This is an update followed by an essay on my current views, shaped by my convictions and circumstances. I am currently about halfway through my sentence, with 16 months left based on the current calculation of my First Step Act credits, which is only 60 days off my furthest statutory release date. But in reality I have earned over 315 FSA credit days of my release date, and I am entitled to 6-12 months of halfway house time, in addition to my good behavior credit time, and points for participating in FSA programs. These points have not been credited towards my release on paper or in the computer despite my repeated efforts to request the administration to remedy this “oversight”. So I am exhausting the grievance process to this end, and when I have done this I will file a Habeas petition and sue the BoP for false imprisonment. If I was given the FSA and other time off my sentence, which I have earned and am legally entitled to pursuant to various laws, I would already be out of prison. This is a separate effort from my appeals which are later this month.
Lately I’ve been struggling to define my core beliefs, as of this moment. As I continue to grow and evolve my ideas change with my situation, limitations placed on me by forces beyond my control, and my exposure to new ideas. Please dialogue with me by offering criticism and your own contribution to this conversation. I offer the self criticism that I am not strong enough to totally resist this system and I am forced to compromise with them by modifying my behavior and beliefs in order to be able to survive and continue to struggle in a less effective form. I also offer the self criticisms that I contradict myself and I’m unconsciously influenced by colonialism, hierarchy and the privileges that come with being a white male in this racist and patriarchal country. The ideas I put forth here are heavily influenced by Buddhist metaphysics because this framework will be effective for keeping me out of prison and for my self development, which will help me and those who interact with me to keep the moral high ground in the eyes of the world. I do not believe that Buddhist nonviolence is the most effective method for bringing about liberation for all beings, but I am forced to resort to this strategy due to the harsh violence of the United $tates government, which threatens to kill, kidnap and otherwise oppress people who struggle for the rights of the poor, the minorities, the marginalized, women and so called foreigners. I’m heavily influenced by Abdullah Ocalan, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Voltairine DeCleyre, Peter Kropotkin, Margaret Atwood, Murray Bookchin, Errico Malatesta, Malcom X, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), Frederick Douglas, Patanjali, Lao Tzu, Mao Tse Tung, Khalil Gibran, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Robert Greene, Walt Whitman and many other great minds who, while I may not agree with all of their ideas and actions, have shaped my current world view.
ALL GOVERNMENTS OF CURRENTLY EXISTING NATION STATES ARE BASED ON VIOLENCE, SLAVERY AND HIERARCHY. This can be visualized as scattered pyramids and ziggurats surrounded by walled cities, guarded by police and soldiers at borders. They protect the ruling class of wealthy business men, priests and politicians from the perennial rage of the ‘insubordinates,’ the working class. Serfdom replaced slavery and wage slavery replaced serfdom. WAGES ARE SLAVERY. Even the salaried ‘bosses’ are ripped off, as hey are on call to come to work at all hours, and expected to work more than the forty hours a week hat is expected of wage slaves. In the end their ‘salary’ is worth less by the hour than the hourly wage slave.
ALL SLAVERY IS BASED ON HOUSEWIVISATION. The enslavement of women paved the way to the enslavement of men. No revolution will succeed unless it is primarily a women’s revolution. THE HOUSEWIVISATION OF MEN AND WOMEN IS BASED ON ANIMAL HUSBANDRY. The captivity of animals in slaughterhouses led to the captivity and slaughter of city state populations. Hunting animals is still the most common form of preparing for the cannibalistic hunt of human beings that is modern policing, the capturing of slaves by slave catchers, the police, and modern warfare, the ritualistic sacrificing of the working class by the ruling class to the gods of profit and selfish ambition. In ancient time the aging hunter enclosed free lands to herd sheep and cattle for slaughter, and in doing so the older man systematically practiced the origins of hierarchy, rape as a form of breeding for selected traits, private property, patriarchy and authoritarian government. Animal husbandry and housewivisation planted the seeds for walled cities, state violence, laws which are violently enforced to protect hoarded property, which is the products of the labor of the working class, and wars for these good, herds, working populations, the women who are abused and the so called gods and religions to justify all this murder and domination.
The laws and violence of all currently existing nation states are based on the ideas indoctrinated by stone age religions, namely that their god finds people to be fundamentally evil and in need of rulers. This is so much nonsense, like many other stone age myths. The priests of these religions, from the Abrahamic to the Hindu, reinforce the idea of ‘original sin’, patriarchy and ‘holy’ wars. Police may pretend to separate church and state, but in practice, and especially behind closed doors, they use mythology, whether sincerely or unscrupulously engaged in, to justify force, the threat of force, slavery and the subjugation of women and slaves with verses from the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, among others works of mythological mental gymnastics.
