According to Granada Indymedia and other things I’ve seen, a local “coexistence” ordinance for Granada entered into force on 10 November which prohibits on the city’s streets, well, basically everything not approved by the authorities. From my perhaps defective reading of the commentary I’ve seen in Spanish, “coexistence” is indeed the correct answer, if the question is, “How shall we, the city’s ruling class, suffer these filthy beggars?”

Among the acts banned are:

Prohibido todo - Everything banned

• All forms of prostitution (via legal constructions which, I hear second-hand, are worded so generally that the police could arrest attractively-clad women based on the types of glances they cast at men)
• Begging at public transport locations, “institutional attention” centers and private property (read: damn near anywhere), with the goal of forcing beggars into the welfare system
• Acrobatics and games of skill involving bicycles, skates, skateboards or balloons, outside ares designated for such
• All “public acts” or protests done without permission, which might in any way block traffic or create a public security hazard
• The purchase or acquisition in public spaces of food, drinks or other products from unpermitted walking vendors
• Allowing dust to fall on the street as a result of cleaning clothes or carpets on balconies or terraces
• Allowing water to fall on the street due to watering plants located outside a building
• Spitting or meeting other bodily needs in public spaces
• Performing as a street musician, especially if collecting money
• Handling or selecting things deposited in city trash bins (which, by the way, you’re not allowed to put your rubbish into except between 8pm and 11pm)
• Washing, fixing or carrying out maintenance work on vehicles in public spaces
• Placing pamphlets or leaflets on vehicles or movable property

Nope, no institutionalized privilege here.

The law provides for the immediate seizure of any instruments, object, money or other “fruits or products obtained via the violating activity”, subject to being passed into evidence in a court proceeding or being forfeited.

A leaflet distributed at the protest says: “They are converting the streets into a place reserved for going to work or to shop”, and, “With the excuse of ‘promoting coexistence’, they would try to rob us of one of the last remnants of freedom left to us: the streets.”

Policía Local - hired thugs

All told, there were maybe 400 people in attendance at Plaza del Carmen. My friend, from a smaller city in northern France, remarked that such an event there might have drawn 10,000 people without being a big surprise.

Policía - Se puede obedecer

The protest was largely street theater. A guy with a seriously-modified, six-foot-tall bicycle came riding around with a sign attached saying how what he was doing was illegal. A couple of girls invited the crowd to jump rope in the square. Another pair carried a clothesline strung between two broomsticks, festooned with underpants. Juggling occurred. Balls were thrown around, as were balloons. A guy cheaply costumed as a police officer (complete with cardboard riot shield, helmet face mask, inner-tube baton and a sign on his back reading “You may circulate and obey”) made a show of beating up some giggling kids.

Maybe 20 local police were there, and made a show of putting their riot helmets on as the protesters made a show of rushing the entrance to city hall. Not a whole lot really happened, though, since none among the protesters seemed to have had the foresight to bring pitchforks or rifles along.

Oh well.

Described simply as “A Novel” in its subtitle, Puck is really something quite more than that. A fictional story, yes, but also a tour of some of the “weirder” aspects of Gene’s universe — and mine.

Pick, pock, puck!

I won’t try to describe much that goes on, save to say that the story takes places in two parallel(?) universes, and sometimes in the spaces between them. You got your swords ‘n’ wizards fantasy adventure, you got your romance, you got your mystery and intrigue, you got your modern psychological drama, you got your science fiction — everything, indeed, that one could ask for in a modern novel.

But there’s more…

Puck is a book on several different levels. It’s loaded with references to mythology, anarchism, religious traditions, history, the odder bits of physics and a whole bunch of classical literature to boot. I consider myself a fairly learned guy, but Mr. Gene has been treading this planet a bit longer than I have, and his learning shines through brilliantly. To paraphrase another great novelist: this book is like a mirror; if a monkey looks in, no Korzybski looks out.

