Santiago, Jan 14 (EFE).- An eco-terrorist group on Saturday said it was responsible for a parcel bomb that detonated at the home of the chairman of the board of Chilean state-owned mining giant Codelco, the world’s biggest copper producer.
In an Internet blog site, the group known as Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ITS-Chile) posted a statement in which it claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack as well as two images of what it said was the bomb sent to the 44-year-old Oscar Landerretche’s home.
The parcel bomb was wrapped as a gift and delivered by a young woman to the residence, located in Santiago’s La Reina neighborhood. A professor of mining engineering at the University of Chile was listed on the parcel as the sender.
Landerretche suffered superficial injuries to his extremities and chest when the bomb went off.
The group said the parcel would have arrived at the offices of the university professor if Landerretche had not received it first.
“The pretentious Landerretche deserved to die for his offenses against Earth,” it said, adding that he “had been deserving of our explosive gift for being at the head of this megaproject devastating all the beauty of Earth.”
They added that they were not anarchists and were seeking vengeance “for Earth’s devastation.”
That group has earlier claimed responsibility for other firebomb attacks or attempted attacks, including one targeting the University of Chile’s Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in May 2016.
Landerretche called the attack “very violent” and “cowardly” after being treated for his injuries at a clinic on Saturday morning.
He told reporters that he and his family were fortunate, adding that his daughter and a domestic worker were in the house at the time but that his injuries were the most serious.
“If someone believes that with something like this the board of Codelco, the top administration of Codelco or I are going to act differently than what we’ve been doing with respect to establishing good practices, probity, controls within the company, which belongs to all Chileans, they are deeply mistaken,” the chairman said.
Chile’s government said Saturday that it was confident it would track down those responsible for the parcel bomb.
“I’m sure that very quickly we’ll be on the trail of the perpetrators of this incident,” Interior Minister Mario Fernandez said after heading a meeting of the country’s security agencies.
Fernandez said that as part of their investigation authorities would probe the possible role of ITS-Chile in the attack.
Why is gangster Jacques Mesrine an icon across the Channel 30 years after his death? UK film-goers are about to find out
The many guises of French gangster Jacques Mesrine (1936 – 1979). Photograph: RDA/Getty Images
No less than the British or the Americans, the French have always loved their movie gangsters, especially if they have an intellectual or political edge. The latest addition to this canon arrives in the UK next month with two films Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1, starring Vincent Cassel in the lead role. Both films tell the story of Jacques Mesrine, the legendary master-criminal who was killed in Paris in 1979. They have been massive critical and box office hits in France, where Le Monde has described them as “brilliant exercises in style”. For the critic of the fashionable and influential magazine Les Inrockuptibles, they are “a searing political indictment” of recent French history. The first film, Killer Instinct, was nominated for nine Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscars) in January. And Mesrine is everywhere in France – a fashion icon, a role model for youth and a cultural phenomenon.
How did this happen? And what does it tell us about France in 2009 that its biggest star is a long-dead mobster from the 1970s?
Although the name of Mesrine is unknown to most UK readers, it occupies a place in the French cultural imagination every bit as important as Zinedine Zidane or Edith Piaf. In the 1970s Mesrine was dubbed public enemy No 1 by the police but also regularly topped magazine polls as the most popular man in France. He courted publicity and would appear regularly on the front of Paris Match, half-disguised, smoking cigars and toting a Kalashnikov, discussing his love affairs and describing the French government as inept and corrupt.
The director of the two films, Jean-François Richet, set out to capture this strange moment in French postwar life. “I wanted to tell a micro-history,” he says. “Not the history of France through Napoleon Bonaparte but through a man you might have passed in the street.”
Mesrine – who was nicknamed “Monsieur-tout-le-monde” (Mister Everybody) for his skill at disguise – has become a hero to the current generation of rebellious youth in France. In the tougher parts of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, hip-hop kids sport T-shirts showing Mesrine pointing a pistol, and the slogan “Profession Ennemi Public – Mesrine, pour toujours et à jamais” (Profession Public Enemy. Mesrine – forever and always).
On a wall at Porte de Vanves in southern Paris, just as you head for the dreaded council estates at the edge of the city, graffiti in homage to Mesrine reads: “Papa Mesrine – pas mort!” (Daddy Mesrine – not dead!).
Mesrine has also become an idol to the current generation of French rappers. “I’d rather have a dead copper under my wheels, just like Mesrine, than just drive a Subaru,” runs a line from Seth Guéko, the up-and-coming white rapper from the Paris suburbs who has declared himself the “spiritual son of Jacques Mesrine”. Other heavyweight rap stars, such as Akhenaton and Rim’K, praise Mesrine as the French Scarface or the new Che Guevara.
How Mesrine achieved this status is the story of the two films. He was born in 1936 into a fairly well-to-do family in the prosperous suburb of Clichy-la-Garenne. In the 1950s he fought as a paratrooper in the Algerian war – allegedly in torture squads – and on his return to France decided to make a career as a criminal. His work – mainly robberies – took him to South America, Switzerland, the Canary Islands and Canada. He was famous for daring prison breaks and was soon nicknamed the French Robin Hood.
He enjoyed deliberately provoking the French authorities and developed great media savvy. During one trial he famously threw his handcuffs into the face of a judge, loudly declaring him “a cretin and an incompetent”.
