I am an anarchist because contemporary society is divided into two opposing classes: the impoverished and dispossessed workers and peasants who have created with their own hands and their own enormous toil all the riches of this earth; and the rich men, kings and presidents who have confiscated all these riches for themselves. Towards these parasitic capitalists and ruling kings and presidents there rose in me a feeling of outrage, indignation, and loathing, while at the same time I felt sorrow and compassion for the labouring proletariat who have been eternal slaves in the vice- like grip of the world wide bourgeoisie.
I am an anarchist because I scorn and detest all authority, since all authority is founded on injustice, exploitation and compulsion over the human personality. Authority dehumanises the individual and makes him a slave.
This picture, which I took, represents a kind of memory for me. What I mean by that is that I don’t remember being there, but it is still an important part of my memories. I remember vaguely the wooden floor and the closeness to the skulls, but…I do remember that these skulls have hunted me in my dreams a couple of times in the past. My memories of being truly there and the even stronger emotions I felt in my dreams are mixed, so the wooden floor I remember might as well not be true; maybe I took this picture from a car when we were on patrol, driving by.
Another thing that is related to this monument in Cambodia, a memorial in remembrance of the millions of people killed during the Pol Pot regime, is the fact that it changed my life. To be clear, my life did not alter course after I saw it for the first time; it was just the tiniest seed that was dropped. Having worked as a UN soldier for five months in a country so different from what I was used to that has changed my perspective. It opened my eyes, and I could see a bigger world than just what I was used to. I got interested in history and politics and started studying in that direction. If people ask me why I am so sensitive to what is happening in the world, I will show them this picture. This monument represents that change.
Free Association is the idea that we cannot be free as individuals without having free relationships with others, that no one person can be free unless we are all free and that for each of us to be free we must work together to insure that everyone else is free. In an Anarchist society people would cooperate with each other to achieve the following:
Complete Social Freedom Including Sexual Freedom and Reproductive Freedom: People associate because all participants want to.
Freedom of Speech, Press and Information to include all forms of communication and education.
Complete Cultural Freedom including the freedom of individual tastes, lifestyle, entertainment and other preferences.
Freedom of Movement: All people must be allowed to live where they chose, travel where they chose, shop where they chose (e.g. do business where you chose), recreate where you chose, etc.. This includes the freedom to migrate and immigrate without being restricted or discriminated upon because of your place of birth or the place of birth of your ancestors.
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
The people who murdered in the name of the state just wanted a better life. They voted for the man with big ideas and were unaware of the path this blind obedience takes them. Their lives while working in a slaughterhouse for humans were not different than their lives when they worked in a slaughterhouse for animals. Daily life is daily life; we all filter out the world we don’t want to see.
We are all different in how we look and what we’ve been through and somewhat different in our wants and needs. Some of us want to find our own way, and others just want to follow. Most of us fall somewhere in between. We have to live together knowing that a quarter of the people in our society have no problems rounding up their neighbors if they are ordered to when shame is taken away. Those are the people who have no rationale for why they obey the strong man, the man who knows “the right words.”
Do you obey?
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
We are happy to be able to report that the principle of federalism has been unanimously acclaimed by the Congress of Geneva…. Unfortunately, this principle has been poorly formulated in the resolutions of the congress. It has not even been mentioned except indirectly. . . while in our opinion, it should have taken first place in our declaration of principles.
This is a most regrettable gap which we should hasten to fill. In accordance with the unanimous sense of the Congress of Geneva, we should proclaim:
That there is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe’s international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe.
That the United States of Europe can never be formed from the states as they are now constituted, considering the monstrous inequality which exists between their respective forces.
That the example of the now defunct Germanic Confederation has proved once and for all that a confederation of monarchies is a mockery, powerless to guarantee either the peace or the liberty of populations.
That no centralized state, being of necessity bureaucratic and militarist, even if it were to call itself republican, will be able to enter an international confederation with a firm resolve and in good faith. Its very constitution, which must always be an overt or covert negation of enduring liberty, would necessarily remain a declaration of permanent warfare, a threat to the existence of its neighbors. Since the State is essentially founded upon an act of violence, of conquest, what in private life goes under the name of housebreaking—an act blessed by all institutionalized religions whatsoever, eventually consecrated by time until it is even regarded as an historic right—and supported by such divine consecration of triumphant violence as an exclusive and supreme right, every centralized State therefore stands as an absolute negation of the rights of all other States, though recognizing them in the treaties it may conclude with them for its own political interest….
That all members of the League should therefore bend all their efforts toward reconstituting their respective countries, in order to replace their old constitution—founded from top to bottom on violence and the principle of authority—with a new organization based solely upon the interests, the needs, and the natural preferences of their populations—having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of the provinces into nations, and, finally, of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and of the entire world eventually.
