We who adore and strive for uncompromised freedom cannot journey out of our abodes without encountering a simple-minded fool who loves only the so-called “peace” of how life has been condemned to be for so many lifetimes. He is infatuated with his lawn, his expensive home and vehicle, his half puffed-up patriotism. He is comfortable in what being a good bitch to order has afforded him. He sees no other possibility for life.
He will summon his harshest tone of offense upon learning of an anarchist in his midst. He will look upon our circled A or chaos sigil or black flags and contend that “You don’t know how PEOPLE work! Without government or police, we would DESCEND into BARBARISM! Without CAPITALISM, we would be waiting in BREAD LINES!” This he declares, with mental filter fixed tightly to avoid digesting the realities of ubiquitous police violence, government overreach and neglect handed down in the same breath, capitalist trickery aimed at robbing our time and pockets, mutual aid efforts saving lives everywhere that they are needed and an unprecedented drive in those inheriting the Earth to undo tyranny that itself marks a need to call all order into question.
The liberal asserts that his precious democracy is both infinitely powerful and blessed with moral superiority, but simultaneously brutalized and persecuted on the world stage by unfair actors. He needs to impose his deluded, artificial nobility of obedience onto fellow subjects in order for his worldview to have a semblance of validity inside the existing institutions. His truest passion is assaulting the rebels into admitting their deep moral wrongdoing in going against the force that came into domination in the 18th century, professing that this order is the last perfect eternal order that will ever be.
But sometimes liberals are a bit less hostile with their police mentality. Sometimes liberals are your grandmother, your neighbor, your coworker, your doctor, your therapist. Sometimes the liberal is someone you love, or someone you need to make friendly with and swiftly part from. Their friendliness is truly their attempt at simply being an amicable enough person, while also administering an opinion on certain situations that, knowingly or unknowingly, reinforces the dominant narratives of a liberal capitalist police state that ends in people experiencing pain, persecution, deprivation and death. This so-called “friendliness” in this context is the mechanism for peer-to-peer mind control. It is the concealed substance inside the delectable-looking dessert. It is intended for nice-seeming people to get a grip on a person’s particular critique and bring it down. We succumb to this in nearly all friendly interactions with people who are vulnerable to accepting what has always been fed to them. All to simply remain cordial.
Sometimes we have situations in the world where an obvious state-sanctioned infraction on life, dignity and autonomy is cheered by citizens and state actors as inevitable, just, well-intended and professionally overseen. The social unrest that results from this state terrorism is demonized, intentionally misinterpreted to confuse the narrative and targeted by an array of collaborating actors.
The false “individualism” of this hell-world constructs buffers between people and the situations in the world; what happens in one city or hemisphere is obstructed from motivating someone in another. The capitalist nation states require a distinct lack of internationalist solidarity to prevail across borders, for fear of stability and civil cooperation. Regardless, information comes through, actions are staged, police are dispatched, people are peaceful, people go to jail. People care about what is happening to other people. They see in others’ suffering their own potential to suffer the same. But it always seems like Adam and Eve all over again when someone seeks to distribute real information on a situation. They are “troublemakers” and “outside agitators”. The liberals do not care about murdered Palestinian children, mothers and boys because, A) they are not white, and, B) they have always been portrayed as terrorists without ever being told of the horrors of the Israeli colonial apartheid state that have motivated their so-called “terrorism”.
We seem doomed at this rate to endure the willful shallowness of thought that liberals of all temperaments cling to in order for an easy grasp at “sense” to be kept on hand, grafted firmly on all they touch for whenever the police knock on the liberals’ doors to tell them that their anarchist kids got killed by the state. We seem condemned to muster a respectful nod that veers away from a sincere interrogation of the existing norms that persist in our peers.
There is no soul left in the desperation that is the belief that “rights and democracy” will triumph over fascism – with the understanding that there will ceaselessly continue to be tidal waves and valleys of fascism and liberalism. I desire no such delirium to rule the ins and outs of my life. I desire no external limit on my passions for life’s possibilities. But this is what the liberal stands for. We anarchists must look plainly at what the liberal wants, and from that reaffirm that we are the enemies of conservatives, fascists, Marxist-Leninists, and yes, of liberals. All four of these compose the social and political slave masters who would collaborate to section off the Earth according to each of their dominions. The anarchist is the savior from this. The anarchist is the one who truly is in touch with reality. The anarchist is the one who manages to break the chains of popular misinformation and light the torch of our daring trek out of slavery.
People raised under liberal capitalism want the right to be stupid. People think it is evil or authoritarian to hold a position that says people cannot and should not think only and precisely what they want to think. This position for me is rooted in a very basic reality: There are very obvious things dominating everything right at this second. Nobody actually has an iota of real freedom. Just a collection of elements and norms taught to us in our upbringings that signal enough nationalistic and sometimes racial pride to keep people in line with all that enables those constructs. Not everyone grows out of these. This itself is simply “disagreed” with. “No” says the liberal. “I choose to believe that we actually live in the best possible balance of things, and that no other human effort could make anything more preferable. Everyone who feels this way is simply a normal person.”
And thus our hell remains. Thus single-use micro and nanoplastics continue to poison my planet and my very body. Thus everyone is still in chains to the economic currents. Thus we are slain by the sword of white colonial capitalist order, and said whites rejoice at this everyday victory while also crying that someone would be even a little “anti-white” in light of all this. In light of all their intentionally stupid bullshit. So we have inner and outer tensions keeping the whole structure together, with the anarchist ready to sever them all.
But this has always been the case in industrial society. Even with much disdain for the fact, the anarchist has merely been the one lurking on the outset of the political compass, not the one wholly free of it. They have been a component to it with some measure of representation – which is still what the anarchist is opposed to. This existent reality must be the motivation to become larger than politics and match the fluid scales of life. On both a conceptual and a material level, the anarchist must successfully undo politics by all means at hand.
The only way to be free is to kill all of the things that make life disposable and gray. Kill them with sense, with kind insight, with love, and equally so with blades, with guns, with bombs. Kill in all ways what kills us in all ways.
Contribution by Anonymous