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Against Helping (Bombing) Syria

The United States has a long history of “helping” others. It appears the Syrian people are next on the list. I oppose the U.S. helping the Syrian people, and I suspect the Syrian people do too.

Some historical context:

The first instance of the U.S. helping people involved Native Americans. The U.S., in a benevolent effort to civilize “poor,” “backward” people who were perfectly happy living as they were, nearly exterminated them. Those who survived were “helped” again and again, until they were reduced in such numbers and their cultures so obliterated that the stragglers were put out to pasture in concentration camps called “reservations.”

The nation “helped” most in the Americas is Haiti. The U.S. has intervened there more than anywhere else in the world. Haiti is the poorest, most desperate, most languishing nation in the Western Hemisphere. So, it would seem, the more the U.S. “helps,” the worse things get.

In my lifetime, the U.S. has done lots of “helping.” In Vietnam, the U.S. helped the Vietnamese repel Communism. American troops sometimes went village to village, burning them down. This was not purposeful destruction of innocent civilians’ ways of life. No. As our military leaders would explain it, it was necessary to burn down the villages in order to “save” them.

Save. As in “help.”

Then, of course, there came Iraq, where the U.S. imposed a decade of sanctions to “help” Iraqis depose Saddam Hussein. Yet, each time anyone attempted to rise up against him—the Kurds in the North or the Sunnis in the South—the U.S. stood idly by as the resisters were obliterated. The sanctions imposed to “help” the Iraqis prevented necessary aid and medicine into the country, as well as technologies to repair the water treatment facilities that the U.S. bombed contrary to international law. As a consequence, more than 500,000 children under the age of six died in just a decade.

U.S. “help” in Iraq murdered a whole generation. Children. Gone.

Also, just as in the former Yugoslavia—where the U.S. “helped” an ally back to the Stone Age—the U.S. used depleted uranium in its armaments, a low-level radioactive material that gets disbursed into the air to be breathed in, causing long-term health damage for entire populations (to include U.S. troops on the ground). No one uses depleted uranium but the U.S.

Just like no one ever used nuclear arms against an opponent except the U.S.

But, back to Iraq. The U.S. helped them. Now, after a decade and a half, in some places, thanks to multi-billion-dollar contracts to Haliburton, the electricity sometimes stays on for a few days at a time.

Sometimes.

Now, the U.S. wants to “help” the Syrian people because their terrible tyrant has allegedly used Sarin gas to kill a small fraction of the children that U.S. sanctions killed in Iraq (half a million, remember that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confirmed was worth it, if only Saddam Hussein was deposed). To stop Syria’s president from Sarin gas on his own people, the U.S. proposes dropping bombs (depleted Uranium) on his people.

A few points to be made here.

First, apart from any debate as to whether Syria’s government used Sarin gas (it seems really convenient that the attack was launched a year and a day after President Obama’s “red line” comment, and that it was launched in an area where U.S. intelligence has been sneaking aid to rebels), are the children killed by the chemical attack any more dead than the children who are going to be killed by falling U.S. bombs or cruise missiles?

Second, isn’t President Obama the same guy who authorized drone attacks on Americans overseas? And are those dead Americans any more or less dead than the Syrians killed by Sarin gas?

Third, when did the U.S. become concerned over the lives of children?

Fourth, should the only nation to used depleted uranium—on its own troops—waggle its finger at Syria?

And fifth, why is it that when the U.S. decides to “help” somebody, help involves cruise missiles and bombs? Why can’t the U.S. just send these people some quilts and cans of soup?

And I think this speaks now to something far more fundamentally flawed in the thinking of the U.S. government. It doesn’t know how to do anything except destroy. Its whole reason for existence is to crush, kill, maim, obliterate.

That’s pathological.

The United States is a sociopath, armed to the teeth, stomping around the global neighborhood. This sociopath has set its sites on the Syrian regime, which will, then, involve destroying Syria’s infrastructure and the standard of living of the Syria people.

Even if the U.S. is successful at stopping the Syrian regime, we are confronted with a far more disturbing question:

Who will stop the United States government?

On Patriotism…Again

People have accused me of being unpatriotic. Having read “In Support of the Troops…Who Frag,” or, more recently, “Against Helping (Bombing) Syria,” some people have questioned my loyalty to the United States of America.

They should. I have none. And neither should they.

What is “patriotism”? At base, it is a belief in loving, supporting, and defending one’s country. That’s what the dictionary tells us.

Now, accepting that definition, what does it mean? Well, first and foremost, to believe in loving, supporting and defending your country, you have to have one. Someone who is country-less cannot very well love a country they don’t have .

So, before I can be patriotic, I have to ask: Do I have a country?

I suppose if I had some sort of “ownership” over a country, that would make it mine. In the U.S., we have this pervasive mythology, almost a civil religion of sorts, the idea that all of us jointly “own” this country. Of the people, by the people, for the people. But I can’t imagine that anyone except the most unthinking rube could still be buying into that faerie tale when everything we see and hear and experience directly contradicts that mythology.

Is there anyone in the U.S. who is not part of the ruling elite who says, “This is running exactly the way I think it should…”? Or are there millions of people deeply disturbed by the conduct of a government that has long ago stopped consulting them and has, for some time, dictated the terms to them?

I am reminded of a protest sign I saw prior to the invasion of Iraq. It featured a picture of George Dubya with a voice bubble that said, “I don’t care what the American people think…They didn’t vote for me anyway.”

The U.S. government long ago stopped caring what we think. In that sense, it has “gone rogue,” has assumed the right to operate without consent of the ruled. That being the case, the United States is no longer out country—it is a country under the control of complete strangers who reserve the right to act like your enemy if it suits them, and reserves the right to treat you like their enemy if it suits them.

