Posts Tagged ‘anarchy’
Anarchy Inside
(Also published in The Occupied Times of London)
“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” – (Jdg 21:25)
The School of Ideas returns to dust, and our tents to ashes or landfill, but the seeds of resistance have been planted in the hearts of the tent-dwellers, who ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Eviction. What will emerge from those seeds, what runners and creepers, climbers and stingers are sending out shoots beyond the square mile, and what flowers will bloom in the coming seasons?
All sorts of philosophies came together on the cathedral steps, including the unabashedly messianic, and each Messiah bore his burden bravely. One hung his head and explained in grave tones how the blocking of his proposal at the GA left him no choice but to unleash a tidal wave against the eastern seaboard of the US.
Then there were the more deeply deluded, revolutionary communists and sellers of retro-sounding journals. Indeed comrades, the world has never seen a genuine communist state, but neither has it seen a genuine Father Christmas, and I still don’t want your dirty red fingers poking around in my stockings. Read the rest of this entry »
Checkmate in Three
or: How to hijack a bandwagon
“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” – Exodus
Back in 1961, as the mild-looking, pen-pushing architect of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann was on trial for genocide, Stanley Milgram began investigating the question of obedience. What he revealed is unsettling, but contains an element of hope for the free-thinking subversive.
The basic experiment begins with two subjects deciding by lot which would be the ‘teacher’ and which the ‘learner’. The teacher first watches the learner being strapped into a chair and covered with electrodes. Then the teacher is seated in an adjacent room at a machine labelled ‘Shock Generator’. A man in a white coat tells him to read questions to the learner through a microphone, and punish errors with increasing electric shocks. Read the rest of this entry »
