“SWARMING” IN THE MORNING, SWARMING IN THE EVENING & SWARMING AT SUPPERTIME
By Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News
MNN. March 24, 07. Swarming is a new form of making connections and taking control. It is creating a new balance between hierarchy and new social networks. Self-determination is a human survival instinct. People will always look for ways to survive. It’s an ingenious way to challenge the corporate government and the military-industrial complex through internet connections and alternative social networks.
Swarming can be a leaderless movement. It reflects the human instinct to make connections. On the plus side it can be used by people to protest against injustices and to overcome abuse. Like all kinds of power, it can be used to commit crimes. This is why the police and military are studying swarming so they can add it to their artillery of abuse.
Swarming is a demonstration of the power of the modern belief in human equality. It shows that autonomy, control and social will is in every single one of us. We can work together for better or worse. We can use our intelligence to be helpful and to defend society from abusers. We can also use it to abuse. Hierarchical powers try to oppress swarming but they can’t. They can’t deal with the idea that they aren’t in control or that no one is in control. Social order is a product of the collective will. Hierarchy is structured to dictate.
Hierarchy is efficient for certain purposes like natural disasters when it makes sense to follow one person’s plan. Most of the time hierarchies suck. The misuse and abuse of hierarchy has caused endless human misery and suffering. The people who fight their way to the top are the worst people in society, greedy controllers who are doing it for power over other people.
Right now in the Middle East people are losing sight of the goal of peace and substituting it with the goal of hierarchy. They are trying to impose U.S. social models because they want to deal with the people through puppets on the band council. It just ain’t working. Iraq is being taken over by independent cell groups that have no master mind. That’s why the U.S. can’t get control and has to get out of there.
The trouble with hierarchy is that people forget to think and act for themselves and to help their neighbors. Whole corporations or even states can be brought down by a lone person who can hack into their website so the hierarchy can’t function.
Of course, swarming has power. Power interests the obsessed hierarchically. They’re studying it to try to make it serve their purposes. There are two main forms of confrontation - the “close-in capability” and the “stand-off range”. Both can be aimed at domination or disruption. For example, wolf packs isolate their victim, cut them off from the massed security of its own group. Soccer hooligans are loosely dispersed groups who swarm around a target that is cut out from the larger group.
In a swarming packs of kids, there may be anywhere from 10 to 20 underage youth with or without a leader. The cops can’t do anything with them. If arrested, they are immune from prosecution because of their age.
Throughout the world kids have been abandoned. They roam around in gangs scavenging to stay alive. They grow up in shanty towns and roam the streets. When someone is walking down the street, they surround him, jump him, knocked him down, grabbed his clothes, pull his belt off, take his pants down, go through his pockets, rip his shirt off and then run away and disappear.
These are “throw away” kids. As a result of the economy where mom and dad are both working or sent back to South America, their children, who are Americans or citizens of Western nations, are left to fend for themselves. That’s where this phenomenon was first noticed. Of course, the kids are called “a problem”. People forget they were created by a system that does not respect the need for family solidarity. In South America the military went into the barrios and started shooting these kids thinking this is how they would stop this. In Africa because of the AIDS deaths, orphaned children are being made into soldiers.
Swarming seems amorphous but it has a structure. When coordinated it strikes from all directions. In Sao Paolo in May 2006 for seven days, people swarmed from the slums into the center of the city in a pulsing force, damaged property and then withdrew. In France they came out night after night, overturned and burnt cars. It defeated the larger more technically advanced armed police. Since no head planned it, they could not figure out how to stop it. The interconnection is on a subliminal level. It’s as though it has one hand or one mind controlling the swarm. They move from place to place together. They do something and take off into the night. The rave parties of the 1980’s was a swarm phenomena.
This idea of swarming is now being used by protestors against corrupt and oppressive governments and their agencies. They are designed to shut down the economy of a city without violence, without riots and without giving the state any excuse for their habitual retaliatory attacks. This happened in Seattle against the World Trade Organization’s plans for world domination.
There are four phases to swarming – locate the target, converge, attack and disappear. They are synchronized between a diversity of seemingly disconnected individuals. Cell phones, text messaging and other means of communication are used. They temporarily join a cell phone card program. Messages are sent out to those nearest to them, who then congregate at the appointed place. After the protest the participants unsubscribe. The cell cards are untraceable.
