Patriotism

So far there have been 44 U.S. presidents, each with their own legacy. Two of these presidents were in office for only a month, so their legacies are short.

To the professor’s question concerning what a teacher should do to bring control to a classroom, a would-be teacher proffered: tell the students that if anyone disturbs the class, then the entire class will have a detention.
“That’s collective punishment,” I responded, to which I added with a tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic flourish, “and it’s a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.”
Nonetheless, why should innocent people be made to pay for the mistakes of others?

To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

July 1, 2016
By Stephen Gowans

I’m still trying to figure out how what is called The Left, in the UK and elsewhere, can hold two seemingly contradictory positions in its condemnation of the Brexit.  On the one hand, they laudably criticize the neo-liberal agenda of austerity, privatization of public resources, and all the rest of the retrograde policies that have returned Europe (and wherever else 21st century capital has managed to extend its tentacles) to a neo-feudal state.  On the other, they criticize the Brexiteers of every political stripe of caving in to some minuscule but megaphoned far Right Wing racist agenda

We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.

Vaunted patriotism It is blind subservience to the state — and it works to censor the reality of war.
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Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
– Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power“, Voices of Democracy, 1966

It’s no secret that anarchists don’t like states. In fact, we anarchists are generally defined by our rejection of, and opposition to state institutions, such as governments, police, and prisons. But while opposing these physical manifestations of the state is certainly an important part of anarchist practice, anarchist critiques of the state go much further, and include the underlying social relationships and ideologies that have historically been used to create states, and to uphold their authority. One of the most important of these concepts is nationalism.

Finished the first draft of a book about my commentary looking at the belly of the beast from the lower intestine up at the unending gluttony of Capitalism. It feels good, and I am ready to send it to the publisher, after a fellow dissident — John Steppling — looks at it, and, I hope writes a bang up introduction to inculcate some magic from my muses. As always, though, being hyper precarious in this rot gut society, I can’t see much these days as worthy of celebratory zeal to the point of letting my guard down.