Last
Easter, the Right was celebrating the
Bunkerville rebellion, and the Left
was calling for severe measures – drone
strikes, if necessary – to
beat down armed resistance to law enforcement. By Christmas, the roles were
neatly reversed, with the Left protesting against the ever-growing tide of law
enforcement abuses and the Right accusing police critics of fomenting
“revolution.”
Both
sides agree that nobody needs to worry about getting hurt as long as they
render immediate and unqualified submission to the police. They also agree that individuals have the right
to resist when they are being abused and their lives threatened by the police.
They can embrace these mutually exclusive propositions because of a third point
on which they tacitly agree: The duty to submit, and the right to resist,
depend entirely on the identity of the person or people on the receiving end of
state-licensed abuse.
This is to say that both
sides agree with Vladimir Lenin's dictum that in politics the basic question is
“Who does what to Whom.” They have also embraced Lenin's formula for
“scientific dictatorship” – “Power without limit, resting directly on force,
restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.”
Police
officers are situational Leninists, authorized to use lethal force to make
people submit to their will, irrespective of the law.
“How
about this? Listen to police officers’ commands, listen to what we tell you,
and just stop,” eructated Cleveland
Police Union Commissar Jeffrey Follmer in defense of
the police murder of Tamir Rice. The twelve-year-old, who was carrying a BB
pistol in a state with an open carry law, was gunned down by police within two
seconds of their arrival at the park where he had been playing.
Even
if we stipulate that citizens have a duty to render immediate compliance with
police “commands,” Rice had no time to comply. Rather than conceding that
point, Follmer used the child's death as an object lesson to other Mundanes:
You are the property of the State, and
what liberties you enjoy – including the freedom to continue breathing –
are subject to summary termination at the whim of a police officer.
Immediate,
unqualified obedience to a police officer “eliminates a lot of problems,”
Follmer insists. “I think the nation needs to realize that when we tell you to
do something, do it, and if you’re wrong you’re wrong, and if you’re right,
then the courts will figure it out.”
And
if you are brutalized or killed without cause by a member of the State's
Punitive Priesthood, the courts will not be troubled by the matter, because the
system's mechanisms of self-justification will quickly ratify the lethal
actions of the police officer.
There
is a heuristic process in place – but it is designed to reform and correct the
behavior of the public, rather than that of the police departments supposedly
established for its protection. The burden is on us to submit to the armed
people who are supposedly our servants. As a punitive populist meme dictates: “Breathe
easy – don't break the law.”
That
motto is inscribed on a line of t-shirts designed by South Bend, Indiana
police officer Jason Barthel. The shirts display a badge insignia against
set the “Blue Line” logo — the universal colors of the State’s privileged
gang-banger fraternity.
“We
are not here to do anything negative to the public,” insists Barthel. “We’re
here to protect the public and we want you to breathe easy knowing that the
police are here to be with you and for you and protect you.”
Police officers – as I have wearied myself in pointing out – have no enforceable duty to protect any citizen from criminal violence. They are paid to enforce the will of the political class that preys upon property, a role that includes inflicting criminal violence on those whose seek to protect their property against such predation.
Police officers – as I have wearied myself in pointing out – have no enforceable duty to protect any citizen from criminal violence. They are paid to enforce the will of the political class that preys upon property, a role that includes inflicting criminal violence on those whose seek to protect their property against such predation.
Jason
Barthel divides his time between law enforcement and honest work as a small
business owner. As a police officer, Mr. Barthel can commit criminal violence —
including homicide — and take
refuge in the claim of “qualified immunity.” In private life, however, he could very easily
be prosecuted and ruined for any of the myriad regulatory infractions he
inevitably commits every day as an entrepreneur – and wind up being fatally
deprived of breath if, like Eric Garner, he refused to cooperate with the imperious
demands of a law enforcement officer.
Both
Cliven Bundy and Eric Garner were accused of tax evasion – Bundy of refusing to
pay grazing fees to the federal government, Garner of selling individual
untaxed cigarettes. Both of them were confronted by law enforcement personnel
who were prepared to confiscate their property and kill them if they resisted.
Garner
was murdered on the streets of Staten Island because he dared to assert self-ownership
– “It stops today!” is the modern equivalent of “Don't tread on me” – and
nobody on the scene was willing, or able, to come to his defense.
Bundy
is alive because of the intervention of armed fellow citizens who were willing
to point guns at police in defense of the rancher, his family, and their
rights. He was also predictably – and quite dishonestly – accused of being a
racist. All of the denunciations of Bundy were offered by left-leaning
commentators who have more recently discovered that the horrors of police
militarization and the culture of impunity that characterizes law enforcement.
