Here are the facts.
I was involved with various sections of anarchist and radical political projects, groups and social circles, off and on from the ages of 16 to 26. I now see this involvement as the outgrowth of an unfortunately overblown adolescent rebellious phase. While i maintain contacts with a few old friends, and remain interested in perspectives that radically question the beliefs and practices of human societies, i no longer have or continue any active involvement in politics of any kind, nor will i resume such activity. The end of this involvement was precipitated over the long term by a growing disillusionment, and in the short term by an extremely ugly incident consisting of a malicious and deceitful attack on my person, both physically and via internet posts, which was political in motivation and has had devastating personal effects.
In the events of June 2010 I was targeted by a very small number of people, most of whose names I know, who used an ideological climate and fear-mongering tactics to convince a larger group of people involved in that certain politicized social scene to scapegoat me. I can see how this drastic, violent activity and bitter rhetoric might make it look like a bunch of people were really convinced I was really too evil a monster to even have a conversation with and the only way to deal with me, for whatever supposed reason, was to ambush me in the middle of the night and attempt to physically brutalize me. In fact, I was not only beaten but I was threatened with murder and mutilation by people who tied me up, I can only assume to torture me, and they only withdrew due to the threat that another person present might call the police or someone else for help.
As if the very form of the event proves the truth of the motivations and claims of those who instigated it. I contend the very opposite.If the bare facts demonstrate anything it is the prevalence of hypocritical groupthink and hubristic self-righteousness on the playground for disaffected middle class kids that calls itself "radical politics". But yes, I don't disagree that most of the people involved probably really believed they were doing the right thing (as if that proves or justifies anything itself). It is clear to me that at the very least, certain people, however consciously or not (I suspect it was very much conscious, at least to the extent that they believed what they chose to, rather than actually getting to know me, or the many women who have had positive experiences with me, sexually and otherwise), manipulated and misled others into an attack on a "straw man" opponent. This is entirely in keeping with the organizing culture and social scene that it was born out of, the avowedly leftist California student social movement, from the insurrectionist faction who placed most of their energies into trying to engineer contrived confrontations, to the identity politicians and traditional leftists who never hesitated to denounce anyone they disagreed with as racist, anti-worker, later sexist, etc.
For my part, while becoming - briefly - friendly with many of the university students involved in these events, I focused my terms of participation into trying to develop an anti-authoritarian analysis of the movement in course because I felt that any social movement which failed to nurture such a perspective was bound to simply become fodder for the opportunism of authoritarian revolutionaries whose entire political ideologies and methods are based on exploiting this kind of discontent to build their own power. There is a lot of historical and political analysis that is maybe too much of a digression here, but examples abound in every revolutionary situation in history, for instance in France 1968, Spain 1936 and Russia 1917: the machinations of parasitic, power-hungry radicals have turned every genuine social uprising into the basis of a new regime, a new police state. Many of the students who were key members of the UCSC scene were Marxists (a lot of them from Orange County) and students, employees, friends and apostles of certain influential UC Marxist professors, including some involved with the New Left Review, a neo-Trotskyist publication.
In other words I guess I of all people should have really seen how stupid this all was, how in their hands it already all was, and how badly it might go for someone like me. I underestimated their arrogance, cruelty, self-righteousness and lust for power. Frankly, I was already back in school myself after years on the road, and feeling a bit old for these kinds of shenanigans. I was buoyed along on a wave of youthful enthusiasm and turbulence and foolishly thought I could help it cross the boundaries of academic Trotskyism and change its course in a genuinely liberating direction. I should have known I would be first against the wall as the new little Robespierres consolidated their gains. (Not their gains towards the movement's actual goals, which as we all now by now went nowhere and has been devouring itself and disintegrating - no, their gains towards their OWN goals...)
Let me acknowledge that mainstream perceptions of anarchist and leftist radicals are largely true in that these social circles and "movements" consist mostly of emotionally dysfunctional children of the more affluent classes. I include myself in this. Our guilt about being reared in relative privilege and comfort while so much of the world suffers is for some of us a very difficult burden to bear, and we deal with it by casting ourselves as consciously revolutionary heroes pitted against a cast of villains: business owners, politicians, cops, rapists, etc.