Can you feel like an “owner” of a country where you wake up every day with a shotgun in your face? Where the Apache attack helicopter (you paid for) has its cannons pointed at you?

I can’t. All mythology aside, I have to face the reality that the entity declaring itself my government is not “my” country. My relationship to that entity is not voluntary, not consentual, but is one of forced obedience.

We are reduced to slaves.

I don’t believe that slaves owe any allegiance to a master. I believe slaves owe allegiance to themselves and to their own liberation, by whatever means necessary. But that’s me.

At any rate, if we do not “own” a country, if we are, for all practical purposes, excluded from the joint ownership of the United States, then it is no more “our” country than is Bolivia or Iran or Belgium. It’s just geographically closer to us and excercises its power over us in a more direct way—which, reasonably, is all the more reason to hate it rather than love it, if you think about it objectively. Yes, Bolivia and Iran and Belgium do exist, but they aren’t in your face and in your wallet if you’re in the U.S.

But the U.S. is.

Important to point out, I think: We’re not working with “What I believe,” and, therefore, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and all beliefs are equal; what I’m describing is a factual truism. I’m not declaring that the United States is not my country; the United States, through its actions, declared that a long time ago.

It makes no real effort to hide its animosity and distrust of its subjects. We are enemies to be spied on, controlled, manipulated and neutralized.

I cannot “love,” nor “support,” nor “defend” anything that spies on me, controls me, manipulates me, and neutralizes me. Anyone reasonable could only despise such a creature as that, not pledge allegiance to it.

One can make the false argument, I suppose, that the U.S. government isn’t “so bad”–that is to say, that a lot of other governments treat people worse than the U.S. generally treats us. This is a kind of relativity argument—that the U.S. looks good relative to other governments. But, this is a false argument. First, we have no way of knowing for certain what it’s like to live in any other country under any other regime because we don’t live there and we don’t know. Second, it’s really irrelevant anyway, because to say the U.S. is not treating us terribly is to say the U.S. is not treating us terribly yet. But if we accept that the U.S. operates without our consent, and we are subjects in a ruler-and-subject relationship, then any argument that the U.S. treats its citizens better than some other regime treats its citizens is nothing more than an observation that we haven’t yet provoked a really serious atrocity—not that a serious atrocity isn’t possible. And we know that in any situation where the government operates without the consent of the people, not only are serious atrocities possible, not only are they probable, but on a long enough time line, they are inevitable.

It’s probably worth pointing out that of all the millions and millions of Germans who lived under the Third Reich, only a small percentage were jailed, killed, or tossed into concentration camps. So, the same argument that “the government’s not so bad” could be (and probably was) used by the vast majority of Germans, just as it is now used by the vast majority of Americans.

Relating all this back to the question of patriotism, do I—or, of any of us– “have” a “country” to “love,” “support,” or “defend”? At the very least, I would have to say that if this is “my” country, it certainly doesn’t seem to know it.

Having said all that, all of the traits that should define a “good American”–honesty, integirty, courage, loyalty, kindness, responsibility—all these virtues militate against “loving” and “supporting” and “defending” the United States. Given the conduct of the United States, it is not possible for freedom-loving, honest, life-affirming, conscientious people to love, support or defend the United States. Good, decent people cannot support things such as genocide or the purposeful and deliberate murder of children.

After the bombing of Iraq, U.S. government documents were declassified, detailing a well-thought-out plan to bomb water-treatment facilities (a crime under international law) because the resultant lack of water would cause dehydration, which kills children much faster than adults; all the dead children would then provoke the Iraqi people to ruse up against the ruling regime.

The U.S. government deliberately murdered children. All tolled, the U.S. murdered more than 500,000 children in a 10-year period, a death toll that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was acceptable.

To love and support and defend the United States is to love and support and defend child murder, wholesale child murder. And that’s just one event. If you look at the conduct of the U.S. in world affairs, that atrocity is not an exception to the rule. (In fact, the language and perception is so utterly twisted that, in 2008, in the presidential elections, candidate John McCain, who participated as a cog in the U.S. death machine in Southeast Asia, disparaged opposing candidate Barack Obama for Obama’s “associations” with Bill Ayers—a man who sacrificed in order to end the illegal war. The American conception of things is so upside-down that a mass murderer candidate questioned the integrity of someone who opposed wanton violence by calling him a terrorist.)

No one with vaulted American virtues can love or support or defend the indefensible. No one can love or support or defend a ruling elite that has highjacked our world imposed an agenda to the benefit of a few and to the injury of many—all maintained through forced and the treat of force.

Allegiance to tyrants is never patriotism. It is treason against conscience.

Dear Heroes of France Formerly Known as Students

Dear Heroes of France Formerly Known as Students,

I am writing to all of you to thank you for the inspiration and hope that you have given to a world in desperate need of both, a world where bad guys are bad guys and so are the good guys.

In the face of injustice, where the wealthy and the powerful counted on the complicity and silence of everyone, you learned the power of “no.”

You said laws are not laws if they serve injustice.

You said the capacity to oppress does not make it right to oppress.

You said you would not go back to your assigned seats until your demands were met.

Heroes formerly known as students—1

The wealthy and powerful who make bad rules—0

Final Score

You saved a 15 year-old girl from a terrible injustice and you have shocked the Republic of France, which is instituting reforms. This is a cause for celebration. You have made history.

But I remind you, we live in a world gone mad. You have saved a 15 year-old today, but what of her future, and yours, and all of ours? In a world of seven billion people, almost all of us have become invisible and silent, but you have learned to glow in bright and radiant colors; you have spoken with a voice that echoes across oceans.

