Flower Bomb flames

Flower Bomb!

From Vegan Primitivist

At about 30 minutes in we dive into the main topic with our guest Flower Bomb who is an anarchist writer that created Warzone Distro (http://warzonedistro.noblogs.org), a zine creating & distributing project focused on anarchy, insurrection, & anti-civilization. Check it out! All zines are available via PDF or you can request a zine package. Check out the MNtersectional episode #20 on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Anchor! We aim to be lifelong learners so if you liked/hated/have feedback for anything you heard on this episode, email us at MNtersectional@gmail.com, dm us on Instagram @mntersectional, or message us on Facebook (search “MNtersectional”) and THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!!

Excerpts of Flower Bomb interview on MNtersectional, starting about 30 minutes in

Ashley- We just can’t continue on like this, but it sucks because I feel like things just are going to continue on like this.

Flower Bomb- … It’s essentially a death march, we’re leading up to death in this way that is just so beyond anything people could have imaged. But because we’re all doing it, it’s this coordinated collective thing. 

Ashley- … For those who aren’t super familiar with anarchy, do you want to explain what that is and how you were introduced to it?

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FB- Yeah. It wasn’t any singular event, it was a combination of different experiences and different observations of the conditions that I grew up in. I guess that would be where those seeds of anti-authoritarian were planted. Before I even knew about the textbook concept and definition of anarchism, I had already been critical of authority, whether it was religious forms, or police, or even the monetary system of money and currency, I always questioned as a kid Why is it that people kill each other over this piece of paper, and why is it that adults will be the first one to say oh yeah, I don’t believe in santa clause or easter bunny or anything, but yet we believe that this piece of paper with a dead president on it has enough value to allow ourselves to be slaves to it and even kill ourselves for it. So these were some of the primary questions I was asking myself and trying to understand, as well as just understanding the difference between a life of poverty versus a life of not poverty where it seemed like a lot of people that were not in poverty didn’t know that poverty existed the way that it does, and to the awful level that it does. And one of the first things I started doing as I was going into my teens was I wanted there to be a way to communicate what I was seeing and thinking to other people. Because at the time I was under the impression that if only people understood the conditions that we were living in and we were all collectively surrendering to the idea that money is this powerful universal truth, maybe we’ll all wake up from it and maybe we’ll all unite together and overthrow this system. I would say that’s where it began honestly for me. And as I got a little bit older I realized there was such a thing as anarchism, and that there was an entire history of other people actively trying to organize workers to overthrow their bosses and overthrow capitalism. And then I got a little bit older and I realized that ever since colonization there had been people, indigenous people in particular, that were resisting colonization and resisting everything about industrial society altogether. And I think the deeper and the further back we go in terms of what was being resisisted, I think the more we start to see people on a collective level out of sight out of mind, this history, because they just think like that was way back then this is now, but everything about here is a reproduction of them on a much larger scale, and if anybody has any hope or desire to see these awful conditions we’re living in change, then I feel it’s important at the very least to discuss and communicate these things. So I started a zine distro in an attempt to do exactly that. I started that in 2013, Warzone Distro, because that was my way of acknowledging that we’re actually living in a warzone, and because we’re so used to it, we’re so used to the idea that a single person, a president, has the power to dictate all of our lives, or that an ideology based on a piece of paper with invisible value has the ability to control us and enslave us, this is not just living in peace, this a war. And so this distro represents my attempt to try to communicate these ideas and thoughts and histories of people that revolted against everything we’re experiencing. I very recently, maybe 2018, started writing my own texts, which is why I go by the author name Flower Bomb sometimes, really just communicating my own personal thoughts.

FB- … I associate with a lot of people that are anti-civ, but they really promote the hunter-gatherer aspect of that, and I am very critical of hunter-gatherer aspects of that for a lot of reasons… current society does a really good job of overpromoting the hunter-gatherer narrative when way back then what people ate was far more complex than just everyone was hunter-gatherer, that’s not true. There was a lot of foragers, but because foragers don’t need tools to pick berries off trees, you don’t see evidence of a lot of people were foragers, but you see bows and arrows and shit like that, it’s like everyone was hunter-gatherers, that’s bias, but that kind of information is used especially by the meat industry to promote meat as this natural healthy thing.

