My tongue does not belong to the state

Students and teachers in schools where the teaching language is Hungarian should get ready for an increased number of inspections of Slovak lessons. This is the response from Slovak National Party Minister of Education Ján Mikolaj to words over the weekend from Hungarian President László Sólyom, according to whom Hungarians in Serbia, Romania and Slovakia should learn the state language as a foreign language.

…they should learn the state language as a foreign language, one politician said. And in reaction, another politician submitted a proposed program to increase the quality of teaching of the state language in schools where the teaching language is that of national minorities. A program which, among other things, would require inspections of Slovak lessons which would then be used as a basis to “create innovation in the state’s educational program”.

The “State Tongue”

I don’t know when the state grew a tongue, since the state is just an abstract concept. When I want to go and take care of something official, I don’t go to the state but to an official office. Therefore, I see it more as an official language. And, under that label, it only has to be used at official offices.

The state doesn’t have the right to lecture me as to how I’m going to speak with my employees or customers, or in which language I’m going to carry out written communication with people, be it an advertisement, classified ad or a poster on my property or land or that of someone who has agreed to let me put it there. Why, Messrs. Politicians, are you interfering in my property? I didn’t authorize the state to do this in any fashion. I haven’t given my property to you, nor have I lent it to you.

Teaching the state tongue, and the state education program

I would also like to ask, dear Politicians, why do you want to decide which language I or my children shall speak? I don’t recall that I signed over the power of decision-making to you for myself and my posterity regarding my life or my body. Or is it that you want to declare that I’m your property? Because that’s how you’re behaving toward me and my children. Are we the modern slaves of your state system?

And the final question for you will be: Why are you using the forceful extortion which YOU call “taxation” and “contributions” to create a centrally-planned economy in education? (And not just there, but I’m only looking at the educational system right now.)

Leave it to me where to put my children, or to where they want to go. Leave what I and my children choose from the field to us, along with what we choose to learn. We want to choose freely among schools where curricula are created according to our current needs and demands, not according to your momentary moods, emotions or fits of power, nor according to the pressure and interests of lobbyists.

And so…

Don’t steal our property from us and don’t create a system based on violence (extortion/taxation) or the institutions (state schools, paid for from taxes) built upon that violence. We are just ordinary people and we don’t know how to compete with those powerful lobbyists who stand behind you and lobby you every day for laws which are acceptable to them and which privilege them versus us. We don’t want state-sponsored positive discrimination.

One pearl in closing: “On Monday, Prime Minister Róbert Fico labeled Sólyom’s words as an ‘insidious attack’ and as a ‘splintering of nationhood’.” Mr. Fico, when did I give you the legitimacy to rule over me? You, or any of your predecessors?

My life, my body and my property do not belong to the state… or do they?

Ján Tralich, Thursday 18 March 2010

One might respond to [a certain discourse] by noting that we are all already, in fact, free.

That the state exists only in our minds and the minds of billions.

And that if defending one’s free life in a crisis against one of the state’s brainwashed minions might mean – gasp – violence, and violence is kinda “off the table” now because there’s “so much else to be done” or “education is the key” or one’s philosophy speaks (rightly) to “peace and trade” as desirable while downplaying (imho, wrongly) the role of self-defense in preserving and seizing one’s liberty, well, one’s not really acting like a free person.

And that if one is in that spot, dithering about whether or not it’s the right time to defend oneself, then one is not really free yet. That the state still exists in one’s mind, binding and constraining one, contrary to one’s true nature.

And may one’s chains rest lightly upon one, should one find oneself there.

Needs notes, but … meh. No time.

Powerpoint 2003: Download

Or would you choose not to eat there at all?

For the benefit of which privileged classes would you like to bully strangers today?

Cute, isn’t it, the way propaganda works?

A lot of well-meaning, gentle folks will look at a poster like this and think they’re being presented with a choice among competing priorities: education, agriculture, or technology?

