Anarcho-Historian Lesson #13: Culture is also Conflict

When studying the Absurd Arts of History, the disciplined student soon uncovers particular patterns and occult designs within the human condition under civilization.

Empires come and go; they bust forth suddenly, and then implode within. Meanwhile, other states commit various legal crimes, and later embrace the art of war with divide and conquer methods. Most of human history records these outrageous deeds, which often refer to sinister and heroic men. Our historical heroes have often become great through the losers’ blood and scattered intestines across thousands of battlefields.

True culture comes out of the Earth, but it also erupts within the scarred lands of human combat, meaning dead, mangled bodies with all of the rotting flesh of humans, animals and plants; violence has also birthed the mutated fruits of human civilization, or as we say today, culture.

This historical truth displays itself perfectly through the decade of 250 BCE, from 260 to 250 BCE in the European Gregorian Calendar; although the events did not happen in Europe, but instead, commenced in the Indian subcontinent.

At one time, before the Great Mughal Empire, over a thousand years earlier, there was the Maurya Dynasty, or the Great Empire of the Maurya. This empire almost conquered the whole of the subcontinent, leaving only scattered unknown parts of the deep north, the east, deep south and the island of Sri Lanka, who were not directly under imperial rule. This is not to say that those little kingdoms did not pay their taxes or tributes to the imperial leaders.

The Maurya Empire of the Ancient Indian subcontinent, was not just any imperial master, it also helped create the spiritual power and mystical reputation of this particular world region.

Still to this day, Europeans have ventured into this European-colonized, tourist realm for a spark of spiritual solace, guidance, ecstasy, or simply to smoke hashish and opium – and hopefully enjoy it with the homeless religious ascetics, called ‘Sadhus.’

Other superficial, Europeanized tourists hang out in particular regions, such as Goa, in order to try the harder stuff, such as Molly, Acid, Heroin and Cocaine. Little do they know that Modern India helped receive its spiritual-mystical reputation from a very powerful empire that ruled there about 2,250 years ago!

One particular Maurya emperor solidified imperial power and grandeur for centuries to come. His name was Asoka. In pre-Machiavelli fashion, he managed to murder most of his siblings, so he alone could grab the throne. He was of a powerful build, possessing long stands of black coal hair and he had the dark eyes of a vulture. He was not only a plotter, but a mighty warrior and soldier who commanded thousands of troops, soldier-executioners.

A province had rebelled against the mighty Maurya, and his new role was to destroy this rebellion. He did just that – and with a terrible fury of public executions and the complete destruction of cities. Like a good military commander, he murdered thousands. The region had the name of Kalinga.

Asoka brutally conquered ‘the enemy,’ but he was also smart enough to adopt a new religious ideology in order to safely rule and maintain power. He publicly stated that he repented of his harsh military exploits, and needed to make ‘spiritual amends,’ and even heal the wounds of war and conquest, for both victors and defeated.

His majesty became the first Indian dynastic ruler to embrace the religion-philosophy of Buddhism. It was Asoka that actually transformed the philosophy of mental discipline, also called the Dhamma, into Buddhism, the world religion.

His imperial forbears did similar things. The first emperor of the Maurya became a Jain religious ascetic, living naked and fasting in a small room until this death – after the great conquests of course.

Asoka changed the laws to reflect Dhamma ethics: no stealing, no adultery, no sedition, no insults, no street brawling, etc. He helped establish the first universities in the world, and especially the one in Nalanda. He financed the Sangha, meaning the body of monks, to copy and organize the multiple sacred texts, or sayings of the Buddha.

Asoka even facilitated the monks to preach the message of the Dhamma to other parts of Asia. Buddhism eventually spread west to Gandhara, (modern-day Afghanistan, Central Asia and eastern Iran), and within a few centuries, moved east to the Indochinese lands and the Malay archipelagos. Asoka transformed the Maurya dynasty, from an empire representing ambition, ego, conquest, war and the bad death, to a universal regime of right conduct and right rule. Official, shoddy history displays the Leader as a righteous ruler that realized the error of his imperial ways. He made right by fostering the spread of the Dhamma on an international level.