Mesrine was described in the press as an “intellectual gangster” on account of his articulate and combative style in interviews. He was very cheeky, very smart and could be very funny: one of his favourite techniques, for example, was to launch bank raids almost simultaneously in adjacent streets. As the police were setting off to bank raid number one, he and his gang were already laughingly looting another bank less than half a mile away, leaving the finest Parisian detectives resembling the Keystone Cops.
This is all great fun and the two films rattle along at a cracking pace, depicting Mesrine’s capers and crimes. But there is also a political meaning here. The first film opens with the shooting of Mesrine on a street in northern Paris on 2 November 1979. This is a highly charged scene. All French people of that generation have seared on their memories the front-page photos of Mesrine slumped in a blood-spattered heap over the windshield of a car. The joker who had taunted the police on the front covers of Paris Match had now met his end in the full glare of the media who had colluded with his tricks and games.
The killing was followed by public anger over whether this was legitimate police action or – most likely – a military execution ordered by a government which, in its anger and frustration, had lost all sense of restraint or control. The police were personally congratulated in private by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Despite several legal investigations launched by Mesrine’s family, there has never been a full public explanation.
This was a period when, under the aegis of a decaying right-wing government, the French police and secret services were both notoriously acting beyond the law. More to the point, there was a direct precedent for the killing of Mesrine. On 20 September 1979 the ultra-left journalist Pierre Goldman had been shot dead in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. The murder was claimed by the far-right vigilante group Honneur de la Police (Police Honour), who vowed to clean France of “all criminals and leftists”. The police quickly and ignominiously abandoned the Goldman case despite a public outcry led by such distinguished figures as the actress Simone Signoret and the singer Maxime Le Forestier.
This was precisely why Mesrine’s death shocked all of France. It seemed, indeed, to many on the French left that his assassination, in the wake of the Goldman killing, signalled that a secret civil war was now well under way, with the aim of sweeping up the remnants of the generation who had led the near-revolution of May 1968. More to the point, by the time of his death, Mesrine had moved politically to the far left. He was close to the revolutionary activist Charles Bauer, whom he had met in prison, and was beginning to campaign for prisoners’ rights.
UK audiences will appreciate these two films as thoroughly entertaining gangster epics (Gérard Depardieu is particularly menacing as Mesrine’s heavyweight mentor during Mesrine’s early days in Pigalle). But for French audiences there is clearly a deeper and more potent agenda at work: from Mesrine’s experiences during the Algerian war in the 1950s, the tumult and anarchy of the French 1960s through to the right-wing vendettas of the 1970s, all of France’s recent traumas are here in microcosm. It is this fact which also explains Mesrine’s appeal out in the troubled suburbs of nearly all big French cities, where riots and skirmishes with heavily armed and militarised police are a fact of daily life. So, if not quite on the scale of The Godfather or Goodfellas, these films are still more than the French standard gangster movie. And you can’t help thinking that Jacques Mesrine – the gangster as arch-prankster – would still enjoy the fact that his ghost is still causing trouble in 21st-century France.
• Mesrine: Killer Instinct is released on 7 August and Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1 on 28 August
Mesrine: the facts
1936 Born 28 December in Paris.
1955 Marries Lydia de Souza (it lasts one year).
1956 Goes to war in Algeria.
1961 Marries Maria de la Soledad.
1962 Sentenced to 18 months for attempted bank robbery.
1967 Maria de la Soledad leaves him.
1969 Imprisoned in Canada for murder and kidnap.
1972 Escapes prison. Robs two banks in a single day.
1973 Sentenced to 20 years in France; escapes during trial. Steals FF1.5m from a printworks.
1977 Publishes his memoir Killer Instinct, in which he boasts of having committed 39 murders.
1979 Shot dead by police on 2 November. Ollie Brock
Once the exclusive domain of credit card thieves and fraudsters, the “Deep Web” or the related “Dark Web” is attracting a slew of startups and their venture capital backers.
“If [you] spend time in there, you begin to understand what’s happening in the hacker world. And you can in a sense be proactive to pick off emerging threats,” says Ryan J. Shaw, co-founder and CEO of Blockade Technologies, a Boca Raton, Florida-based company whose data storage platform uses blockchain technology to encrypt information and store it across several different networks.
Threats in this online netherworld are many and varied, say other sources, and could include acts of industrial espionage, says one cybersecurity attorney.
“It’s not just terrorists hanging out in the Deep and Dark Web. It’s credit card thieves, fraudsters, malware developers, hackers,” says Josh Lefkowitz, co-founder and CEO of Flashpoint, a New York-based company focused on collecting data from the Deep and Dark Web to protect its customers.
“We saw an opportunity to really address an acute pain point that was not only being felt in the public sector and government agencies, but also amongst the private sector, financial services companies, retailers, healthcare providers and law firms,” Lefkowitz said.
“Literature, SDS, Ostermarsch, drugs – that was all a big thing, and they were the ones who later showed themselves by their long hair. They told the people how we were to Vietnam, the drug, the university uprising. ”
Gaston Salvatore and Rudi Dutschke at the Vietnam Congress of the SDS (Socialist German Student Union) 1968 in West Berlin.
