Due to creative strain on the parts of the primary maintainer in other projects, Effrenatum is expected to be on pause until sometime after New Year 2025. Submissions will remain open. We hope to have an acceptable stack of content to be processed into another volume. If all interest here is lost, then let the project die.
Take care.
The Fourth Edition, Volume Four, of A Journal Of Unruliness is out. Viewable and freely reproducible here:
Cover file (PDF), interior file (PDF)
All B&W On Landscaped 11 inch by 8.5 inch copy paper. Your printer may need tweaking beforehand to be able to print/fold both sides of every sheet.
Email us for the editable document files if you need them. You will need to install some fonts if you choose to edit the documents. They are…
Volume Five will be the next installment, expected on or after November 28.
Hovering in the minds of those who toil, tend the gears and muster a convincing smile is the pulsating notion of passionate upset. Of everything failing, of everything coming to a halt, of going home early, possibly to be out of work completely. Teeming just below the facade of civility is the solitary rationale behind setting fires and drawing blades. That flickering, hateful urge for change amidst crushing monotony, amidst horrendous norms will become the lifeblood of persistence against stupefying odds.
Poetic anticipation for the dawn has failed us. We ourselves must become the daybreak. We ourselves must find the strength to raise up our own stars, to act in the light of our revolutionary unique for self-glory, for self-illumination, for the sweet tinge of having delivered a heartfelt blow to everything before and since.
What stands now, what has stood for millenia, can only ferment deeper into a more nauseating brine for all of us to wake up each day and inhale. The empires play their same old games with new toys. The sweat on their brow comes only from the stress of maintaining excuses for war and slavery.
If you do nothing, or do more of the same, nothing new will sprout to nourish you.
We learned this quickly when first envisioning life without parents, and later without masters. We are the children who sifted through tatters of forgotten, forbidden thought and came to assemble our own minds. We are the bitter students who found brilliant intellectual tools reduced to their employment in the existing, sacred power structures. We are the elders who recount heroic, nameless strikes against the organs of everyday business. We are the succeeding inevitability of the free individual.
Proudly godless, proudly wild, proudly defective to every metric of economy and collective symmetry, every outraged accusation is absorbed with an affirming stoicism:
“Yes, we are infatuated with life. Yes, we are self-centered and orient relations accordingly. Yes, we endure towards the abolition of every system, of every righteous decree, of every political section. Yes, our enemies are the ‘god’ of Abraham, society, dogma, morals, prisons, police. Yes, our ends are boundless prairies by means of unthinkable subversions, relentless upsets and mercilessness for universal mercy.”
No system of thought can come close. No school of philosophy — even one belonging to anarchism — can articulate the violent impulse to overcome and weave for oneself their own peace. Anarchism may issue its various claims; the substantive anarchy of the individual is all that those -isms truly point to.
Nothing can be greater, nothing can be more real than the lone individual who has gripped the rod bearing the black flag — and rammed it into the eye of god himself.
Nothing can be stronger, nothing can be more durable than the silent contemplation of the daring anarchist who carries a sovereign universe and territory within them.
Nothing can sound the last whimper of archy like the sharp blade of self-realization against its every stagnating appendage.
Anarchy is the black vessel in which freedom’s fire consumes the old and leaves a welcoming aura ’round the new.
Brilliant fires, unnameable hues and intoxicating vapors impress upon the young rebel and her band of merry life-lovers. They with other cells will raise the dead skull of the unified logic of all archy and plunge it into the ocean. They will fertilize their gardens with the ashes of old masters. And they will surpass all notion of heaven with immediate life made greater than any divine.
Contribution by Anonymous
Fairy faggot,
Growing tits and wings
and fangs.
I sharpened my pocket knife on the real thing this time
replaced a scream with the glass shattering
positioned my feet in the fire
scribbled it on the walls
first burn the museums,
then kill the public.
all it takes is a little bit of ket
and an ate pussy and suddenly
the sky is blue and the grass is green.
this is the real herstory.
I don’t tuck, I fuck,
Bitch.
what a way to make music
smash glass against the wall
my discontent blisters
another wound, another tragedy
I invert despair into absurdity
grasp at my body
and move to act
the song resounds so clearly
filtering thru industrial noise
the static destroying me
and cicadas fill the air
Contribution by Anonymous
The new society established, we will return to its margins to live our lives dangerously as noble criminals and audacious sinners! Because the anarchist individualist still means eternal renewal in the field of art, thought and action. Anarchist individualism still means eternal revolt against eternal sorrow, the eternal search for new springs of life, joy and beauty. And we will still be such in Anarchy.
