8. Sparks from across the ocean, contact with Antonio García García
18th March 2006
Posting 8. to General (no specific category), A young anarchist makes contact, posted by George Salzman.
Subject: Personal Introduction - After visiting your personal pages and blog
From: Antonio García García <>
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:53:25 +0000
To: George Salzman <>
Hi, George.
I stumbled upon your pages accidentally, link-hopping from one site to another, and it inmediately caught my eye that we might well consider ourselves soulmates labouring in the same struggle to achieve highly interchangeable goals.
I have done a superficial overview of some of your pages, and felt such feeling of compatibility I could not wait any longer to try to get in touch.
My name is Antonio García, and I am a native anarchist (this is, I have the right feelings without the burden of indoctrination through the historical literature that most of the time is being interpreted verbatim without regards for situational positioning in their apropiate time and space, nor the ulterior changes like anarcho-syndicalism that adapted the natural theories to harden them against the extremely hostile environment in which they had to survive. Having built and consolidated my own anarchistic theories, I’ve had no trouble reading whatever comes my way regarding anarchy: Kropotkin, Proudhon, Makhno, Malatesta, Bakunin, … too many to risk the pretention of being exhaustive. Also modern up to date thinkers have been read. Lecture has never been limited to anarchist thinkers though. One should not only try to understand the mindset of friends, most of the time it is far more useful to step aside ones own creed and try to objectively assimilate the antagonist believings as a way to better understand how to efficiently fight them: Von Mises, Friedmann, Huntington, Fukuyama, … also an endless list.
Yet all those writers’ production is in urgent need of reinterpretation so that their ideas can be extrapolated to the current historical moment and social, political and economic circumstances, something that is almost always ommitted.
I am fluent in english, spanish, french and dutch, and able to understand with some difficulty languages that share a common root with these in the linguistical evolution.
While I have great plans myself, I look forward to helping you by whatever means I can contribute to your own personal effort.
So far there is not much about me to be found on the internet, but what there is should be quite easy to find if you search for my wartime pseudonym: NingúnOtro, not to be confused with the standard spanish noun ningúnotro (meaning “nobody else” or “no other”), something that should become crystal clear from the context.
I’ve been quite active at two precise spots lately: http://www.zeztamerica.org/Foro, and some interesting comments and contributions to a friend’s blog: http://www.tonyto.net/blog/
Have a look and say hello if you think I’m worth some of your time.
Saludos Anarquistas,
Antonio
mundo está creciendo en este instante—Durruti
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 16:23:52 -0600
To: Antonio García García <>
CC: James Herod <>
Oaxaca, Friday, March 17, 2006
Hi Antonio,
Your e-mail came to me rather late last night, when I was too tired to gather my thoughts and write back. I’m guessing from the indicated time in the heading that maybe you’re living in Great Britain, or somewhere that the local time is Greenwich Mean Time. Clearly your name suggests Spanish parentage, and your English, although extremely fluent, shows hints of Spanish phraseology, so I’m also guessing that maybe that’s your idioma materna. In any case, I was very glad to get your enthusiastic comments. I wish I had your fluency, but even now in my seventh year in Mexico my Spanish is still far from adequate. If in fact you want to join in the effort I’m making, which is mainly in what I call counter-propaganda, I would be delighted. I put in the “If in fact” not because I doubt your sincerity but because my experience has been that oftentimes people are very enthusiastic, especially younger people, and in the zest of their enthusiasm overestimate what they are actually prepared to do. However, I welcome whatever efforts you care to make, whether together with me or independently. It’s certainly very encouraging to get an unsolicited letter like yours, and I thank you for writing.
Right now the overall movement of Latin America is towards freeing itself from domination by the United States. It’s one of the more hopeful signs of constructive change, especially because of the important role of millions of people at the grassroots level, who are pushing for governmental changes and, I think more importantly, for gaining control over their own lives by taking over factories, other enterprises and running them themselves. It is this economically poor, working, and also unemployed class, by far the overwhelming part of the population, that it seems to me most important to try to reach with our anarchist vision and values. The two major essays on my website are those of Jaime Martinez Luna, Comunalidad y Autonomia, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Estrate/ComunEs/indexEs.htm, and James Herod, Getting Free: A sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/index.htm.
I managed to translate some of the first part of Jaime’s essay into English, and a bit of Herod’s into Spanish (or possibly Spanglish). My opinion is that the ideas that Herod puts forward would be very catalytic if they could be widely circulated in Latin America. So it seems to me it would be a most significant contribution if you were to take on a part of this work, i.e. translating part of it into Spanish. Perhaps you might take the time to read some of it and see what you think. If you disagree with my sense of its importance and want to go in another direction, that’s fine too. Also, if you have other ideas of how we might work together, please let me know what they are.
When I did a Google search for NingúnOtro, I found a discussion with your fairly brief comments at http://www.tonyto.net/blog/index.php?blog/show/19#comment136. Clicking on http://www.zeztamerica.org/foro returned the message Not Found, but the URL http://www.tonyto.net/blog/ has extensive material you’ve written. I’ll try to get back to read some of it when I have a chance (slow going for me, in Spanish).
