Gerard Slane was already dead, but his nine-year-old son didn’t know that. Sean sat on the stairs holding his father’s hand and begging him to wake up.
Article from Black Flag #219 (2000).
Michael Bakunin once observed that The State, any State - even when it dresses up in the most liberal and democratic form -is necessarily based upon domination, and upon violence, that is, upon despotism -a concealed but no less dangerous despotism (GP Maximoff, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, Free Press 1953). Usually, the despotic lash is hidden, and we re fed stories of the guarantees of personal liberty embodied in the traditions of parliamentary democracy. We re told that representative politics ensures stability and underwrites freedom.
One of the endlessly recycled stories of romantic fiction is that of the cheating lover who betrays himself through talking in his sleep. Occasionally, the baggage-handlers of the ruling class get caught out in the same way, muttering complacently, and in the process revealing that which is normally concealed. Churchill, for instance, in 1927 said of Mussolini s fascist dictatorship, Your movemen