interesting article alert

"The Gnosis of Anarchy; The Spirit of Revolt and the Revolutionary Spirit" has a bunch of interesting history. for instance, I had no idea there was any connection between Bakunin and the Masons (now I do). maybe you won't find it worth reading. i know it's not really fair to lay something this thick on you (it's 90 some pages). another good article on the recent past is "Down with the Empire! Up with the Spring!", a by now famous piece on the little known EF! Albion slew of amazing victories in the face of "the biggest road building project since the Romans".

water dragons and shinto lanterns

in Ohio, the so-called "hellbenders" are endangered. i think we can fairly call them water dragons. apparently they're so common around here that people are always throwing 'em back when they fish in the South Toe River, down the road. after hearing the local anti-serpent sentiments, it's good to know there's somebody around here that's weird, reptilian and primal. i can't wait to meet one.

in other news, it turns out that those cement Japanese lanterns (tōrōs) that everybody's got in their back yards are cultural artifacts from the entrances of Shinto temples. as we reinvent our spiritualities, chowing down on the buffet of world traditions while already having these around, why not see what kind of magik you can stick back in there? Herbal Gerbil and I hauled one up to a waterfall to aid in communication with ancestors to great effect.

put this in your pot and stew it: The Fifty Dollar and Up Underground House Book

i continue to daydream about settlin down to do a permaculture homestead, and so as my mind wanders from here to there during the odd hours of the day, most of the time without its feet touching the ground, this book jumped in my path again:

"The Fifty Dollar and Up Underground House Book"

The people here were shootin' the shit like fish in a barrel when they started talking about the vapor barrier that brings the cost of these houses down so amazingly low: you get sheet carpet and put it over cheap ass plastic, which goes directly on the subsoil that you've carved out with a shovel. You can get second hand sheat carpet and cheap ass plastic for free, and if you were to timber frame your roof... so cheap! The mustiness factor is what's held me back from saying "yeah, I could live in that shanty with dignity and invite someone over for dinner and a fuck", and with that design gap so elegantly filled there's no stoppin' the train.

parrot head alchemy

have you read paulo coehlo's "the alchemist"? i really dig it, a really educational hero's tale it is. and in one of the "ah ha!" moments that i've been increasingly having at MG's, i made a connection from that story to jimmy buffet's song "if you like pina colada". if you can explain to me the connection you think i made, i will send you a walking stick from my cabbages, which are growing now, if they turn out. here are the lyrics:

I was tired of my lady
We'd been together too long
Like a worn-out recording
Of a favorite song
So while she lay there sleeping
I read the paper in bed
And in the personal columns
There was this letter I read

"If you like Pina Coladas
And getting caught in the rain
If you're not into yoga
If you have half a brain
If you'd like making love at midnight
In the dunes on the Cape
Then I'm the love that you've looked for
Write to me and escape."

I didn't think about my lady
I know that sounds kind of mean
But me and my old lady
Have fallen into the same old dull routine
So I wrote to the paper
Took out a personal ad
And though I'm nobody's poet
I thought it wasn't half bad

"Yes I like Pina Coladas
And getting caught in the rain
I'm not much into health food
I am into champagne
I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon
And cut through all this red-tape
At a bar called O'Malley's
Where we'll plan our escape."

So I waited with high hopes
And she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant
I knew the curve of her face
It was my own lovely lady
And she said, "Oh it's you."
Then we laughed for a moment
And I said, "I never knew."

That you like Pina Coladas
Getting caught in the rain
And the feel of the ocean
And the taste of champagne
If you'd like making love at midnight
In the dunes of the Cape
You're the lady I've looked for
Come with me and escape

repeat chorus twice and fade out

Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! the whole enchillada

soon there will be other stuff besides the main text in this entry, but here are links to all 24 chapters, plus my paraphrasings of their contents.

some day there will be a killer introduction, and maybe a few other things. the original has illustrations, woodcuts by william blake.

i'd be interested to hear who all's reading this and what they think.

thanks to spunk.org and Mysty of the amazing band Spellbox, which you can check out at myspace, for helping me type some of this up. and thank you Fredy Perlman. a lot. i'll do a ghost dance with you after i finish typing.

Chapter 1 (healthy human communities)

Chapter 2 (Morgan's progress, the first cities with a Lugal)

Chapter 3 (gift economy vs. trade, Ur & Sumeria)

Chapter 4 (armed opposition; Jewish Exodus from crumbling Egypt)

Chapter 5 (Israel, an interlude, octopi proliferate)

Chapter 6 (octopi and worms; Assyrian, Phoenician, and Chaldean Leviathans)

Chapter 7 (Zoroastrianism and Darius's Persia)

Chapter 8 (the Phoenecian-like Greek polis)

Chapter 9 (tragic rise of the Roman empire)

Chapter 10 (Isis, Mithras, Jesus; the Roman Empire's beginning of the end)

Chapter 11 (Mani, Gnostics, Yellow Turbans; State Religion Christians rule through Rome's splintering)

Chapter 12 (Byzantium, Donatists & Vandals, Persian Revolution, depopulation of Italy, Mohammad and those armez)

Chapter 13 (Muhammad, his Ummah and Islamic Empire; Arabs,Turks and Mongols)

Chapter 14 (evolution of the Western Spirit, dehumanized invaders, the Vicar of Christ, Northern Europe falls)

Chapter 15 (bullshit Frankish/Catholic Empire: marauders, priests, Vikings and the first nation-States)

Chapter 16 (the Crusading West: Capitalism, Islamization, Catholic Agro-Business, genocide, commodified Earth)

Chapter 17 (Francis recuperation, Albigensian Crusade; Hanseatic League & Teutonic Knight evil, Worldeating)


Chapter 18 (Original Sin and the Inquisition vs. a post-Albigensean movement-Waldensians, Beguines, BotFS, etc.)


Chapter 19 (Plague and Prison; a last hurrah of anti-Leviathanic community: rise and fall of the Taborites)


Chapter 20 (extirmination of the Guanches, Witches, the "enlightenment" [spreading darkness], Humanism)

Chapter 21 (Potawatomi, banishment of Wiske, cyclical time, Maya and Quetzaquatal)

Chapter 22 (depopulation of the Fortunate Isles, Scientific Detachment and the murder of Dream Time)

Chapter 23 (the Last Leviathan, invasion of Great Lakes, Renegades, Merry Mount, Puritans/Quakers, gift/theft)

Chapter 24 (Land Grabbers, Civil Wars, the Illuminati, Ghost Dancers and ? end)

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! Chapter 24 (Land Grabbers, Civil Wars, the Illuminati, Ghost Dancers and ? end)

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 on
Cayuga and Seneca Lakes; the half dozen Seneca towns on the route westward to the Genesee River; and the
complex of settlements at Genesco itself… Before the Revolution, the Six Nations and their dependents had
lived largely in some thirty thriving villages scattered from the Mohawk River to Lake Erie and the Ohio country.
Of all these towns, by the spring of 1780 only two survived undamaged. The others were in ashes or empty,
moldering in rain and wind…

To the Greak Lakes Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Miami who are not reached by Washington’s armies, who are the next Frontier, this terror that calls itself America is no carrier of life, liberty or happiness; it is Wiske gone totally mad. After eating the French, the victorious English declare a war against themselves and, under the guise of fratricide, set out to kill and expropriate the continent’s remaining original inhabitants.

The ostentatious Declaration of Independence, like the proclamation of the First Crusade, is a maneuver in a confidence game, a banner designed to align zeks alongside their keepers. The freedom it offers to zeks is not freedom from labor-camp zekdom, but freedom to kill with no holds barred. Happiness comes, like Salvation to the Crusaders, from the bloody sacrifice of victims. Devotion to such freedom becomes a synonym of Patriotism. The active Patriot is a mass murderer, the passive Patriot an enthusiastic voyeur of his team’s killings.

The beast behind the banner is not concerned with life, liberty or happiness, is in fact their greatest enemy. Hobbes has already published his Leviathan, thanks to which the beast does not only know itself by name, but also possesses a self-consciousness unavailable to Churchmen or to Lope de Aguirre. The beast knows that it cannot speak in its own name without losing the confidence of its human entrails. It knows that it must speak in terms of Life, Liberty and Happiness, and it acquires unprecedented eloquence in the use of such terms.

The fratricidal war of English against English, most viciously perpetrated by both sides against the continent’s surviving communities, has nothing to do with freedom, independence, happiness or anything else that is human. It is a purely internal, Leviathanic affair, a readjustment of the artifice’s levers and springs, a retiming of the machine’s valves. One set of springs and wheels, the Fur Interest, wants to keep the new continent’s woodlands and communities as its own preserve, while another set, the Land Interest, wants to enlarge its preserve.

Both interests are equally Leviathanic, both are Imperialisms, namely zek-makers, enlargers of the archipelago of labor camps erratically but totally administered by the World Market.

The Fur Interest is not as insignificant as it will appear to later observers accustomed to Steel, Oil and Uranium Interests. At the time of the famous Declaration, Fur is Europe’s Oil. The French Empire in America revolves around fur. The nascent Russian Empire in Siberia and America is a fur-trappers’ empire. England expropriated France of the sources of precious furs.

It may be nothing more than a passing fashion for Europeans to crown their heads with the skins of this continent’s animals, yet precisely such fashions move the levers and wheels of the worldeating machine we call Civilization.