I added your name to my e-mail distribution list, which by now has reached about 1,400 recipients. I write somewhat irregularly, and am trying to shift to using a still new weblog that a friend set up for me. Part of my vision is that we build a network of thousands of individuals, each of us with many many contacts, that enables us to communicate our thoughts and news about our activities very broadly. That will prevent any sense of isolation and futility as we struggle against the psychological assault of the corporate and government-allied media. So I will likely post our exchange on the blog, which you can get by typing simply “georgesalzman.org” in your browser, or via my website, where there’s a link to the weblog near the top of the home page.
With all best wishes, y un grand abrazo, fuerte y anarquista,
George
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 03:48:45 +0000
George,
The devil cares about details. Because of your affinity with the zapatista movement, I was particularly interested in showing you I am having big trouble with them (or at least a few of them that form a strategical bottleneck to my efforts of communicating with them at high levels in order to straighten things out) and beg for some kind of help on the issue. More than ever now I see you write from as close to them as neighboring state Oaxaca. As part of my effort, it was crucial to me that you got a straight and honest insight into the nature of my problems with them. Some sparks show through tOnYtO’s blog, because he is also involved, but most of it spreads crystal clear through the wordings and the created situation at zeztamerica. Since you had no time to have a look yet anyway, not that much is lost, other than the time involved in saying hello to Mr. Devil (once again, I’m afraid he is an old friend of mine). The only problem involved is the fact that the server is a linux box and thus case-sensitive. The URL should have been www.zeztamerica.org/Foro with a capital F. Stupid insignificant details can ruin great and vital plans without leaving a clue as to why, driving honest revolutionaries to despair. It might be useful to notice that I contacted Al Giordano on the matter, but with no signs as to whether he has done anything about it.
I see you have forwarded your answer to James Herod, and that is fine with me as I can really use and offer some brainstorming potential. In fact, if I started a quest for like-minded soulmates on the internet it is because I am at a stage in my personal revolutionary process where allmost all the thinking has been done to the extent that, due to the global aproach of my own thought processes, everything I happen to find seems to fit in as a subset of my global framework as a partial or incomplete thought. I’m not anywhere close to thinking I’m God though.
But as an inteligentsia I might say I am pretty damn good, short of being the richest man in the world because something as “stupid” as ethics keeps me jailed much in the same way the given word would jail a gentleman far more effectively than Guantanamo Bay “citizenship”.
The brain is a wonderful “instrument”, but once we are past thinking and looking for some action, the first practical problem that arises in any revolutionary process is the fact that you need more than two arms (I mean to say anthropological apendixes here, though the other meaning might sometimes be important too) to get anything done. More than two automatically call for another brain to be in charge … and through the proven lack of universal ethics in todays world there statistically follows that with an open call for help you are more likely to find interested government officials and corporate private mercenaries than true comrades. You have been thus carefully chosen and a proper risk evaluation based on your public profile has been done (you still might be a dormant undercover agent for the Mossad though, publicly anti-zionist jews could easily be forged and serve well as detectors against dissidents). I’m not that shrewd though, and I sure hope you are not either.
So have a look at that forum and let me hear some of your thoughts.
I am not in a hurry, I’ll have other things to do, so sleep over it if you need to.
Antonio.
P.S: Actually, timezone is GMT+1, and I was born in Belgium, first son of spanish inmigrants from the early sixties.
Subject: On the Zapatistas, and using the blog
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:28:59 -0600
To: Antonio GarcÃa GarcÃa <>
CC: Nancy Davies <>,
Benjamin Melancon <>,
Alberto M. Giordano <>,
James Herod <>,
Scott Pinkleman <>
Oaxaca, Saturday, March 18, 2006
Hola Antonio:
From your message that I got last night, it’s clear that you’re troubled about some aspects of the Zapatista’s Otra Compaña. I will try to read what you’ve written, especially on the site www.zeztamerica.org/Foro, where you said the problems are pretty clearly shown. The truth is that my Spanish isn’t good enough for me to do this easily, and at the moment I’m trying to complete an essay that I began in late February, but which has been repeatedly interrupted, so I’m not sure just how soon I can get to it.
However, Nancy (and the others to whom I’m CCing this note) are also very interested in the Zapatista struggle, and I just this morning posted our correspondence so far in order that it be available to her (and them). Nancy is much more proficient in Spanish than I am.
From what you’ve written, my impression is that you might be expecting too much in terms of replies from either people at “high levels” in the Zapatista cadre or from Al Giordano, all of whom are working like crazy doing basic interviewing and reporting at the on-the-ground level here in Mexico. I’m inclined to think that right now that’s a higher priority for them than communicating with a member of the European intelligentsia. But this is only a first, and superficial impression of mine. Until I know what the problems are that you’ve had with them, I can’t say more.
I think it will be easy for you to post comments directly to the blog. From what Ben told me you won’t even have to register if all you want to do is make a comment. If you want to post a statement that’s independent of another posting, i.e. that’s not simply a comment on a prior posting, then you need to register first. Once you’ve registered then you can login and write your post. If you want me to make any corrections to your earlier letters, please let me know and I’ll take care of them. Thanks again for writing.
All best wishes,
George