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.)

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 millenium,... (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 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 living ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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 f... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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 h... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)