Please don’t hand power back to oppressors. Please don’t return to your assigned seats.

You saved a 15 year-old girl.

Now there’s a world to save.

No more wars. No more immigration control. No more spying. No more privileges for the ruling elite and struggle for bread for the rest of us.

You cannot stop now.

There is a future to save.

The truth is dangerous. Stay dangerous.

Freedom,

Sean Swain

Ohio State Penitentiary

Fascist States of America

31 October 2013

On Fascism: One Anarchist’s Response to CrimethInc’s Podcast #11

In a recent podcast, CrimethInc presented a feature on fascism and anti-fascism. In this feature, Clara presented that fascism “attempts to be a popular movement: which “advocates for strong centralized power in the state.” In this way, fascism “offers an authoritarian vision of society as a solution.” Clara also presented that another “core principle is nationalism,” and that this translates, often, into “hatred of the outsider.” Fascism is also “virulent” in its “opposition to communists, anarchist, and most other radicals.”

For the purposes of the podcast, this served as a good working definition, though a somewhat superficial one. What follows is my response, an effort to provide a fuller context and, hopefully, a much greater appreciation for the reasons that anarchists more than anyone recognize the danger that fascism truly represents.

Freedom

Let’s start this off by talking about freedom. To approach this from a purely Anarchist perspective, I think that’s where we have to start, because ultimately freedom is the true point of conflict. As I think this will demonstrate, Anarchists more than anyone else are for freedom, and fascists more than anyone else are against freedom. And this, then, would explain why the struggle between Anarchists and fascists is such a bitter and important one. In fact, if freedom matters to you, then this ongoing battle is more important than anything else.

But before we get rolling too fast, before we get ahead of ourselves, I think we need to define “freedom.” If we don’t, we’re left with everyone thinking of freedom in a million different ways – in a world where we have something called “freedom fries,” no less – and that can only lead to confusion. So, for clarity, let’s define freedom. For that purpose, I would like to defer to Ward Churchill who has defined freedom as “the absence of external regulation.”

I think that’s a good definition. The more external regulation you have – the more someone or something else is telling you what to do – the less free you are; the less you have someone else telling you what to do, the more free you are. So, without getting into the questions of all the potential activities we either have or lack the freedom to engage in, we have a decent, working definition of what freedom is.

This is important, because everything else rests on this.

So now, imagine a continuum, a line. Often we see this in order to compare and contrast liberals, who occupy the left end of the line, with the conservative, who occupy the right end. But for our purposes, these “liberal-conservative” concepts are really irrelevant. We just want to borrow the line, the continuum.

At one end, let’s imagine freedom – absolute freedom. This is the total absence of external regulation – as free as it gets. Way down at the other end of the continuum, we have absolute non-freedom, which is the total and complete domination of external regulation. This would be the extreme of being controlled by someone or something else, 24 hours a day.

So we have our opposites, our points of reference, absolute freedom and the total absence of freedom, and all the points on the line between them would represent some interplay, some compromise, of varying degrees of freedom and regulation.

Now, having established that, what is another term for “external regulation”? When we speak of someone or something that exercises authority to regulate us, the word we usually use is “government.” To regulate is to govern, and governing is conducted by a government.

This is important, because we turn back to our continuum and at one extreme end; we find absolute freedom, the complete absence of “external regulation.” This extreme end, freedom, has no external regulation, no regulating, no governing – no government.

Absolute freedom, then, the absolute absence of external regulation, is absent the “external regulator” of government. This point on the extreme end of the continuum is the absence of government.

People who advocate such absolute freedom are labeled “Anarchists.” Everyone else in the entire spectrum of politics and social order advocates at least a minor amount of external regulation, a minor amount of imposition or individual freedom, a minor amount of “government.”

(A small side note here, but likely, most people if presented with the freedom to non-freedom continuum and asked what they believe to be ideal, would likely point to the Anarchist extreme of absolute freedom – particularly people in the U.S. They would unhesitatingly point at absolute freedom even though most people, in reality, are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum ideologically. This is because we live in a culture that gives a lot of lip service to freedom while sliding ever further away from it. Keep in mind, the majority of the U.S. population also self-reported to believe in all ten of the Ten Commandments, but the average person could only name three of them…which would indicate that we’re working with a deeply irrational group of people who deeply believe in things they don’t know.)

Given this analytical framework, before we move on, it might be important to point out that everyone on the continuum, besides Anarchists, are Statists – that is, they believe in government. Also, everyone but Anarchists are defined by the degree to which they oppose absolute freedom.

Fascism

In The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini,¹ the Italian dictator wrote, “Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception is for the State…” For the fascist, “…all is comprised in the State and nothing spiritual or human exists – much less has any value – outside the State.”

Elsewhere he wrote, “The capital point of the Fascist doctrine is the conception of the State, its essence, the work to be accomplished, its
final aims. In the conception of Fascism, the State is absolute before which individuals and groups are relative.”²

And Giovanni Gentile, in the Philosophic Basis of Fascism, wrote, “The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the national State…”³

Given these quotes, we can see that what distinguishes fascism as a political philosophy is its belief in the absolute transcendence of the State, of government, and simultaneously, the “anti-individualistic” position that nothing human, i.e., individual freedom, exists. Thus, fascism occupies the opposite end of the freedom spectrum from Anarchism. It seeks to eliminate all human freedom and to subject all to the dictates of an all-powerful State – the perfect and absolute negation of all liberty, all individuality. Nothing matters but the State.

