People Power Reports

[Buddy]

Checking up on the SOTT news today, I found myself primarily interested in the People Power reports and that's what's occupying my mind right now. :)

I read the two below and was practically beside myself with pride, joy and a celebratory spirit, tempered only by sorrow for people who were injured.


Outraged Students Protest Against Garda Brutality in Dublin

Last night (Nov. 9), angry students delivered a clear message to [Irish Pm] Cowen's brownshirts, the government and to the Irish people: No more garda brutalising of people engaged in peaceful dissent. No more Bellanaboy's in Dublin. No more cutbacks, it's fightback time and the students are angrier than hell. No more distorted reporting and censorship by omission by the mainstream media. No more abandonment of students to twist in the wind by the Union of Students Ireland leadership. No more government shoe shine boys and lapdogs in the form of the media and USI president, Gary Redmond.

German people in unprecedented rebellion against government

The Berlin government can no longer rely on the discredited mainstream media to control the way people see issues. Too many people recognize it to be a tool of propaganda. The government now needs to resort to brute force to bludgeon through decisions that enrich corporations and banks and impoverish everyone else.
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A leading figure in a German police union Bernard Witthaut today even lashed out at the government for trying to drive through unpopular policies using the police.
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Many police officers also expressed sympathy with the protesters' aims.
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The organizers of the protest kept journalists and the public informed using live tickers, press releases and at Info points so that the whole country could follow the events outside the mainstream media.
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If this is the resistance for Castor and Stuttgart 21, just imagine what will happen when Germans finally grasp the scale of the banking scam being carried out by their "elite."
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A new freedom and power was born in the woods of Wendland. And it belonged to the people who have had enough of the arrogant authoritarian political class."

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People Power!

I slipped into a reflective mood, thinking about how we've learned that one of the most self-empowering things a person can do is to give up their sacred cows; to smash their own idols, not the least of which is the role of false consciousness in the problem of political acquiescence, as wonderfully presented by John T. Jost (see below).

I also thought about how politics and organized religion are so closely related as to be soulmates due to the similarity of 'identification' and 'idolatry'.

We have seen, on this forum alone, how people can both, 'love' and 'hate' because, whether positive or negative, 'idols' and 'identifications' have a "this-is-me" quality such that when they're questioned or challenged, the idolator tends to regard it as a personal attack and may become emotional or even vicious.

Anyway, I felt as if a few individuals might be winking at humanity from the past. The spirits of whose work and life live on, but who were never fully appreciated in their own lifetimes, OSIT.

I thought I'd share a couple of my favorite quotes from said individuals:

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DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.

Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?

You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest "privilege" he knows - to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

Éttiene de la Boétie

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The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner
Part 1, Chapter 2, section 2.-- The Possessed

Man, your head is haunted;...You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, You have a fixed idea!

Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse.

What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of -- lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; -- are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic's stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too -- that they assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures.

One must read the journals of this period, and must hear the Philistines talk, to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. "Thou shalt not call thy brother a fool; if thou dost -- etc." But I do not fear the curse, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools. Whether a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, etc., or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man -- both these are one and the same "fixed idea."

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon -- so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism.
Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them -- lays hands on the sacred! Yes, the "fixed idea," that is the truly sacred!


The Ego and Its Own (German: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum; also translated as The Individual and His Property; a literal translation would read The Sole One and His Property) is a philosophical work by German philosopher Max Stirner (1806-1856), first published in 1844.
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
_http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enee.html
_http://www.nonserviam.com/egoistarchive/stirner/TheEgo.pdf

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re: John T. Jost:
False consciousness as the holding of false or inaccurate beliefs that are contrary to one's own social interest and which thereby contribute to the maintenance of the disadvantaged position of the self or the group.

Political Psychology: Key Readings (Key Readings in Social Psychology) by John T. Jost (Editor), Jim Sidanius (Editor), John T. Jost (Editor)
Source: _http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Political-Psychology/John-T-Jost/e/9781841690704

Journal Article (Peer Reviewed)
John T. Jost, "Negative Illusions: Conceptual Clarification and Psychological Evidence Concerning False Consciousness," Political Psychology, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995, pp397-424.
_http://www.mendeley.com/research/negative-illusions-conceptual-clarification-and-psychological-evidence-concerning-false-consciousness/
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Anyway, that's what's on my mind. :)