When the State Breaks a Man

Militant Libertarian » When the State Breaks a Man:

“How much does the State weigh?” Josef Stalin asked an underling who had been ordered to extract a confession from an enemy of his regime. Stalin understood that, given enough time, agents of State-sanctioned cruelty can break any man.

Thomas J. Ball, who committed suicide by self-immolation on the steps of New Hampshire’s Cheshire County Courthouse on June 15, was a man who had been broken by the State. A lengthy suicide note/manifesto he sent to the Keene Sentinel, which was published the day after his death , described how his family had been destroyed, and his life ruined, through the intervention of a pitiless and infinitely cruel bureaucracy worthy of Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Granite State’s affiliate of the federal “domestic violence” Cheka.