Cutting Down the Amerikan-style Bar Dependency

 

Some social inventions have endowed humanity’s diversity for millennium. The public market was one such social invention, but modern capitalism exterminated that one.

The monopolies of print newspapers were definitely not one of them. Idolatry and innuendo of the printed word can only go so far, and thankfully, the Internet is destroying that media. European civilization did gift the world two good things however: the game of football, or soccer as we say in the States, and public drinking establishments.

Yet, I now despise bars. I used to enjoy visiting such alcoholic dens. But even when a few bars have had good tasting food to offer – I cannot do it anymore – nor can I afford it anymore. I have seen the light of Reason. But a more important question begs to order: what happened to public drinking establishments in the States? The American Revolution was partly started in urban taverns, and the Wild West lived inside of western saloons.

We must return to Roman civilization. The first bars were actually Tabernae, or taverns. These little stores and eating-drinking establishments had the complete bottom floor to the roads. The owners were often freedmen who got into the trade in order to supply urban dwellers and other visitors ready-made, cheap foods and cheap drinks.

There was not much mead, nor bier, or beer, in those Roman cities. Instead, the cauponis, or innkeepers, served vino, or wine, out of cool, large wooden casks, called cellae, with the most expensive regional grape representing Falernia. The first bars or taverns were more similar to the small convenience stores with large wine barrels, now called bodegas, currently found all over Spain.

Thanks to this popular Roman experiment in social class climbing and cheap oblations, the invention spread all over European civilization, from the steppes of the Rus, or Russia, to the hills of Hibernia, or Ireland, from the fjords of Norvege, or Norway, to the mountains of Iberia, or Spain. Europeans would never lose their shoddy reputations as the Kings of Binge Drinkers and ad-hoc partying. Roman Carnival just never ended for all of them: Bacchus, (Drink), Pan, (Music), and Priapus, (Sloppy Sex). In our absurd contemporary world, we can now add, football, or Soccer, into the sensual mix.

German culture had the kneipe, while French culture preferred the brasserie. The Spanish set up mesones. For the sake of this essay, I will not list every European name for a bar-drinking establishment, as the reader could surely find a specific name for such places in every European language, from Turkish to Breton, and from Frisian to Basque. The American version takes its lift from British culture.

Britain had its alehouses, which were private drinking establishments with a 24 hour, seven-day a week, lock ins. These places were in pre-Norman invasion Britain. At least one thing survived the Anglo-Norman shock troops.

It was during the late 13th century that the first public houses, or pubs, appeared, often run by tenants paying a fee for serving the brew master’s ales, or through freeholders, who owned the entire operation.

These public drinking establishments became such a rage that England’s greatest authors celebrated the local cultures that swam in such saloons, or particular entertainment rooms, filled with storytelling, songs, music and games. Chaucer’s setting for the Canterbury Tales took place at the roadside Tabard Inn, while the notorious Shakespearean character, Falstaff, was often found half-drunk, or pissed, at the Boar’s Head Inn.

Due to the hazards of road travels in those medieval days, many pubs were similar to travelers inns and taverns, which served special drinks and prepared foods. Some places had shared bed lodging, so the drinkers could snore and sleep off the hard water alcohol. The inns generally served beer and ale, while the taverns also served wines.

When the States was the colonial American Plantations, taverns became the premier social space for American men. In Boston, the historical legend states that the first plotters began their talks for American independence inside the Green Dragon Tavern.

As the United States moved west, the first saloons opened their doors for men, which were essentially taverns that served mainly whiskey, beer, sweet wine and other strange concoctions. These saloons also had gambling, such as tilted machines, dice draws, and card games. Other saloons attached themselves to bordellos of loose women, the so-called ‘opera house’ for cheap entertainment, or the local hotel.

Once the US Federal government ‘closed the western frontier’ and ended any ‘wild west’ freedom, about 100 years ago, the first state licensed bars emerged. The bars took their style from the original pub counters in Britain – without the saloon theatrics. Gun fights in the bars now led to arrests and imprisonment. The origins of bars were more medicinal, since certain sick people could take spirits in order to soothe their pains.

With the Woman’s Crusade of 1873, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement and the Anti-Saloon League gaining in political favor, the saloon-bar was a marked entity. The US Federal Government passed the Eighteenth amendment to the Constitution, and the drinking establishments ceased to exist – except for the illegal Speakeasies. This period was Prohibition.

After the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s, the saloon transformed into a wild west side-show, and the bar took over everything, with taverns only designating food service with booze. Bars were also open to both men and women. The meat market scene began with both young and old men trying to chat with, and hopefully lay, the women visitors.

In towns across America, each bar snatched a particular, cultural personality. There were the dive bars for the drunks and cheap losers, old men bars for the elderly drunks and cheap losers, cowboy bars, local bars, cop bars, gay-lesbian bars, black bars, (for the Blacks), vato bars, (for the Mexicans), driller bars, (for the oil and gas workers), and miner bars. With the success of professional sports in American life, and especially the NFL, during the 1970s, the sports bar emerged with multiple television sets on the walls.

In the Amerikan Empire, we now have themed bars, from Metal to Folk, and from Punk to ‘Decadent,’ or whatever that means. Bars have used every imaginable enticement in order to fleece more money from the customer-marks. They regularly employ happy hours, free crappy food days, lady’s nights, DJ-band cover charges, game nights, trivia nights and holiday bashes with expensive entrance tickets. The old demarcations between bars and private nightclubs have blurred.

The pool hall is falling into the relic of historical memory – while hopefully, the latest incarnation of the Amerikan bar will end up there too. Why would a Doctor Historian Anarchist wish for such a thing?

Walking into an American bar is like invading the private den of an enemy. Our current incarnations of bars have lost their community soul. Even the local bar in the small town is dying. Many of the people visiting such establishments represent the lumpen refuse of the Amerikan political-economic nightmare.

Most of the patrons have serious drinking problems, terrible physical maladies, or mental issues – or all the above together. The conversations are either one person monologues that display horrendous suffering, or they represent aggressive-paranoia, back and forth bantering. I have never been able to have an enlightening talk with another person inside those places. I have been able to converse with others inside weirdo cafes – while loaded with caffeine.

The consummation of heavy doses of alcohol with extreme global monopoly capitalism has murdered the bar vibe. This is the reason we should cut down the bar dependency: global monopoly capitalism.

Bars often have owners who personify the worst elements of the small business owner class. Some years ago, I remember visiting a bar run by so-called Anarcho-Syndicalists in a hipster west coast city, and I later found out that the employees did not even receive wages – only tips! And those guys were supposedly fighting the Class War in the employee’s name? There are hundreds of bars across the States where the owners don’t even pay their employees basic wages.

Due to the nastiness of the owners, the tipping scam is out of control in those rip off joints. At restaurants, Americans generally tip 20% for the final bill of service. But in bars, the bartenders expect at least a dollar tip for every drink served! Most bars now have drinks that at least cost five dollars or more, so a dollar plus per drink means 20% per order. If you decide to act the gentleman and pay for a few rounds, the customer is looking at a good amount of his or her salary falling into bartender tips. If you don’t follow this code, you might have the bartender slip some Visine eye wash into your next order – and straight to the restroom you will run.

Intelligent patrons know that using a bank-debit card in a bar is a dangerous proposition. In American bars, you must only use cash. When the bartender’s friends come in for a visit, which they regularly do, then guess who is paying for the ‘free drinks’?

When the bartenders are not dipping into the owner’s till for their lost wages – then the rest of the drinks are on you. If you forget your card and leave it overnight, then you might as well take a deep monetary hit.

Finally, both bar owners and bartenders are generally rude cretins. I have rarely encountered a gentleman-gentlewoman bartender or bar owner working inside an American drinking hole. I have encountered plenty of obnoxious and rude assholes – and they still expect you to tip them 20%!

How many actual bartenders know how to pour a beer, mix a cocktail or even serve properly a glass of wine? There are very few left. In our savage capitalist system, more and more low skilled, jack of all trades people now work behind the bar counter. They might dress well, have a tight friendship with the owner, and if they are attractive women, create a certain eye candy – but they are not true bartenders.

