In dark times, look to the police for hope and potential.
Not to the soldiers: the legions of underfed, screamed-at, drug-addled grunts with body armor and assault rifles, who march through territory jet fighters have already pacified, gunning down disruptive natives and occasionally finding one who fights back. Look to the police, with training in weapons and urban combat; with moving among hostile urban populations where you can't just shoot out at every perceived danger; where you have to actually evaluate public oversight, scandal, and reasonable suspicion, at least to some degree.
And, more importantly, where you're a part of the community. The police who, still, live where they work, because it's not yet economically efficient to ship them in from different places. The police who shop in plainclothes where they
Propaganda For The Police
Elites know this, which is why cops are one of their primary targets for propaganda. Controlling unions, promotions, and retirement funds, and tying them to obedient performance, is a simple, obvious way to control police workers. The more insidious methods involve policy and planning meetings, where representatives from different government agencies ("higher" levels of "law enforcement" and "intelligence") pass along vague warnings of threats and plots that might affect their communities. By permitting actual street cops access to the secret, non-civilian intelligence reports from the central offices (think of retail employees getting a message from corporate), elites get cops to think they understand the real story. Making the messages "classified" makes them seem to have special meaning. The way to make people believe in outlandish stories is to make them secret--like pretending that you're unwilling to sell Grandma's priceless trinket to a naive pawnshop dealer, it makes the information seem that much more valuable. Just like westerners, Americans, academics, et cetera, the police think their increased levels of access to pieces of the story place them in a privileged position of understanding.
The intelligence that purposefully leaks out to the rest of us isn't really useful information; it's just a form of internal propaganda designed to control the militia. Higher levels of law enforcement and secret police exist to police the thoughts of the police. "Chiefs" and other administrators are selected for understanding the ebb and flow of local power, and the ways that local legislators, judges, prosecutors, and private security firms allow and disallow certain actions in certain places; the ways that essential money and influence move in and out of the community, and how to ensure that ground forces know what to look into and what to steer clear of.
Gun Control
Do you want gun control? Are you excited about any form of elite/state involvement in controlling access to dangerous technology?
Look, then, to the elite militaries and police forces as models of how it works out. Guns and ammo are more highly regulated within these organizations than anywhere else. Guns are checked out and back in by serial number. Clips and ammo are checked out, and back in, by number. Any use of a weapon must be logged and reported. Weapons may only be borne and displayed in certain times and situations. "Combat zones" are designated as such not because it makes it sound spooky for the news media, but because a formal combat zone is one of the rare places where a soldier may use ammunition without specific tracking. Officers carefully cordon off combat zones and non-combat zones to ensure that ammunition and weapons are not leaving military control in an area too peaceful to justify it.
(Remember how officers used to get fragged by their men during Vietnam? People with guns, and control over them, often start to resist elite plans to slaughter the world in service of elite wealth. Ergo increased gun control within the militia, so that weapon discharges could be tracked and officers would be safe to middle-manage expanding empires.)
The cost of monitoring the checking in and out of guns and ammo across the police, and the military, is a staggering one, involving careers in bookkeeping, information management, technology, computer science, warehousing and storage, and security. Several different IRS-like internal divisions exist in modern militaries, spending their way through countless millions of dollars each year tracking just what the grunts are doing with their training dummy, training live, and combat ammunition and weapons. The tax dollars of the laboring base pay for this stupendous accounting task, just as they pay for the IRS and the Fed to track and order money and securities. And oh, lots of people starve across the planet, and there's certainly a connection to be drawn there between the use of resources on hyper-sensitive programs of tabulating which gun/dollar/bullet/cent/widget goes where, what it did when it got there, how much of it came back, and how much of it went out again.
...stored in triplicate firsthand, backed up in dozens of government servers, and guarded for a hundred years by paid mercenaries at facilities rented for classified storage.
Leaving aside the money, how are those controlled guns used? Well,
So the whole "control" thing doesn't seem to help. Private citizens kill--both proportionately and overall--fewer victims per year/decade/century with their unlicensed and/or licensed firearms than do the most highly trained, highly regulated gun-users on the planet. Increased gun regulation, then, corresponds to an exponential increase in gun deaths. Taking more power from all humans, and placing it in the hands of the same administrators who brought you the presidency of George W. Bush, would be the actions of a madman.