— Renzo Novatore, Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution, 1919
Art, thought and action’s renewal, their consistent evolution out of static orthodoxy, rests on the will of the living to depose the cruel conservatism of the ruling death cult, to incinerate their every spore thereafter.
Those who presently annul the possibilities of the body moved by the free spirit, instead declaring that the body will work and be without spirit, shall feel the counter-cruelty, the amplified inertia of all they have struck us with. Let them be cruel now — ours will be ten, a hundredfold.
There is no sooner or later about it.
Our blood is black with negative impulse.
Our minds are throbbing with intellectual armament.
We are renewal. We are anarchy.
But we shall never know the cleansing rays of sunlight until the smog of order is cleared forcefully. Until the instinct of the soul is audaciously lifted above the stale moralism of all who pursue authority over others.
Until the most sacred is attacked, erased and prevented from ever being made again.
Until the sacred is no longer conceived of.
Until the real lives that create useful or enlivening matter exceed the corpse of the sacred and realize their own uniqueness.
Speak nothing of “order—” to be ordered is the piecemeal death. To take on being ordered — or giving orders — as one’s noble calling in life is the certain surrender worse than any death.
To worship an orderly existence is to celebrate sorrow, limitation and retrograde ideals murdering joy. Such well-regarded delusions of a certain order being inevitable, calling everything with vibrancy a delusion!
What has one’s precious order brought!? Poisoned salmon, undrinkable streams, gutted mountains, concrete drowning everything . . .
Such preoccupation with damming the rivers, clearing the forests, saving the jobs — all for your bosses’ profit! Or, on the other hand, all for socialism! The sacred new order! All for a vocally “progressive” yet truthfully conservative idea of “the society to-be,” of “the good economy,” of “the exalted collective.”
How often has the ruling class — socialist or capitalist — envisioned their new panopticons, their new subjects, their new territory. Every generation sees a new frontier for the rich or the politburo to conquer, brutalize and exploit.
How often has the intrusive mass of idiots called “The People” approved and encouraged further encroachments on the crevices of breathing room.
Nobody asked for these things. They asked only for what they were told is all that matters: One’s right to be left alone in the liberalism that allows only a passive life unconcerned with death encroaching on all joy.
Soon that tepid deal will come loose; the disposable luxuries will cost more, the power will go out, the fires will be ignited, and it will be time.
It will be time to make yourself sufficient for yourself, to become a destructive monster for your own selfish want. In selfish intercourse, we find something to pursue together — without any sacred togetherness.
We meet them in the fields, in the hollers. We ready our rifles, secure our perches, plant ourselves. But we do not fight fair. Fairness given to those who have only known unfair advantage is giving oneself defeat.
We become truly ungovernable.
We raise ourselves up as lives larger than the mountains.
Our deeds as victors and martyrs ring louder than any sorry drivel at any desperate podium.
Our lives are now. What seeks to end them is rule. What shall move us?
There is no Doctrine of Renewal in me or any anarchist who knows what I mean; this would only be a more spiritual progressivism. Our renewal is done not for the satisfaction of any necessity, but by a will to seize joy.
It is done by every child of horrid parents (slave masters,) it is done by every student of stuffy, rigid instructors, it is done by every fem and gender non-conforming person in their constant confrontation with patriarchy and so-called “normality,” it is done by every organism pushing against all crushing weight.
Our renewal is one of spaces presently occupied by unhelpful stuff made open to those thoughtful, precious lives who mean only positive development for themselves and negative transformation of society into ash — the greatest creation of new space!
Reader, let the paradigm of Now be your testbed in which experiments with life can breach and fracture the enclosures that disallow growth in all important fields of living and creating.
When we assert our living contents, when we mind the present world with creative wit, conspiring in ourselves as individuals, melding ideas with those in whom substance is found — life, joy and beauty will be grown and harvested at the intersections of our abodes, in the gathering spaces of wholly untamed lives.
That is our renewal. A life of adaptability and ease, a life of space and fresh air, a life of richness and friendly intercourse.
Contribution by Wulfinna
As one looks with an even-tempered curiosity at life’s simple occurrences bound up the way that they are, one finds that we are all only trying to feel joy and fulfillment however we may before we turn to ashen corpses. There is a particular innocence to this, but a thoroughly terrorized one: terrorized by this very drive for sustaining oneself seized by those who successfully navigated existing power, using themselves to oppress others for a paycheck. It is all too commonplace to get hit with the fallout of people doing their jobs, obeying the social creed’s demand, reproducing human beings (murdering their uniqueness with an assigned gender/sex category, a name, an institutional schooling, etc.), betting on politicians in elections… everything seems so orderly while producing so much compressed chaos. The one who is looking with curious eyes at all of this must eventually find their mind and hands forming into obliterating tools if they will not simply fall in line, but selfishly realize their own freedom, shared with their loved ones or not.
