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

We Live To Tread On Kings.

  

     Spreading anarchist ideas is obviously the way to  get them picked up by the public at large. The more we make them available the more we will see the general public engage with those ideas. Like the corporate world says, "It pays to advertise". With Stuart Christie giving us The Anarchist Film Archive, this can be enriched by such sites as The Anarchist Library, and now a revamped site that list anarchist texts for printing and distributing, Library Anarhija, well worth a visit. Then of course, at a more local level we have an archive here in Glasgow gathering and preserving the history of the struggles of the ordinary people of the city and the Clydeside area, Spirit of Revolt. We learn from our history.

      All wonderful resources that we should use extensively in our attempt to raise awareness of the rich possibilities of anarchist ideas.

      Of course there are many, many more, such resources, and we should use them freely, however, never forgetting the need for positive action in our communities, our workplaces and our streets.  

A text from Library Anarhija: 

We Live To Tread On Kings.

‘O gentlemen, the time of life is short;…
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;’ 

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Prisons, The Anthithesis Of Justice.

          It is difficult for people on the "outside" to grasp the full extent of the harsh brutality within the prison system. It is not just the removal of your freedom to move about, but the total surveillance, the arbitrary and vindictive rules in an attempt to have total control over you, to keep you in a state of submissiveness, the violence it breeds, and the isolation from friends and family. Despite these inhuman conditions, because humans are what they are, the desire to be free still burns within, and manifests itself in many ways. Not a new article, but still well worth reading again. Michael Kimble has spent 31 years in prison, and is still fighting against the savage oppression that is the state's way of handling those it deems unmanageable and/or a threat, the prison system. All prisoners are suffering an injustice, prisons are the antithesis of justice, freedom and justice will only blossom when the last prison has been bulldozed and given birth to a meadow of wild flowers.

        The following is an extract from an interview with Michael Kimble in 2015:

Could you talk a bit about why you got locked up in the late ’80s?

          I got locked up in 1986 for the murder of a white guy that wanted to do harm to me and a friend who was out one night walking. We had our arms around each other and this guy started fucking with us, calling us fags, niggers, and all kinds of disrespectful, homophobic and racist shit. When he attacked after confronting him, I pulled a pistol I had on me and shot him. The media tried to turn it into a racially motivated murder and all kinds of things. I really didn’t know any of this until I had a chance to view my Pre-sentence Investigation Report (PSI) and this was after I had already been in prison awhile. I took the case to trial and received a life sentence and here I am 29 years later, still in prison because of a homophobic racist. I have no regrets about it.

You’ve talked before about your political development while in prison – from communism to anarchy. Could you tell us about how that happened? Were there experiences, events, relationships, or writings that pushed you in the direction of anti-authoritarian action?

         Yeah, I became a communist in my early years as I’ve said before, because it spoke to the oppression of Black, gay, poor people and of course prisoners, and espoused the idea of creating a world free of these oppressions. I became a part of the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) which was very vocal at the time and it seemed that all the warriors from the Black Liberation Movement was part of the NAIM. And they were active in the prisons as far as legal (lawsuits, letter, phone campaigns, education) support and visiting prisoners. And of course, they participated in cultural programs as well in the prisons here in Alabama. Also around this time the ABCs had begun to be visible through their support of “political prisoners/prisoners of war” from the previous decades’ movements (BLA, BPP, UFF, anti-imperialists, WUO, etc)1 , so I started receiving literature and newspapers (The Blast, Love & Rage, Bulldozer, Fifth Estate, etc.) and started to learn about anarchism and it resonated with me. Shit, I was against authority, against oppression and started to see the contradictions between statehood (government) and freedom. Anarchism was/is talking about doing away with all this, and putting into practice now and not waiting on the future. And I’ve been a staunch anarchist since.

Read the full interview HERE: 

From Anarchy Live, an extract from the latest writings of Michael Kimble:

        A new year, same shit! I’m not really a writer and don’t really like writing, and don’t have anything in particular to write about, so I’ll just put things down as it pops in my head.
          Lately, my mind has been troubled about a lot of things and I do feel compelled to write something. One is how we keep going for the same old stuff that power be putting down. It’s really depressing when I see that even some anarchists, who should know better, decry the election/selection of Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. Don’t we realize that Clinton is just another piece in the power matrix and that she would only continue that status quo of power’s domination?
Right now as I write I’m sitting in a single person cell freezing. It’s in the low 30s tonight and there is no heat. I’ve been doing exercise to stay warm. Now I’m tired and decided to attempt to write something coherent and meaningful. I’ve been in this cell since January 4, 2017, allegedly for discussing actions planned for January 20, 2017 with a comrade on the east coast in a letter. They are calling it a conspiracy. Then, a cell phone was found in my property by the riot squad, who has been deployed here at Holman for the last couple of months in an attempt to regain control and restore order to a population that has proven to be tired of order. But since I’m an outlaw, I’m not tripping.

Read the full article HERE

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Federalism.

Colin Ward. 

      Trying to make sense of what is going on, and what is possible in Brexit Europe and elsewhere, is difficult. Our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, pours out a spew-river of one directional doom, nonsense and exaggeration, from the pundits of the opposing camps, the Brexiters and the Remainers. producing confusion, disillusionment and boredom, among the general public.

