Category: the human condition

Homicidalism is a new branch of anarchist thought. The essential belief is this: authoritarianism will always arise unless dominance hierarchies are actively resisted by killing the people at the top of them. The impetus behind this line of reasoning comes from a passage from the great author Aleksnder Solzhenitsyn.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

In essence, homicidalism recognises that individuals have the ability to kill each other by exercising their free will, and that homicide (and fear of homicide) is the basic social tool keeping authoritarianism in check.

Consider this thought experiment. Try to think of a law that would not change that day if the people who were to be arrested all behaved in the manner that Solzhenitsyn described above.

A practical example of homicidalism in action was given in the case of the cannabis laws by Jan Molenaar, who was responsible for a Police siege that led to the death of one Police officer. Considering that there were 10,487 total cannabis offences in New Zealand in 2014, and that the total number of Police officers is fewer than this, it’s clear that cannabis prohibition could not continue for more than a few days if every victim of it resisted “Molenaar-style”.

Of course, Molenaar did not survive long after taking guns to the Police. This is both obvious and a crucial point.

The first law of homicidalism is this. All tyranny exists because the people oppressed are unable or unwilling to kill their oppressors. This is because it is in the nature of oppressors to tighten the screws further and further until the population begins to resist, and then to release them a little so that the population is oppressed but not enough to revolt.

Thus, homicidalism recognises the psychological reality that tyrants tyrannise to the degree that they can get away with it.

Therefore, all oppression exists because the people oppressed have set the point at which they will revolt and kill their oppressors too low. Had they “loved freedom enough”, as Solzhenitsyn put it, they would have revolted earlier, would have killed their oppressors before the oppressors could have established a stranglehold.

Anarcho-homicidalism is explicitly anti-Christian. The very message of Christianity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche taught us, a slave morality, in which people submit to authoritarians out of fear and then try to drag all others down by way of resentment.

To the homicidalist, the admonishment to “turn the other cheek” is to encourage tyranny by lessening the consequences of trying to oppress a population. “Render unto Ceasar” is the same as accepting the rule of tyranny in the world.

The real difficulty with homicidalism is that it is something of a taboo subject, for the obvious reason that anyone with an intention to commit tyranny instinctively fears anarcho-homicidalists. It is unlikely that homicidalism will ever be taught at a Government-funded school, for example. It is also very likely that anyone publicly promoting homicidalism will get a visit from the Police.

Homicidalism is explicitly anarchistic because it is considered immoral to kill anyone weaker than yourself. This inverts the usual pattern of things, and provides a clear distinction between homicidalism and serial killing. It is also a bridge between anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism, as both of these sides implicitly concede that the means of production always belong to those most willing to kill to control them.

It also has an immune system built in. One of the great problems with most anarchist solutions is that, when the power structure is abolished, there are no mechanisms in place preventing it from arising again.

Homicidalism gets around this by simply continuing to kill anyone who tries to take charge. The ruling class are killed until they stop ruling, and then anyone who tries to disrupt the ensuing anarchy by creating another dominance hierarchy is summarily executed by the nearest homicidalist.

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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s upcoming Anarcho-Homicidalist’s Manifesto.