Heretic TOC is today sending an Open Letter to Iain McNicol, General Secretary of the Labour Party. This follows the news, widely trumpeted in the British media last week, that your host here has been expelled from the Party. I was suspended on Tuesday, on the grounds that my conduct may have been “prejudicial” to the Party. Then, on Wednesday, I was expelled.
So, if I have understood the matter correctly, there will be no hearing at which I could mount a defence.
The first I heard of all this was through the media. Official confirmation reached me only somewhat later, on Friday, when I received two letters from the Party, dated the 16th and 17th and both postmarked the 17th. The first letter did not specify any particular allegedly “prejudicial” conduct, but my activism in relation to paedophilia was obviously the issue, as was made abundantly clear in the widespread media coverage. The second letter, though, was much more specific. It stated:
“The Labour Party has learned that in December last you were convicted at Caernarfon Crown Court of sexual offences involving two children and given a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years…”
The letter went on to say that the Party’s National Executive Committee had decided to expel me immediately based on this being a serious criminal offence, as the NEC is empowered to do under section 2.1.4.D.3 of the Party’s rules.
It seems the Labour Party learned of the conviction from a Daily Mail report on Wednesday. I alluded to the case somewhat cryptically in Truth, reality and baby elephants at the end of last year. Now it is in the public domain and is being used as a handy stick to beat me with, I feel I should say something about the circumstances. But the story will take some telling, and I must put it on the back burner for today.
So, first things first. Heretic TOC is read globally, everywhere from Canada to Cambodia, and Austria to Australia, so I imagine many heretics beyond the purview of British party politics will be utterly perplexed and bemused at this point. All of you, and also UK-based readers who may have missed the news, are advised to read the links guide at the end, which will enable you to catch up fully if you wish.
Briefly, I joined the Labour Party last year, under my own name, under the £3 subscription scheme which enabled non-members of the Party to vote in the leadership election. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn. When he was elected leader, I joined the Party as a full member. I attended Party meetings, canvassed on doorsteps during a council by-election, and socialised with the local MP.
This was all abruptly ended soon after I made the mistake of telling the local police about my Labour Party membership and activities. This arose during one of their regular monitoring visits, conducted because I am on the Sex Offenders Register. They had been asking about whether I had taken up any positive activities that might be of benefit to the community. I thought my work for Labour could be put in that category. The police, however, homed in – as I should have realised they would – on the supposed danger to children involved in me doing door-to-door canvassing, because of the possibility that a child might open the door. Once they knew about this aspect, they decided they needed to notify the Labour Party about my background. This notification was supposed to be “confidential”, but was all over the media within days.
I hold out no hope of being readmitted to the Party but I nevertheless feel I should give them a piece of my mind over the decision to chuck me out. Accordingly, the following Open Letter is being sent to the General Secretary, with copies going to the Party leadership, my MP, some other leading members of the local Constituency Labour Party, and certain journalists.
Preamble almost over, the letter follows. You may feel it is too apologetic and that they are the ones who should be saying sorry, not me. There is a lot of truth in that, but bear with me. Anger has its place, but shouting at people is not the best way to get them listening. Anyway, here goes:
DEAR GENERAL SECRETARY…
I deeply regret that my membership of the Party has resulted in harmful publicity and I entirely accept the decision to expel me. Indeed, if anyone had thought to ask me, instead of blabbing instantly to the media, I would have been prepared to resign quietly.
This is because – although it might surprise you to hear it – I genuinely want the Party to win the next General Election. Note that when the story of my membership broke in The Times, my initial response was No Comment. I hope John Woodcock retains his seat in due course but I think he should take a leaf out of my book in knowing when to shut up, especially as regards his continuing and counterproductive sniping at Jeremy.
Disagree on Trident if you must, John; vote on Syria as your conscience dictates too. But get a grip on your gripes about the leader and take a tip from another unlikely advisor over your communication style: too many tweets make a twat, as “Call me Confucius” said.
John is a likeable young man and already a smart politician. When he grows up he might even move on from being a graduate of the febrile, rapid response, Thick Of It, school of political strategy, and develop a more mature style, less prone to knee-jerk sounding off.
Can’t blame him for his arrested development though. After all, he was groomed by the Labour Party right from when he was a kid in Sheffield. Once ensnared by the cult, he would have been easy game for brainwashing into thinking the Blair/Campbell political lifestyle is normal. Early abuse of this sort is inevitably traumatising and obviously what lies behind John’s problem with depression. He could sue for compo!
And before any professional offence-takers start screaming with outrage over mocking a man’s mental disorder (I’m not, actually), I would remind you that paedophilia is in the psychiatric textbooks as just that. More helpfully, it would be regarded as a sexual orientation parallel to hetero- and homosexuality, along with recognition of the right to be free from discrimination. Instead, paedophiles are routinely treated to hate-speech and face massive discrimination not just in political life but across the board, in housing, employment, you name it. Similar treatment for Jewish people, or gypsies, or Muslims or gays or blacks or women, would rightly be condemned as barbaric and worthy of the Nazis.
Yet even nice guy John Woodcock apparently feels it is acceptable to crank up fear and loathing where paedophilia is concerned.
Why? Because in this case I am a convicted paedophile? a criminal? I would remind you that is not so long ago that practising gays were also considered criminals. So, in his way, was Socrates. And Jesus. And countless ordinary people, too, have been condemned unjustly for their beliefs and even just for who they are. I hoped – still hope – that the Labour Party believes in free expression and even, on occasion, compassion for those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. I need only name the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and there is no shortage of other examples.
Which brings me to the values – the Labour values – I hold dear and to why I joined the Labour Party.
I have been a Labour supporter since long before John Woodcock was born, converted at the age of 15 from my working class dad’s support for the Tories by a clever fellow pupil at my local comp who went on to study economics at the LSE. As a VIth former, I was already an activist, joining CND and taking part in one of the annual marches from Aldermaston to London to Ban the Bomb. When I went to Lancaster University in 1964 I was one of the founding members of the new university’s Labour Club. I canvassed for Stanley Henig at the 1966 general election, when he was returned as the MP for Lancaster. When I was a press officer for the Open University in the 1970s I canvassed for Labour there too, and later did the same in Yorkshire when I was a journalist with the Wakefield Express. I was on the million-strong London march in 2003 against Blair’s ill-fated decision to back the war in Iraq.
Not that I have ever been “hard left”. Absolutely in the mainstream Labour tradition, I have always supported democratic socialism, and I favoured Neil Kinnock over those to the left of him, including Tony Benn. Bearing in mind that there is said to be more of Methodism than Marx in the Labour tradition, I felt a great affinity for Benn’s Christian socialism, but always felt he flirted too much with undemocratic elements, not least in his sympathy for those who were seeking to unify Ireland through terrorism. Jeremy did likewise, but all is forgiven in view of the fact that peace in Ireland was eventually secured through negotiation. Credit to Tony as well over that, of course.
Why, then, it may be asked, did I never join the Party until 2015?
It is simply that I was never inspired to do so because the Wilson and Callaghan governments were a disappointment compared to the fantastic achievements of the Attlee years. As for the betrayal of democratic socialism under Blair, disappointment is too weak a word. The much brighter prospect of a Corbyn leadership was what finally persuaded me I really should join and get properly involved.
Right from the moment of joining, though, I always felt it would be only a matter of time before members would find out about my background and take exception to my presence. Then I would have to go. Until that time, I told myself, I would be content to help as best I could with such humble but vital tasks as stuffing envelopes and pushing leaflets through doors.