The state is disrupted. New thoughts are being spread onto the public independent of mass media, which has lost its persuasive power. The public can now listen to anyone they chose. Corporate media can no longer form opinions for the public. In the 1970’s, 1980’s and even the 1990’s the media socially homogenized the public. Everyone watched and listened to the same shows and programs and read the same newspapers. No more!
The internet revolution is changing the way people get information and protest. It is empowering and improving the performance of smaller units through network forms of organization. From the large and the few to the small and the many! It is breaking the spell of private property, corporate hegemony and capitalism over society. In losing the power of hierarchy, corporate power has to reform their commercial and military organizations. Up to now, hierarchies have had the upper hand. No more!
Where is the youth learning to swarm? One of the big schools is prison. For example, in Los Angeles the youth are sent into adult prisons. There they learn all the tricks of the trade from the older experienced criminals. The U.S. government sends them back to Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and Nicaraugua where they form cells.
To keep the jails full, politicians are in the process of charging the youth with adult crimes. Prison programs like education, health, rehabilitation and dealing with drug abuse are cut out. They come out as super criminals. What do you think of that? They can be taught to either attack whoever the police want, or they can be trained to overturn colonial corporations and their governments. They tried to get the Caledonia mobs to attack the Six Nations people.
The police know they are dangerous. There’s no control over them. The bikers, mobs, government and police try to use them. They are thrown into the drug trade and prostitution. This keeps the prison business growing. The government and the cops are making money at the expense of the taxpayers. Anyone who thinks that the cops can suppress the urge to pocket a few stacks of bills or bags of dope when they make a big raid is just plain naïve.
These gangs have escalated in the last five years. Some of our children are already part of this. Winnipeg has Indigenous gangs that have gone into the drug trade, extortion and prostitution.
Bullying is rampant in schools on Turtle Island. This is partly because the teachers are into bullying the kids. It’s a vicious circle. In some cases there are gangs made up of football players and athletes from middle class families. In Pennsylvania when they got together they attacked and raped a young girl. They got away with it because she couldn’t see who they were. These acts of violence are becoming common. Teachers won’t go into school yards because they might get killed. Today schools are turning into jungles. In New York City 6,800 special police patrol the schools.
The hierarchy constantly works at controlling and undermining the people.
Swarming undermines hierarchies because power is being devolved into small units which are interconnected. They cannot be faced head on in a battle.
Swarming can reshape global competition and assemble social forces to overturn the existing order of world power. Swarm style protesters understand that the current hierarchical power is artificial and wrong. They feel that the power is in the people.
If the goal is not to win but to stop oppression, then swarms can interfere with a competitive force. When the dominators want to fight back they find they have no target. They just disappear. Hitting back at nothing isn’t winning.
When the European military came to Turtle Island, they met Indigenous warriors who did not meet them head on. They attacked and just disappeared into the woods. Our men used swarming to attack and defeat the much larger and better armed British and French formations. Behind our fighting groups we had a democratic organization. It was defensive. The colonists ended up having to deal with us on a nation-to-nation basis. There were natural loyalties among us that glued us together. That is why today Canada has to deal with the Confederacy, the natural government of our people. All these hierarchical governments will break down. They will have to deal with the Indigenous people’s natural governmental formations.
To combat swarming, the U.S. military is developing “BattleSwam” which breaks down the military into small units. They realize that swarming is a part of conflict. The military is already training “pods” that can operate in “clusters”. It sounds like a SciFi movie gone mad. It won’t work because they are not based on natural affiliations.
The U.S. thinks that spying on everybody is going to counteract this new form of conflict. In 2002 the U.S. passed the “Terrorism Information and Prevention System” TIPS. This is based on former East Germany’s “Stasi” secret police system. The similarity is no coincidence. The designer, Markus Wolf, with assistance from the Russian KGB’s Primakov, managed to get half of the country’s population to spy on the other half. In the U.S. the plan is to use 4% of Americans as “Citizen Spies” to report “suspicious activity”. In 2004 Wolf and Primakov were hired by U.S. President George Bush to help him set up his spy agency within Homeland Security.
They planned to start with letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors. Are they paid under or over the table? Since they are spies they are probably being slipped untaxable bills taken out of the tax system. The goal is to have families and organizations spying on each other. The information goes into a data base which is available to government agencies and police forces. People spied upon will not be informed. They could be arrested for objecting to being spied on, without charge and dispensed with as the state sees fit.
