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.

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.

The Amerikan Empire VII: Bad Education through Dirty Social Control

After twelve years of living overseas in Europe, vagabonding and traveling around the world, I decided to return to the Amerikan school system. I wanted to get the top degree as a historian, a PhD. Yet, I always hated the Amerikan system of ‘education.’ Like most people in the country, most of my Amerikan schooling experiences were quite negative.

I had thought that studying for a PhD, or a useless doctorate degree, would signify a totally different experience. I would be able to read what I wanted, and study various themes and topics that interested me. I could write passionately about what truly fascinated me related to historical stuff. I could then become a professor too.

I finally did receive my longed for PhD six years later – but I was terribly wrong. I was good at history, but common sense kicked me in the butt. The rot of the education system had even infected the deadbeat world of Amerikan university graduate school.

From daycare-head start, nursery ‘schools’ to the doctoral program schools in Amerikan universities, bad education reigns through dirty social control. The main culprit represents the mandatory and compulsory state ‘public’ school. The Amerikan forced and coerced schooling system exists solely for training obedient, institutionalized slaves. The elites wanted, and have continued to want, mental cowards that follow orders throughout their bad employment careers. The Amerikan school system currently runs like a minimum security jail system confined within the bureaucratic iron cage.

I’ll never forget my first few weeks on the Amerikan university campus after being out of the ‘school system’ for over ten years. The university charged and extorted students for almost everything that they needed on campus. There were counseling fees, student bookstore fees, student union fess, building fees, computer resource fees, etcetera, and even teaching grad students had to pay for tuition.

In the Amerikan Empire, the state, inclusive of federal, state and city governments, normally tax the citizens incessantly. However, the Amerikan university had perfected this art of taxation, charges and fines, which possessed even greater reach than the state – since tuition costs rose by the rate of inflation times twenty each year.

The university also had a long list of fees and sanctions that required continual outlays of payments, such as parking fees, for both cars and bicycles, late registration fines, drinking alcohol on campus fines, skateboarding fines, and the poor undergrads that lived in the dorms had it worse. Their lives were exactly like prisoners in minimum security jails. They had to inform the security staff when both leaving and arriving in the buildings. Any minor room infraction could land them serious fines, ending up homeless – or even arrested by the campus donut brigade.

I was really shocked when I saw one peculiar ‘innovation.’ The university had a full-fledged and legal, autonomous police force, with its very own detective and jail, cops openly carried semi-automatic guns, high-powered shotguns, and the unit had an armored vehicle with drug sniffing dogs. These cops were often young and hard-core. They regularly rode and walked around the campus looking to harass and bust both unwary students and strangers that ventured on the campus spaces.

While the cops kept the campus on lockdown, surveillance cameras were prevalent everywhere. It wasn’t as bad as a casino or a prison, but it came close. The vigilance cameras were in the hallways, library bookcase areas, and they even faced the front doors of restrooms.

A terrible ambience of fear and distrust pervaded the entire university campus community. The university bosses or administrators managed the whole operation from the top down. The Regents or Trustees possessed the legal management of the university, so they appointed the president. The president next appointed his or her own assistants, and in turn, they appointed the provosts, vice provosts and the other campus directorships. Meanwhile, the provosts appointed the deans and the assistant deans, and the deans appointed their assistants. Almost none of these six figure salaried administrators, and in the case of the president, millionaires, taught classes. They generally attended meetings and passed e-mails to each other.

The administrative chiefs often delegated the heavy university workload, innocuously called service requirements, onto the tenured professor managers. These administrators could dismiss any worker or terminate any job position at will – even if the victim had tenure.

This American university system resembled the old Communist Central Committees of Eastern Europe, or the old Corporations run by the family juntas of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century. The top directors also referred to ‘their university’ as a not-for-profit corporations. The irony apparently escaped them.

The tenured professor managers were quite disappointing as both workers and people. They often acted in a cowardly manner. They never argued with the administrators, and never fought back against most university injustices. The few who did fight back, ended up fired. Most tenured university professors transformed themselves into institutional drones.

Most of them had already transformed themselves into servile workers through faithfully attending the Amerikan Empire school system.

The worst of the bunch were the other graduate students. I had thought that my fellow students would emerge as intellectual colleagues where deep discussions on history, culture and politics were commonplace. The opposite was true. With so little money at the bottom of the pyramid and with most of us gaining horrible salaries at the poverty level, every other graduate student was a competitor for the meager amounts of available money. Hatred ruled inside of those tiny and claustrophobic grad student offices.

The hatred and anger seethed at all levels on the campus. Administrators often blew their tops against recalcitrant professors. Some professors went ballistic against grad students. The grad students showed their rage through harshly grading the papers of the undergraduates – who represented the ‘lazy’ students. Yet it was the laziest of the bunch, the administrators, who received the greatest payouts. And from there, the pyramid of tension, hate and control regularly flushed down into the university cesspool.

