Anarcho-Historian Lesson #8: Economic Elites and the State

 

August 1490 represented a glorious late summer for Renaissance crime, wealth, power, patronage and statecraft, well throughout the entire peninsula of Italy. From the salt water bays of Sicily to the alpine, fresh water lakes between France and Italy, Twelve Families ruled this famous European land. They lovingly murdered and plundered throughout the Boot.

They had the names of Este, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna, Montefeltro, Bentivoglio, Petrucci, Baglioni, Malatesta, and then the three most powerful ‘Famiglie’ – the Medici, (the first bankers to the Popes), the Sforza, (the most ruthless ‘condottiere’), and the Aragonese, (possessing the grand Imperial Navy of Spain – later creating the Spanish Armada). And lest I forget, there was also infamous number thirteen – the Borgia, from Valencia, Spain. The great naval empire, republican-oligarchy of Venice, or ‘The Serenissima,’ watched on the sidelines, confident in its own power.

Eventually, the Venetians would also have to resort to the condottieri in order to support their land empire in Italy, and the French monarchy, under Charles VIII, would soon invade the peninsula within a few years. About thirty years later, the last great German emperor, Charles V, would also invade the peninsula. The Italian farmers suffered the sack of their crops through such foreign invasions; but the Twelve families of crime, power and wealth always maintained their rule and preserved their comfortable positions.

During that late medieval period, most of the Twelve Families begot themselves as hired mercenaries, or contract killers. They fought for the Popes, (called Guelphs), or for the German Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, (called Ghibellines), or for other local, powerful families in Italy. They even fought with other European powers – and a few even fought with the Muslim caliphates across the Great Sea, or the Mediterranean. The money was what mattered. These hired killers had the name of ‘condottieri,’ or men of honor under contract.

The successful condottieri, or those late medieval knights, began to acquire landed properties, lots of money, and most importantly, loyal armed followers, called ‘soldati,’ or soldiers, through their legal crimes: theft-pillaging, sacking cities, and murdering rich rivals.

The loyal soldiers remained devoted until the violence, warfare and thefts dried up. Inside the Twelve Families, the loyalty could break apart due to any infraction of the condottieri honor code. There were also lots of illegitimate sons and daughters too – and they also wanted parts of the action.

In 1500, during a wedding of the Baglioni family, a terrible war started, and half the guests murdered the other half! In 1505, inside the Este family, one illegitimate son, the Cardinal Ipolitio, had paid killers to almost gouge out the eyes of his half-brother, Giulio, over the sexual rights to the beautiful Angela Borgia, sister to the infamous Lucrezia. Eventually, brother Alfonso, the legitimate son, had Giulio imprisoned for 53 years.

The Twelve Families of Renaissance Italy generally married into each other’s blood lines – in order to avoid further bloodshed, and thereby create even stronger alliances for family unity. Marriage also brought wealthy dowries that helped keep the wealth, ‘in the family.’

But one family had a different history, and outshined the others. They were the Medicis of Florence. This family began as a merchant clan possessing great monopolies around the city. Their financial successes transformed them into bankers – and especially for the Popes in Rome. Four of the Medici even became Renaissance Popes.

The Medici intermarried into all the other twelve families, including their rivals and enemies. One of the Medici, an illegitimate son, Cosimo di Medici, became a powerful condottiere, and transformed himself into the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medici represented the greatest arts patrons of the Renaissance, and even greater than the Venetian Empire.

They patronized the best: Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Cellini, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Botticelli. Their palaces slowly accumulated marvelous art treasures, all of which still stand in majestic Florence to this day: the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Belvedere, and Boboli Gardens. They even hired the genius of Pisa, by the name of Galileo, as the personal tutor for the Medici children. Machiavelli, the great political scientist-historian, dedicated his book, ‘The Prince,’ or ‘Il Principe,’ to the Medici.

The Medici Family had ultimately controlled the economic, political, military, and most importantly, the ideological reigns of Renaissance Italy. In Italian, this virtue had the name of ‘podestà,’ or simply pure power. The Medici Family transcended into the Godfathers of the Renaissance.

These historic examples from the Renaissance expose the relations between the criminal state and the criminal economic elites. It has been, and still remains, the perfect example of parasitism, or basically, the scheming of parasites.

The economic elites both influence the state and the state influences the elites. Both clans function together in symbiotic processes similar to worm parasites inside the human body. Like parasitic worms, they move in and out of each other’s spheres and feed off each other. As the parasites take control of certain natural body functions, so the elites take political controls, while the politicians can retire as corporate executives. The state cannot survive without economic elites; likewise, the economic elites cannot function without political bosses in order to enforce their monopoly controls.

The parasitic rule of crime is almost impregnable, but counter-hegemonic blocks, or concocted political alliances, with their many historical absurdities, or as they said in the Renaissance, ‘Mala Fortuna,’ (Bad Fortune), have ultimately defeated such power supports and furtive goals. By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the Medici had lost their power completely, and so, the obese, degenerate Medici offspring married themselves into the powerful royalties of Europe. Their family line had finally ended – forever.

Elite Families are different from the families representing the rest of us. Throughout human history, they have betrayed and murdered each other, so one member could hoard greater controls and more power. It is still this same way for old money elites. Nowadays, they just hide their crimes so much better. Elites families, or old money families, offer higher oaths to their own chosen institutions – the rest of humanity for damnation!

For example, the Kennedy Family in the United States tortured their own daughter, Rosemary, through a lobotomy. They hired a psycho-babble quack to do the ‘surgery’ on her.  The Family wanted her eliminated due to her teenage outbursts and her escape from a convent that her parents had forced her into. Rosemary was always an embarrassment because she was ‘slower’ than the other siblings. Rosemary spent the rest of her life locked up inside a closed institution, with special nurses to take of her, condemned to a life in a comatose mental state. The economic elites never tolerate such humiliations.

These putrid elites generally rule through four chosen methods. They first get away with legal crime and state violence. There is one privilege of law for them, and the full fury of the law for the rest of us. Secondly, they always encourage the settlement or immigration of certain ethnic groups, while they hate, imprison, murder and expel others. Thirdly, they tend to champion and fund certain ideologies over others. Fourthly, they patronize particular artists and artistic styles, and the especially fund modern, public art installations.

Some contemporary examples reference the Amerikan Empire – and the elite parasites within it. The Bush Family always had a reputation for partying, but unlike the poor kids in the ghettos and trailer parks, the privileged sons and daughters never did any jail time for their drug and drinking alcohol indiscretions. During the late Vietnam War period, George W. got a nice spot in a Texan Air National Guard unit, which never had a deployment order to ‘Nam.’

In the United States, there always seems to spark up another ‘immigration debate’ in the corporate media. It is not really a debate at all, but the lobbying of certain elite factions in the United States that want more foreign, cheap wage immigrant workers. Meanwhile, the working classes have no real voice. Powerful urban elites mainly want a docile and cowardly wage slave workforce. These elites are urban sophisticates with money, yet they need slave wage labor for basic cleaning and cooking, and other bad jobs. They also see ‘their cities’ as displacement-gentrification zones.

