OPINION
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 25 years, it’s that you don’t want to mess with the Monkey’s Paw.
For anyone who doesn’t know the story, here’s a quick retelling. There’s this average, run-of-the-mill family, living in a typical spooky old house. They get their hands on this funky monkey’s paw, courtesy of a random old geezer named Sergeant-Major Morris. His only advice is: “Careful what you wish for, folks!” But do they listen? Nope.
Of course, being a curious bunch, the family starts wishing for things. First up, they wish for some cash, because who doesn’t love a bit of dough? Lo and behold, their wish comes true! But, it’s blood money from their son’s unfortunate demise. Naturally, they wish for their beloved son to come back from the dead. But, surprise, surprise, the resurrected son returns as a zombie, scaring the living daylights out of everyone. Can’t say they didn’t ask for it.
I bring this up because I remember 9/11. The terror attacks so terrified the world that citizens everywhere allowed their governments to introduce terrific new laws to fight “terrorism”. Everyone thought this was good and righteous since we all wanted our governments to make the bad people go away. We practically begged the state to impose restrictions on the off chance the Mohammedans would next blow up our child in her schoolroom one day.
Now it’s 2024 and do you see much Islamic terror? The laws must have worked, right? A police state broke the international terror networks and now we get to talk about Islamism in the past tense. Surely our governments will now let us board aircraft without having our genitals x-rayed.
Fat chance. A finger on the Monkey’s Paw already curled downwards in 2001 and it’s never standing back up again. Even a casual student of history knows that governments rarely choose to remove laws that make them stronger. Even if people start complaining, the state simply jiggles some keys in front of our eyes until we forget about the whole thing and go back to our Netflix.
This is the correct context for National’s ban on gang patches. The jiggling keys don’t work on me for some reason. I remember. I watch. I notice.
You may not know that a lot of the people who were arrested for protesting the Covid-19 nonsense had their freedoms removed under those same anti-terror laws everyone applauded when they were targeted at Muslims. It happened repeatedly in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the EU and even in New Zealand (although our laws were never as strict as in those other places).
Anti-terror laws are still being (ab)used against people whom the governments of those countries consider to be their domestic political enemies. Whether those people are real threats is beside the point. The fact is that those same laws are now predominantly deployed against the citizens of the state for which they were initially designed to protect. That’s the Monkey’s Paw.
What precisely is stopping the New Zealand Government from abusing its anti-gang laws as well? Be specific with your answer. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh, I don’t care because I’m not in a gang.” Oh really? What exactly is a “gang”? Let’s play this out. Our freedom depends on it.
The basic definition of a gang is a transient local centre of power. “Transient” in the sense that gangs don’t have sovereignty over geography (the sovereign is he who decides the exception). Gangs can’t be sovereign inside a nation-state because no gang is powerful enough to defend any territorial claim. And if you can’t defend it, you don’t own it, which makes you a slave at worst and a gang at best.
On the other hand, a state is a fixed local centre of power. Essentially, a gang becomes a state if no stronger power exists above it and if it can defend a territory from rival states or gangs, fulfilling the foundational principles of sovereignty outlined above.
Why are these definitions important? Because transient local centres of power come in all shapes and sizes. In Italy and Sicily, the Cosa Nostra mafia is often still the first system of law enforcement used by residents to arbitrate interpersonal disputes. This mafia isn’t as robust as it once was, but in times not too distant it was trusted more by Italians than the central government itself. This afforded the mafia inordinate local – and even national – power. But the mafia never became a state.
Other gangs have different formulas. For example, in a worryingly high number of European towns and neighbourhoods today, mosques and their Muslim clergy are considered the first stage of dispute resolution under Islamic sharia (which just means “law” in Arabic). Many serious domestic squabbles don’t even make it to the police anymore, with obvious implications for state sovereignty.
Elsewhere, there are entire areas of major cities where national rules do not apply. People who work in the City of London, for example, tip their hats to the state, but most of the regulations that would destroy the average person are irrelevant to these bankers. These banker gangs can do essentially whatever they wish because of secret immunity deals forged centuries ago. These bankers are the definition of “transient” since they operate with tentacles all over the world.
The state allows such transient local centres to exist because they either implicitly support the state or do not outright threaten it. Their support for the state might be as straightforward as giving the state “plausible deniability” when it wishes to do something that it can’t be seen doing. Or the state may simply consider these local centres of power to be too weak to care much about (yet).
The mathematics of this system is that any gang that continues to exist in a modern state must, in some way, be allowed to exist. After all, any local centre of power that truly threatens the state would be ruthlessly hunted down and eliminated. If you see a gang, then it must be under the protection of some larger centre of power. It’s probably a good idea to start asking what that power is.
Now that definitions are out of the way, we can answer the question above: Are you in a gang? Do you need to worry about these anti-gang laws?
It all depends on what the lawyers think. No, not the criminal lawyers. The criminal lawyers. They are the ones who hold your freedom in balance. After all, the point of a criminal lawyer is to help you find ways around laws. But a criminal lawyer will find ways to make existing laws not only bounce off you and your friends but stick like a 1000 kg glue ball to your enemies. All criminal lawyers love vaguely written laws. But criminal lawyers write vagueness into the laws.
The practice of drafting vague laws, and then empowering “judges” to “interpret” them, is simply another way of abolishing politics. The effect of legal ambiguity is to transfer the power of legislation to a private body of lawyers who are not subject to public scrutiny. Vague laws mean all you need to do is hire your friends to the bench and you can rearrange society in any way you like.
If you are in the spotlight, criminal lawyers can and will pick any law and “interpret” it in a way that destroys your transient local centres of power. They are already chomping to twist the muddy details of National’s proposed anti-gang legislation in ways so Machiavellian it would make your head spin if you watched them in action.
I am trying to warn you that National’s anti-gang legislation is a trap.
Think back to the pandemic. What lessons did the government learn? It realised that people don’t like it when they see the truth that they have no freedoms, only privileges. When those privileges were taken away, enough people made such a noise that the government got really worried sometime in 2022. Governments tend to react quite poorly to threats with a non-zero chance of being real.
What did that group of freedom-loving, noisy people all have in common? Flags, placards, messaging, networks and – colours. Do you see where this is going yet?
The government doesn’t actually care about gang colours or any colours at all. It won’t outlaw All Blacks jerseys because black is the official colour of a sub-gang that is 100% part of the state. But when the Freedom movement gets a bit too uppity and displays the potential to create local centres of power, guess who just became part of a gang?
That’s right: you. And anyone else wearing Voices For Freedom T-shirts on Queen St.
The government can do the same thing with the Christian cross, the Jewish kippah or the Muslim hijab (which has already been done in France). Anti-gang laws are a blank cheque for the state’s army of criminal lawyers to legally destroy any group it chooses to describe as a gang. Whoops.
I understand the desire to clamp down on gangs. But another finger is about to curl downwards on the Monkey’s Paw. Be careful what you wish for.