The Amerikan Empire IX: The War against Our Bodies and Minds

 

For those of us unfortunates trying to survive in the Amerikan Empire, we always have to tolerate another war that the state apparatus in D.C. and the corporate medias regularly push. We have had the infamous Drug War, the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, various foreign invasions and interventions, the Civil War, WWI and WWII, the War against Drunk Driving, (really against alcohol), the Mormon War, the War against Terrorism, (well, against various low-level ‘terrorists’ – not state terrorists), the Cold War against International Communism, the War against Crime and the Poor, (low-level crime again – not against corporate or state criminals), the War against Carbon Gas Emissions (?), the War against Obscenity, (basically against erotica or anything having to do with sensuality), the War against Tax Evaders, (certain tax evaders however), etcetera.

Most of the Amerikan Empire’s observant holidays revolve around war: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Armed Forces Day, Flag Day, Presidents Days, (American Revolution-Civil War), Loyalty Day, and Columbus Day, (Invasions-Discovery of the Americas). But all these examples have represented the Empire’s openly declared wars.

The Amerikan Empire has actually been engaged in numerous hidden wars since its inception in 1790. In the early 1800s, the US government sent a naval invasion force into Tripoli, North Africa, in order to punish the Barbary ‘pirate states,’ for example. The US government has overthrown governments, bombed and blown up humans, assassinated people, and instigated economic sanctions against scores of countries around the world – without ever declaring any official war whatsoever.

The same has also been true in the domestic sphere. In the early to mid 1800s, there was a national political party against the Freemasons, and later, there were the infamous Know Nothings that violently went after the Roman Catholics. The Amerikan Empire allowed both political parties to legally conduct their violence, just as the US government had unofficially allowed lynch murder against African-Americans and other criminal elements.

Nowadays, the political police of the Amerikan Empire, the FBI, regularly persecute Muslim-Americans, and there are now thousands of them rotting in the Amerikan gulag for longer prison sentences than most murderers and rapists.

The US government currently manages a host of other undeclared and subversive wars against particular targets. Most recently, the US government has pushed major corporate banks into robbing the deposits of certain businesses related to erotica, guns, cannabis, homeopathic drugs, organic tobacco, organic agriculture and locally brewed spirit-alcohols. The US government has regularly persecuted other small businesses that have had peculiar banking habits.

There has even been a recent, ongoing war that has acted in a far more deadlier fashion. This engagement represents the American Empire’s War against both our bodies and our minds, meaning their physical aspects. Why would the US government want to destroy our bodies and our minds?

The answer lies with the complete US government support for monopolistic practices of various major corporations in biotechnology, (such as Monsanto), processed foods, (such as Tyson), fast food joints, (such as McDonald’s), supermarket mega chains, (such as Wal-Mart), and beverage distributors, (such as Coca-Cola). Living inside this Empire is extremely hazardous to our health.

First, most of our public water suffers from hidden contamination due to fluoridated-chlorinated bleaching, while natural gas monopolies possess legal corporate rights to infect ground water supplies.

Second, most of the foods that one sees in corporate supermarket shelves have GMO, or Genetically Modified Organism infections. The meats and fishes are often from overcrowded and murderous factory farming, where the corporate processors even resort to animal torture and wholesale extermination. The corporate processors regularly inject the cattle animals with BVH growth hormones, and they overdose these same animals with overflowing antibiotics in order to hide the feces soaked, mutilated, infected sores.

American people’s notorious struggles with obesity, diabetes, circulatory blood diseases and cancers is not just because of large plate portions received inside of American restaurants. The culprit lies in the GMO poisons plastic wrapped for unwary consumers. This explains the reasons why the lumpens, and many of the working and middle classes in America suffer more from obesity than the bourgeois-owner social class. They often don’t have the money to buy the ‘organic’ fresh, local stuff.

Third, the American landscape, inclusive of the land, air and water, suffers from environmental contaminants due to the greater legal privileges given to mega corporations. Superfund sites now exist in all urban and rural environments. Certain restricted areas are actually off-limits to humans due to nuclear testing, chemical fallout and other industrial disasters.

A few ‘accidents’ have even become international lessons in the consequences of unregulated corporate personhood, such as the Exxon-Valdez Disaster in Alaska and the BP-Oil Spill in the Louisiana Gulf. Another corporate killer, Union Carbide, murdered thousands of Indians after one of their own negligent fallouts.

