Canada’s shame

Canadian police, who were “powerless” to stop a bunch of vandals from smashing shop windows and torching police cars, showed how “powerful” they are by beating up a 57-year-old amputee.

Simple Massing Priest: Cowardly police leave “anarchists” alone and assault amputee:

As Sarah began pleading with them to give her father a little time and space to get up because he is an amputee, they began kicking and hitting him. One of the police officers used his knee to press Pruyn’s head down so hard on the ground, said Pruyn in an interview this July 4 with Niagara At Large, that his head was still hurting a week later.

Accusing him of resisting arrest, they pulled his walking sticks away from him, tied his hands behind his back and ripped off his prosthetic leg. Then they told him to get up and hop, and when he said he couldn’t, they dragged him across the pavement, tearing skin off his elbows, with his hands still tied behind his back. His glasses were knocked off as they continued to accuse him of resisting arrest and of being a “spitter,” something he said he did not do. They took him to a warehouse and locked him in a steel-mesh cage where his nightmare continued for another 27 hours.

They would have done SS Einsatzgruppe proud.

The sheer lunacy of anti-gun control freaks

I’ve always thought that anti-gun control freaks were a bit nuts, but this takes the cake. Hat-tip to Mark Stoneman’s Clio and me.

FactCheck.org: Did gun control in Australia lead to more murders there last year?:

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

The picture is utterly bizarre.

If dissidents in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had had firearms and used them to resist arrest, most of them would have died sooner rather than later, and many more of them would have died.

If you want to avoid arrest in a totalitarian country, your best chance is to avoid or evade the police, not confront them, whether you are armed or not. And then try to skip across the border into a free(er) country, assuming there is one nearby.

I know something of this from personal experience.

Last week I got together with a friend, and we compared our police files from the apartheid era, which recently became available in the archives. We’re planning to write an article on memoiries of a surveillance society, based on the contents of the files, and comparing the fantasies of the Security Police and the Department of Justice with reality.

In my file I discovered that the Minister of Justice had signed a banning order for me on 11 January 1966. I never received it, so I didn’t know about it until I saw it in the file.

At the time I was working as a bus driver in Johannesburg, trying to save enough money to go and study overseas. On the afternoon of 18 January 1966, when I was about to go to work, I had a phone call from a Detective Sergeant van den Heever, asking if he could come and see me. I said I was about to go to work. He then asked if he could come and see me in the morning. I said I would be doing overtime in the morning, but said that I could go and see him between my overtime and my regular shift if he told me where I could find him.

I did not go to work, that afternoon, but went to see an Anglican priest friend, the student chaplain at the university, to tell him about this and ask his advice. We thought that Van den Heever would either be coming to confiscate my passport, or to give me a banning order, in which case I would not be able to study overseas. We decided that the wisest course would be to leave the country immediately.

So at 10:00 pm we set out for Beit Bridge and the Rhodesian border, which we crossed the next morning when the customs post opened at 6:00 am. The priest friend came to drive my mother’s car back. My mother arranged with a travel agent in Johannesburg for me to collect a plane ticket at Bulawayo, and I got on a plane in Bulawayo, and arrived in London two days later, on 20 January 1966.

Now imagine what would have happened if I had done what the gun nut above suggested.

Detective Sergeant van den Heever comes to my door with the banning order, and I have a gun and shoot him.

The SB (Security Police) usually went in pairs, and so I’d have to be pretty quick to shoot his buddy as well before he either overpowered me or shot me.

We lived in a block of flats, and at that time of day people would be arriving home from work, so the incident would probably be witnessed by other residents who would undoubtedly call the police, even if they didn’t know that the two bodies lying at the door of my flat were those of policemen in plain clothes.

So banning might be delayed, but arrest for a real crime would follow shortly. Then would follow a period of interrogation, with the possibility of slipping in the shower and falling through a 7th-floor window (defenestration). If that didn’t happen there would be an appearance in court, an open and shut case of murder, followed by hanging.

Cool.

One bloke who was banned tried to follow the path of armed resistance. Not with firearms; he took a suitcase full of explosives and took it to Johannesburg station. It killed an old lady and disfigured her granddaughter. His name was John Harris. He was hanged on 1 April 1965.

