On Wednesday February 15, we launched several concurrent denial of service attacks against a website hosting an online panel discussion entitled "Occupying Beyond Divisions: Anarchy, Black Blocs and Protests" with Chris Hedges. After initially only creating a few minor disruptions, it was during the second half of the talk that we were finally successful in taking down the entire website, which remained offline further into the night.

Denial of Service Attack Against Chris Hedges Panel

On Wednesday February 15, we launched several concurrent denial of service attacks against a website hosting an online panel discussion entitled "Occupying Beyond Divisions: Anarchy, Black Blocs and Protests" with Chris Hedges. After initially only creating a few minor disruptions, it was during the second half of the talk that we were finally successful in taking down the entire website, which remained offline further into the night.

We carried out this action because we regard this sort of institutionalized dialogue with the bourgeoisie's hatemongering journalists about the nature of revolutionary violence to be a worthless diversion for any movement striving for the complete liberation of the oppressed. Having abandoned all pretensions of providing the public with socially responsible criticism, the once distinguished men and women of letters have reduced themselves to hacks: mechanically churning out one article after another in sycophantic defense of their corporate sponsors. While journalists have always more or less modified the truth at the request of their wealthy patrons, what is currently most striking about the filler crowding today's newspapers is how the poorly written and researched articles now serve, only at best, as a mere decorative showcasing for the adjacent advertisements. It is therefore of no value for us to enter into debate with cretins, who imitate illiterate cavemen, and spend their days endlessly producing primitive scribbles in order to adorn the distorted images of the modern-day fetish: the commodity. We prefer not to squander our time and energy in a discussion on equal footing with the press establishment, as they should, accordingly, be more mindful of the present environmental crisis, and stop needlessly wasting precious ink and paper.

The previous centuries have clearly demonstrated where American anti-anarchist hysteria leads: to Palmer raids, mass deportation, imprisonment, and politically motivated executions. We have not forgotten the role journalists played in stirring up the witch-hunts that ended in the assassinations of the Haymarket Martyrs and Sacco and Vanzetti. Nor have we managed to settle the age-old score we harbor against their entire miserable profession. With that being said: if Hedges and his colleagues insist on continuing their red-and-black baiting, then they should also accept full responsibility for bringing this time honored vendetta back to the surface. As shown by the denial of service attack, we believe our best line of defense is to instead go on the offensive. Rather than waiting for their frantic persecution to eventually spill outside of the media for us to begin taking action, we will start making it exceedingly difficult for these journalists to spew their ignorant slander. Besides his lack of creativity, which is only equivalent to his lack of command over the English language, Mr. Hedges will encounter a host of other, additional problems to be dealt with in the future, if he so chooses to proceed in his career impersonating a writer.

It was not some haughty sense of vanity that convinced us that we were far too dignified to sink to the lows necessary for any sort of "moral" debate with the bourgeoisie's propagandists. When considering how these servile bottom-feeders attempt to ethically vindicate foreign military aggression and domestic police terror in exchange for a substantial salary, our very deliberate silence reveals itself to be an implacable standard to be upheld by all revolutionaries. For this reason, the comrades, who in good faith entertain Hedges as a worthy adversary, are unfortunately misguided in their efforts to respond to his malicious allegations. On the other hand, there are opportunists, like for example Graeber, who ambitiously view the controversy as another chance to advance their pathetic careers. These traitorous parasites, along with their media antagonists, should not be surprised if someday they are hit with more than just internet packets. It would be a mistake to try and justify our recourse to emancipatory violence, especially to those who unabashedly defend another, qualitatively different, and more brutal form of technologically superior carnage designed solely to enforce coercion and domination. This condemnation, of course, extends to the "progressive" and liberal journalists like Hedges, whose livelihoods depends upon fulfilling a spectacular role in the wider ideological facade. We would indeed be hopelessly short-sighted, if, in periods of relative calm and social peace, we could not see beyond the more or less democratic and permissive veneer with which power covers its homicidal essence. Whatever form it takes, the exploitation of man by man always merits a reply in the perspective of its violent destruction. It is not a question of deciding who “fired first” in order to know whether our actions are “legitimate” or not. For centuries the State has “fired first”, and the deaths do not only come about in the streets under the bullets of the police, but also in the factories, the migrant farms, the prisons, the asylums, and the ghettos all over the world. If it were a question of a moral problem there would not be the need for even a minute’s discussion in the face of the hundreds assassinated daily, whose blood cries vengeance to our conscience.

The problem is not only a moral one. Nor will the answers be provided by experts and pundits with direct or indirect interest in perpetuating the State's genocidal order. The discussion must be, and will be, carried out instead by those who do not need to be persuaded that armed self-defense is the only appropriate response to the years of agonizing exploitation relentlessly maintained by a violence which knows no limits or moral obstacles, because its viciousness is, regrettably, an ever present aspect of their daily lives. Rather than offering abstract solutions to an ethical dilemma, their collective decisions will exclusively pertain themselves with determining the most consistent and effective ways to conduct the struggle for their liberation. Contrary to, and regardless of, the mindless babble so often heard from the talking heads in panel discussions; other, more pressing conversations will take place in the Bronx tenements, where 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was gunned down by the NYPD; in the Oakland BART stations, where Oscar Grant was executed; in the cell blocks in Georgia and California, where the rebellious prisoners courageously continue their strike against all odds; and in the deportation camps, where the paperless are routinely held hostage and caged. As the capitalist crisis intensifies, concrete proposals will be brought to the table by the millions of exhausted workers, who are everyday forced to accept lesser wages as compensation for more humiliation and drudgery, as well as by the growing numbers of the unemployed cast out of the labor market like diseased cattle.

Together, with a combined enthusiasm and solidarity, they will thrust open the maximal dimension of creativity and destruction: an event so exuberantly ferocious it will make Pittsburgh in 1877, Seattle in 1919, Watts in 1965, and L.A. in 1992 look like one of Dr. King's more pleasant dreams. When the multitudinous and the miserable, the tired, the angry, and the fed-up finally take matters into their own hands, it will be impossible for the always imperceptive journalists to single out a small minority dressed in black as targets for their petty verbal assaults. On the other hand, this newly recomposed majority will be far too unruly to be confined into any succinct numerical percentage. When this glorious day of reckoning arrives, Mr. Hedges will have to own up to his words - outside of the safeties provided by the blogosphere - in a world that will be rapidly changing, whether he likes it or not.

- American Anarchist Fighters

Screenshot and evidence of takedown: http://pastebin.com/JQCbpU5u