A-Infos (en) Russia, AIT: Ukraine: "A Dodger's Manifesto" (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The anarcho-syndicalists operating in the region of planet Earth, which 
is governed by the Russian state, are in full solidarity with the 
anti-militarist anarchists operating in the region, which is governed by 
the Ukrainian state. With those who, like us, do not succumb to the 
influence of militaristic and nationalist propaganda. As a sign of this 
solidarity, we are reprinting the text of the "Drug Manifesto," which 
was sent out in Ukrainian and Russian by a Ukrainian anarchist under the 
pseudonym "The Wanderer" (even if we do not completely agree with the 
recipes for social transformation put forward in it).

THE MANIFEST

The war between Russia and Ukraine led to the movement of those terrible 
forces that our generation did not know: the extreme and open 
brutalization of state machines, the complete fixation of people, the 
transformation of states into totalitarian concentration camps for 
citizens, the absolute disregard for human life on both sides of the 
conflict (both of the adversary and inside their states), lowering the 
status of man to an operational unit and the nationalistic gloom, which 
en masse engulfed human hearts and drove them to insane frenzy. Each 
machine explains the mercilessness with which it sends its citizens to 
their deaths with some abstract, little-understood reasons: both sides 
are waging "holy" and "existential" wars.

State machines rely in their terror on the imaginary will of the people: 
Ukraine claims that the population wants to fight "to the borders of 
91", while those who "want to fight to the borders of 91" have been 
hunted down like rabid animals for a year and a half , on the streets of 
cities and villages, after which, in the absence of complete obedience, 
they are beaten, kept in basements, tortured, driven to suicide and 
killed by the military commissars in their attempts to force people to 
serve them. Russia, in its turn, did the same to the residents of the 
DPR and LPR, terrorizing all the men who were not lucky enough to leave 
or flee to fight, and also lied to its conscripts when it said that they 
would not take part in hostilities, and took them to the front State 
machines speak on behalf of the people, whose mouths are closed and who 
are forced exclusively by force to do those actions that these people 
supposedly want to do voluntarily.

In this manifesto, we tried to speak with the voice of, we believe, a 
very significant part of Ukrainian and Russian society, which has long 
felt the senselessness of this war, but due to the totalitarianism of 
the systems in which they live, do not have the opportunity to publicly 
verbalize these feelings. Here we have answered the main arguments of 
the advocates of war, mobilization, sanctity, and existential struggle 
between states, trying to show that in the case of a struggle between 
states, a libertarian for whom ideas do matter should avoid aiding 
totalitarian machines in any way and assist in to this population, which 
also seeks salvation from them. We believe that people are torn between 
two states: unwillingness to serve the state, on the one hand, and a 
false sense of guilt for this unwillingness, on the other hand, guilt 
imposed by the same state. It is this guilt that makes a person's 
behavior incomprehensible and contradictory: a person seems to avoid 
participating in the war, but at the same time tries to express his 
patriotism in every possible way.

Therefore, it is necessary to remove this false sense of guilt and 
shame, which is instilled in people, and show that a person is 
absolutely right when he avoids, evades service to a system that has 
strangled, tortured and raped him for decades, and now demands to fight 
for it, explaining it her (person's) own interests. As soon as a person 
understands that his reluctance to participate in war is not a sign of 
his cowardice, as nationalists shout about it, but on the contrary, it 
is the ability to distinguish his true interest and hear his inner voice 
- resistance to war will become more meaningful.

The first argument of the supporters of the war: we have a duty to the 
state that must be fulfilled

No one, never owes anything to the state. There are only two types of 
debt: voluntarily assumed by the borrower on the basis of a private 
contract with mutual discussion of terms, and bandit debt imposed 
unilaterally under the threat of violence for non-acceptance. In the 
first case, the debt implies that there was a loan in front of him, but 
hardly a single citizen will remember when he borrowed something from 
the state and signed an obligation to pay for it with his life. It is 
clear that we are dealing with pure thuggery, where an armed thug 
threatens unarmed people with violence if they do not accept his terms 
of a one-sided treaty. A person does not have and cannot have any 
obligation other than what he has voluntarily assumed.

We can be told, for example, that the state provides services and gives 
people education, and therefore they are obliged to die of gratitude. 
However, the cost of the entire range of services provided by the state 
to its citizen during his lifetime is significantly less than the amount 
of taxes that the citizen transfers to the state during his lifetime. 
That is, we cannot even say that the citizen pays for all the services 
provided with his taxes, because only a part of the funds contributed by 
him goes to these services, while the other part goes to pay the 
exorbitant expenses of officials, various grantoids, incomprehensible 
state programs, the police and other types parasitism

As for education, here we will answer: no state invented the principle 
of transferring knowledge from person to person - it always had a place 
in our history even before the emergence of states, as it ensured our 
survival. The state acts only as a sentinel between a person and 
education, deciding who can be admitted to it and under what conditions; 
it also performs the role of a censor when it adds its ideology to 
education, hiding and distorting everything that harms the position of 
the ruling class in education.

Therefore, we have every reason to believe that if any other state had 
been in the place of this state, then nothing would have happened to the 
process of knowledge transfer, and even if there was no state at all, 
then even then education, as the transfer of knowledge from one 
generation to another, it would not go anywhere. If it weren't for the 
state, we would get an education without the admixture of ideology, 
which later causes enmity between us. Therefore, we should not thank her 
for the fact that she allowed us to get an education, but we should 
banish her from the field of education forever.

The second argument of the war supporters is that we must protect the 
family/city from shelling

The lives of our families are threatened primarily by hostilities, not 
by any warring party in a vacuum. The surrender of one of the armies 
(any one that has the courage) will save all the families. Therefore, 
for the survival of families and the preservation of cities on both 
sides of the front, it does not matter who loses the war. The death and 
destruction is not inflicted by any one side - it is a process of mutual 
shooting in which everyone caught between the two nationalist armed 
forces suffers.

 If you believe that the shelling of a city by an enemy state obliges 
those who live in the city to take up arms to stop this shelling, then 
is it correct to say that when the city is captured by the enemy, and 
you retreat, you will be forced to inflict city of fire damage, wreaking 
havoc and killing civilians, now those civilians must rise up against 
you to stop the shelling?

Silly as this even sounds, you will probably add that it is not the mere 
fact of shelling that is essential to fight against those who are 
shelling, but some sense of kinship between the inhabitants and that 
army with which they are united by flag and citizenship. We will discuss 
the issue of forced communities below, but for now, the argument for war 
as a means of stopping shelling is populist, and nothing stops shelling 
and preserves life as well as peace on any terms.

The third argument: we are fighting for our land

You fight for your land, but we don't have ours. So we don't understand 
what you mean by that. Most people do not own even a small piece of land 
on which they could settle, and are forced to live in concrete burrows.

 What is our ownership of this land? In the fact that we can walk, 
stand, walk there? Why don't we get rich by increasing territories? Why 
should we conquer or conquer something if our well-being does not change 
from it?

 If by "our land" you mean the supremacy of a certain legal right on 
this territory, then we are not satisfied with this right - neither 
Russian nor Ukrainian. You have never allowed us to define the laws by 
which we want to live. Therefore, this right does not concern us and we 
should not defend it. It will be convenient for you, since you wrote it 
for your needs.

For more than 30 years, you have privatized everything that was in bad 
shape, giving the rascals the nation's wealth at a retail price, and 
they, taking mines, gas, oil, and rare earth metals, said: "This is all 
mine, mine, mine!" As soon as a group of armed men from the other side 
began to compete with you for these illegal resources, you howled and 
began to say, "This is all OURS", hoping that this would encourage us to 
give our lives for this rich land. But we remember that she is not rich 
for us.

 You thought that the private property you acquired is only a privilege 
that gives you wealth and the opportunity to study abroad for your 
children, but it is also a burden to protect it from the encroachments 
of private individuals from another jurisdiction - then go and protect 
yours! All that you have taken from the people - protect without the 
people. We'll connect when you start sharing.

The fourth argument: we are fighting for language and culture

We do not understand why there is a need for one language on the scale 
of the entire state, if there are communities living in it who want to 
speak different languages. Therefore, by fighting for your language 
within nation-states, you are not fighting for freedom for all peoples 
in that territory, you are only fighting for your version of national 
oppression.

Neither side in this conflict has even considered offering people 
cultural autonomy and the right to decide for themselves what schools 
they want to study in, what language to speak and what books to read. 
The actions of each side are nationalistic rage and forcing people to be 
what the central government wants them to be.

The fifth argument: we are fighting for freedom

Let's answer briefly: our freedom is determined not by which state we 
join, but by the distance we keep from any of them. A person gains 
freedom by moving away from the state, not by helping it to survive.

Therefore, our freedom lies beyond state control and in refusing to 
serve any military, no matter what flag this military wraps around its 
reckless head.

The sixth argument: we are fighting for the nation

We recognize only voluntary associations of people, while the nation is 
always forced. The majority of people are included in the national space 
without their active consent to be part of it: they do not have a 
collective identity imposed on them, but accept it passively, simply 
because they have nowhere to go from it, and also because for 
dissociation from this identity a variety of repressions are foreseen, 
which at different times can be covered by articles about treason, 
collaborationism, etc. Why be surprised that someone betrayed you, if 
the root of this betrayal is dissatisfaction with the way your state 
treated a person, oppressing him in his right to freedom to be who he is?

