Bitarch’s Column

Among libertarians, there is a firm belief that the existence of freedom of speech in a country based on the principle of the American First Amendment to the Constitution is an unambiguous benefit that helps us fight statism. But is this actually the case, or is it a cleverly planned trap that has helped the US ruling elites avoid revolutions for almost two and a half centuries?

Let’s look at the fate of well-known anti-statists in the US who began to pose any significant threat to the state. Jim Bell, the creator and evangelist of the “assassination market” idea, was imprisoned for “tax evasion.” Larken Rose, a well-known ancap, also ended up behind bars for taxes. I think there is no need to remind everyone of the story with Julian Assange and the sexual allegations; everyone knows it already.

What conclusion can be drawn from this? If your words pose a real danger to the stationary bandit, a pretext for repression will always be found; it is not necessary for him to repress specifically for words. What do you think will happen if a full-page advertisement is printed in the New York Times with the text “The State is a stationary bandit! Panarchy is the primary path to freedom!”? I am willing to bet that the next day the FBI will find child pornography or drugs in the possession of the activist who ordered such an ad. Or it will turn out that he likes to abuse his dog and is generally not opposed to eating it. Unfortunately, most active fighters against the state in the US do not understand this.

In Russia, the situation is completely different. The authorities repress directly for politics, and they don’t even disguise it particularly well. We have convenient “extremism” articles with extremely vague content, allowing anyone to be imprisoned for anything, so there is no need to bother planting child pornography on an activist. Because of this, all active fighters against the state use VPNs, burner SIMs, encryption, and intermediaries from the very beginning of their activities, and they never show their faces. As a result, in terms of the difficulty of capture, such an activist is equal to a professional hacker, so it is easier to earn medals by searching for extremism on VKontakte. The investigator is not concerned with the fact that a real fighter against the state can indeed be dangerous to the state: that is not his level of responsibility. The more pressure the authorities apply, the more anonymization methods the fighters against the state will use, and the faster its territorial monopoly will be destroyed. The same cannot be said for countries where people still believe in freedom of speech.

Ancap-chan’s Commentary

Yesterday, Ved Neuman released an article in which he responded to a comment by Laksi Katal regarding the deadlock of the “butt-end”: the lighter the power, the more willingly people surrender to it.

As we can see, opinions are divided on what is more beneficial for supporters of the total abolition of the state—an openly repressive state that discredits itself, or its liberalization, with a potential increase in the level of trust in it. Bitarch and Laksi Katal believe that the principle of “the worse, the better” works: the worse the state, the easier it is to convince people that it is not needed at all. Following Ved, I believe that appetite comes with eating, and once one starts pushing back the state, one will not want to stop, especially if life actually improves at every stage of the reforms. This is especially relevant in countries that lack a developed culture of respect for the opposition, where the custom is to finish off the opponent. Once the state begins to bend, they will finish it off.

So it seems strange to me to consider it a bad thing if the state has to seek indirect paths for repression because the direct path is blocked. On the contrary, this is merely a reason to block those very indirect paths. Freedom of speech exists—it must be used to stop persecution for victimless crimes, such as possession of child pornography or drug use, and any flailing of the state in this regard should be used to incite hatred toward the institution itself, which, instead of trying to justify its existence with whatever useful things, continues to insist on its right to repress a wide circle of persons on its own initiative, without a request from victims.