Anti-State and Government

Academic explorations of anti-authority movements are virtually non-existent in Canada. We have no reliable primary data or empirical insights into Freemen-on-the-Land (FOTL) or other similar contingents. What we do know comes largely from Associate Chief Justice Rooke’s decision in Meads v. Meads (2012). He refers to the loose collection of individuals and small cells as “vexatious litigants.” In the absence of any academic assessment of these movements, we embarked on a one-year pilot project, bringing an exploratory and multi-method approach to this first such study, grounded in interviews with law enforcement, lawyers, judges, notaries, and movement adherents (n = 32), along with analysis of open source data which included media reports, court documents, and movement websites.

Academic explorations of anti-authority movements are virtually non-existent in Canada. We have no reliable primary data or empirical insights into Freemen-on-the-Land (FOTL) or other similar contingents. What we do know comes largely from Associate Chief Justice Rooke’s decision in Meads v. Meads (2012). He refers to the loose collection of individuals and small cells as “vexatious litigants.” In the absence of any academic assessment of these movements, we embarked on a one-year pilot project, bringing an exploratory and multi-method approach to this first such study. It is grounded in interviews with law enforcement, lawyers, judges, notaries, and movement adherents (n = 32), along with analysis of open source data which included media reports, court documents, and movement websites.

For 45 years, the Virginia State Bar and the Virginia Supreme Court have been violating the Code of Virginia based on lack of authority in the Constitution of Virginia and the Code of Virginia to discipline lawyers practicing law in Virginia.

The Virginia State Bar has no Virginia Constitutional or statutory authority to impose any discipline on attorneys practicing law in Virginia.  The Code of Virginia § 54.1-3915 - Restrictions as to rules and regulations, states specifically that The Supreme Court of Virginia cannot "promulgate any rule or regulation or method of procedure which eliminates the jurisdiction of the courts to deal with the discipline of attorneys."

The Code of Virginia § 54.1-3910. Organization and government of Virginia State Bar, states that specifically that the Virginia State Bar only has authority to "[the] Virginia State Bar shall act as an administrative agency of the Court for the purpose of investigating and reporting violations of rules and regulations adopted by the Court under this article."

The Petition explains the severe impact that these violations had and are continuing to have on the Public and attorneys practicing law in Virginia.

Social media greatly enhanced the capabilities of Ukrainian dissidents to wage a successful Euromaidan movement against former president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013–14. It was used to rapidly break the government’s monopoly on mass media, proliferate images of regime abuse, recruit and organise a self-defence force, supply and sustain thousands of protesters, provide medical and legal aid, disseminate tactical information on internal troop movements, and conduct cyber-operations against the regime. This paper presents selected findings from a study of approximately 40 social media networks active in strengthening and sustaining the Euromaidan movement from November 2013 to February 2014.

The evils of the state cannot be fixed through reforms, checks and balances, elections, international treaties, or virtuous politicians. Because the state is always a violent structure of domination it must be replaced by non-state social arrangements without domination. At least that is what anarchists think. This edited volume presents their diverse accounts of what the state is and does, how it came to be, and how it can be overcome.
Included are the classics Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Landauer. Additional topics are the praxis of Jewish female exiles in the US and of anarchists in the Spanish Revolution as well as the anarchist critique of violence, alienation, and civilisation. On the one hand it is shown how anarchism gives reasons for its hostility towards the state (a stance that is much more radical than Marxist or liberal critiques of the state); on the other hand weaknesses of anarchist accounts of the state become apparent.
With contributions by:
Helge Döhring, Wolfgang Eckhardt, Uri Gordon, Markus Huber, Philippe Kellermann, Carolin Kosuch, Jürgen Mümken, Birgit Schmidt, Maurice Schuhmann, Peter Seyferth, David Strohmaier, Shawn P. Wilbur und Siegbert Wolf.
[The book is in German language.]

Although this literary figure is little known today, Morbello/Malaguerra was famous in Sicily and elsewhere in Italy from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. This essay focuses on his vicissitudes in print (Storia dei paladini di Francia) and on the puppet theater stage, with some attention to the spread of his name and adaptation of his adventures outside Sicily, both in the epic Maggio tradition of northern Italy and in the scripts of a Catanese puppeteer active in New York City. Because Malaguerra repeatedly contests the injustices perpetrated by those in power, his story reminds us that l’opera dei pupi was not simply a chivalric soap opera for the masses before television, but could be a vehicle to express a critical attitude toward the State under the cover of dramatizing medieval and Renaissance epics. Indeed, it may be that puppet theater’s political undercurrent was a factor in its massive popularity both in southern Italy and among Italian immigrants in urban centers of the New World. More generally, the essay aims to contribute to the discussion of political ideologies in the chivalric epic genre, especially in the context of Italian popular culture.

Despite a pervasive concern among law enforcement and security agencies, there are relatively few academic explorations of the likelihood of violence associated with anti-authority activists from groups such as the Freemen-on-the-Land, Sovereign Citizens, and similar movements within Canada. In order to begin addressing this gap in knowledge, this article uses a multi-method approach to explore and assess the potential for crime and violence by the Canadian anti-authority community. Data were gathered from interviews with law enforcement, lawyers, judges, notaries, and movement adherents (n = 32), as well as from the analysis of open source data which included media reports, court documents, and movement websites. Results suggest that there are three distinct classes of criminal and violent activity that are prevalent among Canadian anti-authority movements: (1) offensive/extremist violence; (2) defensive/reactionary violence; and (3) harassment and intimidation. The article concludes with a discussion of two emerging areas of concern related to Canadian anti-authority violence and responses to the anti-authority community in Canada.

Our research suggests that the relation between GDP per capita and sociopolitical destabilization is not characterized by a straightforward negative correlation; it rather has an inverted U-shape. The highest risks are typical for the countries with intermediate values of GDP per capita, not the highest or lowest values. Thus, until a certain value of GDP per capita is reached, economic growth predicts an increase in the risks of sociopolitical destabilization. This positive correlation is particularly strong (r = .94, R 2 = .88) and significant for the intensity of antigovernment demonstrations. This correlation can be observed in a very wide interval (up to 20,000 of international 2014 dollars at purchasing power parities [PPPs]). We suggest that it is partially accounted for by the following regularities: (a) GDP growth in authoritarian regimes strengthens the pro-democracy movements, and, consequently, intensifies antigovernment demonstrations; (b) in the GDP per capita interval from the minimum to $20,000, the growth of GDP per capita correlates quite strongly with a declining proportion of authoritarian regimes and a growing proportion of intermediate and democratic regimes; and, finally, (c) GDP growth in the given diapason increases the level of education of the population, which, in turn, leads to a higher intensity of antigovernment demonstrations.

Included here are links to four texts published in Itaatsiz : three installments of a Turkish translation of “Municipal Dreams: A Social Ecological Critique of Bookchin’s Politics” (pt. 1, Oct. 16, 2017; pt. 2, Nov. 1, 2017; pt. 3, Nov. 15, 2017), and an introduction by Numan Bey (Sept. 29, 2017). The translation is by Alişan Sahin.