TOTW: Spooky Scary Anarchists!

Awww, look at these cuties! You get all the candy you want! <3

Trick or treat?

While some people roam the streets door-to-door merrily busking for candy, anarchists take to the streets to do direct action. For some, direct action means patching potholes, for others, it means littering. Is being an anarchist about being the house that gives the best candy? Or is it about who TPs the house that gives the best candy, or who makes the best prank? Would you rather be feared or be loved? To be remembered fondly, or to live in infamy? Why not both?
Isn't that what masks are for? Isn't that what festival and carnival are for? An opportunity be and do what you regularly wouldn't, then go on with the rest of your ordinary life.

Halloween is such a festival. Many people take the opportunity to dress up as they normally wouldn't. Be it by putting on a cute, funny, or even a sexy outfit, or donning the scary mask of a slasher flick villain, or horror movie monster. But this year, instead of jumping on the bandwagon of whatever is trending -like that year when everyone was The Joker, and surely this year everyone will be wearing a square mask from Squid Game- why not dress up as an anarchist? Which anarchist would you pick?

It's mainstream to have a certain fascination with the macabre, as long as it takes up the form of true crime podcasts and horror fiction. Anarchists can be scary too (BTW: Which are your favorite scary stories about anarchists or by anarchists?). Yet there's been a Santa Clausification of certain anarchist figures, like with Kropotkin, going as far as literally calling him "Bread Santa". Often anarchists try their best to put on a cuddly persona when being interviewed in mainstream media. Nevertheless, anarchists are still widely used like boogeymen to scaremonger.

Which anarchists still remain intimidating and strike fear in hearts of rulers and masses? Which are the most terrifying deeds attempted or carried out by these anarchists? If you wore their faces as masks, what devilish phrases would you shout as you ride out for a night of mischief? Do you dare invoke them by their name?

Can you hear them whisper?

There are 25 Comments

I am only afraid about the anarchists that want anarcho-prisons after the revolution

my dood, the prophesied anarchist revolution is never gonna happen. revolution is incompatible with anarchism anyways.

All past revolutions were in the end, bourgeois and conservative. That which flashes on the red horizon of our magnificently tragic time will have for its aim the fierce socialist humanism. We, anarchist individualists, will enter into the revolution for an exclusive need of our own to set fire to and incite spirits. To make sure that, as Stirner says, it is not a new revolution that approaches, but rather an immense, proud, reckless, shameless, conscienceless crime that rumbles with the lightning on the horizon, and beneath which the sky, swollen with foreboding, grows dark and silent. And Ibsen: “There’s only one revolution I recognize – that was truly, thoroughly radical – ... I’m referring to the ancient Flood! That one alone was truly serious. But even then the devil lost his due: you know Noah took up the dictatorship. Let’s make this revolution again, but more thoroughly. It requires real men as well as orators. So you bring on the roaring waters, I’ll supply the powder keg to blow up the ark.”

Now since dictatorship will be – alas! – inevitable in the somber global revolution that sends its bleak glow from the east over our black cowardice, the ultimate task of we anarchist individualists will be that of blowing up the final ark with bomb explosions and the final dictator with Browning shots. The new society established, we will return to its margins to live our lives dangerously as noble criminals and audacious sinners! Because the anarchist individualist still means eternal renewal, in the field of art, thought and action.

Anarchist individualism still means eternal revolt against eternal sorrow, the eternal search for new springs of life, joy and beauty. And we will still be such in Anarchy.

I am only afraid about the anarchists that want anarcho-prisons after the revolution

Anarchism won't play any role in a social revolution, so I wouldn't worry about that if I was you.

I am an anarchist rather than a socialist. Basically even among anarchists I was among the more radical thinkers. When I was imprisoned in June 1908 in connection with the Red Flag incident I was outraged at the brutal behavior of the police. I concluded that a peaceful propagation of our principles could not be conducted under these circumstances. It was necessary to arouse the people's awareness by staging riots or a revolution or by undertaking assassinations ... I hoped to destroy not only the emperor but other elements too ... Emperor Mutsuhito, compared with other emperors in history, seems to be popular with the people and is a good individual. Although I feel sorry for him personally, he is, as emperor, the chief person responsible for the exploitation of the people economically. Politically he is at the root of all the crimes being committed, and intellectually he is the fundamental cause of superstitious beliefs. A person in such a position, I concluded, must be killed.

I had imagined that socialists were people that rose above the meaningless customs and morality of the society. I imagined them to be courageous fighters with no interest in so-called fame and honor and social reputation. I thought they were warriors fighting to destroy the perverted society of today and striving to create an ideal society. However, even though the denounce the irrational and hypocritical aspects of the society, and pretend that they are indifferent to social criticisms and to fame and reputation, they in fact governed by and are concerned about the standards of the mundane society. They seek to adorn themselves with conventional ornaments, and take upon themselves conventional values. Just as generals take pride in the medals on their chests, socialists covet records of arrests in order to earn their bread. They take pride in this. When I realized this fact I gave up on them.

