Archive for the 'Anarchism' Category

Decadent Worker #96 - 4Dec87

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Decadent Worker 96A sense for the potential of… leadership among the ranks of anarchist/Left SR forces arrayed against Bolshevism can be found where the Cheka had little influence. One of the peasant revolts during this period that was more than a mere revolt occurred in the Ukraine under the leadership of the anarchist, Nestor Makhno. The Ukraine had been ceded as an independent national territory by the Brest-Litovak treaty and the Ukrainian Nabat Confederation organized as an independent government for the region, its first proclamation being the redistribution of landed estates by the peasantry. The German/Central Powers occupation of the Ukraine until November 1918 served to foster both the ‘White’ counterrevolution of Denikin and Mahkno’s anarchist insurgents….

Return of the Ukraine to Russia with the nullification of Brest-Litovak did not prevent Makhno from militarily securing a broad area in the southern Ukraine within which the peasants were encouraged to form libertarian communist communes. The Bolsheviks were not outlawed, but their commissars were stripped of all their powers. Denikin’s ‘White’ armies soon threatened. From March to December of 1919 Mahkno fought Denikin, finally defeating the ‘White’ general with superb guerrilla tactics. His forces mixed extreme democracy with a tight-fisted discipline by Makhno and his personal commanders. Burying arms in strategic locations, his troops would disguise themselves as peasants to move freely through enemy lines to rearm and regroup. He used horse carts to transport guerrilla infantry for lightning attacks. Makhno’s anarchist conception of partisan peasant guerrilla warfare and peasant communism in many ways foreshadowed much of early Mao’s revolutionary experiences.

Makhno did not permit his forces to pillage, loot or rape. He respected the Ukrainian peasantry highly and did not force grain from them in an anarchist requisition. The peasantry supported Makhno’s army, and his army in turn protected the peasantry, neither censoring the peasantry’s political expression nor obstructing their political organization. Makhno forbade anti-seminitism from the ranks of his forces, but Makhno’s army could not be eveywhere at once. Pogroms occurred against the Jews by Ukrainian peasants during this period, though Makhno’s army intervened and protected Jewish communities where possible. The Bolsheviks, who were allied with Makhno in the fight against Denikin, at first considered him a partisan worthy of leading an autonomous Ukrainian national region within an overall Russian socialist revolution. Lenin and Trotsky realized by the middle of spring, 1919 that Makhno would not accept his strategy or his orders from the Red Army command, that he would continue to ignore or abolish the political power of Bolshevik Commissars in the Ukraine and worst of all that he would have the full support of the Ukrainian peasantry in doing so.

Trotsky took the opportunity of a lull in the fight against Denikin to raid Makhno’s headquarters and send Cheka agents to assassinate him, only to renew the alliance with Makhno in the summer of 1919 when Denikin once more became a threat. Makhno defeated Denikin, Trotsky ordered Makhno to the Polish Front as… an independent unit of the Red Army, Makhno refused, and Trotsky ordered the imprisonment of Makhno and his anarchist army in December, 1919. Makhno reslated the Bolshevik Red Army militariliy for nine months until Wrangel’s invasion in October, 1920. The Bolsheviks made another alliance with Makhno, promising the release of anarchist prisoners and freedom of propaganda, and Makhno’s anarchist army was instrumental in defeating Wrangel in November, 1920.

Makhno’s personal military commanders were then invited to a victory conference in the Crimea. All except an escaping cavalry unit were arrested or shot by the Bolsheviks. — Socialism: A Brief History, UCSD, pp. 40-1

Decadent Worker #92 - 20Nov87

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Decadent Worker 92STATE CAPITALISM VS. TRUE COMMUNISM

“Today, along with a host of western companies, General Motors and Ford both have factories in Russia and supply the Red Army with much of its transportation. One bit of knowledge that the public is carefully protected from, on both sides, is the fact that the trucks that carried over 50,000 Russian troops into Afghanistan were built by American companies. And the computers that organized the invasion were built by IBM, who supply both the KGM and the CIA with their intelligence technology. American ambassador to Russia at the time of Afghanistan was Thomas Watson Junior, son of the head of IBM. Vague Magazine #18/19: Programming Phenomena and Conspiracy Theory (BCM Tanelorn, London WCIN 3XX 2 pounds)

