I highly recommend the anarchist compilation "Expect Resistance"...

[Paradoxical]

One of the best books I've ever read. Made me a little misty eyed. And I'm not a person easily moved.

You can find it for free all over the internet. It's a product of CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective.

http://zinelibrary.info/expect-resistance

Full PDF of book:http://zinelibrary.info/files/EXPECT%20RESISTANCE.pdf




Here's a little taste.

Mods, please note that Expect Resistance is intentionally not copyrighted to encourage free dissemination of material.

CrimethInc. is the underground railroad from this world to the next. Hop on

Printed in Canada by unionized workers on 100% post-consumer recycled paper with soy-based ink.

They will say* that we refused everything to make a beautiful but utopian negation--as if it were just a work of art we were out to create. They will say that, like generations of nihilists before us, we uttered that grandiose denial and then were driven by it into the wilds of oblivion and annihilation, that "the air of crimethink is unbreathable for the masses of humanity." They will praise the product--product being their speciality--and deny the evidence. They will imply that we could not have lived--but we do live, we live!--and so we give you these fragments, this poorly charted record, to spit in their faces...or whisper in their ears as they sleep.

A book like this is just the scattered dust from explosions in the lives of strangers, hastily scribbled notes from bygone days when freedoms were fought for and won. Like all such dust, these embers and ashes may retain a certain charge that could help precipitate explosions in other lives. Otherwise, they're useless. Don't stir them up unless you're in the business of starting fires.

*They will say this, at least, if we fail.

"This world, the so-called "real world," is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you'll see the libraries are filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees sympathizers, receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are... and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us."

You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you're still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the roof-tops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways no science or psychology could ever account for. Perhaps you've seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code for which you had no keys, or you've been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies that are supposed to keep us entertained. It's between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of what we feel to be possible and permissible.

When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts or cities with fire, they're trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they're trying to steal into it--for they know better than the rest of us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of an army recruiting center, they're trying to storm it's gates. When you're making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover's body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent--as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or land on the moon--you are charting it's frontiers.

Some find it in the sensation of danger; the feeling that, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, something real is at stake. For others, it is a place of safety and sanctuary in a world of thoughtless brutality and destruction.

Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could ever put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return from whence you'd come, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, that thrill of discovery and transformation--but return you did.

Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition and nothing more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story; we hear of women and men who stayed there fore weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.

You're not the only one trying to find it. We're out here, too--some of us are even waiting ahead there for you. Please know that anything you've ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.

When we talk about revolution, the idea is that we could enter that secret world and never return--or that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.

--Then the catastrophes began: terrorist attacks, wars, hurricanes, pandemics. Or perhaps they'd been going on all along, but we'd been oblivious to them until our own lives were sufficiently disrupted. It hadn't occurred to me that the cancer that killed Daniel might be the harbinger of our species' extinction, nor that the alarmist presentations I'd made about the water table in my former life as an environmental activist would return as chilling front-page headlines.

Faced with actual upheaval, those of us who had been playing at revolution froze, wracked by guilt as if our own subversive desires had somehow invited that chaos into the world. It was absurd to think that the burning buildings on our patches and posters had caused the real buildings of our cities to catch fire, but we behaved like penitent criminals. disguising ourselves in the rhetoric of the dupes who were marching lockstep into the waiting maw of the apocalypse. Our entire approach had been predicated on the exaggerated placidity of the order we opposed; now that the curtains had been pulled back from the abyss, we were utterly at a loss.

Young children, being hyper sensitized to the unspoken , often unconsciously devote themselves to the fulfillment of their parents' unacted desires; likewise, it might be that our own revolts had just been early indicators of the ruptures that were to come. As we had all found our paths to resistance one by one, painfully breaking out of the roles assigned us, we thought of ourselves as uniquely independent from history--but perhaps the forces that sent us spiraling out of orbit were the same ones that were soon to tear through our entire society, and our painful trials were simply that society wresting itself from its prepared track in microcosm.

Some of my friends concluded that the world was indeed coming to an end and attempted to act accordingly, but this only seemed to further immobilize them. They floundered about in millenarian desperation, preparing for a doomsday that never arrived or awaiting some watershed until their sense of agency had atrophied entirely; the specter of the world ending was too vast to address with any particular course of action. If the world really was ending, it wasn't ending fast enough--the end seemed to drag on forever, indistinguishable from the calamities that had always made up our daily lives.

Only in the smoke and tumult occasionally unleashed by real catastrophes was it possible to escape that malaise--and so some of us who once had circled the globe in search of adventure now flocked to those, both to lend a hand and to learn about life after the end of the world. --

[Hannah Bell]

1. if you like crimethinc, i also recommend "burning all illusions, a guide to personal & political

freedom," by dave edwards.

http://books.google.com/books?id=AIe3Emh6rPcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=burning+all+illusions+edwards&source=bl&ots=Lbr30aUjA-&sig=iqvpBUOT5hTcgr-p32mJEx6jGUU&hl=en&ei=AhjBTbD0F5P0tgPCttHgBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Paradoxical]

2. Oooh. Thank you mucho.

:fistbump:

[Hannah Bell]

3. not the same type of writing, but the same general drift.

[Fuddnik]

4. Kicked, recced, and bookmarked.

To download later.

[Karmadillo]

5. K&R.

nt

[Paradoxical]

6. Bumper