From page 105:

[Doc and Sophia] shared several passion-filled years, but by the time Doc was finishing graduate school — when the loudest political voices in the Village were proclaiming that AIDS was a government plot against the gay and minority communities, and were fighting pitched battles with the police over control of Tompkin’s Square Park — he had grown disillusioned with what he had come to regard as the posturing of bored, rich kids. It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for their grievances, but rather that he now perceived their activism as more a palliative for their own boredom and frustration than as a real attempt to address the injustices that were their purported motivation. He suspected that their protests were a contemporary manifestation of the same impulse that had motivated Uncle Franz’s Cabala studies. The radicals he knew seemed to believe that if only they could arrange their political slogans in accord with some occult formula, then the ruling elite peacefully would release the reins of power, liberate the masses, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and sow flower gardens over the obsolete missile silos.

Read with caution, ready to remember just how flimsy your paradigms are, and just how liable they are to slip, like flimsy masks, off the face of reality.

Puck you! Puck me! Puck everyone!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWO4JxM3nDc

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the neutron bomb
Its nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home

The sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Gonna
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rates gone
Feel free again
O life’s a dream with you, Miss lily white
Jane Fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals its okay
So lets get dressed and dance away the night

While they
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight

We had been there a couple of times already during our two weeks or so in the city. Antigua itself is beautiful, up in the high country, filled with classic colonial-period architecture, lots of neat little shops, and plenty for the tourist. Just to the south, Volcán de Agua towers some 12,000 feet above everything. As Guatemala goes, you couldn’t ask for a more serene, lovely place.

Volcán de Agua, Antigua, Guatemala

And the restaurant was lovely too, with an indoor courtyard with tropical trees, a lively bar in the back and a menu worth sampling again and again. Though at the top end of the scale for Guatemala, the prices were quite comfortable for bearers of United States dollars looking for great food in a nice setting. The clientele were generally foreign tourists, with the occasional group of darker-skinned, upper-class guatemaltecos appearing as well.

A couple of people walk in and start making for the back of the restaurant, where there might be some tables available. They approach us, as we’re sitting at a table against a wall along the route to the back. A young man, perhaps 19 years of age, followed by a middle aged man, presumably his father. Both guatemaltecos.

My eye is caught for some reason. Something isn’t right about the youth’s gait. In an instant, I see why: his arm ends in a short stump just below his shoulder. And then I notice his father behind him, with a prosthetic arm slung over his shoulder.

Tragic. What horrible accident must have led to this. I can’t even imagine what life would be like, less than physically complete, not to mention the sensations, the horror, the feelings that must come of losing a limb. The folks who live in the countryside and till the land in Guatemala have hard lives, and accidents must be common.

I turn my attention back to my shrimp cocktail, quickly, as they approach our table.

But something is still not right with the young man’s gait, and I turn as they pass, perhaps impolitely, and look again.

And it is then that I see that the father carries not one, but two prosthetic arms slung over his shoulders. And that his son’s other arm is also mostly missing, ending in a slightly longer stump than the other.

What do you call a young man with no arms?

Victim.

Perhaps I drop my fork as the realization hits me: this young man walking past me, just entering adulthood, was not the victim of an accident.

Silence on the Mountain

Right up until the end of the bloody 46-year Guatemalan “civil” war in 1996, state-sponsored gangs roamed the countryside, striking targets of opportunity and instilling fear into the populace, in hopes of crushing support for the guerrilla resistance groups. A favorite tactic, described in Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala; Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala and elsewhere, was for the terror squads to attack small, rural villages suspected of sheltering or supporting the guerrillas. Everyone in the village was forced out of their homes at gunpoint, assembled, and segregated: men over here, women over there, children here. The villagers watched as soldiers and police raped their mothers, sisters and daughters. Those who resisted were simply shot. Those surviving now watched as some of the children, boys especially, had one or both of their arms or hands hacked off with machetes. And then most of the men were executed. Still more were led away from the villages, bound and at gunpoint, enslaved or slaughtered and never to be seen again: los desaparecidos, the disappeared.

