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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1997-06-06 - Re: [CONTROVERSIAL]: A Defense of Terrorism

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From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 9e4ca9dde2f5677e494f175feee073c675193eb0d4d8c85e68bc1ea81562aa37
Message ID: <11LV8D23w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
Reply To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970605101214.2888A-100000@westsec.denver.ssds.com>
UTC Datetime: 1997-06-06 13:13:45 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 21:13:45 +0800

Raw message

From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 21:13:45 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: [CONTROVERSIAL]: A Defense of Terrorism
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970605101214.2888A-100000@westsec.denver.ssds.com>
Message-ID: <11LV8D23w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com> writes:
> > One of the many interesting contributions Joe Stalin made to the Marxist
> > theory was the observation that the class struggle intensifies as the
> > old mode of production becomes obsolete; and that there's really no differe
> > between "terrorist acts" and government-sponsored violence and economic
> > deprivation.  You might view the second statement as the generalization of
> > Klauzewitz's (or Bismarck's?) maxim that war is the continuation of foreign
> > policy by other means.
>
> Well couldn't class struggle simply mean the difference between wielding
> large quantities of power and not.

Stalin claimed (and I agree) that when the ruling classes are facing loss of
power, even due to purely market forces, they will resort to violence to try
to keep their poer: first government regulation/taxation to suppress the new
technologies/modes of production, and when it fails, jailing and killing those
who challenge them.

Imagine a very primitive society on some sort a of Pacific Island, where
people live in relative deprivation and obey the Chief, whose main duties are
to deflower the virgins, and to allocate the meager coconut harvest "fairly".
Some bright islander invents a way to grow many times as much coconut as
before, making the Chief unneeded (say, he discovers that if you shit on the
roots of the palm tree, it acts as a fertilizer :-). The Chief will try to use
whatever means are at his disposal to preserve his power, starting with
regulatory (declaring that to shit on palm tree roots is blasphemy), to
extreme violence (punishing such blasphemy by torture and death), because the
invention, even though non-violent, threatens his rule.

Get it?

Now replace "shitting on palm tree roots" with "anonymous digital commerce".

> If thats the case then Stalin was
> the ultimate hypocrite when his wonderful revolution attained of
> temporary system of government.  That system of government was unstable
> in that in failed to allow people to provide for their own and each
> other's welfare through free market activity.

Irrelevant to what I was talking about.

> As resistance to centralized modes of production increased (especially
> with the farmers), the central government systematically starved 20
> million people to death.

Irrelevant to what I was talking about, and not quite true.

(The number of farmers starved to death was at most 6 million; many others
died elsewhere. Yes, Stalin used arguments such as the one I cited as the
theoritical justification for the forcible farm collectivization (actually
invented by Trotsky :-)).

> Reminds me a lot of Orwell's "Animal Farm".
>
> Though I do agree in principle with the idea that corruption runs rampant
> at the end of a megapolitical era (for more or less the same reasons),
> Stalin was not the first to have this idea.   For a run-down on this
> concept check out the much-maligned "Sovereign Individual".
>
>
> > Consider, for example, a Black child in the United States who dies of
> > a trivial curable disease because of the lack of health care. Consider
> > the child's parents who labor "off the books" in menial jobs, who are
> > deprived by the state from the ability to marry, to work "on the books",
> > to hold a bank account, et al. Is being deprived from the results of one's
> > labor that different from being sold at an auctioned and whipped in
> > a public ceremony to terrify other (wage) slaves?
> >
>
> No.  I agree with you here.  I think the difference is in the resolve
> of the individuals under this kind of pressure.
>
> > Joe Stalin himself took part in several spectacular terrorist acts in
> > his youth, which resulted in deaths of dozens of "innocent bystanders".
>
> make that millions

Not in his youth.

Before Stalin got in the position of ordering his minion to kill millions
of people, he used to be a "hands-on" terrorist - blowing up Tsarist
officials, robbing banks, killing numbers of "innocent bystanders".

> > Prepare for crypto to be criminalzed.
>
> definitely.  but under what system of law?  for all practical purposes the
> constitution is null and void.  the people that run this country do so
> under the guise of constitutionalism, but its all a grand facade.  the
> whole idea of the current government is a type of consensual reality.
> (literally so, perhaps?)  When enough people agree that the version of
> reality no longer serves them, they will agree that it doesn't exist.
>
> This, of course, assumes they have the power to alter it.

Under the same system of law that criminalizes mj, sex for teenagers,
"sodomy" between concenting adults, driving over 55, tax evasion, et al.

> > Prepare for the former cpunks who
> > "sold out" (C2Net and the like) to support criminalization of crypto use
> > within the U.S. in exchange for a possible relexation of export rules.
>
> I'm not sure I understand why you assert that C2Net "sold out".  I was
> probably out of town at the time this discussion went down.

Yes - review the list archives. C2Net supports criminalizing domestic use of
encryption for the first time, and also sends threatening lawyer letters to
security experts who question their products.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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