The funny thing about telling someone their whole life that people from Group X hate them and will kill them just for existing is that, even if it's not true, that person generally grows up to hate and fear the members of Group X. Every story that appears to confirm their bias will be taken as irrefutable proof of what monsters the members of Group X are, and every counter-example, even if vastly more numerous, will be disregarded as "the exception that proves the rule" or insufficient to mitigate the bias-confirming examples.
It doesn't matter who Group X is. If you tell a white child that black people are dangerous and that they hate her for her privilege and hold her responsible for slavery, that's the narrative that will frame her worldview. She'll either grow up to be an overt bigot, or she'll be afraid and feel anxiously compelled to please every black person she encounters to prove to them (and to herself) that she's not as bad as she thinks they think she is. She's going to be either hostile or nervous...or possibly both.
Now take that same dynamic, but make the child black and Group X the police. If a black child is immersed in a culture that tells him that the police hate him just for being black and that they'll shoot him if they can find any excuse to do so, he's going to grow up to either have a militant hatred of the police or to be deathly afraid any time he encounters a cop...maybe both.
Cops are trained to observe behavior, both to see cues that someone is about to harm them, and to see cues that a person is being evasive, possibly trying to hide evidence of a crime. So when such a person, whose first concern is staying alive and whose second concern is enforcing the law, encounters someone who a) immediately becomes combative and refuses to cooperate, b) quietly seethes with visible, murderous rage, or c) acts as nervous as someone who has a dead body stuffed full of cocaine stashed in the trunk, how do you think the cop is going to react?
I'll tell you. The threat level goes up, and they respond as they've been trained to when someone acts like that: they regard them as dangerous. So what might have been a smiling encounter and wishing a driver a nice day after warning them about wet roads gets escalated to a situation where orders are being barked and guns get drawn. But because the suspect has been programmed his whole life to believe that the police are doing this out of pure malice, he reacts in exactly the opposite of the way he should. He fights, or runs, or lies, or otherwise does any number of things that are perfectly justifiable to do when you think an all-powerful authority figure is about to murder you, but which are exactly the wrong thing to do when Officer Friendly just wants to see your driver's license.
Blacks get stopped and frisked at a higher rate than whites do because they live in poor, high-crime neighborhoods at higher rates than whites do--neighborhoods that are patrolled much more heavily because there are so many more 911 calls in those areas. And yes, that economic disparity is the result of racism. It's the lingering scar of centuries of economic apartheid. But it has nothing to do with whether or not a cop is a white bigot with a beef against black people. Agencies send units to where the crimes happen.
"Driving-while-black?" Try this experiment: Make a list of ten makes, models, and colors of cars and a random list of license plate numbers. We're going to pretend that this is a list of cars you've been told to be on the lookout for. Could be stolen vehicles, fleeing fugitives, Amber Alerts...it doesn't matter. Your job is to recognize them when you see them. Study this list. Stick it in your pocket. Now walk out onto an overpass that looks over a highway. Without taking out the list, look for any cars that match the ones on it. Also watch for anyone speeding, swerving, changing lanes erratically, following too closely, or anything else that might endanger others. If you can listen to a police scanner, keeping track of what's going on in the rest of the county while you do this, all the better.
A tan Honda Accord goes by. There was one of those on the list! Wasn't there? Take the list out of your pocket and check. Yep! Sure, it's one of the most common cars on the road, but at least you spotted it. Now...what was the plate number? In all likelihood, you couldn't read the plate. Maybe you didn't even see it. If you were in a patrol car, you might try to get close enough to read it and call it in for a check. But unless you're Rain Man, there's no way you read the plate on that car as it whizzed by while you were watching the traffic flow as a whole and focused on picking out makes and models.
But forget the plate. What color was the driver's face? Looking straight down into the windshield from above, you have a much better view than the typical road cop. From the road, mostly what you see when you try to see the driver is a glint of sunlight or street lights, or a dark silhouette. All the silhouettes are dark, even the ones of white people. The only thing you really know about the driver is that there is one.
So how, based on that, could you possibly target people of a particular race? You can't. Of course, this doesn't account for how a cop might treat a driver after she's pulled him over, approached the car, and discovered that he's black. What it does show us is that in most cases, police couldn't possibly pull people over based on the race of the driver even if they wanted to, because they can't tell until the stop has already been made. That inconvenient fact does nothing, however, to slow down the persecution complex of someone who's been raised on the idea that everything in life is rigged against him.
With notable exceptions like Ferguson, police departments openly discriminate in favor of women and minorities. I don't know if it's still the case, but ten years ago, if anybody, of any color, wanted to apply for a job as a cop at the Columbus Division of Police, they had to get the application from a place called the Office of Minority Recruitment. Agencies regularly mandate that their officers attend Cultural Sensitivity training, which is invariably aimed at helping officers learn to understand and sympathize with women and non-whites...regardless of the demographics of the officers attending. Useful as it would be to law enforcement, I've never heard of any agency sponsoring a Cultural Sensitivity training session focusing on understanding Christian fundamentalists or the honor culture of Appalachia or understanding the motivations and psychological makeup of Occupy protesters. When an altercation occurs between a man and a woman, most officers--of either sex--will presume that the male is the aggressor and the female is the victim. Even if the opposite is discovered to be true, they'll typically go easier on her than they would on him. If you don't speak English and you're arrested, police will usually go to some effort to locate a translator to make sure you fully understand your rights. If you speak English and you're just too ignorant to understand the Miranda warning, no special effort will be made to help you understand that confessing and pleading guilty is generally a bad idea.