 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

        Perhaps to get a grasp of what is happening and what is possible we should go back to 1992 and Colin Ward's "The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism".

 Peter Kropotkin.

       Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we have a multitude of administrators in Bruxelles issuing edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds or what constituents of beefburgers or ice cream may be sold in the shops of the member-nations. The newspapers joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in Strasbourg from people with every kind of opinion on the political spectrum, claiming the existence of a Europe of the Regions, and daring to argue that the Nation State was a phenomenon of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, which will not have any useful future in the twenty-first century. The forthcoming history of administration in the federated Europe they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia or Saxony, as regions rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally, which had been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the centre of gravity is elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging a different style of federalism. It is interesting, at the least, that the ones whose names survive were the three best known anarchist thinkers of that century: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. The actual evolution of the political left in the twentieth century has dismissed their legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the left, since the road has been emptied in favour of the political right, which has been able to set out its own agenda for both federalism and regionalism. Let us listen, just for a few minutes, to these anarchist precursors.

 

"Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become the formidable engine of a usurping despot It is a perpetual temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people's liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future. Centralisation might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the profit of its government ..."

Proudhon

First there was Proudhon, who devoted two of his voluminous works-------

Continue reading:

Mikhail Bakunin. 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk
 

  

The World's Wanderers.

        Imaginary lines drawn by power mongers and bandits, cross them and you could be an illegal immigrant, all your rights disappear, you risk being locked up, and deported with complete indifference and without dignity. We have no control over where we are born, and it appears we have no control over where we live.

[…] what are you? […] You are not of this castle, you are not of this village, you are nothing. But you are something too, unfortunately, you are a foreigner, someone that is always inopportune and in the way, one that brings a lot of troubles, […] whose intentions no one knows.

F. Kafka

From To The Wanderers:

       The democratic mechanism of citizenship and rights, however much expanded, will always presuppose the existence of excluded people. To criticize and try to prevent expulsions means to realize a critique in action of racism and nationalism; it means to seek a common space for revolt against the capitalistic uprooting that involves us all; it means to obstruct a repressive mechanism that is as hateful as it is important; it means to break the silence and indifference of the civilized who stand by watching; it means finally to confront the concept of law itself on the basis of the principle “we are all illegal aliens”. In short, it means an attack against one of the pillars of the state and class society: the competition between the poor people, the substitution, nowadays more and more menacing, of ethnic or religious wars for social war.

Read the full article HERE:

 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Their Threat Is A Promise.

Taken from Anarchy Works, by Peter Gelderloos;

There are hidden stories all around us,
growing in abandoned villages in the mountains
or vacant lots in the city,
petrifying beneath our feet in the remains
of societies like nothing we’ve known,
whispering to us that things could be different.
But the politician you know is lying to you,
the manager who hires and fires you,
the landlord who evicts you,
the president of the bank that owns your house,
the professor who grades your papers,
the cop who rolls your street,
the reporter who informs you,
the doctor who medicates you,
the husband who beats you,
the mother who spanks you,
the soldier who kills for you,
and the social worker who fits your past and future into a folder in a filing cabinet
all ask
“WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITHOUT US?
It would be anarchy.”

* * * * *

And the daughter who runs away from home,
the bus driver on the picket line,
the veteran who threw back his medal but holds on to his rifle,
the boy saved from suicide by the love of his friends,
the maid who must bow to those who can’t even cook for themselves,
the immigrant hiking across a desert to find her family on the other side,
the kid on his way to prison because he burned down a shopping mall they were building over his childhood dreams,
the neighbor who cleans up the syringes from the vacant lot, hoping someone will turn it into a garden,
the hitchhiker on the open road,
the college dropout who gave up on career and health insurance and sometimes even food so he could write revolutionary poetry for the world,
maybe all of us can feel it:
our bosses and tormentors are afraid of what they would do without us,
and their threat is a promise —

Read the full article at The Anarchist Library HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

We Are All Anarchists At Heart.

        On the street will giving out my free paper I am sometimes asked, "What is an anarchist?", My usual answer is "Somebody like you" followed by "We are all anarchists at heart". A belief that I have held for many, many years. All of us want to control our own lives, all of us, resent being ordered around and told what to do, at heart, we enjoy being part of, and co-operating with, the community in which we live. However convincing people that at heart they are really anarchists, is the difficult part.

This article by David Gaeber from The Anarchist Library, explains it in more detail.

    Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.
        At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.

Read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

Has The State A Monopoly On Violence?

      In our desire to change the world to a better place for all, is non-violence ineffective and statist? Is self-defence violence? This question of violence is expanded in detail in Peter Gelderloos's book, "How Non-Violence Protects The State".

The following is a short extract:

Non-violence is Statist

     Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence. States — the centralized bureaucracies that protect capitalism; preserve a white supremacist, patriarchal order; and implement imperialist expansion — survive by assuming the role of the sole legitimate purveyor of violent force within their territory. Any struggle against oppression necessitates a conflict with the state. Pacifists do the state’s work by pacifying the opposition in advance.[88] States, for their part, discourage militancy within the opposition, and encourage passivity.

 Download the full book from The Anarchist Library, HERE:

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