The “Subversive Action”, founded by Dieter Kunzelmann in Munich in 1962, had learned from her intellectual fathers Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse that the modern “repressive society” no longer had its power by the threat of police and justice, but by the Seduction to consumption.“In the middle of material prosperity, life does not live, people are unable to enjoy themselves, instead of real satisfaction of their dreams, desires and pleasure, people willingly let themselves be fed with substitute offerings from consumption and illusions As in the past, have only been kept open by open violence and sensible oppression. “The role of the police and the prison have taken over cinema, television, consumption and controlled leisure.”(Chaussy, 1985, p. 39). Before revolutionary political changes have a chance, people first have to learn to free their oppressed inner impulses – especially sexuality.At the center of the action and thought of the subversive action were therefore one’s own person, one’s own experience, one’s own feelings. From hippies, Yippies became a provocative part of a political movement that aimed for real changes in the majority society, but without compromising its free lifestyle with bourgeois conventions.“The transformation of circumstances was bound in a holistically understood context to the transformation of its own life.” (Lindner 1996, p. 157f.)
In practice, this meant the “revolutionization of everyday life”: the abolition of private property and life already today (municipalities instead of small families; the insistence on an “intimate life” is a bourgeois bourgeoisie, ie free sexuality / part exchange, , Exiting from the (university) performance pressure, the pleasure principle as the highest maxim of all action and above all – constant provocation as a lustful revolutionary practice.“A revolutionary who is not concerned with bothering his parents with bourgeois clothes and haircut is still largely attached to his bourgeois background.”(Cited according to Bucher / Pohl 1986, p. 28) “If the young people of today are seen in photographs, they are often very good and courageous, but their provocative effect is no longer quite understandable The majority of the youths at that time had a much stronger attraction than the theorists of the 1968. The free choice of one’s own appearance instead of clothes and habits, free school instead of authoritarian educational institutions, free sexuality instead of prudery, commune instead of family.(AaO) The connection between Flower Power and political protest, from revolution, subculture and rock music to a politico-aesthetic “rebellion of the impulses” drew youth into its spell and created a dynamic “we-feeling” in which the adult world outside Remained.
“Literature, SDS, Ostermarsch, drugs – that was all a big thing, and they counted themselves to her, later by their long hair, they meant formlessness, sensuality, openness The parents of the long-haired ones were a generation without a future, without children … It was the pop and rock music, in the personal experience, life-destiny and existential desire, the melancholy and destructive fury of the Beatles were the The songs of the second hour of the Revolt in Berkeley, Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt, the true prophets, were the “street fighting man”, “Eve of destruction” and “I can’t get no satisfaction” Of the dissent generation were the pop and rock groups. “(Mosler 1977, pp. 96-100)
The merging of student protests and youth culture broadened the spectrum of the antiauthoritarian revolt far beyond the student-intellectual milieu.A strong antiauthoritarian music and theater scene arose, the beginnings of a left-wing apprentice movement, and the share of pupils (in grammar schools in general) who were “often and interested” with politics rose from 20 per cent in 1961 to 52 Percentage of 1968. (Bliicher 1969, p. 112)
The APO rebels became trendsetters like Techno 25 years later and attracted more and more young people. “The temptation to jump into a successful movement was almost the same as the provocative counter-identification of external attributes such as parka, long hair, etc. The proof of actual moral and political superiority to the” establishment “was superfluous as long as this disqualified itself . “(Schülein 1977, p. 106)
The antiauthoritarian movement was now composed of a multitude of groups, milieus and interests.The least was a “revolution”, the change in society as a whole, but most of them fought for their individual freedom, for the right to their own lifestyle beyond the orderly and performance-defying mainstream.“The attack against the ruling order is not a direct challenge to the power, which, of course, is known to be unquestionable. The challenge is the obligation of this power.”(Lübbe 1975, p. 46) If the “establishment” had shown itself to be more flexible, the protests taken seriously and used as an occasion for urgently needed reforms, tolerating the rights of young people to their own lifeworlds and models, (RAF).For the political opinion leaders, the core of the APO, who were really concerned with the upheaval of “dominant conditions”, only became radicalized when they had to learn that their symbolic rule violations were not perceived by policy makers and the majority of the population as a thought – But also as “eminent threats to order, justice and decency, which had to be punished indifferently” (Lindner 1996, p. 177f.).The national community idea, which had been massively updated, especially by Ludwig Erhard (born 1897, from 1949 to 1963, Federal Minister of Economics, then until 1966 Federal Chancellor), was still very present, according to which opposites and contradictions within the population were dangerous.For the majority of Germans, democracy still meant economic prosperity, and that “those up there” had to confirm every four years that they had done a good job.“It took years for the fact that demonstrations were a legitimate form of voluntary expression in a free society.”(Fetscher 1990, p. 71)
This was particularly true of Berlin, the last “bulwark of freedom” in the midst of communist enemy lands. “Especially the old-established inhabitants regarded Berlin as the” front city “, as the foremost bastion of the free West, as a” stake in the flesh of communism. “The city was to become a sign of the West Favorable conditions of living, especially young people from West Germany were conquered. After the construction of the Wall in 1961, many inhabitants had left the city, and now a lot of large apartments were empty, which were incredibly cheap to rent.(Prinz 2003, p. 154) Even the pubs, who had mushroomed in the sixties to satisfy the students of the West German province, were cheap. The police force had already been abolished in Berlin before the Wall was built To attract tourists and residents of East Berlin to the free West.Nowhere else was the fight of the systems so inexorable and commonplace as in Berlin, nowhere else was anti-communism so much absorbed into the blood of the population as here.“It was a dark feeling that the eastern part of the population had to spoon out a soup that had been ordered by all Germans, and that this unacceptable debt complex had been struck down by blind anti-communism, and hatred and enmity against Bolshevism still justified part of Hitler’s crimes on.”(Rudolf Augstein in Der Spiegel 24/1967, p. 24) Everyone who dared to get the status quo got this almost brushless transition from “Going to the other side” to critisize.Nowhere else did even bourgeois commentators encourage a rebellion against the APO rebels as here, and nowhere else did social democrat politicians, so self-evident, defamate leftist or even liberal critics who were judged elsewhere as right-wing extremists.Berlin was in many respects a front city, and whoever came between the fronts was combated by all means.
literature
Blücher, Viggo Graf: The Unrest of Youth and the Generational Relationship, in: Deutsche Jugend 1969, pp. 107-123.Here, according to Lindner 1996, p. 129.
Bucher, Willi / Pohl, Klaus: “Dear living as normal.”, In: Deutscher Werkbund eV (eds.) 1986, pp. 24-33.
Chaussy, Ulrich: The Three Lives of Rudi Dutschke.A biography.Frankfurt am Main 1985.
Fetscher, Iring: Utopias – illusions – hopes.A plea for a political culture in Germany.Stuttgart, 1990. Here, according to Geiling 1996, pp. 74f.
Lindner, Werner: Youth protests since the fifties.Dissent and cultural idiosyncrasy.Opladen 1996.
Lübbe, Hermann: Legitimacy Weakness and Youth Movement, in: Youth in Society.A symposium.Munich 1975, pp. 42-53.
Mosler, Peter: What we wanted, what we were.Student folks – ten years later.Reinbek 1977.
Prince, Alois: Dear furious rather than sad.The life story of Ulrike Marie Meinhof.Advertisement advertisement.
Schülein, JA: From the student revolution to the tending or retreat into the private, in: Kursbuch 48, 1977, pp. 108-124.
In a farewell message posted Thursday morning, group members said they were deleting their accounts and making an exit after their offers to release their entire cache of NSA hacking tools in exchange for a whopping 10,000 bitcoins (currently valued at more than $8.2 million) were rebuffed. While they said they would still make good on the offer should the sum be transferred into their electronic wallet, they said there would be no more communications.
“Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for TheShadowBrokers,” Thursday’s post, which wasn’t available as this article was going live, stated. “Free dumps and bullshit political talk was being for marketing attention. There being no bitcoins in free dumps and giveaways. You are being disappointed? Nobody is being more disappointed than TheShadowBrokers.”
The post included 61 Windows-formatted binary files, including executables, dynamic link libraries, and device drivers. While, according to this analysis, 43 of them were detected by antivirus products from Kaspersky Lab, which in 2015 published a detailed technical expose into the NSA-tied Equation Group, only one of them had previously been uploaded to the Virus Total malware scanning service. And even then, Virus Total showed that the sample was detected by only 32 of 58 AV products even though it had been uploaded to the service in 2009. After being loaded into Virus Total on Thursday, a second file included in the farewell post was detected by only 12 of the 58 products.
Parting insult
Malware experts are still analyzing the files, but early indications are that, as was the case with earlier Shadow Brokers dumps, they belonged to the Tailored Access Operations, the NSA’s elite hacking unit responsible for breaking into the computers and networks of US adversaries. And given evidence the files remained undetected by many of the world’s most widely used malware defenses, Thursday’s farewell message may have been little more than a parting insult, particularly if the group has origins in the Russian government, as members of the intelligence community have speculated.
“This farewell message is kind of a burn-it-to-the-ground moment,” Jake Williams, a malware expert and founder of Rendition Infosec, told Ars. “Russian ties make sense given the inauguration [of Donald Trump] happens in a short time [from now]. If that narrative is correct and Shadow Brokers is Russian, they wouldn’t be able to release those tools after Trump takes office. If you roll with that narrative, [the burn-it-to-the-ground theory] certainly works.”
Under such theories, Russian hackers attempted to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump in hopes his policies would be more favorable to Russia than Hillary Clinton’s. Once Trump takes office, Russian hackers would want to prevent any blowback from hitting the new president. Thursday’s farewell message came within hours of a new dispatch from Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that leaked hacked Democratic e-mails that the US intelligence community said was a front for Russian operatives. In the post, Guccifer 2.0 strenuously rejected the accusation that he was Russian and claimed evidence to the contrary was false.
Thursday’s dump came several days after Shadow Brokers members published screenshots of what they claimed were NSA-developed exploits for Windows systems. While the absence of the actual files themselves made analysis impossible, the screenshots and the file names suggested the cache may have included a backdoor made possible by a currently unpatched vulnerability in the Windows implementation of the Server Message Block protocol.
Other tools appeared to provide:
bypasses for antivirus programs from at least a dozen providers, including Kaspersky, Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro
a streamlined way to surgically remove entries from event logs used to forensically investigate breached computers and networks
hacks for a Windows-based e-mail client known as WorldTouch
capabilities for gaining administrator privileges or dumping passwords on Window machines.
The full text of the post read:
So long, farewell peoples. TheShadowBrokers is going dark, making exit. Continuing is being much risk and bullshit, not many bitcoins. TheShadowBrokers is deleting accounts and moving on so don’t be trying communications. Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for TheShadowBrokers. Free dumps and bullshit political talk was being for marketing attention. There being no bitcoins in free dumps and giveaways. You are being disappointed? Nobody is being more disappointed than TheShadowBrokers. But TheShadowBrokers is leaving door open. You having TheShadowBrokers public bitcoin address 19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr6VitWK TheShadowBrokers offer is still being good, no expiration. If TheShadowBrokers receiving 10,000 btc in bitcoin address then coming out of hiding and dumping password for Linux + Windows. Before go, TheShadowBrokers dropped Equation Group Windows Warez onto system with Kaspersky security product. 58 files popped Kaspersky alert for equationdrug.generic and equationdrug.k TheShadowBrokers is giving you popped files and including corresponding LP files. Password is FuckTheWorld Is being final fuck you, you should have been believing TheShadowBrokers.
