Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, March 31, 2021 (I ran out of time)

• Fear of Fairy Tales by John Steppling from his weblog. (Note: Steppling is currently living with his family in Norway. He has a strong background as an American playwright, director of plays, etc., and he apparently is highly educated. I find his posts rather challenging because I don't know how his frequent quotes and images relate to the substance of his articles. He is obviously very disturbed particularly with the current pandemic particularly its impact on children.)
  

💥Thus, I especially recommend Steppling's rather lengthy (1:23:54) conversation (via some technology) with Cory Morningstar, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Johan Eddebo found  at Aesthetic Resistance (Post #35) (also in the link at the end of the above article). I encourage you to listen to this profound conversation among these highly educated people regarding the significance of the pandemic and its impact on people.) This is a best post.

• Vandana Shiva on the Taking Down of Bill Gates' Empires features Dr. Joseph Mercola in conversation (57:47) with Dr. Vandana Shiva from Marcola's weblog. (Note: This is the first video on the page.)

• What The 2007 Financial Crisis Taught Us About Corrupt Bankers by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room on Medium.com.
  

• Washington’s Hegemonic Ambitions Defy Multipolar Reality, Risking Catastrophic Conflict by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Note: Cunningham's introduction precedes an interview with Glenn Diesen who is a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and author of several books.)
  

• The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My commentary follows: 

Johnstone writes in the article "Someone who says it’s human nature to be selfish, competitive, predatory, exploitative, tyrannical, vicious, brutish and violent isn’t telling you about human nature, they’re telling you about their own nature." Maybe so, but she apparently doesn't yet realize that the capitalist system is based on this view of human nature. Capitalists, and those unwitting people that support them, likely wouldn't dare admit to the negative characteristics but would swear that people are basically selfish. Thus, they would go on to support the capitalist system either completely oblivious to the more negative consequent behaviors listed above and would offer absurd rationalizations for them.

We are fed propaganda to cover-up the heinous crimes the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire commits directly or indirectly. Read a current post entitled The True Story of the Rwandan Genocide from Current Affairs for an example of a major crime (a massacre of at least 500,000 people). This is about who really was responsible for what has been "universally acknowledged as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century".

• Faced with ICC Investigation, Apartheid Israel Asserts Moral Superiority Over The Victims of Its Terror by Miko Peled from Mint Press News.
  

• Opposing All Governments Equally Is Supporting The Most Powerful Government by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My reaction: This is only one fundamental reason why I think shallow-thinking anarchists are nuts.

• Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? by Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb from Unlimited Hangout.
  

• Open-Source Versus Patent Monopoly Financing of Drug Development by Dean Baker from CounterPunch. My reaction: The trouble with Baker is that he takes an eighth-grade-civics- class view of how the government of the ruling class works. Thus, he doesn't see that capitalists run the puppet show that the government performs. Patents are one major way they (the capitalist ruling class) have of stealing profits from ordinary workers. Look at Bill Gates and how he accumulated his vast wealth. 

• Twisting the Law by Steve Martinot from CounterPunch. (Note: The following note was published within the article following the article: "[This article contains excerpts from a work in progress called “Brutality: a Study of Police Culture in the US,” which is also looking for a publisher.]". You might also be interested in this post from CGTM, a major Chinese news corporation, via Reuters.
  

• If the Minimum Wage Had Increased as Much as Wall Street Bonuses Since 1985, It Would Be Worth $44 Today by Sarah Anderson from CounterPunch.

• Ecuador’s poisoned loans from the World Bank and the IMF by Eric Toussaint from CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) [Part 1 of the Series].
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, January 22, 2021

• Experts Warn Civil Rights Fallout from COVID Could be Far Worse Than the Pandemic Itself by Raul Diego from Mint Press News.

• Biden's back | George Galloway’s take on what’s next for America from the channel of RT on YouTube.

• Why Donald Trump Had to Go by Peter Koenig from "The Saker" weblog.
  

• Mob mentality: Capitol riot exploited to expand the national security state that failed to stop it featuring Max Blumenthal, who lives near the downtown in Washington DC, giving his on-the-spot views of recent events in a 57 minute interview conducted by Aaron Maté from The Grayzone. My reaction: Blumenthal's on-the-scene report lends support that the January 6th supposed attack of Congress was a pre-planned psychological operation.

