Fair Use Blog

I am happy to announce a new transcription now available over at the main Fair Use Repository site: a rare Anarchist pamphlet from Cleveland, in 1899, of Fred Schulder's essay, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization:

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The theory of anarchism has a destructive, as well as a constructive side. It, being the doctrine of equal liberty, it is necessarily opposed to all that destroys this equal liberty, classing all such destructive agencies under the general term "government." This word has been defined by anarchists as invasion of the non-invasive individual’s liberty. In this sense, I must insist that the word be used in this discussion, for in this sense I shall use it: and if, in criticising my statements, you use the word in a different sense, you are not criticising the thought expressed by me, but only a thing of your own manufacture.

It may be claimed, however, that government, even in this sense, is but imperfectly defined until we know what does, and what does not, constitute invasion of equal liberty in every imaginable case. I concede that a difficulty exists here—that the line cannot be quite definitely drawn. But pray, have those who thus object, a remedy to offer? Have their courts of justice (?) ever discovered the true line? Have they ever discovered what, as an argument against a social theory, is claimed to be undiscoverable? Or, have they not, on the contrary, perpetrated invasions of equal liberty so gross that even the dullest mind must perceive it and cry out in disgust? Under liberty, however, this difficulty will continue to grow less; men will ever more realize their mutual dependence, and this must increase with the development of the social organism. And realizing this mutual dependence, they will adjust these minor differences according to their intelligence—an adjustment which government often prevents.

Now let us get back to the main point: anarchism is necessarily opposed to all government; the state is essentially governmental (that is to say, invasive), not only in its reaction on other organisms, but also in the forming of its own organization; it invades the liberty of its own members. What the anarchist objects to in the state is not the element of organization but the element of government.

Take the element of government out of the state, and no anarchist will object to the remains.

Since organization vastly increases the strength and efficiency of that which is organized, the anarchist sees in organized government—that is, organized invasion—the most effective and the most dangerous kind of invasion. The doctrine of equal liberty necessarily implying the unconditional self-ownership of the individual, it logically follows that it implies, also, the ownership of his product. The taking of the producer’s product without his consent is described by the anarchist as robbery. Hence anarchism is opposed to robbery—to all robbery. And again it finds in organized robbery the most effective form. Through the instrumentality of the state some individuals acquire a monopoly of opportunities, some of which are absolutely necessary to the production of wealth, and others very helpful to it. Such opportunities are freedom to the use of land, the freedom of trade, the freedom to use any medium of exchange which will be accepted, the freedom to invent or to copy, etc.,—monopolies which are unthinkable in absence of government, and which enable their holders to extract from the producer, as a tribute for allowing him to utilize whatever is so monopolized, such a portion of his product as is equaled by the benefits derived from this utilization. Now, since the monopolization of natural opportunities is based on invasion of equal freedom—on government,—its necessary economic result, the exaction of this tribute, (which, I believe, I am safe in saying, constitutes the greater part of the whole product) is also based on government.

Such is the fruit of organized robbery. And again, anarchism is opposed, not to the organization, but to the robbery. Although, of course, without the robbery, the organization would be without purpose in this instance, and consequently would not exist.

Having seen that anarchism is not opposed to organization itself, let us now go a little further and see if it does not in some cases indirectly further organization, by opposing that which tends to prevent or retard this organization. Since organization, as we have seen, is the life-principle of all aggregation or association, it is obvious that it would take place naturally wherever the individuals composing an association found it mutually advantageous. And it would take place as rapidly as they fuond it to be to their mutual advantage, provided this organization were not opposed by other forces. All such opposition must necessarily be in the nature of invasion of liberty; such opposition must be government. Anarchism then, by opposing government, would indirectly further such organization.

Instances of government opposing organization are numerous. Let us take society in general. There is a natural tendency for people to shift about, until they finally settle where they find surroundings to which they are best adapted. This tendency is being interfered with by organized government—the state—through emigration and immigration laws. In thickly-populated parts of the earth we find government prohibiting emigration, while in relatively thinly-populated countries the same force is directed against immigration.