What is quite ironic about this official history is that if Asoka was so saddened by his past ruthless behavior, then why did he not forsake his throne, like the Buddha did, as Gautama Siddhartha, some centuries earlier? Asoka could have rescinded his conquest of Kalinga, and even let the other subjected provinces decide for themselves, if they had wanted to pay taxes to the Great Maurya.

Asoka ‘felt remorse’ after his successful, initial conquests, and this is the key to understanding the grand historical mystery concerning conflict, culture and power.

Culture, or Human Culture, represents a chaotic blend of mental illusions, fantasies and manipulated mind obsessions constructed into everyday actions. Culture births from Agriculture, but it grows strong through State manipulations of past conflicts.

Culture first derived from Agriculture, the Violence of the Hunt and the Gathering of fruits-leaves-fungus-nuts, with the complete Art of food preparation also called, ‘cooking.’ This base of culture always began in the agricultural arts, or really the sacred lands, or the Earth of the people. The word culture even comes from the larger term of agriculture.

This truth about culture also explains why many bigots and ethnocentric creeps often enjoy the foods of cultures that they despise. Do not many Mexican haters in the United States also love their enchiladas, margaritas, tequilas, burritos and tacos? Most modern humans make cultural associations towards a particular culture’s foods.

State propaganda often repeats a false media image against a particular culture in order to encourage hate and murder. All state apparatuses understand that Culture can also grow through legalized murder, or warfare.

But as Culture gets more sedentary, routine and boring, the human condition under civilization needs to create, formulate and fantasize about what they are – and what they are not. This dualistic mental game, or Identity Creation, births the imagined ego.

The State always transcends such lies into transformative truths. The State Institution instructs the subject slaves about who they are, their essential characteristics, and who they are not – implying their opposites, or their enemies. Think on the American Cold War during the 1950s-1990s A.D., and now the US War against the Terrorists.

The most obvious methods in this identity construction are through a shared, common language and political symbols. The subject slaves know their particular symbols of rule, i.e., the emperor, the king, the prime minister, the president, etc., and they fully comprehend their ‘special language.’ Every subject can fully understand his or her fellow subject, even with slight accents, while the potential enemies speak a whole different idiom.

As the people transform into prideful and spiteful subjects, the State can easily motivate the ‘people’ to intellectually support – and even commit their loved ones to die for the State through continual warfare. And as the society becomes more complex and larger, some families hold even greater possessions than their neighbors, all of which become public signs of higher economic status. Class differences emerge, and so there is not only external war, but internal warfare, or Class War.

All of this war and conflict creates History. History is the final foundation of culture. Food, the State, Conflict, Imagined Ego Identity Crises, Language and History merge into humanity’s sacred vomit of Culture.

As Anarchists, many of us believe that Culture can resist the State. Yes, a counterculture can do such things, but the origins of culture, will always return to its fetid source: towards some Authority, and energy draining conflicts. Even the most antagonistic counterculture can fall prey to State and Corporate co-optation, sell-out practices. Think on pop-punk, MTV raps, and contemporary, classic rock stations.

If Culture is not the truth, and does not represent true authenticity in resisting the State and Capitalism, then what does not sell out? Where does the power of the people come from? The answer is only one moral practice: the Code of Honor.

The Code of Honor comprises: Mental Control or Mind Discipline, Defending Human Dignity, Gentlemanly-Gentlewomanly Prudence and Honesty, Courage to Act when hunted by the murderers of the State or the Elites, and boldly facing our Actual Deaths.

Even if such individuals form an armed cohesive guerrilla unit against Tyranny, i.e. the American Revolution, and even then, lose the gun battles and their lives too, i.e. the Spanish Republicans, they will eventually win the cultural war against the State and the political-economic Elites. Why is this? Honor with Integrity always defeats False Honor with Legal Criminality.

Culture is just two sides of the same rotten Human Coin.

 

Dangerous Ideologies II: The Psychobabble Quack Cult

 

Surviving among the cluster bombs of civilization, we have often surmised about our bizarre world as the same, absurd continuum from the beginning of time.

We cannot imagine our preposterous world without its job searches, employment hustles, apartments for rent, bank payment loans, security deposits, credit policies, police forces, prisons, schools, corporations, institutions, hospitals, houses of worship, advertising billboards, street scams, mafia-gang syndicates, criminal sprees, warfare and bombings, propaganda methods, State social control – and all the other criminal vices that plague and pester our everyday lives.