It follows then, as a natural corollary, given that individual freedom is inimical to the State, that the State would seek, under fascism, to wipe out all individuality, all human distinction, all diversity. For the transcendent, fascist State, there can be only one perfect subject, the perfect “National Socialist Man,” as Hitler advertised and promoted him.⁴ With imposed homogenization, conformity, uniformity, anything “other” must be eliminated.

So, anyone religiously, politically, racially, artistically or sexually “other” than what the State has decreed to be optimum for the State’s interest, must be eliminated. Fascism, then, is a dream of a freedom less world of automatons marching in lockstep, surrendering all individuality in deference to the State.

Only Anarchists Can Oppose Fascism

If we return to the freedom-versus-non-freedom continuum, there are some rational conclusions we have to draw. First, we recognize that only the extreme position on the far end of the continuum advocates for absolute freedom, which is the absolute absence of external regulation, which is the complete absence of the State.

Every other position accepts some degree of regulation, of external control, of State intrusion. This means that every single political philosophy, with the exception of Anarchism,⁵ accepts the existence of the State and, on this point, every political position except for Anarchism is in agreement with fascism.

Viewed this way, the entirety of the political spectrum – from communists to social democrats to republicans – is really nothing more than a sliding scale of how many degrees removed from fascism each position is. One step removed from absolute fascism may represent the hard-liners of the Republican Party – a kind of “fascism light,” – with liberal democrats several steps removed, but still firmly in the throes of state-worship.

Thus, even communists and socialists share the same belief in the necessity of the State, but differ with the fascists only in the amount of power that should be invested in it. In the analogy of state worship, fascists sit in the first pew while the communists and socialists sit in the very back – but they all attend the same service. The only socio-political formations that do not bow to the fascists’ god are Anarchists.

As a consequence, only Anarchists can present a full and complete critique of fascism. This makes Anarchism particularly deadly to fascism and explains why, historically, fascists seek to eliminate Anarchists first and foremost.

The Fascist Threat

We can now turn to the reality that confronts us, which includes Nazi Skinheads wearing Swastikas and waving flags while marching through minority neighborhood. And, certainly, as Andrew from the New York City Anarchist Black Cross pointed out in the Crimethinc podcast, these elements cannot be ignored. But realistically, these misguided flag-wavers do not hold State power and given their outspoken advocacy for an ideology most would find at least troubling, this fringe will likely never attain State power.

The true fascist threat comes from those who do wield State power and implement policies and programs that are distinctively fascist in that they serve a transcendent State. While Barack Obama does not wear a Nazi uniform or march with the Hitler Youth, he does approve the vast invasion of the world’s telecommunications; he send drones to kill U.S. citizens abroad; he authorizes the detention of ideological enemies. In short, he serves a de facto fascist agenda, an agenda of extreme and absolute non-freedom thinly-disguised as a representative republic.

The State is central to fascism. If you want to defeat fascism, defeat the State. Only Anarchists can do that.⁶

End Notes

¹Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, by selected members of the Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado, 1952.

² “The Value and Mission of the State,” Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ We have to imagine that the “National Socialist Woman” would also exist, though she isn’t mentioned.

⁵ By “Anarchist,” I mean anything that fits our definition of advocating absolute freedom and the complete absence of external regulation, whatever advocates of such a position may call themselves.

⁶ To clarify, anyone who designs to destroy the State and abolish it, whatever his or her politics would be, de facto, an Anarchist. Thus, only Anarchists can abolish the State, as only Anarchists would undertake to do so.

The Final Straw Radio Interview with Sean and Blackjack

The Final Straw, an anarchist radio show out of Asheville, NC recently did a show about Sean, the army of the 12 monkeys, and various related topics.

You can find it here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2013/11/11/sean-swain-blackjack-the-army-of-the-12-monkeys/

More about The Final Straw:

The Final Straw is an hour-long radio show that strives to provide information and contribute to awareness of and participation in self-liberatory activities around the world by providing a platform to English-language listeners to learn about current struggles and ideas. Simply stated, we promote non-sectarian Anarchism(s) to enrich the struggle and widen participation in the battles against Capital, State & Coercion. We believe that the liberation of each is tied to the liberation of all, and so work to cover struggles against Prisons, Police, Sexism, Racism, Hetero-patriarchy and able-ism. We support autogestion and autonomy.

Goudlock’s War

Jason Goudlock got tricked.

He was Black, 18, and in legal trouble. So, he did what most criminal defendants do, he took a deal. The court sentenced him to six-to-twenty-five years plus nine years for gun specifications.

He’s still locked up after twenty years and there’s no end in sight.

See, what Jason Goudlock could not have known in 1993 is that the State of Ohio would introduce a new sentencing scheme in 1996. Instead of the indefinite something-to-something-more sentences that made every offender face the parole board, offenders under the new sentencing would get definite “flat time” sentences. As a consequence, the vast majority of offenders sentenced in 1996 and beyond do not see the parole board. They do their time, whatever it is, and they get out.

That’s terrible news for Jason Goudlock and everyone sentenced before the new law. It’s terrible because there exists a powerful bureaucracy called the Ohio Adult Parole Authority, and once all the Jason Goudlocks filter out of the system, they have no valid reason to exist.

Jason Goudlock is job security for powerful pencil-pushers who earn six figures a year, pencil-pushers who now have every incentive and vested self-interest in making every “old law” prisoner left in the system, stay in the system until the parole board members collect their 401Ks.

As a consequence, roughly 5,000 prisoners like Jason Goudlock remain in the clutches of the State’s machinery–a burden on the taxpayer who must pay for their food, clothing, and housing year after year–completely unrelated to those prisoners’ fitness to regain freedom. It’s a scenario where States employees are rewarded for continuing injustice.