We remain curious of what an active endurance for the absurd can yield in the determined pursuit of something better. Something outside of the hamster wheel. Everything that troubles us comes back to the totalizing configuration, not any one root but the broad urge to be a part of the powerful class and have everyone else be among the subject class. We know we are held hostage, even during our emotional embrace of certain radicalisms, by the moralism disseminated from power, by the myriad threats of acting out, by the known avenues of making change, by the imminent obligations in people’s lives. Such stunting anxieties are either resolved or allowed to condemn lives to miserable, slow suicides. Curiosity only endures because of this simple constant.
By curiosity we begin to study, and by studying we come to a clear understanding; we map our terrain and mark our points of action. Alas, upon gathering our gear and making our march, we find the pikes of law & order raised against our paths of direct resolution. “You have to pay up to do that,” “You have to be a politician to do that,” “You have to have a permit to do that,” “You have to have approval to do that.”
There was once a general situation wherein people under subjugation would simply arise and kill their direct oppressors, and do so successfully according to a few straightforward variables. It is from this situation that the goal of establishing a new, independent nation state persisted. But now, with new developments and critical analysis, under the stifling weight of surveillance, militarized police, “revolutionary” nationalisms that simply construct new corrupt institutions, the eternal goal of un-establishing what has been put down against our wellness and autonomy remains a suppressed, barbaric urge that the good citizens of all empires are entrusted with vanquishing. The liberal republics have woven a new sense of sanctity coming from its generations of subjects out of the antiquated revolts of mere national independence — now they think of their “freedom” only on its terms. Now they impose that brand of “freedom” on all who dare to speak out against systematized cruelty. They refuse to consider the very existence and profoundness of prisons, of the cost of living, of the descent into ritual escapism. They run from sorrow’s real cause: persisting with mandates claiming “We need the glorious nation! We need the magnificent godly yet man-maneuvered order! We need denial of self-truth in favor of God’s Truth!”
The only realistic solution to sorrow is the intentional embrace of well-cultivated potential against all that creates it. In the throes of willful delusion, willful disregard for deeper learning, willful perpetuating of the cruel and unreasonable, those who are conscious to the toxicity of the nonsense become learned on what they are up against, coming to know that one has to think and act carefully, especially in trusting others.
The simple argument (for simple people) against a sudden rupture of this order rests in the fact that many individuals are simply content with (or resigned to) their menial, distorted lives while other “delinquent types” are thoroughly discontent in what makes the former temporarily satisfied. (This is evoked by those trying to save politics and civilization when they need to cower in fear of critique, but also look like the sensible ones for easy sympathy from idiots.)
The more substantive argument is to point out that the generations that have lived under the dominant, ever-evolving order have become reliant in some way on what only a technique of that order can presently provide. This is very true: some require diabetes medication. Some require seizure medication. Some require hormone replacement medication. There are a great deal of unique needs and desires facing the oasis of certain components of relief in life that have unfortunately been devoured by the millennia of power and caste.
But these arguments do not help get away from the issue that is really plaguing us. We are not capable of being authentically well and joyful under any regime; we do not have genuine access to the things we need without sacrificing some aspect of ourselves. We do not yet know our own fullest capacity, and yet information is simply dirt cheap nowadays, if “dirt cheap” could be any cheaper. The variables for refining skills and knowhow are easily put together by those with a will to succeed. This is precisely what has generated such projects as Four Thieves Vinegar collective, who have taken it upon themselves to pursue “harm reduction for the living,” providing solutions as an “anarchist collective dedicated to enabling access to medicines and medical technologies to those who need them but don’t have them,” to name but one collaboration. These projects are the direct, accessible solutions to what the dominant order has claimed total jurisdiction over. These applications of knowledge are what begin to build new components for a new life, and demonstrate that it is individuals who accomplish things — not exclusive power-holders.
To engage with reality in this way is an act of getting beyond the barrier, of getting outside the confines of the acceptable, of exiting the hamster wheel. Reality held in static captivity has always been challenged in order for people to have free play with conceptual and material matter. For every rule, there has been un-rule. Un-rule had been the necessary step beyond the suffocating limitations of church and crown in order to move what liberals call “progress” in a direction some consider “forward.” The transition from abject feudalism to liberal capitalism is one malignant example of what they praise, while besmirching the anarchists for pursuing the whole of freedom.
