Portugês
O jornal mural anarquista “Blasphegme” encontra-se a hibernar
Como alguns/mas poderão ter reparado, o jornal Blasphegme fez uma pausa. A razão é que sou eu sózinha a fazê-lo e decidi voar para longe da gaiola cinzenta em que me encontrava. partindo a vagabundear, procurando por um pouco de beleza, de alegria, de cumplicidade, calma, aventura e reconforto.
Talvez um dia eu escreva um texto sobre as violências que me empurraram para o espaço aberto de Paris, sobre o desgosto e o desapontamento que sinto em relação a um meio anarquista que protege e dá razão aos agressores, sobre o quão duro é existir num ambiente que reconhece apenas os grandes discursos, o carisma, e que destila as hipocrisias, as manipulações autoritárias; sobre o quão difícil é existir enquanto anarquista no feminino, num ambiente que tem dificuldade em aceitar que uma companheira é capaz de pensar e agir por conta própria, sem que de nenhum homem dependa.
Fazer este jornal era uma blasfémia contra estes autoritários que acreditam ter uma qualquer influência sobre o meio, era para lhes mostrar que há indivíduxs que funcionam sem a sua benção (e sem se ajoelhar perante eles), sem pertencer a um clã ou outro,
sem defender as suas capelinhas e ideologias esclerosadas. Também estava a tentar fazer
algo apesar de tudo, em pequena escala, contribuindo para espalhar ideias que me são caras enquanto ser individual. Porque não somos todos iguais na “afinidade”, que depende principalmente da capacidade de socialização uns dos outros mas também de sermos gregários e do amiguismo. Aqueles que não se sentem em seu lugar nesta sociedade, por várias razões, também são encontrados nas margens desses pequenos ambientes que afirmam funcionar de forma diferente da sociedade, considerando que este não é o caso. E este artigo deveria mostrar que mesmo em situações de isolamento (desejado ou não), sempre se pode fazer algo … um jornal, mas muitas outras coisas mais interessantes de acordo com os meios de cada um, desejos, energia, etc.
Agradeço aos raros companheiros que me ajudaram a colocar Blasphegme na rua, que me encorajaram, que fizeram revisão. Vocês deram-me energia quando eu não a tinha e permitiram que não desistisse nos momentos difíceis em que eram os únicos ao meu lado.
Pode ser que Blasphegme reapareça nas paredes, talvez mude de língua, de formato, etc. Quem sabe… neste momento Blasphegme está a hibernar.
English
translated by Insurrection News
Anarchist Street Bulletin ‘Blasphegme’ is Taking a Break
As some may have noticed, the newspaper Blashpegme has been put on hold. The reason is that I was doing it by myself, and I decided to fly away from the gray cage I was in, and to go wandering, to seek a little beauty, joy, complicity, calm, adventure and comfort.
Perhaps one day I will write a text regarding the violence that has pushed me to take off from Paris, on the disgust and disappointment I feel in relation to an anarchist milieu that protects and justifies the aggressors, on how hard it is to exist in an environment that recognizes only the big mouths, the charismatic ones, and which distils hypocrisies, manipulations, and authoritarians; and how it is to exist as an anarchist woman, in an environment that has difficulty accepting that a comrade is capable of thinking and acting on their own without any man to depend on.
To make this journal was a blasphemy against those authoritarians who believed that they had any influence on the environment, it was to show them that there are individuals who function without their blessing (and without kneeling before them), and without belonging to one clan or another, without defending their small chapels and rigid ideologies. It was also an attempt to do something in spite of everything, on a small scale, trying to help spread ideas that are dear to me while being alone. Because we are not all equal in ‘affinity’, which relies mainly on the capacity for socialization with each other, but also on gregariousness and cronyism. Those who do not feel they have a place in this society, for various reasons, and find themselves on the margins of those small circles who claim to function differently from society, whereas this is not the case. And this paper was meant to show that even in situations of isolation (wanted or not) one can always do something…a newspaper, many interesting things, depending on the means of each person, desires, energy etc.
I thank the few comrades who helped me to paste up Blasphegme in the streets, who encouraged me and did proofreading. You gave me energy when I did not have any and you helped me to not give up in the difficult moments when you were the only ones at my side.
Maybe Blasphegme will reappear on the walls, maybe it will change language, format, etc. Who knows…for now Blasphegme hibernates.
Translations made by Bordered by silence
Two texts from Blasphegme #4, a mural journal that started appearing around Paris on April 4. The first text is an individualist rejection of electoralism and the society that goes with it and the second is a brief round up of attacks against electoral infrastructure in the month before its publication.
I don’t vote!
I don’t vote. Because I don’t want to choose a master, to choose who will decide in my place what’s right for me, who will force me to respect their choices, who will present those choices as my own. I don’t want the majority to determine the conditions of my servitude, I don’t want to the cattle to build the fences that enclose them and select those who will rule over me as well, regardless of what I think.
