This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

July 14th is my favorite holiday. The only secular holiday I celebrate. I’d like to invite you to celebrate it with me, and if we celebrate it properly we might even celebrate it together.
I am talking about Bastille Day. Some history:
Back in 1789, the people of France were pretty angry with their government. It would seem that the government of France in 1789 was a lot like every government that’s existed for the last 6,000 years of hierarchical dystopia, including the current governments all over the globe, to some lesser or greater degrees. But 1789 in France was one of those rare moments like the L.A. riots or Occupy where the growing discontent and anger, and the indignation of being ignored provoked the people to do something a little more…radical.
They took to the streets and tipped over cop wagons, and they smashed windows and took bread. You know, a general state of disorder that happens a hundred times a year in our modern world, an outburst that normally exhausts itself and leaves a little glass to sweep up, while everyone goes back to their assigned seat… and then logs on to consult Crimethinc to find strategies for sustaining these disorders.
But I get ahead of myself. Back to France. The French peasants- an underclass- in the midst of their riot, did something totally unexpected. They marched down to the Bastille, the government’s prison, and they flung the gates open.
Now consider this: even today, I know anarchists who hedge when it comes to prison abolition, and they say things like: “There are some really nasty scoundrels in those prisons…” And they are right, there are… And some of the prisoners aren’t very nice either. But those French rebels were so mad, they flung the Bastille’s gates wide open.
They played Russian roulette with swivelization as we know it.
They said, “Let’s see what happens if we do this.”
Yeah. Pretty radical.
So, you know what happened? Those prisoners became the leaders of the rebellion and they turned a riot into a revolution. They rounded up all the government officials who maintained the corrupt and tyrannical order of the day, and the prisoners used the guillotine to chop off their heads off.
Happy Bastille Day
Man, those French sure know how to party, don’t they?
Of course, they jumped the shark by immediately instituting a new government that, over time, would become just like every other government… but they still celebrate Bastille Day today. I doubt that they do real -life enactments, but if they did, I’d sure buy a ticket.
Bastille Day is certainly worth celebrating. It makes me wonder what would happen if say, during the LA Riots the angry urban youth had refrained from burning down their own neighborhoods, and had paused a moment before looting the TVs from the department stores and instead had driven a tractor over the fences at San Quentin, or Folsum, or Chino, or Pelican Bay, or all of the above. Hell, evacuating the LA County Jail might have changed world history. I wonder what would have happened if Occupy had done the same thing. I remember an anti-nazi march in Toledo that turned into an anti-cop riot back when I was held in Toledo Correctional right down the street from the confrontation. I went to outside recreation that day and sat on the yard, just waiting for someone tipping over a cop car to say, “hey, this way, I’ve got an idea…”
Not only would Bastille-type actions increase the number of rioters, and contribute to a general disorder, but the absence of prisons equals the absence of government enforcement. You can’t imprison without a fence, so once all the fences are down the deterrence factor evaporates and heads roll. No really.
We can’t be certain how the story ends when you fling the gates wide open, but we know exactly how it ends when you don’t. Happy Bastille Day!
This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from the Ohio Supermax, if you can hear the sound of my voice, you are the resistance.