Letter: Anarchists for peaceful protest

ANARCHISM advocates a society with neither state nor government, based on individual freedom, mutual aid and voluntary co-operation. Readers of your article "Anarchy in the UK?" (Section 2, 15 February) could be forgiven for assuming it advocates terrorism. It does not.

The Red Brigades are revolutionary Marxists, not anarchists. The alleged Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, is not an anarchist but a neo-Luddite, and accepts both the existence of governments and the use of their power to effect his proposals. Timothy McVeigh is part of the right-wing racist anti-US Federal Government Militia Movement, but neither he nor this movement is politically anarchist.

The vast majority of political terrorism has never come from anarchists but from Marxists, nationalists, royalists, fascists and other political movements seeking to seize state power.

Jonathan Simcock

Derby