DoreneFC at aol.com:
> Ummm. I WILL go read the Dukhobor websites to see what they say for
> themselves, but...
>
> I once made the mistake of telling an officer at the Canadian border that I
> was on my way to Vancouver to hear a concert put on by a bunch of old
> Dukhobors because someone had given me a ticket.
>
> I was travelling alone. My allergies were busy turning into a head cold. I
> had been moving. Basically I was a MESS and in these War on Terroism times I
> would probably get roundly sent back to my cave in Seattle. The border guard
> looked me up and down and asked me several times was I really going to hear
> the Dukhobors. I must have managed to seem benign because the guard let me
> cross, but you can bet when I got home I went marching off to the library to
> read up.
>
> Before that I only knew of Dukhobors because they declared themselves
> religious pacifists and refused to fight in the Russian tsar's army, They
> eventually were allowed to migrate to Canada. The Dukhobors went through a
> phase of being quite cult-like, and this despite a theological commitment to
> live as God revealed it without too much constraint by doctrine or structure.
>
> They lived according to the dictates of one leader who did the typical cult
> leader thing of being paranoid and having many problems interacting with
> local authorities. During this phase many Dukhobors took to stripping off all
> their clothes, parading around naked and setting fires to their own
> buildings. I have know plenty of people with fringe tendencies, but I would
> find those behavious alarming no matter how much I support someone's right to
> exercise them.
>
> This is not to say that motives and actions on the other side were benign at
> all, but between the cult-like following of one leader and a certain tyranny
> of theological structurelessness, I do not think the Dukhobors are an
> entirely positive example. So keep trying.
Actually, I would not mind at all having a lengthy discussion about whether the Verigins, who I think are the people you are talking about, were actually "cult leaders", as in "secret masters", but I will have to assemble my materials, so it will have to be on another day. If you have a bibliography I'd be interested in it; most of what one gets has been written by people fervently committed to the established order, if indeed they are even aware that anything else might exist, and naturally they don't think much of the Dukhobors. In any case, the existence of leaders, popes, chiefs and so forth without institutionalized coercive powers does not contradict the notion of a society without coercive institutions.
The Dukhobors went around naked and burned their own houses down as a matter of religious practice, in order to free themselves from "materialism" (by which was meant not the philosophical point of view but concern with possessions). As far as I'm concerned, since they kept pretty much to themselves, that was their business. Pseudo-Buddhist that I am, I see greed and consumerism, the mainsprings of the liberal economic order (on its _nice_ days), as a far more intense and destructive fire than anything any Dukhobor ever set a match to, even the bad ones who blew up a bridge or two after their children were taken away to concentration camps and their land was seized for taxes.
--
Gordon:
>>>> ... there are historical examples of societies which
>>>> did not have
>>>> coercive institutions.
Wojtek Sokolowski:
>>> Such as?
Gordon:
> >The Dukhobors, at least until their communities were socially
> >and culturally destroyed by the governments of Canada and
> >British Columbia in the 1950s.
Doug Henwood:
> Hmm, that's one, and they were done in by another society with no
> scruples about coercion. This is not a compelling historical record.
I took the question to be about whether the Dukhobors had a social arrangement which was viable _per_se_. No non-liberal community has been able to successfully confront liberalism in a direct struggle so far; the community must either subordinate itself to liberal State power or suffer war and defeat. Even the mighty Soviet Union, able to defeat Hitler, fell. It is not surprising that a community of a few thousand people was not an exception to this rule.
I am not advertising the Dukhobors as perfect models of fashion, probity, or revolution. They were an example of an anarchist community which was able to function for about two hundred years in spite of the Tsar (who sent them to Siberia without supplies) and later, for awhile, even in spite of liberals. You can't win 'em all.
-- Gordon