In the industrial organism, government interference is so obvious that it is needless to point out any particular case. Wherever we turn, we find ourselves confronted by tariffs, patents, copyrights, licenses, and numerous other legislation. While these laws effectually rob the producer, they also retard industrial organization. For in the absence of these interferences, under free competition, each, after taking into account the economic demand and natural opportunities, would take to such employment as would be best fitted to his peculiar abilities. This he does now, after taking into account also the tax, fine, or (as I should call it) the robbery, which is attached to the consumption of some products, and which tends to disturb the demand. Now, if this legislation remained unchanged, the adaptation would at last become perfect, and although the producer would still be robbed, the organization of industry would not be retarded. But on account of the constant fighting among the robbers for the plunder, and through other causes, this legislation is ever changing, and the energy, which under freedom, would be used for further organization, is wasted in re-adaptation to changed interfering agencies. Hence, such legislation retards industrial organization; and anarchism, since it opposes government, both organized and unorganized, indirectly furthers social and industrial organization.

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--From Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization (1899; Cleveland, Horace E. Carr)

Schulder (1874-1961) was a anarchist writer, speaker, and sometime traveling salesman -- during 1907-1908, he made a living travelling throughout America selling books from Benjamin Tucker's publishing house and subscriptions to Liberty. He had a conscience marriage with fellow anarchist writer Adeline Champney; their son, Horace Champney, was an anti-war radical involved with A Quaker Action Group, who sailed a boat full of medical supplies to North Vietnam during the American War. James J. Martin described this pamphlet by Schulder in the context of the younger generation of individualists trying to build on the work of Tucker and the Liberty circle: Others attempted the task assumed by [William] Bailie in reconciling the many elements which went to make up individualist anarchism from the combined influence of Spencerian and Stirnerite doctrines. One of these projected syntheses was the brief outline of Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization. Another was Francis D. Tandy, an associate of Cohen in Denver, whose Modern Social Tendencies and Voluntary Socialism were anarchist works of considerable repute, showing influence of Tucker, Spencer and Thoreau. Both Tandy and Schulder were recipients of Tucker's approval in their activities along the program of educational propaganda for the anarchist cause (Men Against the State [1970/2009], p. 258). (Tucker may well have approved of Schulder's efforts, on the whole, but the reaction to the pamphlet in Liberty ["On Picket Duty," XIII.12, p. 1] was to make fun of the typesetting. Having read the original, I can say that this was an accurate enough complaint; but perhaps not entirely to the point.) Schulder's essay is, in any case, an interesting attempt at discussing the possibilities of consensual social organization, and the anti-social, anti-coordinative features of State force, from a framework based on Spencerian evolutionary theory.

This is an article of Karl Hess's, which appeared in the October 1969 issue of the New Left magazine Ramparts, pp. 28-31. Hess had been a close friend of Barry Goldwater during the early 1960s and had worked as the chief speechwriter in his 1964 presidential campaign.

An Open Letter to Barry Goldwater

It probably isn’t the highest or hottest item on your agenda, but every now and then you might think about why we are now on opposite sides of the fence—or why the fence is growing more like a barricade every day. My side is what is loosely called the New Left, a position to which you will undoubtedly refer a thousand times in a thousand speeches but about which, if the present is an indication, you will know less and less the more often you mention it.

The thing that first attracted me to the New Left was the familiar ring of what was being said there. Decentralization. The return to the people of real political power—of all power. There was also something very attractive in the New Left’s analysis of the American corporate system and its use of political power to preserve and enlarge itself. The way the largest corporations had so strenuously opposed you and supported Johnson, for instance, certainly made it seem fruitful to ask why. Could it have been that you might not have played ball quite so well as he?

There was, of course, a seemingly dissonant sound in the New Left’s attitude toward American adventures abroad. You had championed, and I had fully seconded, the notion that, morally, American arms could and should be used anywhere to fend off incursions by THEM. The crucial question which I permitted, even forced, myself to ask—and which you must never face if you are to hold onto your position in regard to THEM—was simply Who are THEY? And, lo and behold, THEY turned out to be a lot of US.

Let’s face it, we were trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, we spoke of freedom and liberty; on the other, of arming, adventuring, seeking and grasping. We spoke of a world that could not be half slave and half free, but we worked for a world that would be all American. We spoke of the evils of federal power but clucked approval at the same evils on a local scale. We spoke of letting the blacks in on our shuck, but when it came to liberation, we spoke of law and order.

