THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 21, 1995 TAG: 9509210004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
I praise Judy Grace McReynolds for ``Resist the haters'' (letter, Sept. 16). I am in near-total agreement with everything she had to say, except one point. Ms. McReynolds wrote, ``People who resort to illegal and immoral tactics to promote their philosophies are promoting anarchy.''
People who resort to such destructive tactics as bombing and murder are promoting little except further government regulation of individuals and further degradation of what liberty we have left.
Moreover, even when such groups as the revolutionists who allegedly bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City or such individuals as the Unabomber claim the title ``anarchist,'' they are usually nothing of the kind. These people are nihilists, bent on destruction.
Anarchists, on the other hand, do not desire or promote destruction or violence. The third definition of ``anarchy'' in Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1992 edition, supports my view, to wit: ``a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.''
Prior to the American Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, ``Society is in every state a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.''
Anarchists agree with Paine that government is evil; we disagree with the assertion that it is necessary, at least in the form that we now know it. In his treatise, ``On Liberty,'' John Stuart Mills wrote, ``The `people' who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the ``self-government'' spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.''
If any form of government is necessary, it is only the true self-government of which Mills wrote in the preceding quote - that is to say, ``the government of each by himself.''
Anarchists reject the initiation of force, while reserving the right to exercise force in defense of self, property, family or neighbor. We embrace a society in which order and peace prevail, but reject the notion that there is any law so good, so wise and so necessary as to be universally applicable to every individual in every circumstance.
CURT PRASKY
Portsmouth, Sept. 16, 1995 by CNB