Lal Bihari (or Lal Bihari Mritak, लाल बिहारी “मृतक”; born 1961) is a farmer from Uttar Pradesh, India who was officially dead between 1976 and 1994. He founded Mritak Sangh or the Association of the Dead in Uttar Pradesh, India. He fought Indian government bureaucracy for 18 years to prove that he is alive.

When Lal Bihari tried to apply for a bank loan in 1976, he found out that he was officially dead: his uncle had bribed a government official to register him as dead, so that he would get the ownership of Bihari’s land.

Apparently, Mr. Bihari was far from alone in being thrust into such a predicament:

Bihari discovered at least 100 other people in a similar situation, being officially dead. He formed Mritak Sangh in the Azamgarh district. He and many other members were in danger of being killed by those who had appropriated their property. Nowadays the association has over 20,000 members all over India. By 2004 they had managed to declare four of their members alive.

My mandatory anarchy reaction now: Mr. Bihari was shafted by his greedy jerk of an uncle. But the uncle wouldn’t have been able to carry out his evil deed were it not for being able to buy illicit access to the state “identity” apparatus. Were it not for state monopolies on identity certification and for state-backed oligopoly in banking, Mr. Bihari likely would have been able to obtain his loan on a truly free market, as well avoided being declared “legally dead” in the first place.

Stick around for the etymological fun after the musical interlude.

“Surprise! You’re Dead!”, Faith No More, The Real Thing, 1989:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Surprise! You’re dead!
Ha ha! Open your eyes
See the world as it used to be when you used to be in it
When you were alive and when you were in love
And when I took it from you!
It’s not over yet
You don’t remember?
I won’t let you forget
The hatred I bestowed
Upon your neck with a fatal blow
From my teeth and my tongue
I’ve drank and swallowed, but it’s just begun
Now you are mine
I’ll keep killing you until the end of time
Surprise! You’re dead!
Guess what?
It never ends…
The pain, the torment and torture, profanity
Nausea, suffering, perversion, calamity
You can’t get away

And now, the folk etymology:

Mritak (“मृतक”) is the Hindi word for “dead”. It emerges from the Sanskrit mrtih (“death”), and is generative of English “mortal” and “murder” plus Spanish muerte (“dead”) and morir (“to die”) via Latin mors (“death”, genitive mortis) as well as Slovak mrtvý (“dead”) via Old Church Slavonic mrutvu (“dead”). Additionally, a male first name popular in India, Amrit, means “immortal”. We don’t have “amortal” in English, though we could if we wanted to…

Thus ends the lesson. Spotting cognates that go back to pre-Sanskrit gives me goosebumps

Would that such images reflected reality.

For every “revolutionary” decision handed down by Courts Supreme and by Tribunals Most High — which merely reflect and elucidate, rather than alter or discover, the fundamental nature of that which ought be justice — those same bodies deliver a torrent of support and endorsement for the present system and for that pile of unjust historical deadweight called “precedent” but which, in the words of Kevin Carson, might better be called “the subsidy of history”.

These august incarnations of unquestionable, unaccountable power are dressed up in the finest of robes, placed on the highest of perches and set above all other men, so that they may — to the half-blind, numbed, unthinking bulk of humanity — discover truth, lay blame where it belongs and issue a judgment most holy, and one which contributes positively to the betterment of humankind.

In reality these Holiests of Holies sit not in service of truth over falsehood but in service, rather, to whatever they can get away with to appease and gratify those who own and dominate not only the judges themselves but also the entire society which pretends to or actually does submit to their judgment. And they arrogate unto themselves the power to kill, not in the service of law or truth or virtue, but to the service of those who employ them, as tools, and do so as they have for generation after generation, century after century. The power to kill, on a whim. The power to kill, especially, when a litigant’s ideas threaten the very basis of their own unaccountable, comfortable, profitable and entirely traditional, family-values-right-down-to-that-time-my-gangster-uncle-murdered-a-hobo-who-dirtied-his-shoe-and-ain’t-that-just-the-way-it-is-and-by-god-we-gotta-get-together-and-protect-ourselves foundational power ethic, their perception of and re(ta)l(i)ation to reality.

The statist dreams that the judges will be the best of society in that they are selected and trained by the best of society’s methods. But when the judgement over what those methods ought to be and how those (s)elections ought be carried out is left up to a bunch of people who are highly skilled only in becoming elected officials and playing the statist system to the maximum advantage — rather than to those who must all directly pay the costs and suffer the problems of the system but yet remain able to change it quickly and directly since they are part of it — well, what do you expect? They do not serve truth or justice or virtue over all other things. When they serve those concepts at all, they do so only if — and, often, because — our masters have agreed to stop trying to kill us if we disagree.

These sweethearts don't share your definition of property rights. Should they be killed?

First of all, everyone knows I love cats, right? KITTIES!!! You go, kitties!

Now, to serious matters.

With homeowner in doghouse, bobcats move in

Cute uberkitties challenge capitalist property rights

A family of feline squatters has moved into a foreclosed home in Lake Elsinore. Residents of the Tuscany Hills development first noticed the bobcats about a week ago.