So most police departments actively root out racism and have been pushing the pendulum in the direction of favoring minorities for over twenty years now, but we still have this persistent urban myth about racist police that's become an article of faith among African-Americans as well as among fearful white people who are eager to prove themselves worthy of black approval. It is this myth that trains young black people to have bad encounters with the police. When you perpetuate the lie that police want to kill black people, when you add your voice to the chorus of voices affirming that this lie is the gospel truth and everybody knows it, you're condemning more black youth to violent deaths and incarceration. It's not the 1950s anymore. The old wounds still hurt and are fresh in the minds of the victims of the racist police departments of ages past. But picking off scabs isn't helping those wounds heal. Passing this PTSD and culture of paranoia onto subsequent generations isn't helping them. If you care about the well-being of black children, give them the opportunity to see the police portrayed the way white children see them. Give them the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of what is and isn't actually dangerous. Quit rigging the game against them. Quit programming them to be victims.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Would You, Could You, in the Dark?
A question was posed on a Facebook page I follow:
"If we could successfully grow meat in a nutrient vat (which tasted exactly the same as normal meat and was the same price), would you eat it? Would you also stop eating normal meat?"
My answer:
No.
Let's say I did. Let's say we all did. Demand for meat from living animals would decline until the industry went under entirely. With such an option available, arguments to ban the production and eating of meat from animals would not seem so unreasonable, and would probably gain enough traction in some places to become law. Barns would be torn down, pastures would be paved over. Breeds of livestock would go extinct. Entire species of livestock might become endangered.
So now we're committed. Not only are the animal farms gone, but nobody's growing feed for these now non-existent livestock. Those vast acres of prairies are now growing biofuels, or perhaps they've been paved over and turned into strip malls and housing subdivisions. Food now comes from high-tech laboratories. They use a lot of highly specialized chemicals that are manufactured specifically for that process. The conditions for growth are monitored and maintained by computers. The whole process consumes massive amounts of energy. There's demand for biotech engineers, but common farm workers are displaced.
And then, maybe generations later, something happens. Maybe bad weather causes a disruption in the supply chain. Maybe political turmoil causes a spike in energy costs, forcing food prices through the roof. Maybe someone hacks the software. Maybe a rare mineral used in the equipment becomes unavailable. The more complex the system, the more opportunities there are for failure.
The people can't rely on the factories to feed them anymore, so they decide to turn back to animals for meat...only they can't now. In this future, nobody knows how to hunt anymore. Nobody has any livestock. Even if they could obtain it, they'd have forgotten how to care for it, how to breed it, and how to butcher it. And even if all that knowledge was all archived in libraries or the Internet, nobody would have the stomach for it anymore. By then, every aspect of it would have been outlawed. The entire populace would be suffering such an extreme case of acorn tree syndrome that the very thought of killing an animal and cutting it into pieces for food would seem like cannibalism. Even if people got desperate enough to overcome their squeamishness, all the land for grazing the animals or growing their feed will have been reassigned to other purposes, and nobody's going to volunteer their house to get torn down to make pasture.
Earlier this evening, from a second-story window, I used a bow to shoot a groundhog that was going for my vegetable garden. I want to become proficient at making such weapons from materials that grow wild on my land, and teach my children to do the same. Those are skills we can count on to feed us. We can take them with us anywhere we have to go, no matter what happens in the Middle East or Washington or in the stock market.
"If we could successfully grow meat in a nutrient vat (which tasted exactly the same as normal meat and was the same price), would you eat it? Would you also stop eating normal meat?"
My answer:
No.
Let's say I did. Let's say we all did. Demand for meat from living animals would decline until the industry went under entirely. With such an option available, arguments to ban the production and eating of meat from animals would not seem so unreasonable, and would probably gain enough traction in some places to become law. Barns would be torn down, pastures would be paved over. Breeds of livestock would go extinct. Entire species of livestock might become endangered.
So now we're committed. Not only are the animal farms gone, but nobody's growing feed for these now non-existent livestock. Those vast acres of prairies are now growing biofuels, or perhaps they've been paved over and turned into strip malls and housing subdivisions. Food now comes from high-tech laboratories. They use a lot of highly specialized chemicals that are manufactured specifically for that process. The conditions for growth are monitored and maintained by computers. The whole process consumes massive amounts of energy. There's demand for biotech engineers, but common farm workers are displaced.
And then, maybe generations later, something happens. Maybe bad weather causes a disruption in the supply chain. Maybe political turmoil causes a spike in energy costs, forcing food prices through the roof. Maybe someone hacks the software. Maybe a rare mineral used in the equipment becomes unavailable. The more complex the system, the more opportunities there are for failure.
The people can't rely on the factories to feed them anymore, so they decide to turn back to animals for meat...only they can't now. In this future, nobody knows how to hunt anymore. Nobody has any livestock. Even if they could obtain it, they'd have forgotten how to care for it, how to breed it, and how to butcher it. And even if all that knowledge was all archived in libraries or the Internet, nobody would have the stomach for it anymore. By then, every aspect of it would have been outlawed. The entire populace would be suffering such an extreme case of acorn tree syndrome that the very thought of killing an animal and cutting it into pieces for food would seem like cannibalism. Even if people got desperate enough to overcome their squeamishness, all the land for grazing the animals or growing their feed will have been reassigned to other purposes, and nobody's going to volunteer their house to get torn down to make pasture.
Earlier this evening, from a second-story window, I used a bow to shoot a groundhog that was going for my vegetable garden. I want to become proficient at making such weapons from materials that grow wild on my land, and teach my children to do the same. Those are skills we can count on to feed us. We can take them with us anywhere we have to go, no matter what happens in the Middle East or Washington or in the stock market.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Three Card Monte
Groups of white people sporting shaved heads and swastikas intimidate and harm people of color. But then when you get the leaders of those groups to talk about what they believe in, they'll tell you they don't believe in hurting anyone. They just want white people to be treated as equals and for whites to be able to preserve their culture rather than being taught to be ashamed of being white.
We see police officers beating and killing innocent people. We see them often held unaccountable for this, being protected from scrutiny by other officers. When an officer does try to blow the whistle on a colleague, we see other officers harass and intimidate the whistle blower. And yet, if you ask almost any cop about this brutality and the coverups, they'll say that they hate it as much as you do, that it's a handful of bad apples giving the whole profession a bad name. They'll tell you most cops get into the job because they want to protect people, not hurt them.
We've seen Muslim terrorists saying that Islam must dominate the world. We've heard them say that they are not bound by any law but sharia. We've even seen Shia and Sunnis killing each other. But go into almost any mosque in the world, and they'll tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the Quran says that when you kill one innocent person, you kill all of humanity. They say those violent people aren't "real" Muslims.
We see the Westboro Baptist protesters yelling that God hates fags. We see the cross-wearing protesters outside abortion clinics intimidating staff and patients, sometimes doing physical violence against them. It seems every bigot in American government who wants to oppress others identifies as a very religious Christian. Christianity was spread through the world by force, and entire wars have been fought at the order of the Vatican. Protestants and Catholics have killed each other for hundreds of years. And yet if you ask them, they'll tell you that their Bible tells them to love and not kill, and that they should turn the other cheek and be endlessly forgiving and merciful.
We hear high-profile feminists throughout history denouncing men, regarding men as redundant, disposable, inferior, and as a threat to be eliminated. Feminists have rallied for equal pay, but not for equal financial obligations. They want women to have the agency that is afforded to men, but freedom from the responsibilities that go with it. They protest female--but not male--genital mutilation. They'll raise a stink about Boko Haram kidnapping a bunch of girls, but not even mention the same group murdering a bunch of boys.They elevate the emotional and sexual concerns of women above the literal life-and-death concerns of men.
But then if you denounce feminism on these grounds, someone will claim that feminism is simply about equality, and that to be against feminism is to be against equality.
Being against racism does not make you anti-white. Being against police brutality does not make you against protecting people. Being against terrorism doesn't make you against religions of peace. Being against worldwide repression doesn't make you against love and forgiveness. And being against elevating women above men does not make you anti-equality. Quite the opposite.
Frankly, I'm sick of the double-talk from the lot of them.
We see police officers beating and killing innocent people. We see them often held unaccountable for this, being protected from scrutiny by other officers. When an officer does try to blow the whistle on a colleague, we see other officers harass and intimidate the whistle blower. And yet, if you ask almost any cop about this brutality and the coverups, they'll say that they hate it as much as you do, that it's a handful of bad apples giving the whole profession a bad name. They'll tell you most cops get into the job because they want to protect people, not hurt them.
We've seen Muslim terrorists saying that Islam must dominate the world. We've heard them say that they are not bound by any law but sharia. We've even seen Shia and Sunnis killing each other. But go into almost any mosque in the world, and they'll tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the Quran says that when you kill one innocent person, you kill all of humanity. They say those violent people aren't "real" Muslims.
We see the Westboro Baptist protesters yelling that God hates fags. We see the cross-wearing protesters outside abortion clinics intimidating staff and patients, sometimes doing physical violence against them. It seems every bigot in American government who wants to oppress others identifies as a very religious Christian. Christianity was spread through the world by force, and entire wars have been fought at the order of the Vatican. Protestants and Catholics have killed each other for hundreds of years. And yet if you ask them, they'll tell you that their Bible tells them to love and not kill, and that they should turn the other cheek and be endlessly forgiving and merciful.
We hear high-profile feminists throughout history denouncing men, regarding men as redundant, disposable, inferior, and as a threat to be eliminated. Feminists have rallied for equal pay, but not for equal financial obligations. They want women to have the agency that is afforded to men, but freedom from the responsibilities that go with it. They protest female--but not male--genital mutilation. They'll raise a stink about Boko Haram kidnapping a bunch of girls, but not even mention the same group murdering a bunch of boys.They elevate the emotional and sexual concerns of women above the literal life-and-death concerns of men.
But then if you denounce feminism on these grounds, someone will claim that feminism is simply about equality, and that to be against feminism is to be against equality.