Files included with the post carried the following names:
Of interest to researchers looking for clues about the people behind Shadow Brokers, Images included with the file dump showed the files were included on a Drive D that was most likely a USB drive, given an accompanying icon. The folder was titled DSZOPSDISK, a string that also matches a folder name from a previous exploit dump. The evidence “lends credibility to the argument the leak came from an insider who stole, and subsequently lost control of, a USB stick, rather than a direct hack of the NSA,” independent researcher Matt Tait, who posts under the Twitter handle Pwn All The Things, told Ars. As Tait also observed, the computer the drive was attached to appeared to be running Kaspersky AV and VMware tools, had no connected network or sound card, and was configured to show dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format. The files were signed by the same cryptographic key used to sign previous Shadow Broker dumps.
One theory floated by intelligence officers and reported by The New York Times is that the Shadow Brokers leaks were carried out by Russian operatives as a warning to the US not to publicly escalate blame of President Vladimir Putin for hacks on the Democratic National Committee. NSA leaker Edward Snowden and a host of others have also speculated that Russia is behind the Shadow Brokers as well. There’s no definitive proof of Russian involvement, but the timing of Thursday’s farewell and the potentially damaging leaks that accompanied it—coming eight days before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump—give the unescapable impression of a link.
“They may not be Russian,” Williams said of the Shadow Brokers members. “But it is inexplicable they would release the dump without understanding the timing and how it would be read. Anyone smart enough to steal these tools understands the conclusion that will be drawn by most.”
The entire contents of this book (except the index) are available for free on this site, but you can still buy hard copies should you so wish. This book was written in 1987, things have moved on since then (both for the author and in the world), so please bear that in mind….
It is rare for an art movement to be completely original. The go forward meanings of avant-garde do not mean that its movements are a tabula rasa and this is certainly true for Situationism. Spurred by many previous concepts, this artistic and political movement started emerging during the early 1960s in France and it experimented with the idea of constructing a situation – hence the name. Constructing a situation was setting up an environment favorable for the fulfillment of a particular desire. This was the main concept for all representatives of Situationism[1]. All of the initial theories concerning the development of this movement came from an organization called Situationist International (often referred to simply as SI) – a group whose activities we shell investigate to detail in the remainder of this text.
It should be noted that Situationism as an art movement did not produce too many artworks – as a matter of fact, if one somehow takes Asger Jorn and his pieces out of the Situationist equation, the movement’s output is next to none. However, Situationism is credited with providing some of the most revolutionary theories at the time, concepts that heavily impacted the art scenes for decades. Many of their game-changing ideas can still be found in today’s contemporary art. With all of that being said, we will now investigate how the Situationist International group and Situationism as a movement came to be, as well as exploring just how influential they were to art history.
Destroy The NORM! – Image via cvltnation.com
Origins of Situationism
Situationism was not born overnight nor out of thin air. Originally, it emerged as a part of Lettrism, a movement whose members were operating in the late 1940’s Paris. Naturally, the Lettrist leader Isidore Isou, a Romanian-born French poet and visual artist, had a massive impact on the development and emergence of Situationism. The Lettrists were heavily influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism and the general idea of avant-garde which aimed at challenging everything deemed as traditional. With such goals in mind, members of Lettrism attempted to apply critical theories based on these concepts to all aspects of the arts and culture. Their main guiding star was the lettrie, a term that set the very title of the movement. Lettrie was a style of poem writing which reflected pure form yet was devoid of all semantic content, a characteristic which Lettrists desired to implement in other kinds of art-making.
During the year of 1952, the radically left wing of the Lettrist movement, which actually included Guy Debord who will become the key founder of Situationism, broke off from Isou’s organization and formed the Letterist International, a new Paris-based collective of avant-garde artists and political theorists. This new artistic and literary movement will prove to be pivotal for Situationism as it provided the roots for what would become many of the key theories behind SI.[2] The main concept which was adopted was the new theory of psychogeography – the feelings evoked in the individual by their current surroundings. Detournement also emerged at this point. This was the idea of recontextualizing an existing work of art or literature in order to radically shift its meaning to a new one which had revolutionary significance.
Isidore Isou – Hypergraphie, 1964 – Image via macda.cat
Emancipation From Lettrism
The official Situationist International was fully formed in the year of 1956[3]. At that time, numerous members of the Lettrist International made contact with several different creative collectives at the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Italy. Here, many young thinkers found common ground and they decided to fuse themselves in a new organization which was intended to represent their ideas better than their current groups (most members were from the Lettrist International, the London Psychogeographical Asociation and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus). Slowly but surely emerging as the leader of the new collective, Guy Debord wrote the newly-formed Situationist International’s manifesto in the June of 1956, titling it Report on the Construction of Situations and heavily combining the agreed concepts with the ideas of Karl Marx. This is one of the reasons why SI always had problems with many aspects of capitalism. The entire manifesto was also underlined by a strong sense of Surrealism, meaning that Andre Breton also had a huge indirect say in the matter. Besides Debord, other notable members of the who have been with the Situationist International from the very start were theorist Raoul Vaneigem, the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney, the aforementioned Danish artist Asger Jorn, the architect Attila Kotanyi and the French writer Michele Bernstein.