To me, this speaks of an over-individualization of responsibility for the structural forces which create suffering and inequality in our world. No group of conscious actors has ever created a revolution that abolished capitalism or the state; they have only created new forms of politics and economics. Thus from my perspective there is no conscious revolutionary activity that will fundamentally change our world: if capitalism breaks down via its own flaws, this will be an aspect of capitalism's function and not of any self-proclaimed anti-capitalists. (As for me, in any case, I have been down that road and if I felt a little too old for it then, I feel much, much too old for it now; in case it wasn't clear, politics holds no interest for me whatever now.)
So there is a continual need for an adversary, a bogeyman, a public enemy, a scapegoat onto which our guilt and our failures to change the world must be projected. We must separate ourselves and assert our righteousness. Cops and bosses are hard to reach. So for one particular group of people at a certain place and time, the solution was to accuse me of being a rapist, and physically assault me and attempt to tie me up and torture me. This was a team-building exercise in authoritarian politics. I was slightly injured and extremely emotionally traumatized, and I was only saved from worse because a female friend of mine was present and threatened to call the police.
So why me? As in, why else besides the obvious political motivations and the widespread, unacknowledged roles of conformity, emotional manipulation and various middle class emotional complexes in this particular arena, white college kid radical politics, where certain other people wanted to score political points against me... Some anti-authoritarians with whom I have remained in contact with after the fact have expressed that they can see I was caught in a "perfect storm". There were several factors at play that made me in particular a target, aside from the emotional propaganda mentioned above. I will explain these as concisely as possible.
First, i had a "reputation" which boils down to saying that people had been gossiping about me for years, although barely, if ever, directly addressed me about the idea that I might have been sexually inappropriate with anyone. This is an extremely charged topic in radical scenes, communities of crusading true believers (against their own affluent guilt) where as I have said identifying evildoers to punish is a powerful tactic for group cohesion, and there is at the best of times an extremely passive aggressive mentality about it. There is also a widespread dogma that says that any accusation of "assault" (an extremely vague term, which in a very paradoxical and convenient lack of definition, can cover any sort of discomfort at all, but is nonetheless usually automatically interpreted to mean the worst possible case: outright violent rape) is to be taken at face value, that to question it would be sexist, even if it is only referred to as received information rather than a personal account, that those who are accused must be "held accountable". Jargon from the "restorative justice" movement/ideology is used to camouflage messages of brute reprisal, which satisfy people's cravings for revenge against any number of foes who may be out of reach, and for a sense of self-righteousness by engaging in a kind of holy war.
To be absolutely clear, I have never, ever coerced anyone in a sexual manner. I have never claimed to have always been the most perfect guy in the world either; acquiring a healthy sense of sexuality has been an extremely difficult thing for me in my life and i have had problems with it. There have been sexual relationships and interactions that i handled badly and that one or both of us went away from feeling badly about. I submit that human beings make mistakes in their actions and judgments, and that the radical subculture paints with too broad of a brush in a need to create moral polarity. I have apologized and tried to make right whatever i could. I have never tried to avoid talking with anyone about something i did that they felt badly about. Most of us who are somewhat grown up and have been sexually active for more than a few years realize that there can be gray areas of consent, that people can make mistakes, miscommunicate and misunderstand each other, that things can be especially unclear when people are intoxicated. Most grown-ups realize that it's important to have conversations about these things instead of whipping up a bunch of college freshmen to go torture some guy who maybe stands, in their minds, for every guy who ever did anything bad to anyone, in any way, for any reason.
I also think it's worth pointing out that during my two years in the anarchist community in Santa Cruz, two women who were or had been lovers of mine asked me to speak to men who they felt had mistreated them sexually, precisely because they had experienced me as a considerate partner and as a man who had made progress against the sexist norms of sexuality we are all socialized with. Also i organized a workshop for men to talk about unlearning these kinds of social norms during an anarchist conference in S.C. in May '09. I don't mean to suggest that any of this erases any bad experience anyone may have had with me, BUT i think it is clear evidence that not only am i NOT a totally horrible person with whom it would have been pointless to have a conversation about my sexual behavior, but that i am in fact very concerned about this sort of thing, and i think if we are going to weight the fact that someone might have had negative experiences with me, we should also weight the fact there are people around who have had positive experiences that actually caused them to have a high opinion of me as a consensual sexual partner. SO I think it is clear that if the people who attacked me and who have been smearing my name were at all sincere about the subject in question they would have gone about their business very differently. I think also that this history makes it clear that they were people who either did not have, or did not choose to speak about (since it did not fit their goals of self-glorification and -justification) a picture of me that was in any way complete or even realistic.
