People shouldn’t complain that police aren’t doing enough to combat rampant shoplifting and burglary. Unlike such naysayers, our police and the government they serve understand the inner logic of the modern state.
Treating shoplifting as an innocent prank and burglary as a minor offence is a faithful reflection of that logic, and there’s only one way our state could stop such crimes: making them legal, so they wouldn’t be considered crimes.
Today’s policing and crime tend to grow in parallel. Though England is being policed at a level that would make Robert Peel envious (the Met, for example, had 895 constables under him; today, it has 33,000), an Englishman’s person is increasingly unsafe in the streets, and his property is at the mercy of any derelict who can smash a window and shove his tattooed arms inside.
Contradiction? None whatsoever.
The modern state’s genetic code compels it to expand its power over individuals ad infinitum, regardless of such incidentals as the will of its subjects. That’s why, when it destroys the legal foundations of the West, the state is acting in character.
Governments are no longer there to protect society and individuals within it. They are out to protect the sacred cow of statism from whose udders they have sucked out what passes for their conscience.
For that reason, a crime committed by one individual against another is of little consequence to them, and yet petty crimes against the state, such as driving after a sip of wine too many or neglecting to pay customs duty on a watch, take on an almost religious significance, eliciting swift and sure punishment.
While failing to protect us, British laws also deny us the right to self-defence. If a burglar breaks in, we aren’t allowed to defend our property with anything other than our bare hands, useless against the murderous hammy palms of yet another ‘victim of social injustice’ who is unlikely to be overburdened with concerns about the sanctity of human life.
Yet a man has a God-given duty to protect himself, his family and his property against criminal intrusion. This always was an unshakeable certitude in Christendom, but old certitudes no longer apply. Western countries are now run not by statesmen but by glossocracies, wielding wokery like a club. The glossocratic logic they apply runs roughly as follows:
A criminal, say a serial shoplifter or a burglar, isn’t really to blame for his actions. He is plying his trade, like anybody else.
Of course, his trade is slightly naughty when compared with that of a butcher, a baker or a candlestick-maker. But the poor man isn’t to blame for plying it. He grew up needy and downtrodden, and it’s we, society at large, who are to blame for his plight.
The house or shop he robs belongs to a person who has amassed greater wealth because he was privileged. And anyway, though we shouldn’t talk about this out loud, the burglar is in the same business as the state: re-distributing wealth.
Burglary is a form of income tax, and the burglar merely collects the excess that has evaded the HMRC’s net. Because he hasn’t been authorised to act in this capacity, he deserves to have his wrists slapped. If he is caught, and we shouldn’t go out of our way to catch him, he may be tried, perhaps even convicted. But ideally he shouldn’t spend any time in prison, even if this isn’t his first offence.
The owner of the house doesn’t have much to complain about. His possessions are insured, so he can always buy another TV and replace the smashed window without suffering a great fiscal loss. Therefore, he shouldn’t resist the poor man breaking into his house. If he does, the burglar may have to defend himself, as he is entitled to do, and the whole thing may turn nasty.
If it’s the burglar who initiates violence, unlikely as it may sound, then the owner has the right to defend himself, too. But this right isn’t a licence to kill.
The force used by the owner must be exactly commensurate with the force he is trying to repel. Thus, if the burglar brandishes a baseball bat (shops selling those are doing brisk business in the UK, even though nobody plays baseball), the owner is allowed to use a baseball bat in self-defence. If the burglar pulls a knife, the owner is allowed to use a knife.
If the burglar brandishes a gun, the owner – well, let’s not get carried away. The owner still isn’t allowed to have a loaded gun handy, so he shouldn’t have provoked the poor young man into resorting to such egregious extremes.
If the owner does use a force that exceeds whatever he is threatened with, then he is the criminal and the burglar is the victim. If the owner, for example, panics and kills the burglar with a meat cleaver when none is found in the burglar’s possession, then the owner shall be convicted of manslaughter.
There goes another certitude, according to which a criminal violating a citizen’s property isn’t entitled to the benefit of the doubt. He may have broken in ‘just’ to steal a TV set, not to rape and murder. But the burden of proof should be on him.
However, a frightened, confused owner of the house, awakened in the middle of the night to find a gorilla-like stranger in his bedroom, has no time to grant the intruder to produce such proof. He has to assume the worst.
The owner’s duty to himself and his family is to assume that the intruder has come to do murder. Even if murderous intent is unlikely, the risk is always there, and that isn’t a risk a law-abiding man should be expected to take with his life.
This ancient certitude, however, flies in the face of modern times by negating the logic above. A man who takes a swing at a burglar or a shoplifter presents a greater threat to the state than the criminal does. The former assails the glossocratic premise of the modern state; the latter merely attacks individuals.
These observations apply to all our recent governments, regardless of which party formed them. But our government today is latently Marxist, which is why it’s also taking profitable lessons from totalitarians.
Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks treated enemies of the state with murderous efficiency, while petty criminals often got away with no more than avuncular admonishment. The Soviets, for example, developed the concept of ‘the socially close’ to describe criminals of proletarian or peasant descent.
The concept was expounded in detail by Anton Makarenko, manager of the first Soviet colony for juvenile delinquents. The underlying assumption was that, because they were ‘socially close’ to the state, young criminals, many of them murderers, ought to be rehabilitated, not punished.
“It is only the intelligentsia, children of the upper classes, priests and landowners who are beyond redemption,” wrote Makarenko.
While today’s bureaucrats are unlikely to have read this, they proceed from similar assumptions. An illiterate criminal in no way jeopardises state power. The lout’s victim may.
Hence, every new law will favour the criminal over the victim. Even if an ancient law remains on the books, and an attempt at enforcement is made, the state will make sure that whenever possible an arrest won’t result in a conviction, or a conviction in imprisonment.
Instead of protecting the ‘rights of Englishmen’, the law is becoming a weapon of mass destruction in the escalating class war. Except that only one side is fighting it.