Stanley, Chauvin, and the New Barbarism

 Three years ago, when Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for having shot the twenty-two year old Colten Boushie when the latter with a posse of friends had invaded his farm, I spoke strongly against those who publicly denounced the verdict, including the Prime Minister and the  then Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, and, indeed, said that the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice ought to resign or be made to resign over their remarks.    That I disagreed with them about the case and the verdict – I thought and still think that the RCMP were wrong to charge Stanley in the first place, that the case ought never to have made it to trial, and that “not guilty” was the only sane verdict possible – was only part of my reason for taking that stance.   There was also the fact that for Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould to politicize the verdict in the way in which they did was an abuse of their office.   Ironically, less than a year after this, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould would find themselves on the opposite sides of a huge scandal about political interference in the affairs of the criminal justice system.   In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould accused Trudeau of inappropriately pressuring her to retroactively apply to an ongoing case certain changes that had just been snuck through Parliament by being tagged on to a spending bill so as to benefit a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party that was under prosecution for bribing a foreign government.    In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould was in the right in resisting Trudeau’s pressure but in the earlier incident, the two of them had both been guilty of political interference in the criminal justice system and in a much worse way.   As bad as politicians putting pressure on prosecutors to extend leniency may be it is far worse for them to denounce jury acquittals.   This is because doing the latter is a dangerous affront to the most basic principles of our criminal justice system, the very principles which distinguish civilized legal justice from tribal blood vengeance.   These principles prioritize the protection of the innocent over the punishment of the guilty by giving everyone the right to a fair trial when accused of a crime, placing the burden of proof upon the prosecution, and entitling the accused to a dismissal of the charges if the conditions of a fair trial cannot be met and an acquittal if the prosecution cannot meet the standard of proof.   Boushie’s family and several Native Indian organizations were taking the position that the acquittal was unjust because Native Indians were not represented on the jury due to the prospective jurors of this ethnicity having evinced prejudice against the defendant that disqualified them from performing that civic duty.   In their public display of support for this position, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould were basically saying that the system needed to be changed to make it harder for the accused to be acquitted by weakening his right to a trial by an unbiased jury.    

 

This week the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin.   In this case the verdict was guilty.   Chauvin was found guilty of three charges – unintentional second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter – despite there having been only one body.    As strange as that seems it might perhaps simply be the latest stage in the apotheosis of George Floyd.   When Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis last year he was at first proclaimed a victim of racism and police brutality but has since climbed the ladder to martyrdom and then sainthood.     If he has now been deified and made into a trinity that would explain his death being treated as a three-in-one.    

 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News responded to the verdict by saying “I’m glad that [Chauvin] was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges”.   The exact opposite of this is the just and sane position to take – that Chauvin should have been acquitted of all charges even if he was guilty of all charges.

 

The reason this is the only just and sane position is because of the same principles discussed with regards to the Stanley acquittal in the first paragraph.   There was not the slightest possibility of Chauvin having received a fair trial, therefore the principles of justice say that he ought not to have been tried at all and that he is entitled to be cleared of all charges.

 

As it so happens, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Chauvin was guilty of any of these charges.  Floyd had committed a crime and resisted arrest, which was why he found himself on the ground being restrained.   The knee-hold restraint Chauvin used was a nasty looking one but it was not lethal.   The police bodycam video shows that his knee was not on Floyd’s neck as it appeared from the angle of the bystander video that went viral but on his shoulder blade.   It was clearly not the reason Floyd couldn’t breathe and at any rate the video shows that Floyd’s breathing troubles had started before he was on the ground and under this restraint.   There were at least three other factors that were more likely to have contributed to his breathing difficulties than the police hold.   One of these was Floyd’s heart condition, another was the amount of fentanyl in his blood – three times higher than the dosage that nobody has ever survived.    The third factor was his infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  A difficulty in breathing is one of the main symptoms of the disease this virus produces when it bothers to produce a disease at all.   For over a year now every death that occurred to someone infected with this virus was counted a COVID-19 death even if other morbidity factors included automobile accident injuries, gunshot wounds, or being eaten by wild animals.   George Floyd, who was experiencing symptoms at the time of death that actually correlate with those known to be caused by the virus, is the sole exception of which I am aware.