We are not unruly up to a point. Our unruliness has nothing to do with “progress.” We are not humble participants in any history written by the chroniclers of the ruling order. We do not seek to be The Bad Guys in the annals of Bad People — but we know there is little choice. We know we are so very much more. We are agents of selfish desire transmuted into loving fruits. We are innovators of solutions. We are wild organisms demonstrating the cultivation of freedom, of a desirable existence beyond merely existing in the society so many are resigned to. Our wisdom is expressed by anarchist scientists, anarchist poets, anarchist shamans, anarchist healers, anarchist warriors. The content of our wisdom is this: I am the most important person to me, who I refine and use to assist those whom I see a part of myself in, which is why I am not sacred even to myself. My importance transcends the sacred, and is revealed as something completely unique. The same goes for those whom I see myself in. Our “dastardly selfishness” is only the impulse to be unconstrained in one’s intentions. If one’s intention is to do baseless harm, then substantive harm will come unto them without scruple with any authority over “legitimate punishment.” But if one’s intention is well-deserved kindness, participation and aid, then only the desired fruits of coming together will find them. If one’s intention is to be isolated and rid of all people’s opinions and associations affecting them, so it shall be.
For a long time, it was the anarchists who gave unruliness many names and portrayals. It was anarchists wrestling with the worst desperations of humankind who mapped the distinct regions of social life in which to apply anarchist methods of interaction and solution in order to harness the fruits of unruly endeavors. Now it must no longer be a requirement to be an anarchist in order to understand and embrace unruliness. The unruly must be all former subjects, regardless of their philosophical or political interests — so long as they have a yearning for untainted freedom in their hearts. The unruly come to be so by their recognition of their castes and their willful deviation from their conventional characteristics, by their hostility toward all that has given them caste. They have no unifying model but that which arises from joint agreement and personal judgment. The method is unruliness, and the end is unruliness. Unruliness that amplifies the sublime, unnameable substance in all with breath and form against all that contains and suppresses it.
We do not need to fixate on any perfection of anarchism or anarchy. We do not need a flawless theory when the practice is simply nonexistent. (The two have always been preached to be in balance, but many like to simply make a hobby out of theory with total rejection of practice.) We need an anarchism arising from the soil in our souls that sufficiently realizes the unruly dream, that fleshes the smiles on the individual persons newly marveling their freshly planted freedom. This means definitions determined from real, palpable content — not from epistemological scripture. Unruliness means libraries looted of their precious gems and all their trim used for kindling.
Anarchism and anarchy as concepts are worthless without sincere development seen and felt in the material realm which translates to unruliness. Anarchy must be no more than the vehicle for that matter. It cannot be the defining condition that people consciously mandate. It must be the transparent container for each person’s transcendence of all imposed conditions, including anarchist conditions. The anarchist condition is descriptive for the better, yes. But what it points to cannot actually be described. It can only be discovered and lived.
Are we stagnated subjects of order, its philosophy, its toothless herd? Or are we unknowable organisms with self-created purpose still waiting to be enacted? We ought to have a curiosity freed from victimhood, one that simply brings things into being where they are wanted, not where they are obligations of the here and now. This unruly curiosity is the primal intent to make use of oneself and one’s surroundings. To lift oneself up out of one’s filth, imprinting on the ground the steps out of servitude and into self-alignment with one’s deepest desires.
If we are to live unfree for all our days, we might as well die now to rush toward the freedom from All. But if there is any will to dissolve the intolerable specter of heaven for the obedient and hell for the freethinkers, we need to act like it. The innocent yearning for a comfortable and stable life must become an intentional and resolute project against rule, against what denies our very nature, against what makes life hell.
Co-authored by the Effrenatum collective
The Third Edition, Volume Three, of A Journal Of Unruliness is out. Viewable and freely reproducible here:
Cover file (PDF), interior file (PDF)
All B&W On Landscaped 11 inch by 8.5 inch copy paper. Your printer may need tweaking beforehand to be able to print/fold both sides of every sheet.
Email us for the editable document files if you need them. You will need to install some fonts if you choose to edit the documents. They are…
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Effrenatum is now shifting to a bi-monthly publication model (once every two months) in order to give contributors and editors more time to work on their material.
Volume Four will be the next installment, expected around the middle of September.
“There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”
— Franz Fanon
There’s a specter haunting Ireland, and that specter is backwards ultra moronic patriotism.
The phantasms of patriotism and nationalism have been on the rise throughout the globe over the last number of years, people becoming possessed by false idols and fantasies creating a growing collective mass delusional psychosis. Even Ireland isn’t immune from this spreading disease.