The Kronstadt soldiers and sailers soviet, a strong fortress with 15,000 men, called for immediate reforms in War Communism — and to grain requisitions, free peasant markets, and to the Cheka’s terror and terror within the military, democratic elections of a new Soviet government, revitalizing the power of the soviets over state and the economy — that amount to an insurrection against the Bolshevik state from March 5 to 18, 1921, in solidarity with the stiking Petrograd workers. The Kronstadt revolt was under the influence of anarchist/Left SR elements and allied with the revolutinoary Petrograd soviet, both demanding ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and “Soviets Without Bolsheviks.’

Trotsky, under Lenin’s command, removed Red Army units sympathetic to the revolt from the Baltic area and assembled a large, select force of Red Army troops, first moving on Petrograd, suppressing the workers’ insurrection and killing its leaders. The Bolshevik command decided to act before the ice melted around Kronstadt, permitting the Kronstadt sailors to move their battleships to the aid of the Petrograd proletariat. Red Army troops led by General Tukhachevsky transported cannons across the ice and attacked Kronstadt relentlessly, killing thousands, until its downfall March 18, 1921. Even survivors and prisoners were executed in the move to stifle all remnants of the insurrection. The Cheka went to work in Petrograd to stamp out all remaining sympathies.

The Petrograd workers and Kronstadt sailors, who had prepared the ground for the 1917 Revolution with 1905, who had supported the Bolshevik October Group with strikes and an armed uprising, found themselves starving, exhausted, war-weary and unable to dislodge the Bolshevik regime they had aided to power. Revolutionary soldiers, sailors, workers and peasants had little choice but to accept the one-party Bolshevik rule after 1921. Radical peasant socialists and anarchists considered 1921 the final betrayal of the Russian Revolution, though in point of fact the Bolsheviks had centralized all economic, political and military power in the country and suppressed democractic freedoms well before 1921. The Bolshevik regime tried to mask this phase of the Civil War by calling Makhno a kulak, the peasant revolts, workers’ strikes and soldiers’ mutinies a product of ‘White’ agitation, and Kronstadt a ‘White’ General conspiracy. Anarchism celebrated these events as the high point for the anarchist movement in modern socialism. New Indicator Collective, Socialism: A Brief History, USCD

“For the multinationals, a cheap strike free workforce held tightly in control by a firmly entrenched authoritarian regime.” — Vague Magazine, Ibid.

Decadent Worker #88 - 6Nov87

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Decadent Worker 88Anarchist, syndicalist and Left SR fores in the Russian proletariat and peasantry led the revolutionary unrest from 1920 to March 1921, with anarchists spearheading working class uprisings. Russian anarchism produced Tolstoy, Bakunin and Kropotkin, but its influence was sharply curtailed by the use of Narodniki-style terrorist tactics of assassination. From 1905 to 1971 anarchist, anarchist-syndicalist and syndicalist forces established themselves firmly once more in the Russian working-class with ideologies of decentralized soviet power. Throughout the 1917 provisional government phase of the Russian Revolution the anarchists, with the Bolsheviks, remained at the militant, insurrectionary edge of the proletarian struggle, gaining political strength alongside the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks instigated their October Coup, Russian anarchism split. The majority, while in support of armed proletarian and peasant insurrection, remained wary of Bolshevik intentions. A minority of anarchist elements, considering themselves anarcho-Bolsheviks, critically supported the Bolsheviks. As the Civil War progressed they quickly became either anarchists or Bolsheviks, and anarchism dramatically increased its influence in the Bolshevik military and the Petrograd proletariat.

