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Statist euphemisms abound. People say "public schools" when they mean "government schools." They refer to soldiers and freedom-fighters when its their state's guys, but insurgents and terrorists when it's their state's enemies guys. They call their fuhrers and oppressors "leaders" rather than "rulers." Even technical terms are sugar-coated. Laws outlawing employment for people unable to produce above an arbitrary level are called "minimum wage laws" rather than "minimum productivity laws." Plunder and forced redistribution is called "leveling the playing field" or "fairness." We need to avoid such drivel, and not be afraid to call a spade a spade. We cannot effectively argue against "fairness," but we can certainly argue against robbing productive people.
The statist paradigm is the world-view that the earth consists of competing "teams" called states, that everybody is on a team, and that one should support one's team. It is obvious how such a world-view favors statism, and why states promote such a view. As anarchists, we want subjected people to realize that they are not the rulers, nor are they the state or the government.
With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government... - Murray N. Rothbard, The Anatomy of the State
We need to help people realize that the people and the rulers are not on the same team, on the contrary they are implacable enemies. We need for people to realize that the statist wars are not "us" against "them," but are the rulers who claim us as subjects versus the rulers that claim some other people as subjects. The respective peoples have no real stake in the quibbles of rulers, but so long as the people buy into the statist paradigm, they will be cannon-fodder for their rulers. The very existence of interstate war depends on the rulers being able to shove the costs of war onto their gullible subjects. As soon as enough people realize that they are not their rulers, the jig is up. The proper attitude to statist war would be to let the belligerent rulers have at each other in a wire cage with butcher knives, but leave the people out of it.
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