Michel Onfray - Agent provocateur

The Toronto Star has an article on one Michel Onfray, a French philosopher anarchist, dude:

He is a self-described hedonist, atheist, libertarian, and left-wing anarchist. He is also France's best-selling philosopher.

At a time when a French high school teacher was forced into hiding after death threats for writing an article in Le Figaro in September calling Islam a violent, hateful religion and Christianity and Judaism non-violent, loving religions, Michel Onfray has already gone a step further: in Atheist Manifesto he dismantles and condemns as dangerous and archaic not only Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well.

The reason why Michel Onfray is important, besides the fact that he's a very high profile anarchist, is that his work might speak to the connection between atheism and anarchism. I don't know the details of that link, but it definitely seems like something worth considering. See more on that link here.

Onfray's first book to be translated into English is called Atheist Manifesto.

Also interesting from the anarchist point of view is that Onfray founded the Université Populaire de Caen, a free university:

Onfray founded the university as a reaction to the arrival of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, into the second round of the 2002 presidential elections against Jacques Chirac. The idea, he said, was to fight against that happening again by "promoting and publicizing intelligence," and to try to "analyze and understand how the world functions in order to put forward alternative solutions to the contemporary negativity."

Open to anyone, with free tuition and requiring no registration, prior education, tests or other course work, the concept, like his books, is also spreading beyond his home. There are now five other Popular Universities in France and one in Belgium, all of which acknowledge Caen as their model.

Yet despite his stance on free education for all and his anarchic political ideas, Onfray is not against private property — he owns homes in both Chambois and nearby Argentan — and has a pragmatic mind for business.

That final paragraph of this section strikes me as kind of a hit job, though it may not be. It seems like the typical 'hypocrite' smear used against all activists. You can't be an environmentalist, so the argument goes, if you drive a gasoline-powered (as opposed to solar-powered) car. Ridiculous argument to make, but typical of smear jobs. The paragraph might be completely true - I don't know Onfray - but I'm raising the 'beware' flag, just in case.

Onfray's home page (french).

Caen is about three hours west of Paris.

The Case for Anarchy

Professor Mark Leier of the Simon Fraser University Centre for Labour Studies (in Canada) wrote a biography on Mikhail Bakunin called Bakunin: The Creative Passion. Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary who is known as the father of modern anarchism.

Charles Demers of Tyee Books interviews Leier, and they talk about the book, covering some interesting topics along the way. Most pertinently to this blog is the first question/answer, where Demers asks Leier what it's like trying to talk to people about anarchy - when most people don't know what the word means, or don't know what it means in the political context:

Charles Demers: The other day, I caught an Entertainment Tonight-like segment about the new film, Children of Men, which depicts a fascist near-future in Britain, replete with ubiquitous cops and army, refugee camps and mass deportations. The announcer -- who pronounced tyranny as 'tie-ranny' -- called it 'anarchy.' To what extent are you starting at less than zero in terms of public awareness of your subject matter?

Mark Leier: No question, the word anarchy freaks people. Yet anarchy -- rule by no one -- has always struck me as the same as democracy carried to its logical and reasonable conclusions. Of course those who rule -- bosses and politicians, capital and the state -- cannot imagine that people could rule themselves, for to admit that people can live without authority and rulers pulls out the whole underpinnings of their ideology. Once you admit that people can -- and do, today, in many spheres of their lives -- run things easier, better and more fairly than the corporation and the government can, there's no justification for the boss and the premier. I think most of us realize and understand that, in our guts, but schools, culture, the police, all the authoritarian apparatuses, tell us we need bosses, we need to be controlled "for our own good." It's not for our own good -- it's for the good of the boss, plain and simple.

The rest of the interview has some good stuff, too.

p.s. If I can ever tell the difference between the use of the words 'anarchy' vs. 'anarchism', it'll be nothing short of a miracle. So don't worry your pretty little head over it. I don't.

The Free Voice of Labour - The Jewish Anarchists

The Free Voice of Labour - The Jewish Anarchists:

UFC Anarchist, Jeff Monson

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is one of those two types of often-brutal man-to-man combat competitions you may have seen on tv - PRIDE being the other. Whatever you think of this style of fighting (I happen to dig it, though I do feel guilty about that, and I'm not completely sure why), Jeff Monson is currently one of UFC's biggest stars. Monson is a self-declared anarchist:

He is, without a doubt, the toughest subscriber to In These Times. Standing 5’ 9” tall, weighing 240 pounds and sporting a shaved head, Jeff “The Snowman” Monson looks like a cartoon ready to pop, a compressed giant of crazy shoulders, massive biceps and meaty forearms.

When he sneers, people shudder. When he sweats, they turn away. When he’s angry, your best bet is to run.

He’s angry right now, even though his combat career in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)—an often-bloody tournament that combines martial arts disciplines like Brazilian Jujitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing—is taking off. In February’s pay-per-view event, Monson easily beat his opponent with a chokehold in the first round. If things keep going this way, he could have a title shot in the heavyweight division, against the explosive Andrei “The Pit Bull” Arlovski. So no, it’s not his future career prospects that have him pissed. It’s the state of the world.

“I’m not some sort of conspiracy theorist,” Monson says of his political leanings. “I’m not talking about how the government is trying to hide UFOs. I just want to do away with hierarchy. I’m saying that our economic system, capitalism, is structured so that it only benefits a small percentage of very wealthy people. When I was traveling in Brazil, they had us staying at a really posh hotel. Outside the hotel there was a mom sleeping on the sidewalk with her two kids. That’s when reality hits you. What did that woman ever do? Who did she ever hurt?”

That's a pretty damn powerful story, and it's a great way to explain anarchism in easy-to-understand language. The image of a mother and her two children sleeping on the sidewalk outside a fancy hotel should haunt us all.

Look at what some French folks did to embarrass their government into taking action. Good stuff.

...Jeff Monson to retire after recent loss?

Jeff Monson wiki.
Jeff Monson home page.

How to Decrease Crime?

Take guns away from the cops:

Mexican and U.S. federal authorities say some police are active members of drug-trafficking organizations, and several officers have been arrested over the years. Several kidnap victims say police officers took part in their abductions. The city has one of the highest kidnapping rates in the world.

Now, if we could only get them to try that here in the U.S....

Anarchist U

Toronto doing some more cool stuff:

As the kids go back to school and the rest of us try to figure out how to make ourselves better people in the new year, thoughts often turn to taking some kind of course. A quick Google jog tells us we could learn Chinese brush painting through the Toronto District School Board for $127 (plus materials), take a course called Marx, Freud and Nietzsche: Critics of Religion at the University of Toronto's school of continuing studies for $290, or learn about sociology and gender at Ryerson's G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education for $427.

Or we could study Latin American Politics for free at Anarchist U.

Love this.

Anarchist U.