers of a new death imagery: end of the President's mandate, end of the Government, end of politics as we know it. An apocalypse brought by a newly emerged political multitude. The great resistance and overthrowing potential of the carnival has been historically tamed, though. Its pagan roots have been effaced so that it gradually became the perfectly absorbed tradition of eating the meat deposits before Christian Lent. Hundreds of years of institutionalized Christianity have turned it into a domesticized rebellion. As the protestant ethics came into the scene and bourgeois society formed, the carnival became the indispensable component of the practice of capitalism: the spectacle1. How can one disrupt this historical development of the carnival into the spectacle, trick its contemporary

therapeutic function2 and make it permanent or at least unpredictable? How can one turn the temporality of the carnival into the permanence of a political revolution? The Spectacle Mass-media promptly developed a typical strategy of neutralizing these multitudes. Their continuous presence at the protests during the last weeks of January gradually structured the protests: people arranged their bodies in space like on a scene. The revolt slowly turned into the spectacle of rebellion, a clearly definable object, circumscribed to clear variables: time, space, number of people. The protesters turn into buffoons for the mere entertainment of the TV-watching masses. They stopped representing the idle masses, calling them into action and became some exceptionally bizarre individuals to serve the entertainment industry: they have a constant presence, the same slogans and the same placards. Social change is turned into the spectacle of itself. The end of the current political regime seems even further then before. The end of politics as we know it in Romania, an end desired by the multitudes, a real change is buried by its own image. Media pushes the multitudes back to their passivity. Debord taught a good lesson: the Spectacle is society's desire to sleep. It efficiently guards this sleep. The Spectacle postpones all ends. It delivers the illusion of end and firmly maintains the status quo. The spectacle of the apocalypse, a well directed political tool, satisfies the multitude's desire for the end, for catharsis, for freedom. And it postpones to eternity any real change. The Non-event In the mean time, temperatures got extremely low and immense quantities

of snow accumulated everywhere. The thick layer of snow covers roads, houses, hills and wills. It has produced a new urban relief. The city seems different, seems to be another. Lives seem to have changed: you can not go to work as you used to, people seldom use their own cars so that they don't remain blocked in the streets. School has been out for three days. It is an orange alert of natural disasters. Of course the media and the authorities are overwhelmed by it. They don't seem to have enough machines and manpower to clear out the white matter. It is a catastrophe, they proclaim. We need a hot-coloured code of emergency and alert to understand the immensity of this matter, to proclaim its urgency! Rational statistics maintain the irrational panic: 60 people dead because of the snow and cold, 20 villages completely isolated, hundreds of damaged houses! Is the country able to provide enough electrical power for all of us?! Our panic has good reasons to be installed, it is legitimate, so they say. The State produces this panic and urges people to not be lazy, not wait for the State to fight the snow3! Each citizen has a civic duty to take matters into his/hers own hands and win this battle! The endless resources of the multitudes are called into action. These are the only moments the multitudes are directly addressed by the State: when political elite needs to overcome irrational forces like the crisis of capitalism or the crisis of nature or the likes. A classical mechanism of the shock doctrine4 is immediately set in motion: suspend all politics in the face of disaster. A state of exception is employed, political unrest becomes obscene when confronted to the allencompassing gravity of death by snow! The political elite efficiently trains the masses for their project of the eradication of the State5. So, paradoxically, catastrophes legitimate

the weak, powerless State. It cannot face the force of nature. The minimal state is constantly called upon, invoked and justified. Nature thus becomes the exceptional means to legitimate neo-liberal politics. News are dominated by the white matter, every event draws its legitimation from it. After all, what can one do before nature but surrender? The audience of the news channels (and, according to the logic of rating, profit and advertising, this is the overwhelming majority of the population) has been presented with a gradual, subtle shift from the spectacle of the protests to the spectacle of the natural disaster. The spectacularly vivid matter of the protests turns into the cold, inanimate matter of the snow. And the passage is not at all brutal, it is actually quite unnoticeable. The spectacle is already the sleep of the masses, it is deadening. In a delicate shift of signifiers, the non-politics of the spectacle becomes the nonpolitics of the non-event. The subjectivity producing the spectacle of rebellion becomes the subjectivity producing the non-event of the disaster: the new Snow-Subject. This new and fascinating subject is beyond good or evil, beyond ethics, beyond politics. Or just some politics. Behind the snow, neo-liberal politics slowly become nature. Under the white, bright snow, there is just darkness. Tons of white, cold matter still cover the city. It feels cold, hard and deadening. Snow has become from an object a subject. It determine our lives, our needs, our actions and even politics. The few protesters who still remain in the streets sometimes sing: The Souls melt the the Snows. They already feel that the snow is the new body, the new flesh of the revolts, as the oppressive State-Media duo tell us. Carne vale, goodbye to the flesh is now a somber perspective. We are the snow and the snow should be

cleaned, collected and disposed of.

