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The Iron Web
"The United States is fast losing its reputation as the land of happiness and prosperity. With a sinking economy at home and rising tensions abroad, fear and discontent are boiling over. The Great American Experiment is faltering. Now a new threat suddenly arises: a domestic terrorist group calling itself The Iron Web, a group bent on ending America as we know it. A new President Elect eagerly awaits his inauguration and his chance to bring peace and security back to the country. A rookie federal officer finds himself face to face with the terrorists. And a young woman who knows little, and cares even less, about politics and national affairs is cast into the center of this conflict by a cruel twist of fate. A new and drastically changed America is coming. Some will not want to see it. Some will not live to see it."
363 pages, Paperback
First published March 18, 2015
19 people are currently reading
310 people want to read
About the author
Larken Rose
12 books141 followersLarken Rose is an outspoken advocate of the principles of self-ownership, non-aggression and a stateless society, and is the author of a number of books (including "The Most Dangerous Superstition") and creator of numerous articles and videos.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 30, 2016
All Jessica wanted to do to celebrate her 19th birthday was go camping and test out her skills navigating with a GPS. At no point during the celebration did she want to include her passenger plane getting shot down from the sky and crashing in the middle of a war zone. But that's life. Her new home, Graveston, is the site of a Waco-style standoff between the Federal government and what the news is calling an anarchist cult. Jessica is nursed back to life by a kindly priest living in the no-man's land between the lines, but to her perplexity he doesn't seem to be too alarmed at the nearness of the terrorists. Nor, for that matter, do his amiable neighbors. When a Humvee crashes through the wall and dumps a bunch of ATF agents, guns a-blazing, she realizes why. Her rescuers are the terrorists! She's not the only one in for a surprise, however: when one of the Federal agents left behind in the raid becomes captured by the 'cult', he too is taken aback by the lack of evil villainy. These people don't seem to be concocting any nefarious schemes; they're not building bombs, robbing banks, or planning the assassinations attributed to them by the media. Some of them are even pacifists! Something is rotten in the state of Arizona.
The Iron Web is a philosophical argument doubling as a thriller. At its heart is the titular iron web, which is less a terrorist organization and more a symbol of self-ownership and voluntary association. The book is peppered with conflicts between people and the will of the state, establishing tension that leads to good arguments. Argument constitutes the meat of the book, in fact, though it's no extended lecture; conversations occupy the intermittent quiet moments between the agents' assaults on the besieged community, of which Jessica and the ATF agent Jason find themselves unwitting members. Although the people they met hold to various and sometimes completing political philosophies (there are Constitutionalists, anarchists, and hippies are among their number), all agree to the same principle: no person has ownership over another. The 'web' is a visual representation of how people's lives are knit together through voluntary exchanges; in the story, the symbol is displayed by persons interested in dealing with one another off the books, creating an underground economy independent of the state. No bombing campaign could frighten the US government more than such subversiveness! Another viewpoint character named Betsy, an executive assistant attached to a senator about to be inaugurated as president, offers still more room for tension: the closer the senator gets to assuming political power, the more manipulative and abusive he reveals himself, and Betsy starts to question just who it is she's been following. He won on a campaign of fighting terrorism at home, but his plans for the future involve the effective abolition of free speech. Her disillusionment with the president-elect rises as the 'terrorists' are pushed to their breaking point, but this would be no thriller were the ending predictable. Just as the Iron Web is not a terrorist organization, so to are other appearances deceiving.