Contradictions like these inevitably tear apart any structure—even a friendship, even a world—once you see them. Because you are, so far as my experience has permitted me to judge, the most essentially honest and potentially radical major American political figure, I am still betting that they could tear apart your position and that some day you will find yourself on this side of the barricades. As a matter of fact, the last time we met you were edging in this direction anyway. You described it yourself one day during your successful 1968 campaign for reelection to the Senate. We were in your living room, just shooting the shit. When the histories are written, you said, I’ll bet that the old right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy. That’s right. They do and they are.

That same week, as I recall, you spoke at the University of Arizona where you said that you had much in common with the anarchist wing of SDS. Anarchist! SDS! Remember? You said those words and you were not struck by lightning. And the point is that you have, or at least had, a lot in common with most of SDS. Now it’s probably their turn to snort in disbelief and even derision, and I do admit that I have passed over lightly such details as imperialism, but at least both of you—you then, SDS now—have sought to grasp certain political problems radically, by the roots.

Even before you made your speech about some commonality of interest with SDS, former SDS president Carl Oglesby knew that there was at least a historic echoing from the right of positions which have come to be regarded as New Leftist. Senator Taft, for instance, led the fight against NATO, making many of the same points that SDS makes on a broader scale about imperialism. I know that you departed long ago from a foreign policy position even roughly akin to Senator Taft’s, but perhaps knowing that the New Left’s position did not spring full-blown from the brow of Chairman Mao might at least let you examine, or re-examine, America’s role as the world’s policeman and protector of markets.

Why even bother with the suggestion? The answer is probably more romantic than reasonable. Common sense tells me that the rhetoric has ended and the revolution has begun. But nostalgia keeps suggesting that maybe we could speak for a minute and even agree that it would be far better, and so very much more decent, to give up power rather than having to go through, once again, the agony of having it taken away. I know you at least sensed this once as you contemplated the many changes you felt were inevitable and not very far off.

You caused virtual apoplexy among conservatives when you spoke, as you did in 1964, of the inevitability of world government, which you saw as developing through the political enlargement of such military arrangements as NATO. Your perception of change was right on. Your notion of how it would be accomplished, if you think about it (which I must admit too few of us did during the hectic days of the campaign), was a flat contradiction of your other principles—those regarding the return of political power to individuals. For a man as suspicious of central government as you were, the idea of accepting even the possibility of one huge, overall, overpowering government was 180 degrees off. Clarence Streit and other liberals thought it a silver lining in your otherwise cloudy aspect, of course. And there again you were quite correct in your perception: liberals are fatheads. The only thing worse than a big government is a bigger one!

It was the New Left that most sharply outlined the direction which was consistent with your root principles—decentralization. SDS’s early movement into neighborhood organizing was a manifestation of this. The current and, I think, monumentally significant work on neighborhood government by Milton Kotler—a colleague of mine at the Institute for Policy Studies—is more emphatically libertarian in nature than any single statement, action, stance or proposal of the entire Republican Party, with the Democrats thrown in to boot. And the present movement of SDS out into the neighborhoods, fields and factories, as well as into the schools, is deeply involved with putting power back where you, most emphatically of all working politicians, always said it belonged: in the hands of the people—not the people of some sociological abstraction, but the people in one-by-one, community-by-community reality.

In the long liberation of the blacks in this slave-haunted land, you also perceived a transfer of power as sharply as anyone—back then. You spoke of blacks having to have real political power before they could be free, and you risked and got a political mudbath by emphasizing that power far and beyond the then currently chic bullshit about bigger and better welfare checks, bigger and better federal fetters for a people already bloody from white, liberal legislation.

Today there are blacks who are putting into practice what you spoke about. They are struggling for real political power and they will get it even if they have to take it in combat. The Black Panthers are the vanguard of that struggle. Nineteen have died in it so far. They are in black reality the echo of a white past which you supposedly respect and even revere—the first American Revolution.

Senator, if you had been born black, and poor, you would now be a Panther or I seriously misjudge the strength of your character and convictions.

