Anti-Militarist Anarchy

War is a fight for domination. One state is trying to violently seize power and control over another.

Backing up the military apparatus necessary to carry this out is the intense alienation between people. People need to see one another as just roles, labels, “enemies”, and interchangeable cogs in massive institutional machines, in other words, complete dehumanization. This alienation is reinforced by capitalist consumer culture and authority itself, both of which need to dehumanize people in order to function.

Alienation also leads to us not being able to help one another out, support one another, or accomplish great new things together. Alienation leads us to think that it is not possible for us to work together to meet ALL of our needs.

Dehumanization makes it possible to kill, maim and torture fellow human beings. One does not concern one’s self with the destruction of mere foreign objects.

Authority makes it possible to deny the inherent self-directing and self-realizing nature of human beings. Authority is the delegation of all self-responsibility. “I was just following orders”, “I’m just doing my job” and “I had to do it” are the true rallying cries for authority.

The State is the organized institutional apparatus that makes it possible to commit the genocide that we call “war” and to put people in the soul-killing cages that we call “prisons” and “jails”, all the while denying our own complicity and responsibility in making it happen.

And war, war is the culmination of all of this. War is the final herd-mentality push that keeps the industrial factories running and that keeps the violent gangs of thugs that we call “the police” from being overwhelmed by the passions of everyday people. War is what keeps up the mass violence, death, carnage and destruction needed to crush our hopes for a world and life of voluntary cooperation, harmonious mutual aid, and creative beauty.

As anarchists, we understand this; we respect our inherent human dignity; we respect our vast potential and possibility for joyous living; we respect that freely helping one another out is our most natural and healthy state of affairs as human beings.

With this being the case, we recognize that our resistance must be complete and total. We recognize that not only must war and militarism be opposed, but the State and capitalism must be opposed as well. We recognize that not only must nationalism and jingoism be opposed, but all authority and domination must be opposed as well.

This is not just radical fanaticism and utopian dreaming, this is an understanding of what it means to be human. Our resistance is not just dreaming of overcoming the impossible, it is a reaffirmation of our own inherent power as individuals and the unstoppable force of mutual aid and cooperation.

There is a war going on, but Iraq is just one battlefield of it. This is indeed a fight of life and death proportions, but the “life” that I am talking about entails the fullest sense of the term. The kind of life that I am talking about can only thrive in TOTAL ANARCHY!!

“Every second that I spend working is a denial of the kind of life I really want to live.” – from “Temp Slave”