This system, despite being refuted by modern science, is kept in power by overt murder but also by the sword of hunger. POVERTY IS VIOLENCE and many are “converted” to white Christian nationalistic capitalism at the point of the sword of hunger. What many prisoners, addicts and unemployed homeless masses view as their ‘rock bottom’ is really only the intentional practice of keeping wages down by threatening workers with captivity, starvation, slow, painful death and humiliation. This is how governments of modern nation states legitimize their rule, their hierarchy, their ‘forever’ wars, and in the process convince the downtrodden workers to blame themselves for the suffering intentionally inflicted on them. These exhausted workers are forced to work themselves to sickness and death, resulting in dependence on the drugs which are sold to them by police and state regulated officials, drugs which were ‘confiscated’ from the manufacturers that the nation state conveniently overlooked. The performance of hard working drug addicts is a miracle of human performance at best, and at worst a sad example of the lengths people push themselves to when they finally fail to perform at their tasks and their bodies break down under the strain.
PEOPLE ARE NOT NATURALLY EVIL. HUMAN NATURE IS GOOD AND COMMUNAL. Humans are a phenomenon of social evolution, growing together in a rich and complex community of cooperative people. It is in our nature and our best interest to work together, and for the most part we do. We are an emotionally intelligent species and we are at our best in groups that make decisions by communicating on many levels, to meet the needs of everyone in the group. As a result of this social behavior we have developed and incredibly refined sense of ethics and compassion that predates religion. All perceived evils in co called ‘criminals’ are the results of the failures of a sick ‘civilization’ that is rooted in the core of its victims: slavery, domination, profit and exploitation. Capitalism is inherently based on the selfish attachment of the wealthy to their ill gotten gains. There is a reason that vampires are portrayed as wealthy blood suckers with sick and sadistic perversions born of their spoiled lifestyles. When people in desperate poverty lash out to survive, that is not crime, it is self defense, which is a universal right. Nature has decreed that whoever will not defend themselves will not be defended, and will go extinct if not protected. People’s very existence is criminalized by the constant creation of new laws and the bloated budgets of racist, classist, sexist and morally corrupt police and militaries who justify their existence at others expense. Society, under the overbearing domination of ‘civilization’s domestication’, has created its criminals to justify the rule of the wealthy politicians, priests and blood sucking capitalists. This can be seen in the way the U.$. government taught the nazi party how to abuse a minority with the example of Amerikkkan slave plantations and the prison and military industrial complexes. Today we can still see this ‘culture’ of corrupt cops flooding prisons and poor neighborhoods with the drugs they ‘confinscated’ from smugglers, manufacturers and growers, the same ‘Christian’ police and politicians who outlaw prostitution and at the same time demand sexual services from sex workers (cops and politicians are sex worker’s best customers, especially in prisons). Racist border patrols descended from the slave catching patrols of the original Amerikkkan police. This can also be seen in other countries who emulate Amerikkkan policy, like Turkey, as they abuse Kurdish and Syrian refugees at their borders while playing both sides of the conflict south of their border, a lesson learned from the U.$.
So much suffering is caused by state violence, but suffering can cease. Since all current governments are founded on violence, and the misguided philosophy of original sin, we must reject that system and build a better way towards the end of this suffering. We must create the conditions for a better world. PARTICIPATION IN CURRENTLY EXISTING NATION STATES IS VIOLENCE. As conscientious people we can put an end to so much suffering by refusing to participate in state violence and government hierarchy. Knowing that all kind hearted people reject state violence, we can see that all who choose to benefit from government oppression are consciously participating in violence for selfish reasons or have been brainwashed with religion and patriotic propaganda. These ideas must be confronted by our own ideals, a consciously cultivated propaganda of utopia and liberation for all beings, which leaves room for a continuously evolving form of social structure based on results and ethics. This requires hard work, self criticism, giving and receiving criticism as a community, and the application of wisdom and compassion with direct action, all on a daily basis. Suffering is caused by the attachment of the ruling classes to their wealth, power and illusions of security. Suffering can end by cultivating compassion, wisdom and detachment from excess through the equal distribution of resources to all beings. To do this nations and borders must cease to exist. A non-violent ‘war’ of direct action against oppression is a moral obligation for all of humanity, in the style of Gandhi’s resistance to British colonialism. The goal of a free life cannot be based on a violent act of domination, and for this reason we will only be free of the sins of our fathers when the temporary government of United $tates of Amerikkka, land of the fee and home of the slave, has collapsed under the weight of its own decadence and been replaced by more enlightened standards. All nation states go through life cycles. Everything is temporary. All we have to do is wait for the inevitable, and in the meantime build the infrastructure for the forms of equitable self management that we would like to see in our lifetime. within the dying husk of the old world order.