 

Even if none of this was the case however and Chauvin’s knee actually had caused Floyd’s death he still should never have been charged and tried.   I don’t say this because he is a cop.   I say it because the media, professional and social, had already tried and convicted him in their own forum within a day of Floyd’s death.   If this were not sufficient in itself to preclude his ever having a fair trial before an unprejudiced jury, the long hot summer of rioting and violence in Minneapolis and other major American urban centres constituted mass intimidation of prospective jurors.   Then there was the blatant interference in the outcome of the trial by American political leaders including the present occupant of the White House and, most notoriously, Californian Congresswoman Maxine Waters.   Unlike Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould in the Stanley trial, these did not wait to make their inappropriate remarks as ex post facto commentary on the verdict, but instead made them prior to the jury’s deliberation.

 

The trials of Gerald Stanley and Derek Chauvin were heavily politicized due to the racial aspect of the trials.  Stanley and Chauvin are white men, Colten Boushie was a Native Indian and George Floyd was black.   To the progressive commentators, activists, and politicians who politicized these trials, this was all that was necessary to come to the conclusion that racially-motivated murder had been committed.   All this demonstrates, however, is just how toxic the racist ideology of progressives has become.   When you politicize a trial in this way, refusing to allow the courts to do their job and decide the outcome based on law and evidence, but instead demand a guilty verdict for reasons of racial politics, the consequence of your own actions is that the only just outcome of the trial is dismissal or an acquittal regardless of actual guilt or innocence on the part of the accused.   A guilty verdict, under these circumstances, would amount to a lynching.

 

The principles that I have defended in this essay are the principles that underlie justice in civilization.   While those who have been demanding Chauvin’s head have been framing their demands in terms of “racial justice” this is not really justice in the civilized sense of the term at all, but a tribal blood vengeance that elevates blood and skin colour over law, evidence, rights and due process.   This is a sign indicating a rapid slide into barbarism, one of several that we have seen recently.  The insane drive to erase history (1) which kicked into high gear at the same time and in conjunction with the George Floyd riots is another.   Ironically, the institution that the Left, seizing the opportunity afforded them by George Floyd’s death, sought to indict alongside the man Chauvin, the police, is also indicative of the decay of civilization into barbarism.   In this case it is the slower, more gradual, decay over the course of the Modern era that is indicated.   The police in the modern sense of the term is a semi-military force employed by government to spy on its own people in order to terrorize them into obedience.   Like the near ubiquitous false equation of democracy – mob rule – with constitutionally restrained government, the police are an indication of how we have gradually moved from civilization towards barbarism in its totalitarian form in the Modern era.  (2)   What we are seeing now in the racialized bloodlust against Chauvin is a much faster move into barbarism in its anarchistic form.   Both forms of barbarism are equally undesirable with the paradoxical combination of the two, which the late Sam Francis dubbed anarcho-tyranny, being the worst of all barbarisms.   This is the barbarism into which we are rapidly descending.

 

(1)   While the past itself cannot be erased, history, as John Lukacs defined it, “the remembered past” can.

(2)   Totalitarianism is the idea that we, our lives, and our persons are the property of the state which has the right to do with us whatever it wishes.  It is a Modern idea, the reverse side of the coin of Modern democracy, the idea that the people are collectively sovereign and the state is the voice of the people.  The Modern concept of democracy is not compatible with the civilized ideal of constitutional limits or restraints on government.  Totalitarianism is its inevitable logical conclusion.   The civilized ideal is compatible only with the ancient, prescriptive, institutions of monarchy and parliament.   In practice, totalitarianism requires the Modern police to impose the “general will” of the people.   This is why totalitarian states are often called police states.   The police, by contrast with the civilized institutions of monarchy and parliament, is a fundamentally barbaric institution, which is one reason why it tends to draw bullies, thugs, and other low-life scum into its ranks, offering them a quasi-legitimate venue for indulging their violent and criminal tendencies.    Ironically, Derek Chauvin may very well be one of the few police officers who does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

Defund the Left!

Last month I made the suggestion that we disarm the police. This was a proposal for a sort of “reverse gun control” and was the third in a series of four essays written in response to the way the Prime Minister had shamelessly capitalized on the suffering of the families of the victims of the Nova Scotia shooter to ban the sale and ownership of a large number of rifles based solely on their outward appearance. The police in Lethbridge, Alberta had made fools of themselves on May 4th by drawing their guns on a girl dressed up for “Star Wars Day” and carrying a toy gun as a prop. Since the police have been the biggest supporters outside the political left, of the excessive and unnecessary firearms restrictions that the evil Liberal Party of Canada loves to impose, primarily on Canadians in the prairies and other rural areas, I figured they deserved to have the tables turned on them.