I began to hear other horrible stories and legends. A tenured, professor-pervert got away with his sexual indiscretions due to his ability to garner outside grant money for the university, i.e., the administration. The uni donut cops managed a corrupt practice of busting drivers around the campus at night for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, (DUI) money; meanwhile, some of those same cops would get drunk and then receive free rides home. University administrators would physically threaten attorneys, coaches and professors that refused to bend to their wills.

I also heard about some departments where cowardly professor bullies formed mob actions against their non-conformist colleagues. The university environment functioned under some of the worst institutionalized behavior in the education industry. Only the Amerikan prison gulag or the US Post Office seemed worse off – and yet, I had voluntarily entered this sick world.

I stayed on for six years longer until I received my PhD. I had no where else to go. I was good at history, reading and writing. But I paid a serious price for my desperate and stubborn will to continue and finish graduate school. I too fell victim to the pettiness, the competitive meanness, the nasty envy, and worst of all, the frustrated anger. Yet, I prided myself in resisting such institutional vices. It took me four years after receiving my PhD to fully heal my mind from such a harsh ‘educational’ experience.

After reaching the long sought doctoral degree, I then realized something even more sinister – the Amerikan university had become a rotten extension of the Amerikan high school, which in turn, birthed itself out of the infernal concoction of Amerikan forced schooling, or ‘the public school system.’

The mandatory public school system was actually a recent historical phenomenon. About a hundred years ago in the USA, few people attended the local public schools. Kids might attend a local school-house, but the school was completely autonomous, under a schoolmaster or even a local teacher. Most children attended for a few years, but it often ended when they had to work at their parent’s businesses, farms or small ranches. Children mainly learned their life and work skills from their parents.

At about the same time, Amerika’s elite business capos, such as the Rockefellers, began to lobby the state governments for forced, mandatory schooling. They wanted a more ‘disciplined’ workforce, and so they united with German Empire trained, public intellectuals, such as John Dewey, to set up ‘school boards,’ ‘child labor laws,’ and ‘teacher colleges.’ The Amerikan federal and state apparatuses supported this school system because they watched the spectacular military power of the German Empire, or the Second Reich, which had compulsory state schooling. Other world empires, had also utilized this successful school model, such as the French Empire and the British Empire.

By the 1920s, most US states had some form of mandatory public school law, which gave states the legal right to take away parents’ kids, and hold them against their wills for a good party of the day. The elites however, such as the Rockefellers, never sent their kids to those obligatory public schools; instead, their sons, and eventually, daughters too, attended elite college preparatory private schools, and afterwards, attended the ivy league, elite universities.

The requisite state, Amerikan public schools had more administrators than teachers. They often sat in offices, never taught, and received great salaries, benefits and severance pay packages. Under them were the ‘education leaders,’ or principals, who also made very good money.

In order to earn a little money, I did some substitute teaching at some local public schools. During my period breaks, I overheard teachers recounting some outrageous stories of corrupt Board of Education bosses, often coming into the main office for a few hours and then leaving for the rest of the day. And these bosses made six figure salaries! At the same time, most of the teachers that I saw in the teacher’s lounge seemed tired, worn out, weird and their pay was average. The teachers did most of the work, since the principals never really taught any classes.

Working as a substitute also pained me to view the poor children harassed, categorized and ordered around by the school authorities. Bullying was rampant and the violence between students often exploded into nasty fights. The corporate media liars always blamed school violence on bad kids, bad parents and bad teachers. But I saw first hand that it was the institutional violence of enforced schooling, which had started this nefarious cycle.

The school system of the Amerikan Empire did teach a few reading and math skills. Most importantly however, those schools also taught more deceitful lessons.

The compulsory schooling scam has taught children about their low place in the social hierarchy, and how in order to ‘stay afloat in the world,’ the good student must lie, tolerate boredom, elicit favors, and maintain a false, hypocritical public persona.

The Amerikan state school has represented the most impressive institution for maintaining social control. As long as the Amerikan Empire continually murders and vomits out its casualties across this planet, this disguised jail system for children, adolescents and young adults, will rip apart and destroy its own sad victims.

History shall condemn such a monstruous institution clothed in the black robes of ideological deceit, or ‘educational policy.’ Compulsory State Education has forced millions of parents, under the terrible threats of the State, to hand over their own children for mind and personality mutilation.

Populist-Fascist Social Movements: their emergence and their ends

January 27, 1889 was the date of decision. The day started out quite nice and sunny for a rough winter in that beautiful, modernized city of Paris. Construction workers had almost completed the stunning Eiffel Tower for the upcoming Worlds Fair in October. Many French people thought there was a confidence in the air. France recently suffered terrible losses to Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, and then there was the Commune Civil War that followed in 1871.

About twenty years earlier, the late dictator, Napoleon III, had commissioned an architect to demolish most of the medieval winding streets that had made Paris so romantic. The city still had its charms though, even with its wide boulevards that could march whole armies to better exterminate recalcitrant revolutionaries. This urban project was the first successful modern gentrification undertaking. Also around this time, French artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals had become world-famous through producing works that displayed the modern trends of Impressionism, Realism and Symbolism.

