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You're right, but I don't think the answer is to abandon or invert your beliefs. That's precisely what gets us to yielding political territory. We give up argumentative weight if we use their methods. It would show that our philosophy is lacking because we can only exist by adopting anarchy's antithesis (or strapping anarchism to a useful engine that we hope we can delete from everyone's memories and excise from our ethos in the aftermath).

You have those that only like anarchy when it's comfortable, and either looks like or operates like the state, but that ignores that anarchy will not be some utopia without weak-points. The idea is that those weak-points are worth having, because the benefits of anarchism are worth having.

Some people don't understand that the chance that people will succumb to an illness is still a battlefield to make a statement on. A while back I heard someone say our freedoms persist in spite of not having the ability to silence or destroy our enemies, no matter how much we dislike them. By living in this freedom conscious way, we're saying these values are worth keeping around, because despite the reality that our freedoms produce, the alternative of not having those freedoms is more grim.

We decided that our society was worthy of not wielding such profound powers over others, even people we can't stand to know exist. One price you'd pay for living in an anarchist society is not being able to mandate all the cute laws, sanctions, and violations of privacy that we see so much of now.

Somewhere along the way, certain officials and political groups have decided this existential threat is enough to suspend our society. They're of the belief that we can put a pause on our philosophy and return to it when things cool down. It's hard to take anarchism seriously if it suspends itself when times get tough and adopts its antithesis. Did we give up our beliefs? Or did we never have them to begin with? More than anything else, we're seeing that a lot of people blatantly like authoritarianism when it wears the colors and says the catch-phrases of their choosing.

Still, I'm not of the opinion that I want anarchism to follow suit with a Frankenstein's monster of their own, babbling about anti-statism while giving what it gets from its perceived enemies. It will only further drag anarchy through the mud as a spurious ideology from a haphazard collection of ideological refugees.

Rebellions throughout history struggle to detach themselves from their methods, especially when they result in wanton destruction and other sorts of ugliness, and their future detractors will be too keen to remember for them. Not only that, but it will sully the purity of the philosophy when it's watered down by 'necessary' modifications. I suppose someone only interested in pragmatism of the moment can shrug off the incidentals, but I think that's a catastrophic mistake. Like Nietzsche, it could be the nihilist willingly walking into the abyss, fully aware of their shortcomings and the imperfection of it all. To struggle imperfectly for a chance at breathing a bit of fresh air.

I don't think that inspires a great many people. It inspires some people, but not me.