Crimethink

"Personal liberty is very nearly unknown (except in the newspaper) and any citizen who dares to think in direct opposition to the dogma of the Majority does so at the risk of his life, if he thinks too loudly. " --Ragnar Redbeard, Might is Right (1896)

"Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past."--George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

***

I'm taking a risk writing this confession, comrades.

I've been unpersoned, canceled, censored, talked down to, and treated like a criminal because I DARED to publish a heretical BOOK.

All this in the "Land of the Free, home of the Brave." What kind of bullshit is that?

Hypocrites. Book burners. Where are your Swazi armbands, comrades?

Back not so long ago, I had an account at a POD company and sold about ONE HUNDRED different titles. Most of them were perfectly innocuous titles: gothic novels, books on ghosts, ufos, fortunetelling, etc. That kind of thing. Stuff that isn't going to UPSET a lot of people.

I sold some political and philosophical texts too--that is where I made my mistake. You see, in America, in the "Free World," in 2023, it doesn't pay to hold any strong opinions about ANYTHING. Especially if those opinions run contrary to the established orthodoxy in ANY WAY. There's an "acceptable" and incredibly NARROW level of discourse tolerated by the digital Thought Police. Anyone else is headed for a life behind the barbed wire.

My "controversial" titles included The Antichrist by Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, books by anarchists and slain outlaws, such as Emma Goldman, Albert Libertad, Bruno Filipi, and Renzo Novatore; the wonderful little book by anarchist activist Andrea Dorea, who is long dead, called N'Drea, and...one book that I cannot even mention, as it is just too much of a risk.

I sold Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Bakunin, and The Communist Manifesto in four translations. Mao's Little Red Book, as well as Mussolini's Doctrine Il Fascismo, and even writings by the Marquis de Sade.

Yeah, I sold a few controversial books. (Keep in mind, I sold two editions of the Bhagavad-gita, the Sayings of Buddha, and the Large Print New Testament as well. Ideologically, I went the full spectrum.)

I don't apologize for any of this. I sold books on serial killers and true crime too; violent men. I sold a book on grave robbers and necrophiles I wrote. No apologies, none whatsoever. You have the RIGHT to READ. Or, at least, theoretically. I confess: I'm a heretic and a thought criminal and a subversive and a disciple of Goldsteinism, which is doubleplusungood comrades. Crimethink ungood full-stop own life.

But there is one book, I believe, and one book alone, that got me into real trouble. Oh, friends and neighbors, sons and daughters of Eve, there is ONE BOOK, and one book only, thou art forbidden, like the fruited provender of the forbidden tree, from plucking and tasting thereof. And that book is a mysterious, forgotten little tome called MIGHT IS RIGHT, by a pseudonymous author calling himself "Ragnar Redbeard." That book, and that book alone, has gotten me into more shit than a hundred titles combined could ever do.

Because it got me "canceled." And now I have no DESIRE to publish anything controversial anymore. I have to second guess constantly what I am and am not ALLOWED to publish, what I can "get away with." I'd rather stick to republishing the stuff on puff-poo subjects: fortune telling, comic books, and old monster magazines. Because it just isn't worth it to me, personally, to have my whole publishing platform jacked because the Powers That Be accuse me of promoting...nasty things.

Might is Right is a philosophical polemic dating from 1896, a book unlike any you've ever encountered or will encounter, on your intellectual sojourn. It is like Nietzsche and Stirner and Ayn Rand except actually enjoyable (har-har). Written in thunderous prose that is like poetry, it lays bare the hypocrisy, weakness, and vile servitude of modern times--and it did this in 1896. It attacks weakness and meekness wherever it finds it, and the servile, sniveling wretchedness it sees in Christianity, Democracy, patriotism, "equality," and on and on. Surely it is a blasphemous old occult tome, as it partly inspired Anton LaVey to write The Satanic Bible. Its opening salvos are veritable incantatory evocations. Reading it, as I have, multiple times, is like always being delivered back to a ritualistic spell. Its first lines, "In this arid wilderness of steel and stone, I lift my voice that you may hear. To the East and to the West I beckon, to the North and to the South I proclaim a sign saying, 'Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong!'"

Such a lightning rod for energy, and power (either positive or maleficent, or both) is bound to resound down through the ages. And it has, still shaking up events in the world to this day. But I'll get to that in a moment.