Rejecting modern capitalist nation states requires us to create alternative structures- nonviolent communes and structures for community decision making, communities. This can be modeled after Rojava’s Democratic Confederalism, which is a global union of villages, towns and cities who manage their own affairs without having to pay taxes to a capital. Daily, weekly and monthly meetings are attended and engaged in by all members of the community for decision making, voting, proposing ideas and projects, updating the commune on progress or setbacks, and offering and accepting criticisms and self criticism- and receiving criticisms with acceptance and an effort to adjust to the needs and expectations of the community. These structures work, and are working in Rojava and worldwide. They must be protected by self defense structures like the People’s Protection Unit. These models can be created within capitalist nations, and can operate autonomously and nonviolently, as long as the rights of the people of the autonomous zones are respected by the state governments.
By only being forces of growth, of agriculture, healthcare, housing, transportation and cultural freedom, this structure can peacefully grow with the capitalist wasteland, in the same way that jungles and forests reclaim abandoned shopping malls and the ruins of ancient temples, and bamboo, numerous, fast and flexible, pushes up concrete foundation. But as we all know, the forces of capitalism will not go quietly. Power structures of slavery and oppression will never give up their power, privilege’s and decadent luxuries without a struggle. They never have and they never will. So structures of self defense against police brutality must be willing, and able, to defend the workers, and win. This can never be an expansionist force, but it also should not build fortresses to protect itself, in which it would be trapped and sieged and starved out. Barricades give the forces of oppression a hard target to attack. Evolution has shown us that mobility and speed is favored and armor and size tends toward extinction. These ideals put forth here are heavily censored due to harsh state oppression, imprisonment, violence, displacement and threat of further violence, but at the same time they do reflect an ideal of ethics and morality based on the cultivation of compassion, wisdom and non-attachment. Compassion can be cultivated by practicing non-violence, being vegan or vegetarian, providing medical care for people and animals, growing plants and rescuing those in danger or need of help, and by considering that all being fear death and want to live, so we should view all with love, respect and the idea that we all come from one consciousness and ground of being that we will all return to when we die. Detachment can be cultivated by reflecting on the temporary nature of all things- countries, building, religions, politics, and our own bodies. By meditating on inevitable death and relating to the temporary suffering of others we become kind hearted, equal towards all, and determined to achieve liberation for all beings in this lifetime. Death is coming, and we are so unprepared. We only have a little time to make progress, so we must act daily, with a sense of urgency. The enemies of humanity, the wealthy rulers of capitalist oligarchies and nation states, the privileged politicians and dictators and ‘bosses’, these enemies are training daily to destroy our movement and secure their position over us. In doing so they will doom humanity to die with our sun when it inevitably goes supernova or burns out. Like climate change, which can be called climate genocide, this is a reality we must face . We can only overcome this hurdle rationally, with wisdom and compassion, so that our species will survive.
We must make long term plans of resistance, not one, five or ten year plans, but one hundred, five hundred and one thousand year plans, which are not driven by selfish ambition or greed. Anarchism is an ideology that offers flexibility with the built in capacity to change with time to meet the needs of the moment. This world is on fire and the universe is a chaotic place- life is a miracle in the face of extreme temperatures and cosmic forces like gravity which we are beginning to comprehend and ride like waves across space. As we learn to surf the waves of energy that we emerged from we ascribe meaning to the struggle that is our lives. TO LIVE IS TO STRUGGLE. Even reproduction is a form of self defense. By thinking long term we can see the wisdom of rejecting inherited wealth which spoils generating and creates class divisions. With an impartial perspective we can plan for humanities’ migration to a younger solar system before our star dies. We need to start building the ships, and the political and social structures that will protect the rights of the workers who will build, drive and maintain the transports to the moon, mars, the asteroid belt, the moons around gas giants like Europa, Titan and beyond our solar system. The families of the workers who build humanity’s arks will be subject to the whims of large companies and governments. Imagine Elon Musk’s robot-named child heir making decisions about whether to cut off the air, food or medicines to people who are on strike due to poor working conditions on space stations owned by Tesla, where all space shipments are owned by Jeff Bezos, the only company stores on the space stations and colonies are Walmart and the U.N. navy space marines are trained to view all deep space workers as terrorists. Hopefully humanity can get that far, to face such problems. In order to prevent future massacres we need to form an ‘Outer Planets Alliance’ now, a union to protect space miners and their families. We need to work for a unified humanity that is not at war with itself, but struggles together to survive the natural disasters we will inevitably encounter on larger and larger scales.