Usually excellent barometers of the Russian Revolution, the Russian military and the Petrograd working class had to content with the iron hand of the party. Demobilized Red Army units after the civil war proper were assigned critical tasks in the war shattered economy, and the working class was partially militarized under Trade Union discipline the officials of which were appointed by the party. Anarchist and Left SR agitation, produced no fewer than 105 serious peasant uprisings from 1920 to 1921. The Soviet bureaucratic requisition system under War Communism eliminated the urban/rural system of direct worker/peasant cooperative exchanges and prohibited barter between starving, freezing urban workers and the peasants surrounding the cities for goods needed to survive. The SR/anarchist bombing of the Moscow Bolshevik Party headquarters in fall of 1919 marked a revolutionary alliance between Russia’s insurrectionary peasant socialism and an insurrectionary proletarian sovietism, an alliance that Bolshevism under Lenin’s demands for party vanguardism, centralism and unity could not make.

The second phase of the Civil War from 1920 to spring 1921 was nothing less than an anarchist/Left SR-inspired uprising against Bolshevik rule that was supported by the Russian peasantry, proletariat and minority elements in the Bolshevik military. And a decentralized, proletarian soviet/peasant socialist revolution had been historically possible out of the Russian Revolution, not in 1917, but in 1920/21. Had this insurrection only to contend with the Bolsheviks, Russian revolutionary history and Soviet society might have been different. — The New Indicator Collective, University of California at San Diego (B-023, La Jolla, CA 92093), Socialism: A Brief History (p. 40)

Decadent Worker #77 - 30Sept87

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Decadent Worker 77So authority rules your whole life, the authority of the past and the present, of the dead and the living, and your existence is a continuous invasion and violation of yourself, a constant subjection to the thoughts and the will of some one else.

And as you are invaded and violated, so you subconsciously revenge yourself by invading and violating others over whom you have authority or can exercise compulsion, physical or moral. In this way all life has become a crazy-quilt of authority, of domination and submission, of command and obedience, of coercion and subjection, of rulers and ruled, of violence and force in a thousand and one forms.

Can you wonder that even idealists are still held in the meshes of this spirit of authority and violence, and are often impelled by their feelings and environment to invasive acts entirely at variance with their ideas?

We are all still barbarians who resort to force and violence to settle our doubts, difficulties, and troubles. Violence is the method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak. The strong of heart and brain need no violence, for they are irresistible in their consciousness of being right. The further we get away from primitive man and the hatchet age, the less recouse we shall have to force and violence. The more enlightened man will become, the less he will employ compulsion and coercion. The really civilized man will divest himself of all ear and authority. He will rise from the dust and stand erect; he will bow to no tear either in heaven or on earth. He will become fully human when he will scorn to rule and refuse to be ruled. He will be truly free only when there shall be no more masters.

Anarchism is the ideal of such a condition; of a society without force and compulsion, where all men shall be equals, and live in freedom, peace, and harmony.

The word Anarchy comes from the Greek, meaning without force, without violence or government, because government is the very fountainhead of violence, constraint, and coercion.

Anarchy therefore does not mean disorder and chaos, as you thought before. On the contrary, it is the very reverse of it; it means no government, which is freedom and liberty. Disorder is the child of authority and compulsion. Liberty is the mother of order.
– Alexander Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism?

An adequate appreciation of the tremendous spread of the modern conscious social unrest cannot be gained from merely propagandistic literature. Rather, we must become conversant with the larger phases of human expression manifest in art, literature, and, above all, the modern drama — the strongest and most far-reaching interpreter of our deep-felt dissatisfaction. — Emma Goldman, The Modern Drama

A woman immigrating from Eastern Europe was once being questioned on Ellis Island by a customs official. “Do you,” he asked, advocate the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or violence?” She thought a moment and then answered: “Violence.”

Decadent Worker #75 - 23Sept87

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Decadent Worker 75You might ask whether the holding of revolutionary ideas would not naturally influence a person toward deeds of violence. I do not think so, because we have seen that violent methods are also employed by people of the most conservative opinions. If pesons of directly opposite political views commit similar acts, it is hardly reasonable to say that their ideas are responsible for such acts.

Like results have a like cause, but that cause is not to be found in political convictions; rather in individual temperament and the general feeling about violence.

