#title The Match #97
#date
#source <[[https://archive.org/details/match_92][archive.org/details/match_92]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-26T01:29:08
#authors Various Authors
#topics anarchism, half-finished error-correcting
#cover t-m-the-match-97-1.jpg
Our philosophy and practice: Criticism of, and resistance to, all statist laws and authoritarianism. We believe that governments and religions rest on threats or outright violence, and do more harm than good.
*Number 97* - *Winter, 2001-2002* - Suggested Price on Newsstands: $2.75
Computers as Agents of Chaos • Who the Police Beat • Your Photograph: A Liability • News • Letters
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*THE MATCH! Post Office Box 3 012, Tucson, Arizona 85 702 — Subscription: Free*
First published in 1969, this publication exists solely to criticize authoritarian society and religion in order to argue for the many humane advantages of freedom and rationality. We are not affiliated with any groups or organizations. Any publication of this same general orientation may reprint anything herein. DONATIONS: We welcome them and need them. But please: No checks. Just cash or stamps only. No kidding, no checks! Submissions of letters are extremely welcome, and all letters will be considered as being for publication unless you indicate otherwise. We have no telephone, no e-mail, so either write or don’t communicate at all. Typesetting and printing by Editor and Publisher, Fred Woodworth, 2001. No computers are ever used in this publication. This is issue number 97.
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*** Contents
Obituaries
Freedom Eclipsed
Your Photograph: a Liability
Who the Police Beat
Copstoppers’ Notebook
Reining-In the Police
Crap-Detection Department
Around & About
Anarchism Through the Press
Books & Periodicals Vanishing
Computer and Technology Dept
Computers at Work
History Corner: The Cow-Killers
Review: The Koran
Publications Received
Contributors
Letters Column (World’s Largest!)
Ethical Anarchism
*** From the Editor
***Religion scores another hit.*** In the sad history of the human race, god delusions have been responsible for more death and suffering than anything else except, possibly, disease. Now crazy fanatics have again lit the fire that has destroyed and mangled thousands of lives, and before it subsides (temporarily) once more some other unthinkable number of persons will be blasted out of existence, or poisoned, or shot, infected with ghastly, fatal diseases, and removed from this world—*the only world there is.*
Ideas drive the behavior of mankind, and flawed or insane ideas lead without fail to actions ranging from unfortunate to monstrous. This is precisely why we have to utter a groan of horror every day now.
First a terrorist holocaust, driven by the insane ideas of the world’s most authoritarian religion, wipes out six thousand people in a moment. Then, instead of realizing that if any “god” (that is, any all-knowing, allpowerful being) existed, he or it would have been uniquely positioned to stop this tragedy, the country of the persons who were eradicated plunges into an exact mirrorimage of the moronic delusion that animated the terrorists themselves : it sings hymns to the god, it prays to the god. It *thanks* the god! It promises to root out the evil maniacs, and those are defined as anybody who even knew about the terrorist plots, yet it excuses and *worships* the one entity which, by all operating definitions, certainly had to know if anybody ever knew.
Rather than draw the simple, plain conclusion that there is no such thing as any “god”, people rush to behave just like the madmen who’ve been hypnotized into mental illness by their own so-called holy book. Government and Church fuse together once more, thus uniting again into a potentially repressive force several times worse than either of them separately, willfully overlooking the horrific Islamic model of such unification that set the current world bonfire to blazing. At religious “services” the entire federal horde, seemingly, sat in overdressed and nervous subjection to preaching god-men straight out of the 1400s, just like Mohammed-rabid Allah-ululators who are actually *still living in* their own 1400s— a so significant fact that no one seems to notice.
**THE ESSENTIAL BANKRUPTCY** of religious advocates is" revealed in the responses to a recent question posed to various church ministers here. The basic query was *Why would God let this happen?* Of course, you can see what is wrong with *that* question; it still has built into it the supposition that there is a “god”, and it crawls around the real question, which is better stated as *Does the fact that this happened indicate to you that there is no god, or are you able to still believe god exists, but that he just didn’t feel like doing a couple of extremely* *minor things to ward it off?*
All the religionists who were asked skirted the question in what looked like desperation, and would have been remarked on by reporters had it been some political figure writhing to get out of an inquiry by trying to hedge that “it depends on what the definition of *is* is”. One said: “God gives us free will.” (That wasn’t the question, was it?) Another responded: “We have to remember that God’s original purpose did not include violence of any kind. The problem is sin.” Not the question.
Another: “God does care about what happens to us; however, his allowing humans to suffer trials and tribulations over the many years has a purpose: to determine whether humans can rule themselves independent from God, or whether rule by God is necessary.” (Considering that people have lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, how long is this idiot “God” going to take to make this determination, particularly when he isn’t a god at all if he does not know the future?)
Another: “I actually don’t believe that God allows these kinds of things... I think that God weeps with us in the midst of a horrible tragedy like this.” (Still didn’t answer the question! But raises another: if he didn’t *allow* it, was he powerless to prevent it?)
Another: “The larger question, of course, is why God permits any human evil to exist.” (Thanks a lot; by shifting off to this “larger question”, you didn’t respond to either one, large or “small”.)
Another: “God’s work in the world is redemptive, to rebuild the disasters and the chaos that we create.” (Pretty good; you weasel out of answering the question, but still manage to rig the game so “god” gets credit for everything good, but never anything bad.)
Another: “If he has allowed it to happen, it presents us a graphic demonstration of our need to better unify the world.” (The question! How about answering the *question?)*
Yet another religious “leader” meandered around an answer that was basically “I don’t know”: *“I really don’t believe this is of God. I truly believe this is about hate. To me, God is not of hate, God is of love. Why would God have this happen? That is a good question.”*
The truth is, religion doesn’t have any cogent answers to anything, and particularly to basic questions such as “Why does religion exist at all? Why should we pray to a being who never answers? Why thank him for some events, but others arbitrarily proclaim he must have had nothing to do with?
**WHATEVER** the results of Sept. 11, it’s time to realize that religion is the enemy of mankind. The start -may be here of World War III, or the conflagration may die back if those who deserve to be executed actually receive, for once, the “justice” which governments so constantly promise but only seem to deliver accidentally and sporadically. But let’s be clear that Islam is not some noble ideal that has been perverted by a few foul mullahs and weird rich or suicidal fanatics. They haven’t warped or misconstrued the religion; they have it right — death by fire to the infidels and unbelievers is precisely what their “holy book” dictates. For a look at this brutal “Koran”, see our review of it elsewhere in this issue. Lately there’s a lot of pious talk about how *“Islam is really a religion* of peace.” Well, it isn’t. The fact is that Islam is worse than any other of the widespread mental illnesses. Religions are *all* fundamentally life-denying, freedom-hating, garbled, contradictory relics of days when schizophrenia wasn’t recognized as an illness Today, the only people who really work at incorporating all of any holy book’s mad tenets into their own lives are those who are isolated and undereducated. For them, repeated re-reading and chanting and dwelling on such texts contributes to a form of brainwashing or hypnotic dazing. Many kinds of religious madmen have plunged off this deep end and turned into vicious murderers : Catholic Inquisitors, for instance, witch-trial hysterics; and this is definitely the case with the Islamic “fundamentalists” (which is to say, those who really profess to believe in the religion at all, as opposed to ignoring three-fourths of it but still keeping the label).
Christianity is brutal too, but it has had more years to mellow, to get over the flaring-up of its own deadliest infections, to some degree. It passed through its Dark Ages, through its rabidly inquisitorial and murderous periods, its persecutions of women, its stonings, its drawing- and-quartering torture-executions. The Drug War is a lasting remnant of this moralistic authoritarianism; but to a large degree western civilization has brushed aside the ranting lunatics of biblical religionism and tacitly agreed to go forward with science and medicine and art and literature. Society was still nominally Christian but it had antibodies against the worst pustules and gangrenous microbes, so could more or less live with its affliction.
[[t-m-the-match-97-2.png][*The natives of Chickendirt, Nebraska, in order to bring tourist dollars to their dying community, decide to stage World Trade Center bombing reenactments on patriotic holidays.*]]
But with the attacks by an even crazier religion, the dormant illness becomes re-energized. For this reason, September 11 is becoming an even worse tragedy.
Freedom cannot exist in an Islamic culture. It exists only sparsely in a nominally Christian one, and with the praying and religious/patriotic rituals going on in every public place now, an atheist and a non-saluter of the flag is clearly unwelcome and maybe in danger, so even the sparse freedom is slipping away.
The essentially religious war now under way is going to set the values of this once very feebly secular society back many years. Islam is not going to win; it has shamed itself and to normal people in the rest of the world it appears as a decidedly *unclean* phenomenon. (Mohammed declared all of us “infidels” and “unbelievers” to be *unclean,* so the least we can do is reciprocate. I bet atheists bathe more often than he did.) But even if Islam has largely ruined its own secularists’ hopes of transforming it by selective overlooking into a “civilized” religion, it will launch a lot of poison and death into the world before it gives up to go skulk around and resume stoning women and gay people. In its frenzied launchings of suicide bombs, anthrax infections, poisonous mail packages, etc., it will have a massive impact on such previously tottering relics as nationalism, patriotism, enforced symbolic conformism, and so on. The kid who won’t say the pledge of allegiance in school will again face a harsh extralegal penalty, and the employee who overtly refuses to put on a flag pin may well be fired (for “other” reasons, of course).
Atheists and ethical Anarchists can only draw back from this incredible 21st century religious war.
“...P---- became a signator on the bank account and then ripped off an insurance payment. Several friends tried to get him to take the money back when he finally surfaced a couple of weeks later, but he didn’t. Then Tom received some money from his mother’s estate and reimbursed the company for ten times the amount P---- had taken. “But by then it was too late; all except a handful of the old-timers had quit in disgust. A few months later Taxi Unlimited sputtered out. “Next door was a comedy improv group called the Blake St. Hawkeyes, which Whoopi Goldberg was a member of just before she jumped off in The Color Purple. No one at TAXI got famous or successful but it was a great place to work if you didn't mind being poor. Lots of Anarchists and Wobblies and interesting characters.”After developing liver disease, Tom Morgan went on a health regimen for a while and worked at getting better. At one time he was reportedly on a liver transplant list, but then the doctors told him he would not be eligible for the program if he used marijuana. He took himself off the list.
*‘'.. .Today, the small towns of the nation are being invaded by the drug.. . It is being sold to school children in more than one state. Marijuana cigarettes, or 'reefers’, are peddled at fifteen cents to several dollars each... Before Pennsylvania passed laws against it, the chief of Philadelphia County detectives declared that whenever any particularly horrible crime was committed— and especially one pointing to perversion — his officers searched first in marijuana dens and questioned marijuana smokers for suspects . . .”*(No doubt thousands of innocent persons were charged falsely with those crimes, as a result of this police bias combined with prosecutors" and juries’ slavish readiness to believe anything a cop ever testified to.)
*“. . .The smoker’s sense of space and time becomes distorted. The room in which he is located may appear minute, and everything in it is an infinitesimal spot upon which he gazes curiously like some giant in a doll house. Time becomes interminable. A second seems like a minute, a minute like an hour, and an hour assumes the aspect of a whole day. The time consumed in walking from one chair to another may seem like days on end.* *“Noises sometimes are magnified. A match dropping to the floor will sound like a gigantic thunderclap reverberating on and on until it fades away and is succeeded by deathlike silence...”*All that just from smoking one joint! If you think this propaganda, originally printed in Popular Science magazine in May, 1936 is ludicrously unbelievable, why not look ahead to the future and imagine how absurd today’s propaganda from statist “authorities” will sound? Why not disbelieve in it *now,* instead of waiting 65 years? *** POLICE BEAT @@@[[]] Q. What’s more dangerous than the rattlesnake you see ahead in your path? A. The one you DON’T see, but which is there anyway. All kinds of interested parties are using the most sophisticated and up-to-date, as well as the most ancient, blunt, and tried-and-true, ways to distract your mind from fixing on the real nature of police. The Bible (book of Romans) baldly states that they’re agents of “god”. (It even goes on to assert that they have the right to judge you and mete out punishment— a good gauge of how humane the Bible really isn’t.) Television is almost unerringly cheerleading for police; programs show them pitted against a a world that is all bad. The newspapers are on their side, ALWAYS — even when such organs have to depict them as behaving abominably, since corruption or brutality are represented as anomalies. Schools drum into the heads of the young that cops are their friends; and businesses slap F.O.P. logos or “Support Local Police” stickers on their windows to attest to their own orthodoxy. Liberals love them. Conservatives worship them. Communists install them on every street-corner and Socialists do it on every other one.Fascists give them snappier uniforms, and Oriental Stalin- isms crowd their anthill societies with more of them than anybody can count. Authorities and experts tell you you can’t live without them. Philosophers claim you have some weird kind of unsigned “contract” with them. “Responsible” members of society urge you at every turn to fink on your neighbors to them. In all times and countries they stalk about issuing commands and enforcing behavior ranging from whether you have to have a beard or wear a veil, to what uses you can put the organs and orifices of your own body, or what molecules, even, you may have flowing within your own internal circulatory vessels. They backed up the Inquisition; they smashed property and jailed Jews. In Chile they made people disappear, and in Cambodia they strove to destroy an ancient civilization. In South Africa they were muscle upholding vicious repression, and in Alabama they swung heavy axe handles at fragile human flesh. From Siberia to Mexico their hideous face is masked with the bland urbanity of “civilized law”, and in that most self-congratulatory country of all, the United States of America, they swagger, bludgeon and execute just as they would had they been born in Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan. These are criminals. The real criminals. Far more so than any small-scale individual abusers of rights, because POLICE operate on a scale of numbers and funding that no private criminal or even robber band ever has. Genghis Khan’s barbarian army was tiny compared to the American POLICE. Banana republics’ legendary cop torture is matched and surpassed in the “democratic” USA where statism has careened out of control and foul laws cannot be overturned. For those who are willing to draw back their attention from the swirling jangle of gaudy propolice social inculcation and hypnotism, here is one short look, compiled by one small magazine, that can only suggest, not cover, a monstrous reality operating among us all. When Annette Amoroso was stopped by Los Angeles police who supposedly thought the car she was driving was stolen, they ordered her out onto the ground, where she was made to kneel in an awkward position with her hands up. Behind her, a cop discharged a “non-lethal” shotgun, hitting her in the shoulder. As she fell and turned, he fired again, this time hitting her in the right eye, destroying it. Cops said Amoroso seemed to be reaching for a weapon, of course. Police "non-lethal” rounds are variously described in the compliant press as ’‘beanbag bullets”, "rubber bullets”, "wooden bullets”, etc. The public scoffs at the idea of real injuries inflicted by a "beanbag”, but these hard, canvas or rubber-covered tightly wrapped wads of dense lead chunks hit with about the same force as a hard-swung carpenters hammer. In Tucson, Jeff Knepper, also shot in the eye by police, has filed a $3 million claim for the loss of eyesight and the pain and expense of treatment.. Acting on a so-called "tip”, police smashed the front door of Ann Halliburton, in Far Rockaway, New Jersey, rushed into her bedroom, thrust guns into her face, and handcuffed her. She had no drugs. By now you’re wondering: How come The Match puts this common, garden-variety, drug raid police roust into this column? THOUSANDS of these occur! Well, the reason is that this one is news: not finding any actual drugs there, the police left after only mistreating Ms. Halliburton severely; but they did not, in this case, plant some drugs there to justify their indefensible conduct. We wonder if Ms. Halliburton realizes what a narrow squeak she had. Alameda California cop Sean Lynch ran across a 30-year-old homeless man, Jimmy Robert, sleeping next to his few possessions in an abandoned railroad yard. Pumping five shots into the man, killing him, the cop set himself up for his colleagues to call him,,, a hero. The victim, needless to say, "lunged” at the officer, and a hunting knife was found conveniently nearby. Interestingly enough this was the third person this officer had shot. He must have a bad effect on people. Jerrold Hall, walking away from a police officer after being told to lie down on the ground so cops could verify that Hall really owned the radio he was carrying, said: "What are you going to do, shoot me?” The answer to that question was emphatically YES; Hall was blasted in the back of the head with a shotgun, no doubt while lunging backward at the officer. At least 20 "suspects” being transported in Philadelphia police vans have been injured in recent years when cop drivers, for amusement, subjected them to the so-called Nickel Ride. A "part of street training”, according to a retired cop, the deliberately quick accelerations, abrupt sharp turns and sudden stops are fun for police, but a serious matter for handcuffed passengers with nothing to hang onto and no way to keep from being flung around the steel box where they're confined. Broken bones, a broken neck, and complete paralysis have been some of the sad results of this rotten "play”. The police commissioner professed to be "unaware” that officers would injure transported prisoners on purpose. A cop who worked the after-midnight shift in Chattanooga had fun with people he was desiring to terrorize; in lieu of getting a citation or being arrested, he made them take off their clothing in public places. He did get fired from the force for this, though apparently reaped no other penalties. Just a bad apple you say? An anomalous psycho hired by mistake? Hmmm. He was in fact the Chattanooga Police Department’s Officer of the Year, two years ago. Suppose you are Joe Smith. That’s your name. It’s a common name, perhaps, but yours. Being a 55-year-old black man, you don’t fret over the fact that a 20-years-younger white man bears the same name. You figure anyone can tell the difference. That’s what James E. Parker thought too. However, another fellow, James M. Parker, was wanted by the police in Attleboro, Massachusetts (they don’t call it "Massa” for nothing), so they nailed the black man. Even though they "soon realized their mistake”, by then they’d already charged James E. with "Assault on a Police Officer”, and he spent time in jail and was under probation before the charges were at last dismissed, six months later. The police chief shrugged and says he's sorry, but racial profiling had nothing to do with it. Sure. Anybody could mix up those two guys. We wonder how sorry he is. Suppose he’s sorry enough? Arrested and convicted, Ansche Hedgepeth has to undergo counseling. She also has a sentence of "community service” (slavery) to perform. Her fingerprints are now on file with those of many millions of other Americans — how many millions is difficult to know, but at present 3% of Americans are known to be either in prisons or on probation. She was handcuffed and the laces pulled out of her shoes so she couldn’t run away (or maybe commit suicide). Her crime? Eating some french fries in a Washington DC subway station. Ansche is 12 years old. As an example of how police and high powered government agents can mistreat or destroy people and suffer no consequences at all, here’s a case that came to light recently: After spending THIRTY years in prison