TL;DR – O.R.C.A. is public, don’t hesitate to share any events or media about the space unless it says different on the flier 🙂
We have heard of people being concerned that sharing fliers, posters, and invitations related to O.R.C.A. was not okay so we wanted to make clear O.R.C.A. is a public project 😀 While we appreciate people’s concern for the project’s security we are excited to welcome new people to the space, to host events and meetings, and keep open hours. We maintain a public website and twitter account. While we are happy to host private events, most of the programming at O.R.C.A. is free and public, and we welcome people sharing events that take place in our space. We do not publicly post our address but we try to be responsive and forthcoming about sharing our address and access information via email and direct message to those interested in attending. As always we would love to talk with interested individuals and groups about hosting your event or meeting. Though we do occasionally host private events the fliers or invitations to those events are explicit about how they are meant to be shared.
From @phlzinefest: HEY YALL WE ARE DELETING THIS ACCOUNT
I’m tired of having an instagram account specifically this one/ don’t have 2 energy to run it anymore nor do I think that it’s really even needed. Zine fest will be every last Sunday of the month at 3pm in Clark park and you’ll just have to come pop out or self organize to make shit happen there. We`re trying to plan something special for six months of zine fest in June
So keep coming to hang out !. Today was really fun.Buttt… We made these posters for zine fest that can be used every month!! Please screen shot for your future use! Send to friends who’ve just moved to ‘hillor zine distros that are oming thru town or print some out and paste them round vour neighborhood or hang them in your dorm hall
Please save our flyers and share that tshit around send friends and invite them every month or so , if you have friends who have shit they wanna distro send to your crew.
This is autonomously organized which means I can’t do all this shit by myself including getting the” word out about the event so screen shot that shit fr and keep it in your camera roll to print out or send to friends. We don’t need instagram.com fuck this shit fuck zuck fuck X and all social media the whole spirit of zine festis connecting in person so let’s make that happen
PEACE OUT
MAY ZINE FEST FLYER & DATE JUST DROPPED !!! MAY 25th, 3PM AT CLARK PARK (every last Sunday of the month) 🫣 u guys already know the drill by now , WE WANNA SEE MORE FREE SHIT THO 🗣️🗣️🗣️ no shade to those who’s hustle is selling their art but we’re tryna create a little pocket of the world where not everything is gatekept and influenced by capital!! (The free groceries were sick af last time!!) We wanna see copies of any cool zines you picked up last month , prints of any art you’ve been working on, keep coming thru with the emotional mini zines and crying punchcards that shit was so funny. See ya there ;)))
On a late summer day in 1906, a small group of newly arrived Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia took a streetcar across town to Fairmount Park. Several miles from the cramped row houses and oppressive sweatshops of the immigrant quarter of South Philly, the neighborhood now known as Queen Village, they enjoyed a sunny picnic.
They weren’t there to make small talk, though.
Instead, they wanted to write “revolutionary articles” that would spark the “struggle against all that degrades and oppresses humanity,” as one of the leaders of the group, Joseph Cohen, later wrote in his 1945 memoir.
More specifically, the picnicgoers wanted to start a newspaper. It would be titled Broyt un Frayheyt – Yiddish for Bread and Freedom – the anarchist reminder that to live the good life, one needs both.
I’m a professor of media and politics at Temple University in Philadelphia. For the past year I’ve been tracking the life and times of my great-grandfather Max, a radical Yiddish journalist in the early years of the 20th century.
To my surprise, I found he had lived here in Philadelphia, and his story is part of a largely forgotten moment in U.S. history: when Philly was an epicenter of the national anarchist movement, heartily supported by the city’s burgeoning Jewish immigrant community.
Beyond the Russian pale
By 1906, thousands of people like Max had made their way to Philadelphia from the Russian “pale” – the only part of the Russian Empire where they could legally reside. They fled economic isolation and state-sanctioned persecution in search of a more stable life.