Within the sinister realm of ideologies, our modern world has seen the tumorous growth of outlandish ideological sects that have not only seized the modern State, but have also entered the realms of accepted science and common sense. Some ideological cabals have even taken the reins of social control through subtle hegemonic-state alliances over a short span of time. There are many such strange and nefarious stories from the darkened and hidden annals of human history.

The human mind, or the human brain, has represented one of the most mysterious areas for human research, and at the same time, one of the most desired regions for studying the evil arts of human social control. This explains the nauseating repetition of crap advertising and state-corporate propaganda, or ‘the news,’ found on most radio programs, television screens, and even when we click on to certain websites on our laptops.

Before there existed corporate media outlets under the direction of the political-economic elites, there were other proven methods in the discernment of mental operations. Those ancient methods considered the images, forms, inclusive of symbols, or languages, which seemed to constantly invade the human brain, meaning the intersecting lines and tapes of ego-centric, fantastic, conscious thoughts.

Some ancient religious ideologies preferred to tame the human brain and life actions through the methods of ethical self-systems, such as Confucianism, Jainism, Torah-Legalistic Judaism, Zoroastrianism, African Traditional Religions, Epicureanism, Daoism,  Sikhism and Stoicism. Other religious practices preferred to discipline the mind through the experiences of spiritual transcendence, such as Hinduism, Neo-Platonism, Pythagorean Religion, Neo-Egyptian Religion, Gnosticism, Christian Mysticism, Jewish Kabbala, and African Diaspora Religions. Only one religion was successful in combining both of these methods: Buddhism.

Buddhism denies the existence of the ego-self-soul-spirit bodies, and yet it allows for the Hindu belief in reincarnation-rebirth. It negates the complete idea of a controlling deity over human life, yet it also accepts the influence of malevolent spirits-illusions that infect our minds. Buddhism developed the only comprehensive, ancient method, or practice, in disciplining the human mind.

This mental discipline first emphasizes that we understand a simple truth: our thoughts are mental illusions, which create continual suffering in our lives, since our physical bodies also grow into old age, sickness and death. The second part of the method encourages the middle path of ethical behavior in avoidance of bad karma, or actions, words and thoughts, while engaging our will, or self-discipline, to meditate, or concentrate as much as possible, on our living actuality, such as breathing, walking, lying down, and other common life activities.

The spiritual method requires great self-discipline for the personal conquest of the monkey mind. This is the reason that Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, formed the ‘sangha,’ or the monk practitioners of Buddhism with their shaved heads, brown, crimson, yellow robes, begging canisters and sandals.

About a thousand years later however, another religious mystic would create an even greater method for mind control, and in another sense, he became the first practitioner of modern psychobabble-psychology – although crap history leaves him out of the psycho history lesson.

His name was Iñigo de Loyola. He was a Spanish knight of the lower Basque nobility. In the early 1520s, after a momentous battle against the French in Pamplona, he severely injured his leg during the combat. While bedridden and under severe pain, he almost died from profuse bleeding. He managed to recover, and later began to read books on the heroic lives of the Saints.

How did the Saints manage to go so many days without eating and yet keep their composure, and how did they maintain their dignity and peace of mind even when under physical punishments, mental torments, or the duress of prison? Loyola ultimately got out of bed, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He could no longer live as a knight, so he imitated the heroic walks of the Saints.

He gave up his weapons and fine clothes at a shrine across his route in northern Spain, and then wandered barefoot, limping with a staff, and wore a coarse cloak with relic pieces and crosses, only carrying a dirty leather bag to help him along the way. Through this hard journey, during the 1520’s, he began to keep a rough journal.

This journal would later become his famous Spiritual Exercises during the 1530s when he began his university studies to become a priest. By the 1540s, he already had a group of devotees educated in the method of the Exercises. What was inside those exercises that made them so powerful?

The Spiritual Exercises were the first, modern psychotherapy self-help manuals in disciplining the mind. Through his complete change and turnaround, from killing off his old Spanish Knight self, and remaking himself into a Catholic Saint, he attained something that only a human animal could create: the death of the old self into a resurrected new, transformed other – all through simple mind exercises.

