Dissident Veteran For Peace

One week ago, I wrote:

As of today, the global COVID-19 fatality rate (deaths divided by aggregate confirmed infections) is about 4.1%.

We know that the actual fatality rate is probably significantly lower than 4.1% because not everyone who has been infected has been tested.

There are a lot of other factors leading to uncertainty over the actual fatality rate from COVID-19 that I didn't write about. There is an excellent discussion of the "Coronavirus (COVID-19) Mortality Rate" that elaborates on those factors. I recommend it.

Today, the crude global COVID-19 fatality is about 4.6% per figures from the UW Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Map. I still have every expectation that the final rate will be much lower than 4.6% globally, in Italy, the US, and elsewhere. However, because of the failures mentioned in my earlier post I still fear that "the progression of the COVID-19 in the US will likely resemble Italy's trajectory more closely than South Korea's or China's." Nothing that's happened in the last week has dissuaded me from that view although I remain hopeful something will change.

A week ago, I also wrote: "By the end of next week we may start to see how effective efforts to flatten the curve have been in Washington state." The Governor of Washington believes this may be the case but in my reading of the data it's still too soon to know for sure.

I want to elaborate a bit on the comparison I made between the US and South Korea. China, in my opinion, is the wrong place to look for comparisons. Although China has some aspects of a market economy, large and important entities are state-owned enterprises directly controlled by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the remaining sectors are subject to indirect CPC control in the one-party authoritarian regime.

There is evidence that the Chinese government suppressed key information about the virus at least in the early stages. In contrast, South Korea has a modern, mostly private market economy with a political system that is, by one measure, at least as democratic as the United States' "flawed democracy" (but see here for a different ranking).

One of the big mistakes that many people will undoubtedly make in the aftermath of COVID-19 is to demand a larger, more centralized public health and medical system in the US. One of the big pitfalls of such thinking is that centralization creates the risk of severe consequences from a single point of failure.

We are actually seeing that play out in the US where state and local public health agencies and officials take their lead from the federal government and were slow to react appropriately to the threat of COVID-19. They were also hamstrung by their dependence on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to roll out COVID-19 testing and misplaced reliance on supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).

One counterargument is, yes, but if the federal government had done its job correctly then we wouldn't be in this situation. True enough but there are no guarantees that when a crisis develops there will be an able, humane leader at the helm of the large, centralized ship of state.

I am aware of no compelling evidence that, say a President Hillary Clinton, would have prepared for or handled the COVID-19 crisis markedly better than Trump. Speculatively, we can say she may indeed have risen to the challenge of COVID-19 but Clinton would have been under the same pressures by the investor class not to disrupt their profit-taking and to win re-election this year.

More crucially, the lapses in the CDC and the SNS, for instance, didn't develop under Trump alone. I have been unable to find a concise depiction of inflation-adjusted CDC annual budgets (there is this though) but it's clear that the Obama administration proposed significant cuts in 2011 (-11%). In 2013, the Obama administration again proposed more cuts in "biodefense and emergency preparedness programs" along with a $38 million reduction in the "allocation for the Strategic National Stockpile of emergency medical supplies".

And as NBC reports:

[The] U.S. strategic stockpile isn't intended to be the solution to a crisis. It's designed to be used as a stopgap during emergencies. The stockpile has limited resources, government officials and public health experts say, which weren't at full capacity even before the coronavirus was on the horizon.

And:

The stockpile wasn't at full capacity before the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., in part because it never fully replenished some of the critical supplies used in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response ...

A 2016 report published by the National Academies repeatedly raised concerns about the SNS inventory and the logistics of distributing it in an emergency. The chair of the committee that prepared that report, Dr. Tara O'Toole, presciently told NPR in 2016:

"We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We've lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That's a huge hit," says O'Toole, who wishes local officials would get more money for things like emergency drills. "The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong."

My point is that the inability and failure in the US to implement the successful model of South Korea to tamp down COVID-19 via widespread testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the exposed or infected was born of a longstanding failure of the values and priorities of the bipartisan political establishment and by the servile dependency and doltish complacency of the American people who keep electing them. Trump surely deserves a lot of blame for his failures but much of the finger pointing by, for example, Michigan Gov. Whitmer, is simply not grounded in fact and is counter-productive, self-interested blame-shifting by culpable partisans in the midst of a major crisis.

It bears stating that governments weren't invented for the well-being of commoners and only servile fools would willingly depend upon them for that. Governments were created to secure and enhance the power of the already powerful and to provide rhetorical cover for that domination. That is not to say they cannot potentially be transformed by people to more closely reflect the rhetoric of, say, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but we should never forget that decent treatment of ordinary people is, at best, a means, not an end, of government.

If we are to have a centralized state or any state at all then, ceteris paribus, one that could competently stop an COVID-19 epidemic, for instance, would be preferable but this is a false dichotomy. There are other, better ways for humans to organize themselves free from the coercive state if only we will imagine and create them.

See also: "A Few Thoughts on COVID-19"

Labels: anarchism, COVID-19, government, health, medicine, politics, science, Trump

Roughly translated the text on the image above says: "100 Years" and "Fight with the Comintern for the rebuilding of the Bavarian Soviet! Long live the 100th anniversary of the Bavarian Soviet Republic April 13, 1919 - April 13, 2019". The sign identifies the marchers as members of the Neuhausen—a borough of Munich—section of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

One of the best books on the American labor movement I've ever read is the late Robert Fitch's 2006 Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise. Following Fitch's lead, a reviewer for The Nation aptly compared the book to Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.

Unfortunately, Fitch's constructive criticism of American unions was not generally well-received. It was mostly ignored.

However, the impetus for this post was not Solidarity for Sale but, rather, a bit in a fascinating 2006 book review by Fitch of separate works by Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis. I won't comment on those books or Fitch's review except to say I am on the same side of the fence as Fitch (but for somewhat different reasons) and he was out of his hermeneutical depth.

What I want to focus on here is his striking reference to the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic. In "Vetting God's Politics" Fitch writes:

Lerner's account of the Nazi rise to power leaves out some critical material and political factors — like the Great Depression and the suicidal division of the Left between Social Democrats and Communists. But even more significantly, Lerner blots out the not inconsiderable role of the communitarian Jewish Left in producing the convulsive reaction that Hitler exploited.