I also came to be appalled at the somnolence of the peasants, who are mired in pain but feel no pain, and the ignorance of the workers, who work diligently while they are being devoured to their bones. I the chains that bind them are removed, they are likely to go to the wielders of political and economic power with their chains and beg them to chain them up again. Perhaps they will be happier if they are allowed just to sleep in ignorance. So I got disgusted at all the currents of thought and from the spring of 1922 tightly embraced the nihilistic believes I hold today.

As for the significance of my nihilism… in a word, it is the foundation of my thoughts. The goal of my activities is the destruction of all living things. I feel boundless anger against parental authority, which crushed me under the high-sounding name of parental love, and against state and social authority, which abused me in the name of universal love.

Having observed the social reality that all living things on earth are incessantly engaged in a struggle for survival, that they kill each other to survive, I concluded that if there is an absolute, universal law on earth, it is the reality that the strong eat the weak. This, I believe, is the law and truth of the universe. Now that I have seen the truth about the struggle for survival and the fact that the strong win and the weak lose, I cannot join the ranks of the idealists and adopt an optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control. As long as all living things do not disappear from the earth, the power relations based on this principle [of the strong crushing the weak] will persist. Because the wielders of power continue to defend their authority in the usual manner and oppress the weak – and because my past experience has been a story of oppression by all sources of authority – I decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life but that of all humanity on this endeavor.

For this reason I planned eventually to throw a bomb and accept the termination of my life. I did not care whether this act would touch off a revolution or not. I am perfectly content to satisfy my own desires. I do not with to help create a new society base on a new authority in a different form.

There are no animals in the world as conceited as men. When they are paid even casual compliments by women, they immediately jump to conclusions and betray themselves with loathsome smirks. Men really are the personification of conceit. The more conceited they are, moreover, the more they tend to prefer fainthearted people. In times of emergency, they clearly have more affection for women with no self-respect, who first burst into tears, wailing 'Whatever shall we do?' at their wits' end, than for wives who give good counsel....Many men dislike women with their own opinions. They prefer women who listen to what they have to say admiringly, even if they are utterly indifferent. Men who are very conceited treat women as playthings ... They hide behind their masks, looking grave, putting on airs and affecting dignity; and the more they talk self-importantly, feign cleverness, and take themselves too seriously, the more women are able to see through their downright stupidity.

For a long time I’ve thought deeply that all humans are equal. Everyone being human, they must all be equal. In that there’s no difference between stupid and smart or strong and weak. As humans that exist naturally on earth, I believe that all humans are completely equal in value, and following from the sole qualification of being human they should enjoy completely and equally their right to human activity.

To put it concretely, all actions that have been done, are being done and can be done by humans are built on the foundation of their being human. Thus I think all of these actions, built on a natural foundation and performed by humans on the earth, should be recognized as equal human activities by the sole qualification of their being done by humans. And yet, how very much these natural actions, this natural existence itself, are being denied and controlled in the name of laws made by humans. Humans who should be by nature equal, how unequal their situation is in this society. I curse this inequality.

I don’t believe in the right. Life, which is all a manifestation of incoherent forces, unknown and unknowable, rejects the human artificiality of the right. Right was born when life was taken away from us. Indeed, originally, humanity had no right. It lived and that was everything. Today, instead, there are thousands of rights; one could accurately say that everything which we have lost we call right.

I know that I live and that I desire to live.

It is most difficult to put this desire into action. I am surrounded by a humanity that wants what everyone else wants. My isolated affirmation is a most serious crime.

Laws and morals, in competition, intimidate and persuade me.

The “blonde rabbi” [I.e., Christ or christian values.-translator] has triumphed.

One prays, one implores, one curses, but one does not dare. Cowardice, caressed by christianity, creates morality, and this justifies baseness and begets renunciation.

But this desire to live, this will, only desires to develop freely. The christian takes a good look around to see if anyone is watching him and, trembling, commits a sin. Desire: sin; love: sin. This is the inversion.

“Harlot, everybody’s female, you have no shame in the world. You are frank and sincere. You offer yourself to anyone who pays, never giving or taking illusions.

“Society, on the other hand, modest and clean in appearance, but horribly infected with gangrene throughout its body, makes me vomit, fills me with horror and loathing, kills me.”

* * *

I envy the savages. And I will cry to them in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, civilization is coming.”

Of course: our dear civilization of which we are so proud. We have abandoned the free and happy life of the forests for this horrendous moral and material slavery. And we are maniacs, neurasthenics, suicides.

