Greetings troublemakers... welcome to Trouble.
My name is not important.
Insurgencies are, by their very nature, chaotic events.
They are attacks on the dominant order,
waged by determined and mobilized groups of people
intent on uprooting and destroying the established power structure
by any means necessary.
From the perspective of the political and economic elites
who draw substantial benefit from the status quo,
the unpredictable and tumultuous nature of insurgencies
make them terrifying worst-case scenarios.
To those in power, they constitute existential threats
that must be carefully managed
and avoided at all costs.
Despite the sophisticated means of coercion
and incredible capacity for violence that they wield,
modern states are more precarious than they let on.
Like fortresses built on sand,
they are vulnerable to the seismic shifts
of their internal contradictions and political fault lines.
While anarchists have historically been
at the forefront of critiques of the state,
we are by no means alone in rejecting
the illegitimate authority that they represent.
Whether it's colonized nations fighting against foreign occupation,
crowds of people rising up to topple dictators,
or radicals struggling against the exploitation, oppression
and ecological destruction of capitalist democracies
... the desire for freedom is universal.
Well aware of this, states seek to prop up their legitimacy
by assuming the mantle of the protectors of freedom itself,
and the guarantors of another universally-shared human trait,
the desire for security.
But on their own, these promises are not always enough,
and so states have developed intricate systems of social control,
aimed at proactively seeking out and destroying
any potential challenge to their continued rule.
This constant shaping of internal political dynamics
forms the basis of counterinsurgency doctrine
– a science that cuts to the very essence of state power itself.
Over the next thirty minutes, we'll share the voices of several individuals
as they explain the principles of counterinsurgency,
how they’ve manifested in historical
and contemporary strategies of state repression,
and some of the ways that our movements can thwart these dynamics
in order to challenge state legitimacy,
spread treasonous thoughts,
and all around just make a whole lot of trouble.
Counterinsurgency is a specialized form of warfare
waged by a state against its population.
An insurgency is an organized revolt
by people against an established authority.
Most commonly throughout history it's an anti-colonial
or anti-imperialist resistance movement.
Counterinsurgency is the technical art of counterrevolution.
At it's broadest, counterinsurgency refers to the whole range of activities
that a state engages in to repress an uprising.
Counterinsurgency is basically the constant war
that states carry out in order to manage conflict
and ensure the stability and continuity of governance.
Counterinsurgency is designed to keep a movement
which is at a formative stage, which is weak and vulnerable
– they're designed to keep them at that stage and to be able to crush them.
To make them lose legitimacy
or keep them from getting any real legitimacy
for their demands or their grievances.
Under the counterinsurgency philosophy, conflict is permanent.
Therefore state institutions need to always be the arbiters
and the mediators of conflict.
They therefore need the legitimacy to be seen as neutral arbiters.
To be seen as the only ones with the resources
or the capability to offer a solution to a problem.
There's always a thing within counterinsurgency
that it's always supposed to be operating within the rule of law
and within a democratic context.
At least that's sort of the modern counterinsurgency,
is the ideal that the soldiers won't be out on the street.
It won't be evidently a war.
The objective is to maintain the level of conflict at the lowest levels.
At levels of simple dissidence or non-violence.
And not allow those conflicts to evolve to more insurrectional
or revolutionary levels.
As it has developed as a term of art in the military literature,
it has come to refer to a specific approach
- a specific philosophy as to how that is best done.
And that approach is characterized
less by a reliance on sheer coercive force,
and more by the use of soft power
– the shaping of social conditions,
the co-optation of movement leaders into the state apparatus,
and the offering of concessions and reforms
to undercut popular support for the uprising.
Former British military officer Frank Kitson,
in a book called Low Intensity Operations,
talks about the need to find and neutralize
subversive elements in the population
and to remove the masses from leadership of the subversive movement.
And one of the key components of that is attaching
parts of the resistance movement that engage in
non-violent, civil disobedience-type of campaigns
– attaching those types of elements to the state
as a means of dividing the resistance movement
and undermining the more radical or militant components.
