The other day I had an online interaction in one of the groups I follow: Someone trollishly interjected the opinion “Anarchists should be behind bars. How is that even debatable?” into a completely unrelated discussion of last Saturday’s incident at the Yellow Vests demonstration in Hamilton. The incident in question was a Yellow-Vest “protester” harassing, attacking and assaulting an LGBTQ+ family; including threats of abducting the family’s kids and, it has come to light, spitting on a three-year-old child. (No arrests have been made, by the way, and City Hall’s response was to advise the family not to attend counter-protests at City Hall anymore.)
But it’s the anarchists who should be unilaterally locked up, right.
So I — politely enough — challenged the guy advocating for blanket arrest of an entire ideology, and as the discussion progressed he got more and more trollish, even claiming that he “used to be an anarchist” but that “anarchists that act out their beliefs should be punished” and so forth. It was your basic “I’m a troll and it’s fun to make extreme statements to see how people react” nonsense that I try not to encourage. My primary takeaway from the interaction wasn’t that this guy could be convinced — feeding trolls for the sake of feeding trolls isn’t my bag — it was that a lot of people in the group lacked an understanding of what Anarchism, as a political philosophy, is and isn’t.
Continue reading “Core Concepts 6 – Anarchism”