Ashley- … What do you think about different (kinds of anarchy)?

FB- When I first started out like I was talking before about being a teen and the whole everybody unifying together, that tendency of anarchism would be more considered leftist, which is more of a marxist perspective, and without getting too technical and unnecessarily academic, it is the idea that if we can educate the masses, we will then have the power, the masses, to overthrow the current system. So that trajectory of anarchism is largely considered leftism or collectivist anarchism. I started there, and I came to the realization that unfortunately a lot of that is very similar rhetoric to for example politicians that you see today. There is a lot of emphasis on very small parts of rebellion, there’s a lot of hopefulness going around. And from my personal experience, when I attempted to organize my hood, I realized that people are far more complex than what a lot of Marxist theory assumes people are, and it is not necessarily possible to organize everybody because the very act of attempting to organize people is actually a form of authority, because that assumes that people are incapable of coming to these decisions on their own. And if you try to take charge of trying to organize them, sharing information is one thing, but trying to get them join the movement and fight alongside you, that is something that has been done by even the US military, we see the propaganda of these things, and what I realized is I didn’t want to reproduce another system. Instead what I wanted to do was encourage people to think independently, to think as individuals, because it is at the individual level that these systems hijack and turn us into whatever the system wants. So it was from that point that I decided, rather than attempting to organize people I was going to do what I wanted to do as an individual to fight back against the system, and when people saw that, which is known as propaganda by the deed, other individuals realized that person could do it, that person could do it, that person and so forth. In other words people become their own agent in freeing themselves, rather than relying on an organization or a group or movement or politician, so on and so forth. That is what I consider anarchy, that is the act of reclaiming your life. Within academia that style of anarchy is known as individualist anarchy, or propaganda by the deed, which means don’t wait for the masses to be organized, attack now and let people see these things in action. Actions speak louder than words. So I would identify more as an individualist, which is why anything I do I do for myself, but I also know that the things I do have the power to inspire other people. But I don’t do things for other people, and I don’t do things with the intent of trying to organize other people because I realized all I would be doing is reproducing that role of authority. 

Ashely- … Most of the anarchists I know are also vegan. Do you know many anarchists that are not vegan?

FB- Yes, unfortunately I do, which is one of the reasons I stay so outspoken about veganism, especially once you start getting into the more anti-civ type. The collectivist and leftist type and the anti-civ type, are very different, and a lot of times they oppose each other. The leftist type are simply more traditional, they have difficulty extending their critique of capitalism to critiques of for example colonization, or a critique of agriculture, or a critique of specialization and these building blocks that create the authoritarian relations that we currently have. Leftists usually have a tendency to neglect extending that critique. And with neglecting that extension comes the neglecting of how nonhuman animals also suffer under capitalism as well. So a lot of nonvegans I know are leftists, or leftist types, but also the anti-civ anarchists fall into a very similar trap where they critique everything except for that speciesist relationship that we have with nonhuman animals. It’s interesting because they go so far with their critique, but then they attempt to fetishize and recreate a very past experience. How do you get to where you did without understanding that nonhuman animals are individuals just like us, who are fully deserving of an independent life free from human supremacy.  I feel like sometimes I’m at war with both left and with even people that I would relate to a lot, which also reinforces my own individualism, because I recognize that I don’t want to depend on the leftists or the anti-civs as a group, or as an organization or whatever. I want to continue to carry out my anarchy as an individual without having to rely on them because ultimately, we’re not totally unified. There’s fundamental differences in that, even if we did unify and overcome capitalism, we’re still going to be fundamental enemies if you’re going to continue hunting, and oppressing other animals. I feel like I keep my critiques as open and aggressive as necessary, because there’s so much aggressive push back against veganism, even within these circles which you would think, your critiquing forms of domination and control, but you’re not critiquing all the way. 