Our bars have even become part of the grand American Pyramid Scheme. We pay inflated prices on cheap drinks in order to feel happy for a very short period in our transient lives; meanwhile the bar owner and bartender openly detest us. They might say hello and do a little idle chatter with us, but their eyes always betray their hate and murder. We continue to flush our money down their till toilets.

We do have options. We could simply visit the local liquor store, convenience store or supermarket down the street. Buy paying less for more product, we might also have some money left over for food, like a delicious round of pizzas. We can enjoy the booze and food all within the good community of family and friends.

We ought to reject the fears of encountering bar owner-bartender scam artists, and the aggressive lowlifes who regular visit dive bars in order to commit violent acts. We don’t even have to worry about getting DUIs, where the police normally haunt bars in order to destroy people’s lives.

Submitting to a supposedly cool, fraudster-hipster hangout is just not worth the destruction of our honor, nor the loss of our basic human dignity, nor even playing slaughter house chicken with our fragile lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gun Culture Exhibit D: Practice Dry Firing with Snap Caps

Reaching goals and finishing the work that we had originally organized for ourselves are all marvelous accomplishments. But regular practice matters too, and even when it seems to fall into redundancy and repetitive boredom. The art of regular practice also brings its future rewards and adds a nice structure to our lives.

Within the martial arts of guns, one great practice represents the use of snap caps. They are hard polymer plastic, bullet lookalikes, and they are often of burgundy red color. Gun stores usually sell them in all pistol, shotgun and rifle gauges: from .22 rounds to .45 rounds, from 10 gauge to 30 gauge, and from .17 rounds to .308 rounds.

In the Wild West Days of the States, about a hundred and forty years ago, cowboys, farmers, ranchers, soldiers, warriors, outlaws, bandidos, circus performers, cooks, miners, sheriffs, posses, and all sorts of other types, regularly practiced their dry firing techniques in order to become proficient shooters. They practiced their stances, draw, reach, deholstering, aim, sights, breath, trigger squeeze and holstering their weapons. They didn’t have snap caps in those days, so they had to dry fire without live ammo, or they used live ammo out in the desert, which could get expensive.

The problem with dry firing weapons like the Colt Six Gun Shooter and the Winchester Lever Action Repeating Rifle was that dry firing eventually dulled the firing pin and the trigger mechanism. The hard metal on metal hits, and without any live ammo to give some type of cushion, weakened the weapons’ performance. Imagine going into real combat with some real live ammo – and not having your weapon work properly. This was one of the real and terrible fears of gunslingers back in those days.

Live firing with snap caps is a safe and effective technique for acquiring the martial arts of firearm use.

Now we shooters are lucky in that snap caps allow us to practice in our homes without worrying about severe noise or destroying our weapons through dry firing without anything between the firing pin and the trigger mechanism or bolt-action area. The snap cap has the same shape of the real bullet, except it doesn’t explode and it is perfect for receiving the force of the firing mechanism.

These days, visiting the live fire gun range is expensive, unless you have access to someone’s land for shooting or live near a free use shooting range. But even the amount of ammo normally used in one day of shooting is not cheap. Many shooters go through hundreds of rounds, firing most of their weapons, such as rifles, shotguns and pistols.

The dry firing technique at home with snap caps allows the shooter the ability to practice in private and not have to spend a great deal of money during one day of live fire. Nothing beats the actual practice and skill building of live firing however. But snap caps allow that reinforcement of good skills, which can eventually help produce a good shooting day at the range.

At home, I often practice with snap caps in particular situations. For example, I will use snap caps for dealing with potential jams, malfunctions or stovepipes in my weapons, then practicing safety drills, clearing the jams, and return firing.

I use the snap caps for stance, holstering, drawing the weapons, sight alignment, aim, breathing, proper trigger squeezing and holstering my weapon once again. I will often practice shooting the weapon with one hand, and then with two hands. With my pistols, I like to switch back and forth between left and right hands. Sometimes, while I was live firing, I have heeled, anticipated or flinched when shooting my weapons. I use the dry firing of snap caps to help correct such bad shooting habits.

At home, I also practice imaginary self-defense scenarios, where I move out of cover and try shooting back at a target, or reaching for a weapon nearby when doing another task, such as Internet surfing, and then facing a serious threat, and immediately afterwards, returning quick succession of dry fire. Dry firing with snap caps is not that loud, except for the movement of bolt metal in the chamber. I still use ear plugs with my dry fire practice however.

Snap caps are very simple to use because the shooter simply loads the snap caps like normal live bullets into the chamber or magazine. The racking and ejecting of the snap caps is often the same as live firing with brass, steel and shotgun casings. Instead of a used casing flying out, the snap cap ejects completely.

Before going to your weapons for dry firing snap caps, use the safety protocols. The number one protocol is to check the weapon for any live cartridges in the chambers and in the magazines. I like to leave green zip ties in the chamber-bore area after doing a dry firing round.

The main safety concerns with snap caps refer to keeping the caps in a completely separate place from the live ammo. All live ammo should have its special place for storage in your private abode. Nothing could be worse than to have your snap caps lying around near the live ammo, and then mistakenly loading a live cartridge or cartridges with the snap caps.

The sound and damage of a live round going off in your home could ruin your life forever. These terrible negligent discharges do happen. Keep all snap caps in a particular site for regular dry firing practice. Store the live ammo in a completely different area of your house.

The other safety concern is just getting finger tired, bored or lazy. After dry firing repeatedly, the mind can start to lose its awareness. This is the time to stop the snap cap practice and return to it for another day.

With the amount of money spent driving out to the range and going through lots of ammunition, the dry firing of snap caps allows gun owners to practice the martial arts of firearms within a place of residence.

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.

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.

Capitalism and Slavery United: one of our most enduring enemies

Exactly one hundred years ago, the state government of Colorado and the Rockefeller owned CFI company, (Colorado Fuel and Iron), committed an atrocity against poor striking workers – even before the Great Slaughter of World War I. This terrible atrocity possessed the infamous name of the Ludlow Massacre.

What was amazing about this particular miners’ struggle was that they represented various nationalities and cultures: Eastern European, German, Greek, Mexican, Anglo-American, Irish, Italian, New Mexican, British, French and even a few African-Americans. This motley ethnic group had finally had enough with the mining system practiced in the state of Colorado at the turn of the century.

America’s business elites had badgered the federal government for a more ‘disciplined and compliant’ workforce, so the US state apparatus willingly allowed millions of immigrants to enter its borders. The mine owners preferred to hire the newly arrived immigrants due to their willingness to accept low wages and that they all spoke different languages. Unions had troubles organizing against the mine bosses. Those mine bosses also built company towns. Sometimes they literally took over a town with a pit mine in it, and later, transformed the village into a mining town.

In the mining towns, the mine workers and their families lived in shacks without the basic hygienic systems. They had to pay high rents, and buy their basic supplies from the company stores, meaning clothes, foodstuffs and the basic articles for survival. The company stores nickel and dimed the workers on shelf items, and the workers had to use worthless company scrip papers. Sometimes, the mine company paid the workers in those worthless papers, instead of the regular notes.

Workers had to inform the mine company guards when leaving or arriving. The mine company guards ran the towns like the prisons. These legal criminals even murdered or tortured the uncooperative and rebellious workers in the dead of the night. There was really nothing the miners could do, since the main mining outfits had monopolistic owners, such as the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller’s 40 room villa was all the way on the other side of the continent anyway – Tarrytown, New York!

Mining was a very dangerous job. The mining schedule was a seven-day a week back and neck destroyer that went from sun up to sun down. Back then, accidents, explosions and mine disasters were quite common. Miners died through simple overwork, lung emphysema, suffocation-drowning through getting buried alive or due to flash flooding in the tunnels, or just having their bodies blown into various pieces due to sudden explosions. There was no compensation for any mining accident. A dead miner had to pay for his own burial, or the other miners just threw the dead weight into the common garbage ditch.

In Ludlow, the miners and their families created their own alternative town. They armed themselves with guns, set up a functioning mutual aid system at the campsite, squatted on the land, and the men wore ripped pants, overalls, caps on their heads, and red bandanas around their necks. This was the true origin of the term ‘redneck,’ yet in the current Amerikan Empire, racists and reactionaries have taken the class war term ‘redneck,’ as their own.

The state of Colorado and the Rockefeller monopoly counterattacked with allowing the company mine guards to join the Colorado State Militia. They too had guns – and cannons – and bombs. On April 20th, 1914 they fired upon the tent colony and burnt up the Ludlow miners-squatters camp, murdering around 20 people, most of whom were women and children.

This was not the end of the story. The men of the red bandanas moved the offensive into the Colorado hills. They killed mine guards, worker narc-snitches, and mine pit bosses. The actual number of killed company thugs is still unknown to this day. The miner-guerrillas were so successful in exterminating the mine managers and company town goons that Liberal Democrap, President Wilson sent into federal troops to intimidate the fighters.

Soon, the IWW solidarity union, or the Wobblies, joined with the miner-fighters, while the Rockefellers tried their hands at ‘company unions’ in order to squelch the mutual aid and solidarity networks. Eventually, the mine owners had to settle for union organization with the United Mine Workers. Now the miner job pays well, has some worker compensation packages, and there are less mine pit hours.

The miners had moved onto the war of offense because they had nothing else to lose. They had realized that they had become wage slaves.

Capitalism owes its evil birth from the rotting flesh of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery are historically intertwined like moss growing on an old stone building. We understand this history of Capitalism thanks to the nineteenth-century intellectual, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was however wrong about his general theories of history. Marx stated in his 1848 writings that all culture and history, called the ‘superstructure of society,’ came out of the ‘productive base of labor and work.’ This theory is incorrect. He was mistaken because he was a philosopher trying to become a historian. History is not a social science but an art of interpreting human struggles and violence. Like artists, humans simply create their own history, and make up their own culture.

Karl Marx was actually quite brilliant in describing the brutality of the capitalist system. Capitalism spreads like gangrene, and grows into monstrous monopolies, while it becomes ever more contradictory as it expands out into the farthest reaches of the planet. This tendency to overproduce, to over-control, and to over-extend leads into the contradictory world of class conflict over wage slavery.

Class conflict or class struggle is simply the continual and incessant changes coming from the owners-bosses in demanding more brutal work output from the workers. The owners want the workers to produce more and more until the poor laborers drop dead because the owners run the businesses for the sake of profit. ‘Profit’ comes from the French verb, ‘profiter,’ which implies, ‘to take advantage of someone.’

Yet the workers only want to work the least amount as possible, since they have to give up their lives, their time and their energy for a survival wage. This is the contradictory condition within all ‘businesses,’ both large and small, imprisoned inside the capitalist beast.

The worker or laborer transforms into the wage slave because he or she must have some income, or wage salary, in order to pay government taxes and rent-utility bills for shelter, and then pay for foodstuffs and clothes. Marx correctly surmised that all working people laboring for a wage have to then ‘sell themselves’ to the owners on the capitalist market. The owners hire managers or company commanders to hire out for them. The plantation boss used overseers to manage labor discipline. The wage slaves, like the slaves of ancient times, must willingly give up large portions of their personal time and strength in order to receive this survival wage or slave wage.

This particular labor-slave cycle continues until they are too old, badly injured, or simply worthless, within the general labor pool. Once they go, then the owner can easily find a younger and more compliant worker to replace the labor loss. When the slave never woke up from sleep or died while working, the plantation owner then visited the slave market for a replacement.

The company owner reviews the labor market through hiring managers that do the employment screening. It is the not the tyranny of useless money that eventually kills the spirit of the average worker-laborer-employee, rather it is the tyranny of the cruel labor market represented through a fetid pool of applicants.

The first capitalist systems in the late medieval period, such as Islamic culture and the Venetian Empire needed an easy and compliant labor source too. They used what all empires have used throughout history: the capture, kidnapping and slow murder of slaves. The Muslim caliphates raided the pagan coasts of East Africa and the Christian Balcans, while the Catholic Venetians raided Muslim and Orthodox Christian territories in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa. During the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, (1400s and 1500s), the newer Atlantic world empires of Spain and Portugal would also raid North Africa for a ready supply of slaves. Eventually they would both go deeper into the African continent.

The other Atlantic world empires followed them, such as the Dutch, (Netherlands), with France and Britain in the seventeenth-century, (1600s). Following the Brazilian Portuguese use of captured slaves from the Tupamori Nation, the Spanish soon became the leaders in the use of captured native slaves from the Mapuche Nation of central Chile, the Guarani Nation of Paraguay, and the Apache Nation in the Red Rocks, or ‘Colorado’ frontier of Nuevo Mejico, (New Mexico). In the 18th century, (1700s), the British Empire would even overtake both the French Empire and the Portuguese Empire in becoming world history’s greatest kidnapping-mass murder-slave trade potentate from Africa to Asia to the Americas.

This imperial political-economic system transformed into Mercantile capitalism. The royal state with favored investors, usually aristocrat-noble relations or court favorites, controlled joint stock companies and the profits of final sale. Meanwhile, the slave planters had to bear numerous credit-debts through purchasing slaves and dealing with cash crop fluctuations in the market, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, opium and cotton.

Due to this capitalistic ‘mercantile’ monopoly, a new group of outlaws emerged in order to take fast money and loot for themselves, commonly called back then, ‘pirates.’ But for the West Indian ‘white’ planters, slaves were an excellent resource because they could also resale such movable capital. In the case of the Africans, they were the victims of kidnapping slave traders in Africa, and they had no legal resources. They were socially dead human waste.

Britain was also notorious for using just as many ‘white slaves,’ as their ‘black or African ones.’ The white slaves were often the victims of kidnapping rings found all over England and occupied Ireland. When the white slaves began to fraternize with the African ones, then African slavery began to have more ominous, permanent tones.

Britain’s world-wide kidnapping-slave-mass murder system was so successful that it freed up a special commandeering class of scientists, inventors and investors to fund and experiment in technological advancement. It is no coincidence that during this same eighteenth-century, Industrial Capitalism came into fruition.

But the old system of plantation agriculture slavery in the American colonial-settler states, with its numerous inefficiencies and ugly brutality – had to go. Industrial capitalism valued the factory system, which produced a lot more, and hid its brutalities under smoke stacks and within inferno like worker dungeons. A new slave economy was necessary.

Instead of the owners paying for the worker-slaves’ crap food and flea infested huts, they could pay the losers a ‘wage.’ Now, the lowlifes had to pay their own way through life – and literally beg for a ‘job.’ They were technically free – but like any slave, they permanently lost their honor and dignity.

We have returned full circle to the slave trade of Ludlow. These terrible relations between capitalism and slavery still breathe their noxious fumes as I write.

Now capitalism functions under even greater duress, and its contradictions are so much more intense due to the actual extremes of global monopoly capitalism. Even the technically skilled or PhDs, such as myself, have to suffer under the indignity of permanent unemployment or underemployment. Billions of us currently experience life as capitalism’s victims. Even if we don’t work for ‘The Man,’ we still slave under the mental guilt of not having any good employment prospects. Unless we have family money to support us, we must continually resell ourselves on the slave labor market for survival.

If we really own property, which means no mortgage debts or property taxes whatsoever, then we are all technically homeless. We give dirty stares to the pathetic ‘home bums,’ or permanently homeless, on the street corners; yet, their numbers will only continue to grow. Some of us reading this essay, will also end our lives down there – dying slowly in the hopeless gutter.

For the rest of us that are ‘lucky to have work,’ our ‘freedom’ comes at a terrible price. A good chunk of our time and our lives goes to the owner’s personal profit margin, while our general quality of life suffers. We also live impaired under the political-cultural ideology of global monopoly capitalism, called Neo-Liberalism. Most of us live in overcrowded and unhealthy cities, where most of our ‘wage money’ goes into a toilet drain of rent housing.

In order to live economically, many of us have to consume crappy genetically modified food. Meanwhile, both our minds and stomachs have to tolerate regular scam artistry, ubiquitous, large public signs that warn and threaten with the smoldering potential of violent street crime. All of us must endure the institutional violence of petty felony laws, common deceitfulness between neighbors, continual advertising overload, and pathological lying from politicians. Like the old saying goes, ‘slavery has never ended.’

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #4: Understanding The Six Truths of History

The historical period was the 1240s. Medieval Catholic Europe was completely embroiled in its genocidal and murderous colonizations versus the Enemy. At that time in history, the Church’s enemies included all of their religious-ideological rivals around the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds.