The traffic in dead animals, like the earlier traffic in spices, yields super-profits, extraordinary Savings. In England these Savings are invested in the production of cloth and clothing, a production that is become increasingly industrial, increasingly dehumanizing. The relationship between the person and the tool is being inverted. The human being is becoming an appendage of a machine, usually called Hands. Some of the cloth produced in factories is carried to the fur hunters and trappers and exchanged for their furs.

The Fur Interest wants to preserve the New World’s woodlands as a Fur Factory and cloth market, something the vast conglomerate that sprawls over the continent’s cold north, the Hudson Bay Company, already is.

The Land Interest, personified in such fellows as Franklin, Washington, Lee and other famous Founding Fathers, has as much to do as the other with human freedom and independence.

Crazed buyers give their all for land titles because such titles are passports to Paradise. Each holder is a Hapsburg, an emperor of a real domain, with absolute dominion over the walkers and crawlers, the trees and the streams. The sale of lands expropriated from the continent’s former inhabitants to such buyers yields super-profits, namely Savings as extraordinary as those generated by the fur trade. These Savings are invested in fleets of ships that carry the produce of the expropriated lands to Africa, that carry enslaved Africans to Virginia’s cotton plantations, that then carry the Virginia cotton to England’s and New England’s cloth factories.

(My summary is excessively abbreviated. I should add that the American fleets carry enslaved Africans to other parts of the world as well, that the cargo sometimes consists of indentured Europeans…)

The land pimps get their Savings from the sale of the expropriated lands, and from the sale of the produce of the expropriated lands. Their life, liberty and happiness comes from the expropriation of more lands, and from the prospect of expropriating yet more. They’ll take the land, even if they have to wage war against the fur pimps who have the ear of the King. Their intent is not to eliminate the Savings that come from the fur trade; they’ll let John Jacob Astor get the furs from the French Canadians.

The two feuding Interests are not persons but personifications; they will eventually call themselves Corporations. These are not human beings who feud because they are personally touched, insulted or harmed. It is the Savings that are threatened or harmed.

The feuding Interests are alternative and conflicting ways of accumulating Savings. The Savings come from sequences of sales of the material objects stolen from the continent’s former inhabitants or squeezed from the zeks and slaves of factories and plantations. These mechanical and material sequences or processes constitute the commercial Leviathan’s blood-circulation, its internal motion, its pseudo-life.

The whole task of eloquence is to present the needs of these inhuman processes as urgent human needs. Preserving the sequence of exchanges that yields super-savings from animal skins is identified with Loyalty to the Empire and its King. Furthering the sequence that yields super-savings from animal skins is identified with Loyalty to the Empire and its King. Furthering the sequence that yields super-savings from expropriated lands is identified with Independence, Freedom and Happiness.

The zeks remain zeks whichever Interest wins, but they are nevertheless taken in, and want to be taken in, by the confidence men. They want to be taken in because they share the European longing to be something other than what they are, at least in appearance. They do not want to see themselves as zeks but as buyers and sellers, as Businessmen, even if they have nothing to sell but their labor power. A zek with a title to a plot of land on which to reproduce his labor power is a King of his roost, Lord of his realm, Master of his household. The volunteer zek has confidence in the eloquence because he thinks he’s just like the other Businessmen. His Savings may be no more that what he accumulates in his outhouse, but because he participates vicariously in the other’s as voyeur of Big Business, as peeper of Free Enterprise.

The outsiders like the Potawatomis, Outagami and Miami, the enterprising zek is demented, mentally enfeebled by the grind that constitutes labor-camp existence. This observation gives the outsiders yet another reason to stay away from the labor camps.

The enterprising zeks, understandably, do not like to be looked at by outsiders. The onlookers, as we’ve seen, fill the zeks with murderous rage, further dementing them. From the standpoint of the zeks, it is of course the outsiders who are mad. And according to the confidence-men who speak of zeks as industrious Pioneers, independent Yeomen and proud Workers, there is no outside; the who universe is a labor camp and anyone who denies this is a ranter, a lunatic. The two madnesses are mutually exclusive.

* * *

It becomes very important for the last Leviathan to deny the existence of an outside. The beast’s voices have to project Leviathanic traits into pre-Leviathanic past, into nature, even into the unknown universe.

The post-Hobbesian artificial beast becomes conscious of itself as Leviathan and not as Temple or Heavenly Empire or Vicarate of Christ, and it simultaneously begins to suspect its own frailty, its impermanence. The beast knows itself to be a machine, and it knows that machines break down, decompose, and may even destroy themselves. A frantic search for perpetual motion machines yields no assurance to counter the suspicions, and the beast has no choice but to project itself into realms or beings which are not machines.

All the sweat and labor expended hourly in the beast’s entrails presupposes the beast’s perpetual existence. The notion of a Progress that culminates in a final collapse is Christian but not Leviathanic. The notion is of a piece with Christianity’s commitment to the absurd, and is not altogether absurd if life is considered a vale of tears. But for Leviathan such a notion is contradictory, and Leviathan is an eminently logical entity.

Leviathanic existence, a vale of tears to Christians and outsiders, is to Leviathan a paved highway, and Progress along this highway cannot lead to an Apocalypse but only to more Progress.

Leviathanic self-consciousness expresses itself in the currents of thought known as Enlightenment, Illuminism, Masonry, Marxism, plus a few others. These currents supply the all-swallowing beast with a language suitable to its last days.

It is no longer necessary to identify savings with salvation or greed with devotion to a divine calling. Since expropriation and usury yield Capital Gains which are the basis of Progress, greed becomes Enterprise, and the cover-ups for ancient terms become superfluous because the terms themselves are discarded.

The merchant and banker no longer feel ashamed of inheriting Islam’s commercial practice but not its merciful god. Leviathan is all there is, It is god, and It is merciful to those who reinvest all their interests and profits.

To a Rousseau who says that Leviathan is an artifice imposed on nature and human beings by force and fraud, Enlightened merchants can now answer that all is artifice, nature as well as human beings as well as the very universe. The cosmos itself is nothing but a vast artifice, a machine, a clock wound up by the Great Artificer, the Mathematician. Terms like force and fraud cannot be applied to clockwork, and terms like inhuman and unnatural lose all autonomous meaning if the human and the natural are also mere clockwork.

The Catholic or all-embracing Church, always a few generations behind the times, misses yet another boat because of the langorous pace of its opportunistic prelates.

Long reconciled to spreading the mere forms of Catholicism over realms that resist the substance, Churchmen hurl themselves against the Enlightenment’s forms, against its language. The near-sighted Churchmen fail to notice that the Illuminists and Masons who reject the Catholic language retain the substance of Catholicism, and have in fact performed the feat of identifying that substance with the body of the dominant beast, something the Church has never succeeded in doing.

Blinded by the surface of their words, the Churchmen fail to notice that Creation and Machine mean the same thing, that both presuppose a Maker, an Artificer. They fail to notice that the Illuminists are more consistent monotheists than the Catholics ever were. They fail to notice that Newton’s Cosmic Mathematician, the Great Artificer who sets the vast clocks in motion on mathematical-physical principles accessible to Newton’s mathematical-physical principles accessible to Newton’s mathematical-mechanical mind, is none other than Lugalzaggizi the King of Kings as well as Optimus Maximus the god of armored legions.

Rather than hailing the rise of the Messiah of the Last Days and thereby placing themselves in the beast’s brightly lit cockpit, the langorous Catholics let themselves fall into the beast’s shadow, and Catholicism, the gate and cradle of the Enlightenment, is henceforth known as obscurantism.

Some of the Protestant sects try to grab the posts so narrow-mindedly bypassed by the Church, but they try too late, for the Illuminists, locked out by the Christians, in turn lock out the Christians.

The traditions as well as the personal leanings of the Illuminists predispose them to prefer the Vicarate of Christ, but being rejected, they subject themselves to the Vicarate of Satan, although rarely in such explicit terms. Only some poets among the Businessmen actually go so far as to identify Leviathan with Satan or Mammon, and only the most Illuminati of Masons explicitly align themselves with the fire of darkness, Ahriman’s, against the fire of light, Ahura Mazda’s.

Most Businessmen confine their thoughts to the sums in their ledgers and leave Metaphysics to the Eggheads. Nevertheless they all bask in the light shed over them by the Illuminists. Affairs can now be consummated which much less perfidy than was needed at the time of Christ’s Vicarate. It is no longer necessary to clothe the continual Leviathanic cheating, gouging and killing in a mantle borrowed from an anti-Leviathanic movement.

Those who wear the mantle of Ahriman or Mammon need not pay lip-service to apostolic piety, charity or poverty nor, for that matter, to simple honesty, respect for humanity. Nor need they fear, as Churchmen forever feared, that their own doctrines will turn against them when radicals discover the initial locus and intent of the doctrines, since no part of Ahriman or Mammon can be of service to radicals.

Henceforth radicalism will be external to the beast; radicals will all be outside agitators.

The Illuminati align themselves totally with the beast in an all-out war against all remaining outsiders.

The fact that there are still outsiders introduces a certain dualism into an otherwise consistent monism, but this dualism is not disturbing. The existence of the outsiders is denied while the outsiders themselves are exterminated. The monism is self-confirming. Everything is artifice, and whatever is not will soon be artifice. There is nothing outside but raw materials ready and waiting to be processed and transformed into Leviathanic excrement, the substance of the universe. Some raw materials resist the transformation more than others, but none can withstand the inexorable March of Progress.

The Enlightened have boundless confidence in their machine. Their monism is not a description but a prescription, a program, a military strategy, and it is no accident that so many of the Presidents of the machine’s American segment are military heroes. Before resisting materials can be processed in the labor camps, they have to be mined, harvested or otherwise separated from their contexts, and this breaking and separating is the special task of Leviathan’s armies. The Progress of the machine is first of all an unrelenting war against everyone and everything that is not a machine.

