Why am I singing? To relieve my broken heart. Why should I spin yarn if in the end the yarn will be cut? Why should I remember if remembering only breaks my heart?
Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 documentary masterpiece The Look of Silence opens with these lyrics sung by an elderly Indonesian man who partook in the 1965 Indonesian massacres that claimed over one million victims. The doting grandfather nonchalantly recalls of one particular victim, “I ripped him open. His intestines spilled out…I threw him, his head hit a rock.”
When asked by Adi, the brother of one of the massacre's victims, if his neighbors fear him, another retired killer declares, “They know they're powerless against me. Because I'm part of a mass movement… If we didn't drink human blood, we'd go crazy… Some killed so many people, they went crazy. One man climbed a palm tree each morning to do the call to prayer. He killed too many people. There's only one way to avoid it, drink your victims' blood, or go crazy. But if you drink blood, you can do anything!”
Later another local leader, M.Y. Basrun, speaker of his regional legislature since 1971, says the killings “were the spontaneous will of the people,” despite the fact that the army and police escorted the victims from prison to be killed at the river. “I'm setting the record straight…” “But a million people were killed,” Adi interjects. “That's politics,” the speaker retorts. “Politics is the process of achieving one's ideals. In various ways.”
Dear David,
I found your article, “Eat Me: The Cannabilistic Origins of the State” illuminating in some ways (worst views of the state) but somewhat simplistic in most ways.
Have you read much of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, More, Erasmus, Locke, Hobbes and many other political philosophers on the origins of the state? You will find, as you read them, a much more nuanced and subtle read of the origins of the state.
It’s best to sit with the best and learn from them—when this is done, our perspectives are raised to a higher level–political anarchism is a thin and questionable approach to substantive political thought and action.
Ron Dart