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...by James Mason
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The philosophy behind this would indeed make the kind of epitaph each of us should want to have inscribed over our graves: "He died one up on the System".
Even the worst flunkies and pretenders in the Movement sometimes have their moments as well. It happened to be one of them that first crystallized the concept of getting and keeping "one up" at all times against the System so that, if you're ever successfully "taken out" by the System, you may be able to go out not with a sense of loss or defeat but instead with a very real sense of "Und ihr habt doch gesiegt"– of having yet been victorious in spite.
This has always, since the end of the War, been a struggle for the self– an inner struggle primarily. "First myself and THEN the world!" It is just that only now are we becoming more aware of it. When your moment comes, if you have been successful and done your utmost, probably it will be best known only by just you. Inner satisfaction as opposed to fanfare. If it were otherwise, your score undoubtedly would have been cut short a lot sooner. You'll be able to go out like a man. "Prima donna" types will always go out kicking and squealing, protesting their "innocence" and their "rights" to a System that cares only to be able to get its meat hooks on an opponent who has provided it with the chance to do so through a careless mistake.
The System is so vast, so complex, so inhuman, that sporadic, isolated assaults against it do less harm to it actually than a far-flung community of committed revolutionists living and functioning as an entity unto themselves. The real attack is a fully aware individual in this day and age who LIVES his deepest convictions, actually puts them to work! What an attack! In the face of what could be a dictionary definition of hopelessness, individuals grimly and quietly working against it, for themselves, despite all. To "drop out" of it and go on managing for yourself and for its destruction, QUIETLY, year after year, decade after decade, SUCCESSFULLY, UNMOLESTED... what a victory! And then to have gotten in your real jabs, to have drawn real blood besides.., no one can ask more than that under these circumstances.
Aside from being ready for death at any time, such a life's conduct will allow one to be able to accept and cheerfully write off any tactical losses or set-backs that will inevitably arise in due course.
To play against impossible odds and to keep accounts in your favor is the victory.
[Vol. XIV, #10– Oct., 1985]
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