Our willful soul is multiform…
The fiery throbbing of the sun and the tremulous shudders of the stars pass through it!
We are rebel poets and philosophers of destruction.
We are anarchists.
Iconoclasts!
Individualists,
atheists,
nihilists!
We are the carriers of black flags.— Renzo Novatore, ‘Black Flags’, 1922
From the moment our ancestors accepted rule — we have lost ourselves.
From the moment “peace” became synonymous with “normal brutality”, we have been denied the peace of natural harmony, the resilience of casual deviations and the glory of free evolutions.
From the moment the immortal barbarian heart of the anarchist had been conquered by the eager delusions of the liberal, we have been cornered into our places without legitimate chance of new scenery.
From the moment bigotry of all stripes became a debatable political stance, we have been at the mercy of opinion, perception and fanatical team sports without sincere critical thought levied at everything around oneself.
From the moment grand lies came to hypnotize our progenitors, such as Consent Of The Governed, The Social Contract and Equal Protection Under The Law, the age of the wild and dignified human has come and gone in a flash.
We are held hostage by abusive assurances. Whether they are social obligations, cultural conventions, or off-hand “facts” about so-called life, we are swarmed in every aspect of every day with bullshit that attempts, and by societal imposition, succeeds, to justify and perpetuate our universal slavery. We are each expected to be just as ignorant and absorbed as our coworkers, our bosses, our parents, our most detested public figures.
We are so depressed, so lost, so resigned. We grow older day by day. Life on Earth decays little by little. A heart quietly breaks every millisecond. Truth be told — we are dying. We will die. But sooner or later, before then, we will rise.
“Hope” is not waited for nor submitted to. True Hope is in each of us: It calls to us in the moments before stepping once more into the myriad situations. The mockery of hope lies in the toothless masturbation to its fantastical possibility without ever enlivening and pursuing that possibility. The realities of life, of people, need to be accepted and worked with (or around) in order to realize the fruits of our hope.
This project is a practice of a new hope. This project is a black flag hoisted in a new sunlight in order to extend its hand to all.
Our black flags symbolize negation of every false promise. This is the root of the nihilism that so many fear. But we know this negation to be the implement of untainted freedom. To reject and fight against every lie, every orthodox creed, every puritanical demand, every authoritarian regime is to situate oneself as a conscious, ungovernable, uncharted entity in the face of the powerful and the duped.
We do not stop at new hopes and new promises. We create, we agitate, we enunciate, we assert. We take the time to gather our thoughts, navigate our intentions, apply our skills, our passions and speak clearly when the time comes.
We dedicate what portions of our effort we each may to a wide constellation of focuses and projects that all arrive at the same basic principle: “Things are not okay.” Ideally, this is followed up with: “And we have a responsibility to refine our skills, share the knowledge we have with our collaborators, promote joy, promote peace won through struggle, and share the light of living with others to help them foster their own.”
For seasoned organizers, we know the learned skepticism that builds with every endeavor trustingly taken up at different social and political flare-ups. We begin to see the necessity for an entirely new strategy of tackling our problems, in order to skirt around the cults of personality, the ideological camps, the debate circles that only stir more doubt, the legislators that truly Do Not Care, the cops that would sooner kill us all and go home to their steak dinners than consider quitting and being worthy people.
We want an anarchistic return to our roots, so to speak. We want an unruliness that is based on a clear need for it, orchestrated in such a way to amplify that need. The contents of this journal will elaborate, artistically or directly, on our urgent need to be alive now and act accordingly. To celebrate living, thinking, feeling, processing, becoming.
The project at hand is a practice of bringing something fresh, insightful, striking and audacious into the world through a lens, at minimum, of anti-state anti-capitalism. It is to reclaim “Freedom” from its capture by so-called American rationale. It is to compile creativity when freed from the concrete pastures it’s allowed to roam within in order to generate profitable concepts. The project hopes to allow readers to gaze into the often overlooked crevices of our urban sprawls, of our rural terrains soaked in blood and history, of all in between, to see what lives absorb and describe in their contemplative, outraged states, and to walk away with the knowledge of why people are compelled to destroy what destroys them. The project hopes to foster content attainable through a DIY effort of self-publishing and self-circulating. There will be no non-profits, no big media buyouts. We do everything ourselves. And when the project dies, it dies. And from its corpse, new matter will flourish.
We will rediscover the one true promise generated in each of us at birth. A promise of a true life won through our honest potential. Our birthright.
We welcome all who despise what they suffer and where it comes from to submit their work to the Email address mentioned in this post.
Let the engraving tools of pleasure and potency curse the false innocence of all the surfaces of this hell-world. Let the sincere bright minds, the truest free individuals, rise to their own call.
Anti-Copyright, Steal & Use Freely
Co-Authored by the Effrenatum Collective