By Paul Weiser
As Winston Churchill (not Orwell) once remarked, "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." This truth, rejected by liberals, has disquieting implications.
For there are alternatives (for liberals) to rejecting the guardians in the night. One, pressed with vigor by the self-righteous and angry, is simply to send those rough men after any who disagree with them. This is how the Bureau of Land Management and the Internal Revenue Service get to have SWAT teams: the liberal impulse, unable to convince, must force. Elitism resorts to violence against whole classes it dislikes.
Redirecting the rough men against political targets has the quickly visible effect of leaving actual criminals at liberty to work their harm. Respect for law collapses, as it did in the former Soviet Union, and professional criminals abound. Which is fine (for the Party) so long as the KGB terrorizes everyone against objecting.
Where the Party (for example, British Labour or Chicago Democrat) is a little less secure it pursues a different dysfunction. Instead of misdirecting the rough men against political targets, it insists the rough men who stand ready in the night be very smooth instead. The paperwork mountain perfectly filed, all courtesy to felons who attack them with knives and guns, and the smoothest of the smooth - women, for preference - promoted and highly visible.
And what results, aside from making the police an unhappy, ineffective laughingstock against crime? Why, when those big but agonizingly smooth men have a chance to actually do violence - especially to inoffensive members of the public who support their unctuous masters - they pile on like a ton of bricks, choke and batter them. For they know where the real origin of harm lies.
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