Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 12th February 1910 — No.32
Passing Thoughts
Anarchism
Are we not entitled, by the way, in the interests of the English language, to protest against the misapplication of the word Anarchists to the Indian Terrorists and Anarchism to their policy?
Their methods are wild and lawless, their effort is to create anarchy; but Anarchism and Anarchist are terms which imply something very different, a thing as yet unknown either in practice or in theory to India.
The Irish Fenians did the same things as the Indian Terrorists are now practising, but nobody ever called them Anarchists; to misapply this term is to bring anarchy into the modern use of language.
It is doubtful whether any Indian who has not been to Europe, really knows what Anarchism is.
Philosophically, it is the negation of the necessity of government; in practice, it is often the use of assassination to destroy all government irrespective of its nationality or nature.
Democracy is as abhorrent to the Anarchist as Czarism, a national government as intolerable as the government of the foreigner.
All government is to him an interference with the liberty of the individual, and he sets out to assassinate Czar or democratic President, constitutional king or imperial Caesar with a terrible impartiality, an insane logicality.
For if we ask him how liberty of any kind except the liberty of the strong to prey on the weak can exist in the absence of government, he will probably answer that by right education, right ideas and right feelings will be established and the spirit of brotherhood will prevent the abuse of liberty, and if anyone infringes this unwritten law, he must be destroyed as if he were a noxious wild beast.
And by a parallel logic he seeks to destroy all the living symbols of a state of society which stands in the way of the coming of his millennium.