First, something about anarchy. When most people think of anarchy, they think of lawlessness and political disorder. In the Standford Encyclopedia of philosophy1, you can read in the introduction: Anarchism is a political theory, which is skeptical of the justification of authority and power, especially political power. Anarchism is usually grounded in moral claims about the importance of individual liberty. Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human flourishing, based upon an ideal of non-coercive consensus building. Anarchism has inspired practical efforts at establishing utopian communities, radical and revolutionary political agendas, and various forms of direct action… At this moment, I am not so interested in the political side of anarchism. There are countless forms of anarchism, sometimes also called libertarianism2, and like with all political tastes, they all claim some unique knowledge on how the world should be organized based on their conception of what the world is.
Yesterday I wrote about philosophers and how seriously they can take their task. You can widen this, of course, to all kinds of professions. Today I listened to a podcast where some biologists talked about the history of the crocodile. One thing they have done the last ten years is scanning fossils with all sorts of equipment to see how many different kinds of crocodiles there were 200 million years ago. It’s fascinating and cool to spend your day doing that, and it probably has some purpose down the line. I myself restore old wooden buildings and boats, and I can tell you precisely why it is important but, as I do now, I can tell you also why it is not that important. This finding meaning in what we do is something we all do. That’s why I called it “playtime” for grownups yesterday, and that sounds all jolly, but there is also a downside. We are so rich that we can do all of these fun but unnecessary jobs and produce so much stuff that we don’t need, and this pollutes the world and maybe even cynical.
If I talk to people about life, politics and what is important for them in life the one thing that gets mentioned a lot is tolerance for each other’s views. I cannot agree more if, and I say if everybody would follow that rule.
But if I think about it more, I immediately see some problems with this ideal of respecting each other’s way of life. It is the wet dream of all the libertarians in the world off course, a society of loving egoists but we all live in some kind of group. At work you live in a small group where you might have a lot of freedom, but the workplace expects from you that you follow certain rules like safety instructions and the expectance that you deliver some sort of work or added value for the money you get paid. You cannot go to work and expect your boss to respect your personal opinion that following safety rules is wrong, your boss can’t be tolerance towards you, he can at most tolerate that you want to work unsafe in your own time.
I don’t like to write about politics though I did it a lot when Trump was president, he was a special case, to put it mildly. But now politics in the world is back to “normal” I had some hope that I could forget about it again, at least on this blog. But last week I got really disappointed in president Biden, not that I had high hopes on many issues but maybe he would be less of a…I don’t know. He more or less ended one war and immediately starts provoking China out of some idea that China is dangerous and banging on your chest is the only solution to stop them. I know that international politics is complicated with thousands of moving parts but once again a group of privileged, (middle)-aged man decide the direction the world goes. I understand that a captain of a ship can not steer the boat democratically but a nation is not a ship and should not be treated like one.
After almost 15 years of seclusion from much of society our move to the city was both a welcome surprise and change. Before I moved to North Norway I lived in Holland where you can meet all kinds of people if you want to, and I did. I have had a lot of good conversations, I was already interested in philosophy, psychology and more and I always tried to talk about these subjects but with little success overall. Most people have some interest in for example philosophy but up till a certain level. Its like talking about your train collection, at first people indulge your enthusiasm but if you still talk about the different train tracks you can buy after 20 minutes you start to see in their faces that you went to far. So, my move to Norway, and thus lack of social contact, was not a big problem because I could do without the disappointment of people losing their interest when I wanted to dive deeper.
There were elections in Holland last week, and though I don’t live there anymore I still follow the news with interest. The parties on the right side of the right have won a few seats in the parliament, and that was disappointing. I did learned recently that in a country like Holland you always have around 20% of the people that vote way to the right or populist. This knowledge makes it a little bit easier to have peace with what’s happening, but it doesn’t make me want to move back. I left Holland for all kinds of reasons but one of them was the hardening of society. Here in Norway things are probably not all that rosy to, but even after 15 years, there is still a buffer between me and whats going on here. I make sure of this by not reading the Norwegian news and the character of the Norwegians helps to, they don’t talk about politics with you if you don’t ask them. In Holland it is all much clearer how someone looks at life, they tell you.
Democracy is important, it brought us all a lot of good. Democracy can also steer a country into ruins if a majority, and that is not always necessary, get a chance. Look at Nazi Germany, Trump’s America or Brazil. In Holland the mainstream parties ignore the brown-shirts but you never know what’s gonna happen in the future. I thought 15 years ago that it all would blow over but the parties of resentment only got stronger. It frustrates me, I just wish we had a democracy where we voted for people because we appreciate their competence as a human being and a leader. I have so much to say about this but don’t know how, for now I try it is some kind of short poem that highlights one aspect of the popular leader.
Nochrisis 