Being against racism does not make you anti-white. Being against police brutality does not make you against protecting people. Being against terrorism doesn't make you against religions of peace. Being against worldwide repression doesn't make you against love and forgiveness. And being against elevating women above men does not make you anti-equality. Quite the opposite.
Frankly, I'm sick of the double-talk from the lot of them.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Radical Implosion & Radical Distillation
After long observation, I've come to a conclusion about something. The problem with any social movement aimed at remedying a perceived problem is that the leaders will tend to be the people most passionate about the cause. And the reason they tend to be the most passionate is because they're the ones who have been most harmed by whatever it is they're trying to change. The more vocal and committed the leader, the more likely they are to have been seriously traumatized by whatever it is they're fighting.
The problem is that they're also the people least capable of maintaining a sense of perspective about the problem. They become radical extremists who see the issue as black-or-white. They're difficult to reason with. They're nearly impossible to negotiate with. They're prone to making abusive statements about those who disagree with them.
When you've got loud, brash, unreasonable people leading a group and being the personalities the public associates with it, the group and its message tend to lose credibility (unless their views are widely accepted enough to become mainstream). Moderate people who would otherwise support the cause therefore feel alienated from it and make a point of identifying as not being "one of those crazy people over there." Moreover, if there is an opposing group, it will cite quotes or actions by those leaders to discredit the entire movement and its goals. In this way, the people who care most about the cause end up being the chief reason for its failure.
A wisely managed group, then, should be one where the radicals are put to work as foot soldiers, willing to sacrifice their reputations to the cause, but never allowed to ascend to positions of leadership or where they become the public face of the movement. The leaders can then maintain both an agreeable public image AND plausible deniability about the actions of their radical operators.
The problem is that if these people don't feel appreciated by the movement, they're highly motivated to go off and form their own organization, drawing all the radicals away from the more socially accepted parent organization. Call it "radical distillation." An example that comes to mind is the Tea Party. The GOP recognized the necessity of maintaining control of radical splinters like this, and to do so, you have to absorb them and offer them a sense of being more appreciated and more in control. That sense can be an illusion, but it must be present, or the radicals will continue to go their own way rather than serving the leadership of the larger organization.
The problem is that they're also the people least capable of maintaining a sense of perspective about the problem. They become radical extremists who see the issue as black-or-white. They're difficult to reason with. They're nearly impossible to negotiate with. They're prone to making abusive statements about those who disagree with them.
When you've got loud, brash, unreasonable people leading a group and being the personalities the public associates with it, the group and its message tend to lose credibility (unless their views are widely accepted enough to become mainstream). Moderate people who would otherwise support the cause therefore feel alienated from it and make a point of identifying as not being "one of those crazy people over there." Moreover, if there is an opposing group, it will cite quotes or actions by those leaders to discredit the entire movement and its goals. In this way, the people who care most about the cause end up being the chief reason for its failure.
A wisely managed group, then, should be one where the radicals are put to work as foot soldiers, willing to sacrifice their reputations to the cause, but never allowed to ascend to positions of leadership or where they become the public face of the movement. The leaders can then maintain both an agreeable public image AND plausible deniability about the actions of their radical operators.
The problem is that if these people don't feel appreciated by the movement, they're highly motivated to go off and form their own organization, drawing all the radicals away from the more socially accepted parent organization. Call it "radical distillation." An example that comes to mind is the Tea Party. The GOP recognized the necessity of maintaining control of radical splinters like this, and to do so, you have to absorb them and offer them a sense of being more appreciated and more in control. That sense can be an illusion, but it must be present, or the radicals will continue to go their own way rather than serving the leadership of the larger organization.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Your Opinion Doesn't Negate My Experiences
Let's talk about a form of bullying that doesn't get much attention: dismissiveness. In the debate over gun policy in America, we generally see the antis taking a superior tone and assailing the sanity, maturity, or bravery of anyone who feels the need to be armed. Here's a recent example I encountered on Facebook:
I saw this image shared by someone who likened a fear of being the victim of violence to that of a child being afraid of monsters under the bed. When these folks fall into unison chanting the word "paranoid," the underlying message is that there is no threat. They're saying that you don't need to protect yourself from violence, because there is no such thing. It only exists in people's imaginations, or in Darfur or somewhere like that. Other than maybe a fist fight on the school yard, they've never seen one person harm another, so their normalcy bias tells them that physical safety is the norm. The violence they hear about on the news, they rationalize, is only news because it's so unusual--like a plane crash or someone getting hit by lightning.They think they're safe by default, and that if you think you're not, it's because you've got an anxiety disorder and an overactive imagination.
Allow me to illustrate how wrong they are.
When reading the following, remember, I'm not talking about events in East L.A. or the South Side of Chicago. This didn't take place in East St. Louis or any of the seedier neighborhoods in New York. It wasn't Detroit or Miami. It was Ohio, and not even Cleveland. Some of the events were in a little podunk town of about 22,000 people on the Kentucky border, and the others were in Columbus, a city known more for its college football team and corporate headquarters than for violent crime.
In 1991, I was out for a walk and saw a middle-aged man dragging his wife down the sidewalk by the hair. I mean this literally. The woman was on the ground, hands on her head, screaming, while the man, gripping her by her hair, walked down the sidewalk, dragging her along. I called the police, but otherwise felt helpless to do anything other than yell at him to stop. Why did I feel helpless? Because Ohio law at that time made self-defense (or defense of another) an "affirmative defense," meaning that if I had actually gone and put my hands on the guy, I not only risked being charged with attacking him, I'd also be guilty until I managed to prove myself innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The woman endured a few more minutes of this torture before an off-duty cop arrived. We had to stand around waiting for an official rescuer to show up to stop the violence.