The boundless confidence of the Enlightened is epitomized in the Supply-and-Demand diagrams of Leviathan’s Economists. These diagrams, geometric depictions of interconnected see-saws with flashing lights and buzzing indicators, are a moron’s Paradise. So long as suppliers keep one eye on the diminishing supply of an object and the other on the increasing demand for it, they are sure to get a rise out of their Savings. In other words, the gadget really does do what it was made to do.

The world, unfortunately for the Economists, does not behave in conformity to their diagrams, and the commercial beast’s actual performance in the world does not warrant the confidence of the Enlightened. The March of Progress, which is Leviathan’s name for its war against resisting humanity and nature, is not a war figuratively but in fact. This war is not waged with see-saws or buzzing indicators, but with high-powered explosives and armies of trained murderers. This war is a long sequence of victories, but the victories are Pyrrhic. The reader may remember Pyrrhus as the ancient Albanian militarist who marched directly, from victory to victory, to his doom.

In order to reduce the world to see-saws and flashing lights, Leviathan must first render the world amenable to such a reduction, it must first transform raw materials into commodities and human beings into zeks who harvest, process and circulate commodities. This reduction of nature and people is not realized by Economists but by lynch mobs, militias and armies, namely by Leviathan’s police.

No natural catastrophe, no previous Leviathan destroyed human communities as well as their environments on such a scale. Lush forests and prairies are reduced to plowed fields. Entire populations of animals, sometimes who species, are exterminated. Human communities are gunned down and broken up, their last remnants deported to concentration camps.

Feathers, implements, and sometimes even stuff exemplars of the exterminated populations are displayed in museums as trophies of the victors. Trophy-hunters, called Archeologists, unearth the cemeteries of the extinguished communities so as to place even pipes and arrows of those who lived in Dream Time on display in the showcases of the victors.

The consumed unrenewable materials are replaced by synthetics. The exterminated human beings are replaced by zeks, by human beings, by human beings amenable to labor-camp existence.

Since even the best of zeks are not altogether amenable to the self-repression required by efficient labor camps, they too are replaced with synthetics, by machines, namely by things made of Leviathan’s own substance.

By undergoing what will be called Industrial and Technological Revolutions, the Great Artifice breaches all walls, storms victoriously through every natural and human barrier, increasing its velocity at every turn. But by the time the beast really gets going like a winged rodent out of Inferno, its own soothsayers will be saying an object approaches the speed of light loses its body and turns to smoke. Such object’s victories are, in the long run Pyrrhic.

* * *

The Beast’s victories are Pyrrhic in the short run as well.

The human communities that are decimated by plague and fire, their remnants shattered into splinters, deported and jailed, their last remains displayed as trophies, are not in fact defeated, they are never reduced to labor gangs.

Furthermore, the ghosts of those communities, still unreduced, install themselves in corners and closets of the synthetic beast and make their presence known with an interminable hiss or howl that perpetually rattles the unhappy inmates.

Neither plague nor fire nor gunpowder can suppress the ghostly look, the phantom glance that sees the innards as a labor camp and the inmates as zeks. Recoiling from the image reflected by the ghost-mirror, an image of a less than pardisial Today, the unhappy inmates go on hurling themselves toward the happy Tommorrow. Having arrived in America, they rush toward the next America. Already on the frontier, they stomp over each other to be the first Pioneers on the new frontier. And at every frontier the same jarring his, the same inimical howl and the same knowing glance goes on rattling them.

Contrary to the bedtime stories told by the rattled to their apprehensive children, free people simply do not line up at the recruiting posts of factories to apply for jobs. On this northern continent alone, the prospect of the frugal and productive life is greeted by every form of resistance known in Eurasia since the days of the Sumerians.

The surest way to protect oneself from the invading beast’s embrace, at least in the short run, is to withdraw beyond the beast’s reach. This is the resort of the countless human beings who migrate from oceanshores, woodlands, lakes and river valleys to this continent’s Plains.

These Plains, this vast refuge teeming with living beings, this pastureland for herds of numberless buffalo, limitless to the human eye, is nevertheless bounded, protected, isolated from the monster beyond. It is separated from the east by mountains, thick forests and the Long River, from the south by an impassable desert, from the west by impenetrable mountains, from the north by perpetual ice. Here refugees from decimated communities recover their interrupted rhythms, resume their dances, reenact their myths, reconstitute their music. They avail themselves of a European import that is not a synthetic, not a product of industry, but a living being and a friend, even a cousin, namely the horse. People who formerly paddled canoes, planted corn and sheltered in bark lodges arrive on horseback at councilfires surrounded by circles of buffalo-skin lodges. They are the world’s last free human beings.

Those who cannot, despite the ravages, exile themselves from their places of birth, the places where their ancestors lie, have no choice but to confront the invaders. Capitulators, namely applicants for jobs, are rare, so rare that invading Pioneers consider it axiomatic that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

The resistance is fierce and long. It begins when Caribs and Arawaks turn their weapons against the first guests, and it does not end when Guatemoc and the last pain-racked, plague decimated Aztecs fail to retake Tenochtitlan from Cortez and his band.

The resistance goes on for sixteen generatiosn, four Leviathanic centuries during which the beast’s entrails are a perpetually armed camp and the inmates’ first Business is war.

Trophy cases will be stuffed with presumed weapons and portraits of Wilderness Heroes who dared stand in the way of inevitable Progress. The sad Guatemoc’s successors are proof of the invader’s prowess, and the sole proof. The greater the courage of the Wild Conspirator, the greater the feat of the Civilized Conqueror. The proportions of the real events are stood on their heads by the trophy collections which act on viewers like an inverting mirrors. Gigantic tusks and antlers of fabulous beasts recapitulate the fable of little civilized David pitting his modest strength against bullying Goliath.

Armed resistance coordinated by a military strongman and a general staff is a last resort as old as the Guti federation against expanding Sumerians.

Contrary to the Goliath fable, this continent’s strongmen, called Chiefs by the invaders, tend to be average or small in stature, large in vision; their strength is not in their limbs but in their speech.

Unlike the Guti and the Taborites, this continent’s resisters do not end up being encased by their own proto-Leviathanic military organizations. The various federations and alliances are temporary and they remain temporary; their continuity depends on their renewal at every council. If victory depends on the resisters’ becoming like the invaders, the resisters renounce victory and they disband, undefeated.

The armed resistance undertaken by the continent’s free human beings ties up Progress at every step of its March. The first Englishmen who plant a Virginia on the continent’s outer banks and thing their extremely friendly hosts would love to serve the English permanently are quickly disabused of their great expectations.

The friendly Wingina changes his clothes as well as his name and turns into a veritable Guatemoc under the disabused invaders’ very noses. Wingina and Pemisapan, unlike the Aztec, is accompanied by strong and healthy warriors, not by prostrate Smallpox victims, and the first Virginia, unlike New Spain, is reduced to a Lost Colony.

The English name their Nemesis a Conspirator, and they will give the same name to every warrior who successfully resists their incursion. The English reserve names like Patriot or Freedom Fighter for themselves, even though they are the ones conspiring to take the land and enslave its inhabitants, while the resisters are defending homelands and freedoms. As hypocrites and prevaricators, the Protestant English do not differ from the Papists they consider hypocrites and prevaricators.

French Catholics, not surprisingly, speak of a Conspiracy of Foxes when people of the Great Lakes federate to stop the expansion of New France into their forests and waterways. After almost two generations of war, the Foxes, decimated but still undefeated, disband rather than letting themselves become perpetual war machines in order to continue to confront the infernally persistent invaders. But the French war machine is exhausted by its war with the Foxes, and New France falls prey to the coastal English.

The English in turn try to introduce the amenities of Civilization to the transmontane forests, river valleys and lakes, and are greeted by “conspiracies” even more tenacious than those confronted by their predecessors. The Spaniards who confront Tupac Amaru and a reconstituted Inca stronghold in the Andes do not face the armed resistance that greets the invading English.

The fact that the continent is not empty and that its inhabitants have not been waiting to be Civilized is etched on English memory by a sequence of unprecedented military defeats.

The English are not greeted as liberators from a French yoke by the independent peoples of the Great Lakes.

The Potawatomi and all their cousins federate against the Scalpers, as the English are called by Great Lakes people who have not yet learned this practice. The federation’s first major encounter with the British is known as Braddock’s Defeat, one of the greatest reversals experienced by a European army in the New World.

English land speculators and fur traders nevertheless persist in claiming their God-given right to the woodlands, valleys and lakes, and find themselves face to face with a resistance the likes of which they haven’t yet seen.

All the varied peoples of the woodlands, lakes and valleys, as well as survivors from the invaded coastal lands, peoples of different ways and mutually unintelligible tongues, are united in a single federation and determined to drive the invaders back to the Ocean.

The federated warriors destroy all but two of the numerous British forts and military posts west of the mountains. The warriors fail at the Famous Fort Pitt because the fort’s commander, under orders from the British general, poisons the besiegers with Smallpox. And the warriors fail at the famous Fort Detroit because its siege would involve a loss of life perfectly acceptable to European militarists but totally unacceptable to this continent’s “warlike tribes,” as the English will persist in calling them.

His-storians will dub this episode “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” adding another Goliath to their catalogue of monsters of the Wilderness, one that was too formidable even for the wily and wiry English David.