The Governor and the ODRC’s director are afraid to take on the parole board, to place them under a set of definite guidelines or to get rid of them completely. Governor Kasich and Director Mohr would ratheer betray the people of Ohio and maintain a cash-cow bureaucracy that benefits a privileged few.

Does that really surprise anybody?

Didn’t think so.

So, in the absence of anyone in public office demonstrating any courage, character, or integrity, it fell to Jason Goudlock. He’s now waging his own war against this sprawling, powerful monster called the Ohio Adult Parole Authority. He seeks assistance from journalism students to help get his novel published and bring attention to the injustice of Ohio’s archaic system, and he’s looking for help in launching a campaign against this corrupt institution.

To learn more, go to freejasongoudlock.org

Know Your Enemy: One Anarchist Prisoner’s Response to the California Hunger Strike and to Gender Anarky’s Statement Opposing It

From AnarchistNews.org in response to this essay by generanarky.

Tue, 11/12/2013 – 16:12 — Anonymous (not verified)

by Sean Swain

Explanatory note: In what follows, I would like to make a cogent analysis of the California hunger-strike, which is over at the time of this writing*, and the Gender Anarky oppositive to that hunger strike. I also use, for purposes of contrast, reference to unrelated prisoner resistance in Ohio undertaken by a group calling itself the Army of the 12 Monkeys, and I do so in order to support my own critique.

BackgroundIn July 2013, California prisoners undertook a mass hungerstrike in protest of longer-term solitary confinement conditions. This strike was led by prisoners at Pelican Bay.

In a statement attributed to Sister Amazon of the Gender Anarky Prison Column, this hungerstrike was condemned, as were the anarchists who supported it. According to the statement, anarchist supporters of the strike are uninformed, the hunger strikers are reactionaries who are “worse oppressors than the government,” and a revolutionary agenda can in no way be served by the hunger strike given the tendencies of the strikers and their true self-serving motives underlying the strike.

I would like to respond to these in reverse order, addressing the Gender Anarky critique first, and the strike itself, second.

Gender Anarky’s CritiqueGender Anarky asserts that “supporters” of the strike “have no idea or understanding” of the real situation. This is a dismissie attitude, painting supporters with the same brush. Further there is no way to know if such an assertion is true. Gender Anarky also writes, “any position to the contrary is straight up bullshit.”

Anarchists, in my concemption, acknowledge and validate a variety and diversity of views. This Gender Anarky statement is intolerant of any opposing view, and it is objectively not anarchist.

It also paints all of the hunger strikers with the same bigot-brush, and assigns them the same nefarious, ulterior motive. Just as all suporters are clueless, all hunger strikers are “racists”-“capitalists”-“nationalists”-“anti-revoltionary” and “anti-fag.” This characterization is itself a kind of narrow-minded slander that, if similarly leveled at an ally (“all of those trans prisoners”), would be called out for the reactionism that it is.

So, it becomes clear that this statement is not a theoretical analysis, but is instead a knee-jerk reaction to an event based mroe on how the writer(s) “feel” about the strikers and their perceived politics or lack thereof.

From an anarchist perspective, objectively, no one can be “worse oppressors than the government.” No one else possesses the power to oppress that government does.** To say that someone other than the government could be the worst oppressor is to essentially say that hierarchy is not the problem, that the rulers, the authorities, and the power their yield should only be addressed after properly dispatching enemies on the horizontal plane – like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, and perhaps the John Birch Book Club.

It appears that Gender Anarky has confused “solidarity of action” with “Facebook friending.”

Affinity or personal affection are not necessary for mutual aid and cooperation. Whether two struggling groups with a common oppressor “like” each other or not is irrelevant to the common interest of uniting for a purpose in serving the larger class. In this case, if hungerstrikers successfully achieved gains, they would do so for all prisoners designated to the SHU; Black, white, latino, gay straight, trans, bi; no distinction. The worst Aryan ungerstriker with a swastika on his chest did not sign a statement demanding State concessions only for straight white males who vote Republican. He demande concessions for

prisoners. In that sense, his approach is far more consistent with anarchist principles and his thinking is more inclusive than the statement generated by Gender Anarky. Such a hungerstriker might be inclined to point to the statement and claim Gender Anarky “are worse oppressors than the government.”***

The appropriate criteria for judging an action, by my thinking, is whether the

actionis consistent with anarchsit principles. If it is, then as an anarchist, I can endorse, support, or join it. If it is not, I cannot.

If someone blows up the Hoover Dam and plunges the world into a sustainable Stone Age, the question of that mastermind’s politis is irrelevant. It matters not her position on interracial marriage or her feelings about circumcizing newborn males. What she thinks bout anything is irrelevant; she has delivered a better future for everyone, including interracial couples.

If someone is fighting a cop and yells for help, it would be inappropriate to interrogate him about his anti-State proclivities before hitting the cop with a brick. Whatever the human’s views, one must side with the living organism and oppose the State agent, the representative of hierarchy, politics notwithstanding. So, properly, the question is the character of the action itself. And my criticism, then, turns to the hunger strike itself.

The Hunger-StrikeIn my view, the hungerstrikers are not essentially anarchist. In 2003, in my reformist days, I maintained a hungerstrike for 44 days.I sougth reformist goals through acceptable, reformist action.