What makes The Iron Web work so well as a novel is that its ultimate villains are, in effect, the reader. The ATF agents persecuting the Iron Web are not out to perpetuate a police state and push around the weak; they sincerely believe themselves to be the champion of law, order, and justice. Jason becomes the Web's confederate, but he could have just as easily killed them at the state's bidding had he not been injured in an earlier attempt to subdue them. What altered was his awareness, and Larken's aim is to shift the readers'. Blame is laid, V-like, at the foot of the American people who have allowed the state to become God, who tolerate its invasion of every aspect of their lives, to allow its violence to become the norm. Not the violence of the ATF's campaign against the Iron Web, its pushing them further and further into the woods, burning their homes and shooting them down one by one. Confrontations like these are out of the ordinary. What's most insidious is the mundane tyranny of the state's agents that people encounter virtually every day -- creepy TSA agents, petty cops, corrupt politicians, and exacting IRS officials. The 'leader' of the Iron Web community, and Rose himself, urges those who believe in self-ownership to practice what they preach, and own up to the responsibility that comes with that ownership: resist. Few readers are likely to adopt, whole-cloth, the author's radicially individualist philosophy, but this is a book whose challenges are less preachy than fun. I've read it twice this year, and the ending was just as astonishing the second time around. This is absolutely reccommended.
August 6, 2009
Awesome anarchist fiction! This story will keep you guessing until the very end.
available online at larkenrose.com
available online at larkenrose.com
July 5, 2018
Wow, awesome
Love the way the principles of liberty are spelled out, the myth of authority is debunked and the inaugural speech was the bee's knees. I cried because I don't foresee any such man doing this - mainly because the kind of man who thinks like this doesn't want anything to do with that wasp of hornets we call Congress or "Representatives", an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Good job, Larkin.
Love the way the principles of liberty are spelled out, the myth of authority is debunked and the inaugural speech was the bee's knees. I cried because I don't foresee any such man doing this - mainly because the kind of man who thinks like this doesn't want anything to do with that wasp of hornets we call Congress or "Representatives", an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Good job, Larkin.
March 20, 2016
Larken Rose is an intelligent and thoughtful writer that I admire for his philosophical and political views but as is often the case with an author that writes a work of fiction to endorse a cause, he falls into the trap of inorganically "explaining" through his characters rather than "showing" and the final product ends up less than realistic and less than interesting.
Read
September 11, 2012One of the best books I've ever read.
August 3, 2017
Revolutionary!
I have read thousands of books in my 67 years, but this one instantly became one of my favorites. Rose writes fun dialogue: he presents important philosophical ideas in conversations that you can imagine real people having with one another. And while this may not be the best plotted book I've ever seen, the author seems to have put his anarchistic, freedom-loving soul into it, and it shines through like a star. I read the book in just a few days. Two weeks later I read it again, to make sure it was as good as I thought it was the first time through. Then I ordered 10 copies to send to friends. Yeah, that good.
The book focuses on three characters: a young woman fresh out of high school, a newbie Federal Agent (ATF), and the personal secretary to the newly elected President of the United States. These three are all mild, ordinary folks of good will. Nothing special or particularly interesting about any of them . . . which turns out not to matter too much, because the real show is what's going on around them. The author throws his characters into the middle of a Waco-like government siege of a rural community in Arizona. The government and the ever-trustworthy news media call the besieged folks "terrorists" belonging to an "anarchist cult" called "The Iron Web." But as soon as the viewpoint characters meet the people who supposedly belong to this dreaded conspiracy, they find that the government is up to its old tricks of demonizing people of good will who happen to hold politically incorrect opinions. In this case, the government has real cause to be frightened of these folks: tyrants must always fear men who know that they are free. And that's all I'm going to say about the story - you should have the fun of discovering it for yourself.
Like Atlas Shrugged, this is a novel of ideas, powerful ones. There's even a little speech like the famous John Galt polemic - with the difference that this speech is plain fun to read.
Just to give you a taste, here are a few of the many tidbits I enjoyed:
"Whatever else happens, never tell someone that you accept that he has the right to rule you. Never. You will make him into a monster, and you will make yourself into a slave."
"When has polite talk ever reduced tyranny?"
"What have you done with the country they [America's Founding Fathers] gave you? Today you tolerate a level of oppression and intrusion far beyond King George's wildest dreams, yet you cannot even imagine engaging in passive resistance, much less forcible revolution, in defense of your own freedom. The bravest thing you'll ever do is walk into a booth every few years, where no one can see you, and press a button to say which of two slave-masters you'd rather be owned by."
