Provocations: Don't Call Them Libertarians, AA Lies, and Other Incitements

By Chaz Bufe

Provocations is a collection of Chaz Bufe's writings on anarchism, atheism, religion, Alcoholics Anonymous, political and religious cults, new age nuttiness, political and social repression in the United States, the phoniness of contemporary “libertarianism,” and roads to change. The tone ranges from the serious and analytical to the sarcastic and darkly humorous in this wide-ranging exercise in critical thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781937276744

Book preview

Index

Introduction

HOW DO YOU SUM UP THE WORK of a publisher, social activist, musician, and author whose works have sold in the tens of thousands of copies, and whose efforts on behalf of the anarchist movement and a variety of other social justice causes now span five decades? It seems that any description would be understating the man’s life and work. Chaz Bufe has been active not only in the efforts to promote anarchism, but has also made a significant effort in support of atheism.

Provocations, a collection of Chaz’s short pieces published over the last three decades, provides a good introduction to his work.

Chaz’s writing and publishing activities include spreading the word about the dubious activities of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Mormon Church. Not to be forgotten, too, is his criticism of some leftist groups and individuals who have, over the years, led many progressive and radical movements down a blind alley. Certainly Chaz has criticized groups which, while claiming to support freedom, have been themselves anti-democratic and authoritarian within their own organizations.

Chaz has been active locally in both San Francisco and Tucson, and currently promotes both atheism and anarchism through See Sharp Press. Defining the crucial differences between chaos and anarchy (which Chaz does in Anarchism: What It Is and What It Isn’t) has become especially important now that many liberals have begun attacking right-wingers and so-call libertarians by calling them anarchists. This will only get worse as we head into the next presidential election cycle.

Needless to say, Chaz’s efforts have created a lot of enemies. But perhaps, in the long run, a man should be judged by who his enemies are. For example, his books Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? (1991, 2nd ed. 1998) and (with Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky) Resisting 12-Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA, NA, or 12-Step Treatment (2000), not to mention his article AA Lies, which appeared in the bestselling anthology You are Being Lied To (2001), all have supported resistance to the forces of authoritarianism. For decades, Alcoholics Anonymous has managed to avoid criticism, while at the same time some of its members have hidden behind anonymity as they attack critics and promote AA. The cozy relationship between AA, the court system, and the addictions-treatment industry needed to be challenged. Chaz did it.

We expect it when the leaders of right-wing groups, such as the Tea Party, get caught with their hands in the till, or when anti-gay politicians get caught having sex with men in public toilets. This is the new normal. We all know that conservatives have a tendency toward manipulation, greed and hypocrisy. But progressives and progressive groups should be above this kind of behavior. I have known Chaz for a long time, and I know that he does not suffer fools gladly and has been quick to expose, through his own writings and books he’s published by others, the self-indulgent hokum that many of these people promote—for example, the anti-science, anti-technology tendency within anarchism (see Listen Anarchist!) and the tendency of some anarchists and a great many progressives to worship leftist foreign strongmen (see Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement, by Frank Fernández, which Chaz translated, and Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, by Rafael Uzcátegui, which Chaz also translated). Clearly, anti-authoritarianism has been Chaz’s lifelong preoccupation; and many people who preach anti-authoritarianism clearly deserve the criticism that Chaz has dished out over the years.

I first heard of Chaz back in the early ‘90s when he was reprinting some atheist pamphlets (Little Blue Books) written by Joseph McCabe for the publisher E. Haldeman-Julius. These small pamphlet-size books (about 3.5 x 5) were printed on pulp paper and held together with staples. Oddly enough, I bought a box full of these pamphlets back in 1971 when I was a teenager living in rural Arkansas (from an ad in the back of a farmers’ magazine!). At the time, the heirs to the Haldeman-Julius Company were selling the books in grab bags at $5 a pound.

I wouldn’t have guessed that some 15 years later I would become a librarian at a university with an enormous collection of Little Blue Books. Because Haldeman-Julius’s company was located in Girard, Kansas, the library at nearby Pittsburg State University has gathered what is probably the most extensive collection of Little Blue Books in existence, as well as the most extensive collection of the related newspaper, Appeal to Reason. Having easy access to these pamphlets made it possible for Chaz to rescue and reprint numerous atheist and freethought Haldeman-Julius titles; and the Appeal to Reason collection would later prove invaluable.