The armless young man who just walked past me, without doubt, was one of those children in the villages in the early- to mid-1990s — mutilated, crippled by the criminal violence of state agents in the service of an inhuman ruling class, and left to live as a reminder to those who would challenge their privilege.

I tried several times, in conversations with guatemaltecos, to ask about the war, and how it had touched their lives. None would speak of it to me — perhaps because I am a white man, but without question because they want to forget.

As one big file (MP3, 46m51s, 43MB):

• Direct download from nostate.com: Agorist_Class_Theory.mp3
• .torrent file at nostate.com
• .torrent file at mininova

Click to buy the book!

Broken into chapters:

• .torrent file at mininova
• .torrent file at nostate.com
• Direct downloads from nostate.com:
• 1-Audiobook Introduction by Mike Gogulski.mp3 (2m39s, 2.5MB)
• 2-Foreword by Brad Spangler.mp3 (4m21s, 4MB)
• 3-Introduction by Wally Conger.mp3 (4m10s, 3.8MB)
• 4-Ch1-The Failure of Marxism.mp3 (1m49s, 1.7MB)
• 5-Ch2-The Marxist Appeal.mp3 (3m55s, 3.6MB)
• 6-Ch3-Precursors to Marxist Class Theory.mp3 (1m39s, 1.5MB)
• 7-Ch4-Marxist Classes.mp3 (3m23s, 3.1MB)
• 8-Ch5-The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory.mp3 (4m12s, 3.8MB)
• 9-Ch6-Libertarian Class Analysis.mp3 (2m27s, 2.3MB)
• 10-Ch7-Radical Libertarian Class Analysis.mp3 (5m20s, 4.9MB)
• 11-Ch8-Agorist Class Theory.mp3 (10m27s, 9.6MB)
• 12-Ch9-Agorist Solutions For Marxist Problems.mp3 (2m26s, 2.2MB)
• .m3u playlist (note: for local use, not for playing off the net!)

Someone use these to make a YouTube series and playlist!

If you are able, please download the files via BitTorrent, and re-seed them to infinity.

Text of my introduction to the recording:

Good morning, New Libertarian. Good morning, agorist.

The voice you will hear for the next 47 minutes or so belongs to me, Mike Gogulski.

I am a stateless ex-American. I renounced my American citizenship in 2008 and I have been a voluntary exile since 2004, presently living in Bratislava, Slovakia. As of this recording in May 2009, I maintain a website at www.nostate.com, which you are invited to visit.

The words you will hear belong to all of humanity, but they were written by Wally Conger, drawing on the unfinished work of Samuel Edward Konkin III, arguably the initiator of the agorist theory. The book, Agorist Class Theory: A Left-Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis, was published in 2006, both as a free online PDF and in print combination with Konkin’s seminal New Libertarian Manifesto.

After a foreword by veteran analyst and agitator Brad Spangler and an introduction by Wally Conger, the book consists of nine brief chapters:

• The Failure of Marxism
• The Marxist Appeal
• Precursors to Marxist Class Theory
• Marxist Classes
• The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory
• Libertarian Class Analysis
• Radical Libertarian Class Analysis
• Agorist Class Theory (and finally)
• Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems

I have attempted to read the text of Agorist Class Theory as I have it in hand. Any deviations from the written text – which you can find online at the website agorism.info – are my own. In the interest of brevity and due to its referential density, the Appendix – entitled, “Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory”, written by Konkin in 1973 – has been omitted from this recording. The Appendix is available in the PDF and print versions of the book, and is well worth reading.

It is my hope that listening to Agorist Class Theory serves to raise your class consciousness, and that you not only adopt the class theory in looking at the world around you, but apply it to yourself as well.

After listening, take action.

Agora! Anarchy! Action!

