The Strait: Book of Obenabi. His Songs
by Fredy Perlman

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/...the-strait

A Note to the Reader:

An early death kept Fredy Perlman from finishing the two-volume account of Robert Dupre’s forebears who lived on the Strait and in the surrounding woodlands. In both volumes, "Book of Obenabi. His Songs” and "Book of Robert Dupre. His Tales,” narrators recount familiar historic events as individuals indigenous to the region might have experienced them.

Fredy intended to present The Strait as texts written down by Obenabi’s nephew, Robert Dupre, in the 1850s. In 1851 Obenabi presumably told (or sang) his narrative to Dupre in Detroit’s prison hospital, uncle and nephew having been jailed as conspirators who opposed construction of a railroad across Michigan.

In addition to Obenabi’s songs, Robert Dupre was to be credited with preserving the tales of his aunt Wabnokwe. This history purports to be based on journals Obenabi’s sister kept throughout her life, and it constitutes Book II of The Strait. As a French-speaking resident of Detroit, Dupre wrote both narratives in French.

Fredy planned to present himself as the translator of Dupre’s manuscripts. His ostensible link to the text was through Ted Nasibu, a twentieth-century "rememberer” who was a fellow-printer at the Detroit Printing Co-op on Michigan Avenue. Both Ted and his friend Tissie appear in an earlier Black & Red publication, Letters of Insurgents. Through Tissie, Ted became acquainted with Robert Avis, Tissie’s cousin and Dupre’s great-grandson.

The Prologue situates Avis in a hospital bed in 1984. The surroundings combined with his anguish transport him to his great-grandfather’s side as the latter listens to his uncle Obenabi in 1851. At the beginning of Chapter 1, Obenabi, who also carries the name Jacob Burr-net, is recounting the experiences of his thirty-second year, events which occurred in 1826.

This volume of The Strait was essentially complete at the time of Fredy’s death in 1985 but a few minor changes were appropriate. In Chapter 9, I used Fredy’s outline to write some missing paragraphs. A few inconsistancies remain, but I hope they are minor.

With some misgivings, I have added the chronological dates on the right-hand pages. Although each page of Fredy’s manuscript mentions the year in which the events occurred, I doubt that he planned to include them when publishing the book. I feel they aid the reader in situating the story so have retained them.

Fredy did intend to append a glossary, but the rudimentary one provided here is mine, not his.
John Ricklefs designed the cover.

The photos are by Frank Jackson.

Lorraine Perlman March 1988

An educational documentary from the early 1950s on a group of Aboriginies in Arnhem Land:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNIPXa5USZE

Oh how kooky things are getting.
  Technology is our problem. We all know this,right ? Maybe a reminder of tactics by the controllers while keeping in mind what tech is now capable of.
   There are folks online(for now) writing from the heart,like myself. There are also scum out there that are looking to deceive,entice and help paint a big ol' bullzeye on you. What you say, can, and will be used against you ? Maybe this will hold true in a really big,surprising way some day. But who's keeping track of what we're saying ? Better question is: Who or what is enticing us to openly (online is in the open) declare ourselves as dissidents ?
   Here's another question: If you've been able to realize and grasp what the ultimate goal is for the controllers, do you think for a moment that they're not going to use the internet (and multitudes of other techs) to find and destroy everyone in opposition to them ? 
  We've let the problem go for quite a while now. Ted told us it will get harder. We need to focus OFFLINE. I hope we can find a way to collaborate with local friends without the net. I think it is time to prioritize.
  Talking of rabbits and mushrooms and the wilds is my pleasure too, but this is no time for that. I also don't care what's on TV. Havn't watched for 5 years. Info,intell,tactics is all we should be interested in. With that said, I like Jacobi's site: Wild Will Project. Lot's of good info. 
   Is Jacobi the real deal ? I like to think so, but I will not trust the internet with making my judgement. Nor will I trust the net for accusations against certain people.
  With THAT said, we can remember what the controllers are capable of, in the form of an example,when they team up with occult members.
    Maybe some of you are familiar with the "Free State Project" in NH ? Well, there's an offshoot of this called the "Shire Society". A thirty-something from FL. decided he needed to come to NH to "promote freedom". I've become familiar with their forum and have created a theory. ONLY A THEORY. At the same time I don't give a shit about these technophile/bitcoiners either way. Here is an interesting link on Ian Freeman of the "Shire Society"  
https://thelastbastille.wordpress.com/20...rken-rose/
    Here is another link on informants and infiltration tactics used by CIA. http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/Vortex.htm
You do the math.
  I have faith in bringing it all down. I love the wilds,mountains.  I think the internet,will deceive us in uncanny ways soon. 
   Bottom line is trust. Beware of the internet.
I'll be in the Northeast Mtns. with the boreal chckadees. Fuck the system.
               Hoot

There is something which stuck in my head that I read many years ago. It was either Zerzan or Bob Black who wrote something which included the line 'Marx thought age 9 was a good time to start work'.

At the time when I read it many years ago, it sounded strange. So I looked it up. I remember it took me a long time to find it at my local university library, but I eventually found it in one of the volumes of Letters to Engels (I think?), but I'm not sure. When I read the context it wasn't exactly a devastating critique of Marx's view on child labor, since he also advocated for much better working conditions and shorter hours for working children. So I didn't dwell on it, but I did make a mental note of the fact that Marx was in principle still okay with the idea of child labor.

