Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Being Consistent

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Remember, while you can go back to your home, the locals will have to live with the effects of your decisions. Always imagine yourself in their shoes before making choices, and think through the long-term results of your actions. At the same time, never underestimate how radical people can be. Many a liberal activist secretly dreams of storming the White House; an elderly indigenous man may have fought hand-to-hand with the Canadian army?and may be ready to do it again, or at least support you doing so in his stead.

We need to build networks of mutual aid that can last through years of government repression. Occasionally stopping by for a solidarity action will not suffice to accomphsh this: it demands staying in touch, building up long-term relationships, and providing consistent support.

A great part of this can be achieved by spreading awareness of faraway struggles to your own town, not to mention bringing together local struggles that are not yet connected. Educate people about the issues, and about what they can do. Sometimes it is actually easier to get people involved in local struggles by awakening their interest in faraway ones, and then proposing the possibility of local solidarity actions.

When you're not engaged in solidarity actions far from home, there are countless ways you can show solidarity locally You can set up video showdngs and other educational events to raise awareness, and host speakers and other travelers from distant places. You can hold benefit dinners and parties to raise money for groups that need funding. You can organize demonstrations at or otherwise attack the embassies of nations involved in unacceptable activities; it can happen that unstable foreign governments vidll take these warnings seriously, and decrease the heat on the community you are supporting. Even if there is no embassy, consulate, or other obvious target in your town, there's bound to be some corporate outpost implicated in injustice. By means of picketing, boycotts, property destruction, and sabotage, let them know there are consequences to their misdeeds.

Regardless of the details of your activity, keep your eyes on the prize of establishing long-term, reliable, global networks of solidarity. We're all in this together. Sohdarity work is not charity work: our own undertakings, and with them our very lives, depend on the mutual success of our combined efforts against capitalism. While no one whose life is on the line respects liberal do-gooders, people wiU respect you if they can tell you are as invested in their struggles as they are. Whatever aid we offer other communities with our solidarity work, we take home experiences and fidendships that are worth far more.

Account

We received a spectral smoke signal of nybbles and bytes requesting our presence in the cold plains of Oneida, New York. Not knovidng what to expect, our hearty band of improbable and impermissible white wanderers from the flatlands of the South journeyed to the snowy plains of Oneida. FoUowing directions hastily and poorly translated over an obscure payphone, we came onto a stone longhouse, the home of the Onyota'arka, the traditional Oneida of the Standing Stone. We pried open the heavy wooden doors and peered inside.

A mighty elder, Clanmother Maisie Shenandoah of the Oneida, greeted us with open arms and a broad smile. A powerfid woman, she had seen generations come and go, and she feared that this would be the last to live in freedom. She explained that these thirty acres of land we were now on?and the homes upon it?were the last of the sovereign nation of the Oneida people, subject to no law except their own. This proud people and their land were under assault from without and within. One of their own had gone to Harvard, gotten himself a business degree, and incorporated the tribe as a corporation, building a financial empire spanning mid-state New York. This was Oneida Nation, Inc.?an independent fiefdom with its ovm laws, its own taxes, its own courts, its own (mostly white) police, with Judge, Jury, Executioner, God, and State wrapped up so/jWanty in one man: Ray Halbritter. 497

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