Around 1992, my girlfriend and I were living on the second-floor of a two-story house that had been divided into two apartments. The man who lived downstairs liked to beat his wife, and we naively called the police when he did so. This got us on his bad side. As a result, he started making a habit of getting drunk and yelling for me to come down and fight him. Sometimes he'd do this from his own apartment. Other times, he'd stand in the street and do it. Typically, we ignored it. One morning, though, we awoke to find the frame of our door broken and big, muddy footprints on the outside of the door. He had very nearly succeeded in kicking in our door while we were asleep, and we didn't even hear it. Had he given it just one more kick, there's no telling how far he might have gotten before we woke up, or what he'd have managed to do to us, as we were unarmed.
We called the police, but they said we'd have to go talk to the prosecutor. I took pictures of the footprints and the broken door frame, and went to the prosecutor's office. He did nothing, saying we couldn't reasonably say who did it. We complained to the landlord. He fixed the door frame, but the people downstairs remained.
Maybe a year or so after that, my girlfriend's crazy uncle (one of them) parked up the street and waited for me to leave for school. After I left, he knocked on the door. She opened the door a bit, and he tried to force his way in. She tried to shut him out, but he got one foot in the door and stopped it from closing. She sat on the floor leaning against the door to keep him out, and he kept trying to force his way in, yelling threats and obscenities the whole time. Eventually, she was able to reach a hammer I'd left at the bottom of the stairs, and used it to pound his foot. He withdrew it in pain, and she slammed the door shut and locked it.
He was gone by the time police arrived. To my knowledge, no warrant was ever issued for his arrest.
A few years after that, we were living in another upstairs apartment. Our downstairs neighbor apparently had an unpaid gambling debt, and his creditor showed up late one night, angry and too drunk to tell which door went to which apartment. My wife and I were woken by the sound of this man yelling and trying to kick in our door. As luck would have it, I had a .22 rifle I had borrowed from my father-in-law for use on my trap line. I grabbed the gun, took a position at the top of the stairs, and yelled to the man trying to break in. He heard me, saw me through the window, and ran away. We called the police. They found him hiding in our back yard.
In 2003, I was working nights as a police officer, so I was sleeping during the day. Across the street from my apartment was a car wash. One afternoon, I was woken by a loud argument at the car wash. I looked out the window and saw one car ram into another one. It looked deliberate. The first car started backing up, and I thought I was witnessing a hit-and-run, so I put on my glasses and tried to read the license plate. But instead of fleeing, the car was just backing up to ram a second time. I pulled on my jeans and duty belt, grabbed my wallet, and ran barefoot across the street. By the time I reached the driver, she had turned the car around and was trying to run down a pedestrian (her husband). I managed to pull her out of the car before she could hit him.
When I showed up for her trial, charges were dropped and she was referred for a psychiatric assessment. I don't recall any mention of her driver's license being revoked.
In 2004, three weeks after my wife and I moved into our first house, one of our neighbors tried to shoot another neighbor. I was still a police officer (in another jurisdiction), and a first responder as well by that time, so I went out to see if anyone needed medical attention while my wife called the local police. The bystanders were more freaked out seeing a cop with body armor and a shotgun on scene than they were about the shooting itself. About 15-20 minutes later, a township police car rolled by and I ran down the street waving at them to get them to stop. It was the last time in that neighborhood I bothered to report hearing shots fired.
This neighborhood has some wooded lots that were apparently popular places for criminals to hide, so the police helicopter pretty regularly buzzed over our house, circling the area looking for fleeing suspects. I can remember at least two different times when officers came through our back yard there searching for someone. It got to the point that whenever we heard the helicopter circling, we just locked the doors and turned on the outside lights. It was routine to have fugitives running loose in our neighborhood looking for a place to hide.
Sometime after this, I saw in the news that in the parking lot of the first apartment building I had lived in in Columbus, one man had hit another man in the head with a hatchet.
In 2010, our next-door neighbor called and said she saw some young men stashing something in the wood lot across the street from her. I checked it out and found what appeared to be stolen property. I contacted the owner of the lot, who lived just a couple doors up the street from us. He loaded the loot into his car and then turned it over to the police. The young men my neighbor saw in the woods came back to retrieve their stash. I went out to confront them and get their license plate number. They sped away. After that, my son and I left to run an errand. While we were gone, the thieves came back with reinforcements, knocking on our door. By the time my wife hid our baby daughter behind cover and got a gun, the thugs had moved on up the street. When they knocked on the door of the man who had turned the stuff over to the police, he answered it. The man knocking pulled a gun on my neighbor and demanded the loot. My neighbor then pulled out his concealed handgun and pistol whipped the assailant. The other thugs, who had been standing in the street holding sticks and rocks, dropped their weapons and ran...or tried to, anyway. The neighbor's sons grabbed a couple of the guys and beat the stuffing out of them before they got away.