Over the last year there have been riots, numerous assaults on individuals and a wave of arson attacks on buildings earmarked for refugees. Just yesterday (15/7/24) in the deprived area of Coolock in Dublin anti-refugee violence broke out into a riot on the street lasting hours. Ireland has a long history of anti-colonial struggle and emigration so how can the Irish who have suffered a similar kind of discrimination and racism now be the oppressors. Some may wonder how oppressed people can become possessed by lies and such levels of hate after such a long history of colonial oppression.
To echo Franz Fanon, the first thing the colonizer does to subjugate a people is to plant the seed in the minds of the colonized that they are savages living in misery and insecurity while the colonizers are actually saving them from themselves, helping them gain social-economic and technological progress. Colonial domestication creates a psychological disorder of a self-hate inferiority complex. The colonized believe they are stupid and inferior and the only route to salvation is the civilization brought by the colonizers and so imitate the colonizers.
In neo-colonial era Ireland the recent decades of catholic cultural hegemony, combined with the added psychological harm and alienation created by the rest of the power structures and constructs of civilization continuing the domestication process started by British colonialism.
Adding to multigenerational trauma and socio-economic insecurities and poverty furthering inferiority complexes affecting people in the same way as under direct colonialism. It’s becoming a mainstream belief that modern civilization causes mental illness with all its sensory stimulation gadgets and false realities of social media keeping us glued to phones, TV, and the promises of a better life and wealth to chase after, but most will never receive. Some turn to drugs, substance abuse and the many other addictions of civilized life, some to the false realities of cosmetics and materialism, others direct their inferiority/self-hate outwards taking on the abusive characteristics of the oppressors directing their anger towards those around them and lower on the societal hierarchy and individuals perceived differently than the norm. So this growing hate against minorities and the marginalized is a byproduct of civilization. How civilized many Irish truly have become.
Ultimately the system of civilization is the root cause, but the actors in all this also bear blame and responsibility. Even with the psychological effects of domestication and the influence from socio-economic poverty, individuals can still make some choices. But instead of directing anger and frustration at the oppressors and the power structures, many of the oppressed are turning to patriotic nationalist ideology for a solution to their problems.
***
Patriotism can be found in the same realm of the mind as Christian mysticism. Opium for the gullible.
But what is Patriotism exactly? The feeling of love, devotion, sense of attachment to a country or state. This patriotic love is a false love in the same way an abuse victim may feel love for their abuser.
This supposed love for the sacred ideals of patriotism and nation – to live for, to die for if needs be, to kill for if necessary. To sacrifice yourself for an idol built on lies and manipulation. How can this be love? Love for tyranny, chains, an illusion, pure fantasy.
This psychosis like self-deception for the psychologically weak, frustrated by lack of meaning in their life and alienation from an unequal society, gorge greedily on the lies and fantasies, feasting on nationalist ideals turned sacred in cognitive dissonance.
The patriots pledge allegiance to an abstraction not having the courage or the brains to live their own life on their own terms, and so feel the need to knock down those that do.
Patriotism and nationalism have different meanings in different places and points of time. Currently in Ireland it’s used in the sense of a past time in history of simpler times reminiscing of The Quiet Man¹ Hollywood depiction of the emerald isle of picture postcard perfection. Nostalgia for a time that didn’t really exist. A fake memory built on fantasy, the Irish Free State was never great.
Ireland from the 1920s right up to the 21st century was a place of non-stop housing crisis, poverty, inequality, political corruption. The exact same issues as now were around from the very birth of the Free State in the 1920s. The differences Queers had to hide in closet from fear of annihilation by pretty much the entire population; unmarried mothers were locked away blackmailed to give their baby away to the catholic church who sold to the best bidder, when a woman got married they were slave to the husband divorce outlawed no way out or escape, domestic violence was viewed as legitimate punishment to correct the behavior of your wife, by law a husband couldn’t be found guilty of raping his wife; there were no refugees or immigrants stealing the jobs because there were none, but that didn’t stop the city dwellers of Dublin blaming the chulcies* for the lack of employment opportunities and housing. Mass emigration was the norm scattering Irish across the planet in the search of a better life In Ireland’s past, patriotism was used as a means of uniting a colonized people against the colonizer. When P.H. Pearce² proclaimed “Irish belongs to the Irish”, he meant it in the sense of anti-colonial rebellion. Now it’s the battle cry of the hodgepodge ragtag of idiots that makes up the numbers and supporters of the far right, ethno-nationalists, Christian crusaders and out right fascists. Anti-colonialism bastardized to suit the fantasy of fools.