Both Russia and Ukraine are societies of enormous social inequality and 
injustice, and if you specifically have something to fight for, it does 
not mean that another person also has something to fight for - his 
experience of living in this country may be extremely different from 
yours, and yours the fury directed against those who do not want to 
defend this state and who have suffered from it, is essentially the fury 
of a lord who is dissatisfied with the lack of patriotic sentiment in 
his exhausted serfs. If man did not feel oppressed by your national 
machine, he would have no need to harm you, run away from you, or resist 
you. You should blame yourself for every case of "betrayal" that you 
brought people to a state where they hated you for something.

The genesis of nations is well studied. The nation is an epiphenomenon 
of industrial development under capitalism, and it arose as a rational 
need of industry (the growth of which requires a process when 
communities of people who speak the same language are formed around its 
centers). The battle for the nation was admissible when man was its 
helpless product, could not go beyond the existing ideas about him in 
his imagination, see his origins and purpose, and when he was perceived 
as something immanently inherent in society. But today, when we 
understand that the nation is only a by-product of capitalism, when we 
can look at the path of its development from a historical height, we are 
not obliged to follow its logic, especially because this logic is so 
destructive. We are not obliged to think of ourselves as operating units 
of industrial production, and are free to join together in small 
associations consisting of like-minded people, and not of some 
"compatriots" with whom we often have neither common beliefs nor 
financial equality, no life experience.

In peacetime, our "compatriots" deputies, generals and businessmen 
oppress us at crossroads, buy off justice and take our money. During the 
war, they suddenly want to unite with us. It is clear that they are 
defending their right to continue oppressing us and not to give this 
right to officials from abroad, but what do we get?...

 Within a national group, different people can feel completely alien to 
each other, which is normal and adequate, because they were forcibly 
made part of this national association. We are not the slaves or 
property of the nation, it has no right to dispose of our bodies and our 
wills, to mobilize us whenever it pleases, and to kill priceless lives 
for the sake of some imagined commonality.

The nation is an unstable and cruel authoritarian formation that absorbs 
everyone indiscriminately, without asking anyone whether people want to 
be part of it. It will always be doomed to face all kinds of betrayals 
and mobilization sabotage, until the people who make it up understand 
that you cannot create a society of solidarity when you drag everyone 
there under a stick. Release from your jurisdiction anyone who does not 
want to be a part of it, and you will have no more traitors. However, 
there will not be many people left. But given the thoroughness with 
which you destroy them, we don't think that would scare you.

Whichever nation you support, you are fighting for the old. Your whole 
national philosophy is a convulsion of a dying archaic. We stand for 
something more - for the demise of states that, instead of serving us, 
as it was intended, put us at their service.

The seventh argument: we fight for the preservation of identity

What is this identity that can be destroyed by establishing another 
state jurisdiction? A person who has individuality is not subject to any 
legislative dissolution of identities. Only a floating, invented, vague, 
imaginary identity, which spreads from the ideological center of the 
state, fears the destruction of state jurisdiction, without which the 
identity spread by it will also disappear.

It is the state and its government that is the originator of national 
identity, as it spreads it with the help of ideology and its power 
apparatus. And without the state, people would each choose their own 
identity and would naturally split into much smaller groups than is done 
in the state, which tries to harness everyone into one national harness, 
which feels like oppression for a significant part of people.

The eighth argument: we...

After all, who are "we"? Why do you include us in your communities, even 
though we did not agree to be a part of them? Why do you speak on our 
behalf, why do you formulate the general wishes of the people without 
asking anything from us? Can we speak the same for you, include you in 
our imagined communities? Can we say: "On behalf of the people of 
Ukraine and Russia, we renounce mobilization, war, our governments and 
their obligations?" Would you agree with this? Why is it possible to 
speak on behalf of the peoples only to supporters of the war, who do not 
ask anything from anyone, but repress everyone who questions their words?

 The ninth argument: the people want...

You don't know what the people want. And even your lying polls don't 
reflect that. You have dozens of ways to test this in practice.

It's great to have public opinion polls saying that "the majority still 
want the war to win." But who is this majority? Consumers of war on TV 
who continue to live as if nothing happened? The only honest survey that 
can be conducted in this situation assumes personal responsibility for 
your choice and should contain only two points:

1) are you in favor of war until the complete destruction or surrender 
of one of the parties?

2) are you in favor of negotiations here and now and acceptance of 
compromises?

Note that those who agreed to the first option must personally 
participate in the war until the victorious end, that is, when voting 
for the first point, they must immediately enroll automatically in the 
army, either becoming a reserve or immediately going to training 
centers. Those who vote for diplomacy and unwillingness to serve are 
immediately released from all "duty".

We maintain that the supporters of the war will never conduct such a 
survey and under such conditions, because it is a truly honest way to 
find out what the population will choose to participate in the war or 
not participate in it for themselves personally. Such a survey would 
reveal that no one really wants to fight, and that all your rhetoric 
about popular support for war is just a little trick.

