9 October 2001
I was going to write last week on how I thought eventually events would draw me into the anti-war camp. Basically, my suspicion was that in the short term the desire for revenge would begin to start exhibiting itself more than the desire for justice, while in the long run we'd end up with a boot stamping on a human face for fifty years.Then just this morning on the way to the train station, upon viewing once more the now-ubiquitous presence of the US flag, I suddenly had the urge to get a sticker of the red-black anarcho-syndicalist flag for my bicycle. Although it doesn't describe me exactly (can any single symbol describe any person exactly?) all things considered it probably comes closer than any other flag to doing so. As much as I dissent from its views at times or on certain issues, the anti-authoritarian Left is very much "my tribe": if asked to describe my political views in a word or two I'd still say "libertarian socialist".
Moreover, in an era when our government is basically saying "Trust me. Waive civil liberties. Trust me when I say bin Laden did it even if I don't share the evidence I say I have with you. Trust me that I'm using deadly force responsibly in Afghanistan when there's no independent third-party observers to confirm this. Trust me even though I'm cynically exploiting this situation for the partisan advantage of the current occupant of the White House. Trust me even though I'm using this to sell you a useless missile defense system." I think a dose of good old anarchistic skepticism of government is called for.
Maybe I am falling into the same trap that so many do, of adhering to a particular side's weltanschauung despite any and all evidence against it, the "nationalism" Orwell wrote so perceptively of. Maybe that's an inevitable part of human nature nobody (or nearly nobody) can avoid. I can't definitively say it's not; as I said in one of my earliest writings in the post- 11 September world, I don't pretend to know it all.
But as best I can, despite the limitations imposed by the censorship of wartime, I perceive a threshold being crossed, or on the verge of being crossed. It is the threshold between justifiable pursuit of justice and the unjustifiable (in any civilized society that wants to lay a claim to being superior to those who do things like pilot passenger aircraft into skyscrapers) pursuit of vengeance.
To reiterate: a dose of anarchistic skepticism is a very good thing right now.