The Panthers are dying for the sort of liberty that you used to talk about. Dying, boss, not talking. Can’t you hear a brother’s voice even when it’s his last gasp? Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, and where in the name of Jefferson, Adams, and that grandfather of yours who said fuck foreign kings and wars and came to the U.S., where in all their names is there a more extreme grasp for liberty and justice than in this black colony now breaking away? Here are people who desperately needed some fellow extremist somewhere up there in hazy Washington to talk to, and all they heard was law and order, law and order, the clanking of cell doors, the thud of clubs and the crack of small arms fire.

There won’t be a chance to talk now because wars are much too loud. But while there was a chance, where were you? Where were we all—all of us who made our living talking about liberty, and then didn’t recognize it when it started flowering at our feet, because the petals were black and red and not red-white-and-blue.

I guess it would have been political suicide to talk to a Panther when you wanted to get back into the Senate. But you faced that once before and didn’t even flinch. Remember?

In 1964, it seemed as if there were a real possibility of racial trouble resulting from your campaign. I happen to think you are as color-blind as any man in American politics, but the image of your most red-necked followers blurred it all, and the race issue was a rising concern. To make matters worse, some of your most respected political advisors (real professionals) had talked long and loosely enough about the beneficial effects of racial disturbances on your candidacy to ring alarms for anyone. They claimed that one good race riot would put you in office. They knew, long before Spiro Agnew and probably as soon as George Wallace, that millions of white Americans were just bone scared of the black liberation movement and that it would take very little violence to shake out any government and put in any man with a tough reputation—and that’s just the kind you had.

I am convinced that, had it not been for one crucial action by you, efforts to incite racial trouble would have been inevitable. But you took the action, risking your entire candidacy as you did it. You called in some key reporters for an off-the-record briefing and made a single point: you said that if any racial trouble resulted from your candidacy, you would drop out of the race even if it were the day before the election. It was a flat unqualified pledge and I know you meant it. It not only stopped any insane incendiarism among your supporters, but it also put you on the line for killing your candidacy if there was trouble—whatever the cause.

You see, it’s things like that—the sort of gut courage and conviction that corporate liberals and the country club conservatives who so admire you couldn’t even imagine—that makes me miss you here on this side of the barricades.

But this side, you probably feel, is not anti-communist and you have spent an entire lifetime fighting Communism. Well, so had I. And because it was so easy just to fight, I had stopped thinking about what the hell it was we were fighting about in the first place. I would judge, by all I can read, that anti-communists today are operating almost exclusively from information, images and mind-sets formed in the Thirties and Forties.

Fresh from the horror of the purge trials, the slaughter in the Ukraine, the rise of Stalinism, it was easy to be anti-communist then. It was so easy, in fact, that it distorted the entire direction of the right in America. Its direction had been very individualistic, isolationist, decentralist—even anarchistic—and certainly radical compared to the corporate statism that had been rising ever since Herbert Hoover refined the process of federal rationalization of the economy.

Anti-communism twisted the direction of the right, which I feel, if left undisturbed, would today be near the New Left on most major issues. Unexamined anti-communism made possible these cop-outs: that the proper role of government could be the enhancement of industrial growth and corporate profit as a part of building a strong nation to beat back the Red peril; that citizenship training had to be intensified, education redirected, and certain liberties foresworn in order to—dig it—preserve liberty.

I will bet you an autographed picture of Jerry Rubin against a Readers Digest flag decal that not one of your friends who are so oburatelyobdurately anti-communist today can honestly fill you in on the essential differences between communism in North Korea, Viet-Nam, and Cuba—and Russia. Between China and Poland, between Rumania and Hungary and so forth. And I would double the whole bet that they wouldn’t even know where to look to find out what the Panthers, SDS, and the New Left in general have to say about Soviet Communism, about small c communism, about Marcuse, about anything.

Senator, the world has changed. The Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Viet-Nam (that’s our bunch, not yours) has issued a political platform which evidences much of the concern for individual liberty, freedom of trade and ownership of actually private property that Republicans used to rhapsodize about before they won political power. Have you read it? Or if you have read it but not believed it, have you actually tested your doubts?

I suppose that even mentioning Viet-Nam would cause you to stop reading this—if you’ve even begun. I know how deeply you feel about it, because once I did also and in just the same way. I’ll just sketch what happened and suggest that if you ever care to follow the same path, who knows, we might yet bump into each other again.

