People believe in caricatures of anarchists as violent hoodlums, vandals, and terrorists out to destroy society, but Robert Higgs had a superb response.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

I would add that anarchists did not bomb nearly 200 schoolchildren in Iran, devastate the economy and environment by blowing up oil infrastructure, level entire city blocks in Lebanon, raze most of Gaza to the ground, embroil Ukraine in years of war, or disrupt trade with arbitrary tariffs impositions either.

But we are the bogeymen used to justify ongoing political plunder?