At a certain point in the upheaval that followed the German defeat by the Allies, members of [Martin] Buber's Neue Gemeinschaft group — like Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam — were high-level participants in the regime which seized power in Bavaria.  To understand the terrible repercussion of the 1919 anarchist coup, imagine if Vietnam not only won the war but invaded the U.S. in the 60s and, in the chaos that followed, a handful of long-bearded Jewish radicals from Berkeley seized power in California and declared the state a Republic.  Then, although a tiny anarchist minority of a left revolutionary minority, the government proceeded to decree a new social order; handing out a worthless currency as free money; establishing agrarian communes; and declaring war on Mexico.  (Bavaria declared war on Switzerland after its refusal to lend the new government 60 locomotives.)  It's likely that California would have experienced a reaction far worse than the election of Ronald Reagan.

In speaking this not-so-speakable (see note below) history Fitch exhibits the kind of intellectual integrity that helped unfairly doom him to a relative obscurity in academic and activist circles. There's a reason why Lerner's account left this information out and it is directly related to why Lerner's star rose much higher than Fitch's in elite circles.

That said, Fitch's characterization of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (BSR) as an "anarchist coup" is a bit puzzling. Apparently, some of the leading figures in the BSR, such as Landauer and Mühsam were self-described anarchists. However, the seizure of state power in a coup is inimical to anarchism as I understand it.

Moreover, in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (UChicago Pr., 1993) Benjamin Ginsberg more aptly writes:

Jews were also among the leaders of the Communist government that the KPD briefly established in Bavaria after the murder of Kurt Eisner. Eugene Levine was head of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, Gustav Landauer was its commissar for propaganda and cultural affairs, and Ernst Toller commanded its "red army."

Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller were members of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Founded in 1917, the USPD joined the Communist International in 1920, leading to a split with the majority of party members going into the KPD. (The USPD is not to be confused with the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) but often referred to simply as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The USPD was the result of a split within the SPD/MSPD, a self-proclaimed Marxist party. Many founders of the Spartacist League-KPD, such as the Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, also started out in the SPD.)

This is a complicated period in Bavarian history. As best I can tell, the sequence of events is as follows:

November 8, 1918: Eisner (a USPD communist) proclaims the People's State of Bavaria (Volksstaat Bayern; VSB) in Munich. Johannes Hoffmann, a Social Democrat (MSPD) and not a Jew, becomes the VSB's minister of education or culture (sources vary). Some sources say Landauer and Mühsam had formal positions in Eisner's government, most say their positions were supportive but informal.

November 21: 29-year-old Adolph Hitler arrives at an army garrison in Munich after being discharged from the hospital where he was recovering from war injuries. The following month he is transferred to Traunstein (about 100 km/62 mi from Munich) only to return to Munich in January or February (In Mein Kampf Hitler says it was March).

January 5, 1919: A general strike, led by the Spartacist League (renamed as/absorbed into the KPD in the preceding month) and the Independent Socialists, begins in Berlin. It will last about one week and in the ensuing violence 150 - 200 people will die before it is violently suppressed by Freikorps.

January 12: In parliamentary elections Eisner's party, the USPD, gets only 2.5% of the vote, entitling them to 3 seats. By contrast, the MSPD wins 31 seats.

February 21: Eisner is assassinated by a 22-year-old army officer, Count Arco-Valley (described as "a young Jew" by British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his book, The Occult Roots of Nazism). Some sources claim Hitler is photographed in uniform at Eisner's funeral five days later. The VSB falls into disarray and Toller soon takes over Eisner's position as leader of the Bavarian branch of the USPD.

March 17:  Hoffmann is elected by the VSB's parliament as the VSB's new minister-president.

April 3: Hitler is elected liaison of his demobilization battalion to the Hoffmann government.

April 6-7: A coup is undertaken following which the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Räterepublik Baiern; RRB) is proclaimed under the leadership of Toller, along with Landauer and Mühsam as cabinet ministers. Hoffmann and others flee Munich to Bamberg. It was during this period that the RRB, under Toller, declared war on Switzerland. Hitler stays put.

April 13: Hoffmann's forces attempt to forcibly re-establish control in Munich but fail. That same day a Jewish KPD member, Eugen Leviné stages a coup against Toller and seizes power. According to Richard J. Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich, the Russian-born Leviné is acting on his own, not the KPD's, initiative. He takes directions from V. I. Lenin (also of Jewish ancestry) to, among other things, arrest large numbers of so-called class enemies, seize privately owned weapons under penalty of death, and organize a 20,000 strong "Red Army" to "spearhead the Bolshevization of Europe". The ousted Toller, an avowed pacifist, takes a position in the new regime as commander of the Red Army. Landauer is also prepared to stay in the new regime but when his cultural program is rejected he quits.

April 15: Hitler is elected liaison of his demobilization battalion to the Leviné government. Leviné's repressive policies and inept leadership along with outside pressure quickly bring about chaos in Munich.

May 1: The siege of Munich is broken by an alliance between Hoffmann's forces and Freikorps under Lt. General Burghard von Oven. Shortly afterwards, Hitler comes out in open opposition to the recently deposed revolutionary government(s) and in what he will describe in Mein Kampf as his "first more or less purely political activity" Hitler joins a commission "investigating the behaviour of his regiment's soldiers during the two soviet republics."

Note
As another example of the not-so-speakable consider that on the popular, if generally unreliable, web site Wikipedia there is a category of articles on "Christian communists" (not to mention "Christian communism") and a category of "African-American communists‎". There are also 151 categories of "Communists by nationality". There's a category of "Jewish socialists" but you will not find a category of articles on Jewish communists. That category was repeatedly created and deleted in the span of about two weeks in 2007.

Thus, for instance, Karl Marx is not categorized in Wikipedia as a "Jewish communist". Bear in mind that the Communist Manifesto's primary author had maternal and paternal grandfathers who were rabbis and his mother converted from Judaism to Christianity years after Karl's birth. FWIW, Marx is also not categorized with "Christian communists", "German Christians", or "German Lutherans" (although his father is). 