Yet the real Pontiac is a man of small stature remarkable as an orator but not as a killer, a man who seems to be responsible mainly for the decision not to risk the lives of brothers, cousins and nephews in a capture of Fort Detroit.

The real “conspirators” are numerous seers, some from the invaded coastal lands, who remember, and remind their kin, that their ancestors lived happily without guns, rum, cloth, or invaders from Europe.

The British are so thoroughly thrashed that, despite their retention of the two forts, they capitulate to the federated warriors, they promise to stay out of the lands west of the mountains.

The resisters disband. Their cultures do not encompass the possibility that solemn promises can be simple lies; if someone told them of the prevarications that stand out as the great moments of His-story, they wouldn’t believe it.

Some of the British, the Fur Interests, actually pretend to live up to their promise with the so-called Quebec Act prohibiting incursions over the mountains.

But the coastal British, most of whom are involved with the Land Interests, call the Quebec Act intolerable, declare themselves independent, and march over the mountains with guns and cannons.

The landgrabbers, henceforth known as the Americans, announce themselves to the world as Revolutionaries, as Democrats, as everything under the sun except greedy invaders and unscrupulous scalpers.

But to the Potawatomi and their Great Lakes cousins, honest George Washington and his fellow speculators in expropriated lands are nothing but greedy invaders and unscrupulous scalpers. The never-defeated peoples of the lakes and inland valleys reconstitute their federation and greet the Democratic Americans as they are greeted the Royalist British.

St. Clair and Harmar are not merely the names of two of Washington’s generals. They are names that stand out in American annals the same way Braddock does in British, names of outstanding military reversals, of undisguisable defeat.

In the face of such a foe, the resisters say Yea to life and No to Leviathan by disbanding rather than becoming comparable killing machines. Wayne’s famous victory at an invaded field of allen trees is achieved against the few remaining warriors who do not disperse because they have no homes to which to return.

The Americans eventually devise a strategy worthy of their enterprising spirit, a strategy of confidence. Cudgel in one hand and treaty in the other, they promise to advance no further, and whenever they get a few warriors to believe their promise, they advance.

The most notorious practitioner of this unspeakably hypocritical “gamesmanship” is a wily opportunist called Lewis Cass. This Cass is himself one of the land agents who sell parcels of invaded lands to settlers.

Title in hand, the pioneering settlers realize their dream of dominion by denuding the land of all its tress and animals. Lush woodlands teeming with life are transformed into the desolate fields known as cash-crop farms. The inhabitants of the woodlands are deprived of refuge as well as food. And now the notorious Cass, raised to the post of President Jackson’s Secretary of War, unleashes the American army against the remaining original inhabitants.

At this point, namely when the very environment is rendered uninhabitable to free human beings, when the undefeated resisters are literally undermined, the Americans no longer bother to cover up their genocide. The American program is straightforwardly named an “Indian Removal Bill,” explicitly and proudly genocidal.

Entire populations, including the Potawatomi, are uprooted from their ancestral homes as if they were weeds. Mass deportations that diminish the atrocities of ancient Assyrians are perpetrated by a club of Enlightened confidence men.

And the deportations themselves are yet another way of killing the foe without having to confront him in battle. The deportees, whose wellbeing along the route is entrusted to the emotionally obtuse and predictably corrupt American Army, die on route of starvation and disease because the enterprising military con men profitably sell the food and supplies intended for their charges to pioneering settlers along the routes to the concentration camps.

Settlers with titles rush to devastate the evacuated areas and to raise, on former councilgrounds, schoolhouses where the settlers’ children are taught to recite “Why I’m proud to be an American.”

The murderous invaders now come face to face with the continent’s last free human beings, with those who found refuge from the Leviathan on the endless Plains. Vast military campaigns supplemented by every trick in the American book fail to defeat the resisters. Lying promises are by now of no avail; the people of the plains know Americans are consummate liars.

Another atrocity that boggles the imagination is perpetrated by the agents of Reason and Progress. The world’s population of Bison buffalo is exterminated with a malice byond human comprehension in order to deprive the Plains people of their food and shelter. As destroyers of the very conditions of life, the Americans have no predecessors. An apex of mindless irrationality, this atrocity does not even have a name; no known beasts are capable of it. It is the deed of a mindless and lifeless synthetic.

Yet even after they are deprived of the sources of food and shelter, the emaciated Plains people go on resisting, and they still resist after they are deported to concentration camps.

The last resisters throw themselves into a dance, a Ghost Dance. The shared music, the rhythmic motions revive the emaciated resisters, raise them out of the concentration camp, transport them out of Leviathanic Time, beyond His-story. The dancing Plains people borrow from the Shakers and other Europeans who still retain elements of the European heritage of withdrawal. They dream of a Spirit who will guide them out of the monster’s entrails, a Spirit who will sweep away the invaders and revive the buffalo herds. Never before trapped inside the entrails of a Leviathan, this continent’s free people have no withdrawal heritage of their own; they’ve never before needed to withdraw; they were free outsiders. Disarmed, jailed and starved, they recapitulate the main themes of the anti-Roman crisis cult, the very cult which is still invoked by the American jailers to justify the genocide.

* * *

The last communities do a ghost dance, and the ghosts of the last communities will continue to dance within the entrails of the artificial beast. The council-fires of the never-defeated communities are not extinguished by the genocidal invaders, just as the light of Ahura Mazda was not extinguished by rulers who claimed it shone on them. The fire is eclipsed by something dark, but it continues to burn, and its flames shoot out where they are least expected.

Just as Ahura Mazda’s flame was carried to Albi in southern France by Bogomils and their western successors, the flames kept alive by this continent’s communities are carried to the darkest corners of Europe and America.

A Montaigne experiences a revelation when he sees that the people Europeans call Savages possess realms Europeans have lost. A Rousseau experiences a vision when he pushes obfuscating facts aside and sees that the process called Civilization has not been the boon his Enlightened contemporaries claim it to be but rather the bane that explains the Europeans’ loss. Blake, Melville and Thoreau sing these revelations to their school-stunted contemporaries, and despite an increasingly total schooling apparatus and an ever more ubiquitous press, the grandchildren of irredeemably Leviathanized zeks begin to stir with rhythms that come from outside their synthetic environment.

The fire that was to burn down the last beast of the Apocalypse, a fire kept alive by Free Spirits, Adamites, Ranters and rebelling zeks and serfs, is forgotten but not extinguished. Its flames are relit with kindling that comes from council fires of Cheyenne, Dakota, Potawatomi communities.

But the Leviathanic inversion of this fire by the next Church is already announced.

No less a personage than the Enlightened scientific economist Marx lodges Morgan’s version of an Iroquois community in the basement of his revolutionary edifice. The sharing ways of the Iroquois, dubbed Primitive Communism, linger in the basement of this edifice while laboring humanity passes upward, through slavery, serfdom and wage labor, to Fully Developed Communism.

The four beasts of Daniel as well as the three ages of Joachim di Fiore are processed for their upward passage by Humanity’s Productive Forces. Each stage is a Mode of Production. The context is a labor camp, and the revolutionary subjects are His-story’s objects, namely zeks, called Proletarians.

The Eschaton of this Apocalypse is still a labor camp animated by concentrated zeks, but it can be distinguished from all previous camps by the portentous fact that the Archons of the post-revolutionary polity are all members of the Paradisial Party. The eschatological police bully, incarcerate and kill by the grace of Ahura Mazda, just like ancient Cyrus. The repressors wear the free and sharing ways of the Iroquois as badges and armbands.

A farcical replay of the Roman Church’s expropriation and inversion of the anti-Roman crisis cult, the Revolutionary Church nevertheless succeeds in channeling numerous potential rebels into neo-Franciscan Orders, Leviathanic dead ends which, like the earlier Orders, become the vanguard of the repression. It becomes the main project of the stunted rebels to succeed where Businessmen failed, to destroy what human communities still remain, to eradicate the last traces of what Marx called Primitive Communism, so as to send all humanity scurrying up the escalator, past His-story’s concentration camps, the one ruled by the General Secretary of the Paradisial Party, a ruler who calls himself The Proletariat.

Revolutionary archons compete with Enlightenment archons in rending the Biosphere, turning the world into a place where free human beings can neither stand nor lie nor sit.

The last relics of the world’s communities are safely lodged in trophy cases which, their guards insist, contain all there is to know about communities.

The beast now turns on the zeks in its entrails, for they too, however stunted they may be, still posses what Quakers call an “inner light,” and any such light is anathema to Leviathan, whose element is the dark, the synthetic. Having eliminated the communities of outsiders, the Technological Wonder proceeds to generate outsiders inside its own entrails, to expunge human zeks and replace them with machines, with things made of its own substance.

This bizarre last act surprises only those who still take Leviathan at its word and think it rational. Its rationality is as artificial as its love of nature and its devotion to humanity. The beast that so cruelly and bloodily swallowed humanity so as to turn people into appendages of tools now shoves the appendages aside and generates pockets of human beings superfluous to its further progress.

The new outsiders are not radicals. They are people who happened to animate springs and gears which can now be automated, namely artificialized. The outsider may be scions od the most royalist zeks or managers, like the French Canadians who actually found kinship and community although they, unlike many of their contemporaries, didn’t know they wanted these gifts.

The displaced zeks languish, and it is not yet known if the Quakers are right, if the new outsiders do indeed still have an “inner light,” namely an ability to reconstitute lost rhythms, to recover music, to regenerate human cultures.

It is also not known if the technological detritus that crowds and poisons the world leaves human beings any room to dance.

What is known is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time in His-story, is decomposing.

