BeatYourSoul: Instead of Thoreau, Russell, and Paine, try reading Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. Your notions about anarchy are the result of a 200-year campaign of lies and agitprop by the people whose oppression would be ended by its implementation. Yes, the dictionary defines "anarchy" as lawlessness and chaos. Are you aware that "democracy" was once defined the same way for exactly the same reason? To quote Emma Goldman, "The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child, -- a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence." And incidentally, "direct democracy" is synonymous with anarchism. In the early United States, communities established rules and laws by consensus through town hall meetings. This was a form of anarchism. Since anarchism dictates nothing except that no coercion be used or permitted, there are an infinitude of choices in how a community will organize itself. For example, by preference I am an anarchosyndicalist, but would cheerfully accept anarchocommunism or anarchoprimitivism if that was the consensus of the community. bitter: Nestor Makhno was not a ruler. He was general of the Makhnovshchina, the anarchist army which successfully defended the Ukraine from invasion by fascists. In a military situation, there isn't time to gather consensus from the entire army, so the next best thing is done: all the officers and the commanding officer are chosen by consensus of the soldiers, and they can be replaced at any time, again by consensus of the soldiers. The men who joined the Makhnovshchina did so of their own free will, without coercion, and accepted military discipline of their own accord. The men who put up posters urging hatred against Jews knew perfectly well that what they were doing violated the rules of the Makhnovshchina. Anarchy does not mean lawlessness. Jews were being hunted down and killed in Ukraine at the time by the Whites (the Tzarist forces) so promoting hatred was tantamount to murder. Makhno accepted personal responsibility for the executions by performing them himself. If the soldiers had found his decision harsh or unreasonable, they could and would have removed him as military leader. lelionx: "A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is still an insect, and the other is a horse still." -- Samuel Johnson