In Captialist-Fascist Amerika, the enemy group in America’s large cities, are the large African-American, or Black populations. According to the elites, those people must go. They are the official criminal class. The elites use every illegal method to get rid of them. They run the mostly, white skinned privilege police forces to harass, or stop and frisk, colored youths. They defend slumlords, or urban property pimps, in extorting rent for rat infested dumps. They fill the prisons with the real dangerous ones, and they allow higher priced supermarkets to open up in the ‘bad sections,’ which the banks redline as areas for destruction. These political thugs desperately want to replace the dangerous classes, representing ‘the Blacks,’ with docile, first generation immigrant, wage slaves.

One great example was the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Family decided that it needed to enter politics and secure its ill-gotten, yet legal looting. In the 1970s, a couple of Rockefellers secured governorships, heads of international elite institutions, banking CEO spots, urban property pimping and art foundation dealing. The most powerful state bully was Nelson Rockefeller of New York State. During his governorship, he passed through one of the toughest anti-illegal drug laws in the country, called ‘The Rockefeller Laws.’ Even low quantities for ‘hard drugs’ garnered at least fifteen years in prison.

Like the old ‘gun control’ laws, which Rockefeller also supported, these ‘drug control’ laws targeted New York City’s African-American population. During his putrid reign, the prisoners of Attica Prison revolted and demanded reforms for better treatment. Many of the revolting prisoners were African-Americans. Rockefeller sent in the State Police with full immunity to exterminate the revolting prisoners – which was what they dutifully did.

These urban elites always demand more ‘gun control.’ They don’t want to ban guns for their own bodyguards, for the local police forces, or for ‘their private armies.’ Instead, they prefer that the criminal classes, meaning the African-Americans, do not possess the rights to own firearms and to defend themselves.

America’s economic elites are also very active on their ideological fronts. They fund particular research centers in universities, and contribute to certain ideological ‘think tanks,’ or academic fronts that defend their preferred ideological positions. They push certain nongovernmental organizations, or non-governmental organizations, into ‘international underdevelopment fields,’ and they set up ideological ‘state advising’ organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, etc.

Their ideologies represent a hodgepodge of the different factions of economic elites. Some of them want more population controls and support eugenics. Others demand the continual supremacy of the US dollar as international reserve currency. While various elite groups prefer low inflation and high unemployment; most of them definitely support free trade initiatives for multi-national corporations, and their right to off-shore cheap jobs around the world. There are elite groups who push for more ‘literacy in education,’ or a better qualified workforce, while others want to turn education into a secure profit motive with ‘choice in state schools’ and public monies for private initiatives. America’s economic elites have many other ideological stratagems, but for the sake of this essay, it is too numerous to list all of them.

Finally, these top members of the 1% consider themselves the true patrons of the fine and high arts, good taste, refinement and ‘class.’ They are all active within some type of arts organization. The list has included concert halls, fine art museums, arts fellowships, private collection administration, high-end galleries, and modern, public art placements.

Our top-notch elites also enjoy a variety of high-end restaurants with ethnic diversity-plate presentation twists. Yet, the back kitchens of these fine and wretched dining establishments all have lowly paid immigrants who do not possess legal working papers – the most obedient wage slaves.

Elite economic power and influence seem almost unbreakable. But their sick dreams and perverted desires often twist and turn – and not to their liking usually. What the elites actually receive is quite different from their goals. Hegemony and historical absurdity always confound them – and will continue to do so.

They want white hipster, ‘artiste’ heavens with first generation immigrant communities in ‘their cities,’ but they often manage hard to live-in, expensive cities with few good jobs left, and a violent crime rate that keeps spiraling into dangerous levels. They want gun control and open immigration, yet America’s rural working classes and middle classes know their game, and so they always successfully resist the elites every time they pull one of their influence tricks into pushing their agendas. This is the reason America’s economic elites give total support to the police-surveillance-prison state.

Since the beginning of human civilization, economic elites and the state have existed as parasites between each other. They move and feed in and out of each other, meanwhile, they try to impose their wills on the lesser ones. They have generally won in human history, but their victories are always different from their original plans.

The six truths of history always come into play – and will continue as such. Neither the state, nor the economic elites can exist without each other, yet there always farts some competing factions between them. Although they have a lot fewer numbers compared to the rest of us, their powers and privileges of legal crime award them greater unity and strength.

Worlds of Pharmakopeia II: Cannabis Churning in the Mystical Orient

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

Gun Culture Exhibit B: Real Self-Defense Training

Spring at the Border was coming together. A personal renaissance was brewing its smoke inside of me once again. I had just visited a despicable academic conference in the western States, and had sworn to never attend one of those scam productions ever again. I had learned a valuable lesson. I decided to celebrate my recent wisdom, and my recent attainment of a useless PhD degree in six years, by visiting a US-Mexican border town – but on the Mexican side.

I had always loved the explorations of North American border cultures, the wild Mexican culture meeting the Empire of ‘Gringolandia.’ I had Mexican friends that lived in the same border town and I could hang with them – and which was what I did. I was partying every night and loving the street life and struggle around me. I even felt compassion for the Mestizo tourist touts and lowlifes that hung around the center of town just to harass the gringo visitors. With all the fleeting happiness that I had felt, I had also forgot an important truth to life. The world in which we must survive is also evil, bad, unjust, hypocritical, criminal and brutal.

Then Sunday came, and even in the wild Mex-Border Town, most everything was shut. I soon found an open cafe with wireless Internet, and saw a Mexican couple sitting inside too. It was near the hostel I was staying at – but the street was eerily deserted. I spent some hours sitting in there enjoying my Internet browsing and nursing my latte coffee drink. I was loving life in code white.

And then towards the end of the afternoon, a criminal vermin sprinted into the cafe quickly and suddenly. I saw the Mexican couple startled when he pointed the gun at them, and then the scum pointed his gun at me.

My adrenalin went into overdrive. Everything slowed down. I carried a knife on me during that period, but I was so stunned physically and mentally that my body moved slowly and roughly. I got up from the table, and the excrement threatened again to shoot me. He ran off with my laptop and the laptop of the Mexican couple. I had just bought that laptop from a web designer too.

And then I had a terrible realization, both of my back up flash drives were connected to the same laptop during the robbery. I understood that I had lost a few personal documents forever. I made a major system backup some six months previous – but six months is a long time. I horribly lost a personal journal that I had written in both English and Spanish. My only consolation was that both backup flash drives had most of my personal documents encrypted. I began to cry. The local Mexi-police arrived, and like usual, did nothing. I walked back to my lonely room in the hostel and entered a world of desperation and excruciating mental trauma. I had to talk with my Mexican friends about such a horrifying incident.

My Mexican friends consoled me, but they also spoke the truth to me. I should not have visited that border town. Border towns are just too dangerous to visit these days. I was a foreigner and I was even more of a target than they were. And they were completely right.

In Mexico, the foreign visitor cannot defend him or herself either. I was totally disarmed during the encounter. According to the ‘Law,’ only the government thugs-narcos have permission to carry weapons and use them on civilians. Americans carrying guns in Mexico can expect a lengthy prison term nowadays. But even if I had a gun on me, with all of the adrenalin dope running up and down my body and soaking my brain, I probably would not have been able to use the weapon properly during that awful situation. In truth, I shouldn’t have been in that cafe on the deserted street corner, and most importantly, I shouldn’t have been in that border town. I had experienced another horrible life warning – never again to forget. Self-defense is not so much about fighting, but awareness.

