Modern Day Heretics.

      A dedication to all those who don't fit the conformity of this consumer society with its emphasis on wealth and power, and decide to do something about their situation. Those who don't fit the rules will be punished harshly, all too often with the approval of the public. The punishments may change, but the message is still the same conform, be subservient to our code, or suffer.

He Didn't Fit Their Rules.

This from The Anarchist Library:

‘Heretics’ by Gabriel Pombo da Silva

      The heretic, like the bandit, knows that the loss of his freedom takes him irremediably to the gallows. What awaits him is a tribunal that will ask him about his actions. A court that will exercise its power and absolute reason in the name of God, the People, the Kingdom and the State. Power and reason are acts of authoritarian syncretism developed throughout the course of the centuries by the proprietors of the Earth, the Sea and the Sky. Therefore the individualist anarchist – who is at the same time heretic and bandit – is aware that his conviction on power and reason takes them to the stake. Like a moth, they seek light and succumb. Like Icarus, they fly high and the Sun melts their wings. Like Prometheus they steal the fire of the gods for themself and for the others; like him.
       The anarchist’s drama is his passion for freedom, his unrelenting search for accomplices, whom he rarely finds. She/he despises the conformism of the herd, the cowardice of the crowd, the dogmatism of every faith.
      Any priest – of every ‘ism’ – hates her because they can’t be controlled, she/he doesn’t obey him, he/she doesn’t listen to him; and when he/she can, she/he raises their voice to attack the slightest form of power and authority. Sometimes these solitary avengers throw a bomb or plunge a dagger with the intent – always – of sowing chaos into the order of reason, rigorously established as law or supreme truth. At other times, they mingle with discontent with the intent to trigger insurrections.
      But they use most of their time reading, because their best friend and hobby is the knowledge of what was and what is. They do not have illusions or hopes, but convictions. They know that knowledge is their strength and that it gives them self-determination.
      They live each day as if it were their last. In an enslaved society, Freedom is punishable with death. They don’t resign themselves, they don’t complain, they curse, attack, expropriate. There aren’t many of them, but even these few can preoccupy all governments, precisely because they are ungovernable; in love with total freedom. What was doesn’t matter. They reinvent themselves at every step, every shot, every kiss. They are not strategists because they do not have a final goal and, therefore, their actions arouse the anger of others.
       They have no ‘partisans’ other than those who know and love them, apart from their barbarian iconoclasts. Often, they are caricatures in newspapers, from the moment that they are thought to be able to prevent people asking: who are these madmen/women? What do they want? How to explain who anarchists are to citizens who delegate their lives and thoughts to others?
       Yes, they are mad and they don’t want anything less than nothing. Everything that has been taken from them and nobody can give back. There they are! They have no ‘arguments’, fire and powder speak for them. A kilo of dynamite and a poem. A kilo of black powder and a new heresy. A ‘Hands up’ and they are off. Machines that destroy their banks, courts, police stations; Barracks, churches and political seats… ‘What do these madmen/women want?’ Nothing! The destructive nothing which leaves space to wild nature. Flowers eat their way under the ruins of their putrid ‘civilization’.

Gabriel Pombo Da Silva
5th July 2019

From somewhere in the Old World

     Note: dedicated to our dead in combat, our prisoners of anarchist war, our fugitives and all the conspirators who acted in the night.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk