Brotherhood of Democracy and Tyranny
by Albert Jay Nock

The following is an extract of essays by Albert Jay Nock, an influential American libertarian author of middle 20th century.

Furthermore, the idea that the procedure of the "democratic" State is any less criminal than that of the State under any other fancy name, is rubbish. The country is now being surfeited with journalistic garbage about our great sister democracy, England, its fine democratic government, its vast beneficent gift for ruling subject peoples, and so on; but does anyone ever look up the criminal record of the British State? The bombardment of Copenhagen; the Boer War; the Sepoy Rebellion; the starvation of Germans by the post-Armistice blockade; the massacre of natives in India, Afghanistan, Jamaica; the employment of Hessians to kill off American colonists. 

What is the difference, moral or actual, between Kitchener's democratic concentration camps[ii] and the totalitarian concentration camps maintained by Herr Hitler? The totalitarian general Badoglio[iii] is a pretty hard-boiled brother, if you like, but how about the democratic general O'Dwyer[iv] and Governor Eyre[v]? Any of the three stands up pretty well beside our own democratic virtuoso, Hell Roaring Jake Smith,[vi] in his treatment of the Filipinos; and you can't say fairer than that. 

As for the British State's talent for a kindly and generous colonial administration, I shall not rake up old scores by citing the bill of particulars set forth in the Declaration of Independence; I shall consider India only, not even going into matters like the Kaffir war or the Wairau incident in New Zealand. Our democratic British cousins in India in the Eighteenth Century must have learned their trade from Pizarro and Cortez. Edmund Burke called them "birds of prey and passage." Even the directors of the East India Company admitted that "the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade have been obtained by a scene of the most tyrannical and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country." 

Describing a journey, Warren Hastings wrote that "most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach"; the people ran off into the woods at the mere sight of a white man. There was the iniquitous salt monopoly; there was extortion everywhere, practiced by enterprising rascals in league with a corrupt police; there was taxation which confiscated almost half the products of the soil. 

If it be said that Britain was not a sister democracy in those days, and has since reformed, one might well ask how much of the reformation is due to circumstances, and how much to a change of heart. Besides, the Black-and-Tans[vii] were in our day; so was the post-Armistice blockade; General O'Dwyer's massacre was not more than a dozen years ago;[viii] and there are plenty alive who remember Kitchener's concentration camps. 

No, "democratic" State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you. A citizenry which has learned that one short lesson has but little more left to learn. 

Stripping the American State of the enormous power it has acquired is a full-time job for our citizens and a stirring one; and if they attend to it properly they will have no energy to spare for fighting communism, or for hating Hitler, or for worrying about South America or Spain, or for anything whatever, except what goes on right here in the United States. 

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Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870 – August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free-market thinkers of the 1950s. Nock's essays are collected in The State of the Union.