Paul Cudenec: On Declaring & Defending Our Freedom

Our Quest for Freedom: Defending

by Paul Cudenec, Winter Oak
March 25, 2024

[This is the final section of Paul Cudenec’s essay Our Quest for Freedom]

While the message advanced in the quotations from Mollison and Dervaes is appealing, it does not tell the whole story.

The system does not want us to be free. Its very existence depends on the fact that we are dependent on it, enslaved to it.

That’s why it threw us off the land in the first place, that’s why it condemned the simplicity of our needs and our lack of interest in accumulating wealth as “poverty”, our natural ways of life as “backwardness” and our relaxed, unhurried, approach as “laziness”.

The system needs always to encroach. It is the act of permanent encroachment, theft, destruction.

If you and I declare ourselves free tomorrow and say that we will have nothing more to do with the system, it will send its shock troops to crush us, for fear that our defiance will spread like wildfire.

But if hundreds, thousands, of small groups of people do the same thing simultaneously, all across the territory, the system is going to have logistical problems in crushing us all at the same time.

If it knows that in each case it will be facing people ready to resist, with all they’ve got, then its worse nightmare will be coming true.

This scenario appeals to me, although that’s not to say that we should stop resisting otherwise, in whatever way seems best in certain places, at certain moments, for certain people.

Everything from political organising to physical sabotage can play a role in creating the resonance of rebellion.

But, at some stage, the uprising has got to become physically real, it has to try to shake off the authority of the system once and for all.

Declaring ourselves free and then defending that freedom to the death, if necessary, seems to me like the best possible plan of attack.

It gives our resistance an anchor, a moral high ground, that can be absent when we are merely sniping and screaming at power.

This doesn’t seem a likely thing to happen, though. I know that.

That’s why the suggestion comes right at the end of this essay. All the other stages of the quest have to happen as well, for it to become a real possibility.

If people don’t understand the extent of the problem with contemporary society, if they don’t understand who they really are, if they are not prepared to risk everything, then our bid for liberty will fall short.

Sufficient numbers will have to have realised what this world has turned into, remembered what it should have been and started consciously yearning for what it could once more become.

We can help win them over by exposing the corruption of the system, explaining how we got here and proposing that we do something about it.

Our rebel myth will offer both meaning and motivation, empowering people to become what they have to be and spreading the inspiration to countless others.

Only then can we, together, build, prepare and boycott. Only then can we embark on the mass physical defiance that will be our heroic and historic reclaiming of a free future for humankind.

Download PDF of the full essay Our Quest for Freedom

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Cover image credit: Foundry