That doesn’t mean that “most people are stupid,” a proposition to which 95% of citizens surveyed will agree.

But when I see dozens commentators on talk shows discussing bailouts, tax increases (and, properly, taxes at all), inflation, the hot/cold/muddled trade wars between east and west, war, torture and any number of other subjects, well, gosh… there’s a whole lot of stupid out there.

Add Guy Fawkes mask for more powerful effect

When there is talk of, oh, another trillion dollars being shoveled out to first-to-the-trough interests owned and controlled by the global elite, well, the talk isn’t about where the money comes from. The talk isn’t about how inflation of that sort is exactly equivalent to grand larceny. The discussion doesn’t center around any sort of moral consideration, or recognize the fact that lending out a trillion of these “dollars” into existence has the net effect of devaluing the holdings of all dollar holders, or that these compelling accounting fictions created by the elder warlocks of Wall Street and Washington will be as yokes upon the necks of generations. The questions come to revolve instead around such subsidiary matters as whether or not enough tribute is being extracted from the proletariat via inflation to benefit the komitet, or whether or not the right factions of the ruling class will receive the newly-stolen booty first — certainly not around such other (equally subsidiary) matters as whether or not the robbers should be executed by firing squad or by being bound to a tree naked in the jungle, smeared with honey, and left for the ants.

This in and of itself isn’t stupid. The people here are focusing attention in directions which benefit them. They flirt with the jungle, honey and ants every day by speaking their “minds” to the masses. They get paid very well for doing it. The stupid, here, is that people watch and listen to and read this drivel, they absorb it, they internalize it, they believe it, and they will cast out as devils those who would challenge the dominant tribal paradigm.

One day, the masses are going to wake up, en masse, as it were. Paradigms will shift, as it were. The future will, perhaps, shock again.

Meanwhile, the stupid is man-in-the-street reactions filmed on the east coast of the US by Iran’s PressTV along the lines of “Gee, I don’t know much of anything about anything, but I got faith in Obama,” or “Change gonna win, baby!” or “Well, I guess if that’s what they figured out is necessary…”

Me? I’m investing in honey.

The master class: Why be born anyplace else?

I don’t know how many of the security cameras disguised as birdhouses around Hviezdoslav Square catch sight of me. Doesn’t matter, really. I also don’t bother with my usual survey of the people around, looking for the undercover secret police and intelligence agents who can sometimes be spotted in the vicinity through careful observation.

Hviezdoslav the bollard, via bratislava-photo.com

I haven’t been to the Embassy since its renovations were completed over a year ago. The visible signs of that renovation included moving the security perimeter of the compound outside the building proper into a small, newly-constructed building dedicated to being an access control choke point. A metal detector was added, supplementing the X-ray machine for visitor baggage. Perimiter fencing was extended to encompass the new man-trap building, and new vehicular denial devices installed at a couple of points. Modifications to the underground parking garage connected with the adjacent Carlton Hotel were performed in order to prevent close access to the Embassy premises by unapproved vehicles. Additionally, a passive cordon consisting of a series of bollards linking areas bounded by long fountains was added to prevent vehicular access from all but approved directions. One of the ironic features of this cordon is that the monumental statue of famed Slovak poet and parliamentarian Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, the square’s namesake, has been incorporated into the bollard lines, thus making a symbol of Slovak cultural identity part of the American Imperium’s local outpost.

A small line of people wait outside the man-trap security building to speak with the woman behind the bulletproof glass. They are all hoping to pick up visas. They present their paper receipts, the woman looks through a box of documents, and to each one says to come back on Friday. A woman next to me asks me, in Slovak, something about Friday. “Sorry?” I say. “Oh, I mean…” she fumbles, switching to English. “Aj po slovensky,” I tell her, indicating that she can continue in Slovak. She asks me what the woman behind the bulletproof glass was telling the others, and I say that I don’t know, but that it appears the folks here must come back for their business on Friday because the Embassy is closing for the day in a few minutes and tomorrow, Thursday, is Thanksgiving, an American holiday.

