Against His-story, Against Leviathan

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 The roster of destruction is a long one (and it earned Washington the name of Town Destroyer): Three towns on the Chemung River; three towns on the Tioga River; all of the dozen or so Cayuga and Seneca towns... (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 entire globe. In the brief span of a few generations, all of Earth falls into the entrails of a single artificial beast. But by encasing all of Earth within one Leviathan, the Europeans do Civilization a disfavor, for they put a term on its... (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 free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan. Free human beings were able to encompass Leviathan in their horizon and still remain free. The Leviathanized cannot encompass free... (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, and fed him all he could eat. Wiske was on the verge of becoming a Potawatomi Lugal. But the land around Kichigami, the lush woodlands, prairies and forest openings surrounding the Great Lakes, was not “the Fertile C... (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 millennium of Christianity has taught Europeans that fallen human beings live in Sin. The dictum is not passively accepted by Christian Europeans. It is actively implemented. Those who do not live in Sin shall not live at all. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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 te... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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. Haven’t we always kn... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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 ot... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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” because there w... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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 r... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)