It was from here on out that the Situationist International started to heavily influence arts, politics and urbanism. Its advocation of a cultural revolution and creation of Situationism made it the perfect backdrop to influence popular culture. One of their main interests was making a person living in the capitalist system see art as part of their daily living. The first four years of the Situationist International were marked mostly by the collaborations and theories presented by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn as the two unofficially became SI’s de facto leaders. The two wanted to invoke a cultural revolution within the Western society. Although the group would later swim into much more political waters than it was first intended, the Situationist International had an enormous influence on the art scenes across Europe.
The Situationist International manifesto – Image via pinterest.com
The Role of Situationism Within Art
The connection between Situationism and art is extremely diverse because the members of the group came from such different backgrounds. That fact makes Situationism one of the most interesting gems of modern history to explore, but it also poses a challenge to anyone interested in such an endeavor. Another troubling occurrence to confidently analyzing the art of Situationism is that a number of members never stayed steady with their conceptual basis, constantly evolving alongside the collective.
Primarily, the SI rejected all art forms which were autonomous and detached from politics. Naturally, this led to a new definition of what art actually is, a fact that often connects the actions of SI with early Conceptualism. Guy Debord and early Situationism was heavily based on the aforementioned concept of psychogeography, presented in Guy’s Psychogeographique de Paris. In it, he took a map of the city of Paris, cut it into pieces and glued different parts together. Among other things, the newly formed map was supposed to indicate locations which were able to evoke most emotions from people standing there. Also, this version of the city is thought to be a series of linked transformable structures which were able to adapt to current needs of art. This concept became instrumental to the early French street art scene which will soon start to be emerging on the creative wings of Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
Another important novelty Situationism introduced was also pivotal for urban art as we know it today – members of the Si were the one of the first to use graffiti. These were short and powerful statements, such as the one from 1952 when Guy wrote Ne travaillez jamais! (Never work!) on various locations in Paris. Via such interventions, representatives of Situationism were using public space, altering it in order to convey a message to the public. Situationism also introduced the roots of performance art, a medium that was later continued by Fluxus artists. This form of expression also explored the way surroundings could be used in order to send a clear message to the observers.
Asger Jorn – Letter to my Son – Image via tate.org.uk
Posters, Collages and Hypergraphy
A very modern form of artworks commonly found within the SI’s creative arsenal was their work with comics, posters and publications[4]. Through their guerilla tactics, members would paste their propaganda around urban surroundings, often using popular comics with changed content placed in the speech bubbles. This misappropriation was called détournement. Situationism presented some new utilizations for the medium of collage as well. Asger Jorn was the one who stood out in that department. He used collages in his films as well as for his technique in which he would cover up some aspects of famous paintings, therefore changing the context of the piece.
Another interesting novelty SI adapted to their own requirements was the so-called hypergraphy, also known as metagraphics. This method was based on merging poetry and graphics, combining text and visual ways of communication. The technique was originally developed by the Lettrist movement and Asger Jorn was the one to work with it the most until he left the SI in 1961. He left because of his worsening health and disagreements concerning the events that we shall soon discuss. The moment Jorn abandoned the SI’s artistic cause is the moment many experts agree that Situationism in its finest form ceased to exist. Although he lacked the personal warmth and persuasiveness to draw people of different nationalities and talents into an active working partnership, Jorn was the creative motor of the Situationist International.
Situationist Détournement – Image via bp.com
The Year of 1968 and the End of SI
After Jorn abandoned the SI, the group basically consisted almost exclusively of the Franco-Belgian section, led by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. These two were much more comfortable with political theories then creating pieces of art, so the entire organization was shifted to accommodate such tendencies. Observed from an artistic perspective, the group which founded the Situationism was doing next to nothing to advance it from that point on.
One of the group’s favorite activities during their political period was visiting various institutions and scandalizing the capitalistic authorities – a kind of project which placed the members in the heart of the 1968 uprisings. The May of that year was a volatile period of civil unrest in France, punctuated by demonstrations and massive general strikes as well as the occupation of universities and factories across the land. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution and many believed that the chaos was a direct result of SI’s activities. Ultimately, the chaos of 1968 served as a series of events that cemented the Situationist International as a capable and noteworthy political organization. After the uprising was brought to a halt, SI became notorious and lost many members. By the year of 1972, Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Guy Debord were the only two remaining members of the SI. The entire organization was dissolved that same year.
Graffiti in the University of Lyon, May 1968 – Image via wikipedia.org
Effects Situationism had on Arts, Politics and Culture
As was said earlier, Situationism did not produce too many artworks, instead focusing on developing theories that had deep and long lasting effects on modern art. Other aspects of culture were affected as well – for example, Debord’s analysis of the spectacle has been influential among people working on television and the emergence of punk subculture was also inspired by the SI’s theories. The development of advertisement as we know it today also owes a lot of its aspects to Situationism.
Since much of SI’s efforts were focused on politics, it comes as no surprise that this was the field that felt their influence the most. Communists and other leftists were fascinated with Situationism and its ideas, regularly incorporating their concepts within their political guides. Dislocating the SI’s concepts from Marxism, anarchists also held some aspects of Situationism in high regard, allowing it to influence both the music industry and all levels of punk design.
