Warlike, Howling, Pure: book presentation & discussion

Wednesday 9^th April, 7pm

Touchpaper Anarchist Library

“From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself.

Leviathan is turning into Narcissus, admiring its own synthetic image in its own synthetic pond, enraptured by its spectacle of itself.

It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty polis.”

– Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan

Anarchists fight against poverty and enslavement, in spiritual as well as material form. Our struggle – which takes freedom and self-responsibility as both means and ends – has been expressed as an ecstatic “Yea to life”, as an unleashing of the “creative nothing” of individual uniqueness, and as “the conquest of life and the realization of our dreams.” Therefore anarchists have always been heretics and blasphemers, deserters of all orthodoxies, enemies of clerics, and sometimes burners of shrines and temples.

 But anyone who loves freedom and dignity can find no complicity among atheists who replace religion with the worship of scientific and technological progress – which has colonised and devastated the whole planet to feed its ghostly meat-grinder, the economy.

 The author of a new book, “Warlike, Howling, Pure” (Contagion Press, 2024), will present some stories of rebels who have fought against domination, with looted weapons or bare hands, armed also with spiritual convictions that animated their fight against colonisation and domestication.

 Touchpaper Anarchist Library

385 Queens Road, London, SE14 5HD

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