Looks as though the worm is starting to turn in Oz:
Wild scenes broke out in Richmond as a group of hooligans clashed with police trying to contain the violent ‘freedom rally’ march.
…with predictable results:
Police arrested 235 people and while most were taken away for breaching health directions, some were charged with assault, riotous behaviour and weapons and drug offences. Each will be fined $5,452, with 193 infringements handed out so far.
Naturally, police blamed the Deplorables:
‘Angry aggressive young males (were) there to fight the police, not to protest about freedoms,’ he told the media late on Saturday.
Then again, I myself might have turned into an “aggressive male” (i.e. man) had I witnessed thuggery such as this:
An elderly woman was shoved to the ground and doused with pepper spray by two policemen during the Melbourne anti-lockdown riot. The woman was bowled over by the two cops before they fired the spray directly on her face as she lay defenceless on the road trying to shield her eyes.
Because this is Oz, public opinion was divided into two camps, i.e. “bastards” and “she deserved it for breaking the law”.
Please join me in a couple minutes’ silence to allow the RCOB to subside.
Note to the various OzGovs: “breaking the law” means things like murder, robbery and violence towards the undeserving. Protesting against totalitarian government is NOT breaking the law except in totalitarian countries like Iran and Communist China.
And now, it seems, Australia.
It appears that some of Georgian England’s deported criminals carried it in their genes, and their descendants now run the country.
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Good for the people of Oz! Resist bad laws then remove the tyrants out of office. Remove their agents as well.
JQ
Note that the Oz Nazi spraying the downed woman is wearing his chin diaper, well, down around his chin and not over his mouth and nose. He’s committing the same “crime” he’s there to punish the citizens for committing.
It begins.
So the question is – now that the first incident is passed, who will learn from this? All of those persons arrested need to demand jury trials – every single one. With a little luck, they’ll get a number of acquittals on jury nullification grounds; at the very least, they’ll gum up the system for months, if not years.
Perhaps more importantly, will the citizenry learn that if they act together, the authorities cannot rule them? Next time, instead of a few hundred, there may be several thousand people. No amount of police can stop large numbers of determined citizens.
Will police arm up, or will citizen pressure get police to back down? It may start singly – an officer or two who, when pressed, simply stands aside, and declines to participate in the arrests. If more and more officers do that, police cohesion will break down. Will military forces follow? How cohesive will they be?
Liberty begins with a single word. And that word is “No.”
If worse does get to worse, the OZ Authorities might find out to their great displeasure that their loyal constituents have been lying to them during all the gun “buy back”/”turn-in” schemes over the past decades.
When bubbles burst, a lot more than hubris gets punctured.
The “she deserved it for breaking the law” crowd need to learn some history:
Those that hid Anne Frank and her family were breaking the law.
Those that sent her and her family to the camps were following the law.
Legal and Moral are not equivalent terms.
Randy
You’re absolutely right. Freedom Riders, peaceful protestors for civil rights, Ghandi’s people in South Africa and India, the people who hid Ann Frank and others, Rosa Parks etc were all breaking the law.
The Holocaust, Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainian people, Mao’s humanitarian crimes etc were all legal within their countries.
JQ
Proforma vs Malforma