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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
To combat swarming, the
The
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
Under the
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
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
The corporate governments are responsible. They set up structures that cut down people’s initiatives. They have to stop doing this.
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
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
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
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