Should Kiwis With Historical Cannabis Convictions Be Compensated?

Now that the New Zealand Parliament has officially apologised to Kiwis convicted of historic homosexuality offences, the day when they apologise to medicinal cannabis users draws ever closer. So in much the same way that there are calls for gay men convicted for homosexuality offences to be compensated, there will also be calls for people convicted of medicinal cannabis offences to be compensated.

This isn’t necessarily a brand new idea – Article D of the twenty-six point plan in the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook calls for compensation on the grounds that a criminal record for a medicinal cannabis offence severely impacts the sufferer’s social and financial standing.

It’s easy for most to agree that a person’s rights to cultivate a herbal medicine are in the same category as their rights to have sex with another man. There is no good reason to sic the Police on people who do either, because neither action causes harm to anyone else.

And so it’s straightforward to accept that there is a genuine case for compensation for harm done to the victims of the Police and Justice systems. After all, putting someone in a cage for an action that harms no-one is itself a crime.

There are life-long consequences to getting a criminal conviction, such as extreme difficulty in finding a job, getting a loan or being accepted to an academic course. The financial losses to these three consequences alone might add up to half a million dollars or more over the course of a lifetime.

So most of us can accept that it’s fair that the Government pays money to put right the damage that it caused to its own people by effectively conducting a war on them without their consent.

If a person wants to make the argument that compensation should be denied because the offences were technically crimes at the time they were committed, they ought to ask themselves if they would be happy with a criminal conviction for reading this VJM Publishing article in a dystopic future where websites without state approval were considered pirate media.

Because it’s very easy to dismiss the psychological damage caused by arbitrary misapplications of judicial power when it doesn’t happen to oneself.

What ought to happen is, first, that it be written into the New Zealand Bill of Rights that actions that do not have victims cannot be crimes. This will not only entrench the legality of both homosexual activity and medicinal cannabis use, but it will also make it impossible for any future offence in this category (i.e. victimless ones) to be pushed into law.

What needs to happen, second, is that a commission is put together to calculate – using the same evidence-based methodology that is being pushed by some with regards to cannabis law reform – an accurate dollar figure corresponding to the amount of suffering caused by being persecuted by this law.

Possibly the fairest way would be to declare a set sum of compensation per conviction and per day in jail if there was a custodial sentence.

For example, we might say that the amount of personal damage inflicted on a person by giving them a criminal conviction was equal to $25,000, with a further $250 for each day spent in prison.

And third we need to decide if we’re actually going to pay this compensation or if we’re going to just say “Fuck ’em”.

The Four Tenets of Anarcho-Homicidalism

Politicians who push things too far might find themselves faced with this

Anarcho-homicidalism is a radical new philosophy that is rapidly challenging people’s conceptions of what is possible within political space. Despite the tooth-and-claw simplicity of the doctrine, it is not always obvious how one transitions into it from a lifetime of statism. This essay examines four basic precepts.

1. Violence is the basis of self-defence.

In this physical, material world, life is dog-eat-dog to a major extent. Cannibalism is, after all, a fairly recent phenomenon in these very isles, and often the only way you were able to avoid this fate was with counter-violence.

It could even be argued that the very concept of violence perhaps not being fully legitimate is a particularly human invention, and even then not shared by all. As such, the concept of illegitimate violence is far from universal.

A truth frequently denied is that all property rights ultimately come down to the capacity to enforce violence. In our modern societies, there is little more to property rights than being able to bring the Police force to bear on any trespassers.

Therefore, your ability to defend yourself comes down to your ability to inflict violence upon anyone threatening you.

2. You’re allowed to kill anyone trying to enslave you.

If any other person tries to make you into a slave, you have the right to kill them in self-defence. This recognises the fact that anyone who approaches you with a will to enslave you is going to succeed unless deterred.

After all, if you are not allowed (or willing) to kill people trying to enslave you, then you don’t have any rights at all, because you will eventually find yourself unable to assert them.

If a person is not trying to make you into a slave, you don’t have any more right to kill them than you otherwise would (i.e. in the vast majority of cases, doing so would constitute murder).

Therefore, the anarcho-homicidalist only strikes upwards; only ever up the dominance hierarchy. If no-one tries to assert dominance over the anarcho-homicidalist then there is no reason for them to upset the peace.

3. Everyone must decide for themselves who they kill.

Not only does the anarcho-homicidalist never strike downwards, but they also refuse to kill on command. Anarcho-homicidalists do not kill on other people’s orders, because to do so necessarily brings into being a dominance hierarchy.

