#aragorn!

[autonomoustweekazoid]

"We are not drifts of snow moving through reality. Things have happened. Choices have been made. These choices can be evaluated, not from a timeless doctrine but from a human scale. By this human scale the size, the scope, of the choices made is beyond comprehension. This being the case, and as the desire of conscious bodies is to understand, a frame of reference to begin to impact the world can be based on one of two options. Either shrink the world that you desire to understand and touch or assert yourself onto a world gone mad in such a way as to transform scale. Institutions, ideologies, systems, schools, family, capital, government and revolutionary movements have all developed beyond the body. Nihilist anarchism isn’t concerned with a social revolution that adds a new chapter to an old history but the ending of history altogether. If not revolutionaries then possibly epochanaries, for the transformation of society without a positive program."

- Aragorn!

Anarchy and Nihilism: The Consequences

[111seedhillroad]

Self-determination should be read as the desire for people who are self-organized (whether by tradition, individual choice, or inclination) to decide how they want to live with each other. This may seem like common sense, and it is, but it is also consistently violated by people who believe that their value system supersedes that of those around them. The question that anarchists of all stripes have to answer for themselves is whether they are capable of dealing with the consequences of other people living in ways they find reprehensible.

Aragorn! Locating an Indigenous Anarchism

[allslost]

we have urges but little wisdom about the unforeseen consequences of our small strategies

aragorn!, nihilist animism

[forbidden-sorcery]

Animism (grand, capital A) began to die as the City was being born. This does not mean the urge died, but that urge primarily moves us against ourselves and towards camping trips, Eschatology, and faith–based approaches to the sickness of this world. Our question is whether mediated experiences are the only ones we are capable of. If that is the case, as is likely, then our capacity for revelatory joy is similarly curtailed, all arguments to the contrary. If we are indeed broken are we capable of NOT being broken? As anarchists who have an interest in how the world operates, and perhaps how we could perform as wooden shoes to it, we are naive about what grinding gears mean today. We think it is enough to change the world without realizing that troubleshooting gears is a quarter of what the world does. We have urges but little wisdom about the unforeseen consequences of our small strategies. This is the reason why we are so hungry for the possibility of animism, a spiritual practice where desire and capacity are mapped perfectly.                 The reason we will not solve this problem like the little special snowflakes that we are is because of exactly that. Just as monotheism has succeeded in the deception that it represents a personal relationship between you and the almighty (parsed and mediated by priests, ministers, and the dining room table) animism needs a social fabric, outside of the civilized order, to keep warm. This social fabric isn’t as simple as playing outdoors with other children, starving for life lessons from the kitchen table where the elders sit and talk, or rituals that help you understand that you are a part of something large. But one can imagine such simplicity. One can imagine life without screens as that life just passed us by, but that is only a fraction of what it would take to live a whole life. While the cell phone may itself be sacred and alive, the things we see on it are mundane and ordinary and make us the same.

Aragorn! - Nihilist Animism

[lefty-hooligan]

[paganarch]

Death Of An Anarchist

Death Of An Anarchist (in memory of Aragorn!)

This morning I learned through a social media post that an anarchist publisher, writer, and cantankerous miscreant has died.

That anarchist was Aragorn!, someone lots of anarchists loved to hate. As probably as many anarchists hated him as loved him, as many feared his influence and work as were thrilled by that same influence and work. And the fact so many anarchists couldn’t agree on what he…

[pleistocene-dreams]

Do you think that nihilism is like a prerequisite for being an insurrectionary anarchist or nah

not at all! nihilism colors my personal philosophy a little bit, however. aragorn! and monsiuer dupont both have good things to say on this.