South Philly was better than where they had come from, but immigrant life then, as now, was by no means easy. They had escaped a legal regime of oppression and the perpetual threat of antisemitic mob violence. But in turn they found a world of dark alleys and dead ends. Their labor was exploited, their living conditions meager.
For some, the American promise of freedom and prosperity seemed to ring hollow.
They did, however, find one freedom they had not experienced before. They were able to speak, write and publish their ideas no matter how outlandish or against the grain.
The Yiddish press in the United States was experiencing extraordinary growth at the time. In New York, Philadelphia and other cities, newspapers quickly emerged – and often disappeared – month over month.
Max moved to Philadelphia in 1906 to work with another immigrant named Joseph Cohen. Cohen had arrived in Philadelphia three years earlier. He earned a scant living making cigars, but his real work was advocating anarchism.
At the dawn of the 20th century, anarchism was not the nihilistic chaos the term may bring to mind today. It was a heartfelt dream of a free and egalitarian society.
The anarchists believed that man-made hierarchies – political, economic and religious – were illegitimate and limited the full expression of humanity. They rejected the authority of the state. That particularly appealed to many Jewish immigrants, for whom laws in the old country had long served as vehicles of oppression.
Cohen had studied this philosophy of local autonomy and communal life with the Philadelphia activist Voltairine de Cleyre.
History may remember Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian-born New Yorker and perhaps the leading voice of American anarchism from that era. But de Cleyre was the heart and soul of Philadelphia’s anarchist scene.
A tireless critic of the inequities of the industrial age, de Cleyre had taught herself Yiddish to better serve as “the apostle of anarchism” in the Jewish ghetto.
While de Cleyre could often be found speaking in front of city hall, Max, Cohen and their colleagues were more likely to gather at the corner of Fifth and South streets, the hub of Philadelphia’s Yiddish press and its culture of rambunctious street debate.
By 1906, Cohen had co-founded the anarchist Radical Library in the upstairs rooms at 229 Pine St. This provided the Philadelphia anarchists a meeting space and reading room.
But “the Jewish newspaper men, the radicals and the tireless talkers,” as the Philadelphia historian Harry Boonin wrote, still congregated in the ramshackle cafes lining the 600 block of South Fifth, where they would argue over anarchism and atheism deep into the night.
Competition with NYC comrades
Cohen’s goal was to publish a nationally influential anarchist paper that would give voice to the “comrades from Philadelphia.”
That meant direct competition with the New York Yiddish press and the influential weekly newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme, or The Free Voice of Labor. Edited by Saul Yanovksy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, FAS was the center of the Jewish anarchist movement and of the Yiddish intelligentsia more broadly.
“To be able to say ‘I have written for Yanovsky,’” wrote the sociologist Robert Park in 1922, “is a literary passport for a Yiddish writer.”
Although the FAS masthead said the paper was located in New York and Philadelphia, Yanovksy controlled the operation from New York, much to Cohen’s dismay.
Cohen had partnered with Yanovsky earlier in 1906 to publish a daily anarchist newspaper. He maintained a small office in the back of Finkler’s cigar store at Fifth and Bainbridge streets. But the paper was printed in New York and delivered back to Philadelphia each morning by courier train.
Cohen wrote in his memoir that he suspected Yanovsky intentionally sabotaged the effort by insisting that he personally write the daily editorial, but then turning in his copy too late for the paper to make the train. After two months the partnership, and the paper, fell apart.
For Cohen, the lesson was that to be the genuine voice of the anarchist movement, he had to print the paper locally in Philadelphia.
Bread and Freedom published its first issue on Nov. 11, 1906. The date was symbolic. It was the anniversary of the execution of the “Chicago martyrs” – the four men wrongly sentenced to death for the 1886 bombing at a labor rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The Haymarket affair galvanized the anarchist movement among immigrants, even as it accelerated the wider fear of foreign-born radicalism.