“You may be right about temperament,” you say. “I can see that revolutionary ideas are not the cause of political acts of violence, else every revolutionary would be committing such acts. But do not such views to some extent justify those who commit such acts?”

It may seem so at first sight. But if you think it over you will find that it is an entirely wrong idea. The best proof of it is that Anarchists who hold exactly the same views about government and the necessity of abolishing it, often disagree entirely on the question of violence. Thus Tolstoyan Anarchists and most Individualist Anarchists condemn political violence, while other Anarchists approve of or at least justify it.

Is it reasonable, then, to say that Anarchist views are responsible for violence or in any way influence such acts?

Moreover, many Anarchists who at one time believed in violence as a means of propaganda have changed their opinion about it and do not favor such methods any more. There was a time, for instance, when Anarchists advocated individual acts of violence, known as “propaganda by deed.” They did not expect to change government and capitalism into Anarchism by such acts, nor did they think that the taking off of a despot would abolish despotism. No, terrorism was considered a means of avenging a popular wrong, inspiring fear in the enemy, and also calling attention to the evil against which the act of terror was directed. But most Anarchists today do not believe any more in “propaganda by deed” and do not favor acts of that nature.

Experience has taught them that though such methods may have been justified and useful in the past, modern conditions of life make them unnecessary and even harmful to the spread of their ideas. But their ideas remain the same, which means that it was not Anarchism which shaped attitude to violence. It proves that it is not certain ideas or “isms” that lead to violence, but that some other causes bring it about.

We must therefore look somewhere else to find the right explanation.

As we have seen, acts of political violence have been committed not only by Anarchists, Socialists, and revolutionists of all kinds, but also by patriots and nationalists, by Democrats and Republicans, by suffragettes, by conservatives and reactionaries, by monarchists and royalists, and even by religionists and devout Christians.

We know now that it could not have been any particular “ism” that influenced their acts, because the most varied ideas and “isms” produced similar deeds. I have given as the reason individual temperament and the general feeling about violence.

Here is the crux of the matter. What is this general feeling about violence? If we can answer this question correctly, the whole matter will be clear to us.

If we speak honestly, we must admit that every one believes in violence and practices it, however he may condemn it in others. In fact, all the institutions we support and the entire life of present society are based on violence.

What is the thing we call government? Is it anything else but organized violence? The law orders you to do this or not to do that, and if you fail to obey, it will compel you by force. We are not discussing just now whether it is right or wrong, whether it should or should not be so. Just now we are interested in the fact that it is so — that all government, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or the fear of punishment.

Why, even spiritual authority, the authority of the church and of God rests on force and violence, because it is the far of divine wrath and vengeance that wields power over you, compels you to obey, and even to believe against your own reason.

Wherever you turn you will find that our entire life is built on violence or the fear of it. From earliest childhood you are subjected to the violence of parents or elders. At home, in school, in the office, factory, field, or shop, it is always some one’s authority which keeps you obedient and compels you to do his will.

The right to compel you is called authority. Fear of punishment has been made into duty and is called obedience.

In this atmosphere of force and violence, of authority and obedience, of duty, fear and punishment we all grow up; we breathe it throughout our lives. We are so steeped in the spirit of violence that we never stop to ask whether violence is right or wrong. We only ask if it is legal, whether the law permits it.

You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief, and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is “lawful,” you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence “unlawfully.”

This lawful violence and the fear of it dominate our whole existence, individual and collective. Authority controls our lives from the cradle to the grave — authority parental, priestly and divine, political, economic, social, and moral. But whatever the character of that authority, it is always the same executioner wielding power over you through your fear of punishment in one form or another. You are afraid of God and the devil, of the priest and the neighbor, of your employer and boss, of the politician and the policeman, of the judge and the jailer, of the law and the government. All your life is a long chain of fears — fears which bruise your body and lacerate your soul. On those fears is based the authority of God, of the church, of parents, of capitalist and ruler.