Fourth, most of our cleansers and cleaners, both for both our bodies and for the household, contain various contaminants, which actually destroy our interior worlds – even though they ‘get the job done.’ Some unwary gardeners have used the weed killer, ‘Roundup,’ which is from the same corporation that helped produce Napalm gas murdering millions of Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Fifth, The US government continually protects these same monopolies, often through periodic federal and state legislation, while the mega-corps will often try new public relations approaches in order to cover up past crimes. Regular citizens are the ones that have to endure the aftershocks of environmental suffering. The corporate boards of directors and owners live in special, gated community areas – often more ‘environmentally diverse.’

The so-called regulatory agencies, such as the well-armed FDA, or the Federal Drug Administration, protect the licensed and corporate killers, while they often target the local homeopathic drug providers for ‘fraud.’ The US govt.’s Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management , (BLM), are also well-armed with machine guns. Again, they prefer to harass the regular people that use ‘their properties,’ rather than the corporate monopolies.

Sixth, the US government also works in tandem with another dubious triple-headed, monopoly monster, called the AMA, the APA and the ADA, or the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Dental Association. This unholy alliance moves into both the Biotech and Insurance corporate rackets where the ideology of ‘doctoring’ has transformed into a lucrative legal drug trade, while some expensive surgeries have full legal support. Meanwhile, alternative health programs receive the labels of ‘quackery,’ or unregulated and dangerous options.

One such government supported medical practice, or torture in recent medical history, represented the use of lobotomies on Americans, from the 1940s to 1960s. A few unfortunates, without their consent of course, had to undergo the ‘surgery,’ while imprisoned inside mental institutions. The psycho-quacks often used ice picks to rip apart the frontal lobes of their victims. Naturally, most of the victims either died painful deaths within a few years, or they turned into human blobs with little mental functioning. The psycho-quacks stopped using lobotomies due to the later efficacy of psychotropic medications.

Millions of Americans, especially active children, spinster women, hyper-intelligent young men, and returning combat veterans have bizarre, made up diagnoses stamped to their personalities. They are now the laboratory animals for the more powerful and legal psychotropic medications. The continual mass shootings in gun free zones across the country attest to their potency.

I have my own personal story. After living in Europe for some years, I decided to return to the Amerikan Empire. My first impressions during my return to the States, besides the flags flying everywhere and the massive loads of dangerous felony laws for every conceivable action, was the nasty looking, smelling and tasting American food.

In this case, the Europeans were right about American food – it was lethal garbage. The low standards of American foods were quite horrid from the low standards found in the cheap supermarkets in Europe. American foods generally had more of that bland and chemical taste. The meats and fish seemed worse off than the vegetables.

I also heard stories about the massive concentration camps that processed millions of murdered animals annually in the heart of the country. After seeing an undercover video of a slaughterhouse, I decided to become a vegetarian.

I was then a vegetarian for eleven years. I had replaced meats, fish and eggs with breads, rice, legumes and lots of soy products, but I still had a hard time losing weight. After a few years, I also realized that my vegetarian diet of soy, wheat and corn contained massive amounts of genetically modified poisons – and I especially discovered this debacle inside the vegan treats, many of which contained TVP, or textured vegetable protein, and processed GMO soy tofu.

Due to such body and health issues, I had quit the vegetarian diet and began to partake of the local diet coming from small farmers, collectors, ranchers and hunters. I only ate locally killed meats, and locally harvested nuts, fruits and vegetables.

Like millions of my fellow Americans on the permanent health watch, I must constantly live on guard, and stand ready against the relentless, genetically modified, crap food onslaught. As thousands of other Americans understand the truth, from this time on, I expose the US government’s insidious war against our bodies and our minds. This war is dead on serious, for we only come equipped in this life with one set.

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.

The Amerikan Empire VIII: Diseased Culture

In the contemporary USA there is a serious subculture that mixes together gun owners, actors and historians. They call themselves the reenactors. These historical period actors represent the aficionados of old military costumes, weapons, and martial movements. They regularly follow the sacred dates of battle memorials. Other tasks include interpreting for museum exhibitions and extras for historical episodes on cable TV. They do reenactments at historical sites, while replaying personal battle accounts. They truly do live the history and experience the combat flutters – even without the dead and mangled human bodies lying around them.

Across this United States, there are thousands of local historical societies doing their parts for regional memory. There also thousands of mini-museums, which feature glass cases of local artifacts and human stories. There also exist live nostalgia sites, and especially in the West and in the South, featuring dudes and gals dressed up in historical costumes. Along the ‘done up’ stage, tourists can see the period furniture, walk in the local stores, and visit the bars and restaurants. They can also watch the dressed-up people ‘doing their stuff the old way.’ We should not forget the medieval lore of Renaissance Festivals too. No other nation on Earth has so many museums – and museums for every imaginable taste inside of our tiny Earth universe.