A hugnerstrike is appealing to authority, not rejecting it. A hungerstriker is validating the ruler-subject relationship. Furthermore, the hungerstriker, operating within the framework of commonly defined pacifism, is implicitly rejecting the legitimacy and efficacy of political violence, thereby reinforcing false conceptions that contribute to the anti-revolutionary status quo. And, on top of all of that, even when successful, the hungerstrike only presents that the problem can be solved through reforms to the system rather than through smashing the State.

Apart from that essentially anarchist critique, hungerstriking is

notnonviolent. As a former hungerstriker, I can say unequivocally that a hungerstrike is violence. It inflicts harm upon the hungerstriker.

As an anarchist and as a revolutionary – and simply as a prisoner – I must object on principle to any strategy that inflicts harm upon a prisoner rather than upon the guards.

Contrast the hungerstrike with the unrelated but simultaneously-occuring Army of the 12 Monkey resistance in Ohio prisons. The 12 Monkey actions were of a distinctly different character.

Apart from organization, which appeared to be strictly horizontal, non-hierarchic, and based on consensus, their conduct was revolutionary rather than reformist. Their literature called for attacks on the prison system, to include sabotage and violence against staff; and while some of their flyers made reference to potential gains like conjugal visits or state-pay raises – which seems to imply a process of negotiating demands – the group made clear their singular purpose in crippling the prison complex. In other words, The Army of 12 Monkeys’ singular and non-negotiable demand is the end of prisons… conjugal visits and state-pay raises be damnded.

From another view, The Army of 12 Monkeys was “revolutionary” and “anarchist” in that they appealed to the prison population to engagei n insurrectionary action, in complete rejection of the authority of the State and its agents. One flyer, featuring Guy Fawkes, stated: “If you are a PRISONERS, consider this an invitation… If you are a WARDEN, consider this a threat…”

The 12 Monkeys rejeted the pacifist-reformist paradigm, instructing on guerrilla methods for attacking staff. But even in thsi, the Army of 12 Monkeys can be distinguished from prior prisoner revolts such as the Attica and Lucasville Uprisings in that, even when avocating political violence, they did not advocate

recognition of the State. That is, unlike Attica and Lucasville where prisoners ultimately sought concessions from the State in exchange for returning control of the prisons, the Army of 12 Monkeys did not contemplate recognition of the State so much as they intended its destruction. In this way, the emergence of the Army of 12 Monkeys is singularly distinguishable from all previous prisoner resistance, and is more analogous to the 19th century slave revolts led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, or the John Brown rebellion at Harper’s Ferry – all of which are far more in line with genuine anarchist principles than the hungerstrike which gained more “anarchist” support.

Instead of facilitating prisoners starving themselves to death, begging for scraps from the mater’s table, anarchists could have supported a revolutioary formation intent on burning down the prison industrial complex and liberating everyone completely. Self-harming, pacifist reformism (that was in the end defeated) won out.

In this way, the prisoners’ self-harming, pacfist reformism didn’t just prove a failure; didn’t just use up a lot of time and resources; didn’t just pull a huge number of self-identifying anarchists away from a more-essentially anarchist revolutionary action; but after all of that (and setting back reformist goals by failing), the hungerstrike continues to suck all of the air out of the room while the Army of the 12 Monkey resistance continues and spreads, absent any media attention and ostensibly without any free world support, seemingly still disconnected – in the wa that self-harming, pacifist reformism is inextricably connected – to the anarchist community.

There appears to be no outside support for the Army of the 12 Monkeys apart from the online posting of their materials (http://ge.tt/2ckaeFO/v/0; http://ge.tt/6UJJ4xP/v/0; and http://ge.tt/6UJJ4xP). Yet, after their emergence at the Mansfield Correctional, which drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (who had personnel on site within 2 weeks), the group spread to the Lake Erie Correctional and staged a 3-da riot, and then spread to Noble Correctional. These are also, it must be reminded, the events that the Ohio prison system simply cannot deny. Quite conceivably, 12 Monkey resistance spread and is ongoing at plausibly-deniable levels at every Ohio prison. Prison staff intimate, for isntance, that 12 Monkey materials were found in a large cache hidden in a common area in shakedowns after a prisoner-on-prisoner beating death that occurred at Toledo Correctional.

Objectively, the California hungerstrike, by maintaining attention, may yet contribute to the neutralization of a revolutionary, insurrectionary, anarchist resistance formation that is singularly monumental and historic for its revolutionary, insurrectionary, and essentially-anarchist character.

*I point this out because, while the strike was ongoing, every reference I made to it was supportive and I write this criticism only now, after the strike has ended. While ongoing, I owed fellow prisoners in struggle my solidarity. Consulted post-action, I owe them my honesty…

**Perhaps “capitalists” could be considered “worse oppressors” from a certain perspective, but I am assuming a theoretical understanding that governments serve as middle-managers for the capitalists and, therefore, multinational corporations are “government.”

***Ironically, Gender Anarky has the inauspicious distinction of being more narrow-minded and exclusionary than the reactionaries they critique.

WRITE TO SEAN SWAIN:

Sean Swain #243205
Ohio State Penitentiary
Coitsville-Hubbard Road
Youngstown, OH 44505

(Another) Shotgun In Your Face

Statement prepared for the 26 October 2013 Running-Down-The-Walls, Hamilton, Ontario

I wake up every day with a shotgun in my face. The pig establishment’s hired thug would gladly pull the trigger and put a slug in my brain pan, leaving me limp and dangling in the concertina wire if I ever had the audacity to act upon the principle that I am above the State, rather than the State being above me. If I ever attempted to take my freedom, the freedom I know I deserve, that pig would kill me for union-scale wages and a mediocre dental plan.

So that’s my situation. Let’s talk about yours for a moment.