With real estate values plummeting and foreclosed homes sitting empty, a family of bobcats apparently decided the time was right to pounce.

So last week, they slipped out of the parched foothills of Lake Elsinore and into a spacious, vacant home in well-groomed Tuscany Hills.

Residents of the development got their first look Aug. 27 when the feline squatters — at least two adults and three kittens — lolled atop a wall outside the Spanish-style house.

There arises now a moral question, the resolution of which sits at the base of your conception of property rights.

Get offa mah property!

Very likely there is a bank that is presently the legal owner of this house. Can the bank come around randomly shouting “get offa mah property!” like Fuzzy Lumpkins, and if the cats disobey and refuse to vacate the property be justified in shooting them? Regardless of whether they were cats, moral actors, Randian ubermenschen or even Republicans, I should say no, and not wish to share my table with the type of folk who would believe that was really okay. Can the bank transfer legal title to the place to another party, and therefore be justified in killing the bobcats if they fail to timely vacate? I say that the bank may transfer title, but it may not evict the tenants (assuming that, quite characteristically, the bobcats have executed no auditable contractual agreement with the bank). Could the new owners evict the bobcats? To be consistent with the values that underlie the foregoing, I can’t permit them to do that. Could any of the foregoing (presumptively) evil owners delegate killing the bobcats to a disinterested third party charged with handling such matters, in the interests of all? It would all be legal, of course, approved by democracy of the highest quality and refinement.

If you’re the bank, is killing the cute, fuzzy kitties okay? If you’re the new owner? If you’re a delegate elected by the neighbors? If you’re the employee of Bob’s Ancap Defense Services and Pizza Company, Ltd.? If you’re the toppermost of the topmost federated syndicalist committeemen?

It is not okay to kill the kitties in these scenarios. If you kill the kitties under any of these scenarios, I don’t want you around me.

There are other scenarios. Maybe I’ll think about them while I go hunting for more photos of these adorable anarcho-cuties.

Let’s picture the citizen/state relationship, for the sake of discussion, as a marriage. You fell in love when you were young and impressionable and decided to get hitched. For the sake of linguistic convenience, let’s have you be the wife, the citizen, and the state the husband.

After your honeymoon and as time goes by in your marriage, you notice some things are decidedly wrong about your husband. For one thing, his history is really quite different from how he described it before you got married. The more you learn about what your husband did in the past, the more doubt you have in the notion that he is really a good person. How could the one you love have done such awful things? How could he wrap his past crimes up in fancy language and present them as virtues? You try to ask your husband about these things, and if you are not met with stony silence or cold dismissal all you get is a repeat of the same slide show and heavily edited home movies you’ve seen before, to the strains of triumphant music and accompanied by words that seek either to bury that terrible history or to change the meanings of the very words themselves. Sometimes you get slapped hard across the face. You have real doubts.

One day your husband comes home after a late night out with blood on his clothes. “What happened!” you cry. “Oh, I was handing out candy to the children in the neighborhood. Then I killed a man.” Why? Because the other man believed the wrong things, spoke out of line, failed to obey, resisted your husband’s commands and was trying to fight off your husband. “What was the fight about?” you ask. Turns out that your husband was trying to rob that other man, or force him into slavery, and he wasn’t too happy about it. It’s all okay for the moment — surely your husband wouldn’t do such things to you or your family now, would he? But still, the doubt grows: do I really want to be married to a robber and a murderer?

One day you realize that your husband in fact comes home every day fresh from killing and/or robbing someone. There always seem to be good reasons for the torture and the killings — or so dear hubby says — but there’s this nagging voice inside you that asks: how is he different from any other psychopathic mass murderer? Am I next?

You look back more deeply into your husband’s history and find and entire lifetime drenched in blood and clouded by lies. The horror runs so deep and is so pervasive! Sure, your husband may have performed a million good or neutral acts in his past, but there are thousands of incidents of such unrestrained barbarity that there never possibly could have been good intent behind them. You see a pattern.

And you wake up one morning — alone in your bed, as your restless husband never sleeps — and you realize you’ve been tricked. You recall, all at once, the times your husband has beat you, has tormented you about your own nature, has slandered you to the neighbors and has treated you as worthless. You note that he does no work himself, but regularly steals half of your paycheck before you have a chance to enjoy any of it. You see his bloody, murderous present in the context of his bloody, murderous history, and you wonder just what sort of monster you married. No matter: he is certainly not the man you imagined, nor the man he claims to be.

"I love you" by nubuck @ sxc.hu

You try to reform your husband, but he is recalcitrant; in fact, the beatings become even more severe when you do so. You try to enlist the help of neighbors and friends, but they all rebuff you, saying that your husband can’t possibly be an evil psychopath — after all, look at the millions of good things he’s done! You find few if any people that can see through the deception. You realize that your husband is the very embodiment of evil, and that you have been duped into believing him virtuous, duped into the marriage and lied to every day and through every one of his acts. You realize that your love was misplaced, as it was based on lies.

Clearly, it’s time for a divorce.

