Si Vis Pacem

The videos today are of a sobbing female police officer in the UK crying that nobody from the crowd came to help her. Colonel Kurt points out that the UK has taught its subjects that they aren't entitled to self-defense; how then to expect them to know how, or be willing, to jump in to defend the police? Commenters note that it's even worse that the assailants were Muslims, because in the UK anyone jumping in would also have to fear hate crime prosecutions. The police have to take care of themselves, without necessarily having nearby backup, but it's no longer a hiring consideration whether or not they are physically capable.

Now one place that female police work pretty well is in Japan. Japanese society is intensely rule-following and group-harmony-directed. The odds of violence being turned against the police are very low there, so polite requests from the police and security personnel are usually sufficient. There too, however, they're finding themselves at a loss to deal with the assault situation from Islamic tourists. Fortunately in that case the assault was merely spittle. 

In both of these countries the police are generally not armed, so their congruent lack of physical strength and size is doubly risky. Disarming yourselves and trusting to the kindness of others is only fit for the hoped-for world to come; in our world, a government strong enough to make that viable has proven tyrannical.
For fear of his yasa and punishment his followers were so well 
disciplined that during his reign no traveller, so long as he was 
near his army, had need of guard or patrol on any stretch of road ; 
and, as is said by way of hyperbole, a woman with a golden 
vessel on her head might walk alone without fear or dread. 
And he enacted minute yasas that were an intolerable imposition 
upon such as the Taziks, e.g. that none might slaughter meat in 
the Moslem fashion nor sit by day in running water, and so on. 
The yasa forbidding the slaughter of sheep in the lawful manner 
he sent to every land ; and for a time no man slaughtered sheep 
openly in Khorasan, and Moslems were forced to eat carrion. 

-Juvayni, Ala-ad-Din 'Ata-Malik, trans. John Andrew Boyle, The History of the World Conqueror (Harvard: 1958), 272.

Safe enough for the submissive, but intolerable all the same. 

No comments: