Gun Culture Exhibit I: Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tzu, ancient Chinese intellectual, 544-496 BCE

Sun Tzu once again wrote the truth. The warrior has to truly understand his or her enemies – and his or her own weaknesses.

This method also applies a full understanding of the enemy’s total world views, reading their articles and books, and especially, and most importantly, getting inside their minds.

This method fully understands their tactics, and so we will stay ready for their coming affronts. The most important questions revolve around: why do they hate us so much, and why do they want to exterminate us physically? Our enemies have operated a continual war against us.

We can look at their social class backgrounds. They represent mostly high socio-economic elites, and they tend to work in the fields of state media propaganda, government-union bureaucracies, state mandatory education, software corporations, and corporate entertainment media. Note where they live, such as urban enclaves in high-priced sections of town with gated communities, or doormen, elevator men, or armed security.

Smart observers will analyze their cultural formations, which often represent university-college trained ideologies. We could even scrutinize their cultural tastes, such as preferring to dine out in restaurants rather than cook their own meals, frequenting certain ‘hipster’ hangouts, such as expensive bars, clubs with lots of synthetic drug use, and attending gigs of certain genres of music.

These observations relate to intensively doing our research. We will not only know our enemies, we will even be able to think like them.

That first part is not hard to do. But knowing thyself is a lot harder to perform. The reasons are that we must face ourselves with total and complete honesty. We have to look at ourselves from a distance, as if some casual onlookers just spotted us at a remote position, and then we can critique our faults. We ought to know our weaknesses, and like other social-cultural groups in the United States, we do have glaring weaknesses.

Before pointing out America’s gun culture weaknesses, we first need to understand the political practices of hegemony, national popular movements, organic intellectuals, historical blocs, war of position, war of maneuver, and optimism of the will.

These political practices come from the writings of the Italian Communist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937 AD. The Italian Fascists murdered the guy through criminal neglect in prison, but his political methods eventually transformed the Italian Communist Party into the most powerful Communist Party outside of the Warsaw Pact after WWII.

I would like to thank my Neo-Marxist tenured professors within the Amerikan university education system for teaching me these occult arts in manipulating political power. Many Americans wonder why Amerikan universities are such Left-wing madhouses. Administrator, six figure salary bureaucrats now run these scam stations, and they are more corrupt than most union boss officials. Most concernedly, our political enemies, inclusive of Amerikan university administrators, have been using these political tactics against us.

Gramsci took his political ideas from the combat tactics of WW I in Europe, with its mass mobilizations of drafted armies, trench warfare and technology efficiency in destroying human life. Gramsci applied such military tactics to the furtive arts of political alliances and to the political engagement of total defeat and no surrender.

Hegemony is simply the art of maintaining strong political alliances, often containing contradictory ideologies, transformed into a powerful force of action. Gramsci understood that hegemonic political action has the potential to block state hegemonic alliances, and even overthrow them. The Fasciste movement in 1920s Italy did just this.

American gun owners are a diverse group, such as hunters that like to eat fresh meat, sports shooters, self-defense trainers, gun store employees, military veterans, ex-cops, small business owners that run businesses in rough neighborhoods, trailer living people that like to shoot metal in the deserts.

We also have lots of other different people within our cultural salad, inclusive of lots of women, gays and lesbians, Muslim Americans, Anarchists, bikers, Jewish Americans, Atheists, Evangelical Christians, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, tattoo-piercing artists, sex workers and artist musicians. Yet, our political enemies often portray us as a fringe group of politically reactionary, overweight, older white men with genetically attached baseball caps and a bad wardrobe style.

National popular movements are political hegemonic movements that successfully become integrated within the national culture. Some good historical-ideological examples, within American political history, have represented: Jacksonian Democracy, Manifest Destiny, The Cause of the Southland-Dixieland, Abolitionism, The Gospel of Wealth, The Temperance-Prohibition Movement, Federalism, Constitutional Law, Environmentalism, Public School Education, The American Economic Dream, Racialism-Eugenics, The Black Liberation Struggle, Populism, The Big Stick Policy, The Labor Movement, Second Wave Feminism, Multiculturalism and Progressivism.

American gun culture holds profound and deep roots within American culture and history – and it will always stay that way. Our strong cultural power inside of the United States means that our political enemies are desperately trying to dislodge us from our privileged cultural position. Even with such a privileged cultural position, Gramsci learned from the aftermath of WW I that a strong cultural-political hegemonic alliance can dislodge and defeat the strongest national-cultural affinities. Like the human condition, culture changes and morphs into absurd newer creations.

Historical blocs are the different national popular movements that make up hegemonic political alliances. They are important because, in Gramsci’s own words, they are organic, meaning they spring from the cultural roots of the country. The political leaders are true citizens that represent the nation. Successful hegemonic alliances must have organic intellectuals as their public voices. American gun culture is definitely American. Our political-enemies however prefer to live in a more sophisticated culture, such as Europe and Australia.

The strategy for historical blocs is to transform themselves into national popular movements. Next, they must form powerful hegemonic blocs or counter-hegemonic blocs of political alliances in order to completely seize political power – and ultimately destroy their political enemies.

The first strategy is the War of Position, where the political movement uses deep political tactics against its ideological enemies, such as entrapments, faking mobilizations, incendiary language, incessant political agitation, continual propaganda outlay, and ultimately, incitement to violence.

All of these political tactics work in that they eventually weaken the will of the enemy to respond adequately, since the political opposition has to continually defend its positions, representing the War of Attrition. Eventually the beaten down opposition must either fortify itself, close off its gaps, and slowly decline and fall for final liquidation, or it must surrender gradually to the political onslaught, and ultimately become the tribute paying slaves of their new masters.

Gramsci referred to this end game for political victory, which is always violent, as the War of Maneuver. All successful hegemonic blocs must first utilize the War of Position, and then when achieving some cultural power in the nation, move into the War of Maneuver.

Ultimately, Gramsci encapsulated his most famous phrase, Pessimism of the Spirit; optimism of the Will. Gramsci insinuated through this statement that the Communist or Radical inside of the War of Position must reject any spiritual or religious morality.

Instead, the United Left has to replace such weak sentiments with a continual and untiring political struggle, or political warfare, against the Enemy. In fin, the revolutionaries have to seize political power in order to physically annihilate the Enemy. Modern history has shown the way in successfully using the Gramscian political process.

America’s Gun Culture is now facing such a War of Position – and our political enemies have learned the same Gramscian political tactics from their own Neo-Marxist tenured professors that they studied under. The Neo-Marxist tenured cowards have taught in the Amerikan university system for over a generation. Hopefully, we can now see where both our weaknesses and strengths lie.

As gun owners we must avoid contributing our writings to hard right-wing blogs that spout non-stop bigotry, often against the corporate media’s new hate targets: Muslims, and we should stop supporting pro-war/pro-US Military articles, which yell for more violence, revenge killings, bombings, genocide and mass murder.

While those right-wing political blogs will often attack the mainstream corporate media, they always echo chamber their 1984 Goldsteins of the Year, such as ‘Radical Islam.’ We don’t particularly like the outrageous fulminations coming from the ‘hoplophobes,’ so why do we collaborate with the rants of Islamophobes, homophobes or negrophobes?

Just because those political blogs often feature pro-gun articles does not mean they are our political allies. These hard right-wing blogs often belong to other hegemonic blocs. When we contribute to their rants and bile, we fall into our political enemies entrapment strategies.

The corporate mainstream media will once again picture us as ignorant, white racist, right-wing kooks. And always remember after the Sandy Hook Mythology Movement – many of those same hard right-wingers joined with their supposed progressive political enemies calling for gun restrictions.

We possess guns because we believe in the natural right to self-defense for all of humanity – including for our political enemies. We reject cowardice and stand upon the code of honor. We will never surrender to tyranny and we value our liberty.

This does not mean that we find guns sexy or even beautiful. Guns, like all weapons, are tools for extermination. We only use weapons as a last resort against any agitated wild animal, criminal attacker, or tyrannical invasion force, ready to physically harm us, our family, or our good friends. All of humanity has the right to defend themselves from violent attacks.

Most Americans are with us on this point, including many young urban hipsters, with pseudo-Leftist politics, who don’t know us, and who probably don’t any guns. Let us celebrate our diversity of differing political ideologies and backgrounds – yet united in our eternal virtues of courage, honor and gentleness.

The gun confiscators’ preferred method in dislodging America’s gun culture from the core of American cultural identity is through extreme, cowardly name calling. They commonly refer to us as terrorists, gun nuts and enablers of mass murder, and some have even called for outright, mass gun confiscation and snitching to the cops when we open carry. This is another war of position tactic.

We will simply reply to their calumny that they are gross hypocrites and lazy cowards: while they hate guns for us, they love guns for the cops and the military, which often target the poor, and the people who can’t fight back around the world. They rant for gun confiscations, yet they want the regular police officers and the enlisted military soldiers to bear the burdens of such a national confiscation, or having to detain open carriers.

Our most formidable weapons, which will carry out the defeat of their War of Position, is our knowledge of history. Educated Americans know about the Revolutionary War for Independence, the Civil War-War Between the States, John Brown’s Raid, WW I & II, and the Wild West Frontier. Guns entered all of those conflicts.

Tyrannical Laws never deserve the respect of a free people. Courage and Honor never comply, and never will we just follow orders. We didn’t come into this Earth to die as slaves.

Thomas Paine, the American radical wrote in his political pamphlet, The Crisis No. 1, (1776), “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph…”

We stand upon this truth. We remain within our hallowed ground, well inside American national culture. Whatever War of Positions the Enemy thrusts against us, we shall not surrender.

We respect honor, they do not. They are cowards, we are not. Never forget this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #3: Understanding the Practice of Hegemony

Germany could never shake itself from the trauma of the First World War. The year was 1930, and even though Jazz clubs and racy nightlife augmented in Berlin during the latter parts of the Twenties, the Great Depression steamrolled over all of the capitalist nations of Europe. Stories of children starving to death again reached German ears.

The ‘western’ propaganda machine still fulminated that Germany was responsible for all of the evils of the war. Why was there no mention of the French Empire or the British Empire that controlled almost a quarter of the world’s surface? All of this Allied war propaganda was untrue, and French troops still occupied the Ruhr region. The failed and twice failed, and even thrice failed, Weimar Republic coalition governments, still had to pay ‘reparations,’ or extortion monies to Britain, France and the United States. Germany won on the eastern front in WW I, and of course, there were no reparations towards Russia. The hypocrisy and lies never ceased.

The National Socialists, or the Nazis, could also see that the Socialists or really, the ‘Social Democrats-Leftists-Reformists’ in the Weimar government were pathetic, and most Germans had gotten quite sick of their cowardice and lack of direction. They were no different from the right-wing, militarist madmen that just wanted to wield power. The Nazis main rivals, the Communists, and at that time, the strongest Communist Party outside of Russia, were still split and battle-scarred from the defeated 1918 Spartacist Revolutions in both Berlin and in Munich. The other political opposition was the Center Party, or the ‘Zentrum,’ which represented German Catholicism.

The Nazi Party began to jump onto and embrace the most recent political changes. Instead of watching on the sidelines like a small splinter party within the fringes of political discussions, it began to make the strategic moves, stir its own news, and form its own political coalitions. From a radical fringe of southern German reactionaries that tried to create a Bavarian separatist-fascist state during the 1920s, the Nazi Party transformed itself into a German revolutionary party, while utilizing both street violence and secret party coalitions in order to construct its national transformation.

It successfully moved from the War of Position to the War of Maneuver. Or as a contemporary political scientist and Italian Communist under house arrest, Antonio Gramsci, had stated: the party successfully creates the counter hegemony to counterattack the state hegemony.

Hegemony is not about domination. I continue to read both Leftist and Libertarian writers that refer to hegemony as a type of political-imperial oppression over the weak and subjugated, with statements such as, ‘the weakness or power of American hegemony.’ These intellectuals forget that hegemony, as previously explained by Antonio Gramsci, is actually a cultural practice of understanding the world and doing something about it.

Within our modern existence, and where most of us command caged lives inside violent, industrialized cities, we ourselves form our own ideas about our environs, initiate discussions with like minded friends, join political or cultural associations, and even make our own political alliances or choices.

People construct their own worldviews, shape their own realities, and create their own cultures. Whether it is a particular religious worship, hanging out with a certain subculture of fashion and music, or even attending a political demonstration, people themselves make their own history. History is not just battles, presidents and laws; it also represents everyday humanity creating their own cultural expressions, temporary communities, or hegemonies, in order to comprehend the world around them.

Most humans are not dupes as some Leftists commentators like to rattle about incessantly. We are all philosophers in our very own individualistic ways. The Tea Party Conservatives were not the willing idiots of the Koch Brothers either, as some Democratic party hacks have ranted about recently. If there was no national anger already swelling about seeing their proud country decay into a Third World disaster, yet possessing the most violent empire in world history, then no amount of Koch brother money would have been able to set up their public protests.

For us Anarchists, this means that we also have to embrace the times and places that we both live in and suffer from. A few intelligent Americans are waking up to the American nightmare that fogs over people’s lives, bodies, minds and emotions. Most citizens are too scared to fight, and we should leave them alone. But other angry and confused citizens are struggling out there. They want to hear another story besides the trite and pathetic lies vomiting out of the corporate news media and crap American television. We Anarchists have that other story. We do not need to form a cohesive political party like our Communist sect enemies, nor do we need to seize power, like some military officer caste; instead, we must have the courage to speak the truth when people ask, or when they complain to us about the way things are going politically.

I will continue my story on how the ultra-nationalist and reactionary Nazis became a national-revolutionary German party. When the Weimar state cowards and liars tried to push a bogus national referendum on making partial reparation payments, the Nazis rejected the vote fraud completely. Modern Germans did not like bullshit, and still do not like such games. Continue with your previous work or fight. The Nazis understood completely. Meanwhile, the National Socialists continued to incite even bloodier street fights against Communists and supposed collaborators with foreign occupying troops on German soil. They also began to move into other directions, such as fomenting the necessary political alliances, and often-contradictory ones.

Soon, the Nazis made overtures to particular German business owners and small business owners, or good capitalists that they liked. They successfully sloganeered that the problems of reparations and war guilt on Germany had destroyed business and opportunities in their own land. Meanwhile, the party press kept blabbering the anti-Semitic cant about manipulative Jewish stock jobbers turning the world capitalist economy upside down. The Nazis also played down their nationalist-class conflict patter.

Then, the National Socialists made overtures to the Prussian military caste, or the German military. This political alliance was not hard because the Nazis had the same desire for a continuation of war hostilities like the German high command. The Nazis even won some political positions inside a few regional governments.

With all of the street gang methods and political maneuvers towards the other gravitational pulls of power, the Nazis were still another right-wing political party moving on the national front. Their main base was Bavaria, which was the center of the German reaction and a very Catholic region. Finally, the Nazis made the right openings to the Catholic Church, and to its political appendage in Germany, the Zentrum.

Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party and not the most observant Catholic, arranged a meeting with the papal nuncio in Berlin, a man by the name of Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII during World War II. Right before the elections of 1933, the two parties, both the Zentrum and the Nazis united to form the strongest coalition party in Germany. The Nazi Party started ranting about the ‘destruction of the German family and defending real family values.’ The same year, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. The rest is history.