We thought that Viet-Nam was another case of international communism trying to bend the free world’s borderlines. Diem was reisting THEM—a story that was easy to buy and impossible to prove. But in truth, the NLF was local, and was bent on pursuing justice for the South Vietnamese who were being stripped of land and political power by Diemist politicians. From there on, the errors were compounded.

You once said that it wasn’t worth a single American life just to save face in Viet-Nam. But how many lives is it costing today to do just that? Today the face is Richard Nixon’s. Yesterday it was Lyndon Johnson’s. At least you took a crack or two at Lyndon. Is your friend Dick really any different? Or have you changed your mind about that fatal ratio between face and lives?

It occurs to me, Senator, that there is a document written by a fellow named Goldwater, an ex-Air Force general, that bears on this issue. It was a position paper you prepared for an Air Force project, as I recall. It discussed convergence between the communist and non-communist nations, but you didn’t see convergence as simply a matter of the two blocs coming together. You felt that perhaps as the communist bloc broke up and the demands of the people were felt, free institutions would develop strongly there, but that at the same time they might crumble in the other bloc. There could be a time, you felt, when Eastern Europe would be moving into freedom while America was sinking into tyranny.

Isn’t there something familiar going on today? Aren’t there in fact more difference between the communist parties of Eastern Europe than between, say, the Democrats and Republicans in this country? Aren’t we showing a tendency to side with the Soviets against dissident communist regimes—China being a foremost example? Isn’t there a revival among your very colleagues in the Senate and House of the security-law syndrome that did so little but hurt so much during the Fifties? Wasn’t there something more than just signpost sloganeering in the description of the Chicago police riot as Prague West? Isn’t Czechoslovakia just Russia’s Viet-Nam—not as brutal or bloody but just as politically obscene?

If you ever got a chance to read the New Left’s literature you might feel a jolt of recognition, page after page, as you found an analysis of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. detente that makes many of the points you once made. I can imagine that the word left would turn you off; yet, in an historical sense, you were a prominent leftist when you attacked established power, as you used to attack it. You even wrote several times of your position as being classically liberal—classically, that is, leftist. Is it socialism that still haunts the phrase for you? It shouldn’t. You are now supporting an administration which is practicing the sort of industrial-military socialism that Bismarck developed. Is the socialism of, for instance, neighborhood control of the community’s resources really more frightening than that?

Which reminds me of Ocean Hill-Brownville, or People’s Park. Senator, they were doing just what you used to talk about. You should have been there. Your old ideas were.

You used to make the liberals froth when you spoke against federal influence in the schools. Federal money, you used to say, inevitably leads to federal pupils, and the liberals turned pale, threw up their dickies, and said you were a heartless monster. Well, they treated McCoy the same way at Ocean Hill when he said that his folks should run their own school and not your folks.

And your old buddy Ronald Reagan! Now there’s a lesson in liberty for you. On one side of People’s Park there is the State of California with its right of eminent domain. It took the land. I would say it stole the land. How, I wonder, do you describe the right of eminent domain? On the other side are people who have an exotic notion about ownership. They don’t think it should be exercised at the point of a gun or a bayonet. They worked that land. They homesteaded it. They owned it in a sense far deeper than any government proclamation. Think of it that way: a scrap of government paper on one side; real people on the other, and your old friend Ronald Reagan, so help us, now supporting that scrap of paper against the people, with as much bloodcurdling diligence as any man you ever fought in the political arena. Senator, are you really sure you want to be a deputy sheriff for state power? That’s just what you are on the other side of the fence at the People’s Park!

Student dissent generally? Why did you have to come down so solidly on the side of the police? Don’t you remember that they are the employees of the state, not the people? Why couldn’t we have heard your rebel voice, instead of your company manners, when push came to shove at Berkeley and Columbia? Wasn’t that a time to re-examine the entire structure of the system? Was there any more appropriate man to do it, after the years you had spent talking about the dangers of a schooling that might force people to conform rather than encourage them to think? Why couldn’t you, of all men, see what was on the other side of those broken windows on the campus?

