Blessed is the Flame of Retribution

(The Pragmatic Deconstruction of the Church and State)

As Churches go up in flames in and across the nation and colonialist statues, venerated by the State, are splashed blood red, ripped from their foundations, and smashed to pieces, it is crystal clear that liberal-centrist institutions are the major culprit of cultural, economic, and real genocide. The Church and State are power-tools, machines of ideology. They are designed to perpetrate mass surveillance, discipline, and punishment of any type upon the general-population and/or any specific social group; all the while, they mask their inhuman activities in an instantaneous legality manufactured by their very own institutional apparatuses. And, of course, this so-called legality is always a legalized oppression orchestrated by the Church and State themselves, namely, the very same institutions engaged in various forms of repression, both ideological and real.

The fact of the matter is that people require the abstraction of the State-apparatus and/or an apparatus like the Church to absolve themselves of responsibility and culpability as they partake in cultural extermination. In fact, the slimy tentacles of the State-apparatus and the Church, which snake throughout the social fabric of our communities infecting everything and everyone with the venom of docility and passive acceptance, continually pontificate that whatever is told to us from the pulpit of the Church and/or the parliament of the State is the word of God and the law of the land. Throughout history, the State-apparatus and/or the Church have always offered Janus-face civil servants and priests the unique Ubermensch ability to act with legal impunity and a good conscience, regardless of how vile their acts may be because, in the end, they are doing God’s will, or in the case of the State, the people’s will.

There are no rules or laws when it comes to the Church and State in the sense that the Church and State will say and do whatever is necessary to retain their supremacy and stranglehold on the people and the land. Indeed, the Church and State will perpetrate genocide in one era, hold onto their bigoted convictions tooth and nail for over 100 years, and as soon as the winds of illumination change, just as quickly they will denounce their former genocidal activities in order to remain in step with the enlightenment of the people and retain State-power. And, we the people, bombarded daily by a litany of mainstream State-approved propagandists, are meant to swallow once again the manufactured tripe feed to us by the very State and Church who bureaucratically colluded together in covert acts of systematic extermination.

So let the Statues fall and the Churches burn.  I encourage it.  There is nothing wrong in tearing down the opiate of the people in the sense that it is high-time that people stand on their own two feet, without the aid of their spiritual and political painkillers. We, the people, must hold the Church and State accountable by burning them down since they are un-reformable apparatuses, both are cancers and cesspools of liberal-reformists, conformists, and careerists, who only say and do anything when the media-optics dictate as such. Then, instantaneously, out of the blue, they offer up ridiculous half-hearted apologies when new information comes to light or they are caught with their bony hands in the people’s cookie jar.

The Church and State are amoral and have always been so. They have no backbone or genuine principles. In reality, they both will flip-flop back and forth on any and all social issues, depending on which way the wind blows. And the manner by which they accomplish all these feats of hypocrisy, back-peddling, and double-dealing is by adhering to liberal-centrism, or more specifically, the middle and the center, which enables them to pivot and twirl at a moment’s notice so that they may slip-out of the tight-knots of real responsibility and/or culpability.

In fact, power and decision-making-authority in and across the Church and State are constantly being shuffled around from apparatus to apparatus, from department to department, from committee to committee, from personnel to personnel etc., wherein responsibility and/or culpability pertaining to any State-policy or Church activity is diluted in and across multiple State-sectors and/or multiple sets of Church and State-apparatuses, whereupon, in the end, no-one is truly responsible and/or culpable for any outcome the Church and State-policies may have incurred. And this lack of responsibility and/or culpability is no accident. It is designed and encoded in the functions, operations, and/or institutional mechanics of both the Church and the State, shielding their executive branches and upper-level personnel from any real accountability.

Ultimately, the end result of all these power-shifts is that no-one is specifically responsible and/or culpable for anything and/or any policies the Church and State enacts and/or exercised in its past, since no-one, except maybe the personnel at the very top of the echelons of power, truly knows what the Church and the State’s real agenda is and/or was in the past. And even then, responsibility and/or culpability is limited and/or non-existence for most and/or all top personnel, in the sense that the Church and State’s real agendas are constantly subjected to reformulation, reordering, and reorganization, which constantly raises the spectre of plausible deniability for any Church or State bureaucrat, as well as for any of their dysfunctional apparatuses.

Subsequently, the back channels and hidden corridors of power undergirding the Church and State are, for the most part, shrouded in mystery. All of which is designed to conceal the real centers of power embodied in the Church and State, which, in the end, gives the Church and State carte blanche to perform all sorts of egregious activities, since blame or guilt is always diluted or delayed in and across many sets of Church-State institutions. Case in point: the institutional-apparatuses of the Church and State are specifically designed to quash or put a lid on any disturbing activities the Church and State may have perpetrated in the past. Facts are smothered, victims are ignored, documents are burned, grave-markers are removed or lost, while any presiding State or Church officials are moved along to other departments or apparatuses, and/or are conveniently retired to cushy pensions, where their troubling memories slowly fade into oblivion.

In effect, bureaucracy conceals. And bureaucracy also absolves the agents of bureaucracy, Church or State, of any wrongdoing. Thus, the reason why the State-sanctioned horrors of the Church-run residential school program have been kept bottled-up and underground for many decades, having only recently surfaced, after more than 100 years.