To the extent that Jews constitute an ethnicity or nationality, Karl Marx was Jewish. Although he was baptized as a child (so was the execrable Abe Foxman), Marx was nevertheless Jewish under Judaic religious law, i.e. halakha. As one Orthodox rabbi notes: "... in Jewish law there is no true notion of converting out of the faith. Once a person is born Jewish, that is his lifelong status, whether he is observant or not ... past baptism and conversion never [change] that."

There is also no apparent evidence that Marx ever participated in the Lutheran rite of confirmation or that he ever professed faith in Christ as a child or an adult. Marx did profess atheism but that is not necessarily a halakhic disqualifier.

Now consider the case of Benedict Spinoza. Amsterdam's rabbis formally branded Spinoza a heretic and expelled him from the community in 1656. In 2012, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam's Sephardic Jews was asked to rescind the writ of cherem; he refused. Yet, Spinoza's biographical article is included in the following Wikipedia categories: 17th-century Jewish theologians, 17th-century Sephardi Jews, Dutch Jews, Jewish biblical scholars, Jewish philosophers, Jewish skeptics, Jewish translators of the Bible, and 17th-century Jewish biblical scholars.

The single, Wikipedia categorical reference to Marx's Jewishness is "German people of Dutch-Jewish descent". The point is not that Karl Marx was an observant, professing adherent of Judaism; he, apparently, was not. The point is that, unlike virtually every other group of communists, Jewish communists such as Eisner, Toller, Luxemburg, and Leviné are not allowed to be seen and considered in their collective in Wikipedia. Why is that?

Labels: Abraham Foxman, anarchism, communism, history, Jews, labor, Lenin, Lerner, Ronald Reagan, Wikipedia

I finally got around to reading Starship Troopers (1959, 2006) by Robert A. Heinlein and The Forever War (1974, 2009) by Joe Haldeman this summer. Over the years I've heard and read a lot about the books.

I also watched Paul Verhoeven's film treatment of Starship Troopers (ST) not long after its 1997 theatrical debut. Regarding the film, I am in general agreement with Joseph Sale's take (which I've edited slightly below):

Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film, while a masterpiece in its own right, misses much of the nuance of the original novel. He makes Starship Troopers into a satire of fascist states, casting Aryan, white, blonde, beautiful people in the lead roles to further his point, and it works brilliantly, but the novel itself is not an advocate of fascism to begin with. Johnnie is not an Aryan, he is Filipino (Juan Rico is his real name), and the [Mobile Infantry] is made up of people from all over the world. In fact, Heinlein bizarrely presents us with one of the most utopian and unified visions of future human society I have ever read. The film also makes use of over-the-top violence to contrast with its propaganda-interludes, no doubt highlighting how the lies of the state juxtapose with the realities of war. This is intriguing, almost a reverse of the novel which flits between Johnnie’s excruciating mental and physical training, which make explicit the gravity of war on every level of understanding, and the action sequences, which it's undeniable Johnnie seems to enjoy. In the novel, the state is far more responsible than Johnnie is.

It's interesting that at least one key didactic point that Heinlein wrote into ST was more or less faithfully preserved in Verhoeven's film. In the book, Major Reid, an Officer Candidate School instructor in History and Moral Philosophy asserts:

To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives—such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will!—the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force.¹

Why did Verhoeven leave this (without the reference to the fasces) in the film? I suspect it is because he believed it furthered his case concerning the alleged fascism of Heinlein and/or ST. In fact, it is a profound truth that force and violence underlie voting and political power. Yes, even in representative democracies.

Why is it acceptable to coerce people simply because 51% of the voting population agrees that people should be punished for doing or not doing x, y, or z? In nearly all cases, criminal laws are never even put to voters, they are enacted by politicians viewed unfavorably by large segments of the population.

The case that is made in ST is that the truth about voting logically leads to the following solution:

Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility—we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life—and lose it, if need be—to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and yang, perfect and equal.²

Approached from a slightly different angle it seems to me quite reasonable to expect from those who would wield the coercive power of the state against others to demonstrate some tangible civic virtue, to have some literal skin in the game.

However, there is an unspoken corollary that I find even more appealing. That is, by reducing the coercive power of the state—if you're going to have a state at all—one can expand the franchise and lower the bar to participation. That is, a widespread franchise would be appropriate only where the state has little or no coercive power. Steps in this direction might be to abolish capital punishment and military conscription and then to progressively redistribute centralized authority downward.

(The most interesting take I've read of 'the voting problem' in ST is in Dan Thompson's account of a discussion he was involved in at a WorldCon in Baltimore. I've included a link to it below in the See also section.)

Recurrent accusations of Heinlein's alleged personal and literary fascism are well known. Despite the many problems I have with some of Heinlein's later political positions, I think the charge of fascism is an unfounded example of the scurrilous name-calling too common among political ideologues.

It's interesting that Haldeman and Heinlein were friends. Moreover, in 1999, Haldeman was asked "about the whole 'fascist' argument, that ST is a novel about fascism, etc.?" He responded: " 'Fascist' is too easy an epithet. My problem with ST is more complex than that." Haldeman also penned the introduction to the 2018 Folio Society edition of ST (I have not read it yet though I would like to).

It is almost a commonplace that ST is an inadvertently dystopian novel meant to present a (fascistic) utopian vision. By contrast, The Forever War (TFW) is often taken as "an anti-war classic" and a refutation of ST. However, Haldeman himself has said that although he did not pen a reply to it, he was influenced by Heinlein's book.

In any case, of the two books I find TFW to be markedly more dystopian than ST. If forced to choose between living in the sci-fi future world of ST or TFW I would unhesitatingly choose ST.

I do not subscribe to the view that every act or idea in a work of fiction is endorsed by the author. Yet, authors generally do not let acts and ideas to which they object go unchallenged. Moreover, Haldeman has stated the TFW is based on his own experiences in the Vietnam War and, as others have pointed out the main character's name (Mandella) is a near anagram of the author's surname. Haldeman earned a degree in physics before he was drafted as did Mandella.³ Mandella's lover and companion is Marygay Potter while Haldeman's wife's maiden name is Mary Gay Potter.