Hegemony also works repeatedly in the United States. The Republican-Democrat deception is a perfect case to analyze. The two parties simply pick and choose their new ‘political alliances’ depending on what gets the election results. First, there is the Democratic ‘base,’ which tries to include both large, and small business owners, both labor union bosses and workers with union seniority. Meanwhile, it makes overtures to middle class African-Americans and to certain Latino populations, such as second generation Mexican Americans. The Dems do not stop there, but also seek alliances with certain socio-economic ethnic groups, such as urban Asian Americans that despise lazy state spongers, wealthy Jewish-American, Israel First supporters living in large urban cities, and college educated, yuppie hipsters. This contradictory hodge-podge also hopes to attract Conservative farm and rust belt workers and senior citizens feeling insecure about Social Security, and next, urban Gay and Lesbian populations.

The Republicans also have their absurd political concoctions. They have attempted to organize Christian Evangelicals that want a Christian Republic, and yet the Repubs attract freethinking Libertarians in the western states wanting the government out of their lives. This political assemblage has the support of the ‘Don’t tread on me’ gun-Bible belt in the South, Mormons in the West, and large farmers in parts of New England. The party also contains a bunch of law and order followers calling for tougher laws, more prisons and more police, including staunch militarists, all of whom believe that the government has the sole right to bear arms – and to use them when it damn well feels like it. The party aims for the support of both business owners that live in gated communities and a few racist rednecks that live in trailer parks, and it hits on certain ethnic groups, such as Cuban Americans. If a historian were to examine the hegemonic alliances of both parties a hundred years earlier, in 1912, he or she would find very different and contradictory political bases on both aisles.

As long as there exists human civilization and urbanization, hegemony lives around us. We create our own culture, our own histories, and so therefore, we make up hegemonies, or our own political frameworks, even with all of their internal inconsistencies and absurdities.

We Anarchists have the easiest work load, unlike the other political party hacks and slaves out there hustling their weird ideologies and crap literature. Our destiny, or ‘Fortuna,’ takes some courage to act upon. Just bravely speak up or write the truth to power.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #2: Knowing and Dealing with Enemies

In the year 1917, the US government decided to enter the war in support of Britain and France, which had been previously fighting against Germany in that Intra-European conflict. During this same year, the United States Government also deported scores of foreign-born Anarchists and radicals living in the United States. The state criminals first imprisoned them, and then forced them to board an old Merchant Marine ship to Soviet Russia.

The ship was more like a floating jail, where passengers could not get off until the final destination to Soviet Russia, and the ship had US military guards to ensure that the prisoners did not leave the ship until reaching that final destination. These radicals were actually lucky. Other activists in the States, who were both US citizens and that had spoke publicly against WWI, had to endure longer prison sentences than murderers and rapists under the new repressive laws of the Espionage Act. President Wilson was the instigator of these state crimes. He was a Liberal Democrat, a hypocritical reverend and a proto-Confederacy sympathizer.

Emma Goldman stood firm in not supporting such a monster when he ran for president, and even after other Leftists and Socialists almost proclaimed that phony as a new Democratic messiah for the USA. She was not fooled when the imprisonment and deportation orders arrived against her, and against her ex-lover and collaborator, Alexander Berkman. This deportation was a heavy blow to both of them. Their country of birth was Russia. However, they had transformed themselves into Americans after thirty plus years living in the country, and their Russian was quite spotty after hardly ever using it in the States.

Both of the Anarchists, Emma and Alexander, or Sasha, finally arrived in Russia, and even though they lost a country, they had hoped to see an actual workers revolution in progress. During their short sojourn, they even met with Lenin and watched the bureaucratic-military genius of Trotsky. Yet, something was seriously wrong.

