The talk about Citizen Vigilante continues hot and heavy. There are critical voices in the mix. Some consider the film dangerous, while others cheer for the Michael Sanders character and express a yearning that someone make him real. It’s perfectly clear what sensibilities and spirit the film has tapped.
The facet of the film that’s excited the most negative comments is the scene in which Sanders, enclosed in a steel box, must shoot it out with two dozen SWAT team members. “He didn’t have to do that!” shriek the critics. And indeed, they’re right: he didn’t. But once they had confronted him and made it plain that their mission was to cut him down regardless of the consequences, the moral choice became too clear to avert.
What did it say about the priorities of those police and their commanders that they would bring seemingly overwhelming firepower to the task of killing Michael Sanders? When rape and murder are running riot throughout Europe? When those same police have been told to treat violent savages as if they were made of spun glass? When justice has become the bitterest word in any language? What did it say about their commander that after the first wave had been eliminated, he sent a second wave, no better prepared, to the same fate?
It may strike even some who see the matter as I’ve delineated it above as unfortunate, unnecessary to the movie and preferably to be omitted. I disagree completely. I find it to be the element of the film that cuts through all the noise:
Michael Sanders gave those SWAT members a chance to back away. He allowed that “You’re only doing your jobs,” but followed by telling them what “doing your jobs” – i.e., following their commander’s orders – would bring about. Their commander, a loyal State employee who mouthed “democracy” as if that shibboleth could excuse the complete abrogation of justice, sent them forward into withering fire.
It had to happen. It was entirely in keeping with both the context of the film and the nature of the State.
The question must be posed: Are matters in Europe – or anywhere else – really that bad? Would a real-life Michael Sanders who committed himself to delivering justice to proven criminals be acclaimed by Us the People? Would the minions of the State do their level best to cut him down, while ignoring the savageries being perpetrated by those criminals? And would Sanders’s acclaim among common people have any effect on State priorities and practices?
Apart from the occasional reportage of some immigrant atrocity, I haven’t really kept track. But it does seem that Europe, which has admitted millions of Third World immigrants to its shores, is trending in that direction. Indeed, matters aren’t that much better in North America.
Let it be said outright: the majority of those immigrants are Muslims. They were schooled in the most aggressive and violent “faith” the world has ever known. That faith tells them that it’s quite all right – indeed, it’s their duty to Islam — to rape and murder the “unbeliever.” Many of them cannot read the Koran that exhorts them to those deeds. Few have anything to “contribute to society,” even if they have the potential.
They’ve behaved as the soldiers of a savage conquering army have always done. As their numbers swell, so will their crimes… perhaps faster, at that.
I’ve written elsewhere that justice in this world is a human artifact. The concept of justice is one of Mankind’s highest intellectual creations. Men have tolerated States among them in the hope that an entity supposedly dedicated to the maintenance of justice would improve upon “nature red in tooth and claw.” The challenge of our time is to read the news and evaluate the validity of that hope.
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