Privileges And Immunities Part 2: The Most Privileged Group

     I was uncertain about extending the thoughts in this essay until I saw this report on events in Germany:

     MAINZ, Germany — Roving packs of men sexually assaulted dozens of women on New Year's Eve in western Germany's city of Cologne, officials said, describing the attacks as unprecedented....

     Police said the attackers — who struck in pairs and groups of up to 20 men — appeared to be part of a larger, 1,000-strong group that had gathered in one of the city's main plazas for New Year's celebrations.

     Cologne's police spokesman Thomas Held told NBC News that authorities had fielded around 90 complaints of pick-pocketing, groping and at least one of rape.

     Mass sexual assaults! In Germany! And who, oh please tell us who, might the perpetrators have been?

     Police on Monday had said the suspects appeared to be of "Arab or North African descent," sparking fears on social media they were among around 1 million asylum seekers who have flooded Germany this year. Held told NBC News that it was too early to tell if the suspects were recent arrivals.

     NBC News, at least, has learned to avert the hazards of:

• Providing no information at all about the attackers, and:
• Specifically mentioning that they were Muslim immigrants,

     ...so they “split the difference.” That’s not terribly surprising. But the events do bring into focus a group that possesses important – perhaps the most important – privileges and immunities, but which I forbore to mention in the earlier essay.

---

     The word privilege has a telling etymology: its Latin roots mean private law. A privileged person or group is treated as being governed by a legal code specific to that group, rather than the broader one that applies to the non-privileged. Obviously, for the privilege to be valuable, that special legal code must be more lenient than the broader one.

     The first essay noted several groups that enjoy such special treatment, de facto at least, in the United States. Muslims were one of those groups. In Europe, their special status derives from the special status of an even more privileged group: a group that is immunized against all penalties for its misdeeds, no matter how outrageous.

     Here’s the giveaway:

     German authorities were at pains to try to avoid any discussion of the background of a veritable army of assailants that preyed upon so many victims. Indeed, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned that the ethnicity of the criminals was irrelevant to their crime.

     “The rule of the law does not look at where someone comes from but what they did,” Mr. Maas told reporters in Berlin. “We will investigate what circles the perpetrators may have come from.”

     Aha! Let’s work this out together, shall we?

• Muslims are known to hold, as a tenet of their creed, that women are inferiors, ruled by their lusts, who must be governed by men at all times. From this flows the “uncovered meat” rule: that a woman who appears in public in anything but an abaya or burq’a is “asking for it.”
• Outrageous numbers of sexual assaults, all the way up to gang rape, have occurred in every concentration of Muslims outside the explicitly Islamic states. In nearly every case, the perpetrators have eventually been revealed as Muslims.
• The German government opened the country’s gates to approximately 1 million Muslim “refugees” in calendar year 2015.
• But the German Justice Minister has instructed Germans not to link “ethnicity” to this most recent rash of sexual assaults, even though it was apparently semi-organized and the perpetrators displayed “North African or Arab” appearances.

     Is Heiko Maas protecting the “refugees,” or is he protecting some other group – a group that was in Germany well before the “refugee crisis,” that’s legendary for taking credit for good events and evading the odium for bad ones? For averting all punitive consequences from its actions?

---

     The governing class in Europe is even more cohesive than ours in America. Its members enjoy nearly indefeasible tenure in their positions, and nearly always succeed in getting away with their crimes. The recent pillorying of Silvio Berlusconi of Italy was remarkable for its uniqueness; seldom is a European politician of any stature compelled to face a criminal trial. Note also that despite the mountain of evidence against him, Berlusconi eventually “walked.”

     At this time we have a similar farce playing out on the stage of the American presidential contest: Hillary Clinton, personally responsible for the disclosure of at least 1200 items of classified information via the use of a private email system, is far more likely than not to suffer absolutely no penalties for it. She’s a member of the governing elite by virtue of her terms as First Lady, United States Senator, and Secretary of State. Despite the great animosity felt toward her by many others in the governing class, including many in her own party, they will resist compelling her to stand trial for those violations of the National Security Act for a simple reason: it would whet the public’s appetite for blood from that class, which has abused it serially and seriously for decades without experiencing more bruises to minor players.

     The desire to wield power isn’t solely about the delights of power; it’s also about the immunities that come with being one of the governing elite.

---

     The State is that entity in a region that possesses the pre-indemnified privilege of coercing its subjects: i.e., the privilege of using force against private individuals and organizations while immunized against any penalty for it. The agents of the State are the beneficiaries of that privilege / immunity. In other words, if you want to “get away with it,” you should aspire to high office, and the higher the better; it will shield you against the consequences for nearly any subsequent misdeed.

     The American conception of a “rule of law” superior to any person’s birth or status offset that privilege / immunity of office for some time. However, its ability to penetrate the circles of the elite started to weaken early in the Twentieth Century, along with other aspects of our revolutionary, status-indifferent order. By the end of World War II, it had already become extremely difficult to hold even a former bureaucrat such as Alger Hiss responsible for provable espionage against the United States. (Hiss was never tried for his acts of espionage, but rather for perjuring himself before Congress.) By the time Bill Clinton ascended to the presidency, a president could commit virtually any odious act without suffering for it. The atrocities at Ruby Ridge and the mass slaughter at Waco suggest that even mass murder is insufficient to force the issue.

     Europe is learning how noxious the privileges and immunities of the governing class can be. Angel Merkel’s government openly welcomed the horde of Muslim “refugees” into Germany. The subsequent rash of crimes, especially crimes of sexual assault, were no coincidence; as I observed above, that’s always what happens when a significant number of Muslims is admitted to a Western, Christian-Enlightenment-based nation. Yet Mrs. Merkel is almost certain to escape all the odium for facilitating them. In this she’ll have the active cooperation and support of both the governing elite of Europe and of its courtier press, which is even more sycophantic toward the governing class than our own.

     But Barack Hussein Obama and his allegiants think America should strive to be more like Europe. In particular, he wants to admit tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” to our shores. What do you think, Gentle Reader?