Tresy Kilbourne wrote:
>
> You, Howard Olson, wrote:
>
> >Hobbes' homily is little more
> >than a transparently statist sermon with no scientific basis.

> Oh really? Then let's turn to concrete examples. Since you didn't take
> the anarchism bone I offered you, you make it easy to cite them. As far
> as anarchy is concerned, how about Rwanda, hmmm? Albania? Zaire, any day
> now? Etc., etc.

Competing states vying for political power is not anarchism. These
examples are really about as bad as you can get; I wonder why no one
cites the "no man's land" of any war as an example of "anarchy" -- same
thing.

> It's all very well and good to wave a book about as the
> answer to all of society's problems, and to drop eptithets like "statist"
> to describe any position you don't like, but sooner or later you are
> going to have to persuade people whose experience is different from yours
> if you hope for your program to make any headway. Is there any sustained
> real-world example of anarchy producing anything like a just society, as
> opposed to a nightmare of predatory violence described by that "homilist"
> Hobbes (and many others)?

Here we go. Harold Barclay, People without Government: An Anthropology
of Anarchism is my reference. Most "primitive" societies do not have
states; and most of them do not resemble Hobbes description at all.
(Another reference is John Zerzan, Future Primitive.)

Incomplete list of just a few stateless societies that are not "a
nightmare of predatory violence":

Eskimo
Bushman
Pygmy
Australian
Lugbara
Konkomba
Tiv
Plateau Tonga
Ifugao
Land Dayaks
Nuer
Lapps
Mediaeval Iceland
Berbers
Santals

Many of these societies number in the hundreds of thousands, a few in
the millions. There are also the various utopian communities, such as
Josiah Warren's, and also -- on a larger scale -- about half the Ukraine
during the Russian Revolution went anarchist, and much of Spain later
on. None of these cases seem to have had any great problem; except
outside aggressor states, of course. (Note: it was specifically noted by
a man who served as judge under both the Tsar and later under the Soviet
Union, that there seemed to be no "crime" in the Ukraine while it was
anarchist.)

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