In the year 1917, the US government decided to enter the war in support of Britain and France, which had been previously fighting against Germany in that Intra-European conflict. During this same year, the United States Government also deported scores of foreign-born Anarchists and radicals living in the United States. The state criminals first imprisoned them, and then forced them to board an old Merchant Marine ship to Soviet Russia.
The ship was more like a floating jail, where passengers could not get off until the final destination to Soviet Russia, and the ship had US military guards to ensure that the prisoners did not leave the ship until reaching that final destination. These radicals were actually lucky. Other activists in the States, who were both US citizens and that had spoke publicly against WWI, had to endure longer prison sentences than murderers and rapists under the new repressive laws of the Espionage Act. President Wilson was the instigator of these state crimes. He was a Liberal Democrat, a hypocritical reverend and a proto-Confederacy sympathizer.
Emma Goldman stood firm in not supporting such a monster when he ran for president, and even after other Leftists and Socialists almost proclaimed that phony as a new Democratic messiah for the USA. She was not fooled when the imprisonment and deportation orders arrived against her, and against her ex-lover and collaborator, Alexander Berkman. This deportation was a heavy blow to both of them. Their country of birth was Russia. However, they had transformed themselves into Americans after thirty plus years living in the country, and their Russian was quite spotty after hardly ever using it in the States.
Both of the Anarchists, Emma and Alexander, or Sasha, finally arrived in Russia, and even though they lost a country, they had hoped to see an actual workers revolution in progress. During their short sojourn, they even met with Lenin and watched the bureaucratic-military genius of Trotsky. Yet, something was seriously wrong.
The aging Peter Kropotkin, an Anarchist theorist that had previously lived in exile in Britain and was dying in Russia. He warned both of them about the Bolsheviks. Emma encountered some old Anarchist revolutionaries and comrades shut up in revolutionary prisons. The Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, even tortured and murdered Anarchists like the repressive Czarist secret police. People were starving to death on the streets. Children in rags stole food. There was still a Civil War in the country with the ‘Whites’ losing the war yet receiving support from the capitalist world powers: Britain, France, the United States and Japan.
The Anarchist Black Legions of Nestor Makhno actually helped destroy the murderous Whites in the western part of Russia that had been murdering Jews and Gypsies in the Ukraine. After the extermination of the Whites in the west, the Bolsheviks then used the Red Army and the Cheka to hunt down the Anarchist Black Legions. When the revolutionary Kronstadt sailors revolted, the Bolsheviks sent in the Red Army to liquidate them too.
Both Emma and Sasha had realized the truth: the Bolsheviks had set up another dictatorship under a phony worker’s republic. When both of the Anarchists publicly criticized the Soviet Union in the radical press, Communist Party maniacs all over the world went on the offensive against them. They even threatened violence acts against them if they spoke at public events. The Communist movement had then become another mortal enemy of the Anarchists. About ten years later, the Anarchists in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War would learn the same hard lesson. In Politics, all ideological formations and associations are the Anarchists’ enemies because they seek control and violence through the seizing State Power.
And these groups are still our enemies today. Yet, some Anarchists dream of a united Left front to destroy capitalism and the state. It does seem quite powerful to fantasize about a revolutionary movement of thousands upon thousands in the streets, but it is often a political pipe dream and a mirage.
The human condition under civilization truly exists inside an even funnier existence. Humans are both absurd and contradictory. Humans create and transform older cultures, yet they hold on to outdated values and belief systems from older cultures that were completely different from their own, and that had encountered very different realities. We are both innovators and contradictory buffoons.
Not everyone out in the streets protesting against a corrupt and sinister government wants the same outcome, or has joined ‘the movement’ for the same reasons. Revolutionary unity is a fiction, just like doctrinal purity is a lie. Doctrinal purity needs an Inquisitorial court, while revolutionary unity needs a Marxist vanguard party. The Marxist party fiction that the masses make revolts is also a lie because there exists no such monster as the masses. Revolutions explode due to a decent sized minority hating the system, the state losing legitimacy in the minds of some intelligent citizens, and the implosion of the society into some type of monumental disaster, whether invasion, economic destruction, or both of them together.
The Marxist vanguardist parties are our enemies. This includes those few madmen hawking their rag papers at small urban protests making up a Communist Revolutionary cell outfit, or any Maoist, Socialist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Leninist, Guevarist, etc. and etc. conglomeration. The Fascist nut jobs and creeps are our enemies. Well, they are enemies with everyone too and quite proud of it. The Liberal-Leftist-Progressive-Reformists are our enemies because they only want a few token reforms for them only, and to leave the same rotten system for everyone else. Conservative-reactionaries are our enemies because they believe that if society and culture would never change, then everyone would feel more content. They forget that people change and culture changes. We are all just too human.
All political groups, ideological formations and party alliance positions are the enemies of all humanity. What all of these political groupings truly want is to seize a part of the state, to have a say in the decisions, to maintain control over others, and to feel their wills to power transformed into violent state power. Their only revolutionary positions are that they have been left out from also gorging on the pie of power. They are resentful and vicious, and nothing more.
As Anarchists, we ought to never align with them, never join their coalitions, never make political pacts them. We need only watch them, peruse a few of their documents, and continue to read more history. We can leave them to their ‘struggles,’ since most of the true believers will die resentful old men and women, and even enter the realms of mental insanity. But all political ideologues are malicious fools. Malicious fools are dangerous and can turn violent for any reason. If they decide to fight us, then we will give it to them. For us, it is not about losing and winning, but defending honor, dignity and freedom through the human right of self-defense. For this reason, the gun is always near.
Guns and Anarchy 