Against His-story,
Against Leviathan!

“The darkling plain is here. This is the waste land: England, America, Russia, China, Israel, France ….  And we are here as victims, or as spectators, or as perpetrators of tortures, massacres, poisonings, manipulations, despoliations.” –Fredy Perlman

If you want to talk about reads that hold, within mere pages of paper, the power to fill you with disgust, bring you to tears, and change your life, Fredy Perlman‘s essay Against His-story, Against Leviathan! is one such read. I’ve read it countless times now, and every read resonates deeply within the core of my being in a new way each time. AHAL! is more or less like “The Rise of Human Civilization 101.” Perlman goes over the rise and fall of human civilizations, and gives gut-wrenching explanations on how they each have impacted our birth in the belly of an artificial beast, Leviathan, who thrives on the disconnect between man and natural world. This essay was written by Perlman in 1983 and served to shape anarcho-primitivist thought.

Here are some killer excerpts:

“The secret is out. Birds are free until people cage them. The Biosphere, Mother Earth herself, is free when she moistens herself, when she sprawls in the sun and lets her skin erupt with varicolored hair teeming with crawlers and fliers. She is not determined by anything beyond her own nature or being until another sphere of equal magnitude crashes into her, or until a cadaverous beast cuts into her skin and rends her bowels,” (7). 

“Civilization is a humanly meaningless web of unnatural constraints, it is the organization of repression within the entrails of Leviathan. Civilization is the “culture” of Leviathan’s springs and wheels,”  (208). 

“Communities were able to possess the Leviathanized. But Leviathan cannot possess living subjects. Leviathan can only possess things, dead things, objects. Communities could remove masks and armors.  Leviathan removes the scalp, the skin, the flesh. Communities could help the repressed recover their humanity. Leviathan dis-covers unrepressed humanity and consumes it. Dis-covery, the removal of Earth’s cover, the liquidation of free beings, is in fact Leviathan’s central project, and communities that nurture free beings are its greatest enemy,” (254). 

You might be reading this thinking, “yeah whatever… I’m not into that tree-huggin’, earth-worshipin’ bull.” You could be be way too bleak and apathetic to care about the decaying of the human spirit, and rotting of the earth. That’s cool. I get it. If nothing else, this book is awesome for those times when you are suffering from a brutal case of writer’s block, and need some despairing imagery as inspiration… tell me “leviathanic armor” doesn’t sound rad enough to be dropped into the lines of some doom and gloom tunes.  It’s also excellent for people that are a fan of beautiful, poetic writing. Usually I am not into dry history, but Perlman is such a captivating and phenomenal writer that one can’t help but thirst for more. Against His-story, Against Leviathan! is a total crushing heart-punch of a book.

You can read it for free online here too: http://noblesavagery.blogspot.com/2007/03/fredy-perlmans-against-his-story.html

Or if you can’t read really heavy stuff on the computer, like me, and have about 10 bucks to spare you can pick  it up from Black and Red Books (or the many other sellers on amazon, or wherever you get your books).

Definitely read this book if you are down to get mad, and get sad. Forever.