• Fake Lower Class Coup, Real Upper Class Bigotry, Near Social Collapse by Frank Scott from Dissident Voice. 
  

• New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato featuring both James commenting initially regarding planned proposals by billionaire Bill Gates and later other crimes that are being committed by our ruling class posted on The Corbett Report. True to his anarchist ideology, Corbett declares that people like Bill Gates is "not the font (def. #2)" (around 4:20m) of these crimes, "the government is the problem" (12:35m). He does not yet identify the system and its rewards in the form of wealth and power that seems to always end up in the hands of a tiny class of billionaire capitalists. He continues to mix-up the problem, the capitalist system, with the government which is only a facade constructed by the ancestors of the ruling class and sponsored by this tiny class of billionaires--a ruling class whose power shapes all of our institutions. I can't wait for his "solutions" (sarcasm).

• The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky from Global Research. This is an E-book summarizing all of his articles regarding the "pandemic". My commentary follows:

The Covid-19 pandemic which is real but exaggerated to a great extent by ruling class's control of the media, using bribes to hospitals to identify an upper-respiratory illness as Covid-19, pressure on doctors to diagnose anything that looks like coronavirus to do the same, tests like PCR that the creator of the test, Kary Mullis, severely criticizes as inappropriate, censorship of all voices in opposition no matter how qualified they are, etc.

I can't entirely figure out where Chossudovsky's views are coming from. He has in prior years severely criticized those who worried about the deterioration of our environment and the climate crisis. He hints of that position in this article by writing:

The same philanthropic foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Soros, et al) which are the unspoken architects of the “Great Reset” and “Global Governance” are also involved in (generously) financing Climate Change activism, the Extinction Rebellion, the World Social Forum, Black Lives Matters, LGBT, et al.

He mixes in the climate crisis with all the nefarious projects that are sponsored by the capitalist ruling class. The latter, which is unsolvable under their system, has been worrying them since The Club of Rome issued its 1972 report "The Limits to Growth" which correctly recognizes that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. However, the emphasis was on population growth which ironically had been previously celebrated by capitalist sources because the increase of population always meant more customers for their products. The international capitalist ruling classes have been worried about this problem ever since. The Great Reset is often cited by critics as an example of a population reduction project, that is, a reduction of "useless eaters" (those who do not contribute to the profits of major corporations) as a major objective of its project under the cover of protecting people's health.

Perhaps he, too, is an anarchist.

• Zoom Privilege: How Lockdowns Made the Rich Richer by Jordan Schachtel from American Institute for Economic Research.

• Washington Post “Expert” Linked to Defense Companies Hypes North Korea Missile Threat by Alan Macleod from Mint Press News.

Presented as a neutral authority, the Washington Post did not inform its readers that the IISS is largely funded and overseen by the weapons industry, with five of its six most generous contributors — Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon — major defense manufacturers, each donating six-figure sums. The IISS’ council includes a former NATO Secretary General and previously included the CEO of Lockheed Martin.

• Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack by Whitney Webb from The Last American Vagabond. (Note: Because this article deals with a lot technical information regarding computers, it would be helpful for one to have some knowledge of computer science.)

• Navalny Should Be Released by Craig Murray, a whistleblower from Scotland, an article from his weblog that gives us a true scoop (with his recommendations) about the latest Empire propaganda project regarding a Russian "dissident".
  

The United States of Fascism Hysteria [updated]

Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc.

This time Hopkins uses his well-honed satirical weapons on what he identifies as liberal anti-fascists. However, although some liberals are involved, I think the real target are unthinking anti-fascist anarchists. These people have a way of predictably reacting to the latest propaganda by the fascist Deep State who have for a long time practiced and perfected their skills at manipulating people. Because of the many years of propaganda and psychological warfare directed at the American people (as described by Christopher Simpson in his excellent book Science of Coercion), there is no shortage of these dumbed-down, uncritical thinking people.

Concentration camps and dead people are nothing to joke about. It’s OK, however, to cynically use them to whip people up into a paroxysm of manufactured mass fascism hysteria. Not that the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media would ever do that. No, they would never repeatedly attempt to evoke our hatred of the actual Nazis (and their actual concentration camps … which people were dragged out of their homes, loaded onto trains, and shipped away to, and which you could not voluntarily depart) in order to short circuit our critical thinking, or otherwise emotionally manipulate us into supporting their War on Populism.