I nonetheless developed a "reputation" during years of traveling between various radical social scenes around the U.S. because people declined to talk to me about what they heard about me. I believe this is due to the moral absolutism embraced by so many "revolutionaries" and an adherence to their particular ideological gossip mill of choice. Snowballing gossip picked up worsening shades of meaning as "radicals" in their social networks across the U.S. felt duty-bound to pass along as gospel truth, in a slanderous, self-righteous and fear-mongering game of telephone, I became "notorious" as someone who had been "called out for assault" in city after city. Yet in these cities no one ever talked to me about the problems they thought i had caused, let alone how they might be resolved. At most they expressed discomfort about my presence or angrily threatened me. A vicious cycle was created. A few people who did bother to get to know me did hear me out, but this was not common. I guess this is where i should have realized that a mob mentality prevailed even in the supposedly anti-authoritarian scene, but i stubbornly stuck to the beliefs which meant so much to me and which fueled my quixotic, pointless, decade-long quest for utopia.
So when i heard that there was a "radical women's group" discussing me (from which certain women were expelled because they opposed the course of action that the group's leaders advocated towards me, and to which certain males were included because of their willingness to commit aggression towards me), i immediately contacted them to acknowledge certain facts of my sexual and relationship history, as well as the cloud of unproductive and inaccurate rumors, to ask what other problems they had and what i could do about it. Their only response, which had apparently already been decided upon, was a terrifying and barbaric assault and a coordinated campaign of public humiliation and slander. Coordinated so well in fact that this was one of the things that led me first to question about whether I was merely the target of the aggressors who were known to me, or of the government as well, since I knew more than a few people who had been surveilled or imprisoned for political activities, and Santa Cruz was very much in the attentions of the FBI - about which more soon.
To sum up, I believe i was targeted because of my participation in the students' movement which erupted in California over the fall and winter months of 2009. During the course of building takeovers, protests and a few small riots i was active in organizing and maintaining a blog which consistently criticized authoritarian tendencies within the movement. This quickly made me enemies in the authoritarian left which had numerical and organizational superiority within the sum total of people organizing and acting around the UC budget cuts and other issues. I also had a minority position as i had been a homeless, socially marginal dropout and welfare recipient for many years and was now attending community college so that i could get the discipline and degree to have a steady job and a safer life. Virtually all of the other kids were working on semi-useless humanities degrees and the protests erupted first because of cuts to those departments, which were themselves symptomatic of the overall decline in the economy over the past few years. Finally there are also regrettable incidents of my personal history, which has NEVER included coercing anyone in a sexual situation, but which left me vulnerable, for various reasons, to scapegoating, and I am positive that it was not only the Trotskyists who knew this, but law enforcement agencies that have been active for decades in disabling domestic radicalism.
I believe that it is also possible that my targeting was influenced by some kind of government infiltration or counter-information propagated into the radical movement. The FBI in particular, for instance, has a very well-documented history of disrupting radical groups and social movements through infiltration - COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s, a more diffuse effort by Homeland Security nowadays against anarchists, radical environmentalists and animal rights activists, who are frequently labeled a "domestic terrorist threat" of greater import than radical Islamists. At any rate, we are talking about covert programs run by people who spend more time analyzing radical milieus than most people spend in them (late teens to mid-20s at most, usually) and have a more objective grasp of the dynamics at play. Case in point: in the bloodier previous era, a favorite tactic of infiltrators was to accuse people of being police agents. This is generally recognized now as an accusation which requires some sort of proof or substantiation. Meanwhile, the vast majority of college-age left/anarchist radicals treat accusations of a male committing rape/'assault' (an extremely vaguely-defined term in this context)/being sexist, etc, as inherently unquestionable due to their need to claim credibility as feminists. In this case, as in some others, they are blinded by their ideological commitments and by the politics of the subculture they inhabit.