1. We are implying the spectacle as defined by the Debordian-Situationst perspective. 2. Nowadays carnivals like the Cologne, Venice or Rio de Janeiro carnival are nothing more than profitable enterprises for privates, advertising stunts, forming together a well-organized embodiment of the illusion of freedom. 3. Mihai Razvan Ungureanu publicly stated on the 11th of February: It is inadmissible to pass through a locality in Romania and see the army clearing the streets, while direct beneficiaries are inside enjoying the heat. We cannot pay for the lack of action and laziness, it I a lack of respect for those out there in the cold fighting to clear the streets to let the emergency cars pass and fix other life and death situations. source: http://www.bucharestherald.ro/dailyevents/4 1-dailyevents/30395-ungureanu-the-army-isclearing-the-snow-and-locals-are-withinclosed-doors-enjoying-the-heat-it-isinadmissible 4.For the complex, US variant see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, published in 2007. 5.The ordo-liberalism doctrine of the party in power, the the Liberal Democrat Party (PDL), is another name for neo-liberal ideology. Its core concept is the maximum minimisation of the State, the privatisation of State companies as much as it can be done and the decrease of social security. See the German original at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism and the Romanian Constitutional programme at http://www.contributors.ro/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/ordo.pdf (in Romanian).

What can we do with an Apocalypse?

Florin Fluera It is 2012 and the Apocalypse is here. The question is what can we do with it, what can we do with this concept, what is its potential? Apocalypse in the common sense means the end of the world, it etymologically means a lifting of the veil or a revelation about what is already here, hidden in plain sight. Nowadays we have too many signs of the end and not so many about the revelation. We cross or we are about to cross some major important boundaries like climate change, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater usage, land cover change... Each of these rifts in planetary boundaries constitutes an actual or potential global ecological catastrophe.(1) The panic of the end is everywhere: it is in the current desperate phase of capitalism with its aggressive and destructive scratching for the last resources, using techniques like tar sands, fracking and deep sea exploitation... And, similarly, it is in the aggressive exploitation of the sensitive zones of human subjectivity - our emotions, empathy, sociability, intuition, imagination are now extracted and put to work at the center of the economy. The consequences on ecosystems, sociosystems, psycho-systems are the same they are all collapsing. All this should be presented daily in the news, everybody should think, debate, try to find solutions... But it isn't. To deal with some peripheral symptoms then facing the monster seems to be preferable - what to do with the fact that acidification of oceans dangerously increased by 30% lately, climate change is now largely irreversible (2)or what about the fact

that we are in the middle of the fastest mass extinction in the known history, including the 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs extinction? (3) The spectacle goes on at any price, and the price is continuously growing, while more and more policing at all levels is needed. A militarization of police takes place everywhere. Even drones with no human attached, the perfect partner of capital, are in the air now searching for enemies. And there are drones that are set to operate on the domestic fronts too, the war is with the 99%, the enemy moves closer and closer, the terrorist is your neighbor, the enemy is you. With all the private contractors that are replacing the police and the state army, the administration of death can become more profitable than the exploitation of the living. So, the morbid component of capitalism (until now only externalized and contained at the periphery, in the 3rd and 2nd World) is spreading everywhere. It was a lot of talk at the beginning of this crisis that we assist to the end of Capitalism. Capitalism is not over, because catastrophe and death are profitable, so we will rather assist to the end of the world than to the end of Capitalism. All these conditions provide a continuous state of emergency, a lot of important distractions and nonevents. There is a great time acceleration, always something urgent to figure out, to fix, there is no time to reflect, to evaluate the whole - all the solutions are technical and punctual. The veil is lifted but there is no time to see. Even the supposed resistance looks to be trapped in this small range of perception in the end, for protests we have to be realistic and to have reasonable demands - like, everything will be OK, we just have to change this bad and corrupt politicians, we just need to have more people on the

streets... There is a very conservative impulse beyond all this. Everything is based on the image of what already is, there is a strange lack of imagination, it seems that the only solution that we can imagine is to amplify the problem. Two million people in New York against the War in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Athens, sometimes even winning in confrontation with Police, but what for, to be ruled by a technocrat from Goldman Sachs? The same thing happens now in Romania: the government was changed at "the pressure of the streets" into something much more toxic. Just to have an idea, the prime minister is a former head of a secret service agency, the Ministry of Agriculture is the CEO of Monsanto Romania... We are not ready to face the hopeless situation of the protests, maybe because it is too late, and somehow we can feel it... Ignorance and collective denial seem to be the main strategies in use, in order to cope with the depression related to our present and (no) future. Our needs are linked in a complicated way with the present capitalist reality and this makes it practically impossible for us to can really move away. Without necessary wanting it, we continue to protect the status quo and to operate according to an economic logic that pushes us to the wall. In a perverse way, we are all depend on our collapse and that's why we can't even imagine an alternative. Talk with the elephant in the room, in its own language It is a hopeless situation and we still have too much hope. In the 2012 movie, between the hundreds of the 1% elite that saved themselves on that ark, miraculously there was also one family from the 99% to show that even in the midst of the catastrophic

