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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (17013)	9/5/2000 5:37:19 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 17770

Re: The further left you go, the more laws there are. It's only too true.... Note, however, that the more people got radicalized or engaged in "subversive" leftist activities, the more laws become irrelevant. Let me just take a real-life example: if you go to your local supermarket and shoplift a coupla foodstuffs, you'll likely get framed in the security videoscreen and guards will arrest you before you reach the exit gate. Then, depending on the circumstances and the seriousness of your shoplifting they'll call the police or have you sign a "probationary" confession.... Now, if a dozen dodgers engage in a similar scheme to rob the supermarket of foodstuffs then the charge against them will ratchet up: it might extend to "robbery with violence" and "aggravated assault" and "criminal conspiracy" (ie in French, association de malfaiteurs --criminal partnership). So, up to that point, any would-be revolutionary anarchist still ends up on the wrong side of the Law. But now, think of what happened a couple of years ago in France.... There suddenly was an outburst of rage/frustration among different lots of destitute people. Unemployed people, the homeless and other welfarites got angry at the pittance they received from the so-called Welfare State. Of course the timing was not on the off chance: they actually looted France's supermarchés two weeks before Xmas.... As several of them appeared on TV newscasts, the general public empathized with them and was not offended by their demanding a higher minimum wage and the right for the jobless to be entitled to a Xmas bonus (one of the perks most employees are entitled to). Mothers were pathetically claiming that their children too had the right to celebrate Xmas and get a present from Santa Claus.... So, all the viewers could watch supermarkets suddenly gatecrashed by an altogether sympathetic mob: people were filling their shopping carts, passing by the cash register, and leaving the chainstore free, gratis and for nothing! And guess what --even the chainstore manager was smiling, helping them to scramble with their overladen carts through the gate.... No more guards, no more video surveillance, no manager would have dared call the police. And that's the kind of social conflict where your Law-and-Order logic turned upside down: in this highly subversive scene where hobos can shoplift supermarkets in different (French) cities --and yet get away with it-- the Law has reached an inflection point beyond which the uncooperative chainstore manager himself becomes a criminal. BTW, that's the whole point with genuine, historical revolutions, after all. What a single, isolated individual is plotting against the Law is a mere felony. What a gang of political militants is conspiring against the state falls either into organized crime or terrorism. However, what a hundred thousand people are initiating turns out to be.... a Revolution! The laws themselves become disposable liabilities --remember your Boston Tea Party, remember the beheading of king Louis XVI. Were the culprits indicted? And yet, see how far left they strayed: Americans spoiled His Gracious Majesty's property rights and French bourgeois dismissed a monarch by divine right!