It is a sad fact of human existence that there are tendencies in our psychology where people who are victimized become bonded to and emotionally dependent on those who prey upon them. Battered person syndrome is one such, and Stockholm syndrome is another. I have known many people, largely women, who have gotten trapped in abusive relationships with the most despicable creatures. Worse than seeing their bruises or wounds, worse than crying with them, worse than knowing the agony of their pain is hearing them justify why they really ought to stay with the person closest to them and who causes them the greatest harm — for the children, for the house, for the money, to avoid looking like a failure in marriage, because what will the neighbors think, because a marriage is a gift from “God”, because they think themselves worthless, because maybe “this time” it will all work out for the best, etc. Trying to talk these poor souls out of such situations, especially when you care for them personally, is most often an exercise in bitter disappointment as you watch them again and again return for more and more abuse.

The one thing they really must do in order to save themselves is to sever the abusive relationship immediately: pack your things, leave the house, start a new life, get a divorce, never look back.

I’ve done the first few of those things, now it’s time for the next step. It is my intent to divorce the criminal enterprise which calls itself “The United States of America”. I will not remain bonded to evil voluntarily through the exercise of citizenship.

The perfect gift for the budding young statist in your family!

More to come!

Sorry to inform you, friend, but it’s gonna be a tough road. I refer you to Canada’s Citizenship Act, section II(9)1(a):

Renunciation of citizenship

9. (1) A citizen may, on application, renounce his citizenship if he

(a) is a citizen of a country other than Canada or, if his application is accepted, will become a citizen of a country other than Canada;

(b) is not the subject of a declaration by the Governor in Council made pursuant to section 20;

(c) is not a minor;

(d) is not prevented from understanding the significance of renouncing citizenship by reason of the person having a mental disability; and

(e) does not reside in Canada.

Part of this section, which was enacted in 1975, is intended to conform with the provisions of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (available at my Renunciant Resources page above), which came into force in 1975 and to which Canada is a State party, specifically Article 7 §1(a):

If the law of a Contracting State permits renunciation of nationality, such renunciation shall not result in loss of nationality unless the person concerned possesses or acquires another nationality.

Or, translated into my own terms:

A slaveowner may transfer ownership of a slave to another slaveowner; manumission is not permitted.

I believe that my correspondent intends to leave Canada at some point, but unless she obtains citizenship someplace else first, Canada will not allow her to sever the bond and become stateless. As far as I know she’s not a citizen elsewhere, so Canada will continue to treat her as its subject no matter how many times she renounces, unless she can show a different passport.

Fortunately, she has some European ancestry in the family tree, and there might even be a living grandparent to provide justification for any of the (disappearing) “reclaiming ancestral citizenship” programs available around the continent.

If that doesn’t work, the only paths available to bailing on Canada are taking up residence someplace else and going through the waiting period for naturalization there, or finding one of the (disappearing) “economic citizenship” programs available around the world. Gonna cost you either way, though.

So this morning I’m reading Roderick Long talking about whether or not Étienne de la Boétie actually wrote the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. A mention of Isabel Paterson takes me over to Wikipedia on biographical curiosity. A reference citation to her place of burial takes me over to the Find a Grave website. Putting in my own surname, what do I find?

I find that one Stefan Gogulski was killed in 1940 at the Katyń massacre.

Who was Stefan? I have no idea. My father’s grandparents left Poland around 1905. “Gogulski” is not a common surname. According to some information I found a few years ago but have since mislaid, a census in the late 1990s showed about 650 “Gogulskis” living in Poland, most of them concentrated around the Poznań area.

Stefan was almost certainly a relative of mine, though the blood connection likely would need to be traced back to the mid-1800s to find the common ancestory.

So Stalin killed one of my relatives, then. Lovely.

And, oh look here… plugging in my paternal grandmother’s name at Find a Grave, I see that one Edward Korecki also was killed at Katyń.

So, two more rather personal reasons for me to hate the state, I guess. I’ll add these two to one I discovered a few years back…

Suitcase of Anna Kraus at Auschwitz

My mother’s birth name is Kraus. A few years ago when I visited Auschwitz, I took this photo above. There is a room there which displays gigantic piles of luggage which belonged to those killed there in the gas chambers and before the firing squads. And right there, front and center by the window, a connection to one of my family names. Mind you, “Kraus” is far more common than “Gogulski” or “Korecki”, but this was the top chiller on a brutally chilling meander through the detritus of the final solution.

I’ve gotta give my ancestors credit for getting the hell out of Germany and Poland when they did, even before World War I. Thanks, y’all.

It is time — arguably, it is past time — for you to get your family and your wealth safely outside the borders of the United States. America has become a police state that is moving quickly toward total surveillance and, in typical American fashion, the resulting society will almost certainly be the “the best and the biggest” tyranny in the world.

You’d think there are limits and ways to break people out of insanity and things they’ve gotten used to being normal because of everything they’ve been through, but if even your own crying child can’t do it, what can?

Unfortunately, when it comes to the evils we’ve been indoctrinated with and inured to — be it by parents, religion, society, culture or states — breaking out of insanity is something that precious few of us manage to do.