A lot of gun guys on the Internet love to boast their ‘tough guy’ credentials, such as ‘try prying my gun out of my cold dead hands, or ‘better being judged by twelve, then carried out by six,’ and other macho-male cowardly crap. These Internet liars are a terrible danger in American gun culture. And it is not just the boasting gun guys. I have heard pseudo-alpha male bullshit coming out of the martial arts black belt dudes, saying how they could rip a gun easily out of some criminals’ hands, or that they could have easily gotten behind the perpetrator and broken his neck. Yeah right. Too many of us gun owning citizens have been listening to and reading such nonsense.

Self-defense is real. But it begins and ends with mental awareness – not doing rolls on the karate mat or even doing weapon live fire once per week. Mental awareness is actually the hardest skill to master, but without any mental discipline, all of our martial physical practices are useless. Sun Tzu, the ancient philosopher, in his Art of War, mentions this discipline.

The first practice and discipline of Mental Awareness implies living our day-to-day lives in code yellow – not code white. Code white has our minds distracted, in fantasy la-la land, and preoccupied over mental garbage. Code yellow keeps our minds in mindfulness, aware of our breathing, walking, sitting, listening, seeing, sensing-analysis of our immediate environment, and most importantly, where our ‘go-to weapon’ is – in case of emergency.

The second practice and discipline of Mental Awareness forces us to analyze our common choices and actions. Principally, we have to understand what social group we fit into. We all fit into some social class distinction. Being honest works.

Do we outwardly represent college educated young people with middle class tastes? Then, we should not do a nighttime partying venture into the rough side of an urban cauldron where young, lumpen class gangbangers, street hustlers and desperate muggers proliferate. Nor ought we to set foot into the biker bar, cowboy bar or the redneck bar for some ‘slumming fun.’ Does the bar have a reputation for fighting and brawling, or does the cafe or restaurant feature the regular visits of our personal enemies or ex-whatevers – inclusive of their jealous boyfriends and girlfriends? Then we need to visit another cafe or restaurant in town. We do have choices in life – and we need to make the intelligent ones. This basic survival guide goes for whatever neighborhood, city, region, land or country that we visit.

The third practice and discipline of Mental Awareness implies practicing our Civil Rights Duties against the cop gangs. Some of us have seen the videos of heroic citizens defending their rights at police encounters, police traffic stops and at uniform checkpoints – but if we don’t practice our rights regularly, and inside the privacy of our homes, then we will not feel ready for our own future donut cop encounters. We are all perps now.

Experiencing the sudden presence of an Amerikan donut cop is quite scary. It prompts the same ‘hunted feelings’ as dealing with a criminal attack: our adrenalin energy immediately spurts into the red zone. Cops know this, and so they try to get us to talk and blabber. This is the worst thing we could do. Even the slightest comment could legally incriminate us.

We must ask the police officer, if ‘we are free to go,’ and if not, then ‘invoking our rights to remain silent and asking to speak to our attorneys.’ If the donut wants to search our bodies or our vehicles, then we need to make clear to the law enforcement officer that ‘we do not consent to any searches.’ Practicing these imaginary scenarios at home will make sure that we run a smooth operation against any live encounter with the Amerikan ultimate police gang state. Nervous potential perps also make the cop-gangers nervous. – and suspicious.

The fourth practice and discipline of Mental Awareness implies letting go of the past and a general forgiveness of the bad things people have done to us. Forgiveness does not mean that we need to go out, look for and befriend our past enemies. Instead, we need to understand that the past died within the past worlds. Our pasts no longer exist in our lives. We are different people now and we must move on and live life. If we drag the past with us, then we will fall into frustration, next anger, and eventually, will commit criminal acts – when we begin to think that vengeance matters more than our freedom.

The fifth and last discipline of Mental Awareness is basic knowledge of the laws. Nowadays, living in the infernos of the Amerikan Empire, there are thousands upon thousands of felony statutes: municipal, state and federal. Unlike the old days in the American West, we cannot legally defend ourselves against potential threats, insults to our honor, and even against actual physical threats. After any act of self-defense, including a home invasion, we will probably have to undergo the horror of the American legal system.

State prosecutors have the criminal authority to charge us for attempted murder, or if we are lucky, manslaughter. It all depends on their political whims. The miscreant’s family might want to sue us for everything we own in civil court. Unless we are members of the economic and political elites, we are all slaves to the cruel fiat of the Amerikan legal nightmare. We should never forget that we live inside of an Empire with both the highest prisoner population in the world, and the world’s largest percentage of prisoners to the general population. The Amerikan prison-concentration camp-gulag is always on the prowl to destroy more lives.

Out West, we recount the tragic story of Matthew Shepard. Matt Shepard was a smart, multi-talented university student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and he came from a high social class background. His dad was a respected oil company engineer and his family lived in places like Saudi Arabia.

The kid studied in Switzerland, while he could converse in German and Italian. He could also keep up an intelligent discourse on history, politics and culture, and he had an extensive musical collection. Matt looked different too. He was not athletic, but had a good sense of clothes style and decorum in his demeanor. He was also liberated sexually, or commonly called, ‘openly gay.’

Matt Shepard had his group of friends at university and when they wanted to party, once in a while, they did the drive to the only gay bar and cool dance place in the region – all the way to Ft. Collins, Colorado. In the 1990s, DUI crimes began to inflate and the jails began to open up – even out west, so the three-hour ride back and forth, Laramie-Ft. Collins, became a risky venture.

On the night of October 7th, 1998, Matt Shepard wanted to party, and he was alone at home. He lived in a small apartment near downtown Laramie. Instead of waiting for another night, or just buying some booze from a local liquor store, the smartly dressed, up and coming university graduate, decided to ‘slum it.’ He was going to visit the rough bar in town, the infamous Fireside Lounge – alone and unarmed.

The Fireside was the typical western dive with pin-up ‘girls’ stapled to the walls, sports crap pasted along the rafters, and a taxidermied American Buffalo head over the bar. It was definitely not a drinking place for the likes of Matt Shepard.

The dive attracted the worst sort in town. Also inside, were two trailer living, lumpen class losers involved in petty crime and odd jobs with some criminal history. The two western trash bums noticed the outsider already. The low, bottom-eating crap always notices the differences between their harsh world and the higher class of people. There was ‘something up’ with the college kid at the bar – a fag – a helpless weirdo? Later in the night, they decided to give the kid a ride – and then they murdered him for fun.

We Anarchists that are gun owners need to keep this story, and our own embarrassing experiences, in the file storage of our minds. We are outwardly different, smart, well-read, dignified, artistically inclined, and most importantly, we are open to the freedom around us. A majority of the people on Earth are not into these things. Most two-legged animals tend to fall into the dishonorable victim category, or the prey of life – and they don’t know their victimizers. They don’t like to read, nor do they write letters. They are angry and frustrated about living. Yet, we suffering humans – all have the potential to commit murder.