Many anarchists among the working class, who simply do not have the time to develop critical thinking skills, do not realize that contemporary capitalism has morphed into a new version of neoliberal fascism because they have always been taught to believe that fascism were stereotypes depicted by goosestepping fascist thugs who beat up decent people and send them on trains to their death. This new updated fascism uses more sophisticated psychological methods to deceive and manipulate people in order to continue their self-serving exploitation of people and nature.  

NATO’s Anarchist Brigades

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from Voltaire Network. 

Presented in the West as the realization of a friendly utopia, the brand new « Rojava » is in reality a colonial state, designed and cemented in blood by Washington. This time, the plan is to expel the populations of the North of Syria and replace them with people who were not born there. In order to implement this ethnic cleansing, the Pentagon and the CIA have mobilised combatants from the circles of the European extreme-left. Thierry Meyssan reveals this insane project which has been ongoing for the last eighteen months.

In this article Meyssan, a French intellectual and political analyst, has presented much new information about the strange appearance of the US backed Kurdish rebels fighting in northern Syria. Although he uses undocumented information to support many of his arguments, the logic of his arguments fit very well with other independent sources that have carefully examined this phenomenon. 

I, too, for the last four or five years have been following these Syrian Kurds after rather romantic coverage of them appeared on the web (see this, this, and this), and was initially much impressed by these latter reports because Syrian Kurdish spokespeople always asserted that these Kurds want to continue to be a part of Syria but under a looser federation arrangement. Now I'm not so sure particularly after I learned that they were backed by the US and the US has established numerous military bases in the territory under Kurdish control (see this, this, and this).  

If what Meyssan reports is true (and I think it is), then this is another illustration of the sophistication of US's secret services to deceptively use people to serve their many nefarious agendas, and in particular, their Ziocon agenda to balkanize Syria.

Fueling Fascism: The Secret History of How Texaco Supplied Oil to Fascists in Spain

Click here if you wish to access the transcript of the 13:20m interview with author, journalist, and lecturer Adam Hochschild from Democracy Now!.

It is very important to realize that Texaco's history of supporting fascist powers in the Spanish Civil War, which extended into WWII, is only one illustration of a number of such corporations that supported fascism. (IT&T, General Motors, Ford are among many others that I immediately recall.) It is very important to obtain a meaningful understanding of this devastating war to see it as a dress rehearsal for WWII. This history has been subject to gross distortions by capitalist historians in an effort to portray it as a kind of folklore for their subjects--ordinary workers and their families--as a contest between us "good guys", the "democratic" powers, against the fascist "bad guys".

The history is much too complicated to review for this blog. Thus I recommend that you read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and The Spanish Civil War by Paul Preston among others. The important factors in the war were the following: the Soviet revolution of 1917, the anarcho-communists that dominated the defense of the Spanish Republic, and the natural fascist proclivities (see this, this, and this) of the capitalist ruling classes of Western countries.

Thoughts on Rojava: an interview with Janet Biehl

Click here to access this interview (posted on Reflections on a Revolution) conducted by Zanyar Omrani, who is an Iranian Kurd and an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker, with American Janet Biehl who was Murray Bookchin’s companion and collaborator for his last 19 years.

The interviewer, Omrani, asked various questions that were designed to get Biehl's opinion as to how much conformity there was in the actual decision-making operations as practiced by the people in Rojava with the ideology of Bookchin's bottom-up political ideology.

Specifically to Bookchin, the institutions of democratic self-government that they described corresponded to much of what he had envisioned (under the name libertarian municipalism). At the base of democratic confederalism is the citizens’ assembly (in Bookchin) or commune (in Rojava). The commune sends delegates to the confederal council at the neighborhood level, and the neighborhood council sends delegates to the district, and the district to the canton. In this multi-tiered structure, as Bookchin described it, power is to flow from the bottom up.

Has the vision become real?

Although Biehl's observations were interesting, I finished reading the interview without any conclusive answers. And I think one should not expect any conclusive answers at this point in time.