To root this further in recent historical facts and trends, consider how Santa Cruz had already been targeted by federal law enforcement. Obviously, the radical scenes are capable of generating their own controversies, the leftists and identity-politicians are well-known for grandstanding on them, and again, the powers that be know this quite well. For example a similar and very bitter controversy marked the beginning of the end of the influential and militant eco-anarchist scene in Eugene, OR, around the beginning of the last decade. Santa Cruz sort of took its place, even years before the occupations and May Day, with nocturnal anarchist bank-smashings, ecological sabotage, animal rights arsons, and rowdy campus protests threatening multi-billion dollar lab and campus expansion project at UCSC; anarchists actually were gaining some social traction in the town over First Night celebrations and the gradual liquidation of street culture as well as broader ecological, anti-war and anti-capitalist issues. The FBI has displayed quite an obvious interest in shutting down this scene over the past decade, sometimes showing up with SWAT teams to break down doors and interrogate people. But they don't always work in such an obvious way; in fact several informants and agents have been unmasked in the anarchist network in the past 5 years and it's been widely seen as likely that there were more. The more blatant police operations against radicals in S.C. have suggested, to some, a more diffuse and long-term surveillance, and possibly infiltration, of those circles. Anyone can spread a rumor; anyone can post lies on the internet; and depending on the content, the majority of college-age radicals in a given scene may likely feel honor-bound to spread it and treat it as gospel. Anyone can post derogatory comments on an anarchist news website. This could be an explanation for the origin of some of the more blatantly absurd things said about me and could also explain certain indications that i have been subject to surveillance.
In any case, I can definitely say I was targeted by certain leftist elements (with or without encouragement from the state) because I consistently opposed representative politics and identity politics, i.e. those which categorize the legitimacy of people's politics by the color of their skin, their sex, gender, etc, categories which are traditionally enforced by the dominant social system, along with formal authoritarian organizing in any form. In the postmodern left, creating mirror images of the various dominant systems of oppression has become a key mobilizing tactic, especially in "industrialized" lands where class belonging no longer plays the role it did in classical marxism and anarchism. To me, while white supremacy and patriarchal male supremacy are clearly still aspects of U.S. and global society, the fact that so many women, people of color, and non-heterosexuals play important leadership roles in the political and economic establishment; that the pay gap between women and men (if you wanted to quantify sexism, i can't think of a better number than that) continues to decline; that rape, "sexual assault", and general sleaziness are (despite claims of certain radical feminists) treated extremely seriously by not just the student activist scene but the state and society at large and we have seen some powerful men go down over these sorts of things in the past few years; anyway - all this is, to me, obvious indication that headlining one's struggle as "anti-sexist", "anti-racist" etc. is by no means necessarily related in any way, shape or form to being anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian. This brand of politics also features many people who like to claim "I am a woman, talking about feminism and sexism, therefore I speak for all women", "I am a person of color speaking about race, therefore I represent all non-white people who are not here to disagree with me," etc. and I have always found this inherently authoritarian as well as, to put a somewhat finer point on it, essentialist and chauvinist (ie, sexist and racist!)
In other words: I criticized popular political projects, tactics, organizing methods and stances from an anti-authoritarian perspective, and it is exactly these same people who organized the attack on me and who have written various lies to bolster their claims in the debate that has unfolded online and around the country about it.
Meanwhile, quite a few of my anti-authoritarian friends quit political organizing afterwards due to feeling threatened - and i am confident this was exactly the goal of those who instigated and perpetrated the incident and the rhetoric surrounding it (whether they were Homeland Security, UCSC communists, or both). Some of them have spoken about writing a statement in defense of me but seem to have fallen through based on a combination of being frightened of being targeted next themselves, and having dropped out of politics as well and therefore no longer feeling invested enough for it to be worth any kind of risk to speak up about such shady goings-on in that scene. The historical record shows that such underhanded undermining of anti-authoritarian involvement in social movements can be attributed to both authoritarian leftist organizers and police agencies.
To sum up, i was targeted for the political gains of others. I do not believe that people who talk about "accountability" and "community" as positive values would have committed such a cruel, violent and divisive action, nor would they have done so while hiding their faces and their real agenda.
