Just say you were on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and, coming up to the $500,000 question, Eddie asks you, as he would be highly likely to do at that moment, ‘What do the following have in common? King Humbert I of Italy, President William McKinley of the United States, King George I of Greece and Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of France? (a) John Howard denies knowledge of any of them and says we should move on; (b) Wilson Tuckey will not confirm that he has written to them; (c) Tony Abbott denies having funded them; (d) they were all assassinated by anarchists.’ Lock in (d) Eddie and let’s head for the million.
Not many contestants would get that right, but Joe Toscano, the subject of a brief, slightly awestruck report in a recent issue of The Australian, probably would. Who is Joe Toscano? I hear you cry. Well, he’s Dr Joe Toscano, GP, for a start and while that may not especially distinguish him from the medical ruck, the fact that he bulk bills does lend him a fading and arcane particularity. When you add that Joe is a radical anarchist and a sometime S-11 protester he bursts from the ranks of the grey and anonymous as surely as if he’s paraded down Pitt Street in peak hour wearing a jockstrap and playing the bagpipes.
Anarchism, as distinct from anarchy, has fallen on hard times since its heady days in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The founding father of anarchism, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and his so-called Philosophical Anarchists, sought to remove the idea of authority from society, and replace it with extreme individualism, but they expected anarchic organisation of society to evolve without violent stimulus.
Proudhon would have been appalled by the modern equation of anarchism with random terror. Though it was definitely anarchists who finished off Humbert, McKinley, George and Marie François, (and who, unlike some latter-day ideologues of the left, right and centre, proudly owned up to their handiwork), the movement was blamed for many deaths of which it was innocent.
Joe Toscano is in the apparently contradictory position of being an anarchist—that is, someone who is opposed to all forms of government—and at the same time a vigorous campaigner for Medicare. I’ll leave Joe to sort that one out for himself while applauding the fact that a true anarchist has emerged at this time of