Big non-profit groups are responsible for subverting radical political change,
and they play a big role in the counterinsurgency.
Their goal is to channel people in directions
that will not put them in the position of directly confronting the state.
Basically counterinsurgency as a state philosophy arose
as specialists working for the state,
as state institutions analyzed their failures and weaknesses
in the anti-colonial struggles of the 50's and 60's,
and the particularly urban, and other domestic struggles
within powerful colonizing states of the 60's and 70's.
Back in the 60's and 70's, you had more of a revolutionary consciousness
among many people in the United States.
A lot of it was influenced by the revolutions that were actually
– the armed revolutions –
that were going on in Africa and South-East Asia at the time.
They did not want these kinds of groups to ever exist again.
They did not want groups like the Black Panther Party
to ever be able to come into existence again.
Counterinsurgency, because its a type of warfare,
involves all the means of war
– including political, economic, military, cultural and ideological
as well as psychological measures.
A huge part of counterinsurgency, it's about hearts and minds.
That's what they say,
but really it's not about actually offering people services
or actually providing them with a better life.
It's about saying that that's what you're doing,
and repressing people to the point that their silence becomes consent
for whatever kind of rule you decide is appropriate in that moment,
as the sort of state or as the elite ruler.
It's all about fear.
It's about managing people through fear.
And when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy-waggon,
you just see them thrown in. Rough.
I said please don't be too nice.
Whether it's handing out speeding tickets,
kicking in doors to execute search warrants,
or putting down riots with batons, tear gas
and other so-called “less-lethal” weaponry,
police are the front-line shock troops of the state and capitalist class.
They’re tasked with enforcing laws
and meting out repression
in order to keep domestic populations in line.
Armed with a badge and a gun,
and basked in the legitimacy of the state,
police are granted a blank cheque to beat and even kill
whoever they deem a threat to their authority
… as long as the person on the receiving end is
Black, Brown, queer, trans, and/or poor.
Because they form the most visible face of state repression,
cops are often seen as being synonymous with state power itself.
And while they actually comprise only one small component
of the broader state security apparatus,
which itself makes up only one facet of
the state’s sprawling bureaucracy
... it’s fair to say that their historical development
was of pivotal importance to the rise of modern states.
Processes of state formation and consolidation
have taken different paths in countries around the world,
as they’ve had to account for different historical,
geographical and socio-political factors.
And while cops generally play the same repressive role everywhere,
and are, without a doubt, all bastards
… these national and regional distinctions have left imprints
in the character of local police forces themselves.
In the United States, for instance
... given contemporary police officers' role as the enforcers
of white supremacist terror in Black communities,
it should not be surprising that they trace their origins
to an earlier institution of racist social control
– namely, slave patrols.
[♫] WOOP WOOP! That's the sound of the police.
WOOP WOOP! That's the sound of the beast! [♫]
To understand slave patrols,
it's important to understand the slow development of the state intervention
in maintaining slave society,
beginning with simply passing laws
that would restrict the activities of the slaves.
And then, laws on their own being insufficient,
authorizing any adult white man to enforce those laws.
But then the reliance on individual action proving insufficient,
forming into this body called the slave patrols
that were an off-shoot of the militia
and worked as kind of a voluntary-compulsory organization,
meaning that participation was mandatory,
but it wasn't a professional outfit.
That provided a way of making the entire white male population
directly involved in maintaining slave society.
As industrialization came to the south,
and there were larger slave populations in southern cities,
the slave patrols moved similarly into the city.
And there they became professionalized
and very quickly their duties expanded
and they became a body that we would
immediately recognize as a modern police force.
[♫] Overseer! Overseer! Overseer – officer!
Yeah officer from overseer!
You need a little clarity?
Check the similarity! [♫]
And now 200 years later,
the basic function of the police is largely the same.
It's maintaining the stratified nature of the society,
both in terms of race and class.