Many
of the same right-leaning commentators who extolled Cliven Bundy's resistance
to the BLM and the Las Vegas Metro Police have dismissed Garner as a “thug” and
a “career criminal,” and insist that the murder of two NYPD officers is a
direct result of “anti-police hate speech.”
“Like
Pontius Pilate[,] who deluded himself into thinking that he could `wash his
hands' of his part in Jesus' death, so too do Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Eric
Holder, Bill DeBlasio, and every other politician, `civil rights activist,' and
commentator who did their part to fuel the inferno of anti-police rhetoric
think that they can no wash their hands of their responsibility for the murders
of [NYPD] Officers Ramos and Liu,” bloviates authoritarian commentator Jack
Kerwick at TownHall.com.
Writing from the right-Leninist perspective –
which in this case dictates collective guilt on the basis of imputed motives --
Kerwick
claims that “the only difference” between murderer Ismaiiyl Brinsley and
critics of the police is that “while those who regard police as `racists' or
`armed enforcers' of `the State' talk the talk, Brinsley actually walked the
walk.”
Interestingly,
Kerwick – who fancies himself a philosopher of sorts -- doesn't explain why, in
the case of the torture and execution of Jesus, he condemns the judge who
imposed the death sentence, and the officers who dutifully carried out their
lawful orders by executing it, choosing instead to take the side of the
condemned criminal.
But
I digress.
"Words
mean things,” insisted
another right-wing proponent of collective guilt in the murder of Officers
Liu and Ramos. “Words cause actions." The journal published by the
organization over which that individual presides peddled a similarly expansive
indictment, identifying the “real enemy” as “those who stoke the fires of
racial unrest with rhetoric forged on lies and feeding, every day, on
blood."
Transpose
those sentiments into a slightly different collectivist idiom, and they are
indistinguishable from the rhetoric that came out of the Clinton White House,
and the State-aligned media, following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.
That
terrorist act, we were told, precipitated from a "climate of
violence" created by "anti-government extremists" who condemned
the Waco Massacre while routinely -- and quite properly -- referring to the ATF
and other federal law enforcement shock troops as "Jackbooted Thugs."
At
the time of the bombing, the cover The New American magazine – the publication
alluded to above -- depicted an ATF badge with the headline: "Freedom's
Foes." For the next several years, TNA and its sponsoring organization
were routinely denounced as part of the "real enemy" who "stoked
the fires of [political] unrest" with anti-government rhetoric.
At the
time, I was a senior editor at that publication, which led to being listed – by
name – as a terrorist sympathizer in a law enforcement training program produced
by a federal subcontractor named John Nutter.
Subsequent
to the murders of Liu and Ramos, we have been instructed to pretend that this
crime happened because a small and atypical group of anti-police protesters
chanted: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!”
In
similar fashion, following the massacre of 168 people – including 17 children –
in the OKC bombing, the Regime and its servitors in the media sought to
implicate the entire conservative sub-population in that crime. That agitprop
campaign focused heavily on anti-government “hate rhetoric,” such as the advice
provided by syndicated talk show host – and convicted felon – G. Gordon Liddy
to listeners in the event of an ATF raid.
"Head
shots, head shots,” Liddy
instructed. “Kill the sons of bitches... Shoot twice to the belly and if
the does not work, shoot to the groin area. Arm yourself. Get instructed in how
to shoot straight. And don't register [your weapons] either."
An
updated version of that refrain was taken up against the “insurrectionist
right” earlier this year after Jerad and Amanda Miller, who were banished from
Bunkerville by supporters of Cliven Bundy, murdered three people — Las Vegas Metro
Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, and Joseph Wilcox, an armed citizen who
heroically tried to stop their rampage.
Apart
from his well-documented hostility toward law enforcement, Ismaiiyl Brinsley
had no connection of any kind to the nation-wide movement in opposition to
police brutality.
The Millers, on the other hand, were among many hundreds of people who traveled to Bunkerville, Nevada to support rancher Cliven Bundy in his confrontation with the BLM. They may well have been the only volunteers who were asked to leave because of concerns regarding what was described as their “aggressive nature” and eagerness to incite violence. During their brief visit, however, Jerad was interviewed by the local NBC affiliate, which meant that he was depicted as representative of the people who had rallied to the Bundy family’s cause.
Predictably,
following the couple’s subsequent killing spree critics of Cliven Bundy claimed
that the rancher, his supporters, and the “anti-government” Right shared collective responsibility for
that crime – just as Jack Kerwick and his right-Leninist ilk insist that critics
of law enforcement constitute the “Many Brinsleys” who murdered Liu and Ramos.
Significantly,
the only mention Mr. Berwick made of Cliven Bundy during or following the
Bunkerville stand-off was to condemn Republican politicians and commentators
who had abandoned the rancher after he was traduced as a “racist” for
expressing cultural views not dramatically different from those of more
conventional conservatives.
