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.
2 comments:
I highly recommend to you the latest video, 3rd in a series, release from Jordan Peterson's tour of last year before his illness. What he says about how tyrannical states grow parallels what we hope is really a push-back. as response to this film seems to indicate, to the psych phenomenon he relates.
The following is the comment I left at the video. This link will take you to where the transcript begins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQo7qoZoo7U&t=1065s
JBP has reversed engineered the logic of the ambiguously labeled Progressive movement @17:45 on how to get people to accept the Progs' (and all totalitarians') incremental (progressive, gradual) accumulation of power over all subjects:
"if you put people in the appropriate circumstance, there's very little they won't do. It's a rare person who won't go down that road when the opportunity makes itself known, especially one little move at a time, which is how totalitarian states develop, right? It isn't that you go from normal to Nazi in one leap. It's like it's 10,000 little steps and each step is a little farther into the abyss than the previous one. And nowhere along the way do you ever wake up and say, "Well, that's just too much." Now, if you examine the whole pathway from beginning to end, you'd think, "Well, that was too much." But each little nudge you can rationalize with your silence or with your acquiescence, with the fact that you'll put up with it, with the fact that you don't want to take the trouble, with the fact that you want to hide, with the fact that you want to maintain your own pristine view of yourself."
BRILLIANT!
I will point out another parallel benefit in my next comment.
In the above transcript you will find that reinforces what I've laid out a few times in the past about the goals of the ambiguously labeled Progressive movement -- claiming to be forward looking but incrementally creeping regression into every institution -- and how it grew, incrementally, or gradually as Peterson put it.
Peterson make the case that It should not be hard for many of us to see the trends. Trends such as policies that, were they not easily almost always written off as mistakes, could rationally be expected were it widely known that a death cult put in charge of every institution.
Peterson says we have a tendency not to say much about such things. At least not UNTIL a trusted scholar lays it out as Peterson did in this video. And even then, we have a psychological resistance to refuse to accept it as factual.
I've only provided the portion of the transcript that reinforces my view, but he takes it much further of course. Explains why normal people fall into line under totalitarian regimes and carry out its worst atrocities. He says (elsewhere) how he has fought off evil inclinations that presented themselves as a choice, so he feels uncomfortable when people praise his work as those of a good man. He knows he's human and his life is not over. That applies to us all. It seems he empathizes with those who've failed perhaps because he can't be sure he won't.
Were he well, he'd likely opine that the commander of the swat team is the story's quintessential of all those who feel compelled to maintain his own pristine view of himself.
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