From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself. Being above all else a war engine, the beast is most likely to perish once and for all in a cataclysmic suicidal war, in which cas Ahriman would permanently extinguish the light of Ahura Mazda.

People waste their lives when they plead with Ahriman to desist from extinguishing the light, for such a deed would be Ahriman’s final triumph over Ahura Mazda, and the pleaders might learn too late that they are the ones who put the idea into the monster’s head.

Leviathan is turning into Narcissus, admiring its own synthetic image in its own synthetic pond, enraptured by its spectacle of itself.

It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty polis.

In ancient Anatolia people danced on the earth-covered ruins of the Hittite Leviathan and built their lodges with stones which contained the records of the vanished empire’s great deeds.

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its His-story as All but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.




Detroit, March 1983

take a deep breath and start from the beginning

I haven't been this righteously furious since i broke my foot at that pacifist's impotency, so I'm gonna tell you all about it.

I need cash for when I leave Mountain Gardens, so there's a neighbor who I hired myself out to this weekend. He's obsessed with breeding variegated-leafed comfreys according to the teachings of Luther Burbank. I thought this was a harmless quirk, and a bit intriguing, because comfrey is such a non-descript plant to look at, yet has an ancient history of use for injuries.

My meditation for the day was "everyone is beautiful", so even though the guy drives away all his interns by working 'em so hard, I focused on his beauty. It wasn't too terribly tough of work, 'cept for he was fussy 'bout where on the bare soil you stepped. Basically I was digging it, until...

He brought up snakes.

Now, I'm well aware of some of the discripancies between my cosmology and those of Dominionist christians. I went to the local Baptist church last week so people'd recognize my face and pick me up when I hitchhike, and they said that their god destroyed two ancient cities with fire and brimstone because the people there were queer. That frustrated me, made me go tsk tsk, but the snake thing...


When I was in North Carolina, which I never blogged too much about, people said that they killed all snakes on site, ostensibly because of their dominant paradigm roll in mythology, (snake gets orders from Satan to tempt Eve, Eve tempts Adam, snakes and women get blamed for posterity). I got frustrated and didn't want to eat at the same table with those "Serpent Slayers". Since I was trying to get into the libratory aspects of these people's mindset, I held my tounge and just got frustrated. But this time...

I pick a comfrey outta the ground, and there's a huge orange salamander underneath it. I figure it must be a fishing lure, it's so big, immobile and cool lookin. The Gardener took it gingerly from me, and said something to the effect that "These (salamanders) and turtles and frogs are nice. But snakes are bad. I kill 'em."

I just about flew off the handle. "I s'pose you grew up in a Church where they said snakes are evil." "Pretty much."

I grew up at a Waldorf School, and going to Sunday School. I had some of the same snake/devil/woman/evil stuff put in my psyche early on, but it was never really shoved down there. And from hanging out with some entheogen-partaking, occult-oriented synchronicity manipulators, I know that that's not the full story, nor even the part of the story that an anarchist should be synthesizing.


Snakes are good in a lot of cosmologies. From reading AH, AL! I know that some of the resistance put up by real human communities has used lots of the same language as the Enemy, as the empire builders. For instance, some Gnositcs take the Garden of Eden story (the same story that's being enacted here at MG) and put Lucifer as a bringer of Light, with the snake as a messanger, sort of like Prometheus. The Pachakuti Mesa folks that I hung out with last year say that Mother Earth is connected in some way to snakes, and once again that they are bringers of wisdom. I know some of the Hindu sorcerers of our day make use of some sort of "kundalini" snake magic, associated with the opening of all the chakras and divine light seaping directly into your head. The Celts may have had some similar thoughts, according to my girl DJ Conway- sometimes, when a Celtic hero got pumped up, their head burst into flame like their kundalini force was erupting.

Since I'm working on the premise that humanity needs to realize and actualize all the inspiration and light and wisdom it can, and since the snakes have been our symbolical allies, AND SO WHEN THIS GUY SAID HE WAS KILLING SNAKES I WAS PISSED.

We walked over to this huge apple tree in the middle of his garden, and The Gardener basically said "If I had my way we'd cut this thing down." I accused him of hating apple trees and snakes, and he said the fruit was bad. I sollemnly sware that if I ever encounter someone about to kill a wild snake in a habitat it won't reduce to weeds, I'm going to say "Wait, there's another snake and it's about to strike! Hold still while I get it." Then I'll kick that person square in the crotch.

Northerner by Birth, Southerner by the Grace of Ahura Mazda

so all kinds of fun has been going down at Mountain Gardens, but now is not the time to tell. i'm about to eat dinner, and with a few dinky solar panels, there's not enough juice to spend much time on the computer.

AH, AL! will all be up soon. i'm going to ask someone who knew Fredy Perlman to write an introduction. also, when i get to a comp where i can freely type, the blog posts will roll out of me like a mighty mountain stream. stay tuned.

wooo, yeah, i'm finally here

so Mountain Gardens. yeah. not Cincinnati.

wake up at quarter to 8, cook breakfast over a rocket stove, and then work/play for the rest of the day. all to a soundtrack of small critters. if it's not the squirrels rustling so noisily through the leaves that i can hear them across the holler, or the owls hooting from farther up the mountain in the national forest, it's the worms and mice all around me. sometimes the sound of rain or snow hitting the tin roof, or tumultuous gusts of wind working it's way into every crevice on the three acres. either way, i don't regret not ponying up for an MP3 player.

i'm starting seeds for my own garden. there will be goji berries, several strands of native tobacco and other smokables. st. john's wort, should a spat of inclement weather overstay its welcome with me. and of course, the Jersey walking stick cabbage i posted about here.

most of the hillside terraces that you see as pictures on the Mountain Gardens website were originally trenches dug to bury human excrement, with the soil placed on the downhill side and the rocks piled up to make a retaining wall, possibly with the help of some stakes and planks or branches. this strikes me as a brilliant example of stacking functions, especially considering we use the ash from our cook fires as the drying agent in the composting toilet. and, it working so well and supporting so much life, it starts to feel sacred and beautiful. every day when i wake up and head out the door, i walk through fairy land.

bah. i've only been here a few days and i'm waxing poetic. it was hard to get to a spot to blog. had to hitchhike for 15 or 20 miles, and ride on the back of my friends bike/jog the other 5. but it's worth it to be able to share a good story.

speaking of good stories, i still have 30 pages of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! to type up. it would be lovely if someone else wanted to take that on, but i'll get it up by the middle of May, anyway. email me if your up to it.

if you're already writing letters, like maybe to some prisoners or your homeless godmother in the Maldives, think about dropping me a line. (i'll remember you better on your birthday.) my address is

546 Shuford Creek Rd.
Burnsville, NC 2874

werebrock out

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! Chapter 23 (the Last Leviathan, invasion of Great Lakes, Renegades, Merry Mount, Puritans/Quakers, gift/theft)

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 further existence.

We've seen that earlier Leviathans were always in a state of decomposition. When one decompsed, others swallowed its remains. But when there are no others, when Leviathan is One, the tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, is almost at an end.

Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World, called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is Leviathan's end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the cadences of a long-forgtten music or to the eternal silence of death without a morrow.

It will be said of the Europeans who carry the beast to the world's last places of refuge and who thereby put a term on the beast's existence that they know not what they do. Their ignorance of themselves, of others and of Earth is proverbial, but it does not altogether account for their behavior. The Europeans are zeks, administrative zeks and menial zeks, children and grandchildren of zeks. If some of them remember ancestors who were no zeks, none of them can imagine the world of those ancestors, a world that was not a labor camp, and what they cannot imagine they cannot see, even while looking at it. In this sense they are ignorant. But they know that they are incomplete, that something inside them is stunted or dead, and they resent the slightest suggestion that others possess what they lack. The resentment makes them strike fiercely at any who pretend to be more, for Europeans are great equalizers--Democrats thay will call themselves--and they are determined to universalize their own condition. In this sense they are not ignorant for they know perfectly well what they do and also why.

The last Leviathan's zeks are not conscripts but volunteers. They are not an altogether new phenomenon. Volunteer zeks existed in earlier Leviathans, but only on the margins or at the interstices where Roman Equites made themselves indispensable to their beast's continued functioning. The volunteer zeks of expanding Europe are not on the margins but constitute the beast's body as well as its head.

Tasks imposed by force on earlier zeks are taken up as Callings by the volunteers. With a gun and powder, the successor of a conscript serving military corvee is a virtual Nero. The killing power of his gunpowder is equal to the Emperor's. And with a continent emptying before his every advance, the descendant of serfs faces the prospect of becoming a Habsburg, an Emperor with uncontested dominion over a realm of dead souls.

America is a land of promise for the self-conscripted zeks who help turn it into an empty continent.

The bonds of servitude are not cut or even weakened, but these bonds undergo a subtle transformation which renders them invisible to the pioneering zek. Tithes and dues are no longer paid to the visible and odious agents of parish and manor. The dues become costs which are paid at exchanges or markets, and at such markets what counts is not the buyer's blood or station but only his money. At such markets, all of which are local manifestations of an interconnected world market, every buyer's coin is equal to the Emperor's, so that every buyer is not only the Emperor's equal but is also just as free.

For the sake of such freedom, tasks considered onerous by serfs are self-imposed by the volunteer zeks. The clearing of stony or forested land, the digging and burrowing, the lifting and the hauling are all taken up with unprecedented conviction.

If after all the sweat and toil the emancipated zek finds himself in debt to sellers and lenders, his plight is no worse than the Emperor's. If lenders drive him to ruin, he can move further west, join with pioneers emptying new lands of promise, and renew his freedom.