So, I think it's fair, in this case, to assume that TFW reflects, in no small part, the author's personal views at the time he wrote the book. And Haldeman leaves a number of objectionable things in TFW unchallenged. For instance, in Haldeman's fictional world women are integrated into the military by requiring them to be sexually "compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law)".⁴

In TFW, several dubious ideas about war are also left unchallenged: War is good for the general economy, the war in TFW is mainly the fault of bellicose veterans, and once begun, "only continued because the two races were unable to communicate".⁵

In fact, economists have shown that wars and unnecessarily large peacetime military establishments are macroeconomically detrimental. Arguably, wars may sometimes be necessary but as the authors of Economic Consequences of War on the U.S. Economy concluded, "Regardless of the way a war is financed, the overall macroeconomic effect on the economy tends to be negative." Wars benefit those who supply the weapons, munitions, and other material used to wage war but everyone else loses, especially the human casualties which seldom, if ever, include war profiteers.

As for bellicose veterans starting wars, it is perhaps just as likely that veterans will oppose offensive wars. For instance, in the aftermath of WW I, the American Legion was founded in 1919 proclaiming that a "large standing army is uneconomic and un-American" and pursuing "National safety with freedom from militarism ..."

In its early years the Legion was a major actor on the international stage in a citizen-led peace movement. Among other things, it actively supported and endorsed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact "condemn[ing] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounc[ing] it, as an instrument of national policy". Though largely ignored this treaty remains in force. While it has arguably drifted far away from it roots, the Legion, to this day, exists, in part, "to promote peace and good will on earth".

In any case, modern large scale wars are not initiated by a single individual or small group of people. One could argue that a veteran named Hitler started World War II but that war was set in motion by the outcome of World War I and Hitler could not have initiated it without the support of the German establishment and a large segment of the German population. Likewise, I am aware of no war in history that continued (or began) simply because of a miscommunication.

Sexual orientation in TFW is also problematic. Haldeman seems to see it as strongly dichotomous, culturally determined, and easily changed.⁶ In TFW, human sexual orientation collectively swings between extremes. Without going into further detail I am a bit troubled that Haldeman did not imagine a future where society was not so polarized in terms of sexuality.

Finally, Haldeman also tacitly endorse eugenics.⁷ His solution to ending war is to erase nearly all human diversity and individuality. At the end of TFW, most of "humanity" is comprised mainly of "clones of a single individual."⁸ In TFW, humanity's fate is to become something resembling the Bugs—with their "total communism"—in Heinlein's ST. ⁹

I'd like to hope that humanity will one day abandon war and I disagree with some of Heinlein's ideas. However, if the price of peace is a future like Haldeman imagines in TFW (and I don't think it is) then I would choose war in the ST-like world.

Notes:
1. ST, p. 193. Emphasis is in the original. All ST page references in this post are from the 2006 Ace trade paperback edition.
2. ST, p. 194. It is often asserted, mostly by those critical of Heinlein, that in the ST's Terran Federation the only way to earn the franchise is to serve in the military. Although Heinlein could have been clearer in ST on this subject there are several passages suggesting what is required is not necessarily military service (see pp. 32-33, 190-194). For an in-depth and fair discussion of this perennial controversy see "The Nature of "Federal Service" in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by James Gifford.
3. TFW, p. 7. All TFW page references in this post are from the 2009 Thomas Dunne Books paperback edition.
4. TFW, p. 45.
5. TFW, pp. 139, 261, 281.
6. TFW, pp. 118, 129, 189, 197, 260.
7. TFW, pp. 197, 260.
8. TFW, pp. 260-262.
9. TFW, p. 261; ST p. 194.

See also:

• "Who Deserves To Be A Citizen? A Reflection On Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by Farzan Sabet
• "Starship Troopers and the Right to Vote" by Dan Thompson
• "Over the hump: Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers" by Jo Walton
• "Blasting bugs is more complicated than you think" by Sam Jordison
• "Fascism and Starship Troopers, Once More" by hyperpat
• "Heinlein's Female Troubles" by M. G. Lord

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, communism, culture, eugenics, gender, Heinlein, human reproduction, LGBT, military, politics, quotations, voting, War

For [Cody] Wilson, the public danger of 3D-printed guns is far outweighed by the danger posed by a government strong enough to block the free flow of information in the name of safety.

"If they could build a system that could prevent people from downloading that pistol, it would be far more dangerous and the effects would be far more terrible than that little pistol," he said. "Power wants to know everything, surveil everything, absorb everything. This impulse should be checked."

Source: Chuck Lindell, "Texas man in 3D-printed firearms case welcomes legal battle," Austin American-Statesman, Aug. 14, 2018.

Labels: anarchism, civil liberties, Cody Wilson, government, guns, quotations, resistance, technology

Where there is greatness, great government or power ... error is also great.

Source: Character of Pontius Pilate in William Wyler's film Ben-Hur (1959).

Labels: anarchism, film & television, government, quotations

The most pernicious image of all is the anarchist-hero figure. A creation of commodity culture, he allows us to buy into an inauthentic simulation of revolutionary praxis. The hero encourages passive spectating and revolt becomes another product to be consumed.

Source: Character of King Mob in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles: Counting to None (New York: DC Comics, 1999) p. 213.

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, quotations

Labels: anarchism, politics, video

See also: "3D Printed Guns Render Gun Control Moot" by Tony Cartalucci on the Land Destroyer Report.

Labels: anarchism, Cody Wilson, guns, resistance, technology, video

Chaos is life! As much as Order is death.

Source: Character of the keeper in Forbidden by Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee. (Center Street, 2011) p. 276.

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, Christianity

David Atkins seems to be an honest Liberal, he unapologetically says Liberalism is "paternalistic" and an ideology that fully sanctions the use of violence in the name of the "weak and powerless". Of course, nearly everyone dresses up their use of violence in the garb of justice, freedom, or whatever.