For me, it was all about the Party. Passionately as I believe in freedom of speech and radical thinking unimpeded by any perception of the “correct” line, I am not an indulgent individualist. I am a team player when allowed to be. I simply wanted to do my bit in a quiet and unassuming way.
Turning to my own “radical” thinking, I would note first that there was much hand-wringing last year over whether those joining the Party under the £3 scheme were true supporters of “Labour values”. That is not the easiest term to define. The Party’s website presently says the following, which is a bit motherhood and apple pie and open to wide interpretation:
…the values Labour stands for today are those which have guided it throughout its existence.
- social justice
- strong community and strong values
- reward for hard work
- decency
- rights matched by responsibilities
Some might feel my values fail on the “decency” score but I beg to differ based on Labour’s own history and traditions, and also on a broad view as to what the word means. I take it to be grounded in respect for others, rather than blind conformity to conventional mores. I might also mention that this official list of Labour values is too Blairite. It fails to spell out that “social justice” requires a more equable distribution of wealth. Also, does Labour not value liberty? Where is that word? Is freedom a value to be ceded to the right? Has Labour become just a party that hates pleasure, loves to restrict people’s lives, and seeks to ban things – including me?
I mentioned the importance of Methodism, or one might say non-conformist Christianity more generally, to the Labour tradition. But the non-conformity of Marxist studies on the family, and on the fundamental economic underpinnings of social and sexual life, have also contributed deeply to Labour thought. Engels’ book The Origins of the Family did not shy away from such big issues as the origins of the incest taboo, the rise of patriarchy, and the “bourgeois” family. Anthropology was in its infancy then: much theory was perched precariously on a sketchy foundation of traveller’s tales from far-flung outposts of empire; but a tradition of deep engagement with the origins of our social arrangements, and the ways in which they might be critiqued and developed for the better, has been an aspect of Labour intellectual life ever since the Party’s inception, if not always through the Party itself then through associated intellectual developments, notably the Fabian Society, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Left Book Club.
Early Fabians included the poet Edward Carpenter and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis. Carpenter was an early LGBT activist, whose socialist vision saw sexual freedom, including free reign for consensual sexual relations between man and boy, not as the abuse of a powerless young person by a powerful older one but quite the opposite. As he proclaimed in his book The Intermediate Sex, “Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society.”
Havelock Ellis, likewise, an esteemed figure in his day, described the sexual relations of homosexual males, including men with boys. He wrote objectively, as a scientist, without characterising such relations in terms of disease, or damning them as immoral, or criminal. He discovered through his studies that same-sex love transcends age taboos as well as those of gender.
Fast forwarding to more recent times, my own early recollections are of a Labour Party in the 1960s and 70s that actually achieved far more than I gave it credit for at the time. Looking back, I note in particular the great social and educational reforms under the leadership of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, such as the abolition of the death penalty and of theatre censorship, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality and the creation of the Open University.
Roy was derided by the right as a “champagne socialist”. It seems to me he simply wanted a rich, enjoyable life for the many, not the few. Unlike today’s dour breed of censorious, mind-shrinking, PC authoritarians on the left, he was the patron saint of permission. May we do it? Yes, we may! The permissive society, he boldly declared, is the civilized society. He is even said to have been impressed by the Paedophile Information Exchange’s Evidence to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee, which would effectively have led to an age of consent of 10 in most cases, plus a new system of civil law protection against relationships contrary to the best interests of the child. It may have been under PIE’s influence, indeed, that research was commissioned by the Home Office leading to an official report in which consenting underage children were described as “partners” rather than “victims” (Sexual Offenses, Consent and Sentencing, H.O. Research Study No. 54, 1979).
The big mistake of that era was not Labour’s “permissive” approach, which was always grounded in respect for others and for communal values. Nor was there anything wrong per se with the hippie mantra “make love not war”. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence from primate and human studies linking the encouragement of personal intimacy in infancy and childhood, including the unimpeded discovery of sexual expression, with peaceable, cooperative, pleasant attitudes in adult life: it’s the difference between the female-dominated bonobo world, where sex is permitted in all age and sex combinations and is actually used as a peace-making strategy, and the tough, kick-ass mentality we see exemplified in gun-loving America, where Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl, exposing a nipple, apparently counts as a bigger outrage than the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which 20 children aged between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members, lost their lives to a crazy gunman.
What remains discredited from the days of Roy Jenkins, and rightly so, is selfish, individualistic, irresponsible hedonism – a philosophy that includes the relentless pursuit of personal greed and wealth accumulation, and which belongs to the right wing not the left.
I rest my case.
LINKS TO THE NEWS
Fury as paedophile campaigner is allowed to join Labour party
Subscription access only. This was the story that broke the news on Tues 16 February. No indication here as to how reporter Nigel Bunyan was first on the scene, for The Times. Story gives background re Harriet Harman; Hacked Off; Heretic TOC blog, with quote from About: : “I have been at odds with ‘the dominant narrative’ of sexual morality over the last several decades”.
Paedophile campaigner who joined Labour to back Jeremy Corbyn knocked doors in a by-election campaign
Very full account in Daily Mail on 17th. Story mentions my trial in Wales last year for “abusing brothers aged nine and ten”. Says “Labour today said O’Carroll had been ‘auto excluded’ from the party following his suspension yesterday and would not have the opportunity to resign.” Quotes one of the brothers, who: “…feared he had infiltrated Labour in a bid to continue his campaign to justify paedophilia.” Briefly, I had some sexual engagement with a 10-year-old boy in the 1970s. He said in court that he had been a willing participant and I treated him “respectfully”. His younger brother, who had been present at the time, took a dim view. He is the one who initiated the case.
Notorious paedophile’s night in the pub with Barrow MP
Local paper in Barrow: Quote: “Looking back, the most disturbing thing about that meeting was how pleasant and articulate was the demeanour of this highly dangerous man – a million miles from the myth of the shifty paedophile who can be identified from his suspicious manner.” Also: “He also spent two hours debating Trident and Syria at a Christmas party at Cunningham’s, the former Furness Hotel, in Bath Street, Barrow.” Also: “The Barrow and Furness MP said: ‘The idea of him using Labour activities to get the opportunity to prey on children is sickening beyond words’.” Story says I will step down voluntarily as I do not wish to embarrass Corbyn.
Yet more paedophile questions for Labour
Daily Mail editorial: “…the suspicion is that his membership was only suspended yesterday because the Press had found out about it.” Also: “Hacked Off, of course, is backed by Max Mosley – who has never forgiven the News of the World for revealing his spanking sessions with prostitutes. Is it so surprising that O’Carroll beat a path to its door?”
Former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange has Labour Party membership suspended
Daily Telegraph. Nice quote from my blog site About: “My aim here is to present a discourse of resistance. That probably sounds grim, but humour and cheerfulness are my weapons of choice, along with reason and research.” Also a Profile box with details of two books: Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980); Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons (2010). Also some quotes from Radical Case.
Tom O’Carroll: Labour suspends convicted paedophile and pro-child sex campaigner who joined party
The Independent: Followed by some interesting comments, notably from Leonard Mann and Liberationista.
Labour Suspends Pie/Hacked Off campaigner
Guido Fawkes, 16 Feb 2016: “Guido was in the room but failed to spot him among the crowd of weirdy-beardy grey-haired wrong ’uns with shared interests in shutting up the press.”
Paedo Tom O’Carroll’s plan to emulate Corbyn
Guido Fawkes, 17 Feb 2016: “O’Carroll wrote a disturbing post praising Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, implying he wanted the paedophile movement to take inspiration from how a man with controversial views had won “respect” after decades of sticking to his principles.”