Over the next three months, the newspaper offered a weekly digest of anarchist arguments. It translated into Yiddish Voltairine de Cleyre’s critique of capitalism and what she called its “moral bankruptcy” – its hunger for wealth, power and material possessions. It attacked what de Cleyre called the “dominant idea” of the times – “the shameless, merciless” exploitation of the worker, “only to produce heaps and heaps of things – things ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the best largely unnecessary.”
Almost as soon as it began, however, Bread and Freedom ran out of money. Its rhetoric was exciting but ineffective. The paper offered no real solutions beyond an impossible demand to dismantle the capitalist state.
Although two members of the group were briefly detained by the police in Baltimore for selling a radical newspaper, their fiery propaganda lit no revolutionary spark.
Instead, it disappeared quietly, folding in January 1907.
Shifting tactics
Even then, a different kind of immigrant was arriving in the U.S. from Russia. Their radical politics were coupled with organizational acumen.
Many of the older anarchists would join forces with these newcomers, and the effort morphed into something more pragmatic. They helped build the foundations of the 20th-century labor movement, which successfully fought for once-radical ideals such as the eight-hour workday and paid sick leave.
A few years earlier, though, the streets of South Philly had been home to a vibrant space of free speech and boundless political imagination. It would not last long, but it is a moment I believe is worth remembering.
Mark ur calendars 4 the 4th zine fest of the year babeyyyy !! The vibes were just so immaculate and the reads were just oh so sexy and subversive last time I don’t wanna wait til Sunday, April 27th at 3pm to get my zine distro on!!!! 🤬 act autonomously wear a mask bring your neighbors or you friends from out of town (we need more pet appearances too come y’all on I wanna play with ur dogs). LETS KEEP THIS GOINGG ⚡️😛🪕💕
Making this zine started for me as a vague desire to know how Assata Shakur escaped from prison. I had enjoyed reading her autobiography “Assata” and I was left wanting to know more. One chapter ends with her declaring that she was done with being locked up, and the next begins with her living in Cuba if I remember correctly. I mostly moved on, focusing on other things. More recently a friend mentioned that they had heard of a book about the Shakur family that went into the details of the liberation. The book in question was An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs And The Nation They Created by Santi Elijah Holley. I sought out the book and found a text that not only went into the details of Assata’s liberation but provided context about who all took part, the social movements and underground networks they were a part of and a whole set of histories that intrigued me.
I decided to only reprint the parts that explicitly deal with the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison and her transit to Havana, Cuba. The rest is worth reading in my opinion, as well as Assata’s own autobiography which gives context to Assata’s life path and freedom struggle, and Russel Maroon Shoatz’s I Am Maroon which also documents prison escapes, life on the run, and life underground from a Black liberation perspective. The idea that prisons are impenetrable, inescapable is demonstrably false and these histories are proof of that (as are the escapes that continue to take place today)! This bootleg reprint is only a snippet of a larger history of experimentation in collective and individual liberation that I feel Black anarchists and other revolutionaries could benefit from familiarizing ourselves with and learning from.
In the wake of the genocide taking place in Palestine at the hands of the zionist entity numerous calls have gone out for escalation and also — though less well circulated — for (re)building the underground in today’s movements for decolonization and liberation. Today’s undergrounds will look different from those of the 1970s and 1980s, yet there is still much we can learn from them. We are already seeing waves of political repression attempting to capture, pacify, eject, and domesticate rebels from the George Floyd revolts, the struggles to stop the construction of cop city in Atlanta, and the struggles in solidarity with Palestinians fighting for liberation. Unfortunately we are already seeing a new generation of political prisoners and exiles. Of course it is inevitable that some will be locked up as long as liberation struggles haven’t destroyed the cages. By learning from the struggles that came before us we can be better equipped to make the state’s work as hard as possible. Some of my goals for reprinting and circulating this account of Assata Shakur’s liberation from prison are to exercise our collective imagination of what is possible and contribute to dialogues about escalation, building undergrounds, and facing state repression.