BDUs
Soldiers, town guards, cops--all used to be the same thing. The idea of "our fighters" having different classifications is a relatively new, and objectively stuporous, one. Changing titles allows for changing standards of honor and responsibility; "to protect and serve" rather quickly becomes "death from above." That's what "soldiers" are: the police of the future; police who are moved, by elites, from one region to another, where they are freed from any scruples of connection to the land and its people, and free to act out elite will without repercussion. The elite goal right now is to separate police from their communities, making them more and more responsible to distant authorities, and even to physically live farther away. Police will be gradually moved into different neighborhoods, then townships, and perhaps "counties" or "states," and brought in on a shift-by-shift basis. This, more than the ongoing provisioning of military equipment to SWAT and drug teams, will be the representative shift bringing the American zone in line with the African one: police who don't live among "their" people.
While you still have them available, look to the last remaining local cops. Armed, combat trained, overtime-getting, health-insured, pensioned, union-belonging police. For all their flaws, they're a last gasp of something that is going to look eminently desirable a hundred years from now: institutionalized violence that still had roots where it lashed out. Trying to fix this thing without them is going to be a hundred times as difficult.
I'm wondering if the general populace senses this loss / dislocation of local police from the community and is subsequently collecting its own guns and ammo to act in its stead. Many proponents of gun ownership suggest that guns for the people are readying for a time when "government gets out of control."
ReplyDeleteAnd... this article also suggests one interesting reason as to why we have bad cops and good cops. The pull of power is irresistible, no?
Certainly there's a sense of that. Some desperately try to reclaim that feeling of closeness with bumper stickers, donations, and volunteering, while others try to grow further alienated from police by viewing them as the gestapo.
DeleteAmerican militia nuts, of course, often say that they're practicing in case they are invaded by Hillary Clinton's U.N. helicopters and/or China, so that they can back up the police and protect real America. There's a level of disconnect and fantasy there, but running through the forest with your friends playing camp-out is probably a less-troublesome sign (even if it's still a troublesome one) than plenty of other more common social activities.
What makes these debates more interesting is that a lot of the civilian gun-people are highly trained ex-military, ex-police, and their desire for gun freedom stems from the desire to allow everyone--not just upper brass and city managers--access to what they see as power. There's a race, class, and sex division of internal gun control between waged patrol officers and sergeants, and salaried, white, grizzled, male, locally-well-connected senior lieutenants and chiefs.
Not only did police/army used to be the same thing, they used to be otherwise useful people in non-war or disaster time. So, not only were they among the people, they WERE the people. This concept of a standing army and professional police force would seem very strange and scary to any medieval European. As, perhaps, it should to us.
ReplyDeleteCertainly; the idea of a society that needs millions of full-time mercenaries is patently absurd. Particularly one where the mercenaries are under the direction of such a corrupt republic. The "random" gun tragedies that keep occurring are sad, but the non-random ones are much more numerous and all the sadder for being covered up.
DeleteThe proper equation here might be that allowing more guns would eventually result in a state where no one really cared about guns anymore, as opposed to now, where they're on the American mind almost constantly.
Allowing more would, though, result in a temporary increase in tragedies, just as the greenhouse effect is said to melt glaciers and result in global cooling prior to global warming.
How long do we want to keep things this way before we try something else, and are we willing to pay down the principal balance of our violence to attain a better world? Or will it just be minimum interest payments forever?
”in from ‘er ..not a slut ..but need to walk , the wee hours / pen k o’ , have you removed my .. in just un just justin comment or did i not touch the send button ..somehow ?, -of monk’s atlas ,of justin’s need .. need to “…sometimes you have to get clumsy and incoherent for awhile.” —Justin “, of his going too far in his coherent but wrong minded babble on line .. on something said on line that it looks like he removed in my now looking back for it ,of a few weeks back i think .. , i did not say , but that led me to thoughts of .. don’t make me blog .., the most feminine wom. on the planet has had enough .., a response to what he wrote is going to be put more than on line .. . , i forgave him many times because of his high functioning autism , but not on this .. . /.. . no one paints an elephant quite as good as she ,not quoting “..
ReplyDeletearka , needed to put my comment above in a few public places connected to ioz/jacobb. , of something of power and control , not of guns/ policing , but of the more able, not foot, soldiers of this on line , more in time on this if you will let me ..
ReplyDeleteThis one has not encountered Justin in several months; he seemed to cling to Jacob and vanished around the same time.
DeleteDo please write more at your leisure. :)
thank you arka ,you are perfe ct, / justin vanis'ed ,uv, around the time of my landing on io z, because he started writing to me at length at the time ,asking if he could come up here to visit with me , i let him ,i'm too nice
ReplyDeleteWe need to try something else. Your thoughts on this subject are fascinatingly scary. Political courage vs. Political expediency. Basically this is the battle to be fought. We need more politicians with complete disregard for reelection. Easier said than done...
ReplyDelete