for a murder he did not commit, Joseph Salvati was released. It turned out that he had been railroaded by the FBI, which never turned over to the defense some reports showing Salvati was framed by a vicious hit-man who had become a government witness. FBI agent H. Paul Rico, now 76 years old, who was largely and apparently knowingly responsible for sending Salvati into that hell, coldly shrugged off questions this May about what he did to this man. “What do you want— tears?” When asked if he cared that he could have given the court his report showing Salvati was innocent, Rico sneered: “It would probably be a nice movie or something, but I don’t know." MeanwhiIe, 15-year-old Michael Barker of Columbus Ohio faces six years in prison for spitting in a police officer’s Coke at a fast-food joint. There are beatings and beatings. The “beating” that David Shawn Pope received is an unusual variety: having just been freed after almost 15 years in prison for a rape he did not commit (as perhaps proven by modern analysis of evidence), Mr. Pope has received a bill from the State. He supposedly owes, because of a “law" requiring prisoners to pay for college courses taken in prison, $2300. What does the STATE owe HIM for fifteen years spent behind bars? NOTHING. Another wonderful example of the fine concern the State exhibits for people’s rights, is the government-sponsored beating of Richard Danziger. During 13 years spent in prison that resulted from a police beaten-out confession and implication of himself by another man who didn’t commit the original crime either, Danziger got severely kicked in the head by another prisoner. After evidence slowly emerged against the most strenuous exertions of prosecutors and police, showing that Danziger was innocent, police-state grudgingly admitted that he should be released. But, because of the prison beating, he’s now brain-damaged and has a hard time getting along on his own. He gets no compensation for this outrageous theft of his life and his physical abilities because “federal prosecutors" and “the Police Department’s internal affairs unit” found no “wrongdoing" in his case. I guess the conduct of these officials was “right-doing”. Criminal charges won’t be filed against Modesto California cop David Hawn.Hawn killed 11-year- old Alberto Sepulveda as Alberto lay face-down on the floor during another botched drug raid in September,2000. Shooting the kid with a shotgun was “excusable homicide”. Dozens of victims of the Los Angeles Police Department have come to light in recent probes that reveal cops as, in the words of the Los Angeles Times late last year: “reigning over secret domains, ...governed by codes of behavior of their devising, liberated from normal life... in a shadow world,” where “they can come to feel like royalty, true princes of the city and masters of all they survey.” An apt description of cop psychology, but missing one contributory dimension: They couldn’t do it without the quiet acquiescence of the press all the rest of the time. Sure, once some scandal of this magnitude comes to light, complete with large-scale payoffs and police drug-dealing, the press gets on it for another short season. Later, though, they will revert to being cheerleaders for the “thin blue line”that supposedly is the sole barrier holding back “chaos". Arrested while sitting in her car beside the road, crying after having had a quarrel with her boyfriend, Angelina Torres probably didn’t think “What a nice young man!” when the officer drove her around for a while, then stopped the car, ordered her to strip down to her underwear, and walk some blocks through the streets to her home. After this last story hit the news, other young women in the same New York area began coming forward with similar stories. Jennifer Charles, arrested in 1998 for driving with a suspended, license, was subjected to extended one-on-one holding cell visits by a burly plainclothes cop who terrorized her with overt sexual comments and strong suggestions that his intention was rape. Giving nazis like THIS limitless power is what we have to do to stave off “anarchy”? Another woman, Juliana Rubio, 19, was also forced to strip by police. Josephine Castello, cleaning snow off her car in a parking lot, had a cop stop to “‘help” her.(Such a nice young man.) "Then, after we were done,” she recalls, he gave her a strange look and said: “You know, I could have killed you.” Horrified, Ms. Castello hurled herself into her car and got out of there. Far from hallucinating that cops are “nice young men” now, she says firmly: “I don’t trust cops now, just because they’re cops.” In other words, Ms. Castello has now glimpsed that snake in her path. Can her warning make you see it too? If so, we’re all better off. Quoted in the New York Post concerning this situation, an anonymous New York Police Department “commander” blustered this way when asked what women should do when stopped by male police in lonely places: “Can you call 911? ...I’m not going to allow you to do that. I I can order you out of your car. We can order you out of your clothes.” Getting more into his snarling rant, the unnamed “commander” turned up his rhetoric: “If I arrest you for a traffic violation”, he raved. “I’m going to run my hand over every part of your body — your boobs and between your legs. I’m looking for guns and other weapons. It doesn’t matter what sex you are. “With a male you always grab the genitals through the pants.” This psychopathic sex-criminal gives new significance to Mae West’s once amusing inquiry, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Cops seem so preoccupied with their "weapons” that some dimension of sexual repression or substitution is bound to be involved, but the question one yearns to see put to the Commander is how MANY people he has run across through this procedure who turned out to have box-cutters in their panties (HE said it, not me!) or .357s taped to the underside of their penis? Such anatomical prodigies should surely have some better way to spend their time than riding around on lonely, police- haunted streets in the dead of night. You may perhaps remember the Ismael Mena case mentioned here in The Match two issues ago. in Denver, police raided the home of Ismael Mena without knocking or producing their sham search warrant. They ended up killing Mr. Mena, and were at the "wrong” address. (There is no right one.for them, EVER.) The cop who signed the request for the search warrant, relying on the shopworn anonymous tip, got the maximum penalty of the law, 150 hours of community service. He'll also be on probation for a year, but could eventually return to the police force. The judge who rubber-stamped the search warrant without investigating it in the least, ought to be buried in the deepest pit of Hell, but in reality will have huge retirement benefits and get elected President of the Rotary Club. While Annette Amoroso, the woman whose eye was shot out, "only” then got arrested for “interfering with an investigation,” victims in Oakland California had heavier charges fall on them when cops wanted to excuse the sadistic beatings and other damage they’d just inflicted in their routine, swaggering nastiness. Cops working night shifts in Oakland formed a specially brutal gang that called itself “The Riders”. Its members routinely worked people over for the sheer pleasure of it, then always falsified reports to claim that arrested people were attacking them, fighting, etc. Police carried bags of crack cocaine to plant at arrest scenes so that the people they ruined would be smirked at in court as stupid, middle-class jurors exchanged winks with the uniformed monsters. As some of this was revealed in court this past June, one young witness testified that after a man named Delphine Allen was tortured mercilessly, cops ended their shift and went out to breakfast, joking about what they’d done. Drawing, on a place mat, a crude picture of Allen’s bleeding head, one cop chortled to another: “Jude, you’re going to have to peel his cornea off your elbow.” Here is some of what they did to Allen: First, they handcuffed him. All tyrants and bullies want to prevent the oppressed from defending themselves so the first thing they do is to take away their firearms or tie their hands. Next they forced Allen to the ground and drove knees into his back. He was beaten, taken to the police car, beaten some more, and sprayed with chemical mace. They then drove away with him and took him to an isolated area under a freeway overpass, where they beat him for a solid quarter of an hour. During the early portions of this arrest, police directed a rookie cop to “find” a bag of crack on the ground near where they crushed their knees into the hapless man’s back. Later, in the concluding phase of this outrage, they presented Allen, now sobbing, with a certain paper to sign. He signed it. Such nice young men. The biggest fear of actor **Anthony Dwain Lee**, reportedly, was getting killed by police — because Lee, a tall black man, had seen all too clearly how these protectors of society really behaved. He was shot to death by Los Angeles cops while attending a Halloween party. **Jack Dreyer**, of Kokomo Indiana, was detained for being drunk. He was arrested and after a time admitted to a local emergency room where he was treated for severe intoxication. Police then took the arrested man away. Hours later, Mr. Dreyer was found unconscious in a roadway, and he later died of the following injuries, as found at autopsy: subdural hematoma and basilar skull fracture; multiple blunt force injuries to the head. It’s clear what happened to him, but the system which can convict anyone else in moments on the slightest evidence and incredible evidence of jailhouse snitches and so forth, *** HUD’S HOUSES FOR COPS PROGRAM FLOUNDERS IN FRAUD Readers will recall the glowing picture painted by the academic we cited last issue in our CrapDetection department, of the wonderful new list century police. So excellent, so vital to society are these officers, he chanted, that homes were being made available to cops, through the department of Housing and Urban Development, for tiny prices and as little as $100 down. We stated then that such a program probably had more to do with inserting cops into neighborhoods to keep track of people than to “help” them; and we expressed doubt that the “new” police would be any more decent than the regular OLD police. Subsequently, as reported by the Associated Press on March 4, dozens of cops, possibly hundreds across the country, have used the HUD program to get hold of cheap houses... and have turned around and sold the places for high prices or profiteered by renting them out at hefty rates. These are the excellent new-style police that we’re to regard as fundamentally different from the usual old vicious and corrupt ones? *** Copstopper's Notebook @@@[[]] WHAT IF they show up at your house? First: Don’t let them in. You don’t have to give your consent to any search of your house, car, or person, unless they have a warrant. Politely refuse and tell them to contact your lawyer. If you do consent to a search it can affect your rights later on in court. Needless to say, in our modern times of noknock raids, you don’t have a chance to ask to see any warrant, as the gestapo will burst in screaming and shouting orders, firing chemicals at your face, and discharging 'flash-bang” disorientation grenades. But in case there is a possibility that anyone can hear you over the din, at least SAY the words
"It's an amazing automatic crap-detector," she said drily. "No home should be without one." -Dream WorldCONSIDERING some of the items that have received notice in this column over the past years, it may seem hard to believe that we have now whiffed out probably the most incredible one yet, but surely it’s true. See what you think after reading this notice from the September 14, 2001 edition of the Arizona Daily Star (sec. B, page 3):
“LIBRARIES TO MARK BANNED BOOKS WEEK. The Downtown Tucson Public Library will join library branches across town in marking Banned Books Week, Sept. 22 through Sept. 29. The library hopes to call attention to hundreds of worthwhile books that would-be censors have tried to ban. ‘Libraries and bookstores across the country want to really help remind people of some of our freedoms that we need to safeguard,’ library spokeswoman Elizabeth Burden said. “‘We want to say what a great loss it would be if these books were banned... It’s important to make them available.’ "And what books are in this horrible danger of being subjected to censorship? What ones are direly threatened with being unavailable, relegated to dark corners and kept off the library shelves if not for heroic, enlightened efforts like this one?
“...Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (and) J. K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter books..."HARRY POTTER! The recipient of uncounted millions of dollars of publicity, much of it donated by newspapers and other willing accomplices of the billion-dollar promotion machine dedicated to thrusting a copy of this chunk of printing into the hands of every man, woman and child — possibly every infant — in the Englishspeaking world! HARRY POTTER — the lurid covers in carefully painted likenesses of a young Bill Gates, no doubt to cross-reference propaganda for his own giant corporation at the same time! Harry Potter — millions sold! Libraries buying as many as 80 copies APIECE to meet the artificially pumped demand created by incredible “best-seller" lists published before a single copy is sold! Inflated by newspapers with as many as five separate articles in one single edition, examining, hyping, promoting, and bludgeoning parents and schools to lay down their cash lest young Johnny and Sally feel deprived as EVERYONE ELSE reads HARRY ! Censorship? You want to hear about CENSORSHIP?! In the city where I’ve been writing and publishing for 32 years, NOT ONE SINGLE WORD of mine resides in any branch of the public library system.
“Each library branch will mark the week differently .Some branches will wrap targeted books in plain brown wrappers, and those who check them out will receive bookmarks and other commemorative items. The Downtown branch will cater to area workers with ‘brown bag banned book lunch specials’ displayed on carts decorated like food vendors’ wagons..."As for Maya Angelou : How somebody who was feted by the Clinton administration, published slavishly by major outfits no matter what feeble swill she produced, and anthologized in one-half of the high school textbooks of this country, can be regarded in any way as having even the most distant resemblance to a censorship victim, is a topic on which I will offer no further remarks.
“In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev threatened America with the famous words, ‘We will bury you.’ Today,his son,Sergei Khrushchev, reveals why he chose to become a U.S. citizen.”Now, clearly of course the whole article that follows is just Readers’ Digest-style tendentious junk. It would not be worth regarding here except for one very interesting example of the old Big Lie technique. This Khrushchev says:
“I could write what I wanted (in America) and publish every word... “The great thing about this country is that people aren’t trying to suppress their neighbors.”Of course he can write, and get every word published — because he’s saying what the U.S. government (and Parade Magazine) want to hear (and want YOU to hear). But suppose he were to say, instead of the above: “It’s a shame about America. People are always trying to suppress their neighbors.” What then? And which.of the two statements is actually true? Well, in this country laws are passed against anything that religious pressure groups, liberal buttinskies, and conservative fascists don’t like. From the Drug War all the way down to neighborhood associations that want to give you orders to paint your house (and tell you what color too), the most salient fact about America is, in truth, that Americans are overwhelmingly EAGER to “suppress their neighbors”. Look at the number of snitch hotlines currently in operation: Newspapers regularly print telephone numbers to call if you want to get at your “neighbors”—there are numbers for reporting too - frequent yard sales, unlicensed dogs, straying cats, private drug usage, loud mufflers, allegedly unsafe driving, rude gestures made in traffic, water wastage (a few drops on the sidewalk get you a $250 fine in some localities), alleged gang membership, operating an unlicensed business, failing to pay tax, looking like a crook seen on TV, allegedly owing childsupport, having too many weeds in your yard, or storing an inoperative car in your driveway, or WORKING on such a car there; not having a young passenger in a car buckled into a child restraint seat; possible use of unauthorized software; too many or suspicious visitors at your home; people living beyond their apparent level of income; yards with containers in them possibly contributing to mosquito-breeding... In The Match’s home city there’s a busybody who walks around looking for containers as tiny as a small saucer that might collect water; he immediately phones in the tip. And, as is usual in most of these instances, that’s ALL it takes; people have the bureaucracy descend on them and they become embroiled, on the unsubstantiated word of one anonymous informant, in a nightmarish effort to prove themselves unguilty. More include: hotlines to report "aggressive drivers[2]’, people with flowers growing in their gardens that could possibly (with the utmost efforts of expert chemists) be transformed into opium; gun-snitch hotlines (in Connecticut a neighbor can report that you have a gun and may be mentally ill, and on that claim alone the police will raid your home and remove any legal weapons you may own.) And of course any disgruntled enemy of yours is GOING to be believed as a matter of course if he or she phones in an allegation that you have been abusing your child or children. This never seems to stop actual child abusers, but it has a way of bringing to bear a lot of muscle against precisely the most innocent parents (This writer once saw his next-door neighbor in a state of real terror because one of her kids had got some kind of scratch and bruise on the way to school, and SHE was called in and going to have to account for it satisfactorily the next morning,) Professor Khrushchev (that’s right; America is so good it called him all the way from Russia to be a "Senior Fellow" at Brown University) is seen in a photo in Parade Magazine holding a tiny American flag and pretending to read a book called "Welcome to USA Citizenship". But this stooge for lying propaganda knows nothing of the totalitarianism outside his ivory tower.
"Near the beginning of the conference, women and men took turns telling each other what each needed the other sex to know and what their feelings were about the other sex. Most of the men’s comments centered on the help they needed from the women, putting us once again in the position of the ‘nurturer’, expected to help the men deal with their subjugation of women ... “After this exercise... the men began a process of gender-healing, discussing the ways society forced upon them ‘masculine’ archetypes. When the men and women regrouped, the teary- eyed faces of the men were thrust upon us. The facilitators of the conference warned us that the men had gone ‘very deep’ and were extremely vulnerable. In the activities that followed, the men repeatedly compared their ‘oppression’ to ours ...”Which, of course, is intolerable because only women and "people of color" are ever oppressed at all. If the female writer of the piece had to register for the draft she might feel a little different, but it doesn’t really matter, since anybody who attends a "Gender Conference” is an idiot. Such events are pure crap.
That quote was from David McReynolds. From a report concerning recent Genoa events (we don’t know who wrote this article), here’s another: *“Rioters...are all being characterized as anarchist. An ‘anarchist rioter’ is described as waving a hammer and sickle flag. On the BBC footage is shown of ‘anarchists’ waving Maoist flags...(Some rioters indeed are members of the police force. Both in Prague and Genoa there have been reports of undercover police taking part in property destruction and assault. The Irish Times reported on July 23rd that a large group of people dressed in black had been seen at one police station. And video evidence collected by protesters and independent media suggests that men dressed in black were also seen in police vans, being taken to protests...”* Actions like these are eroding support for anarchism, even among Anarchists themselves. There is no way to fight such dirty tricks except to stay away from street demonstrations; the demonstration as a tactic is now fatally flawed. Since actual Anarchists never want governmental institutions to take any action at all except disband, the only real purpose of engaging in a demonstration is to get publicity.The publicity we are getting is atrocious.*** Making room for Harry Potter: BOOKS AND PERIODICALS VANISH DOWN MEMORY -HOLE* By Iris Lane FOR SOME thirteen years I have been attending library discard sales in my city : those several- times-a-year events in which the public library sells off, mostly at very low prices, tens of thousands of unwanted books. In the beginning I was overjoyed at being able to build a personal library at rock-bottom prices, but I soon became deeply disturbed by the scope of and the purpose behind what the library system refers to as the “weeding” of its collections. My particular interest is classical music, and the sheer numbers of really valuable reference books that were being tossed out appalled me. Again, I was glad to get such volumes for my own collection, but the fact that no one else would now be able to consult them, and that most of the books were being sold for a tiny fraction of what they originally cost, angered me, both as a music lover and as a person who had been taxed so that the library could purchase these books in the first place. Occasional out-of-town newspaper articles made me aware that in other cities librarians were shipping their unwanted books to landfills, only to be met, to their great surprise, by angry book lovers who were denouncing them as heirs io the Nazi book-burners. I had already begun to consider myself to be a rescuer of books, and these articles made me aware that there were others like me all across the country. All of us were outraged by the deliberate destruction of our cultural heritage by those who had been hired to protect it, and all of us were buying from the discard sales as many irreplaceable books as we could squeeze into our homes.
Modern librarians don’t like books. They like computers, boxes of microfilm, and neatly arranged shelves of brightly-colored copies of today’s hottest bestsellers. What matters to them is not the depth and breadth of human knowledge in their collections, but how little space is used and how frequently their materials are “accessed”. One would think that the dealers in used books would have taken a prominent part in this battle over library weeding, complaining that government agencies were engaging in illegal competition with private business. Based on my observations at the discard sales, however, I believe that the dealers were bought off by being given advance access to the stock. Consideringwhat the dealers charge their customers for such things as regional and art books, being allowed to buy what they wanted before the public got a crack at the books was a valuable concession that cost the libraries nothing. AND SO IT WENT for quite some time, with the media paying only slight attention to the incredible destruction being wrought in this country’s libraries, from those in small towns all the way way up to the Library of Congress. But then Nicholson Baker came along, and stirred up a hornet’s nest with the book he called “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper”. Baker’s book is a passionate denunciation of the library profession, not just in America but in Europe as well. It reveals how libraries have purged their collections not only of irreplaceable books, but of priceless newspapers and periodicals. Having manufactured a “crisis” in which periodicals from the last two centuries were supposedly “crumbling to dust”, they spent enormous sums of money making bad microfilm copies of the papers and then throwing away the originals. Why? Because of a fascination with “new technology” and a yen for the government grants that accompany its use. And now that it is too late, the librarians have been forced by the publication of “Double Fold” to admit that not only was the microfilming of these now-destroyed newspapers incredibly shoddy, but that the film itself is far more fragile than the newsprint was. In fact, the microfilm is being eaten up by fungus, which thrives on the gelatine it contains. By spending all of his savings and going deeply into debt, Baker was able to save complete runs of several of the most important daily newspapers, including the New York *World* and the *Herald Tribune.* Much of his collection exists nowhere else except on microfilm, and the contrast between the glorious color of the original papers and the dreary, grainy black and white of the library microfilm is shocking and depressing. Because of the ferocious outcry generated by DOUBLE FOLD (the title refers to a library test for brittleness in paper), the librarians5 destruction of old periodicals has mostly ceased. Now that the horse is long gone, the barn door is securely locked. But the library sales are still going on. The pickings are nowhere near as lush as they once were, but that’s only because the good stuff is also long gone. Some went to the landfills, some went to dealers who cut them up for the engravings that illustrated them, and the rest are scattered among thousands of book lovers. We are glad to have them, although it can be hard to find a place to sit down in our homes that are overflowing with books. And we share with Nicholson Baker an intense worry: What will happen to these books when we are gone? *(Double Fold: Libraries and Paper, by Nicholson Baker, Random House, 384 pags, $23.) [[]] *** Libraries as Potter’s Field “I *spent a bit of time wading, through the library's ’catalog' to find out how many.* Harry *Potter boohs they actually have. It tooh me almost an hour to count them all. The Alameda County Library system has one huge main branch, and* 10 *other branches, many times smaller,'in neighborhoods. One is just a Bookmobile.* *“All told, these 11 library outlets own 837 Barry Potter books, and that does not include Barry Potter books on cassette,* CD, *or* CD-ROM' *That works, out to* 76 *books per branch on average.* *“You've seen these books — they are* HUGE *tomes that take up almost three inches of shelf space in hardback (and cost a whopping* $30 *apiece), and even the paperbacks take up a full inch and cost* $15. *One can only imagine how many copies of the sure-to-be-a-putrid-blockbuster movie will make their way into the library in video form.* My *conservative guess:* 50, *at least."* *(Correspondent Violet Jones, commenting on the fact that Dream World, published by The Match, is not available at* ALL *in the public library system, while the Potter books are now a featured display of “Banned Books Week". See also the Crap-Detection Dept., this issue.)* *** COMPUTER & Technology REPORT @@@469.jpeg]] **** COMPUTERS’ ELECTRICAL NEEDS TO DEMAND FEDERAL ENERGY GRID? The unprecedented draw on electric power, largely caused by millions of computers in day and night operation, will require the federal government to create and maintain a nationwide power transmission system, says Roger Anderson, director of the Energy Research Center at Columbia University. Even a small computer, connected to the Internet, draws as much electricity as a large refrigerator, he notes. See what you really promote when you use a computer to write those articles about decentralization and a “simpler” lifestyle? **** WHY THE CAR OF TOMORROW WON’T WORK Trumpeting the glorious advantages of autos we’ll supposedly see soon, Rich Taylor, in a special advertising supplement in the New York Times this past summer, listed the following ominous trends in engineering: digital steering, on-board navigation systems, “safety” contrivances that call the police automatically if they decide you need “help”; computerized controls; and “computerized digital highways”. (Sorry, we won’t be able to make it this weekend. The freeway has crashed.) **** COMPUTER COMPANY PUSHES FOR INTERNAL PASSPORT The San Jose Mercury News reported on September 23 that a computer company with ties to the CIA and other branches of the federal government has volunteered to donate its efforts if a law mandating a national internal passport is enacted. The passport, in the form of a plasticized document containing electronic and physical information, including engraved or embossed fingerprints, photograph, and computer chips holding a volume of other data about a person, would have to be presented on demand to any police officer. The passport would be required for all airline, railroad, and bus travel; and in many other common situations. Urging this oppression, and offering its multimillion-dollar resources toward implementing it, is a company called Oracle, specifically its chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, The Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly done a large amount of business with Oracle in past years, and Oracle is the world’s biggest maker of software for databases; Ellison himself is one of the wealthiest men on Earth. Adroitly seizing on the point that computers and the Internet have eroded considerable areas of privacy already, Ellison in a television interview jeered privacy, saying that nothing is left of it now except an illusion. “Right now, you can go onto the Internet and get a credit report about your neighbor and find out where your neighbor works, how much they earn and if they had a late mortgage payment and tons of other information.” True—in some cases. But far from all. Huge numbers of people do not, in fact, show up in such databases at all; or if they do it is only in a shadowy way Ellison’s “proposal” in essence converts this invasion into the normal, and staying clear of it into the ABnormal—or an illegal — state of affairs. In short his argument is that because HE and so many others like him have had such success at aggressing against private persons, nobody retains any further rights. A curious turning upside-down, since the argument ought to mean that as these companies have gotten so far already they should not be given even another inch let alone all the rest that we have.
However, it is a serious mistake to allow this assault to cast itself in terms of mere privacy. What’s happening with a national internal passport is far more than an attack on PRIVACY; it is an attack on our personal, bodily integrity — the right to exist upon the surface of this planet without being seized by authorities for violating laws requiring documentation in order to exist. In regular operation, the role of such passports would quickly escalate. By a domino effect similar to the one Ellison approvingly cites, each new requirement for the document in daily life would set up and justify the next. Soon no freedom of movement of any kind would exist, as “citizens” would have to present the card in order to buy gasoline or even food.In IRregular operation, more typical with computer technology, passports might succumb to magnetic or electrostatic fields and lose or add or distort information, leading to severe inconvenience and arrest or even death for persons misidentified or falsely accused of something by the card they carry but cannot read. Begin now to form the resolve not to cooperate with this assault. Square your shoulders and decide that no matter what “seven out of ten Americans” want, they aren’t going to force YOU into line with this totalitarianism. Also begin now to see this computer phenomenon as an ENEMY, and get clear of it as far as you can. It has a plain and obvious agenda: converting all life to an adjunct of itself—a straitjacket in which human life as we know it cannot exist. **** NEW WEAPONS DEVELOPED Information we’ve received suggests that the government has at last managed to create the weapon so long envisioned by science fiction, and for so many years tinkered at by lone inventors in basement laboratories (including, we must quietly admit, our own). Two versions of this type of device have now sprung upon the world, and both operate by directing energy at a distance onto the human body. Variety One uses microwaves, tightly focused, and a high-powered microwave generator, to put high-energy electromagnetic vibrations of the same general type that you may use to cook food, onto people’s skin. Range is unknown, but the effect is of extreme heat at the surface of the body. Supposedly there is no actual penetration of the body at the frequencies used, but the truth will only be known after extensive use on actual persons. (Sixty years ago, during the first testing of radar/microwaves, technicians actually stood in front of and adjusted dish antennas while pulses were being sent out. At least one engineer was said to have died after experiencing internal warmth—his insides were burned by the radiated energy.) Variety Two apparently works by way of the discovery of the Holy Grail of electrical technology, an ionized beam (something your editor tried at various times for about 35 years to create). An ionized beam conducts electricity; you aim it at something, then run a voltage into the beam with return through the ground. Or, in this new weapon’s case, a pair of beams puts the voltage directly onto a human being. Reportedly, the beam is ionized by two focused lines of ultraviolet light. That ought to be easy enough to replicate at home . . . *** COMPUTERS AT WORK, Part II By June A. IT’S BEEN over six years since The Match published my article entitled COMPUTERS AT WORK. Since the summer of ’95 I have continued to use computers at work, and things haven’t changed much. When the machines work they can be very helpful, but they erode people s skills and there’s always something going wrong with them About a month ago my current office, a construction company, suffered a computer disaster. Someone pulled out of the wall a plug-which- must-not-be-pulled, and the system crashed. Frantic calls to tech support ensued, and I congratulated myself heartily for having been nowhere near the building when the crash occurred. The owner of the company is a decent guy, but he has something of a temper The plug-puller would have been in a lot of trouble, except that he is the owner’s son. As a mere employee I could have been fired, but it’s hard to get fired from the position of “son”. Repair attempts went on for about a week, and these were complicated by the criminal origins of our computer system. Although my employers were as innocent as the newborn babe, the person who had originally installed the system a few years back had been steeped in sin. Now serving a stretch on software piracy charges, he had used the same piece of software to inaugurate the computer systems of several different clients. The upshot of this was that although we had gotten straight with the software people, we had no way of reinstal ling our system because the criminal had given the discs to someone else About a week and $2,000 later, the system was mostly working again, although some files were still corrupted and the last two weeks of data we had entered was gone. While others in the office wrestled with their own problems, and tech support continued its mysterious operations, I reentered my two weeks of data, got caught up on my current work, and recreated a few corrupted documents. All seemed pretty well until the tech support guy came into my office and began to specifically work on my computer. What exactly he was trying to fix I don’t know, but he said something about system-wide problems that he had traced back to my hard drive. He had trouble getting his discs to work in my drive, which, as I told him, didn’t surprise me at all, since if one attempted to play music CDs in it they skipped horribly. Eventually the fellow took my hard drive back to his office and ordered some parts for it. For days I wandered from office to office, using other people’s still-not-entirely-fixed computers. Two of these I could enter data into, but couldn’t print from. The reason I couldn’t print from them was that for some reason everything came out in about two-point type — readable only if you held the paper about three inches away from your eyes. Two days later than he had promised to, the tech support guy returned with my hard drive (and two more invoices for upgrades and parts, totaling about $1,000). For some not entirely clear reason, he attached my hard drive to another employee’s computer and gave me the other guy’s hard drive. He said it had something to do with speed, but I’m not sure which of us was supposed to get the faster unit. He spent most of the afternoon doing mysterious things at my desk, and at one point when I looked at the screen I saw files with wings on them flying from one place to another. About 45 minutes before it was time to go home, he announced that my computer was pretty much okay now, although he would have to come back the next day to do some other things to it. I sat down and looked at my monitor, which revealed a desktop with a rather different arrangement from the one I had previously had. Well, it’s an old story, so I can’t say I never thought it would happen to me: while the basic programs I had worked with were all there, all of my personal spreadsheets seemed to have vanished. Hurrying after the computer guy, who was now in the vice president’s office reporting on the progress he had made this day, I got right to the point. “Where are all my files?” I demanded.
“All that barricade *rhetoric advocating the instant realization of utopia here on Earth is nine parts delusionary and one part worthwhile.* We *should treat with a pinch of dream-dust every claim that a particular ‘ism’ will prove the panacea for the human condition. Anarchism, like anything, else, has no solution for every social problem. Freedom does not solve all problems. It may even make some of them worse."*-Doreen Frampton, in ‘The Cunningham Amendment’journal *** WHERE WE GET OUR MONEY** Since last issue, and as of August 27, 2001, donations to The Match have been received from the following people and bookstores. Note: all stores are on a voluntary-payment system; we do not bill anyone. Cover price is a suggestion only. Subscriptions are free, though donations are accepted. Thanks to all of you for helping to make The Match possible: Anne Seaman, Bob Conrad, Jonathan C.,Eljay’s Used Books, Thaddeus Bordofsky, David Dionne, Jasiu Milanow-ski, Rick Howe, Joey Lynch, Mark Wruble, Al Medwin, D.R., Kim Kearby, Robert Kephart, Carl Watner, Brian Mallett, K. Comer, Dave Villanyi, Salve Santos, Tom Nespeco, Shane Blackledge, Stephen Brodersen, Jr., Joyce Hardin, D. R., Mary Dixon, Geov Parrish, Robert Carr, R. F., Jack & Shirley Davis, Bill Hansen, Jacques Musy, Time Tested Books, J. H. for Lucy Parsons Center, Bound Together Books, Robert J. Casanas, Douglas Bolton, Susan Boren, Fourth Ave. Smoke Shop, Henry del Bianco, Randall Cornish, Ned Brooks, Steve Bovee, David Dionne, Martine Richardson, Joan Thomas, J. & A. Deal, Bill Dunn, Al Medwin, Jerry Kubias,' R. Lambert, Mike Reilly, Richard E. 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Wilson, Judy Sciandra, R.C., Bob Calese, Otis Kinkade, Mort Newman and Fay Blake, Peter (for Cunningham Amendment publication), Camille Ninaud, Reinhold Lang, Daniel Holmes, John Johnson, Chris Slack, Bob Conrad, John Fletcher, Jack Morris, Stephen Brodersen Jr., Left Bank, D.R., Rhea Rainwater, Larry Mathis, Ronald Sanderfer, Joe Witt, Greg W., Lish Wilson, Eli Rough, Kimmo Sundstrom, Laughing Horse Books, D.R., John Johnson, Louise/Eljay’s, Phyllis Avery, Nick Wolf, David Andre, Robert Calese, Milaka Strand, Doug Harrison, Rob Morris, Tom & Jeannette Jaquish, Frank Roemhild, Hannah Vollmer, Mario Cesari, D.R., Lucas S., Terraphile, Subterranean Books, David Kent, Gene Roberts, Marc Myers, R. Husek, Ryan K., Martine Richardson, A.J.H., Ryan K., Samuel Paniagua, Earl Lee. Multiple listings indicate multiple contributions. *** Letters @@@[[]] **** Brought to You in art by LAW Hi, Fred: As I write this, we’re in the middle of total war-hysteria. I posted a message on Alt.Zines telling people not to lose their heads. I said this showed the failure of government agencies to ^‘protect”—even though we’ve given them trillions. I alluded to the U.S. government’s interference in other countries’ affairs, to its own global empire, manned by U.S. troops, as a cause of all this. (The U.S. accounts for nearly half the total “defense” spending on the planet, SIX TIMES the next closest country, Russia.) I pointed out the sight of senators wrapping themselves in the flag and singing “God Bless America” on capitol steps as away to distract citizens from their own incompetence. I also referred to President Bush — who talks on TV to his countrymen as if we were all five-year-olds, as a stooge. (“Today people destroyed our buildings. These are bad people. These are evil people. They were big buildings. This is tragic. But we will win.” etc.) From all the voluble talkers on that forum, I received ONE response, from a zinester who said: “Yes, Bush is a stooge, but he’s the only stooge we’ve got.” He went on to say he’s ready to go and fight. All the rest, to date, seem to have been buffaloed into silence by 24-hour- a-day war propaganda. Sure, it was shocking; it was tragic. We have to make sure it never happens again. But like a magician distracting the audience with sleight of hand, so it won’t see what’s really happening, the media will never unravel the causes of this, including the ties that have existed between U.S. oil companies and the U.S.government,and those mideastern governments and groups.True Americans recall what George Washington said as a warning, to “avoid entangling alliances.” The U.S. has been backing this side or that side, financing — and arming — most of the parties, whether Israeli, Saudi, Egyptian, or Taliban (once U.S. allies!), and now it’s blown up in the U.S.’s face. A good starting point as history of this interference in, and exploitation of, the mideast, is Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope”, which is an insider’s view of the machinations of the Anglo-American establishment. It’s one of the more eye-opening books I’ve ever read. Will dissenters to war be put in cages, as happened to Ezra Pound at the end of WWII ? P.S. By the way, I notice Noam Chomsky has come out for “The rule of Law” through the U.N. Security Council and World Court. That kind of thing is how we got into this mess! Bush says the fight against terrorism will last many years. Of COURSE I Long enough to impose “Homeland Defense” on this country, and the “rule of law” upon every square yard of this planet.
— Karl Wenclas, P.O. Box 42077, Philadelphia, PA 19101.*Thanks for those sane and encouraging comments, Karl.* *Readers: Karl is one of the founders of the Underground Literary Alliance (reachable at the address just given).. See also our comments on publications received, elsewhere in this issue. —Editor.* **** They’ll Be In Touch Dear Fred: I want to thank I. R. Ybarra for the “Around &
— Refusenik, U. S. A.*I bet there are quite a few people of Arabic extraction around this country right now who wish they had just thrown away the forms of this recent damned census. Now they have to be thinking worriedly that there is a government agency that can correlate their ethnicity and their street address, and take any kind of* preventive *action it decides is “legal”, against them at any time.* *Since nobody ever knows what’s going to happen in the future, including what hysterias and “special circumstances” there may be that will easily invalidate all current glib promises of confidentiality and privacy, it behooves anyone who understands how governments operate, to look out for his own interests by trashing census forms and COMPLETELY AVOIDING censustakers.* **** We Anarchists In Danger? Oh, Surely Not! Dear Fred: Welcome to World War III. The politicians and religious nuts are starting to piss me off. I suspect you could be in some danger in the wave of patriotic fervor that’s sure to develop in the coming weeks and months. The righteous blather and flag-waving is going to be ’way more sickening than it normally is. I heard a report this morning that Wal-Mart’s sales of American flags have increased a hundredfold. Happy days are here again.
—Al Medwin, Englishtown, NJ.**** He’s Being All He Can Be (The misspellings are his.) Woodworth: God bless the USA! Love it or leave it! Your article in the November, 2000 issue of Playboy entitled “Why I’m an Anarchist” should be entitled “Why I'm an Ignoramus.” If you don’t love this country, move somewhere else, you ignorant moron. You are nothing more than what most would call an “oblivious utopian.” You don’t seem to understand that laws, sometimes numerous and absurd as they are to you, are here for order and protection. Your comment that states, “It asserts the right to conscript people to kill others,” is absolutely correct. I am an Army Second Lieutenant and yes, our military does exactly that. Do you know why we conscript people to kill others? You obviously don’t, you ignorant unpatriotic asshole. We (the United States) conscript people to kill others so we don’t allow facists to come our nation and force their obscene laws and beliefs on us. Why don’t you move to China, Russia North Korea or any other nation and write the same article? You would last about two seconds if you were to do that. You see, in the United States, we have free speech. You exercised your right to free speech when you wrote your article in Playboy you uneducated dumb bastard. We conscript people to kill others to protect that right along with our other Constitutional Rights. You can be damn sure I would go to war and kill anyone that tries to take away that right from our citizens. Why don’t you take your worthless ideals to another nation and see how far you get? I guarantee you would not get far. This country may not be the best for everyone but it’s the best damn nation in the world you un-American piece of dogshit. So get over it, we have laws and as long as I can help it, I will kill others who try to take our freedoms away. , P.S. You may wonder why I did not include my name or address. It is because Anarchists like to bomb people. You are the “bomb throwers”. Our military bombs people as well, and yes, there are civilian casualties, but you can blame the government of the nation we bombed for that, not the U.S. So go ahead & visit Mr. McVeigh or Mr. Kacinsky in prison and send them my regards, Asshole ! P.S.S. Don’t forget to vote & file your income tax! Also, smoke some dope too. That helps everything. Also if a “free society” wouldn’t be a perfect world, I’d sure like to know what it would be.
