From, well, The Criminality of the State:
“The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9,000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness — which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe — its criminality may be safely got on with.
So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country…
…Many now believe that with the rise of the “totalitarian” State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.
…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.”
The Dutch massacre Nock refers to is the 1740 Batavia Massacre in present-day Jakarta.
In an era of the rapid growth of surveillance ability by our own government, Nock exposes the true nature of the institution we are allowing to amass such power. That governments butcher and enslave entire populations is the greatest lesson of history. And governments always strive to obtain more convenient methods of doing so. The phenomenon is so bizarrely consistent that you almost wonder whether the human cogs that make up the institution even know what they’re doing, almost like its part of our programming. Once established, the State begins hoarding power the way a dragon hoards gold. And to ensure a sufficiently subjugated population, one homogeneous enough and malleable enough to hand over power willingly, this institution immediately takes over the education of children. Every government in history has made the education of the young one of its first priorities. This ‘education’ consists mainly of instructing children to worship the State, through prayers and pledges, and the insistence that the State is a civilizing force, and the expansion of its power is necessary, and inevitable. In the film Serenity, River Tam’s instructor presented the Alliance to her class as a necessary, civilizing force, and anyone opposed as backwater Neanderthals standing in the way of peace. But the Alliance was borne out of a succession of bloodbaths, pogroms that cleansed the subdued populations of dissent and rebellion. So it has been with every State in history.
