[This essay was written in the Summer of 2008, to be used as a preface to this collection of Thomas Müntzer's sermons. It is a bitter piece of self-criticism on our "mytho-poetic" politics during the 2000-01 period (roughly from the "Battle of Seattle" to the mayhem in Genoa).  It's been circulating widely in Italian and Spanish, but not in English, due to problems that delayed the publication of the book. Many people asked us for it. We decided to post it in four chunks on this blog. This won't harm the book, indeed, our long-time experience with anticipating stuff on the Internet tells us quite the opposite.]

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«A few months before the summit we started to write epic texts such as From the Multitudes of Europe… (and many more), you know, it was like an edict and it went: “We are the peasants of the Jacquerie… We are the thirty-four thousand men that answered the call of Hans the Piper… We are the serfs, miners, fugitives, and deserters that joined Pugachev’s Cossacks to overthrow the autocracy of Russia…” Then we pulled media stunts in order to create expectations for Genoa. An example: on a quiet springtime night, we put placards around the necks of the most visible statues in Bologna (guys like Garibaldi and other nineteenth-century national heroes), with messages encouraging all citizens to go to Genoa [...] We wanted to persuade as many people as possible to go to Genoa, and we ended up convincing as many people as possible to fall into a full-scale police ambush. Demonstrators were assaulted, beaten to a bloody pulp, arrested, even tortured. We didn’t expect such mayhem. Nobody did. I regret we were so naïve and caught off-guard, although I think that was a crucial moment for the latest generation of activists. In a way, it was important to be there. That experience has created bonds between a transnational multitude of human beings [...] We’ll see the consequences of that “being there” for a long time to come, on a grass roots, extended, long-tailed level.»
- Wu Ming interviewed by Robert P. Baird, Chicago Review #52:2/3/4, October 2006

0. A present from the monkeys

It happened one chilly night of March 2001.
It happened in Nurio, state of Michoacán, Mexico, where all the indigenous tribes of the country were gathered to demand an Indian Rights Act. It was the third meeting of the National Indian Congress, largely a creation of the Zapatistas, those media-savvy poetic warriors who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere – out of the depths of time – seven years before. U2 were wrong, sometimes something changes on New Year’s Day. Sometimes an army of balaclava-wearing Maya peasants occupy a city and get their message across to millions of people. It occurred in San Cristobal de las Casas, state of Chiapas, Mexico, on the first of January 1994.
And there we were, seven years later, in the darkness on the edge of Nurio, and the Zapatistas were there, Subcomandante Marcos was there, for the indigenous meeting took place during the famous and internationally covered March of Dignity.
The March: throngs of people travelling on battered coaches, covering thousands of miles, from the backwoods of Chiapas to a spectacularly crowded Zócalo, the biggest square in Mexico City. Twenty days of travel, twenty days of poetry delivered by Marcos in seven allegorical speeches called the ‘Seven Keys’. (more…)

[On May 2nd, 2009, our friend and colleague Valerio Evangelisti sent us a dispatch on the situation he's witnessing in Mexico. As we already told you, he lives half of the year in Puerto Escondido. The text was published on Carmilla, one of the most important Italian multi-author blogs. We quickly translated it into English, and here it goes.]

Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico.
I’m writing from a country that seems to have sunk into madness. The place where I am, in the far south, has so far been spared by the “raging” swine flu which is causing  great outcry in the world after the World Health Organization classified it at a level of dangerousness 5 on a scale 1 to 6. Despite the peace around me, every day I see people on TV traveling with blue masks on their faces, doctors giving advice to the population, politicians having their say (whatever their level of competence), supermarkets assaulted by hordes of customers amassing food supplies in the unlikely case of a famine. (more…)

We just received a text message from our friend and colleague Valerio Evangelisti, who spends half of the year in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. We were worried about him, as some member countries of the EU (e.g. France) are proposing to cancel all flights from Mexico to Europe. He wrote:

I’ll be back on May 9th. Psychosis here as well, thanks to the WHO. Deaths by broncopneumonia caused by ordinary flu are 159, deaths by swine flu are only 7, in a country with 100 million inhabitants. There have been more cases in California, and yet it’s depicted as an all-Mexican disease. Hope in 10 days it will be over. Goes without saying that I’m OK.

It’s true, there’s a distinctly racist way in which the western media cover epidemics allegedly originating in poorer areas of the world. A hypocritical and racist way, given that the most famous and dangerous zootechnical epidemics of the past years (the Mad Cow epidemic of the 1990′s and the Foot-and-Mouth crises of 1967, 2001 and 2007) had their epicentre in the rich UK. Moreover, animal/cross-species epidemics in poor countries are often caused by the hastily adoption of new models of mass zootechnical production, i.e. factory farming, industrial pigsties, nightmarish chicken batteries etc. (more…)