Signed, G.I. Joe “The Real American Hero” 2LT US Army.**** Take This Advice Hey, Fred: I’m too young for this, at 54, but I had a knee joint replacement done recently. Doing good, thank you very much, walking pretty much without a cane, and continuing to work on flexion, extension and strengthening. All this a result of my patriotic duty “serving” in Viet Nam. Had to volunteer all over the place to get there. Enlisted in the Army, volunteered for jump school (paratrooper), volunteered for Special Forces training (Green Beret), taught to be an aidman (medic), then, with time running out, volunteered for Viet Nam. There, in addition to being battalion medic, I was a company commander (advisor). First Purple Heart was for shrapnel in the face from a rocket propelled grenade that blew apart the heads of two of the three guys I was talking to. The second Purple Heart was from an RPG round exploding so that it broke my leg with a through and through hunk of iron. (Went through the femur one inch above the knee.) Another hunk of iron caught me across the left cheek and lower eyelid. So, all these years later the osteoarthritis got so bad that I could scarcely walk (forget about stairs), but I worked as a carpenter. Suck it up, whistle to keep from crying and all that. So I have a new knee, and it was done at the VA. Not an easy road. It took me several years from the time I began asking for evaluation from the orthopedic surgeons before I was referred up to see them. I was told I was too young for a replacement; was told that I wasn’t bad enough, not being in a wheelchair or on crutches. What I did finally just for the referral was to have X-rays done at a private clinic, then to have two independent opinions and evaluations of my knee and the X-rays. Will spare the details of seeing a different resident each time I went to the clinic, being scheduled for surgery and canceled the day before because it was decided that the femur was too deformed to do a straightforward replacement. Okay, okay; finally it was done, and apparently done well. I stayed on the VA because that was the deal: I go to your war and you tend to the wounds and their aftermath. A deal’s a deal. It all goes back to the prime mistake which was buying into the notion that our fathers who art in Washington know better than that 19-year-old kid — me — that it was in our national interest to fight a war in Viet Nam (or anywhere else— Iraq, Yugoslavia, Panama, Korea, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico, ad infinitum). Well, it was in our national business interest, which is to say, none of MY business. So, all this is to say to the young folks out there: Don’t buy into the military patriotic lie. What you gain isn’t worth it and may not be gained anyway. Killing folks and destroying is what it’s all about, pure and simple. Computer training, college, all that isn’t worth it. Ask yourself if you want to be part of a system that perpetuates killing and the lording it over the world’s people. I hope most of you will think not—and act on that rejection. I’m a war tax resister—I resist paying taxes because so much of it goes to war, past, present and future— not because of my leg troubles, but because of being an old conscious objector. I’m past the powers-that-be wanting my body, so as far as possible I’ll not pay for some younger body going for the killing machine. . Cheer up & happy trails.
— David Waters, Birmingham, Alabama.*Thanks for sharing your hard-won insights, my friend.* **** Try to Enjoy Life While You Have It Dear Fred: It has been a while since I last wrote. I’ve been getting on with the usual effort of earning a living, finding some time and money to publish a few more editions of “Total Liberty", the latest of which I have just sent to my printer in Stafford. I am luckier than most, as I am able to work part-time and so have enough free time to work the garden, take a few walks in the hills near here and to pursue my other interests of playing music and learning the Welsh language. Like most of your readers I greatly enjoy your magazine, especially its heart-felt anger at the state of the world and the growing level of authoritarianism. I enclose a few back copies of T.L. I like your addition of the word “ethical” to the masthead. I have used “evolutionary” myself with the intention of differentiating my journal and my own view of Anarchism from that of mindless confrontation and violence. My friend Peter Good has been very busy producing his inspired letterpress magazine, ‘The Cunningham Amendment”. He is currently learning binding techniques. I shall be seeing him and some other Anarchist friends in September; we have hired a Yorkshire farmhouse for a get- together (I hope it will be fun).
—Jonathan Simcock, Derbyshire, England.*Thanks very much for the issues of your very lively and interesting Total Liberty. I hope your gathering was indeed pleasant. Wish I could have been there; the closest I could get was setting the type for your letter and this response on the weekend of Sept. 22-23, which I merely guessed was the right one.* *For readers who haven’t seen Total Liberty, it’s 12 pages (8.25 x 11.75), containing bookreviews, letters, and commentary including: Co-operative Anarchist Economics, Individualism, Letterpress Revival, Josiah Warren and Modern Times, Science Fiction as Social Criticism, and more. The address is: Box EMAB, 88 Abbey St., Derby DE22 3SQ, England.* *Cost of four issues is £8. For information on Peter Good’s letterpress journal, The Cunningham Amendment which Jonathan mentions, see our commentary elsewhere in this issue on publications we’ve received.* **** People Who Are Afraid of Freedom Dear Fred: I’ve lately been reading the work of Richard Mitchell. He published a newsletter called “The Underground Grammarian” for many years—setting the type of each issue by hand, no less! In his essays on language and education, he presents language not as just some fancy motor skill that enables us to order a regular coffee or a few gallons of unleaded gasoline, but as a cognitive tool that aids in clear thinking. To Mitchell, muddled language IS muddled thought. This particular point impressed me a great deal, and found a snug fit with my own vague feelings about what good writing is. Perhaps this helps explain why Anarchism, as articulated in The Match, is so appealing to me. The screeds of the statist (and, sadly, any professed “anarchists”) strike me as muddled, cluttered with jargon, self-contradictory, or downright boring. I have far more respect for writing that is able to proclaim freedom and liberty desirable absolutes than I do for the preposterous snake-dancing required to select one liberty over another, or get bogged down in a complicated calculus of greater goods and lesser evils. If the first step to freedom is understanding the MEANING of freedom, Anarchists in this country have a huge job ahead. I often despair when talking to my office colleagues, who, despite their apparently solid education, show little aptitude for defining the term. To them, freedom is license granted for specific things, or discrete allowances of civil rights, or—stranger still— SECURITY in the things from which they are free. Dare I bring up the idea of complete freedom, of total liberty, and they recoil in horror! Far from finding freedom a desirable absolute, they actually seem afraid of it. “What would happen? If there were no government, there would be total chaos!” Imagine, if you will, some ancient river culture where people could drink delicious water freely, swim in the gentle currents, or fish, wash, and bathe as they liked. Now imagine how that culture might change were the river dammed up. The river culture would fade away as the dam’s walls rose, choking the river off into a trickling stream in a dry channel. Perhaps the people get jobs on the dam, which might pay enough so that they can buy water fortheir families. Unlike an uncorked river, which washes itself clean, the turgid waters of the reservoir would require administration and policing. After a few generations of work on the big job, with the ruins of their ancient culture submerged out of sight, I see fear in their eyes. They are not afraid of the dam; it is their bulwark against disaster. They do not fear the administrative class that much; they see their job as an important task. What these people are afraid of now is WATER. That is why they find themselves hard at work shoring up the sagging walls, taking feverish eight-hour shifts on the sandbag line, trying to plug any leaks orcracks, and always hoping that the walls can be stronger, higher! Were somebody to propose that the dam should be taken away, perhaps the dambuilders would growl: “You believe that water should just be able to go ANYWHERE? That would be chaos!” I apologize for this bald parable, but to me, fearing freedom is just about as silly as fearing water. Fearing a sudden flood is reasonable, as are fears of the torrents of rage and reprisal the sudden collapse of the state would leave in its wake; but people seem blinded by fear, and wrongly equate hatred of the dike with love of catastrophe. ...I recently spoke with the curator of the “Gilded Rage’ exhibit at the Queens Library. She seems to be a nice enough kid, though it’s a shame she fell in with the experts, advisors, or “consultants” she did. Her attitude toward my complaints about the exhibit was one of polite tolerance, and I’ve not heard back from her since I sent her a letter and photocopies of selections from The Match. *...The Gilded Rage exhibit presents Anarchism as something that died out before 1920, but that producedcool-lookingcollectibles: old-fashioned swirly lettering, etc. In other words, Anarchism made commodity for modem consumers.* *We sent some copies of this publication after getting word that the exhibits promoters pooh- poohed claims that Anarchism still existed; but despite this effort, they wouldn’t give an inch.* *However, the curator apparently did know of some plan to “create, at last”, an Anarchist magazine, and from what we’ve been able to find out it largely features a disgusting person who has advocated theft as Anarchism, and promoted an ex-hijacker as a laudable Anarchist militant.* I also did a bit of research on that “new Anarchist magazine’ she mentioned. In fact, a local Anarchist approached me to see if I was interested in getting involved. After seeing one of the names on the “Editorial Board”,needless to say, I declined. (Even the minor contact our Underground Literary Alliance has had with this person has resulted in trouble.) I’m almost ready to make book that the thing will be entitled “The Bombhurler” and will feature red-eyed, drug-fogged fulminations about all the great things we’ll do “after the revolution”, with, of course, a few pieces by academics or ex-Black Panthers thrown in for good measure. I’m sending you some very disturbing “Anarchist” zines I’ve been assigned for review in “A Reader’s Guide’. One of the very worst features an essay by YOU! You’ll wince when you see it: lovingly reproduced images of Che Guevara and horrible, sub-literate essays spouting leftist dogma about “the masses”. I’m actually starting to long for the days of the Soviet Union when these morons would identify themselves with Communism. One look at their revolutionary pose shows that they never really left that mindset.
— Michael Jackman, New York City.*The essay by me in one of those gutter- zines was ripped off from Playboy, November 2000 issue. Why anybody would like or agree with what I wrote, and also like or agree with the leftist iconism and viciously pro-vandalism graphics of the gutter-zines, is still another big mystery. A couple of examples of the garbage I refer to are printed here to show what I mean when I speak of how violentism tends to lose all sense of decency or ideals after a while.* **** AN INTERESTING MISTAKE In the aftermath of the 9/ I I terrorism, The New York Times had, understandably, a rather larger incidence of typographical errors and misspellings in its columns than usual. A different kind of slip-up, however, was this sentence in the issue for Sept. 19, page B-9: "Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, said that citizens of 62 companies were among the trade center victims.” We wonder: How tough are the naturalization requirements? @@@[[]]
*...People who react favorably to gutter material like these two graphics are not anarchists. In fact, they are indistinguishable from Nazis.***** It Was The Worst Hey Fred: I am really glad you have been knocking Zerzan and his merry crew. They (and some of their apologists at Left Bank Books—you are correct to surmise a connection) despise me now for my public criticisms of their WTO antics. It’s not that I object to property damage per se, but what they did was at best one of the great tactical mistakes of protest history ; at worst, an intentional sabotage of historic proportions. Theirs was an infantile, knee-jerk plan that intentionally upstaged and undercut the far more courageous actions of the so-called peaceful protesters — who are usually ineffective, but who happened this time to be extraordinarily effective. Rather than letting the story of “pathological pacifists” (many of whom were anarchists) shutting down the WTO get out, it became a media frenzy of broken windows and a sicken- ingly distorted media stereotype of anarchism. The corporate state couldn’t have planned it any better. Tens of millions now not only know what an “anarchist” is (“it’s a terrifying young criminal who riots and breaks windows for no apparent reason”), but are happy to excuse whatever new abuses our police state can connive to control the menace. Any truly effective challenge to the corporate state will result in attempted crackdown, but it doesn’t have to happen with broad popular approval. That’s what Zerzan’s bunch accomplished. It will take decades, at minimum, to undo all the damage, and they’re quite proud of it. Those little fucks deserve all the contempt they have coming to them. And Zerzanthe most, because he sits back and lets young folks who don’t have his experience take all the risks and in some cases wind up ruining their lives through needless entanglements with the legal system. What a profile in courage! In general, I don’t understand the contempt many young anarchists these days have for people they label “pacifists” — that seems to be anyone who engages in nonviolent resistance. It’s one thing to criticize a tactic, and voluntary arrest can be pretty idiotic at times. But I always thought anarchism REQUIRED pacifism, and vice-versa. After all, what is anarchism but self-rule, and the refusal to rule others? And what is violence but the use of force to make others do your bidding? Coercive anarchism is an oxymoron. And if you’re a pacifist, how can you justify an inherently violent institution? (The state.) I don’t get why more anarchists aren’t at least political pacifists (personal self-defense is another issue), and why more pacifists aren’t anarchists. Thanks also for your ongoing clarity regarding “Anarchy” magazine. They’re another example. All in all, there seem to be a lot of people running around who think “anarchy” means “I can do whatever the fuck I want, no matter how badly it harms you.” In a two-year-old that’s understandable. Adults will have tojo better than that if they ever expect to build a sustainable movement that can help get the corporate jackboot off our necks.
— Geov Parrish, Seattle.**** You Misunderstand Fred Woodworth: We are sorry that you feel the need to pull The Match! from our collective, but frankly the reasons you gave for your decision are misinformed. This is most likely due to miscommunication. “Pulling the Strings” was given away free at our store per your request, as were the Anarchist calendars. We were glad to have them. Since they were donated, we did not sell them via our catalog because we judged they would be gone before our next catalog came out. John Johnson’s publication, “Imagine”, has sat in our “To Review” box as have many other “worthy” publications. This is the unfortunate side effect of a short-staffed, overworked project. With our recent downsizing of the distribution end of our project, we have had especially little time to add new publications to our mail order operation. In fact when we decided to close down our warehouse we completely stopped accepting new titles until after our move. Many great publications did not get our attention due to this transition. Moreover, it is just not true that we have not carried your novel, “Dream World”. Many times we have hand-written you letters with prepayment checks in order to carry your book at our store, and when we have had it in stock it has usually been shelved in our front room on our new arrivals and “staff picks” shelf. You must understand that to send a letter and check each time we run out is virtually impossible with our small staff and work load. The Match! has always been sold in the front of our magazine rack. We hope that you understand the limits of a small collective project such as ours. We can’t respond to each thing we receive in the mail as elaborated in the paragraph above. If you had called or written us directly about your concerns which you printed in the latest Match! we could have talked about them and saved us all these unfortunate miscommunications. Finally, we sell many different publications here at Left Bank, which each collective member has different feelings about ranging from good to bad to indifferent. The Match! is included in this, along with John Zerzan’s books and even the Unabomb- er Manifesto. We have consistently sold each issue of The Match! over the years and it would be truly unfortunate to see such a fixture in the anarchist community leave our shelves. We hope you understand our situation and reconsider your decision. Sincerely,
The Left Bank Books Collective, 92 Pike Street, Box B, Seattle, WA 98101*In point of fact: I did write you, last year, as soon as I heard it said that you’d refused Johnson’s anarchist magazine, Imagine. Since there was no reply I decided it must be true, and therefore had to stand in solidarity with' this extremely promising new publisher.* *Yes, I’m aware that your project has been experiencing some serious problems. I’ve tried to help out in the ways I could. It was my hope, for example, that you would take the pamphlets and calendars I had sent you, and SELL them, keeping the proceeds for your own operating expenses. But perhaps I wasn’t clear about this.* *I want you to understand that this is a time of profound doubt, for me, about whether I want to go on calling myself (and this journal) Anarchist after my deadline of issue
*—Fred Woodworth.***** Don’t Give In To Them Dear Fred: I know how disheartening it must be to see the philosophy of Anarchism continually being usurped by the violent and authoritarian pseudo-anarchists. Such usurpation is beneath contempt. However, I do not believe it is enough of a reason to abandon the word Anarchy altogether. It is still important for The Match to continue using the word, for the simple fact that your journal preserves the real meaning of the word. It was that which first drew my attention to The Match. I don’t want to see Anarchy become completely devoid of its true definition, as the word Liberal became in the early part of the 20th century. As long as your journal continues to use it in its correct sense, the true definition of Anarchy can never fully be lost. — Brian Mallett, @@@484.jpeg][]] **** A Written Attempt at Ju-Jitsu Hi, Fred: I find your reasoning about the illegitimacy of the government’s claim on you to "serve” jury "duty” attractive and compelling. Of course, that philosophy extends to other government institutions as well. I love your denunciation of the rock-throwing "anarchists” who have romped in various cities. For ethical reasons—and because my study of history leads me to believe that the use of violence never really changes things at their roots —I am committed to nonviolent social change. But is violence justifiable, even in extreme situations? The criteria you use (if there is an emergency, a self-defense situation, or if it will save innocent lives) opens up a can of worms, as you recognize. The criteria are quite similar to the historical basis for just-war theory, which religions (and the governments to which they are parasitically attached) have applied to sanctify all sorts of wars, no matter the death and destruction they bring. I’ve always detested just-war theory because, as you say, its adherents often treat it as an excuse to take off all restraints. Trying io get inside the heads of the "anarchist” vandals, I wonder whether they might use your criteria to claim their actions are well-founded. I know many of them believe they have the right to throw stones because of the situation we are in. Some may consider every moment a potential emergency, as the fate of the planet rests on a precipice. Human actions are ravaging the environment at a pace where there will soon be little to save. The corporations these activists are targeting are encouraging the consumption driving our depletion of natural resources and the creation of pollution which will lead to immense destruction through global climate change. There’s also the loss of species habitat, making the offensive on corporations "defensive” in the minds of these activists and a matter of life or death for non-human animals... Put in these terms, my own choice is to boycott such corporations and encourage the same in other people I know, and to engage in nonviolent campaigns (not just sporadic vandalism) that have the chance to undermine the corporations’ global aims to some degree. But the vandals are fighting a just war — what’s so bad about a few rocks?
