Joe Sobran on Force

I stumbled across an intriguing quote while searching for an image of Joe Sobran to attach to my latest podcast, The Nature of Jewish Power – Part 3. The quote comes from the conclusion of Sobran's essay, Anarchy without Fear, dated 17 Oct 2002:

The measure of the state’s success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

The body of the essay concerns the interplay of rule, legitimacy, morality and force:

The first great American anarchist was Lysander Spooner, who died more than a century ago. His argument was simple. There is a natural and unchangeable moral law, which forbids slavery. No man has the right to force others to do his will. The state not only claims such a right, but claims a monopoly of force — the right to force its subjects to accept its laws as morally binding, no matter how arbitrary and unjust those laws may be.

. . .

There is no getting away from it: at bottom, the state is nothing but organized force. Its only abiding rule is this: “Obey, or we will hurt you.”

What is force? Simone Weil defined force as that which turns a person into a thing — a corpse or a slave — with no will of its own. Of course even a slave exercises his own will to some degree, but only by sufferance of his master. The state itself has to allow its slaves some latitude, but its permissions aren’t genuine rights.

. . .

Most men today can hardly imagine living without the parasitic force-systems we call states. However bad the state may be, they assume that anarchy would be somehow even worse, even after a century of world war, mass murder, and general waste and destruction claiming hundreds of millions of lives and creating poverty where there might have been plenty.

By now, if men learned from experience, they would talk about the state in the same tones in which Jews talk about Nazis.

"Obey, or we will hurt you" echoes the title jew Joey Kurtzman gave to Derbyshire's odious acquiescence to jewish power, Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You.

When it comes to jewish power, men have learned from experience. Thus most talk about Nazis in the same tones as jews because they don't wish to be hurt or crushed.

To paraphrase Sobran, the measure of the jews’ success is that the word Nazi frightens people, while the word jew does not.