We spent the rest of that day and much of the next couple days holed up in the house, worrying that the thieves would return with more men and better weapons. We had two young children to protect, and nowhere else to go. We had to be ready to fend off an attack if it came.
In 2012, animal rights activists started stealing my chickens and damaging my fences and chicken coops, but they didn't stop there. At one point, they used a ladder to climb into our house through a second-story window, and stole a bow, an axe, and arrows with broadheads. These are not things you want in the hands of someone who regards you as an enemy.
A few weeks after that, I caught some trespassers on my land, and one of them had stolen a knife out of my greenhouse. My phone was dead, so with a sledge hammer in one hand, I marched them next door and had a neighbor call the police. (I was hoping I had caught the chicken thieves.) While we were waiting for the police to arrive, one of the men said, "I'm not going back to jail," and walked away. I placed my free hand on the other guy's shoulder and he stayed. He had been very cooperative, returned my knife (which was broken and only worth $3.50 when it was new) without my even asking, and seemed to have been dragged into this by the troublemaker who ran away. When the prosecutor interviewed me, I spoke as strongly as I could in favor of showing the young man leniency. She was happy to hear it, but later called back and said he was in other trouble, too, and they were sending him to prison on felony charges instead.
I don't imagine that fellow is too happy with me. After he gets hardened in prison, I can't be certain that he'll be quite so agreeable when he gets out.
Also in 2012, a burglar broke into our house three days in a row. The first two days, he stole most of my tools and I filed a police report. The third day, I was waiting for him with a gun. When the police arrived, the burglar claimed he was just looking for some water because his car was overheating, and the sergeant let him go. Let me repeat that. The burglar had prior convictions for Receiving Stolen Property. He had a record of domestic violence. I had a report on file from just two days earlier. He came in the same way as the thief who had stolen my tools, but the police let him go...when he was caught in the act of a felony.
I had to go to the prosecutor's office myself to file charges. I was told that since a police officer didn't file the charges, they could only pursue misdemeanor charges against the burglar. He appeared on both the trespassing charge and a domestic violence charge, and got a suspended sentence of 30 days, with a warning not to contact me. Weeks later, as I was walking my son home from school, the burglar accosted me on the sidewalk. He asked if I knew who he was, and when I said that I didn't, he replied, "You stuck a gun in my face?" He then went on to tell me there were "no hard feelings," as though I were the one who had done something wrong. My son and I continued home, and I called the man's probation officer to report this violation. Then I went to court to get a protection order.
Last year, a man I know a couple blocks away needed some money and went to a neighbor's house to try to sell him a knife. The neighbor wasn't home, so after knocking a while, the man returned home and went to sleep. When the neighbor returned home, another neighbor (who has a well-known habit of making up lies about people just to start trouble), said that my friend had threatened to kill the family and cut off their heads with that knife. Neighbor #1 looked at his security camera video and saw footage of my friend standing on the porch with a knife in his hand. Rather than call the police right away or even investigate the matter further on his own, this neighbor decided to dispense some hillbilly justice. He rounded up his entire family, they strapped on their guns, and they went banging on my friend's door. They ordered his girlfriend to go wake him up and tell him to come out so they could beat him up. She refused, and they told her that if she didn't, they'd kill her, him, their other housemate, and the two dogs. To her credit, she stood firm and yelled at them to go away. As they left, they told her that she'd better find another place to live, because they'd be coming back to kill her if she didn't.
THEN the neighbor called the police. When the officer came around to interview the girlfriend who'd been threatened, she wanted to file a report. The officer wouldn't take one, instead saying, "I'd have done the same thing if I were them!"
There are two lessons I want you to take away from these stories: 1) at least in southern and central Ohio, the danger of violent crime is very real, and 2) you can't rely on the police to protect you from it. You can't even count on them after the fact to put the assailant away to keep it from happening again. As on a battlefield, there are people who will try to harm you, and it's up to you to stop them from succeeding. They might sometimes have guns, legal or not. Given these facts, what is the best way to deal with such a threat? Maybe you want to stick your head in the sand and imagine that you'll talk your way out of any threat that comes along. You're free to take that risk. But for the love of all that is good, don't try to impose that risk on others, and stop insisting that people who take rational measures to keep themselves alive are paranoid or childish for doing so.
I saw this image shared by someone who likened a fear of being the victim of violence to that of a child being afraid of monsters under the bed. When these folks fall into unison chanting the word "paranoid," the underlying message is that there is no threat. They're saying that you don't need to protect yourself from violence, because there is no such thing. It only exists in people's imaginations, or in Darfur or somewhere like that. Other than maybe a fist fight on the school yard, they've never seen one person harm another, so their normalcy bias tells them that physical safety is the norm. The violence they hear about on the news, they rationalize, is only news because it's so unusual--like a plane crash or someone getting hit by lightning.They think they're safe by default, and that if you think you're not, it's because you've got an anxiety disorder and an overactive imagination.
Allow me to illustrate how wrong they are.
When reading the following, remember, I'm not talking about events in East L.A. or the South Side of Chicago. This didn't take place in East St. Louis or any of the seedier neighborhoods in New York. It wasn't Detroit or Miami. It was Ohio, and not even Cleveland. Some of the events were in a little podunk town of about 22,000 people on the Kentucky border, and the others were in Columbus, a city known more for its college football team and corporate headquarters than for violent crime.