Over the years I had forgotten about it until recently when it came up in a discussion I was having with someone on a youtube channel. Now they are demanding a source.

So I went back through Zerzan's works and Bob Black's works to try and find the original source where I first read it, but I can't find it anywhere in either of their writings. I thought for sure I had read it in Zerzan's The Practical Marx, but it wasn't there. Maybe it was in an article in AJODA? On the other hand, I'm not about to go through Marx's entire collected works to try and find it again.

If anyone on here is well read in Marx and could point me in the right direction where Marx would have mentioned this, and exposed his belief in child labor, I'd be grateful for a reference.

Thanks.

2017 interview with Bob Black:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jYPon4mgsM

Hallo all. The fact that it's taken me so long to write this post is indicative of its necessity. I can't be bothered with the Internet beyond minor—well spaced out & sporadic—doses. I don't like the way people talk to each other on-line, or the fact that the Internet cannot deliver the human touch. As such I am more or less withdrawing from the forum. I'll check in to approve new posters; & I think I get an email if you PM me, so I'll try to check those too.

If anyone wants to take a stab at running the forum, then let me know, & I'll try to get you the db & src. If the forum is going to be vibrant, someone needs to effectuate that—& it's not going to be me. I'm not planning on deleting the website anytime soon, so there's (probably) no rush.

Ta.

Sad Radicals

by Conor Barnes

When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

More:

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad-radicals/

[Image: https://i.redd.it/lpxtl1vc0u521.jpg]

It's just too funny.

The obesity epidemic is of course a big problem. It is entirely clear that we need drastic measurements on a societal and ecological level to address this staggering problem.

Or—you could get an implantable device that sends signals to your brain, so that it thinks that you're full, so you'll stop eating. «In laboratory testing, the devices helped rats shed almost 40 percent of their body weight.»

It's just such a blatantly idiotic thing, that you'd be forgiven to think it satire.

https://www.engr.wisc.edu/implantable-de...ight-loss/

[Image: https://thesocietydispatch.files.wordpre...=300&h=300]
source

For green anarchists, egoists and nihilists, when divorced from the larger narratives of the left, we are left with our own quests. Quests that are sometimes fraught with difficulty and conflict, just as much as they grant us the experience of adventures few get to achieve. Uncle Ted’s shadow still is cast on the ground and while his acolytes have largely  moved away from his vision and strategy of anti-industrial revolution, there still is a feeling that action for its own sake is worth pursuing.

In the age of Climate Change, the Anthropocene mass extinction event and the totalizing of society in a web so delicate to upset its balance would to destroy the integrity of our connectiveness. Seeking action in this environment is not a matter of achieving upheaval. Time and again small groups fail to rally the popular interest against nations and regimes, while vanguards move in to state power and use governing institutions to create minor political change. But no more is there a drive to dismantle the state from supposedly radical forces.

There is the rhetoric of revolution, insurrection; tough posing that that suggests rebellion, but the atmosphere created is not that of encouraging individual empowerment and activity. Rather, the dominant politic is centered on individual and group shaming, ostracism, petty ego bantering and other behaviors that are divisive in the name of unity. Only after crushing dissent can the movement roll forward, comrade.

Moving beyond this can be difficult because creating space away from these behaviors is less about physical space and more about social and virtual space. More about creating an entirely different internal dialogue that somehow both addresses the dominant politic while shifting the conversation from shame to desire. From suppressing the transgressions we don’t like to encouraging the transgressions we do. This is the most profound difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

While the dominant politic complains about chains, points at them and shames those with weaker chains than others, we should be encouraging chains to be broken, to be unchained, to let our desires bloom and our wills express our drive for freedom. But how to?

Green anarchists have a long history of asking why. From many of our influences in the theories of anarcho-primitivism and deep ecology, we can understand the human at root (anarcho-primitivism), the world at root (deep ecology) and how the human impact on the world has been disastrous in one form or another.

It is not the origins of the problem we are dealing with. However, origins are part of our story, a story of why we are where we are. The importance of origins is that it exposes we aren’t rotten authoritarian savages at heart, but humans are also far less noble or neutral in how we’ve imposed control on each other and the world since before history has been recorded. Point made.

For how to, we can look far more recently. We see the actions of Freedom Club attributed to Ted Kaczynski, the actions of Earth First!, ALF, ELF and ITS. A short list in some ways, which aren’t counting the many other varieties green anarchists and related have also organized themselves. However, it is here we have been loudest and for good reason. Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, deeds are still great propaganda. While we aren’t necessarily aiming to hit them where it hurts, as we see the effects of climate change capable of far more damage than we could ever hope to cause as small groups, there is still the capability to inspire others, to carry forward a message that can change the conversation on what we are capable of.

In recent green anarchist texts, a new variety of activities have been opened up, but the takers haven been few. We are perhaps still in an infancy, hindered by time consuming activities from work to media interaction. To break this spell would be to promote and grow our face to face connections and expand on our lived time space with each other.

So the first how to. How to green anarchy is to break bread with each other. To share in conversations with each other and to see reason to connect with each other despite our flaws, rather than divide because of them. How to create green anarchy? Create trust, love and attention. The impact we would like to see in the world is not necessarily born from the most alienated, but rather, perhaps from those that want more connection to ourselves and to others. Alienated by society, yes, but not to the want of the social. To act from the love of the self, the planet, friends and family. It is those forces that prevent and divide us from our will to love that deserve our spite and give us our reason to fight.