White lives matter! White lives matter! White lives matter!
If you look at the whole concept of white supremacy
and how that fits into the counterinsurgency
on a historical basis,
of course the oldest terrorist organization in the United States,
which is the Ku Klux Klan
– that was a group that was founded right after the Civil War
to inflict terror against the African people in the United States,
who had been newly freed from slavery
and who were beginning to try to organize.
And as you move on into the 20th century
and the Civil Rights Movement began to develop,
the Klan and other groups would work alongside the police,
whether it was local police or whether it was sheriffs departments.
And they would work together to inflict terror
to restrain the movement - the organizing against white supremacy.
I think one of the big differences
between police in Canada and police in the US
is that the North-West Mounted Police
were modeled after the Royal Irish Constabulary,
which the British had set up in Ireland as a colonial police force.
And they replicated this type of thing not only in Canada,
but also in their colonies in India and Africa.
Y'know, one of their main functions was to impose colonial law and order,
and to extend the control of the state into these frontier regions.
And that remains pretty much the role of the RCMP today across Canada.
A lot of the critical infrastructure and transportation corridors,
such as railways and highways,
they pass through or very nearby Indigenous populations and reservations.
Especially as you go further north in the country.
So this type of situation creates a lot of vulnerabilities for Canada,
and I think the state is very aware of this.
And that's why it's so cautious in its repression of Indigenous social movements.
A big wake up call was during the Oka Crisis of 1990,
when you had widespread solidarity actions across the country,
and you had sabotage actions being carried out
against this type of infrastructure.
So I think it's very clear to the state that this is the possible consequence
if their repression leads to the widening of Indigenous resistance,
and even to the beginning of actual insurgency.
We try to use training dummies as much as we can for,
like, the strikes and everything.
But a lot of the pressure points you really gotta feel it on the human body.
Repression is basically the attempts by the state to punish,
and to enclose and to isolate – and therefore neutralize –
threats to its authority.
Recuperation are the attempts to integrate threats to authority.
To redirect them towards non-threatening modes,
or modes that even regenerate or modify state power
in a way that makes states more able to respond to similar threats.
And if you look at the 1950s and 1960s
civil rights struggle in the United States,
there's some really good examples because the government,
especially the Kennedy administration,
y'know they're having high-level meetings with Martin Luther King
and all these other leaders of non-violent civil disobedience organizations.
And then at the same time,
they're carrying out repression against the more radical elements
of the Black Civil Rights – which came the Black Liberation Movement,
and which led into the FBI's counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO.
In addition to COINTELPRO,
the FBI ran a program called the ghetto informant program.
And the ghetto informant program is where they would get preachers,
pastors of churches, teachers or whomever
– they would try to get those people to be informants.
Militarization and community policing are talked about
as though they're these two separate alternatives.
Two different ways that policing can develop.
But what the history shows
is that they developed at exactly the same time,
both in response to the crisis of the 60's.
And generally developed alongside each other in the same cities
- often with the same commanders in charge.
Rather than seeing these as two separate and competing developments,
it makes more sense to see them as complementary developments,
each operating as one half of a domestic counterinsurgency strategy.
The counter-intelligence program was designed to be hard-hitting.
And designed to assassinate,
designed to subvert and actually destroy organizations,
whereas the ghetto informant program was designed
to spy on the Black population at large,
and to find out who it was, as they saw it,
would be agitating for riots.
All of that is pretty textbook counterinsurgency stuff.
As we see it play out domestically,
it has the political benefit of building legitimacy for the police,
while at the same time the militarization preserves their capacity
to come in hard when they do face actual resistance.
The FBI's illicit program of surveillance,
sabotage and assassination known as COINTELPRO
was formally ended in April of 1971,
after their covert activities were exposed by activists
who broke into a Pennsylvania FBI field office
and released troves of top-secret documents to the press.
Just two months later, the Nixon administration launched the War on Drugs.
America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
Pretty convenient, right?
