The Anarchist: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 186-192

 What we know about Webster is that she’s a fascist and wants a totalitarian government. This is the only way that we can make sense of her contradictions. She spent the last several pages, and the last chapter; describing how the Jewish plot was to institute socialism. We ran into a bit of a difficulty because she’s not clear who is in charge. Is it the Jewish Socialists or is it the Illuminati and the Creed of Weishaupt? If they were doing the same thing this would be minor pedantry. It would be a case of me not knowing whether to use the red yarn or the blue yarn; but Webster throws a wrench in that, “Meanwhile, Illuminism had continued to develop along the line of Anarchy.”

Develop along the line of anarchy is one of those contradictory sentences. How are they developing a system of anti-system? These are questions she never considers because she knows that the type of person that is reading her book (and believing it unlike us).

It’s a fallacy of composition. It doesn’t work if you know any of the terms being used. All her readers know, and what she’s relying on; is that her readers understand that socialism if bad and that anarchism is bad. If both things are bad, and they are against both—then the other side must be for both. Webster has never defined socialism in a way that is clear and makes sense; she’s not going to do so for anarchism either. What we are going to get is a long section on one particular person Mikhail Bakunin.

Bakunin is an interesting character. I’ll say this for Webster she’s got some people in this book that are worth looking into on their own. Luckily, for me, Bakunin is one of those people I read about college, and not for class. Just because he was anti-system and I was still a conspiracy theorist. Bakunin was an incorrigible ass. He was very difficult to get along with and was bounced around from group to group. Webster likes to portray this as some kind of detriment to Bakunin’s cause—but that’s another part of the plan she’s portraying that makes no sense.

She claims that the Illuminati were using Bakunin to spread anarchism; but no one liked Bakunin as a person. The Illuminati, the all powerful kings of the world, use an utterly unlikable grating person like Bakunin to spread their message. The only way that this is a prudent course of action is if we wanted to discredit anarchism by saying, “look this is the type of person that is your typical anarchist.”

Bakunin’s thinking isn’t deep. He’s not a good writer but he’s very angry. His life would be spent during those years of bouncing around participating in revolutions and revolutionary thought. I don’t know why Webster focuses on him because ultimately, he never became the household name of someone like Marx or to lesser extent Proudhon.

Eventually the anarchist is going to meet the Marxist, and by that I mean Marx himself. The two get along initially but later, they have a falling out. Most of their falling out is ideological, with the remaining portion being that Bakunin was just unlikeable. Marx believed that some organization of the workers would be necessary in a society and that transition periods would need a rough hand in charge. Bakunin disagreed and thought that the working classes would sort it out and that any transition authority would be loathe to give up that authority. I’m not a political scientist so I can’t comment too much on who is right; but I can see the value in the dispute here. Marx is probably more correct that society needs organization while Bakunin is probably right to warn against the Hobbesian sovereign.

Webster provides us with a long quote from Bakunin about meeting Marx and she caps it claiming that Bakunin was merely a tool for Marx and that the “shrewd German Jew,” recognized the value of a Bakunin as a dynamic force. There’s no reason for Webster to mention Marx as a “Jew” aside to remind us of who she really is.

The story continues with Bakunin being expelled from France, partaking in revolutions in Russian, Prague, Dresden, being arrested and imprisoned a bunch. He’s sent to Russia where he contracted scurvy and all his teeth fell out.” Eat your broccoli kids, you don’t want scurvy.

Here’s where the story gets disgustingly crazy, “On the accession of Alexander II, a fresh demand was made for a reprieve [for Bakunin’s release from a Russian prison], but the new emperor, on being shown Bakunin’s ‘confession’ to his predecessor, remarked, ‘I see not the least repentance in this letter,’ and sent him to Siberia. Here Bakunin spent four quite pleasant years.”

Four pleasant years in a Siberian prison? Yeah, that doesn’t seem possible. Star Trek VI modeled the Klingon Prison camp of Rura Penthe after Russian Siberian Gulags. Webster gives us a letter from Bakunin that says he is perfectly happy there. Maybe it’s different under the Tsar, but confinement to Siberia is still confinement to Siberia, and Bakunin does meet a woman there that he marries.

The rest of the biography is nothing more than a wiki-bio which in fact, you should just read that as it will be more accurate and informative. Skipping the rest of Bakunin’s life we get a little philosophical and Webster addresses the contradiction, “I have dwelt at some length on the character and career of Bakunin because more than any one he seems to me to embody the spirit of Anarchy—a spirit widely different, indeed diametrically opposed to that of State Socialism.”

Great idea. Let’s hash this out. Her position is that the State Socialist is going to attempt to force every person into the same mold and remove any vestige of liberty in subservience of the state. The anarchist, in contrast wants unbounded freedom: “the idler should be free to idle and live on other man’s labour, the drunkard to drink himself into a condition of maudlin imbecility, the murderer to cut throats until he wearies of the pastime, the thief to continue helping himself to other people’s goods until he has accumulated enough to satisfy him.”

She thinks this is what the appeal of anarchism is to the common person. This is the state of nature by Hobbes, or the Anarchism that Aristotle warned about. This is not what people like Bakunin were arguing for. They were arguing against the monarchies and control of the state by elitists operating in a caste system that was immovable. The idler who is free to live off other people’s labor is the capitalist factory owner—that’s where the venn diagram of socialist and anarchist cross circles. Webster is one of those people that think without the threat of Hell, a person cannot be moral.

Bakunin was a violent person who seemed to delight in revolutionary activities—this is what put him off of so many people. Once successful there is no place for someone like this in the world once the revolution is successful.

We end our post today with her strangest comparison. She says that Bakunin is typical of Eastern Europeans who have a personality trait where violence is good for its own sake. She’s got racism all over the place; it’s not just Jews and Germans she hates. She brings up the story of Baron Ungern von Sternberg who used a lighthouse to crash boats and then hunted the survivors for sport. I can’t find proof, but Sternberg has to be the inspiration for General Zaroff in “The Most Dangerous Game”…if this story is true.

After she tells the story of Sternberg, she says that his is exactly like Bakunin if Bakunin was “not masquerading as a champion of the people.”

For people like Webster and other right wing conspiracy theorists there exists an impossibility that people could support causes and ideologies that they oppose. This is the “paid protestor” gambit. I’m opposed to my current president and his actions because they are both terrible things not because someone is paying me to do so (though I will also take that check). As much as Bakunin was a grating person there is not a single line, she has provided which makes any claim that he was lying or that he actually didn’t believe in these causes. She tosses that last claim in lest anyone become too interested in this guy and actually look him up.