end of the world there is still some hope. We have to kill that stupid hope or to leave it to the 1%. There are some small signs that we are more ready then before to give up hope and to go a bit beyond the reformist impulses. For instance, as a reaction to the softening of the discourse around the Occupy movement, a FULL COMMUNISM meme appeared on Twitter. Here is a very good description of this meme: Like #occupy, its a shared shout of Im fucking sick of this shit. Unlike #occupy, however, it also holds an added threat: Im so fucking sick of this shit I have no desire to reform it. I want to go beyond. I want to fuck shit up. (4) Similarly in Romania people preferred to #occupyRomania, #Universitate (the name of the square where the protests happened in Bucharest), the #revolutie (revolution) hashtag to communicate on Twitter. And there are also small signs that are visible everywhere in the daily life. For instance in all statistics Romania is one of the most depressed nations. Some friends from abroad are amazed that the waitresses, saleswoman and salesmen are not even trying to smile to their clients anymore. But this is an important sign of sanity, of connection with one's own feelings, of acceptance of depression and the misery of (self)exploitation. It is much more problematic to try to keep it up or to be adjusted. The world as it is now doesn't seem to be the moment and the place to be happy. Maybe we should occupy our depression and hopelessness and let it work. A lucid desperation can be a good idea. Maybe even fear is a good idea. Probably the best way to go through this panic and anxiety era is to stay afraid, to stay in contact with the collapse, otherwise the accumulated fear will break up in panic attacks or will constantly work as an anxiety, a diffuse fear without object. Maybe it is time to see what is happening when

the collective energy of hopelessness, depression, mixed with fear and an apocalyptic awareness, accumulates. If we don't block them anymore and we let them work. In capitalism, like in any other religion, everything is based on faith. When the faith and the hope will disappear, the apocalypse will come. And it looks like it is happening... or, if not, apocalypse should be created as maybe the only weapon-concept that can create possibilities and potentiality in a dead world. In one of Castaneda's books (4) Don Juan speaks about a kind of death awareness as the base of some very powerful transformative processes. He speaks about Death as our eternal companion that is always to our left, at an arm's length and it's always watching us, until the day it taps us. Death awareness is essential for a different perception about what is important and to give the necessary impulse to start the radical change of subjectivity needed for becoming a man of knowledge or sorcerer. It works as an advisor and puts the things that we deal with in a new, much more productive perspective. What if we do the same with apocalypse at a social scale? Being aware that Apocalypse is at the length of an arm away can be the social equivalent of Castaneda's individual approach to death. Having all the time in our peripheral view the current collapse the thousands of starving children that are dying every day, the 200 species of animals and plants that are disappearing every day - can give us the real dimension of what is happening, the needed urgency and a real impulse for a radical change. Apocalyptic awareness can be the constant transformative presence that we need. Let's learn to talk with the 'elephant in the room', in its own language.

1. John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe, http://t.co/0AsQYGAw 2. Gilbert Mercier, Overpopulation, Climate Change, Food Crisis, War: The Horsemen Of Apocalyptic Capitalism, http://t.co/LPxz9SE2 3. Here is an archive of articles about the current mass extinction http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html 4. @Spitzenprodukte,On FULL COMMUNISM: cursory notes on the evolution of mimetic non-demands http://t.co/QtW2tWoM 5. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, http://controlledfolly.googlepages.com

The imaginary child and the queer vampire apocalypse

Mihai Lukacs Romania is slowly extinguished.It is no secret that we are an aging country, with a high death rate, but with a declining birth rate.There are many international forecasts which predict that Romania will be among the first countries to disappear or that the population will reduce by half in the next few decades. (Dana Mihailovici) Following last year's census, a very strong fear was established in Romania.The nation will disappear, there is no social reproduction taking place and LGBT people are part of this anti-national conspiracy. The child of the future has become the providential hero that will save the aging population. In a series of analyzes, increasing birth at all costs becomes a priority. I will offer a queer reading of those fears and I will propose an alternative discourse as suggested by a theater performance I saw recently. I use queer as an umbrella term for people that are marginalized on the basis of sexuality and gender. Besides criticizing homophobia, the queer approach includes a critique of transphobia and sex- work phobia, a critique of reproductive state policies and also an intersectional connection to other forms of social marginalization. Queer does not define sexual identity. On the contrary, breaks the normalization of identity categories. From an historical point of view, the unnatural category (where I position the queer existence) functions as a collection of concepts in order to ensure the right to life and keep intact the "laws of nature"; to not only maintain population growth and a strong nation, but also to keep the right to reproduce for a very limited minority