The universe is chaotic, but we can survive. Anarchy is the natural state of our galaxy. We do not fear anarchy, we invoke it. We evolved from chaos and anarchy, and we will return to it. We adapt to our environment and live in harmony with constant change, with pose and counter pose to balance our fragile existence. Anarchy is the unrestricted manifestation of free people. Anarchism is direct democracy, communal living in tune with nature, not hierarchical, but horizontal, and circular. We reject borders, dynasties, heirs, monarchies, dictatorships, representative republics, religious theocracies and modern capitalist states. We will create our own ‘Starfleet federation’ based on out experience building democratic confederalism, based on radical equality, direct democracy, social ecology, feminism, ethical morality and freedom. Our goal is one global community of united peoples with high quality healthcare, focused on meaningful longevity, with physical, mental, emotional and social well being and intelligence, working as one to survive long enough to migrate to planets with young suns, on a generational social plan which prioritized survival of humanity and an idealistic quality of life in the face of the reality of the temporary life cycles of suns and the difficulty of finding habitable planets like Earth and Kepler.
Obstacles to these goals amount to an insane, selfish obsession with mythology, progeny, blind ambition and bureaucratic patriotism, which could doom us all to a nuclear holocaust well before our sun expires. We have evolved beyond the need for myths. We can defeat these forced of regression with clever and skillful means in the style of Gandhi and the Earth and Animal liberation movements. Soldiers going AWOL (I did); civilians abandoning violent power structures; activists monkey wrenching; strikes; refusing to work at all until society evolves a conscience; using only cash and gift economy, or cryptocurrency; rejecting all debts; erasing and destroying records; defunding police and militaries globally; guerilla gardening and farming on public lands or any available space for public food forests; building medical infrastructure within your community; creating transportation structures within your neighborhoods; redistributing resources to enslaved and marginalized peoples; providing universal healthcare, universal basic income, housing, work, and education programs, especially for the space program for all working people, not just the rich and ultra rich who can afford joy rides. Many necessary strategies and tactics cannot be discussed here openly under the observation of racist, dogmatic zealots who adhere to political power structures based on stone age mythologies. Do not expect the imprisoned veterans of liberation movements to fight your battles for you. You, yourself are the hope for the future. You must be practical and do the impossible. Find meaning in helping and living with others and stand up for what you believe in. Listen to your heart and take action on what you find there. Hope is as hollow as fear, but to indulge in hope is a joyful exercise. These two opposites, hope for your own fulfillment and humanities’ future and fear of our failure, are like two wings that lift us up. We have a duty for fight for our freedom; we have a duty to win! We must love and support one another! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
This is all a voluntary venture – none of this can be forced on anyone. It is only a recommendation – much like a parachute is only a recommendation when the plane is burning as it falls from the sky. This world is on fire. We can all hang on to each other or we can hang separately.
To accomplish these goals requires global solidarity. With education, daily direct action and a common goal uniting humanity we can come together and survive in a meaningful and fulfilling way. It is not enough to live miserable lives of pain and preventable hardship, illness, disease, injury and silent desperation. We demand more from those who attempt to rule over us, not that they grant us privileges, but that they get out of the way of the progress of all of humanity towards our highest potentials. We will carry on with dignity, meaning, health and wellbeing. Please join us in coming together for all of our own best interests. If any of this statement falls short it is only my own fault for not working harder to convey these ideas in a clear structured way. I am trying to do my best with limited resources, writing from federal prison. Please offer me criticisms, questions and your own input. Take these ideas and make them your own, use them for your own specific circumstances. May all beings be happy and free!
Dan/Alishare
Write:
Daniel Baker, 25765-509
FCI MEMPHIS
P.O, BOX 34550
MEMPHIS, TN 38184