Over the years Chaz and I have worked on a variety of projects, but I am proudest of work we did to resurrect the original edition of Upton Sinclair’s classic novel, The Jungle. As the head of Special Collections at Pittsburg State’s Axe Library, my late colleague Gene DeGruson worked tirelessly to reconstruct the first published version of Sinclair’s novel, based on the serialized chapters published in Appeal to Reason in 1904. This rediscovered version came out in 1988, but—even though it got a lot of media attention in the first few months—the book was quickly undermined and hijacked by agents working for the meatpacking industry, who clearly didn’t want to see this newly resurrected Jungle in bookstores. The original and unexpurgated version of The Jungle was quietly smothered in the cradle.

Fifteen years later, in 2003, Chaz’s See Sharp Press brought out a similar uncensored version of The Jungle, based on the edition published in 1905 in One Hoss Philosophy, a magazine published by Appeal to Reason’s owner J.A. Wayland. Like the DeGruson edition, the One Hoss version restores the socialist message of The Jungle, and it includes all the graphic details that had been cut from the heavily abridged Doubleday, Page commercial edition. The new See Sharp Press edition was well reviewed and found its way into public libraries all over the country, not to mention many American Literature and American History classes. You could aptly compare the See Sharp edition of The Jungle to the extended director’s cuts of the many films that come out on DVD. The original edition may be famous, but the uncensored version not only deserves a place in literary history but is, in several ways, superior to the old, shorter commercial edition.

Chaz’s writings have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines since the early 1970s, including Utne Reader, The Match!, Processed World, Freedom, and Counterpoise. Chaz’s work in the anarchist movement also includes translating several Spanish-language anarchist works into English. This includes translating many of the writings of Ricardo Flores Magón (Dreams of Freedom), and translating the previously mentioned works on Cuba and Venezuela. It would be fair to say that Chaz has done a lot to bring the Latin American side of 20th-century anarchist history and analysis to non-Spanish-speaking readers.

Chaz’s writings and publishing activities are not confined to politics and atheism, though. He has also written a popular book on music theory for pop musicians, An Understandable Guide to Music Theory: The Most Useful Aspects of Theory for Rock, Jazz and Blues Musicians, now in its sixth printing, and he’s written Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia, a well-reviewed science fiction novel, under a pseudonym. Since founding See Sharp Press in 1984, he has published dozens upon dozens of titles on a very wide array of topics, with total sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies.

Hopefully his example of service and his iconoclastic publishing will continue for many years.

—Earl Lee, Pittsburg, Kansas

1

You Call This Freedom?

ONE HEARS, SEES, OR READS IT EVERY DAY. Often several times a day. It’s inescapable. And it’s an almost unquestioned article of faith: the United States is a free country.

But is it really?

Civil Liberties—Freedom from Restraint

The more enlightened part of the American public (perhaps as much as 15% or 20% of the whole) regards freedom in purely negative terms, as freedom from restraint, intrusion, and compulsion—such things as freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. In short, the freedom to do or say anything that one wishes as long as one does not directly harm or intrude on others.

Many who believe in freedom in this sense find it very troubling that the government routinely violates supposedly guaranteed individual freedoms whenever it feels threatened, or even at its whim. Examples of such violations abound in U.S. history, from the first days of the republic to the present day. To cite but a few: under John Adams, congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave the government license to arrest and jail those who criticized it. It wasn’t the courts that saved Americans from these totalitarian laws; rather, they expired, due to a built-in time limit, while Thomas Jefferson, who had opposed their passage, was president.

Another example is the Espionage Act of 1917. Under it, criticism of the government was again declared illegal, and the victims of this law numbered in the thousands, many of whom were imprisoned for lengthy terms for exercising the supposedly guaranteed right of free speech. Victims included innumerable members of the Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, and the great Mexican anarchist and revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón.

Shortly after World War I, many states passed criminal syndicalism laws prohibiting unions and their members from advocating and organizing for worker management of the economy and dissolution of government. (The states permitted only AFL-type business unions, which accepted and supported capitalism.) Again, these laws and their application constituted a gross violation of the rights of free speech and free assembly; and thousands of IWW members were jailed under these laws throughout the land, often for lengthy terms.

Still another example, this time aimed at freedom of movement and freedom of association, was FDR’s executive order mandating the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. Of course, the courts found that this was perfectly legal.

During the Vietnam War, the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign did its best to silence dissent through the use of wiretapping, blackmail (of, for instance, Martin Luther King), use of agents provocateur, framing activists (such as Black Panther Geronimo Pratt and American Indian Movement [AIM] leader Leonard Peltier), and on more than one occasion murdering activists (including Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, murdered by Chicago police in an FBI-planned raid, and dozens of AIM members murdered on the Lakota reservation during early 1970s by goon squads operating with FBI help). Because these violations of individual rights were carried out secretly, none of the agents responsible for these violations were ever brought to justice.