I don’t vote because I don’t want the world they force on us. I don’t recognize the idea of the nation, of peoples, or of citizenship, because states always manage to construct identities that give the illusion of a unified population. My nationality, the language I speak, and the colour of my skin in no way determine who I am, and I don’t recognize the borders of the state in which chance saw me born. In the same way, I don’t want to hear about any “common good”, because I don’t want to be part of any community – I don’t want to be bound to anyone and I want to choose those with whom I build my life.
I don’t vote because I don’t want to give power to the hypocrites who present themselves as something they’re not, trying to nourish our illusions to the point where waking from them is painful. I don’t want a world where I’m just a pawn in a chess game played between cunning strategists who use my credulity to trample my individuality in service of their sly interests, in their frenzied quest for power and domination.
I don’t vote because I want to live in a world without masters or slaves. And such a desire will never fit into a ballot box. Instead, I want to take charge of my life and push myself to create it while revolting against the existing order and the misery it imposes on lives everywhere.
I will never abdicate my freedom!
Rather revolt than the passivity of the vote!
Warming up
Just like how some good citizens have the tradition to go put their ballot in the box every five years, there’s also an enduring tradition of attack against the sad electoral circus. Here’s a summary:
Talence: The Médoquine centre, where Emmanuel Macron was scheduled for March 9, was vandalized in the night. Several windows, notably the entryway, were destroyed. The damage was serious and slogans were written on the walls of the concert hall.
Alençon: On March 18, at the windows on the National Front office were broken using a metal barrier that typically serves to “hold back the crowd” and the office was seriously damaged by a fire.
Grenoble: The office of the Republican party received a little night-time visit on March 21. Its front windows were broken, the furniture and electronics damaged, and slogans were painted in red on the walls. On January 21, the Socialist Party’s had their turn for a nocturnal visit.
Montpellier: At the end of March, the offces of the Socialist Party and the National Front showed the signs of how they’re despised.
Nantes: The regional assembly was repainted in grey by the Laughing Painters Network in time for François Fillon’s visit.
Rennes: During a political meeting of the Republicans in a bar on March 30, those in attendance were sprayed with urine and fish soup.
Bordeaux: In response to a meeting by the National Front, a demonstration took place on April 2nd. Windows were broken along the route and tags were left on the walls. One particular tag’s stood out for this announcement:
April 23 riots everywhere
[And there were…]
Texts from the second issue of Blasphegme, pasted up around Paris in December 2016
War among the poor
This summer, a man died after he was the target of a racist attack. We might be surprised not to have heard this mentioned by the professionals of the anti-racist cause, leaving the state and its representatives to take the lead. And if the irritating demand for “truth and justice” was not made, we can be sure it wasn’t for a good reason. On the one hand, the professional anti-racists ignored this story and on the other, associations from the so-called “Chinese community” took advantage to draw lines between groups of people, while the state was happy to play the anti-racist card, going so far as to inaugurate a plaque in honour of this man a few weeks ago.
Those who have always sought to oppose racism without trying to make a profession of it recognize that all the various waves of immigrants (and not just them) have experienced the racism latent in a large part of the population (immigrant or not). It seems ironic, then, that the “anti-racist” ideology (and here we don’t mean the state, who during this same time is forcing out migrants in Paris and Calais) only takes into consideration certain expressions of racism, while leaving aside others. As if some deaths and assaults were more serious than others, some racisms and discriminations more serious than others.
As well, we remember the demonstration for “safety” that took place on June 20, 2010 in Belleville, (with the intention of showing that the “chinese community” was fed up with being the preferred target of assaults and theft), which transformed into a race riot. The demonstrators were calling for more “safety”, more police measures to protect them, but went on to scapegoat some youth on the basis of their clothing and skin colour as being thieves. It was simply a racist and reactionary riot, there’s nothing more foul.
In the face of demands like these for “safety”, we can only repeat there that are already too many cops and cameras in the streets (and that there are any at all is too much), and that those who call for the cages that hold us to be made smaller are pushing in the same direction as the state. In the same way, the “night patrols” created in Aubervilliers, made up of “citizens”, remind us of the “good citizen” militias, like the “neighbourhood watch” programs that want to see social peace reign and who supplement the many cameras and cops already present. Soon, they’ll ask to start carrying guns to defend “their neighbourhood” and to shoot anyone who looks like a threat, in the same way that others seek to rob “rich people”, going by nothing but their physical appearance. Nothing better to push us towards a civil war, with different communities killing each other, to the glee of the state as this war of all against all replaces the social war.
