The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s. The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone. They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine. Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together. Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville. Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration. Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period. The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.
Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work. Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.
This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs. Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Clubin Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.
The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members. Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs. Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred. According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution. That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.
There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty. All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker. Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood. Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.
A Cavalier History of Surrealism is not so much a history, as it is a critique of the Surrealist movement. While it does move through discussions of the different phases that the Surrealist movement had taken in its thirty years, Vaneigem criticizes the movement as being inferior to its immediate historical predecessor, Dada. Vaneigem is especially critical of the Surrealist turn towards Communism which went as far as involving an official affiliation with the Communist Party that attempted to mandate Surrealist activities, and also a later turn towards mysticism/occultism. Surrealism is so often identified by artists, critics, and art historians as Dada all grown up that it is exciting for someone like me (who’s far more enthusiastic about the Dada movement) to see a well known revolutionary theorist praise the earlier art movement above the latter.
I should note that Vaneigem's SI Comrade Guy Debord was critical of both Surrealism and Dada. Debord saw both groups as characterized by a failure to give their artistic revolutions any relevance to life as it was actually lived by people. (available to read online here)
There are a number of books published between approximately 1990 and 2010 that attempt to survey the post-war radical racist scene in various geographic contexts. Perhaps the best recent book that attempts such a history is Leonard Zeskind’s 2008 survey Blood and Politics, which looks at the political efforts of American white supremacists during the second half of the 20th century. Martin A Lee, a co-founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, produced his own contribution to that subject, a lengthy work of investigative journalism on the global far-right scene of the post-WWII period, ranging from a post-Third Reich German Nazi underground to the contemporary American anti-semitic “second revolution” fantasizing militia movement.
Lee’s book is probably the only text about the racist far-right, that I know of, that follows the threads of that scene all the way back to the Third Reich. He describes the post-war influence of Nazi Party members who were close to Hitler including Otto Skorzeny, an SS Colonel who was in the Furher’s bodyguard regiment who, up to the time of his death, was involved in numerous racist organizations. The narrative of Lee’s history comes almost full circle when he notes that Oklahoma City bomber and American right-wing fanatic Timothy McVeigh had a contact in the German ultra-right wing scene in a section that sounds almost like conspiracy theory if only because this contact is not mentioned in other sources about the bomber.
Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau). By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.
Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant. He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty. The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein. In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.
The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club. He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie. This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture. Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.
Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?
The Lost Revolution is a book that covers a largely neglected aspect of the Republican politics during the period of recent Irish history referred to as ‘the troubles’. That aspect being the activities of the Official IRA, the ideological opponents of the British Crown, the Irish-Protestant paramilitary groups and also the Provisional IRA. The Officials emerged as the IRA split in 1969 at the beginning of the troubles, and occasionally shed the blood of their Provo rivals into that recent period of Northern Irish conflict.
This book serves as a history of a lesser component of the IRA history. The Official IRA was less intensely invested in violence than the Provos were, although they did engage in gun battles when necessary, and fund their movement through violent crime. Also their Marxist analysis of the situation in Ulster held less appeal than the more moderate socialist views of the Provos and their Sinn Fein political associates. Much of this long book is about the maneuverings of the Officials against their Provo rivals to gain an edge in the greater republican movement, and also about the emergence from the Official IRA (who gave up armed struggle long before the Provos had) of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, a political party with strong Marxist leanings and also strong opposition to sectarian violence .
Much of the writing by and for hackers has, since the beginning, been primarily electronic text distributed via networks and BBS systems. Relatively recently, as has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, hack/phreak e-zines such as Cult of the Dead Cow and Phone Losers of America are finding print publication via various self publishing platforms. 2600 Magazine (a name taken from the ‘blue-box’phreaker technology that played a 2600hz tone into a trunk line to seize telephone operator status for the caller) has, since 1984, been the one consistent print publication for the computer underground.The magazine has always focused on the analysis of telecommunications and computer systems, although it has also always taken a libertarian-tinged leftist political slant as well. In 2009 2600 published an almost 900-page ‘best-of’ anthology of the magazines articles. The single largest component of each issue, however, is the letters section, and this volume anthologized close to 30 years of correspondence with the publication.
