Life, Love, and Liberty

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In reading this, I ask that people please understand the horror of what I went through. I was literally locked up, and at the mercy of doctors complicit in a psycharistic-state alliance. All I wanted was to go home, and I had to spend nearly all of a day waiting for them to approve my transfer to the hospital that my psycharistist is connected to. If I had not been working with him, then they may have held me for a longer period of time.

I’ve prefaced it with two quotes.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

~ Ayn Rand

“Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

~ Emma Goldman

I now know the meaning of confinement much more acutely. I now know the state’s destructive power much more personally. And I have had my convictions against coercion and anti-individualist ethics strengthened.

There is no justification for a therapy based on guns — metaphorically, of course — and bondage. In the future, I refuse to deal with any therapist or social worker who refuses to renounce their monstrous “right” to have me civilly committed. Whether they know it or not, they are my enemies. They are the people who accept the fundamental ideas that are destroying America and other parts of the world. They prop up the legitimacy of the creeds of morally mandatory self-sacrifice, the nationalization of human beings, and the exercise of coercive domination in the name of benevolence and charity.

Don’t you see the connection between the mentality that can justify the military draft, and the mentality that can justify coercive commitment? Both of them are based on the fundamental conceptual premise that man does not belong to him or herself, but to the society that he or she happens to live in. And it doesn’t change a damn thing when you dress it up in the language of helping the person being coerced. There is no equal power balance between the psycharistist and the person on the receiving end, so the talk of consent is all a sham. Most likely designed to help monsters sleep at night.

And they are monsters. Never forget it, and don’t let a Christian sense of “love thy neighbor” make you feel guilt for being profoundly angry at them.

In light of what they help make possible, they have earned it. And the path forward for the world is away from their anti-individualist ethics. The world needs an intellectual revolution in favor of the supremacy of individual rights and individual thought. The friend of liberty and individual rights is simultaneously the foe of the racially motivated lynch mob, the tyrannical employer who mandates intrusive drug testing, and the vice cop who helps destroy the life of a sex worker. And this promotion of individual self-determination should make no distinctions between private or public tyranny.

When the peoples of the world become consistent friends of liberty, then I will dance and make merry, until I can do so no more. Please consider joining us today! Not for my sake, but for your own.

(I threw in that point about opposing both private and public tyranny, because I want the libertarians to see that the oppression of employees by private employers should be met by us with a demand for social justice. In other words: the libertarian philosophy should be connected to a wider philosophical totality concerned with individual self-realization, rather than just starting from the premise that the state must be opposed)

Alix Lakehurst of Chicago was kind enough to quote me in one of her recent posts.

Thanks! Alix.

By the way, I’ll be revising and potentially expanding my comment on there in a future post.

The essays of Voltairine De Cleyre are wonderfully absorbing, and I have added her to the list of writers whose style I would love to emulate. She combines rigorous logic with some of the most beautiful sentimental and emotional writing that I have ever been privileged enough to read.

Go forth and read Sex Slavery.

It’s socialism without the state!

“What should the stance of the anarchists in regards to the welfare state be?

For starters, we should follow the advice of the late Sam Dolgoff who maintained that workers should demand their entire pay without deductions of any kind ( income taxes, social security, corporate insurance programs) and instead create our own health care, old age, disability, etc. programs under our control through our own mutual aid and solidarity organizations ( unions, cooperatives, clubs, community groups). We need to organize claimants’ unions for the recipients of “public” assistance and demand direct cash payments to the beneficiaries themselves rather than vouchers, coupons and stamps issued by government agencies. “Public” schools, institutions created for the purpose of indoctrinating children with elite class ideology, should be scrapped in favor of progressive educational services established by our own working class oriented revolutionary organizations ( perhaps modeled after Summerhill or the Modern School). Workers organizations should demand the expulsion of both corporate overseers and government sponsored “regulatory” bureaucrats from our workplaces in favor of direct self-management and self-regulation by the workers themselves. “Public” housing authorities should be scrapped, their offices destroyed, and tenants should assume direct management of their own housing facilities. These same principles would, of course, apply to tenants renting from “private” landlords, the self-employed and farmers dealing with state-supervisory agencies, consumers’ interests and so on. The final aim, of course, should be the dismantling of the false dichotomy between the “public” and “private” sectors and the socialization and communalization of state and corporate resources under the direct control of our worker, consumer, tenant and community organizations.