I’m at the front of the line in about a minute, show my passport and tell the bulletproof lady I’m here to renounce my citizenship. “Okay,” she says, “but very quickly; we are closing.” She tells me to go to Window 5, and confirms that I know where that is.

At right, US Embassy in Bratislava. At left, the man-trap.

I shuffle around and enter the adjacent door as I am buzzed in, passing inside the man-trap. Backpack off and into the X-ray machine, pocket contents into the plastic tray for X-ray as well, and I pass through the metal detector — much less sensitive than those at airports, as my belt buckle and the studs in my shoes fail to set it off. One of the four guards in the room hands me a visitor’s badge and a receipt token for my mobile phone, which must remain at the security checkpoint until I am ready to leave the premises. I reclaim my backpack and pocket contents.

Through another door and out into the small parking area in front of the embassy, surrounded by high metal hurricane fencing. I enter the first door, turn, and find myself in an unfamiliar place. I take a few steps in, up a couple of stairs, and find myself in a small room with another bulletproof box containing a young United States Marine Corps junior officer. “Your badge, sir?” I show my badge, and he tells me I’m in the wrong place. Go to the next door down. Ah, right, the proles’ entrance. This door for ruling class tools only.

Back outside, and through the door that was always the entrance before. The security checkpoint used to be here, but now I just breeze in, turn right, through the door, up a few steps into a waiting room, turn left and into the sound-muffling, heavily camera-monitored room which is the place where petitioners to the almighty American State come to present their pleas, again to women safely ensconced behind bulletproof windows.

I approach Window 5, pull out my passport and all the documents I’ve brought with me, all pre-filled-in and ready for execution. After a few minutes’ wait, a Slovak woman employed by the Embassy comes to the window and asks how she can be of assistance. “Hello, I’m here to file these documents and take the oath to renounce my citizenship.” She pauses a moment, frozen, and then a sly smile steals across her face. “Are you sure?” she asks. “Yes, quite sure.” “And may I ask why?” she inquires. “Political reasons.” “And have you spoken about this with anyone?” Yes, I tell her, I’ve spoken with a great many people about it. “Ah, but anyone here?” she insists. “No, not yet.” “Very well,” she says, and invites me to pass my passport and documents to her through the narrow slot which presents the only opportunity for contact between the two worlds separated by the bulletproof glass. “Please take a seat in the waiting room, and I will call your name.”

I go back into the waiting room, plop my backpack on a chair and head over to a wall to examine a large poster with attached paper addendum laying out the fee schedule for the various “services” performed by the Embassy. A quick scan of the lists shows that there are no fees given for renouncing one’s citizenship. I sit down and pick up a week-old copy of Nový Čas, a trashy daily tabloid paper, and settle in to read a short editorial celebrating the fact that Slovaks no longer require a pre-arranged visa to visit the US as tourists, but doubting that the young people taking the most advantage of the “privilege” of visa-free travel reciprocity today really have any appreciation of how much the world has changed since the 1988 Candle Demonstration, which took place right outside where I am sitting now on Hviezdoslav Square and which was an important event toward the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

“Mister Gogulski,” comes the woman’s voice over the loudspeaker. I shuffle back into the petitioning chamber.

“So,” the woman behind the translucent barrier tells me, “if you really want to do this, we need you to fill out this form, and contact us to make an appointment to speak to the Consul.” Again, the wry smile: in her eyes, perhaps, I am either insane or stupid — or both.

Form? What form? Oh, damnit. It’s the Questionnaire: Information for Determining Possible Loss of U.S. Citizenship. I forgot about that one. Nuts. Oh well, another day.

“One more thing,” I ask, packing up my things, “are there any fees for this?” “No,” she tells me.

“Thanks. See you on Friday,” I tell the woman, and leave for home.