globally. The right to life was conceptualized legally, scientifically and artistically as a right of blood. The right to life includes a discourse of blood and even further: the purity of the nation, class and ethnic blood. Therefore, these approaches sentence those who cannot or will not provide this right to life based on blood to a metaphorical or literal death. Queer subjectivities resist these narratives and the pro-natalist discourse that is governing our symbolic reality of which we should be part. The Charter of Principles of the Romanian Federation of Orthodox Organizations Provita states: The family based on heterosexual and monogamous marriage is the work to which God calls human beings to achieve through the origins of human nature, unity, otherness and interdependence of human beings.7.In this respect, the family based on heterosexual and monogamous marriage is the only proper place of the expression of sexual love and the only proper place of procreation.10. With the arrival of a new human being, God blesses not only parents but, to different degrees, whole communities that it will be part of (the extended family, the parish, the city, the diocese, the nation, the country and even all of humanity). Therefore, these communities have their own responsibilities to the material and spiritual life and development of that person. The mythological image of the Child is the dominant narrative of our times; the existence of the fictional innocent Child cannot be questioned. It works as a literal truth to whom we owe our existence as subjects and the social relations in which we live relationships for which we are willing to give up our lives just to keep them functional.1This discourse emphasizes the imaginary Child as our only salvation from the queer apocalypse that awaits us. It is the promise of

the rainbow after the queer storm. Because the queer apocalypse is perceived as an attempt to destroy the Child, its future and childhood in general. This disciplinary image of the Child, always watching us, performs the compulsory culturalization of social reproduction, the monogamous family and the laws of nature. The lives, discourses and rights of adults in Romania are under the threat of the imaginary Child, whose future is built and put in danger by various "social diseases" such as queer sexuality. These rights for adults can exist only in the future tense, through the possibility of succession, by transmiting these rights to their future children. This agreement follows the famous slogan, "Romania is not Sodom", derived from a homophobic, apocalyptic reading of the biblical narrative that associates a gay sexual practice with the destruction of the future.Directed against queers, the right to life functions as a contradiction between the queer sterile sex and the fertile heterosexual practice, which can produce the imaginary children who will save the future of ethnicity, nation, class and heterosexuality itself. From a heterosexist perspective, the social practice of producing children is associated with giving life- a divine act or a blessed sexual practice that is socially acceptable while giving life becomes a natural trait of human beings. The right to life is not just a slogan for the unborn but for the sexuality of those who are producing children. In contrast, the queer people stand for sterility, death of the nation, an unnatural practice, and the apocalyptic end of the future, and therefore not eligible for the same rights to life as everyone else.From this reading, queer sexual practice exits the category of the living.

Equations like hetero = sex = life or homo = sex = unlife generate, on the other hand, a queer discourse that relies on morally forbidden desires, imagining sexual practices in the area of unnatural, unusual or even supernatural.2 "I.C." by Paul Dunca is a theatre performance that took place at the National Library in Bucharest as part of the LGBT History Month. It tells the story of a queer vampire from Romania, a new type of being, a nonreproductive imaginary person who surpasses the mandate of the right to life. The vampire reconnects historical unnatural desires to the current social situation in Romania, ridicules the apocalyptic fears and proposes a reversal of the pronatalist and homophobic speech. Vampirizing queer people introduces an alternative discourse that exceeds the imagination of the heterosexist society. Attacking the core of a marginalizing discourse, queer desires break the life/death and reproductive/destructive dichotomies and move beyond a heterosexist notion of being.
1. see Lee Edelman, No Future: queer theory and the death drive, 2004. 2. Sue Ellen Case, "Feminist and queer performance: critical strategies", 2009.

Survival architecture in the global slum (Part 1)

Candidatul la Preedinie opposition will not be sustainable -

1989 and 1999 was absorbed in the fetid, densely packed slums of Nairobi and Mombasa. It seems that as soon as 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years. All these stats are strictly related to global poverty and in some countries are almost a direct consequence of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (especially in Africa) of the 80s and 90s. Even World Bank and IMF (that implemented SAP), at their annual joint meeting, already in 2004, declared: SubSaharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, and a 50 percent reduction in poverty no sooner than 2150 and so on. Adding that natural reserves are not augmenting in any scenario of the future while redistribution is almost stigmata for contemporary policy makers and we already have a dystopian image wherein the architectural dimension and life conditions are still to be conceived and adapted to these cruel social realities. In spite of the aging population in some of the former western societies if we eliminate the west as a reference - the demographic figures never looked more flourishing and, as studies show, before 2015 earth will reach seven billion inhabitants and in 2050 almost ten billion. An exponential growth that started in the twentieth century