Another goal of spreading this story is a fear that many stories of this kind, especially the illegal ones, will be lost. Either buried with the aging revolutionaries who made them happen, locked behind tight lips to ensure the safety and anonymity of the guilty, or neatly entombed in academic or historical literature that few will have the patience and position to read. To me these histories are not meant to be left in the dirt or hidden away in sleepy archives accessible with a student ID, they are part of our struggles today, weapons to be used to free ourselves, and by freeing ourselves free the dead who wrote these histories with their own sweat and blood. We can remember and tell these stories as part of our own race toward liberation and freedom now.
More selfishly, I am exciting to be adding a little something to a growing tendency of Black anarchist struggles. Anecdotally it seems there are more Black anarchists than before and that more approaches to Black liberation are imagining freedom through an anti-authoritarian lens. The former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army soldiers who advocated anarchic visions of freedom and struggle, during and after the decline of the Black Panther Party have paved the way for Black radicals to understand anarchy as a vision of freedom we can hold as our own. Russel ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, and Martin Sostre are coming up more in the anarchist space, as well as the dialogues of Black revolutionaries. The last decade has seen a number of anarchically oriented Black liberation groups and projects that explore the synchronicity between Black freedom and anarchy. Salish Sea Black Autonomists, Afro-Futurist Abolitionists of the Americas, various zines, a handful of small gatherings, dialogues across geographies, increased interest in anarchists in Africa generally.
The text below is part of a longer book that goes into the history of the Shakur family. While I do not agree with the author’s position that the Shakurs aimed to improve amerika I have found the information useful nonetheless. I have added a few of my own notes to the text and added complete names in brackets to give context to readers who may not be familiar with the history of the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur, or other aspects of the struggles taking place at the time of Assata’s escape from prison. Again I encourage readers to dig deeper, to learn about the Black liberation struggles, guerrilla groups, and social movements that the people involved in Assata’s liberation were part of.
Download PDF to print (front/back), cut in half, hand out: https://tinyurl.com/recuerdan
For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.
(Blackened/improved from a previous document shared early 2025.)
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN
Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.
Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.
2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.
1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.
1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.
Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.
« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A) »
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!
¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!
Look for those pushing and help them push harder.
Move together. Be water.
They can control a march of 10,000 — they can’t control 10 marches of 1000.
De-arrest. Don’t let people get grabbed.
If they do, don’t let their cars or busses leave.
They only care about money, so causing monetary losses is your only vote.
On the inside, the demonstration is an organism of care and support.
On the outside, it is ferocious and uncontrollable.
Without their toys they are powerless.
No one is coming to save us.
Everything is at stake.
Limited amount of physical copies available, email reekingthickets@proton.me to check availability and get yours – $5 for the book, $2 for the pamphlet (just to cover part of the cost of printing) plus shipping if not local (book weighs ~1lb) If you’re a reading group or bookstore, infoshop, think you can get it into a prison, etc., inquire about possibly reduced cost or free books! We’re still working out the kinks of our very small-scale production process, and this edition is somewhat rough, with some edges trimmed on a slight slant, the occasional smudged or faded line of text, and the possibility of some toner rubbing off over time.
To our knowledge, The Unexpected Guest, A Mano Armata, and many of the included sections of Palestine, Mon Amour haven’t been properly translated into English, and this primarily machine-based translation – though we feel is sufficient for some purposes – certainly can’t be considered as such. Translation was carried out by Nim Thorn, a non-speaker of Italian, using various translation programs with the results then checked for apparent mistakes or divergences and the offending passages re-translated in context with dictionaries and using other translation programs. Short stanzas (such as the section “Untitled” in Palestine, Mon Amour) or metered sections (such as the Faust excerpts in The Unexpected Guest) were also translated word by word using comparisons of multiple tools. The introduction to the second edition of A Mano Armata is a particularly bad translation, of a difficult text in the first place, though some parts of it still shine through quite clearly, and the subject matter – in part about the desire to engage with the word backwards by constructing semio-cognitive labyrinths to reflect absence and help bypass the recuperating tendency of the will and language – feels ironically relevant.
