Intro to Anarchy: If Words Have Power, Bullets Speak Louder
Read Time:3 Minute, 41 Second
“He loved the women and he hated the law and he just wouldn’t take nobody’s jaw”
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government. -Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
Leon Frank Czolgosz was an American anarchist who assassinated U.S. President William McKinley in September 1901 using an Iver Johnson revolver in the now obsolete .32 S&W caliber. It was a weapon designed for “card table distances” but deadly enough. It was our introduction to anarchy and affirmation of the idea that if words have power, bullets speak louder.
The Anarchist…the image of the black-cloaked, bearded figure with a bomb in his hand seems to have faded over the last 120 years, replaced perhaps with the similarly attired Communist saboteur. Think Boris Badenoff if you’re old enough to remember Rocky and Bullwinkle. But a bomb is a bomb, a gun is a gun. Are Communism, Anarchy and a Capitalist Democracy siblings if not identical triplets?
Most Americans don’t remember the international movement and it’s multiple assassinations, but it was once the source of much fear and trembling – and political cartoons. Most have not read the philosophy behind it either which is troubling because so much of it re-emerged unnoticed in the guise of movements within the Republican party in the last couple of decades. One can see, or believe he sees the thoughts of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the Tea Party movement, the Sovereign Citizen rebels and many other places masquerading as Conservative Republicans.
“I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will.”
Said Anarchist philosopher Proudhon and I became interested in him years ago because of his eloquent rants against religion, but there is far more to the man (or less in a way) than his hate of Theocratic assertions.
Government is bad, and all laws are the enemy of Liberty, opined several GOP members during the Obama administration and without attribution. Is his repudiation of democracy and government in general a refined version of Conservatism? Is the assertion that we don’t even need government the source of the “less is more” attitude of the American Right toward regulation. Are they as some have suggested just anarchists in business suits?
“To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.”
I report, you decide. But think again, are we hearing similar things from those now beginning to identify themselves as Liberals?
“I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.”
Seems innocuous enough but read on:
“Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Why, then, to this other question: “What is property?” may I not likewise answer, “theft?”
He goes on to assert that Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak and one imagines he’s hearing advocacy for just that from some Democratic voices. The idea that wealth is a fixed sum and if it’s accumulated by one class, it’s stolen from another seems to be common to both allegedly polar opposites of the new left and right. Is the obsession with dividing everything into Liberal and Conservative; everything from science to economics to psychology, really a forced illusion, designed to deceive? Do both roads lead to the same place and is that place worth being in?
Proudhon may have been the father of “modern” anarchism with his idea that liberty is the mother of order and not the other way around, but I see a family resemblance, a possible ancestry with the confused hybrid or bastardized philosophies running wild in our United States.
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It seems that those who call themselves law and order people are the first to to break those laws.
It’s like the Bible Bangers Bill, particularly those who condemn homosexuality with a vigor. Often they turn out to be pedophiles.
One of my points is that things are circular. Far enough left and it’s indistinguishable from right. Proudhon seems to agree with the indefensible premise that order and peace spring into being spontaneously in the absence of law and order. I find that to be – both in contemporary Republican ‘philosophy’ and in Classical Anarchy, to be indistinguishable from bullshit.
Strange that the GOP, the former Law and Order Party, has become the home of the Chaos party and the other guys want to restrict speech and opinion and give that power to the government.
I’m looking for the exit ramp because I don’t like where this highway is going.
I’m also looking for the exit ramp, and have been for some time. So far I haven’t found it. Let me know if you do.
I sometimes say that if I was any more left of left I would be an anarchist. I have never really looked into what anarchy is though, I just say that.
LOL! I’m not really left, except when I’m really hungry, and then I’m left-handed. I heard that once, but not sure what it means. In point of fact, I’m more of a moderate except when it comes to the environment and animals and then I’m like anarchy bound.