So I stayed up all night and dragged myself up-to-date on my comics, e-mail, anarcho-news, and got the backend of the FUSApplet AFAIK-working. While reading some critiques of the concentration on protest by anarchists in the states, I couldn’t help but notice that nobody mentioned that we’re a completely media-driven society today. We’ve been so conditioned by television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, etc. to think whatever they tell us to think it’s unbelievable. People will do whatever they think is popular, in a little bandwagon-fallacy writ large. Which, BTW, is why protest is important. If people believe that “the revolution” is here, and they can finally shake off the shackles of their unproductive jobs, complete with wage slavery, people will start shaking off those shackles. And that is why protesting is important. Not to placate the rulers to rule nicely, but to illustrate (in the now cliche’d term) that “another world is possible.”
Unfortunately, as I’ve said umpteen times before, anarchists really dropped the ball after September 11. They let the old commie-brand left take over, and run itself (and us) into the ground… again. This really shouldn’t come as a shock, but does anyone think that in a country that barely refrains from outright worship of The Who (“meet the new boss, same as the old boss”), people will suddenly accept what some jerkoff from the (if you peel back the layers of front organizations far enough) RCP/WWP tells them to do. No offense, but I already get told what to do, and the revolution is not about putting some old commie in charge of my life, it’s about putting me in charge of my life. If everyone’s not in charge of their own life when the revolution is “over,” then it wasn’t the revolution, it was just a changing of the guard.
Sink-or-swim style, I’ve no desire to be told what to do in order to save me/society/civilization/freedom/justice/the revolution/whatever from my/itself. In case people haven’t noticed, that’s exactly what the current group of rulers claims when the pass “tough new drug laws” that just happen to imprison even more black people, guaranteeing that anyone they catch will be stuck at the bottom of the capitalist heap—ironically, most people who start dealing do so to climb out of the bottom of the capitalist heap. (Welcome to the Vicious-Cycle Penal Colony, have fun trying to leave.)
It’s also what the current rulers claim (post-facto) as a defense of an illegal invasion which has killed a conservatively estimated 100,000 people. And what the current rulers claim when they setup their version of the old Soviet GULAG prison system, now a global network that literally anybody, worldwide, can be disappeared into.
James Cape 