Museums were actually a new invention to the human condition. Museums were not part of the large urban dynamic until the late 1700s, eighteenth-century. People hadn’t the need for museums during most of human history. Life, art, conflict, love and death were all around them. They just didn’t need a special space in order to experience their lives. The actuality of living worked fine – filled with surprises, sublime joy and tragedies.

The official founder of museums was none other than the ego-maniac dictator of the French Empire, (1798-1815), Napoleon Bonaparte. Like a good state thug, he just stole the grand art works of Italy, especially some of the more famous paintings, after his army had invaded the country. His army transported them to Paris, and then placed most of them inside an old Royal Palace in Paris, called the Louvre. Now every major and minor city across the world – has its very own, sacred ‘museum’ space. Bad habits are certainly addictive. But the irony of ironies, art mausoleums of the dead, commonly called, ‘museums,’ have become synonymous with modern, high culture.

Returning to the American reenactors, they generally prefer particular reenactments. Their favorites are two wars in US history: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. How many reenactments does one see representing the War of 1812 or the Mexican War? There is a definite reason for the reenactors’ preferences.

They prefer these two wars because they exemplified the good side to American culture: the right to complete and total personal freedom, and the cultural action of honor to defend such rights. The reenactors don’t just act and play for the sake of historical posterity; they also reenact because contemporary Amerikan culture represents the direct opposite of true freedom – and the fight for one’s honor to defend it. Only small sections of the American South still give obeisance to the cultural value of honor.

American culture has always had a terrible link to cruelty, but over a hundred years ago, true liberty and the defense of honor made the American a respected world citizen, violently birthed out of a newly created republic. Americans shared these values with most of the nations of the world. Nowadays unfortunately, only the day-to-day cruelty remains.

Global monopoly capitalism, state-public-coerced schooling, corporate media-advertising-Hollywood garbage, the prison-gulag, ‘legal’ institutional powers, the ultimate police-gang state, and the military-spy-industrial-war complex have all done their insidious parts in transforming American society into a low and diseased culture. Due to this terribly diseased state of Amerikan Imperial culture, the Empire is rotting from the inside. The terrible news is that the sociopaths that hold and manage political power in the States – also know this.

Actual American culture features the horrible diseases of immaturity, boredom, indiscretion and ignorance, mostly due to Amerikan public schooling and the corporate media TV-Hollywood junta. Watching the momentous crap on American cable television, from reality TV shows, to making money shows, to TV shopping channels, can convince even the most patriotic observer on the actual cultural rot.

The other current diseases in the culture represent gluttony, fear-distrust, frustration, and explosive anger: all of which come from extreme monopoly capitalism. Mention leads to the obesity epidemic, the fast food nightmare found in every town and city in the States, the overuse of psychotropic medications that lead to mass shootings, and the street hustling and petty crime that plague most of America’s cities.

The most life threatening disease found inside the culture is cowardice. This mortal killer comes from decades of succumbing to the authoritarian police, militarized surveillance state.

The word ‘culture’ originally comes from the word, agriculture. Just like people use the earth to create foods, cooking and the arts of the table, culture owes its first connections to the holy earth. The most durable cultures have always been the societies that have used the earth for their daily benefits, and yet they have also respected the earth and taken care of it. They understood the balance between use and abuse. Their religious practices always referred back to the earth. We can think on the Native nations in the Americas before the arrival of the European invaders.

Yet, culture can also exist outside of any connection to the earth due to the human ability to mentally create, through both imaginative fantasy and the adoption of complex language structures and vocabularies. With the rise of monotheistic religions on the world stage, such as Christianity and Islam, human cultures created new arts, sciences, idioms and civil societies. These cultural changes help explain Modern Europe’s obsessions with its modern fighting words, such as language, class, people, race and nation. As long as there exists the concept of ‘Europe,’ these fighting terms will not go away any time soon.

I remember when I lived in Europe, a few Europeans had stated to me that America had no culture. Compared to their thousands of years of conflict and history, American culture did not come close to the high levels of Europe. However, every subgroup, region, city, society, club and clique has a culture, even if it is a superficial or weak one. The difference in cultures relate to the various cultural levels, whether high or low. There do exist hierarchies of cultures. And cultures, like the earth and people, can get infections diseases – and even epidemics. This is the current, unfortunate state of the Amerikan Imperial culture.