FB-… I have a theory about that. I think a big part of the reason why there is so much push back against the idea of being vegan, not only because the propaganda – flesh, secretions, meat and cheese and shit that we have everywhere in society- I think also it boils down to this division between philosophy and action. Because anybody can claim that they’re against oppression, and that they understand how authority works, and the logic of control and domination, but when it comes to actually doing something about it, that’s when you see people take three steps back. What distinguishes veganism from just a theory is that you have to actually change your life, you have to change your interaction with these beings. There’s a lot of anarchists out there, self-proclaimed anarchists at least, who think that veganism is just a boycott. It’s just a boycott. It’s just consumer politics. But if it was just a boycott, then it wouldn’t cause rupture within family, within friends, within work place. Veganism is powerful. You can point at animal rights protests holding signs and you can laugh all you want, but the fact that they uproot a cultural and traditional relationship to nonhuman animals, that stirs people up. Because when you go vegan all of a sudden everyone says you think you’re better than us, nobody wants to hear you talk about it, but everyone’s ok with fucking mcdonalds and burger king and big fucking meat billboards everywhere because that’s normal. Everybody is so conformist to this fucked up normality, but then you go vegan and you disrupt that, and you disrupt and challenge that mental comfort. And I think that is the primary tension between vegans and nonvegans, whether they’re anarchists, or communists, or socialists, is the fact that some people are more comforted by just being philosophers about action, and some people actually put that shit into practice in their own lives. And that’s another aspect of being an individualist, is that you take that action, you change your life on an individual basis.

FB- …We have to remember that the system, capitalism, industrial society, its laws are set up to preserve itself. And we recognize and understand that industrial society was built on enslavement, control and domination. So when we, in our noble attempt to try to change the system from within the system, we have to remember that this is a system that’s not broken, it was designed for control and domination. And when we try to change the system in any legal sense, you gotta remember that it’s not really ethics we’re talking about, it’s more about profit motive. If there is a profit motive for there to be a change in which whoever is being exploited can be liberated, then sure, the change might go through, because there’s a profit motive. But it’s very rare to see any sort of change within capitalism that is motivated by ethics, because everything about capitalism is death by design. When people realize that, as they have long long before capitalism and industrial civilization, and even currently now as you’ve seen with so many people taking action, when people realize that, they realize that there is no changing the system from within. There is only the illegal act of destroying it. And Ashely brought up something that was a very interesting conversation we had about hopelessness, and about nihilism and pessimism. I think that’s relevant because its like, well shit, if I attack the system, it will either kill me or it will lock me up. That is a very real thing, because the system has laws in order to preserve itself. So then the question on an individual level is, do I stay alive and do I stay with this limited freedom to be a wage slave, and allow this system to continue, or do I go out with a bang? Do I use my life as a way of saying Fuck you I will not allow the system to continue without some sort of disruption. And I think that’s what a lot of people, especially a lot of vegan anarchists, have been talking about with themselves, maybe with their friends, for a very long time. Do I destroy that slaughterhouse and deal with the fallout of probably being locked up for the rest of my life? Do I liberate those animals and deal with the possible consequence of the owner running out and shooting me because I am on his property, sabotaging his property? Do I deal with the consequences of potentially just liberating the animals, the puppy mills or whatever and burning those places down? It really just depends on what that individual is comfortable with. I leave it up to people to decide for themselves their own comfort, because I don’t want to be in a position to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do. People come to these conclusions on their own, and of course these decisions relate to our lives, our lives as in what lives the system allows us to have while we watch everything around us fucking die. 

