– Franz Oppenheimer, The State, 1908 (emphasis mine)

“The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origins. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class State.”

– Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935 (emphasis mine)

“In Western Europe, as in many other civilizations, the typical model of the origin of the State was not via a voluntary “social contract” but by the conquest of one tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim to the conquerors. At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on. But at some time the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis. The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called “taxation.”"

– Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973

If we accept the thesis that the states arise and have arisen, not through the hocus-pocus of “social” “contracts”, but through conquest, and are perpetuated as systems of exploitation — especially, to use Nock’s terminology, “of one class by another” — does it not follow that we are at war?

Does it not follow that all people living under state domination and exploitation ought to rebel, right now?

Does it not follow that all of the state’s edicts, decrees, laws, proclamations and regulations which affront the sensibility of the individual, the tribe, the family, the neighborhood, ought rightly be ignored, denounced, ridiculed and overthrown?

Does it not follow that state agents are the enemy and deserving, perhaps qualifiedly in some cases, of the same response given to those who violate a peaceful person, a peaceful tribe, a peaceful family, a peaceful neighborhood?

And yet this does not happen. It does not happen despite the noble efforts of generations of philosophers, revolutionaries, scholars, activists and teachers.

The whole planet has been conquered. The whole planet has been being conquered, and held under conquest and exploitation for the benefit of the smallest, most despicable number, for a great many centuries.

They live. We sleep. And it is we who live the nightmares.

I used to consider myself a conservative, yet still a hard-core libertarian, and there is one sense in which I still do:

…it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against any social change.

– Rothbard, Left and Right (which I’m still reading, having been prompted to post this when I read the sentence)

Perhaps the reason for this old conservative streak in my political thinking connects to a perception that when practically any social change was proposed, discussed or implemented by government or the parasites I saw swarming about its loathsome carcass, I very often saw the nature of that change and of the likely effects to be horrible. There’s an element of philosophical conservatism which at least stands up saying, “what you are proposing is far more often bad than good, and so we oppose you in general for the sake of erring on the correct side far more often than not.” To sum it up, the essence of this theory is that the government should not be given any new powers. Essentially, that nothing in the political sphere ought to change.

The tragic — and, in hindsight, obvious — flaw in this position, and one which I have seen since turning to anarchism as opposed to libertarianism in its bulk, is that the libertarian philosophy demands essential, widespread, sweeping changes across societies and cultures if a world based on its ideals is ever going to exist. It’s not new government powers that frighten us, it’s all government powers. We cannot both resist any change and simultaneously be desirous of the most dramatic change imaginable.

Throwing away that resistance to change, we can look back and see that it served to support, anchor and buttress not only the gibbering horror that was the state, but the entire Lovecraftian dark-forces-from-beyond-the-rift-in-time nightmare ruling class which uses the state as its tool. Add in the disgusting bigotry dressed up as “cultural conservatism” and you suddenly have a realization akin to discovering that why you’re distrustful of your neighbor is because your neighbor is, in fact, a cannibalistic ghoul.

Dissolution to the state! Restitution from the ruling class!