According to Aragorn!, “A definition of nihilism could be the realization that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake, independent of any constructive program or possibility. This exposes one of the greatest idealistic flaws of modern activism: The articulation of the specific world-to-be as a result of your actions does not guarantee that world’s creation.” (Aragorn: Nihilism, Anarchy and the 21st Century).

i like that definition a lot, although very far from everyone will agree with it. and while you could boil it down to “the world is worthy of being destroyed because of its own badness, not because of a possible better world” i still personally hold that the world after the state’s destruction WILL be better and that the destruction IS possible. my opinion there, for a lot of people, means i can’t be a nihilist and that’s why i don’t really identify with the moniker.

monsieur dupont writes in “anarchists must say what only anarchists can say” that 

"To be against capital in all its forms is sufficient, there is no need to tack a utopia at the end as some kind of golden handshake, all such solutions smack of religious falsity. To say ‘we want a better world free of this or that’ plays into their hands, it’s so easy for politicians to say, ‘we agree, we’re all working together’ when really there is no commonality of interest, the class system from its very origins robs some to pay others. To say ‘we are against capitalism in all its forms’ is enough. The specifics of what comes next is not ours to propose.

The anarchist role is negative, their aim is the destruction of all exploitative and repressive false hopes.”

I like this a lot. Their point in the work is that anarchists don’t have the power, relevance, influence or organization to take the destruction of society into their own hands. Instead, whenever the low-intensity war that the state is waging on us heats up into armed resistance, the role of the anarchist is to sabotage and destroy any “false hopes” or false solutions proposed by the politicians of recuperation and to help open the road to successful insurrection.

I hope this cleared some stuff up. To summarize: You don’t have to be a nihilist to be an insurrectionist. Personally, I’m not a nihilist (unless you define it a certain way). However, I take notes from some of its proponents.

[ibooksblog]

Love & Letters of Insurgents

Love & Letters of Insurgents

From Fifth Estate – by Artnoose

a review of Letters of Insurgents by Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vocheck, as told by Fredy Perlman, with a new introduction by Aragorn!. Left Bank Books, 2014, 722pp., $20 leftbankbooks.bigcartel.com

In 1976, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman and other people at the Detroit Printing Co-op published Letters of Insurgents, which at more than 800 pages qualifies as a hefty…

[prisonbookscollective]

Love & Letters of Insurgents

Love & Letters of Insurgents

From Fifth Estate – by Artnoose

a review of Letters of Insurgents by Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vocheck, as told by Fredy Perlman, with a new introduction by Aragorn!. Left Bank Books, 2014, 722pp., $20 leftbankbooks.bigcartel.com

In 1976, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman and other people at the Detroit Printing Co-op published Letters of Insurgents, which at more than 800 pages qualifies as a hefty…

[forbidden-sorcery]

The fight for Turtle Island is a fight about the physical impacts of Colonization, Borders, Reservations, Poverty, and ultimately how these constraints perpetuate themselves through racism. Racism is a set of rules and values inflicted on a population by a force capable of maintaining its mythologies - usually by violence and the threat of violence. Some refer to this force in the modern ideological regime as Whiteness or White People but that presupposed a unity that is dubious at best. Perhaps the social order of capitalism is a better description of this force but the toxic way that Marxism exists as the only intelligent way to express an opposition to capitalism makes this a challenge also. Why would we join a fight where we want to see both sides lose?

Aragorn!

[overelegantstranger]

so i think i did a tag-essay about how i would like Aragorn as just a man, just a ranger who gets caught up in shit, not this king-by-divine-right, but i lost it, and I've just been hit by feels, so.

I don't want him growing up in Rivendell, I want him growing up on the road; I want his and Arwen's romance to be more frowned upon and unlikely than it is; I want him to be a sort-of friend of Gandalf looking after these four brave but naive (so naive, he thinks, like children really, they know nothing of the world) hobbits, and not really knowing what the fuck is going on, but carrying on anyway; I want him at the Council of Elrond, but near the back - he's the only one willing to go to Mordor, this man, this poor, bedraggled wanderer, and of course, after him, the representatives of Mirkwood, Erebor and Gondor have to volunteer just to save face.

I want distrust and angst and pain, I want Boromir tentatively admitting that if Gondor ever had a king, it would be someone like Aragorn. After Khazad-Dum, Boromir and Aragorn are the only ones who are not crippled by grief, and Boromir just wants the weight of the world off his shoulders for a moment so Aragorn is the one to take the lead. I want Aragorn wondering why this leadership shebang feels so natural, I want Boromir jokingly call Aragorn my king with his last breath - why Aragorn kisses his forehead, calls him son of Gondor, as if he has the right, as if he is a king, he has no idea. But it feels right.

