Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Can We Survive Without Police ???

Recently we've been hearing calls to defund and/or abolish police departments in major US cities. Radical groups such as Antifa appear to be pushing us in that direction by setting up self-policing zones such as this one in Seattle:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/seattle-protesters-establish-autonomous-zone-after-police-national-guard-pull-out

Can we survive without police? It's hard to say, since this appears to be uncharted territory. But removing police from any locale is certain to create a power vacuum, and such a vacuum almost certainly will soon be filled by someone.

The history of the International Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies" as they were called), includes episodes in which they attempted to achieve self-rule. You can read about them here:

https://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/anderson.shtml

and

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/seattle-general-strike-iww-labor-revolution

From my perspective, all such attempts are doomed to failure; and the reason can be found in the phrase "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Revolutionaries may indeed for a time establish peace in whatever area(s) they control, but one of two things will eventually happen:

(1) They either will adopt the repressive practices of their predecessors (e.g., the Bolsheviks were at least as cruel as the Czar had been); or

(2) Outside forces will break through and reestablish their control of the briefly "liberated" area.

Do you really think corporate America would allow We the People to rule ourselves as "sovereign citizens"? If you do, you're ignoring 400 years of history.

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