Any suggestion that the timing of these two events
could be chalked up to simple coincidence was quashed
by Richard Nixon's chief policy advisor, John Ehrlichman,
who in a candid interview in 1994,
admitted that the War on Drugs was a lie
concocted to target anti-war leftists
and Black communities for political repression.
After Tricky Dick was dishonorably deposed...
I'm not a crook!
... subsequent Presidential administrations took the idea of the War on Drugs,
greatly expanded its scope,
and refined it into a potent tool for both domestic social control
and imperialist foreign policy aims.
It's hard to overstate the effect of the War on Drugs
and its role in accelerating the development
of counterinsurgency in American policing.
Nixon launched the War on Drugs.
And the War on Drugs was chemical warfare.
A spreading of – at that time it was heroin –
into the communities of colour.
Black and Latino, poor communities of colour.
They called it a War on Drugs,
but they unleashed the drugs into the community,
then they went into the communities
and started arresting people for using the drugs.
This chemical warfare, it has a historical parallel.
After they killed the Indians here in this country,
after the Indian Wars,
then they turned around and gave them whiskey.
And whiskey was an addictive drug that even to this very day
is still destroying the lives of people in Native communities.
So they gave them whiskey.
Well they gave Black people,
to put down the insurgency that erupted in the 1960's and 1970's,
they gave them crack cocaine.
This was deliberately done as the government's response
to the Black Power movement,
and all the other radical progressive movements.
They wanted to make sure that none of this stuff ever happened again.
And crack cocaine was distributed by people
who were given the drugs by federal agents,
and distributed to the urban market.
And the effect of crack cocaine just destroyed
numerous vibrant communities at the time.
Communities where people had jobs
... communities where people had social cohesion
- well crack cocaine destroyed that.
And the federal government used the fact of the drug trade,
that they created
– they used that to then turn around and build a paramilitary policing force.
It provided a handy pretext,
with the stories of police being out-gunned by gangs
and all that sort of thing.
Beyond that, there's just the sheer demographic effect
of the War on Drugs providing a mechanism for
removing a large portion of the Black population,
just from cities altogether
and putting them in prisons for long periods of time.
And then later normalizing the monitoring of those communities
through probation and parole,
and other sorts of community-based corrections.
I think it's probably impossible to accurately estimate
the damage that has done to those communities
in terms of just sheerly fracturing them.
We've gotta understand that there's a continual path
leading from COINTELPRO to the War on Drugs.
And then the War on Drugs, now we're at a new counterinsurgency.
The War on Drugs everywhere is a US war.
The US is the largest consumer of illegal narcotics in the world as a market.
Almost half of the whole drug market is in the United States.
The US has always been pushing the most radical,
militaristic “solution” to the drug problem.
The basis of the US drug war in the United States is the prison system.
And in places like Mexico, in places like Central America, Columbia
– it's massacre and it's enforced disappearance.
And it's often based on social class.
It's based on living in certain areas that are resource rich.
It's based on the potential that those communities could be a threat.
That's where again, that same pretext gets used.
They're called narco traffickers, they're called drug dealers,
and instead of being brought to jail
... they're murdered in the street.
I think what's happening in Mexico
is a counterinsurgent war against the people,
and I think in Mexico they've sort of
expanded the idea of who the insurgent is
to include basically the entire population.
Even just the idea that people are living in different ways,
that they have assemblies, that they're living on collective land,
that they're organizing in some way... even just with their neighbours
– all of those things are seen as threats to the dominant order.
And in Mexico they're being dealt with through a kind of
counterinsurgency that is extremely violent.
The Merida Initiative started in 2008,
and it's a multi-billion dollar plan funded by the United States
to finance the militarization, essentially,
of the War on Drugs in Mexico.
So when the drug war started in 2006, there were 4,000 federal police.
Now there's 40,000, and they're deployed together with the army
to different cities to "fight the War on Drugs."