But there was another rumbling in the air that day. A French general by the name of General Boulanger had become the talk of the nation. This great and honorable man seemed to have fortune on his side. He was ready to retake his beloved France with the movement that supported him to power. This opportune winter moment was the day for his sunny ‘coup d’état.’

That French term meant that this military adventurer and strongman had to seize the day, take over the state, become a new Caesar, dictator – and even a tyrant. General Boulanger won the election to the French Parliament, La Chambre des députés, but he couldn’t bear to sit among the corrupt deputies that most French citizens hated. His ‘political movement’ wanted him to declare himself President, lead the French Army to disband the corrupt Congress and win back territories that the Second German Empire, or Second Reich, had seized during the last war.

The corrupt French press could not resist him, and they transformed the general into a greater than life, ‘Hero of the Nation.’ But there was more to the man than his press persona. The political mobilization that supported him was the real power behind such a figure. A bizarre political cabal had already mobilized angry French citizens, mostly conservative ones, who saw their country turn into something they hated. The French Third Republic was quite corrupt and the ideals of French Revolution seemed to matter little to the ambitious band of politicians in Paris.

A movement coalesced between old Monarchists, (Boulanger even spoke to Napoleon’s exiled family living in Switzerland), devout Catholics, and militarists who wanted to see France avenge its humiliating defeat against Germany, and possibly even – defeat the great British Empire and complete Napoleon’s sacred dream of the ‘L’empire français universel.’

The Boulanger political deployment started off as a propaganda agitation campaign. It next moved into a street mode of action, and then resorted to selective violence against its political enemies. Now they had their symbol personified in a dignified general that showed his public face against the corrupt republic.

The problem with this social movement was that it did not represent the whole of the country. Courageous French intellectuals began to expose the shaded groups behind the Man, and especially the political alliances in the shadows that hated the ideals of the French Revolution, which most of the French population did still support.

With the exposures against him, General Boulanger got scared, lost his honor and courage, and he flaked out with his coup d’état. The scheming plotter in the costume of a French general would eventually kill himself just two years later. This political moment in French History became the Boulanger Affair. It represented the first modern populist-social movement of France. This movement attempted to destroy the country in order to save it.

Populist-fascist social movements are the most powerful hegemonic political blocks in modern democratic countries. They emerge when the entire democratic system begins to rot from the inside. Corruption becomes rampant, the legislature transforms into paid off hacks, and the government turns into another tyrannical regime. Anger increases substantially through the citizenry, and especially among the male population. The term populism signifies a political movement geared for a large section of the people, or the ‘nation.’

Populist-fascist movements grab their power through unifying angry elite institutions with angry social movements, most often religious ones. Religious social movements work wonderfully because they have the best social meeting spaces: churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. Through uniting powerful people with powerful social movements, the populist-fascist social movements transcend into optimum political forces or complete counter-hegemonic blocks against the state – while making alliances with other scheming sections of the state. These contradictions are not apparent among the street level activists.

Once the populist-social alliances increase their organizing into mobilizations, they move powerfully into the political field, through both agitation and violence. They ultimately hope to seize the state in order to murder their enemies. They lost in 1880s in France, but they almost won about a hundred years later in the United States.

America in the mid 1980s and into the 90s was a volatile place. Right-wing intellectuals have often talked about that time in history as a type of ‘restoration’ under President Reagan – but it was anything like that. What really happened was that elements of the Republican Party, implying certain members of the old guard that surrounded Nixon, the disgraced former president, decided to form a powerful political alliance, or a new hegemonic block. This block would emerge as a powerful force in dividing the Democratic party electorate, which allowed that party to control the US Congress for over twenty years.

First, they forged an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, which had about a quarter of the US population. The Catholic Church was always the strange Christian group looking on the outside compared to the standard Mainline Protestant Churches of America, such as the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. But now they had a substantial part of the population, (about one quarter), and with special thanks to President Reagan allowing a Vatican ambassador to D.C. and signing the Immigration Reform Act into law – the first dice was cast.

Later, right-wing activists helped this base achieve even greater mobilization and power. The conservative activists in the Catholic Church set up the Moral Majority Organization using a Baptist political-preacher, (from the South), as a front man, named Jerry Falwell. Catholic conservatives would use this same strategy through mobilizing other single issue front group-crusades, such as fighting against the separation between Church and State, anti-homosexuality, anti-pornography, anti-teenage rebellion, anti-illegal drugs, anti-sex education, exposing Satanism in rock music and popular culture, and most importantly, anti-abortion.

Those particular political mobilizations proceeded into the street agitations. The single issue that could unite them was abortion. Phony anti-abortion evangelists, or disguised Catholic preachers, entered the parachurch world of Evangelicals that met in rented spaces, such as movie theaters, Mainline Protestant churches and even inside Masonic halls! These religious movements represented the Charismatic types that ‘spoke in tongues,’ or unintelligible gibberish, fell on the floor through being ‘slain in the spirit’; while selected parishioners blurted out prophetic statements during the worship, and the church goers danced sexually to Christian musicians playing a type of repetitive soft rock beat with militarized church lyrics, such as ‘Army, marching, warfare, battle, victory, etc.’