No authorization was sought for this independent, not-intended-for-profit project and, for our part, further printing or distribution is welcomed.
`The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’ brings together a new, rough translation of the 2010 book L’Ospite Inatteso by influential Sicilian insurrectionary anarchist, robber, poet, and philosopher Alfredo Bonanno (and as he reminds us, former motorcycle racer, professional poker player, and business executive) with similar, mostly previously untranslated sections from another book of his, Palestina, Mon Amour, and some relevant excerpts from his essay, “E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo: Contro l’amnistia” (trans. – “And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again: Against the amnesty”).
An accompanying 51pg. pamphlet, “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)” collects more topical sections from that book of his (the title of which translates as `with armed hand’, or `at gunpoint’ and is part of the Italian legal name of offenses analogous to armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, with `a mano‘ also having the sense of a tool ready and available for use, or of `hand-made’, `manually’).
The sharply echoing, often numbered and diary-like stanzas that make up much of the book are a remembrance of the deadly, pro-liberatory armed struggle Bonanno took part in during the `60s and following decades, including alongside Palestinians in the Levant (relating also his experience of torture for this by Mossad in 1972), in Greece against the junta, in Ireland, Algeria, Uganda, and Italy. Written mostly during various later-life prison stints in Italy and Greece for robberies and seditions (both real and fabricated), these poetic, searingly honest tracings of formative, difficult memories grapple with suffering, monstrosity, humanity, and ghostly normality, the silent, irreversible and all-transfiguring singularities of death and of ending the lives of others, and the irresolvable tension between the quantitative and qualitative. The paradoxical, messy engagements with the often deeply flawed, recuperative, and quixotic but sometimes critical aspects of clandestine revolutionary warfare come deeply into play, alongside those with the projects of memory, theoretical and personal understanding, and the word itself. Bonanno refuses to shy away from the stark insights and puzzling question marks born of having closely shadowed and struck at torturers, informers, provocateurs, traitors, cops, and soldiers, and does so without hiding behind either moralism or trite anti-moralist cliches. Reaching us like an esoteric, late medieval folk heretic, Bonanno in these texts feels perfectly attuned to apprehend his and our current moments (in particular their real incomprehensibility), even through such unlikely lenses as his highly ambivalent exegeses of Saint Augustine or Goethe’s Faust.
Footnotes, selections, typesetting, back cover text for the book (the back cover text of the A Mano Armata pamphlet is taken from excerpts of the text), and cover designs are also by Nim Thorn.
ITS GETTING WARMERRRR 🌞 phillys 3rd monthly zine fest , March 30th 3pm in Clark park at the chess tables! Come distro food, smiles, warmth, joy, spring very well may have sprung by the time zine fest rolls around again!! 😱🫦🌷🪺 read some zines, have a picnic, make some friends… Dress cute or dress like a slob either way don’t bother brushing your hair or washing your ass because we don’t give a fuck. SEE U THERE 💌🧸💌🧸
Submission
🤖🐶
It is unclear what the struggle for Palestinian liberation will look like in the coming days. At the time of this writing a ceasefire has just been reached between Hamas and the Zionist entity, at the same time the Zionist entity continues to devastate Gaza and the West Bank. Last year a specific struggle against a local technology company connected the dots between Palestinian liberation, local gentrification, education, militarism, and borders. The company in question, Ghost Robotics, has come under fire for creating robot dogs used by the Israeli Defense Forces. That struggle may well be ongoing and this zine is not meant to push struggles into the safety of history, its aim is to inspire revolt, specifically against Ghost Robotics and generally against all aspects of domination. The struggle against Ghost Robotics has taken many forms, from spreading information and popular education, to organizing demonstrations, to destroying property. By reflecting on the past struggles we can better imagine and carry out our struggles today. This zine brings together writings about Ghost Robotics, a timeline of publicly documented action against Ghost Robotics, communiques from anonymous actions, a few photos. All information is taken from sources listed in the Resources section at the end.