Look into your heart and see if what I say is not true. Why, even among children the ten-year-old Johnny bosses his younger brother or sister by the authority of his greater physical strength, just as Johnny’s father bosses him by his superior strength, and by Johnny’s dependence on his support. You stand for the authority of priest and preacher because you think they can “call down the wrath of God upon your head.” You submit to the domination of boss, judge, and government because of their power to deprive you of work, to ruin your business, to put you in prison — a power, by the way, that you yourself have given into their hands. — Alexander Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism?

Decadent Worker #54 - 10Jul87

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Decadent Worker 54In Defense of Libertarian Communism

by Kerry Wendell Thornley

For many years I accepted without question the prevailing opinion on the libertarian right that communist anarchism is “anti-market,” that it was espoused principally by people who objected unconsciously to the idea of having to work and that it preached excessive violence. During the summer of 1975 I read Alexander Berkman’s What is Communist Anarchism? and confirmed a suspicion I’d been nurturing since 1969 that the last two of these charges, at least, were wholly in error. Berkman, like his comrades Emma Goldman and Rudolph Rocker, held views similar to those developed by Peter Kropotkin — except that Berkman was exceptionally eloquent and quotable in his expressions of them, while at the same time confining himself in What is Communist Anarchism? to simple, working-class language.

All during his brief, tragic life he worked incessantly and tirelessly in support of all revolutionaries — including, in the early stages, the Bolsheviks in Russia and, later, all the anarchist dissidents, including Stirnerites, in Lenin’s prisons, without ever claiming to share the predominent views of either. Needless to say, his support for fellow communist anarchists was unstinting.

As for the notion that revolutionary communist anarchists are bloodthirsty individuals, it is adequately refuted in the chapter in What is Communist Anarchism? on violence. Berkman compares the social revolution to a fragile flower that must be cultivated gently. Believing that some violence is necessary, he argues that it is like rolling up one’s sleeves before beginning the actual work of revolution, asserting also that when great thinkers like Bakunin and Malatesta ranted about destruction they were referring to the destruction of institutions, not of human beings.

But the charges that libertarian communism ignores the laws of the free market do not simply result from ignorance of its doctrines, but comprise instead an intellectually formidable position. In the first place, Berkman failed miserably to comprehend the significance of monetary mutualist ideas about central banking — blaming the warlike nature of capitalism upon the overproduction of goods and the consequent necessity to find new markets, unaware that in a free society stored overproduced goods could become a basis for mediums of exchange. Moreover, he failed to see that the prospect of war is needed by multinational banking corporations as a mechanism to insure the collection of interest on debts from governments and failed to realize that credit monopolies such as central banks virtually thrive upon the misery and destruction that create debt.

Beyond that mistake, however, his thesis does not express an ignorance of free market principles, but instead depends upon a view of human nature that differs from that of most Conservatives and laissez-faire capitalists. Conservatives accept Original Sin and libertarian righists assume that the laws which result from present economic values will always prevail, although those values result in turn from centuries of authoritarian conditioning.

As Hagbard Celine points out in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, left anarchists disagree with right anarchists only in their predictions as to how people will behave in a free market — the leftists believing that cooperation will take the place of competition, the rightists assuming that people will remain as competitive as ever. In other words, while authoritarian economics are prescriptive, libertarian economics are predictive — a realization which facilitates left-right unity among anarchists and libertarians.

Libertarians tend to agree with Marxists that economics usually determine politics, that economic forces are more basic to the structure of society — but neither seem to take into consideration how much prevailing human values determine economic choices. An ignorant society composed of ignorant people will make foolish purchases and thereby become a market for junk merchandize and/or enormously destructive weaponry designed to wipe out foreign civilian populations instead of its own domestic and multinational oppressors.

Unfortunately, ignorance tends to feed on itself. Spencer thought universal literacy would culminate in the solution of all or most of society’s problems, but as Aldous Huxley observed he did not anticipate that most people would opt to read trivia — escapist fiction, inaccurate propaganda, advertising, etc. — instead of consciousness-raising material and scientific papers. When television was in its infancy all kinds of optimistic predictions were made that it would eliminate war by establishing global communication between people of all cultures!