These disguised abortion preachers even entered the sacred Protestant spaces of Southern Baptist churches. For the first time in its religious history, the Roman Catholic Church forged a strong political alliance with its most hated rivals – the heretics, under the common single issue of abortion. History has always been so absurd.

The anti-abortion evangelists successfully mobilized these hurting people, or ‘heretics,’ into joining the crusade against abortion in America. In the beginning of the crusade, the main groups against abortion in America were political committees formed through the US Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

Suddenly, a populist-fascist social movement had conceived its nativity on the American political scene. Even former pro-choice Republicans, such as the Reagan successor, President Bush, joined the crusade. All of a sudden, angry activists were attacking, confronting and surrounding women’s health centers across the States, and then in the early 90s, the movement resorted to the common tactics of religious fanatics through murdering doctors and health providers across the country. A homegrown political terrorist net birthed, but America’s political police, the FBI, refused to take down the movement. A certain element of America’s political and intelligence elites had a big stake in the anti-abortion assemblage.

But the six laws of history had to come into play, and the Roman Catholic Church failed to understand the cultural blocks that had formed within the United States up to that time. American women had already achieved substantial power in society through fighting two previous waves of feminist agitation. Many American women had already attained important career and lifestyle choices in their lives, and they were not going to give up their hard-won privileges due to some anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-contraception religious fanatics.

America’s Women organizations countered the movement through fully allying with the Democratic party and mobilizing, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of citizens to annually march on D.C., something the anti-abortionists could not do. Some political elites in Washington stood aghast. Their sick plans of ‘national salvation and resurgence’ met a strong political counterforce.

The Republican Party countered with their Convention of 1992, which featured speeches of selected religious fanatics and fascists in order to scare the opposition. It did just the opposite. They looked quite bad on TV. The conservative Southern Democrat, Clinton, seized on the scare and placed himself into the political center. He won the presidency and all of a sudden, the federal government changed its tolerant policy with the populist-fascists, while they began to hunt the most extreme terrorists inside of the anti-abortion crusade.

The populist-fascist crusaders attacked President Clinton mercilessly through the press. But the president was also an expert killer like the ones that preceded him. He had the US government exterminate the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco as a warning and a lesson to the defiant holdouts in the Movement. It worked.

Abortion stayed legal in the US, even with a Supreme Court that had a Catholic majority. The Mormons decided to bolt from the anti-abortion alliance and leave it to the Catholic Church and the rattled Evangelicals. And then ‘Mala Fortuna,’ or Bad Fortune, stabbed the Catholic Church in the foot. Media headlines exposed to the public that the Catholic Church had protected pedophile priests and perverts within its ranks. The public exposure of such crimes permanently damaged the reputation of the Catholic Church in American culture. The Roman Catholic Church would never be able to return to its short glory that it possessed during the 80s and 90s.

The mobilization did work in intimidating many doctors from performing abortions. Now, it is difficult to find abortion providers in many parts of the States. But there also exists the abortion pill that does not require surgical procedures.

This anti-abortion movement has kept up the protests, but it could not seize the state in order to complete its extermination of the ‘evil ones.’ It achieved a stalemate. A hundred years earlier in France, it lost.

In Spain however, during the 1930s, it won. The Spanish populist-fascist movement won because it had the backing of foreign intervention: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the secret support of the British and American governments.

For us Anarchists, this modern political story can help us recognize the political environments that encourage these movements, how they mobilize, and how we can ultimately help destroy them.

Populist-fascist social movements lose when a more powerful alliance of institutions and the people reject their plans. They stalemate or tie when they meet equally powerful social-cultural-political mobilizations. They win when they have the outside support of powerful foreign governments.

Gun Culture Exhibit A: Safety, More Safety and Even More Safety

The terrible news stories never end. First, I read about a top state spy honcho, while representing a pro-citizen disarmament government, who shot his weapon’s laser sights at foreign visitors. Next, I glanced at some story about an irresponsible gun owner that allowed his gun to blast off as he was testing it in front of people. If he was lucky, then nobody ended up wounded or murdered. Sadly, this has not been the case from previous collected accounts of negligent discharges.

I have also perused news items about guys showing off their guns to their friends, forgetting that they had recently gone out shooting, and then messing around with their weapons while a live round was in the chamber. The stupid guy then murders his friend that was sitting right across from him. So many lives destroyed over some fool showing off his new weapon!

There are other stories about cops, and cop leaders, demonstrating the proper use of weapons, and then having them shoot off live bullets in front of a shocked audience. Sometimes, the round destroyed some inanimate object, while other times the cop gangers shot themselves with permanent consequences. For all of us that handle weapons, we all must repractice basic gun safety.

Guns are tools. But they are very specific tools. Guns are tools specific for extermination, whether at an old TV that only plays static, or against a rabid, four-legged animal ready for a meaty bite, or even against a human, a two-legged ‘animal’ ready to do some serious violence. We must all safely handle these tools of extermination, so that we do not destroy ourselves, our families, or our friends.