In truth, we are able to embrace some real self-defense – not martial arts moves and just buying more guns for the sake of buying guns – but instead, maintaining our mental disciplines. We can always stay in code yellow, being mindful, aware, and concentrated when performing daily tasks. We should try to avoid the dangerous snares across our paths: fancy rip-off bars or taverns where the violent come to die, unsafe, unlit areas, menacing situations with nasty people, and locales where our enemies like to hide and lurk. We could also regularly practice our anti-donut cop training, so that we will keep silent and composed when under the glare of the state gangs. As Anarchists, we have the courage in letting go of our pasts, embracing mental freedom – and just moving on. We now breathe, walk and act, while we daily strengthen our minds – the first line of auto-defense techniques.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #7: Actual-Real History versus Crap History

October 1519 was a dangerous month for living in central Mexico. A new invading army with metal plated chest armor, leather boots, helmets, pikes, swords, horses, and a few firearms were on the march – literally. These hundreds of foreign speaking men smelled real bad and a good amount of the men sported beards, which clustered stale food droppings mixed with dried mucus. They were a sick sight to behold.

An even sicker sight was a strange disease never seen before, which had already wiped out whole villages on the Caribbean coast. Thick red and black bulbs grew on the outside of the body and then the human form would rot from the inside out!

Accompanying these rancid bearded men, thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors marched ready to do some damage to their old enemies, the Aztec-Mexican Empire. Spanish conquistadors acted with discernment when encountering advanced civilizations, (meaning urban societies), during their invasions. They first acknowledged the main empire to fight, and then they made alliances with their enemies in order to destroy them. Only twenty years later, they would use the same tactics against the Inca Empire in Peru.

The Spanish had already destroyed some of the crack Aztec warriors within the pyramid of Cholula. The Spanish warriors would soon enter Tenochtitlan, the capital city, and take Moctezuma II hostage. Eventually, the Aztec-Mexica warriors counterattacked in the capital city, and they almost exterminated the Spanish with their Tlaxcalan allies. But the Spanish-Tlaxcalan alliance won the final war in August, 1521. This ad-hoc alliance finally destroyed the Aztec-Mexica empire centered in Tenochtitlan. But there was another invading force that gave the new invaders a special edge.

What truly destroyed the Mexica-Aztec capital was a strange outbreak, never experienced beforehand in central Mexico, called ‘cocolitzli,’ or smallpox, which burst forth in the year 1520. An outbreak had ultimately hit the capital that same year, and it had killed the very emperor himself, Cuitlahuatzin. The epidemic spread all over central Mexico, which of course, made ‘the conquest,’ so much easier. Even the Spanish allies, the Tlaxcalans, experienced its ravages.

A hundred years later, from August 1521, 90 % of the indigenous population of central Mexico would die terribly due to recurring plagues and epidemic outbreaks. The Conquest owed a lot more to micro-biological history than to the genius of Cortes, or even due to the thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors that had increased Cortes’ military forces up towards 8,000 troops.

Yet, crap history accounts continue to rant about the military brilliance of Hernan Cortes, or the invincibility of the Spanish knight-conquistadors, or the funniest account of all, that the Mexica-Aztecs, especially Emperor Moctezuma II, thought that the Spanish were gods. All of these accounts are lies, legends and represent crap history.

How does the discerning historian spot the crap history, or the excrement, from the real and actual history?

Crap history accounts always resort to easy one line reasons for historical acts.

All of those crap accounts are lies because we humans, under the human condition of civilization, are too complex for easy one liners. Looking outside the window at the world around us, we see the incredible complexity that represents the living humanity moving in and out of the urban streets. Since the birth of human civilization, humans have had this human complexity. True history always shows the intricacies that lie behind the incredible acts of human violence.

Crap history also has a particular and very open agenda. It is often found within the pages of state college and public school textbooks, corporate media hype broadcasts, boring history teacher lectures and in museum displays. There is an old saying that the winners write the history books. This is true.

After the Spanish imperial invasions in the Americas, Spanish conquistadors did recount their great ‘heroism and valor.’ But their accounts are often annotated with ego rants and descriptions that defy ordinary beliefs. Their hodgepodge of historical offerings are actually quite hard to read, and few historians use Cortes’ own ‘incredible account,’ for historical research.

The same historical problem also relates to the winners codifying and arranging their writings in archives and in libraries, so that later historians would have easier access to their works. A bad historian will simply read their works and recopy the garbage found in their notes. A good historian however, will reread their writings and then look for particular themes that pop out between the lines. The well-trained historian reads with the discerning eye, while the crap historian reads as a copyist – and then writes a pathetic book or article that most people don’t care to read anyway.

Unfortunately, the historical profession still suffers from the infection of crap history and crap historians. But there is a solution.

Anyone can do the art of reading and write real and actual history. All it takes is the eye of discernment. While reading an ancient text, the historian ought to ask his or herself a few questions: why is the author writing this work, who is the intended audience, how does the author put the work in order, and what was the historical context of the work? We all have our own agendas – and so did our forbears in human history. The official history of United States is a perfect example of the recurring plague of crap history.

The official and standard, crap Amerikan history only lists the official wars of the United States government against other official states, such as Britain, France, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Korea, China, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also gives a special section on the Civil War.

The real and actual history however includes the US govt.’s continual wars of extermination against the Native nations on the continent, the war against the Mormon religion, the Civil War-War of Northern Aggression, the war against crime or against African-Americans, the war against Asian aliens, the war against ‘illegal’ drugs or against young people of color, the war against alcohol or Prohibition, the war against Terrorism, or against Islam, the war against Narco-terrorism-Latino drug cartels, the war against obscenity, the war against International Communism, or the Cold War, the war against illegal immigration, the war against the poor-lumpen proletariat that have no work skills, the war against drunk drivers, etcetera.

The official and standard crap Amerikan history prefers the points of view of presidents, generals, the rich and the powerful. It often praises both their acts of greatness and crimes; while it never offers the perspectives of their unfortunate victims. Crap history acts if the rich and the powerful represent the entire country, culture and society! Obviously, the upper classes don’t live like the rest of us.

The real and actual history includes the perspectives, thoughts, writings and actions of a whole diverse group of historical players: the homeless vagabond, the construction worker-laborer, the skilled mechanic-artisan, the sick and dying in the hospitals, the feisty small business owner-merchant, and the prisoner locked away in some prison-dungeon. Their views matter because they had the gift of human life and lived during a certain historical epoch. What they did with their lives was their business, and often due to birth, they had no other choices open to them.

Again, the complexity of human history comes into play. Even within a particular regional culture, the local humans have represented diverse backgrounds, such as familial relations, ethnic histories, work experiences, and educational formations. All of these elements, and even more that I haven’t listed in this paragraph, construct an individual’s cultural frames.

We frequently live our lives on dysfunctional remote control containing jumbled past experiences, contradictory cultural references and mental juggling acts. We the people under the condition of civilization are complex and all too human.

The Anarchist revolutionary must also act as a historian. He or she understands the truth of this human condition. Any time we hear some mad ranter or pseudo-expert historian ramble about the simple and easy answer to any current problem in society, then we need to either ignore the screamer, or if it is within a private setting, then rebuke the foolish discourse.

We clean our asses after excreting the feces. Our lifetimes are too short for tolerating anymore crap history.

The Amerikan Empire VI: Third World Juntas of Big City Corruption

 

There was something evil about the walk, and the eyes. The man seemed like a borderline obese monster dressed in a fine suit and polished boots. His gait both wobbled and strutted into public buildings. The protruding, balding head had tufts of oiled hair pasted on the side, and the beard possessed a stench mix of tobacco reek, whiskey, rancid beef and pungent perfume. A grotesque and large cretin at first glance, this fetid human specimen was also one of the most powerful politicians in the United States, from the 1850s to the 70s. Boss Tweed was the name of infamy.

