The Living Citadel

“Troops in desperate straits know no fear. Where there is no escape, they stand firm; when they have entered deep, they persist; when they see no hope, they fight.”
- Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, pp 74

As I stand now my back is pressed against a wall and before me a panorama opens before my eyes: I see soldiers, American, Canadian, British, French, German – all the countries of the NATO alliance backed by Israelis, Ethiopians, Colombians, Mexicans, Filipinos, soldiers and security forces from every continent and behind them all I see their leaders – Bush, Cheney, Olmert, Netanyahu, Karzai, Zardari, Singh, Brown, Sarkozy, McCain, Obama, looking out I think I see even Donald Rumsfeld chuckling away off in a corner.

The Reasons Why: My Radical Politics

To begin with, let me first say a few things about the human race, humankind – now I think it is pretty obvious that we are a social species, we like to do things in groups, we like to socialize, we work together, fall in love, share our thoughts – it’s what we do and we do it in a place called “society”.

Guards, Part IV: "Veritas"

As the testimony continued and as the evidence was produced, the “Judicator” and the other black-clad man remained stone-faced and silent, displaying no emotion. When at last it ended, the man said “People of the commune, citizens of humanity, your testimony has been heard and the crimes of this man have been laid before our eyes this day – your judgement is clear and now here is ours.”

Guards, Part III:"The Trial"

The warlord's heart sank as he did as he was told, dropping to both knees on the hard-packed earth. A flood of questions poured through his mind: who were these people? Agents of the UN, an armed NGO, that was unheard of! Entering the country and getting past all of bureaucracy and corruption and then proceeding to train helpless villagers how to fight and defend themselves against his militia, impossible! Foreigners in these parts only ever engaged in useless aid efforts for the peasants or contacted his militia if they wanted to take part in illegal diamond trades – so what was this all about? How could he have become so helpless?
The two black-clad strangers, dressed almost identically, now stood on either side of him as the villagers gathered around. Even the women and children began to appear, some of the women, like the strange black-clad woman, with guns in their hands. Women with guns?! To Rambo’s mind this too seemed impossible and yet here it was.

Guards, Part II: "The Encounter"

Rambo’s amazement quickly turned to anger: these villagers had defied him, defied him to the point of armed resistance and killing his own fighters – an example, a brutal example had to be made of them, and he could not let this challenge stand. “Kill them all!” he bellowed to his men, who needed no encouragement. He followed closely behind as they plunged through the ring of blazing huts and into an open space beyond, taking pleasure in treading on the dead bodies of several unlucky village defenders. Expecting to run into a last ditch group of defenders he brought up his magnum, but stopped dead in his tracks along with his men when he saw that the place was deserted.

Guards, Part I: "The Burning"

Huts burned, the air was filled with smoke, the tortured smell of blazing grass and the rending cries of the terrified villagers as the raiders bore down.

Setting a Trap for the People

The ultimate job of all of these security agencies, set up and empowered to an incredible degree by the liberal regimes around the world, is to set traps for the people to fall into so that the jails remain filled with legions of lawbreakers. Instead of addressing the root causes of crime and working to eliminate the conditions which give rise to it they seem more interested in keeping the jails full and the security forces active and the so-called “War on Terrorism” has given them the justification they need in the eyes of a docile populace to place more and more people under lock and key. Infinite numbers of flexibly applied laws are exploited to this end – from “breach of the peace” to “resisting arrest” – and the aim is to ensure that anyone can be detained for any reason without calling into question the liberal façade of “democracy”.