We had a discussion once about the campus scene, and it seemed clear to me that you would be in a far different position as a student than you are as a senator. Not long ago, you reminded me, marijuana was as common a smoke as burley in the Southwest. Nobody thought much about it, you said. I don’t really know what you thought about it then, but I can’t imagine anyone else in the Senate with your sort of good, bull-headed devotion to politically inadvisable principles, who could better take the lead in stopping the insane rampage against young people going on across the country in connection with a drug which, you freely admit, was as common as and much less troublesome than whiskey back where you came from.

The draft is another raid on young people that you did take the lead on—once. It was your very first presidential campaign pledge. You didn’t bullshit about it. You said that as president you would end the draft. Period. Just end it. You didn’t fuzz it up with after the emergency or after we study it, like your chum Dick. You may recall that the draft was the subject of our very last conversation. In preparation for your return to the Senate, I had worked up material for a flat-out repeal of the draft which, I felt, could appropriately be your first order of business when you were in the Senate and, hopefully, raising hell instead of brownie points.

I don’t cry about politics anymore, but if I did, I surely would have when you replied that in regard to anti-draft legislation you thought you should wait and see what Dick Nixon was going to do! You know what Dick Nixon always does! He shillies for a while. Then he shallies. Then he very carefully sets out in every direction at once, arriving exactly nowhere some time later, but promising that tomorrow he’ll begin again.

But, since you've returned to the Senate, it seems as if you are forever checking with someone to see if the coast is clear. You used to tell a joke about the little old lady you met in the hotel lobby who asked if you didn’t used to be Senator Goldwater. It’s getting less funny as time goes on. Something is happening out in the world, out on the streets. Much of it involves things you have said and thought throughout your life; much it involves things with which you profoundly disagree but which you should at least subject to a new dialogue. All of it involves a basic crisis, the sort of broken faith in state power that you have urged, the sharp awareness of the meaning of political power as the power of people against the power of overriding institutions. On the other hand (I mean the other side, your side now), there is ossification, resistance to radical change, support of vested power, liberal reformism, rule and repression by fiat and that most abhorrent of all organically collectivist notions—that the state really can and should claim the loyalty, blood and lives of all born to its borders and its bias.

Maybe that’s where you want to be after all. If I had only read about you, over the years, I would come to that conclusion and let the matter drop as being of little real importance. But instead, I have worked with you over the years. I think that even with the absolute disagreement I now have with you in regard to American imperialism, corporate-state capitalism, and anti-communism, there is such a crucial point of mutual interest on the New Left in regard to political power (it properly exists only in the people and in their communities) that you should be here and not over there. Because that’s where it’s at today, Senator. Here or there. The left of the individual people of this entire earth, taking back the power that the politicians and the exploiters stole from them, or the right of reaction, of established authority, of vested interests, of police, politics, and power.

There was a time when you used to drive the professional pols stark, staring mad because whenever you discovered that you had made a mistake on a position you would just come right out and say, Folks, I was wrong. Now here’s how it is.

Well, again, take a long, hard look at the contradictions between liberty at home, imperialism abroad; anti-colonialism abroad, black colonialism at home; free markets in the speeches, state-industrial-complex in the reality; local responsibility in the platforms, local suppression in the precinct houses; anti-communism for Castro, detente for Brezhnev; unshirted hell about welfare programs, unzippered lust for warfare programs.

I will have to admit that there is not exactly a long line queued up on the New Left waiting to hear from you. But there’s a hell of a lot more room for you over here, I would think, than in a Republican Party which regards Everett Dirksen as a hero and you as a maverick, respectable now only because you seem to have been broken to the bit.

In case you want to visit my side some time, there are a lot of pamphlets and things around that you might find interesting. And ideas. And, most of all, people. Good people. Love to see you over here. But if not, that’s okay. We’ll be up your way sooner or later anyway. See you. Right on.

Karl Hess is a former editor of Newsweek. He was the principal author of the 1960 Republican platform, a co-author of the 1964 platform, and Goldwater’s chief speech writer.

Here’s the new rules:

1. At the top of the post, make a list of the books you’ve read all or part of, in print, over the course of the past week, at least as far as you can remember them. (These should be books that you’ve actually read as a part of your normal life, and not just something that you picked up to read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Pick one of those books from the list, and pick out a quote of one or more paragraphs, to post underneath the list.

3. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, which should be more a matter of context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than they are a matter of discussing the material.

4. Quoting a passage absolutely does not entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the books:

• Sonia Johnson (1989). Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution. (Albuquerque: Wildfire Books. I picked it up some time ago through BookMooch.)
• Richard Gombin (1975), The Origins of Modern Leftism. Translated from the French by Michael K. Perl. (Baltimore: Penguin. Picked up this very week for 49¢ from the Shaman Drum used books sale rack!)
• Fred Woodworth, The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). (Tucson: Fred Woodworth. PO Box 3012, Tucson, Arizona 85702. I picked my copy up last week from May Day Books in Minneapolis.)

And here’s the quote. This is taken from Fred Woodworth’s Evil Empire Notes, Issue No. 107 of The Match! (Summer 2009; also, incidentally, the 40^th anniversary issue of The Match!). This was airplane reading, taken in somewhere in the sky between Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

GIVEN all the millions of horrifying stories in the naked country, now and then it’s good to pluck out one to hear an authentic voice rather than a statistic. Amnesty International printed up this one, by Donald Boyd of Chicago:

I have been a victim of racial profiling since I was 17 years old. Once when I was walking to the cleaners, I stopped to talk with some young men…. When I walked away, the police just automatically accused me of purchasing drugs. Two officers jumped out of a car and kept asking What did they sell you? I repeatedly replied no one sold me anything. … They cuffed me and drove me to a police substation.

… The next morning they loaded 45 people into a van made for 32. The men were almost all black and Latino. When we arrived at the jail, sheriff’s deputies, dressed in riot gear, met us. They shouted obscenities and threats. The deputies assaulted several people, including me, for supposedly not complying with their every word.

At each step in the process—arrest, detention and bond hearing—we were lined up, and numbers were scribbled on our arms with black marking pens…. In court, you appear before a judge, but via a television screen. You don’t get to speak, and the judge never even looks you in the face…. They treat our communities with disdain and contempt. I had to hire a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars to get the charges dismissed….

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AS Law becomes increasingly complex, with hundreds of thousands and even millions of laws stacked on top of each other, almost no one can confront officialdom in any way without a lawyer. But what happens when your lawyer takes your money and does no work, don’t file basic motions or writs, and essentially shafts you? Not much. Bar associations have a cap of compensatory payments they sometimes make to incompetent or dishonest lawyers’ clients, but the amouts are often based on century-old, or even older, stated maximums. And it’s next to impossible to go after such a lawyer legally, because to do so you need… another lawyer.

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EIGHT COPS raided a home in Minneapolis in ‘08. They shot up the place, accidentally not killing anyone. Well, it was the wrong house (there is no right house for something like this). This is completely comparable to a surgeon amputating the wrong leg, but if the doctor who did this to you then got a commendation from the medical association, wouldn’t you feel absolutely floored? So did the family whose home was raided and shot up. All eight cops received medals.

Undoubtedly this sounds like hyperbole or mere rhetoric, but the simple fact is that there is no conceivable way anyone can interpret this but as an official statement of Good Work, Men to stupid, negligent, incompetent thugs for terrorizing and injuring innocent people.

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NOT SURPRISINGLY, when humanitarian spirit is dead in officialdom it’s not partly alive; it really is extinct and defunct. Also in Minnesota, a poor wild bear somehow got a plstic jar or bucket stuck on its head. Official solution: shoot the bear. No sympathy for an unfortunate creature; no imaginative or bold remedy. Just kill.

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AS REPORTED by the Washington Post, prison guards at Prince George’s County Jail in Maryland are apt to be the kind of guys the average person expects to hear of as BEHIND bars. An investigation by the paper found guards who’ve been charged with assault, theft, beating and threatening their wives with death, having sex with prisoners, robbery at gunpoint, and other crimes.

Among the nine officers was Mark R. Bradley, whose then-wife asked for a protective order in 1998, claiming he had threatened, taunted, punched and slapped her… When she reached for the phone, Bradley who had been on the force for almost four years, yanked it away… His wife recalled him saying: Call the police… Make me lose my job. I’ll kill you. Almost a decade later, he was still on the payroll at the jail, despite three protective orders issued against him in the late 1990s. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to assaulting another woman, whose rib was broken. The woman, who had been pregnant with his child, told police that after a beating days earlier, she had a miscarriage. A judge put Bradley on probation and ordered him to take an anger management class.

