Counter-Currents
Remembering Sam Francis: The Rising Tide of Anarcho-Tyranny
Beau Albrecht
1,977 words
Author’s note: An earlier version of this appeared at Return of Kings as “How Our Government Is Sanctioning A New Kind Of Tyranny.” The following expanded version is in my compilation Deplorable Diatribes.
My first encounter with anarcho-tyranny was when my grandfather got busted in a sting. His “crime” was cutting hair without a license, which got him a fine. Being very pious and impeccably straight-laced, he’s about the last guy you’d think would get a criminal record.
I should mention a few particulars. He was retired and just doing this as a hobby. He had been a barber until retirement, cutting hair since likely well before the arresting officer was born. Furthermore, this was near the border of Mexico, where drug smuggling and human trafficking were rampant. Burglaries were also taking place in that very RV park. It just happened to be more expedient and profitable to bust an old guy for cutting hair — which he certainly knew how to do, despite not having that state’s paperwork — than to go catch some real crooks.
Theodore Dalrymple touched on anarcho-tyranny when he aimed his considerable writing talent at the way parking tickets are disbursed like confetti in Britain. He begins:
The alacrity, efficiency and speed with which monies are collected from certain members of the public are in stark contrast with the incompetence, inefficiency, and waste with which the ends for which the monies are supposedly collected are pursued. In short, the British public administration is a Moloch whose appetite grows with the feeding, and whose only real purpose is to feed itself. Existence and expansion is its very raison d’etre.
Basically, it has nothing to do with public safety; it’s all a big cash cow for the government. Other examples readily spring to mind, such as speed traps. Worse are automated cameras to detect speeding and red-light violations. That’s not really about safety, but rather about playing “gotcha” and fleecing citizens. Still, there’s more to it than that.
What anarcho-tyranny means
The late Sam Francis, who would’ve fit in quite well into today’s alternative right scene, did the most to describe the concept. As he put it, that’s “a kind of Hegelian synthesis of two opposites — anarchy and tyranny.” He explains further:
The elementary concept of anarcho-tyranny is simple enough. History knows of many societies that have succumbed to anarchy when the governing authorities proved incapable of controlling criminals, warlords, rebels, and marauding invaders. Today, that is not the problem in the United States. The government, as any taxpayer (especially delinquent ones) can tell you, shows no sign of collapsing or proving unable to perform its functions. In the United States today, the government works efficiently. Taxes are collected (you bet), the population is counted (sort of), the mail is delivered (sometimes), and countries that never bothered us are invaded and conquered.
Yet, at the same time, the country habitually wallows in a condition that often resembles Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature — nasty, brutish, and short. Crime rates have indeed declined in the last decade or so, but violent crime remains so common in larger cities and their suburbs that both residents and visitors live in a continuous state of fear, if not terror.
He states as an example that we allow illegal aliens to invade our country, yet at the same time, we went out of our way to invade Iraq without due cause.
It’s not just illegal immigration that’s the problem. Ever since Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act, the USA has let in people from anywhere with no thought as to how they’ll fit in with the rest of the public. (The European equivalent is the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan, implemented by Eurocrats such as Angela Merkel the arch-hypocrite.) The public is never consulted about these population replacement policies, of course. When problems happen — 9/11, the Fort Hood shooting, the San Bernadino shooting, the Orlando nightclub shooting, etc. — the answer always is that the government needs more powers (like the Patriot Act) to stop them. How about we stop letting in incompatible people instead?
As Francis further explained, this is a very widespread racket:
What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.
Basically, the government doesn’t make a serious effort to stop real crime, although it’s certainly capable of doing so. Meanwhile, it harasses honest citizens over petty matters. It’s an overreaching nanny state — verging on a police state — with selective enforcement directed at the wrong people.
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Soft on real crime
Some crimes do get taken seriously. Murders will be investigated. The authorities will pull out the stops when politically incorrect motives are involved. On the other hand, don’t expect much effort if you’re the victim of a burglary or mugging. At best, you’ll get a police report for the insurance company.
Today, gangs aren’t exactly the Jets and the Sharks from West Side Story. Now, we have outfits such as the Bloods, the Crips, MS-13, and so forth. They number in tens of thousands each, cross state and sometimes national boundaries, and use social media to organize and coordinate operations. Why does the government tolerate large paramilitary criminal organizations? With our electronic surveillance apparatus beyond the wildest dreams of Stasi or the KGB, they could be rounded up and charged with organized crime overnight. Apparently whoever is running all that has other priorities in mind.
Gangs, rioters, and the presence of urban “no-go zones” seem more befitting of Afghanistan or the outlands of Pakistan. This is symptomatic of a weak state, a Third World country with guerrillas lurking in the jungle, or a medieval kingdom with bandits controlling the highlands. The USA isn’t the only industrialized country where this surreal arrangement exists. Every so often, Muslim rioters erupt from the Parisian banlieues to torch cars and buildings. Britain has seen its share of similar incidents too.
