Against His-story, Against Leviathan

Chapter 1

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night. (M. Arnold) Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain... (T.S. Eliot) The darkling plain is here. This is the waste land: England, America, Russia, China, Israel, France.... And we are here as victims, or as spectators, or as perpetrators of tortures, massacres, poisonings, manipulations, despoliations. Hic Rhodus! This is the place to jump, the place to dance! This is the wilderness! Was there ever any other? This is savagery! Do you call it freedom? This is barbarism! The struggle for survival is right here. Hav... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2

An armored one asks: If the Age of Gold was so valuable, so beautiful, so pure, why did people leave it? If the Civilized remember it, why don’t they rush back to it? If it was so comfortable, why don’t farmers throw away their plows and return to digging sticks? (This same questioner also asks: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?) There are answers to these questions. But the questioner does not want to hear them. He already knows the answer. Humanity left the state of nature because Civilization is a higher stage. (Higher stage of what? The armored one will never tell. He quickly turns to something else.) The theory of the higher stage is as old as Civilization itself. One of its more influential modern vers... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3

The surplus product, the famous margin, did not give rise to the Leviathan. On the contrary, it is the Leviathan that gives rise to the margin. Communities of human beings needed this margin no more than communities of wolves. Bes need a margin to feed their queen. The Leviathan needs a margin to feed, not only the gods and their shrine keepers, but mainly the Lugal and the Ensis and the Scribes as well as all the springs and wheels with which to make war. The first Leviathan does not revolutionize the material conditions of production, for it institutes these; it is itself synonymous with material conditions of production. The first Leviathan revolutionizes the conditions of existence itself, and not only of human beings but of all livin... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4

The book at the origin of today’s Civilizing Religions does not begin with Civilization-builders, say with Sumerians who launched the first Leviathan. Its first chapter tells of an earthly garden, Eden, a place reminiscent of the state of nature. Its second chapter tells of the withdrawal of people from the entrails of a large Leviathan. The book then uncritically describes these people’s attempt to launch a Leviathan of their own, but the Book goes on to tell of painful and often insupportable captivities in the bowels of other worms. The overall impression it gives is that the wonders of Civilization are not positive, life-enhancing wonders. Withdrawals from Civilization are so numerous and so frequent that the life-eating wo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5

The Israelites who withdraw from Egyptian captivity and then proceed to set in motion a worm of their own do not, by their efforts, introduce anything new to the Levant, despite their mentor’s innovative theories. They occupy fields and lodges of those they are able to defeat militarily, and then they try to follow the dead leader’s precepts. In addition to giving them the abstract Yahweh, Moses, is said to have been given his heirs numerous laws by which to keep themselves clean in the Abstraction’s immortal eyes. After keeping themselves clean for two or three generations, they start to copy the ways of their unclean neighbors. Raving orators have fits of frenzy as they try to figure out just what it was that Moses had... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6

The Phoenician octopus and its later Greek, Venetian and other offspring will come to be seen as something altogether different from the Assyrian worm. There will even be those who will see the octopus as a form of human freedom. I intend to show that this is an optical illusion. There is no doubt that the two Leviathans differ. The artificial worm’s claws and fangs, its armies, are usually attached to the body, whereas the tentacles of the artificial octopus detach themselves from the body and can be said to move about freely, especially if the tentacles are ships. The worm is largely landborne whereas the octopus tends to be seaborne. There is no doubt that two different types are in question. The point is that these are not types... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7

With the Arrival of Medes, Persians and Scythians, we get a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of what has been brewing in the cauldrons of the witches and shamans of the Eurasian steppes and mountains. When the Guti, Kassites, Hittites and Greeks arrived, we couldn’t look into their past because they forgot or repressed every memory of it. The Greek Hesiod remembered only that the past was golden compared to his own age, but he forgot most of the details. When the Persians arrive, they remember a visionary, or a movement of visionaries, called Zarathustra, and they will preserve the surviving traces of this memory in books. It is not known if this Zarathustra lived in the steppes or on the outskirts of the neo-Babylonian empire, or even... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8

Returning eastward from Thrace, the Persians tangle with Aegean and Anatolian Greeks, people called Mushki on ancient tablets. The Persians’ own one-time Scythian companions. It is true that the Aegean and Ionian seas are veritable hornets’ nests of petty quarrels, feuds and never ending wars among puny cities. But on closer inspection the former Mushki are not at all as the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets describe them. They speak the Greek dialect of the Persians’ own original tongue, but in all other respects those the Assyrians called Muski are Phoenicians-not like the Phoenicians of Darius’s day, but like the ancient world-embracing Phoenicians. They write their Greek with Phoenician characters, wear Phoenicia... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9