[…] Oddly enough, he didn’t seem so concerned about “the integrity of the process” in my case, which I blogged about in An Open Letter to the Labour Party. […]
I’m sure this is not the best place to ask such questions, but I don’t know how else to contact you as you don’t seem to be on Twitter or anywhere else! Just hoping you’re ok?
[…] An Open Letter to the Labour Party recently, I revealed that the official reason given for my expulsion from the party with no […]
I’m fine thanks Katherine.
>I don’t know how else to contact you as you don’t seem to be on Twitter or anywhere else!
There’s a reason I’m not on Twitter or Facebook: I was kicked off both, just as I was expelled from the Labour Party! I am on email though: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk
Tom,
To be kicked off of both Facebook and Twitter really sucks Tom. We can use Twitter to find like minded people and build a social movement. IMHO Begin paying attention to Michah White the founder of #occupywallstreet @ micahmwhite.com. He talks about using social media. One thing he mentioned really caught my ear and that is the use of Twitter Bots to find like minded people. I haven’t tried them yet but will soon. I am thinking of using the bots to search for people using these words/phrases: Caravaggio, Whitman, Starry Night, Paleo Man, Peaceful Man. Wonder if there is anyone else you communicate with that knows the use of Twitter Bots. In the mean time take a look at micahmwhite.com. We know how right what we are is. I am sure there are others, lots of others we just need to find them and come together in community with the aim of becoming the government or at the minimum sending delegates from our community into government. Twitter might be able to help us, help mankind via us.
Lukas
Twitter Bots sounds like a useful tool for those who like working with Twitter, which is undoubtedly a powerful social medium for all sorts of activism. Facebook, it seems to me, is a much more a truly social medium: great if you want to develop personal contacts with like-minded people for friendship etc but less important for political activism than Twitter which is much more immediate and dynamic and “on the ball”.
Unfortunately, Twitter is also great for one’s opponents as well as one’s allies. The immediacy that makes it so lively also gives great opportunities for online mob rule. You can be courteous on Twitter and obey all the rules but still fall prey to mass trolling by people screaming abuse and making death threats.
Threats and other forms of extreme personal abuse are of course against the rules. But the Twitter authorities chose to kick me off the forum rather than acting against the rule-breakers. I suppose they think it is easier to get rid of one person than many. And that is true, but it guarantees that mob rule will continue.
That is one reason why I have not attempted to re-join Twitter using another identity, which I am told is easy to do. Another is that you would presumably be starting from scratch again, with no Followers. That makes it very hard to compete in influence with those who have thousands of Followers and can use them to launch a mob attack on you.
Even motormouths can be correct:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/katie-hopkins-calls-15-year-old-victim-of-adam-johnson-child-sex-abuse-a-slg-a6915346.html
Seen this? http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/what-should-we-do-about-paedophiles
It’s the usual.
LOL. I don’t even bother to read such Antisexual propaganda put forward by the reactionary Sexophobic moralists who set themselves in power after the succeed of the counter-revolution against the ’70s anymore. It’s the same predictable yadda yadda. That journalist is a fucking joke and should be ashamed of herself. Selfish piece of shit.
The writer, Sophie Elmhirst, contacted me last October. She said she was doing a long-form article for the Guardian and asked me a very narrow question. But she apologised for asking too broad a question! She wrote:
“If it’s not too broad a question, could you explain to me how you define paedophilia? And what your thoughts are on the way the DSM-5 and medical experts define it?”
My initial reply, in what became quite a substantial email exchange, included this:
>”I do not think paedophilia can be meaningfully discussed without reference to wider considerations, including children’s sexuality, sexual ethics, and the relationship between permissible sexual expression and the changing nature of society, including the connection of sexual behaviour and morality to economics.”
Unfortunately, she remained resolutely focused on her narrow concerns, and that is reflected in her article. All she really wanted from me, it turned out, was whether I thought paedophilia is a sexual orientation, like hetero- and homo-sexuality. In line with the researchers she quoted, notably Cantor and Seto, I said that it was.
I asked who else she was consulting. She mentioned Cantor, Seto, Grubin and others, including Sarah Goode. I said I thought Cantor, Seto and Grubin could all be relied upon to give a view backed by scientific evidence, even though I did not necessarily agree with their conclusions.
As for Goode, I said I thought her opinions were rubbish grounded in nothing but unsubstantiated dogma. I referred her to my review of Goode’s two books on paedophilia. It may or may not be significant that Goode is not quoted in Elmhirst’s article!
I emailed a Letter to the Editor today in response to the piece but I don’t suppose they’ll use it. Elmhirst didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know when the article was coming out.
Why continue with long decades of all subjective and defensive discourse against increasingly deaf ears?
When so much all powerful OBJECTIVE evidence of Under AOC’s ability to morally, mentally, and emotionally CONSENT to so called ‘Adult’ activities is – OVERWHELMING.
There are none so blind as those who will not see?
.
“Be the change you wish to see…”
https://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/713198.htm
I think that’s a splendid letter. Not too conciliatory at all — but I guess I would say that.
I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles last year. That must have been grim, and personally painful.
Rephrase ‘A’, “I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles last year. That must have been grim, and personally painful, but why would anyone complain about kind Tom supposedly causing THEM pain at all – never mind after four long decades since the SeXy ’70s? It makes no sense, let alone Nonce Sense!”
Well, Tom… Your idea of “anarchy” as a bloody mess dominated by a constant warfare between rival wargangs and their warlords – war, war, war all the time – is not an anarchy envisioned by the libertarian thinkers and activists. Unlike you, they were trying to describe a peaceful, yet fully liberated society, which combine personal autonomy and self-determination with a highly flexible, multi-dimensional organisational relations and social mechanisms of collective decision-making and conflict resolution. I, personally, prefer to call such super-developed future society a “high anarchy”, to distinguish and separate it both from the “low anarchy” of the failed countries in the state of collapse and mutual disorganised violence (a picture that is usually evoked in the minds of most people when they hear the word “anarchy”) and the “simple anarchy” of the pre-state, “primitive” tribal societies.
I will try to present you a short, simplified – and a very rough – description what the “high anarchy” may look like.
As I have said already, the basic unit of the “high anarchy” is an autonomous individual, provided with a fundamental personal sovereignty required to create and transform itself and its life according to its intentions. But such independence does not mean complete isolation and separation from others: being social creatures, such individuals will aggregate and team up to form communities and (informal) organisations, where they will satisfy their shared needs and fulfill their common goals with an active mutual aid and advice. Such groups will be extremely diverse in their structure and purpose. There would be neighbourhood communities of people living together in a particular locale, helping each other with the everyday problems and enjoying the company of others; volunteer organisations engaged in some productive processes, such as a construction of buildings; and, of course, a mixture of different groups dedicated to some creative activity, be it scientific research, philosophical debate, spiritual development or artistic expression. All these groups will be forming alliances and unions with each other, according to their own initiative and mutual consent, and participate in some macro-scale projects; and alliances and unions, in their turn, will participate in global social networks and movements, where they would be able to coordinate their activities, share knowledge, make useful long-distance contacts etc.
Two important issues would be collective decision-making and resolution of conflicts.
Let’s look at the group decisions and interpersonal conflicts within a community or organisation. Decisions will be made on a basis of a temporary (and freely challengeable) consensus of all group members who have an interest in a particular issue. For example, we have a large main building, where many people live; some of them want to perform an action which affects the whole community, say, install an accessory building, and intend to invite an organisation of construction specialists to assist them with the building process. In such a case, they will make an announcement through a local communication network, publicising a statement about their intentions and asking their neihbours to participate in a decision-making. Anyone who is not indifferent to the vocalised problem will be able to debate it; and, after all pros and cons will be weighted, a worked-out decision will be made.