The government seems to have a great deal of tolerance for those who steal with a pen. Sure, the Enron executives were brought to justice. (J. Clifford Baxter “committed suicide” shortly after agreeing to testify. Later, CEO Ken Lay had a convenient “coronary” and was hastily cremated.) Bernie Madoff got sent to Club Fed after his $9 billion Ponzi scheme collapsed. Still, there were no legal consequences for the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which plagues the economy to this day.
There were many opportunities for fraud charges: banks that underwrote liar loans for people who defaulted on their ARMs as soon as the interest rate went up, investment firms selling the shady mortgages as bundled securities, rating agencies certifying these investments as high grade, credit default swap issuers way over their heads, etc. Instead, the banksters that got their fingers burnt with their casino capitalism got bailed out because they’re “too big to fail.”
Tough on trivial “crimes”
There’s something to be said for the “broken windows” theory of controlling crime. Mayor Rudy Giuliani did much to improve New York City by going after graffiti, turnstile-jumpers, and the like. However, anarcho-tyranny goes well beyond this by criminalizing trifling things and coming up with new ways to hassle honest citizens. As Tacitus noted two thousand years ago, “When the republic is at its most corrupt, the laws are most numerous.”
As Sam Francis said:
Just before the end of this year’s legislative session, the Maryland lawmakers passed several new laws that (a) allow policemen to stop drivers for not wearing seat belts, (b) authorize hidden cameras at red lights to take secret photographs of the license plates of cars that run the lights, (c) ban loud car stereos on state roads, (d) forbid minors from buying butane lighters because they might inhale the gas, and (e) require drivers whose windshield wipers are running to keep their headlights on. The lawmakers seem to have missed outlawing cooking breakfast in your underwear, but of course there’s always another session next year.
The citizens of Maryland will no doubt be thrilled to learn that law enforcement in their state has now so mastered violent crime that the cops have little else to do but round up non-seat-belt wearers and butane-sniffers. As a matter of fact, Maryland’s Prince George’s County has just announced that rapes and homicides increased in the first three months of 1997. Nevertheless, you can be certain that no one will be raped or murdered without wearing a seat belt.
Indeed, Maryland is a prime offender. One of my friends got pulled over three times for trivialities shortly after moving there. Later, I was driving him around while visiting, and he warned me not to pull out so soon from stop signs. I replied, “I’ve been waiting five seconds. Should I wait ten?”
The campus rape witch hunts are another prime example. As directed by the Obama administration, guys can get thrown out of college on no more than an allegation, subject to the findings of tribunals and without due process protections. If actual crimes are taking place, why are they being handled that way? Too many famous cases turned out to be groundless. Not only are the lives of the falsely accused ruined, it’s simply a bad idea to trivialize a serious crime like that.
Gun control is yet another example of anarcho-tyranny. Some debate the existence of natural rights, but the fact is that survival is encoded into our DNA to be our first priority. American citizens who seek to be as well-armed as the bad guys must deal with a lot of red tape first. The more Left-leaning the locale, the more onerous and restrictive this is. Many other countries forbid private ownership of guns. After Britain did so, crimes involving guns increased drastically, and the incidence of home invasions skyrocketed. So what’s going on here — is it just pointy-headed liberals worried about muggers getting themselves shot? Or do those pushing gun control want the public scared, dependent, and disarmed?
Who benefits?
The government gets a lot from anarcho-tyranny. This includes:
- More money from tickets and fines;
- Job security and justification for their budgets;
- The politicians can talk about how they’re “tough on crime” or doing something about public safety by these empty gestures;
- Expanded powers and ability to control citizens;
- Security theater;
- Domestic spying;
- Social engineering; and
- The ability to crack down on dissidents selectively.
Ancillary parties benefit too, such as propaganda groups delivering “sensitivity training” and multicultural curricula (as Sam Francis mentioned), activists, foundations, “watchdog” outfits, and so forth. All told, it’s a hell of a racket for both The System and The Hive.
Wherever anarcho-tyranny is found, that’s evidence that the government has its priorities way out of order and isn’t working for your interests. Unfortunately, this trend is still rising. The greatest problem with soft despotism is that it could lead to hardcore despotism.
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15 comments
It WASN’T Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act, it was Manny Celler’s and LBJ’s.
Teddy was a 32-yr-old junior senator and had nothing to do with it other than being a gofer/whip for LBJ. For that matter Phil Hart (as in Hart-Celler) had about as much input as a cigar-store Indian. Jeez!
I did write this a while back, and since then I’ve become aware of some other details about the 1965 Immigration Act. Senator Javits was a major promoter, though taking more of a behind-the-scenes role. Ted Kennedy was more like the public face of it, lying like hell and telling the rubes it wouldn’t change America’s ethnic composition.
Thank you. Of course I’m aware it’s an old piece, from a time a few years ago when there was an active campaign (especially among people who don’t remember the era) to say Teddy Kennedy did it all when he was a kid. Even Ann Coulter got into the act. It was a cheap shot that distorted history and distracted us from Manny Celler and Jake Javits.