In the east and the south lived the Orthodox Byzantines and the Muslim Caliphates. In the west, such as Spain, the Muslim caliphate was weak, but the last stronghold remained in Nasrid Granada. In Italy, there resided Orthodox Christian groups and other heretics called Waldensian Protestants. Holdouts of pagans and nominal Christians survived in the northern fringes of Europe, such as western Ireland and in Old Prussia-Lithuania. In the south of France, a strong and vibrant Manichean influenced community, called Cathars or Albigensians, flourished. And of course, the eternal enemies of the Church, the Jews, were everywhere.

The Pope had thought that his Catholic knights of the Cross and the Sword had once again landed at the golden cusp of history. He was sure that they could recapture, reconquer and destroy forever, the Church’s ideological rivals. The times seemed fortuitous. God had definitely given the Church, and the Christian Crowns in service of the Church, good omens of Victory. During the same decade, the Church’s greatest doctor theologian St. Thomas Aquinas was prepping notes for his opus work, ‘Summa Theologica.’ The Glories of the Cross and the Mass resided in the clouds. The pope at the time, Innocent IV, was so convinced of such good fortune that he convened an ecumenical church council at Lyon, France, which demanded complete obedience of all secular authority to the Roman pontiff.

But like all emperors, dictators, despots, tyrants, presidents, politicians, prime ministers, sociopaths and leaders, he was wrong. The man probably knew his theology well, but history was his weakness. And just as it has been for most of humanity’s watchers within the real theater of the absurd, called life and humanity. History has six truths, and those humans that do not know them will never understand how the human world operates. With Pope Innocent IV’s lurid visions of victory, arrived the cataclysms of multiple defeats.

His secular defender, Saint King Louis IX of France, had just exterminated the Albigensian Cathars during the siege at the castle of Montsegur in Occitania, now southern France. Yet, this same saintly King went on two crusades, the Seventh and Eighth, and could never recapture Jerusalem again, and even their Crusader castles on the Levant coast would eventually fall to the Muslim Saracens. The French did not get their revenge until 1920 when they reoccupied the Levant and carved out, ‘Lebanon,’ from the lands of greater Syria.

During the Seventh Crusade, the Saracens even captured Saint King Louis after a battle, and then demanded that the French royal court pay a hefty ransom, for the King’s release. This hostage fee completely depleted the French royal court’s capital. The English royal court would attack their French royals around fifty years later. Such incidents began the First Hundred Years War. During his voyage on the Eighth Crusade, Saint Louis ultimately died a bad death. He fell sick due to catching a traveler’s disease, in Tunis, north Africa. Saint Louis’ contemporary fame has pinned itself to a crime ridden American city along the Mississippi River.

More troubles for Christendom ensued. The Teutonic German knights were almost certain that they could force a complete extermination of the pagans in Old Prussia and Lithuania, or even force them towards Christian conversion. The Teutonic Knights occupied more lands and territories each successive year. Yet, their most recent battles against the pagans were utter disasters. The Baltic pagans fortified their cities, temples, and rites, and they remained committed pagan pantheists for another 200 years!

Then all of a sudden, the maximum upheaval took place, which no one during that decade could foresee. An invading army from the east had attacked the Chinese emperor, the Muslim Caliph in Baghdad, and the Russian Emperor. And this imperial onslaught continued to move westerly. History refers to this invasion as the Mongol Empire under the Khan, called Genghis Khan. The Mongols eventually attacked the Catholic monarchs of the East, such as the Poles and then defeated the Hungarians, all until their routs ended with defeats in the Balkans. The Catholic kings of the East could do nothing.

The Byzantines in Greece next regrouped, and succeeded in taking Constantinople once again for the Orthodox Church. The French royal court tried to form a military arrangement with the Mongols, and the Pope even sent Franciscan monks as emissaries to the Great Khan to advance a mutual pact. The Church hoped to form an alliance with the pagan Mongols to exterminate all the world’s Muslims. The Pope’s evil intentions fell into the chamber pot. Less than a hundred years later, the majority of the Mongols in central Asia eventually converted to Islam instead! Pope Innocent IV just did not understand the six truths to world history.

The first truth of history is that all particular civilizations and political-economic-military empires decay and implode upon themselves after their rise to power. This cycle will continue until the human race naturally extinguishes itself on the Earth.