Whether your are from Romania or from another country on a different continent is of little importance. In the close future the most pressing issues, that will affect any architectural planning, long term social development and life strategy in general, will be overpopulation and access to resources - taking into consideration that by then the urban population will outnumber the rural one for the first time in history at a planetary scale. In his seminal book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis argues that mega-cities will account for virtually all future global population in vast conurbations that will have informal living as core practice with much of the city explosion happening in the peripheral, sub-standard, slums. Examples are numerous, Mumbai will reach 33 million inhabitants by 2050, together with Karachi, Dhaka, Jakarta and Shanghai going about 25 million each and Mexico City already today accounting for more than 20 million enforced by the periurban development on the rise. Africas slums are on the extreme side as well, as Mike Davis continues, an incredible 85 percent of Kenyas population growth between

and doesnt seem to diminish in its acceleration any time soon. This situation requires political and architectural solutions such as the ones that are already pioneered by architects as Jose Castillo (Mexico City), Teddy Cruz (US) both dealing with slum accommodation, or the MMBB bureau of architecture from Sao Paolo, involved in innovation for shantytown dwellers. As them, we have to imagine the social-political and economical context of this anxious present/future in a realistic and pragmatic way, again at a global scale, in order to see what kind of architecture is possible, and more important, for whom? The financial criteria and ones position on the power map will stand by far as the most important conditions for all developing architectural projects and this will force the new generation of architects to integrate moral and political principles. It is thus fundamental to describe the future following todays hints and symptoms. Of course any kind of predictions are submitted to the same historical risks that any idea, manifesto, chart or prophecy has carried within, from its proclamation to its implementation. For example the 1993 UIA Chicago declaration of inter-dependence for a sustainable future may look very cynical from the 2012 perspective. Although echoes of the declaration have reached a wide segment internationally in terms of awareness to new problems that humanity faces in the contemporary era, sustainable has become nowadays the forefront slogan for all major multi-national corporations, some of them involved directly in anti-environmental industry (see Gold Corporation and Rosia Montana case in Romania). Any kind of ethical and emancipating principles can become tools for the ideologies in power, arguments that

would only reinforce the highly unsustainable status quo. The formal city vision that has surfaced subsequently to Athens Chart in 1933 has also faded and proved inoperative at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, both of the major ideologies that produced urban planning have shown their limitations and severe faults. Cities from zero as Brasilia or Astana (Kazakhstan) seem now strange experiments, but if socialist state housing architecture (central planning in general) has failed in a specific sense (spawning large proletarian ghettos) and is now a thing of the past, the capitalist paradigm of housing through ultra-private space and individual unassisted initiative is still ongoing. By 2050, through market dictatorship, politics will be reduced to economical efficiency, competition and survival of the fittest attitude. Traditional parties will grow obsolete and local governments will act only as an interface between IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank and the indigenous population, like anger management buffer apparatuses. The political equator (Teddy Cruz) will grow in clarity and thus the slum dwellers of the South will continue to work in sweat-shops for the corporations of the North providing the labour force for the former colonists. According to U.N. Department for Economic and Social Affairs (population division) by mid-century there will be more than nine billion people on planet earth, Japan, Eastern Europe and Germany being the only places that will not contribute to this demographic growth. Together with the replacement of all ideologies with profit imperative and the rising empires of Asia the picture of this future world may have a totalitarian shade. As it was already predicted fifty years ago by Aldous Huxley:

overpopulation will be one of the main enemies of freedom. In a continuous crisis of resources morally it will be easier to cut to the chase, the state of emergency will rule without debate/opposition, because opposition would not be sustainable. Over-territorialisation will be an unquestionable necessity for the ones that govern the flow of capital while open-source knowledge and sharing procedures will be inevitable for the South. In the slums, collective negotiating will no longer be a leftist scope but an unavoidable strategy following a fast expanding precarity. (end of part 1)

Paradis Garaj

Ninja Bugeicho
tefan Tiron NINJA BUGEICHO is the 1967 movie of Nagisa Oshima. It is not a Japanese animation movie, it is not a movie either. It was filmed close-up of the manga(Japanese comic) pages. Oshima didn't want to sacrifice or modify the celebrated work of gekiga mangaka SANPEI SHIRATO. Gekiga manga was the dramatic, more adult version of the manga - the generation that was actually labeled as the "manga generation". It was a sort of graphic novel tradition in Japan with more serious and more demanding subject and core economic and social issues. In the 60s it was a clear act of rebellion against the establishment. The same order of post-war Japan that was otherwise accepted by the mainstream super stars such as Tezuka. Most of the manga generation were student opposing the US-Japan Security Treaty and the establishment of a semi-permanent American military especially in the pacifist Okinawan islands. Most of the protest movements were left-oriented and Labor movement related. This is the context and background of Oshima's movie and Shirato's manga. NINJA BUGEICHO was a manga published in 1957 that got the attention of both

