On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.
Ms. Mangu-Ward’s piece is entitled “Bodies Against the State,” and though she doesn’t quite come out and say it, not all protests are equal, either, with some deserving more respect than others.
“In China, crowds of people line the streets,” Mangu-Ward writes. “They are holding blank sheets of paper.” This is something I’ve written about, too, in “Point Blank Protest” back in November. “The police nonetheless know what they mean. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party know what they mean. The world knows what they mean.”
Helpfully, she explains: “the protesters’ goal is to make manifest the implied violence that authoritarian states use to keep order.”
Of course, in China, even more than here (not all transgressions being equal), the state’s violence is too often more than merely implied.
And in America, the symbolism of protests has been marred by too much violence — something Mangu-Ward mangles in her piece. But the point of pitting oneself symbolically against state crimes remains important, as she explains: “The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn’t have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.”
The art of protest needs some perfecting in the west. When our protests run to riot, their symbolic impact becomes confused, and adds to our ideological strife, clarifying nothing — quite unlike Tank Man, and the blank paper protests.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“There’s no free will,” says the philosopher; “To hang is most unjust.”
“There is no free will,” assents the officer; “We hang because we must.”
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 8 (1911), § “Epigrams,” p. 350.
On the third of January in 1777, American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis’s forces in the Battle of Princeton.
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig (pictured above) became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
On the right, the go-to solution has always been to ramp up policing, to make the basic function of the state — crime-fighting — stronger and more effective.
On the left, a leading idea has been to disarm the populace so people cannot do as much harm, and also to “rehabilitate” troubled folks with government TLC.
I grew up in the ’70s, when the failures of benevolent leftism (which we called “liberalism”) were becoming clear. So there was a reaction: Lock more people up.
That reaction fizzled in recent years, and, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, crime on a city-by-city case, as well as nationally, has increased.
Nevertheless, during this period another policy has gained a huge momentum: instead of disarming the populace, arm them!
How’s that going? The most recent case study is in Maine, which in 2015 allowed permit-less concealed carry of firearms.
“While rates of violent crime increased nationally from 2015 to 2020,” writes Steve Robinson in “Maine Crime Fell Following 2015 Repeal of Gun Control Law” (MaineWire, December 29, 2022), “the rate of violent crime in Maine fell steadily beginning in 2015, after a slight increase from 2014 to 2015, according to data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.”
Robinson notes that while the Maine experience doesn’t prove that “an armed society is a polite society,” it falsifies, quite clearly, the catastrophic predictions made by gun control advocates back in 2015.
I hazard it does much more. It shows that distributed power (in this case, firepower and defensive capacity) in the peaceful population is a separate, non-left/non-right solution to the age-old problem of crime.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. 7, sec. 11, 1689.
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
On the second day of 1819, the Panic of 1819, the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States, began. The classic historical treatment of this crisis remains Murray Rothbard’s dissertation.
Paul Jacob tries to see straight into and through two of the biggest stories of the week. OK: one of them is a classic movie. So, not the BIGGEST story out there. But the implications? Huge:
Scientific method consists in applying to those subjects which lie without the range of our immediate experience those same common-sense methods of reasoning which successful men of the world apply in judging of matters which concern their own interests.
Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, chapter III, “Of Scientific Method”
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.