Related to this is another contradiction peculiar to Liberal peace advocates—their unthinking embrace of tax-supported government progams in the name of equality, justice, etc. Liberals seldom seem to acknowledge that behind the tax collector is someone with a gun ready to put you behind bars if you don't pay up and to kill you if it comes to it. As Voltairine de Cleyre put it one hundred years ago: " ... even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through."

Lost, too, is the lesson of Mohandas K. Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." And as Paulo Freire wrote more recently: "Welfare programs ... ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems. "

American Liberals ought to embrace the political approach of Conservatives who don't want tax funds used to support abortion and apply that to their opposition of US foreign wars but that's unlikely to happen. If Liberals embraced that principle they would have to reject their paternalism and embrace of force as a means to their ends.

Any way, I digress. What set me to thinking about all this was something I read today in Samuel Noah Kramer's History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History (U Penn Pr, 1981). At least 3,762 years ago, some Sumerian scribe wrote down this bit of wisdom:

You can have a lord, you can have a king,
But the man to fear is the tax collector!

Labels: abortion, anarchism, freedom, Gandhi, history, politics, quotations

SAVAGES we call them, because their Manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.

Perhaps, if we could examine the Manners of different Nations with Impartiality, we should find no People so rude, as to be without any Rules of Politeness; nor any so polite, as not to have some Remains of Rudeness.

The Indian Men, when young, are Hunters and Warriors; when old, Counsellors; for all their Government is by Counsel of the Sages; there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no Officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment. Hence they generally study Oratory, the best Speaker having the most Influence. The Indian Women till the Ground, dress the Food, nurse and bring up the Children, and preserve and hand down to Posterity the Memory of public Transactions. These Employments of Men and Women are accounted natural and honourable. Having few artificial Wants, they have abundance of Leisure for Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the Learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless. An Instance of this occurred at the Treaty of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, anno 1744, between the Government of Virginia and the Six Nations. After the principal Business was settled, the Commissioners from Virginia acquainted the Indians by a Speech, that there was at Williamsburg a College, with a Fund for Educating Indian youth; and that, if the Six Nations would send down half a dozen of their young Lads to that College, the Government would take care that they should be well provided for, and instructed in all the Learning of the White People. It is one of the Indian Rules of Politeness not to answer a public Proposition the same day that it is made; they think it would be treating it as a light matter, and that they show it Respect by taking time to consider it, as of a Matter important. They therefore deferr'd their Answer till the Day following; when their Speaker began, by expressing their deep Sense of the kindness of the Virginia Government, in making them that Offer; "for we know," says he, "that you highly esteem the kind of Learning taught in those Colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinc'd, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some Experience of it; Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy, spoke our Language imperfectly, were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing. We are however not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take great Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."

Having frequent Occasions to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order and Decency in conducting them. The old Men sit in the foremost Ranks, the Warriors in the next, and the Women and Children in the hindmost. The Business of the Women is to take exact Notice of what passes, imprint it in their Memories (for they have no Writing), and communicate it to their Children. They are the Records of the Council, and they preserve Traditions of the Stipulations in Treaties 100 Years back; which, when we compare with our Writings, we always find exact. He that would speak, rises. The rest observe a profound Silence. When he has finish'd and sits down, they leave him 5 or 6 Minutes to recollect, that, if he has omitted any thing he intended to say, or has any thing to add, he may rise again and deliver it. To interrupt another, even in common Conversation, is reckon'd highly indecent. How different this is from the conduct of a polite British House of Commons, where scarce a day passes without some Confusion, that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to Order; and how different from the Mode of Conversation in many polite Companies of Europe, where, if you do not deliver your Sentence with great Rapidity, you are cut off in the middle of it by the Impatient Loquacity of those you converse with, and never suffer'd to finish it!

The Politeness of these Savages in Conversation is indeed carried to Excess, since it does not permit them to contradict or deny the Truth of what is asserted in their Presence. By this means they indeed avoid Disputes; but then it becomes difficult to know their Minds, or what Impression you make upon them. The Missionaries who have attempted to convert them to Christianity, all complain of this as one of the great Difficulties of their Mission. The Indians hear with Patience the Truths of the Gospel explain'd to them, and give their usual Tokens of Assent and Approbation; you would think they were convince'd. No such matter. It is mere Civility.

A Swedish Minister, having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanah Indians, made a Sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical Facts on which our Religion is founded; such as the Fall of our first Parents by eating an Apple, the coming of Christ to repair the Mischief, his Miracles and Suffering, &c. When he had finished, an Indian Orator stood up to thank him. "What you have told us," says he, "is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat Apples. It is better to make them all into Cyder. We are much oblig'd by your kindness in coming so far, to tell us these Things which you have heard from your Mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours. In the Beginning, our Fathers had only the Flesh of Animals to subsist on; and if their Hunting was unsuccessful, they were starving. Two of our young Hunters, having kill'd a Deer, made a Fire in the Woods to broil some Part of it. When they were about to satisfy their Hunger, they beheld a beautiful young Woman descend from the Clouds, and seat herself on that Hill, which you see yonder among the blue Mountains. They said to each other, it is a Spirit that has smelt our broiling Venison, and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her. They presented her with the Tongue; she was pleas'd with the Taste of it, and said, 'Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this Place after thirteen Moons, and you shall find something that will be of great Benefit in nourishing you and your Children to the latest Generations.' They did so, and, to their Surprise, found Plants they had never seen before; but which, from that ancient time, have been constantly cultivated among us, to our great Advantage. Where her right Hand had touched the Ground, they found Maize; where her left hand had touch'd it, they found Kidney-Beans; and where her Backside had sat on it, they found Tobacco." The good Missionary, disgusted with this idle Tale, said, "What I delivered to you were sacred Truths; but what you tell me is mere Fable, Fiction, and Falshood." The Indian, offended, reply'd, "My brother, it seems your Friends have not done you Justice in your Education; they have not well instructed you in the Rules of common Civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those Rules, believ'd all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?" When any of them come into our Towns, our People are apt to crowd round them, gaze upon them, and incommode them, where they desire to be private; this they esteem great Rudeness, and the Effect of the Want of Instruction in the Rules of Civility and good Manners. "We have," say they, "as much Curiosity as you, and when you come into our Towns, we wish for Opportunities of looking at you; but for this purpose we hide ourselves behind Bushes, where you are to pass, and never intrude ourselves into your Company."