A priest who has already inducted himself into the Exercises leads the adept through the four to five-week process. First, the acolyte has to examine his or her life to find the faults, weaknesses or sins, which have kept the person from attaining true spiritual power, or mental freedom and peace.

After confessing and acknowledging one’s sins, and next, actively changing his or her habits in transforming the vices into virtues, the devotee later experiences the life of Christ, and especially his Passion on the Cross through understanding the hard process of personal, mind transformation.

The spiritual adviser or priest leads the adherent through controlled breath work, visualizations, vocal, repetitive prayers, and then participation in the Mass. After each session, he or she feels energized and more transformed, while the follower truly feels the power in belonging to the militant body of Christ. The most important part comes at the end of the session, where the votary learns the discernment of spirits.

The discernment of spirits implies understanding the thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences, images and beliefs that come into his or her mind. Thoughts of doubt, laziness, sensual pleasure, guilt or nervousness represent demonic attacks, and they are let go, while thoughts or images that bring peace, spiritual rapture and joy come from the Holy Spirit. Once the adept successfully finishes the Exercises, he or she transforms into the disciplined believer-warrior. The worshiper has assumed control over his or her own ‘spiritual mind.’

The Order of Loyola, or the Company of Jesus, was also an authoritarian, military like Company under the direction of the Jesuit General. This mental practice was for the ‘greater glory of God,’ or really, the glory of the Catholic Church. Loyola wanted fanatical believers to defend the Church against the dangers of Protestant heresy, or against any non-Catholic belief systems across the globe.

Less than fifty years after the founding of the Company of Jesus, or the Jesuits, they had controlled most of the Catholic Universities in Europe. They also became the confessors to Catholic monarchs, built Catholic Schools across Europe and the American Continent, and had sent missionaries across the Earth in order to convert the heathens, while the Religious Wars had taken off across Europe. This religious order even became one of the wealthiest religious corporations in human history.

Modern Psychology, or Psychobabble, has used the same methods in recent history. ‘Social Workers’ have manipulated public opinion through the US corporate media, talk TV reality shows, such as ‘Dr. Phil’ and ‘Intervention.’ Psychologists have made strategic alliances with the State through the power of illegally imprisoning, ‘dangerous’ people, while holding full legal powers in giving testimonies in courts of law.

Psychiatrists have gained nefarious profits through their bogus psycho therapy sessions, murderous psycho surgeries and their legal rights in dealing brutal, psychoactive drugs to the unwilling. Psychology has become a respected area of scientific study in universities across the globe.

Since modern psychology’s founding, under the German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt during the late nineteenth-century, this ideology has dedicated itself to controlling and manipulating the human mind. Since its inception, it has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths across Europe and North America.

This ideology-pseudo science has mostly annihilated its victims through committing society’s weaker populations into asylums, mental hospitals and sanitariums. . The list of victims has included the autistic, the delusional-imaginative, the outspoken-rebellious, the open homosexuals, the excessively weird, the overly sensitive, the mentally deficient, the anorexic, the obsessive-compulsive, or the artistically strange.

Through its spurious research in ‘experimental’ behaviors, and crimes of staff brutality, neglect, restraints, tortures, psycho surgeries, and forced drugging of lethal pharmaceuticals, this ideological-institution has destroyed millions of lives.

Due to its powers as a respected science of social control, governments, militaries, police forces, corporations, schools and other dictatorial institutions across the societal spectrum, have used psychology as one of their preferred methods in dominance and destruction over others.

A short list of psychobabble’s historical crimes should suffice. The ideology and institution of Psychology collaborated with the Nazi Regime’s mass murder of mentally deficient people in the 1930s. Due to their sinister success in this psycho-operation, the Nazis went after Jews, Gypsies and other hated social groups during the 1940s.

The psychobabble pseudo science used the surgery-torture of lobotomies on outspoken-rebellious individuals from the 1930s-70s, such as Rosemary Kennedy, the actress Frances Farmer, the musician Josef Hassid, the painter Sigrid Hjerten, and thousands of other homosexuals, artists, non-conformists and other imaginative dreamers that seemed too weird. Most of the victims of lobotomies either died soon after or survived as incapacitated blobs.