Of course, the economic and political requirements of the status quo tend to reinforce precisely those values that will maintain the established order, so there is some validity in the Marxist view of economic necessity, but the Russian and Chinese experiences have shown that a political takeover of society aimed at changing economic conditions does not succeed in significantly altering the economic infrastructure or in transforming personal values — and all libertarians understand the reasons.

But if, by libertarian methods, authoritarian values and the ignorance that they require are at a future point in history eradicated, what then? Will communist anarchism remain an anti-market philosophy or will the so-called laws of the market, being nothing more than descriptions of observed human behavior, change in accord with a proliferation of economic choices that result from psychologically liberated and informed values?

Like most higher mammals, human beings are herd animals, or tribalists. But the thelogical conceit that they are not mammals at all, but creatures “a little lower than angels,” causes them to behave in a way that alienates them not only from their own bodies, but also from their own emotional and social needs.

Imagine, as one example, belonging to a voluntary extended family of twenty-five individuals, children included, that lived in the same village neighborhood, labored in the same workplace, and enjoyed the same recreations together. Assume that these individuals had located one another through a computer matching service and that therefore their lifestyle values were very much alike. Such a group might be further bonded in multilateral marriages, or it might be monogamous and bonded vicariously in collective autoerotic sharing, or it might be sexually monogamous but held together by strong religious convictions or nonmystical philosophical values. Would such a group necessarily function in a manner that was anti-market? Even if it was organized internally for the equal sharing of what is produced?

Contrary to popular belief, human beings like to work, as the biography of many a millionare will attest. What makes labor alienating under present social conditions is that it is organized after the military model, wherein participants are told when to work and when not to work, how to dress and what relations to maintain on the job with their fellow workers. With such a distorted notion of what is necessary to production it is no wonder that the average person suspects that if working conditions were controlled directly by the workers themselves everyone would sluff off! Or that a few would work and all the others would sit back.

A peculiarity of my own background is that I come from a Mormon family, and from ages twelve to sixteen I was intensely active in the church. Mormons are famous for contributing untold hours of free labor to their church, and it works that way because, for them, work is a social occasion. As Alan Watts would say, they have managed to break down the dichotomy in their church activities between work and play.

That communist anarchists are by and large ignorant of free market principles are simply not true. For while their choices of words are different than those of the libertarian right and they therefore seldom use the term “free market,” it can be seen from a close reading of either Peter Kropotkin or Alexander Berkman that they recognize, as one example among many, that economic values are subjective, although they did not know this would become known among Austrian capitalists as the “law of marginal utility.” In keeping with their contrasting view of human nature, the anarchists use marginal utility concepts to justify equal rations, since subjective value also implies that it is impossible to ascribe an objective value to anyone’s labor.

Evidence that the communist libertarian view of human nature may tend to be the more correct one is contained in A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, where it is observed that in an environment of complete freedom children tend to be self-regulating and to master their subjects in the absence of any immediate rewards for so doing. That the resentment generated by compulsory measures is also absent in such a milieu seems to go a long way to explain why bribery, or reward, also becomes unnecessary. Further evidence is to be found in abundance in the study of anthropology, the Hopi Indians being only one very conspicuous, very extreme example of how far cooperation can develop in the direction of eliminating competition without crippling productive activity.

Instead of making metaphysical assumptions about the nature of human beings in a free society, it asks: With people as they are how can we arrange social institutions to allow for the optimum in both individual choice and useful cooperation?

Once we construct our alternative institutions with that question in mind, generations of human beings will begin to grow up in genuine freedom — and no past or present communist anarchist or laissez-faire capitalist can predict with certainty what will happen after that, but it seems to me they should be able to agree that this is where to begin.

For libertarian capitalists that means becoming aware of communist anarchist doctrines, and realizing that they are based not so much on ignorance of economics as on ulimited optimism for the potential rationality of genuinely free people.

Decadent Worker #44 - 5Jun87

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Decadent Worker 44“Goats Forever!” — Robert Anton Wilson, Werewolf Bridge (MS)

Brother-in-law’s private amusement seemed to increase.