Their Manner of entring one another's village has likewise its Rules. It is reckon'd uncivil in travelling Strangers to enter a Village abruptly, without giving Notice of their Approach. Therefore, as soon as they arrive within hearing, they stop and hollow, remaining there till invited to enter. Two old Men usually come out to them, and lead them in. There is in every Village a vacant Dwelling, called the Strangers' House. Here they are plac'd, while the old Men go round from Hut to Hut, acquainting the Inhabitants, that Strangers are arriv'd, who are probably hungry and weary; and every one sends them what he can spare of Victuals, and Skins to repose on. When the Strangers are refresh'd, Pipes and Tobacco are brought; and then, but not before, Conversation begins, with Enquiries who they are, whither bound, what News, &c.; and it usually ends with offers of Service, if the Strangers have occasion of Guides, or any Necessaries for continuing their Journey; and nothing is exacted for the Entertainment.

The same Hospitality, esteem'd among them as a principal Virtue, is practis'd by private Persons; of which Conrad Weiser, our Interpreter, gave me the following Instance. He had been naturaliz'd among the Six Nations, and spoke well the Mohock Language. In going thro' the Indian Country, to carry a Message from our Governor to the Council at Onondaga, he call'd at the Habitation of Canassatego, an old Acquaintance, who embrac'd him, spread Furs for him to sit on, plac'd before him some boil'd Beans and Venison, and mix'd some Rum and Water for his Drink. When he was well refresh'd, and had lit his Pipe, Canassatego began to converse with him; ask'd how he had far'd the many Years since they had seen each other; whence he then came; what occasion'd the Journey, &c. Conrad answered all his Questions; and when the Discourse began to flag, the Indian, to continue it, said, "Conrad, you have lived long among the white People, and know something of their Customs; I have been sometimes at Albany, and have observed, that once in Seven Days they shut up their Shops, and assemble all in the great House; tell me what it is for? What do they do there?" "They meet there," says Conrad, "to hear and learn good Things." "I do not doubt," says the Indian, "that they tell you so; they have told me the same; but I doubt the Truth of what they say, and I will tell you my Reasons. I went lately to Albany to sell my Skins and buy Blankets, Knives, Powder, Rum, &c. You know I us'd generally to deal with Hans Hanson; but I was a little inclin'd this time to try some other Merchant. However, I call'd first upon Hans, and asked him what he would give for Beaver. He said he could not give any more than four Shillings a Pound; 'but,' says he, 'I cannot talk on Business now; this is the Day when we meet together to learn Good Things, and I am going to the Meeting.' So I thought to myself, ' Since we cannot do any Business to-day, I may as well go to the meeting too,' and I went with him. There stood up a Man in Black, and began to talk to the People very angrily. I did not understand what he said; but, perceiving that he look'd much at me and at Hanson, I imagin'd he was angry at seeing me there; so I went out, sat down near the House, struck Fire, and lit my Pipe, waiting till the Meeting should break up. I thought too, that the Man had mention'd something of Beaver, and I suspected it might be the Subject of their Meeting. So, when they came out, I accosted my Merchant. 'Well, Hans,' says I, 'I hope you have agreed to give more than four Shillings a Pound.' 'No,' says he, 'I cannot give so much; I cannot give more than three shillings and sixpence.' I then spoke to several other Dealers, but they all sung the same song, Three and sixpence, Three and sixpence. This made it clear to me, that my Suspicion was right; and, that whatever they pretended of meeting to learn good Things, the real purpose was to consult how to cheat Indians in the Price of Beaver. Consider but a little, Conrad, and you must be of my Opinion. If they met so often to learn good Things, they would certainly have learnt some before this time. But they are still ignorant. You know our Practice. If a white Man, in travelling thro' our Country, enters one of our Cabins, we all treat him as I treat you; we dry him if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, we give him Meat and Drink, that he may allay his Thirst and Hunger; and we spread soft Furs for him to rest and sleep on; we demand nothing in return. But, if I go into a white Man's House at Albany, and ask for Victuals and Drink, they say, 'Where is your Money ? ' and if I have none, they say, ' Get out, you Indian Dog.' You see they have not yet learned those little Good Things, that we need no Meetings to be instructed in, because our Mothers taught them to us when we were Children; and therefore it is impossible their Meetings should be, as they say, for any such purpose, or have any such Effect; they are only to contrive the Cheating of Indians in the Price of Beaver."

Source: "Concerning the Savages of North America" by Benjamin Franklin in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 10., pp. 97-104

Labels: anarchism, history, Indians, quotations

"Organized crime!" What's that? Historical curiosity? Couldn't find it, I should think so.

But I did, said Jai. Sure I found it.

Government.

Source: Character of Jai Vedh in And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ (Boston: Gregg Pr., 1978) p. 133.

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, crime, quotations

... ideas never were controlled by laws and governments ... You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush ideas by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change ... the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure ... The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the ... society by stifling the individual mind. --Character of Bedap, p. 165.

To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. --Character of Shevek, p. 225.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. --Character of Shevek, p. 272.

We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! ... The means are the end. ... Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! --Character of Maedda, p. 296.

You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere. --Character of Shevek, p. 301.

... revolution begins in the thinking mind. --Character of Shevek, p. 333.

Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. 'The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' --Character of Shevek quoting character of Odo, p. 359.

Source: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Eos, 2001).

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, politics, quotations, Ursula K. Le Guin

A short story by Ursula K Le Guin

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms,exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned withwhite-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: This is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I don't think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope...." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "Eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, Ursula K. Le Guin

When you vote you are exercising political authority. You're using force and force, my friends, is violence—the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.

Source: Character of Mr. Rasczak in Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film, Starship Troopers.

Labels: anarchism, art and literature, Heinlein, politics, quotations, violence, voting

A popular yard sign in my community says, "Change We Can Believe In—Obama '08." I want to take seriously this notion of the presidential election as an act of faith, as a sort of religious exercise.

