The Good Book

Damon Frank (Anarchist)
The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation? Of course I had a copy of it. Every anarchist worth his fucking salt had a copy of that book. I know Nakamura even had his copy signed by the author.

Koji Nakamura (Former Anarchist)
That used to be one of my interview questions: Do you own a copy of or have you read The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation? If the applicant answered no to both parts then they weren't ready to join us. Simple as that. Of course, I would give them directions to the nearest Market Bookstore or whatever other shitty, corporate book depot there was nearby and tell them to look in the tiny and hard to find “Science” section near the back. The book was a bestseller with the public and not just with us anarchists but you couldn't tell by most bookstores. Seriously, if you had gone into a Market Bookstore and looked at the "Featured" rack you would have found books like Inspiration: Letting God Rule Your Life, Basketball and Love, and Nights in Apalusia. Ephemeral garbage and feel-gooderies. I'm pretty sure it won a Pulitzer prize but God for-fucking-bid that that would earn it a place on the “Featured” rack of those intellectual wastelands.

We didn't really catch on to the book at first though. Well, I did but I knew almost nobody else who had even heard of it for the first couple years after it came out. I'd love to say that I had something to do with the fact that the book caught on so strongly in the anarchist crowd but I really have no idea if that's true or not. As far as I know everyone else picked it up independently and saw in it the same things I did and just sort of ran with it. Dickinson didn't intend for that to happen at all. He wrote it almost as a sort of exposé or a cautionary letter to the governments of the world. Turns out most of what he said was true and the book became our unofficial manifesto.

Elias Dickinson (Anthropologist/Author)
The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation was most definitely written with the intent of pointing out the flaws of the implementation of the concept of a nation as we knew it in 2034. My book enjoyed great success in the first few years on the market and it even won a Pulitzer prize. If only the target audience had not ignored the message of the book and my recommendations for how to fix the issues I illuminated then maybe none of the events of the last couple decades would have occurred. It might have been too late by that time though; maybe our nations were beyond repair. The fabric might have already been too damaged.

The Upton Militia

Elias Dickinson (Anthropologist)
Say, “Waco, Texas,” or, “Branch Davidians,” or even, “Jonestown,” to anyone born in the last forty or fifty years and they will probably only give you a blank look. However, say, “Lakeridge, Montana,” or, “The Upton Militia,” to those same people and I am sure their eyes will light up and you will never get them to stop talking about it.

Koji Nakamura (Former Anarchist)
The siege of the Upton compound in Lakeridge, Montana was definitely a wakeup call to the rest of us. The American government had no idea what kind of hornets' nest they had stirred up by attacking those people. If you want one event that you could call the rally cry for the revolution, I'd say it was the Upton Massacre.

Aimee Markum (Journalist)
The circumstances leading up to my stay at the Upton compound were actually very similar to the events leading up to the siege in Waco in 1993 and Leo Ryan's visit to Jonestown in 1978. The United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been interested in James Upton and his compound and had maintained a high level of surveillance on it from the very moment they became aware of his purchase of the land near Lakeridge in 2033. Upton had been an advocate for gun rights his entire life and had gained a level of notoriety when he ran for a seat in the United States Senate in New York in 2032. He was a very controversial candidate at the time because of a variety of policies including repealing most of the gun control laws and the role of the federal government in state issues. His campaign drew a mountain of negative attention and he ended up losing in a landslide but his fervor garnered recognition outside of the state of New York and he even gathered a fairly sizable following in states like Montana and Idaho. So, really, his actions following his embarrassing defeat were a surprise to no one.

Proximate Causes

Elias Dickinson (Anthropologist)
There was no singular cause; it was far more complex than the anarchists will tell you. Talk to some of them and they will attempt to boost their egos and tell you that they were the ultimate cause when really they were merely one of many proximate causes. Many of them have held onto the dream despite everything and especially when it should have become obvious to them that their dreams of true anarchy were completely untenable. Of course, there are people out there like Mr. Nakamura who have reformed and become fairly prominent local political figures. Such irony that is though; Nakamura was one of the architects of the Anarchic Revolution and now he is one of the architects of the rebuilding efforts.

Damon Frank (Anarchist)
Fuck yeah we caused it and we will again if we have to.

Facing Reality

Koji Nakamura (Former Anarchist)
Have you ever seen all of your plans come to fruition and all of your dreams come true and realize that they were all bullshit? How humbled would you be when you come to that realization; when you're standing at the edge of the end of everything and you finally see clearly for the first time that you've helped to cause the death of millions of people and caused suffering on a level that is completely unprecedented in recorded history? This isn't the future I envisioned but in hindsight? Yeah, I should have seen this coming. We should have seen this coming. Maybe some of them did and this is exactly what they wanted. Fact is, the Nazis were pussies compared to us.