The volunteer zek does not resent the sellers who ruined him, for he is himself one of them. He does resent fellow-zeks who relegate their most onerous tasks to imported slaves, but he does not feel threatened by them for he knows that the slaves labor without conviction, for which he dispises them. He resents even more those whom he calls Renegades, namely fellow zeks who make themselves at home in communities of the continents's survivors. He resents the Renegades not only because they are as lazy as the slave-owners, but because they dispense with the amenities that brand them as Human (he means Civilized).

His bitterest passion is reserved for the decimated communities in which the Renegades find refuge. The beings in those communities are not human to him. They are Cannibals. They will also be called Savages, Primitives, Natives, always with the same meaning. The pioneering zek spends his living days doing god's calling, sweating and laboring, frustrated by stubborn Earth, beset by lenders. Yet the good-for-nothings, the Cannibals, pretend that food simply offers itself to them on its own, they hunt and fish like Nabobs or ancient noblemen, they spend their days as well as their nights howling and jumping like demented wolves.

Were the pioneer to admit their humanity, however briefly, however grudgingly, his innards would explode, his armor melt, his mask fall, for he would in that flash of light see himself as a zek, his freedom as self-enslavement, his market-Civilization as a forced-labor camp. The devil would try to tempt him to become a Renegade and, irony of ironies, he would fall, unlike Eve, out of blessed labor into cursed Eden.

Until Enlighteners provide him with a new language for the same enterprise, the pioneer's humanity hangs on his exorcism of the devil, on his removal of the Tempter from his path. The pioneer is self-defined as a converter of heathen, a civilizer of the wilderness. Translated into meaningful language, the pioneer is self-defined as a zek committed to the extermination of the world's free beings.

* * *

The old language, the language of salvation and damnation, of sin and the fall, becomes increasingly archaic in the land of endless frontiers, and it is more often an obstacle than a guide to enterprising invaders. Spanish- and French-speaking marauders are more committed to the old language than English-speaking ones, and the consequences are fatal for the archaic-minded.

The Spanish invaders of the southlands save all the gold and all the souls they can reach, damn the rest, and then freeze, literally freeze, stand still on a thin ledge, afraid of falling into the abyss in front or the one behind them. While Catholicism in Europe shrinks from attacks by Reformers and Enlighteners, priests multiply and churches rise in Spanish America, where congregations of the continent's last survivors pay their respects to emaciated Toltec, Maya and Inca deities converted into Catholic saints. Becoming ever more marginal to the world-Leviathan's great accomplishments, the descendants of the Conquistadores themselves become Natives, namely objects of plunder, for enterprising invaders who speak a newer language.

French invaders of the northlands fare even less well than the Spaniards.

French priests and treasure-seekers sail up the river through which the Great Lakes leave the land, a river they name Saint Lawrence. The French "discoverer" of the Saint Lawrence discovers Basque and Biscayan fishermen who give him a tour of the river's mouth and environs and introduce him to the river's permanent and hospitable inhabitants. The armored uninvited guests kidnap several of their hosts, leave Smallpox and Plague-infested rats among the rest, and return home with less than the expected gold from a northern Tenochtitlan.

Disappointed by their initial haul, French-speaking scavengers do not return in mass until three generations later, and on this voyage they find the treasure they seek. They find gold as well as souls.

The gold they find is not mineral but animal gold: marten, muskrat and beaver gold. They find a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fur coats, and the further up the river they sail, the more coats they find.

The coats were once winter garments of the numerous inhabitants whose villages dotted both sides of the river now called Saint Lawrence. The village sites are still visible, but the inhabitants have vanished, inexplicably.

The disappearance of the inhabitants is inexplicable only in the annals of the invaders' scribes. The spreading of plagues is neither honorable nor brave in the eyes of the descendants of Franks, nor is such a deed Christian in the eyes of the French priests. Furthermore, French theologians are not anxious to weigh the sin of infestation against the sin of cannibalism, nor are French inquisitors anxious to identify the perpetrators of one or the other sin. French mirrors are not made for such uses.

The French see large communities shrink before their very eyes, and still their annalists make no sound; they tiptoe through the depopulated villages as if they were walking on eggs. The annalists even invent European-style wars between fictitious "tribes" to explain away the large empty villages.

The French cannot without embarrassment broadcast the sources of their windfall, for the greatness of their accomplishment would diminish.

The seemingly inexhaustible fur coats come from three generations of Plague-victims.

The epidemics themselves were not all brought by the French Dis-coverers of the Saint Lawrence. Some of the diseases undoubtedly came with the Dis-coverers' Basque and Biscayan predecessors, others traveled northward from the coast, carried either by animals or by Dutch or English adventurers.

The Saint Lawrence French reap the Plague's harvest. The ships of the royal company of adventurers return home laden with fur coats which are sold to waiting hatters at windfall profits. Out of the skins of the dead animals that once protected the Plague-victims from the winter's cold rise cities, fortresses and missions.

While the skins travel toward hatters, French missionaries reap a harvest of souls. They go among kinless men, homeless women, orphaned children, among survivors of once-numerous communities.

The priests go to great efforts to learn the languages of the survivors, for they have an urgent message to impart: The Savior came among the displaced and disoriented and the poor in order to raise them out of their misery and turn them into subjects of King Louis' realm.

Adult cousins of the Potawatomi recognize Wiske under the missionary's black robe, but the children become French Catholics. Converted women find employment as fur dressers, converted men as hunters of new furs, but few of them become prosperous French Catholics because the overseas hatters continue to prefer the soft furs oiled by years of wear to the rough and unworkable new furs.

French America prospers, but not for long. The fur ships glut the European market and the windfall profits end. This is temporary. It recurs, but again only temporarily. The King orders several shiploads of furs burned, and the prices rise again.

A far greater disorder strikes French America. Young Frenchmen defect from the centers of Civilization. They become Renegades. Leviathan loses its hold on its human entrails. In the language of the frightened chroniclers, Civilized Frenchmen turn into Savages, yet no Savages become Civilized; even Catholic converts return to the Wilderness whenever the gates are left ajar.

The phenomenon is something like a counter-plague: the centers of Civilization become depopulated while the plague-decimated villages repopulate themselves with bearded adoptees. The question "Who would aband the amenities, etc." is answered by decisions and by acts which cannot be kept secret by the French court or clergy because the defection is so vast it causes a scandal. The answer is: everyone who can. Centuries later, the last descendants of Winnebago, Ottawa, Potawatomi and other peopels herded to concentration camps by President Jackson's armies will still retain the French names of the renegades.

This is not the first withdrawal of human beings from the entrails of Leviathan. I've mentioned many earlier instances of this phenomenon. Examples also exist in Spanish, English and Dutch America, some less and some more scandalous to the guardians of Civilization's gates.

What is almost unprecedented in these escapes to the pre-American world is that the refugees or Renegades actually become members of functioning communities. Those communities are fragmented remnants compared to what they once were, in Dream Time. But even in their decimated condition they give the adopted invaders a wealth of freedom, kinship and community not available to Europeans for a very long time. Descendants of French Renegades will turn up later as storytellers, healers, keepers of songs and arrangers of ceremonies, as upholders and defenders of their hosts' cultures.

The initial French Renegades are not closet-Adamites, Eden-seeking radicals. On the contrary, they are scions of French colonial Civilization, some are even sons of aristocrats. Their ability to compare the relative attractiveness of the two modes of existence comes to them as an unintended consequence of the organization of the fur trade. The Company dispatches travelers, voyageurs, to gather the fur coats of all villages accessible by water, for large quantities of fur cannot easily be transported overland. The voyagueurs travel singly or at most in twos, since the point is to return with a boatful of furs, not riders.

A single individual--sometimes even two--is free of the censorious pressure that represses a member of a group, the pressure to keep the armor tight and the mask from falling. Consequently the individual is able to respond to offered hospitality, friendship and love. And as soon as he responds, his stiffness starts to dissolve. He arrived as a scavenger. If his hosts offer to turn him into a kinsman, he will, slowly or quickly, realize that he can be more than a zek in a labor-camp.

French priests rail against the Renegades and threaten them with excommunication. French governors import the latest Paris fashions for the young ladies of Quebec and Montreal, and they send punitive expeditions against the Renegades, but members of the punitive expeditions also defect.

In fact, the governors’ only reliable soldiers are those who have just arrived from France, and New France defends itself from New England by giving large presents and larger promises to people who are still called Les Sauvages but are treated with ever-greater respect, for they are cousins now, kinsman, not figuratively but really.

The armies of New France are Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Wendat warriors, and these warriors, although European in their weapons, have their own strategies as well as their own aims. These strategies and aims probably do not encompass a reconstitution of the communities of Dream Time with help from plague-rimmune bearded kinsmen, but we will never know what they do encompass. The existence of French America is cut short by greedy English-speaking racists.

* * *

The English-speaking invaders who eventually swallow the entire northland do not allow themselves to fall into kinship relations with the continent’s former inhabitants. They, too, are scandalized by Renegades who walk out of their labor camps and never return to the life-style of zeks. But they are not merely scandalized. They raise impassable fences between themselves and the continent’s surviving inhabitants, fences which are forerunners of the electric barbed wire fences of our time.