Richard A. Horsley has written extensively about "imperial religion." That is, "the construction and cultivation of religion primarily as individualistic spirituality, identity, and meaning [that] tends to leave the operations of political-economic power uncontested and acquiesces in the commodification of religious expressions" (see Religion and Empire (2003), p. 130). In this same vein, he talks about how Christmas "has become a central expression and embodiment of American imperial domination, an imperial religion" (Religion and Empire, p. 109).

So, here we have the related ideas of religion being reduced to private expression and the public expression of a religious holiday being turned to imperial ends. What of our secular political acts? Can they take on the trappings of religion? In "To Vote or Not to Vote," I wrote, "Politicians see voting as a means of granting legitimacy to the government." If that is correct then it would make sense to construct voting as, in some sense, a religious rite. I think that's the case but I am not going to develop that argument, for the present moment at least. Instead, I want share some illuminating remarks of others.

The two quotes below come from comments to "Ten Reasons Why I’m Not Voting" on Jesusmanifesto.com.

Voting is more rite than right. I see it as a participation in the cult of the empire, a symbolic bowing to the State's claims of sovereignty over this land. —Sara Harding

Voting is the central liturgical ritual of the false and idolatrous religion known as liberal democratic governance. In fact, voting is sacramental. The purpose of voting is not to choose government or alter policy (in liberal/industrial democratic government, that has already been done), but to mystically link those governed to those who govern, to make them one body, the body of the nation-state. —Charles Featherstone

All right, there it is and I am going to just leave that hanging there. To close things out I want to share below "None of the Above," the recent video by the anarchist Celtic Hip Hop Fusion group, Beltaine's Fire with Emcee Lynx on lead vocals.


See also: Tilly on the Nation-State as Racketeer

Labels: anarchism, Christmas, Obama, politics, religion, United States, video, voting

I can't decide whether to stay away from the polls altogether this year or to go and deliberately spoil my ballot.

Politicians see voting as a means of granting legitimacy to the government, which is one good reason to stay away completely although the facts undermining government's legitimacy are conveniently brushed aside. In the 2004 presidential election more eligible voters (39.1%) stayed away from the polls than voted for either Kerry (29.4%) or Bush (30.9%). In 2006, more eligible voters (58.7%) stayed away from the polls than voted. As a political scientist, I know that while pundits often like to spin low voter turnout as a sign of contentment or apathy there is good evidence to suggest low US voter turnout is a sign that people realize the system is corrupt and they don't have a meaningful choice.

Below are two critical essays from the 2004 election and some links on voting. The massrefusal and dontjustvote links with the two essays are both dead and so I have linked to the archived versions of those sites.

Announcing: A New Call For Mass Refusal
Take The Pledge--Don't Vote For President! http://massrefusal.org/
July 30, 2004

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2004
A CALL FOR MASS REFUSAL
December 23, 2003

from New Democracy http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/index.htm

Our government sent 160,000 troops to invade and occupy Iraq in a war based on lies. The Democratic Party and the media have been fully complicit in this criminal aggression. Meanwhile the government makes war on working-class Americans. It gives tax cuts to the wealthy, attacks pensions and health care, and ships jobs overseas.

This war exposes the huge chasm between our system and real democracy. In a real democracy, people would be truthfully informed, not systematically lied to, by their government. We would be encouraged to debate peace and war fully. Our young people would not be sent to murder other innocent people in the name of "liberating" them.

We live in a fake democracy, a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Now the rulers are using the 2004 presidential campaign to keep us from seriously questioning the system from which have sprung this and countless other wars and social wrongs, pretending that electing Dean or Kerry or Kucinich will change society. The elections are designed to create an illusion of democracy to prevent real democracy from emerging.

Politicians are front-men for the system. To challenge the system we need to take away the system's lifeblood: the illusion of democracy. We need to refute the lie that our government represents us. Therefore we call for Mass Refusal to Vote in the 2004 presidential elections.

LOOK TO THE PEOPLE

We the people are constantly told to look to politicians and officials as the force for change. We are encouraged to be passive consumers, not informed actors shaping society. But to make real change, we must look to ourselves and each other as the source of political power.

In a movement for Mass Refusal to Vote and real democracy, we can find in ourselves and friends and communities the power to move mountains and the vision for a better world.

TAKE THE PLEDGE

• Because we live in a fake democracy run by war criminals and servants of giant corporations;
• Because our government attacks the values and livelihood of ordinary people;
• Because the Republicans and Democrats collaborated to bring about a war of aggression;
• Because the elections provide only the illusion of democracy;
• Because democratic change will only come about through a mobilized people;

I agree not to vote in the 2004 presidential election and work instead for real democracy.

dontjustvote.com
Voting vs. Direct Action

Date: Mar 05, 2004 - 12:26 PM

People in the United States are preoccupied with voting to an unhealthy degree. This is not to say that everyone votes, or regards voting as effective or worthwhile; on the contrary, a smaller and smaller proportion of the eligible population votes every election year, and that's not just because more and more people are in prison. But when you broach the question of politics, of having a say in the way things are, voting is just about the only strategy anyone can think of-voting, and campaigning for others' votes.

Could it be this is why so many people feel so disempowered? Is anonymously checking a box once a year, or every four years, enough to feel included in the political process, let alone play a role in it? But what is there besides voting?

In fact, voting for people to represent your interests is the least efficient and effective means of applying political power. The alternative, broadly speaking, is acting directly to represent your interests yourself.

This is known in some circles as "direct action." Direct action is occasionally misunderstood to mean another kind of campaigning, lobbying for influence on elected officials by means of political activist tactics; but it properly refers to any action or strategy that cuts out the middle man and solves problems directly, without appealing to elected representatives, corporate interests, or other powers.

