Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

For a year after that bombing, we fought a strange, silent war. Our first targets were corporate, because we believed corporations were pulling the strings of government. After the bank bomb, we attacked a chemical company, a subsidiary of a group that sold defoliants and white phosphorous to the American army. VICTORY

TO THE NLF AND ALL THIRD WORLD REVOLUTIONARIES. We bombed the head office of a construction firm with a contract to build new prisons. We bombed a bank that financed the regime in South Africa. WE ARE EVERYWHERE, we wrote. WE ARE IN YOUR OFFICES YOUR FACTORIES WE ARE THE MAN AND WOMAN NEXT TO YOU ON THE TUBE THE BUS THE TRAIN. Anna and I composed them together, lying on the floor or sitting at a rickety Formica table in one of the flats we rented after we closed down Thirteen.

Their school is a concentration camp. Their factory is a concentration camp. Their prison is a concentration camp. Their hospital is a concentration camp.

Concentration Camp Britain.

We are the Jews.

Can you smell smoke?

We’d argue about the tone, veering between a terse, tabloid style we hoped would speak to the masses and the technicalities of an argument we wanted to make to other revolutionaries. As we wrote them, our statements felt reasoned and sober. If they sounded harsh or hysterical, we felt it was only because we were speaking truth to power and the truth was bleak. We drafted them in a notebook, then made copies with a child’s printing set, sealing them and giving them to militant friends to circulate to the media.

Lessons: how to police each other, how to persecute the weak. State machine, making the citizens it needs. Bells telling you when to sit, when to stand. Can you handle it? Always productive, always on time. Ring ring! Mummy, Daddy,

Janet, and John. Open up, pop it in. The State installs the cop in your head.

SMASH THE STATE! OFF THE PIG!

The silence was eerie, absolute. Nothing in the papers, nothing on the TV. We tried to seed rumors, put out feelers to the underground press, who were running lurid stories about the Brigate Rossi in Italy, the German RAF, the PLO, the Weathermen. Nothing came of it, nothing reflected back to us at all. It was obvious the mainstream media had been instructed not to run the story, but why was no one else asking questions? How many accidental fires and midnight gas explosions would people accept? Richest one thousand have more than poorest two billion. A billion live and die on a dollar a day. It was as if we were shouting into a vacuum. I began to wonder what else took place in this silence, how much dark matter there really was in the universe.

Our lives changed very rapidly that year. We moved out of Thirteen, splitting up to stay in rented flats, two in London, the other in Manchester. I cut my hair and started to dress conservatively, something I found oddly wrenching. I hadn’t realized how attached I was to my Bohemian self-image, how empty it would feel to be a man in slacks and a drip-dry shirt. Passing other young people on the street, I’d feel angry and envious. In Criticism-SelfCriticism I was diagnosed as a closet élitist, still trying to set myself apart from the proletariat. Since we’d stopped organizing or participating in mass actions, I knew the others were just as isolated as I was. We saw no one, spoke to no one who wasn’t part of an increasingly narrow and rarified network. What, I wondered, was the difference between a vanguard and an élite?

Discipline, certainty: the way they seem to bleed into one another, to blur at their borders. Because I am disciplined I am certain. Because I am certain, I am disciplined.

Sean pinned a magazine picture to the kitchen wall, a NASA image of the earth seen from space. It was the only decoration in

the tiny Kentish Town flat and it wormed its way into our heads. A green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness. The shortest of shorthands. We were on the world’s side, the side of life.

WE ARE EVERYWHERE. We needed funds. Our best source of money was cars, luxury models we stole from quiet streets in Mayfair and Belgravia. The market is not nature. The ruling classes are not invulnerable. They have no immutable right to power. First comes refusal, then resistance. Fumble with the lock, break open the plastic housing round the ignition and yank out the cable. Touch the wires together, then listen for the starter motor. We sold the cars to a connection of Leo’s, a feral-looking ex-con called Fenwick who ran a garage out of a railway arch in Bethnal Green. It wasn’t an arrangement I felt happy about. Fenwick had little reason to be loyal to us, still less the pair of black mechanics he had working for him. I never knew their names and they never asked questions, but they were always checking us out. They knew there was something odd about us. Our accents, our manner. We didn’t fit. I hoped Fenwick was spreading a little of his profit around.

Pigs, know that we can get to you behind your high walls, your mock-Tudor mansions, your barracks, your police stations, your plush offices. There is nowhere to hide. Sean and Leo went to meet a Spanish contact in Earls Court, someone connected with the anti-Franco resistance. They took elaborate precautions, getting on and off buses and trains, watching, doubling back. They came back with two handguns, snub black Czech pistols that they proudly unwrapped on the kitchen table. The guns looked brand new.

“What are we going to do with these?” I asked.

“Expropriations,” said Sean, pointing one at the wall and squeezing the trigger. “And self-defense, of course.”

“It’s a serious business,” said Leo, pointing the other at Sean. He swung round, so the muzzle was pointing at me. “Have a go?”

We had a rule. We’d all agreed. We would attack property but never people. That was supposed to be an absolute prohibition, a

line we would never cross. What good, I wanted to know, was a gun against a building? Sean told me to relax. It was all spectacle. We had no reason to use them.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with misgivings. A few days later Sean went over to the other London flat. He arrived back a couple of hours later, swearing and slamming the door. I’d never seen him so angry. “I’ll kill them,” he said. “I’ll fucking kill them.” He picked up a coffee mug and smashed it against a wall. “Fucking cowards. Can you believe it?”

It was a while before I could get any sense out of him. Helen and Matthias had disappeared. They’d packed their things and left. They hadn’t communicated with anyone. Jay, who’d been staying with them, thought they’d seemed unhappy, but hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. The news provoked a flurry of paranoia. We wondered if they’d informed on us, if perhaps we were about to be raided by the police. In the next few hours, we moved the guns and explosives out of their hiding place under the floorboards and left London.

Through Claire, we’d found ourselves a hideaway, a tumbledown farmhouse in North Wales that we could use in emergencies. Driving there, behind the wheel of a stolen Ford Cortina, I tried to work out what had happened. The last Criticism-Self-Criticism had been particularly hard on Helen. She’d admitted she was missing the work she used to do, the women’s group, the housing activism. Though Matthias had covered for her, it was obvious she was losing faith. Anna told her bluntly that her problem was psychological. If she agreed in theory that we had to resist the power of the state, it must be the reality she found disturbing. Leo joined in. He’d said he’d always thought of her as a typical intellectual, happiest with ideas, so nice and neat and antiseptic. Why couldn’t she admit that real people disgusted her, that she wished she was back in the library? When Matthias tried to defend her, he too was accused of harboring reactionary tendencies. The whole tenor of their relationship was suspect. Monogamy was tied up with all sorts of other capitalist formations. If they couldn’t bring