Some people thought the proposal to be a rather radical one. It was not, though. Not really. Radical, despite its derivation from the Latin word for “root”, is generally used to indicate that something is a major break away from what is customary and traditional towards what is novel and unprecedented. My proposal would bring the policing aspect of the Canadian branch of the great tree that is the British Commonwealth tradition back in line with the trunk. Police in England do not traditionally carry firearms. My proposal, therefore, could only be called radical in the archaic sense of “having roots” which is seldom if ever used today.

By contrast, the anti-white, anti-police, hate movement known as Black Lives Matter has come up with a proposal that is truly radical in the modern and contemporary sense of the term. “Defund the police” and even “abolish the police” are the slogans at the forefront of their most recent round of protests and riots. To defund or abolish the police is to defund or abolish law and order since the police are by definition those whose office it is to enforce the law and maintain order. To call for the abolition of the police is to call for chaos. It is appropriate, in a dark and twisted sort of way, that the thugs and crooks and hooligans and other low-life scum who are smashing windows, looting stores, burning down buildings, and tearing down monuments, would be in favour of something that amounts to chaos. It is difficult to understand why anybody else would treat it as a serious proposal.

Black Lives Matter claims that the institution of the police is deeply embedded with racism towards blacks in the United States and towards Indians in Canada. The evidence does not bear this out, but the news media has been distorting the facts to make the same claim for so long, that most people believe it. The supposed racism of the police is the basis for the movement’s call to defund or abolish them. To protect blacks from the police, the police need either to be abolished or to have most of their funding transferred to social programs of various sorts.

Now that we have seen what stupid people do in lieu of thinking let us look at what someone who knows what he is talking about has to say on this matter.

David Clarke Jr., was sheriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin from 2002 to 2017, and a career law enforcement officer long before that. He is himself black. His take on defunding or abolishing the police is very different from that of the Black Lives Matter thugs.

In an interview with WorldNewsDaily earlier this week, Clarke said:

The biggest losers in all this will be poor black people in crime-ridden ghettos. The police are the only thing standing between them and violent criminal predators.

Clarke is, of course, right about this. Poor black neighborhoods, especially in large cities, have been afflicted with much more crime, especially robbery and homicide, than other neighborhoods for decades now. This, and not “police racism”, is the reason they are arrested and on the receiving end of police violence in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population. This is not a case of black neighborhoods being invaded by white criminals. It is overwhelmingly black-on-black crime. When police use force against black criminals it is primarily black victims whom they are protecting.

Clarke, therefore, was also right when he went on to say of the “defund the police” proposal:

You'd have to loathe black people to do that to them.

What Clarke has pointed out here is a particular example of a general observation that has been around for a long time - revolutions usually make things much worse rather than better for those in whose name they are carried out. The saying “a revolution eats its own children” goes back to the French Revolution when it aptly described the way the factions of the Jacobin Club, after sending the king, queen, aristocrats, and prelates to the guillotine, began turning on each other and denouncing each other as “enemies of the people” or “enemies of the Revolution”, until eventually even Robespierre himself, literally lost his head. The masses, however, fared even worse than the revolutionary leaders. The most general form of this observation goes back to Aristotle in his Politics, 2, 370 years ago. It was because revolutions so consistently made things worse rather than better, Aristotle argued, that the better constitutions are marked by their security and stability, and the best constitution would be the most secure and stable of them all.

Who in their right mind thinks that black people in the United States or Indians in Canada would be better off rather than worse of if there were nobody to investigate when one of them turns up having been murdered? Or that they would be better off rather than worse if there were nobody to call if their house or store were broken into?

Since they are the mostly likely to be victims of these and other serious crimes, somebody would have to be completely off his rocker to think they would be better off without the police. Liberals and progressives have been jumping on the “defund the police” bandwagon, but that is merely the same point worded another way.

There are a lot of reforms than can and should be made to law enforcement. This is not one of them.

A short time ago – it was just last month – the same people who are now calling the police racists and demanding that they be defunded and abolished, were insisting that they be given more power to go around ticketing people and imposing exorbitant fines for ordinary, everyday, non-criminal behaviour, such as shaking hands, going to church, or going for a walk in the park.