He started his nefarious political career as a gang leader in New York City within the rough neighborhood of the Lower East Side, or L.E.S. for short. He grew into one of the top gang leaders through swinging a large axe on rival fire fighter guys during street fights. Houses were of wood in those days, and so for those poor unfortunates that lived inside of those hovels, fires were quite common. Poor tenants had to pay protection money to the fire gangs – if they wanted to save their personal stuff and lives from the flame inundations. And if business was ever slow, the fire and cop gangs could do a little arson action on tenement buildings too.

The obese, axe wielding brute soon caught the greedy eyes of some corrupt NYC officials needing some muscle in extorting votes from the lower class lowlifes, the white ones living in the L.E.S. The politicians were members of a notorious Democratic machine and gang called ‘Tammany Hall.’ Boss Tweed gleefully took on the role as the ward boss, and then slithered into becoming the greatest boss of the city, where even national Democratic and Republican party politicians sought out the chubby thug of destiny.

Starting his illustrious career in public service, He purchased for himself a phony attorney credential, which the state government of New York duly certified as legitimate. Next, he continually got himself ‘elected’ to various political positions, such as city alderman, chairman of the NYC Democratic Club, city commissioner, NY state assemblyman – and even a stint as a NYC congressman in the House of Representatives. Every time he placed his name on the ballot, he miraculously won the election and served out his time in office. Yet with all of his important and innovative political work, nothing ever changed in NYC.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he constructed a stronger pre-mafia gang at Tammany Hall where all the parasites received their cushy jobs. They did not have to work at all really, yet they regularly collected nice salaries and pensions. He also handpicked local, rich bums with distinguished faces to run as mayors of New York. Most of them were from the Lower East Side wards of Irish Catholic immigrants. All of his mayoral candidates fantastically won. Everybody understood: the real power behind city hall government mob was Fat Bastard Tweed.

Tweed monopolized most government posts, and he also monopolized all NYC government construction contracts. Any building that needed repairs or a new facelift had to go through ‘his companies.’ Tweed further capitalized on his loot and became the biggest property pimp landlord in the City through buying up expensive buildings on Fifth Avenue, and then purchasing farm landholdings in the Harlem section of Manhattan.

Some years later, the railroad capitalists Jay Gould and Jim Fisk put up some flim flam municipal bonds in order to raise the stock in their ‘new company’. They needed the master con man Tweed to certify the deeds. Tweed made sure the stock hoax was legit – and demanded that his horde rob a few inflated dividends.

Tweed was such a corrupt master, that the rival Republican machine gang in the City, finagled a deal with the all-powerful boss to completely rewrite New York City’s Charter. Most importantly, Tweed successfully used the different NYC cop gangs as his personal foot soldiers, whether the Municipal Police Force or the Metropolitan Police Force.

Crap historians often look at the Tweed and Tammany Hall Era of New York history as a type of aberration in American urban government. Those historians are not just bad historians, they are also liars. This corrupt urban system in Amerika still functions marvelously, and not just in megalopolis cities, such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, but also in supposedly progressive cities, like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon – and this Amerikan urban gangrene exists in even medium to small cities across the country.

Amerika’s urban juntas have represented the most foul epitomes of criminal neglect against the poor and lower classes, while those same city bosses have continually colluded with urban elites in order to shortchange the local political economy. Amerika’s city father hoodlums have consistently brutalized the poor lives of those unfortunates that must survive inside those infernos of cruelty.. They legally steal, cook the books, monopolize, extort, graft, bribe, and they rewrite the tax codes, public education system, criminal laws, and urban boundary lines to their sick whims.

They have even used the police as paramilitary murderers and jailers against those honorable people who have resisted such tyranny. While the official US propaganda system has brazenly extolled the lies of freedom and democracy, Amerika’s urban states of sinister corruption and criminality have crafted the inner city horrors of abject slums and ghettos.

We are not dealing with Boss Hogg buffoons. These are shrewd card sharp players that know how to filch and swindle through legal fiat and institutional switch and bait. They are merciless to the working class and lumpen populations that lack money, while they offer innumerable monetary benefits to corporations, real estate conglomerations, large business owners and white yuppie transients with money. These municipal crooks have coated their own pockets for their very own individual perks, like free travel and multiple bodyguards, permanent post-retirement mega-salaries and hoarding public tax monies for their own private initiatives.

A short list of some of their more contemporary frauds and rackets will suffice. These gangs of respectable criminals have often used the improper use of TIF monies and economic gerrymandering of ‘enterprise business zones.’

In order to receive more property and city taxes, which also increase their personal salaries, the city hall bosses continually extend the city limits. Once they illegally rob the outlying lands, they hand over the cheap disused fields or farmlands within those ‘limits’ to a low-cost private developer who then receives a monopoly on all work contracts. This nefarious practice also limits other companies from competing for scarce work opportunities and jobs.

Ultimately, a sprawling area of real estate either sits vacant or fills-up, whether for residential or commercial use. Even if it is a bust for the local economy, the privileged property owner continues to pay the low tax rates, while the city government stooges collect their tax bribes.

University administrator hacks have also worked in tandem with these legal gangsters. Local city judges in on the fix will then allow a ’eminent domain’ section to enter the urban map plan. A new satellite university campus is now under construction. The university administrators pay nothing, while the students pay another tuition increase.

The city bosses have used another popular money laundering-bribery scheme through increasing municipal taxes in order to pay for professional sports stadiums. The multi-billionaire sports team owner pays very little and receives his very own team stadium.

City Hall has even more legal and legit frauds under its sleeves, such as Community Development Block Grants, Corporate Income Tax Credits, Industrial Revenue Bonds, Property Tax Abatements, Sales Tax Exemptions and Tax Formula Changes. Meanwhile, the average citizen living in the cockroach and rat infested tenement building receives the icy stare of the donut cop.

Most of Amerika’s City Hall overseers are also the most rabid supporters of gun confiscations among the local citizens. They are not anti-gun for their own bodyguards or for the local donut brigades, but they will imprison the average citizen for even possessing a shotgun in the home. Crime in these urban Amerikan cauldrons is often rampant and brutal. The urban citizen that defends himself from a criminal act often has to endure a long legal battle or a hard prison term.

These urban bullies only want more control, and more money flowing in to their bank accounts. They also want some extra desserts for their rich friends. The only other group that they tend to stomach are transient yuppies with white skin privilege – as long as they have money to spend. They say they like ‘artists’ too, but the ‘artistes’ only work as the first wave of rent paying transients for their gentrification projects. They have to displace the African-American and Latino poor first. And then the privileged landlords will come for them too.

The cycle of deceit and legal crime continues within Amerika’s cities. Politicians, Financial Banks, Real Estate Conglomerates and Insurance Fraudsters are always the big winners in urban sprawl Amerika. Now we understand why so many big cities in the United States have had all-powerful Mafia families. The regular people have always known that City Hall was on the take, so they went to the wise guys instead for some meager justice. And for the rest of us in the city, we just have to sell ourselves on the rigged market for the bare basics of life: a wage slave job that robs our time and our energies, while paying the rent debt for some privacy and some sleep.

