Sunday, May 13, 2007

Canadian "Anarchism"- something worse than Napalm

[Reading Note: Sometimes in writing of prose the author may use quotation marks to distinguish a word which seems to need particular attention. Your humble Runagate-Blogger often does not agree that the meaning commonly attached to a word is correct. Hence the frequent use of sarcastic " ". They save time and space.]

Laid up over the weekend with an injury, I found time to ponder my Sat. morning Blog on the neophyte Ottawa "anarchist" who sought to "expose" the putative Tory agenda on "managing" climate change with taxes and other coerced behaviour. The Tory agenda of course has more to do with managing voter opinion than with counting carbon molecules, but that's another con, and another Blog.

For me, the only aspect of the news story of interest was the
claim that the "whistle blower" is an anarchist. With just a little Google
sniffing you too can quickly profile every member of the Anarchist collective which has just opened a 2nd floor bookshop in downtown Ottawa.

The group upon inspection, seems to be nothing more than an assembly
of inoffensive free spirits. Their quoted values and opinions betray the
fact that they haven’t read Anarchist theory or even its history, but then who ever claimed that Canadian youth read books? Hell, according to
Bob Black, even the middle aged anarchists haven’t found time to read Anarchist theory. (Black once wrote that he had read 19 important books on Anarchism, and couldn’t find another person in the movement who
had read more than a few.) Bob Black often derides the trend to form
anarchist collectives, (like the Ottawa group at hand) or a variety of alternative social systems – which “will let you smoke pot, suck cock,
sniff panties and watch TV so long as you join up.”

The simple core belief of these Ottawa anarchy-groupies seems to be
that T shirts and song lyrics can change the world. Mr. Monaghan (the "whistleblower") plays in a punk band called The Suicide Pilots, and of course Young Ms. Pascale Gagnon-Arpin (allegedly a budding graphic artist) favours badly designed T shirts with confused messages.


In the photo a Douglas Skyraider dropping napalm canisters. Note message- "Democratic governments kill". Get it? I am really curious about how people respond to political shirts. I saw napalm dropped once but in peacetime. It was a Canadian CF-5 dropping its load on an air bombing range in New Brunswick, and it wasn't that impressive. Hollywood does it better. I am impressed by the fact that our young anarchists choose to assail democracy with such frequency, while living under the protection of its institutions. The young lady is too young to know much, but her naiveté and that of her Ottawa friends (reported to be unhappy with Canadian combat troops in A-Stan), bring to mind a poem written in 1967, during the era of napalm.

POWERLESS, WITH A GUITAR
By Gunter Grass

WE READ napalm and imagine napalm.
Since we cannot imagine napalm
We read about napalm until
by napalm we can imagine more.
Now we protest against napalm.
After breakfast, silent,
we see on photographs what napalm can do.
We show each other coarse screen prints
And say: there you are, napalm.
They do that with napalm.
Soon there’ll be cheap picture books
With better photographs
which will show more clearly
what napalm can do.
We bite our nails and write protests.
But, we read, there are
worse things than napalm.
Quickly we protest against worse things.
Our well-founded protests, which at any time
we may compose, fold, stamp, mount up.
Impotence, tried out on rubber facades.
Impotence puts records on: impotent songs.
Powerless, with a guitar.
But outside, finely meshed
And calm, power has its way
.

Ms. Arpin’s plaintive views on living an anarchist lifestyle were recently published in the Ottawa (X)Press. On the need for founding the Exile Infoshop she said: "It's important for cities to have this kind of safe environment for activists and curious people alike, to be able to exchange ideas…” A safe environment for anarchists??? Bob Black would sh*t his pants if he was forced to read such tripe. Anarchy reduced to needing shelter, like a home for pregnant teens or an after school drop-in centre for urban youth? Are Canadians so freaking pampered that even our anarchists are now promoting the Nanny State? Apparently so. Sickening isn't it?

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