Marx was wrong to lay the blame on capitalist exploitation for creating alienation, although partially true. Stirner completely pulled the veil away when they wrote the Unique and Its Property; an in-depth description of how alienation stems from the social constructs and abstractions which birthed civilization and all the horrors that came with it. Nationalism, patriotism, states, borders, racism, classism,xenophobia, queerphobia, patriarchy, culture and a whole host of other malicious anti-individual fantasies are all civilization creation weaponized to justify invading, enslaving, exploiting, murdering, raping and pillaging every corner of the globe.
***
The far-righter rant about “our” culture being destroyed. The culture they are referring to isn’t even real, it was a creation of post-British occupation mostly influenced by the Catholic church. Repressing women and queer people at it’s core and society generally through theocratic hegemony of the Roman Catholic church.
What are the specific attributes that can be narrowed down to describe a culture? Most of the cultural attributes that culminate in description of a supposed Irishness have come from other places and cultures across the globe. Humans like many other animals are a migratory species we have always moved around even as far back when gatherer-hunter lifeway was the norm; people existed and lived through vast interconnected networks of tribes. No culture is static, cultures are in a constant state of evolutionary flux. Culture is a multigenerational overlapping of trends, traditions, values, beliefs, etc . Let’s look at Irish traditional music which has a big place in what’s described as Irish culture, tunes such as jigsaw, reels, hornpipes and the likes, many of which a mixture are from across Europe and the US, although with some indigenous aspects.
Banjos (an African invention), fiddles and mandolins (Mediterranean) don’t come from Ireland but are synonymous with Irish traditional music.
Another example is in Irish Celtic design such as triquetra the trinity knot. It spans across Irish culture; the book of Kells uses it in all sorts of images, but is it Irish, or even Celtic for that matter? It can be found spanning across multi cultures of Europe and into the middle east all the way back to the iron age. Far-righters use such designs as part of their propaganda and symbolism and mostly don’t know it’s history.
Even the contents of the book of Kells is an importation, a Christian bible. Christianity the first colonizers of this land started the domestication process 1600 years ago assimilating Celtic culture into its fold turning Pagan goddesses and gods into Christian saints and sacred places into places of Christian prayer.
Before colonization the people on this island had a Celtic ecological animist culture based around the unwritten Brehon law, which wasn’t like bourgeois law, it wasn’t to protect private property of a minority against the majority. It recognised divorce and equal rights between the genders and also showed high concern for the environment. Homosexuality was provided for and was only criminalized on this island in the early 16th century when British king Henry the VIII took over the monasteries taking control of the courts which had been ruled by the Catholic church previously.
Irish myths and legends also have a Queer and immigration undertone to them, in which the patriots wouldn’t like to recognise. The mythical warrior hero Cúchulainn is believed to have been bisexual. The Aos Sí (Sí meaning she in Irish Gaelic) were fairies (Pucas in Gaelic) that were shapeshifters between human and non-human animal forms, they were non-binary/gender fluid shifters. They cannot be pinned down as male or female; they were beyond the binary. They were descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann also known as the people of Danu. Danu is believed to possibly mean the Danube, one of Europe’s longest rivers. So the Tuatha Dé Danann could be in reference to the first Celtic people that immigrated to Ireland. Queerness in Celtic cultures across Europe was acceptable; there are many references from Roman text confirming this. Queerphobia is an invention of Christianity and was the norm in many cultures before Christian colonization.
Even the Patriots hero Micheal Collins³ is rumored to be closeted gay or bisexual. And the flag they love so much, the Irish tricolor, itself is an importation, from France. The Tricolors meaning is of diversity among different cultures to coincide living in peace on this island. And likewise the ideology of Republicanism is an importation inspired by the French Revolution and its motto, Liberty, Equality Fraternity ( Liberté, Égalité Fraternité). These homegrown patriots have forgotten this in their nationalist fever that Irish revolutionaries who took up the ideology of Republicanism were fighting for diversity of cultures, organized religion, slavery, and all forms of tyranny.
In the very same way culture is multi generations overlapping; ethnicity can be viewed in the very same way. A clear example of this in the context of Ireland are with surnames, many of which people would think are of Irish origin but are actually Anglo Saxon or otherwise, such as Barrett, which coincidentally is the surname of one the most well known far-right and neo-nazi agitators in Ireland. So this proud patriot is actually from British colonizer descent not fully Irish, as is nobody really because most people classed as Irish have ancestry from all sorts of places.
And likewise community, another sacred construct weaponized as a tool for oppression and conformity. Each collectivist ideology from left to right has different meanings for what community constitutes. A term readily used to justify all sorts of heinous acts against any individual deemed enemy or subhuman. “We don’t want outsiders, foreigners, unvetted males in our communities” – the delusional patriots proclaim.
John Zerzan was right when he described a community as an elusive term. What constitutes a community exactly? People that live on the same street or apartment block? Or individuals who share a common characteristic?