We will be able to look at Rome closely. It will be an extremely well-documented Leviathan because it is enamored with its own His-story. We will be able to ask if Latin tribes really did step out of the “darkness” of the Eurasian steppes into the “light” of Mediterranean Civilization because the productive forces were ripe and waiting for them, if the “Barbarians” stormed the gates of Civilization because they were eager to take on the refinements and enjoy the amenities of the Higher Stage. In the case of Rome, we will not have to speculate; the story is set down and preserved. Only the beginnings are shadowy. The Romans say they desended from twins suckled by a wolf. They share this myth with Turks, s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 10

The Persian King covered himself with the mantle of Light, of Ahura Mazda. The Christian Church will cover itself with the mantle of reborn Osiris. Both have to lie continually to deny that they’ve put the mantles over machinery and to keep the mantles from slipping off. The fire that spews out of Leviathan’s jaws is a stolen fire. It is stolen from those who come to burn the monster. Neither lives nor fire are freely given to the monster; both fall into it as a trap, and once inside they try to find a way out, to burn their way out. The reign of Octavian Augustus the first Emperor of Rome is not a time of first things but of last things, it is not dawn but dusk. It is the time when the fourth beast, the beast with great iron ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 11

The Roman Empire continues to decompose rapidly-but not rapidly enough for the resisters. Every year brings new surprises; every season more springs pop, more wheels get jammed. But the artificial worm lingers on, and it keeps on lingering far too long for any resistance movement to remain what it was. It must be remembered that machines have the perverse ability to do the same thing the same way for as long as they operate. The ability is built into machines. But people do not have this ability. They change, they die, they are replaced by others who perceive and behave differently. The early resisters have some clear and powerful conceptions; the generations that follow them eventually invert every one of these conceptions and turn the i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 12

The ancient Greek city called Byzantium inherits all the refinements of Roman Civilization and also all the rot. It becomes the head of half the former worm. It retains the machinery of the entire worm while the body continues to decompose and shrink. The former boundaries of the Roman Empire are the only Kingdom of Heaven to which the Emperors in Byzantium are committed. The abomination abhorred by the early Christians is Paradise to the Byzantine Christians. All that Christianity contributes to this eastern half of Rome is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the fanatical attempt to impose what later imperialists will call Gleichschaltung. Such a Gleichschaltung will be realized by much later Leviathans which learn to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 13

When Byzantine Emperor Justinian dispatched to Persia the army that had devastated Italy, he set more waves in motion than he probably intended to. The besieged Persian ruler Nushiravan, “The Immortal,” was the strongman most responsible for suppressing and massacring the peasants and Manicheans who had risen against Persia’s nobility. Unablte to count on the loyalty of the recently repressed Persian peasants, the Immortal sent recruiters to Arabia and confronted the Byzantines with an army of camel nomads. The nomads fought well, and both Leviathans sent recruiters to Arabia. Then both tried to establish permanent garrisons on the peninsula. Byzantines allied with Christian Abyssinians occupied Yemen and destroyed a Je... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 14

To get something of an overview of what Turner calls “The Western Spirit,” I have to go back to the days when strongman Constantine transfers the Roman capital to Byzantium. The transfer does not go over well in Rome. The Roman Empire may have been an abomination in the eyes of Christ, but Rome is determined to remain the abomination’s capital, even if it has to lie. Prevarication becomes the West’s major art. From the day when a Church official names himself the Vicar of Christ and a Goth parades his puppet as Emperor of Rome to the day when the biggest empire of zeks in Leviathan’s entire His-story will speak of itself as The Free World, everything in the West is a lie. Lying becomes necessary and then com... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 15

The Church’s project of rehabilitating the Roman Leviathan on its west-Eurasian home-grounds succeeds — but only for an instant, a fleeting instant which gives rise to lasting illusions. Charlemagne’s neo-Roman Empire in Frankish garb is neither a rehabilitated Fourth nor a new Fifth Beast. It is no more than the last death-rattle of the moribund Roman worm, a sudden burst of flame among the cinders of a burnt-out fire. The stench emanating from the unburied decomposing carcass will continue to attack western nostrils, but the artifice will never again be set in motion. Muslims, Byzantines, Turnks and Mongols seeking a Leviathanic name for the West will continue to refer to Europeans as “Franks&r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 16

Vikings, Slavs, Magyars and Byzantines confine Romanized Frankdom to a field whose dimensions are modest for an all-embracing, namely Catholic Empire. Islam will undermine and cut short the development of any Frankish project even within the narrow field left by the others. The incursion of Charlemagne’s army into Islamic Spain does nothing for the Franks and it warns the Muslims of the existence and character of the Frankish Empire. There isn’t even a war. The two sides are too unequal. We must be careful not to project later Western traits into earlier events. The Muslims are armored with weapons and technologies of Central Eurasia’s Leviathans. The Frankish Knights are armored with coats of mail which serve them best... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 17

