• Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Are you fucking KIDDING ME? I linked to crimethink. An anarchist site actively telling and helping people to fight against Flock and ICE:

      And you dare say I “sound like a MAGAt”. NO I FUCKING DON’T! I’m LITERALLY distributing anarchist propaganda!

      But clearly you didn’t actually read the post I linked you to because in that case you would have seen exactly why anarchists oppose the guillotine, and why we can’t “burn it after” because we would have been on the chopping block.

      For radicals, fetishizing the guillotine is just like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

      It is impossible to make the revolution with the guillotine alone. Revenge is the antechamber of power. Anyone who wants to avenge themselves requires a leader. A leader to take them to victory and restore wounded justice.”

      - Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy

      The guillotine is the law made concrete… It is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral. Whoever sees it quakes, mysteriously shaken to the core. All social problems set up their question mark around that blade.

      - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

      Have mass killings ever helped us advance our cause? […] If we seek transformation rather than conquest, we ought to appraise our victories according to a different logic than the police and militaries we confront.

      When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. Yet what we do to the worst of us will eventually be done to the rest of us.

      Precisely because it is sometimes necessary to employ force in our conflicts with the defenders of the prevailing order, it is especially important that we never lose sight of our aspirations, our compassion, and our optimism. When we are compelled to use coercive force, the only possible justification is that it is a necessary step towards creating a better world for everyone—including our enemies, or at least their children. Otherwise, we risk becoming the next Jacobins, the next defilers of the revolution.

      Those last three are taken from my previous comment when this came up: https://anarchist.nexus/post/357494/comment/2040563
      Feel free to read my other responses in that thread as well.

      And before you dare to claim I’m advocating against fighting:

      This is not an argument against the use of force. Rather, it is a question about how to employ it without creating new hierarchies, new forms of systematic oppression. […] The image of the guillotine is propaganda for the kind of authoritarian organization that can avail itself of that particular tool. Every tool implies the forms of social organization that are necessary to employ it. […] As a tool, the guillotine takes for granted that it is impossible to transform one’s relations with the enemy, only to abolish them. What’s more, the guillotine assumes that the victim is already completely within the power of the people who employ it.