The U.S. Congress nixed it. Now private companies like “AmeriCorps”, “SecurCorps” and “HighWatch” have taken it over. Wolf died in his sleep in 2006. Primakov of Russia continues to be the main advisor in setting up this “surveillance grid police state”. He calls it the “Sovietization of America”. The U.S. bucks keep coming and he’s laughing all the way to the bank. The U.S. has taken an oppressive system that is a proven failure and trying to make it work in “the land of the free”. Did radioactive “polonium 210” hit their brains?
Under the U.S. Patriot Act you don’t have to be guilty of anything or have a lawyer. You can be shipped out of the country just like that. You just have to be accused by someone of being a terrorist.
Eventually the government will have the infrastructure and the excuse to impose martial law. They are already pointing at us as terrorists. The government is creating the dire situations in our communities by demonizing us publicly, not letting us get jobs and putting negative information onto our background checks.
The gated communities throughout Turtle Island show the success of fear mongering. Why are they afraid? We, the people, have power and we are beginning to use it. We can decide to be visible or invisible. Internet spreads information more effectively than mass media which has been used to silence us in the past. Swarmers can be unorganized or well organized. They are everywhere.
History is repeating itself. Cops are glorified more than ever in movies and on television. Colonial governments are building more prisons. It is now a big private business. These are schools that train these youngsters to do the dirty work for the government and police. They think they are going to unleash these young people to attack the public. It’s an old strategy. The European colonizers emptied their prisons and cleaned up the streets of their desperate people. They brought them to Turtle Island to kill off the Indigenous people. They are hoping to create the same kind of people and release them on the public again. It didn’t work before and it won’t work again. These guys don’t know that autonomy is a human survival instinct.
The corporate governments are responsible. They set up structures that cut down people’s initiatives. They have to stop doing this. Ontario plans to raise the minimum wage by $2 an hour and to give more welfare money. This will cut jobs and more will be out-sourced to third world countries. If they don’t share the resources equitably among the people, they will all have to become criminals to survive.
The Onkwehonwe are targeted for extermination for many reasons, mainly to steal our land and resources and get their roots into our land. Welfare was created by the government to control us, our food, our homes and communities. They manipulate jobs. The U.S. military is running out of volunteers. They create a lack of opportunities so that the kids have no choice but to be scooped up by the military.
The main strategy is to cause confusion. The fascists are creating more prisons which are really concentration camps. The government is passing laws that we can easily break and as a reason to put us away.
The fascists have no love for us. They will use the skinheads, KKK and Neo-Nazis. To take over Germany, Hitler organized the unemployed, those who had nothing to do, had no future, were dispossessed and hanging out in the beer halls. He put brown shirts on them and gave them targets to go after.
The roving youth will be used to create anarchy. It’s the tried and true fascist recipe. Same old. Same old. With the same program and the same agenda. They will try to get rid of Onkwehonwe, Jews, Gypsies, people of color and then the poor people.
Fascists are by nature fascists. They will get rid of those in their way. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whether he knows what he is doing or not, is following the fascist agenda. In his budget he decided to keep all our money to himself with no feelings at all for our hardship. We are already the poorest people in Canada. He is firmly committed to intensifying this situation. He is reneging on the egalitarian accords that allowed the destitute rabble of Europe to come here and destroy Turtle Island’s ecology. Stephen Harper suffers from the “Stockholm Syndrome”. He wants to be friends with the powerful. By coddling up to them, he thinks he is protected.
We Onkwehonwe learned a long time ago, “Don’t coddle up to the powers that are out to kill you”. Don’t stand in front of the enemy and ask for justice. We warn our brothers and sisters, “Don’t put on the fascist uniforms and help the colonizers eliminate our people to save yourselves”. You can be put away too.
This is a very dangerous time. All these colonial flag wavers are waking up to what their government is all about.
We Onkwehonwe have to protect ourselves to survive. We need to know how to build a shelter, raise crops and how to skin a rabbit. These marauding groups will try to come into our communities and take what we have.
The worst of the lot will be wearing police and military uniforms. We have to persevere. There may be a lot of starvation. We can’t let our kids go to bed hungry without food and knowledge.
Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News