A Castle of . . .

James K. Baxter, addressing a large audience of students last week, defined the present system as ‘bullshit castle worshipping the dollar note’. He discussed the attitudes to power and individual freedom offered by anarchism, Communism, democracy and fascism.

The fear of Communism in the Western world, Baxter claimed, arose from the threat this posed to the man of property who protested that Communists would deprive him of his wealth but really feared the implications of freedom. The man who relies upon the security of the power structure and betrays his true feelings and loyalty Baxter described as ‘Judas’; the man who sells his friend to the police, scabs on his workmates, fears the loss of respectability and the Communist who immediately erects an oppressive bureaucracy. The true man of love has no such fear and thus no need to protect himself within ‘bullshit castle’.

The gypsies, living in tribal communities with an essentially anarchist society had for centuries been terrorised and slaughtered because the way of life they represented was considered to threaten the established patterns of economic society. When it was suggested that they were being punished for having opted out of society, one gypsy replied that they had never opted-in. Baxter claimed that deep in the mind of Western man there remains an obscure recognition of the energies of freedom and a memory of the European peasant risings whose revolutionary origins were commonly anarchistic; the bourgeoisie is the ‘firefly whose light has gone out’.

Baxter said that the fascist was preoccupied with power and security; he inevitably clashed violently with the anarchist who felt that no one was fit to govern another and that a community should be maintained by the spirit of mutual love. The fascist despises the anarchist because ‘those in chains hate to see another free’. Atheism, Baxter suggested, should be redefined as the failure to love one’s brothers.

Christ was the perfect man; the Cross was of iron and the blood from his wounds was flowers. Baxter emphasised the importance of complete trust among friends: ‘the bread of friendship can be eaten even covered with fly-dirt’. The beauty of such love is supported by its own strength.

Baxter believes that a viable solution to the oppressive depersonalisation of our society with its economic and power mania lies in small regional communities respecting the land and learning from ancient anarchistic tribes such as the Maori pa.

1970 (615)