Anarchists Quotes

Otis and his paper were virulently anti-labor. See {617172} .

The reason that this quotation is important is that most Americans from the 1920s on concerned with Marxism and communism in the United States, conflated Marxism with Anarchists as if Marxists were anarchists who were bent on violence. In reality, to most Marxists, anarchists were more their enemy than the capitalists. Stalin was then only 28 years old and the Russian revolution was 9 years in the future.

It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.

It is a common misconception that anarchists would not have any societal mechanism for preventing and combatting crime. Anarchists believe in the long run that with anarchism the reasons and motivations for crime will disappear, but until then they generally have been willing to use force to protect against force being used against the citizens. To critics, this seems to be government, and a government which uses force. Anarchists have never well detailed how they would manage such a seemingly conflicting situation.

This quotation is typical of the anti-government intense feeling, paranoia, and hyperbole of the early 21st century. While a minority of the American population identify with the Tea Party, the Center for a Stateless Society, and other anti-government groups. However, the orthodox members of both of the major political parties tended to avoid publicly criticizing these individuals and organizations lest they end up with an opponent in their next primary election which did not succeed in the majority of cases, but in all cases, it cost the politician a great deal of money, time, and energy to run a primary campaign which often weakens them for the general election that follows.

There were a number of anarchist organizations across the country and in New York that advocated anarchism. As Moss testified, one of the reasons that the anarchists found sympathizers and followers was the incompetence, corruption, and injustice of the courts. After the Page Commission report New York Courts began a reform and triggered similar court reform efforts throughout the country. Even today we have problems with overzealous or corrupt police or prosecutors who falsify or hide evidence, but the frequency is very small compared with what it was in the early 1900s.

Most Americans looked at anarchists as communists. They generally were not, and opposed state communism as much as state capitalism. In many ways they distrusted government the way some modern libertarians do.

See {638747} for a similar view from a later worldwide revolutionary figure.

In 1920 in the midst of a wave of anarchist bombings, two men in Braintree, MA were murdered in an armed robbery. Vanzetti and another political anarchist, Ferdinando Nicola Sacco, were charged with the crime. While anarchy was a non-violent philosophy for many, there was another movement imported from Europe who used bombings as a method of terror and protest to achieve their political aims. Vanzetti and Sacco were of the former type with no criminal record whatsoever but both were considered politically undesirable and part of the terrorist anarchist movement that had been striking in a number of cities. These men were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the robbery and murders despite what was very flimsy and contradictory evidence. In Vanzetti’s case, the evidence against him was the fact that 2 of the shell casings from the crime scene were according to the police fired from the same type of Colt pistol that Vanzetti owned. However, 300,000 other people owned the same type of gun, and ballistics scientific evidence later showed that the shells could not have been fired from Vanzetti’s gun. The case became a worldwide cause celebre with politics, police and judicial misconduct. Even today, there is no clear evidence of either their guilt of innocence (although there was even less evidence against Vanzetti), However, the trial brought more publicity to the anarchist political philosophy than the defendants could have imagined. It also called the finality of capital punishment into question and caused major examination of the police, prosecutorial, judicial systems and even the defense attorneys. The two men were electrocuted on August 23, 1927 amid protests the world over. See {625975} and {600317} for example. Almost a century later, Vanzetti and Sacco are well known politically and historically, while those who prosecuted and executed them are long forgotten.

See {42210}, {626788}, {626784}. Palmer had been a potential Presidential candidate until his excesses ended that possibility.