I want Aragorn in his element as they hunt - this is what he was raised for, this is it. He finds, too, that he cares for those naive, silly hobbits. Cares enough to scream in anguish when he finds the pyre. He finds that after navigating the strange, gaping schism between elves and dwarves that the politics of Rohan is simple, and when their king says that Theoden is king of Rohan, last he checked, not a ranger of the north with ideas above his station, Aragorn can stand straight and look him in the eye. He does not feel quite so much like himself, any more - and yet, and yet, there is something familiar about this life he has fallen into.

I want Helms Deep, I want the Paths of The Dead - Aragorn is bluffing it, when he says that the ghosts will follow the King of Gondor, that he can set them free - and yet, the sword that was broken feels at home in his hand, and they follow him. They do not rip him to shreds with their traitorous fingers. They follow him, as if he were a king, their king.

He is late to the Battle of Pelenor, but he's there - and it's his arrival that turns the tide.

He sees the White City, battered and broken as she is, and it feels like coming home.

He stands at the Black Gate, Gondor on his chest, and they listen to him, to the speech that comes to him on the spur of the moment, they listen, and they follow him, as if he deserves their fealty.

And it ends.

It ends.

It is over.

He thinks this is the end of it.

It's not.

Somehow, somehow, his mother's ring is an heirloom of the line of Isildur. He doesn't really listen to the details, though Gandalf and Faramir take all of two days to explain it to him. Somehow, somehow, he's the long lost king of Gondor.

He's walking in a daze, the day Gandalf crowns him, the day they cheer, these people who have been through nothing but misery and darkness and they look at him like they see hope in his eyes.

But Arwen is there, and she kisses him in front of everyone, and for a moment he thinks that somehow, somehow, he might just be able to do this, if she is by his side.

[pleistocene-dreams]

my unasked for two cents: revolutionary nihilism to me means that i don't care to hope or impose a Better World after this one is destroyed because literally anything is better. I'm pretty sure there's an Aragorn! quote that sums this up better than I can: "A definition of nihilism could be the realization that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake, independent of any constructive program or possibility. This exposes one of the greatest idealistic flaws of modern activism: The articulation of the specific world-to-be as a result of your actions does not guarantee that world’s creation." (Aragorn: Nihilism, Anarchy and the 21st Century)

[desire4destruction-blog]

What Nihilism provides then is an alternative to the alternative that does not embed an idealist image of the new world it would create. It is not an idealist project. Nihilism states that it is not useful to talk about the society you 'hold in your stomach,' the things you would do 'if only you got power,' or the vision that you believe we all share. What is useful is the negation of the existing world. Nihilism is the political philosophy that begins with the negation of this world. What exists beyond those gates has yet to be written.

-Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21st Century Aragorn!

[forbidden-sorcery]

As self-described green anarchists, revolutionaries, or whatever, we do not have unique resources to make our dreams a reality. Those who seem to have these resources also seem incapable of dreaming beyond their own pleasures and conservative impulses. This is so true that it seems naive to believe that if we or our friends had the power to change the world that any of us would make different choices. I feel strongly that our most political of frenemies would make exactly the same choices that I despise from enemies, as evidenced by the name calling, bullying, and shunning they perform towards anyone who disagrees with them. Their future would be a nightmare for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to leftist us-them simplification.                 The Black Seed project, if we are brave enough to state it out loud, is to find a way to hold these ideas forward. We are the monks of this era, illuminating on sheets of vellum the hidden truths of this world. Power seduces, not corrupts. There is no good or evil in this world but a lot of mediocrity. The world we walk on is more important than the work we do. Relationships are better than ideologies. We attack out of love and not politics. Activism is the enemy of anarchy. Our enemies should be ignored and not engaged with. If we are lucky, a future generation of people will come who love the idea of wild nature, complexity, and heresy and who have the power to inflict these ideas upon the idiots and politicians of the world. They will know what our illuminations portray and will not judge us for the fact that we have settled for survival in this shitty world and did not instead choose the quicker end of taking on everything, everywhere at once.

Aragorn! (Black Seed)

[liebeimrevier]

059. Ich fand Frodo immer dumm.