The violent suppression of the Seattle and Genoa demonstrations against capitalism-run-amok and globalization at the end of the 1990s confirmed that the Western society in which we and our forebears had invested money, sweat and blood was far from being as democratic as it ought to be. As the testimony of thousands of ordinary people who had been subjected to inexcusable violence by our democratic rulers' bootboys began leaking into a wider public consciousness, thanks to some courageous journalists and editors who stood up to their publishers, more and more normally unengaged people began wondering about the official versions of events. Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' became a best-seller and the moneybags and their political lackeys began to realize that the proverbial cat was chewing its way out of the bag.

It is tempting to imagine the small group of really high-powered oligarchs who control the West's money getting together in Davos or some such place after the Genoa debacle in November of 1999 to work out an exit strategy enabling them to pull as much money as possible out of the economy before the whole house of cards collapsed. The ideas might have included a major war or two, with the added bonus of plundering Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves, and less dramatic wheezes like the sub-prime loans scam, a kind of pyramid selling scheme on a national level of the kind that fucked Albania in the mid-1990s. The moneybags put their man, George W. Bush, into The White House by fixing the 2000 election and nobbling the recount. Not long afterwards comes 9/11, allegedly masterminded by a CIA-trained Saudi whose family is friendly with the Bushes and other American moneybags, and the game is on.

It is hardly as if we were not warned. Back in 1997, when New Labour was blowing cool Britannia, Clintonian America was swimming in money and rabid ragheads were a flickering television image in the background. George Soros upset his fellow moneybags by telling us: 'I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.'

Intelligent observers may have viewed Soros's statement as little more than a fat cat's attempt to exculpate himself before the mob came swarming over the walls but events have proven him right. Meanwhile, the usual spittle-flecked scaremongers continue trying to preserve the status quo with dire warnings of the imminent descent of Western Civilization into anarchy. It makes a change from the usual warnings of the end of the World although the Eco-Nazis have that market share of the terrorization industry well in hand. Rest assured, however, that the World cannot end, because wherever you are, it is always tomorrow somewhere else. Moreover, anarchy cannot reign. Anarchy can only exist.

As Sun Tzu remarked in his Art of War, the best chance for peace is to know your enemy before meeting him. Classical Greek thinkers like Plato wrote of utopian societies governed by reason rather than authority. The concept in ancient Greek was expressed by the word 'anarchos,' which can be translated as 'without a leader, chief or king' or, simply, anarchism. The goal of true anarchists is the establishment of a society free of coercive authority of any kind but without any implication of disorder. This philosophical approach to the state of man has always been anathema to ruling classes for obvious reasons, and attempts to establish such societies, even on small local scales, have met with concerted resistance.