Column by Paul Bonneau.
Exclusive to STR
Back during the American Revolution there were a lot of radical ideas floating around, one of which was “no standing army.” In those days before police existed, the army was what the rulers used to plunder the productive and keep the people under the rulers’ thumbs: “the sharp point of the spear.” The Crown used it that way in Boston. So naturally, the people were having none of that.
Of course one of the first things the new American ruling class did, after the 1787 counter-revolution, was to get up a standing army. And as in Boston, when the Whiskey Rebellion rolled around, it was used to plunder and suppress. To be more precise, Washington called up militia from four states to make this army, so it may not fit the definition of a standing army very well, but this is a distinction without a difference. It still performed the functions of a standing army.
I suppose people from that period were still opposed to the notion of a standing army, though, so that the rulers must have been overjoyed to learn about Sir Robert Peel’s experiments with police in the 1820s. Here was a concept that could give them a standing army stationed among the people, without it being called a standing army--exactly the remedy they needed. The history of American policing is laid out by Roger Roots here [3]. It’s well worth the read, even if Roots is a constitutionalist.
But the question is, why do rulers like crime? To answer, one must attempt to see the world from their viewpoint.
What do the rulers do; what is their “job”? It’s no longer very controversial, for those with some practice interpreting “the narrative,” that they exist to plunder the productive and to enjoy the exercise of power. Only naive or very silly people believe “they work for us” any more.
It’s not that they are so much different from the rest of us [4] (excepting the occasional lizard person or psychopath); it’s that they face and respond to different incentives than the ones we face. That’s what it means to be corrupted by power--to respond to such incentives.
To do this “job,” they need minions--a standing army, and a whole lotta bureaucrats. These implement and also feed off the plunder that occurs, and as well, enjoy the exercise of power in their smaller spheres.
However, the rulers have to convince the ruled that reality is other than what that unsavory picture portrays. Needless to say, they glommed onto government schooling as soon as Horace Mann imported it from socialist Prussia in 1852. Before that innovation in Prussia, the notion that the state might “educate” the people was ridiculous, given the effort the rulers had put into keeping any and all serious learning from them previously.
1) Rulers like crime because it provides a justification (of sorts, for indoctrinated people) for the existence of their standing army, the police. If there were no crime, there would be no “need” for police. Of course the police do not prevent crime; they are at best only the “clean-up crew” (and that only if they feel like it) after crime occurs.
The existence of police, in turn, provides a justification (of sorts, for indoctrinated people) for gun control. After all, if your friend the cop on the corner is “protecting” you from crime, then you supposedly no longer need to do so, and neither does anyone else. Gun control, leading to gun elimination, is a very important goal for any ruling class worth a damn; after all, a disarmed population is much easier to exploit (even psychologically, since being disarmed is demoralizing) and much less dangerous to the rulers. If there were no cops, there would be no gun control. In other words, cops enable gun control.
Gun control, in turn, makes people weak and easy to plunder, just as any kind of dependency would do. Of course the rulers like that. Just as rulers have no use for intelligent and aware peons, they also have no use for strong and self-reliant peons.
2) Rulers like crime, as it is another avenue for plunder, via corruption. What percentage of cops have taken cash in exchange for leaving criminal activities alone (e.g. drug and alcohol prohibition)? How many judges and politicians have been corrupted by organized crime?
3) Rulers like crime because it generates a “need” for more empire building. All the social work and welfare and other such “efforts” are at base, a response to crime.
4) Rulers like crime because if the natural background level of such things as murder is high, then many will go unsolved, and an occasional “hit” by government minions on troublemakers and malcontents will go unnoticed. Just another way of keeping the people under their thumbs.
5) Rulers like crime because of “divide and conquer.” Different people will argue and debate over the causes and get wrapped up in crime, and fear it, and cause them to beg government for a larger standing army! This distracts people from the ruling class plunder and manipulation going on. Crime is, in fact, one of the main routes for joining the ruling class. Many a prosecutor has made this step into the legislature on the basis of his record jailing a lot of essentially harmless people; and crime is always something any politician is happy to bloviate about.
Crime is so important to the rulers that, if it did not exist, they would have to gin it up. That is the entire reason for being, for such mala prohibita as gun, drug and alcohol prohibition. No, they didn’t pass those laws to protect your kids! The purpose of laws is to generate crime, not to stop it.
Amusingly, violent crime has been going down for decades, probably as a result of people arming themselves as much as anything (the gun control effort has been failing despite the indoctrination). However, the perception is that crime is going up. The rulers, through their Ministry of Propaganda, do a lot of work to keep it in the forefront. An old Ministry slogan from the days of newspapers was, “If it bleeds, it leads.” If you eliminated cop shows from TV, there would be little left.
Crime will increase in the near future, as that is the sort of thing that happens when economies die. Get ready for even more calls for an increased standing army. Just more fodder for the coming revolution.
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