The problem isn’t “safety”. The problem is to view society as made up of communities, seen as homogeneous groups, without taking into account social differences, without thinking of whether people have status or not or of those who are exploiters and those who are exploited. The problem is to think it’s normal that people divide themselves up into “races”, nations, religions, skin colours, or geographic origins: to see people who come from China (or anywhere) as “others” and to treat them differently or attack them for this reason.
The problem is the war among the poor: to steal from your neighbour who’s struggling, who is also exploited, rather than go a few kilo meters away to rob those who get rich of the backs of the exploited, be they Chinese, North African, French, Portugese, Congolese…
We don’t want to choose between falling back on community divisions (and the appearance of civil war) and a “safety” managed by the state. We want to develop as individuals, in a world without cops and without communities.
Against Racism and the Tyranny of Safety!
Let’s respond to this social cannibalism by attacking those responsible for our misery!
The Daily Beep
Beep, when we get on the metro with our transit pass. Beep when we enter our workplace. Beep when we check out at a university or school cafeteria (where sometimes, instead of a card, we use our palm prints). Beep when we got to the library. Beep when we enter our building.
When we aren’t beeping, we’re typing away on our smartphones, our tablets, or on a computer keyboard. Not a second of the day passes without interacting with these technologies, that have taken the place of face to face interactions, leaving us with virtual contact by social network, and in reality, each in our cold solitude.
We’ve almost forgotten that when we want to talk with someone, we can got to their place and knock on the door. We’ve almost forgotten what it means to communicate in person, with emotions, laughter, or anger that can be read on our faces, in the tone of our voice, or in the trembling of our hands. We’ve almost forgotten that not so long ago these machines weren’t part of our lives, that we weren’t closed into these digital worlds that take more and more control over our days, that people lived, loved, communicated, and kept up to date on the news without these invasive technologies.
Sometimes in the metro, we feel like intruders, as one of those rare individuals not absorbed by their little screen and headphones, oblivious to the people around them. By folding in on ourselves in this way, we don’t even notice how society is changed by these technologies. For instance, in jail, in school, on the borders, and in some workplaces, biometrics are now routine (fingerprints, shape of the hand, facial features, the network of ocular veins…). We will have to be creative to counter systems of control that are so omnipresent in our lives and whose work is made easier by the new Secure Electronic Identity database, that will be a centralized depository of biometric data on everyone with a passport or a national identity card. And add to this the cameras in the streets, the GPS in smartphones and cars, electronic monitor bracelets, and a swarm of other machines just waiting to be launched in this lucrative market.
The walls close in little by little, with everyone more or less accepting this overarching policing in their daily lives. We even forget that it won’t kill us to unplug (not even socially) and that the celebrated “neutrality” of technology doesn’t exist; we have already forgotten our ways of interacting, communicating, and thinking. Most of us are reduced to serving machines, fundamentally alienated in every sphere of life.
And if we relearned how to live without these machines? What if we cut the virtual cord and reconnected with each other, weaving complicities in person to fill the void created by our atomisation? We could reconnect with time, space, and each other, everything that the cold interaction with machines has pushed to the background.
What if we openly blaspheme against the religion of connectivity? What if we storm this much-vaunted technological heaven, but that seems more like a science-fiction nightmare?
What if we destroy the machines…
______________________________________________________
[From the first issue of Blasphegme: An anarchist broadsheet on the walls of Paris. It’s been getting pasted up around the city in the past month. The biggest difficulty faced by anarchist counter-info projects is often distribution — how to get texts into the hands of people who will be interested in them? Using posters as a way of distributing long-format texts has definitely been tried before, either by connecting to a website or by keeping things short enough to fit, but it’s an interesting idea that’s worth experimenting with more.]
Introduction
“I spit on your idols, I spit on your gods, I spit on the homeland […] I spit on your flags, I spit on capital and the golden calf, I spit on all religions: they’re jokes, I don’t give a shit about them, I don’t give a damn. They only exist because of you, leave them and they’ll fall apart.
You’re resigned, but you’re a force — you don’t even know it, but you’re a force nonetheless, and I cannot spit on you, I can only hate you… or love you. Beyond all my other desires, I want to see you shaken from your resignation in a terrible awakening into life. There is no future paradise, there is no future, there is only the present.”
Albert Libertad, To the Resigned, 1905
Blasphegme: A neologisme designating a blasphemy delivered in the form of spit (or phlegm) on all religions, whether monotheist or polytheist, whether the religion of the state or of capital, the religion of work or of the ego.
The blasphegme spits in the face of all gods and of all prophets, with no distinction between the various collective delusions that poison us, that keep us in awe of a higher power before which we must kneel.
The blasphegme is the individual expression of non-resignation in the face of a society that leaves us no time to breathe, using the power dynamics between individuals to keep the cattle calm, too busy competing and acting out our frustrations, products of lives that have known only the coercion of laws made to regulate social life.
This journal aims to agitate, to spread anarchist ideas, to spread seeds of subversion in a daily life as boxed-in as graph paper.