As I mentioned, current “antigovernment” rhetoric employed by elite class mouthpieces represents, I believe, a certain laziness and complacency that the “powers that be” have sunken into. So successful have their efforts of the past thirty years to coopt and subjugate the people through social democratic welfare state policies that they no longer think it is worth the bother. They no longer see the need to even put on the charade of maternalistic government, which they view as costly and not generating enough profits for corporate interests in the same way that the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex and other recently emergent forms of repression are doing. Consequently, we see renewed attacks on our class in every area. Gentrification and “urban revitalization” are displacing the traditional urban poor. “Welfare reform” is displacing those enslaved to the state via “public assistance”. Nearly ten million people have been dispossessed of their traditional lands across the farm belt of the American heartland. Three million people, perhaps more, are living in the street and repression against the homeless is rising. One in thirty people, perhaps more, are in the direct clutches of the state by means of the prison-industrial complex and the repressive apparatus of so-called “criminal justice”. The availability, affordability and quality of health care has declined due the centralization of health care services under oligopolistic HMO’s. Now that U.S. warmongering and imperialism can no longer be justified with shallow Cold War rhetoric, the American regime simply undertakes violent assaults on other societies on whatever whim it fancies at the moment or for no apparent reason at all. The elite class is creating a powder keg that will eventually erupt in a rather big way.”

~ Keith Preston

Well, I lost the piece of paper I had the password for the first one written on, so I had to create another. Here’s the information you’ll need:

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If you want to send me an encrypted email, then you can find it on this key server. You just need to search for “Life, Love, and Liberty”.

Go read this chapter of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.

Then recall what you were told about the “heroic” Washington in school.

Then tell me if it bears any resemblance to the above.

Voltarine De Cleyre had this nailed down 100 years ago. To quote her:

Ask any child what he knows about Shays’ rebellion, and he will answer, “Oh, some of the farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught ’em a good lesson” – “And what was the result of it?” “The result? Why – why – the result was – Oh yes, I remember – the result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts.” Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer “No.”

Who today, would stand up for liberty for these farmers like De Cleyre did? I fear that the number would be far too few.

I recently wrote the following:

Fuck the odious political entity known as the United States of America. Fuck its murderous wars. Fuck every member of the American populace that sees fit to defend this:

February 08, 2008
More Bombing Creates New Enemies

Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*

BAGHDAD, Feb 8 (IPS) - Now that the smoke has cleared and the rubble settled, residents of a group of bombed Iraqi villages see the raid as really a U.S. loss.

Many Iraqis view the attack Jan. 10 by bombers and F-16 jets on a cluster of villages in the Latifiya district south of Baghdad as overkill.

“The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in Iraq,” Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. “U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery.”

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

“On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages,” Ahmad Alwan from a village near Juboor told IPS. “We took our families and fled. We have never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody.”

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span of 10 minutes.

“The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area,” Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. “Americans are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and surroundings of Sunnis.”

The cluster of Sunni villages was bombed just weeks after the U.S. military encouraged families to return to their village after heavy bombing earlier in which scores of people were killed. Many residents had fled fearing sectarian death squads, which they say were backed by the U.S.

Few people in the village now talk the language of reconciliation of U.S. President George W. Bush and of some Iraqis in the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

“We have no alternative but to fight this occupation and its allies,” a former army officer in Baghdad speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. “We can see clearly now that Americans came with the idea that we, Sunni Arabs, are the enemies they have in mind no matter what we do to please them. We will fight for our existence, and this massacre will not go unpunished.”

“It was a miracle that I could evacuate my family at the last minute,” said Omar Hussein, who fled for Dora in Baghdad from the bombarded area. “My house and farm are on the outskirts of the village. I took my family out the minute I saw the aircraft in the sky.

“Apache helicopters later fired at the trucks that were carrying the families out of the area, and killed so many civilians. They took some wounded people to their military base. I am sure hundreds of people would have been killed. It is just like the Fallujah crime.”

Thousands died in prolonged attacks on Fallujah to the west of Baghdad, particularly in 2004 and 2005.

Taha Muslih al-Joboory, his wife and three sons were among those reported killed in the bombing. Juboory was an Iraqi journalist who lived all his life in the area. Many families were reported buried under the rubble of their houses.

