People v. State

Portland police Lt. Robert King said.

The official demonization of “anarchists” by State propagandizers continues on apace, in this instance by an agent of an “agency”-without-principals which intends to violently evict Occupy protesters from Portland parks this weekend. Meanwhile, a real-life “anarch” (leader of leaderlessness), Wendy McElroy, explores, at the Daily Anarchist, what an anarchist system of justice might look like, and in reply to a comment on her post writes:

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. . . appears as the vital Idea of which the “consent of the governed” is a pale and passive imitation, and as what distinguishes and divides a People from a State. A few posts ago I quoted Nietzsche:

Where there are still peoples, the state is not understood, and is hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.

I hold up as support for Nietzsche’s observation the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy and the attitude of the Iroquois to the authoritarian governments brought over by the British colonists, and recommend Charles Mann’s 2005 op-ed in the New York Times on this subject. In his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Mann wrote:

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Thus wrote Justice Robert Jackson almost 70 years ago, as quoted in a NYT op-ed by Kent Greenfield which points out that “Constitution Day is probably unconstitutional.”

What is it that I find admirable and worthy of emulation in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy? Pretty much the same things I find admirable and worthy of emulation in Aldous Huxley’s vision of a just society:

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Via Wikipedia, I’ve been reading Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, by Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen. The thesis of the book is that the Founders’ contact with Native Americans and their forms of government inspired Revolutionary fervor and ultimately influenced the U.S. Constitution. Personally, I believe, with Albert Jay Nock, that, rhetoric aside, subsequent history (including the genocide of Native Americans) demonstrates that the prospects for Old World-style exploitation in the New World, and the wresting of the mechanisms for such exploitation from British hands into American hands, was a far greater motivator for the Founders and the U.S. Constitution than the libertarian example of their indigenous neighbors. Nevertheless, the Native American exemplar remains as a reminder of what America could have been, and as an indictment of what America has become.