W.H.N.I.O.W.H.I.C.B.T.F.A.C

September 18, 2007 1:18 PM

Tanja Nijmeijer is a Dutch woman who joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). They found her diaries and a movie (Dutch version).

Pax Christi are trying to get her out because they, like the Colombian Government fear for her life. Colombian media is not amused with the so called "freedom fighters" from Europe who join the terrorist group.

"Spokespeople from the organization W.H.N.I.O.W.H.I.C.B.T.F.A.C (We Have No Idea Of What Happens In Colombia But The Farc Are Cool), announced the opening of several registration tables throughout Amsterdam to meet the demand of wild young people to follow in the footsteps of their fellow countrywoman, who according to last week´s statistics, managed to beat Paris Hilton, Harry Potter and Shrek in the popularity polls."

You can buy the shirts here and here. FARC in MEFI

posted by kudzu (36 comments total)

FARC?

worst. revolutionary. acronym. evar.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:31 PM on September 18, 2007

Must be tough trekking through the jungle in those wooden shoes.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 1:34 PM on September 18, 2007

The FARC are scum.
posted by SweetJesus at 1:38 PM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

But hey, at least Hugo Chavez is a Real Communist Hero, right? Right?
posted by nasreddin at 1:40 PM on September 18, 2007

Also, looks like they finally got a spiffy website.
posted by nasreddin at 1:44 PM on September 18, 2007

FARC?

worst. revolutionary. acronym. evar.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:31 PM on September 18

This is a really frightening organization. I really doubt they care what nerds on the Internet think of their name.
posted by vacapinta at 1:59 PM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh wow, FARC kidnaps foreigners and bullies coca farmers into a cut of their profits, which they term as a taxation. It is more or less organized crime anymore, despite ostensibly a communist revolutionary group. Their access to pure cocaine makes them a very, very dangerous group as financing no longer becomes an issue.

The only joke is on the Dutch woman and the fake group. It shows a real lack of understanding about what goes on in Columbia and clearly demonstrates that they have never met a Columbian.
posted by geoff. at 2:06 PM on September 18, 2007

Or Colombian.
posted by geoff. at 2:07 PM on September 18, 2007

Oh wow, FARC kidnaps foreigners and bullies coca farmers into a cut of their profits, which they term as a taxation. It is more or less organized crime anymore, despite ostensibly a communist revolutionary group.

Yeah, I know of very few Marxists who think systematized kidnapping and narco-trafficking is an acceptable way to keep your coffers filled.
posted by SweetJesus at 2:12 PM on September 18, 2007

The news reports refer to Tanja Nijmeijer but the video clips refer to Eileen. Can anybody with better Dutch (or Spanish!) than I have explain the discrepancy?
posted by speug at 2:20 PM on September 18, 2007

Eileen is her code name, given to her by FARC.
posted by keep_evolving at 2:22 PM on September 18, 2007

It'sNotNewsFilter
posted by Poolio at 2:23 PM on September 18, 2007

Thank you keep-evolving
posted by speug at 2:25 PM on September 18, 2007

Yeah, I know of very few Marxists who think systematized kidnapping and narco-trafficking is an acceptable way to keep your coffers filled.

Well hardly any, anyways
posted by vorpal bunny at 2:30 PM on September 18, 2007

Eileen is her code name, given to her by FARC.

Narco terrorists have no sense of humor, they should have code named her Patty.
posted by doctor_negative at 2:36 PM on September 18, 2007

Why is the Columbian gov't fearing for her life? Shouldn't they be trying to kill her?
posted by Nahum Tate at 2:47 PM on September 18, 2007

I'm having a real hard time feeling sorry for this woman. When someone goes down to the river to bond with the crocodiles, it's hardly surprising to learn that they've been bitten.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:49 PM on September 18, 2007

Nahum Tate: From what I understood from the Dutch Video ( it is rather big news here) the FARC kill people who leak from within their organization. Since she is Dutch it is a diplomatic issue now.

