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Posts filed under Quotes

Verbatim

Officers’ safety comes first, and not infringing on people’s rights comes second. — Lieutenant Fran Healy, Special Adviser to the Police Commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department

(Via Radley Balko.)

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Monday Lazy Linking

Barack Obama: Deep cover Anarchist?

Has the current occupant of the White House been sneaking reads of Equality: The Unknown Ideal, and, convinced by Roderick’s argument, spent the last few years quietly advocating the Anarchistic doctrine that principles of individual freedom, carried to their fullest extent, logically entail freedom from any and all forms of government? Selective quotation and convenient ellipses would seem to indicate that he has!

We consider these rights to be universal, a codification of liberty’s meaning, constraining all levels of government …. Moreover, we recognize that the very idea of these universal rights presupposes the equal worth of every individual. … We also understand that a declaration is not a government; … [T]here [are] seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality… [F]or if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order, how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?

–Barack Obama (2006), The Audacity of Hope, 86-87.

Well, we can’t. Which is fine. Of course, you’re free to go around cohering as much as you want on your own time; but what I want is a peaceful, consensual society. One where people come together where they want to, and aren’t forced into lockstep where they don’t want to be. Obama is of course right that the principles of individual liberty and equality produce declarations, not governments, and that that soil is sown with the seeds of Anarchy. He’s right to see that when you let those seeds grow and come into bloom, it means that everybody is truly free, and that they overwhelm any political scheme of rigid rows, of constraints of birth and rank, of social orders imposed from above (whether by the self-selected, or the majority-elected). Which is exactly why Anarchy is something to be desired and cultivated. The solution to the problem of incipient Anarchy is to realize that there isn’t a problem. Political coherence is not required. Freedom, peace and equality are more than enough.

(Via Francois Tremblay 2008-12-03, via Noor Mehta, via Facebook.)

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Countereconomic commentary

Today’s postulate:

One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive it from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it.

— Catharine MacKinnon (1987), The Art of the Impossible, in Feminism Unmodified, p. 16

(MacKinnon is talking about the survival strategies women have to adopt under patriarchy. The point generalizes, or analogizes, for many other forms of domination.[1])

Today’s corollary:

The point of practical counter-economics, as a strategy for social transformation, is to reverse the polarity. You do some grassroots organizing, and when you do it right you open up new social spaces, within the shell of the old, where the best strategies that help you flourish from day to day — the ways you make yourself a living — become precisely those that weaken the system’s supports, and drive its mechanism towards collapse.

Today’s epigram:

Establishment (military-industrial) economic life processes us all into the oil for the gears of the machine. Grassroots organizing has to free us up to become the sand.

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[1] If you don’t believe me, just try adding up the number of times you lost a day filling out government forms last year; the number of times you wrote down your Social Security Number in a blank box to better enable the government to keep track of where you work and what you make; the number of times you put on a false face and tried to make disarming small talk with a traffic cop or a TSA goon; the amount of money skimmed off from every gallon of gas or submarine sandwich you buy, every month’s rent you pay, and every dollar you make, into the wages for the very cops and bureaucrats and border guards and soldiers who shove you around, and who invoke your name, without your consent, to justify oppressing and murdering and stomping on your neighbors and your fellow workers and innocent strangers halfway around the world.

Over My Shoulder #48: from Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke”

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker’s sparely-written, chapterless skein of documentary vignettes retelling the events that led up to World War II.

Cyril Joad, a philosopher who was writing a book called Journey Through the War Mind, had a talk with his pacifist friend D. Joad asked D. whether D. thought Chamberlain should have negotiated with Hitler after Hitler’s peace offer. Yes, of course, said D.: Wars should never be begun, and as soon as they were begun, they should be stopped. D. then listed off many war evils: the physical and moral mutilation, the intolerance, the public lying, the enthronement of the mob. He quoted from the text of Chamberlain’s refusal–that by discussing peace with Hitler, Britain would forfeit her honor and abandon her claim that international disputes should be settled by discussion and not by force. Our claim is, you see, D. told Joad, that international disputes are not to be settled by force, and this claim we propose to make good by settling an international dispute by force. We are fighting to show that you cannot, or at least must not, impose your will upon other people by violence. Which made no sense.

Once a war has started, D. said, the only thing to do is to get it stopped as soon as possible. Consequently I should negotiate with Hitler.

Joad said: Ah, but you couldn’t negotiate with Hitler because you couldn’t trust him–Hitler would break any agreement as soon as it benefited him to do so.

Suppose you were right, D. said–suppose that Hitler violated the peace agreement and England had to go back to war. What had they lost? If the worst comes to the worst, we can always begin the killing again. Even a day of peace was a day of peace. Joad found he had no ready answer to that.

Cyril Joad talked about the war with another acquaintance, Mrs. C., a vigorous Tory. War was natural and unavoidable, said Mrs. C. The Germans weren’t human–they were brute blond perverted morons.

Joad asked C. what she would do with Germany, and a light came into her eyes.

I would make a real Carthaginian peace, she told Joad. Raze their cities to the ground, plough up the land and sow it afterwards with salt; and I would kill off one out of every five German women, so that they stopped breeding so many little Huns.

Mrs. C.’s ideas were shared by others, Joad had noticed; he’d recently read a letter to the editor about Germany in London’s News Chronicle: Quite frankly, said the letter, I would annihilate every living thing, man, woman, and child, beast, bird and insect; in fact, I would not leave a blade of grass growing even; Germany should be laid more desolate than the Sahara desert, if I could have my way.

The longer the war lasted, Joad believed, the more this kind of viciousness would multiply: Already Joad wrote, Mr. Churchill was reviving the appellation Huns.

— Nicholson Baker (2008), Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. ISBN 1-4165-7246-5. 154–155

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