Here we come to the most sensitive moment: what would we do if we face an apparently irreconcilable conflict – some are enthusiastically supporting the construction, yet others reject it vehemently? The intermediate group will be formed, for the sake of reconciling the conflicting sides. This group may consist of the neutral members of the concerned community, respected enough by members of the conflicting sides to act as a kind of informal arbitrage. Or, alternatively, members of another community, which has undergone a similar conflict before and has resolved it successfully, may be invited to add their experience in the process of negotiation. Or a group of skilled mediators, who has worked with such issues repeatedly, in different communities, and now offers its help to the interested parties, may be asked to come and assist.
After all, if nothing helps, the dissident group may simply leave the community and find a new one to live in – one which will be more tolerant to the construction innovations. They entered this particular gathering of people voluntarily, and they are free to leave it any moment if they find their neihbours unbearable.
Another moment which need to be stressed is that the social consensus reached by such collective decision is not some kind of an unshakeable dogma: if later someone finds a valid reason to challenge it – for example, data pointing to the excessive softness of the soil covering the place of the proposed accessory building construction, which may lead to a technical disaster during the work – this one would be able to present it to others and ask for the revision of the previously made decision.
If we move from the level of the interpersonal conflicts within specific communities to the one of inter-communal and inter-organisational conflicts within alliances and unions, we will find the similar methods of conflict resolution, even on a larger scale. The forming of intermediate groups to serve as mediators, including the groups specially formed by people highly skilled in the negotiation processes, is as available on the higher union level as on the lower communal one. And the devotedly oppositional organisations are as free to leave the alliance at will as their individual members are free to leave these organisations.
The same principles will work on a highest societal level of global networks and movements: the participation is fully voluntary, and departure is always an option.
Another highly important factor to mention is the total, unrestricted freedom of information. Combined with highly developed communication networks (we are taking about future, after all), it will constantly provide the members of any specific social constellations with the information about the lifestyles and conditions of the alternative constellations they may enter. So, they will be able to differentiate between available groups, compare them with each other and prefer the ones which will be best for them. People will not be staying in unpleasant conditions for long if the better possibilities will be always available.
>…an anarchy envisioned by the libertarian thinkers and activists. Unlike you, they were trying to describe a peaceful, yet fully liberated society
I applaud their imaginative efforts, and would dearly love to find them convincing.
>After all, if nothing helps, the dissident group may simply leave the community and find a new one to live in…
This is great if you have somewhere to go, as early human populations did. They could migrate to virgin terrain. It is theorised (and there is some supporting evidence, albeit vigorously contested) that just such conditions allowed for relatively peaceful cultures in deep pre-historical times.
Incidentally, the Victorian anthropologist Edward B. Tylor spoke of the problem of when tribes began to “press on one another and quarrel”. He saw this as the reason why people (either the men or the women) left the tribe to marry into another tribe. He wrote: “Again and again in the world’s history, savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds the simple, practical alternatives between marrying-out and being killed out.”
It is now thought that he was wrong, but the growing tendency to “press on one another and quarrel” was bound to grow as population rose and competition for resources grew ever greater.
>Another highly important factor to mention is the total, unrestricted freedom of information…. People will not be staying in unpleasant conditions for long if the better possibilities will be always available.
What better possibilities? Some of us feel the need to depart for a better planet. We have plenty of information to suggest this solution will not become available to most of us any time soon.
What your optimistic vision seems to leave out is very much still the problem of limited space and resources outlined above. We can find new groups and alliances to work with, but in an increasingly monocultural world it is not that easy to find something truly different. With regard to sexuality, especially, the dominant world trend is towards the repressive, “protective”, Anglophone model.
Leonard Mann’s vision of a Deep Green future is quite promising if we can get a more rational distribution of resources (big if) based on a Citizens’ Wage etc. Optimism is to be found in the fact that we are now so good at making things, growing food, etc, that nobody really needs to go short if the distribution is fair.
One point to add is that in my Open Letter I was very critical of selfish individualism. But there is also a much more creative left-wing vision of individualism, as set out in Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
What your optimistic vision seems to leave out is very much still the problem of limited space and resources outlined above. We can find new groups and alliances to work with, but in an increasingly monocultural world it is not that easy to find something truly different. With regard to sexuality, especially, the dominant world trend is towards the repressive, “protective”, Anglophone model.
Leonard Mann’s vision of a Deep Green future is quite promising if we can get a more rational distribution of resources (big if) based on a Citizens’ Wage etc. Optimism is to be found in the fact that we are now so good at making things, growing food, etc, that nobody really needs to go short if the distribution is fair.
You just mentioned the major rub in the above passages, Tom 🙂 The very essence of socialism as I follow it – i.e., as envisioned by Marx and Engels, as opposed to Keynes – is equitable distribution of the resources, not private control by the few who then dispenses them according to the individual’s ability to pay; and a system based on cooperation, and not competition for individual control of these resources. Contrary to popular belief, there is no shortage of resources; the U.S. states of Kansas and Iowa alone can produce enough grain to easily feed every human being on the planet. The non-renewable, polluting fossil fuels can be readily replaced by fully renewable and non-polluting energy sources such as sunlight, wind, hydro, and even thermal. In the not too distant future, fracking for the limited metal resources on the planet can be replaced by cooperative intra-solar space travel to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as a single large ferrous asteroid out of the many thousands in that belt are capable of providing sufficient mineral and metallic resources for all humanity for at least a thousands years without the need to strip mine our own planet. This is not “utopian,” but fully scientifically feasible in our modern post-industrial society. And moreover, it’s designed to fulfill the needs of people all across the planet, not just small isolated communities.
The main problem is not lack of sufficient resources so much as a system based upon competition and private ownership rather than cooperation and social ownership of these resources; and distribution based on private profit rather than fulfilling the needs and wants of all human beings. Social democracy and democratic socialism do a much better job of distributing resources than the non-regulated Randian capitalism so beloved of the U.S. iteration of capitalism and Rand’s intellectual followers, no doubt. However, it still leaves intact the core of capitalism: production for profit, the retention of private ownership of many industries, the continued use of money, a need for constant expansion, and an elite privileged class with the power to coerce government into making laws for the benefit of this privileged handful.
This a man I call “Robert of Union Square” talking about anarchy. Thought we might find what he has to say and who he is kind of interesting and informative. This is a video taken maybe 3 years ago. I miss him just talking. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23070379
Hi Explorer
A good read here: http://uryourstory.org/index.php/books-by-jay-edson/5-a-galaxy-of-no-stars by Jay Edson. “Coming to terms with the sudden loss of billions of humans in a single event has so long been an underlying theme of stories that the genre has its own name – the post-apocaplyptic novel. Many deal with the practical dramas and demands of such an event, and many with the sociological ones implicit in rebuilding human society from what scraps remain. Few books, though, have ever used this genre to question our very notion of ‘human society’, of what is right and wrong, of the nature and purpose of human morality itself and of how humans must re-think their society’s attitudes, goals, structures, and behaviors.”
Perhaps it will take nothing less than an asteroid collision event to bring about a change in the present state of “anarchy” to one envisioned by you and by Jay Edson in his novel.
An asteroid falling on people’s heads?! That would be too much even for a most dedicated revolutionary…
To be honest, I’d rather avoid discussing the exact methods of changing the world from the present state to the anarchic state here on the blog – I don’t want to see Tom being silenced with some kind of an Extremism Disruption Order – or how is this recent British extra-judicial repressive invention called?