In the hellscape concrete jungles of civilization people live beside others mostly not out of choice. People could live next door to each other for years and not even know one another’s name, many people in estates don’t even talk or like one another in fact. No mutuality and no voluntary association exists here. Iv heard community my whole life but never felt part of any of this supposed thing.
Cities, towns, housing estates with their alienation, social isolation and exclusion are an invention of colonial civilization along with private property, which also didn’t exist on this island prior to colonization. People lived in tribal clan structures based on mutualism of loved ones and extended family living with the environment and animals in kinship. In all, the closest to an authentic Irish ethnicity and culture that partially survives today would be the Irish Traveling people also known as Pavees. Who lived in nomadic clans for at least a 1000 years, it’s not known for sure how long their culture spans back because of the lack of written records there are different theories and vast oral history by Travelers themselves to where Travelers originated from, such as: they were predominant culture before the Celts arrived here, refugees from Cromwell’s genocides who took to land, the people who refused to give in to British colonization and domestication living in the traditional way.
***
The nationalist psychosis engulfing Ireland over the last few years culminates in idiotic stupidity that would be laughable if it wasn’t having serious consequences. In one such case a few months ago fools possessed by patriotism attacked two Croatian men, beating one to death. All because they weren’t speaking English. These warrior patriots of Ireland while stomping on the skulls of these unfortunates didn’t seem to know just a few generations ago British colonizers inflicted cultural genocide on the island to enslave and assimilate the inhabitants into their colonial system. And one outcome from these horrors was the near annihilation of the Gaelic language. So the language they love so much they’d kick a person to death for not speaking isn’t even “Irish”.
The patriots burning buildings earmarked to house refugees proclaim “house the Irish” and “house our homeless”. If they are so concerned for their beloved Irish why not squat the buildings and hand them over to Irish homeless people? It’s because the patriot warriors couldn’t give two fucks about homeless people Irish or otherwise. These begrudging fools even have issues with refugees sleeping on the streets.
How many of these brave fighting men took up arms against the British occupiers or loyalist death squads stalking the streets executing Catholics at random. Where were the heroic Irish warriors when loyalists assembled to block Catholic school girls attending primary school in Ardoyne, when mad bigoted loyalist grannies shoving porn mags into the little girls faces while their men folk threw bottles of urine and pipe bombs at defenseless primary school children and their parents. Where were these brave men then? It wasn’t that long ago, many of the patriots were of “military age” but yet did nothing.
Not one of these fascists have I ever heard say anything about the very real oppression of British colonialism that inflicted hundreds years of genocide and which is very much still alive and well occupying this island. Patriotism, nationalism, loyalism, colonialism, fascism, Catholicism, Christianity, leftism, all collectivist moralities with their social constructs each believes in refusing to allow the individual to be considered as a unique being, instead every single individual is put in social category boxes for the benefit of their identity politics lies: which is the cause of so much misery and all sorts of shite in the world.
“The people is dead. Long live me!” – Max Stirner
Footnotes
¹ a movie starring John Wayne made in 1952 depicting a highly romanticized version of Ireland
²was a revolutionary republican and one the leaders of the 1916 Easter insurrection. And was also closeted gay
³ was one of the leaders of the IRA during the Black and Tan war. He betrayed the struggle accepting partial liberation of Ireland which split the country allowing the Brits to remain in the north of the island. He was assassinated in the vicious civil war that folded. The far right hold Michael Collins up as the nationalist founding father, strangely considering it was his actions which partitioned the island instead of gaining total liberation.
Contribution by Renzo Connors
(From Individual Inklings)
The “Evil” calls to me,
For my “Good” will was debased
One singular time too many.
(The betrayed naïveté as a child
Had indicted every possible lie
Every upright authority will tout.)
Now the floodgates are breached —
The shattered jaw of the white Jesus Christ
Is my latrine!
*
Once I cowered under the renunciations
Of life put forward by the gospels.
Now I raise my boot to quash Every Idea
That employs and negates me.
Once I was an acolyte
For what simpletons call “The Lord.”
Now I am the torch-bearer
For my heathen trek to Kill him.
*
The Antichrist? Der Übermensch?
Call it what you must. I call it barbaric will:—
The will of the Barbarian against the Roman
To secure one’s own and sack all empires.
I want the boundless resolve of my ancestors.
*
The ancient axe of my foremothers
Used to open the skulls
Of their kings and patriarchs
Lies before me, sharp and sturdy.
Now my will soars over the thunder
And careens like lightning onto god himself.