And what we see time after time in these different regions
where federal police and soldiers are deployed together,
is a spike in homicide rates,
a spike in violence, a spike in disappearances
– and again, enacted against the population at large.
We're told that it's one drug cartel
sending a message to another drug cartel.
But when, y'know, in your town
there's a bunch of beheaded bodies in the central square
– that's a message to the whole town.
What the militarization of prohibition has really done
- because it's a militarized strategy to enforce prohibition -
is it has meant that the folks who are
moving these products also militarize.
And that's kind of a paramilitary process.
In Mexico these groups aren't explicitly political groups,
but it's clear that they often work closely with other parts
of the same state apparatus that's fighting them.
So like, say the federal police come in
and they crack down on the Sinaloa cartel
... okay, the Sinaloa cartel goes and they start working with
state-level police officers, whatever it is.
So people in these strategic areas,
just regular folks trying to get on with their lives,
they're the ones who are being picked up and disappeared.
They're the ones who are being massacred.
They're the ones who are paying, actually, with their lives for this war.
And so when you take that kind of step back
and you see it on a bit more of a macro level,
it's very clear that what's happening is a war against the people.
And the whole idea of the state fighting drug cartels
is a big charade, basically to justify militarization, paramilitarization
and a war against the population.
States go to incredible lengths to study our movements.
Dozens of federal security and intelligence agencies,
and an untold number of private contractors
are constantly combing over our social media posts,
mapping out our networks and probing them for vulnerabilities.
Analysts churn over a never-ending stream
of risk assessments and policy suggestions,
covering a vast array of possible contingency plans.
Each year, billions of dollars are spent keeping tabs on dissent,
infiltrating our organizations and training local police forces
in riot suppression
and community engagement tactics.
No matter how powerful states are,
and no matter how vast the scale of resources they're able to marshal
towards maintaining and expanding their power
... they still view us as threats.
And why shouldn't they?
States are collective illusions.
The social, economic and political hierarchies
that keep the many ruled by the few are
built on a foundation of fear,
loyalty
and internal division.
If these supporting pillars were ever to be removed,
the whole house of cards would come crashing down.
States have invested a lot of resources
into understanding how insurgencies arise,
understanding how uprisings succeed,
understanding how states fail,
and then working to counteract that.
And I think we can learn from some of their insights,
even as we are counteracting their operations.
I think it's very important to understand,
and to have some knowledge of
how counterinsurgency operations are carried out,
because that's how you can better defend yourselves against them.
The more that we can spread awareness
of counterinsurgency beyond anarchist circles,
the more people will understand the methods we use,
why we choose antagonistic and combative methods vis-a-vis the state.
Because once you understand that states organize
according to a philosophy of counterinsurgency,
people understand that the state views them as their enemy,
or as their potential enemy.
And so people understand that when we talk about social war,
it's not because we like war or we like violence,
but because the state started the social war.
The existence of the state is a social war,
it's constant warfare against all of us.
In order to defeat the enemy's plans,
we have to understand them.
And we have to do political education
on a large scale about government repression.
But even more than that, we have to design our movements
to be able to withstand government repression,
to be able to withstand all manner of secret police activity.
Specifically within anarchist circles,
if we encourage more nuanced understandings
of how counterinsurgency works,
it will certainly help identify recuperation
and how not to fall into that trap.
And it will also help us improve our anti-repressive strategies.
Especially at the point that we realize that repression
is primarily a mechanism for isolating people,
then we'll begin to put more importance
on creating broader social relationships,
avoiding isolation and certainly giving up on strategies
that basically amount to self-isolation.
Still some of the best resources for this are our adversaries'.
A lot of the RAND Corporation research on counterinsurgency
is available on their website.
The US Army Field Manual, FM-324, is widely available.
All of that is worth looking at directly as well.
A very important counterinsurgency campaign that people can learn from
is the FBI's COINTELPRO operations in the United States
during the 1950's to early 1970's,
because I think these are the types of tactics
that are being used against resistance movements today.