Never before has the late Sam Francis’s concept of “anarcho-tyranny” – a synthesis of anarchy and tyranny in which the ordinary protection of the rule of law is withdrawn (anarchy) and unjust, arbitrary, and oppressive rules are imposed (tyranny) – been more applicable. It is precisely what the left has been demanding.

Who do we talk to about defunding the left?

The Irrationality of Anti-Racism

It is amusingly ironic that in the taxonomy of modern thought, racism is considered to be a species belonging to the genus prejudice. The word prejudice refers to certain types of non-rational beliefs or ideas. Note that I said non rational not irrational. Something can be non-rational without being irrational. Something that is irrational is contrary to logic or reason. Something that is non rational is not derived from logic or reason but is not necessarily contrary to logic or reason. Prejudice, a word formed from components that mean “before” and “judgement”, denotes beliefs or ideas that have been formed before the process of making a reason based judgement. It has both a positive and a negative sense, although the former is all but forgotten in our day and age. Prejudice in the positive sense refers to the ideas that have been passed on to us through tradition that enable us to make decisions in the absence of the information necessary to form a fully rational judgment. Edmund Burke praised prejudice in this sense of the word at great length in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the other sense of the term, prejudice is a negative opinion formed against a person or group without sufficient evidence to support it. Both forms of prejudice are non-rational, neither is necessarily irrational, but the latter kind of prejudice is frowned upon because it involves unjustified injury to the reputation of a person or group. Racism is considered to fall under the category of the second kind of prejudice. This brings us back to our initial statement. The irony is due to the fact that anti-racism, in the sense of the set of beliefs that expresses itself in organized activism against racism, is not just non-rational but thoroughly irrational.

As evidence of this claim, I offer the anti-racist response to the words "All lives matter".

This expression is obviously itself a response to "Black lives matter", a phrase which began as a Twitter hashtag seven years ago when George Zuckerman was acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and which became the name of an organized activist movement. For the sake of distinguishing between the phrase qua phrase and the movement it has been attached to, quotation marks will be used when the phrase is intended and the capitalization of the initial letter of each word will indicate that the movement is intended. Note carefully the nature of the response. “All lives matter” does not contradict what is stated by “Black lives matter.” Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, it clearly affirms it. Black lives are part of the extension of all lives, therefore if all lives matter, black lives matter. Furthermore, “All lives matter” is more inclusive than “Black lives matter.” In anti-racist theory and rhetoric “inclusivity” is ordinarily considered to be good, desirable and ideal, while its opposite “exclusivity” is treated as being bad and undesirable. Indeed, one of the principle objections to racism is that it excludes people. A stereotypically racist club, for example, is one that excludes people from membership on the basis of their skin colour.

Anti-racists, however, regard “All lives matter” as being a racist slogan, take offense whenever they hear it, and demand that people stop using it.

Let us look at a couple of examples from this past week alone.

Grant Napear, long-time play-by-play television announcer for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, as well as the host of a show on Sacramento’s KHTK Sports 1140 radio station, was fired from the latter and made to resign from the former, because of a tweet including the slogan “All lives matter.”

Here in Manitoba, our provincial premier Brian Pallister, speaking on Tuesday about the anti-racism protest that was scheduled to take place on Friday and in support of that protest said “Black lives matter, All lives matter, of course” and was immediately attacked for doing so. Someone named Elsa Kaka, who apparently hosts a podcast entitled “The Ordinary Black Girl Podcast” gave an interview to the press in which she said “'All lives matter' is a deeply offensive and problematic phrase that has been used to derail and disregard the Black Lives Matter movement.” Pallister, much to my disgust, apologized on Wednesday.

How could "All lives matter" possibly be "deeply offensive and problematic" to anyone except those who hold and cherish the belief that some lives don't matter?

The rational answer is that it cannot. The late Sir Roger Scruton frequently talked about the distinction between "giving offence" and "taking offence" and here we have a textbook example. The phrase "All lives matter" does not give offence in what it affirms, those who object to it are taking offence.