Paraphrase Carl Gustav Jung, “Fascists with closed minds but an excellent opinion of themselves cherishing amazing virtues, have always others within their power supporting but never disputing their delusions.”
Tom,
This is all so disturbing. I am appreciative of being able to read your letter/see your arguments. I will work on ways to incorporate your words and thoughts into my own words and thoughts.
We live in a world of criminal negligence of science and nativity.
Thank you for sharing,
Stay Safe – I too am with you,
Lukas
By derivation, anarchy just means no government. We are then left with the implications of that. Historically (though not perhaps in very small communities deep into pre-historic times), absence of government has tended to mean very undesirable chaos, as rival parties vie for control. This meaning is reflected in the main dictionary definition of the word, which looks to the present and the past.
Which is why I support a central managing body like an industrial government, including the type described as industrial labor unions as formulated by Daniel De Leon, as opposed to no type of central managing organization whatsoever. That is how Marxian socialists are largely distinguished from anarchists.
Maybe we should distinguish anarchy from anarchism.
Agreed!
Anarchists, including you, look to the future, and to more positive possibilities. Such a system would not be lawless, you say, but there would be “no central authoritative body”.
By that, I mean no central oligarchy who make all of the rules themselves, with no input from the laborers, and who control a professional police force and military that is separate from the laborers to enforce their edicts. An industrial labor congress has often been described as having the task of “managing *things*, not people.” Its purpose of ensuring equal access to the social store and an equitable distribution of the output that labor works collectively to create would ensure a classless society where want, and the insecurity that comes from the fear of want, would no longer exist; no one would ever worry about being forced to incur debt, or end up homeless, or involuntarily denied meaningful work, or to go hungry, or access to the goods that are required. All that would be expected in return is a modest share of the useful work from everyone. As a result, crimes against property – which take up the bulk of legal books in all nations – would be all but non-existent for lack of a purpose to commit them. The rampant violence that results from such insecurities would be considerably lessened, if not all but eliminated from more than incidental occurrences. Again, I have nowhere near the space here to fully do this subject justice, but labor would be able to set the few required rules themselves and police their own community locally with designated security guards who have the purpose of breaking up the incidental fist fights that would occur from personal disagreements, etc.
If then, there are to be laws but not state imposed ones, who will impose them?
Order wouldn’t need to be forced by restrictive laws in a classless, moneyless society where everyone would be free from want, and all would be guaranteed work that was conducive to their personal talents and interests, and only be required to perform them a fraction of the hours we do today, since there would no longer be any requirement for the large number of jobs that deal with money, banking, accounting, or any type of fiscal concerns where so much labor is required for in systems that run on money. Social democracy and democratic socialism would – and have – ameliorated the worst effects of capitalism, and contribute considerably better to maintaining social justice; but as I noted before, the main source of these problems remains intact, and a counter-revolution by the remaining privileged elite may always be imminent.
A village council of elders? Local democracy?
The latter can certainly consist of councils representing local needs, while larger councils can be voted into existence to manage and distribute goods that are required on a larger scale. These economic planners would be voted into their positions by labor, would be fully re-callable at any time they fail to fulfill their obligations, and would not receive remuneration (i.e., power and privilege) above and beyond what all other laborers receive. The local councils could easily convene juries in the rare cases that serious offenses occurred, and to determine any type of justice that may be necessary as a result. However, the vast court and prison systems of today would likely be done away with.
Granted, this brief overview doesn’t come close to answering all the questions that would need to be answered, but I certainly think its imperfections could be easily manageable with the vast majority of people standing behind it and genuinely benefiting from it. The remaining few who wanted a return to a system allowing ruthless competition, unfettered greed, and inequality would just have to deal with the fact that they had to share power and security with everyone else, just as the few billion poor and oppressed today must deal with the lack of material security and are expected to just deal with it as a “given”.
As Sylvie noted quite well elsewhere in this comments section, the Left as we know it today is but a shadow of what it was during the relative halcyon days of the 1970s. The brave defenders of justice, democratic principles and open-mindedness of those days that allowed you and PIE to be treated with a degree of respect have been replaced post-’70s by a lot who are more interested in promoting identity politics, PC attitudes that take feelings into consideration over any type of principle, and trying to assimilate and “fit in” with the prevailing institutions that actually promoting a better and more progressive world. Comparing progressive organizations like Liberty as it is today with its 1970s incarnation when it was accepting of PIE is a sobering case in point.
As you noted yourself, Tom, many of the principles of social justice noted in the Labour Party’s mission statement is carefully worded to be vague and conveniently open to interpretation. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn are openly attacked by mainstream media outlets and the majority of constituents in his own party, rather than lauded as would have been the case in the days after World War II but before Reagan and Thatcher took power. Your letter was excellent as an appeal for the Labour Party to become more of what it once was, rather than what passes for “liberalism” and “progressive politics” today. I likewise do not think that your missive was overly apologetic, but had just the right balance of firmness and humbleness, with a complete willingness to admit your own mistakes and encourage the Party to be mindful of its own.
here is an interesting article: Swedish youth group advocates legalisation of Necrophilia and incest:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/incest-and-necrophilia-should-be-legal-youth-swedish-liberal-peoples-party-a6891476.html
Yes, very interesting. Unfortunately, I may be a bit too old, at 70, to be allowed as a member of the Swedish youth group in question!
I was particularly struck by what the German Ethics Council reportedly said in 2014, calling for an end to the criminalisation of incest between siblings:
>The council argued that the risk of disability in children was not sufficient to warrant a law putting couples in “tragic situations”, and that decriminalising incest would not fuel the spread of the “very rare” practice.
Siblings brought up apart do sometimes fall very passionately in love when they meet as adults. In such circumstances it is indeed tragic and cruel to say they cannot have a relationship. But I don’t think they would be wise to have children and perhaps there should be a deterrent penalty for this. The risk of having children with disabilities caused through inbreeding may be low but such disabilities can be very serious when they do happen and the consequences may be lifelong.
I think incest between non-first-degree relatives ‘should’ be a subjet of interest to heretics since it seems that a lot of adult-child relationships fall into this category: older and younger cousins, uncles and nephews, perhaps most of all uncles and nieces, since for a lot of reasons it can be harder for men to strike up friendships with unrelated girls than with unrelated boys. In Terry Leahy’s Negotiating Stigma, two women discuss their positive childhood sexual experiences with their uncles: https://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/NegotiatingStigma.pdf I liked this Huffington Post article on cousin marriage: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/faheem-younus/why-ban-cousin-marriages_b_2567162.html
Why do we consider cousin marriages icky when we didn’t use to until quite recently? I personally feel grossed out by it because I spent enough time with my cousins before I was six or seven that the Westermarck effect kicked in. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but my guess is that in the past, with extended families being physically and emotionally closer, there were more Westermarck-effect cousin pairs out there, not fewer. But in the past people didn’t tend to think of the ideal marriage as a deep romantic and sexual bond, as we do. It may have seemed very nice to marry someone with whom you shared a sibling-type love.
It is pretty common for prepubescent siblings to play sexually together; the Westermarck effect seems only to kick in during or after puberty. I have read that if people are more than eight years apart the Westermarck effect is greatly diminished for the younger person. I’m looking for the studies that back this up and can’t find any, but it’s interesting if true. There’s a 1970 film called I Start Counting, based on an Audrey Erskine novel, about a fourteen-year-old in love with her thirty-two-year-old adopted brother. It’s also got a lust-murderer of young girls in it and stars sixteen-year-old Jenny Agutter, who was openly marketed to older men in the publicity photos. There’s also a 2001 novel by Ronald L. Donaghe, Uncle Sean, about a fourteen-year-old who falls in love with his uncle.
