Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
– Robert Higgs
Higgs, who describes his political philosophy as “libertarian anarchism,” is no hero of mine, but this quote is one that comes to mind every time some dogmatic statist says something to me like “Oh, you just want anarchy then?” The implicit meaning behind that emphasis is that “anarchy” necessarily involves chaos and violence, like something out of The Purge movies.
Capitalist and statist propaganda has been undeniably successful in painting anarchism as an evil to be avoided at all costs. Unpacking all the bullshit there can feel like an insurmountable task at times.
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