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Anarky (Lonnie Machin) is a fictional character in the DC Comics Universe. Co-created by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, he first appeared in Detective Comics #608 (November 1989) as an adversary of Batman. Stories revolving around Anarky often focus on political and philosophical themes. Named after the philosophy of anarchism, the primary philosophical element that has underscored the character's appearances has been anti-statism. With Grant's transition to the philosophy of Neo-Tech, Anarky was transformed from a vehicle for socialist and populist philosophy, to rationalist, atheist, and free market based thought. Highly thematic and philosophical in tone, Alan Grant avoided using the character often, but addressed multiple social issues whenever the character appeared, including environmentalism, antimilitarism, economic exploitation, and political corruption. Inspired by multiple sources, early stories to feature the character often included homages to political and philosophical books, including notable anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, among others. The creation of the character was also partially influenced by Alan Moore's character "V" from V for Vendetta.

Originally intended to only be used in the debut story in which he appeared, positive reception by readers and his editor convinced Grant to continue using Anarky as a recurring character throughout the early 90s. The character experienced a brief surge in media exposure during the late '90s, beginning when Norm Breyfogle convinced Grant to produce a limited series based on the character. The 1997 spin-off series, Anarky, was received with positive reviews and sales, and later declared by Grant to be among his "career highlights". Batman: Anarky, a trade paperback collection of stories featuring the character, soon followed. This popular acclaim culminated, however, in a financially and critically unsuccessful ongoing solo series. The 1999 Anarky series, in which even Alan Grant has expressed his distaste, was quickly canceled after eight issues. (read more...)

Credit: Aristide Delannoy.

Émile Pouget (1860–1931), as portrayed by Aristide Delannoy. Pouget was a French anarchist and trade unionist who was elected to the position of Vice-Secretary of the Confédération générale du travail. He narrowly escaped French persecution in the Trial of the thirty by escaping to exile in England.

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• ... that in his book In Defense of Anarchism, anarchist Robert Paul Wolff argues that the incompatibility of state authority and individual autonomy means that all states are morally illegitimate?
• ... that according to Franz Oppenheimer's book The State, the purpose of the political state is to establish and enforce class divisions between conquerors and the dominated?
• ...that Unabomber for President was a 1996 write-in campaign to elect Theodore Kaczynski a.k.a. "the Unabomber" (pictured) as President of the United States?
• ...that although he contributed to an anti-militarist resolution at a congress of the Second International in 1891, Christiaan Cornelissen was one of a few syndicalists to support the Allied effort in World War I in 1914?
• ... that in his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin anticipated the importance of cybernetic technology to the development of human potential over a decade before the origin of cyberpunk?

“ The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." But there is great probability that things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have been formed all at once in the human mind. Mankind must have made very considerable progress, and acquired considerable knowledge and industry which they must also have transmitted and increased from age to age, before they arrived at this last point of the state of nature. Let us then go farther back, and endeavour to unify under a single point of view that slow succession of events and discoveries in the most natural order. ” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

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• 1846 - Henry David Thoreau (pictured)refuses to pay the local tax collector and spends a night in jail, a formative experience.
• 1873 - Cantonal rebellion: The Cantons of Motril and Torrevieja are dissolved.
• 1909 - "Tragic Week", a series of bloody clashes between the Spanish army and the working classes of Catalonian cities, begins.
• 1936 - Spanish Civil War: The Ascaso Column leaves Barcelona, as the third of the confederal militias headed for the Aragon front.

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