—Vincent J. Romano, White Plains, New York.*What’s so bad is that to people looking at such tactics from ’way off, these actions seem to be just variants of any other terrorism, the same way normal people can’t distinguish between the 57 meaningless varieties of Stalinism, Leninism, Trotskyism, etc. (There may be differences, but who the hell cares what they are?)* *Another thing that’s even worse than just the loss of sympathy among regular people, is that such tactics lead to isolation of “mere”* window smashers *in increasingly ultra-radical sects, where growing self-reinforcement pushes them along into still-worse actions against, ultimately,* people. *It’s similar to how cop-culture propels half-decent people into full-fledged nasty gestapohood.* *Power corrupts, and if Anarchists don’t even comprehend this themselves, it’s a huge mystery to me what part of Anarchism they do understand.* **** More Thoughtful “Help” Hi, Fred: I’ve been a reader of your publication since 1971. As a matter of fact, The Match is the first explicitly anarchist publication I ever read and it’s thanks to your listing of periodicals that you exchanged with that I found out that the IWW still existed (I lined-up in 1972). As an aside, I might also note that it was Noam Chomsky’s 1969 book, "American Power and the New Mandarins”, that turned me on to anarchism in the first place. I want to make a few comments on the manifesto denouncing the so-called Seattle "riots” (in terms, I might add, practically indistinguishable from those of then-President Clinton). Now, if it was only a question of opposition to the trashing I could see your point. When I heard about it on the news I was at once delighted that those corporate exploiters got a taste of people’s wrath and, at the same time, certain that the spectacle would give the media the chance to once again depict anarchists as nothing more than violent thugs. So, I have mixed feelings about that whole episode but I definitely don’t think that it was "authoritarian” or "anti-anarchist”. Anarchists are no more wedded to nonviolence than they are wedded to violence. Corporations are powerful institutions in our world whose daily decisions affect the lives of millions of people (both as workers and consumers). If a few broken windows, or picket lines, strikes or boycotts factor into those decisions and help to prevent them from harming people, then why shouldn’t anarchists participate in such activities? (By the way, I don’t think that breaking windows is a very effective tactic.) As to the question of property: I think you make the mistake of equating personal property (e.g., your car, stereo, house, etc.) with fixed capital (e.g., mines, factories, banks, corporate owned retail outlets, etc.). The targets of the trashers were not mom-and-pop corner grocery stores or cobbler shops: they were banks and outlets for major capitalist corporations who make their money expropriating the product of the actual producers (e.g., 14-year-old girls in Indonesia and middle-aged men in Seattle alike). They have the State and the plute press to defend them. Why should anarchists? One other point on this matter of the vandals: Your allegation that they were most likely police provocateurs based solely on the
— Mike Hargis, Evanston, Illinois.*If you want to edit your own paper, do so. But you’ll get noplace trying to get me to turn this publication into a typical, dreary, “anti-capitalist” leftoid organ.* *But now I must address something you said back at the beginning of your letter: that you’d been a reader of this publication since 1971. You did indeed subscribe then. But you got mad when I criticized the IWW in 1975. Shortly thereafter you went off the mailing list. In 1978, during a period when I no longer could get anybody here to print the publication, and was broke and literally starving, you crowed that it was you and the IWW that had finally put an end to The Match.* *When I managed to scrape up an old press and figure out how to make it work, and made a comeback, you weren’t there helping. You finally got back on the mailing list many, many years later, but by no stretch of the imagination have you been a supporter of this journal, as you try to make it seem, for thirty years.* *Time may pass, but I never forget.* **** Match Made Their Day Fred: I work for a moving company here in Richmond, Virginia. Every morning the workers are dispatched into crews and sent out to the jobsite of the day. During one such drivel found myself sharing a truck with two co-workers who unbeknownst to me have as fevered a hatred for law enforcement as I do. We had a long drive to the job that morning and I began reading the Who The Police Beat column from issue 96 aloud to them to break up the monotony of the day. After a while P , a white guy about 50 years old, T , a 19-year-old black guy, and myself, 27 and white, all began sharing our stories of varying degrees of police abuse and mistreatment. P , as it turned out, once served a prison sentence of over two years for failing to comply with financial regulations relating to his now defunct firm. He passionately spoke of making the people who tortured him suffer for what they put him through. T------ grew up poor in an inner-city neighborhood that was devastated before he was born. By the time he was 16 he was involved in a neighborhood gang; his arms are covered with tattoos. He was beaten by several cops and, at the age of 16, put in the city lockup for almost three months. He can barely speak of what he went through during that time. I then shared my own story of being arrested. That day at work was one of my best ever, largely due to The Match.
— Greg Wells, Richmond.**** Does Mayday Books Control the State? Dear Fred; Some of us are fans. Especially your dislike of computers and the police. No computers here at Mayday. But, what about capitalism? Who controls the state, police, military, etc.? Who benefits? Do you have any critique of capitalism?
— Craig P., Mayday Books, Minneapolis, Minn.*Who controls the state, etc.? Lots of people, not just “capitalists”. The religious are an even more enormous reservoir of controlling mania.* *I have plenty of critiques of capitalism, but they all boil down to one simple word, which is “big”: anything that is big gets authoritarian. Big newspapers inevitably become authoritarian. Tiny ones generally aren’t. Do you oppose the very concept of newspapers, then? No. Nor do I oppose the concept of business.* *YOU are in business; Mayday Books is a business (you sell books). The only difference between you and Barnes & Noble is size — they’re huge and you’re tiny. If you got to their scale you’d behave just exactly the same way they do. If any small zine inflated up to the size of the Arizona Daily Sewer it would turn into the precise equivalent of that hypocritic al, lying, cop worshipping, statist/religionist putrescence.* *Left Bank Books, another outfit that, is in* business *(again, selling books) has put out a pamphlet stating flatly that Anarchists are against all business activity, period. Here the lies and contradictions or hypocrisy have already started, because the truth is that PLENTY of Anarchists do not at all object to the concept of business.* I *don’t—does that mean I’m not an Anarchist? If so, please tell me quick, as 32 years is more than enough time to waste on advocating a philosophy that excludes oneself.* **** This Businessman Sure Didn’t Control It Dear Fred: Don’t drop the A-word. If YOU don’t use it, I have nowhere to point to for a definition. I sit writing this from a building I now rent that is dripping so badly from a roof leak it looks like it’s raining inside. This is after be ing forced from a building I OWNED and kept repaired, by a government I don’t respect. It’s not raining on my merchandise now, though; the cops took it again— after raiding me for the sixth time — on charges that they’ve already lost at a jury trial for. This time I’ll sue. Will let you know about my “huge
— Gary Elvers, Kokomo, Indiana.*Gary had a small business that sold records and publications, including this one. The STATE smashed his store, raiding it six times in different locations. Whose side are you on, Anarchists? Are you on the side of those who claim that “business controls the State”? If so, how come THIS business couldn’t exert such control and save itself? Are you on the side of Stalinoid window-breakers who’d smash Mr. Elvers’ windows whenever they could get a brick in edgewise between the cops’ raids?* *Anarchists: Are you really on the side of the joyful theft advocates who urge everybody to filch anything they can from any store they go into? Can’t you see the destruction of individual rights that such criminal acts will lead to?* **** Is It A Clockwork Universe? Dear Fred: The disappeared convict has reappeared. He was vanished when it was time for his evil, dissident Anarchist literature to be given to him. However, when it was time for his 41st trip to the
— Another human being. Location withheld.**** Horrifying Events Dear Fred: My wife turned on the radio; told me I’d likely not be going in to work. We went out into the back yard and watched the smoke, but could not see downtown through the summer foliage. Turned on the television just in time to see a fireball on live TV. I said at the time: “Get ready for every rat to crawl out of the woodwork and use this tragedy as an excuse for even MORE tragedies.” Sure enough, within hours all the old hawks were on television, angry as hell, but specifically angry at the old Church Commission of the seventies, or at old Executive Order 12333 forbidding the state-sponsored assassination of anybody. I saw George Stephan- opolous comment that people seemed ready to give up a little liberty for security. This was ugly stuff, political hacks grinding their old battle-axes on the morning’s rubble. A phone call from a friend in lower Manhattan told us he couldn’t go outside, not for fear of any danger but because armed patrols were enforcing a perpetual curfew. Elections have been suspended. A vague state of full terrorism alert exists, although nobody is able to explain what that means. I wrote before about TWA Flight 800, and I said that it wasn’t important who did it, but it was instructive to see to what uses those in power would put the tragedy. I don’t see much of a difference here. Particularly unenlightened is today’s editorial from Steve Dunleavy for the New York Post (Sept. 12) entitled
Dunleavy goes on: “Right for that time (the 1970s), wrong for this time. Train assassins (we’ve done it before), hire mercenaries, put a couple of million bucks up for bounty hunters to get them dead or alive, preferably dead. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts... We should go into the interior (of Afghanistan), hunt down the desert rat and execute him and his followers on the spot. And if Saddam Hussein makes so much as a peep, do him, too. The time has come.” This guy sounds like a total maniac. I’m going quiet in a lot of local conversations with people in my neighborhood because of all this hysteria. Let’s face it: I’m not going to make any friends here by pointing out that this sort of TERRORISM is exactly what has happened around the world, sponsored by the United States government. When the state does it, it’s collateral damage; when THEY do it, it’s cowardly evil. Just try telling that to the people in this neighborhood, though; try telling them that the chickens are coming home to roost. It's pointless. Was what happened ugly? Sure. Was it horrifying? Yes, I am horrified by what I saw. Was it, as so many talking heads have claimed, unprovoked? Absolutely not. But I worry about getting pummeled for heresy. Independent thought and reason could mark a person here, now. My wife and I gave our phone number to the Yemeni guys who run the corner bodega, just in case any Captain America types try to make trouble. Then I saw them again this morning and they told me that a few people had shouted at them to take the next plane home, or had threatened to kick their asses ... It’s apparent what trouble rats like Dunleavy are making. Yes, Dunleavy; let’s fuel a Krys- talnacht! They control everything leading up to a catastrophe, and they’re going to solve the problem with — more control. I hope all’s well at The Match. Here the sirens are wailing and the fighters are thundering. Much of the city is “occupied”. Martial law and the irrational jingoism scare me. How long before venomous editorialists declare that OTHER people who “make a peep” should be “done” as well?*No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States should engage in assassination or conspire to engage in assassination.”
— Michael Jackman, New York City.*All is well here at The Match, and many thanks to those of you who’ve expressed concern. I’ve mostly just buried myself in work here at the off ice, produc ing this issue of the magazine, and have been careful about going out.* *However, I don’t think anarchists are in for much hassle — at least not yet. That could change in a flash, though, particularly if what I dread comes to pass. That is that some vicious police-sponsored “anarchist” publication comes out with a big spread crowing that the 9/11 terrorism was “a glorious victory against capitalism”, and lauds the religion-crazed attackers as models of “revolutionary” spirit.* *That could happen. In fact I think every day that it doesn’t happen is a kind of reprieve, and wait for the provocateurs to lower the boom. You can bet that some gutter-zine or other is going to do it eventually — and it won’t be its originators who wind up in jail; it’ll be us.* *The instant I get this issue out, I’m going to stash some equipment in another place, so that if the shouting, screaming mob of police kicks in my door and rampages through here destroying machines under the pretext of a search, I’ll still have some apparatus left to restart after a while.* *Let’s hope that the merely irresponsible and deluded publications which posture this way will be shamed into silence, while the outright government-financed and cop-written ones will dry up as funding and effort shifts elsewhere.* **** More Atrocious Discreditation Mr. Woodworth: Enclosed is a December 17, 2000 story in the San Francisco Chronicle about theLabadie archives that I thought you might find interesting. Thank you for publishing parts of the Ammon Hennacy autobiography a few issues ago; I really enjoyed it.
— Colin Everett, Massachusetts.*The article Colin sends us is titled* Unabomb- er's Gift Makes his Life a Study in Anarchy, *and reports the donation of The Ted Kaczynski Papers to the Labadie Collection,, which again is bragging about the acquisition and acting as if this garbage has something to do with real Anarchism.* *We mentioned last issue how the Labadie library ballyhooed the acquisition of the papers of police informant Bob Black, comparing him to ethical Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Ammon Hennacy. The library also stocks a lot of authoritarian Black Panther Party material too, and thus this swill gets referred to ultimately as anarchist or related to anarchism.* *In protest over the bragging about the Black papers (which, sickeningly, he probably got paid* *for), we withdrew The Match’s future issues from the library along with many boxes of other documents we’d hoped to donate to Labadie some day. Now I’m at a loss to figure out what to do with this stuff, but (I hope), I have a while to think it over.* *Julie Herrada, curator of the Labadie Collection, responded to my withdrawal of The Match with an arch statement that she can’t let anyone “dictate” what goes into the collection, which exists* “to document anarchist history". *She also implied that my concerns verge on “censorship”. (That’s interesting; the only publication no longer going into that collection is THIS one.) Herrada also stated that “ours is the only place within many miles where people can read The Match for free,and many do.” Since subscription is free, it seems to me that anybody wanting to continue reading this journal in the vicinity of Ann Arbor Michigan should just request it from me.If people have to be seen frequenting Ted Kaczynski’s shrine in order to read The Match, it’s a disgrace and readership would probably have fallen off anyway.* *Incidentally, I have never objected to any library anywhere carrying anything WHATSOEVER.My objection here is the intense publicity given out suggesting to nationwide media that these documents are somehow central to Anarchism. Speaking of the Unabomber, Herrada as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, said:* “He’s the most contemporary and the most notorious person we have here (in the collection)." *The most notorious, maybe, but the most contemporary?? This is an insult, and it’s another example of the bragging, the dis gusting prestigevalue placed on an individual who was nothing more than a sickening mass-murderer. There is a value judgment implicit in a statement like that, and made plain it is that real value and interest for modern library patrons springs from notoriety and horrific impact, not decency, idealism, or lasting dedication to a cause.* *By that reasoning, it seems to me that the Labadie Collection will next be seeking out any surviving papers from the band of Koranic criminals respons ible for the recent terrorism. Sure, if papers like that exist, they probably ought to be kept someplace where people can examine them, but I don’t want to be linked with them in a common Chamber of Horrors. Do you?* *If “Anarchy” and “Social Protest” are exactly the same thing, then publications from the modern Nazis and race-hate groups are going to* @@@487.jpeg][A person with a stick and a dog AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] *wind up on the same shelf. “Documenting Anarchist history,” under those conditions, comes to be code for including anything ghastly and attention-getting, and calling it ANARCHY, an underhanded game that the decent protesters are bound to lose.* *Withdrawing from a rigged game doesn’t give one a victory, but it does keep you from losing even worse.* **** Anarcho, Ergo Sum Dear Fred: I am an Anarchist. It is the most important thing in my life. It is the essence of who I am. I will never back down from anyone on this. I will put myself up against anyone at any time on any discussion and state my beliefs, thoughts and feelings based on my Anarchist philosophy. And no matter what anyone, anywhere, anytime says or does in the name of anarchy, no matter how ignorant or inaccurate or negative it may be, it won’t cause me to stop saying “I am an Anarchist.” To me, Anarchy simply means: Without authority. No one has authority over me and, most importantly, I have authority over no one else. Everything else expands from this point. In discussions with others I sense a disease of their own concept of the ownership of their own lives. This disease is the assumption that authority, in whatever manifestation, must exist. I believe that assumption grows out of fear. All the ways in which people delude themselves into believing that their rights supersede the rights of others are based ultimately in fear. Thus it is important to prove that Anarchy does not mean chaos, violence, vandalism,terrorism or whatever other misconceptions some unfortunately choose to portray. Of course everyone must determine the best way to express his or her views, but one must be wise in word and action. I hope we do not allow the ONE word that says it all — Anarchy — to be taken from us and further demonized.
— Michael Priborsky, Glen Burnie, Maryland.**** Free-Market Anarchist Dear Mr. Woodworth: Heretofore I have much resisted the label of
— Frank Mathews, Oregon.**** Sorry for Bad Publicity Dear Fred: I recently finished reading my first copy of The Match. At almost every paragraph I had to stop and nod my head in agreement. Although I have been calling myself an Anarchist for 10 years, my study in Anarchist views is really just beginning. I am a 22-year-old prisoner; four years ago I was kidnapped and put into this evil place. On the street I was one of those punkrock kids with colored hair and spikes and piercings, that the media take pictures of while we drunkenly do something stupid. We were quick to paint a big circled A onto something, but basically we had no real understanding of what we were talking about. Let me say, for all the idiots of my generation, that I’m sorry for causing this struggle of awareness to take steps backward in the public’s eye.
— Andrew Greer, Columbia, S. Carolina.Too Bad This Book Costs $125 Dear Fred: Did you know that you are listed in Warren Allen Smith’s 1300-plus pages tome, “Who’s Who In Hell”? You’re on the same page I’m on. The book covers anybody who has been a free-thinker, and goes back hundreds of years. I’ve learned much history from reading in it.
—James E. Wood row, Michigan.*Well, the title is accurate.* **** Savant Always Pitches Statist Line Hey, Fred: I didn’t catch the Marylyn vos Savant column alluded to in the last Match, but I did see a column of hers about four years ago. A reader then asked her if she thought treatment for drug offenders was more effective than criminal prosecution. She asked the reader if he felt the same way about wife beaters. I wrote a letter to Ms. Savant knowing it would never see the light of day. I pointed out that her giving such a transparently specious answer showed how western civilization’s re ligious crusade against drugs had an effect even on those who aren’t users or participants. I hope you’re keeping a close watch on the fuses of your crap-detector machine, as it’s dwarfed by the size of the brainwashing machine it’s going up against (and most middle-Ameri- cans will succumb to a light rinse).
— Hal C. Pattee, New York.**** Sign or Die To The Match: Regarding the Census— I’m in an Iowa prison. Here the so-called Correctional Officers told us all that if we didn’t fill out the Census forms we would be placed in the “hole” as punishment until we decided to “stop acting like stupid convicts and fill out the fucking Census”.
—Victim of arbitrary authority, Iowa.**** Invasions By Landlords Dear Fred: Everyone is getting into privacy intrusions. Companies’ questionnaires for job applicants now are full of personal-life questions. Apartment complexes have “inspections” of the inside of your home, and often when you are not even present. Purpose? No doubt to find drugs, porn, controversial literature, sex toys, etc. (Since you’re not present, the inspectors can steal also.) I am glad to be living now in a house, where we can refuse to let people in and ignore knocks on the door. And no one else has a key.
-L. S., Southgate, Michigan.P. S. This system is run by idiots with no common sense or reason. Such a thing cannot last. **** A Last Annoying Letter from Musy Dear Fred: I sympathize with your dislike of banks. The officials make all kinds of promises but later weasel out of everything. They have made errors in bookkeeping, but each time this has happened with my account I have obtained a written letter of apology. But may I respectfully urge you to reconsider your refusal to use banks. You ought not to cut your nose off to spite your face. I beg you to obtain a no-fee checking account and use it only for deposits, never write a check on it, except occasionally to drain out the cash. Never give out checks if you wish, but make it easy for people to make a donation in safety. You will publicize your hatred of checks and sooner or later one of your neighbors will think you are receiving cash in the mail and will break into your mailbox. I ran a business through mail for over 30 years and received enormous amounts of mail, with no losses, but if word gets around that you prefer only cash, you are going to be robbed, sooner or later. Competition is strong among banks, and you will be able to find one which is free of charges and which will allow you to open an account which you use only to accept checks. It is okay for you to hate banks, but you are entitled to use them for your benefit, rather than accept the inevitable burglary you will have. Please reconsider your stand on checks.