Dear Hacker is an enormous collection of the letters that appear in 2600 magazine, introduced by Emmanuel Goldstein, the magazine’s founder and editor-for-life, who notes his own history of writing letters to magazines. Goldstein noted the importance of a reader responding to something they read in print, demonstrating their engagement with the media and participating in the social life brought into being by writing and publishing. Dear Hacker includes the unedited letters of hackers writing about every aspect of hacker culture, with the original editorial responses. Each chapter focuses on a different component of the full range of hacker concerns, such as dealing with law enforcement, hackers in prison, questions about technology, and questions about the magazine itself. These chapters are subdivided according to years, showing similar concerns revolving around changing technologies and environments as time proceeds. The book is not simply a collection of correspondence, it is also a history of a print magazine operating as a medium of active information exchange to a subculture that is based on the use of computers. Maybe next 2600 will edit a book of Goldstein's editorials that begin each issue.
Discordia is a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada that records the strife at Concordia University over the issue of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The events depicted in the film begin with a 2002 visit to the campus by (then) former and also future Israeli Prime Minister Bejnamin Netanyahu at which protests gave way to rioting. This event was followed by an attenuated struggle for student space between members of the progressive Student Union and members of the Concordia chapter of Hillel (an international organization for Jewish university students). Directed by Ben Addleman and Samir Mallal, Discordia captures the events of this struggle as they unfold. At the centre of the struggle was a challenge to the right for Hillel to use campus as recruiting grounds for the Israeli Defense Force. The students of Hillel saw their recruitment efforts necessary to protect Israel, a Jewish island in an ocean of Arab hostility, while Arab students took the actions of Hillel as a provocation against them, and as a means of evoking the actual violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the people who actually do the fighting for that organization. The film thus captures numerous interviews with the students involved as well as moments of direct conflict between the groups, as well as moments of friendship and solidarity among the members of either side. Finally, the documentary also captures reactions by a number of students who are not interested in the strife these issues have caused and are simply frustrated by it having temporarily taken over campus life. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this kind of subject matter is the question of where bigotry and politically conscious activism overlap. Consistently, the argument is made against pro-Palestinian activists that their work is basically anti-semitic. There’s no question that in the broader spectrum of pro-Palestinian expressions a strong anti-semitism can be found that pushes the immediate socio-political realities of the central issues to the side (often to indulge in age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish manipulations). In this particular documentary, the weight of dealing with the present issues as bigotry falls mostly upon the shoulders of Hillel members, both in accusations they make of their adversaries, and in their attitude towards the other. The pro-Palestine Concordia Student Union is headed by Aaron Mate, a young Jewish activist who currently works as a producer for Democracy Now!, a daily social justice radio program carried by the Pacifica Radio network, and Samir Elatrash, a Canadian-Palestinian student with family in the occupied territories. Hillel is primarily represented by Noah Sarna, a leader of the Concordia chapter and a sincere and passionate fighter for Israel. There are some instances of unadulterated Anti-Semitism expressed, but more common are the Islamophobic statements of the Hillel students. Furthermore, Aaron Mate is characterized as a self-hating Jew during the documentary and also off screen by his opponents. This charge against Mate suggests that in some circles Jewishness demands unlimited support for Israel and all of its policies.
This film was released after the release of another documentary about the Netanyahu riots called Confrontation at Concordia, directed by Martin Himel. I haven’t seen Himel’s film (I’ve now added it to my watchlist) but according to wikipedia it heavily emphasizes the anti-Israel sentiments expressed and the anti-free speech dimension of the riots which ultimately succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from speaking. In interviews, Himel also was someone who regarded Discordia as flawed for its heavy presence of Aaron Mate, the “self-hating jew” who sided with Palestinians. During a talk given by Himel about the two documentaries, he said, “In my Concordia, we did interview the Arab student leader Samir Elatrash, as well as the Jewish student leader Patrick Amar. But Discordia, besides interviewing Elatrash, interviewed a self-hating Jew who agreed with the Arabs. There was no interview with Amar or any other self-respecting Jewish spokesperson.” This kind of statement indicates a point of view where race and ethnicity determines political disposition. Discordia challenges that notion however, showing that Anti-Israel doesn’t have to mean Anti-Semetic, and in fact, opposition to oppression of Palestinians doesn’t have to mean death-to-Israel. The struggle over this issue is far more nuanced in its actual manifestations than a simple clash of ethnic hatreds.
Discordia is essentially a film about the subaltern struggle for Palestinian sovereignty from Israel, and an example of how this conflict carried out by diasporic communities far from the centre of the fight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its epicentre in Jerusalem’s West bank and the Gaza Strip - the ‘Occupied Territories’ - but it has its peripheral battlegrounds on university campuses and public spaces and events such as, for example, the Toronto Pride Parade, where the presence of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is an annual source of controversy. At these peripheral sites of conflict, ideologies, flows of influence, rhetorics, symbols, and attitudes are the means of attack and the ground upon which the battle is waged, and they are relevant to the overall conflict.