In the 1970s, with lobotomies exposed as a form of torture and murder, and yet none of the ‘psycho doctors’ doing any prison time, psychobabble went on the offensive with its APA organization, the American Psychological Association, the Vatican of Psycho quackery.

Each successive year, this organization’s bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, seems to grow exponentially. Even a nervous tic could put one on the list of disorders, and often the same psycho babble experts have suffered from the same neuroses. These ‘experts’ even had ‘homosexuality’ listed as one of the diseases to cure.

The Psycho mob soon made important ties with the federal, state and municipal governments in the United States, giving quacks full legal rights in stating court testimony and holding the legal rights to commit people involuntarily. Psychology had trumped the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution. All of this didn’t stop the tortures however, and so the Psycho punishers began to use the horrific practice of electroshock therapy, or giving voltage shocks to the brains of rebellious mental patients.

They also went on the offensive in the corporate sphere, helping to create the Biotech monolith in legally dealing the deadly, psychoactive drugs, such as Prozac, Lithium and Thorazine, which opened a flood gate of profits for both the Biotech companies and the Psycho practitioners. This practice also opened the floodgates to serial killers and mass shooters, which have become part of the diseased American cultural dynamic.

A few Psycho monsters had earlier collaborated with the US Government of Sociopaths in some very evil behavioral experiments during the 1940s and 50s. There was Project 4.1, which studied radiation effects on Marshall Island natives who had been victims of the US government’s use of nuclear testing nearby, and the Tuskegee Study, where US government doctor-thugs and psycho quacks injected syphilis into African-American men in the South in order to study the mental effects of the disease. And there was the most famous of all, Project MK-ULTRA, where the CIA and psycho experts heavily dosed US military personnel, patients in mental hospitals, prisoners and prostitutes, with LSD, in order to find a ‘truth serum.’ Some of those unsuspecting participants were never the same people again.

During the Satanic sacrifice-Child molestation scare of the 1980s in the United States, Psycho hacks were found in the corporate media defending the discredited use of ‘repressed testimonies’ in children, something not seen since the European witch trials of the 1640s.

Throughout this same decade of the 1980s, the Psychology Mafia also instituted a terrible scam on rebellious teenagers from white, middle class backgrounds. With the collusion of disreputable Insurance companies, both parents and psychologists could involuntarily commit rebellious adolescents into mental hospitals or special homes that tried to reform the defiant young people. The parents paid the Insurance companies, while the Insurance companies, mental clinics and Psycho gangs reaped the profits.

These same mental centers often recruited local thugs and weirdos to control the kids, while a few of those brutes even got away with legal murder through using restraints and tortures on the kids. This crime syndicate especially flourished in the state of Florida. The evil connivance of Psychobabble, the State and the Insurance Mafia, destroyed thousands of American families due to neurotic parents duped into imprisoning their own children.

Psychologists have collaborated with the US military through its ‘Psychological Operations,’ while sanctioning the use of torture and murder during its recent genocides in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finally, I remember watching many of the Psychology graduate students when I was a doctoral student in history. Unfortunately, the art of history shared the same building complex as that quack ‘social science.’ Those Psychology doctoral students were often bizarre and anal, and a few of them were actual wing nuts. Were these the experts that were going to help the mentally afflicted? Psychology has even tried to capture of the art of history with its very own version of psychohistory!

Psychology-Psychobabble has been an integral state ideology through its arts of social control. There is nothing scientific about it. The Modern State and all tyrannical institutions, such as schools, cops and the military, adore it, while the Psycho leaders always eye newer and weaker victims to liquidate and murder.

We Anarchists know the truth about this disguised evil covered in the cloak of science and ‘normalcy.’ We must also fight their leaders as we fight the State, the cops, the rich elites, the powerful and the corporations. Ultimately, we should even refrain from using their terms and vocabulary, such as ‘psychopath, neurotic and schizo,’ which have become part of our common English vocabulary – and we should try to never see, speak with, or pay for a visit to one of those despicable fakes. Our Anarcho-spirit of liberty would engender a ‘mental illness’ and a forced imprisonment in one of their dungeons.

The Psychobabble Quack Cult is now the State’s and the Elite’s most trusted co-conspirator.

 

 

 

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.