“Kerry,” he said, groping for words, “there is a game where the people form a large circle and hold hands — and then they choose a person to be in the middle of that circle, called ‘the goat.’ Now, the object of this game, for the goat, is to break out of the circle. For all the other participants — the people who make up the circle — the object of the game is to keep the goat from breaking out, at their particular point in the circle.”

I sat there, annoyed at the change of subject.

“Getting back to that anarchist and the Ryder Coffee House,” I said, trying to hide my annoyance at Gary, “he’s got a lot of other weird ideas besides anarchy…” (p. 115) Dreadlock

“Oswald was overbearing and arrogant throughout much of the time between his arrest and his own death. He consistently refused to admit involvement in the assassination or in the killing of Patrolman Tippit.” — The Warren Report

One of the things he mentioned most often was the concept of the scapegoat, that it was originally termed escape goat and that it was derived from a tribal ritual mentioned in Leviticus. “The custom was to take two goats and to kill one of them and to sprinkle the altar with the blood, and then to take the other goat and bestow upon it the sins of the tribe. Then they let the scapegoat go, to wander in the wilderness.” (p. 56) Dreadlock

Somewhere in Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (W.W. Norton & Company, 1974) there is, I seem to recall, a reference to some Process Church literature that says: “Hail to the Goat!”

In the early eighties in Riviera Beach, Florida, I told a man I met casually the story of the two goats. He said, “Isn’t the Tryall Club of Jamaica a tribal organization?”

Of course the Knights Templars were accused by the Church of goat worship: of the bizarre Baphomet, resembling the ancient European horned god of the hunt.

In my opinion Lee Oswald was ritually sacrificed, a sacrificial goat. In Leviticus Aaron appoints the goats, casting a lot. In the Discordian Society Slim Brooks chose as his name Aaron Immanuel Viking I, and his title: “Keeper of the Submarine Keys. (”I like that because it brings up two questions,” Slim said. “What submarine? And why is it locked?”)

I think I am the escape goat — ritually designated to wander in the wilderness of conspiracy politics with all the sins of a horrid secret society on my head. (You thought I thought I am a philosopher-king, huh?)

“Kerry, there are some tribal societies who take a man and subject him to an ordeal, and if he survives that ordeal they make him their king.” (p. 60) The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984 - Not, however, if you “expose the assassins” and don’t keep “state secrets” and are a Taoist Anarchist who won’t rule.

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Politician: A neurotic with power. - Ho Chi Zen

Decadent Worker #31 - 23April87

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Decadent Worker 31My imaginary king was able because of his training to resolve all disputes in the manner of Solomon. Not then understanding anything about the SNAFU factors involved anywhere there is not communication between equals, I thought of it as a helluva nicer way to make a living than telephone soliciting.

If he really didn’t have me in mind for the job, I didn’t want to seem so low as to envy anyone else who might be appointed. To resent the line of work itself — like some raving anarchist hanging out at the Ryder Coffee House who was bitter at everyone and moreover possessed the nerve to look smug about it, seemed inappropriate.

If perhaps the idea Gary dreamed of wasn’t functional, there were still always the esthetic considerations to take into account. Omar Khayyam never wove such fantasies as these in the minds of Sultans. And that was so unusual for Gary, who generally preferred to discuss something ugly…. (pp. 53-54)

“And there is also the fable of a king,” he once mentioned, “whose people were forbidden to speak to him by a rival monarch, so he worked out a code where every article of clothing and every gesture stood for something, so they could tell him what was going on. Do you think you could do something like that in a similar situation?”

Yet another time or two he said, “Kerry, you know, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is that they develop whole languages of their own — using ordinary words, but ascribing their own private meanings to them.”

“Yes, I read that in one of Loy’s psychology textbooks from nursing school.” Loy was a French Quarter friend, one of my closest, a serene woman with long black hair who made her living as an artist.

“Well I wonder what makes them invent their own secret languages. Why would anyone, especially a crazy person, go to all that trouble?”

“Maybe because they are crazy. One kind of paranoia is paranoid schizophrenia.”

