I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

Todays Aphorism

"Once learned, conspiratorial habits are hard to shake off".

Mohamed Heikal discussing President Sadat in his classic "Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat".

The Spoils

"The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated."

US Presidential adviser Karl Rove. Quoted in "Bush At War" by Bob Woodward.

Today's Aphorism

"Happiness for Everyone Through Violence"

The sign above the gate at the Solovki Labour Camp in the former Soviet Union.

Today's Aphorism

"Opera! What a waste of time and money. It's dead boring. You can't understand a word they say, and all the birds are fat and they never get their tits out."

Morris Day Sexual Pervert, Viz.

Today's Aphorism

"When it comes to jokes I have always concurred with Schopenhauer in his belief that there's nothing funnier than the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between a general concept and a heterogenous object which is subsumed thereunder, and hence between what is abstract anbd what is perceptive.
When that happens I piss myself."

Introduction, More Viz Crap Jokes (House of Viz, 1999)

Today's Aphorism

"He who was the money owner, now strides in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other hesitant, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but - a hiding."

Karl Marx, Das Kapital.

Today's Aphorism

"Selfish people, when embarked on what they deem to be a noble cause, step over people and use people without realising what they are doing. All of these people he was aligned with for that cause , none have spoken out for him or his family."

Charles Ihetu, son of the boxer Dick Tiger. An advocate of Biafran independence, Tiger is widely regarded as the greatest African boxer, but his legacy been largerly forgotten in his native Nigeria.

Today's Aphorism

"When the working class unites, there will be a lot of jobless labour leaders."

Eugene V Debs.

Today's Aphorism

"Once upon a time there was a bunch of wankers who had nothing better to do with their time than waste it on deciphering codes."

Former Boxing champion Terry Marsh, in a coded leter from prison that was intercepted by the authorities.

Today's Aphorism

"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come, he will never come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again.
I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves."

Eugene V Debs.

Today's Aphorism

"Without violent confrontation with the forces of the state the working class will never break through the deadly, stultifying condition which enmeshes it today.

The class becomes decadent without class violence.

Without a willingness to confront and attack capitalism physically, the state, authority, institutions will continue to flourish. This will mean the ever increasing subordination of every individual, not part of the ruling class, to every facet of the system."

Ian Bone - 'Anarchist'.

Today's Aphorism

Pick up any newspaper in Europe, Asia or anywhere else, regardless of date. It is only seldom and as if by chance that one finds anything about the basic principles and nature of the processes of love, work and knowledge, their vital neccesity, their interrelationship, their rationality, their seriousness etc.

On the other hand, the newspapers are full of high politics, diplomacy, military and formal events, which have no bearing upon the real process of everyday life. In this way the average working man and woman are imbued with the feeling that ..... they are small, inadequate, superflous, and not much more than an accident in life.

Wilhlem Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Today's Aphorism

Rise like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number;
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many, they are few.

Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy.

Today's Aphorism

"For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it."

IWW leader Big Bill Haywood.

Today's Aphorism

"Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms.

Today's Aphorism

"The scab is powerless under terrorism. As a rule, he is not so good nor so gritty a man as the men he is displacing, and he lacks their fighting organisation."

Jack London, The Scab.

Today's Aphorism

"Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master."

Albert Parsons, "The Philosophy of Anarchism."

Today's Aphorism

"There is only one answer to the question - what can be done to better this penal system? Nothing. A prison cannot be improved. With the exception of a few unimportant little improvements, there is absolutely nothing to do but demolish it."

Peter Kropotkin "Prisons And Their Moral Influence On Prisoners".

Today's Aphorism

Don't Trust Experts!

Today's Aphorism

"The Spaniards inflicted upon us the worst superstition the world has ever known: the Catholic religion. For this alone they should all be shot."

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Today's Aphorism

"It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come and do not see the things which happen today. We see them only too well, and in their true colours, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forests of prejudices that beset us."

Peter Kropotokin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal.

Today's Aphorism

"By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward."

Nietzsche - Twilight of the Gods.

Today's Aphorism

"Politics are everywhere, we can't escape them. You're here because of the politics between your mother and father".

Leon Garrie, former Vice President of California Judo Inc.

Today's Aphorism

"I think the fundamental mistakes made by everyone from groups on the radical left in general to the Red Army Faction itself was that we weren't based enough in reality and were too obsessed with ideology. There were meetings, papers, campigns, concept discussions - but these weren't reality.
Politics means real process. Not ideology. The white European left, and the German left in particular, was more clever than anyone. No one read more or talked more than the left here did. But that's not politics."

Red Army Faction prisoner Helmut Pohl in a 1996 interview. You can read the full interview here.

Today's Aphorism

"The man who carried out the attack is still in power and still insane, so we shall expect another attack any minute."

Colonel Gaddaffi in 1986, following the American attack on Libya.

Today's Aphorism

"I have kept this photograph in my wallet to keep my hatred strong."

German Urban Guerilla Hans Joachim Klein, on the death of Red Army Faction member Holger Meins.

Meins was killed by force feeding on November 9 1974, the 53rd day of his hunger strike.

Today's Aphorism

"The Soviets maintained radically different perspectives than Westerners on the indigenous nature of the Afghan resistance. From the beginning the Soviets believed that it was more of a fundamentalist Islamic movement than it truly is, usually stressing the dominance of the Islamic resistance."

US Army writer Joseph J Collins in "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan - A Study in the Use of Force in Soviet Foreign Policy" p.124.

I guess after 9/11 it may actually have occured to the US Army that the Soviets were right?

Today's Aphorism

"All the success and the fame and money that goes with it isn't worth a thing if your own people think you're a dickhead".

Boxer Ricky Hatton.