www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html
This is a very long, but interesting, article from the New York Times. It is based on thousands of administrative documents found in Mosul after IS had been driven out and interviews with 'state' officials who had remained in post after the IS takeover of the region. IS actually ran the state infrastructure very efficiently and by doing so made a great deal of money, by way of taxation, to finance their military operations.
I'm posting it to illustrate my point that, although we like to believe that a state runs effectively on consent and consensus, the ultimate 'weapon' of state control is force and fear.
So although the consensus on this thread is that a state mechanism is a 'Good Thing' I think we have to recognise that 'states' can be as bad for its citizens in regard to freedom and tolerance as the vision of anarchy conjured up by the absence of 'the state'. And that as citizens we should be aware of (and resist) the potential for our 'state' to become a repressive force rather than a benign one.
This is how ISIS did it:
"Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques.
Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices.
To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: “If you don’t show up, we’ll come and break your back ourselves.”
The phone call reached Muhammad Nasser Hamoud, a 19-year veteran of the Iraqi Directorate of Agriculture, behind the locked gate of his home, where he was hiding with his family. Terrified but unsure what else to do, he and his colleagues trudged back to their six-story office complex decorated with posters of seed hybrids.
They arrived to find chairs lined up in neat rows, as if for a lecture.
The commander who strode in sat facing the room, his leg splayed out so that everyone could see the pistol holstered to his thigh. For a moment, the only sounds were the hurried prayers of the civil servants mumbling under their breath.
Their fears proved unfounded. Though he spoke in a menacing tone, the commander had a surprisingly tame request: Resume your jobs immediately, he told them. A sign-in sheet would be placed at the entrance to each department. Those who failed to show up would be punished.
Meetings like this one occurred throughout the territory controlled by the Islamic State in 2014. Soon municipal employees were back fixing potholes, painting crosswalks, repairing power lines and overseeing payroll.
“We had no choice but to go back to work,” said Mr. Hamoud. “We did the same job as before. Except we were now serving a terrorist group.”
The disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert more than three years ago founded a state that was acknowledged by no one except themselves. And yet for nearly three years, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that at one point was the size of Britain, with a population estimated at 12 million people. At its peak, it included a 100-mile coastline in Libya, a section of Nigeria’s lawless forests and a city in the Philippines, as well as colonies in at least 13 other countries."