As for art scenes, it is possible to trace Situationist ideas within the development of other avant-garde threads such as Neoism, as well as artists such as Mark Divo. As it was mentioned before, SI’s theories helped set the course of the French street art scene which later served as an inspiration for urban interventionists on a global level. Due to its concepts of using an environment, SI also impacted the rise and evolution of Installation art, as well as Performance. Ultimately, Situationism as an art movement offered the authors a new perspective that was applicable to all levels and kinds of art making, proving that avant-garde was far from dead and that pieces of art were more than capable of playing a pivotal role within our societies. Situationist International may have turned a lot of its attention to politics, but their true legacy can be found echoing throughout art history[5].
Editors’ Tip:What is Situationism?: A Reader
This anthology gathers together a broad range of critical material about the Situationist International. The texts run sequentially according to date of original publication, thereby providing an overview of the way in which situationism has been historicised in the Anglo-American world. A wealth of historical and interpretative information is provided by various contributors. This plurality of voices ranges from underground legends to art theorists, ultra-leftists to professional academics, whose opinions blend and clash to provide a book that is far more vibrant than a conventional monograph. Contributors include Sadie Plant, Chris Gray, Bob Black, Alastair Bonnett, Stewart Home, Jean Barrot and George Robertson. Ultimately, this book offers an overview and analysis of Situationism, one of the most interesting art movements of the second half of the 20th century.
References:
Elliot, K., Situationism in a nutshell, Barbelith Webzine, 2008
Barrot, J., What is Situationism?, Flatland, 1991
Knabb, K., Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets; Revised & Expanded edition, 2006
Nabuco, J., Situationism: A Compendium Kindle Edition, Schiffer Publishing, 2012
Debord, G., Chtcheglov, I., Jorn, A., Vaneigem, R., Khayati, M., What is Situationism? A Reader, AK Press; 1st US, 2001
Featured Images: Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein and Asgar Jorn – Image via spike.com; Guy Debord – Naked City – Image via pinimg.com; Asger Jorn – Photo of the artist in a studio – Image via pinimg.com
For Marxists, economic relations are believed to shape and maintain virtually every other aspect of human life. Capitalists, on the other hand, have a different view of what economic relations should look like, but share the Marxist conviction that the economy represents the highest ordering principle in society. The idea that every other value should be subordinated to the primacy of economics—which is often referred to as economism—is anathema to us. Like our ancestors in Indo-European Antiquity, who relegated the mercantilist classes to the lowest rungs of society, there are any number of things that we value over and above strictly financial considerations. The shortlist would include virtues like courage, brotherhood, loyalty, and honor, but it would hardly end there.
Nevertheless, there is a tendency for people on “our side” (and I use this designation very loosely) to equate the rejection of economism with an attitude that almost seems to idealize poverty. They will attempt to make a virtue of their own financial failings by acting as if they’re somehow too noble, or too “spiritual,” to even bother thinking about money. When someone else succeeds in carving out a manageable living (or, as is more often the case, some small pittance) by making music, writing books, or creating art that these people purport to care about, they will respond by declaring that said individual is now a “sell out” who “only cares about money.” Of course, this behavior is partially motivated by resentment. Tell a few friends about your trip to Europe, or that nice bottle of bourbon that you and your wife/girlfriend just finished, and at least one of them will respond with the reliably cringe-worthy “must be nice!” Yes, it is nice, asshole. It is all the more ironic when this sort of thing comes from people who claim to be “pagans” or “heathens,” because it smacks so much of Christianity (as Nietzsche observed, ressentiment is the driving force behind the Nazarene’s slave morality). A pagan is comfortable with all of the “worldly” things that the Christian rejects, and there is nothing quite as worldly as money.
But what is money, really? Gold bugs will decry the modern monetary system as a fiat currency, not backed by a physical commodity like silver or gold. The argument for the gold standard is based on gold’s historical track record as a reliable source of value. There may be some truth to the claim that gold holds its value better than an arbitrarily-issued government currency, but the idea that gold has any more intrinsic worth than paper money ignores the fact that, in the end, a Krugerrand is just a hunk of metal that has value only because people have decided that it has value. Of course, we all understand that this “value” is a stand-in for something else, and that something else is power. This is not to say that money is the highest form of power, but it is a reasonable barometer of worldly success. And, as in other power relationships (and let’s face it, all relationships are power relationships) money can make us sovereigns or it can make us slaves.
When you don’t have adequate access to money, chances are you’ll find yourself in one of two situations: either dependent on the generosity of others (or worse, dependent on the State) or working yourself to death at menial jobs just to get by. In the first instance, you have clearly abdicated your own power. If you are completely dependent on someone else (and especially someone outside of your own immediate family or tribe) for your personal upkeep and maintenance, than there is a certain sense in which that person owns you. In the second instance, you are literally working like a slave. Slaves are fed, clothed, and otherwise provided for by their masters. If you are spending all of your time working just to pay for basic essentials, than how is your situation really any different from that of a slave? Furthermore, low-paying menial work is, quite literally, soul-crushing. In my early twenties, I worked on a framing crew during the day and in a shipping warehouse unloading trucks at night. I told myself that I could get up early, or stay up late, to read, write, or do the other things that I felt were meaningful. Sometimes I managed to pull it off. Mostly, I was just too tired. My time (the most valuable asset that any of us has) was being siphoned off by people I couldn’t have cared less about.
