“I won’t be satisfied until the last ‘christian anarchist’ is hung from the guts of the last ‘national anarchist’.” –An anonymous anarchist that, I hope, will go through much of life relatively unsatisfied.
Check out the quote just below it from the same source (once you click on the above link, you have to scroll down the page a bit to find the quote), “I’d rather roll with church-burning Norwegian black metal neo-nazi meth addicts then [sic] the most well-intentioned pacifistic Tolstoy milquetoast any day.”
I bet you wouldn’t.
This one’s even better: “He lacks authority as an anarchist.”
That comes from another anonymous anarchist who, apparently, does not quite grasp the irony of making such a claim.
The above anonymous (what’s in a name and why won’t you give it?) cloddish comments do not, however, bother me so much as those coming from the “Christian anarchist” branch. This rather cliquish ‘Jesus-loving/nation-state hating’ group finds me to be as deplorable as the idea of Sean Hannity getting it on with a goat.
A few of my brothers and sisters in Christian anarchists circles are beside themselves because I’m not as concerned with who is flying the “real” flag of green/red/red & black/black/periwinkle anarchism, the difference between post-left anarchism and post-structural insurrectionist anarchism, or which riot grrl is making googlie eyes at that framed autographed picture of Zerzan hanging up in their oh-so subversive “these particular coffee beans make me so much smarter and more self-righteous than you” coffee shops.
Andy Lewis, who, like everyone else, is capable of mustering a good critique without posing any sort of viable alternative to go in its place (congratulations, you are now, officially, an academic) recently referred to my work as “half-assed and downright lame”. As true as that half-assed remark may be (and dude, I’m not lame, I gots a pimping gait), I continue to be joyfully surprised by the amount of needless invective that anarchists (whoops, sorry Andy, anarcho-primitivists, did I get that right? By the way, what color flag is that?) have towards those who either do not share their well-thought out “I bought my book in the back of a van” opinions or have not yet read Derrick Jensen. Which, by the way, is pretty good stuff I guess (don’t hurt the beavers!), but I’ll still like you if you don’t include his work in yours–especially if you are writing a book that has nothing to do with his thinking.
(Click here to check out the book that is in question.)
Though he was not writing a book review per se (it’s not much of a review when you can reduce a person’s work to five words…granted, I know, I am not immune to such generalizing myself and, to be honest, I actually quite enjoy it, so, hey, good job brother!), let me at least say this to all other writers attempting to buttress their academic careers (or reasons for not bathing) off of other people’s work: if you want to write a book about anarcho-capitalism, albino-5th wave vegan mujeristas, who is the punkest punk, or whose schlong is the schlongiest, then you should write that book, but don’t hammer other people for what you think they should have written. It seems that the vast majority of people who do that are people who have never actually written a book. And, for some reason, I am just Aristotelian enough to think that only people who have written books should be the ones writing book reviews. It’s like a non-baseball player telling other non-baseball players how baseball players should swing a bat. Ridiculous, right? And I was talking about a baseball bat, not a flying mammal (though I would not put that past you oh-high-and-mighty Andy Lewis, knower of all things good, beautiful and true, as to know how to swing a common pipistrelle).
"I'm more punk than you!"
So, enjoy your breezy dismissal of other people who, actually are, at least relatively, in the same camp as you (I’ll bring my own sleeping bag, though, if you don’t mind). I’m sarcastically sure our numbers are large enough to continue in-house ridiculing.
In the meantime, I’ll just sit here waiting for the revolution to happen via the internet, where anarcho-primitivists, ironically, love to push their Ludditian propaganda (that’s kind of cute.). Hey, make sure you poke me on facebook when it arrives, you know, just in case I miss it.
[By the way, post-script and all that, is it okay if I bring along my Brian Vaughn graphic novels? I know he’s not as radical as you are, and he probably doesn’t take post-European individualist anarcho-syndicalism as seriously as he should–“Damn you, Brian K. Vaughn!!”–but I just love his writing. And yes, I actually do want to be Dr. Cox.]