The offence they take from the slogan has nothing to do with the meaning of the words themselves. Indeed, any attempt to find fault with the assertion made by those words would immediately render them susceptible to the charge that they think some lives don't matter. Their justification for taking offence, when they deign to give such a justification rather than simply assuming that their taking offence is itself its own sufficient justification, is to either rely upon the ad hominem argument that the slogan is racist because those who say it are racist, object to the intention of the words, i.e., to counter the "Black lives matter" slogan and criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, or argue that "All lives matter" detracts from their own message which is that the institutions and structure of American, and by extension all Western, societies are embedded with a racism that treats black lives as if they don't matter.

The first of these arguments merits no response.

The problem with the objection to the intent of the words is that it requires the assumption that the Black Lives Matter movement is or ought to be beyond criticism. This assumption is both false and dangerous. No movement, let alone one the "peaceful demonstrations" of which have a tendency to become violent or degenerate into riots, ought to be beyond criticism.

The final argument rests upon a belief that is widely held even though it is demonstrably wrong.

Let us consider the specific type of alleged institutional racism which has been the primary focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. Police in the United States, especially white police, are accused of being racist towards blacks and expressing that racism by making blacks more than anyone else the objects of the violent abuse of their authority.

The facts simply do not bear this out. In 2017 American police killed 457 whites and 223 blacks, in 2018 they killed 399 whites and 209 blacks, in 2019 they killed 370 whites and 235 blacks, and in this year so far they have killed 172 whites and 88 blacks. Now, the fact that the total number of whites killed each year exceeds the total number of blacks is not sufficient to disprove the allegation. It is to be expected because there are more whites than blacks in the United States. In 2017, for example, there were 247.62 million whites in the United States and 43.5 million blacks. Now here is where the argument for police racism comes in. There were 5.69 times the number of whites than blacks in the United States in 2017. By contrast the number of whites killed by police was only twice as high. This, the anti-racists maintain, proves that police are racist. If they weren't, the number of whites killed by the police would be around 5-6 times higher than blacks so killed. However, there is another figure which must be taken into consideration. In the same year out of reported non-fatal violent crimes, 2, 230, 910 involved white perpetrators and 1, 112, 610 involved black perpetrators according to the American Bureau of Justice Statistic’s National Crime Victimization Survey. In other words, the number of whites who committed non-fatal violent crimes was only twice the number of blacks, the exact same ratio as is found among white and black victims of police killings, and equally disproportionate to the relative size of the two racial populations. Since the vast majority of cases where police kill a suspect involve violent crimes - the recent example of George Floyd being an obvious exception as it involved passing a bad bill - it is far more rational, if far less politically correct, to attribute the disproportion in the percentage of blacks among victims of police violence to their identical overrepresentation among violent crime offenders than to racial prejudice on the part of the police. Since this holds true for pretty much any year for which these statistics are available, and studies have repeatedly shown that policemen of every race are far more likely to shoot a member of their own race than of the other, just as criminals of all races are far more likely to choose victims of their own race than of another, this conclusion is quite definite. Arguments which take the form of "but look at what happened to fill-in-the-blank" are not valid as a rebuttal. Ironically, they involve an extrapolation from the specific to the general that is very similar to the sort that anti-racists would immediately recognize as invalid in the case of racial stereotypes.

Clearly, the anti-racist condemnation of "All lives matter" is utterly irrational. This is only to be expected. After all, we are talking about a belief system/movement that fifty-six years after an American Congress that was by a vast majority white passed a bill protecting blacks against the private discrimination of employers, landlords, etc., sixty-three years after a white American president used military force to racially integrate a high school in Arkansas, forcing it to comply with the ruling of an all-white Supreme Court three years earlier that all segregation laws were unconstitutional, and one-hundred fifty-five years after an all-white American Congress abolished black slavery, maintains that institutional white racism is the biggest problem in the United States. Furthermore, it is a belief system the representatives of which frequently claim that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, which very much suggests that it is itself an example of the very thing it ostensibly opposes. The assertion that there is an evil demanding extirpation, of which all whites and only whites are guilty, cannot be anything other than racism against white people - frequently on the part of white people. It is thoroughly and utterly irrational

If We Must Take Away Guns From People Start With the Police

This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.

Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.

A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.

I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.

According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.

All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.

Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.

The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.

Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.

You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.

Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.

There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.

The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.

The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.


(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.

Obama's Legacy

The last year of the US presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is now half over and it is abundantly clear what his enduring legacy – that for which he will be remembered – will be. It will not be his disastrous attempt to give the United States a socialized health care system that has all the failings of ours up here in Canada and none of the more positive aspects. It will not even be the relentless jihad his administration has waged against traditional Christians on behalf of birth control, abortion, gay rights, and other aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution. Rather it will be a legacy of racial division and strife.

It would not have taken a great degree of prescience to have predicted as much in the fall of 2008 when Obama was first elected president. At the time media progressives in an orgy of self-congratulatory rejoicing proclaimed that the election of Obama was ushering in a new age of a new “post-racial” America, oblivious to the reality that in a republic which, for the first time its history, had chosen its president largely on the basis of his skin colour, race was obviously more important than it had ever been before. Less than a month after Obama’s first inauguration, his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. provided another clue as to the direction in which this administration would lead the United States when he berated Americans as a “nation of cowards” that has “still not come to grips with its racial past” and called for a “national conversation” on the subject of race. What Obama and Holder meant by “conversation”, of course, was not a dialogue, an interchange in which varying points of view are respectfully heard and discussed, but a monologue in which blacks voice their complaints and everyone else listens and grovels.

Then began the long stream of incidents in which the media shamelessly politicized the private suffering of black families who had lost a son to the gunfire of police or, in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case that started it all, a neighborhood watch co-ordinator, and Obama, even more shamelessly, interjected himself, and tried to make it all about him. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.” “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

This gave birth to “Black Lives Matter”, which started as a banal cliché and then grew into a radical protest movement. The movement is founded upon the idea that the United States of the present day is a white supremacist country in which black lives are devalued and the police, the agents of white supremacism, systematically target blacks with violence causing a disproportionate number of black deaths. This idea is, of course, completely contra factual, although every smug, snarky, self-assured, progressive on the planet seems to be convinced of its truth.

As was reported last year, far more whites die at the hands of the American police each year, than blacks. In Philadelphia, at least, black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot at blacks than white cops. Forty percent of cop killers in the United States are black, making blacks much more likely to kill cops than the other way around. For that matter, violent interracial crime in the United States is overwhelmingly black on white rather than vice versa. Finally, far more blacks die at the hand of other blacks each year, than at the hands of the police. If anyone devalues black lives in the United States, if anyone thinks that black lives do not matter, it is not white police officers, but other blacks.

If the people who parade under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” really believed their own slogan, they would be preaching at other blacks, rather than at white cops.

The slogan and the movement, however, have never really been about bringing down the black death count in America so much as stirring up bitterness, anger, and hatred against white people and especially against white cops. That there was an abundance of such bitterness, anger, and hatred already is quite in evidence in the statistics referred to above. To deliberately stir up more can only be regarded as an act of pure malice especially in the light of the deadly consequences that we have seen over the last couple of weeks.

On Tuesday July 5th a black man named Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the following day another black man, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in St. Paul, Minnesota. The media immediately began to fit these killings into their narrative of racist white cops killing innocent blacks – despite there being plenty of facts which do not fit that narrative (1) - while politicians like Obama and his heir designate Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to do the usual grandstanding and posturing. Then on Thursday, July 7th, at a protest over these killings organized in Dallas, Texas by Black Lives Matter, a black army veteran named Micah Xavier Johnson, having declared that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers” put this wish into action and went on a shooting spree, killing five officers and injuring about a dozen other people before holing up in a college building, where, in a bizarre sci-fi twist to the story, a police robot armed with a bomb took him out.

It did not end there, naturally. The next day similar incidents, albeit on a smaller scale, took place in Bristol, Tennessee, Valdosta, Georgia and Ballwin, Missouri. On the Saturday night after that someone began shooting at the police headquarters in San Antonio and that same weekend protests in Baton Rouge and St. Paul turned violent, with protestors in the latter attacking the police with crude projectiles and Molotov cocktails. Then, on July 17th, a man named Gavin Eugene Long, who referred to himself as a “black separatist,” shot six police officers in Baton Rouge.


At the recent Republican National Convention, David A. Clarke Jr., the Sherriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin called these events “guerilla urban warfare against the police”, which seems an apt description. Perhaps it would be more apt, however, to paraphrase the notorious remarks of the American president’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and say that “Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

At the beginning of his presidency, Obama’s administration asked for a national conversation on race, and at the end of it, what he has given America is a race war. This will be all that history will remember him for.

(1) Among other contra-narrative facts were that both men were armed, Sterling was resisting arrest, and the cop who shot Castile was not white.