Ironically, high-earners often fall into a similar trap. The danger here is that money will become an end-in-itself rather than a means-to-an end. One of the tricky things about money is that the more you make, the more it will seem like you need. I have often marveled at the phenomenon of extremely rich men who spend their entire lifetime building up a fortune that vastly exceeds their own, or even their children’s, ability to spend it. This kind of behavior resembles nothing so much as a junkie vainly chasing after the rush that first got them hooked. As you become more affluent, a similar pitfall involves buying “stuff” that only has value as a signal of status. But pursuing recognition based on material possessions is the ultimate fool’s errand. That’s because there will always be someone with a bigger house, a fancier car, or a trophy-wife with higher-end cosmetic modifications than yours (I am being facetious, of course). What’s more, the kind of people who are impressed by this sort of thing really aren’t worth trying to impress. All of this is greatly exacerbated by the fact that the dominant culture (notice I avoid calling it our culture) is constantly encouraging us to take on debt. By going deeper and deeper into debt, you can acquire the appearance of wealth without necessarily having any. Soon you will find yourself working just to service your debt, and you will be no better off than the poorer man who works at things that he hates just to satisfy his basic needs.
Whether you’re working just to get by, with no time for anything else, or whether money has become like a drug that you pointlessly consume, the power that money represents has become a power over you. The first step in breaking this power—and in putting it to work for you instead—is to start thinking about what money is for. In slaveholding societies, it was a common practice to allow slaves to buy their freedom; basically, the slave could pay a set amount of money to reclaim ownership of himself. This should be our goal as well: to use money intelligently to free ourselves for the things we really care about. Essentially, there are two ways to do this. The first, and probably the ideal way, is to figure out how to monetize the activities that you want to be doing anyway. This might involve opening a restaurant or a gym, a tattoo studio or an auto-repair shop. Many of you are writers or musicians, and it has never been easier to self-publish and sell your own work online, often with little to no start-up money. The important thing here is not getting rich (although it’s certainly possible), but rather to figure out how to satisfy your basic needs without wasting your entire life in the process.
The second—and perhaps more ambitious—way to buy your own freedom is by creating passive income streams that leave you with plenty of non-working hours. This might involve accumulating rental properties, or buying small businesses like self-service car washes or Laundromats that generate money without requiring full-time maintenance. My own personal long-term strategy involves a mixture of these options. I hope to build up my small publishing business into something more financially viable, while continuing to manage real estate on the side (instead of the other way around). Of course, all of these strategies involve acquiring at least some capital to get started, which means having a financial plan you can begin to implement now. Although I don’t endorse everything he says (you will have to ignore all of the Jesus-talk, for example), the popular financial writer Dave Ramsey is not a bad place to get started. That said, one of the biggest practical steps you can begin taking in the near-term is to always live below your means (this is the exact opposite of what the average American does). Do not buy the biggest house or the most expensive car that you can. Do not status-signal by acquiring “stuff” which will only get in the way of your greater goals, and never buy “stuff” using credit.
Finally, if you get to the point where you have extra money to spend, spend it on things that will increase your real status as a free and powerful human being. Spend money on books and education, jiu jitsu and boxing classes, gym memberships, tactical training, and travel that broadens your personal horizons. Whenever possible, avoid giving your money to marketers and corporations. They are the Enemy. If it’s feasible, buy books, clothing, music and other products from friends and fellow-travelers. One of my personal indulgences is buying artwork, and I never begrudge the money I spend on art because I know it’s going to support people who are trying to live their own dreams, outside the produce-and-consume economy of the System. Encouraging a network of mutual financial support that will help all of our comrades to buy their freedom is one of the first steps we can take toward building a nation.
Money is neither the Highest Principle—as the overlords of the Inverted World would have it—nor is it the “root of all evil.” Like a gun or a knife, money is neither good nor evil, but a tool. Although he was speaking about war, the words of Heraclitus ring just as true about cold, hard cash: “some it has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.”
The “surface web” is the bit we are all familiar with – it’s where you watch videos, read news stories and shop online
The dark web is the most hidden part of the internet where illegal items, from drugs to weapons, can be bought and sold anonymously.
A Newsbeat investigation found that “millions of pounds of drugs are bought online every day” and delivered unknowingly by UK postal workers.
Delivery staff who said they had “definitely handled suspect packages” told us there is “nothing they could do”.
Royal Mail says it does not knowingly carry any illegal items in its network.
Most users access the dark web via free software which conceals their identities and their online activity from surveillance, such as the Tor browser.
Morerelated stories
Is your postman delivering drugs?
“Tor” stands for “The Onion Router” and it directs internet traffic through a vast network consisting of more than 7,000 relays to conceal a user’s location and usage.
Now it’s a key route to illegal trading on the dark web.
How we used the dark web to investigate drugs in the post
Newsbeat ordered MDMA, cannabis and former legal high Spice on one of the dark web’s marketplaces using virtual currency Bitcoin.
Deliveries to a PO Box took around a week to arrive.
We then collected the drugs and gave them to a government-approved lab for testing and destruction.
Newsbeat spoke to delivery staff who said they had “definitely handled suspect packages” but there was “nothing they could do”.
We were told that some random spot-checks do occur but most workers we spoke to had never seen a sniffer dog.
Image captionThe dark web is a murkier part of the internet, a collection of thousands of websites that use anonymity tools to hide their IP address
The Home Office says it is spending £1.9m trying to “increase understanding” in how organised crime networks “adapt and diversify” using technology.
A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “Where Royal Mail has any suspicion that illegal items are being sent through our system, we work closely with the police and other authorities including the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to assist their investigations and to prevent such activities from happening.”