students and intellectuals at the time in Japan. Firstly it was a historically-based manga inspired on the doings of revolutionary deeds of ninja's from the 16th century. Shirato's works are based on historical records of Japan, mainly dealing with ninja's fighting against oppression, discrimination and severe exploitation of the peasant masses. These revolutionary men and women were hunted down, arrested, slain and their remains publicly exhibited publicly to bring fear and scare away anybody who would think to fight the landlords or their minions. And still ninjas keep on turning up again and again, escaping out of impossible odds and recurring throughout historical accounts. They are dismembered, decapitated and burned to the stake. They share the fate of many indentured peasants and always take up their cause. Their enemies think they finally put an end to the revolt, but the struggle goes on as long as the oppression will continue. Other people take the ninja road and keep on escaping and tricking their captors in an endless series of riots and clashes with superior forces. This manga is a clear example that we can find and should search in the overlooked historical records for revolutionary content that has been left out by official histories. Basically the history of the revolutionary ninja's reads like the Gheorghe Doja or the Horia, Closca and Crisan peasant revolts against feudal masters, landowners or opressive boyars in Romania, or like any other peasant uprisings anywhere in the world since then till now. Somehow we have to imagine the haiduk tradition as being some sort of balcanic romanticized versions of the ninja. There is a rich tradition of such accounts that has been excluded out of history books in the last couple of 20 years in Romania. Actually such histories provide inspiration an vital hope during difficult moments of

defeat or situations without any escape. We hope they will sustain future protest movements, became illustrated manuals for future uprisings against economic terror, austerity measures and neo-feudalistic caste systems. The fight against all sorts of discriminations, the class-struggle and the fight against economic oppression is common for the whole of humanity and echoes down during the ages. You can admire the original manga without any animation other than slow movement across the page or quick cuts from one slide to the other. The epic is really great and seemingly an endless struggle, with many ninja characters male and female, both young and old, the voice-over and sound effects adding to the action. It is an incredibly intense and quick-paced movie even if the technique seems so unusual. You can feel the care and respect Oshima had as a manga-reader himself for this revolutionary manga.

The ninjutsu arts and techniques where considered miraculous because they literally rendered the practitioner invisible, fast and stealthy in the face of overwhelming power, armies, of policemen or the gendarmes. I think these techniques were considered miraculous in the face of what they had to face, of the unequal battle which they had to wage. How else than miraculous can one consider the weapons of the weak ones, the lessequipped, the socially oppressed that always had to know everything about the forest or the neighborhood. What more miraculous, multi-use, multifunctional, multi-tasking peasant weapons such as the nunchaku or the burning bottles with gasoline. Such ninja tales like the Ninja Bugeicho have to circulate and be kept alive as an inspiration for future student uprising and protest movements.

You make friends in darkness and wake up with monsters next to you
Arnold lahter You are young, you see the problems, you see that there are things you do not like at all, you see in the distance some people, who take decisions for you and not only for you. These are decisions that influences your life, conditioning it, putting limits to it... And you decide to go out in the street, to join the people like you, who see the problems, who just want a decent living, a possibility to live with a little bit of safety: in

health, in environment, in food supply, in employment, in nondiscrimination, in freedom of expression, in education, in matter of rent, in cultural stuff, and others. And it is winter and it gets dark very early. At 4 p.m. it is already dark and you join those who have slogans like yours, you make friends in the darkness. And you ask them, because you do not know them: why are they here just like you. You want to know: why do they have this or that banner and this or that symbol... Some of them answer you, others are far, and suddenly you realise that in the darkness there are monsters next to you: this is bezna!

About safety and heroism in activism

Ciumafaiu Exactly one year ago, I came across a brochure in London called simply The Paper[1]. In it, one of the articles had as a title We are not going to be famous. I felt immediately that this title alone speaks to so many of my own experiences, so many attempts to build something, and equally as many failures. The following lines are written with this sentence in mind we are not going to be famous. I will write from my own perspective and about my own experiences and feelings. This means that I dont want this to be a sermon about activism, solidarity, modesty or security. Im not in a position to lecture anybody, especially you, the people who have been out in the Bucharest or Cluj winter cold for the past one month. But I believe that there are lessons that we could learn from each others mistakes. Unfortunately, there is a great chance that the social movements of the past year around the world will not succeed. As I write this, people have been protesting in Cairo for more than a year, in Athens for a couple of years, in Germany (against nuclear waste transports) for over two decades. Sometimes, we might achieve some tangible objectives, but most of the time it seems that the State could not care less about democracy. Even worse, it uses social movements as a pretext to tighten up austerity and security measures. But I dont want to say that its all in vain. Rather, I want to say that I believe in underground change, in radically challenging all existing dominant structures, and creating alternative and parallel ones. For me at least, this challenge to ALL dominant structures had to start first of all with the ones that were closer