The Amerikan Empire V: The Greatest Brainwashing Show in History

Living and surviving in the United States of America is like no other experience. Propaganda overload and brainwashing overdose entail part of the process. For those of us unfortunately born here, the corporate media have inundated, attacked and cudgelled us into accepting certain ways of thinking since we were children sitting in front of the TV ‘boob tube.’ This image-emotional thinking spawns from a nefarious concoction that has mixed the fine arts of media spectacle, hip TV advertising, and a hard dose of sociopathic mythology.

We Americans can never fully extirpate those monstrosities out of our mental systems – unless we become full on ex-pats and embrace completely the new culture that we happen to live in. And this does not just mean becoming an advanced level speaker in the new language. It also means redirecting the mind into a completely distinct mindset.

I actually performed this mental release program through living in Europe for about five years, and I was able to change my thinking completely. But, when I returned to the States after my living overseas adventure, I was surprised with the change of cultural scenery. The United States did not change that much really. I had changed.

I first remember seeing flags flying everywhere representing the United States government. In no other country in the world does one see so many government flags crowding into the frontal sight view. In the rest of the world, the state apparatuses put out the flags for visits of foreign dignitaries or for special occasions, such as Independence Days or Revolution Days. But in the USA, regular citizens and many businesses hang out the flags on their automobile antennas, on auto bumper stickers, front license plates, on their shirts, pants, shoes, asses, jackets, on the doors of their private homes, and grandly displayed on brick walls, vacant windows, high ceilings and even floors.

I realized that some Americans actually believed that the Flag, which was really one of the symbols of the US government in Washington D.C., also represented them as a people. The Flag was for them too – and they could do what they liked with it. The US government had successfully transformed one of their symbols into a popular culture hip item. In no other country in the world has this seductive method worked so splendidly. The Amerikan Flag has transformed itself into an idol fetish symbol.

The other symbols of the US government are the Statue of Liberty, the Bald Eagle clutching arrows and branches over the Seal of Stars and Bars, the US Dollar, the White House, the US Congress Capitol building, Mt. Rushmore, and the Uncle Sam character. Yet, how many Americans put up the other symbols around their homes, businesses and cars – or even on their clothes?

I also noticed the terribly repressive nature of the laws compared to many of the foreign countries where I had traveled and lived. The nasty cop presence was everywhere looking for victims to harass, detain, arrest, and even imprison. The repressive nature of the laws and police state terror also showed their scars on the everyday American people. In big city Amerika, it was terrible. Paranoia and suspicion truly ran deep. I felt the violence in the eyes, while spotting the fear on the faces.

Actions that in other countries that had no legal consequences, possessed the potential for serious crime infractions in the USA, like drinking alcohol in public, physically fighting back against a person that had insulted you publicly or physically threatened you, or looking at a pretty woman or man in a public library. I was frightened myself, but I embraced Anarchism while living in Europe, so I was going to do something inside this Evil Empire. And if there was so much tension, hatred and fear on the streets, then why did a good part of the American public still embrace the symbols of the US government as part of their own identities?

The most dangerous and most sophisticated power of the Amerikan Empire is its corporate media propaganda and brainwashing control. This indoctrination power is even more powerful and dangerous than its military power because this system slowly rots out the insides of people’s brains. This media propaganda, emotional manipulation and brainwashing system have been, and always will be, the greatest indoctrination program in human history. No other empire, class based society or political culture has been able to compete with having such a high percentage of its own citizens visibly identify with the state’s ideological political goals. Many citizens of different countries around the world would say that they are proud to live in their respective countries, but Amerikan patriotism and exceptionalism are quite different breeds of activities.

Most US citizens revert to a type of immediate defense of government policy regardless of the facts or the truth. The Fascist governments of Europe and Latin American tried to create a similar world through murdering many of their own citizens that did not accept the new order. They failed at their goals because the tactics were too brutal for human consumption. The Communist governments of eastern Europe tried to create a particular mind control system among its worker-citizens, yet they failed too. Only ancient monotheistic religious ideologies, such as Christianity and Islam, can actually compete with, and resist, the ideology of American patriotism and exceptionalism.

The American propaganda ‘greatest show on earth’ uses some very important methods in maintaining its hold on many American’s minds. The first method guarantees a compliant corporate press media group that keeps up the public lies of ‘independent’ and ‘objective.’ The second method makes sure that alternative viewpoints and the actual history of the situation, versus the official government lies, are kept marginalized, isolated, and outside of the corporate media. The American public has become the most ignorant and ill-informed populace in world history.

The third method operates on the corporate media and government intellectuals who regularly destroy the English language with contradictory phraseology, such as ‘surgical strikes,’ ‘medical experts,’ scientific studies,’ ‘tax rebates,’ ‘affordable care acts,’ ‘public education,’ ‘department of defense,’ ‘institutions of justice,’ ‘freedom fighter,’ ‘assault weapon bans,’ ‘human rights sanctions,’ and ‘humanitarian interventions.’ The fourth method runs on the corporate media system regularly using old theatrical stunts in order to hammer its viewpoints across the public spectrum: constant repetition of key ideas, emotional image manipulations, plot breakup and suspense building through continual advertising cuts, and destruction-war-technology-violence-special effects mega shows. Some good examples of the US government’s brainwashing methods were the gradual re-education methods and repression used during the 1970s-1990s, when the political-economic-military elites had decided to destroy the cultural legacy of the ‘Sixties.’

The changes from the Sixties blew up in the 1970s. The elites in power were in shock – and they were scared. Many Americans lost respect for most government and corporate entities. The corporatist elites knew that a revolution was not on the near horizon – but they weren’t exactly sure. They had to do something. And so they did.

If a foreign person were to judge those times, 70s-90s, just through watching American television, her or she would think that the United States was the embodiment of the Fourth Reich. In many ways, it was, and especially for those unfortunates stuck in the American prison gulag, or for those unfortunates that were victims of American state terrorism overseas, like in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Libya, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Iran and Iraq.

It was during this tumultuous period that American television erupted into a terrible outbreak of cop shows. The other popular sitcoms were family shows, which was normal in a society where divorce and alternative family arrangements were changing the greater society. But the cop shows came and they stayed.

The television ‘hey day’ of cop shows actually began in the late sixties and early seventies. This was not a coincidence. If the adept cultural historian looked into that period in American history, he/she would find a culture of widespread distrust, and even outright rebellion, against police forces and government agents. In fact, cop and spy shows increased substantially during the seventies TV period.

Every type of cop imaginable came into being on TV. Such colorful examples have included the cool and hip, undercover agent snitch-cops, such as ‘Mod Squad,’ the good-looking, suave cop of ‘Rockford Files,’ and the weathered, tough talking, urban cops such as ‘Kojak’ and ‘Baretta.’ There were other cop genres, such as ‘Hawaii 5-O,’ ‘SWAT,’ ‘Barney Miller,’ ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ ‘Ba Ba Black sheep,’ ‘Chips,’ etc. The major TV networks saturated the next decade, the eighties, with an even more diverse variety of cop shows, from realistic and serious, urban precinct stories of ‘Hill Street Blues,’ to the young and hip, good looking narcs of ’21 Jump Street.’ By the end of the eighties, cops even had their very own, a real life docudrama where they arrested and destroyed the lives of real citizens, called ‘COPS.’