"Majority rule is not freedom. Majority rule is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
"We view and treat each other as adult human beings, each responsible for his actions, each obligated to judge right and wrong for himself. We detest the alternative: the giant daycare center that so many of you seem to prefer, where a bunch of whimpering brats whine about their 'needs' and demand preferential treatment based on some twisted, delusional notion of 'fairness,' while at the same time begging the nanny to punish the kids they don't like."
Buy the book, and enjoy the whole feast.
I have read thousands of books in my 67 years, but this one instantly became one of my favorites. Rose writes fun dialogue: he presents important philosophical ideas in conversations that you can imagine real people having with one another. And while this may not be the best plotted book I've ever seen, the author seems to have put his anarchistic, freedom-loving soul into it, and it shines through like a star. I read the book in just a few days. Two weeks later I read it again, to make sure it was as good as I thought it was the first time through. Then I ordered 10 copies to send to friends. Yeah, that good.
The book focuses on three characters: a young woman fresh out of high school, a newbie Federal Agent (ATF), and the personal secretary to the newly elected President of the United States. These three are all mild, ordinary folks of good will. Nothing special or particularly interesting about any of them . . . which turns out not to matter too much, because the real show is what's going on around them. The author throws his characters into the middle of a Waco-like government siege of a rural community in Arizona. The government and the ever-trustworthy news media call the besieged folks "terrorists" belonging to an "anarchist cult" called "The Iron Web." But as soon as the viewpoint characters meet the people who supposedly belong to this dreaded conspiracy, they find that the government is up to its old tricks of demonizing people of good will who happen to hold politically incorrect opinions. In this case, the government has real cause to be frightened of these folks: tyrants must always fear men who know that they are free. And that's all I'm going to say about the story - you should have the fun of discovering it for yourself.
Like Atlas Shrugged, this is a novel of ideas, powerful ones. There's even a little speech like the famous John Galt polemic - with the difference that this speech is plain fun to read.
Just to give you a taste, here are a few of the many tidbits I enjoyed:
"Whatever else happens, never tell someone that you accept that he has the right to rule you. Never. You will make him into a monster, and you will make yourself into a slave."
"When has polite talk ever reduced tyranny?"
"What have you done with the country they [America's Founding Fathers] gave you? Today you tolerate a level of oppression and intrusion far beyond King George's wildest dreams, yet you cannot even imagine engaging in passive resistance, much less forcible revolution, in defense of your own freedom. The bravest thing you'll ever do is walk into a booth every few years, where no one can see you, and press a button to say which of two slave-masters you'd rather be owned by."
"Majority rule is not freedom. Majority rule is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
"We view and treat each other as adult human beings, each responsible for his actions, each obligated to judge right and wrong for himself. We detest the alternative: the giant daycare center that so many of you seem to prefer, where a bunch of whimpering brats whine about their 'needs' and demand preferential treatment based on some twisted, delusional notion of 'fairness,' while at the same time begging the nanny to punish the kids they don't like."
Buy the book, and enjoy the whole feast.
August 1, 2017
I got half-way through, and put it down. The premise is great (Pollyanna/clueless citizen is caught-up in the middle of a false-flag event that no one in the country knows is a false-flag event---except the US government that initiated it, and the anarchist gang that has her in their custody in the wilderness (and which gang is under seige by said US government agents).
The execution is just horrible, unfortunately. Poorly-crafted characters; implausible situations and plot developments; characters that engage in jeremiads and expository explanations in order for the author to express his philosophy of anti-statism/anarcho-capitalism; meandering and sometimes boring storyline.
Sometimes it's like the Keystone Cops, with Federal agents running this way and that, pursuing the anarchist gang this way and that...all within probably 1 few square miles. And the leader of the gang, dispensing his supposedly unmatched, incisive, libertarian wisdom to the naive, confused woman---a la John Galt's droning lecture in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"---doesn't make for a great story.
And it is very implausible that with the greatest man-hunt in US history going on, for the most wanted, domestic terrorist in the U.S. (think Tim McVeigh), the BATF and FBI only assign, like a dozen agents or so to the rugged wilderness, to surround and trap the gang. So silly.