FB- … Another aspect of it is that the system reinforces itself in every way possible disempowering the individual. The system is set up to make us feel weak. To make us feel essentially we are mindless children who need government, because without government we would just kill each other, or without jobs we would just all be homeless, without money we would just be misguided, without civilization we would just be barbaric. Oh my god we need the system, we need something to keep us in place. People have existed for years and years and years without any of this governance. And it’s ironic if you think about it because we have all this control, all this surveillance, we have all these fucking cops, and people are still getting shot, people are still getting raped, people are still getting killed by the cops, people are still getting sentenced to death through the courts that supposed to serve justice, and the government is not actually governing anything except for our freedom. Because everything that these entities are supposed to do they’re not doing, if anything they’re making worse. Industrial civilization is supposed to be this great wonderful thing. No matter how many great projects, no matter how many wind farms or whatever, the planet is still dying. It’s still dying because everything is still about money. Everything is still built against nature. 

FB- …On an individual level we are responsible for providing this entire system more people to become slaves to reproduce it. At the end of the day, there’s so much propaganda within industrial society that attempts to convince us that our choices are our own, that everything we do is really our own, but there’s so much of it that ultimately influences us. One of those things is having a family. You have a family, and you have these lovely kids, and your kids turn around and they say What am I going to do in this world, in this world full of plastic and fucking sky scrapers and cars that are going 60 miles and hours? And it’s like You go get a job and you produce another family. When you think about it you realize that all you are doing is becoming this mechanical animal that is reproducing in order to reproduce this system. Kind of in alignment with why I named my bistro Warzone Distro. Why on earth would I bring another being into a war zone? Because that’s exactly what this is. People can say I’m being over dramatic. They can say I’m being overly pessimistic. It’s like even if you have it good, even if you have a great job with a nice house and you don’t live in poverty, or you don’t even live near a hood, can you do it, can you really claim to be happy knowing that in cities there are people that are sleeping on cardboard to keep warm in the winter. There’s people that fill their jackets with crumbled up newspapers to keep warm or else they’ll freeze to death. It’s not just one or two or three cities, it’s everywhere. It’s global. And it’s getting worse. I don’t want to live in denial. I absolutely refuse to live in denial, because that denial is exactly what this system uses in order to make us feel like we’re individually weak. 

FB- …It is a form of individualist anarchy when you break and refuse to surrender yourself to the social and societal peer pressures, because society has a way of setting everything up where it takes  everybody’s individual power away, and pretty much makes everyone dependent on everyone else. In order to feel valid, in order to feel accepted, you depend on the norms of other people, the norms that other people are reproducing, that reproduce the system. So a lot of people feel influenced and coerced in so many different ways to have kids. And they have kids and they realize it’s an incredibly stressful situation, but now you’re part of the loop. And nobody’s ever gonna so Oh I regret having my kids. Because you don’t do that. You love your kids, you build this bond with your kids. You just kinda come to terms with I have you and I’m gonna take care of you, I love you. But nobody wants to question Why did you have kids? Did you really want kids? You had to work two or three jobs to raise these kids. It’s circular. Society reproduces itself by taking away individualism and turning us all into a collection, a collective, a commune of co-dependent people. 

FB- …It’s back to that philosophy versus action thing… I don’t consider my anarchy politics because if you think about how people relate to the word and the concept ‘politics’, it’s often just external, almost a hobby thing. You hear people say That’s just politics, I don’t talk politics. So the way that I understand and express anarchy it’s through a life. It’s a lifestyle. It is the life activity of rejecting and reclaiming myself, and also reclaiming myself from surrendering to all these institutions and ideologies that once turned me into a reproducer of politics. I think people are in the habit of being like Oh I used to be an activist, I used to be one of those, I’ve grown up and I’ve gotten old, and I’ve understood some things. They want to just quietly retire. So this was a job? This was just a hobby? This was just some external ideas that you had? This wasn’t your life? I think that is where you see the difference between the philosophers and the people that are actually putting forth these ideas putting them into action. 

Ashley- I’m curious if you have received push back from family or friends for your lifestyle.