Meanwhile, Hollywood began to premier particular movies that displayed the US military in a more jovial fashion, such as ‘Private Benjamin,’ ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ ‘Top Gun,’ and ‘Stripes.’ The Eighties was also the period when movies finally dealt with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’ such as ‘Deer Hunter,’ ‘Rambo’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. The corporate media did not show the true story about what happened to the five million murdered Indochinese victims, but instead, focused on the mentally disturbed US servicemen who came back to a country that ignored them, and so they became worse off when they returned. Those veterans were the true sufferers due to an ungrateful public and a neglectful VA administration. Not one movie plot mentioned the real culprit: an US government lie to begin a war, (The Gulf of Tonkin Incident), and a forced draft on working class youth, which used them as live bait and as paid assassins for the upper ranks of the officer class and political elites. Even the German governments after WW II did not conduct a media campaign of their Wehrmacht veterans as ‘victims’ of Allied hypocrisy.

In the middle of the 1980s, the US government committed a despicable act of tyranny against the state governments and young Americans. It willfully, and without any citizen or state consent whatsoever, rose the drinking age from 18 to 21, and gave the US government a cultural mandate to control a good amount of the personal behavior of its young people. This underhanded policy also gave enormous powers to one non-government and non-elected moral crusading agency, which soon had power over the lives of millions of young citizens. The group called itself Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Prohibition was back.

After the raise in the drinking age, police forces then set up roadblocks on the nation’s roads where they forced drivers to stop, and conducted illegal searches of ‘drivers under the influence of alcohol.’ The federal and state governments enabled another domestic war against the citizenry: the imprisonment of intoxicated drivers. These actions outrageously violated the fourth amendment to the Constitution, yet there was very little public outrage. Driving under the influence ‘crimes’ are actually the only crimes on the books that do not secure the constitutional right to have a trial by jury in the United States. Some dangerous legal precedents were set.

In the mid to late 1980s, the corporate media began to inflame the hysterics in the US government’s phony ‘war against drugs.’ Local police forces under the paramilitary SWAT acronym commenced the now common practice of breaking down private doors in working class neighborhoods, and willfully murdering suspected ‘drug dealers’ or ‘uncontrollable addicts’ without any sufficient notification. Most of the victims of these institutional murders were simply American citizens who were minding their own business and unlucky enough to experience such acts of state terrorism.

Another good example of such US government, corporate media mythology event during the 80s was the sudden death of an African-American college basketball player, named Len Bias, after a night of partying. The liars in the media blamed his death on the use of ‘crack’ cocaine, but the basketball player actually used a whole lot of drugs, both legal and illegal, such as alcohol and energy drinks during his partying escapade. The corporate media played up the hype, and then saturated the public news broadcasts with cities under siege from drug peddlers, gang bangers, gangsta rap thugs and ‘crack babies.’ Why was there no media debate about infants born with mutations and severe illnesses due to all of the legal drugs forced on women during pregnancy by respectable doctors?

Millions of unfortunate young people caught up in the easy money sham entered the American prison-concentration camp system for longer years of penal servitude than most murderers and rapists, and most of them were African-Americans and Latinos. The Meth corporate media hysteria next opened up and the police moved slowly into ‘trailer trash’ residential areas, mostly filled with lower class young people of white skin privilege. The prison population jumped substantially once again, but the police forces continued to focus on the young African-American population in regards to drug crimes. Crack cocaine prison sentencing was almost a hundred times greater than regular Cocaine sentencing.

This 1980s-90s media exaggerated, drug and crime hysteria actually copied the earlier Satanic, child abuse hysteria in the middle part of that decade. The corporate media once again inflamed Americans about child day care centers abusing children and the growing threat of Satanism in American communities. All of sudden, fanatical Evangelical Christian cops and previously unknown ‘social workers’ popped on the TV talk shows warning Americans about the coming Satanic sacrifice danger. Accusations flew across the US like in the old witch hunting eras of Early Modern Europe. A shameless media huckster Geraldo Rivera did a one-hour national TV special on ‘Satanism.’ Still today, innocent US citizens have been putrefying in prison and have completely lost their lives from that terrible period of legal witch-hunting.

Amazingly, by the late eighties, one of the most hated institutions in American society, the US military had become the most respected institution in the United States. After the debacles of Korea and Vietnam, the American alternative media exposed the US military’s corruption in favor of high-ranking officers and its continuous lies to the public. Other media outlets exposed the US government’s genocidal horrors, mass murders, and judicial oppression against soldiers of conscience, A little over ten years ago, most American university ROTC officer programs had to close down their doors due to the successive fire bombings and destructive attacks against their offices.

As the reader can see, most of those seventies and eighties TV cop shows and Hollywood ‘Vietnam’ movies most definitely had their desired effect. They kept the young people in a type of infantile state of watching the local paramilitaries arrest, beat up and imprison the unfortunates in police traps. Kids could laugh at the antics of the poor, working class and minorities caught up in the dragnet. But their laughs were soon to end because then the cops moved into greater terrains that were more fertile, like robbing people’s personal property through ‘civil forfeiture.’ Now the police have been targeting everybody. Meanwhile, the US Military is on the warpath across the Earth. The Vietnam Debacle is over.

These days, DUIs are even more costly and sanctioned, while the cops don’t care who they grab driving around late at night. The corporate media also wanted to get rid of the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’ which meant a hesitance of using American troops in combat. The beginning of the Invasion against Iraq in 1990 successfully finished off that concern. The US Military is currently in overdrive with over a thousand bases around the world, and many of us don’t even know how many countries the US is currently in war against.

The media drug and crime hysteria, with the Satanic abuse hysteria also functioned magnificently. Most Americans believed the corporate media then, and they still do. The US government would exterminate a religious group using various federal agencies who burned alive most of the children inside that building. The US govt. exterminated them over buying some ‘guns from out of state.’ This was the Waco extermination campaign against the Branch Davidian religious group in the 90s.

The corporate media used the same exact lies about ritual abuse against the children in Waco, as they had previously done in 80s with the Satanic abuse scares. And of course, the US government mythologized the attack on the World Trade Center Towers in NYC as the 9/11 Event. Again, the corporate-government media used the same exact lies from the Drug War hysteria: a secret cabal of evildoers led by a sinister evil man overseas pulled off the nefarious deeds. In the 80s, it was the evil Latino, narco-terrorist drug lord, Pablo Escobar, but after the 9/11 Event, it was the evil Muslim, Arab terrorist of Osama Ben Laden.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with the greatest brainwashing show in world history. We cannot counter it, nor can we construct a rival to such unbelievable media propaganda power. Even the corporatist elites know this. We have the Internet, but they still hold the real power of the TV screen and the cinema. Most Americans still get a good amount of their information from those two sources.

But pathological liars, and especially the sociopaths in power who believe their own lies, eventually catch themselves in their own snares. Lying uncontrollably leads to greater secrecy, greater cover-ups, and greater outrages. When around 20% of the population can finally see the true visage of the Monster, then the propaganda show will burn in its own foils. And this will happen eventually. At the same time, the Anarchist waits patiently.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #3: Understanding the Practice of Hegemony

Germany could never shake itself from the trauma of the First World War. The year was 1930, and even though Jazz clubs and racy nightlife augmented in Berlin during the latter parts of the Twenties, the Great Depression steamrolled over all of the capitalist nations of Europe. Stories of children starving to death again reached German ears.