You wake up every day with a shotgun in your face. It may not be so close that you can smell the gun oil. You may not see the perimeter truck rolling slowly around the borders of your world. But it’s there. The same pig with the reflective sunglasses and leather driving gloves, itching to punch an entrance wound through my spine, is watching you through the satellite imaging. He’s tracking your movements and purchases. He’s flipping through your e-mails and listening in on your phone calls.

He’s got a shotgun trained on you at all times.

Ask Edward Snowden. Or Chelsea Manning. Or Barrett Brown. Ask them about freedom.

Ask me. I came to prison in 1991 for defending my own life in my own home. I killed an intruder in self defense.

He was the nephew of the Clerk of Courts.

A relative of a court official died. I didn’t. I clearly didn’t know my place.

We have a prison industrial complex that serves social, political, and demographic agendas for those who assume the right to rule us, sure. But the primary purpose served by the system is to terrorize the population-at-large to keep them in their places while brutalizing and re-socializing any perceived “threat” through deprivations, isolation, and torture.

They’re going through your e-mails. They’re listening to your calls. They’re monitoring your radical sources of news online.

They’ve got a shotgun in your face.

Don’t go entertaining the wrong ideology. Don’t go demonstrating funny ideas about human freedom’s primacy or proper limitations on government intrusion or control. Don’t post anything anywhere about anything.

You have the right to shut up.

You have the right to go back to your assigned seat.

Exercise both of those rights and do not get the notion that any other rights exist, or you will see that perimeter truck, and you will see that shotgun leveled at your head, up close ad personal. You will be removed from the program.

I am a noncriminal–not that it matters to the State. I write this from Ohio’s super max facility. So naturally, the question must arise–what could a noncriminal have done to go to a super max facility?

I wrote an article critical of a prison policy that illegally outsourced the private information of 750,000 people without their consent–a policy that would enrich a multi-billion-dollar corporation through state-approved identity piracy.

Criticism equals terrorism.

Prison officials tortured me. Under advice of the FBI, they created a full-spectrum state-terror program to harass every aspect of my life, to make existence intolerable, attempting to disassemble my personality and my mind.

I am now held at a super max facility, admittedly and expressly for my “ideology.” Having an “ideology” is an offense. Written words are “violence.”

Strange definition of violence, from an entity holding a shotgun in our faces, an entity whose declassified documents explain in great detail the solitary confinement conditions experienced by me and by tens of thousands of others existing in what the U.S. government describes as, “the simple torture situation.”

Yes, the sociopaths who employ “the simple torture situation” to silence critics of their violent criminal agenda, propose to lecture me, a critic, about “violence.” Telling the truth about State-terrorists is “violence”…as defined by state-terrorists.

And keep in mind, what they employ on me, they perfect on you. I am the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Consider how police defeated Occupy through use of crowd control and riot response tactics and strategies perfected over decades of quelling prison uprisings; or how controlled movements at public demonstrations resemble the controlled movements of prisoners to the chow hall or prison yard, or how the monitoring programs of the NSA exposed by Edward Snowden resemble an expansion of the prison mailroom to monitor the entire human population, and it’s pretty clear: what state-terrorists do to me, they will soon do to you.

So what can we do about it? We can picket and march, protest, boycott, and vote–the same tired strategies that got us into this position, the same tired strategies that have never resulted in any remarkable or long-term development in the struggle for human liberation.

No. We have to recognize that our true enemy has the inherited wealth from ancestors who committed genocide on the inhabitants of the Americas, and who kidnapped a labor force and exploited them for brutal profit. For true liberation to occur we must develop strategies to divest those criminals of their ill-gotten gains. I’m not advocating the robbery of banks and multi-national corporations, I’m advocating “expropriation.”

What we cannot take we must destroy. We cannot leave our enemy with infrastructure to use against us. I’m not talking about terrorism. No. Terrorism is the purposeful bombing of Iraqi water treatment facilities with the aim to increase water-borne diseases, deliberately increasing dehydration deaths of children. What I’m talking about is called “controlled demolitions,” the destruction of standing structures that are in the way of human liberation. We can tear down a WalMart….and build a future. We can burn down a bank…or a courthouse…or a legislature…and build an ecosystem.

I’m not advocating terrorism. I’m discussing priorities.

In this struggle for liberation it may become necessary to apprehend the true enemies of the people, those doing the most harm, whose policies of pathology continue this social disorder. I’m not talking about kidnapping corporate and government officials and issuing demands to force those corporations and governments to address the maldistribution of wealth and power in the world; I’m not talking about negotiating an exchange, Senators or judges in exchange for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal or Marie Mason. No. I’m talking about “arresting” the most heinous and most dangerous criminals who have disturbed our peace and dignity, and demanding clear demonstrations that they have been “rehabilitated.”

If we are serious about liberation, it is time to start living and to stop dying. That may mean we will have to shoot the enemy before the enemy shoots us. I’m not talking about selective assassinations. I’m talking about defending the lives and the well-being of the many, even at the expense of the wealthy and powerful few. I’m talking about collective self defense, which, if employed long ago, might have saved the lives of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Malice Green, Michael Pipkens, Amadou Diallo, and the unarmed couple shot 137 times by the Cleveland police for driving-while-poor.

If we truly oppose the fascist terror-state, if we reject the final solution now being waged upon the poor of the world–for which the prison industrial complex is a key component–and if we really seek to bring an end to the repressive machinery of a technological totalitarian terror-state that grinds out a profit for the banksters and warmongers, then we must form our own mobile guerrilla communities and effectively live up to our ideals of liberation. We must evolve from Occupy to Shockupy, and build a million brushfires to topple all of the components of the enemy’s empire.