A very good way to measure the general culture level, within a particular place or region, regards local festivals and celebrations.

One summer, I attended an annual festival in a small, western American town. The weather was beautiful and I was looking forward to feeling the magic of the small town west. What I received instead was lots of boredom, fear of controls and ignorance about the actual history of the region. I didn’t learn anything new; although, there were lots of vendors trying to get me to spend a lot of money.

I heard there was a night concert downtown, so I walked around the downtown area, and found out there was no concert at all. Apparently, the town politicians mandated no loud music after sundown in the fear of attracting people drinking alcohol and having fun. The next day, I walked around the downtown area again, and all I saw were stands, either selling local junk trinkets or genetically modified laced greasy, fast food. I also spotted the traveling carnival rides. Almost all the locals walking around were either fat or obese.

The rides were mostly nausea producing machines, meaning they moved round and round and round, while the rest of the carnival structures featured ‘carnival games,’ or really scam productions to steal people’s money, like throwing a heavy ball into a small, tilted basket, all in order to receive cheap and bogus prizes. Even if the person wanted to just walk around the carnival, they still had to pay up front for just entering the festival zone. On one side street off the Main drag, I observed that there were more police walking around than actual locals. I was so scared of the police presence that I left the area.

I returned again, the next day, to experience the town’s premier music concert. I walked to the park off the main drag. As I stepped toward the park’s entrance, a security staff guy then approached me and told me that I had to pay a good amount of money in order to enter. He also said that I could only buy their overpriced alcohol from the inside vendors, and that they had to search both my body and personal bag for pre-entry. If I got too drunk, then the police would have to arrest me.

I was so shocked about ‘the rules’ that I waked away. I also noticed a heavy local police presence around the park entrance. As I looked over from the outside, the band arrived on stage, and when they started playing, the music was absolutely horrible. The band played Country music cover songs, with a background player for other instruments, such as piano, banjo or accordion, and the musicians used music stands, so they could sing the lyrics. I also noticed that the crowd was sparse and almost nobody danced, except for a few older couples. This so-called festival had a theme related to the town’s history, and yet, I learned nothing from this event. The festival was a bust – and so was the town.

This town was dying like so many other towns out in the American west, and it failed to reinvent itself in order to bring in more tourist dollars. That terrible festival represented the same terrible level of general culture found in the town.

No matter what the local politicians cook up in their deceitful minds, if the local town possesses a low culture, then the place is on the path of dying badly. During that particular festival, I experienced more fear, boredom, disgust and ignorance than anything else. I had really experienced some of America’s mortal cultural diseases.

This is the reason culture is so important to people around the world. Culture represents the totality of our body expressions, values, productions, actions, words and contradictions. Culture, like the planets around the suns, and the moons around the planets, revolves around our difficult lives. We all possess, live and create culture. And culture always goes through movement and changes, just like the universe. Finally, culture also has ties to conflict and resistance.

For example, during an annual religious festival, in the year 1580, in the town of Romans, France, the local people moved into revolt mode. The party started off with some hard-drinking and soon transformed into a liberating revolution!

In contemporary Amerika, some urban hipsters, intolerant leftists, rich liberals and other pathetic snobs like to focus their disgust on to the Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors. Yet, it is truly their hypocritical, cowardly and low cultural lives that make most people gasp. As long as people breathe, they will create culture. The ones that move culture into resistance will create the highest and most powerful one. Meanwhile in the Amerikan Empire, the sociopaths holding power watch in fear.

As we Anarchists lose tolerance for the repetitive boredom, ignorance, and media fear campaigns vomiting out of the crap television programs, corporate radio broadcasts, and Hollywood movies – we can create alternatives spaces using similar visual mediums. As we perceive the endless public signs and billboards that advertise useless crap, threaten us, attack and harass our daily lives, we can avoid their public spaces and take alternative routes, poster or paint over them, or even take the small signs down. If a state or corporate-funded cultural space wants to rob us so they can make a cheap profit, then we can set up an another space open to marginalized forms of artistic expression – whether on a deserted sidewalk, in a basement or in a public park. The culture of resistance always breathes new life into the general revolution – and offers a marvelous and new sense of freedom.

We Anarchists have made the first steps in resistance and freedom just through our rejection of such a corrupt system. We understand the truth on both life and death, and we see through the sociopaths’ methods of social control and their criminality.

Movement and deep activity are what we are after.