Lest we forget, the Church and State have always been partners in arms, victimizers and abusers of indigenous populations, their abusive natures and bigoted ideologies are encoded in the bureaucratic processes and the apparatuses of the State and Church themselves, regardless of who holds power. And ironically, these are the very same apparatuses most people now look upon to mitigate and rectify the horrors of this State-approved genocide. Do not be fooled by the bleeding hearts and talking heads paraded before our eyes by the State and the mainstream media eager to regurgitate the State-approved politically sanctioned message on cue. They are only cajoling us; i.e., we the people, to buy into the notion that the Church and State are now born again, having finally seen the light and the errors of their ways. And with flowing tears in their eyes and endless apologies on their devilish tongues, we the people, are repeatedly told to faithfully trust the bureaucratic process again, to trust the very same abusive institutions once again to right things; that is, the very same institutions who would in all intent and purpose do it all over again given massive public approval and similar circumstances.

So let them burn, let them burn black, red, and orange into the night, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As the Church is a rotten institution and the State as well, hence, why they have made excellent bedfellows for the last 154 years in all sorts of nefarious endeavors against their perceived enemies, the indigenous populations. In truth, both institutions have always promoted the most mediocre and pliable types into the upper-echelons of their apparatuses; i.e., all those degenerate moderates filled with State-approved ideologies and the spirit of Christ, whom we always find in the public square positioning themselves as champions of the greater good, but when silently behind closed doors are always willing and ready to do anything for God and country, that is, a morsel of power by any means necessary.

To quote Max Stirner, “the State…calls its violence ‘law’; that of the individual [it calls] ‘crime’”. ((Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own: (The Case of The Individual Against  Authority), trans. Steven T. Byington, Brooklyn, New York: Verson, 2014,  p. 182.)) And the systematic cover-up of dead indigenous children and all the traumas of residential schools are just another set of examples on a long list of atrocities perpetrated by the Church and State, hand in hand. Ultimately, the State is beyond the law, because it is the arbitrary judge, jury, and executioner of its own legal framework. In fact, the State writes, enforces, changes, and enacts its own laws. As a result, the State is beyond the law in the sense that it is stationed over and above bourgeois-law as the author and upholder of its own manufactured legality. Therefore, as the sole and rightful author of the law, due to its monopoly on legal and illegal violence, the Church and State are inherently impervious to their own legal arbitrary creations and, thus, simply brush aside any inconveniences with the simple phrase, “the lord works in mysterious ways”.

In short, it is this paternalistic imperviousness that permits State-officials and the Church to exercise genocide, in the sense that they both have a monopoly in manufacturing societal laws with little or no genuine oversight, whether it is State-laws and/or God’s law. Therefore, let the Churches burn and the colonialist statues fall, retribution and grieving take many forms, blood for blood, an eye for an eye etc.

Violence is subjective. And, contrary to bourgeois-law, people cannot be violent towards property or institutions, since, property and institutions as concepts are inanimate objects, devoid of life and/or any ability to feel pain. As a result, people can only deconstruct or demolish property and senile institutions by smashing them in various ways, they can never be violent towards them, insofar as violence is only done unto persons, living human beings.

In fact, as a concept, violence can only be perpetrated directly against another person, by infringing violently and directly upon his or her realm of freedom and/or his or her right to exist, but, when it comes to smashing property or burning down institutions, there is no violence, only deconstruction. In the sense that property and institutions are devoid of any sense of freedom or the ability to feel pain, since, freedom and pain are  human attributes, not institutional or structural ones. Consequently, to burn down and/or demolish decrepit institutions and colonialist statues is a valid legitimate human response to an inhuman set of corrupt institutions, institutions that have engaged in forms of State-sanctioned systemic-violence against an unsuspecting segment of the population. Thereby, to destroy the Church and colonialist State property, or more specifically, any rotten apparatuses, structures, systems, processes, mechanisms, statues etc., is legitimate, valid, and a genuine human response to the inhuman horrors of any covert systematic institutional-violence.

In brief, when the target of deconstruction or demolition is property and/or defective institutions, then deconstruction or demolition is not violence, but self-defense, namely, an assertion that people are more important than structures, institutions, and all the property in the world. It is a reassertion of the egalitarianism, freedom, equality, and humanity that stirs in all human beings when faced with the incomprehensibility of Church and State-sanctioned genocide.

In sum, as Abraham Lincoln states, “institutions belong to the people. [And] whenever they shall grown weary of the existing government [or the Church], they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it”. ((Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.))  In consequence, burning down churches and/or tearing down State-approved colonialist statues is nothing but an affirmation of our innate revolutionary right to dispose of any and all senile inhuman-apparatuses, whether these are religious-apparatuses and/or degenerate liberal State-apparatuses. All told, we will tear your cherished statues down and burn your sacred Churches to the ground, with cold callous precision, joyful smiles, and dancing electric Pow-Wows!

Live, Laugh, Loot! Blessed is The Flame of Retribution!

Michel Luc Bellemare's latest book, Techno-Capitalist-Feudalism, was published in September 2020. He is also the author of The Structural-Anarchism Manifesto: (The Logic of Structural-Anarchism Versus The Logic of Capitalism). Michel Luc is a member of the Metis Algonquin Nation of Ontario, Canada. Read other articles by Michel Luc.