The first step for using any gun or any weapon is not shooting it live, or even disassembling it and then the reassembly. The first step before holding any weapon, is learning, memorizing, checking, and then constantly reviewing the basic gun safety rules. The alternative is just one negligent discharge within a few seconds that can horribly alter our human existence. In one fleeing moment we could destroy our lives and the lives of others.

The first safety rule is to treat all guns and weapons as if they had live rounds inside, meaning ‘loaded.’ This basic rule is not paranoia, but a safe way of always pointing the weapon in a direction where it will not hurt any living being or dangerous object, such as a closed gas canister, and at the same time, always checking the gun safety, releasing the magazine, (if there is one), and examining the chamber. Even if the gun has not been used for a long time, the owner has to do the same procedures. He or she has to make sure that the weapon points at an area that will cause the least amount damage, if the gun happens to discharge a round. Next, he or she has to perform the gun safety check: magazine check, (if there is a magazine inserted), and a chamber check to see if it is free of bullets.

Finding a safe area to point a weapon is hard. If you live above or below someone, then you cannot point the weapon at most surfaces, because almost all bullet rounds go through walls, doors, windows, floors and ceilings. Even pointing the gun at a regular old wall is dangerous because you just don’t know who there is on the outside, on the other side of the wall, or just standing around your place. The point of this lesson is that you never want a negligent discharge.

If you live in an urban environment, the sudden, loud ‘bang’ of a weapon firing is enough for a snitch, cowardly neighbor to call on the donut brigade. When the cops show up later at your door, good luck in not allowing the police gang to push you out of the doorway and then search your personal space. Cops always find some evidence for some crime. The police can then say that the gunshot gave them the probable cause. In some anti-gun Amerikan big cities, a civilian negligent discharge is an actual crime. This is one of the reasons some gun people live in out in the rural parts where guns are prevalent. Gunshots tend move in and out with the wild animal noises.

The second rule about pointing the weapon in a safe direction, also implies that we need to see the target and what is behind it. Since we consider all weapons loaded, we also need to handle and store our weapons in such a way that if a negligent discharge of a bullet does go off, the bullet will do the least amount of damage to the target right in front of it. After we check the gun’s chambers, with no magazine, (or an empty magazine), and the safety on, then we should lock the weapon and store it inside some container. We should place the container in such a way as to have the barrel facing a hard surface, and where there is usually no human contact or pressurized structures behind the surface.

We should never point the weapon at our faces or bodies in order to check for obstructions in the barrel. The gun owner has to do the safety check first, and then disassemble the weapon second. After cleaning and reassembly, the gun owner can then inspect for the barrel for obstructions. After reassembly, the gun owner can also check both the safety and trigger functions – not pulling the trigger itself.

This is the third rule. Never put the finger on the trigger unless you are ready to destroy something. The trigger mechanism is the final act for extermination. Once the owner pulls the trigger even slightly, it can never return back. The round will fire and then come the consequences. This is the reason that all guns come with trigger guards. Even the slightest pressure on the trigger can set it off. We should keep the trigger finger on the frame, and only put that finger on the trigger when all other options are not available in a combat situation. We are now ready to commit devastation. This mentality also implies that we are in the right mind.

The fourth rule is extremely important. Never handle a gun or any weapon while partying with friends, while anxious or mentally preoccupied, after imbibing some alcohol, and don’t even make the gun a common conversation piece for bragging rights, or just to talk about your day shooting with someone. It is better to keep quiet about your weapons, then letting your neighbors or acquaintances find out what you possess. When things get nasty in the Empire, that same neighbor or acquaintance may become the snitch narc that will turn you into the police. Talking about your gun to other people often moves into showing off your gun to other people. When drinking alcohol or mentally preoccupied, you will probably not do any safety checks. A fun get together between friends could turn into the most terrible act we could ever do.

In all my many years of handling weapons, hunting trips, military experience and plinking with friends, I have had one negligent discharge. Luckily, I was not hurt, and nor did I really blast anything important. But as they say, one mistake is one too many, and this is especially true with firearms. I learned my lesson because I startled myself and I felt an acute shock that I could commit such a mistake. I swore that I would never do such a negligent act ever again and I returned to the gun safety protocols. I am still a fanatic for firearm safety. That one embarrassing experience solidified the first and only rule with handling any weapons: safety, more safety, and even more safety.

Anarchists of Action: Violence and Silence, the Death of the Ego-Self

I read some interesting articles on the international Anarcho-blogosphere about the need for more insurrectionary Anarchism versus the more middle class oriented, Civic Anarchism.

The Insurrectional Anarchist practices the original Class War methods of classical Anarchism, meaning Propaganda of both the Word and the Deed. These actions imply that the Anarchist reads and writes prolifically, and then proceeds into the insurrectionist mode. The insurrectionist mode involves industrial or commercial sabotage, firebombing work places and factories, destruction of targeted private property, attacking cops at protests, fighting back against Fascists at their demos, and killing selected targets from the elites and the powerful.

