This is one of the examples of domestic resistance to Nazism that I referenced in my most recent article. While I would not discredit their contribution, them also facing the death penalty if they refused to participate, I feel it’s criminal that there is much wider knowledge of the actions taken by those compelled by conscription to fight tyranny (i.e. government military intervention) than those who chose to fight it on principle despite the odds (and with much more to lose). There should be much more focus on bottom-up history, or what historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of Everyday Stalinism, calls “history from below”.

“Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom.” — Ludwig Von Mises

“For the glory of wealth and beauty is fleeting and perishable; that of the mind is illustrious and immortal.” — Sallust

“He who fears God fears nothing else.” — Edmund Burke

“Anarchism is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be.” — Crimethinc

“Whatever its future success as a historical movement, anarchism will remain a fundamental part of human experience, for the drive for freedom is one of our deepest needs and the vision of a free society is one of our oldest dreams. Neither can ever be fully repressed; both will outlive all rulers and their States.” — Peter Marshall

“The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.” — Friedrich Hölderlin

@Jeff Booth @Peter McCormack https://lewisdwilliams.substack.com/p/digging-deeper

“Government control of a country’s economy — any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever — rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state.” — Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” — Thomas Jefferson

I am quite happy to be re-educated on this subject, but as I understand it, truly sovereign gold ownership did not come with the prerequisite of learning the value of private property rights, economic independence, and forever striving for greater and greater degrees of decentralisation in order to more confidently secure one’s wealth. This is why I believe Bitcoin is fundamentally more than just “digital gold”: it comes as not only an economic revolution but, perhaps more importantly, a philosophical one too, where to truly own Bitcoin is to have learnt these important lessons and therefore to have undergone such a philosophical revolution. Truly sovereign Bitcoin ownership is nothing like truly sovereign gold ownership in this respect — hence repeating the mistake of centralising one’s wealth in the hands of a third party, therefore recreating the conditions that spawned the monopolist fiat system we see today, becomes exponentially less likely to occur in a world built on the evident utility and thus virtue of increasing self-custody and, as a consequence, decentralisation. Put simply, in a world where people are, because of this philosophical revolution, innately more sceptical of relinquishing ownership over their property, and so more prone to conspiratorial thinking when someone offers them the opportunity to do so, it is less likely that such a people would blindly trust a wannabe custodian rather than continue to secure their wealth themselves when, after all, such a practice has never led them astray — meanwhile the opposite has done nothing but. This, coupled with its confiscation from the corruptible hands of human beings, is what makes Bitcoin a “paradigm shift”. @Jeff Booth @Peter McCormack

“This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestiona­bly necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

“Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Larken Rose is one of the most outrageously underrated pro-peace communicators alive today; and I think his analogy of the Island is more effective than even his Candles in the Dark method at demonstrating the overwhelming presence of anarchist ideas in the average person’s thinking — the Island going further to remove the fog of politics that prevents many from having this epiphany.

“Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that ‘freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license’; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man’s determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” — Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarchism & American Traditions (1932)