Precious few will look and see the robbery that is taxation. Perhaps fewer still will see the false choice in being able to select from a limited menu of privileged classes: parents of school-aged children, textbook publishers, teachers and others involved in the “education” industry; farmers, agribusiness, pesticide producers and the giant industrial manufacturers of agricultural machinery; or technophiles, those wealthy enough to enjoy the benefits of modern telecommunications and the corporate interests behind the telecoms wallowing already in a century of robbery-subsidized privilege? Maybe only a handful will recognize that government monies are never “invested”, but rather are stolen from taxpayers and bestowed upon politically-connected, privileged classes. Perhaps almost none at all will notice the false choice, the presumption and attempted transference of moral corruption involved in the use of “we” and “our” (the linguistic situation is even worse in the Slovak version, which asks, “Na čo by sa mali použiť naše peniaze?“, placing the question into the passive voice: “For what should our money be used?”).

Few, indeed, will startle, perceiving that freedom is not on the menu.

I call bullshit, horseshit, and dogshit.

The short answer, of course, is an emphatic “no”, unless you’re going to adopt the patently insane position that we’re all criminals for doing so, as Francois Tremblay does in saying “We are all war criminals” — a position which I will contest to my last breath.

In exploring the question, FSK links to my first “Educating for anarchism” post, and elaborates on a theme that I’ve heard before — and rejected.

This post was originally going to be a reply comment to FSK’s post, but since it grew so long and was so long ago, I thought it deserved a post of its own, here:

FSK writes:

I noticed this post by Mike Gogulski, where he refused a job for the State. The fallacy in his reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes. Suppose I have two choices. I can do $10k of work directly for the State, or $10k of work in a wage slave job. Suppose my income taxation rate is 50%. In the $10k wage slave job, I contribute $5k directly to the State. Similarly, if I accept the $10k job working directly for the State, I pay $5k directly back to the State in taxes. (In some countries, income on State jobs is tax-exempt. I’m ignoring that possibility here.) If I don’t accept the $10k State job, someone else will take it, still getting paid $10k but perhaps doing marginally worse work. However, by refusing the direct State job, I am forced to accept a marginally lower salary. Overall, the net damage to the State by my refusal to work directly for the State is negligible.

“I refuse to work directly for the State” is an attitude that only works when vastly more than 50% of the population has been convinced “The State is evil!” By that time, the State has already lost anyway. Once a vast majority of people have been convinced “The State is evil!”, then it’s already all over for the State. In the meantime, if you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Hello, FSK! I’m finally circling back on this post, which has been open in a browser tab since, er… last year I’m just gonna reply to the bits that mentioned me.

The fallacy in his [i.e.: my] reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes.

This is true. However, you overlook something here, though you do kindof address it later — though I have a quibble with that as well.

If I earn $10k making sex toys (something which, as far as I know, no state anywhere actually produces, nor desires), and surrender $5k of my earnings to the state, the state receives a net benefit of $5k, minus collection and enforcement costs, which may be held to be negligible.

If I earn $10k making ICBMs for the state and surrender the same $5k in income tax, the state receives a net benefit of $5k cash PLUS whatever benefit the state assigns to the missiles.

By choosing to make sex toys which do not benefit the state in any way (other than by the taxes imposed upon them) rather than missiles which benefit the state directly, I at least keep my hands off of a transaction which would create greater evil.

I put it to you that by refusing to do the state’s work I am creating a benefit for freedom. Certainly, in the inverse case, you would not praise me for finding a quasi-agorist method of doing work to help provide the state with ICBMs. The object of the work matters as well as the economics.

That was quibble #1. Quibble #2 is this:

[I]f you refuse to work directly for the State, then someone almost as qualified will gladly take your place.

Arguably true, given today’s circumstances. However, in my particular case, there are only a very small number of professional translators who both speak English as their native language and who have a high level of competency in translating the Slovak language. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that I have a real niche market, and that there are only ten other people in the world, including me, who can deliver the same Slovak-to-English translation job at the same level of quality as I can. My refusal takes me out of the pool of available labor, and thus the state has only 90% of the potential labor force available to it. At any given time, this tends to make getting the state’s work in translating Slovak to English more difficult, as there are fewer resources which can be applied to the task. It might also have the side effect of driving up prices among those other nine translators who are willing to work for the state. At some point, when prices are driven up high enough, the customer stops buying.

However, there is yet another benefit. When I tell one of my agency clients that I do not do any work for directly governments, that I do not do any work on non-governmental company/charity projects that are funded by governments, that I do not do any work for organizations that derive more than X% of their revenues from taxes, that I do not do any work for organizations which engage in certain objectionable statist activities, I am making a contribution toward anarchist education. I have alerted one or more people at that translation agency that there is a moral objection which might be raised against taking certain kinds of work.

