When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick”.
— Mikhail Bakunin, 1873, Statism and Anarchy
Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian anarchist in the period when they were destroying any hope for Russia to modernize gracefully. I doubt I would have agreed with him on much of anything. The political philosophy listed in the article above is something I completely oppose. So normally you would never hear me quote an anarchist. ( Before I go further, we do not need to rehash the recent Libertarian Comment War like a team of reenactors. If we do, I call dibs on casting myself.) Worse yet, apparently Noam Chomsky is fond of this quote.
That said, even a stopped clock is accurate once or twice a day. Bakunin predicted that Marxism would lead to a tyranny as horrendous as the Tsar’s, and he was right beyond his worst imagining.
Nowadays, we do not have People’s Sticks, aside from Bernie Sanders’s cane. We have Social Justice sticks, Children’s sticks, and Green sticks, but they all boil down to an implement to beat down your opponents for a noble cause. If someone takes your money or locks you up, it hardly matters if was for Social Justice or Mother Gaia or Allah or for the honor of the Tsar. Unless the punishment serves justice, it is just another beating.
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