These English Christians guide themselves with a terminology that comes to them, not from their Christianity, but from their practices of breeding sheep, horses and dogs. Terms like Mescegenation, Hybridization and Mongrelization become the guidelines for dehumanizations that have no precedent. Human beings are permanently branded, stigmatized, classified, in terms of their heredity, their so-called blood. No religious conversion, no services rendered, no dues paid can ever remove the stigma. The branded and all their progeny are marked for all eternity. In the face of such a barrier, English Renegades must be fortified by a determination and courage their French and Spanish counterparts do not need.

The invaders who set the tone of the whole English enterprise, the progressive spearheads of Leviathan, the Pioneers tout court, are the New Englanders who consider themselves purists or Puritans.

Next-door neighbors of the Saint Lawrence French, the New Englanders are beset by Renegades a few short seasons after their arrival. Alongside the purists who establish themselves at Plague-emptied Plymouth, non-purists establish themselves among the shoreland’s surviving inhabitants, at a place the Renegades call Mare Mount or Merry Mount.

The non-purists of Merry Mount let their eyes feast on the continent’s beauty and their ears to the villagers’ music. They let themselves be possessed by their hosts, with whom they dance around a maypole, a symbol of fertility. They let their masks and armors fall. And they laugh at the small-minded stiff-necked zeks who escaped from one labor-camp only to imprison themselves in another of their own making in a land inhospitable to labor camps.

The Puritans are not merely scandalized, they are driven to burning rage by the merry Renegades who expose the repressive fangs behind the purity. They dispatch a Puritan police led by the renowned murderer Miles Standish to raze Merry Mount to the Ground and to cut down the maypole, the symbol of fertility. They purify America of maypoles.

One of the survivors of the Puritan purge, a Thomas Morton, will continue to expose his victimizers with laughter in a satiric poem he will call the New England Canaan.

Puritans and their successors will speak much of Fate and Predestination and will think themselves as holders of Destiny’s interest-bearing certificates. But the path of these profiteers is paved with as many freakish quirks and cruel ironies as the paths of any of their Leviathanic predecessors.

I can only mention some of the grossest ironies. The Puritans are not, first of all, spiritual heirs of Catholic Crusaders who stormed the lands of Unbelievers. They are spiritual heirs of the Crusaders’ victims, heirs of Albigensians, Beguines and Beghards, of Wyclif and John Ball, of radical Lollards and insurgent peasants. Their burning rage does not come to them from Ahriman’s fire, the fire that consumes light in order to plunge the world into darkness, but from Ahura Mazda’s fire, the fire that expels darkness. Their project comes, not from the heritage of Leviathan’s builders and keepers, but from the heritage of withdrawers, of rebels against Leviathan. And their feat resides, not in the realization of this project, but in its complete inversion. This feat can be called great, for it surely has not equal since the day when the anti-Roman crisis cult emerged as Rome’s Church.

The inversion of Europe’s radical heritage is not all the work of the Puritans who plant themselves on the New World’s shores.

When Vikingized Europeans began to expropriate Jews and Muslims and occupy themselves with profits from trade and interests from moneylending, they incurred a loss which they could never quite compensate with their monetary gains. The Burghers lost Paradise, both in this life and in the afterlife. European noblemen could reach Paradise by killing infidels, European peasants by killing priests and noblemen, but the Burghers could reach nothing but more money. Having expropriated Muslims of their enterprises and ways but not of their merciful god, European merchants could not even look forward to the Earthly paradise promised by Allah.

Good Christians all, Europe’s usurers could not but suspect that they were Satan’s tools, sinners in this world, irremediably damned in the next. The bleakness of such reflections led most Burghers to confine their thoughts to the sums on their ledgers, and to leave thinking to clerics.

But some of the merchants were determined to find a substitute for the merciful Allah, so determined that they didn’t shrink from placing Mammon himself at Heaven’s gate. If a poor man could freely cross the heavenly threshold, surely a rich man could buy his way in.

The Swiss Burgher Calvin would even deny the poor free access to Paradise. Poverty, according to Calvin, confers no such privilege. The elect are chosen ahead of time, or rather out of Time, and the fortunes, or lack of fortunes, of sinful men affect their final destiny not a jot.

Calvin opens the gates of Paradise to merchants, but he gives them no tangible safe-conducts. The passports are issued by the Puritans, to themselves. And the passports of these Christians are, believe it or not, the very profits and interests from trade and usury.

The Puritans do not bend Calvin’s teachings, they do not read between the lines. The accuracy of their ledgers depends on their literal-mindedness. The Elite, the Damned, along with the rest of Creation are predestined. Signs of this predestination are in fact an open book, visible to anyone who can read them. Unmistakable signs of Salvation can also be seen, read, sensed. The Elite know themselves to be saved. Their savings in this world are the signs of their salvation in the next.

The profits and interests of the pure replace the miseries of the poor as passports to Heaven, investments in Paradise. The poor, with nothing to invest, are in fact excluded, predestined to damnation and poverty. And the impure, the profligates and libertines with all their pomp and circumstance, are ovciously out of the running from the start, they are Satan’s own brood. The gates of Heaven do not only open to Puritan merchants: they open to noone else.

Persecuted by the beast’s agents for their very righteousness, the Puritans withdraw from the beast just as the Israelites withdrew from Egypt. The analogy is not mine but theirs. It is they who find their predecessors in the armored Moses and the sons of Levi. The Puritans withdraw from the fleshpots of Egypt and sail to the Promised Land, which they name Canaan.

Others, among them English radicals, French Beghards, Moravian Taborites and Adamites, dreamt of just such a promised land, of just such an earthly Paradise complete with communities of human beings who knew how to enjoy and celebrate the gorgeous bounty surrounding them.

But to the pure English Israelites who actually reach the Promised Land, the promise is neither in the land nor in its surviving communities, but in the Puritans themselves, irrevocably, irredmediably and predeterminedly in themselves, and nothing they see, hear or touch can budge the rock of Puritan knowledge.

The Puritans are the first Americans, and henceforth wherever Manifest Destiny takes them, there is America, for it is not a place but a condition, a manifestation of the self-recognized predetermined Elect. The Puritans call it Canaan, and with very good reasons. Canaan is indeed the land of promise. What it promises to the Israelites is

dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The English Israelites have come to denude the land of promise. Their intent is to make deserts bloom, for they are themselves the deserts.

The actual inhabitants of the lush New Canaan are marked for extermination already before the Puritans meet them. For the English Israelites know that they

will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite…
And thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver
unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them…

Ill-equipped for their arrival in a Canaan not located between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent but in colder climes, the new Israelites do not refuse the gifts offered to them by people who remain hospitable after three painful generations of plague. The Puritans accept from their hosts the winter coats that will launch New England’s fur trade and they accept, as gifts, the forerunners of all-American sweet corn on the cob, Thanksgiving squash, Halloween pumpkin and Boston beans, free gifts which America’s food merchants will sell to the world.

To fulfill their destiny, the Puritans brace themselves for the attack, an attack they’ve known all along unavoidable, predetermined, since it is already consummated in the holiest of books. But they are embarrassed by all the gifts. They suppose that no Canaanite, Amorite or Hittite could have welcomed the first Israelites so generously, so disarmingly. Surely the Canaanites gave the Israelites a sign, a pretext, a provocation.

In the absence of any pretext, the Puritans have to invent one, and this is no problem for the pure. The New World’s inhabitants are not Puritans. Every one of their ways, and particularly their aversion to labor, marks them as Satan’s tools, as cursed heathen bound toward damnation. This is provocation enough for the first attack as well as all the later ones, it is provocation enough for total war against all the continent’s surviving inhabitants.

The first Canaanites to fall to these scourges of the Leviathanic god are seaboard cousins of the Great Lakes Potawatomi, called Pequots. The Puritans attack while the Pequots sleep. In the words of a participant in the massacre, one of the Elect sets powder on fire while another

Brought out a firebrand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire.
[Both fires] meeting in the centre of the fort [as the Puitan chooses to call the Pequot village], blazed most
terribly, and burnt all in the space of an hour. Many courageous fellows were unwilling to come out, and
fought most desparately through the palisades, so as they were scorched and burnt with
the very flame and were deprived of their arms…

The courage of those fellows will not be forgotten. The foe vanquished in this first American military victory will be painted as formidable, as a Goliath confronting David. Such stout, brave fellows can be kept in their place only by means of the sternest measures, such as the killing of women and children, unprecedented in the New World, introduced to this continent by God’s own Elect. The god of Israel, and of the new Israel,

hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most
terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their
parents. Sometimes the case alters, but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient
light from the word of God for our proceedings.

The Puritans do not dispute it now or later; they establish the precedent. Henceforth women and children perish as a matter of course.

Apologists for the Puritans will pretend, for purposes of military but not of economic explanation, that the Empty Continent teems with warlike tribes, all full of inhumanly courageous fellows.

Courageous they surely are, unflinchingly brave, sometimes stretching the limits of human endurance, none of which can be said of the rifle-armed incendiaries waiting to shoot enemies who are not completely burned.

David indeed! The story of this continent’s Goliaths is constructed out of a deliberate and malicious inversion of the term “warrior,” a term borrowed by the invaders from the people of this continent’s woodlands. Clashes comparable to the so-called wars of this continent’s warriors have been known in Eurasia as raids and feuds since the days of Sumerian military machines. Such raids and feuds required forms of bravery which were not needed by soldiers in Lugalzaggizi’s imperial army, and which become superfluous and even undesirable in the days of guns and powder.

By using the word “war” to cover the exploits of Braves as well as Puritans, apologists magnify the raids and feuds of the Braves while belittling the exploits of the Puritans, exploits which are already fully Modern wars of mass extermination, exploits which will in our time be given the name Genocide. Apologists who will shudder at the thought of raids and feuds while taking genocide for granted will not exhibit some new and progressive morality; they will exhibit the oldest and rankest hypocrisy.