to me, and the most powerful my own prejudices, stereotypes, my own behavior as a privileged, white, educated, arrogant East European male. Some of you might already start to frown here, and think that I mean some sort of personal redemption. Well, no, but something close, something less pretentious and quieter. I mean that in order to fight the cops on the street, we first have to fight the cops inside our head. More concretely: I will not become a hero, nor do I want to. I will not be an icon of the movement, a new Guevara, not even a name in a future chronicle of todays movements. This is first of all because I am trying to eliminate my own need of hierarchy. In the groups where I work, decisions are being taken by consensus. This word consensus seemed to me an impossible idea because I believed that there is no way that a bunch of people with strong individualities would be able to reach a common view on important decisions. But I discovered that the key is exactly in how we perceive our individuality. If we agree that we wont become heroes, and if we strive for a non-hierarchical interaction with the others, we might realize that consensus means that individuality can be enhanced in a collective. This is not to say that my ego has to be in any way subdued quite the contrary I discovered how emancipatory and empowering it can be to actively participate in a collective action, instead of the usual alienation that I was feeling when I was supposed to either follow the tasks delegated by the leader, or conversely, to tell others what to do and be responsible for it, as a leader. Of course, there is a very important element missing from this picture, which might even seem utopian, if there would not be so many instances of it actually happening everywhere where there is consensus; this element is solidarity. Precisely because I do

not want to become a hero (or a martyr), my focus is not on my own merits or defects, but rather on how these affect the entire group, and how the group itself can operate. For me, this means that everybody in the group should feel safe, comfortable, empowered, allowed to speak and listened to without prejudice and with patience; not only in actions, but in the daily discussions of the group, where actually most of the activity happens. For me, solidarity means that I treat everyone as a friend with love, patience, trust, care, modesty and (non-offensive) humour. I try to keep my personal ambitions low, to be modest and to make compromises; I try not to get pissed off at people, and whenever someone gets offended or hurt, I apologise. I try to trust people, and I take what they say for granted, assuming that they actually mean what they say, and dont try to deceive me. I try not to speak loud in discussions, to wait until the speaking person finishes, to signal silently when I want to say something, and not to talk past anyone in the group. I also try not to place myself in a position of superiority to others, by bragging about my achievements, by belittling what others do, by being holier-than-thou about my merits; by shaming others whom I feel have not done enough; by emphasizing others weaknesses, emotions or disabilities; and by being blind to my priviledges. And generally, I see no reason to be offensive or to hurt someone deliberately, if Im in solidarity with them what would be the point? All these things may seem banal or utopian, but for me they were a better way to approach the people that I work with, and to actually have more authentic connections and relationships with those around me. The cop in my head would have never allowed for that, because he was too proud and too afraid to let the guard

down. But this text is about security and safety in public actions, and you may ask what the hell is this person ranting about? Well, I want to say that without all these things lack of heroism, consensus, solidarity, care, patience and love I dont think that we can really be safe in front of the huge machinery of the State. Any revolution has to start from our head, and from among our selves; otherwise, I think it will end up being eaten by the same system against which it fights. And this is why it is more vital to build these ways of living as alternative structures to the system, even if our protests fail. And since we cant really count on any state agencies for our protection, we have to learn how to take care of ourselves. As for the concrete security stuff, here goes: in my groups we always operate with the buddy system. This is an autonomous cell made up of 2-3 people, no more, in which all members have to fully feel comfortable with each other and trust each other as much as possible. Usually, buddies are friends, but I have been in actions with buddies that I barely knew, but that I had lots in common with, and that I had talked with a lot beforehand, and it was ok. Among the buddies there is of course no hierarchy, and there is as much solidarity and mutual care as possible. The idea is that the buddy group can function both in solidarity with the main group, and as an autonomous cell. It is crucial that buddies take care of each other, know each others personal info and possible health or mental needs. Also crucial is that buddies discuss each others confrontation level. This level is not something that universally characterizes one person some people may have a day when they just dont feel like standing outside in the cold, and another day when they

would be over-excited. These things should be accepted and cared for. As a matter of fact, I discovered that among the buddies in particular, expressing and accepting emotions is the most important thing. Buddies are always attentive and open to each others feelings, and buddies always know exactly where their buddies are, if theyre not in the grourp. Usually, buddies follow the person with the lowest confrontational level, so if a person feels uncomfortable with a situation in an action and wants to leave, the buddies follow him or her. Nobody should be left alone. And nobody should be mocked or called names for wanting to leave the action. We are not heroes, and our buddies are not cowards or chickens. If we play the Lord Bravery by ourselves in an action we might endanger the others. I spent so much on buddy groups, because I find them the most important security and organizing thing to care about in a collective action. Buddies can stay safe, disperse easily, run for cover, decide quickly and consensually in emergency situations, and at the same time make the larger group work easier. This larger group is usually an affinity group. This means exactly that a bunch of people that have some affinity among them, whether they come from the same organization, or have the same political views, or are just very good friends. This affinity ensures that the people in the group have some common ground to stay and act together. Affinity groups should not be very big, and I found it useful sometimes that a larger group that planned an action together split into 2-3 smaller affinity groups. The smaller the group is, usually the easier it is to stay safe and decide quickly and consensually. The affinity group can be always easily dispersed in buddy groups in case of emergency, or in case that some people want to leave the action. In my experience, the affinity group uses hand signals

