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Second, don’t rely on Oathkeepers bluster (another word beginning with “b” also fits). They mean what they say now, but things will be different then. Police will have no problem cracking down on you because (1) most cops will follow any plausibly legitimate authority; (2) human beings are born to rationalize; and (3) you’ll be demonized long before you’re raided. They won’t whack you, they’ll be whacking your indescribably monstrous straw man evil twin.
Every totalitarian state in history made liberal use of the ordinary cops for its political roundups, and no police element has ever mutinied or walked off the job when faced with that task. For example, the Gestapo and SS did not need to round up the Jews in occupied France: the ordinary French beat cops were glad to do it. None of them was ever punished; they transferred their loyalty seamlessly and unquestionably from the 3rd Republic to Vichy to the occupying power to the 4th Republic. Likewise, the Weimar cops became Nazi cops, who in turn became East or West German cops, and now unified Federal German cops. Hitler? Stalin? Who cares, we can retire at 45 with a good pension, and no one will miss a few Jews.
Those two paragraphs really say it all.
I keep circling back to this. I want to like and trust the police, but I know what's going to happen if we don't get our stupid asses to being a well informed electorate and unfuck our government. It won't be the people we can vote for knocking on the door asking if our papers are in order.
History is what I'm listening to when I worry about the police. We're presently building a police force with some terrible capabilities and being chided that they're great folks; no need to worry. But time and again, if Government can, Government IS! Or will if given time. The police, no matter how likable and friendly they are now: are the government.
Also, this remains true:
The armed agents of the state have the same function in North Korea they do in the USA and vice versa. That is to intimidate those of questionable loyalty to the state. The goal is not to arrest or kill, it is to "keep 'em in line". When the armed agents have to arrest, club, kill, etc, etc, they have in a real sense, failed in their primary mission. The pivot point in the USA is that the definition of questionable loyalty has expanded, from a small minority of the population until it now includes just about everybody not a full time employee of the state. Therefore the armed agents must attempt to intimidate a wider and wider range of people, like those who cut down a tree in their back yard, or join a Tea Party, and so on, and on, and on. This requires an ever greater number of armed agents, who will fail (in the sense outlined above) ever more often. If the state finds it imperative to tax a single cigarette at thirty seven times its actual economic value the armed agents will have to arrest, club, kill, etc, the disloyal who act outside the states economic web (cf. NYC/NYPD). There it is. -W. Fleetwood
It pisses me off.
This trajectory began before I was born, so I got no vote in preventing it.
When I got old enough to vote, it seemed it was on terminal guidance already. I still tried and try to tell people that this arc leads to no-good. But they'd rather play video games and not even bother registering to vote (while complaining about how much their health care costs without seeing that they didn't even show up to try and stop WHY the costs shot up).
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| From: http://explosm.net/comics/4211/ |
It might be useful to print out this comic and hand it to assorted bozos.
ReplyDeleteTwo things:
ReplyDeleteFirst, never before in history did cops have an opportunity to a.) ignore orders in support the law of the land; b.) in a country founded on personal freedom. This may make all the difference in the world between what might happen here and what has happened historically elsewhere. At no time before could the cops rely on the law to support their refusal to carry out orders; there never before was such a thing as an "unlawful order." There is such a thing here and now.
Second: The cartoon.
What happens if you vote for the lesser of two evils (which is, let's face it, what we usually end up having to do), the lesser evil wins, and then proceeds to cock up the works? YOU voted for that person; you helped him win. Feel good about that? When the choice is between two evils, by not voting you are not helping EITHER evil to win, and you can disavow responsibility for the mess the winner creates no matter who wins. When I withhold my vote because I disapprove of both candidates, I do not waste my vote. I waste my vote when I vote for someone I do no support in order to vote against someone I support even less.
Something I think would help a great deal is more accountability and far less immunity in the here and now to alleviate the worry today. I get the impression that there's a lot of "why would there ever be consequences?" going on.
DeleteHowever if the police and the military ignore orders to "round up 'indescribably monstrous straw man evil twins'" it will be the first time ever; and I do dearly hope that they do.
But it's up to us idiot voters to actually fix it, and we're probably not going to bother. We're still living in a time where it was safe to ignore our mostly toothless government.
The matrix needs more lines. "You voted for the lesser evil! Feel good you did something to slow the advance of evil. Feel ashamed that you still advanced evil." Someone who takes the principled "refuse to advance evil at all" stand and doesn't vote for a lack of good in the candidates is far different from the apathetic "why bother, it doesn't change anything."
And with that attitude, they're right!