Or, of course, one could use firearms. Go to Norwood police station (where, if my banning order had been delivered, I would have had to report every Monday between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm) and make like Columbine High School — shoot everyone in sight.

Ultimately, the result would be the same.

But the gun nuts who write stuff like that above are too stupid to see it.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps they would go into a school or a shopping mall and open fire on everyone in sight, and think that that would save them from the Gulag or whatever. Or they could join their likeminded buddies in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

So instead of saying idiotic things like “In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated”, let the gun nuts say exactly how having legal firearms would have prevented them from being rounded up and exterminated.

And if they feel so strongly about it, perhaps they could strike a blow for freedom and smuggle arms to all the poor dissidents cooped up in Guantanamo Bay.

Greece, Zimbabwe and South Africa

On 6 December 2008 a Greek policeman shot a teenager in Athens.

A subsequent demonstration turned violent, and cars and shops were burnt.

There’s a good summary of events on Wikipedia.

I can’t help wondering what might happen if Zimbabwean youth responded like Greek youth — or like South African youth in 1976.

In Greece, similar action by youth in 1974 resulted in the restoration of democracy. Two years alter, South African youth responded in a similar fashion, but it took nearly 20 years, and many more deaths, before democracy was established.

One result of the Greek action in 1974 was that the youth were honoured. There is a public holiday, Polytechniou, to commemorate the Polytechnic students who died, just as we have Youth Day in South Africa to commemorate the young people who died in June 16 1976 and the following weeks.

Another result, according to my daughter, who is a student in Athens, is that since 1974 the police have not been allowed to enter universities. This makes it easier for students to manufacture Molotov cocktails and the like, and it’s quite common to see burnt-out vehicles on campus.

I suspect, however, that if Zimbabwean youth tried the same thing, the police would not arrest the policemen who killed young people, but would reward them, and there would be many more deaths.

After 1976, many South African young people went abroad for military training, and returned to fight back.

Many Zimbabwean youth, faced with a similar situation of police repression and brutality, also leave the country, but I’m not aware of any of them forming a liberation army to go home and fight back. That’s probably just as well — the Democratic Republic of Congo as dozens of “liberation” armies, most of which are fighting to be in a position to oppress others. A lot of Zimbabwe’s present troubles stem from the misguided attempt of the Zimbabwean government to support one of them by sending troops to the Congo to support one of the factions there.

Are there any lessons in all this for Zimbabwean youth?

Greece, Zimbabwe and South Africa

On 6 December 2008 a Greek policeman shot a teenager in Athens.

A subsequent demonstration turned violent, and cars and shops were burnt.

There’s a good summary of events on Wikipedia.

I can’t help wondering what might happen if Zimbabwean youth responded like Greek youth — or like South African youth in 1976.

In Greece, similar action by youth in 1974 resulted in the restoration of democracy. Two years alter, South African youth responded in a similar fashion, but it took nearly 20 years, and many more deaths, before democracy was established.

One result of the Greek action in 1974 was that the youth were honoured. There is a public holiday, Polytechniou, to commemorate the Polytechnic students who died, just as we have Youth Day in South Africa to commemorate the young people who died in June 16 1976 and the following weeks.

Another result, according to my daughter, who is a student in Athens, is that since 1974 the police have not been allowed to enter universities. This makes it easier for students to manufacture Molotov cocktails and the like, and it’s quite common to see burnt-out vehicles on campus.

I suspect, however, that if Zimbabwean youth tried the same thing, the police would not arrest the policemen who killed young people, but would reward them, and there would be many more deaths.

After 1976, many South African young people went abroad for military training, and returned to fight back.

Many Zimbabwean youth, faced with a similar situation of police repression and brutality, also leave the country, but I’m not aware of any of them forming a liberation army to go home and fight back. That’s probably just as well — the Democratic Republic of Congo as dozens of “liberation” armies, most of which are fighting to be in a position to oppress others. A lot of Zimbabwe’s present troubles stem from the misguided attempt of the Zimbabwean government to support one of them by sending troops to the Congo to support one of the factions there.

Are there any lessons in all this for Zimbabwean youth?