Note that this gives the anarcho-homicidalist cause to shoot any conscription officer that comes to his house. Conscription is slavery, and if someone else tells you that you have to kill another person who you’ve never met, the anarcho-homicidalist is within their rights to turn the gun on the person giving the orders.

An inescapable consequence of the total application of this tenet would be that no armies could ever be raised to attack anyone else, because anyone being pressed into one would simply kill their conscriptor.

Therefore, nothing like the invasion of Iraq could be possible, because there would be no-one willing to serve in a dominance hierarchy that killed on command.

4. Everyone is 100% responsible for the consequences of their decision to kill.

There is absolutely no guarantee that a person taking anarcho-homicidalist action will be protected from the consequences of having done so.

An anarcho-homicidalist might decide to shoot a government apparatchik who works to enforce some totalitarian horror, but nothing within the tenets of anarcho-homicidalism necessarily protects him from the consequences.

The Police and secret services will still definitely come after anyone who homicides a high-ranking political figure, no matter how fervently the homicidalist believes in their philosophy.

However, a sufficient quantity of anarcho-homicidalists would still be able to form an underground railroad for the sake of protecting any of their own who gave the dominators the full measure.

*

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

An Anarcho-Homicidalist Primer

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.

*

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

Spirituality Is The Ultimate Threat To The Government

The quintessential psychedelic experience is to gradually but irreversibly become aware of any of a range of truths about reality, such as that there is no such thing as death, or that life is only a dream, or that on the other side of the illusion is bliss. Few understand that it is becoming aware of these spiritual truths that has given the control freaks cause to make psychedelics illegal.

There’s nothing more illegal than true spirituality. There will never be anything more illegal than true spirituality – by definition – because true spirituality is the antidote to all forms of slavery, whether by iron, silver or gold.

In order to enslave someone, it is necessary to first cause them suffering, so that an alleviation of that suffering can be offered in exchange for acquiescence. This is true of every level of primate hierarchies from monkeys to humans, and is even true of some mammals and reptiles.

The suffering can either be physical in the form of pain or psychological in the form of fear (or, most commonly, both). If either of those is present in a target it is possible to enslave them by granting them alleviation.

However, there is a trick, not known to everyone: that all suffering is an illusion borne of an incorrect (if tempting) over-identification with one of the temporal forms of the material world.

In other words, if you refrain from identifying excessively with one of the ever-changing patterns that present themselves to your consciousness, you can exist in the full knowledge that you are that eternal, indivisible consciousness.

An excessive identification with the phenomena of “your body” is the most common of these.

The more strongly a person identifies with their body, the more sharply they will feel the pain of that body, and consequently the more passionately they will resist being put in situations that cause them pain – even if their escape from them comes through causing others to suffer even more.

This excessive identification with one’s body is fundamentally an error caused by a lack of spiritual knowledge. Therefore, anyone aiming to enslave anyone else must begin with the spiritual enslavement of his enemy, for without this no other form is possible.

And so, slavery begins by separating people from their birthright – which is to know the spiritual truths.

After all, how can a person be controlled when that person is no longer in fear of death?

The whole point of Government is that, if there was ever a war, you’d be the one fighting it and the people who currently make up the Government would be giving you orders from a safe distance.

How they get you to be the sharp end of the spear and not themselves (or their offspring, or their political donors or their offspring) is the result of the successful application of a set of mass psychology tricks that have been refined ever since Babylon.

The main objective of this set of tricks is to separate people from their birthright to know spiritual truths by instead filling their heads with lies, violence, deception, hatred, rape and destruction.

The more a person’s head is filled with such, the more easily they can be enslaved.

Ironically, the more afraid of death a person is, the more powerfully they attract it – a fact understood by men of gold since Egypt. The more powerfully they attract death the more fear they suffer, and the more fear they suffer the more easily they can be enslaved.

Or more to the point, the more easily they can be persuaded to submit to slavery in exchange for amelioration of the suffering caused by the fear.

Hence it has been said, by men of gold in all times and places, that “The truth will set you free.”

Anyone truly spiritual is invincible; this is true of all levels of the Great Fractal, from individuals all the way back to complete unity of consciousness.

For the sort of person that seeks to enslave rather than to co-operate on even terms, spirituality is effectively their ideological enemy.

And so, it is possible to get life imprisonment for giving a person some LSD – even with their informed consent – even while people are given much more lenient sentences for physically or psychologically brutalising their fellows.