Although the authorship of Might is Right, the identity of "Ragnar Redbeard" has been spuriously attributed to Jack London (by Anton LaVey, no less), the most likely candidate is socialist and radical thinker Arthur Desmond, an obscure literary "mystery man" of the late Victorian, early Edwardian period, who died in 1929, and who published a variety of tomes under a variety of aliases (Desmond Dilg, Gavin Gowrie, etc.) His other books and pamphlets include Rival Caesars, Christ as a Social Reformer, The Sayings of Redbeard (which I also use to publish), The Sayings of Stirner, Nietzsche, etc.

Born in New Zealand, and immigrated to Australia, Desmond fought on behalf of the Maori chieftain, was a socialist campaigner against the "big banks," was accused in his life of plagiarism, "seditious utterances," and eventually ended up in Chicago in the early Nineteen hundreds, operating the publishing house of Thurlow and Weed, which sold exactly one book--Might is Right. There's no mystery anymore as to who "Ragnar Redbeard" was.

Unrepentant to the very end, Desmond met that end in Chicago. He is buried, alongside his estranged wife, in a family plot in Gary, Indiana. He was around seventy years old when he died.

But this isn't the biography of Arthur "Ragnar Redbeard" Desmond.

The book, I'll freely admit, has offensive material in it: politically incorrect, even wildly so, by modern standards. It is, after all, a HUNDRED AND THIRTY-year-old philosophical text on Social Darwinism, egoism, individualism, and all sorts of subjects that place the power-seeking individual (some would say "predator") atop the social ladder or food chain. You'd expect such a historical document to be rife with scandalous and unorthodox proclamations as has been pointed to as an excuse for its suppression. However, as the former publisher of the book, and the one who performed the most popular audio version yet available (one that has had tens of thousands of listens across various platforms), I would argue that any such objectionable content does not make up the BULK of the bo0ok, NOR is it the POINT of the book.

But even if it were, so what? It's not kiddie porn, and it isn't bomb-making instructions. It's WORDS ON A PAGE. You can take them at face value, suspect the author of self-parody, think them brilliant, think them inane, think them the crudest, stupidest, most vile of all words ever printed across a piece of paper. Whatever the case may be, it is YOUR responsibility as to what you do with the book, and how you react to it. NOT MINE. I just provide the book, for reasons of my own (partly because the damn thing always sold so well, comparatively).

Might is Right flew beneath the radar for a long, long time. Hell, YouTube will still let you upload it, and until I pulled my upload of it (others have downloaded and re-upped my audiobook version), again for personal reasons, I was even allowed to monetize it.

That was until the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting.

America: the Home of the Homicidal

On July 28th, 2019, a troubled young man named Santino Legan went on a killing spree at the Gilroy Garlic Street Festival in Gilroy, California. He killed three and wounded seventeen. Santino was of Italian and IRANIAN descent. He was not, let's be clear, a WHITE power guy. Mass shootings, of course, are now a common, almost daily occurrence in the United States.

To this very day, domestic terrorism investigators have yet to determine just what Santino's motivations WERE for shooting his victims. He possessed a strange collection of both leftist and right-wing literature and even extreme Islamic material. He had targets picked out that included both Republican and Democratic offices. He complained about both Mexican immigrants and "Silicon Valley White ----," in his Instagram posts. He was a mentally ill young man who was grasping for some ideology to validate or justify his rage. To that end, one of the final things he hit upon was the book Might is Right.

And I find that curious since the book itself advocates the complete OPPOSITE of the self-destructive monstrous act that Legan carried out. Desmond/Redbeard would have argued that indiscriminately killing others, and then killing yourself, is "not the way of men and gods." "Survival of the fittest" may mean many things; it does NOT, however, mean "going out in a blaze of glory." Quite the opposite.

But that didn't matter to the news media, the ADL, or any other bourgeois watchdog or censor, eager to find a motive behind the madness. Legan's final Instagram post, encouraging others to read the book, was enough to have it MISCHARACTERIZED as a "proto-fascist manifesto." It was not long after, Amazon pulled it, and twenty-four other titles, including books such as The Lightning and the Sun by Hindu mystic Savitri Devi (who thought Hitler an incarnation of Vishnu) and novels by Harold Covington, and even The Communist Manifesto. (The last has since been reinstated.)

Keep in mind: I wasn't the only small-press publisher selling an edition of Might is Right. Currently, the book is available, as far as I know, through the Satanic publishing house Underworld Amusements. But it has been pulled from Amazon; no POD company, as far as I know, will let you publish an edition of it. It is relegated to being preserved in certain internet archives for digital content who have an absolutist view of freedom of expression. But, of course, the book is actively suppressed and effectively "memory holed." Effectively "banned."

