What Is To Be Done?

Another show trial. Another conviction achieved by the very direct means of the judge giving the state leave to not prove its case, forbidding the defense to defend the defendant, and tampering with the jury. A life sentence for running a web site without the state's permission.

Just like Chelsea Manning. Just like Barrett Brown. Just like Jim Bell. Just as the case would be with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden had the state been successful in abducting them. Numerous others have been so treated, or would be so treated if apprehended.

I periodically change the teaser quote at the top of this blog. This morning I changed it to the following:

"If the road of peaceful progress and evolution be barred, then the road of revolution will beckon and will be taken."

The quote is more apropos to the current situation than it was to the context in which Eamon de Valera first uttered it (during his post-civil-war campaign to bring his followers back into the "Irish Free State" parliament).

Silk Road was the epitome of "peaceful progress and evolution." The paradigm of commerce which it proposed and implemented made the state extraneous, vestigial and of no practical use; therefore the state moved to preserve its own prerogatives by barring the Road (pun intended).

Peaceful progress and evolution having been barred, revolution is the only remaining option. The time has come for the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre to form and to act.

My own thoughts as to what the RAC should look like are different from J. Neil Schulman's original vision, of course -- not because that vision was faulty, but because the on-the-ground situational specifics (e.g. the available technology and the organizational flexibility it offers) have changed since Alongside Night was first published. [N.B. I do not claim Schulman's endorsement of what I'm writing here, but I suspect he'd agree with this particular claim.]

Precepts of the RAC, as I see them:

• It should be a decentralized movement of individuals and cells, not a centralized organization. For more on that, read up on "leaderless resistance."
• Some individuals and cells should concentrate on informational and intelligence activities such as publishing propaganda and doxing enemy personnel.
• Other individuals and cells should be "action cells" of various types -- ranging from hackers who seize the assets of enemy personnel to propagandists of the deed who take more direct, public and physical action.
• Above and beyond specific remedial, retaliatory or punitive actions, the primary objective of the RAC's action cells should be similar to that of the IRA's "Squad" during the Irish War of Independence. That is, where possible, their actions should be specifically directed at degrading and dismantling the state's intelligence, investigative, prosecutorial and penal apparatus.

Am I recommending physical violence? No. In my opinion, that should be refrained from until and unless it can't be avoided (immediate self-defense is always justified, of course).

Let me be specific to the situation:

A number of individuals -- including but not limited to US Attorney Preet Bharara, Assistant US Attorneys Serrin Turner and and Timothy T. Howard, and US District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest -- did openly and publicly conspire to deprive Ross Ulbricht of his liberty; to steal tens of millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin which they believed belonged to him; and, ultimately, to steal his life by caging him for the duration of said life. Don't tell me they were just doing their jobs. So was Reinhard Heydrich. Since they didn't even bother to hide their crimes,  and in fact openly and publicly brag of said crimes, there's no presumption of innocence. They have tried themselves, and they have convicted themselves.

Therefore, their own lives and fortunes are rightfully forfeit.

They should be thoroughly and publicly doxed.

They should be shunned and ostracized by all individuals of good character. They shouldn't be seated or served at restaurants. They shouldn't receive communion at churches. They shouldn't be able to get up a golf foursome, but that shouldn't matter because no country club should tolerate them as members anyway.

Anyone who is capable of doing so and willing to do so should, at any opportunity, seize or destroy any and all assets which they own or dispose of, preferably in ways which will serve as partial restitution to their victims.

Since caging them for the duration of their lives is not, at present, practical, they should be induced to cage themselves in personally constructed hells of crippling fear and shame for the duration of said lives.

And all of this should be done as publicly as possible (consistent with the people who do it avoiding abduction, "trial" and caging themselves, of course), so that other would-be evildoers will pause and recoil at the idea of pulling this kind of shit in the future.