[Clips] 'A' Is for Anarchy

[R. A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 06:09:52 -0500
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  From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] 'A' Is for Anarchy
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  <http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008105>


  OpinionJournal

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  TASTE COMMENTARY

  'A' Is for Anarchy
  Anarchism has gone from intellectually complicated and violent to just
  plain silly.

  BY TODD SEAVEY
  Friday, March 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

  It might look like just another violent sci-fi film from the ads, but "V
  for Vendetta," opening in theaters across the country today, is the first
  superhero movie that's explicitly anarchist. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the
  producers, also brought us "The Matrix"--which ended, as you'll recall,
  with Neo's memorable anarchic warning to humanity's captors that he was
  going to "show them . . . a world without rules and controls, without
  borders or boundaries" and spark a revolution. The Wachowskis are now
  apparently trying something even more radical in adapting this comic-book
  story.

  The "V" film features some delightfully topsy-turvy casting. The man who
  played the enslaved Winston Smith in "1984" (John Hurt) now plays the
  fascistic leader of a future London. The man who played authoritarian Agent
  Smith in "The Matrix" (Hugo Weaving) now portrays a deranged
  freedom-fighter/terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes being the
  real-life terrorist who tried to blow up the British Parliament 400 years
  ago). And the actress who was an elected queen in recent "Star Wars" films
  (Natalie Portman) now plays an oppressed journalist.

  But the greatest turnabout, if it actually occurs, will be audiences
  cheering for the hero of the film, who is a terrorist. Where did the ideas
  behind this movie come from, and why would we have any sympathy for them?
  London audiences may be particularly wary, recalling not only last year's
  jihadist bombings there but also, from the history books, anarchist bomb
  attacks on the London Underground in 1883 and 1896. The attacks were part
  of a campaign across Europe near the turn of the century, the inspiration
  for anarchist villains in novels by G.K. Chesteron, Joseph Conrad and
  others.


  America's own collective cultural memory of anarchism generally begins with
  the killing of eight Chicago police officers by anarchists in the 1886
  Haymarket Riot, the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in
  1901 and the murders committed by immigrant Italian anarchists Sacco and
  Vanzetti in 1920 (they were indeed guilty, as their own lawyer admitted to
  a sympathetic Upton Sinclair, who kept the knowledge hidden for years).

  Anarchism, the idea that society would be better off without the
  constraints of government, has a long and often sordid history. What is
  arguably the first book urging the complete abolition of government, "A
  Vindication of Natural Society," was written 250 years ago by the man
  usually credited with founding conservatism, Edmund Burke. The British
  philosopher and politician, who served in the very Parliament building that
  Fawkes tried to destroy, argued that the same sort of anti-authoritarian
  reasoning that was being used in the 18th century to dispel religious
  belief could be used to undermine earthly political leaders.


  Scholars long accepted Burke's assurances later in life--when he had become
  a conservative member of the (generally liberal) Whig Party--that
  "Vindication" was merely satire. But 20th-century "anarcho-capitalist"
  economist Murray Rothbard argued that Burke's views had simply evolved over
  time and that Burke was embarrassed by his youthful ideological excesses.
  Indeed, anarchism has often been an attractive notion for young people.
  Paul Avrich, a historian of anarchism who died a few weeks ago in New York,
  suggested that James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill were all
  anarchists early on in their intellectual development.

  Regardless of whether Burke's book was a satire, it was an inspiration to
  the man who first developed a full anarchist philosophy, William Godwin. He
  combined conservative religious sensibilities with Whig-inspired political
  arguments and communist-anarchist solutions to conclude that God-given
  goodness and the rational nature of human beings meant that the best
  outcomes would occur in the absence of force, thereby alleviating the need
  for both government and property. The utopian oddness of this view,
  whatever the sophistication of its argument, is a hallmark of anarchist
  reasoning.

  In the 19th century, anarchist radicals who, from our perspective, seem to
  have diametrically opposed views often thought of themselves as a united
  front, aligned against the political establishment. Many anarchists
  believed, then as now, that government and the free market should both
  wither away and allied themselves with Marxists. But there were also
  ardently capitalist anarchists, such as Lysander Spooner, who started his
  own profit-making postal service to compete with the U.S. government's lazy
  monopoly.

  Marxists found more in common with French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
  who famously declared that "property is theft!" Russian anarchists and
  communists found figures they could both admire in Michael Bakunin and
  Peter Kropotkin, who praised "mutual aid" as an alternative to top-down
  government. (One sees hints of Kropotkin's thought in things like the
  medical center quickly set up in New Orleans by the anarchist group Common
  Ground while the government floundered in the wake of Katrina.)


  Russia's most famous anarchist, though, was Leo Tolstoy, who said: "There
  are no crimes so revolting that they would not readily be committed by men
  who form part of a government." But Tolstoy, in stark contrast to the likes
  of the Haymarket murderers, appealed in the name of Christianity for an end
  to violence by soldiers and anarchists alike. (His countryman Dostoevsky
  was unconvinced and depicted anarchists as both dangerous and
  self-destructive in "The Devils.")

  For most of the 20th century, it must be acknowledged, anarchism functioned
  as little more than an adjunct to other, more popular, political movements:
  labor in the case of "anarcho-syndicalists" and left-anarchists such as
  Emma Goldman; capitalism in the case of anarchist libertarians like
  Rothbard; and hippie culture in the case of prankster chaos-worshippers
  like authors Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey.

  As anarchism has aged and largely eschewed violence (fantasies like "V for
  Vendetta" notwithstanding), its members seem to have gone one of two
  routes, either becoming fringe figures who produce manifestoes and
  performance art of no great political impact or, ironically, choosing to
  replace the chaotic violence of old with allegiance to the more
  predictable, systematic coercion of laws and government. The ideal of the
  ending of all political control has gradually, perhaps inevitably, been
  pushed aside by the more familiar one of shaping political control to suit
  one's own agenda.

  In fact, modern so-called anarchists are usually working to increase
  government power. They form an important faction of the antiglobalization
  movement, agitating for stricter regulations on international trade. To
  judge by the sometimes violent protests at World Trade Organization
  conferences, the latest anarchists are usually grungy kids with strange
  hair and piercings; it is hard to say for certain, but they have probably
  spent more time listening to Rage Against the Machine and the Clash than
  reading Godwin or Proudhon.

  Perhaps the greatest evidence that there is little intellectual heft left
  in the anarchist movement is the occasional protests in Albany, N.Y., where
  self-proclaimed anarchists turn up to protest budget cuts at state-run
  schools. It's a satire Burke never could have dreamed of.

  Mr. Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com (now part of the OpinionJournal
  Federation of sites).

  --
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  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'