The execution is just horrible, unfortunately. Poorly-crafted characters; implausible situations and plot developments; characters that engage in jeremiads and expository explanations in order for the author to express his philosophy of anti-statism/anarcho-capitalism; meandering and sometimes boring storyline.
Sometimes it's like the Keystone Cops, with Federal agents running this way and that, pursuing the anarchist gang this way and that...all within probably 1 few square miles. And the leader of the gang, dispensing his supposedly unmatched, incisive, libertarian wisdom to the naive, confused woman---a la John Galt's droning lecture in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"---doesn't make for a great story.
And it is very implausible that with the greatest man-hunt in US history going on, for the most wanted, domestic terrorist in the U.S. (think Tim McVeigh), the BATF and FBI only assign, like a dozen agents or so to the rugged wilderness, to surround and trap the gang. So silly.
September 12, 2020
Great Story to Convey a Very Important Message
It is no Atlas Shrugged style and plot wise, nevertheless it is able to convey in a simplistic and rational way arguably the most important message that is needed to be grasped today as we come face to face with the end results of our own self-deceit. The only shame is that the author while quoting in the book that “the victors write the history books", is still apparently unconscious of the false narrative he still holds as truth about the events of ww2 and Hitler.
It is no Atlas Shrugged style and plot wise, nevertheless it is able to convey in a simplistic and rational way arguably the most important message that is needed to be grasped today as we come face to face with the end results of our own self-deceit. The only shame is that the author while quoting in the book that “the victors write the history books", is still apparently unconscious of the false narrative he still holds as truth about the events of ww2 and Hitler.
May 10, 2018
BRILLIANT, non-preachy, any-age-appropriate from about 7th grade reading level and up, and yet clearly displays some profound truths in ways that many people in our modern day might find abrupt and yet challenging to their worldview. The humanity in this is massive, and the author's heart for peace is evident in the clear and undiluted portrayal of the realities of government deception, war, and surrendering our choices to merely 'order-following' other human beings who send orders to kill... and how relevant this all is RIGHT NOW in America today.
This, like Rose's The Most Dangerous Superstition, is one of the most important story-forms of what real freedom should mean for the world, and could mean... only it implies that by revealing not-so-subtly what REALLY EXISTS and what government today really does/is.
This, like Rose's The Most Dangerous Superstition, is one of the most important story-forms of what real freedom should mean for the world, and could mean... only it implies that by revealing not-so-subtly what REALLY EXISTS and what government today really does/is.
August 27, 2024
One of the few authors that can successfully weave TRUE MORALITY and what it means to be human into an adventure story. Ayn Rand, Tolkien, James Branch Cabell. A few others. A tour de force for us AnarchoLibertarians. Larken makes a few historical interpretations I don’t agree with but slaughters the Sacred Cows of Lincoln and FDR and others, including some of the various crime families from fairly recent USA history. Quite a dangerous book and they are always the best. A handful of red pills that go down like jelly beans but won’t for the Normies and NPCs or what ever the current term for the unthinking mass is these days.
October 12, 2020
I wish everyone would read this book as it would truly change the world and how we treat each other. I have recommended it to many family members, friends, and coworkers. I have read it together with my kids and we have discussed different topics and taught them how to be better people.
June 18, 2020
Larken Rose is worth his weight in gold.
January 22, 2022
One of the best books I've ever read in my life. I really wish many of the events in this book would happen in real life (particularly the ending). It should be a movie damn it
December 10, 2009
Great book, It kept me interested from the start. Closer to the end it felt like the author lost interest in the story line and cared more about ranting his views on politics and the government. While the ending was a let down it was still a good read and I would recommend it.
March 31, 2012
Wow Totaly Great - Best book in the last 10.
February 28, 2015
Very great book. Interesting story and interesting perspective. Highly recommend to anyone and everyone.
July 14, 2015
An excellent book for anyone interested in learning more about anarchy.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews