Gangsters in Blue

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been witnessing a huge leap forward towards a police state over the past week. In addition to the preemptive raids, extralegal break-ins, illegal detentions, disappearing citizens, news media harassment, and general displays of unprovoked violence by law enforcement, we’ve witnessed a very aggressive strategy of mass arrests. Here’s some choice documentation on their strategy for trapping and processing as many people as possible - protestors or not.

While apologists for cops may represent indiscriminate arrests as necessary, it’s actually incredibly sloppy police work. They just declare a “national security event” and suddenly there is no need for self-discipline or judgement whatsoever. Why should people take cops’ authority seriously when they prosecute their jobs so carelessly? If national security is truly at stake, why sweat a few broken windows?

Imagine if this was their response to any suspected crime: just arrest everybody near the scene! Why not just arrest everybody in the city, or the state - surely if everybody’s under arrest, there’s nobody to get in the way of the convention. Cities are a lot safer if you get rid of the people, law enforcement seems to think.

Yet isn’t this the modus operandi of any totalitarian state? By denying everybody freedom and granting police maximum prerogatives to detain, surveil, and otherwise harass citizens, a government blurs the distinction between being under arrest or being free. People under despotic governance experience a sliding scale of captivity, to be moved up or down at the discretion of unaccountable bureaucrat/captors.

It is important to correctly recognize this trend towards a police state. The myths of freedom, civil rights, and the rule of law must be maintained. So instead, the government institutes the police state on demand - invoking it when necessary, and then dispersing it without a trace and shrugging, “what fascism?” You’re never free, really - you just enjoy perpetual probation until the next time the government flips the switch. Under arrest? That’s a relative term; just check the threat level.

This is exactly how police states arrive historically - in easily ignored, irregular spurts. Those are perfect opportunities to train officers in their new attitudes towards citizens, gather data on the effectiveness of tactics, and experiment with new strategies for oppression. The trick is always for the people to wake up before the slow metamorphosis passes the point of no return.

Sadly, it’s clear to me that we’ve probably missed our last chances to reverse these trends. With the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act granting the legal cover for whatever our rulers want to label as “terrorism” and impenetrable secrecy about anything else, there’s no recourse in “the system” for citizens to air legitimate grievances. Meanwhile, any direct action is dealt with in the most brutal manner possible (yes, they could be more brutal - but that would impact the efficiency of their actions).

So if we’re in a police state now, what do we do? Obviously, there was a point at which the citizens of Germany in the ’30s gave up on speaking out. There was a point at which the Soviet citizens stopped protesting the Bolshevik treachery. Throughout history, people who found themselves under a totalitarian government had to face a terrible fact: that the modes of democratic society were no longer tenable.

But to admit to yourself the horrible truth, that we have lost our country, that is the truly difficult thing. Keep in mind, however, that it has always been through denial, self-deception, and lack of honesty on the part of the people that totalitarianism has gained a foothold. We must be courageous, pragmatic, and most of all careful. The rules have changed, and if we’re going to play this game we do well to use our time-outs to strategize, not simply to feel sorry for ourselves. In other words, as much as I hate to say it, we’re going to have to unlearn the bad habits of citizenship in a democratic republic.

The silver lining in the police brutality at the RNC this week is really that the activist movement might finally see themselves on the other side of the rubicon. As John Robb explains:

Very cool demonstration from Minnesota of how police forces have been militarized. In addition to the five fold growth in SWAT forces since the 90’s, there’s been a shift in attitude. All likely due to a misdirection of GWOT Homeland security $$ and thinking towards domestic protest. The side effect: the heavy handed approach here will cause a quick shift protest to the open source/disruption model if things deteriorate. Protest is dead. (my emphasis)

It’s time for the activist movement to modify their tactics to reflect the new environment. Flaunting our outrage in the hopes of media attention and citizen backlash has failed. Throwing our bodies on the gears of the machine has not slowed it, let alone stopped it. Protesting every violation of our rights just demonstrates in spades how vulnerable and dependent we are. Demonstrating and organizing just provide easy targets for agent provocateurs, infiltration, and extralegal, preemptive harassment.

Protest doesn’t work in a totalitarian police state. Acknowledging that condition is the first step towards fixing it. Whatever we’re going to do, it’s time to start doing it underground. It doesn’t have to be violent, but it does have to be realistic about the threat.

This is from Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1894 address, In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation. She is responding to Goldman’s maxim: “Ask for work; if they do not give you work, ask for bread; if they do not give you bread, then take bread.” What I love about her favorable yet cautious response to that phrase is the way she penetrates the illusory fervor of the mob mentality, extracting instead the need for reflection and understanding.

You are told you have the power because you have the numbers. Never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in numbers. One good, level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten excited, unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City. Do you know I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give you an illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain capitalist, and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of gold from the muscle of man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his workmen, (not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brickbats, red hot pokers, anti other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects, went up to his house for the purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly to do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone, one man, met them on the steps of his porch, and for two mortal hoers, by threats, promised, cajoleries, held those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they went away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his head. Now that was power! And you can’t help but admire it, no matter if it was your enemy who displayed it; and you must admit that so long as numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity, power does not reside in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving advice, I would not say, “take bread”, but take counsel with yourselves flow to get the power to take bread.

There is no doubt but that power is latently in you; there is little doubt it can be developed; there is no doubt the authorities know this, and fear it, and are ready to exert as much force as is necessary to repress any signs of its development. And this is the explanation of EMMA GOLMANN’S imprisonment. The authorities do not fear you as you are, they only fear what you may become. The dangerous thing was “the voice crying in the wilderness” foretelling the power which was to come after it. You should have seen how they feared it in Phila. They got out a whole platoon of police and detectives, and executed a military maneuver to catch the little woman who had been running around under their noses for three days. And when she walked up to them, why then, they surrounded and captured her, and guarded the city hall where they kept her over night, and put a detective in the next cell to make notes. Why so much fear? Did they shrink from the stab of the dressmakers needle? Or did they dread some stronger weapon?

Ah! — the accusation before the New York Pontius Pilate was: “she stirreth up the people”. And Pilate sentenced her to the full limit of the law, because, he said, “you are more than ordinarily intelligent”. Why is intelligence dealt thus hardly with? Because it is the beginning of power. Strive, then, for power.

In this era of ever expanding access to information, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the people down by force. This problem has been solved largely by inventing myriad means of distraction. Not only does this quell substantially the corrective dynamics that moderate outward inequality and subjugation, it also prevents the understanding of the self that is so crucial to unlocking the seat of true power.

I don’t really care whether you believe in God or not. What I care about is the human spirit, for that is the only gateway to our best nature. And that, my friends, is the only divinity we’ll ever be able to count on in any measure, regardless of the exact character of its source (which we insult one another by arguing over, as if we have the words to express the subtlety of these immensely personal experiences).

The more I study the task of liberation, the more clearly and urgently I perceive it as a struggle of self against the authoritarian within far more than against the authoritarian without. The latter’s position is far less precarious if they have set the terms by which you judge your own potential - if they have trained you, in other words, to oppress yourself. And similarly, I believe that the overthrow of the former will ultimately be more rewarding to the individual and, by extension, society.

As an end note, let me remind the reader that I wrote extensively about the crossover of spirituality and individualism in my essay, History as the Evolution of Identity.

This time it’s from Eric Husman:

The Left may not favor the police state, but they are for a police state. The Right is just the opposite: While they claim to be against a powerful, central government, they keep building the powerful, central government.

Of course, he’s entirely correct about the establishment Left and the Right. And keep in mind that the generality or specificity of their authoritarianism changes in direct proportion to who’s in power - in other words, the Right was all up in arms about militant law enforcement in the not too distant past. The establishment is defined by its pettiness, superficiality, lack of reflection, and most of all its sheer hypocrisy.

Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch fucking nails it - isn’t he on “teh Left”?

The Virginia Tech terrible massacre should prompt a radical review of the utility of SWAT teams which now infest almost every community in America. Each time there’s a hostage taking or a mass murderer on the rampage, one sees the same familiar sight: overweight SWAT men, doubled up under the weight of their costly artillery, lumbering along in their body armor and then hiding behind trees or cars or walls while the killer goes about his business. SWAT teams perform most efficiently when shooting down unarmed street people menacing them with cellphones.

The answer is to disband SWAT teams and kindred military units, and return to the idea of voluntary posses or militias: a speedy assembly of citizen volunteers with their own weapons. Such a body at Columbine or Virginia Tech might have saved many lifes. In other words: make the Second Amendment live up to its promise.

In 2005 I listened to some earnest ACLU type at a meeting in Garberville, an hour from where I live, deliver a judicious speech about Taser guns–a new toy for the cops, whereby a person can be zapped with 50,000 volts. The ACLU guy was torn. On the one hand, he reasoned that the Taser — being purportedly, though not actually non-lethal — is better than a 12-gauge or high powered rifle. On the other hand, there is the possibility of “improper use”. His answer: more regulation. He didn’t entertain the actual course of events, namely that Tasers have now been added to the means whereby the police can kill or terrorize people and that regulation will be zero.

The left complain about SWAT teams, but doesn’t see that the progressives bear a lot of responsibility for their rise. If you confer the task of social invigilation and protection to professional janissaries–cops — and deny the right of self and social protection to ordinary citizens, you end up with crews of over-armed thugs running amok under official license, terrorizing the disarmed citizens. In the end you have the whole place run by the Army or the federalized National Guard, as is increasingly evident now with the overturning of the Posse Comitatus laws forbidding any role for the military in domestic law enforcement.

I cannot tell you how happy I am seeing somebody on the left identify progressivism as part of the problem. The central task in the evolution of leftism in this country, now, is to rid itself of the vestiges of progressive thought - managerialism, professionalism, large-scale organization as an end in itself - and get back to its decentralized, populist roots.

Now, if we can just get some left wing militias in this country, we’ll be all set.

Since the Patrick Henry Supper Club meeting, I’ve been thinking about a lot of the questions I’ve received on what left libertarianism is. I can’t answer for anybody but myself, but I figure this is as good a place as any to try.

First, I should address the term “left”, since many find it grating and statist. My use of the term rests on its original usage since the French revolutionary era, stemming from the seating arrangements of the French legislature. Those who supported the ancien régime - the status quo, the establishment, the ruling class - sat on the right side of the assembly. Those who opposed the old guard (for whatever reason) seated themselves on the Left. Of course, opposing the establishment is not an endeavor unique to the Left, strictly speaking; nevertheless, it has been the Left that throughout history has consistently worked against authority. The Left has not always been libertarian, but the farther left one goes, the freer one gets, until you end up on the so-called “infantile Left” that was far too anarchic for somebody like Lenin. The central theme of leftism, at its heart, has been resistance to the status quo. That is the sense in which I’m a leftist (and the sense in which somebody like Stalin or Clinton could hardly qualify when compared to other thinkers and activists on the Left).

My leftist principles would not be alien to other libertarians. Abolishing aggression and fraud is still the ultimate means to libertarian ends. Where I find I differ with more mainstream libertarians is on my speculative vision of what those ends look like if the principles or liberty are consistently followed to their natural conclusion. Yes, it is a cultural issue, but not just that - left libertarians extend the analysis of the State consistently to uncover those aspects of the economy, society, and environment which are affected by the pernicious influence of the State in some way. A world without institutionalized violence, they believe, will necessarily free humanity to organize in a variety of ways that will change the face of the planet.