In 1991, I was out for a walk and saw a middle-aged man dragging his wife down the sidewalk by the hair. I mean this literally. The woman was on the ground, hands on her head, screaming, while the man, gripping her by her hair, walked down the sidewalk, dragging her along. I called the police, but otherwise felt helpless to do anything other than yell at him to stop. Why did I feel helpless? Because Ohio law at that time made self-defense (or defense of another) an "affirmative defense," meaning that if I had actually gone and put my hands on the guy, I not only risked being charged with attacking him, I'd also be guilty until I managed to prove myself innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The woman endured a few more minutes of this torture before an off-duty cop arrived. We had to stand around waiting for an official rescuer to show up to stop the violence.
Around 1992, my girlfriend and I were living on the second-floor of a two-story house that had been divided into two apartments. The man who lived downstairs liked to beat his wife, and we naively called the police when he did so. This got us on his bad side. As a result, he started making a habit of getting drunk and yelling for me to come down and fight him. Sometimes he'd do this from his own apartment. Other times, he'd stand in the street and do it. Typically, we ignored it. One morning, though, we awoke to find the frame of our door broken and big, muddy footprints on the outside of the door. He had very nearly succeeded in kicking in our door while we were asleep, and we didn't even hear it. Had he given it just one more kick, there's no telling how far he might have gotten before we woke up, or what he'd have managed to do to us, as we were unarmed.
We called the police, but they said we'd have to go talk to the prosecutor. I took pictures of the footprints and the broken door frame, and went to the prosecutor's office. He did nothing, saying we couldn't reasonably say who did it. We complained to the landlord. He fixed the door frame, but the people downstairs remained.
Maybe a year or so after that, my girlfriend's crazy uncle (one of them) parked up the street and waited for me to leave for school. After I left, he knocked on the door. She opened the door a bit, and he tried to force his way in. She tried to shut him out, but he got one foot in the door and stopped it from closing. She sat on the floor leaning against the door to keep him out, and he kept trying to force his way in, yelling threats and obscenities the whole time. Eventually, she was able to reach a hammer I'd left at the bottom of the stairs, and used it to pound his foot. He withdrew it in pain, and she slammed the door shut and locked it.
He was gone by the time police arrived. To my knowledge, no warrant was ever issued for his arrest.
A few years after that, we were living in another upstairs apartment. Our downstairs neighbor apparently had an unpaid gambling debt, and his creditor showed up late one night, angry and too drunk to tell which door went to which apartment. My wife and I were woken by the sound of this man yelling and trying to kick in our door. As luck would have it, I had a .22 rifle I had borrowed from my father-in-law for use on my trap line. I grabbed the gun, took a position at the top of the stairs, and yelled to the man trying to break in. He heard me, saw me through the window, and ran away. We called the police. They found him hiding in our back yard.
In 2003, I was working nights as a police officer, so I was sleeping during the day. Across the street from my apartment was a car wash. One afternoon, I was woken by a loud argument at the car wash. I looked out the window and saw one car ram into another one. It looked deliberate. The first car started backing up, and I thought I was witnessing a hit-and-run, so I put on my glasses and tried to read the license plate. But instead of fleeing, the car was just backing up to ram a second time. I pulled on my jeans and duty belt, grabbed my wallet, and ran barefoot across the street. By the time I reached the driver, she had turned the car around and was trying to run down a pedestrian (her husband). I managed to pull her out of the car before she could hit him.
When I showed up for her trial, charges were dropped and she was referred for a psychiatric assessment. I don't recall any mention of her driver's license being revoked.
In 2004, three weeks after my wife and I moved into our first house, one of our neighbors tried to shoot another neighbor. I was still a police officer (in another jurisdiction), and a first responder as well by that time, so I went out to see if anyone needed medical attention while my wife called the local police. The bystanders were more freaked out seeing a cop with body armor and a shotgun on scene than they were about the shooting itself. About 15-20 minutes later, a township police car rolled by and I ran down the street waving at them to get them to stop. It was the last time in that neighborhood I bothered to report hearing shots fired.
This neighborhood has some wooded lots that were apparently popular places for criminals to hide, so the police helicopter pretty regularly buzzed over our house, circling the area looking for fleeing suspects. I can remember at least two different times when officers came through our back yard there searching for someone. It got to the point that whenever we heard the helicopter circling, we just locked the doors and turned on the outside lights. It was routine to have fugitives running loose in our neighborhood looking for a place to hide.
Sometime after this, I saw in the news that in the parking lot of the first apartment building I had lived in in Columbus, one man had hit another man in the head with a hatchet.
In 2010, our next-door neighbor called and said she saw some young men stashing something in the wood lot across the street from her. I checked it out and found what appeared to be stolen property. I contacted the owner of the lot, who lived just a couple doors up the street from us. He loaded the loot into his car and then turned it over to the police. The young men my neighbor saw in the woods came back to retrieve their stash. I went out to confront them and get their license plate number. They sped away. After that, my son and I left to run an errand. While we were gone, the thieves came back with reinforcements, knocking on our door. By the time my wife hid our baby daughter behind cover and got a gun, the thugs had moved on up the street. When they knocked on the door of the man who had turned the stuff over to the police, he answered it. The man knocking pulled a gun on my neighbor and demanded the loot. My neighbor then pulled out his concealed handgun and pistol whipped the assailant. The other thugs, who had been standing in the street holding sticks and rocks, dropped their weapons and ran...or tried to, anyway. The neighbor's sons grabbed a couple of the guys and beat the stuffing out of them before they got away.