Let the enemy wake up with a shotgun in his face for a change.

FREEDOM
Sean Swain
Anarchist Prisoner of War
Ohio State Penitentiary
8 October 2013
(Day of the Heroic Guerrilla)

———————————-

Sean Swain is a prisoner in Ohio State penitentiary and a regular contributor to Fubar. He does not have computer access and cannot receive email. Sean’s website http://seanswain.org is maintained by his supporters.

Sean’s address is:

Sean Swain 243205
Ohio State Penitentiary
878 Coitsville-Hubbard Rd.
Youngstown OH 44505

Letter About Migs

From: http://oppenpal.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/an-open-letter-from-sean-swain/

The following is a letter Rachel Allshiny recently received from Sean Swain, an anarchist prisoner who is behind bars indefinitely, after she sent him a copy of her Suicide Girls blog post on prisoner support work.

11 SEP 13
You-can’t-kill-500,000-children-under-
the-age-of-6-in-10-years-of-sanctions-
without-suffering-the-blowback-day

Allshiny + Everyone –

I got your 28 AUG letter.

As you’ll note from my address, I’m now at Ohio’s super-duper-über-mega-ultra-max. It’s a program for scientifically disassembling human personalities.

I seem to be getting my mail. It seems to be timely too. Here, I’m getting zines and other reading materials. I’ve been here 2 weeks, however, and still do not have a large box of my legal documents + addresses + writings, etc.

Having read your article again just now, I see a pattern. The fascists fear ideas. Ideas on paper. Mark’s. Mine. That speaks to the poverty of their own dysfunctional ideology and the unsustainable system it creates.

Rehabilitation: They kick us in the head until we get dumber.

Another pattern I see. You mentioned that Mark looked skinnier. A year ago, I weighed 215 pounds. I now weigh 151. I’ve lost 14 pounds in the last 2 weeks here at the super-duper-über-mega-ultra-max. I’ve been hungry since August.

Something I really don’t understand about what’s going on with Mark (and also with my situation). An anarchist is one who rejects hierarchy. It is a belief. Really, it’s an acceptance of provable, demonstrable data that hierarchy doesn’t work.

Anarchist literature + symbols are expressions of those who accept the truth that hierarchy doesn’t work as advertised.

What interest do the fascists have in punishing a community of people for knowing something that’s true?

Mark and I do not like hierarchy. Do the hierarchs imagine we’ll like them better after they torture us??? And I imagine this again speaks to the poverty of hierarchy. Hierarchs only know how to punch, bomb, torture, kick, punish, tame, train, deprive, tear-gas, bludgeon, starve… “Act like you like us…OR ELSE…” Like an all-powerful, petulant child.

You 23 AUG 13 article is a masterpiece. Really awesome. You feel the pain you witness, and you convey that pain + your sense of urgency very well. It’s really a moving piece. So I want to thank you for sending that, and for all that you’re doing for Mark.

I too hope Mark focuses on documenting his experiences. Something I’ve been thinking about for seanswain.org is a series of telephone interviews. That may be an option for Mark too. Audio files.

Not everyone writes. Not everyone reads.

Having read your article, there’s an observation I want to share with you. It takes a lot of courage to be so connected in the suffering of others. It takes a real fearlessness. The natural instinct is to close off oneself and erect barriers for self-protection. It is a real gift to feel as deeply as you do. But it is also a very difficult way to go. Don’t let it destroy you.

Some of what the fascists do, they create a situation as you aptly observed where every moment is a crisis. They create a situation of long-term intolerable trauma + keep changing the conditions, making it impossible for you to stay on top of it – every update is outdated, every effort addresses events already changed. They do this as much wear you down as to wear down Mark.

They don’t fear Mark or me or any prisoner. They fear us as members of a larger struggle. They fear us working with you. In my situation, when they found out about the website, they subjected me to torture + even now hold me hostage in an effort to get supporters to shut the site down. If I have anything to say about it, that will never happen.

There’s a line by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience where he describes the state as children who have a grudge against someone so, unable to reach him, they kick his dog. That’s what the state does. The state has no grudge against my body. Its principle annoyance is my mind. But they can’t get to that, so they feebly attack what they can reach. It serves no good end for them. Even as they subject the body to more + more deprivations, my ideas follow out behind them and drift above the concertina wire + get posted on-line, and end up in the hands of others.

Even if we accept the state’s story, that it actually believes that I was a creator of the Army of the 12 Monkeys, their manuals are on-line + can be accessed thru anarchistnews.org. Hundreds of people have printed off copies of their training manuals. How does it serve the state’s interests to lock me in a shoebox when I’ve never been on-line in the first place?

The state kicks the dog.

So, what I recognize is that we’re dealing with an enemy that is irrational, not very bright, and in control of Apache helicopters. It’s like being locked in a room with a cannibal. You don’t really have a hell of a lot of options.

But that’s not to say that it’s hopeless. It’s not. We only live once, as far as we know, so we have to make that life count for something. We also only die once, so we also have to make that death count for something. If we can live with purpose and die with purpose, what more could we ask for?

The enemy loses. But the enemy is doomed to lose because the enemy can only kill the body. It can only defeat the carcass. And in every conflict, the enemy reveals its true character.

Do you know what a dent you kicked in the system by humanizing Mark? Or the value of my friends’ work in documenting what happened to me? The enemy loses control of the narrative. Others recognize who the real bad guy is. Then you have another dozen Mark Neiweems being inspired.

A great tide is turning.

Don’t lose hope.

We own the future.

Thank you for writing. I hope to hear back from you.

Stay dangerous.

Freedom,
Sean