Virtually no "civil libertarian" will go to bat for it. It is routinely overlooked when such groups compile "banned books" lists. I always take the time to post and remind them of it.

It is still okay, as far as Amazon is concerned, to sell MEIN KAMPF, a book with a few objectionable points here and there, I'll wager. A book written by a mass-murdering dictator who started a world war that led to the deaths of fifty million people. A man that attempted to exterminate a race. That's apparently just fine to sell at Amazon.

However, a book by a radical individualist, egoist, who never, as far as we know, did anything violent, and whose chief crime seems to have been flying in the face of generally revered institutions and accepted conventions, well, that's just a bridge too far!

So, Might is Right is gone, even though it is highly, highly unlikely it served as the inspiration or motivation behind Legan's cowardly act. But, now, what else must go?

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs? It features huge sections of violent and sickening eroticism. What if someone were influenced by that book to do something similar? It must be banned.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger? Inspired Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon, supposedly. It must also go on the book bonfire. We must cleanse tomorrow of any impure thoughts, as we march toward our Brave New World where even the possibility of crimethink is, forgive us, unthinkable.

And why stop at books?

Manson liked the Beatles' "White Album." Patti Smith has a song that references a certain word that can no longer be used, ever. In any context. That music must go, too. Matter of fact, punk, heavy metal, rap--all those forms of music are often offensive. We'll put them on the bonfire as well.

Classics. Shakespeare featured some violent content, as does Poe, Lovecraft (a known racist), and Goethe. Mark Twain depicted Southern racism in an unflattering light. Nietzsche's ideas are dangerous, as are those of Emma Goldman, and Voltairine de Cleyre. Rimbaud was a homosexual who wrote of the spiritual horrors of his existence. A Season in Hell? Please. It must burn too.

Kafka? That goes without saying.

Along with a certain book by Ray Bradbury. And another by George Orwell.

The Holy Bible has some very violent and intolerant content. Maybe we burn it, eh? Must keep the world safe. Must sanitize the future. After all, people are going crazy these days, right? It must be literature that is driving them to it. Not the wealth inequality, social alienation, SSRIs, constant media barrage of lies, or any of the other frustrations of their daily lives. Dump the blame on books, music, art, philosophy, and freedom of thought.

I lost my POD account. One hundred titles, all up and down the spectrum of political and philosophical thought--just pulled, gone. I received a baseless, one-sentence accusation from their "Questionable Content" department, and was told I would get my last royalties and, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

I remember as a teenager listening to Jello Biafra talk about censorship and the politically-motivated obscenity trial over the Dead Kennedy's 1986 album Frankenchrist. I never thought the issue would ever hit so close to home for me, hit me so personally.

Might is Right sits on my computer, a book I would love to publish and sell, to this day. It is a remarkable document and deserves study and preservation. But I can't. I'm not "allowed" to. If I do, I'll eventually be ferreted out, and lose my new publishing platform. I've been blacklisted, silenced. And a writer that has been dead since 1929 is still so provocative, his book has to be quashed. That's a powerful testament to the endurance of his ideas.

But who is next on the chopping block? Which book goes next on the digital bonfire? Oscar Wilde? Raymond Chandler? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Hemingway, maybe L. Frank Baum? Who? Seems like there's some pretty controversial stuff, some violent content, and some nasty words in those Stephen King novels from forty years ago. I know! Lewis Carroll, the perverted pseudo-pedophile who wrote about Mad Hatters' tea parties (an apt metaphor for modern life, if ever there was one). Surely HE must go as well?

It's amazing that in this day and age, when there are so many channels of communication open to everyone, there is virtually nothing of any importance anyone dares say.

Close your mouth. Still your mind. Turn on whatever channel of 24/7 propaganda best validates your worldview. There's nothing worth saying, nothing worth learning, that can't be filtered through the electronic sieve of conventional bourgeois media programming. Tune in, turn on, and drop dead. Mentally. Or rather, convince yourself that this is life, real life, true life and that YOU, and every other "bourgeois toad or plebeian frog" (to borrow a phrase from Renzo Novatore) that thinks like you, has the answer. The solution. The only one. And remember:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death, thoughtcrime is death.

And crimethink is forever.

In the future, AI will simply build a digital profile of every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. With this, the Powers That Be will decide who is a "good citizen," and who is a potential problem, a heretic; who is guilty of "crimethink." People may begin to disappear, giving the term "canceled" a whole new meaning. Don't think "It can't happen here." It's already begun.

Bella ciao.

Now.

"Welcome to 1984. In 2023..."