What in the hell …

(Lights up. Our protagonist types frantically, trying to maximize the efficacy of the openness provided by the whiskey- and amaretto-sours before their total, and ultimately stultifying, effect kicks in.) And why is it on my mind so much lately? For some reason this has been on my mind. My friends Colin and Tzuchien and I proposed a panel for the SEP conference themed “What is Terror?”. I’ll say more about this later. I’ve also been checking out loads of books about the Years of Lead in Italy, with the Red Brigades and the government sponsored terror as well, and about Argentina with similar issues. I don’t know why I find it all so compelling, certainly not out of any romanticism of armed groups. Jon post recently on political violence (I would link to it but for some reason I can’t get his blog page to load, computer trouble on my end, or something strange on his?), I’d be keen to hear more of his thoughts.

One of the books I got out is State of Fear by Andrew Graham-Yooll, an Argentine journalist in the 70s. I’ve only just started it. There’s a scene where he meets Mario Roberto Santucho, leader of the armed group the PRT-ERP, the People’s Revolutionary Army connected with the Revolutionary Workers Party. (incidentally, Santucho is the father of one of the members of the Colectivo Situaciones, my friend Mario, which makes this all much closer to home at an emotional level for some reason, though he and I have communicated very little about this). In a sporadic series of posts I plan to compile what I know about Santucho, to lay out me and my pals reflections (and on my part primarily word-games) on terror and related concepts of panic (I’ve already laid out some of the products of our discussion on emergency), and to think about memories and histories, legacies of all this stuff. For instance, in Argentina there’s the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers whose children were disappeared during the genocide, and the group H.I.J.O.S. (which means ‘children’), children of people disappeared, often ‘movement’ people. H.I.J.O.S. started the ‘escrache’, a mode of, for lack of a better term, popular justice. The Mothers and later the HIJOS, I’m told (by Raul Zibechi, primarily, whose book I’ve been taking way, way too long to translate) played a critical role in political recomposition in Argentina. (My friend Sebastian Touza and I translated a piece co-written by Situaciones and el Grupo de Arte Callejero which at one point was to appear at the exargentina.org website. I can’t find it now. If it doesn’t turn up I’ll post a copy here.) I may also start compiling some thoughts on Che Guevara, another figure I know very little about. I’ve been hostile to El Che for quite some time, as in my experience he’s been basically only one of the flags unfurled by many a lefty I hate, both in the abstract ideological “I disagree with your line on …” sense and in the personal “you’re an asshole and you fucked up this thing I care about” sense. At the same time, Che has a different meaning for some people I care about and respect, and I want to understand that meaning even if I may still not get onboard with some of the idea (Mario has described Situaciones, for instance, as Guevarist - or there’s El Mate, about which I’ve written a tiny bit in in my notes the translation of the Manifesto of the Network of Alternative Resistance, posted August 24, 2005, who were - among other things - the main ground out of which Situaciones formed).