“If I can give you a visual of this particular brand of white order that reigns in Eugene, imagine a well tended garden in someone’s front yard with an ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ sign and a Ring Camera surveilling the street. This epitomizes the outward appearance of inclusivity while preserving an antagonism towards the criminal class.
White Order does not materialize out of thin air; it requires active self-identification from its participants who feel a personal stake in upholding it. While the more extreme expressions of this mobilization may involve lynch mobs or vigilante actions, the liberal manifestations often take the form of model citizens, ‘good neighbors,’ or ‘good community members.’ Eugene has no shortage of individuals fitting into these latter categories.”
We received the following submission for publication, regarding the events of the Free Palestine march that took place in Eugene, Oregon on Saturday, October 21st, 2023. During the march, a reactionary drove their vehicle up the march and shot at march-goers with an airsoft gun before being subdued by marchers, some armed.
We commend the bravery and courage of those organizing and taking the streets in Eugene, and encourage others to take the initiative as well in solidarity with the struggle to Free Palestine, and for a world without settler-colonial states.
Unfortunately, a march-goer suffered a broken leg during the altercation, and had to be hospitalized. To that end, we share their venmo for their recovery fund: @Spencer-McIntyre
Communique from the Free Palestine March in Eugene, OR
October 21st, 2023
People who are oppressed, imprisoned, ghettoized, blockaded, colonized, and occupied have a right to resist by any means necessary. On Saturday October 21st, over 300 working people, students, Muslims, Anti-Zionist Jews, and committed comrades of all varieties in Eugene, Oregon extended our full, unwavering solidarity to the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against genocide and ethnic cleansing by the US-backed state of so-called “Israel.”
A half hour into the march, a fascist provocateur in a white pickup truck bearing fascist American flags pulled into an intersection blocking the march, pulled a handgun as he existed the truck, and fired several shots that sounded like compressed air. Two brave comrades in the march rushed to the front, drew their own firearms, and ordered the man to drop his weapon and take off his mask, while protesters fled out of the intersection. Other comrades rushed to make sure the young children in their keffiyeh’s at the front of the march could find their families, while a protester who broke their leg in two places fleeing the fascist shooter was escorted to safety.
Just as Zionist settlers exercise extra-judicial terror of the fascist Zionist entity as they enact pogroms daily against the Palestinians, shooting, burning, humiliating, and killing with impunity, fascists in the US feel called to exercise this same terror in support of the weaponized wing of US imperialist and the genocide it is actively undertaking. But the imperialists and their thugs (whether in uniform or not) are nothig but paper tigers. The masses of Palestinians and all oppressed peoples struggling in solidarity with them show us this as they struggle to defeat — and will defeat — the imperialist axis of terror and genocide.
The fear we felt that day was nothing compared to the fear that pervades the daily lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are resisting by any means necessary occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Like the Palestinians and their resistance, we will not let that fear intimidate us and will continue in the belly of the beast of US imperialism to rise with the Palestinians against the Zionist entity and the fascist terror of the US.
Solidarity to the fighters in Eugene who successfully neutralized a Fascist threat.
Intifada Until Victory!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
to submit a piece for publishing, email counterflow_collective@protonmail.com
“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”
“We hope that by sharing this brief collection, we can offer a small artifact for inspiration: something that suggests, even ever so slightly, another way out of the suffocating logic of this world — a deliriant to arouse the senses out from the mundane cycles of non-life and into the chaotic, convulsive beauty of dreams.”
“Finding a way to the horizons presently hidden from us and into the lives that were stolen from us will necessarily take time; what is asked of the insurgent hearts of this vast Sonoran Desert is a practice of experimentation, intentionality, play and imagination. It is a practice of self-creation aimed at subverting the metropolis that keeps us imprisoned, that endlessly fuels itself with the corpses of the immiserated. The ways we relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us must be overturned on the most fundamental level; our approaches and aspirations must reflect that fact. We are — collectively and individually — in a state of always-becoming, unfixed at any given moment by the very necessity of what it means to be alive, and so our approaches must be as well; we need to be engaged in a constant practice of experimentation, evaluation and reevaluation towards a life truly worth living, towards things we never thought possible. In the simple, resonant phrasing of the late Fredy Perlman: anything can happen.”
“To start from the beginning would take a very, very long time. So, I’ll start from the middle.
From the middle of a march that felt very different than any other I’d ever attended in Eugene.
From the middle of a crowd unafraid to yell at the cops, to chant angrily, and also unafraid to take pleasure in all the fun things about being rowdy together: shooting off fireworks, dragging signs into the street for makeshift barricades to slow police, and enjoying the open expression of anger itself.
From the middle of the on-ramp to the I-5 where police attempted to disperse the crowd with pepper spray, getting the windows of their cars smashed out by skateboarders in response. The cops squealed off in fear, not to engage again for hours.
From the middle of that intersection on Washington we took over uselessly, celebratorily, for several hours. The one we decorated with countless tags and built a bonfire in the middle of, those excessive gestures that can only be expected from forced shut-ins finally brought out to the street to respond to an anti-Black cop lynching.
And from the middle of a sea of outrage and disavowal produced in the wake of the riot by many so-called radicals after something real finally happening; these counteractions being fatal to the expansion of the rebellion in Eugene.”
“Anarchists have generally accepted property destruction in their humanist vision of a ethical social change. Things matter less than people. Nihilism informs us that this dichotomy ties us to the world we must supercede, before we are capable of actually having social relationships with people and not things. Strategic nihilism provides us a solution to existentialism and liberalism. It argues for an active pose in this world and for the inviability of reformist solutions. When confronted with the horror of your existence, race towards the bleak consequences, not away. Deal with the moralism explicit in your stated irrelevance by identity politics, communism, and postmodernism with a sword in hand. Moralists should be spared no patience.”
