"Long Live the Queen" - Red Lotus and anarchism

To think that I thought that shit went down last week. (I mean, it did, but it does not quite compare with this week's episode - Book 3, Episode 10 "Long Live the Earth Queen.")

Do I even need to tell you that there will be spoilers?

After the Red Lotus gives the Earth Queen Mako and Bolin in exchange for Korra when she arrives, they hear that the ship carrying Korra crashed in a desert, and they know that there is no way that Korra would be able to be caught again. They go into the throne room and the Earth Queen threatens to imprison them. Then Zaheer says another badass anarchist quote:

"I don't believe in queens. You think freedom is something that you can give or take on a whim, but to your people, freedom is just as essential as...air, and without it, there is no life. There is only...darkness."

(For some reason, I feel like I need to clear up that the way I punctuated this is actually different than from how it is punctuated with captions. I wanted Zaheer's speaking style to show.)

I also changed punctuation for this to make it more visually-appealing.

Answer the timeless question: is freedom essential to the human condition?

After the Earth Queen's assassination, Zaheer announces to Ba Sing Se that they are now free, and lets out the Queen's prisoners. Ghazan tears down the walls that separate the levels of the city, and we see civilians eagerly rushing towards areas they had never seen before. Next thing we know, looters and rioters are wreaking havoc on the city.

Seriously, hopefully I am not the only one who found parallels.

I guess that would make Mako the Dark Knight.

I have always wanted to write about the walls of Ba Sing Se that separate the levels from each other, and use it to illustrate real-life examples, such as gated communities and Brasil. While I am critical of the divisions, which most likely contribute to the socioeconomic inequality, I realized I had not given thought to the idea of immediately bringing them down before.

Do you believe that lawlessness like that would exist in real life if walls separating different classes of people (that these people grew up with) were brought down? Remember that they are also being encouraged by Bane...er, I mean Zaheer and the Red Lotus. Or would it be as realistic as The Purge?

This speculation got me wondering about Murray Rothbard's "button to end the state" - the gist being if there was a button that ended all the states everywhere, would you push it? You do not necessarily have to believe in anarchism, just in the idea that governments as we know them are over-inflated and that there is no way to bring their power down to a reasonable level with the political processes already in existence.

Personally, I would not push the button. You?

A friend of mine wrote this - it was commentary on a speaker we were listening to, but I forgot what exactly the speaker was talking about:

"To be clear hesitation to press Rothbard's Button can arise from more than just fear of a new, more tyrannical state. It can also come from the desire to see gradualist policies to help make a more peaceful transition to a "stateless" society while also helping to establish a social and economic order that would be conducive to a horizontal, equitable, and free society."

I guess my point is that what the Red Lotus has done to Ba Sing Se is evidence that pushing the button is a bad idea.

EDIT: Michelangelo Landgrave wrote a response to this.

Do you believe what the Red Lotus did to Ba Sing Se was bad? (I do.)

Should Zaheer have killed the Earth Queen? (I do not think so. Then again, I make a terrible violent revolutionary. I feel like it is going to end up like one of those kid shows or movies when we see the character a little bit later, just injured.)

I think we can all agree that the Earth Queen was out-of-line. Are any libertarians still non-interventionist after watching Book 3?

What could have been some better alternatives to liberate Ba Sing Se?