Concrete examples of direct action are everywhere. When people start their own organization to share food with hungry folks, instead of just voting for a candidate who promises to solve "the homeless problem" with tax dollars and bureaucracy, that's direct action. When a man makes and gives out fliers addressing an issue that concerns him, rather than counting on the newspapers to cover it or print his letters to the editor, that's direct action. When a woman forms a book club with her friends instead of paying to take classes at a school, or does what it takes to shut down an unwanted corporate superstore in her neighborhood herself rather than deferring to the authority of city planners, that's direct action, too. Direct action is the foundation of the old-fashioned can-do American ethic, hands-on and no-nonsense. Without it, hardly anything would get done.

In a lot of ways, direct action is a more effective means for people to have a say in society than voting is. For one thing, voting is a lottery-if a candidate doesn't get elected, then all the energy his constituency put into supporting him is wasted, as the power they were hoping he would exercise for them goes to someone else. With direct action, you can be sure that your work will offer some kind of results; and the resources you develop in the process, whether those be experience, contacts and recognition in your community, or organizational infrastructure, cannot be taken away from you.

Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few individuals; through force of sheer habit, not to speak of other methods of enforcement, everyone else is kept in a position of dependence. Through direct action, you become familiar with your own resources and capabilities and initiative, discovering what these are and how much you can accomplish.

Voting forces everyone in a movement to try to agree on one platform; coalitions fight over what compromises to make, each faction insists that they know the best way and the others are messing everything up by not going along with their program. A lot of energy gets wasted in these disputes and recriminations. In direct action, on the other hand, no vast consensus is necessary: different groups can apply different approaches according to what they believe in and feel comfortable doing, which can still interact to form a mutually beneficial whole. People involved in different direct actions have no need to squabble, unless they really are seeking conflicting goals (or years of voting have taught them to fight with anyone who doesn't think exactly as they do). Conflicts over voting often distract from the real issues at hand, as people get caught up in the drama of one party against another, one candidate against another, one agenda against another. With direct action, on the other hand, the issues themselves are raised, addressed specifically, and often resolved.

Voting is only possible when election time comes around. Direct action can be applied whenever one sees fit. Voting is only useful for addressing whatever topics are current in the political agendas of candidates, while direct action can be applied in every aspect of your life, in every part of the world you live in.

Voting is glorified as "freedom" in action. It's not freedom-freedom is getting to decide what the choices are in the first place, not picking between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Direct action is the real thing. You make the plan, you create the options, the sky's the limit.

Ultimately, there's no reason the strategies of voting and direct action can't both be applied together. One does not cancel the other out. The problem is that so many people think of voting as their primary way of exerting political and social power that a disproportionate amount of everyone's time and energy is spent deliberating and debating how they should vote while other opportunities to make change go to waste. For months and months preceding every election, everyone argues about the voting issue, what candidates to vote for or whether to vote at all, when voting itself takes less than an hour. Vote or don't, but get on with it! Remember how many other ways you can make your voice heard.

This being an election year, we hear constantly about the options available to us as voters, and almost nothing about our other opportunities to play a decisive role in our society. What we need is a campaign to emphasize the possibilities more direct means of action and community involvement have to offer. These need not be seen as in contradiction with voting. We can spend an hour voting once a year, and the other three hundred sixty four days and twenty three hours acting directly!

Those who are totally disenchanted with representative democracy, who dream of a world without presidents and politicians, can rest assured that if we all learn how to apply deliberately the power that each of us has, the question of which politician is elected to office will become a moot point. They only have that power because we delegate it to them! A campaign for direct action puts power back where it belongs, in the hands of the people from whom it originates.

See also:

• Strike the Root's "Non-Voting Archive"
• "Fight the Illusion--Don't Vote!" by Robert L. Johnson
• "The Anarchist Case Against Voting and Elections" at Infoshop.org

Labels: anarchism, critical thinking, politics, United States, voting

A few excerpts from Charles Tilly's "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" in Bringing the State Back In by Peter B. Evans et al., eds.:

If protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making – quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy – qualify as our largest examples of organized crime. ... At least for the European experience of the past few centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government. ...

War makes states ... Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum ...

Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the costs of protection. ... To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers. There is, of course, a difference: Racketeers, by the conventional definition, operate without the sanctity of governments. ...

What distinguished the violence produced by states from the violence delivered by anyone else? In the long run, enough to make the division between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" force credible. Eventually, the personnel of states purveyed violence on a larger scale, more effectively, more efficiently, with wider assent from their subject populations, and with readier collaboration from neighboring authorities than did the personnel of other organizations. ...

Labels: anarchism, crime, critical thinking, politics, violence

I just recently learned that Utah Phillips died late last month. I met Utah Phillips on a couple of his visits to Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s and was fortunate to participate in some long discussions with him at the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) national office when it was located in downtown Ypsilanti. Utah was a great storyteller who told great stories in song and word. He was a generous man who exemplified the best of the IWW's anarcho-syndicalist principles. You can read the "offical [sic] Obituary as provided by the family" here. Click here to hear Utah's "Moose Turd Pie" story. Below is a clip of Utah talking about how his stint in Korea with the US Army radicalized him.


In another clip he talks about his 'professional' ethics--"making a living, not a killing."

Labels: anarchism, nonviolence, politics, Utah Phillips

Terrorism is tempting with its tremendous possibilities. It offers a mechanical solution, as it were, in hopeless situations.

... the principles of terrorism unavoidably rebound to the fatal injury of liberty and revolution. Absolute power corrupts and defeats its partisans no less than its opponents. A people that knows not liberty becomes accustomed to dictatorship: fighting despotism and counter-revolution, terrorism itself becomes their efficient school.

Once on the road of terrorism, the State necessarily becomes estranged from the people.


There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. [She] sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because [she] is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that [she] works for their destruction. ...

Unlike the politician, [she] does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, [she] believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress.

Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for [rulers] can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.


... the genuine Anarchist looks with sheer horror upon every destruction, every mutilation of a human being, physical or moral. He loathes wars, executions and imprisonments, the grinding down of the worker's whole nature in a dreary round of toil, the sexual and economic slavery of women, the oppression of children, the crippling and poisoning of human nature by the preventable cruelty and injustice of man to man in every shape and form.


Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. ...

Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that "realism" and their "circumstantialism" invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion.


... violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.

Labels: anarchism, nonviolence, terrorism, violence