The day before the European and national elections. 24th of May 2014. The circus of opinions and the incessant bombardment of lies and promises is coming to an end. The voter is getting ready to do his duty as a citizen. He is complaining, that’s beyond doubt. He is complaining that politicians don’t have ideas anymore, that they are all the same, that they are one big mafia. But still he goes to the ballot box. But still he will choose his master and give his approval that everything may continue as before. And so he becomes an accomplice of the politicians. And so he becomes also the enemy of those who reject this whole circus, who refuses to still have masters or bosses, left or right, corrupted or “honest”. He becomes our enemy, the enemy of those who fell in love with freedom.
The day before the elections. During the night, in Wavre, an huge transmission tower antenna of the French public television and radio RTBF is put on fire. The arson provokes a total black out of several radio stations, some digital television broadcasts are disrupted. In the province of Brabant Wallon and in the south of Brussels, the whole mobile phone and mobile internet network of the company Base is down, because the tower antenna also functioned as a knot between tens or even hundreds of mobile phone antennae. Elsewhere, in Veltem-Beisem close to the city of Leuven, in Flemish Brabant, another transmission antenna is hit, this time belonging to the Flemish public television and radio VRT, also arson. There, some radio stations are disrupted. So, on the night before the elections, on the day of the elections, hundreds of thousands of people were for once sheltered from the data bombardment, of the frenzy of modern communication which is nothing but alienation, of the mind control the powerful are realizing through their apparatuses of propaganda.
The day of the elections, we were all supposed to be listening to the voice of the master, reaching us through the internet, the television and the radio. We were supposed to speak all day long about the results of the elections. But maybe, thanks to these sabotage acts, some might have spoken about something different, who knows. Sabotage provokes a rupture, a crack in the normality. Something which wasn’t supposed to happen. Something abnormal. It’s not strange then to see the administrator of the RTBF declaring that “When a media is attacked, it is bad for everyone. I think somebody wanted to send a disgusting signal.” Disgusting? For who? Disgusting is the word we would rather reserve for the elections circus, for the world in which we are living, for the spectacle by which power assures itself of the assent of its subjects by presenting it as a “choice”. Disgusting are the media who brainwash, the journalists who transmit the voice of power and legitimize all atrocities committed in the name of power, from war to total poisoning of the environment and the murders by the cops. Disgusting is that we are living in a time where the communication means are omnipresent, but where nobody any longer knows how to communicate, to dialogue, to discuss, to reflect, because everybody is repeating what the machines and the screens are saying to them.
The anarchists are enemies of all authority, be it statist, capitalist or patriarchal. They are for freedom and against slavery. But they are not stupid. They know that authority is not only the politicians, the capitalists and the leaders. It is also those who obey, those who consent to be exploited, and those who follow orders. Even if we will never put on the same level those who exert and those who undergo authority, those who possess the industries and those who are being exploited in the factories, those who wear the uniform and those who are forced to respect them, we will not stop saying that the only way to emancipate is to start to fight, is to break the cohabitation between masters and slaves.
We are probably many asking ourselves. How come that after centuries of oppression and exploitation, the capitalist system and the state power still seem in good health? Why haven’t they been eradicated from the surface of the earth, thrown into the gutter like all rot? Many attempts were made, attempts of insurrection and social revolution. But today, we have to acknowledge the fact that domination has managed to include a vast majority of the exploited themselves. Through the fetishism of consumption, generalized numbness, the decentralization and thus the spread of power to all spheres of human life, capital and state seem, for the moment, to manage to block off any horizon other than the reproduction of the existent. This reproduction, the social reproduction of domination, is probably the principal target of the revolutionary intervention today. If sometimes riots may erupt, a discontent may express itself in the streets, virulent reactions may happen against yet another crime of power, the question is to aim further, deeper, more fundamental: it is about targeting what is supposed to guarantee “the normal way of things”.
To return to the sabotages of the transmission antennae of the RTBF and the VRT, we believe they provide some important indications concerning the struggle methods to use and the possible domains of intervention. If the technological world is instilling permanently, 24h/24, resignation and acceptance of our “place” in society, the place of sheep who consume, work and obey; this world depends also of very numerous structures, spread out all around us, and which are quite easy to attack. And no military force or tight surveillance could ever protected them efficiently.
To provoke a short circuit in the daily life of numbness and exploitation means to crack the layer of concrete which is crushing us all. No waiting for a magical moment where “the people” will take conscience of their situation and take out on the streets; waiting only plays the game of domination, which day after day is building and consolidating, as well on a material level (new prisons, new police stations, new industries, new control networks) as on a mental level (brainwashing, deleting of the very idea of revolt, reduction of life to commodity). From out of the cracks the rebels will know how to provoke, another horizon might arise, a horizon of freedom and social revolution.
//Hors Service, anarchist paper, n° 45, Brussels//
