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Much of my attention\u00a0this\u00a0week has been on the unfolding civil rights calamity\u00a0in the United States resulting from the Ferguson, Missouri decision not to prosecute police officer Darren Wilson. The popular will in America’s\u00a0streets to stand up against this injustice has been\u00a0a shining example of resistance<\/a> to be emulated in other countries.<\/p>\n #FergusonDecision<\/a> #protests<\/a> are a legitimate cry for justice and freedom, based on #AmericanSpring<\/a> model http:\/\/t.co\/ADr7E2mOOr<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Harry J. Bentham (@hjbentham) November 25, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have no grudge with Officer Wilson. Of greater significance, the\u00a0popular unrest that occurred in response to the decision drew\u00a0attention to the\u00a0widely criticized use of grand juries, which are\u00a0seen as a “rubber stamp” and have only ever served whatever purpose was decided already\u00a0by the government.<\/p>\n #Ferguson<\/a>: A grand ‘jury’ is not a jury. It is a captive instrument of the government: https:\/\/t.co\/PfPfxi9qyO<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/u7N6WMPr0b<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 25, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ironically, the failure\u00a0to prosecute Wilson\u00a0only further discredits the police and weakens their ability to do their job, as well as worsening their relations with the community. This leads me to the analysis of why the police are in a state of enmity\u00a0with the public in locations such as Ferguson: illegitimacy.<\/p>\n The unrest has drawn\u00a0attention to the total illegitimacy of police and security forces in many parts of the United States: something the US government can only be expected to ignore and dismiss\u00a0repeatedly in the decades to come, maybe until its back is to the wall and it can’t even enforce the personal safety of regime officials in their own homes. If\u00a0the law repeatedly fails to\u00a0coincide with the wishes of the people, the law is illegitimate and the people are not at fault. This might make me sound like a bloodthirsty\u00a0Jacobin, and that’s exactly why it is\u00a0a basic tenet of modern liberal democracy: liberal democracy is Jacobin. The United States cannot expect to be perceived as a liberal democracy, and yet refuse to be governed by the will of the people and insist on unpopular manifestations\u00a0of law enforcement.<\/p>\n One exercise that is useful is to compare the way the police and security forces react to civil unrest in the United States with the way they react in so-called autocratic states, namely countries like Ukraine (before the military dictatorship… I mean democracy… rode to power on the back of a tank) or Baathist-ruled Syria. In the latter, the state is greatly offended by even the mildest\u00a0forms of protest. Negative depictions of the regime by journalists and bloggers result in persecution or detention, even torture. Acts of protest and civil\u00a0disobedience are met with physical attacks by security forces almost immediately. In the United States,\u00a0the regime uses\u00a0a softer\u00a0approach, but it\u00a0is\u00a0no less illegitimate and even\u00a0worse for the overall survival chances of the regime. Theirs is a strategy of denial and withdrawal.<\/p>\n A city\u00a0is struck\u00a0by riots – as happened in Detroit\u00a0in 1967\u00a0– or a natural disaster – as happened in New Orleans in 2005 – and the US government responds quite forcefully, but its forcefulness is limited. In the long term, the US government\u00a0will not\u00a0try to re-establish\u00a0the respect that the authorities have lost\u00a0from the public, or attempt to reconstruct community cohesion. Instead, they will withdraw or attempt to shirk responsibility, claiming that it is the responsibility of the more local state authorities. Less government spending will occur\u00a0in the region affected, and there will also be\u00a0flight of capital from the region (largely due to the damage to businesses in the rioting itself). Policing will continue, but in an increasingly adversarial fashion, treating impoverished and disaffected communities almost as if they are a foreign threat rather than a disenfranchised social stratum\u00a0of American society itself.<\/p>\n We can predict that such a strategy of denial and withdrawal will take place in Missouri to a greater extent now, as the US government bitterly avoids picking up the pieces left by the disturbance. In shame, they will avoid confronting the hard truths of injustice and bad governance exposed by such rioting, fearful that trying to restore ordinary life would only pull out further threads from the fabric of the great America that so few are able to maintain\u00a0faith in.<\/p>\n I would like to take a moment to clarify\u00a0why I say the things I say, and to show that my critical view of the US regime and other so-called democracies is not hypocritical in view of more repressive states, but constructive for\u00a0the cause of advancing both democracy and civilization itself. Because I don’t live under the jurisdiction of the Russian, Chinese or Iranian governments, I have no interest in changing their regime and no interest in undermining them. It is of no interest to me, one way or another, whether those regimes survive or not. That’s why I don’t bother to criticise them, and instead focus all my criticism on the United States.<\/p>\n The regime whose jurisdiction we\u00a0live under in Britain is not our own,\u00a0but the US regime. The US regime\u00a0might not rule the whole world as it claims, but it does rule Britain. We can tell this by how effectively\u00a0the US\u00a0is able to leverage Britain’s (and Sweden’s) institutions to persecute its critics like\u00a0Julian Assange, who is forced into exile at the Ecuadorian embassy here simply because the humiliated\u00a0US leaders couldn’t stand the\u00a0disclosures of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n All regimes are illegitimate. I encourage everyone to undermine the regimes under which\u00a0they live, and attempt to hold them to account. No regime should be above the judgment of the people, and regimes\u00a0that pretend to rule by popular mandate are only all the more offensive to humanity than open\u00a0dictatorships. No event would be more\u00a0conducive to civilization than for\u00a0the United States government’s institutions to fail and the regime\u00a0to\u00a0collapse completely, paving the way for ultimate freedom and anarchy. Such a transition to statelessness\u00a0must be developed\u00a0in the US before it occurs in\u00a0any other state, for\u00a0where else can Rome fall\u00a0if not in Rome? It is my understanding that s0-called sociocultural evolution \u00a0in the United States filters through to Britain and Western Europe, so all alternative regimes and triumphs\u00a0of peaceful statelessness<\/a> must take their accelerated forms and manifest first\u00a0in the United States. This is true whether we are talking about transcending the state through something\u00a0as grand as Jacque Fresco’s\u00a0Venus Project (pursued by the Zeitgeist Movement) or the Zero State’s VDP State<\/a>, or simply the libertarian and anarchist visions of minimal or abolished state – all of whose values are carried\u00a0among we,\u00a0MONT bloggers<\/a>.<\/p>\n The key to that turn of events is no\u00a0single act of rioting or destruction in the US – no silver bullet. Instead, rioting and civil disobedience must be legitimized in the US, to forever\u00a0expand the spaces that\u00a0cannot be effectively governed in the United States and decrease the maneuvering room of the central government.\u00a0Such steps pave the way for the eventual total collapse of all present norms of\u00a0state in the world in favor of united and stateless order\u00a0– something that is of maximum\u00a0value to humanity\u00a0if it first happens\u00a0in the United States.<\/p>\n If it takes two more decades or three, evolution has selected\u00a0America’s fate and the costs of that can now only be mitigated. The prices of withdrawal and ignorance in the face of injustice and lost social cohesion will be final destabilization and regime collapse, and we should welcome this change\u00a0as part of our sociocultural development.<\/p>\n For more of my popular political commentary, I have collections of some rather more radical essays<\/a> that can be easily downloaded and rated.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/71KJhtgZfjL._SL1286_.jpg\")
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