GREEN AND BROWN ASSHOLISM: WHAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE MY 'LAST WORD' ON GREEN ANARCHIST by Stewart Home

It is neither necessary nor possible to deal with all the smears scum like Green Anarchist put into circulation about me and others. However while updating this site I thought it worth briefly readdressing this matter. Most of those involved with Green Anarchist have now fallen out with each other and their immediate supporters. I had no interest in the GAandALF trial and made no public comments about it, my criticisms of Green Anarchist were not intended to have any effect on its outcome, but in retrospect it seems they may have been of some benefit to Molland and Wood since my critique may have played a minor role in speeding up their inevitable separation from Booth and Rogers. Of course, if my criticisms had this effect, then so did those of others. Credit where it is due and both Molland and Wood seem to have distanced themselves from much of what I opposed in Green Anarchist, and to the extent they have done this the criticisms either don't or no longer apply to them.

The most recent smears I know of emanating from what remains of the GA 'camp' appeared in "Green Anarchist" 71-72 (2004). On page 9, John Connor aka Paul Rogers writes: "And what of Home Now? Virtually silent, whether because Brit Lit's star has fallen and without himself even tagged to its tail (so no publishers, no moronic pseud fan base, etc - hard life, eh?) or because the final expose of the convergers at the 2000 bookfair..." All of which is patently ridiculous, because my most successful novel up to that point "69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess" had been published by Canongate in 2002 (reprinted within a few months and then reissued in 2003 as a mass market paperback). Around the same time I won an Arts Council Writers' Award and my books were still being translated and published around the world. Shortly before this issue of "Green Anarchist" appeared my novel "Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" was published. Subsequently Virgin Books published my novel "Tainted Love" and in 2007 another novel "Memphis Underground" will be published by Snowbooks. So rather than having no publishers, I actually had and still have several. Likewise I was one of the first people to publicly attack key converger Jonathan Boulter (in "Anarchist Integralism" in 1997 which was credited to Luther Blissett, see the latter part of footnote 26) and alongside others (Richard Essex, Space Bunny) was very active in opposing Anarchist Heretics. Of course one should not be surprised by "Connor's" nonsense, since it is preceded by the repetition and elaboration of many of Green Anarchist's old smears about me, lies which hardly require refuting yet again. So rather than going into that, I prefer to reproduce some of what Connor aka Rogers has to say about his former comrades in the same article. I have no way of knowing if any of the following is true, and the best approach to it is to doubt the veracity of everything since the author has a long track record as a fantasist and smear merchant. However, it does provide some insight into "Connor's" paranoid mind set and the levels to which he's willing to stoop in his mudslinging; from this perspective it might be read as (unconscious) humour.

Stewart Home, London October 2006.

SPLITS AND SCHISMS by John Connor (aka Paul Rogers)

The end of the GandALF prosecutions also marked a slow. acrimonious end to GAs fourth editorial collective. As you've already read above, the obsessive Noel Molland - who had neither understanding of or sympathy with GA's broader politics and used our pages simply to get his listings printed in the name of animal lib movement cred - moved out of our orbit even before the first trial was done and now plays on his short spell inside as an angle in publishing his "Earth Liberation Prisoners" newsletter. A rigid, mother-identified individual, Molland's publication is more appreciated by the animal lib movement than he is. His compromising behaviour - including sneaking off to a hotel room to talk to a journalist that then ran one bogus anti-ALF programme after another - during the GAndALF trial is a matter of record, after all.