To the best of my knowledge, Ted pooh-poohed the demographic-upset question once: ‘Senator Ted Kennedy, speaking of the effects of the Act, said, “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”‘ (From Wikipedia, quoting from some book.) He was not running around the country telling lies. He was on the Senate floor, debating Southern and Western senators who wanted to prevent a floodtide of Mexicans. To get their votes the bill’s proponents wrote a “Western Hemisphere” limitation into the bill. But just as a gun-control bill doesn’t keep criminals from having guns, so immigration restrictions do not eliminate illegal aliens.
To be fair the Mexicans would always seek El Norte. Wouldn’t any rational economic being?
Apologies for the ambiguity. I didn’t mean to suggest that Ted Kennedy was touring the country to fool the public. It’s just that I think of lying in front of a national legislative assembly (in this case, the Senate) as lying to the country. I could’ve chosen my words more carefully.
What is it about right-wingers and traffic enforcement? In the UK, you have to be going well over the speed limit to get caught by a ‘speed trap’, and what objection can any reasonable person have to punishing those who run red lights (many of whom will be low impulse-control non-whites)? Dalrymple was right about parking tickets, admittedly.
When they put the cameras in, usually the yellow light will be shortened. This is so that more people can get busted for extra $$$$$$$$$$$$$. A side effect of this is that this causes more people to slam on their brakes suddenly as the yellow light comes on, which increases the risk of a rear end collision if the guy behind him wasn’t as sharp on the game.
Despite what they say, it’s never about safety; it’s about government grifting under color of law. If the government wants more safety, let’s have some more patrol cars in traffic busting people who drive unsafely.
When we used to have patrol cars the oft-heard complaint was “Why aren’t they out catching real criminals?”
I’ve had plenty of near-death experiences in traffic, so I’m fine with patrol cars to do something about drunks, lane encroachers, etc. I’d rather have that than surveillance technology designed to play “gotcha” and fleece drivers.
Has anyone ever exposed gangs like MS-13 to West Side Story, to see their reaction to “gangs” dancing, singing and leaping around? The cognitive dissonance would be extreme. “These gringos are loco!” It would be like Springtime for Hitler came out first, then the Nazis showed up later.
Call it Homies Take a Day Trip to Broadway… It actually sounds like a plot to a screwball type comedy. Stage Gangsters meet the real thing.
I figure the result would be lots of Salvadorans with facial tattoos howling with laughter in a theater. 1950s gangs were kid stuff to what’s going on now; these days, we effectively have private paramilitary forces that the government isn’t in any hurry to bust.
That reminds me of a book or article about John Waters, wherein one of Waters’ in-crowd was quoted complaining that the “wrong people” were going to see Pink Flamingos. He said something like “It was great seeing it in the theater until word got out to the Puerto Rican gangs, who would come in stoned yelling ‘Let’s see the fag eat dogshit!'” Well, if you make a movie featuring a notorious scene of a fag eating dogshit, could you really complain of that bait working? Hopefully Waters himself answers “no.”
I am not sure that this is an entirely accurate diagnosis. Most of us – particularly in mixed-race communities – would have no problem if the state were to vigorously enforce of “quality of life” laws such as car stereos at all hours of the day and night, single family homes turned in to boarding houses, urban roosters crowing, cars parked on lawns, and busted furniture or old mattresses unceremoniously deposited on the sidewalk, curb or parkway (seriously, where on earth do all those mattresses come from?). In fact, were society of a different demographic mix, these issues would be negligible and these rule never would have come into existence in the first place. Elaborate rules of conduct only came about as a reaction, by Whites, to the accretion of alien standards of living, and de facto imposition of those standards, on society as a whole. As we are want to do, whites projected a sense of rationality upon other demographic groups, assuming that these new groups would learn to behave like whites – and that some semblance of order could be maintained – if we simply created more elaborate rules. In retrospect, that effort was (and always will be) doomed to failure because although we (and many Asian groups) are programmed to respond to the negative stimuli of rules and laws, the groups that habitually engage in the problematic behavior are likewise prone to ignoring the rules imposed on society, including responding with corrective action when cited by state actors. No one is prepared to enforce citations and send blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Latinos) to prison for refusing to register their cars or buy insurance, to park in designated spaces, to pick up their trash, to leave shopping carts at the supermarket, to refrain from subdividing houses, and the like. So the parking enforcement funtionary may have the presumably abandoned car towed at some point, but then some angry person of color will show up at the tow yard (often after enlisting a local advocate of some kind) hollering about injustice and calling for said functionary’s scalp. In fairness, who is going to risk their job to get drawn into that? So the system is left strictly enforcing rules of public order against the only people who will respond to citations – i.e., those who adhere to public order in spirit, but who have committed some trifle. In other words, whites and Asians (though Asians tend to be even more punctilious and thus less prone to commit trifles). And as blacks are further conditioned with the dogma that the enforcement of rules reflects systemic racist, and as policy-makers strive to “desegregate” every nook and cranny of this country, the enforcement of “petty rules” against whites will only escalate, as we are the only ones who acknowledge being bound by them in the first place.
Sorry, a couple of typos, including “want to ” instead of “wont to do.” I will blame auto-correct for my own failure to properly proof-read.
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