'At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.'
-Emma Goldman, Living my Life
Michael Scheuer is deadly accurate - foreign interventionism is a bipartisan religion (or disease, whichever you prefer). Too often, I believe, Americans think about Washington’s interventionism only as the actual physical intervention of U.S. military forces abroad in places where no U.S. interest is at risk. That activity certainly is intervention, but President Obama’s despicable decision last week to have his administration leak intelligence claiming that Israel has concluded an agreement with the government of Azerbaijan to allow its use of Azeri airfields for an air strike on Iran is just as much an unwarranted intervention by the United States government. Readers of this blog will know that I carry no brief for Israel, that I believe it is a state that is irrelevant to U.S. national interests, and one whose U.S.-citizen supporters are disloyal to America and involved in activities that compromise U.S. security and corrupt the U.S. political system. That said, Israel — l...