Why should I care that civilization has given humanity wings to fly so that it can bomb cities, why should I care if I know every star in the sky or every river on earth?

In the past, it is true, there were no legal codes, and it would seem that justice was done summarily.

Barbarous times! Today, instead, people are killed in the electric chair unless the philanthropy of Beccaria only torments them in the penitentiary for the rest of their lives.

But I leave you to your knowledge and your legal codes; I leave you to your submarines and bombs. Still you laugh at my beautiful freedom, my ignorance, my vigor. Yesterday the sky was beautiful to look at; the eyes of the unknowing gazed at it.

Today, the starry vault is a leaden veil that we vainly endeavor to pass through; today it is no longer unknown, it is distrusted.

All these philosophers, all these scientists, what are they doing?

What further crimes are they plotting against humanity? I don’t give a damn for their progress; I want to live and enjoy.

“Monkey of the Borneo jungle, Darwin has slandered you!”

* * *

Meanwhile, my whole being cries out to me: “I want to live!”

I rip the thorns of christian renunciation from my brow and drink in the perfume of the roses.

I am well now. I am delighted to live.

The sirens blare and the blissful crowd goes to the slaughterhouse.

And you as well, oh rebel, you climb your Calvary, you too are

rotten!

How I envy the great Bonnot!

“Il me faut vivre ma vie!”

* * *

It’s useless, I am rotten. Society has vanquished me. And hatred. I furiously hate the brutal humanity that has killed me, that has transformed into a human hide.

I wish that I could change myself into a wolf so I could sink my teeth into the belly of society in an orgy of destruction.

MAN: A filthy paste of servitude, tyranny, fetishism, fear, vanity -and ignorance. The greatest offence one can commit against an ass is to call it a man.

WOMAN: The most brutal of enslaved beasts. The greatest victim shuffling on earth. And, after man, the most responsible for her problems. I’d be curious to know what goes through her mind when I kiss her.

it's scary, all these old timey anarchists have spooky skeletons in their closets. maybe even all current anarchists. would these old timey anarchists be any different if they were anews trolls? are anews trolls any better?

I am an individualist because I am an anarchist; and I am an anarchist because I am a nihilist. But I also understand nihilism in my own way...

I don’t care whether it is Nordic or Oriental, nor whether or not is has a historical, political, practical tradition, or a theoretical, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual one. I call myself a nihilist because I know that nihilism means negation.

Negation of every society, of every cult, of every rule and of every religion. But I don’t yearn for Nirvana, any more than I long for Schopenhauer’s desperate and powerless pessimism, which is a worse thing than the violent renunciation of life itself. Mine is an enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flame that sets my vital exuberance ablaze, that mocks at any theoretical, scientific or moral prison.

And if I call myself an individualist anarchist, an iconoclast and a nihilist, it is precisely because I believe that in these adjectives there is the highest and most complete expression of my willful and reckless individuality that, like an overflowing river, wants to expand, impetuously sweeping away dikes and hedges, until it crashes into a granite boulder, shattering and breaking up in its turn. I do not renounce life. I exalt and sing it.

Anyone who renounces life because he feels that it is nothing but pain and sorrow and doesn’t find in himself the heroic courage to kill himself is — in my opinion — a grotesque poser and a helpless person; just as one is a pitifully inferior being if he believes that the sacred tree of happiness is a twisted plant on all apes will be able to scramble in the more or less near future, and that then the shadow of pain will be driven away by the phosphorescent fireworks of the true Good...

Life — for me — is neither good nor bad, neither a theory nor an idea. Life is a reality, and the reality of life is war. For one who is a born warrior, life is a fountain of joy, for others it is only a fountain of humiliation and sorrow. I no longer demand carefree joy from life. It couldn’t give it to me, and I would no longer know what to do with it now that my adolescence is past...

Instead I demand that it give me the perverse joy of battle that gives me the sorrowful spasms of defeat and the voluptuous thrills of victory.

Defeated in the mud or victorious in the sun, I sing life and I love it!

Because i am a happy pessimist, I shall be laughing when you suffer sorrowful pangs of defeat ;)

> Which anarchists still remain intimidating and strike fear in hearts of rulers and masses?
Bookfair anarchists.

> Which are the most terrifying deeds attempted or carried out by these anarchists?
The publishing of Atassa 1 & 2

> If you wore their faces as masks, what devilish phrases would you shout as you ride out for a night of mischief?
Can I interest you in some dangerous literature?

> Do you dare invoke them by their name?
Only in the comments of anews.

> Can you hear them whisper?
Only when I forget to take my meds.

> Which anarchists still remain intimidating and strike fear in hearts of rulers and masses?
Anews anons.

