Swamp's Last Day on Earth . . . And Other True Tales of the Anarchist Underground

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It's a couple of Saturdays before Christmas at the Out of the Fog coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon, a place where Santa Claus is just another capitalist oppressor. The Fog, ground zero for Eugene's thriving anarchist population, is located in a warehouse at the edge of town. A young man named Swamp sits at a rickety wooden table on the loading dock. A week ago he was living 170 feet up an old-growth fir tree west of town, but in just the past few days his life has gotten considerably more complicated, and now it looks like he had better get out of Eugene quickly.

Swamp, 26, is one of about twenty local anarchists who crashed the mostly peaceful demonstrations at November's World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, unleashing such a vicious and efficient reign of angry vandalism that 400 armored riot police responded by tear-gassing the entire downtown -- enveloping nonviolent protesters wearing endangered-sea-turtle costumes, labor-union marchers and businessmen who were caught up in the spectacle on their lunch breaks. For four days, the Eugene anarchists roamed downtown Seattle, busting windows, setting fires and redecorating storefronts with anti-corporate slogans. The rampage cost Seattle business owners at least $17 million.

Swamp was at the center of the action, earning a reputation as one of Eugene's most hard-core revolutionaries. He fought cops, brawled with security guards, "unarrested" three friends by yanking them from the arms of the police, and played a key role in defacing a Starbucks, a Gap and a McDonald's. "He kicked a lot of ass for all of us," says Carlos, one of the anarchists who was with Swamp in Seattle. And while most anarchists tend to take themselves very seriously, Swamp treats his felonious activities as a form of good, clean fun. When a riot cop took a swing at him with a club, Swamp says he blocked it with his hands and taunted his armored attacker: "Hit me! Hit me!"

"That probably wasn't the best tactic," Swamp says, laughing. Right then, three other riot cops stepped forward and complied. They clubbed him, shot his eyes full of pepper spray and tear-gassed him until he puked all over himself.

Fueled by endless cups of militantly correct coffee -- made from beans picked by supporters of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico --the anarchists are blitzed on triumph. "The inferno is way out of control," says Shade, a local rabble-rouser. In his mid-thirties, with thinning blond hair, Shade is one of the oldest anarchists in Eugene. Before moving to Oregon, he fronted a Seattle punk band called Total Toxic Rebellion. "The Man just wants to tighten his fat fucking white ass on the throne," says Shade. "They can't crush us like in a Raid commercial. If they try, it's going to be North Vietnam all over again, and this country will know what it's like to lose a big one."

Swamp's uniform would be familiar to anyone who has ever seen the FBI's composite sketch of one of his heroes, the Unabomber. He's wearing a black hooded jacket and camo pants. His face is obscured by a wild beard. Dreadlocks hang to his shoulders. He claims he has not combed or cut his hair in five years. His only nod to vanity is the wing nut woven into one of his dreads. From a distance, Swamp has the feral appearance of a man who has been living under a freeway bridge, but his quick eyes reveal alertness, humor and intelligence. He is slightly built but has the large, powerful hands of someone who is good at things like laying bricks, fixing cars, assembling land mines from objects commonly available at the hardware store -- all of which are activities he discusses with familiarity. He is also an accomplished Dumpster diver and shoplifter. Theft from corporations is an honorable means of survival, according to his anarchist code. It ensures that as little capitalist lucre as possible dirties his hands.

Swamp says he may as well be called Pine Cone or Scrotum. Whatever name he has doesn't matter, so long as his identity remains hidden from the authorities. In fact, Eugene's anarchists conceal their names even from one another; only one person in town knows Swamp's real name, and Swamp won't tell anyone who that is.

Tomorrow morning, Swamp will leave town and head for L.A.; after that, "Swamp" will cease to exist. He does not know where he'll go or who he will be. All he knows is that he will dedicate himself to the goal --revolution -- maybe by hooking up with some animal-rights activists and anarchists from the Southwest and taking it from there.

"After the new year, there will be no more Swamp," he says. "You can't fight a revolution from jail."

The anarchists who set fires and defaced storefronts during the protests against the WTO conference in Seattle were only the most visible elements of a growing radical fringe. Arson fires and acts of destruction carried out by animal-rights and environmental activists have increased markedly in the past few years. Early in 1999, FBI director Louis Freeh testified before a Senate subcommittee that "the most recognizable single-issue terrorists at the present time [in the U.S.] are those involved in the violent animal-rights, anti-abortion and environmental-protection movements."