We spent the rest of that day and much of the next couple days holed up in the house, worrying that the thieves would return with more men and better weapons. We had two young children to protect, and nowhere else to go. We had to be ready to fend off an attack if it came.
In 2012, animal rights activists started stealing my chickens and damaging my fences and chicken coops, but they didn't stop there. At one point, they used a ladder to climb into our house through a second-story window, and stole a bow, an axe, and arrows with broadheads. These are not things you want in the hands of someone who regards you as an enemy.
A few weeks after that, I caught some trespassers on my land, and one of them had stolen a knife out of my greenhouse. My phone was dead, so with a sledge hammer in one hand, I marched them next door and had a neighbor call the police. (I was hoping I had caught the chicken thieves.) While we were waiting for the police to arrive, one of the men said, "I'm not going back to jail," and walked away. I placed my free hand on the other guy's shoulder and he stayed. He had been very cooperative, returned my knife (which was broken and only worth $3.50 when it was new) without my even asking, and seemed to have been dragged into this by the troublemaker who ran away. When the prosecutor interviewed me, I spoke as strongly as I could in favor of showing the young man leniency. She was happy to hear it, but later called back and said he was in other trouble, too, and they were sending him to prison on felony charges instead.
I don't imagine that fellow is too happy with me. After he gets hardened in prison, I can't be certain that he'll be quite so agreeable when he gets out.
Also in 2012, a burglar broke into our house three days in a row. The first two days, he stole most of my tools and I filed a police report. The third day, I was waiting for him with a gun. When the police arrived, the burglar claimed he was just looking for some water because his car was overheating, and the sergeant let him go. Let me repeat that. The burglar had prior convictions for Receiving Stolen Property. He had a record of domestic violence. I had a report on file from just two days earlier. He came in the same way as the thief who had stolen my tools, but the police let him go...when he was caught in the act of a felony.
I had to go to the prosecutor's office myself to file charges. I was told that since a police officer didn't file the charges, they could only pursue misdemeanor charges against the burglar. He appeared on both the trespassing charge and a domestic violence charge, and got a suspended sentence of 30 days, with a warning not to contact me. Weeks later, as I was walking my son home from school, the burglar accosted me on the sidewalk. He asked if I knew who he was, and when I said that I didn't, he replied, "You stuck a gun in my face?" He then went on to tell me there were "no hard feelings," as though I were the one who had done something wrong. My son and I continued home, and I called the man's probation officer to report this violation. Then I went to court to get a protection order.
Last year, a man I know a couple blocks away needed some money and went to a neighbor's house to try to sell him a knife. The neighbor wasn't home, so after knocking a while, the man returned home and went to sleep. When the neighbor returned home, another neighbor (who has a well-known habit of making up lies about people just to start trouble), said that my friend had threatened to kill the family and cut off their heads with that knife. Neighbor #1 looked at his security camera video and saw footage of my friend standing on the porch with a knife in his hand. Rather than call the police right away or even investigate the matter further on his own, this neighbor decided to dispense some hillbilly justice. He rounded up his entire family, they strapped on their guns, and they went banging on my friend's door. They ordered his girlfriend to go wake him up and tell him to come out so they could beat him up. She refused, and they told her that if she didn't, they'd kill her, him, their other housemate, and the two dogs. To her credit, she stood firm and yelled at them to go away. As they left, they told her that she'd better find another place to live, because they'd be coming back to kill her if she didn't.
THEN the neighbor called the police. When the officer came around to interview the girlfriend who'd been threatened, she wanted to file a report. The officer wouldn't take one, instead saying, "I'd have done the same thing if I were them!"
There are two lessons I want you to take away from these stories: 1) at least in southern and central Ohio, the danger of violent crime is very real, and 2) you can't rely on the police to protect you from it. You can't even count on them after the fact to put the assailant away to keep it from happening again. As on a battlefield, there are people who will try to harm you, and it's up to you to stop them from succeeding. They might sometimes have guns, legal or not. Given these facts, what is the best way to deal with such a threat? Maybe you want to stick your head in the sand and imagine that you'll talk your way out of any threat that comes along. You're free to take that risk. But for the love of all that is good, don't try to impose that risk on others, and stop insisting that people who take rational measures to keep themselves alive are paranoid or childish for doing so.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
I Am Rubber, You Are Glue
Following is my reply to a left-wing blogger ranting about a right-wing author's claim that liberals are fascists:
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word "fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means "stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate "fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps, with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say, "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early 20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock. Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education, and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist, but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait. Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word "fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means "stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate "fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps, with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say, "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early 20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock. Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education, and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist, but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait. Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
Saturday, May 10, 2014
On Suppressing Dissent
It just occurred to me when reading about Sophie Scholl: governments that suppress dissenting speech are making a huge strategic error. I can see why they would have an interest in silencing people who want to publicize shameful things that the government prefers to keep secret, but making an example out of the person who says, "The Supreme Leader sucks! Down with the Supreme Leader!" is counterproductive.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
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