FB- I’ve lost a lot of friends. It’s a weird way that I lost friends. I think a lot of friends become self-conscious because I am doing what I’m doing. I’m not just talking about these things. The way that I live my life. I don’t work. I don’t have a bank account. I don’t ever plan on working again. Don’t plan on having a bank account. I have a little flip phone. I try to engage with people more on a face to face basis than over the internet. I don’t have a bunch of social media, I have facebook. that’s it. I do the thing. It’s not like I’m out there being like I’m better than you. I’m literally just enjoying my life. I love my life. It’s not a duty. It doesn’t feel like an obligation to the greater good. I am having so much fun saying Fuck you to the system that is trying to turn everybody, including myself, into one of its reproducers. Some of my friends get uncomfortable because they still go to work. And they still maybe even have some ideas that maybe they would agree with me, but they feel uncomfortable being around me because every time they’re around me, they’re like What did you do today? Well I went out, I exercised, I practiced a little ??? and I’ll probably go out for a walk later. And it’s like, Oh, well I don’t have anything fun to talk about. I went to work. Ok, well how was your day at work? I don’t want to talk about it, you don’t want to hear that. You find out people will start contacting you less and less and less. It sucks, but I guess that’s the weird thing that happens. As far as family, most of my family know that I’m a terrorist. So they kinda keep their distance. They understand that being Christian nonvegans there’s not going to be a whole lot of conversation to be had that isn’t going to eventually lead to some of the things that I’m outspoken about. My mom is 100% supportive. vegan herself, reversed her type 2 diabetes. Even though she has difficulty with information because she doesn’t socialize much, she’s usually on youtube and know how youtube algorithms can feed information depending on searches and shit. Sometimes she’ll get some wacky ideas. Sometimes right wing shit will cross her and she’ll be like Oh yeah well what about that? And I’ll have to have a conversation with her. But other than that she totally supports me, because she was there with me, she raised me. I owe it to her to having the strength to raise me the way she did in the poverty that we were living in. So we have a great relationship, excellent relationship. As good as a mother and son relationship would be. 

FB- …The more you interact and the more you get out into the world, you observe and you listen, the more you start to understand generally speaking how a lot of these systems work. It makes sense to be vegan, it makes sense to be an anarchist. Honestly I wish I could just say I’m an anarchist and people would understand I’m vegan and this and that. But because there’s so many different interpretations and perspectives and histories related to these things, I have to be specific, but that’s ok because that’s where good conversations like this one come into play, where we actually sit and discuss the ways that we think. Because I think a lot of people are just so in a habit of just slapping on labels and making assumptions about what people believe and what we want to do. Because a lot of times people don’t want to talk about the problems in the world. 

FB- …I allow myself to be open to trying out different ways of living, and right now I’m happier than I was when I had a full time job, my own car, and my own apartment. I’m gonna be living out of a van soon, and whatever happens happens. Let the chips fall where they may. People are not comfortable with that kind of vulnerability, that kind of chaos. But I feel like I personally thrive within it. It’s exciting. You only get one life, why not fucking make it the best. Why not kick the system in the balls at the same time.

There are 14 Comments

Ashley- … For those who aren’t super familiar with anarchy, do you want to explain what that is and how you were introduced to it?
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FB- Yeah. It wasn’t any singular event, . . .
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This is such a perfect copy/paste from the source. Look out, someone's ideological commodity is showing!

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(Damn I hate having to explain jokes.)

However, tiqqunism is more of a marxist project with heavy individualist sympathies. The speaking style of the interviewees here reminds me more of hippy anti-capitalism.

Ive read a lot of the content from warzone distro, and it has always made me think of lifestyle policing than anything else. I dont think their obnoxious use of "individualism" as a word has anything to do with their intentions.

They're a social media addict and online 24/7. Nobody needs to interview them. Plus it's be way too cringe.

"Let the chips fall where they may" = Amor Fati
WooHoo, brah's bin reading sum Neech!

Vegan primitivism is such a funny concept: literally retvrning to monke so that I can survive on fruit alone. Also very funny: interpreting this as somehow the message of tiqqun

"This already very popular consumer trend is a monkey wrench in the gears of civilization! The capitalists are really going to feel this!"

FB is a well-known tiqqunist. they actually studied in france and occasionally translate

...LMFAO

FB was one of the major architects of the downfall of the ZAD. They were very active in France when they were 'studying' there.

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