That was a radical period in the 1960's and 70's,
and so they used that heavy-handed repression.
That was an illegal program.
But the same kind of repression, if not even worse,
now is being used – and it's legal.
Under the so-called PATRIOT Act first,
and now under other forms of legislation
that allows the police and state agencies
to spy on the population at large.
Including spying on dissident organizations.
Intelligence-gathering is probably the single most important part
of a counterinsurgency campaign,
because without intelligence
the state doesn't know who the organizers of resistance are,
where they are, what their plans are, or how to combat them.
The tools around counter-surveillance,
the tools around anonymity,
and making sure that you're protecting yourself
and that you're protecting your comrades from state surveillance
... that stuff's really important.
Obviously, y'know, not snitching and not talking to police officers,
all that basic stuff - I mean, those are our weapons.
We have to figure out how
to build a movement to fight fascism in this period.
In the United State particularly.
And we have to begin to develop movements
that are not just "left" movements.
We have, y'know, people who will go on the streets
and engage toe-to-toe, fist-to-fist combat with the alt-right,
the neo-nazis, and neo-fascists
on the streets and in various protests.
And this kind of resistance is still needed.
But this is a kind of resistance
that is not going to organize masses of people.
Everyday people in the communities,
they identify that as being more of a kind of leftist movement.
And most people in our communities, everyday communities,
are not leftists.
It's just amazing that no one was shot and killed in Charlottesville.
And we can't say that that's not gonna happen
in other demonstrations that they put together.
But they're not the primary threat.
We're getting past the time when you could just say
that the task to defeat fascism is just to get out
and punch nazis in the face.
They're in office now. They're running the state.
So we have to go to another level.
We need to build a broader-based movement.
We need to bring in peoples of colour and communities of colour.
We need to bring in the women's movement.
We need to bring in all the forces that are necessary
to overthrow the entire system.
Our task is still a revolutionary task.
We have to change the society that creates fascism in the first place.
We have to overthrow capitalism.
Looking at it from our adversary's perspective,
their authority is in some ways very fragile.
And from their perspective,
the crucial thing that they need to maintain
is the sense of legitimacy.
The sense that the population trusts them.
The sense that the population supports them.
The sense that when they issue demands, that people will respond.
And we can reverse-engineer that
and see from what they feel like they need to protect,
where they're fragile.
And that sense of legitimacy seems to be something
that popular movements are very good at damaging,
even with far fewer resources.
And so the good news of all this is that
the place where they feel themselves most vulnerable
is actually the thing that we are best positioned to hurt
– which is their sense of public support.
They want our cooperation.
That's what this whole thing is about.
The key thing we can do against counterinsurgency
is not share information with them,
cooperate to the least extent possible with the state
– especially in terms of the criminalization of other people.
And keep our relationships with our friends, with our comrades,
but also with our neighbours, to the extent possible.
To other people in our community, folks we met at a Trouble screening.
Really keep those relationships strong and have each others' back.
That's our best weapon. That's all we've got.
People are deploying new strategies,
looking for new terrains of struggle and conflict,
and as always, the story hasn't come to its end.
As the world continues into a period of sustained and ever-deepening crisis,
new counterinsurgency strategies are being developed and deployed
in countries around the globe.
Overlapping catastrophes,
fueled by the destructive effects of neoliberal capitalism,
climate change,
devastating wars
and surging levels of global inequality
are culminating in historically-unprecedented levels of human migration.
This is feeding into a rise of xenophobic reaction,
whereby states and far-right media outlets
are redirecting popular discontent
towards targeted and already-oppressed groups.
These are dangerous times,
which require serious reflection
and committed action on the part of revolutionaries.
So at this point,
we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in groups,
and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Think that anarchists and other anti-capitalists in your town
need to start upping their game?
Consider getting together with some comrades,
screening this film and discussing what steps you can take
to collectively prepare yourselves to better anticipate
and resist state strategies of repression and recuperation.
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