Sax Wood also legged it out of UK rather than get called to testify at the 3rd GAandALF trial. This was the start of a strange odyssey indeed. EF!UK refuses all representative principles - including that there is an "EF!UK" as opposed to a scattering of distinct local groups - and yet Wood addressed his way across Canada to the Amerikan West Coast as its self-styled "representative". He landed a post at the Earth First! Journal then based at Eugene. Oregon, this way too. He first offered to get GA printed over there for global distribution - marginally cheaper than UK printing. much better security, and distribution inroads into the US too - and then decided to fuck us off after a couple of issues on realising he could make more money publishing his own paper from Eugene instead (that this doubled our print costs in UK meant nothing to him). Much as Molland claimed to be non-anarchist (despite years publishing something called the "Rabbixian Anarchist Times") and nonviolent on lawyers' advice during the CAandALF trial, so they had Wood dream up some 'fundamental' green anarchism out of the pre-Hunt primordial soup. An Albonesque mishmash of allotments and home spun pacifism. Calling it "Green Anarchy", Wood touted his version from venue to venue around the States, claiming it to be "the American version of Green Anarchist" and himself to be me, John Connor. Needless to say, he prevaricated endlessly about a1lowing any criticism to be published in it by GA (UK) - a green anarchist publication open to all except other green anarchists, evidently! Well, it would have rather blown that little scene of his and there is no dole worth talking about Stateside. Ironically, the Eugene based crew he eventually recruited as co-editors - his dyslexia made it impossible to edit the publication beyond reprints on his own - took him at his word and when they, too insisted on anarcho-primitivist content like the UK version. Wood worked himself up into a huff and walked out, compiling his more honestly titled "News From Nowhere" from the East Coast thereafter. A further delicious irony was that this all happened only months short of the N30 anti-globalisation protests in Seattle, which (absurdly) hyped the Eugene anarchists and their GA (USA) to worldwide attention.

While at the Journal, Wood met radical archaeologist and fellow editor, Theresa Kintz. Although she'd been involved in EF! over a decade, she had only become aware of the anarcho--primitivist perspective on meeting John Zerzan in Eugene. When the Journal received the offer of a first interview with Ted Kaczynski, convicted for a 17 year campaign of anti­tech Unabombings and at one time Amerika's #1 Most Wanted, Kintz. took on an assignment the other largely upper-middle class, liberal editorial group wanted nothing to do with. The Journal wouldn't publish this 'dynamite' material - not least on the insistence of Daryl Cherney, the big money Californian EF! supremo then suing the FBI for injuries caused by their bomb during the Redwoods Summer campaign - who subsequently had her purged from the editorial group. Kintz then left for the UK, both because GA had agreed to publish the interview without any or the official nastiness that might accompany Amerikan publication and because it was possible to write her thesis on radical archaeology and anarcho-primitivism in the British academic climate but not any Amerikan one (nice to live in a free country then. .. ).

Unfortunately after little over a year in UK, Kintz and myself found Larry O'Hara our de facto landlord whilst doing (extended) summer work in London. O'Hara has serious, unresolved problems to do with women, particularly his deceased, adopted mother and it didn't take much prompting from a malicious neighbour (who also happened to be a copper's wife) he'd adopted as a mother-substitute for things to turn very nasty indeed. Things might have ended with our de facto eviction but O'Hara. never one to under-do vindictiveness, then encouraged Steve Booth to believe Kintz was (in his own words) "an agent for the American equivalent of Searchlight". As the Irrationalist debacle during the GAndALF period demonstrated, Booth is given to inappropriate quasi-autistic fixations and at this time, Larry 0'Hara was one of them. He was happy to believe and / or do anything O'Hara told him. whether it made sense or not. Despite repeated public and private challenges to provide any evidence of his agent baiting BS, none has been forthcoming with Booth himself admitting in private correspondence that his risible amalgam of paranoid surmises are "not proof". This didn't stop him from a covert campaign of unsubstantiated, hostile whispers and mail interception (given our precipitate move, we had to route our mail via his home before we knew of his 'aberration' and until a more secure alternative was available), ultimately setting up his own spoiler publication, also called "Green Anarchist", "to save it". Needless to say, Booth could hardly publicly admit the true reason for his 'split' without deserved ridicule, so he first pretended it was to do with Kintz trying to sell a second Kaczynski interview to porno magazine "Penthouse" (surely a matter principally between Ted and her) and then later, when that didn't get sufficient reaction in these post -feminist times, claimed it was due to "differences of approach".

From Two Decades Of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist's first twenty years by John Connor (aka Paul Rogers) in Green Anarchist 71-72 (2004).

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