Anarchists Left & Right

When I was founding the Free Learning Exchange my first statement to the public published in a west side paper resulted in my getting an invitation to join some people in a radio discussion. My hosts turned out to have been active in a Free U and were currently active in a People's Yellow Pages. I'd never heard of either and was glad to meet them. In fact I was delirious: I'd never met people with philosophies compatible to mine before, not in a group. They met in a church on West 4^th, just off Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. My activities went public there in 1970; they'd already been public through the 1960s.

Before long I heard them call themselves anarchists: and at one meeting I met a bunch of other anarchists visiting from Europe. These decades later, my son having researched my philosophical background with a thoroughness I never felt a need for, tells me that I had run into the left-wing anarchists. It makes sense: there was an awful lot of something damn near Marxism in the rantings of some of my new friends. Meantime my son tells me that there were also right wing anarchists around New York: Murray Rothbard and friends, for example. They too had their own alternate university. I didn't know of their existence. If they knew of mine, they ignored me. They were busy arguing against government. Only I was offering a tool that used by the public might pry government off their back; the Rothbardians just talked. And they're still talking. I'm still talking too. Only nobody pried government off of much. Government has just grown and grown: and serves us right, since we didn't, as a group, support my FLEX.

These days my son ignores my deschooling (when he's not misstating it, misunderstanding it, misrepresenting it) from the right, Rothbardian wing of anarchism. In those days my left anarchists turned on me, accusing me of being a federal spy.

Paranoia and political radicalism go hand in hand.

In the last days of the Nazis they were all accusing each other of treason, were busy assassinating each other. They killed Jews, fags, dissidents: then they killed each other.

(There's billions of people on earth, so clearly they didn't kill enough.) (That's a joke: a black joke, to match my black mood.) (I'm not aware of the right-wingers killing each other, but that's probably more due to my ignorance than to lack of examples.)

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The gal who first phones me to invite me to join her and her friends in a radio interview I remain fond of, though I haven't seen her since 1976 or so. Her group shortly after we met began renaming themselves. She became Mercury. Alas, I don't remember what her "real" name had been.

One thing I did Not like about my new friends was that they seemed to be 100% homosexual. There were plenty of WASP "genes" in the group: English, German, Scots-Irish ... Dutch ... I don't remember anyone seeming Jewish. There were no blacks ... But they were all fags and dykes. Boy was I jealous of one of Mercury's little girl friends.

One thing I remember distinctly about Mercury, from our very first in person meeting – she came to my house – was her ghastly body stench. I'm confident she was on speed. The whole group, always except-for-, may have been speeding on A's.