Anarchism: Creative or Destructive?
There is a segment of the anarchist movement which fetishizes violence and rejects empathy, which gets off on righteousness. It is the politics of enjoyment, practiced largely by economically comfortable youth with black bandanas hung in their ample wardrobes. Even their most admirable aspirations must be treated with extreme suspicion.
Take, for example, the new brand of anarchists who claim that in order to be an anarchist you must adopt a particular set of progressive values: anti-racism, feminism, respect for gender identities, and so on. To be clear, I am viscerally opposed to racism, I am a feminist, and I have nothing but love for trans people - same as I have for everyone else. The danger is not in these progressive values; the danger is in the notion that you MUST adopt them - the notion that you have to be, think, speak, or behave within a particular and narrowly defined paradigm.
The danger of this was demonstrated to me last year when an anarchist I follow, gleefully posted a picture of an alleged racist who had his throat slit and was subsequently strung up, dead and bloodied, in public. This anarchist was willing not only to condone but to celebrate practically any degree of violence, provided it was perpetrated against somebody he disagreed with viscerally enough. For this anarchist, it is proper that we should gut people like pigs when they fail to live up to our ideals.
In terms of temperament, there have always been at least two anarchisms.
There is the creative anarchism of Josiah Warren and cryptography, and the destructive anarchism of Bakunin and the late-19th century French anarchists.
There was Kropotkin, who had faith in the power of human sympathy, and who understood that "the man who is called 'criminal' is simply unfortunate; that the remedy is not to flog him, to chain him up, or to kill him on the scaffold or in prison, but to help him by the most brotherly care."
And then there was Emile Henry, who, in Octave Mirbeau's words, "hurled his inexplicable bomb in the midst of peaceful anonymous people who had come to a cafe to drink a beer before going to bed." He did this, in his own words, to "show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood."
I would urge you to search your spirit and to choose among them. Should anarchism uplift people, love them in spite of their flaws, heal them by "the most brotherly care," or should it cast them down "among filth and blood," murder them for taking refuge for a time in a cafe, or slit them from ear to ear, strip them naked, and fly their corpses from flagpoles?
Is your anarchism that of creation or destruction - of love or hate?