> Which are the most terrifying deeds attempted or carried out by these anarchists?
Trolling anews.

> If you wore their faces as masks, what devilish phrases would you shout as you ride out for a night of mischief?
I only read the comments!

> Do you dare invoke them by their name?
No.

> Can you hear them whisper?
Yes.

If I hurled a bomb at you, I imagine your life blood would gush with just about as much vigorous as you had when delivering that address, wouldn't it? In the months after my release from prison in September last year, 1909, my resolution to kill you did not waver. Also when I was told after my collapse in October when I was feverish and unconscious that I'd raved in my delirium about Prosecutor Taketomi – that I bore that deep a grudge against someone – it was enough to make me laugh. Then someone, I don't remember who, said that Prosecutor Taketomi - was not that brutal personally, and my antipathy subsided a little. Also, because I had much to do for the cause and my own affairs to attend to, until today there has been no opportunity to kill you.

my favorite spooky anarchist is Doctor Bones. OHHH YEAH GROOM ME DADDY!

Halloween, or this Stranger Things of Americanization – get a costume, buy candy, go knock on the doors of your neighborhood (unless they’re a Jehovah Witness), have a party with friends, get drinks and food. This all sounds kind of lovely, but also there is so much to dislike about society and it’s continuation. I love friends, food, drinks, neighbors, masks, the darkness, autumn, fire, singing, dancing and the changing seasons are all wonderful and beautiful - it just seems like you might be one of the lucky ones if your town has some really fun anarchist Halloween parties in the times of rona (maybe I’ve become a giant nerd as growing older) vs. the total consumer driven holiday as most Americans experience it. Bah humbug.

One of my favorite spooky anarchists is the one and only official photographer of the anarchists, Kati Horna. Of her images that I’ve seen by digging the depths of the Internet to no end, none of them seem to be specifically Halloween themed, but many of them seem to have a spooky surrealist vibe to them, that brings to mind the spirit of what I picture Halloween to be.

Runners up = 1. pagan anarchists dancing around a giant bonfire (not Starhawk, but maybe Starhawk if they bring cool friends). 2. anarchist witchhouse music, whatever that means (I heard it’s good) 3. giving apples to kids = you’re either vegan straightedge and love Earth Crisis or you’re just terrible and hate kids. All three assertions are bad. 4. getting friends together each year to create Misfits cover band for Halloween show at the punk house. 5. Pumpkin pie is the greatest pie ever created. 6. And Furries (not anarchist!)

i’ve noticed a waning in popularity in halloween and trick-or-treaters for years, covid was the final blow, stores have christmas decorations for sale since september and not much halloween. if it was up to them, it would be christmas all year. but that’s all about online sales now, telling people to buy early since supply chains are busted up and expecting delays. last year was a missed opportunity to dress-up as the Ever Given (the name of the boat that got stuck, Evergreen is the name of the company that was painted on the side), but i did find one cosplay of it online https://www.reddit.com/r/cosplay/comments/minggm/self_ever_given_got_stuck/

Wouldn't the loss of interest in Halloween be a positive thing? Halloween is a Catholic holiday and every aspect of Halloween today and in the past comes from Catholics. The dressing up, "trick or treat" and giving out food on 10/31, to the pumpkins/jack-o-lanterns are practices within Catholicism that European Catholics imported to the US. The suggestion that Halloween involves paganism, druid witchcraft, satanism or the devil comes from US Protestants trying to make Catholic immigrants look bad. I find it weird that anarchists engage in these Catholic rituals and actively encourage it without a second thought. It's bizarre and doesn't make a lick of sense to me. The only issue people on here have with Halloween, that I can decipher, is the consumerism aspect of it. I wonder if they'll be a Passover and Ramadan totw on this site in April.

The Ever Green boat that got stuck in the canal happened this year so if you partake in Halloween, you still have time to dress up like a boat wedged in a canal. Though one can have parties and engage in cosplay, the furrydom, or just wearing something you normally wouldn't. I guess society and Christian rituals have a significant influence on people for when it's acceptable to wear a costume, knock on people doors, and/or have a costume party?

Cosplay and/or the Furrydom always seemed like peak consumerism run amok to me.

When suburbia celebrates samhain it's called halloween. You should dress up in a scary costume every day and preferably make it yourself. There's no reason why the bourgeoisie should live in a false sense of security when we know that as soon as they stop giving us candy the thin veneer of civil society breaks down. Trick or treat!

Now, what we fear with regard to Expropriation is exactly the contrary. We are afraid of not going far enough, of carrying out Expropriation on too small a scale to be lasting.

The littering was the worst shit I've seen and has nothing to do with anarchism.

Why not dress up as Max Stirner?

Add new comment