The Coming Insurrection

Some wonder what Michael Steele's "safe word" was.

Well, Bill Kristol says the Russians deserved the metro bombing, Ed Koch lambasts the Obama Administration for its mistreatment of Israel and Norman Podhoretz defends Sarah Palin. No wonder the world looks on us believes we're crazy. Because we are.

Glenn Beck said he had read a book he called "the most evil thing I have ever read." Since any book mentioned by Glenn Beck is bought for our local Barnes & Noble store, I thought I would check this out. Lo and Behold, I discover my old friends of Semiotext(e), which publishes French anarchist philosphers who use their precise Cartesian logic to argue the most balmy things. Their best title was "Why the Gulf War Never Happened", which proved beyond any reasonable doubt--as long as you bought their logic--that it really didn't happen. I love reading their titles because it cleanses my mental palate.

The title of the most "evil book" is The Coming Insurrection, written by the Invisible Committee. As the blurb on the back warns," It's useless to wait--for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides."

I suppose Beck believes this is an ultra-left manifesto that the progressive democrats are going to adopt. Unfortunately for the authors, the French authorities arrested them on November 11,2008, in the village of Tarnac. They have been accused of 'criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity on the grounds that they were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on France's national railways. Although only circumstantial evidence has been presented against the nine, the French Interior Minister has publically associated them with the emergent threat of an "ultra-left" movement, taking care to single out The Coming Insurrection as a "manual for terrorism".

The book begins with a new chapter penned by the men from prison concerning the continued world crisis.They talk about the youth forming communes to confront the state and other fun things some of us remember. While the called themselves "Communists", it's clear from the book they are anarchists and deliberately mock the idea of organization and institutions as instruments of social control.

Good luck if you want to use this book to launch terrorist attacks. The book reads as if it's written by smart Yippies, who also were smart. Who can ever forget the great Yippie campaign button "Papoose for Not Insane"?

No wonder this stuff sends Beck over the wall. Take this" The West is a civilization that has survived all prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. ..the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form."

They have long riffs on the meaning of all the riots in France that burned the cars and how the only reality is the MP-3 player and changing your interior reality by altering the playlist. They sound like they would be a great rock band.

I leave you with this passage:

"There is no 'clash of civilizations'. There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet's atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own "values", and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart,deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the "It all depends on your point of view";it's the eye-rolling or wounded indignation at anyone's who's stupid, primitive or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it's found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can base itself for long on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure."

Ah,to be young again! Hope the authors get out of jail soon. They have a bright future.