The people we rely on to run our country, the world, our world leaders, run on corruption.

Power-hungry desperation, they resemble spoilt schoolchildren throwing tantrums when they don’t get their own way, as we saw last week when a fistfight broke out in Georgia’s parliament.

Fully grown men throwing punches…

Superiority vs inferiority, there’s one rule for them and another for us, whereby they can attack each other, but if we speak out against them, it’s an ‘attack on democracy.’

We’ve seen it happening for decades, people getting shut down under the guise of a ‘breach of peace’, peaceful protests being tarnished as ‘hooligan fuelled mobs’, young people calling for a better tomorrow, ‘terrorists.’

In 1970s Britain, for example, at the dawn of the punk movement when The Sex Pistols, the revolutionary brainchild of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood came on the scene, no sooner were their records released than they were banned from British media.

God save the queen
She’s not a human being
and There’s no future
And England’s dreaming.

Upon the release of the anti-monarchy song, ‘God Save the Queen’, (lyrics above), several tabloid papers along with a Royal commentator accused the song of being borderline treasonous in its lyrics. 

It was consequently banned by the BBC and many shops refused to sell the record. One of the few shops that did sell it, Virgin Records in Nottingham, saw their manager, Chris Seale, being prosecuted as a result- arrested and charged under the Indecent Advertisements Act…

Deemed to be in ‘gross bad taste’, according to band members it was even suggested in Parliament that the band be prosecuted [for treason] off the back of God Save the Queen.

While The Sex Pistols were never prosecuted, they were persecuted, portrayed as ‘thugs’ by the British press, ‘out to cause division in society.’ 

But, as singer John Lydon later observed: 

You don’t write God Save The Queen because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated.

Regardless of their intentions behind the record, The Sex Pistols were still made the scapegoat- ‘all that’s wrong with the youth of today’, a narrative that has been pushed on us since the dawn of time. 

‘If you speak out against the system, you’re responsible for everything that is wrong with that system.’

As I said, the ‘scapegoat’, where the oppressors transfer the blame to the oppressed…

Just consider the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s, for example, where groups were pitted against each other, with mods and rockers being labelled as ‘violent yobs’, when the reality was far more peaceful.

While the media were suggesting that different subcultures were polar opposites, their division being the source of conflict in society, the fact is that every subculture is far more similar to each other than they are to the mainstream. 

Behind them all is the underlying belief that things could be, and should be, done differently. A call to arms for the people in charge to be held accountable.

And it is this prospect of a ‘call to arms’ that scares the people in charge…

Where ‘counterculture’ is all about diverting away from mainstream ideals, the people in charge of dictating those ideals fear what will happen if groups of people come together to call for change…

They fear our power because they know that, together, we would win.

Under anarchism, we would win.

Yet they push forth the stereotype that anarchism is about ‘violence and conflict and the disintegration of society’, when it is, in fact, precisely the opposite of this…

Anarchism isn’t about destroying society, it’s about removing it from the hands of the people who are destroying it, into the hands of the collective.

‘Out with the old, in with the new.’

A call to arms, to reiterate the point again:
They fear our power because they know that, together, we would win.

Under anarchism, we would win.

So, what are we waiting for?

Become so very free that your whole existence is an act of rebellion.
– Albert Camus.