In many cases, that message may well fall on deaf ears today. Maybe only 1 in 100 translation agency employees might have their own beliefs modified by coming into contact with mine in this way. But it will be remembered, and perhaps in the future those same people might think over the issue again, or tell a story to a colleague or a friend: “Hey, there’s this Mike guy who says ‘All taxes are theft!’ and ‘I read FSK!’ and won’t take certain kinds of jobs from us, isn’t that funny?” And it can spread from there.

And now, quibble #3:

There is a moral argument for refusing to take jobs and income from the state. All of the state’s money and property is stolen. When we freely accept known stolen property in trade, if we do not become accessories to theft ourselves we at least become facilitators of that theft, in that if we refused to accept unearned wealth in trade and convinced those around us to do the same, then the criminals stealing it would no longer have an incentive to do so, as they could never spend it. I, personally, do not want to be paid out of money stolen from other people through taxation. Recognizing that eliminating this entirely under the statist system may be impossible, I still hold it as my own duty to minimize the occurrence thereof and to encourage others to do the same.

A drop, perhaps, in an ocean of statist shit. But it’s my drop, damnit, and I’d like you to see all sides and all possibilities.

Dixie Flatline of the No Treason blog adds additional commentary, to which FSK replies in An Example of Pointless State Resistance. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Victoria must pay tethered teen $30,000

Friday, November 28, 2008

VICTORIA – Willow Kinloch has been granted half of the $60,000 she won in a lawsuit after being tethered in Victoria police cells, with the payment of the rest hinging on an appeal of her case by the City of Victoria.

The city had applied for a stay, or suspension, of payment until the appeal is heard, perhaps sometime next spring. But Justice Mary Saunders of the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Thursday that Kinloch is entitled to $30,000 now.

Kinloch’s case dates to 2005 when she was 15. A B.C. Supreme Court jury came up with the award earlier this year following a decision that officers had violated Kinloch’s charter rights.

Kinloch had been picked up by police in the downtown area for being drunk and was taken to police cells.

She spent about an hour screaming and banging on the walls before two officers tried to take her home to the apartment she shared with her mother.

The apartment intercom was broken and officers wouldn’t let Kinloch yell up to a window, so she was brought back to the police station. She did not want to return to a cell, and police described her as uncooperative. She ended up being bound at the ankles, tethered and left in the cell for four hours.

Kinloch is now in Thailand.

Here’s to hoping Ms. Kinloch is safe, given the unrest in Thailand at the moment.

See also:
The further education of Willow Kinloch
Victoria, BC citizenry to pay $60,000 to brutalized teen (includes video)

hi boy… how are you?

ahoj girl Fine, thanks, and you?

fine…. ahoj? do you speak Slovak? or you just know some words…

I translate from Slovak into English as my work… so I know quite a bit

translate? really? wooowww… is it an interesting job?

Well, I enjoy working with and learning languages, so it is pretty good… the best thing is that I work from home, and I don’t need to work a “full normal” schedule…

oh, so you like your job.. it’s good…

I agree! It’s much better than working for some jerk manager Do you live in Bratislava?

no… I just visit university there… the police academy

Hmm, I really don’t like police…

why?

well, police work for the state, and I hate the state

aha… hmm I don’t know what to say..

anarchists are like this, you know

yeah.. and lot of people think about police that ACAB

sorry, what is ACAB?

all cops are bastards….

I don’t know if they are all bastards, but I do know that they all serve the interests of the ruling class, against the people.

And she never wrote back…

He obeys her because she is his elder, because she conjoins within herself the vision of many, and because he owes to her his begetting and his nurturing.

He honors her above all others, placing her in a special niche within his secret heart, in front of which the candles of respect and admiration are forever kept alight.

He defends her against all enemies, and counts his life well lost in her behalf.

Above all else, he loves her deeply and without display, knowing that although he shares that privilege with others, the nature of his own affection is unique and personal, rising from the deepest well-springs of his being, and returned in kind.

This is the good citizen. While his kind prevails, so also flourishes the Great Republic.