“But you know, Kerry, there are some people who have exhibited the symptoms of paranoia who were taken to psychiatrists, and when they began investigating their backgrounds and their life situations they found out the patient was really being persecuted.”

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that a couple of times before. There are also actual paranoids, though. Not all of them are really being persecuted.”

“No, Kerry — not all of them.”… (pp. 85-86)

“Kerry, I think the best person to solve a complicated political assassination would be an anarchist — because he would not be partial to any of the many political factions involved.”

“Yes, but anarchy isn’t practical.”

A smug smile brightened his expression. “Don’t be hasty in passing judgement on the writings of the anarchists. They had some good ideas, no matter how you feel about the need for government. For example, Bakunin and some of the other anarchists said some very perceptive things about money and banking.” His evident amusement puzzled me at the time…. (pp. 114-5)

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Fascism: A political view holding that government is a necessary evil and that, therefore, the more evil there is the more the conditions of necessity are set.

Decadent Worker #24 - 30Mar87

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on March 30, 1987
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Decadent Worker 24For Robert LeFevre (1911-1986) who helped me understand what it must have been to hear William Jennings Bryan or Robert Ingersoll delivering orations; who spoke to me of drinks, of Yards O’Flannel that inebriated the Minute Men who formed that weaving line on Lexington Green where fired they the shot heard ’round the world so that I saw how the America loved in days past meant daring to wage war against tyranny, however sanctified, not just some better government; who convinced me, in fact — just as I had in hat I thought were mad moments suspected — government is not only dangerous, but unnecessary; who taught me exactly what a principle is in human conduct and how precious is human liberty and how significant the life devoted to no other cause than liberty for the sake of peace and prosperity for everybody, unalienably, all the time, forever; he understood what freedom meant and found many ways to be free. –Kerry Wendell Thornley (Reprinted from New Libertarian #17)

“Whenever they only give you a choice between one thing and another, tell them you want all three.” — Bruce Duncan, Berkeley Street Person.

There seems, as usual, to be a misunderstanding about my political beliefs concerning, first, their relevance and, second, their nature. My political opinions are my own business, not that of the community. I am not running for office; I am a witness to a war crime conspiracy that at this time — by means of landlordism and supression of energy alternatives — is orchestrating famines in the Third World, after previously making war in Indochina in order to spare Caucasian Cuba the ordeals of an invasion. (Besides, my politics have remained fundamentally the same since 1969 and will probably not change no matter how rudely I am treated by Marta bus drivers, store clerks, waiters, street hoodlums or other Nazi and Uncle Tom pawns.) Since 1959 I have been studying the tragedy of starvation in Third World nations in terms of its cause; since 1964 I have been studying the sociology of human liberty (due to Robert Lefevre’s inspiration). My politics stem from a lifetime of contemplation and uphold unswervingly the goals of individual rights and class justice (both, noe one or the other) and, contrary to what your rulers in the East and West would like you to think, these two goals are not logically antagonistic to each other.

I am against prisons, institutional secrecy, ground rents, usury, dividends, taxation and conscription under any names. I also especially oppose racism and puritanism of a coercive nature and disagree with every form of group chauvinism, including nationalism. Although I moreover oppose technological thought control, I do not think it can be effectively resisted on a short-term basis — since the mind control conspiracy simply turns its opposition into experimental fodder. Rather, a strategy of rendering mind manipulation unprofitable by eliminating absentee control of production (in accord with Individualist Anarchist and Anarcho-Syndicalist theory) is probably the only realistic way to reduce it in the future. (I further share with technocrats the opinion that mind control is sometimes the only way to deal with such atrocities as basement nukes, artificially induced earthquakes, weather-control warfare and corporate terrorism in the form of “accidental” spills of radioactive water, etc.)

28 years of sociological study, on campus and off — I was also a sociology major at GSU — have convinced me beyond doubt that a lasting free society is not possible without three things: sexual freedom and rational values in general among its majority; land and natural resource tenure rooted in labor and occupancy as against private or public absentee control; accurate information about the past, particularly the recent past. Everybody wants us to choose where to be chained instead of wanting to offer us all three.