Philadelphia, Occupied Lenapehoking,
Winter 2025
[PDF] [PDF For Printing]
Anarchists are going to make explosives. In Greece and Russia it is regular, but a lot of the recipes easily available online are either quite dangerous (like TATP) or outdated (like most of the US Army Improvised Munitions Manual). The recipes I have compiled are found with a little bit of digging but are often garbled and not easy to understand due to a lot of tweaking happening on the forums they are posted in. My sources are primarily sciencemadness.org and various YouTube chemistry channels, as well as some rocketry sites and occasionally reddit. (With a little work you will be able to verify all the instructions I have put into this document.)
**It is my hope that by the compilation of this guide anarchists who are going to make explosives will at least make safer ones** that will not lead to injuries, arrests, or deaths.
The cutty slutty queer anarcho spellbook you’ve been seeking is accepting submissions through mid-March 🔮 This thursday from 7-9pm we’ll gather to talk a little bit about this upcoming zine and enjoy some leisurely open writing time. Optional prompts including the chaos magic of militancy and the 5-year-plan of frivolity // Autonomous sharing and feedback groups encouraged.
Join us on March 16th at 6:15pm at ORCA for the release of the book `The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’, the pamphlet “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)”, and a screening of the film ¡G.A.R.I! (2013, 1h 23 min, French with English subtitles), by Nicolas Réglat, followed by a discussion if the mood strikes us. For location and accessibility info, email orca.philly@protonmail.com (note that ORCA is not wheelchair accessible and heating in the space can be spotty). There will be free books (somewhat limited quantity, somewhat crudely printed and bound) and pamphlets and the event is also free, with no RSVP necessary. Masking is encouraged and expected, and there will be an air filter running. There will be a box you can drop contributions to Reeking Thickets and ORCA in, but only if you really feel like it. After the event the full reading and printing pdfs will be uploaded, and a somewhat limited further quantity of physical copies will be available (email reekingthickets@proton.me) for $5 each to cover some of the costs of production, or, possibly, for slightly more at local radical bookstores.
`The Unexpected Guest and a Section of Palestine, Mon Amour’ is a 266pg. book from Reeking Thickets Press bringing together a new, rough translation of the 2010 book L’Ospite Inattesso by influential Sicilian insurrectionary anarchist, robber, poet, and philosopher Alfredo Bonanno (and as he reminds us, former motorcycle racer, professional poker player, and business executive) with similar, mostly previously untranslated sections from another book of his, Palestina, Mon Amour, and some relevant excerpts from his essay, “E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo: Contro l’amnistia” (trans. – “And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again: Against the amnesty”).
An accompanying 51pg. pamphlet, “A Mano Armata (Excerpts)” collects more topical sections from that book of his (the title of which translates as `with armed hand’, or `at gunpoint’ and is part of the Italian legal name of offenses analogous to armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, with `a mano‘ also having the sense of a tool ready and available for use, or of `hand-made’, `manually’).
To our knowledge, The Unexpected Guest, A Mano Armata, and many of the included sections of Palestine, Mon Amour haven’t been properly translated into English, and this primarily machine-based translation – though we feel is sufficient for some purposes – certainly can’t be considered as such. Translation was carried out by Nim Thorn, a non-speaker of Italian, using various translation programs with the results then checked for apparent mistakes or divergences and the offending passages re-translated in context with dictionaries and using other translation programs. Short stanzas (such as the section “Untitled” in Palestine, Mon Amour) or metered sections (such as the Faust excerpts in The Unexpected Guest) were also translated word by word using comparisons of multiple tools. The introduction to the second edition of A Mano Armata is a particularly bad translation, of a difficult text in the first place, though some parts of it still shine through quite clearly, and the subject matter – in part about the desire to engage with the word backwards by constructing semio-cognitive labyrinths to reflect absence and help bypass the recuperating tendency of the will and language – feels ironically relevant.