One part of the interview compared the historical experience of the Russians during their revolution and their subsequent war with the West which supported factions that were inclined to capitalism (the White armies). 

People in Rojava seemed very aware of the danger that a bottom-up system can turn into a top-down system. That’s what happened, after all, in Russia. In 1917, the multi-tiered system of soviets, or councils, all over Russia, was originally supposed to carry power from the base to the summit. But once the Bolsheviks came to power, they were able to use those very institutions as conduits for top-down power, indeed for totalitarian domination. 

Essentially this question dealt with the question whether such a bottom-up political apparatus could survive particularly in a wartime situation. The specific Russian experience and the latter general question has always intrigued me. My studies of various writings particularly by Trotsky, who commanded the Red Army, and Isaac Deutscher, who studied and wrote about the revolution extensively, caused me to reach a tentative conclusion about what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. 

Trotsky and others both in the Bolshevik party and outside did not question the authoritarian structure of a military command once the war began in earnest. Thus they readily adopted it. After the Bolsheviks won the war, they relied on this structure to defend the revolution from all the problems they faced after victory: widespread famine, poor crops, epidemics, destroyed infrastructure, etc. Then it was only a matter of time when the top-down command structure completely replaced any independent power of the Soviets. People such as Stalin, who were particularly susceptible to the addictive power of control and domination (like people predisposed to alcoholism are particularly susceptible to alcohol), took over the command structures of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

This always led me to the following questions. Could the Russian Revolution have succeeded if they had adopted a bottom-up command structure to prosecute the war against the White and Western capitalist armies? Given that wartime conditions often see people supporting a tight and efficient command structure, how can a people suddenly dismantle a military command structure and foster a bottom-up political structure after the war is won?

Of course the Communist party leaders always explained the success of the revolution depended upon the revolution immediately spreading to other advanced capitalist countries, especially to Germany, and when this did not happen, deterioration of communist practice was inevitable. 

Mr. Anarchist, we need to have a chat about colonialism

Click here to access article by Petar Stanchev by Reflections on a Revolution.

Although I don't regard such anarchists as a significant problem due their relatively small numbers, but I think that this discussion is important because it distinguishes two ways for seeking revolutionary truth. Rather than attacking such sectarian anarchists and exhibiting a colonial attitude as Stanchev does, I think it more useful to see their criticism of the Rojava and the Zapatista revolutionary struggles as patriarchal or hierarchical modes of thought: a vanguard kind of thinking in which revolutionary thought is essentially the province of designated experts. This type of thinking dominated revolutionary movements of the 20th century.  

I thoroughly agree with Stavchev when he writes about the new path to revolutionary truth:

Without any doubt, these structures of democratic self-governance are under development, with many issues still to be addressed and plenty to learn. However, they do reaffirm the basic principle that true liberation can only be lived and applied here and now through the self-organization of the people. 

Bookchin: living legacy of an American revolutionary

Click here to access article which provides a transcript of an interview conducted by Federico Venturini and posted on Reflections on a Revolution.

Editor’s note: Below you will find an interview with Debbie Bookchin, daughter of the late Murray Bookchin, who passed away in 2006. Bookchin spent his life in revolutionary leftist circles, joining a communist youth organization at the age of nine and becoming a Trotskyist in his late thirties, before switching to anarchist thought and finally ending up identifying himself as a ‘communalist’ after developing the ideas of ‘libertarian municipalism’.

Bookchin was (and remains) as influential as he was controversial. His radical critiques of deep ecology and ‘lifestyle anarchism’ stirred up a number of heated debates that continue to this day. Now that his revolutionary ideas have been picked up by the Kurdish liberation movement, who are using Bookchin’s works to build a democratic, gender-equal and ecologically sustainable society in the heart of the Middle East, we are seeing a renewed interest in the life and thoughts of this great political thinker.  

The Empire is Crumbling, That is Why it Needs War: 2015 Will See Decisive Battles

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from CounterPunch.

Although Vltchek makes many important points, particularly about the apparent desperation of the directors of the Empire to crush all opposition, he, like many others, does not zero in on the basic problem--inequality. I'm referring here to an organization of society in which inequality is built into it, and which inevitably produces a class-structured society. 

