“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
– Beyond Good and Evil
Background
We know that there is no eco-extremist tendency in Indonesia, although past statements from FAI cells tended to have some merit concerning the general hostility against the social and leftist anarchist moralities concerning violence, destruction, and the fetish of organization. To be honest, we don’t have illusions when we talk, write, or act against our enemy using any means possible. Attacking the state and capitalism is essential for anarchists of all tendencies (we’re going to ignore the pacifist tendency as it needs a different context of discussion), although this is a joint statement involving a wide range of tendencies of anarchists, most of us don’t have this nonsense liberal point of view toward violence against the system and the people who defend, maintain, and materalise it in everyday life. Some individuals in our network maintain their anti-civ and post-leftist stance while others found some aspects of social anarchism are necessary in organizing the disruption of the machine.
Our intention of this statement is to join the front against the eco-extremist tendency that has been given platform by the self-labeled ‘nihilist-anarchists’ in the US and Europe, from our sources we know that most of these individuals who endorse EE and keep continuing in giving them platform are using absurd reasoning and it’s post-modernist at best- we will discuss about this more below. It is funny though that most of the individuals in our network evolved from anti-civ and post-leftist discourses, even some of us have translated the writings of authors in AJODA: A Journal of Desire Armed (yes, including that boyfriend of ITS, Aragorn!). The critiques of the leftist movement have been useful in identifying the decadence of leftist populism in our territory, their dead-end strugglism and their social democratic tendency which aims to make “a more humanist capitalism,” therefore we find it obscure when the recent eco-extremists were using the terms “humanism”, “morality”, and even “sectarianism” in their absolutist communiques as if the corpse of Nechaev Jesuitism was resurfacing again.
Are We Storming the Same Heavens?
From their communiques and texts it is clear that most of these individuals don’t really have any actual experiences of consistent anarchic struggle in real life. Our experiences in whatever forms in our past actions have sometimes created a spontaneous solidarity with different tendencies of anarchists, where labels and dichotomies of adjectives were not that relevant. We found solidarity sometimes in the most unexpected way, even with those adherents of Murray Bookchin and those anarcho-syndicalists that we used to make jokes about. For us, this is a proof that when your fellow anarchists are fighting, for the ideas that you yourself also believed in but they were in a weak situation, then we cast aside all of our labels to divide each other and help each other out instead, because that’s what we really understand about being anarchists. Sure, there’s this never-ending drama, power struggle, and all of those aspects of the “movement” or “anarchist space” that the Eco-extremists seemed to be so proud in ridiculing (Anarchist Myth), like it had never been done before. The Eco-extremists were proclaiming that their holy sect doesn’t have such stupidity and they were composed of very dedicated individuals (priest-like posturing) who don’t share any of these weaknesses. It’s an almost superhuman characterization of themselves.