Thomas Mann did write in his journals that he felt passionately sexually attracted to his fourteen-year-old son Klaus. But then, like most men of his time, place and class, he wasn’t exactly an involved parent when the kids were little.
Yes, came across this about Thomas Mann in Colm Tóibín’s review of this book for the LRB in 2008:
In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by Andrea Weiss
Tóibín wrote:
In his diaries Thomas Mann made clear his own sexual interest in Klaus: ‘Am enraptured with Eissi,’ he wrote in 1920, when Klaus was 14 (Eissi was his nickname), ‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’.
As for the Westermarck effect, did you see my review of Arthur P Wolf’s last book?
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-015-9327-9/fulltext.html
No I hadn’t. Fascinating! Think I’ll get the book.
Greetings from Russia, Tom! Here I am, one of your regular, yet silent foreign readers (well, silent before this day). First of all, I want to thank you for your public activity, including blogging – for a libertarian youth rights proponent like me, it is a rare pleasure to read the messages of a person who takes children really seriously – seriously enough to give them control of their own bodies and sexualities. Unfortunately, such perspective is marginalised these days, after the advent of protectionist “children’s rights” movement, which seek to deprive kids of any freedom for sake of illusive “protection”. So, why I’m not a “child-lover” myself – in the realm of sexual desire, I’m a pretty standard heterosexual “adult-lover” – I still support your cause as the cause of the one who stand for giving children a choice.
First of all: my congratulations for you, Tom – you are being massively slandered and defamed in the mainstream sources! Again. And I’m not being sarcastic – I’m serious: no matter how hostile and misguided the coverage is, it still serves your purpose in the long term, since a lot of common readers will visit your blog to horrify themselves… And a few of them will read it in detail, and start really thinking about the topic. A very few of them may even question their own assumptions about child sexuality (and the possibility of consensual and harmless child-adult sex). And finding some new supporters seems to be valuable enough to sacrifice your Labour membership.
In fact, Tom, I don’t understand why you have been participating in the Labour party for all this time. Maybe they once were for freedom and permissiveness, and for the personal dignity and independence for anyone, including children. But nowadays they appear to be as pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, pro-restrictiveness and pro-repressiveness as nearly everyone else – everyone except a small number of libertarian types like you (and me). But to be a libertarian type today is also to be a “fringe” type; to be the one who is banished beyond the constraints of the mainstream. As a sex-positive feminist (and a brilliant scholar of a sexual dissidence) Gayle Rubin sadly noted in one of her interviews, in the early 1970s people were living with an optimistic feeling of a coming utopian tomorrow; and nowadays we can only grimly anticipate a rise of the new fascism.
I can only wonder how manage to keep yourself strong for all these decades, Tom. Well, I know that such a question sound a bit like a standard press interview cliché, yet I still would ask it: how you managed to remain unbroken for this long? Being a most active and visible member of the most despised and demonised minority in the modern Western world must have been a heavy burden, but you was able to live with it since your young years. Where is the source of such a remarkable resilience?
Another thing which surprises me about you is your persistent moderation: despite being a constant target for a persecution and harassment, you remain a classic democrat, arguing for a state and its law. After all the repression you have survived in the hands of the legal system, I would rather suspect you to become a full-blown anarchist. For me, the mere intellectual analysis of the fundamental hypocrisy of statism, with its insistence that state has an unique elevated social status which allow it to initiate violence against its “citizens” – and, in the cases of international warfare, even against the “citizens” of other states – is enough to condemn the law-and-order system as nothing but a deceptive veil covering the authoritarian violence. Yet you – the one who have actually lived through the suffering of baseless condemnation and undeserved punishment – still maintain the view that the state and its law deserve their existence. Why is it so?
However, one’s choice of democracy versus anarchy is not as vitally important for me as one’s choice of defiance versus compliance. And the latter case, you definitely choose defiance – including the defiant defense of children’s liberty. And here we stand together.
Many, many thanks, Explorer, for this very encouraging contribution. Positivity always means so much when it comes from those whose own sexuality is mainstream.
>Yet you – the one who have actually lived through the suffering of baseless condemnation and undeserved punishment – still maintain the view that the state and its law deserve their existence. Why is it so?
Churchill said democracy is a terrible form of government. Unfortunately, all the others are even worse. That is pretty much how I feel about state power. It’s terrible. It’s oppressive and unreasonable. But do you know a place where anarchy is a better alternative? Somalia, perhaps? Libya?
It is sometimes said that small communities can work well informally, without inflexible state bureaucracy and law enforcement. But there are also nightmare cults of only perhaps a dozen members, or a hundred, in which charismatic leaders tyrannise their followers.
The good thing about a big bureaucratic state, and even more so a supra-state organisation like the EU, is the very thing we often think is bad: the inflexibility, the slowness to change. The state monopolises violence but probably in a better way than a warlord in Somalia or a Libyan faction leader would do. The latter can be arbitrarily ruthless, paying off scores on a personal basis. But established nation states, especially democratic ones, are restrained by a massive and cumbersome, but relatively very civilised, system of law.
Personally, I have been badly treated by such a system. But at least I am alive, free and able to write this blog. I have even benefited from a court judgement confirming my continued right to free speech, despite previous convictions. There are many anarchic places where I would just have been tortured, mutilated and killed, or else dumped in a dark mediaeval-style dungeon and left to rot for years with no outside communication. I am grateful for not-so-small mercies!
I wonder what is your view of Russia today? Is it a free country? Would I be better off there?
People are always bigging up the European arrest warrant; How it tackles cross-border crime — its also a eyesore, you can be bundled into a plane and taken to, say, Bulgaria – for a crime you know nothing about. Nick Clegg mentioned Jeremy Forest, describing him as a ‘monster’ justifying it in the EU debate — The EU project seems to be a sinking ship, best exit while you can!
Modern Russia? A free country? Not a chance. Being compared to the European states, it is a xenophobic and reactionary autocracy with a mix of imperialistic militarism and clerical traditionalism serving as a quasi-official ideology. Of course, the situation here is not as dismal as in, say, Northen Korea, but it is still quite unpleasant for a person who knows that a much more humane and liberated life proceeds beyond the Western border.
And you won’t survive a year here. Even a standard European-style gay activism is in fact legally forbidden. And, what is worse, it is also informally forbidden by the society, which allows multiple vigilante groups to attack – not only verbally and symbolically, but also physically – any gay acting in public. In fact, giving a gay activist a severe beating – with a bunch of cops standing nearby and cheerfully wathcing without a slighest attempt to prevent an assault – is a common deed for many militant “defenders of traditional values”.
As for an “out” paedophile like you, Tom… You would likely be simply murdered – probably not in a street, but by other inmates in a prison cell where you will be thrown for nothing but your views.
Exactly as I thought, but I wanted to hear it from you. The British media have long been insistent that Russian democracy is a sham. I have reasons to distrust the media here, but from what you are saying the picture they paint of Russia today is quite accurate.
All in all, I think what you are saying strengthens my argument. We may think things are bad in Britain and going to the dogs in the EU — Salem 21 has commented, reasonably enough, on the dangers of the European arrest warrant — but we need to understand that utopia is not available, and will not be achieved through “anarchy”. Anarchy just means having a good time if you own a Kalashnikov in a lawless country and are ruthless enough to use it. Anarchy may bring an enviable degree of freedom, but only for the strongest, and only until they too die in a hail of bullets.
Vladimir Putin is essentially the guy in Russia with the Kalashnikov (and a whole lot more fire power, of course). I find myself wondering, Explorer, whether he has a personal reason for cracking down on paedophiles. After he kissed a little boy’s midriff he was accused of being one himself. Is he struggling to wipe out this image (or reality?) ??
