“No gods, no the masters, no borders.” That’s how I was introduced to anarchism on Tumblr as a kid. Up until that point, I knew but couldn’t have put it more concisely. I grew up in poverty and loved music, and music articulated my conditions more than anything. From Kanye West’s College Dropout album, to Rage Against the Machine, and System of a Down’s Toxicity, I had known to question everything, including authority, from a young age, as my mom told me to resist any teacher that attempted to force me to say the pledge or fuck up my name. It’s “Ma-lik,” not “Malik,” it’s “Muhammed,” not “Mohammed.” Hierarchical structures’s authority was thus immediately disregarded to me. Religion was questioned as my devout father walked out the door the last time. So went with him, my adherence. I went through institutions my whole life — school, foster care, jail, military, prison, college, job core, and the workforce — the only difference I gleaned was the level of access, surveillance, and state sanctioned violence.
My first experience knowing the fallacy of authority was a walkout I scheduled after Treyvon Martin’s murder. We were threatened with suspension, expulsion, and violence from school security and pigs if we staged this walk out. So when I was asked, I rationally said, “they can’t suspend everyone.” When I was asked about the school pigs and security attacking us, if we went through with the walkout, I replied, “if a pig touches you, then we’re all fighting. And there’s always more of us than them.” Come the week of, every day, on the morning announcements, the principal lobs his threats. Every day, I emphasized it as being more of a reason to do it, in defiance of being told not to. “Our people are being murdered. How do I just come to class?” I would ask.
On the day of, I float[ed] out into the hall as they filled with kids walking out of class, past pigs and security and the principal. I stood on the table and looked around at the collective united front, and it took me back. The collective united front, that show of us, the many, and they, the few, impacted me greatly, and I knew authority isn’t real. It’s not derived from consent but coercion and threat of force and violence and should state or institutional violence be outmatched, authority is nothing more than a word.
When I read “no gods, no masters, no borders,” it clicked. “No gods,” being a Muslim, took the longest to jive, but no gods isn’t or doesn’t have to be the absence of faith or spirituality, but the absence of organized hierarchical structures that produced holy wars, jihad, molested kids, and dogmatic views of gender and sexuality. Religious institutions that back and support state functions and give legitimacy to illegitimate entities, those are inherently oppressive.
“No masters” is self-explanatory, though I also immediately, given my ancestry, thought of slavery. No masters, to me at least, also alludes to the construct of race and its nature being to create Others and oppress them justifiably. And no borders means no nation states, no invisible lines separating made up races, people who all happened to be born in the geographical location.
The common thread through all this is hierarchy. The commonality, the crux of it, is hierarchical constructs based on coercion and oppression — gender, sexuality, race, nation states, religion, all hierarchical social constructs meant to give legitimacy to the illegitimate and create classes of Others to oppress. If hierarchy is the problem, and I do believe it is, it doesn’t matter how your hierarchy gets established, nor where or why. It doesn’t matter. Hierarchy is inherently evil, as capitalism is inherently evil, and they are symbiotic. When undergoing the excising of a tumor, you don’t ponder what to put in place of the tumor. No, you extract the thing that’s killing you. The tumor is hierarchy, and never can the tumor be convinced to reform and not kill you.
So when I say, “I stand with the Iranian people and not the Iranian regime,” it’s ’cause I believe in the people. I love the people, I’ll fight with, die, and kill for the people. I will never champion a state. None are benevolent. None are without their oppression or exploitation. I do not stand with any state. The enemy of my enemy is most often just another enemy. The Iranian regime would not want me or those I love to live, as the u.s. doesn’t, as most states don’t. Being an enemy of the u.s. doesn’t make you a friend to the people.
On a micro sense, prison is full of white supremacists who hold ideologies of oppression and violence towards me and the ones I love. Should we partner with these hateful groups against the fascist pigs here, even if it were possible for white people to leave aside their place of privilege, we’d have to kill the whole white supremacist community immediately after the fact. The reason being, they still have oppressive ideologies, they still want me dead. To set that aside momentarily is nothing more than opportunistic. Not even close to altruism.