At present, we’re seeing a renewal of COINTELPRO-type FBI activities directed against peace and political activists, notably the Occupy and Anonymous movements. In an eerie echo of WWI-era hysteria and its espionage act (virtually none of whose victims were engaging in espionage), this time the excuse is terrorism, even though the government must be well aware that peace and left-wing political activists pose absolutely no terrorist threat, and that the only terrorist acts which have resulted in bodily injury or death that have taken place in this country for the last four decades have all, with the sole exception of the Unabomber attacks, been carried out either by the extreme religious right and racist right (for example, the murder of Denver talk show host Alan Berg by The Order, and the Oklahoma City federal building bombing), right-wing right to life religious fanatics (numerous bombings of abortion clinics and shootings of abortion providers), and, in the most spectacular acts, by right-wing Muslim religious extremists.

More routinely, day in and day out, the government violates the individual right to be free from intrusion, the right to be left alone as long as one is not harming or intruding on anyone else. These violations of individual rights are codified in the laws against victimless or consensual crimes, most prominently the laws against drug use and possession, prostitution, gambling, and, until recently, sodomy. The oft-times extreme penalties for violating these laws have ruined literally millions of lives, with many of those who violated such laws serving far longer terms than rapists and murderers.

As well, the government still jealously guards its right to press its citizens into involuntary military service via conscription. The fact that this is an obvious violation of the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude, and that the courts have repeatedly ruled that this form of involuntary servitude is not, somehow, involuntary servitude, serves to point out the weakness of the supposed guardians of individual rights: written constitutional guarantees and the courts that interpret those guarantees.

Occasionally, as in the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down the sodomy laws, the courts will uphold individual rights. But the courts tend to do this only when public opinion has shifted powerfully against the laws in question, and the government feels no compelling need to maintain them in force. (The Supreme Court upheld the sodomy laws as recently as 1986; since then public opinion has shifted strongly against such laws.) In most other cases, the courts feel no compunction in declaring that black is white and that written constitutional guarantees do not mean what they plainly state. To cite a few additional examples showing how near-useless the courts are as guardians of our rights, one might consider the numerous decisions upholding the government’s right to intrude into the private lives of individuals via laws outlawing private drug use, consensual sex acts between adults (such as prostitution), and gambling.

The courts and paper promises are not in any real sense guarantees of individual rights; and federal, state, and local governments continue to routinely violate our most basic rights, especially the right to be left alone so long as we’re not intruding on or harming someone else.

How did this sorry state of affairs come to be? How could gross violations of individual liberty be so common in a country whose citizens supposedly value freedom? The answer is simple: a large majority of Americans passively accept this state of affairs in sheep-like silence, and at least a sizable minority actively support the government’s violations of individual rights. The few who have the courage to stand up against these violations, and the authoritarian herd supporting them, are often crushed like bugs.

The government’s treatment of author Peter McWilliams, civil libertarian and author of Ain’t Nobody’s Business, is a tragic example. McWilliams, who was diagnosed in 1996 with AIDS and cancer, began using medical marijuana to combat the nausea caused by his AIDS drugs. Due to his high-profile status as a defender of individual liberties and medical marijuana use, he was targeted by the DEA, which invaded his home, trashed it (a very common practice), and arrested him on marijuana cultivation charges. At his 1998 trial, the judge refused to allow a medical necessity defense, and thus refused to hear both scientific evidence of marijuana’s efficacy in combatting nausea and any mention of California’s 1996 law permitting the use of medical marijuana. McWilliams was convicted, and after his family put up their houses to raise his bail ($250,000—higher than for most rapists and armed robbers), he was released on bail, but on the condition that he not use medical marijuana to combat his nausea. In 2000, while his case was still on appeal and he was still under the restriction prohibiting his nausea medication, he died as a result of choking on his own vomit.

The Freedom of Voting

Again, how could such a horrible thing come to pass? How did our fellow citizens become so degraded as to support such horrendous misuse of government power? How is it that so many Americans have so little understanding of and so little concern about their own freedoms and those of their fellows?

A good part of the answer lies in what they consider freedom to be. It seems that a great many, probably a good majority, of our fellow Americans do not consider freedom from restraint and freedom from intrusion as fundamental. No. What they see as fundamental to freedom—and many seem to regard this as freedom’s only component—is the right to vote. Numerous consequences flow from this.

The primary result of believing that freedom consists only of voting, of choosing one’s rulers, is the belief that anything the government does is okay as long as the government is elected and enacts its decisions into law. In individual behavior, this attitude manifests itself as passive acceptance of intrusive, authoritarian government violations of individual rights, or in many cases goose-stepping enthusiasm for