– Max Rafferty, California Education, Vol. II, No. 8 (April, 1965), quotes from Thomas Harris, I’m OK  — You’re OK, 1967

Fuck you, Max Rafferty. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, and fuck the “good citizen”, and fuck the “Great Republic”. May they all die screaming, excluding the innocent horse.

Fortunately, Harris quotes Rafferty to make a point, and not one of agreement. He leads in with:

We call our defense “patriotism,” and their defense “enslavement.” To some extent all nations live behind a curtain. Perhaps it is the same curtain.

It is the same curtain, indeed, though Harris doesn’t identify it outside of his paradigmatic approach to psychology (which has plenty of value). The curtain is statism.

In the spirit of doing only the best things possible for mothers and babies, ACOG and the AMA are now pushing to eliminate a terrible danger to babies and mothers alike: home birth.

Eamon greets the world, at home. Image from chrisandjenni @ flickr.com

Now, babies have been born at home, or in fields or forests or any number of other places for millions of years. I even had the pleasure recently of meeting a young woman who was born on a train in Russia. The distinction between “hospital, medical” birth and anything else is a rather modern invention. Just a hundred years ago in the West, and even today across huge portions of the planet, children were always born at home. Birthing carries risks for both mother and child, and sometimes medical intervention is needed to save lives. In many parts of the world, the expertise and facilities aren’t always there.

From ABC News:

Are Home Births Dangerous?

AMA Says Women Should Use a Hospital — Some Doctors Disagree

The American Medical Association has agreed to support proposed legislation that, some physicians say, could make make having a planned birth in one’s home difficult, to virtually impossible.

As of now, no actual legislation has been drawn up, but the AMA has agreed to back a measure called “Resolution 205,” a request to support the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) position that home births are not safe.

“We are against home births, period,” said Gregory Phillips, an ACOG spokesman.

What does Resolution 205 say?

RESOLVED, That our AMA develop model legislation in support of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex, that meets standards jointly outlined by the AAP and ACOG, or in a freestanding birthing center that meets the standards of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, The Joint Commission, or the American Association of Birth Centers.” (Directive to Take Action)

Jennifer Block, writing for the LA Times, rightly questions what’s going on here:

The AMA’s statement calls for legislation that could be used against women who choose home birth, possibly resulting in criminal child-abuse or neglect charges. The group says this is about safety, but with no credible research to back up its claim, this argument falls flat. Women are simply caught in a turf war over the maternity market, and it would appear that the physicians’ groups are perfectly willing to trample the modern medical ethic of patient autonomy — grounded in our legal rights to self-determination, to liberty and to privacy — in their grab for control.

Block’s op-ed makes a lot of good points, and asks a very cogent question: “Why do U.S. doctors strong-arm women into our standard maternity care system?”

ACOG, the AMA and other organizations like them are, effectively guilds in the medieval sense. Guild membership or approval is required to practice the guildsmen’s trade, manifest in all sort of licensing and education requirements that these groups have managed to write into law with the “objective” criteria for inclusion or exclusion of any given would-be practitioner being left up to those who have already passed whatever arbitrary bar for inclusion they have set, and backed up by the unlimited violence that is the state. That organizations such as these serve to limit the supply of medical services and thereby increase costs to patients while enriching their members has been analyzed in great detail elsewhere.

Born free, born at home. Everett with mom. lobo235 @ flickr.com

Quibbling a bit about how the mechanics of guild exclusionism get written into US law, I doubt that mothers would be penalized for choosing to give birth at home. No, what AMA and ACOG are really after here is the criminalization of midwives, and especially those who aren’t members of the various AMA-approved midwifery guilds or who haven’t passed stringent certification requirements. The guilds don’t give a damn about unlicensed midwives’ patients. What they care about is limiting the supply of childbirth-assistance services, to the benefit of their members’ profits.

ABC’s headline, “Are Home Births Dangerous?”, really might be better written as “What Penalty Should Home-Birthing Mothers and Midwives Face?” AMA/ACOG are calling for legislation. There will be fines and disincentives, penalties and prison terms, police raids and prosecutions, all against midwives practicing a skilled trade that has existed for thousands of years.

But the penalty for violating statist law is always death. Deconstructed, what we see is the physicians’ and obstetricians’ guilds calling for non-guild midwives to be killed for practicing their trade.