Some defenders of these methods call themselves Anarcho-Nihilists or Anarcho-Individualists. A few have even stated that their actions value more than their lives, and that imprisonment from the state becomes the beautiful moment of peace, and for a few, a true clarity of vision. They also state that the insurrectionist locked inside the prison inferno is truly free because he or she has no more fear of the State.

Civic Anarchism tends to exist in many urban centers of the ‘Western’ European and Colonial-Settler European regions, such as the Americas and Australia. The Civic Anarchist, and mostly associated with the Anarcho-Syndicalist, radical unionist bunch, reads and writes a lot, and then works within the system through ‘radical’ organizing. They eschew violence and often condemn the violence of certain Anarchists. The ‘civies’ might organize a workplace, or help out in a strike, but there is a lot more organizational tactics at work, such as endless meetings, writing articles for Indymedia, or setting up a benefit punk show for collecting more organizing funds.

According to the Insurrectional Anarchists, the Civic Anarchists play it safe like their Activist-Leftist, Middle Class counterparts. According to the hard cores, the Civic Anarchists are really Anarcho-activists, and they are not much different from the mortal enemies of Anarchists: the Marxist sect-ideologically crazy activists, with their ideological platforms and assemblies lasting over two hours.

The insurrectionists might have very good reasons to criticize the civic-minded Anarchists. Anarchy is not just talking at meetings and writing polemics. Anarchy also represents the actions of taking what is ours and attacking targets; however, the insurrectionists, like their civic rivals, are also guilty of too much talk.

Too many Anarcho-revolutionaries scream their violent works on their own websites and hard copy pages – and they have even given interviews related to ‘illegal’ activities to corporate news organs! A good example were some Eugene Anarchists that publicly proclaimed their resistance to the State and Capitalism after the WTO protests in 1999.

After their foolish interviews to the corporate press, the full violence of the State came upon them, and then a few Anarchists ended up doing some hard time in prison. While these same insurrectionists are often fanatics for ‘security culture,’ they have often broken their very same rules. Nothing is more damaging to any revolutionary group than having boasters and blowhards scream about their ‘actions’ against the enemy.

I have also read uncountable declarations on the Internet blogosphere, mostly coming from particular Anarcho-gun owners, stating that they were ready to violently throw down against the US government if they try to take away their guns. Oh really? Are those armchair tough guys going to risk it all when the SWAT team thugs show up at their front doors? It is one thing to write the tough words on the Internet, and it is quite another thing to actually engage in a heated gun fight with the authorities.

All of those hard cores know full well that the state spies and police forces are also listening and reading their pronouncements. In the dangerous world that we live in now, one simple slip of the tongue, and often a person goes down. Sometimes, the civic-minded Anarchist that printed the insurrectionist diatribe in his or her written format, whether electronic or paper, represents the one that pays dearly. Other times, the insurrectionist falls into his or her own imprudent post-action actions. The state authorities don’t care much either way, because at least they have found another enemy to destroy who is against the legitimate authority of the state.

Anarchists ought to remember the first rule of any organization antagonistic to the state: silence. For example, the Italian Mafia has always had its code of ‘Omertà,’ and the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Eastern Europe had the code of “Mesirah.’ The Gypsies have also used their code of silence against harassing state bureaucrats.

The Anarchist community has to abide in the code of silence. Silence has generally related to the first law of both prudence and maturity. We also have the old saying, ‘silence is golden.’ If an Anarchist has committed a propaganda of the deed, then the Anarchist must never talk about or refer to the past event – ever again. After an action, it is even best to stay away from friends and alcohol for a few months, so that the boasting, imaginative mind never tempts the loose, undisciplined tongue.

Most importantly, we Anarchists ought to realize that the mental concepts of our selves are illusions. We have our likes, dislikes, cares and preferences, but just like human culture throughout the various ages of history, all cultures change. So do we. We are not the same people that we were ten years ago, and definitely not twenty years ago. Yes, we do have similarities to those ancient selves of ours, yet we are now a different breed.

Even with these changes, our egos often get in the way of clear thinking. We often surmise that both our personal views and words are truth, while our perceptions are the absolute truth. We often dwell too much on the personal mind garbage. Instead of letting go, we get bogged down inside our recurring thoughts.

Unlike the Marxist sectarians, Anarchism contains some marvelous diversity within its methods. Squatters who take over an abandoned building and open it up for the homeless and vagabonds are doing a great work too. They have fixed up an abandoned property left to rot by some property pimp, and now they can live freely without the common anxieties of having ‘to make rent payments,’ or relying on the landlord to fix the problems. Other residents that have had to pay rents, have seen such successes, and they would also want to enter such living arrangements.

There are other methods that have worked splendidly, such as living in trees to save a forest area, video exposures on the cruel methods of factory mass murder of animals for cheap meat, corporate billboard sabotage, cop watching on a Friday night, setting up a spontaneous street party in a busy intersection, such as Reclaim the Streets, or camping out in a park right in the heart of a large, corrupt mega city, which led to the Occupy movement. All of these tactics have worked and they will continue to work because they have used the greatest powers of the Anarchist, direct action and mutual aid.

