This thought provoking article was posted by “Oamaru Tomorrow” back in March 2022 – but is well worth repeating to keep this on our Radars especially in light of what has been happening not just in NZ over the past 6 months – but in a bevy of other countries including – Canada, the Netherlands/Holland, Pakistan, Australia………… Suddenly many of the comments made here are feeling a whole lot more relevant.

OAMARU TOMORROW  16 March 2022

What would a police state look like in New Zealand? Mention anything of this ilk and you get a hysterical “you can’t compare New Zealand to Nazi Germany”.
Well no. That’s not what I’m doing. That was a police state in Germany in the 30s. That’s not what a police state would look like in NZ in the 2020s.

Our cops are nice people. I like them. But they are not big thinkers. Sadly the ones that are appear to have quit recently. Now of course, the cops are not subject to the mandates you or I are subject to. That’s step one of a police state. Put them in a separate privileged class.

A police state looks at every issue through the eye of the police. So start with firearms. A farmer views a firearm as a tool like a quad bike or a pipe wrench. A police officer views a firearm as an offensive weapon they may have shoved in their face. They get up in the morning with a risk they might get shot. Having lived like that myself and had a few guns shoved in my face, I understand the sentiment. Today, we as a society view guns through the eyes of the police. They are offensive weapons.

A bit of polling among the shooting community, based on the amount of free pest control being done and the (very high) cost of commercial pest control, the cost to the country of viewing guns through police eyes is already in the billions.
I haven’t done any free pest control of this type since the confiscations. I’m not alone.
A police state views everything through a police officers world view. They don’t see the good side of society. When you make the rules in this way, you lose the good side of society.

We move on to protestors. In a functional democracy an angry crowd of people need to be dealt with by politicians. That’s their job. There are upset constituents and people need to sit down, air grievances and compromise. If you don’t do that it’s a failed democracy. Today if your position is less than 50% of the population, you simply don’t matter. You have no voice, no rights. Nothing. People won’t accept democracy under those circumstances. If you don’t have democracy, society is ruled by the most powerful and violent minority. Currently the police.

That’s what we saw in Wellington. The entire affair was viewed through police eyes. Only the criminal element was discussed. Only a police response was discussed. Politicians said over and over from day one they were leaving it up to police to deal with. Police have historically been convicted of every crime imaginable. If we applied the same logic to police as was applied to the protest, they would all be viewed as rapists and murderers. Clearly that’s absurd, but it was accepted for the protestors.

So for a third example, one that will soon come to fruition, how would police view entrepreneurs? When police deal with business proposals, it’s exclusively fraud and scams. So that’s how police will view entrepreneurial activity. Show me a police state anywhere with a thriving economy. They quickly descend into paranoia and economic stagnation.

As people become poorer and more desperate, they start to behave in ways that justify the police state view. People are going to starve. Everyone has criminal tendencies when their children are starving. The police state is a source of this behavior. It feeds off its self. If you combine this democratic dysfunction with scarcity, due to resource shortages, it’s a short path to ruin.

We are effectively under sanction. This is why North Korea and Russia and Iran are under sanction. By putting the people under economic pressure we know a war will break out between the police state and the general public and eventually the regime will collapse, once this cycle is initiated. So as gas prices hit $4 a liter and the police break protests what do you think is the likely outcome?

It’s a short path to ruin and we are on it.