"The Black Flag is a progressive, independent, alternative news venture based in Roswell, New Mexico. Its goal is to provide alternative viewpoints not commonly expressed in the popular media, and to effect change on both the local and national level."

"What we call politics is really a shadow play conducted by corporate power. Parliament is the buffer between the popular desire for democracy and the reality of corporate rule. People, after all, are unlikely to resist that rule so long as politicians (and journalists) succeed in persuading us that it is not there; that in fact it is we who are in control. The mass media plays a crucial role in supporting the democracy illusion by pretending that the arguments presented to us - together with the parties we are allowed to choose from - constitute a free and fair spectrum of choices, which are our choices, and not what is left after state and corporate power have filtered out choices that threaten to interfere. One of the choices deemed unfit for public consumption is the idea that the mass media is a propaganda system."

"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.

...

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy, says J. J. Chapman, then move the point, and your opponent will follow. So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded. Tolstoi's pacifism is the only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world's values, and makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this world's values; and instead of the fear of the Lord and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear of poverty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic literature with which I am acquainted. Even in Lowes Dickinson's exquisite dialogue, high wages and short hours are the only forces invoked for overcoming man's distaste for repulsive kinds of labor. Meanwhile men at large still live as they always have lived, under a pain-and-fear economy — for those of us who live in an ease-economy are but an island in the stormy ocean — and the whole atmosphere of present-day utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority.

... All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood."

"Usually our inner piece of polarity is locked or hidden in a space of our lives between our conscious recollections. Most times our inner piece of polarity is hidden in a place where we 'lost our heads', either out of fear, anger or rage, or we have become unconscious. It is different for every person. When you find your own inner piece of polarity (and it can usually be found within about five minutes), there will almost be a physical feeling of release, like a puff of smoke going poof.”

”Resolving one’s inner polarity is the key to spiritual growth. There is a tendency for people to undo their good efforts through the action of this inner polarity. The first step is to recognise the action of this polarity and relate this action to the action of outer polarity - seen in societal affairs and in Nature generally. The polarity cannot be abolished only balanced. For example the libido should be balanced against a heightened sense of responsibility. One cannot go around copulating indiscriminately, the consequences would be dreadful. So the desire to copulate must be converted into wanting to improve oneself and others.”

"...
What ultimately matters most to people's prospects now and into the future, is the struggle between the world's masters and its aroused citizens.
...
The conflict between these super powers rages in neighborboods, communities, counties, countries, and regions, and across the whole planet. Advocates of justice are getting stronger, but we cannot yet reverse the rising tides of repression, violence, and impoverishment. We cannot yet win big victories for peace, redistribution, and justice. ...
....
... We have seen, in recent weeks, not only the largest simultaneous peaceful legal demonstrations worldwide in history, but massive civil disobedience, coordinated resistance, citywide, regional, and national teach-ins, protests, and marches, and what is ultimately most important, local outreach in towns, on streets, in schools, and everywhere.

... People are seeing the necessity to not only oppose this war, but to oppose all imperial war. People are seeing the need to not only seek peace now, but to seek pervasive and lasting peace, and not just peace but also justice. People are seeing the need to not only reject the barbaric, the colonial, and the domineering, but to propose and advocate positive alternatives to capitalism, patriarchy, and racism.

A movement is growing that can persist to fight again and again, amassing strength as it goes. By the standard of winning big changes every day, this movement will lose, lose, lose, for awhile. But by the standard of daily growing bigger, broader, more committed, and more competent, it will win, win, win. ....
...
Mainstream media presents what suits the masters. It obscures what doesn't. Media mystification so swamps the air waves, the sound waves, and the byways, that any person not directly plugged into alternative avenues of thought and not sustained by a community that ratifies true information and analysis, cannot help but to some degree succumb to the fear and loathing and triumphalism screaming forth from every orifice of society, ...

This is the age of wisdom. .... The public is becoming poetic. The commercial and the crass, broadcast everywhere and requiring our attention at every moment if we are to be part of society, are nonetheless ultimately losing the battle for our hearts and minds. People are gaining awareness, consciousness, and even, ever so slowly, confidence.

... Empire is what we reject, not the touchstone of our behavior. Those with the highest education pontificate against fact, lecture against reason, and preach against the slightest sense of moral decency....

Here in the USA, we have belief and incredulity. We have light and darkness. We have hope and despair. Looked at one way we have everything before us. Looked at another way we have nothing before us. ....

So, which is it? Is history on a road to a worse past or on a road to a better future?

Is democracy coming to the USA…real democracy, for the first time? Or fascism? ... "

"A man has been escorted home by police after waking up in a house he had lived in years before."

"...apparently he writes about the dangers of the 'all is "One" idea' as being a good excuse for a kind of communistic fascism. where one's individuality is taboo, or one's made to confrom or feel guilty and so on.

.. of course for many ideologies the "One" is "God" to whom one must conform, and we, one of the "Many" are somehow "less-than" this idealized "One" ....doesn't this idea--whther the "One" is "God" or some Buddhist-like principle disEMPOWER one's uniqueness?"

"This book delivers what it promises in the preface and introduction, describing the many settings and situations in which overt and covert authoritarianism can intrude into social, political, and religious beliefs and interfere with normal personality development. Part I examines destructive relationships between one person and others, the guru-disciple dynamic broadly applied not only to political and religious leaders but also to parents, close friends, and lovers. Part II explores subtle, indirect forces in values and beliefs both personal and global concealed in what people assume and take for granted, most of the time unknowingly."