Also, 10 or 15 years ago, a lot of child porn was being produced in Russia, apparently with no police action against it. Has that been stopped as far as you know? Is it just open paedophilia that is violently attacked or is it tolerated for those who can pay big bribes?
Here are my brief thoughts on this as a Marxian socialist, Tom.
I agree that the existence of no central managing body as espoused by anarchism would be a problem. However, anarchy in and of itself does not actually mean a chaotic, disorganized, and lawless system as so many seem to assume. It simply means a society where there is no central authoritative body in the form we today know as the state. “Anarchy” too often has been used as a generic term for a chaotic situation or complete lack of order that the law is incapable of controlling.
I agree with what you say about the state as its now embodied by, say, the EU model is better than the type of chaotic and overtly repressive dictatorships in the Middle East that you mention. But I do not believe a cumbersome and democratic state run by bureaucrats as you describe is the only possible alternative to a dictatorship. This is why I support the conception of an industrial government, i.e., a true labor government, which would be run directly by a free and classless society of laborers for the common interest (i.e., social ownership, NOT state ownership). Even though I fully agree that democratic socialism – which is actually a heavily liberal form of nationally regulated capitalism – is by far a better variant of a market-based system than the fully unregulated form of capitalism supported by the likes of the American Republicans and the opportunistic “centrists” in the Democratic Party who likewise support the 1% (e.g., the Clintons and their followers) – it nevertheless leaves class divisions and the existence (and heavy importance) of money completely intact, however regulated and “reined in.” As a result, it leaves intact a privileged class and their attendant bureaucrats who can bide their time and prepare a “counter-revolution,” which is what has happened both in America and in your native Britain.
This “counter-revolution” is precisely what happened to allow Thatcher and Reagan to take control on their respective sides of the Atlantic by the onset of the 1980s, which resulted in (among many other negative things), the rampant dismantling of the New Deal gains initiated by Roosevelt in America; the corruption and tainting of progressive parties and organizations (e.g., Democratic and Labour Parties; Liberty) with conservative ideals and the rise of the PC authoritarian “left”; and yes, the political atmosphere allowing for the rise of the ongoing sex abuse hysteria and the consequent unraveling of all progress made towards youth liberation in the ’70s which modern liberals mindlessly join in on rather than oppose on principle. All the good that a Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party or his hypothetical equivalent in the American Democratic Party can accomplish over the next generation can similarly be undone in subsequent years by another “counter-revolution” initiated by the still intact and respected capitalists and their bureaucratic servants.
This is why that while I happen to support social democracy and democratic socialism (i.e., liberalized and regulated capitalism) as preferable to the type of unregulated capitalism that you and I both deride and which too many American intellectuals and worshipers of Ayn Rand throw their full support behind, I do not support it as an ultimate goal, but merely as a possible transition point to a fully classless, stateless, and moneyless society where the central organizing body is provided by all labor and not by a group of aloof, exceptionally powerful, and usually privileged bureaucrats. Focusing on support for democratic socialism (as it’s called) as an end result is indicative to me of the “lesser evil-ism” mentality that currently dominates mainstream political thinking in America, encouraging far too many people to vote for Hillary Clinton rather than throwing more widespread support for Bernie Sanders, let alone throwing mass support behind Jill Stein or working en masse to build a third political party that truly stands up for labor rights.
Just my two cents there, which I admit were far from sufficient to do this topic full justice.
>…anarchy in and of itself does not actually mean a chaotic, disorganized, and lawless system as so many seem to assume. It simply means a society where there is no central authoritative body in the form we today know as the state.
By derivation, anarchy just means no government. We are then left with the implications of that. Historically (though not perhaps in very small communities deep into pre-historic times), absence of government has tended to mean very undesirable chaos, as rival parties vie for control. This meaning is reflected in the main dictionary definition of the word, which looks to the present and the past.
Maybe we should distinguish anarchy from anarchism. Anarchists, including you, look to the future, and to more positive possibilities. Such a system would not be lawless, you say, but there would be “no central authoritative body”. If then, there are to be laws but not state imposed ones, who will impose them? A village council of elders? Local democracy?
As I hinted last time, when I mentioned cults with charismatic leaders, small communities do not necessarily do a great job just by virtue of being small. Lynch mobs are local too, and arguably a good deal less fair and principled than formal law: think To Kill A Mocking Bird, and Atticus Finch. Admittedly, formal laws have been applied with grotesque unfairness in the Deep South. On the other hand, it was a national government that ended slavery and through which civil rights have been developed in national law and upheld by a national Supreme Court.
Woodcock’s video, as linked, is an absolute disgrace (and slanderous). I’m sorry that I knew none of this (I am currently travelling and have not followed UK press all that much). It is unclear how open your letter is – was it sent to media outlets also? I would hope that you get a response of some sort from Mr. Corbyn who has, so far, shown himself to be a decent and intelligent chap. I have to wonder a little if simply stuffing the envelopes and modestly avoiding the doorstep canvassing might have been an option…. It was absolutely brave and forthright of you to do so – but your value to our diffuse ‘community’ is large – larger, perhaps, than your value to a simple political party.
> It is unclear how open your letter is – was it sent to media outlets
A number of H-TOC quotes have appeared in the media in recent months without me sending them, so it is quite likely the media will pick up on stories here when they want to; but that probably doesn’t include this Open Letter, which may be a bit too theoretical.
They prefer things like my child sex robots story: easier to make it sound scandalous and dangerous!
Anyway, yes, I have sent it to a small selection of journalists. No reaction so far.
Mr Corbyn may be indeed be a decent and intelligent chap but anything other than a condemnatory response to Tom would do him a great deal of damage. This is a man who can’t even get away with not singing the national anthem, which anybody with half a brain can see is sentimental and reactionary bilge.
Yes, and let’s do away with the “reactionary bilge” of Trooping the Colour and hold in place of it an annual parade of social workers, in order to celebrate how far we’ve come.
Might there not be more than one kind of bilge?
H-TOC, good enough for BIG cats Google & WordPress – TOO GOOD for for gutless Labour!
(As for Fascist phoney Anglos wanting Brexit from modern EU? Next they’ll want Brexit from modern UN! Check, Julian Assange, Iraqi people and millions more including innocent children killed by Fascist phoney Anglos trashing lawful on high, UN rulings.)
TOC’s rushed cut of our re-post has too few lines and too much ‘for’, for full accuracy.
> Adult Feb 23, 2016 @ 09:53:59 H-TOC, good enough for BIG cats Google & WordPress – TOO GOOD for >for gutless Labour! (As for Fascist phoney Anglos wanting Brexit from modern EU? Next they’ll want Brexit from modern UN! Check, Julian Assange, Iraqi people and millions more including innocent children killed by Fascist phoney Anglos trashing lawful on high, UN rulings.)
> Adult Feb 23, 2016 @ 16:46:07 Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Not to wreck TOC’s irresistible rise and rise thru the ranks to become Lab Gen Sec himself! But rephrase earlier post, “H-TOC, good enough for Global BIG Cats Google & WordPress – TOO GOOD for gutless little rats UK Labour!”
Great letter, Tom. It’s good that you’re being combative about this and not taking this kind of unfair treatment lying down.
>”The letter went on to say that the Party’s National Executive Committee had decided to expel me immediately based on this being a serious criminal offence,”
What criteria are they using for the ‘seriousness’ of a ‘criminal offence’?
Presumably the only worthwhile criteria for judging this is the sentence the judge passed. The fact that the judge gave you a two-year suspended sentence seems to indicate that it wasn’t that serious an ‘offence’.
