Flag.Blackened.net | Long ago we should have given up the notion that there is some kind of divine right among rulers, that these political masters are cut from a different cloth than the rest of humankind. This fairy tale just doesn’t wash. The presence of such jewels as Richard Nixon and Co. should cause even the most believing of today’s believers to question the notion that members of the political class have particularly noble and generous characters and are possessed of angelic qualities lacking in the rest of humanity. The governing class is not an elite arising from the people ordained to save mankind from itself. If history should teach us anything, it is that the political class is composed basically of self-servers who thirst for power and privilege and who have found in government the perfect vehicle to achieve their purpose. They are not the noble denizens of this earth that you picture them to be.

You have suggested that an anarchist world would be one full of bandits and gun duels. But the truth is quite contrary. It’s a world in which states exist that is full of banditry and gun duels. Governments are virtually unable to check the acts of individual violence that abound in this country and in many cases are directly and indirectly involved in causing them. Throw in a hopelessly outdated court system that doesn’t dispense justice and hardly even gets around to dispensing the law, and you have a system that fails miserably to operate the one service government defenders always claim government alone is capable of providing.

But beyond that there is one fact that government defenders often choose to ignore. That is: The biggest and most aggressive bandits and murderers are the governments themselves. Whatever violence there would be in anarchist societies could only pale in comparison to the violence governments through wars and persecutions have brought to human history.

The legalized murder and plunder that go under the name of war are the creations of your beloved government. All the broken lives, destroyed homes, maimed individuals and slaughtered peoples that war leaves in its wake are the children of that state that you so unhesitatingly turn to to be the defender of the downtrodden and helpless.

For everyone like you who has benefited from the state’s system of organized theft, there are dozens whose lives have been ruined or destroyed by that same state. Government stands condemned by it own record as an institution that for centuries has been responsible for massive terror, torture, and slaughter. Government has no equal in this grizzly business – and never will.

what I have written so far has largely been a negative response to your remarks. Let me for a bit approach this subject from the positive aspect of anarchism. Anarchism is not a dead or negative philosophy as you suggest – it is very much alive with a positive message for humankind. Far from being solely bent on trying to tear down government, anarchists are a people of peace who ask nothing more than that people respect the humanity and individuality of each other and reject coercion as a way of life. Of course we condemn government every opportunity we get because we recognize it as the single greatest threat there is to human peace and well being. But our attacks on the state are rooted not only in our knowledge that government by its very nature is destructive of true society, but also in our conviction that the full benefits of social life can come only to free people, and, conversely, that only free people can create a climate where true society can flourish. Read Entire Article

By Michael E. Coughlin

Objections to Anarchism – The Principles of Anarchism are Timeless Truths was originally published in serial form in the dandelion between Summer 1977 and Summer 1979.