Friday, June 1, 2018

The collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK

Peter has a long and well thought out post concerning the jailing of UK activist Tommy Robinson:
At the time, Robinson's supporters tried to claim that his arrest and (suspended) sentence were violations of his right to free speech.  They were not, as the judge made clear.  He violated British laws, he ignored common practice concerning interfering with defendants and/or witnesses in a criminal trial, and he arguably jeopardized the defendants' right to a fair trial by his conduct.  I have no issue with the sentence given him.
Peter is correct and puts together a strong argument for following long established social norms - which is after all, what the legal code is supposed to encapsulate.  You should go RTWT because I am going to pose a number of questions, all pointing to the same meta question: has the UK government lost its claim to legitimacy, and if so, do any of these long held social norms still apply.

Question 1: Is justice being served in the UK?

Technically, it is a "Court of Law", but when we speak in terms of governmental legitimacy the view is broader.  It must be a Court of Justice if society is to keep to the old bargain negotiated 1000 years ago.  Back in the Dark Ages, "justice" was the responsibility of the people - specifically their extended family.  Clan feuds were the norm - and this has echoed faintly down to our own times with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys.  Government was weak then and so justice was rough.  The deal that was negotiated between the states and their subjects over the next 600 years was that the State would administer justice, but do it as fairly as it could, making blood feud unnecessary.

Is justice being meted out in Her Magesty's Scepter'd Isle?  For those who haven't been paying much attention, there have been dozens of arrests (perhaps hundreds) of adult men who have gang raped under age girls.  This has occurred in many locales throughout the land.  It has been doing on not for years, but for decades.  The number of victims is not reported, but is certainly in the tens of thousands.  In each case, the State knew what was happening.

As far as I can tell, none of the State officials - local, county, or national - have lost their jobs over this.

Remember, the deal was that the State would enforce justice fairly so that blood feud would no longer be needed.

Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an "activist" while Peter refers to him as "Alt-Right".  I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like.  But it also cuts to the heart of this question.  If we don't look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment.  The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades.  The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

The alleged perpetrators are described as "asian males", as if some of them were from China or Korea.  This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

Are the "asian males" actually Pakistani immigrants?  Are they all muslim?  Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims?  To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here.  It's actually worse - one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary - the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we're told is an "Alt-Right" fringe.

Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris.  If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off.  Blood feud may be the only option.

Question 4: Is this worse than the Child Abuse done in the Catholic Church?

Peter has written eloquently about the crimes that were committed by many, many priests, and covered up by their bishops.  I myself lived outside Boston when the scandal broke, and saw Cardinal Law recalled to Rome (and promoted) by the Pope himself - a more stark depiction of institutional rot is hard to imagine.

But now consider that membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary.  If you don't like their church, you are free to go to a different one.  But if you don't like your local UK Council (local government), you have to move away from your family and friends.

I guess you could try to vote them out, but what are your chances making this an election issue when there's a chance that some Judge will throw you in jail for talking about it?

Question 5: Is Justice being served in the UK?

Yes, I already posed this question, but want to bring it back into focus after the discussion above.  Certainly some people think that the answer is no:
Even if everything done by the police or the court was perfectly legitimate and reasonable, the problem is that many people in England believe that Tommy Robinson is being unjustly persecuted by his government. The fact that he was arrested so shortly after his successful Day for Freedom event, where he gathered thousands of people in support of free speech, strikes many as a little bit more than a coincidence.
Discussion

This is what a collapse of legitimacy looks like.  The answers to the questions are more or less irrelevant; the fact that they can be posed without being dismissed out of hand is the point.  Societies are remarkably resilient: Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country, and Roman political and social institutions outlived the fall of the Western Empire by a century or more.  But that was because everyone more or less agreed that those institutions still deserved support even though the Emperor had been replaced by the Rex of the Goths.


That's not we're looking at here.

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon.

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be?

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

UPDATE 1 June 2018 12:42: Via Brock Townsend, I see that I'm not the only one who sees things this way.

10 comments:

B said...

A point:

Were you to publish this in the UK, you might well be arrested and destroyed and imprisoned by the "Government" for racism and (attempted) insurrection.

There is no "Free Speech" except at the whim of the Government there, and they have proven that BadSpeak is to be suppressed.

And the above goes to the Legitimacy argument. The proles are told what the Government wants them to know...what they are told to believe. How can there be legitimacy when the Government will tolerate no dissidence? When there can be no criticism? When there can be no reporting of the Government's failures and no punishment for those organs of the State who failed to keep the Government's promise of Justice?

Borepatch said...

Maybe, B. But the problem is that this is *SO* widespread that if people can't talk about it in public, they'll talk about it in private. It will become samizdat, like in the old Soviet Union. Except Samizdat will be hosted on the 'net on non-UK servers, and so the Brit.Gov will have to take themselves off the 'net to stop it (or implement a Chinese style "Great Firewall of Britain" filter).