I daresay that the labour party has members who have committed crimes which have earned them heavier sentences than that.
Will all these members now also be suspended?
Of course they won’t – their problem is not with the ‘seriousness of the offence’, that is just a smoke-screen, but with your being a paedophile, and worse – an out and proud one. I expect that anyone who was openly campaigning for children’s and paedophile rights, even if they had not been convicted of any crime, would also be suspended.
This is not just a critcism of Labour (a party I long supported before moving onto more radical politics) since I suspect that all the other parties would have acted in a similarly dishonest and cowardly fashion – I’m guessing that, in their witch-haunted minds, they are happier having party members who are murderers, tax-cheats, or drunk-drivers than they are to have paedophiles, even paedophiles who have never broken the law.
>”the supposed danger to children involved in me doing door-to-door canvassing, because of the possibility that a child might open the door.”
On the same basis shouldn’t the police/the Labour party also prevent all teleiophilic heterosexual males from campaigning in case a female between the ages of 16 and 122 answered the door? Or zoophiles in case there’s a sexy dog in the garden? Or homosexuals in case a man answers the door?
The Labour party’s thinking seems to be informed by the principal that ‘a paedophile just existing in the presence of a child is a serious offence’.
This is true dark ages, voodoo thinking. What do their febrile imaginations, unconstrained by fact or reason, conjure up as to what you might do? They clearly imagine that we have urges so uncontrollable that the mere sight of a child (any child, regardless of age, gender, personality, attractiveness) would trigger a response akin to that of a starving dog faced with a juicy bowl of pedigree chum. Their stupidity would be laughable if it were not so wide-spread and did not have such nasty consequences.
>” social justice
strong community and strong values
reward for hard work
decency
rights matched by responsibilities”
That a political party dare present such a list as ‘principals’ shows what little respect they have for the electorate’s intelligence, and to what extent the Labour party has drifted from its former radical core beliefs.
If someone, or an organisation, presents as its principals ideas that no-one could reasonably object to – then those principals are empty and meaningless because they do not enable us to distinguish the holders of those principals from their opponents, who would presumably would advocate the same principals .
Only principals that can be credibly objected to have any validity.
Many good points here. On Labour’s values, I might have added not just that they are motherhood and apple pie, so nobody could be against them (which is important for the reason you spelt out) but that the official attempt to articulate them is execrably written.
One of the values is said to be “strong community and strong values”. So one of the values is to have values! Tautological, or what?
For the mass misinformed wrongly blaming NuLab/Lite Tory/BBC et al for being constantly trashed and cowed into appeasing the Fascist phoney Anglophone 80% rabid Right wing mass mind raping media;
Check veteran true journo, Learned Lefty John ‘Peerless’ Pilger in depth on Mad Dog Media Monster Murdoch;- Nil water By Mouth!
…the hypocrisy, however, is almost magical. In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about “the need for a new moral purpose in politics”, which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: “Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life.” The two are devout Christians, after all.
The Murdoch “ethos” was demonstrated right from the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has documented. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, “WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL’S ORGY DIARY”. A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother’s clothesline. The “sex diary” was subsequently found to be fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl. And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq: “There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now.”
His most successful war has been on journalism itself.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/murdoch-a-cultural-chernobyl
A companion to the first Daily Mail article you link to:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3450338/An-evil-twisted-zealot-Labour-Party-pals-ANDREW-PIERCE-child-abuser-joined-support-Jeremy-Corbyn.html
It quotes a lot from you, certainly it will lead the curious reader to have a look at your blog.
The Blairites are now regretting having allowed £3 supporters to vote, and they are now organizing a backlash to kick out as many pro-Corbyn members as possible. The Daily Mail’s insistence on your support for Corbyn and on the “links” between the PIE and Harriet Harman of the NCCL represent their contribution to that anti-Corbyn campaign.
Wow! I didn’t see this one and hardly know where to start unpicking the absolute libels. The trouble is, these lies have been recycled from falsehoods put out years ago, possibly by the police, at times when I was unable to challenge them because I was in jail.
As for the Mail having an anti-Corbyn campaign, they certainly do. As always with the Mail, though, they take every opportunity to bash Labour in general. Same with the BBC: the poor old beeb can do no right.
Interesting how a ‘left-wing’ political party sees it as just fine to discriminate someone on the basis of sexual orientation.
The ‘canvassing’ accusation was just ridiculous. Even on the case that kids opened the door, and if somehow they made you instantly hard, were you supposed to be anally raping them right there in the few seconds you were there? This just goes on to expose paedohysteria as ridiculous once again.
You have my 100% support.
The 1970’s “values of the Left” which you praise have unfortunately long ceased to belong to any European Left, whose one and only value nowadays seems to be political correctness, with the consequential lack of grasp on reality regarding the issues and dangers faced by the societies we currently live in.
On too many occasions, whenever I had hoped to hear a dissenting voice, I realised I could no longer look left but had better turn my face 180 degrees the other way. Leftists everywhere have proven themselves to be too scared (if not brainwashed) to have a dissenting voice, in the perpetual fear to “offend” the sensibilities of…of whom, for God’s sake? Since when has Truth been offensive? And yet most are reluctant to admit that perhaps the EU project has failed to work out well, or that uncontrolled mass immigration isn’t proving to be the “resource” they had thought it would be, or that the civil liberties and individual freedoms past generations have fought and laid down their lives for, are now being jeopardised as a consequence of blind gullibility, or that our security is now perilously at stake.
One of the few voices I have recollection of, to speak up and suggest that the hysteria over paedophilia has gone out of hand (i.e. the insistence on seeing the paedo danger everywhere, and the subsequent creation of regulations that originate from irrational suspicion and are allegedly aimed at preventing “abuse”) was that of – guess who – Mr. Boris Johnson. A man who, despite having to be obviously careful with words due to his political role, often manages to say it like it is and expressed outrage at the fact that perhaps, things have gone a bit too far.
This being said, despite our truly opposite political stances, you know I stand by you, Tom, and l admire your bravery in writing this open letter. I personally do not find it apologetic, or too compliant.
Thanks, Sylvie!
>I personally do not find it apologetic, or too compliant.
Glad to hear this!
The 1970’s “values of the Left” which you praise have unfortunately long ceased to belong to any European Left, whose one and only value nowadays seems to be political correctness
These values have never really been part of the European Left. As you probably know, Pasolini was expelled from the Italian Communist Party already in the 1950s!
Actually Sylvie, things did go a bit too far for Boris when British Airways tried to move him from his seat on-board the aircraft because he was sitting next to, not one, but two children – his own children: telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3634055/Come-off-it-folks-how-many-paedophiles-can-there-be.html
I saw that policy implemented once, oh, about ten years ago now, with an unrelated man and child. Attempting to raise awareness, I said something to the woman next to me about paedophile hysteria having gone way too far. Oh no, she said, it’s not that, surely, they just want a lady to sit next to him (the child) so he’ll feel happier and more comfortable. And not a word of my explanation would she believe.
Such a sad state of affairs where 50% of adult human beings are obliged to stay clear of young people, and thus implicitly categorised as being a risk to young people.
Predictably, we have newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph asking the question: “Why aren’t we doing more to encourage men to be primary school teachers?”, and the Teaching Times telling us that a quarter of all primary schools in England have no male teachers. Still have no fear, Mr Gove has said that the Government plans to launch a ‘troops to teachers’ programme, aimed at turning members of the armed forces into teachers, to boost the numbers of male role models in schools. It would appear then that only men from the armed forces qualify as role models.