The aging Peter Kropotkin, an Anarchist theorist that had previously lived in exile in Britain and was dying in Russia. He warned both of them about the Bolsheviks. Emma encountered some old Anarchist revolutionaries and comrades shut up in revolutionary prisons. The Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, even tortured and murdered Anarchists like the repressive Czarist secret police. People were starving to death on the streets. Children in rags stole food. There was still a Civil War in the country with the ‘Whites’ losing the war yet receiving support from the capitalist world powers: Britain, France, the United States and Japan.

The Anarchist Black Legions of Nestor Makhno actually helped destroy the murderous Whites in the western part of Russia that had been murdering Jews and Gypsies in the Ukraine. After the extermination of the Whites in the west, the Bolsheviks then used the Red Army and the Cheka to hunt down the Anarchist Black Legions. When the revolutionary Kronstadt sailors revolted, the Bolsheviks sent in the Red Army to liquidate them too.

Both Emma and Sasha had realized the truth: the Bolsheviks had set up another dictatorship under a phony worker’s republic. When both of the Anarchists publicly criticized the Soviet Union in the radical press, Communist Party maniacs all over the world went on the offensive against them. They even threatened violence acts against them if they spoke at public events. The Communist movement had then become another mortal enemy of the Anarchists. About ten years later, the Anarchists in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War would learn the same hard lesson. In Politics, all ideological formations and associations are the Anarchists’ enemies because they seek control and violence through the seizing State Power.

And these groups are still our enemies today. Yet, some Anarchists dream of a united Left front to destroy capitalism and the state. It does seem quite powerful to fantasize about a revolutionary movement of thousands upon thousands in the streets, but it is often a political pipe dream and a mirage.

The human condition under civilization truly exists inside an even funnier existence. Humans are both absurd and contradictory. Humans create and transform older cultures, yet they hold on to outdated values and belief systems from older cultures that were completely different from their own, and that had encountered very different realities. We are both innovators and contradictory buffoons.

Not everyone out in the streets protesting against a corrupt and sinister government wants the same outcome, or has joined ‘the movement’ for the same reasons. Revolutionary unity is a fiction, just like doctrinal purity is a lie. Doctrinal purity needs an Inquisitorial court, while revolutionary unity needs a Marxist vanguard party. The Marxist party fiction that the masses make revolts is also a lie because there exists no such monster as the masses. Revolutions explode due to a decent sized minority hating the system, the state losing legitimacy in the minds of some intelligent citizens, and the implosion of the society into some type of monumental disaster, whether invasion, economic destruction, or both of them together.

The Marxist vanguardist parties are our enemies. This includes those few madmen hawking their rag papers at small urban protests making up a Communist Revolutionary cell outfit, or any Maoist, Socialist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Leninist, Guevarist, etc. and etc. conglomeration. The Fascist nut jobs and creeps are our enemies. Well, they are enemies with everyone too and quite proud of it. The Liberal-Leftist-Progressive-Reformists are our enemies because they only want a few token reforms for them only, and to leave the same rotten system for everyone else. Conservative-reactionaries are our enemies because they believe that if society and culture would never change, then everyone would feel more content. They forget that people change and culture changes. We are all just too human.

All political groups, ideological formations and party alliance positions are the enemies of all humanity. What all of these political groupings truly want is to seize a part of the state, to have a say in the decisions, to maintain control over others, and to feel their wills to power transformed into violent state power. Their only revolutionary positions are that they have been left out from also gorging on the pie of power. They are resentful and vicious, and nothing more.

As Anarchists, we ought to never align with them, never join their coalitions, never make political pacts them. We need only watch them, peruse a few of their documents, and continue to read more history. We can leave them to their ‘struggles,’ since most of the true believers will die resentful old men and women, and even enter the realms of mental insanity. But all political ideologues are malicious fools. Malicious fools are dangerous and can turn violent for any reason. If they decide to fight us, then we will give it to them. For us, it is not about losing and winning, but defending honor, dignity and freedom through the human right of self-defense. For this reason, the gun is always near.