“Republicans
would be well served to heed Christ’s admonition to remove the boulder from
their own eyes before proceeding to pluck out the pebble from the eyes of their
neighbors,” Kerwick
pontificated, sparing Bundy and his supporters from criticism for actually
threatening to kill police officers in defense of their property rights.
Like
much of the activist Left, interestingly, Kerwick and other conservatives are
eager to re-purpose the controversy over the police state into an overtly racial
conflict – one side depicting police as enforcers of “white privilege,” the
other condemning critics of the police for promoting the idea of black
victimhood and the “entitlement mentality.” This is precisely the quarrel our
self-appointed rulers want us to have. In this way, the public will be obsessed
over the question of whether their officially designated collective is the
“who” or the “whom.”
In this fashion, the public will be distracted from critical examination of the “what” – state-licensed aggressive violence – and be dissuaded from pondering the possibility that if the “what” were removed from the equation, the “who” and the “whom” wouldn't matter nearly as much.
In this fashion, the public will be distracted from critical examination of the “what” – state-licensed aggressive violence – and be dissuaded from pondering the possibility that if the “what” were removed from the equation, the “who” and the “whom” wouldn't matter nearly as much.
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Dum spiro, pugno!
11 comments:
It's the same with school shootings. The right will complain vociferously when the left politicizes a school shooting and demands more gun control. As soon as two cops are shot in New York, they rolled out their political machinery.
If as they say, "words mean things", then everyone who supported and pontificated long and loud over Iraq and elsewhere are responsible for the deaths of countless thousands. Eh? Or am I missing something?
Another fantastic article Will. I've been saying this for awhile that conservatives who lick the boots of leviathan in this latest episode were cursing his name when those same thugs went after Bundy.
Being a New York state citizen I also question these conservative badge lickers if they'll follow orders of the enforcement class when Governor Andrew Cuomo starts to really enforce the SAFE Act.(aka turn in your weapons, register them, etc) Especially with those two deaths, who knows what the slime in Albany are possibly cooking up for us who choose to exercise our rights to defend ourselves. Of course no conservative has given me a real answer outside of their standard squawking of their insults and mindless rambling that comes whenever a libertarian makes them look stupid.
If you dont know what the SAFE Act in NY is, here is a decent breakdown of it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_SAFE_Act
There isnt much to say of the left given like the right, hypocrisy is a long tradition. Like the right the left's desire for state violence is well documented. They (like the right) have no leg to stand on when it comes to coproach brutality as they support it in other forms.
Let moronic Sharpton lefitsts and the paleocon right squawk that this is the start of some mythical race war that many of these statissts have been dreaming about since the 60s. All these clowns do is provide a distraction. Real liberty lovers such as yourself and others know that it's not race its government vs the people.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-27/supreme-court-rules-police-can-violate-4th-amendment-if-they-are-ignorant-law
it is beyond time to effect the change from elite controlled occupation forces to corporate provided peace officers.
Oh, Kirk . . . a biblical verse comes to mind for your naivete: "Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do." Your controllers just chuckled. Both entities you mention are ONE AND THE SAME!
rkshanny: naive? maybe. i cannot say since i am not aware of any place where such has been tried, unlike the state model currently upon us which has been everywhere forever with human 'history' the result.
a corporate entity could be sued for the misdeeds of its employees, as opposed to the state which is immune. from this, there would at least seem to be a motivation to less, not more, force when events arise.
Here is a crazy idea: maybe the government and its police forces can start holding themselves accountable for the crimes they commit. The law, you know the ones they're always passing and insisting we follow, also applies to the government and police. It won't happen, though. Throughout history, governments are notorious for doubling down on the stupidity when they are given this option.
How about this - get rid of cops altogether? It is a fundamentally unAmerican institution; why do we put up with it?
https://www.dollarvigilante.com/blog/2014/10/1/what-happens-when-all-the-police-in-a-town-are-removed.html
Asking for the ruling class enforcers to police themselves is pie-in-the-sky, folks.
I too had to laugh at all the conservative fussing at the cops receiving some push-back. Are these the people, the III% who we are going to depend on to oppose any future gun confiscation order? How are they going to oppose it without shooting cops? Talk about faint-hearted commitment...
'because a small and atypical group of anti-police protesters chanted: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” '
Yeah, it was atypical. In fact it looked like a production of the Ministry of Propaganda to me. "Provocateurs R Us!" I think it never occurred to those conservatives that maybe they were being manipulated...
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
I thought we were going to have a glorious each according to his needs post-racial 1000 year hopetopia once Dear Leader Messiah Hussein the Immaculate was selected?
Is the glorious rainbow utopia still just one four year plan away?
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