As long as we Anarchists keep up the diversity of our work, we will continue to be old nails on the floor for the creeps of the State. We Anarchists are not criminals however, nor should we glamorize muggers, petty thieves, robbers, looters, wise guys and con artists. Unlike them, we fight to build a better world for ourselves. The criminal elements only want their inflated egos caressed. Their worlds are only for themselves – and themselves alone. There is an old saying, ‘there is no honor among thieves.’ This is also the truth.

We can kill the obsessions with ourselves, keep up the revolutionary work, and finally, keep our mouths shut – bearing our secrets forever, while simply holding on to our reserve and dignity. The state authorities and the elites will definitely persecute us, but the invisible barbed wire of silence, coolness, and a noticeable lack of ego trips will weaken all of their insidious methods – security culture or no security culture.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #5: Seven Classical Methods in Maintaining Social Control over Subject Populations

A violent year was ending; this ‘august’ day was also in the middle of a hard winter – and it was even rougher inside the moderate climes of Rome. This particular year was 27 BCE. It was the month of January, and the  new emperor of the great Roman Empire claimed the day of the 16th as an imperial holiday. The emperor’s name for historical posterity was Octavian Augustus.

During the subsequent years of his reign, he would use all of the ancient classical methods in maintaining social control over Rome’s subject populations. The Roman Empire would never experience its previous civil wars again, yet he snuffed out the Roman Republic from its existence. He replaced the Republic with an Empire and the rest was history.

The first method in social control was Octavian Augustus successfully claiming the rituals, images and titles of legitimate authority. His second method ingeniously utilized slow and repressive tyranny with token reforms. The third method represented the mastery of the bread and circuses spectacle. The fourth used the infamous, and always-triumphant, political technique of divide and you shall conquer. The fifth aspect of control made use of naming enemies and aggravating the public fear of such enemies. The sixth system of statecraft employed selective justice and pardons for some, while making brutal examples against a few easier targets, or called ‘the carrot and the stick’ approach. The final one, and most important method tied with the first one, availed in him creating state mythologies out of selected events.

And many patrician elites, the senate, the army, common plebes, farmers, artisans, foreign citizens, resident merchants and even slaves would commend the name of August for historical posterity. In fact, this dictator’s name now has the English synonym of prestigious. A month in our Gregorian calendar also has the name August. This short story is how it got that way.

On this day, the 16th of January, 27 BCE, called ‘the first settlement,’ his friend and associate, Lepidus, received the spiritual title of the top priest in the Roman religion, ‘the Pontifex Maximus.’ Lepidus and Augustus acted through a complete religious ceremony that included animal sacrifices and sacred rituals. Lepidus dressed accordingly in the beautiful robes and hat of a Pontifex Maximus. Octavian was not finished however, for he soon dashed into the public state theater in his imperial purple and crimson toga over his old military outfit, when he was previously a military commander of a victorious Roman legion. In one full super event, he claimed all three state powers and legitimized his rule: spiritual, political and military. Octavian Augustus would eventually take the imperial spiritual title of Pontifex Maximus from his old client Lepidus.

While Octavian claimed the semi-divine powers over life and death within the entire empire, he also instituted some important reforms on this sacred holy day. He symbolically handed over his legislative power to the Senate, where a faction of that body had warred against his late, assassinated protégé, Julius Caesar. Augustus made sure that the name and title of Caesar also possessed a semi-divine stature, and Octavian took the name of Caesar as the eternal symbol for the Roman emperor – and which would signify emperor even until modern history, with such bogus titles as Kaiser and Czar.

The entire ritual set up featured senators, military commanders with their officers in full military campaign dress, and a flourish of Romans, equestrians, gentleman farmers and distinguished citizens standing in awe inside of the imperial city, surrounded by grandiose, cleaned white temples and Roman imperial majesty. With all of the state pomp and ritual, which utilized all of the five senses and displayed the flourish of power and greatness, the emotional crowd screamed the new titles and powers of Octavian: ‘Princep,’ or First Citizen, ‘Consul,’ or legislative-military adviser, and ‘Imperator.’ or military commander.

This public ritual super event solidified both his power and legitimacy to rule, while he simultaneously showed his historic preservation of the old Roman values of ‘Dignitas,’ or public honor, ‘Gravitas,’ or public temperance, and ‘Auctoritas,’ or valued wisdom. In an ancient historical age without the Internet, video, television, film, radio and photo-print media, Octavian the Great had prepared a true masterpiece of state theater.

Octavian the Augustus claimed even greater honors, all for his ‘duty’ to Rome. He set up another date of glory called the ‘second settlement,’ where he claimed the powers of the ‘Tribune,’ or the sacred interests of the people, called the ‘Popolus.’ Augustus even claimed that the massive conglomerations of Rome actually represented one great family on the Earth, and so his ultimate title was ‘Pater Patriae,’ Father of the sacred country. In an Empire that swarmed on three different continents while possessing many different languages and cultures, this new truth was certainly something else to believe.