Iran funding the freedom fighters in Palestine and Lebanon and Yemen is also not altruistic, but based in an opportunistic need to protect its regime. It’s certainly no secret the u.s. has wanted to topple Iran for decades. They’ve been under sanctions. They’ve been cyber attacked by the u.s., chemical weapons used against them by Saddam provided by the u.s., and the u.s. using israel as its arm in the region, coupled with a real belief, a very valid belief, that israel shouldn’t exist, creates a cocktail for an opportunity to fund people to fight and die away from their borders and fight the u.s. imperialist by proxy, wrapped up in the flag of a good deed. All so long as the fighting stayed outside their borders and their military doesn’t get used. And the states do play the optics game and hope the optics of it all plays in their favor. In the end, the Iranian regime, like all states, are determined to protect themselves at the expense of everyone else.
I’d [never] champion the Iranian regime like I’d never champion any state because they all are inherently evil. And that’s an objective fact. To claim a right to rule using the threat of force is evil, and every step a state must take to preserve itself and uphold its false authority is wrought with violence and blood. I believe as those before me did, that all power belongs to the people. I believe those who still cling to the state come from a place of privilege. For those people, they could possibly survive the state, even thrive. For others like me —queer, Black, brown, women of color — assimilation is impossible, passing unlikely, and being safe unrealistic. For people like me, who have seen our people murdered all my life, as a person who got beat close to death as a teen by state attack dogs serving the function they do, as someone currently kidnapped by the state, who has been in institutions of the state all my life, someone who has seen it for what it is and holds that revolutionary love in my heart that drives me to rage and fight against this for the people — shit, for the people, the only people that matter, supplanting a state with another states will not save us. We struggle with the people, not with the state. ‘Cause it’ll never be the state that keeps us safe, and I don’t believe our focus should be on championing states disaligned with the u.s., but rather championing the freedom fighters around the world taking bold autonomous actions against their state, like Russians blowing up the railways to impede the war machine. [We should champion] them and [emulate] that here because to liberate the world, the u.s. needs to be brought to heel.
Doing our part in radical direct action against the u.s. is much more effective than championing or critiquing Iran. Call me in accelerationist or an idealist, I just like to be called an anarchist.
Championing communalism, a communism devoid of a central hierarchical government structure, would make for a better position than championing states. An anarcho-communist at least can recognize the illegitimacy of authority and the need for the absence of the state. To say empirically that state communism is objectively better than state capitalism or fascism is like saying a bullet to the head is better than a cyanide capsule. If I only have the choice between a slower or quicker death, I guess that’s a choice, but perhaps there’s a third. Perhaps one can use their imagination to think outside the confines of the box that caused the problem.
Communism has been attacked by u.s. imperialism for decades, yes, and communism can do bad all by herself, too. There are living descendants of the great terror, and as communism has had to fight to survive, in its centralized state, they persecuted and killed many. Just as capitalism has. It’s not that they’re equal in their scope of violence, but the same in the end result is oppression for the many by the few.
The argument shouldn’t be, “well, communism hasn’t killed as many people as capitalism.” That’s the same red herring argument used to justify pigs killing Blacks, saying, “well, pigs kill more white people per year.” The point is, pigs kill people, the state kills people. These entities seek a monopoly on violence and attempt to legitimize theirs as benevolence and in the name of the greater good.
I’m sure some Russians disdain [Russia’s] aggression and also see the West’s provocation. They don’t side with the West, they side with the people. I’m sure Iranians disdain their theocracy and also u.s. aggression the same. Two things can be true at the same time. One doesn’t have to be pro Iran to be anti u.s.. [You can be] pro the people everywhere and anti state everywhere.
You can interrogate the multitudes of global conflict and try to make it two sides, but the only side that matters is the people. States oppress and coerce through violence against the people. Any way you slice it, no matter the flag you drape it in, or the economic centralized hierarchical structure it’s placed on, under a king, president, parliament, socialism, capitalism, or communism — the end result for the people is the same. States and state sponsored violence has killed more people than any -ism it’s postured itself under.