Now how is that good for mothers or babies?

It is not often, here, that I praise men, but I will do so in this case. Christian exudes both a deep-rooted self-confidence and a genuine interest in the people around him, their lives and their truths. To hear him speak of his travels, of his history and the history of others, of art, of his belief and of his loves is an education in what it is to be a human being. That he does this with neither pretension nor hyperbole is a testament, I believe, to his character. I do find him admirable.

During the Liberty English Camp last week, I heard him say something several times which resonated deeply with me, both for what the message contained and for tone and context in which it was delivered. Both because my memory is poor and because I heard several different versions of the same idea, I will paraphrase, with any necessary apology in advance if I distort Christian’s meaning:

I used to be a libertarian, and one who believed that liberty might be delivered through the action of States. Over the years, however, I have come to embrace a higher moral philosophy, and thus today call myself an anarchist without reservation.

Bravo, sir. Encore!

I have been reading and digesting a speech that Christian delivered several years ago, from the title of which the title of this post is derived. So long as we are to have State-mandated “education”, the entire thing should be made a rote-memory exercize for slavesstudents everywhere. Surely it less harmful than, say, what passes for a high school history curriculum in America these days.

A few glittering gems catch my eye:

Politics does not exist to eliminate violence but to legalise it.

Even in the Cold War-flavored, American exceptionalism-tinged milieu in which I grew up, I heard from an early age in school that “politics is the institutionalization of violence”. Here, though, the analysis came to an end, diverted from what might have been a valuable clarity of thought into a muddled and worthless utilitarianism.

Did you vote this year, last year? Were you able to ignore the blood on your hands as you did so? Or were you perhaps blinded by the dogma you clutched most dear to the blood’s very presence? Or, even worse, did you eagerly pull the wool over your own eyes, seizing the vaunted vote as that which might bring you deliverance in choosing which wolf might have you for dinner?

Democratic law does not say, “Thou shalt not kill”. Instead, it designates certain people who have the right to kill — soldiers and State police. Democratic law does not order, “Thou shalt not steal”. It says that only certain people have the right to steal — tax and customs agents. What does “power to the people” mean when the people enjoy fewer rights than their supposed servants?

Because I am a language geek, I shall go farther than Christian does in deconstructing the State’s (and the Bible’s) “thou shalt nots”. Thou, in archaic modern English, is the second-person familiar pronoun. It is cognate with the Spanish tú, the Slovak ty and many other Indo-European forms besides. The historical, linguistic sense of the informal construction is one of intimacy and/or condescension. We have lost the taste and meaning of it in modern English, and the missteps and awkwardnesses we face in communicating with those of cultures that have preserved the distinction are endless. The implication in using thou, or tú, or ty is that the speaker need express no deference to the listener, that he is either superior to or equal to the listener. In terms of the Biblical Commandments and the laws and institutions derived therefrom, the sense is always condescending.

Yet democracy pretends to put all of us on the same level. We gather periodically in celebratory binges to praise such sacred cows as “popular sovereignty” and “the will of the people”, but we still retain this disrespectful, condescending, patronizing thou. How is it that a group of free individuals get together and, by an act of collective decision, create a greater being, worthy of speaking down to us?

Michel speaks to the process:

[W]e still encounter magical practices today in our modern societies. [...] We adore our idols. It is reassuring to believe that things we control, like amulets and charms, have more power than they really do. The institution of the democratic State is a remarkable example of modern idolatry. By ritually celebrating elections that are played out like a great social mass, the State allows us to participate in a religion that will influence the idol in our favour. If we make the idol an offering of the right ballot, it will bring us security, lifetime employment, a guaranteed pension, free medical care, environmental protection and a good school for our children. All these favours will rain down on us. We will not have to do anything to earn them. What could be more magical than that belief?

In closing, he gives us a formula:

The priesthood of government officials and its protégés are able to perpetuate their exploitation through this myth of the people’s political power upon which the democratic order is based. The best way to protect oneself from their violence, and especially to protect one’s soul, is to deny their basis for power. Don’t give it legitimacy. Don’t vote. Refuse to be part of their system. A just society will not be built from above by the magic of a good government, but from below by the emancipation of each individual, one conscience at a time. [emphasis mine]

With that, I bid you a safe journey on your own road to liberty.