The current form of society was established by capitalists starting mostly in the 18th century. They became increasingly powerful and wrested control from aristocracies and monarchies whose power was based on control over land. Under capitalism today's societies are basically divided into two classes: those whose primary income comes from the "ownership" of capital and those whose primary income comes from their labor. The former class of people have over time become very rich and powerful and nowadays they constitute a tiny section of our population in contrast to the vast majority who work for a living--if they are lucky--by selling their labor in a labor market. 

Vltchek and many others like Pepe Escobar and William Engdahl correctly see the true nature of what has evolved into a marauding US-led Empire which tolerates no opposition to its rule. However, they do not see the underlying system which has produced such a destructive empire. Apparently they have not learned from history the underlying dynamics of capitalist class rule that produced the imperialist British Empire, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, or the Japanese Empire. 

These people merely see the surface realities of a marauding US Empire and look to Russia, China, and the rest of the BRIC countries to counter the US-led Empire and thereby create a peaceful "multipolar" capitalist world. They have not learned the lessons of the capitalist empires of the 20th century when capitalist gangs vied for dominance much like street gangs or mafia organizations do in today's world. Because they don't see the same imperialist traits in the leadership of China or Russia, they think that they will remain this way in the future. That is very naive thinking. 

No, the only way humanity will achieve peace is through organization of societies based on structured equality. That is the challenge we ordinary people must strive for. There is now so much at stake. There are threats to the very existence of humanity: never-ending wars, catastrophic nuclear wars and climate destabilization.

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War

Click here to access this 53 minute interview with Adam Hochschild from KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California, 

This interview is for younger Americans who have no idea what happened in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This ignorance is no accident because our masters in the One Percent do not want people to know about the dangerous (to them) ideas and practices that emerged during this period in Spain, and because of their embarrassment about the history of all the major capitalist countries of that time in relation to this war: US, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

I listened to most of this recording and found that Hochschild's understanding of this war corresponds with my own. There were only a few indications of a liberal bias in the form of references to the "democratic" countries. Both Hochschild and the interviewer, C.S. Soong, made such references to the capitalist fake version of democracy found in US, Britain, and France. Like all liberals, both regard this version of democracy as in a different category from fascism when in reality the latter is simply capitalist class rule without the soft gloves of their fake democratic forms.

The great significance of this event was clearly the revolutionary ideas and practices that the anarchists and other leftists put in practice in this brief period in Spain. They were fundamentally at odds with the entire history of class rule that has plagued societies since the beginning of civilization. Obviously, the directors of capitalist countries, whether fascist or pseudo-democratic, could not let this exist. Meanwhile Russian policies toward Spain, under Stalin's leadership and narrow nationalist perspective, was only looking out for Russian security in the face of the growing fascist threat.

After listening to this, I recommend that you continue your studies of this event by reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

”Engines of Domination”, An Argument For Anarchism, Out This October 17

Click here to access article from Revolution News!

In this preview of a film based on Mark Corske’s book Engines of Domination, we are offered an anarchist's perspective on what is wrong in today's world. Although I take issue with some of the statements in the article which make inconsistent use of concepts and arguments, I believe that this anarchist view has much to offer.

”Engines of Domination" offers a theory of political power as a tool for making tools of human beings — an engine that converts human energy into authority and privilege for the rulers. Invented in the Bronze Age, brilliantly refined for six thousand years, today the engine has caused a human emergency that threatens to destroy our world. This documentary makes a powerful argument that there is only one way to save the future. Armed central authority must be abolished, giving way to a world of peaceful voluntary communities — in other words, an argument for anarchism.

The economic arrangement imposed on the masses of workers is a miserable failure for the simple reason that it destroys people.

Both capitalism and the state, in any form, are incompatible with the individual freedom of the working class and peasantry....

Libertarian communism: an introduction - DRAFT

Click here to access article from Libcom.

A short introduction to what we at libcom.org refer to as communism or libertarian communism, what it is and why we think it is a good idea.

Lots of good ideas about a different kind of organization of society that we simply must start thinking and bringing about if we are to survive. 

The Ukrainian Revolution & the Future of Social Movements

Click here to access article by CrimethInc. Workers' Collective from their website. (Appears to be based in Salem, Oregon.)