All this progress is fiercely resisted by its victims. Those who will refer to the Western Leviathan as “We” will alternate between denying this resistance and maligning it. Peasants form leagues of self-defense against the suddenly profit-crazed Lords and work-supervisors. Weavers turn against the merchants who hire them. Everywhere in Europe, townspeople and countrypeople turn against the entrie ecclesiastical hierarchy. In Flanders they attack priests and withhold tithes, not because the ecclesiastics are enemies of commerce but because they are the grossest of the traffickers. A Tanchelm of Antwerp calls the Church a brothel. The priests and the Pope himself are its pimps. They sell saints, apostles and the Holy Mary for a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 18

Worldeater — swallower of worlds and destroyer of the Biosphere — is already an apt, funtionally descriptive name for the Western Leviathan at the time of its inception in Crusades against Infidels. But such a descriptive name will not be acceptable to Westerners until the post-ecclesiastical cleric Hobbes and his contemporaries Bacon and Descartes take up the calling of advertising their beast’s powers. At the time of the Crusades, an earlier Bacon is already castyin greedy glances at the Biosphere, but the lethal character of the Western beast is not yet visible either to those in its entrails or to outsiders. The Universal, all-embracing or Catholic Church has been carrying the project of total dominion for a milleniu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 19

Marguerite Porete is burned by the Inquisition. Thousands of her sisters and brothers are burned by the Inquisition. The Church is determined to keep Europe Christian, if need be by depopulating it. This reign of terror is not perpetrated by radicals, extremists, revolutionaries. It is perpetrated by the serious and solid people, the authorities, the doctors of theology and the bishops, the royal councilors and mayors. And it is not a sudden outburst, a single event, but an ongoing process of institutionalized murder. Europeans who do not see Marguerite Porete’s light have less reason to exult than the persecuted radicals. Life outside the Temple is a vale of tears, a wilderness traversed by greedy armies of sinful men tearing each ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 20

The Taborite communities that commit slow suicide are contemporaries of communities of Guanches murdered by mercantile Catholics. The Guanches are the last free inhabitants of Atlantic Ocean islands called Canaries, the first non-Europeans exterminated by seekers of Fortunate Isles. The Guanche communities were previously visited by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Muslims, yet they survived until a Norman adventurer called Bethencourt settled among them at the time when Rector Jan Hus refused to sell indulgences. By the last Hussite extinguish the unintended consequences of the Rector’s refusal, the Guanches are on their way to extinction. The hospitable Guanches, like the radical Taborites, are not allowed to live in Eden. A... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 21

Potawatomi storytellers of the Great Lakes told of a certain Wiske, an ancient trickster who, long ago, almost became Archon over Nesh-nabe, over free people. This Wiske was not altogether villainous to the Potawatomi. In ceremonies enacting his deeds, he wore the long-eared mask of the Hare totem. It was said that he helped the destitute, the trapped and the lost. His nephews said he gave the people webbed shoes so they could traverse the snow, canoes so they could float on water, as well as spears and arrows so they could feed themselves. Wiske’s nephews thought much of their uncle’s gifts, and they expressed their gratitude by returning gifts of similar magnitude. They pulled Wiske over the snow, paddled him over the water,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 22

The idyll is gone now. Nothing is left but the dirty realities. Leviathan is all there is. These very words, written words, are inventions of the Lugal’s scribes. They cannot convey dream time. Every meaning has been inverted. “Central Africa,” “Australia,” “America” are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan’s “empty continents.” From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan’s world is a Wilderness to f... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 23

I’m impatient to end the story of the artificial beast with human entrails. In a different work I will tell some of the details of the resistance to Americanization on the part of some of the world’s last communities. I cannot tell all, either there or here, because the struggle against His-story, against Leviathan, is synonymous with Life; it is part of the Biosphere’s self-defense against the monster rending her asunder. And the struggle is by no means over; it goes on as long as the beast is animated by living beings. It will conclude with His-story by summarizing, ever so briefly, the moments leading to its end. By carrying Leviathan acrss the Ocean, Europeans stretch the beastly integument over the expanse of the ent... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 24

The English speaking Aguirres who spread death, slavery and ever-bleaker misery across the Dis-covered continent speaks eloquently of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Opposites merge, antonyms become synonyms on the Frontier, where all conflicts are reconciled. Zeks fight alongside their keepers, debtors alongside their creditors, borrowers alongside their bankers, suckers alongside their hustlers, in the most fraudulent extravaganza since the First Crusade. Desolation beyond imagination’s grasp is carried to uncountable Jerusalems. In the northern woodlands alone, where General Washington’s orders to General Sullivan are “to destroy totally the villages of the Iroquois,” Anthony Wallace will tell that ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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