The U.S. military said that the aircraft which bombed the area targeted “suspected militant hide-outs, storehouses and defensive positions.”

“We know they will get away with their crime now, but we will teach our children that America and the whole West are our enemies, so that they take revenge for these crimes,” 35-year-old Nada, a woman who has relatives in the village told IPS.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

I am usually much more restrained in my criticisms. I just lose it when I read accounts like the one I quoted though.

I mean, this is the reality of what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, and nobody with any major political power in America will acknowledge it. Instead, we get treated to odious comments from Hilary Clinton about how “Those savage Iraqis won’t do what we want”, to paraphrase this:

Our troops did the job they were asked to do. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They conducted the search for weapons of mass destruction. They gave the Iraqi people a chance for elections and to have a government. It is the Iraqis who have failed to take advantage of that opportunity.

– Hillary Clinton, New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate, June 3, 2007

You know, because Americans would have constructed a Jeffersonian republic by now. It’s really easy when your infrastructure is shot to hell and military checkpoints abound. Furthermore, even if Iraqis don’t want to construct a Jeffersonian republic, why should the U.S. government be allowed to bomb them into dust?

A very intelligent person I know once told me that most Americans are on the ethical level of Germans during World War 2 or something. The nation’s main complaint with a war tends to be that Americans are dying and “we” aren’t winning. For god’s sake, what about the lives of the people on the receiving end? I don’t give a fuck about the nonexistent credibility of the United States. I don’t care if anyone turns up their noses at the U.S. government. In fact, I’d encourage them to do so. What matters to me are the lives of the dead and injured. Yes, it’s important to revolt against an unnecessary war, because the government is treating the lives of “its” citizens as expendable, but it’s not all about us.

As much of an egoist as I am, I still quite egoistically believe in the preservation of human life. I feel joy at knowing that others are alive and not dead. This cuts across national boundaries, and I will not reflexively take the side of “my” country over the preservation of human life.

The United States of America is a political entity that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history. In its place, a free America could take root.

Note: to be entirely clear, I am not advocating violent revolution in this post. I am talking about an ideological shift among the populace, and the subsequent creation of new social relations. I don’t really expect the people in Washington to care about the distinction though.

Aster of Wellington says what I was thinking:

I would also point out the continuity of this sort of child prison brutality with the generally accepted patterns of childraising in general. While reading through this chronicle of abuses I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like a compilation of all the things I’ve seen or heard parents do or threaten to do to ‘their own’ children.

Conservatives often say that ‘criminals are just children who never grew up’- i.e., that ‘civilisation’ is the project of breaking the stubborn will of the stubborn natural barbarism of children. In this view, which is obviously linked to Christian notions of original sin (or equivalent ideas in other authoritarian religions and moralities), ‘making people behave’ is precisely ABOUT beating them down into submission- ‘productive citizens’ being those beaten down enough, and ‘respectable’ people being those who have accepted repression and control as the norm. According to this view, there is a natural link between the proper treatment of children and criminals- the first have noy yet, and the second have failed to, internalise discipline adequately.

Of course under such a system there can never really be too much discipline, or any real objection to brutality. This is the same mentality which justifies torture- and insofar as the ideology of racism is linked very strongly with the perception of nonwhites as ‘half-devil and half-child’ (i.e., less naturally self-disciplined than white people), it’s very strongly linked to racism. And of course this psychology is the natural corollary of oppressive systems as such, which of course function primarily by pressing people to do things they just plain hate to do.

But none of it is comprehensible aside from a certain view of human beings- as bad things which need to be made ‘moral’ by constant orders and harangueing… and a certain institutional treatment of children. I personally don’t see this torture camp as something distinct from ‘normal’ childraising- it is merely a more extreme form of the way children are usually treated by conservatives. I think this kind of atrocity is implicit whenever one’s natural approach to evil is to yell and moralise and shame.

~ Comment on Charles Johnson’s blog

Well, I wasn’t thinking of it exactly in those terms, but I wholeheartedly support her message! I am a staunch unschooler who supports the right of children to decide how they want to learn.

For liberty!

For happiness!

For children too!

I will be writing more on these issues in the future. I strongly believe that the libertarian and anarchist movements must understand that context matters. In this case, the context that children grow up in will have an effect on the type of society we live in. If you believe that the “good” comes from discipline with children, then you will be more likely to believe that the “good” comes from discipline meted out to adults by other authority figures.