The ‘western’ propaganda machine still fulminated that Germany was responsible for all of the evils of the war. Why was there no mention of the French Empire or the British Empire that controlled almost a quarter of the world’s surface? All of this Allied war propaganda was untrue, and French troops still occupied the Ruhr region. The failed and twice failed, and even thrice failed, Weimar Republic coalition governments, still had to pay ‘reparations,’ or extortion monies to Britain, France and the United States. Germany won on the eastern front in WW I, and of course, there were no reparations towards Russia. The hypocrisy and lies never ceased.

The National Socialists, or the Nazis, could also see that the Socialists or really, the ‘Social Democrats-Leftists-Reformists’ in the Weimar government were pathetic, and most Germans had gotten quite sick of their cowardice and lack of direction. They were no different from the right-wing, militarist madmen that just wanted to wield power. The Nazis main rivals, the Communists, and at that time, the strongest Communist Party outside of Russia, were still split and battle-scarred from the defeated 1918 Spartacist Revolutions in both Berlin and in Munich. The other political opposition was the Center Party, or the ‘Zentrum,’ which represented German Catholicism.

The Nazi Party began to jump onto and embrace the most recent political changes. Instead of watching on the sidelines like a small splinter party within the fringes of political discussions, it began to make the strategic moves, stir its own news, and form its own political coalitions. From a radical fringe of southern German reactionaries that tried to create a Bavarian separatist-fascist state during the 1920s, the Nazi Party transformed itself into a German revolutionary party, while utilizing both street violence and secret party coalitions in order to construct its national transformation.

It successfully moved from the War of Position to the War of Maneuver. Or as a contemporary political scientist and Italian Communist under house arrest, Antonio Gramsci, had stated: the party successfully creates the counter hegemony to counterattack the state hegemony.

Hegemony is not about domination. I continue to read both Leftist and Libertarian writers that refer to hegemony as a type of political-imperial oppression over the weak and subjugated, with statements such as, ‘the weakness or power of American hegemony.’ These intellectuals forget that hegemony, as previously explained by Antonio Gramsci, is actually a cultural practice of understanding the world and doing something about it.

Within our modern existence, and where most of us command caged lives inside violent, industrialized cities, we ourselves form our own ideas about our environs, initiate discussions with like minded friends, join political or cultural associations, and even make our own political alliances or choices.

People construct their own worldviews, shape their own realities, and create their own cultures. Whether it is a particular religious worship, hanging out with a certain subculture of fashion and music, or even attending a political demonstration, people themselves make their own history. History is not just battles, presidents and laws; it also represents everyday humanity creating their own cultural expressions, temporary communities, or hegemonies, in order to comprehend the world around them.

Most humans are not dupes as some Leftists commentators like to rattle about incessantly. We are all philosophers in our very own individualistic ways. The Tea Party Conservatives were not the willing idiots of the Koch Brothers either, as some Democratic party hacks have ranted about recently. If there was no national anger already swelling about seeing their proud country decay into a Third World disaster, yet possessing the most violent empire in world history, then no amount of Koch brother money would have been able to set up their public protests.

For us Anarchists, this means that we also have to embrace the times and places that we both live in and suffer from. A few intelligent Americans are waking up to the American nightmare that fogs over people’s lives, bodies, minds and emotions. Most citizens are too scared to fight, and we should leave them alone. But other angry and confused citizens are struggling out there. They want to hear another story besides the trite and pathetic lies vomiting out of the corporate news media and crap American television. We Anarchists have that other story. We do not need to form a cohesive political party like our Communist sect enemies, nor do we need to seize power, like some military officer caste; instead, we must have the courage to speak the truth when people ask, or when they complain to us about the way things are going politically.

I will continue my story on how the ultra-nationalist and reactionary Nazis became a national-revolutionary German party. When the Weimar state cowards and liars tried to push a bogus national referendum on making partial reparation payments, the Nazis rejected the vote fraud completely. Modern Germans did not like bullshit, and still do not like such games. Continue with your previous work or fight. The Nazis understood completely. Meanwhile, the National Socialists continued to incite even bloodier street fights against Communists and supposed collaborators with foreign occupying troops on German soil. They also began to move into other directions, such as fomenting the necessary political alliances, and often-contradictory ones.

Soon, the Nazis made overtures to particular German business owners and small business owners, or good capitalists that they liked. They successfully sloganeered that the problems of reparations and war guilt on Germany had destroyed business and opportunities in their own land. Meanwhile, the party press kept blabbering the anti-Semitic cant about manipulative Jewish stock jobbers turning the world capitalist economy upside down. The Nazis also played down their nationalist-class conflict patter.

Then, the National Socialists made overtures to the Prussian military caste, or the German military. This political alliance was not hard because the Nazis had the same desire for a continuation of war hostilities like the German high command. The Nazis even won some political positions inside a few regional governments.

With all of the street gang methods and political maneuvers towards the other gravitational pulls of power, the Nazis were still another right-wing political party moving on the national front. Their main base was Bavaria, which was the center of the German reaction and a very Catholic region. Finally, the Nazis made the right openings to the Catholic Church, and to its political appendage in Germany, the Zentrum.

Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party and not the most observant Catholic, arranged a meeting with the papal nuncio in Berlin, a man by the name of Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII during World War II. Right before the elections of 1933, the two parties, both the Zentrum and the Nazis united to form the strongest coalition party in Germany. The Nazi Party started ranting about the ‘destruction of the German family and defending real family values.’ The same year, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. The rest is history.

Hegemony also works repeatedly in the United States. The Republican-Democrat deception is a perfect case to analyze. The two parties simply pick and choose their new ‘political alliances’ depending on what gets the election results. First, there is the Democratic ‘base,’ which tries to include both large, and small business owners, both labor union bosses and workers with union seniority. Meanwhile, it makes overtures to middle class African-Americans and to certain Latino populations, such as second generation Mexican Americans. The Dems do not stop there, but also seek alliances with certain socio-economic ethnic groups, such as urban Asian Americans that despise lazy state spongers, wealthy Jewish-American, Israel First supporters living in large urban cities, and college educated, yuppie hipsters. This contradictory hodge-podge also hopes to attract Conservative farm and rust belt workers and senior citizens feeling insecure about Social Security, and next, urban Gay and Lesbian populations.

The Republicans also have their absurd political concoctions. They have attempted to organize Christian Evangelicals that want a Christian Republic, and yet the Repubs attract freethinking Libertarians in the western states wanting the government out of their lives. This political assemblage has the support of the ‘Don’t tread on me’ gun-Bible belt in the South, Mormons in the West, and large farmers in parts of New England. The party also contains a bunch of law and order followers calling for tougher laws, more prisons and more police, including staunch militarists, all of whom believe that the government has the sole right to bear arms – and to use them when it damn well feels like it. The party aims for the support of both business owners that live in gated communities and a few racist rednecks that live in trailer parks, and it hits on certain ethnic groups, such as Cuban Americans. If a historian were to examine the hegemonic alliances of both parties a hundred years earlier, in 1912, he or she would find very different and contradictory political bases on both aisles.

As long as there exists human civilization and urbanization, hegemony lives around us. We create our own culture, our own histories, and so therefore, we make up hegemonies, or our own political frameworks, even with all of their internal inconsistencies and absurdities.

We Anarchists have the easiest work load, unlike the other political party hacks and slaves out there hustling their weird ideologies and crap literature. Our destiny, or ‘Fortuna,’ takes some courage to act upon. Just bravely speak up or write the truth to power.