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FAI/ELF Communique For TV & Radio Blackout

fai/elf | 04.01.2013 12:00 | Other Press | Policing | Social Struggles

As part of the ongoing anarchist war for total liberation, we carried out a hit on the Bathampton radio and TV relay station. Fires were set at four points of the structures, and we left undisturbed. As a result of the sabotage, on top of causing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage, we regionally shut down all TV channels on Freeview as well as all national analogue and digital radio stations. Additionally it took down Vodaphone and other mobile networks, damaging police communications and other digital services. 80,000 homes and businesses in the area were affected.

The entertainment industry is an important tool to manipulate human behaviour. Without a steady supply of distractions it would be much harder to persuade people that their lives are satisfactory, to convince them to keep going to work or in whatever way to reproduce the system. So to deprive the network of the ability to offer this essential means of escape from chronic modern stress, anxiety, frustration and dissatisfaction is to undermine the smooth running of society, however temporarily.



There are many soft targets and many lo-tech methods available for us malcontents who gladly choose conflict over dispair. This gives rise to the prospect of rebellion with thousands of faces, with infinite reasons to blockade and destroy whatever stands between us and our goals. We want to experience harmony as a living planet, face to face encounter as intimate circles of proud and free-thinking individuals, and a chance to mould an existence filled with wild play and fierce joy. Our first response when faced with today's crushing domination and a subservient society will always be outbreaks of disorder, refusal and beauty.



Our comrades from far and wide who also carry this fight share our thoughts so closely that often their words could be ours. So when they are kidnapped and held far away from us our determination is only further fuelled. Following many actions in Italy the state has unleashed a wave of repression against anarchists and their projects (Operations Ardire, Mangiafuoco, Ixodidae, Thor...), some across borders, accusing some of attacks of the FAI (Informal Anarchist Federation) and raising a trophy for the media-judicial circus: Nicola Gai and Alfredo Cospito, who they claim are FAI / Olga Cell. But if the prosecutors thought for one minute that they had dismantled the group even in Italy with their operations, another cell soon proved them wrong with an attack on the banking system in the capital, followed by grid sabotage in Indonesia, gunshots in Mexico, liberations in Russia, bombing in Greece, mass arson in Argentina, to name but a few. The new anarchist guerrillas laugh in the faces of the powerful because the repression is only throwing petrol on the fires of the open leaderless resistance.



We are on the side of everyone who has burnt stuffy textbooks and taken the offensive to reanimate an anarchy that had turned to dust in so many throats. Any rebel's capture becomes yet another motive to strike, as we have before and will again, as a reminder of the social cost of their imprisonment.



This action carried out eight years to the day since Xosé Tarrio died in the cells (he was a dignified prisoner of Spain's FIES isolation units, against which a series of attacks last decade were later claimed by the first generation of the FAI), leaving his blood on the hands of the jailers, courts and cops.



FAI / ELF,

New Horizons of Burning Rage

fai/elf

Comments

Hide the following 11 comments

So it goes...

04.01.2013 13:28

One premise of insurrectionary anarchism is presumbably based on the notion of the rebel and all the poetry of a free life lived in the everyday here and now as far as you can go under present conditions.

The trouble is these communiques are so cliched and moralistic and simplistic that you wonder how poetic those who carry out these actions can really be:

"The new anarchist guerrillas laugh in the faces of the powerful because the repression is only throwing petrol on the fires of the open leaderless resistance. "

One more step, comrades, if we are to be revolutionaries.

Andy Capp


Please let this be a joke

04.01.2013 17:10

Can you idiots hurry up and blow yer hands off n go crying back to mater and pater so the rest of us can get on with convincing the general public that all anarchists aren't total fuckin anti-social numpties!?

Town End Boy


@Town End Boy

04.01.2013 19:40

like the public have ever given a fuck anyway or are about to give one.. sad but reality.

North


Public?

05.01.2013 00:06

Which public do you mean? Is that the general universalised public?

Andy C


What is this I don't

05.01.2013 00:06

I can't work out if this is serious or if it's a bunch of people who just wanted to have a bit of fun and are now putting some pretentious meaning to it. You carry on the good fight, I'm sure you'll gain some significance never.

Pisshead steve
mail e-mail: mitchaman@hotmail.com


yes

05.01.2013 01:14

the general universalised public.

North


Public 2

05.01.2013 11:41

The general universalised public is always such a great measure of complex realities - emotions, thoughts, conceptualisations, histories, memories, desires and so on.

Andy C


@Andy Capp

05.01.2013 15:32

Good post.

Grim up North


well done

05.01.2013 22:52

Great action. Well done obvioulsy not for all but resistance is furtile

ivor had enough


a few things we can learn...

06.01.2013 02:39

Tv/radio transmitters are great targets, its amazing what a bit of petrol can do, also sub stations, telephone relays, take note of this and fuck them the next time the youth are rioting, everyone will think the army has shit theyre pants.
meanwhile please drop the silted communiques, they look like theyre written by the Iranian secret police!

professor sensible


But.....

06.01.2013 10:31

A large part of the reason the youth riots were so well coordinated was that the youth harnessed the power of capitalist technology such as Blackberry Messenger etc.

Burn the wrong transmitter and you burn one of the primary organisational tools of the youth you referred to!

Also, Yeah, TV is propaganda, but forcing people not to have it does nothing to make that point. Many foods produced by capitalists lead to serious health problems, but would you go around snatching food from the hands if ordinary people to fight back against the capitalist that produced it.

The only way products will be 'ethical' is when they are created and distributed in a self managed, non-hierarchical way. I don't see how this action moves us any closer to that end

Town End Boy