—Jacques E. Musy, Valrico, Florida.Mr. *Musy’s letter is the last one we will see from him, as he died a few months ago. Like so many purely Atheist readers, he had no concept at all of what rebelliousness to high-handed commands MEANS. Why should a person have to make use of a go-between or middleman in the case of a simple exchange of small sums of money? .* *I was annoyed enough at Musy’s thickheadedness that I sat down and figured out my losses to burglars and banks, respectively. Since 1971:* *Lost to burglars— about $900 in possessions.* *Lost to banks— about $360 for the decade of of the 1970s (in bank fees). About $600 for the decade of the 1980s; and about $900 for the decade of the 1990s.* *This means that the banks have taken at least twice as much as the burglars, and it adds up to more than enough for me to have been able to buy the second-color attachment for my press, the lack of which has cost me more physical drudgery than anyone will ever know. (Also, we are now past the time when that piece of equipment could even be bought at all, so tack of cash at a certain time translates into lack of opportunity FOREVER).* *A year and a half ago a bank’s devaluing of $2000 to $20.00 cost me the ability to buy a copier I needed at a bargain I may never find again.* *Obviously I’m not taking this writer’s last bit of advice.* **** An Excellent Fellow Hi Fred: Enclosed is $50,000.00 cash, I hope those thieving Post Office employees don’t get their mitts on it. You can’t trust those guys the way you can banks. By the way, you mentioned in a recent issue that you don’t have a copy of a pamphlet on printing you wrote back in the Pleistacene (I’m too lazy to go in the other room and look this word up in the dictionary; never could spell worth a damn; just one more character flaw) Era. It happens that I do if you’re referring to “Offset”, second edition, 1977, from Western World Press. Be glad to send it to you if you’d like.
— Steve Bovee, Bisbee, Arizona.*Wouldn’t you know it? By the time your letter got here those USPS crumbs had removed all except twenty dollars.* **** I’m a Technophobe/Freedom is Slavery Dear Fred: I really appreciate your focus on non-violence, and your content is so coherent and positive I am not turned off by the occasional technophobic column or Chomsky-bashing rant. (I feel Noam still contributes greatly to people’s awareness of the evils perpetrated by our country.)
— Ian Latta, Sacramento.*I’m just curious: What would the guy have to say before you’d finally concede that he’s only another inhabitant of the statist spectrum?* **** Syndicalism Must Mean Loving the Law Dear Fred: A few people have attacked Chomsky and Zerzan, lumping them together... *Both Chomsky and Zerzan are non-anarchists doing things that are so contradictory and absurd that anyone who can think is bound to object to their posturings.* ...One guy gave the typical Ayn Rand-style claim that people like Chomsky and Marcuse are no better than Stalin or Mao. I suppose this makes people like Ayn Rand belong in the same category as Hitler? Right-wing libertarians just don’t get it. Just because someone doesn’t like or agree with capitalism, this does not make them a ‘statist” or authoritarian. There are libertarian socialists who fuse socialism with anti - authoritarianism. Like it or not, they are still anarchists. Letter-writer Nick V. hates Chomsky and Marcuse because they are people who very eloquently pointed out what was so bad about modern capitalism; yet he tries to get everyone else to hate them by putting them in the same category as Stalin or Mao. This is shameful behavior. Nick hates unions, and claims he wants to be ‘left alone”. Does he mean he wants the right to treat his employees like cattle, and to be as authoritarian with them as he wants, with no options available for his workers but losing their jobs if they resist? Unions were supported by the early individualist anarchists: Tucker, Warren, Heywood, etc., who supported the 8- hour day. Yes, modern trade unions like the AFL-CIO are not very good examples of unions, but there are still libertarian unions around like the IWW. I do not agree with Chomsky’s position defending the welfare state; but look at what he’s saying: he feels that so long as corporations are so powerful in society, the poor and working class need some protections. This is not some evil position to take. It’s hardly “Stalinism”. Get rid of capitalism and you won’t need welfare or OSHA. Chomsky has done an immense amount of work toward spreading anarchist ideas. Yes, he is an anarcho-syndicalist, and he has every right to be. Anarcho-syndicalism is a valid form of anarchism which has been around since Bakunin. Nick doesn’t want people to complain about East Timor. Well, considering how the East Timorese have been treated, the guy is pretty darn insensitive. Fine, he doesn’t have to care, but some of us ARE interested in the subject, and we have a right to be. Zerzan is against computers, just like the Match... *What an insult your statement is! The Match doesn’t USE computers. Zerzan and the publications touting him DO. Are you so stupid you just can’t see the difference, or is this only another of the dis ingenuous statements that occur thick and fast throughout your letter?* ...but he has also decided he likes theUnabomb- er. He also totally rejects all modern industrialization... *If so, does he actually make any effort to live without electricity, to fabricate his own shelter, or to gather his own food without depending on huge networks of trucking companies and the grow in g/proce s s in g/ c ann ing indus tries ?* ...I disagree with him on both these points, but I want to point out that he has come out against terrorism and opposes bombing people for political ends. Zerzan is no statist, no authoritarian, and not a terrorist. He’s just a guy with some ideas that many anarchists disagree with, and he’s recently gotten some popularity. I doubt it will last long. Zerzan and Chomsky are not the reason anarchism has a bad image. The bad image is mostly the fault of the corporate media, and also the fault of all anarchists who do not work hard to organize and spread real anarchist ideas.
—Jamal Hannah, Cambridge, Mass.*Your pal Chomsky has come out in favor of (1) strengthening the federal government, (2) liking and appreciating the IES, and (3) widening the “rule of law” (see earlier letter, this column).* *Chomsky is in the large-scale bookselling business; his huge number of in-print volumes may be found in Borders, B. Dalton Books, Barnes & Noble , and many other undeniably “capitalist” outlets. He himself makes money off such sales, and beyond that he receives a salary from a state-supported university. THAT jibes with being an anti-statist or opponent of “capitalism”??* *I think your jab at Nick V. for disdaining to posture in the correct leftist way (“Solidarity with East Timor!”) is still another disingenuous assertion. There’s not one single thing The Match or any other Anarchist publication can do to help the unfortunates in that island, so to posture as if we could, and to print slogans and clenched-fist graphics as I guess you would have us do, would only turn this publication into yet another gutter zine with a quasi-religious do-nothing political correctness. You may want to see empty slogans appear, as they do so many other places, here in The Match—but it isn’t going to happen. If, as you say in reference to the previous letter-writer, “the guy is pretty dam insensitive ...but some of us ARE interested...” then I have to ask, exactly WHAT great action did YOU take to manifest your* solidarity with East Timor? *Finally, a word about syndicalism: I hate it. In the past decade I’ve had a lot of opportunity to watch organizational busybodies in action. I have sat quietly through all kinds of “neighborhood” etc. meetings; and what I’ve witnessed convinces me that a certain kind of person REVELS in this kind of thing. If there’s no real issue to tackle, they make up one, and it invariably launches some assault on the self determination or dignity or individuality or right to be let alone, of some person who either isn’t there or is in the minority. Groups that decide are a sickness; everything I believe and stand for revolts against them except in cases where they are very, very tiny. The principle of BIG takes over at even appallingly small scales when it comes to Groups that Decide.* *Every time I hear from a so-called syndicalist what I get is a truckload of crap: confused ideas and blatant contradictions, frantic efforts to defend rank statists or other authoritarians, the . ant-hill proposed as a model for human life. I guess you think you can wear me down after a while; keep trying if you want to waste your time.* @@@488.jpeg][A black and white drawing of a rock formation AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] **** Sad & Scarey Dear Fred: I was just reading about U.S. and British governments trading information and monitoring e-mail. That should be very scarey for anyone silly enough to send something via computer. I’m sorry to hear you’ve pulled out of Left Bank Books in Seattle. That was how I first became aware of The Match, from reading their catalogue. You’re right, they don’t list Dream World in their catalogue. If they carried The Match I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t carry Imagine; I read issues 1 and 2 of Imagine; they were very well done. The Crap Detection Department was very interesting with the information on
(Name withheld by editor) Chicago, Illinois.*I’m sorry your friend turned into a thug.* *About e-mail: If people want to entrust sensitive communications to a medium broadcasting them to every part of the planet, all the time, then let’s let Evolution operate.* *Left Bank Books: We’re not. available there anymore, but at least Imagine now is, so our stand in solidarity had that effect anyhow.* **** Very Probably Dear Fred: Thanks for continuing to publish The Match. There is much to disturb one in our only world and time of existence. If the human race along with everything else survives another fifty or one hundred years, what will be left? There are no “new worlds” to ravage and destroy. We are finally up against it. We can no longer sweep our problems under the rug or kick things into a closet. No more denial allowable. But it may be and probably is too late.
— Frank Roemhild, Bayfield, Wisconsin.**** They Need to Know Where We Are Dear Fred: Continue the rage! As a fourthgeneration atheist, at 80 years of age, I for one do not intend going gently into the night. Please note the involuntary change of my address, even though I haven’t moved, made by the 911 authority to “make it easier to locate” us (in case of “emergency”). Right.
—Marcel Stratton, Massachusetts.**** Heartfelt Anarchism Dear Fred: Sometimes I wonder if Iceland, where I live, may be a place that was brought too fast into “civilization”. Some hundred years ago the heroes of the community were hardworking fishermen, and sometime before that they were Vikings, plundering and raping around Europe. Today we have young, money-making hedonists and media hypes as role models. Consumerism is so overwhelming that I see children as being born as property of the banks and saying their first words into mobile phones. There are people working to destroy the environment and natural wonders of this country with dams for electricity, and aluminum plants. Fundamentalist Christians reap from the drugged and alcoholic youth, and right-wing hate-groups are rearing their ugly heads against increasing immigration of foreigners who are ready to take on the low-paying jobs. Situation hopeless? Two years ago we Anarchists in Iceland managed to get together and agree on something long enough to “participate” in the elections for government (it was done mostly to make use of the media hype around the elections to spread the word, but we did get some 1.3% of the votes in the Reykjavik area). There’s been hardly any Anarchist activity after this; no active group, though some of us are spreading the word individually. The Match is the only Anarchist publication I have read where everything inside interests me. I have been trying to read through some writings of the Anarchist theoreticians but I hardly find anything in there I can relate to. Anarchism comes from the heart in my case. That’s why I am a nurse: because I am an Anarchist. Best wishes, — Siggi in Iceland. @@@489.jpeg][A person and person carrying luggage AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] **** Sends Word of Mine Okubo’s Death Dear Fred: I found the History Corner particularly interesting this time around. Wasn’t at all familiar with Okubo’s book, although I’ve read quite a bit about the relocation camps and the official apology issued in 1989. At the end of his column, Mr. Holbrook wonders “where the young artist went, and what she did, in the 50 years that followed.” Well, Ms. Okubo’s name has just this week turned up in the Los Angeles Times. The news, unfortunately, is not so good. Still, the enclosed clipping might help to answer some questions.
—Xan Karn, Orange, Calif.*Thanks for that clipping, Xan. See the obituary elsewhere in this issue. How strange that she died just days after our long-delayed review of her 50-year-old book.* **** Modern Concentration Camps Dear Fred: I just read The Match for the first time, and needed to write to thank you. I did not know that there are people who feel as I do about our government’s increasing control of every element of our lives. My own life is controlled completely by authoritarians. I am a victim of the alleged “justice” system of Texas, serving two sentences of 60 years for refusing to testify against myself when a cop wanted me to perform tricks most able-bodied people cannot do on the side of the road, nearly in traffic. The attorney I paid my life savings to quit, and I’ve yet to recover a dime. The state-appointed attorney, well— the name says it all. He would not even object when it came out during trial that the distric attorney gave the cops the witness statements to review. I was frightened into pleading guilty, in fear of stiffer punishment. My guilty pleas were used to make these Class B misdemeanors (maximum 6 months) 25-years-to-life. Texas has a law that once a conviction for Driving While Intoxicated becomes 10 years old, it can’t be used against you anymore. Nevertheless, such an old conviction was used to make two other priors felonies. So, I came out with 60 years. You might be thinking I killed someone or hurt them at least. No. No wreck, no weaving, no drunken behavior of any kind. In Texas you just have to be accused. Texas has a higher number of people in prison than any other state, and most are for non-violent crimes.
— David D. Crowder, Huntsville, Texas.Mr. *Crowder needs help with appeals. If there’s anyone who can assist in any way, please contact this prisoner directly. His address is: David D. Crowder,
Thanks so much for your free subscription. (Name withheld by editor).**** How It Works Dear Fred: Here’s a look at how sentencing works. In this state at least, one’s institutional record affects the amount of time you’re sentenced to. I thought, for instance, that I was a first-time offender. But no! Suddenly I had about 22 or 23 “prior convictions’. They used past brushes such as “truancy from school”, being an “unruly child”, “truancy from home”, “possession of alcohol”, “harboring an unlicensed dog”, and so on. Boosting a prison sentence because a person skipped school at age 15 ! —Jason Gould,
— David Andre, Sacramento, Calif.**** Is Any Reform Permitted? Dear Fred: You were wondering whether, if legislators could be legally punished for passing laws that were subsequently found unconstitutional, this would actually result in fewer bad laws or merely mean that no law would ever again be found unconstitutional. In my opinion, this would depend on whether the legislature and the Supreme Court were in the hands of the same or opposing parties (or ideological factions). If the Court and the legislature were at odds, such a provision would be a powerful weapon for the former to bludgeon the latter; if they were controlled by like-minded people, then the Court would have that much more reason never to declare any laws unconstitutional. Their ability to do this when they feel so inclined is obviously unlimited; if they can say that military conscription isn’t “involuntary servitude” or that asset-forfeiture laws don’t violate the Fifth Amendment, they can rule that black is white or that up is downif necessary to uphold a law. I disagree, however, with the statement that this thought-experiment shows the bankruptcy of ANY reformism. Experience (not theory) shows that reformism has brought improvements in the past in some cases. Not perfection, but improvements. In any case, considering the millions of lives ruined by the victimless-crime laws, what punishment for such laws’ authors could possibly be sufficient? The rhetorical tactics you describe being used to neutralize votes that go “the wrong way” (pp. 39-40, issue 96) are being applied here in Oregon right now. A ballot initiative passed which requires the state to compensate property-owners whose property loses value as a result of government regulations. A coalition of local governments is suing to have it overturned, using the same rhetoric that people “didn’t understand what they were voting for”, and so forth. Another initiative passed in Oregon which reforms the asset-forfeiture laws to require that a person must be convicted of a crime before their property can be seized. (Under the status quo, they can take it without even filing charges.) One county narc squad is suing to have THIS initiative overturned. Also, during the last couple of days before the initiative’s provisions were to go into effect, the Portland cops made a big sweep of East 82nd Avenue (a known prostitute-pickup area) and seized about 20 cars from men they claimed were caught soliciting the services of ladies of the evening. One last big grab before the (possible) lifting of their looting licenses. Incidentally, just after issue 96 came out I got a letter from a “Socialist Anarchist” in Massachusetts, irate at me for “slandering) what (I) refuse to understand”. It was accompanied by a couple of articles from the internet which I can fairly and accurately describe as... articles from the internet. Same-old same-old. Still, thanks for printing my address—I do hear from interesting people that way. Looking at your response to my letter on p. 57, you don’t seem to specify which culture you expect to gain ascendancy as America declines, focusing instead on eliminating possible contenders. You expect it will be a country speaking an Indo-European language written with an alphabet, but not a member of the Romance family (stultified by Catholicism), nor Russian (“exhausted”), nor German (an “evolutionary dead end”). All other obvious possibilities thus being ruled out, it sounds as though you are anticipating the resurgence of the British Empire! Seriously, though, based on history I don’t really think that the nature of the language spoken by a country has much impact on its ability to achieve a dominant position; and once it does, its language tends to spread into subordinated cultures. Russian is very complex and difficult, yet in Czarist and Soviet times it was widely learned by subjugated Central Asians whose Turkic dialects were unrelated to it. Chinese is unrelated to Korean or Japanese and its sound system is radically alien to theirs, yet it had a huge influence on both. If Japan or China (or Germany or Russia) achieves global pre-eminence in the 21st century, thentheir languages will eventually do the same, regardless of the difficulty. Actually, I think the difficulty of Japanese is much exaggerated; it’s structurally and conceptually alien, but also quite simple, with none of the interminable complexities of case, gender, verb conjugation, etc. which clutter up most IndoEuropean languages. Its pronunciation is also fairly easy for Westerners, unlike that of Chinese. Adaptation of electronic informationstorage systems to easy use of Chinese characters is obviously more difficult than doing the same with an alphabet, but it is being done. Also, I wouldn’t write off German quite so easily. Among Germanic languages it may be something of a living fossil, but it is certainly thriving in its home countries. And Germany, as the world’s third-largest economy and the dominant entity in Europe, would seem quite likely to take on the role of the core state of Western civilization if the US went into terminal decline or became isolationist.
—Jeffrey Deboo, P. O. Box 930, Gresham, OR 97030.**** Common Ground Dear Fred: I don’t agree with you on everything, but I am still an anarchist and we do share a lot of common ground, especially with regard to computers. I read a lot of different publications, and The Match has been one of my favorites for about 12 years now. Libertarian regards,
-Shell 63, Nightcliff, Australia.*I sure am curious about your name !* **** Another Change of Address Without Moving Dear Fred: Thank you for another riveting issue of The Match. I always find an unhoped-for kinship in your fabulous letters column, something that’s usually pretty tough for a misanthrope like me. Please note my new address.