I don't mind making a rough translation of the Dutch video tomorrow, if anybody wants it. They pretty much say, in not to many words, that the FARC kill, are terrorists and that she has to be complete nuts to join them after 9/11 when they became part of the terrorist list. Off to bed now.
posted by kudzu at 2:54 PM on September 18, 2007

Wow I thought radical chic was dead... but apparently not.

Newsflash, revolution that involves shooting people is an ugly, morally compromised act from the get go.
posted by wuwei at 3:13 PM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

This is an excerpt from one of the links above, discussing the Dutch woman's journal:

She says that in the middle of the solitude of the jungle, the Farc guerrilla members have sex all day long, to the point of getting AIDS, in other words.. to fuck, kill and fuck because this world is coming to an end!

Memo to Michel Houellebecq: you've got the plot for your next novel.
posted by jayder at 3:20 PM on September 18, 2007 [2 favorites has favorites]

It is more or less organized crime anymore, despite ostensibly a communist revolutionary group.

Ditto, and ditto. What's worse is, we have idiots working within our own government who think that revolutionary taxation is a fine and dandy thing. Fucking useful idiots.
posted by micketymoc at 3:24 PM on September 18, 2007

To paraphrase Dexys, ah come off it, Eileen.
It's not like you're short of proper revolutionary movements in Latin America to help, preferably not by tarting around the jungle like a silly sod.
posted by Abiezer at 3:35 PM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yeah, I know of very few Marxists who think systematized kidnapping and narco-trafficking is an acceptable way to keep your coffers filled.

Oh, of course if you're sitting around in an air-conditioned room debating dialectical materialism, you're not gonna be like "Our revolution will be funded by drugs and murder! Trust us, there's no way this whole 'dictatorship of the proletariat' thing could possibly go wrong!" At that point, it's still warm fuzzies, and the revolution is still being funded by rent checks from well-meaning upper middle class parents. It's when you figure out that the peasants actually don't really want to be New Socialist Men, and that the government isn't quite collapsing from its internal contradictions, that you start creating Revolutionary Preservation Committees and requisitioning the people's stuff for their own good. Watch what happens to Chavez when the oil runs out.
posted by nasreddin at 3:48 PM on September 18, 2007 [4 favorites has favorites]

Now 23, she visited Colombia in 2000 as part of a Danish tour aimed at exploring Marxist experiments in South America

Difficult to know what to say about that line.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:48 PM on September 18, 2007

Wow, she's like the dutch Johnny Walker.
posted by mullingitover at 3:52 PM on September 18, 2007

In Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevara writes at length about the character of the guerilla, how they've got to have the fortitude to endure great hardships for their cause--starvation, the elements, being constantly on the run. He doesn't mention the perils of VD, probably because his band wasn't having coke-fueled orgies all the time. This may perhaps explain why Cuba is communist, and Colombia is not.
posted by Nahum Tate at 4:10 PM on September 18, 2007

Couldn't the carpetbaggers with their lame cafepress shirts have bothered to synthesize the top of her head, instead of just running some newspaper photo through Photoshop's threshold filter?
posted by unmake at 4:28 PM on September 18, 2007

As a Pre-Internet Smart Guy, I knew of F.A.R.C. long before Fark.com and always thought it was Drew Curtis who'd make a poor naming choice. From what I knew of them, I thought they'd gone from Marxist to PolPot-ist some time ago and were the one organization most deserving of the label "narco-terrorist".

"Nijmeijer would be one of the few -- possibly the only -- recruit from a Western country."
...which makes her historically noteworthy but not worthy of serious analysis. Radical chic IS dead but a few people haven't heard yet. Publicizing the stuff she wrote does increase awareness of this bad gang, which is not a bad thing. Of course, whenever the Authorities who seize diaries like this release them in bits and pieces, I get a little suspicious of their motives, but then, the FARC is pretty-much indefensible. Still, this is Not News...
posted by wendell at 4:54 PM on September 18, 2007

From what I knew of them, I thought they'd gone from Marxist to PolPot-ist some time ago and were the one organization most deserving of the label "narco-terrorist".