I and many others think that a thorough study of what happened in Ukraine is of utmost importance if we, ordinary people, have any chance of surviving in a decent world. Although this collective does not clearly identify themselves as anarchists in their "about" page, from their writings, and this one in particular, they clearly express an anarchist perspective. 

I've never been able to identify my own political orientation even though I have agreed with some elements in various left ideologies. This has been especially true of anarchism about which I've always experienced a lot of ambivalence. It looks to me like that this piece may be helpful in clearing up most of my confusion in addition to offering a very thoughtful examination of recent Ukrainian events. Therefore, while my following comments may seem like a digression from the article's examination, I think it adds clarity to the latter.

In this article as in so many anarchist writings, one sees an emphasis placed on the "state" and governments which rule states. Anarchists are fundamentally anti-authoritarians and, of course, states and their governments are inherently authoritarian. Socioeconomic class concepts are sometimes inserted in their discussions, but their importance is lost in the background because the state is so dramatically thrust into the foreground. Thus the state becomes an independent actor in the drama of human affairs, according to anarchists, and I think that this perspective is clearly reflected in this article.

A variety of capitalists and state actors must be evaluating these protest movements as a way to pursue politics by other means. As more resources flow into the hands of reactionary participants in social struggles, we will likely see more developments like those in Ukraine and Venezuela.

Likewise, powerful governments will not stand by and let common people get a taste for overthrowing them. They will be pressed to intervene, as Russia has in Ukraine, in hopes that war can trump insurrection. War is a way of shutting down possibilities—of changing the subject. It is a risky business, however—it can help governments to consolidate their power, but history shows that it can also destabilize them.

With war looming, even the limits of violent nationalism become obvious. Mere protest militancy is worthless in the face of the Russian military; only contagious disobedience could serve to even the odds when a social movement does battle with a superpower. This is the one thing anarchist opposition to the state has going for it today: in a globalized world, all insurrections must ultimately become international or perish.

I argue that states (and their governments) are creations of the capitalist class to serve the competing interests of capitalist players and to establish the legitimacy of their class rule in the eyes of their working class subjects. Capitalist propaganda has always portrayed the state as serving all of society. This is explicitly expressed in national documents where one encounters such words as "of the people, by the people, and for the people", "inalienable rights" of people, and a "Bill of Rights" as in the US constitution. They have continually affirmed in their propaganda and indoctrination that they have established "democratic" governments and the "rule of law" that supports all people. (Of course, the reality is completely different: rights and access to their legal system, as well as everything else, all depends on how much money you have.) 

Victorious capitalist classes merely substituted state concepts in place of kingdoms after taking power from monarchs and aristocracies. They did this originally to enlist the support of working people to overthrow the rule of the old feudal authorities. When their victories were accomplished, they were stuck with all the promises contained in their propaganda and thus had to create new authoritarian structures which pretend to be "democratic". Hence, their construction of the concept of "state".

On Anarchism: An Interview with Andrew Gavin Marshall

Click here to access the interview as reported by Devon Douglas-Bowers posted on The Hampton Institute website.

I haven't had a chance to read this article in its entirely until today, and I try very hard not to post articles or videos which I haven't read or listened to myself. In short, I highly recommend it as an excellent overview of the history of anarchism in all its complexity. 

It's clear why anarchists are always targeted for abuse and even violence: it's because they eschew all hierarchical associations. This, of course, offends so many: from those in ruling classes and to those in left oriented anti-capitalist organizations that function in some sort of hierarchy whether overt or disguised.

Marshall also deals with probably the most common articulated objection to anarchism propagated by those who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in hierarchical thinking:

The most common argument against anarchism, from those who typically do not understand what anarchy is, is that without some form of "authority," the world would be chaos, people would be killing each other, and we would have disorder and destruction.

The simplest answer to this, is to ask the person what we have in the world today: we live in a world of extreme authority, of more globalized authority in every sector of human action and interaction than ever before in human history, yet so much of the world is in chaos, disorder, destruction, war, starvation, decimation, division, segregation, exploitation, and domination. It is not a lack of order and authority that has brought this to be, but rather the exercise of authority in the name of order. People see anarchy as a paradox without acknowledging the paradox of the ideology versus reality of the world we currently live in.