— Susan Boren, PMB 265, 4230 E. Towne Blvd., Madison, WI 53704.*Susan is a zine-publisher; her best-known publication is “Universe of Truancy”, a back issue of which is, I believe, still available. The Post Office sold her p.o. box to someone else while she was away for a few days, so she lost a lot of mail.* **** And What Else Will They Check For? Dear Fred: Enclosed is a mailing I got from the City of Berkeley Ecology Center. Notice the first three points made:
‘Recycling Contest — Here’s How It Works: Each week, one Berkeley residence or an apartment building of nine nine units or less will be picked at random. “On refuse collection day we will intercept the trash from that address. After getting permission from a resident or manager, we will check the trash for re- cyclables. ‘If no recyclables are found, residents at that address will win $250. If only a few are found (less than 1% by volume) they will win $50. If more than a few are found, they will receive a small in-unit recycling bin and/or a $10 voucher redeemable at local green businesses..."Note the use of the word ‘intercept" in the second point, and the bit about ‘getting permission from a resident or manager". I’m not a big fan of census takers, pollsters, or anyone else who wants to stick their nose into my personal life. A notice like this shows that these people are just one neighbor’s “permission" away from digging around in MY trash. Thanks for The Match. It means a lot to me. I moved to the San Francisco Bay area for its alleged penchant for smart, leftish (if not leftist) variety and was disappointed on all three counts.
— Clint Marsh, Berkeley, CA.Where Do They Get Our Names? Fred: In issue
— Human Being, New York.*They do conscript jurors through drivers’ license records, but shred your trash, just in case.* Old Issues Still Valid Fred: I was reading some very old issues of The Match, and your observations and insights are right on the mark, even years later. As a librarian, I’m frightened by the whole ISBN, LCCN, ISSN etc. attempt to control/regulate what the public can have access to. Thanks for being a voice of reason.
—Aren G., St. Louis.Situation, Hopeless (Revisited) Editor: It seems as though the problem with the new uses of the word “anarchist" have been noticed by others and the consensus is that “Anarchist Expert" is a respectable title, but “anarchist” has had its meaning stripped. What anarchism needs to avoid this constant problem of definitions (which always occurs in philosophical circles) is a lexicon, an Anarchist Lexicon, to enable people to speak with each other without the need for constant clarification. The Objectivist movement had a lexicon which allowed them to be much more logical and more importantly to share ideas without having to define the same words over and over while debating within the movement. (They were still selfish, inhumane capitalists but they didn’t believe in the use of physical force.) It wouldn’t change the issue of people as a whole misunderstanding us when we use the A-word. The title still may need a new description. I would like to encourage you to continue using the A-word in whatever form fits grammatically. It would be a shame to sacrifice a name to the same political force which has named all the other political parties and groups in such wildly misleading ways. Think of all the oxymoronic titles like Democratic Party, Liberal, and Freedom Fighter. Liberals enslave us with more laws every year; Freedom Fighters kill people; and The Democratic Party has settled for holding office in a government which is somewhere between Parliament and a Republic. Situation Hopeless hasn’t improved, but I never would have expected to see a great change in my lifetime. I watched a documentary about the history of Christianity which was told by theologists who weren’t overtly zealots, but gave a good account of the rise of the religion in the midst of Paganism, Judaism, and the Roman government. It was a tale of how quickly a new philosophy can spread through a region and become a part of history. (In under a millennium, that is, which is very patience-inspiring.) ...The census people surprised me and got me to answer some questions (she must have been a racial expert because somehow she determined my race for me even though I refused to answer the question). If I had read your column and had rehearsed my ignoring a little I’m sure I would have had her checking a mirror to see if she had become invisible. Maybe you could print up a pamphlet to be distributed in 2010 on the tactics and ethics of evading the U.S. Census. Regarding fingerprinting: I read recently about a system in California, where finger- prints had been digitized. It resulted in millions of unreadable prints. Apparently the computer can’t decipher them or reduce the possibilities to a reasonable number. And according to Biometrics, a company using fingerprints to activate such things as doors and guns, 3% of the population has prints that are unreadable by the devices. The Labadie Collection will suffer a horrible loss as a result of your no longer sending it The Match, but as a result of your mention I went to the website and found thousands of documents which have been carefully scanned by students and librarians. The practice of replacing books with computerized copies is completely crazy, but the practice of copying old fragile books which shouldn’t be handled anymore by converting them to microfilm and digital images is a good way to expand the readership of a rare book. I spent some talking to the people in the Special Collections department and they have microfilmed your magazine collection. I may have a chance to study them all for free.
—Joshua Hutchison, Urbana, Illinois.*Oh, good. Maybe while everyone is there reading The Match for free they’ll want to make a donation to the library to help offset its expenses in paying people like police-informant Riack and Unabomber Kaczynski for their “papers”. Situation Hopeless.* @@@490.jpeg][A drawing of feet in smoke AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] **** Events In Anarchism Dear Fred: Your review of Imagine brought a nice, almost instant flood of requests, including a number of subscriptions. Match readers are far more likely to respond to a recommendation than any other publication’s readers. Regarding the Labadie Collection, I’m sending you a recent story from the San Francisco Chronicle about the joy with which this Anarchist library has acquired the papers of the contemporary philosopher, Ted K., the Unabomber. After reading it I was so disgusted that I looked up a couple of earlier articles which I’ve also included. ...The San Francisco book fair this year was fun. I shared a table with a Match subscriber, and sold a few Imagines. Mostly I scoured the booths for books. The fair had many more tables this year. The green anarchists from Eugene had a table and lots of Bob Black’s literature. Left Bank did a booming business (our table was next to theirs) and specialized in Zerzan titles. The Anarchy: A Journal of blah- blah had a big table paired with its Alternative Press magazine. They had giant full-color posters of the covers of the latest issues, and tons of back issues. I got to meet the couple behind J. L. Hudson; they were wonderful, inquisitive, happy. They had apples for free and sold lots of seeds. They sold out of the newest Match within a short time of opening. I don’t know if I ever mentioned it but at last year’s fair, Left Bank had zero copies of The Match, and none again this year. Only one other table had any and it had only one copy when I passed by fairly early. I’m not sure who that table was affiliated with, but it may have been Bound Together. Incidentally, I saw in Any Time Now that you are a contact for getting a British publication called Total Liberty. Is this true?
—John Johnson, Imagine Magazine, P. O. Box 8145 Reno, Nevada 89507.*No, I think that was a computer glitch at Any Time Now, blending two lines of copy. I do think Total Liberty is a good, actual Anarchist publication, though; its address is listed earlier in this letters column.* *About the limited availability at the event you mention: As Anarchism tends to move on toward increas ing authoritarianism and violentism and weird reverence for the Unabomber and returning to a so-called hunter-gatherer existence, the number of places where people will be able to find The Match displayed will likely continue to decline. It’s getting so that specifically Anarchist bookstores that will still carry this journal are the exception and not the rule; and unless the 9/11 terrorism brings the movement back to its senses, it’s clear to me that a split is under way: Ethical Anarchists will go on pretty much as before, though under an increasing variety of names. The refugees from various Communist* *sects, reluctant to use the C-word now that it has been so thoroughly discredited by the experience of Russia, China, and other places, will continue to appropriate the term* Anarchism *and convert it to a doctrinaire anticapitalist street-fighting gang largely feared by ordinary thoughtful people concerned about the incursions of government on everyday life and human rights.* *So far, I’ve still managed, each and every issue, to increase the individual reader circulation (the mailing list) enough to offset the loss of outlets, and even to keep up a small overall gain. But any readers who would like to suggest local progress ive bookstores, or who would be willing to try to place some extra copies in possible local outlets, should write to me.* *Inc identally, c irculation has now topped two thousand. That means that if I print exactly 2100 copies, I soon get down to just two or three file copies, and have people clamoring for back-issues that are now all gone. Therefore: I can’t supply any issues older than Number 95— and will soon run out of those. For libraries or serious archives, I have perhaps 10 or 15 copies of 94 and 93. Others, only single file copies, so please don't ask.* **** Thoughtful New Edition Dear Fred: Here’s my latest, the Shelley translation of Plato’s Banquet. I’ve loved this work since the first time I read it, about 30 years ago — and one afternoon a few months ago decided to publish it since no one else had for over 15 years. The translation has been anthologized a couple of times, but never before by itself in a good readers’ edition. Whether or not Shelley was an anarchist, he intensely hated tyranny in all its forms, and he despised religion. I just recently read his
In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude; the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!And on Christian prayer:
Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may be considered under two points of view:—as an endeavour to change the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.Anyway, I’ve really appreciated your work over the years. I don’t always agree with you, but you do always make me think. And I strongly agree with your stands on violence and censorship.
—John Lauritsen, 78 Bradford St., Provincetown, MA 02657.Activity Stops When Computers Down Hello, Fred: Another example of Better Living Through Computers: Twice a week they have a “Classics by Request” show on the local public radio. Today they don’t have the show because “the computers are down”, so they can’t find any requested CDs. A trivial but typical case.
— Clark Dissmeyer, Riverton, Nebraska.*Clark has lately been publishing a little 32- page pamphlet called The Journal of Discarded Literature. His address is Box 1, Riverton, Nebraska 68972.* **** Unreliable Systems Dear Fred: I had to laugh at the letter from Don G., and your response. Let me add my own vote to the debate. I have written two theses, both on computers, “back when” floppy disks held “only” 360 K. I was always careful to print out major changes, etc., and was always happy that I took this precaution as I lost the text files on several occasions due to media failure. Don G.’s space argument is equally spurious— in both cases my thesis fit neatly on a single floppy disk, with room to spare. I’m sure Don G. will rush to point out that “today’s media” are altogether more reliable, etc., to which I say bunk. A simple flex of a CD-R will render it unreadable. Floppy disks in all their incarnations are frail at best. Bang a fixed disk drive a little too hard and it’s gone forever. Write a backup tape without cleaning the tape head, and forget about loading it, etc. The very fact that so many backup copies and so many types of media and so many “solutions’ to this problem are created and sold should indicate how totally unreliable the whole system really is, even when temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. When is the last time somebody needed to “back up’ their copy of The Match, in case they accidentally dropped it? Don G.’s assertion that those who mistrust computers are those “not in the know" about how they really work is pretty simpleminded. I’ve been using computers since 1984 when dad brought home the first Apple II system, which I programmed in assembler. Today I am employed as a Senior Applications Programmer/ Analyst with years of experience. Friends and family are calling me on a daily basis for help getting this or that system running, or retrieving some file or whatever. I know a lot about computers — enough to say unequivocally that they are unreliable, vastly expensive, useful for some things, yet indispensable for nothing. I have a box of letters my great grandfather wrote to my great-grandmother during the 1880s. That old-fashioned pen on paper is still readable today, over 100 years later. Not only that, aside from being personally interesting, the fact that I have 100-year-old documents isn’t even really noteworthy. However, remember those two thesis disks 1 wrote, saved, and backed-up in the early 1990s? I can’t read them today, even supposing the media are still in good shape. They are on an old-fashioned type of media (five-and-a-quarter-inch disks), for an old-fashioned operating system (MS-DOS), and saved in the format of an old-fashioned word processor (WordPerfect 4.1). Less than 10 years old and already they are totally unusable ; had they not been printed off, they would be totally gone. Please keep up the good work — yours is a truly unique publication, and I think it’s inspiring that you do your own production at all steps; the care you take is obvious in the end-result.
— Clark Timmins, W. Jordan, Utah.Pushing “E-Books” Fred: To further prove our already “paranoid” view that books are being done away with, when we recently bought a book the salesperson put on a cunning sales smile and handed us a leaflet about “electronic books”, saying: “Wouldn’tyou rather take one of these with you on vacation instead of a book?” Wouldn’t you want to curl up on a cold winter night with a glowing LCD display instead of one of those musty old books? Congratulations on the solar power hookups. To get further away from the grips of the beast is a commendable effort. It was disturbing (and probably more so for you) to read that suicide note from the reader that closed last issue’s letter column. Have you heard anything since? I can understand the depths of despair one can get to. I have to ration how much of the official news I read because if I read too much I get a hopeless feeling— not to equate this with that reader’s pain, however. It is definitely a huge downside to being curious and having a heart: the extent to which one feels pain is greatly increased.
— Tony and Hazel Roehrig, Utah.*I never heard anything else from or about that reader, though I started making inquiries the moment I got the note. A longtime friend of The Match, who lives in the same city the note was sent from, was unable to find out anything. A person who may have been an acquaintance of the reader never responded to our inquiries.* *Yes, I was sad, and wished I could have done* @@@491.jpeg][A person reading a book AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] *something, but as you can appreciate I’m sure, I certainly DIDN’T want to set any kind of roaring, authoritarian officialdom in motion to violate that person’s wishes.* *Turning to so-called electronic books: An article distributed by librarians in the summer of 2000 pretty clearly trumpeted that real books were on the way out. It wound up by noting that it won’t be possible to pass “e-books” on to children or others in future generations after years pass, because the e-books will probably disappear each time a new technology undermines the storage and reading contrivances they inhabit. Sickeningly, the article closes by quoting some electronic apologist who simpered:* “We’re all holding hands and venturing into the future carefully, one step at a time, checking with each other, saying, ‘Does this work for you?"’ *(Excuse me for a moment; the Crap Detector is buzzing.)* *Yeah, they’re so halting and careful; that’s why they dump millions of actual books every year, and practically point a gun at library users to force them to get involved with computer systems.* *Cut, less than a year later, a Portland newspaper editorialized that the hype “has died down...the millions who were going to abandon reading as we know it and flock to e-books instead, have failed to materialize.”* *In other words it was just another scam, raking in millions for some grinning cultureless barbarian who has by now moved on to the next racket to be carried out with the inevitable assistance of People Hating Everything Except Computers. (They’re the real luddites.)* *True books, made of paper and cloth and cardboard, will still be around eons after Soft Micropenis has been forgotten. Nothing PHEEC says can be believed.* Do Computers Cause Senility? Dear Mr. Woodworth: I just read a news article that made me think of you. It was from USA Today and was headed: “Computer-Induced Senility?” “Remember what you had for dinner last night? If not, you might be able to blame it on your PC. New research indicates a growing number of people in their 20s and 30s are suffering severe memory loss... Complaints among those studied—150 people ages 20-35—include being unable to recall names, written words, and appointments. ...Doctors blame electronic overload from devices such as computers and electronic organizers, which leads to diminished use of the brain to work out problems..." It could be added that the use of electronic calculators and computers with grammar and spell-checkers reduces the need, and hence the development of young people’s ability to think for themselves. Since my incarceration nine months ago I have had to get used to typing on a typewriter. I write articles for both Prison Legal News and Justice Denied: the magazine for the wrongly convicted, and I’ve been surprised that my productivity hasn’t seemed to have been hurt by no longer having a computer to use. I can relate to the article, because I’ve almost had to relearn how to spell, after relying on spell checkers for the past 15 years. You have a loyal following among people who find your single-mindedness inspiring, refreshing and laudatory.
— Hans Sherrer, Sheridan, Oregon.**** Computers As Religion Dear Fred: I find it very discouraging and disheartening when long-time readers of The Match still vote, take the census, acquire loyalty cards, etc. These little decisions indicate a complete lack of resistance and understanding of authoritarian methods and where they lead. I believe you’ve done all you could to instill an anarchistic mindset in your readership; you (we) are up against statist thought processes instilled in everyone since birth. In last issue’s letter column John Barlow claims he doesn’t understand my reference pertaining to his affection for the police. “This is not something I said or even intimated," he admonishes. Really?! Well, let’s just dig up his exact words and see what he DOES say, then: To Mr. Woodworth he insultingly chides, “I suspect your contempt for these ‘public servants’ has more to do with Tucson, Arizona than anything else.” He glowingly submits: “I get a good feeling when a cop walks in.” Now here’s a revolutionary thought: “Cops tend to see people at their worst." How about this anarchistic bit of wisdom: “This is the frustrating situation the police have to face every day." I stand more firmly behind my original assessment : This is police apologizing, sympathizing and defending at its most repulsive. John also states it is not true he possessed an unthinking enthusiasm for store loyalty cards even though he immediately, without thinking, acquired one as soon as he possibly could and even laminated it. The card “seems to act as a coupon”, he enthusiastically relates. You are indeed, John, not my enemy and I did NOT end my previous letter hoping for the worst for you; nor would I be happy if you’re “beaten to death by a cop on (your) 62nd birthday”. I am not instilled with lightheartedness when informed of cruelty, violence and injustice. Last issue someone wrote in and jokingly remarked that computers can’t be all bad if they give you free parking (due to the prevalence of malfunctioning computerized parking meters). Careful! In Baltimore it is illegal to park at inoperative meters, and stickers on many of them warn you to that effect. The reader who thinks he may save a few quarters risks fines and possibly being towed. Our goal should be to dispense with these robbing, silent, ubiquitous sentinels permanently. Developing scams and looking for loopholes are merely hacking at a branch. We must strike the root! I hope Cool Hand Luke still has his wheels. As for computers themselves: By now it should be obvious to anyone that the new opiate of the masses is the computer. Atheism scores no success nor gains any ascendancy if the god pestilence is replaced by the scourge of microcircuitry. A mere metamorphosis of the altar at which one worships is not an enlightened advancement. If humanity sloughs off the yoke of religion and superstition only to burden itself with something equally malevolent and murderous toward freedom and knowledge and the arts, then that transformation is worthless. In short, computer devotees are not the utopian visionaries they so often claim to be. In fact, the young child sitting in front of the very latest computer model is nothing more than a well-worn and decrepit replica of some fossilized relic kneeling in subservience before an icon as old as ignorance. Those who incessantly and insistently stress that these inhuman contraptions are imbued with anthropocentric qualities and possibilities are fools. One can not,in the midst of backtracking 1,000 paces, take a tentative half-step forward and then insist that observers of this sorry spectacle only notice and comment on the one anomaly in what is, essentially, a funeral march fraught with decay and regression. Any niggardly increment forward has been bleakly overshadowed by this somber requiem. We are witnessing nothing less than the spiralling disintegration of civilization and culture. Modern technology, finding its most appropriate representative and symbol in the compute r/inter- net, is profoundly anti-human. It is exercising diabolical repressiveness and debasement of real and meaningful social interaction and personal relations in its hideous mockery and sneering contempt for genuine creativity and artistic endeavors, in its “dumbing down" and stultification of educational processes, in its all-consuming blatant vandalism and destructiveness toward every historical record and documentation (including works of priceless value) and in its defilement and erosion of language and communication skills. Sadly, even those I once thought immune to this conformist mania—the great lovers of freedom and proud admirers of scientific in- quiry — seem to see no conflict or contradiction in cherishing and adoring that which enslaves and deludes. Everything I once thought these people stood for is under attack by this obscene device. With an increasingly active authoritarianism, the Computer Age is displaying an assertive, cunning enmity toward every single ideal of anarchism and atheism. Don G. (a letter-writer from last issue) and others choose to ignore and pooh-pooh my opinions on computers as they wish to contend that my beliefs stem from FEAR. My beliefs couldn’t be derived from actual familiarity, detached observation and educated speculation, could they? Nope! These people won’t lend any credence to these notions for one second. But it just so happens I am well acquainted with computers and must protest against those who try to dismiss my views as irrational emotion. Don G., your shabby diagnosis reveals much about you and nothing of me. We’ve all had exposure, unfortunately, to people who can’t converse for more than a few minutes without lapsing into sickening praise of
“learning Hypertext Markup LanguageLavishing such(HTML),* “using Active Server Page (ASP) and Basic Input Output System (BIOS).”