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AIRPORT FASCISM is being extended to railroads. Amtrak, the railroad passenger company, has brought in a SWAT-style phalanx of agents in full combat gear to sweep through train stations, randomly screening and searching passengers. The randomly chosen passengers will have to place their bags on a platform and be swabbed with chemicals that are claimed to react to traces of explosives. You can also be ratted out by dogs.

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ONE OF THE factors that propelled the United States as far along into the police state that it now is, was the Vietnam War. There’s plenty of evidence that soldiers in ALL wars become brutalized, but something extraordinary seems to have taken place in Vietnam. Whatever it was, American men who went there (and survived) tended to come back in a vicious state of mind. Ordinary people were their enemy. They made up stories (essentially none has ever been verified) of people spitting on them when they arrived at stateside airports; and they formed cliques of us-versus-them. Looking for work, a high proportion of them went into law enforcement, and there they reinforced and amplified the already-existing us versus them mentality, ratcheting the propensity toward police brutality to amazing heights.

Now the same thing is happening with Iraq. Our guess is that the psychological corruption happens when soldiers fight amid a culture and a language that has few points of contact with the west and with Indo-European languages. It is one thing to fight, say, Germans or Italians, whose general culture is largely familiar (same religions, for instance) and whose languages have a large percentage of words that are the same or nearly enough so to be comprehensible even to the monolingual standard American youth. But in Vietnam—and now in Iraq—these military people are surrounded by words and behaviors utterly alien to them. Our own idle theory, therefore, is that this operate on their minds in such a way that the enemy becomes completely dehumanized. This creates the us-versus-them, and when they return to the USA, they still have it.

Then they go into law enforcement.

Already we are beginning to read about cases in which police—now Iraq war veterans—are opening fire on people merely running away from them. And already, too, the convoluted excuses are starting to evolve: Re-experiencing a war zone is one of several classic signs of combat stress reaction, says the Department of Veterans Affairs. If persistent and untreated, the Department goes on, this can result in post traumatic stress disorder.

Whatever verbal gimmickery you haul out to gloss over the facts, the truth is that these men (generally they are men) have been ruined, corrupted fatally and irretrievably, by being sent out to murder masses of people for no good reason in a country where they ought never to have gone. Mostly it’s their own fault, too, since ultimately it was their own volition that was compliant in their going there.

The bottom line is that Bush’s freudian effort to surpass his father’s Panama coup by similarly taking Saddam Hussein, unresisted by the press and the American people at the outset, is now going to result in thirty or forty more years of ever-worsening police violence against the public here. With this on top of everything else—the overpopulation, insanely burgeoning law-pollution, disastrous shift to digital culture, etc.—America is rapidly turning into an unliveable hell. Then add global warming.

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IMMIGRATION PRISONS, where you’re sent for not having adequate proof of being a so-called citizen, are the new concentration camps of the Evil Empire. There are now a whole class of persons of various ethnicities who are afraid to travel outside of the towns or cities where they live, because of the possibility of being stopped by some profiling trick excused as a broken taillight, and then being sent sprawling into a cell at an immigration prison.

A recent well-publicized case in some of the larger newspapers (and excluded from the local dailies) concerned one Hiu Lui Ng, who’d come to the US from Hong Kong. Making the mistake of going to immigraiton headquarters in New York City to get a green card (legal authorization to live and work in this country), he was grabbed and put behind bars. There he developed cancer, was in severe pain, laughed at by the medical matrons, and eventually died from the rampaging and untreated disease.

. . . They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation. Instead, … guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, dragged him from his bed on July 30, craried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lock-up in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case. (New York Times.)

One out of hundreds of thousands.

— Fred Woodworth, Evil Empire Notes, in The Match! Issue No. 107 (Summer, 2009). 19–21.

See also:

• GT 2009-05-07: Occupying forces
• GT 2009-03-28: It doesn’t take much imagination.
• GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security (#3): The Disappeared.
• GT 2008-03-18: Death by Homeland Security (#2): Francisco Casteneda, of San Diego, California.