We’re not trying to teach, rather we hope to spark debates on the ideas that matter to us and that seem essential for any individual seeking to liberate themselves, here and now, from all that shackles that keep us from soaring high.
Emmaüs: Profiting off misery
Four people will be appearing in appeals court on October 3 in Paris, following some events in the summer of 2015 in a shelter operated by Emmaüs on rue Pernety in the 19th arrondissement. A group of migrants, sick of the scorn of this charitable organization that makes money off their situation, decided to block the entrance of the building with the help of a few others acting in solidarity. Like a good charity, Emmaüs called the cops, crying about illegal confinement, which lead to one migrant and three supporters being held in investigative detention before being released on bail and later being handed a four-month conditional sentence, plus fines, in October 2015.
To be clear, Emmaüs is the company put in charge of the migrant issue by Paris city hall, taking over the sites that the government sets up and working to prevent all struggle, sorting and dispersing migrants, or even collaborating in their incarceration in detention centres.
But Emmaüs is also known for its charitable work. It manages a big block of rent-controlled housing in Ile-de-France (1) and there too is known for its desire to force poor people into ever greater misery in order to make a profit. Kicking out tenants, raising rents… usual speculator tactics. That said, we know this organization mostly for its “communities” where they exploit homeless people, called “companions”, offering them shelter and a meal in place of a wage. The strict rules can see “companions” thrown out in the middle of winter if they’re suspected of not obeying. As well, let’s remember that the Emmaüs stores depend on the work of “companions” and make a profit by selling donated or scavenged stuff to poor people.
For this reason, Emmaüs deserves to join the Vultures of Misery club, alongside The Red Cross, France Land of Refuge, the Salvation army, and all the other humanitarian organizations that prosper on the backs of the poor.
The party’s already over?
(excerpt from a poster seen in the streets of Paris these past months)
We’ve had a good time running through the streets these past months, trying to subvert our existing lives and these modern, sanitized cities, these showpieces of capitalism and the society of control.
We didn’t give a shit about this law, just like the results of a presidential election or of a football match, because we don’t want to work, period. We don’t accept our exploitation, whether or not its facilitated by this law.
So why wait for the next “movement” to have fun, when all we have to do is to continue what we started these past months? Why should we each return to our own isolation, submerged in the various alienations that distract us from our self-destructive boredom and loneliness, when we’ve seen that so many of us want to attack the existing world? This society tries to break us down a little more each day, and to frighten away those who have decided they can no longer accept this comedy, no longer blindly follow the union march and the marching orders of good citizens, no longer accept states of emergency, or, for that matter, any states at all.
We have discovered, or rediscovered, what it means to run across the pavement, to play in spaces where policing controls our every movement. We knew that this society of misery depended on our servitude, and our fear of cops, but we’ve learned that we are strong enough to overturn it, that they can’t prevent us from playing like wild children who destroy everything they pass.
We’re off to such a good start, let’s not trade any piece of the present for a fictional tomorrow, and let’s not surrender anything of this moment for the winds of the future!
Solidarity with all those arrested these past months!
Some summer notes
This summer, some sparks of revolt flickered here and there, sending a clear message to power that attack against the established order doesn’t take vacations!
The riot is the most beautiful street art … The art festival on Aurillac street happens each summer and, like last year, took a rather subversive turn. Following a collective refusal by some people to be searched at the entrance to the festival, some cheerful revellers tried to change the tone of the party and to spread their hatred of this society among those in attendance.
Tags against fundamentalists … Twice in July and August in Besançon, anti-religious tags were thrown up on the walls of buildings belonging to a catholic fundamentalist organization, known for its actions against abortion and contraception. Here’s a small selection of the messages left for these religious reactionaries: “Down with robes, up with rubbers”, “No gods no masters” and “Catholic Fascists, out of our lives”(2).
The MEDEF deprived of golf … In Chailly-sur-Armaçon, in Côte d’Or, the golf course that was going to host a tournament for members of the MEDEF (3) was trashed. Two banners were left behind, reading “Done playing” and “200 € = one round of golf or one month of misery”
…and all the rest. We don’t have enough space here to list all the other attacks carried out over the holidays, but we’ve observed that everywhere it’s the cops, the offices of political parties (the Socialist Party, the National Front) (4), banks, schools, journalists, etc who take the blows of those whose hatred of this society is not held back by summer.
Notes
1) The province that contains Paris
2) Two of these slogans rhyme in french: the first one, capote (skullcap) rhymes with calotte (condom) ; in the third one, the expression uses abbreviations, “cathos fachos”
3) The acronym translates as the Mouvement for French Business, it’s a lobby group for bosses, very influential
4) The socialist party (partie socialiste, PS) is currently in power. The National Front (Front National, FN) is a far-right party