All your support of the war population rests only on the majority of 
those people who are ready to "participate without participating": those 
who have left the country and are roaring from abroad with patriotic 
bison, those who have armor and those who are not suitable for 
mobilization according to some criteria. Most of the supporters of the 
war in both countries are not involved in the front itself, the state 
needs only formal and public approval from them, relying on which, the 
state will be able to force people to go to war; it seems to legitimize 
death and terror with the voices of those it frees from death and terror.

Someone who is not fighting and who is not threatened with mobilization, 
and even more so someone who is not at all in a country that is at war, 
hardly has the right to form "public opinion" on the topic of supporting 
the war and speaking in favor of its continuation. Because this is how 
they dispose of the lives of millions of people who are forced to die on 
the battlefield by violence, while those who speak out lead their 
relatively carefree lives.

Thus, let only those who are ready to personally participate in it be 
able to speak for the continuation of the war, and let all others speak 
against it. And then we will see what the people want.

How to lure dodgers to war

We are convinced that many of the evaders may agree to fight - we are 
not cowards. We have enough courage not to listen to the orders of the 
red-faced military leaders and not to obey anyone, despite all the 
threats and pressure. But considering ourselves to be free individuals, 
we will go to war only after discussing the terms. We don't need the 
money you are showering the soldiers with, as inflation is only getting 
worse and will eventually become useless. Therefore, we will give 
preference to rights and opportunities.

First, we want land - the same land you call ours. We really want to 
protect it, but first we have to take possession of it. The most 
valuable thing in the earth is its resources, so you have to give them 
to us. If the land is ours, then there is no rational explanation why 
the government disposes of its resources and does not share anything 
with the population. Therefore, from this moment on, all further profits 
from the sale of resources must be distributed among all people in the 
country and given directly to us. In addition, it is necessary to 
conduct a full audit of the income received from the sale of resources 
for decades of independence. Everything that settled from them in the 
accounts of oligarchs, officials, everything that was invested by them 
from these funds in infrastructure, business, housing (at home and 
abroad) - everything must be described and divided among the entire 
population equally.

Secondly, we want general arming of the people. The uncontrolled 
circulation of weapons carries its own serious difficulties, but at this 
stage it seems to us that an armed people is a guarantee that our 
people's will will always and in any situation be carried out 
steadfastly, and that no one will be able to pass off their personal 
interests for ours. gagging people and forbidding this will to be 
expressed. When the people are armed, no mobilizer will dare to treat 
the people as they do now, because their lawlessness is connected only 
with the fact that they are not punished for any violent actions against 
civilians, and civilians are punished for the slightest manifestation of 
disobedience. Their behavior is cowardice of the highest form, the 
cowardice of a scum who rushes to the victim only based on the knowledge 
that she is helpless in front of him.

Thirdly, we want true federalization of all subjects of the state: let 
each subject independently determine its federal language, its laws and 
regulations. Let every people in the state feel at home, and let it not 
happen that only one national group, which has sneaked into the central 
offices, gets into the private lives of everyone else and orders them to 
speak differently and think differently.

Fourth, we want to decide for ourselves where to pay taxes: we want to 
pay doctors, teachers, rescuers, firefighters, but we do not want to 
give our money to officials, judges, bailiffs and policemen, because the 
benefit from them is doubtful, and the harm is enormous.

Fifth, we want direct democracy and the ability to determine the state's 
policy, so that the people themselves can decide when to start and end 
wars, under what conditions, how to name streets, or demolish monuments, 
etc. We do not want to be held hostage by the unrealizable military 
ambitions of our governments, which are senselessly fighting for goals 
we do not understand. If you are telling the truth that you are acting 
on behalf of the people, then it must be considered that until now you 
have not contributed to the introduction of the principles of direct 
democracy only because you did not know about such a possibility. 
Otherwise, the only reason you can prevent it from happening is because 
you're lying like you're relying on the will of the people, and you've 
just taken all the people hostage to your bloody machines. In short, 
having all this, we will protect it single-handedly and without any 
whips, including from you.

We do not claim that our demands are absolutely correct and should be 
accepted exactly in this form. We only want to point out the approximate 
contrast that exists between your illusions about the people and their 
real needs. You have lived good, long, and abundant lives in these 
states, and therefore love them, while at the same time extrapolating 
your feelings of joy from being in these states onto everyone else. But 
our experience is different from yours, and we refuse to serve the 
welfare of a limited group of individuals. Who dares to accuse us of this?

Dedicated to all whom it may concern. Do not serve anyone but your 
conscience!

https://telegra.ph/Man%D1%96fest-Uhilyanta-06-29

https://aitrus.info/node/6227
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