What's holding a lot of the normal people back is a deeply ingrained sense of decency and fair play. While that is causing this to work its way forward more slowly, it's also a huge weakness for the government as that very sensibility is what is being violated.

Beans said...

Well, what B said above, but don't forget to apply it to pretty much the whole EU.

Truth is now illegal to say, be overheard, be written, be read, be transmitted, when Truth touches certain subjects.

As to what Borepatch said, hosting discussions on non-EU servers isn't safe. What? Why do I say that? Well, since most hosting platforms here in the USA, land of the (formerly) free, caved to the EU in reference to cookies and tracking and other Bullscat, what else will our USA companies cave to?

(Quite frankly, Google and all the rest of the gaggle should have told the EU to shove it sideways up their constipated posteriors, but I am just a crude, unschooled, non-effete conservative Southern redneckish sort of dolt, so what do I know, right?)

As to the (formerly) free USA, watching the scandal enveloping active illegal spying, wiretapping, harassment by government of our sitting President, how have the powers-that-be been treating us mere peons? If you have any answer than 'poorly,' then you are wrong.

I am actively scared of our bureaucratic overlords.

'Tommy Robinson' has happened here, in the USA. Just look at 'Joe the Plumber' or anyone trying to actively give the truth against Al Sharpton, or the last sitting president of the USA. Ask the ghosts of Randy Weaver's family for an answer on this issue.

B said...

Proton VPN

Differ said...

One minor point: the use of the word Asian has different geographic context between US and UK. In UK it is specifically Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asian.
Robinson is detested by polite society in UK; he's working class in a still highly class conscious society, and worse, he speaks about uncomfortable truths. That he might be inciting racist violence is the one defect that allows Brits to dismiss him and avoid accepting responsibility for ignoring the current state of affairs and their own impotence at changing that situation.

Richard said...

Most of the EU (excluding Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic), including the UK, has indeed broken the social compact. And as a previous poster noted the US isn't far behind. The power of the "elites" be they in London, NYC, or Brussels must be broken in order to restore the compact because they are not going to do it on their own. And I don't want to hear about Federalism or libertarian fantasies about the private sector. Sacramento and Google are as noxious as anything the Federal government could dream up.

Glen Filthie said...

The institutions are working exactly as they should. They are transitioning from those that serve the British people to those that serve the world. Laws are a function of culture and with so many different cultures in Britain, for the institution to survive - it will have to have rules for some people, and rules for others. In the countries these animals come from, preying on children is not a crime unless you prey on the wrong victim. Treating women like property or dirt is just fine, as is racism, sexism and bigotry. Justice is reserved only for those with power and position. I believe we are watching history unfold right now, folks. They were never going to convict those perps anyway.

Gazing into my crystal ball, going forward: 'White man's'justice will no longer be dispensed by the courts. Therefore, the white man, at some point, will impose it himself with vigilantism. The pakies involved will want to take care for their own safety, methinks. I can also see terrorist (or, if you prefer), 'activist' attacks on public officials involved in enabling this - and everything will go downhill from there. Nasty race and civil wars will almost certainly result if saner people can't walk this back... but they have to act now.

Tacitus said...

I have been spending quite a bit of time with Brits the past two weeks and this matter came up. They opined that this Robinson chap is a nasty bit of work and that the faction he represents are as well. So far so good. But when I tried to explain that here in The Colonies we have plenty of folks who fit that description and that - whether you agree with them or not - it is considered entirely appropriate for them to stand in a public place and state their opinions....they had a hard time getting their minds around the concept. They share our view that scorn is appropriate for those on the fringes of the political world, but can't seem to figure out that keeping the hand of government away from such matters is healthy. I did have a quiet conversation with an ex military "Tory" chap who agrees that there are some matters that nobody dares discuss in public. TW

Borepatch said...

Differ, no doubt some of the reaction to Robinson is because he is getting above his class. But the problem is that he is clearly speaking of some things that actually, you know, happened while nobody else seems to be willing to touch the topic. That reduces the establishment's credibility and increases his, simply because they've ceded the intellectual battlefield to him on this.

Tim, if nothing changes I expect that things will bet ugly. As they say about Trump, he isn't a cause, he's an effect. There is a lot worse than Trump in store for the establishment if they won't grapple with basic truths.

LSP said...

What an excellent post.

I'm no expert but, I think with you, the law degenerates into tyranny/irrelevance when it's divorced from justice.

That the UK and the West is experiencing this should come as no surprise, given an educated elite that's jettisoned objective value in favor of expediency.

Robinson highlights some of this -- the Muslim rape gang coverup being the presenting issue and one that speaks to a lot of people in the UK.

It's worth remembering that the UK is FAR more white/homogeneous than we are in the US, with Islam rooted in inner city ghettos.

Recipe for a pogrom?

Well, let's not deny the precedent. And for a fact, lots of people are over there are more than ready to kick off. I know this.

Hope that doesn't happen but I'd be surprised if the Muslims find it within themselves to, ahem, behave.

Forgive the essay!