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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I am by no means a Nietzsche scholar or fan boy, but in light of what he had to say about the State I think it’s safe to say that those inclined to blame him for the Nazis are grossly mistaken. In any event, I want to distance myself from any vulgar and probably mistaken interpretation of his denigration of the “superfluous” and the “all-too-many” that I approvingly quoted along with his damnation of the State.

Albert Jay Nock notes what I think is the relevant distinction:

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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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reading this:

Smith, who had been released from custody in 2006 pending the government’s appeal of her case, is expected to return to prison before Christmas, her attorney said.

. . .

Lawrence Daniels, a supervising deputy attorney general who argued the case for restoring Smith’s conviction, said he couldn’t answer questions about the case until he had fully reviewed the 18-page decision.

Smith’s attorney, Michael J. Brennan, said he would file a clemency petition with the state government but that the chances of it being granted were “extremely slim.”

“The attorney general’s office has fought vigorously to reincarcerate her for years. They don’t have the authority to say, ‘Just kidding, she doesn’t have to go back to jail,’ ” Brennan said.

. . .

made me think of this:

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