"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it."

Thomas Paine

02 April 2010

Who are the radicals, again?

-------------------------------------------
http://www.anarchist-studies.org/node/299
-------------------------------------------

A friend forwarded this website to me and while I don't usually spend much time reading “anarchist” literature, I thought I'd take a little time and peruse this one piece. It's posted on a slick looking website called “Institute for Anarchist Studies”. They state that their political ideology “emerged out of the socialist movement as a distinct politics in the nineteenth century. It asserted that it is necessary and possible to overthrow coercive and exploitative social relationships, and replace them with egalitarian, self-managed, and cooperative social forms. Anarchism thus gave new depth to the long struggle for freedom.”

Sounds like a fun group of guys, eh?

They start out this long-winded diatribe by stating that the author is a white working class male” and the article is aimed at the same.

“Hey”, I said to myself, “that's me!”

But as you try to work your way through this extensive composition on the evils of capitalism and that all that you have been told about what freedom and liberty are, is a lie, you discover two things.

First, the author is very good at the art of propaganda and playing on peoples' emotions. His work is intelligent and well thought out. He makes his argument for a “new social paradigm and movement that goes beyond the idea of liberty being a protection for property ownership”. And if you didn't know better, you'd probably think it didn't sound like a bad idea. Oh, and watch out for the Tea Party movement. If you support them, then you're just being “exploited” by the “mostly...rich politically ambitious organizers”. You rube!

Second, the term he uses to describe his prospective audience would more accurately be called:

White working class male... who doesn't know American history, our Founding Fathers' definition of private property, the proper role of government or Marxist propaganda techniques.”


It is chock full of class envy and class hatred, which he seems to believe could be taken care of with a healthy dose of class warfare. In closing he lists eleven “concrete steps that white working class people can take to work to build a movement for real liberty”.

Here's a sample (emphasis mine):

9) Be ready to actively defend your neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities from the police and state forces. Take whatever measures you deem necessary to do so.

10) Don’t get a job as a cop or prison guard. These jobs also reinforce racial divisions within our class, as well as create domestic armies to use against us when we do work toward our own power. Cops are not our friends. The police systemically exist to protect the rich and their property.

11) Do anything you can to take back resources from the rich. We’ll keep this suggestion intentionally vague. The rich have all the food, all the money, all the wealth, and all the power. Let’s take it back. Any way we can.

Any way we can? Really?

If I posted this on the website for the Idaho Light Foot militia I'd have the Feds at my door with bells on (and body armor, kevlar helmets, machine guns and armored personnel carriers!).

And they call us in the patriot movement “radicals”?


Years ago there was a magazine public service advertisement supporting local cops which showed a police officer holding a small, dead girl in his arms; tears running down his face. The caption read, “They call him Pig!”.

I feel the same as that officer when I cry for the state of our country today...

...only they call me “domestic terrorist”.

----------------------------------------

No comments:

Post a Comment