These destructors and their depraved controlling minds think they’re onto a “win-win”. With specific intelligence they may, and sometimes do, disrupt our activities directly, they can try to fragment us by sowing dissention, as Marcos apparently attempted, but if / when they are discovered they rely on us self-destructing through recrimination, mutual suspicion and internecine squabbling.

Is that’s what’s going to happen now? Is it fuck! Let’s not do that, eh..

So this is a call to arms
This is a call to legs
This is a call to brains

Sure, we have analysis to carry out and lessons to learn. Much of that is not going to happen on IM for Hugh Ordure and his ilk to lap up, so this is not a call to arseholes. It’s highly unlikely the last infiltrator has been rooted out, and there are bound to be new ones. How can we improve security whilst remaining open, because we have nothing to be ashamed of and everything to win?

It would be easy to get depressed in the current situation, to think we can’t trust anybody, to wonder if we can really achieve anything, to lose our future-orientation and determination to fight for the only planet we’ve got and for it to be free from all exploitation and oppression.

Paradoxically, a strong antidote to that and an important enhancement of security would be for us to trust and cherish each other more, to know ourselves and our comrades better, whilst being open to new people, new ideas and new inspiration. Above all, we need to discuss and understand our politics more deeply in a context where we’re never going to agree with each other about everything, but are bound together by a commitment to action, and to informing our ideas by, through and during what we do.

It’s significant that so many people who were close to Flash Mark, and shared many ventures, many stresses and many good times with him, now say things like “..but I never really had a political discussion with him”. We have been too readily infiltrated by taking our politics as read, or as signified by mere cultural superficialities.

Could the likes of Flash have remained unsuspected for so long if we’d had a more analytical and consciously transformative politics of direct action, without slipping into exclusivity or “right on” doctrine? Would he have been sussed much sooner against such a background? Not everyone has thought through their politics with equal clarity, of course, and some people are more instinctive than intellectual in their approach, but I can’t help feeling that Mark Kennedy’s fundamental motivations were never apparent because we don’t talk about such things as often or in such depth as we need to..


REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

Many not to be, of course. On the shit side, there’s apparently people in Ireland who were sent down for possessing stuff Mark had supplied to them. People and networks in other countries may have been compromised. There needs to be a reckoning of all such damage and what, if anything, can now be done to repair it.

But on the jammy sandwich side, the powers of darkness have tripped over each other big time. The disruption, disintegration, unwelcome exposure and mutual recrimination frenzy they’ve managed to cause themselves is massive and will go on for some time. NPOIU, NETCU and their seedy mates are now hanging morosely round the Shit Creek Paddle Shop and may soon find the stock exhausted. We can also be quietly satisfied, though not complacent, that of the three infiltrators now confirmed (or virtually so in the case of Marcos), two of them came under heavy suspicion and disappeared. Only in the case of Kennedy was a stroke of luck required.

Certainly, there’s many bad aspect to all this, not least the hurt and distress some people are going through. But it’s not all bad by any means. We’re used to thinking and moving quicker than the cops on the streets and in the fields, to shifting, adapting and improvising while they stand around waiting to be told what to do. It’s one of our strengths, so let’s use it now and turn chaos into opportunity. Let’s fashion renewal and improvement out of Sir Hugh’s ordure.


P.S. The above is not the answer to everything. It’s meant to be just a start, and this may not be the best place to continue it.