Freeh singled out the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front as organizations posing significant challenges to law enforcement. According to Steven Berry, an FBI spokesman, "Environmental extremists tend to disregard legitimate public debate over environment and resource protection, and instead employ various forms of illegal activity in defense of the environment."

Last September, a series of articles on ecoterrorism published in the Portland Oregonian identified 100 significant acts of destruction in the West since 1980 that were linked to environmental saboteurs. One-third of these occurred in the past four years, most notably the pipe bombing of a Utah fur-breeder-supply company in 1997 by straight-edge punk rockers; the Vail, Colorado, lodge burnings in 1998 by the Earth Liberation Front; and the partial destruction of an Orange County, California, animal-testing lab in 1999 by the Animal Liberation Front. Though the word anarchist seldom appears in the names of groups that claim responsibility for these actions, anarchist principles are behind them, and many members interviewed identify themselves as such. "Anarchists have created a leaderless resistance movement," says Bryan Denson, a co-author of the Oregonian series. "It's not a unified movement in the traditional sense. It's a polka-dot thing that's not easily tied together."

"Anarchism has been on the uptick in the last decade," says University of Oregon sociology professor Michael Dreiling, author of a forthcoming book on the politics of international trade. He explains that anarchism first took root in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, on the radical edge of the labor movement. Anarchism was wiped out before World War II, Dreiling says, but in the past fifteen years, anarchist tendencies developed among forest activists in the West, the anti-racism movements in the Northeast and Midwest, and the rising labor movement across the U.S.

The current movement is loosely organized in a series of co-op houses in a dozen cities in the country. Anarchists are active in anti-hunger programs like Food Not Bombs. They have lent support to labor strikes. "They avoid traditional employment," says Dreiling. "They avoid using money. It's a movement that's difficult to categorize or quantify. Anarchist tactics are based on direct action -- the destruction of property -- carried out by small 'affinity' groups of, for example, two to six individuals. Affinity groups are a highly effective tactic for mobilizing wide groups of loosely networked individuals."

Many factors are converging to create today's anarchist movement, Dreiling says: "The 1970s and 1980s were a period of consensus and conciliation between environmentalists and the power elite, but the economic boom of the Nineties has primarily benefited the upper reaches of society. The kids identifying themselves as anarchists today are mostly middle-class white kids. They are offered the neon-pleasure-dome vision of society on TV. They are promised life will be an endless Mountain Dew commercial, but they end up with jobs assembling burritos. They have a lot of anger. No one wants to hear their rage. And they can't afford to plant a million-dollar lobbyist in the Beltway to solve their problems."

Eugene, Oregon, has long been a haven for militant anarchists, but recently they have stepped up their actions. Last June, anarchists smashed storefronts and tagged shops along the main commercial strip. A year before, they trashed the local NikeTown. After the chaos in Seattle, instigated by Eugene anarchists, Eugene's mayor said his city was "the anarchist capital of the world." If you ask one of the locals what his goal is, he will answer, "Global revolution." But even some of the most ardent brick tossers from Eugene also say that their job is to create the outer edge of liberal protest. As Shade says, "When the anarchists do their thing ... the liberals look middle-of-the-ground all of a sudden."

Swamp arrived in Eugene in the spring of 1998. He had just been paroled from a California jail after serving six months for dealing marijuana. Swamp had supported himself for several years as a pot and LSD dealer. He says he made $200 a day dealing acid in San Diego. His activism began in a haphazard manner. Traveling through the South, he says, he vandalized signs on churches that had anti-homosexual messages. He claims that on another occasion, he sabotaged a Pepsi bottling plant by dumping several trash bags of weeds into the building's air intakes.

Around the time of Swamp's arrival in Eugene, Zip-O-Lumber, a local company, was about to follow through on its intentions to clear-cut the last remaining old-growth firs in the Fall Creek area of the Willamette National Forest. Thus was born Red Cloud Thunder, a small collective formed to protect the trees. "We were just a bunch of fuck-ups -- gutter punks and anarchists," says Pacific, an early member of Red Cloud Thunder.