Book overview
We have already been through the horrors of a Third World War. Today we are in the Fourth, and if we are to stop this war, we need to know what we are fighting, or rather, what is fighting us.
To better understand this moment, we turn to theory from below from those who know about war: our Maya elders, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, the EZLN.
The Maya rebel communities in Chiapas have been not only living under conditions of war for more than 500 years, they have also been theorizing about WWIV since it began with the fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called "triump" of capital.
The seven communiques in this book are only a small number of the many writings the EZLN offers us on war and struggle, spanning from 1997 when they introduced their theorizations on WWVI, to 2023 in the context of the genocides before us in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and the intensified violences across many more geographies: Chiapas, Haiti, Rojava, Syria, Artsakh, Iran... a a geography and calendar of war as unbearable as it is endless.
As this exceptional moment unmasks the fallacy of exceptionalism, we are certain of one thing: the world History we have been told is a lie, and we will not allow any more lies.
What we are witnessing is reality, "the harshest of all judges," as the Zapatistas put it. It is reality that every day testifies to the fact that we are already in a world war, a global war, a truly total war where the enemy is life, where the enemy is all who stand in the way of capital, where the enemy is us for simply being us.
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Ya hemos pasado por los horrores de una Tercera Guerra Mundial. Hoy estamos en la Cuarta, y si queremos detener esta guerra, necesitamos saber contra qu