just like the general assemblies; it uses the huddle sign to get together in a close and closed circle where everybody is listened to, and decisions are made quickly and through consensus. Because there is affinity, and because there have been prior discussions and consensuses before the action, decisions are usually taken easily and people rarely veto. If a veto happens, the person has to decide on the course of action with her or his buddies. Other affinity group signs can be: following each other, running away as a group, alerting that there is a danger, disperse in buddy groups and meet at the agreed meeting point etc. Also for security reasons, we dont shout each others names out loud in a protest. There may be cameras and police everywhere, not to mention infiltrators or undercover cops. The way I witnessed the solution to this is to invent easily remembered names for the buddy group and for the affinity group. My groups had usually ridiculous names like kiwi or abba, but the idea is to have a name that is easily shouted, and that everybody in the group can recognize as their own. When we hear the name shouted, we get together and stay as one, and we take care of each other. Having buddies and affinity groups is also one of the ways (although theres never a sure one) to stay safe from infiltrators, since I mentioned them. There is a lot of writing about this topic[2], and fortunately, I have no experience with this issue. I just think that its good to be precautious, and a bit secretive, to talk about sensitive stuff only to people that we fully trust. It doesnt matter if this sensitive stuff is illegal or not; its of no use to give out our strategies and ideas to people that can use them against us. This also does not mean that we should be paranoid, and treat everyone in the group as a potential informer. I dont

think theres any recipe for this, and thats why its better to take care of ourselves as much as possible. Recently, social movements and street actions have been increasingly treated by the police and authorities as issues of terrorism. If you get arrested under a terrorist law, youre in deep shit. This also means that the authorities start to employ antiterrorist tools to deal with protesters. And this refers not only to the militarization of police making the cops look like turtles, as you were saying in Bucharest :). It refers to a lot of data gathering and processing, a lot of profiling, spying, and eavesdropping with the most state-of-the-art technologies. So watch out for your phones! They can record and transmit even when youre not using them. In the discussions before some actions, I was asked to switch my phone off, and put it in another room. Dont give out information to people you dont know, or you dont trust. Dont ask information from people that might get in trouble if they talk. Watch out for what you carry with you in a protest: personal data can be found in notebooks, photo cameras, cell phones, laptops etc. Always have the phone number of a lawyer, or someone that can help you if you get detained. Always carry a health kit, or at least some medicine (and Maalox), and water. Dont carry weapons or drugs, and dont carry stuff that has information about the others (like a note with a phone number, or a map with the meeting points). Pay attention to your internet activity! I cannot really emphasize this enough. Letting your full faces to be photographed in protests and tagged on Facebook is highly unsafe. Ask your friends to refrain from doing that, and try to avoid direct exposure to cameras, if you can (or wear a mask or scarf, while its still legal).

Dont boast and brag about your activism! This is, again, part of the whole were not heroes thing why would you have photos of you on the internet with a megaphone in your hand, or shouting at the police? Its not going to grant you celebrity, and its unsafe for you and your buddies. My advice is to keep a low profile, dont shine too much and stay modest. Victory will surely come; it may not be you personally who will bring it, but you will enjoy it even more when it comes.
[1] http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/the-paper/ [2] For example http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/securi ty.php or http://zinelibrary.info/securityculture-handbook-activists

blood... "Our blood"...who is it in fact - "us"... for the capitalists and politicians, real-estate agents, generals, and settlers, we are their platform for realising their damned visions of taking over the world. "Us" - slaves? Zeros? Oh no, first of Jews as we are reminded so often. And for us: "us" are also the capitalists and politicians, real-estate agents, generals and settlers, they're "us" too. Because first of all

The Hebrew Spring

Roi Alter From the French version of "The Internazional" (romantic but relevant): That's the outbreak of the end Let us erase the past Masses, slaves, rise up, rise up The world is about to change We are zeros, let's be everything This is the final struggle Let's unite, and tomorrow The internazional Will be the whole human kind Somehow it feels as if it has something to do with here, with last summer, the civilian protests, "the awakening": ..."masses, slaves, rise up..." And so rose up the slaves, 300,000 people went out of their homes on a Saturday night, like always in independence-days, sylvesters, or any other promise for a combined experience of unity, transcendence, and fun. Pier pasolini criticized the student protests in 68' because, among other claims, he didn't see authentic rage in them, such rage which can ignite revolutions. Here there wasn't any rage either - firm stand against an ENEMY - those sucking our

we are Jews. Communal, disconnected, forever persecuted, and being the eternal victim is our preffered prism for looking at the world, and hence for analyzing and understanding it. And that's why in our little ghetto we have true rage for example towards the orthodox-jews, the Hamass, some occasional pedofile, all of those who for real but for real jeopardize the state called Israel, which used to be socialist, and which there are still those, who think it's democratic. *The work includes plaster copies of the hands of the original Beit Haam group, who operated in the last stages of the tent protests, in a failed attempt to escalate them.

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