Yeah, a long time ago. It's weird to see them resurrected here as some sort of "socialist" movement. They've been pretty exclusively a kidnapping, thieving, extorting, drug-running, killing machine for at least the last ten years. Any legitimate aims that they may have had at one point have long vanished behind their campaign of terror.
posted by Brak at 5:46 PM on September 18, 2007

"Newsflash, revolution that involves shooting people is an ugly, morally compromised act from the get go."

It's that cut and dry is it? The American revolution? Because, I'm thinking that when the regime is oppressive, intransigent, and immoral, armed revolution is a fairly straightforward and acceptable solution.

Or would you rather that the victimized masses wait patiently for their oppressors to see the error of their ways after many long discussions over tea?
posted by oddman at 7:44 PM on September 18, 2007

Newsflash, revolution that involves shooting people is an ugly, morally compromised act from the get go.

Um, the revolutions that don't involve shooting anyone are pretty few and far between.
posted by serazin at 8:25 PM on September 18, 2007

Nobody got shot in the Dance Dance Revolution.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 9:03 PM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

serazin: the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia

Oddman:
Where did I say that I wanted people to sit back and do nothing? I said that violent revolution is morally compromised. Sometimes violence may be the best alternative out of all the others-- if you're a Muslim living in Sarajevo in 1994, a gay Spanish Communist in 1936, then it's kill or be killed. Violence comes to you. And you have to decide what you're going to do about it...it's not an abstract "OMG in 6 months, this'll be a fascist dictatorship, if this happens/if that happens." It's "OMG, these people have guns and they are killing the people I love, and trying to kill me."

It doesn't change the fact that when a person picks up a weapon and start killing people, they have to make hard moral choices. Maybe the commandant is also a loving father with two kids who only know him as their father, not as the gray uniformed organization man who presides over the execution of your ethnic compatriots. For the greater good, he must die. Sure. It doesn't change the fact that you've deprived those kids of a father.

How about sending someone to her death? She has to go, because she's the only one who has the necessary skills. But it's a one way mission. And she will die. And you will deprive someone of their daugher or their sister or their mother. You get to live with that for the rest of your life. And so do her relatives. But that's what it means, to live the life of a violent revolutionary.

Or what about making deals? I'm not talking about making deals with the 'opposition.' I'm talking about the kind of people who revolutionaries usually have to work with-- drug runners, diamond smugglers, loan sharks, professional sadists, killers-for-hire. It's not pretty. There's money to be made in failed states, but the people cutting the checks are not the kindest people you'll meet down at the cafe. It's not like holding a dinner party, to paraphrase a man who knew what he was talking about. Drug running and smuggling of high margin items are typical ways to fund a revolution, whether in China, Albania or Colombia.

You can't turn away from that. It's the inevitable cost of violence. There's nothing straightforward about it at all. I wish people would see that.

As for the American Revolution-- it definitely split families. From Wikipedia: "William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and Governor of New Jersey remained Loyal to the Crown throughout the war and never spoke to his father again." And there is the minor detail that the Founding Fathers compromised and allowed chattel slavery in their new Republic. It was necessary to keep together the rebel alliance remember?

Sometimes violence is the answer. But let's not pretend that there's anything noble or pretty about it. That's what got Tanja Nijmeijer in so much trouble.
posted by wuwei at 10:27 PM on September 18, 2007 [2 favorites has favorites]

F.A.R.C.E.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 4:42 AM on September 19, 2007

FARC are just attempting to fight the US funded shit-heads at their own game. In doing so, they to become shit-heads.

So it goes.
posted by asok at 10:40 AM on September 19, 2007

to too
posted by asok at 10:41 AM on September 19, 2007