But sacred state rituals and costumes in the service of legitimacy needed some more backing for wider public support. Augustus became the Roman game and circus leader extraordinaire. Normally, such games and circuses happened only during Roman holy days, or holidays. But Augustus kept the party spirit burning with lots of back to back contests of chariot races, gladiator fights, mock battles, and even naval ones, and public contests of lyrical-musical, religious, poetic and physical glories. During these festivals and spectacles, Augustus distributed rations of bread, killed bull meat, and watered down wine to the anxious urban crowds in Rome. The theatrical comedies were in full operation, and the emperor even rebuilt the great Theater of Apollo.

Octavian had also made sure that his rival enemies ended up fully destroyed and discredited. Octavian’s greatest concern was Caesar’s cousin and Roman hero, Mark Antony and his relationship to Cleopatra in Egypt. Octavian managed to pull the Roman Senate against the Mark Antony, and he had even read the supposed will of Mark Antony to the Roman people in the Forum market. Like a skilled manipulator, Octavian moved the public sentiment against the ‘dictatorial degenerate’ lying in waste at Cleopatra’s palace in Egypt. Eventually, Octavian managed to seize a Roman legion that exterminated his followers, and he even ordered their son, Caesarion, killed. Any Roman associated with such a rabble became a public enemy of the Roman people.

While the circuses and bread distribution progressed, Octavian warned the Roman people of the coming sacrifices ahead in order to maintain their wonderful empire. Continual war was the other standard in Octavian’s rule. The Celtic nations in Gaul, or France, and in Hispania, or Spain, still needed the iron discipline of Roman blood and fire. Augustus also had to exterminate the pirate danger in the Mar Nostrum, or the Mediterranean Sea.

Earlier, Octavian had finished off one of the sons of Pompey; Pompey the Great was an old Roman General and ally, later enemy, of Caesar. His sons still had a base of operations in the wilds of Sicily. Augustus’ latter warfare eventual paid off with full victories in Spain and in France. His Germania, or German campaigns, did not gain much territory. In fact, his war campaign against the German nations ended in defeat, but the Roman blood would demand future sacrifice in subduing them. His descendent Claudius would do the faithful job.

In the east, he took Egypt, grabbed more territory from Dacia, or Rumania, and Rome successfully battled the Parthians, or Persians-Iranians, whereby the Roman imperial standards moved from Mesopotamia, or Iraq, into Northern Africa, and on the northern periphery, from the Danube to the Rhine river. Octavian Augustus had many spectacular public triumphs in his city of Rome. His unforgettable triumphant returns featured marching Roman legions in sync, loud war drums, megalith flower displays, stolen religious objects on pedestals, massive stone gods brought back on ships, and thousands of unfortunate captured slaves in chains.

Octavian always maintained the astute politician role. He knew when to offer pardons and patronage, and with other unfortunates, exterminate them mercilessly. He had all of the Senatorial conspirators associated with the assassination of Caesar exterminated – including the noble Cicero, yet he lavished power and patronage on the rest of the Roman Senate to help ‘govern’ the Empire. He exterminated the last heir of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, yet he pardoned Mark Antony’s brother that warred against him in the Perusine War. He ultimately exterminated the sons of Pompey, or the Pirates of Sicily, and yet, he redistributed lands in Italy to his Roman soldiers that faithfully fought with him and even with those that fought for Mark Antony – and he pardoned his old ally Lepidus when his old and disgruntled client decided to battle against him.

Finally, Augustus was the master in creating a renewed imperial and cultural mythology. His death culminated in Roman holiday celebrations that included a monolithic funeral cortège of flower wreaths featuring his noble family and the successor emperor, Tiberius, the Roman Senate, the Roman Praetorian Guard, or elite soldiers, equestrian Roman cavalry, Roman legions stationed near the city of Rome, and throng of innumerable Roman nobles, plebes and citizens in mourning. Augustus financed many public work projects, and his most famous was the construction of the Pantheon, which still stands in the actual Rome of today. His burial took place in the sacred corner of the temple, and his ‘Genius,’ or essence received deification. His eulogies also spread to other writers, intellectuals and historians that Augustus patronized. The greatest work was the epic tale of the Romans, called the ‘Aeneid,’ which traced the early history of Rome back to the honorable and courageous, Trojans – and finishing with Augustus, of course.

And so, the mythology of Octavian Caesar Augustus still lives in historical grandeur, or historical infamy, if you are an Anarchist. His statecraft also continues to breed its monsters. Since those ancient times, uncountable emperors, dictators, thugs on thrones, tyrants, princes, kings, queens, dukes, state criminals, sociopaths, prime ministers, presidents and self-proclaimed leaders have utilized the same methods and have unfortunately made them work.

Now the readers know the truth of such tactics and we can counter them. Anarchists can tell this story and other such examples to the angry and the ignorant. The astute reader can also see how the current monstrosity of empire, the United States of America Empire, has also used, and continues to use, such sinister practices of public manipulation.

But the current evil Amerikan empire has even greater power at its disposal in statecraft and social control. This criminal regime in Washington D.C. has been, and always will be, the greatest at utilizing particular modus operandi: media advertising through image-phrase repetitions, emotional manipulations, and blatant news speak propaganda.