Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is also the simplest.
Half a century ago, an anarchic scholar struck out to write a heroic story of peasants. It was when bodies were piling up in Vietnam, indicating to him that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task had not been easy, given that peasants serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.
The heroic peasants were a good start for the anarchic scholar. But, after national liberation struggles began claiming that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar found an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe how people transformed themselves into poor materials for state-making.
What anarchic scholar loved most about the hill peoples’ was their slash-and-burn culture. Most dismiss it as hillbilly backwardness, yet he knew their whole way of life was an elaborate trick to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted. It all changed after World War II. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminated their “dark twins” in the hills. Space was spanned, he said. The peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape, and they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.
Not far away, a similar discovery was made.
A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily barrage of manufactured urgency and its subsequent oppression Olympics asphyxiated most of us long ago. But he had a plan to fight Reagan’s imperialist interventions in Latin America. So, after gaining a little know-how in engineering, with a focus on alternative energy, he headed south to make a real contribution to ‘people who could use help.’
But after he got there, the student felt out of place, as if that struggle was not his struggle. The projects he worked on were practical, no doubt. Computer donations from the States were not hurting the people of El Salvador, but they were not really helping that much either. When he looked for guidance, they were kind but blunt. War torn El Salvador did not need engineering solutions to political problems.
Look, just go to the mountains, the comrade later said to the student. The student shot back an incredulous glance. Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the mountains. That’s what we do, get some guns, go to the mountains, and wage a revolution. The student responded thoughtfully, suggesting that, yes, there were mountains in Seattle, but that does not make any sense. A few moments later, with an embarrassed grin, he admitted that it simply does not correspond to his reality at all.
Where the anarchic scholar and the student of revolution agree, we may have silently come to the same conclusion long ago: there is no sense in running to the hills. Before, the hills may have made sense; they were once a place without history, void of space and time. In this non-place, a u-topia, there existed a people without a history. And while it is said that the history of people is the history of class struggle, it would be at least as truthful to say that the history of peoples without history is the history of the struggle for escape. But with the great latticework of surveillance and control that now spans most of the developed world, the veil of spatial isolation has been pierced. So today, the hills cannot make class struggle or freedom a reality. (more…)
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Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is among the simplest.