Footnotes, selections, typesetting, back cover text for the book (the back cover text of the A Mano Armata pamphlet is taken from excerpts of the text), and cover designs are also by Nim Thorn. No authorization was sought for this project and, for our part, further printing or distribution is welcomed.
The sharply echoing, often numbered and diary-like stanzas that make up much of the book are a remembrance of the deadly, pro-liberatory armed struggle Bonanno took part in during the `60s and following decades, including alongside Palestinians in the Levant (relating also his experience of torture for this by Mossad in 1972), in Greece against the junta, in Ireland, Algeria, Uganda, and Italy. Written mostly during various later-life prison stints in Italy and Greece for robberies and seditions (both real and fabricated), these poetic, searingly honest tracings of formative, difficult memories grapple with suffering, monstrosity, humanity, and ghostly normality, the silent, irreversible and all-transfiguring singularities of death and of ending the lives of others, and the irresolvable tension between the quantitative and qualitative. The paradoxical, messy engagements with the often deeply flawed, recuperative, and quixotic but sometimes critical aspects of clandestine revolutionary warfare come deeply into play, alongside those with the projects of memory, theoretical and personal understanding, and the word itself. He refuses to shy away from the stark insights and puzzling question marks born of having closely shadowed and struck at torturers, informers, provocateurs, traitors, cops, and soldiers, and does so without hiding behind either moralism or trite anti-moralist cliches. Reaching us like an esoteric, late medieval folk heretic, Bonanno in these texts feels perfectly attuned to apprehend his and our current moments (in particular their real incomprehensibility), even through such unlikely lenses as his highly ambivalent exegeses of Saint Augustine or Goethe’s Faust.
¡G.A.R.I! (2013) by Nicolas Réglat is a documentary about the affinity groups of French and Spanish anarchists who briefly gathered under that acronym (trans. – `Revolutionary Internationalist Action Groups’) in France from 1973-1974 for revolt and to join with Spanish anarchist and autonomous rebels in combat with the far-right dictatorship of Franco and the broader capitalist, authoritarian order, who were then under real threat of judicial or extra-judicial execution. It included the participation, alleged in some cases, of many influential figures including Jean Weir, Lucio Urtubia, Floréal Cuadrado, Jean-Marc Rouillan, and Octavio Alberola. Operating between various regions of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and coordinating with rebels in or exiled from Spain, and with groups across Europe, GARI carried out a kidnapping of a Spanish banker and numerous non-lethal arsons, bombings, acts of infrastructure sabotage, machine-gunnings, robberies and fraud, while carrying out creative counter-information and aiding in the smuggling of arms and fighters to and from Spain. In the ambit of groups like the Angry Brigade or the First of May Group, GARI embraced an aggressive and strategic transnational armed struggle while remaining in touch with the spark of situationism and the autonomous movements, and resisting the vanguardism, organizational fetishization, and authoritarian variants of anti-imperialism so prevalent then and now. Though only existing as such for a short period before diffracting in countless directions across the constellation of struggle in Europe (including some arguably non-anarchist directions, such as the later path of Action Directe) which they contributed to spreading, GARI was an important node and precedent in the experimenting millieu from which contemporary insurrectionary anarchism was then emerging. Taking as point of departure a never-published comic book created by the GARI kidnappers in 1976, Réglat sets out to `save from the dustbin of history’ the stories of those involved, which includes that of some of his own family members. Consisting of archival footage and present day conversations with people involved in the events, and made possible by the expiration of statute of limitations, the film is a refreshingly human look into complex experiences from a chapter often glossed over, yet the consequences of which still ripple strongly in our struggles today.