Bring Back The Metropolitan Indians!

You have built the Reservation for us, and now you want to chase us back into it, into the ghettos of marginalization and despair. No more is this possible! Because it is precisely out of the ghettos that our Rebellion has exploded. Today Human Beings have found themselves again, have found their strength, their joy of collective living, their anger, and their thirst for communism.
-The Metropolitan Indians of North Rome, 1977

Some say that a certain distance lends itself to a certain obscurity, but a certain distance can also lend itself to certain clarity. When Franz Kafka wrote Amerika, his final novel, he had never been to the United States and in his book he describes the Statue of Liberty holding a sword in her hand, not a torch. Max Brod, the man who ensured that his friend’s work would become immortal after his death, did not edit out this error. We can only speculate as to why Kafka believed the statue held a sword. The torch in her hand is meant to be a symbol of freedom, a beacon for the poor and hungry immigrants of the world to flock to. But as we all know, when the immigrants arrived, they found the sword hanging above their heads.

We have no idea who the Whitherburo are but it is clear they are not from the United States. Their name is a combination of the English adverb whither and the Spanish word for donkey, one of the most dependable, stubborn, and burdened animals on the planet. Together, their name could be taken to mean, “to what place, donkey?”

The Whitherburo have pierced directly into the heart of the United States with their new book, simply titled Whitherburo. Their ideas of this country (a place they despise) are informed by history books, radical literature, the internet, a few conversations, a few visits, and a surprising amount of inspiration. But like Kafka, they have inserted one strange item into their text: the idea of the Indian.

They dwell often on the counter-culture that emerged throughout the developed world in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this upsurge of revolutionary activity, they find a desire to evoke, channel, or otherwise manifest the spirit of the earth and the forces of life that were being suppressed by fascist/colonial culture.

In the section of the book titled Indians, the authors write “the Americans unnaturally wiped out a people who loved and respected nature and integrated it with their lives. Now the Americans wander about, talking constantly about spiritual belonging, organic food, and so forth. They killed the Indians and paved the land only to regret it later. This is nihilism.” The forces of life that were suppressed during the colonization of North America are constantly struggling to return, to reverse the tide and push back “the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people (Symbionese Liberation Army, 1974).”

When the authors use the term Indian throughout the text, they are referring to these suppressed natural forces, the eternal antagonists to the American project of total fascism. Their use of Indian as a term potentially ripe with antagonism is perhaps intentionally ironic, or perhaps naively so. Regardless of their purpose and motivations, it revives a history of the fetishization of Native cultures while simultaneously asking us to consider how the symbol of the Indian might constitute the spirit of anti-fascism. In the section titled Digression on Nazism and America, the authors make clear that the nihilistic death culture of America is not accidentally, but consciously fascist. “If America brings the Nazis into its own country, puts them back in power in West Germany and Greece, and helps them come to power all over Latin America, Africa, and Asia, it is because America has an affinity with Nazism.”

Franz Kafka was to die before the horror of the Nazis exterminated his entire family in the furnaces and death camps of fascist Europe. In regards to our dear Franz, the authors offer the following words. “Kafka well understood America, even though he never visited, and his book Amerika certainly deserves a higher estimation than it receives amongst Americans, who in their typical stupidity treat it as some sort of comedy unique amongst his works, instead of reflecting that he, as an early chronicler of the emerging bureaucratic nihilism, hound his only real country for study in America.”

Every metropolis is created by the forces of death. It surrounds and enslaves the forces of life, the rebels, the insurgents, the people who simultaneously inhabit this web of domination and struggle to destroy it. This war is constant and never ending, and the Indians suffer long defeats and sudden victories that threaten to engulf the world. The upsurge of revolution in the United States that took place in the 1960’s and 1970’s was a moment of possibility that revealed the continued existence of the spirit of life.

In the 60’s, the fun Americans were having is contextualized by remembering the horrific, earth-crushing sadness of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible. When we hear of the street theater of the Diggers, the joys of Woodstock, of the counter culture, we see that Americans were finally starting to enjoy themselves, which meant a break with the Protestant death culture of willing nothingness…The nihilism of American life swallowed up the return of the Indian children, for a brief time at least. But it will only re-start, and this time in a more virulent and final fashion.

While their use of the word nihilism may not synchronize with the common, contemporary understanding, this author finds it to be appropriate. To them, America is the triumph of nihilism. It is nothingness made material and virulent, spreading across the entire world. It hollows out the minds of the population, turning them into dead shells who are concerned only with aesthetics, appearance, image, and representation. When these poor shells first dream of rebellion, they always start by imitating and appropriating the appearances of the rebels that the death culture has extinguished. They do not make this point to forever condemn all potential rebels, but merely to highlight the long and difficult process of decolonization.

In 1975, Bommi Baumann, a former fighter in the June 2nd Movement, published his memoir How It All Began while living underground. In the book, he explains the multiform, diffuse, and ecstatic counter-culture that came to be known as the “support base” of the various guerrilla groups that operated in Germany. Before it took on such a militaristic and lifeless character, the counter-culture was its own weapon of liberation against the forces of death. But all of that began to change.

In the second half of his memoir, Baumann laments this turn that the counter culture took. Before, people would smoke hash, grow their hair long, express their sexuality, commit irrational acts on the street in large groups, and burn things they did not like whenever they were possessed to do so. Life was the guiding force, the spirit that made Baumann quit his alienating job and become a freak. However, as a guerrilla in the J2M, Baumann suddenly found himself forced to dress like the people he despised in order not to be apprehended and remain underground.

Suddenly you’re right there again. You’re standing there with short hair, with a suit, with everything the same again as where you came from; and the people around you react in the same way, they’re just as hardened as you. So you wore yourself out all those years, and did everything, and suddenly you arrive right back there again…the more you make yourself illegal, that is to say, the further you isolate yourself, the more secret the things you are doing become, the more you fall right into this consumerism. Of course, you can’t run around like you did before, so you keep getting more velvet suits, and at the end you look like you’ve jumped right out of Playboy.

The authors of Whitherburo are correct in believing that most Americans (including American radicals, anarchists, etc.) have no knowledge of people like Bommi Baumann or the lessons that others like him tried to pass on. To them, Americans are a largely stupefied and ignorant mass of nihilists with no connection to the past and no hope for the future. The hatred of America that courses through this text cannot be overstated.

Unlike the Americans that they despise so deeply, the authors do offer a clear suggestion to their readers. They believe the spirit of the earth, the spirit of the Indian, will lay waste to the nihilist void threatening to destroy the world. Although the revolutionaries of the 60’s and 70’s might have imperfectly understood this spirit and appropriated forms that were not theirs to have, the authors do not discourage similar efforts. And nor does this author, for that matter.

Before we offer one final quote from the book, I would like to clearly state that we need a return of the freak, the mad, the irrational, and chaotic, and the wild. No more stupefaction, hollowness, depression, or frigidity. We need life, love, joy, rebellion, madness, and laughter. Bring back the Metropolitan Indian! Channel the spirit of the earth! Go wild, be free, and destroy what destroys you!

It is very appropriate that some revolutionaries of ’77 called themselves Metropolitan Indians. These groups knew unconsciously that their real enemy was America, and that the real enemy of America is not the proletariat but the Indians, who represent the power of spirituality returning to a world from which it had apparently been banished. When the factories crumble and reveal their spiritually transient character, all the magic, the metaphysics they had repressed from the world returns to a new and everlasting life. Now the next revolution in this historic chain of appearances will in its turn annihilate historical nothingness, the American Way of Life.