The second truth of history is that world history moves in circular cycles, not through linear stories, such as the ideologies of Human Progress, the coming Utopia, the Second Coming, the return of the Messiah, or the Battle of Armageddon of the Apocalypse.

The third truth of history is that there was never any Golden Age, nor did there exist any mythical Kingdom of Justice, such as Atlantis, the Garden of Eden, Paradise, etc. There were however, various cultures that had Anarchist social relations of equality, with no social class differences, no fixed property relations, no prisons, no police forces, no permanent social exclusions, and they supplied all the basic necessities for all of their members: clothing, community, culture, shelter and food. Modern states and empires have successfully exterminated such cultures – and they will continue to do so.

The fourth truth of history is that the grand conspiracy theories of evil groups that control or pervert world power, such as the Jews, the Illuminati or the Masons, have never existed and nor do they now exist. Humanity is too complex in order for such groups to have complete power and influence over our lives.

The fifth truth of history is that all state apparatuses, institutional bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, despotic empires and tyrannical regimes generally relax and slightly liberalize their brutal systems, so that they can save time for implementing even harsher laws in the future. They liberalize with token reforms, and criminalize gradually through retroactive laws.

The sixth truth of history is that state criminals, corrupt politicians, despots, and tyrants often act on sudden or extreme positions due to the harsh actuality of the current situation, or due to expediency within the political moment. The actions of state criminals rarely begin with planned plots inside of closed, secretive quarters. Hopefully, the reader can see that Pope Innocent IV failed to understand the six truths of world history. No empire, whether papal or secular, can survive the ravages of time and human cultural change.

The Amerikan Empire is good at murdering millions of victims across the earth and inside of its own continent, but the Amerikan Empire tends to lose its wars in the end. The US government destroyed the Confederate States, both militarily and economically, during the Civil War. Yet, the Confederate South won the culture war, which was greatly more important. The cult of the Wild West, outlaws, rebels, guns, Evangelical Christianity, racism against African-Americans and other racial castes, barbecue and Country folk have transformed the official American culture. This cultural hodgepodge will always remain ‘Americana’ until the US government decides to exterminate the residues. And once it initiates this cultural and physical liquidation, the empire will crack into a maelstrom of violence that will even shock most of the world’s inhabitants. The US military recruits mostly from the white South.

The Pope thought that the Papacy had reached a Golden Age of power, and it some ways it did, but other empires also received their second winds, such as Islamic world culture, the Mongol Empire, the Mexica-Aztecs, the Sukhothai Empire, the Mali Empire, the Yuan-Mongol dynasty of China, and even the Inca Empire would reach its coming glory. In every historical period, there are gaining and receding powers.

Pope Innocent thought that the evil heretics, the eternally wicked Jews, and the reprobate Muslims, deserved the final destiny of the fire and the sword. Finally, the Church could eliminate the satanic conspiracy that plagued the known world. The Church could ultimately reform itself and not have to worry about the evil conspiracies around it. Even during the 1240s, the world was a complex place. The Jews, the Muslims, the Orthodox – and Heresy survived.

However, Pope Innocent IV was a moderate strategy player when the political situation demanded action. He pardoned the noble knights that defended the Cathar heretics in the south of France. He wanted to use their military prowess against his rival, the German Emperor Frederick, (the Holy Roman Empire). He next tried to form an alliance with the pagan Mongols for a counterattack on the Muslims. Pope Innocent IV also institutionalized the authority and power of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to discover, redeem – or extirpate, (meaning murder), all ‘heretics.’ Even with his newly empowered Inquisitorial courts, Innocent IV could never destroy all of the heretics.

The political and cultural situation of the world today is not much different. The technological advances have made the world a faster and more complicated place to survive, but the human god-animal is still a complex and absurd actor on the globe stage. As long as there exists a human condition under civilization, the six truths of history will never change.

Anarchists should understand these six truths of history, so that they can relax and party, stay free and enjoy the absurdity of life, keep vigilant against any token state-criminal reforms and warn others about the state’s corresponding methods of gradual repression, and like always – continue the revolutionary practice, the revolutionary art, and the revolutionary life.