*
In all my honest hatred, I will be the device
That implodes Abrahamic resignation
And punishes pastors for propagating
The Highest Lie, The Chief Falsehood:
The plastic “Grace” of toothless submission.
In all my hell-bent creative rage, I will live
As everything they detest, or deeply desire;
I will scale the walls of everything
They pose against me and leap into the sea
Of my boundless determination.
Contribution by Wulfinna
There were several iterations of this introduction planned. But ultimately, with so many different events unfolding across the world in the month of July in the year 2024, the general overview of the world was left as follows:
We could be looking at an official conservative autocracy holding power in Turtle Island
in the face of a stubborn and severely aging Biden staying in the presidential raceas Vice President Kamala Harris is endorsed by Biden against the newly confirmed Trump-Vance ticket made emboldened by a failed assassination attempt by a fellow republican twenty-year-old; some weeks before, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said on far-right media “We are in the process of the Second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be”; American fascist groups have marched on several different occasions in Nashville, Tennessee without proper dealing with; Project 2025 — the christian nationalist project to eliminate the administrative state and redefine presidency as autocracy — is being put into place every day before Trump’s potential re-election with backing from lawmakers in the Democratic party. Abroad: Coolock in County Dublin, Ireland has seen a far-right anti-migrant uprising involving the arson of the construction site of a migrant housing center; Argentina’s far-right government continues its war on the working class with much needed resistance taking place in the streets; India remains under the stranglehold of Modi’s recently re-elected far-right Hindu nationalist government, further sowing division in the nation and oppression onto the Muslim population; Israel’s unabated genocide of the Palestinian people begins to destabilize in the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere amid conscription of orthodox communities, calls for the bloodthirsty Bibi to step down continue while shipments of weapons from the US resume; The Turkish military persists in their attacks in South Kurdistan with many civilian casualties a time after the YPJ had captured the leader of the current iteration of Daesh (ISIS.)
We had revised this some ten times while trying to keep it compact, and still it was not enough to capture the evolving tire fires of humanity’s thrashing pangs. Listing off headlines is more nauseating than one can imagine. That’s all that reality is now. Everything from afar. Everything from institutional word of mouth. Something could be going on right outside your door, and the world would only know it as a headline. Your real lived experience is made lower than the lice. This is what people vote, humiliate and exhaust themselves to maintain. Just to be lice of the Earth.
But this is not a news outlet. We are not fixated on the particulars of current events as the end goal. We are here reading and writing this zine to tackle power — and we know that power corrupts, we know where it is concentrated and we know the arsenal of incendiary distractions used on working poor people against other marginalized peoples. But well after power has corrupted those susceptible and concentrated itself in their violent social systems, after all the distractions are exhausted and debunked, it becomes desperate. Thus Elon Musk is now donating $45,000,000 a month to Trump’s “America PAC”, making his campaign a competing corporate welfare baby with the Walton family. This is done generally as a consolidation of economic forces with political forces, the core tenant of fascism. There is an obvious project collaborated on from both christian nationalists and the corporate/private owning class to enshrine the government as a direct instrument of far-right interest, without any retaining of “equal protection under the law” or “due process.”
We have already seen far-right microcosm victories in Turtle Island with homelessness itself being outlawed with no actual solution to the problem. The lawmaking class of the state is actively seeking out criminalization of every aspect of human life in order for people to either be working slaves or incarcerated slaves. The picture is not pretty at all. And this is not to say it is any prettier if Harris or whoever manages to pull through and win the electoral college. It will only be a slightly preferable buffer once more between us and the next far-right political uprising. That pathetic dream is dwindling more and more every single hour that this game persists. Imagine those reading this text four, eight, twelve years in the future. We cannot afford to let our somber embrace of The Worst get the best of us.
Pessimism is only helpful if it is contextual, not general. To be generally pessimistic is to reach for the easy victory in being defeated on a cosmic scale by the calm, enormous substantive nothing of galaxies. Our problems are down here on Earth. What matters here and now is refining skills, building connections, doing tangibly helpful work. Anarchism is not to be preached as a salvation of what we have known, but demonstrated as the effective guiding principles toward a genuinely free and self-owned life for all.
Shall we allow the mental and spiritual gunk of stupid powerful people to anchor our legs to the bottoms of a moralist ocean of non-action and self-denial? Or shall we depart from every consideration they may have, every question they may pose, every mandate they may codify, and act to spitefully save our own lives, nourishing and keeping them as long as we may from the maniacs and their mindless, soulless goons of domination?
Whatever you’re going to do — just do it. But do it wisely. And if you will, raise the only flag whose black field represents the only imminent action we can know: the forceful negation of all things perpetuating domination.
Co-authored by the Effrenatum collective