“back the information up in multiple places, generally at multiple sites.” It should also be “backed up onto a network server...backed up nightly to tape, using a (sic) incremental backup process that assures that all files are on at least two tapes and one is stored off-site in a ‘salt-mine’ location impervious to fire, (and) stored on your own computer, also on a floppy disk in...a file cabinet.’What kind of progress is THIS?! I do not have the enormous sums of time required to pore over voluminous rulebooks in a doubtlessly futile attempt to navigate through these labyrinth- ian instructions just to accomplish the most insignificant tasks that I do now in the blink of an eye without any worry at all. Don’s abstruse directions spit in the face of simplicity and reality while insulting the intelligence of those who take a pragmatic approach to a task and follow a logical sequence of processes in order to solve a problem. These computer creeps have created problems for today where none existed yesterday; then they tell you the only way to cure these ail- @@@492.jpeg][A person falling off a staircase AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] @@@493.jpeg]]It’s what we were saying back in 1995. Now it is ruefully recognized that the “dot-coms” — businesses thattried to substitute electronic impulses for reality — were a huge failure. An article in the L A. Times earlier this year moaned: “How could everyone —the entrepreneurs who founded them, the venture-capitalists who funded them, the investment bankers who took them public,and the media that cheered them on — have been so wrong...? “ ‘You can hype this e-commerce stuff all you want,' said Patrick Byrne, whose Overstock.com buys excess merchandise from defunct dot-coms, ‘but at the end of the day, reality happens.' ” @@@494.jpeg]] ments is through THEIR patented solutions; they create and perpetuate a contrived and false misery, then claim they have a monopoly on the remedies you now require (at a price, of course). Sound familiar? In a more sane time you merely left your document on your desk and went peacefully away to sleep. You awoke to find no problems. Today, however, you jump through many hoops, are forced to guess at the answers of nonsensical riddles and uncomfortably feel your way across alien landscapes — only to wake up and discover the goddamned document has vanished anyway. But if so, you must not have followed Don’s “new and improved" methods which he so graciously dictated you must follow. The priests of this new religion are never without an answer, are they? The very fact that Don G. writes in at all to “defend" computers is an enormous statement in and of itself, when one considers that they are everywhere and one hears naught but endless praise from “virtually" every quarter for this plague. It speaks volumes that someone in his lofty position finds my impotent dissent bothersome at all. I mean, look around! Computers in almost every home. Computers in almost every business. Computers in every school. Computers in cafes. Computers in cars. Computers in audio and visual equipment. Computers in exercise gear. Computers in household appliances. Dozens of monthly periodicals in love with computers. Thousands of books all about computers. Libraries ripped to shreds to make way for computers. (One should really pause a moment and seriously ponder why so much “information" about computers, PRINTED ON PAPER, needs to exist at all if they’re as “user friendly” as we’re constantly told.) Everywhere you look— computers, computers, computers! Computer chips are being im- Fad Topic: "THE INFORMATION ECONOMY” ?®"dy ana,YSt C°,Umns these da
—William Jed Orndorff, Baltimore.*Thanks for a fantastic letter. Computer enthusiasts wouldn’t rush to try to stamp out even the few sparks there are of anti-computer sentiment if they didn’t FEAR our expressions. That’s the unconsc ious motive behind their use of the word “technophobe” to dismiss us: they yearn to substitute an irrational mental state (fear, or phobia) for our actual CRITICISM and REJECTION, because it is really THEY who fear US.* *I uonder why they fear and hate so much all technology that is not computer technology. Whatever the reason, the overwhelming bulk of all the technology the human race has ever created, is non-computer-related machinery. The great preponderance of apparatus working around us and keeping us from living like the savages of 25,000 years ago, is real-world systems of gears, engines, motors, power transmission, the smelting of metals, and other massive, actual technologies, not digital simulations thereof.* Wide-Ranging Comments Hi Fred: I was very chillingly impressed with the way you compared the “Cat Collector” story with the old Witch Hunt days. Indeed, as a female, I find that old fear of The Crone pretty scary. You’re dead right: the poor victim in the story was old, female, poor,
— Sheri Calkins, La Honda, Calif.*Unlike that religious/atheist imbecile you got accosted by, I saw Madalyn and her unethical behavior up close. Out of absolutely nothing, she fabricated an astonishing allegation and tried to have me imprisoned on federal charges. The senile sycophant you heard ranting is all too sadly typical of the cultist fascists in Madalyn's misnamed American Atheists group.* *(Continued)* *Those interested in using their powers of reason, rather than ignorantly and ignominiously worshipping this (now defunct) foul person, are invited to read my long presentation, “The Atheist Cult”, which is loaded with documentation and history.* *Anyone taking the trouble to behave as an Atheist ought, instead of accepting half-truths and made-up legends about a glorious godlike leader, will quickly discover that Madalyn was long in the habit of trying to intimidate critics (or even just persons she suddenly got mad at) by running to the authorities with made-up legal charges, suing people, and in at least one case, trying to seize someone’s large estate after his death, just because he was an Atheist. If anyone she mailed her publications to ever got any kind of mailing from any other atheistic group, she claimed it was because the other group stole her mailing Usd; and she tried to go to court to prevent such contact, asserting that Atheists were a* proprietary client list *(i.e., she owned them). She invited people to uproot their lives and move to Texas to work in her “GHQ”; then, when they did so, she made their lives miserable by constant barrages of obscene screaming and racial epithets — and when they’d finally have enough and quit the place, she’d allege in print that they’d been phonies, “Christians in disguise” who were guilty of theft, laziness, or fooling around with young girls.* *This is the sort of psychopathic personality Madalyn was. The press loved her, exactly because she WAS such a hideous discreditation of Atheism (which the press and media are always glad to find terrible examples to illustrate).* *There are people who will defend Stalin, or Mao Tse Tung. Followers are an obstinate, truculent, and often seemingly brain-damaged or almost hypnotized bunch — in any ease, defective in some important ways. You can’t bother them with the facts; they won’t even read things that criticize or expose their fixated heroes or cultish obsessions. It is a disgusting fact about human susceptibility to such mental illnesses, that not even Atheists, who realize the truth about religion, are immune to this sort of deplorable True Believer syndrome.* **** More Book Fair, More Computers Dear Fred: About the Book Fair— first, LAST year’s: a lot of fun, everyone very relaxed, big crowds, etc. Very friendly atmosphere, even with the Zerzan talk. No problems with Zerzan followers. Now THIS year’s fair: same big crowds, same generally friendly atmosphere, but an underlying tension was in the air. Very odd. More nut-cases wandering around, etc. More people arguing about political points, more young people unclear on the concept. Early on a young woman (who frankly looked like hell, or at least like she was on something) came over and engaged me in conversation. She was helping at Zerzan’s table, and didn’t care for my negative remarks about him and the ski-mask set. I explained how Zerzan’s “back to the Stone Age’ philosophy is identical to stuff that came out of the Third Reich, and that it would necessitate a huge reduction in the human population, etc., and would not be accepted voluntarily by most people — implying either lots of killing or coercion. Her response was jargon about a “total critique”, and they didn’t necessarily have to have a workable plan of how to get there from here. A valid point, I suppose, but hardly novel or constructive. And of course her position was that “there are no real anarchists” speaking at the Book Fair. Of course: Only Zerzan and his followers are “REAL” Anarchists. It was pretty funny in some ways. Zerzan’s “considerably deepened analysis’ is mostly what I concluded 30 years or more ago, when having high-school fantasies about running away and joining some jungle tribe. The stuff of a boy’s adventure novel, in fact, but quickly seen as impractical once daydreaming stops. Besides, while coercion and authoritarianism may well be built into industrialism, it wasn’t conspicuously ABSENT from agrarianism or huntergatherer groups, either. Zerzan may well be correct that industrialism is doomed (eventually), but short of some bio-warfare scenario with plague killing off 99% of humanity, the Stone Age is not coming back. It is disingenuous of Zerzan to hold out an Edenic vision to young people without fully apprising them of the fact that THEY won’t see it. Very different from your more honest “Situation Hopeless” and “Message in a Bottle” for @@@496.jpeg][A black and white drawing of two men AI-generated content may be incorrect.]] Graphic Used on Book-Fair Literature the future, along with living Anarchism RIGHT NOW in our own lives. Anyway, the Zerzan follower went on and on about what REAL Anarchists they are, and how many of them are in jail for various numbers of years. They are proud of that? Shades of Ammon! I ran down the whole objection to ski masks. I said if it was just to protect their identities, they could wear clown masks. So she said they wanted “to be taken seriously.’ Of course if they REALLY wanted to be taken seriously they would wear suits and ties. A clean-cut guy who looks like a Mormon missionary talking Anarchism would REALLY make people sit up! Maybe I should try to copy that look... But, talking with lots of people during the day, it seems to me that most Anarchists don’t really take Zerzan and the ski-masks very seriously. One woman who laughed about our little bumper-stickers talked about how the good- hearted Anarchists, who write positive stuff, would be remembered and read long after Zerzan and his crowd are forgotten. She enjoyed our attempt to convey positive anarchist messages with a little humor. *Editor’s note:* *Something about the Book Fair that I think was unfort unate, was the leaflet sent out to advertise it. A faux linoleum-engraving used as a decoration on the item depicted a thuggish man and woman, armed with an automatic weapon, staring with delighted express ions at some burning books. Enough people wrote to me wanting to know what I thought of it, and themselves feeling uneasily that it was some kind of paean to Spanish Civil War “anarchist” action, that I think it probably had more of a disturbing or counterproductive effect than otherwise. Was the leaflet suggesting that Anarchists burn books? If not Anarchists, who? Nazis? Why— were THEY going to attend?* Turning to computers: I have such a chance to write —on a typewriter— because I have to sit in front of this piece-of-shit computer, waiting and waiting for it to
— J. L. Hudson, La Honda, California.*Shut that thing down! Go back to the Linotype! Store info on three-by-five cards! NOTHING can be more ineff ic ient than the wonderland of screw- ups you describe.* **** Invasive Pests Dear Fred: Digital television broadcasting started on January first in Victoria, and its only effect so far is to interfere with analogue signals. Equipment for receiving digital TV is almost unobtainable in the shops, so the digital broadcasters are like Swiss or Hungarian admirals. Your piece on “Animal - Control Nazis” struck a sympathetic chord. I have come across some floridly disturbed people obsessed with “rescuing” animals! I was puzzled by some of J. L. Hudson’s article on invasive pest species, insofar as it does not square with what I know of Australian environmental problems. The main cause of species loss in recent times in Australia is simple; Homo sapiens. Forest and bush clearance has deprived many native species of habitat, or boxed them up in small, isolated pockets of relict forest. That said, introduced plants and animals are a major problem here. In this part of southeastern Australia, large areas of forest are being infested at ground level with brambles (blackberries), which grow over everything else. Brambles were introduced (circa 1860) by — here’s a nice one for you! — Victoria’s first state botanist, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, who thought that blackberries would be handy snacks for lost travelers. Other major pests are rabbits, cats, foxes, and dogs. Rabbits spread rapidly once successfully introduced in the 1850s or ’60s, and contribute to land erosion. They can live in most non-desert parts of Australia, and where rabbits can go, so can the other three, as rabbits are their staple diet. However, although cats and foxes feed mainly on rabbits, they are more than willing to snack on any small-to-medium native animals they find. The introduction of the dog into Australia sometime during the last 10,000 years was very probably responsible for the disappearance of the thylacine (Tasmaniantiger) and Tasmanian devil from the Australian mainland. Introduced pest plants (mainly scramblers) are seriously degrading tropicalAustralian forests. In South Africa, particularly around Table Mountain, introduced Australian plants, notably Hakeas, are causing serious trouble. South African plants such as boneseed and capeweed have become pests in Victoria. Attempts to “fix” introduced pests can backfire badly. Back in the 1920s the Australian sugarcane industry was being troubled by (I think) a cane-borer beetle. So the “experts” sent off to Hawaii for some cane toads to eat the beetles. The cane toads thrived in tropical Australia and are now a major threat to native wildlife. Cane toads will eat other things besides cane beetles, but creatures that eat frogs and toads die rapidly if they try to eat a cane toad! I am not trying to suggest that every introduced species is a problem. Foxgloves, for instance, have gone wild in Australia and New Zealand, and although I occasionally come across foxgloves in the bush, they give me no cause for worry. Brambles certainly do. Also last issue; Thanks for acting as a watchdog on the matter of archivesand records. I liked your latest squib on American Atheists, Incorporated. I am delighted to learn that you are trying vegetarianism again. I have been a vegan since about 1980, mainly because a boycott of the meat-milk industry seems to me to be a practical way of reducing exploitation and cruelty in the world. I also regard the pet trade as another industry to avoid; it reminds me of the slave trade. I do not agree with everything I read in The Match, but I never find it boring. The magazine certainly stimulates my imagination and reasoning powers, and makes me question all sorts of assumptions.
— Nigel Sinnott, Alexandra, Victoria, Australia.*If the government can put thousands of plants on a banned list because they have existed in a geographical area for only the last thousand years or so, the potential exists for ecological and social catastrophe beyond imagining. The bureaucratization of Life itself will be the result, and doom and brutality will await as crazy federal agents uproot hedges, swamps, lawns and forests in a quest for life-forms that some totalitarian blueprint says aren’t supposed to be there. What makes these wonks so wise? University degrees?* **** Dr. Richard Kimble Dear Fred: In regard to your mention of the 1960s television series, The Fugitive, one of the remarkable aspects of that series which you didn’t bring out in your article was that it was only through the constant assistance of strangers that Dr. Kimble was able to stay out of captivity and continue on his quest to find his wife’s killer. While that wasn’t a farfetched idea in the mid-1960s, it is absurd to seriously entertain the idea that in the United States of the year 2001, hundreds of strangers would knowingly assist someone labeled by the law enforcement network as an escaped killer. That is one aspect of American society that has radically changed in the last thirty-plus years.
— Hans Sherrer, Sheridan, Oregon.**** Barks’ Anarchistic Ducks Dear Fred: I read your obituary of Carl Barks and was pleased to see that you think highly of the late, and great, artist. You and I and millions of other youngsters got a lot out of Barks’ work. We knew which stories he wrote, and read them with relish. His drawings had
— Dennis P. Eichhorn, Seattle.**** What Happened to This Country? Dear Fred: Another police crime. A woman is HELD HOSTAGE by Detroit cops to get husband to surrender. She just gave birth to a baby by C-section when police picked her up! Is this a banana republic or something? It’s an outrage! What happened to this country? — Lisa Schaeffer. POLICE HOLD WOMAN HOSTAGE TO FORCE HUSBAND TO SURRENDER Detroit cops kidnapped a woman and held her for five days (no charges were ever filed or even suggested), in an effort to coerce her husband, a murder suspect, into surrendering Maribel Franco-Rosario had absolutely nothing to do with any crimes whatsoever, says one of her attorneys, Steven Fishman. “They just held her to get at the husband.” Joel Fuentes, the wanted man, turned himself in and is now in jail awaiting trial. “Unfortunately,” said the lawyer, this kind of thing happens routinely.” **** Hope For The Hopeless Fred: Hope for a truly free America is a lost cause. Government is like a cancer which only grows and gets worse as time marches on. There is no hope for remission; it is too far gone. I myself am serving 20 years for nonviolent crimes. But at least here in prison we are, in a sense, experiencing freedoms denied to society. Foremost, we don’t pay taxes; thus we’re not supporting or taking part in government, paying for police or bureaucracy or all the other ways in which taxes uphold the oppression of the people who pay them. Yes, we have petty rules in here, but they go with the territory, and we are NOT subject to the thousands of laws and rules placed on society at large. Sure, we miss the simple freedoms and comforts of home, but there’s a certain amount of pride and a feeling of contentedness in not living in a society you don’t believe in.
—Jason Roten, no. 137209, Gulf Correctional Institution 500 Ike Steel Road Wewahitchca, Florida 32465.**** Profound Grief Fred: Don Holbrook’s history corner speculates that Mine Okubo’s literary style was
— Paul Jorgenson, Maximum Penitentiary,*** ETHICAL ANARCHISM It's not a form of statism. Ethical Anarchists don t want to impose their value-system on anyone. It's not terrorism. The agent of the government — the cop who wears a gun to scare you into obeying him — is the terrorist. Governments threaten to punish any man or woman who defies state power, and therefore the state really amounts to an institution of terror. Anarchism — Ethical Anarchism —never relies on fear to accomplish anything, because a person who is afraid is not free. Here’s what Ethical Anarchists believe: **Government is an unnecessary evil.** Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness. **No true reform is possible that leaves government intact.** Appeals to a government for a redress of grievances, even when acted upon, only increase the supposed legitimacy of the government’s acts, and add therefore to its amassed power. **Government will be abolished when its subjects cease to grant it legitimacy**. Government cannot exist without at least the tacit consent of- the populace. This consent is maintained by keeping people in ignorance of their real power. Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness, since it cannot do otherwise than reaffirm the government’s supposed legitimacy. **Every person must have the right to make all decisions about his or her own life.** All moralistic meddling in the private affairs of freely-acting persons is unjustified. Behavior which does not affect uninvolved persons is nobody’s business but the participants’. **We are not bound by constitutions or agreements made by our ancestors**. Any constitution, contract, or agreement that purports to bind unborn generations — or in fact anyone other than the actual parties to it — is a despicable and presumptuous fraud. We are free agents liable only for such as we ourselves undertake. ------- **All governments** survive on theft and extortion, called taxation. All governments force their decrees on the people, and command obedience under threat of punishment. **The principal outrages** of history have been committed by governments or the similar authoritarian ideologies, religions, while every advancement of thought, every betterment in the human condition, has come about through the practices of voluntary cooperation and individual initiative. The principle of government, which is force, is opposed to the free exercise of our ability to think, act and cooperate. **Whenever government is established**, it causes more harm than it forestalls. Under the guise of protecting populaces from crime and violence, governments not only do not eradicate random, individual crime, but they institutionalize such varieties as censorship and war. **All governments** enlarge upon and extend their powers. Under government, the rights of individuals constantly diminish. **ETHICAL ANARCHISM** is in favor of a free society organized along lines of cooperation and mutual aid.