The massacre of the Pequots is not an aberration in an otherwise peaceful story of God’s Elect in the promised land. The Pequot massacre is the model for all that follow, and the Puritans are every getting ready for the next. They deal the same way with all those who bring them food and clothing, guide them along forest paths, showm them how to harvest syrup from maple trees. All are Canaanites, Amalekites and Amorites, all are placed in Canaan merely to test the Puritans’ ability to carry out their destiny.

David is out of the picture altogether. Goliath is the Puritan himself, and Goliath’s god is none other than Optimus Maximus, who will receive His final incarnation in America as the Dollar.

The seaboard’s inhabitants are reduced to place-names in New England. The various peoples of the east, the totems, clans and federations of Pequots, Narragansetts, Massachusets, Wampanoags, all called Tribes by Bible-readers, will not be considered human beings but things, obstacles in the way of American progress.

The humanity of the Puritans’ victims will not be recognized until our time. The recognition will wait until Nazi emulators of America’s Pioneers perpetrate similar deeds on eminent Doctors, Lawyers, Merchants and Scientists. Only then will appear the numerous light-bringing books which talk with sympathy and deep imagination of the vanished communities of free human beings who were decimated but not broken, massacred but not defeated, displaced but not domesticated.

This is not to say that there cease to be radicals or renegades in English America. Radicals there are, and in such numbers that New England’s predetermined Elite is not done massacring Narragansetts before it has to turn to hanging nonconformists, jailing or deporting radicals, selling dissenters into slavery or burning them as witches.

God’s Chosen effectively silence the radicals, and with such energy that one wonders when the Saved find time to do their Saving. For save they do, and they invest their savings in fleets of ships. The ships carry products grown on Pequot and Narrangansett lands to Africa. There the ships fill their holds with human beings “predestined” to slavery in Virginia. The ships return home with Virginia cotton and tobacco. If radicalism could be exorcised once and for all, the whole enterprise would run like clockwork.

Canaan becomes a little England, an artificial octopus that sends its tentacles to every part of the glove. The New World becomes just like the Old. Or rather, the New World is consumed by the Old, it ceases to be a separate entity, it is all part of a single commercial empire.

Within this empire, which in reality is a network of exchanges and markets, States compete for privileged positions, and England outdistances all the other contenders. The reason for this is not as complicated as His-storians will sometimes make it seem.

We’ve seen that in commercial matters, octopus-like Leviathans have a distinct advantage over worm-like artifices, because the worm-like entities tend to eat up the contents of their ships and thus send the sources of their wealth, namely their own commercial fleets, to the seabottom. Holland is too small to remain a contender for very long. Spain as well as France are land-oriented monsters which cannot, like insular England, keep their fleets ever circulating from places where some things are plentiful to places where those things are scarce. Thus England becomes the metropolis of a Leviathan that soon embraces the entire world, and English America is not an outpost or a fringe, but an integral part of the metropolis.

* * *

English radicals, nevertheless, continue to think that by leaving England and sailing to America they can abandon the Old World and reach the New.

This is true only for those who become Renegades, who abandon not only England but America as well, who let themselves be adopted and possessed by the continent’s remaining communities. Such Renegades continue to be numerous, and few of them choose to return to Civilization even if only to tell their stories. In fact, it is said that Raleigh’s “lost colony” on the continent’s sandy outer banks moved inland and survived by hunting, fishing, singing, dancing, and neither Virginia Dare nor any of her relatives or descendants chose to reveal so much as their identity to Raleigh’s slave-owning successors.

The silence of Renegades is not self-imposed. The silence is imposed by the armored, the Civilized, who understand or even hear a Renegade no better than they understand or hear other people who are not zeks and do not spend their lives in labor camps.

Dissenters or Radicals who move from England or Europe to English America do not have to travel as far as the Renegades, and can in fact cover the same distance by staying home. The famous Quakers and the less well-known Unitas Fratrum, called simply Moravians in America, are among the European radicals who undertake such a voyage.

The first Quakers are part of a movement that tries to turn the world upside-down, at least in England. The radicalism of this movement will be described in our time by Christopher Hill. This is a movement that has its roots in the earlier uprisings of English radicals and peasants, roots that go back, by way of Beguines, Beghards, Free Spirits and Albigensians, to anti-Leviathanic currents that preceded the anti-Roman crisis cult. These radical currents erupt once again during the so-called English revolution.

While people with money who consider themselves God’s Elect remove the King and Archbishop in order to install themselves in the offices of English power, the radicals, who constitute the army that does the overthrowing, aim to remove the power of Aristocracy, Church as well as Money, and reconstitute on earth the Adamite Eden. People called Familists, Diggers, Ranters and the first Quakers are among the radicals who try to topple hierarchy, law and privilege.

The Protestant gentry establish what they, prevaricating like practiced Catholics, call their Commonwealth, and they promptly silence the “peasants, clowns and base people” who would “follow our example” by overthrowing the Protestant gentry as well as the Protestant Church.

Quakers who survive the repression, but emaciated and spiritless. They still long for an earthly Eden, but they become extremely patient. They renounce armed resistance, recognizing that the victory of the radical army led to a tyranny by its generals. They continue to reject the Leviathanic hierarchies of wealth and power, but in practice they limit their radicalism to denouncing the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the hierarchs.

Even this mild practice makes Quakers a bane to American Puritans, who hound, deport and execute the pale radicals with the viciousness of Catholic inquisitors and heresy hunters.

The first Quakers in America oppose the extermination of the continents original inhabitants, but few Quakers become Renegades, and the rest gradually acquire the dishonesty and hypocrisy they once denounced. Whether they were peasants or artisans in England, they all become businessmen in America, and like other invaders, they get their first windfalls from the expropriation of the original inhabitants. Renouncing arms as well as the incendiary methods of the Puritans, the Quakers resort to legal maneuvering and outright cheating, and they empty the Quakerland called Pennsylvania of its original inhabitants as thoroughly as the violent invaders of the Empty Continent. Like Moses, they intended to find a new world only while they were inside the old one; when they leave, they carry the old world with them.

The United Brethren, known in America as The Moravians, bring to America a radical heritage as old as that of the Quakers. The roots of this heritage are in Central Europe, specifically in Tabor.

We’ve seen that the heritage of Tabor reaches back to Waldensians, Free Spirits, Albigensians, and further back to Bulgarian Bogomils, Persian Manicheans and ancient Zarathustrians.

After the last Taborites were repressed, first by their Hussite allies and then by their Catholic enemies, isolated and secretive groups of Taborites preserved, if not the commitment, at least the memory of the attempt to reconstitute Paradise on the outskirts of Prague. Many of them took part in extensive peasant rebellions viciously repressed by German military aristocrats with Luther’s blessings and urgings.

Broken and intimidated by a persecution that never ends, Taborites who still survive become intent on showing the world they are not the fanatics they are taken to be, they do not come to set fire to the Leviathanic world. One of the most famous of these Taborites, Jan Amos Komensky, reduces the fire of the revolutionary to the light of the educator.

Hounded even as educators, reduced latter-day Taborites at last abandon Europe and scatter to every part of the world. Some of them try to establish new Tabors in America. Most of them succeed only in founding a Moravian Church. But some of them venture to the fringes of America and acquaint themselves with the people being persecuted as remorselessly in the New World as the Taborites were in the Old.

These Moravians cannot help but recognize that the communities outside the fringes of America have affinities with the dimly remembered Adamites. They take the plunge so dangerous in racist America and let themselves be adopted by surviving communities of Mahicans, Lenni Lenapes, Shawanos.

Unable to rid themselves of Komensky’s gift to their Church, the Moravians outside the fringes do not let themselves become brothers and insist on being teachers, although it is their souls and not those of their hosts that are dimly lit. Thus instead of partaking in the Shawano love feasts, the teachers from abroad prevail on Shawanos to attend a poorly preserved Adamite love feast which is disfigured to the point of looking for all the world like a Christian mass.

These Moravians preserved enough of the ancient heritage to guide them to the threshold of the communities, but not enough to help them cross it. These spiritual heirs of Tabor are English America’s first missionaries.

Unlike later missionaries, the Moravians respect and admire their hosts, for despite their unremovable pedagogical masks and armors, the teachers cannot keep themselves from suspecting that Tabor is on the other side of the threshold. Their numerous books and journals are unique in the sympathy and understanding with which the authors describe their hosts’ ways. These teachers’ books and stories will in fact inspire much of the meager literature in which American racists such as James Fenimore Cooper grant a shred of humanity to the vanquished Other.

Although they are no more than missionaries, the Moravians are hated by American Pioneers as only Renegades are hated. The sight of Moravian teachers living in mutual respect with “Savage Injuns” dements the Pioneers, drives them into the murderous rage characteristic of American lynch mobs. The continent’s inhabitants are vermin to the impatient Pioneers, who cannot wait to exterminate the inhabitants so as to appropriate and rape their fields, forests and streams.

In two of the most vicious massacres ever perpetrated, the Paxton Massacre and the Gnadenhutten Massacre, frontiersmen of American Progress and Civilization attack Mahican, Lenni Lenape and Shawano villagers who lodged and befriended Moravian teachers. Although there is not a single warrior among the villagers, the enraged Pioneers cut them to pieces.

Thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity
them…

Neither pity nor respect nor understand them. America means the extinction of freedom, kinship and community, and also of their memory.

* * *