Puh, I am totally worn out. I am super behind with my spring cleaning and am fearing my parents stumbling over my mess tomorrow. There are still 3 half bicycles lying around in my living room waiting to be fixed, and also 2 carpets waiting to be fitted. Of course, there are pamphlets and leaflets flying around everywhere, tomorrow I have to politically disinfect my flat in a quickie.
The last weekend, which was Easter, I had originally planned to tidy and clean up, but then I spontaneously planned to go over to Glasgow to visit the Balata installation, about the Balata refugee camp in Palestine, and also Ewa Jasowiesz was talking about the newest development in Iraq.
She has friends currently been in Falluja, which is the besieged and bombed city of the resistance to the US occupation. So I zoomed over there and made a 60-minute interview, and still today I am still editing it. Other people were looking out for pictures and devilish in London has phoned to Iraq and made an audio interview directly.
Then today I was totally worn out in translating a German article about Zapatistas being shot at a demonstration, as Chiapas Indymedia was unavailable, and often they can’t keep up with translating everything from Spanish into English.
Anyway, yesterday we had our first anti-G8 film event, and the organisation was pretty much a mess. I spare the details, but my nerves were pretty wrecked and unfortunately, I am not the person keeping cool if something goes wrong. The film was great, it was “The Fourth World War” being screened. Anyway still have to recover from that event, too, as it was such an organisational chaos.
Furthermore, I seem to have continuously head- and gum-aches. The gum-aches are nearly worse than the headaches.
Ah, and then I should really talk a bit about a tremendously failed meeting yesterday, on IRC, Internet Relay Chat, about the European Indymedia Summer Camp. Anyway, it seems like it won’t happen now. I feel like having given the deadly strike to the summer camp, but luckily, my friend supporting me and said, that if one person could stop something going ahead, then the organisational structure did not work out anyway.
In my opinion, it was because of the lack of local organisers being enthusiastic and committed to having a big meeting there. Although other people see it differently, they suggest it might be because of the lack of organisers in general. But I had a really foul taste in my mouth (apart from this drilling headache), because there actually were enough local organisers willing to put on a meeting around Athens, but for some strange reason, a lot of people refused to take them into account. I stated that in my opinion, it is a discriminative behaviour towards the Athens collective.
And also the real reasons for not considering Athens were in my opinion never clearly stated. There were some relevant “difficulties” with having the meeting in Athens, but the advantages, in my opinion, were that the local collective were keen to put it on, and that is the main thing.
Because it just can’t be all organised by people from other countries and out of town. Also, I had a deja-vu of an EYFA meeting, which ended in the most horrible experience of my political life ever in Escanda. I now came to the conclusion that I really don’t like “professional activists”. I find these hierarchical and domineering. See: Give up activism text.
Anyway, I don’t like meetings with head organisers, restricted places and booking procedures, prefixed food and i thought it was a camp as in camping and not staying in a squat which brings back bad memories, especially as its a closed space in summer.
In a way, I am quite happy it’s not happening because I am quite horrified with the organisational and structural procedure. We are not semi-professional activists here, we are volunteers and we should have a meeting to have some fun, and the bloody structured organisation can be left to groups like EYFA and Escanda. I like and want to have open meetings and open spaces, and i do want Indymedia to stay like Indymedia – open, chaotic, with lots of discussions based primarily on honesty but somehow with this discussion, I quite felt there was a “hidden agenda” by some people who wanted rather to have an EYFA meeting and hanging out with their friends and not an Indymedia meeting.
Anyway enough now.