Speaking of which, i think it's also worth pointing out that if i was the monster some would like to paint me as, i could very well have gone to the police and/or UCSC administration and named off most of the people involved, and for more than a few of them their addresses, places of work and courses of study, as well as their precise roles in organizing protests and occupations which led to damaged property, cancelled classes, overtime costs, etc. Although i'm not interested in politics anymore i don't think it's in my interest or anyone else's interest to snitch about these things, and on principle i still have no desire to align myself with the police or court system, i do not think they truly represent my interests or those of the working class. Perhaps the assaulters felt that they could trust my anti-authoritarian principles precisely because that's exactly why they were targeting me. Naturally, fear of being targeted yet again and of the possible repercussions for myself, my family and other loved ones are the biggest concern here, unfortunately. I do believe that these people deserve something at least as horrible as what they have done to me to happen to them, and I'm sure it probably never will.
Of course, a lot of the people involved in condemning and attacking me were also very young, less than a year out of high school, and had only been introduced to radical politics in the previous few months, and while i don't feel any greater sympathy for them because of it, i think it's important to also point out that ignorance, immaturity and being impressionable and easily manipulated are a large part of what happened.
There was apparently a very similar incident that happened under similar circumstances in NYC, at about the same point in their timeline of the local student movement there. The victim's was an anarchist named Jacob Onto and he was hospitalized by the people who assaulted him.
As for me, i am currently suffering from some PTSD-type symptoms, such as intense issues with fear, paranoia and preparedness to defend myself as well as frequent nightmares about being lynched and persecuted. I learned a very unpleasant lesson about politics when after this happened, many of those who used to present themselves as my friends and comrades stopped talking to me altogether. Some of those who kept in contact apparently did little or nothing to speak up for me, to hear me out on my side of the story or to make sure my side was heard; instead they asked if i was sure i didn't have it coming, and minimized the suffering and trauma that still affects me as well as its threat to attempt to live my life from here on out as a good citizen (which naturally was a worthless goal in their 20-year-old bourgeois activist student eyes...). I understand people are afraid, but i think it is very telling that people whose priority is politics, whether my "friends" or "enemies", treated me primarily as a political object and when i was no longer useful to them in this way, they lost interest.
This is also why i know it is not rational to have so much fear; i am completely dissociated from politics and from my stupid, naive idealisms and motivations that drove me into it in the first place. They will find other scapegoats in their own ranks, their stupid children's crusade will continue as long as there are suburbs spewing out people like them (like me). PTSD is a disorder, not because it's rational, and life isn't all about being rational; i don't know what is going to happen; i never expected what happened this summer, although maybe i should have. Mostly I am afraid of the way in which these lies could return to harm me again. Which as I'm sure you can tell is why I have written and posted this despite having to delve into these very painful memories at great length.
At any rate, i am trying to live rationally. I have severed my connections with all these crazy brats and their fake utopia, i don't even live near anyone like that, I hope, and i am continuing my education in preparation for a more stable, sane and secure life. A "sellout", sure. What can i say, i got sick of being a radical bum constantly on the run from authority figures both official and self-proclaimed. I want a real life, not an ideological life. I have learned that the people who live this way are not only misguided but dangerous: they believe themselves better and more moral than the rest of society. However, most people's behavior is dictated by the practical forces of politics and economics and the kind of conditioning we receive on a daily basis in this society. Radicals are not any better than anyone else based on what they have written on their banner; in the way that they carry the banner, they are only more deluded about their place in the world. There is a strong tendency towards cultishness, hive-minded-ness, and a will to deliberately ignore external reality that holds such communities of true believers together. Plus, I think it's no surprise that most of these people are university students or of a similar age and socioeconomic status. Statistically, i am also just too old for that nonsense now. Life has taught me otherwise, as it will probably teach them soon enough. I hope.
I have been grievously wronged and it has taught me nothing but that i have wasted years of my life with a bunch of immature losers. My radical political period is behind me for good. I am not a rapist and i do not deserve what happened to me. I believe that the political allegiances of the people who accuse me, as well as their method of trying to terrorize and silence me or anyone else who stood up to them, speak strongly of their true motivations in demonizing me. Don't buy into a mob mentality; use some objectivity.
Jan Dichter
10/6/2010
Revised: 10/16/2010
