In our current situation, would that this basic protection of man against state even be applied consistently and forcefully.

Even so, I hold that the presumption is fundamentally lacking so long as it is not attached to another, very important consideration. And so, I rephrase:

Let no person be held guilty until proven innocent, except insofar as when that person is a privileged actor of state (or other similarly socially privileged group), they shall not enjoy such presumption.

The Last Jew in Vinnitsa

Photo via Distributed Republic.

I hold that none of the uniformed men in this photo should have ever enjoyed a presumption of innocence.

I might not gun them all down myself. I might not assist in doing so. But I decidedly would oppose anyone who aimed to get in the way of that happening.

In the sociopolitical sphere, what I find myself drawn to the most is the idea that we ought to reject any sort of institutionalized privilege: king over subject, collective over individual, priest over congregation, man over woman, master over slave, capital over labor, state over citizen (or non-citizen!). Alongside that, of course, I have my own preferences that I advocate as well, but an opposition to privilege, at least, ought to be universal.

Power and privilege are two different things. Privilege is that which says “okay for me, banned for thee”.

I have no issue at all with consensual organization, employment, business per se. The “authority“, the power, which arises by virtue of reputation, of achievement, of value given to others, by appreciation from others is not the authority I oppose: it is the type of non-consensual authority which gives some people a presumption of greater social worth and an expectation of deference to them, usually codified in oppressive institutions, the most visible and omnipresent of which is the state.

Or would you choose not to eat there at all?

For the benefit of which privileged classes would you like to bully strangers today?

Cute, isn’t it, the way propaganda works?

A lot of well-meaning, gentle folks will look at a poster like this and think they’re being presented with a choice among competing priorities: education, agriculture, or technology?

Precious few will look and see the robbery that is taxation. Perhaps fewer still will see the false choice in being able to select from a limited menu of privileged classes: parents of school-aged children, textbook publishers, teachers and others involved in the “education” industry; farmers, agribusiness, pesticide producers and the giant industrial manufacturers of agricultural machinery; or technophiles, those wealthy enough to enjoy the benefits of modern telecommunications and the corporate interests behind the telecoms wallowing already in a century of robbery-subsidized privilege? Maybe only a handful will recognize that government monies are never “invested”, but rather are stolen from taxpayers and bestowed upon politically-connected, privileged classes. Perhaps almost none at all will notice the false choice, the presumption and attempted transference of moral corruption involved in the use of “we” and “our” (the linguistic situation is even worse in the Slovak version, which asks, “Na čo by sa mali použiť naše peniaze?“, placing the question into the passive voice: “For what should our money be used?”).

Few, indeed, will startle, perceiving that freedom is not on the menu.

I call bullshit, horseshit, and dogshit.

I used to consider myself a conservative, yet still a hard-core libertarian, and there is one sense in which I still do:

…it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against any social change.

– Rothbard, Left and Right (which I’m still reading, having been prompted to post this when I read the sentence)

Perhaps the reason for this old conservative streak in my political thinking connects to a perception that when practically any social change was proposed, discussed or implemented by government or the parasites I saw swarming about its loathsome carcass, I very often saw the nature of that change and of the likely effects to be horrible. There’s an element of philosophical conservatism which at least stands up saying, “what you are proposing is far more often bad than good, and so we oppose you in general for the sake of erring on the correct side far more often than not.” To sum it up, the essence of this theory is that the government should not be given any new powers. Essentially, that nothing in the political sphere ought to change.

The tragic — and, in hindsight, obvious — flaw in this position, and one which I have seen since turning to anarchism as opposed to libertarianism in its bulk, is that the libertarian philosophy demands essential, widespread, sweeping changes across societies and cultures if a world based on its ideals is ever going to exist. It’s not new government powers that frighten us, it’s all government powers. We cannot both resist any change and simultaneously be desirous of the most dramatic change imaginable.

Throwing away that resistance to change, we can look back and see that it served to support, anchor and buttress not only the gibbering horror that was the state, but the entire Lovecraftian dark-forces-from-beyond-the-rift-in-time nightmare ruling class which uses the state as its tool. Add in the disgusting bigotry dressed up as “cultural conservatism” and you suddenly have a realization akin to discovering that why you’re distrustful of your neighbor is because your neighbor is, in fact, a cannibalistic ghoul.

Dissolution to the state! Restitution from the ruling class!

In the US, habeas generally means that a suspect arrested and jailed must be brought before a judge within 48 hours of the arrest to be arraigned, which is to have the charges against him formally read, and to enter a plea. If that doesn’t happen, a request can be made to a judge that the authorities holding the suspect free him immediately.

Habeas is a check on arbitrary State power. Detention is used primarily as a punitive measure, and is widely and rightly seen as a denial of liberty. The balance being struck under the doctrine is that it may require a bit of time for police or prosecutors to secure witnesses or evidence, and that during that time the suspect may evade capture, go on to commit other offenses, destroy evidence or compel or eliminate witnesses, and that in such cases the burden imposed on the suspect by detaining him is reasonable, either in the interests of the State or society. Habeas is a princple of law in all common-law countries, and similar legal doctrines apply in many other places.

Seven hundred years later, under threat by “modern” terrorism — that is, acts of mass violence committed by people not wearing clown suits — habeas is breaking down. The US Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspends the writ of habeas corpus for anyone the President designates an “unlawful enemy combatant”, which is to say anyone he damned well pleases. It essentially grants the President to point at anyone, mumble something about “terrorists” and imprison that person — without charge or trial — forever.

In the UK, time limits for charges to be laid against terrorism suspects have been getting longer since 2000: seven days under the 2000 Terrorism Act, 14 days since 2003, 28 days since 2006. This week, the House of Commons passed a bill to extend the limit to 42 days, as the BBC reports:

Brown wins crunch vote on 42 days

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days.

Thirty-six Labour MPs joined forces with Conservatives and Lib Dems to vote against the proposals.

But that was not enough to defeat them – although the government still faces a battle in the House of Lords.

Before the vote, Anthony Barnett wrote in “42 Days: An ‘abundance of caution’“:

In presenting their case to the nation for the extension of detention without charge to 42 days, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and the Prime Minister emphasise how much time may be needed to gather all the evidence required to lay the necessary charges because of the immense complexity of such evidence in the age of information technology and international conspiracies. Much detail is offered about thousands of files and hundreds of computers. Their supporters say that we must not allow a terrorist to walk free just because there has not been ‘enough time’ to accumulate the necessary evidence to make good his arrest. The presumption is clear. It is important to highlight this. We are supposed to accept that the argument is over how long guilty people have to be held before they are charged.

This presumption is false. Over half those arrested under the Terrorism Act are “innocent members of the public”. This is officially regarded as acceptable due to the need for the police to exercise “an abundance of caution”. And of the small number held for nearly a month without charge, half of them are innocent too.

To jail someone who is innocent is a crime, one done in our name.

Don’t worry, Britain, it’s okay. They’re terrorists after all. If they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects, right? And 42 days under State interrogation while locked in a cage isn’t really all that bad. I mean, sure, you might lose your job, have your mortgage foreclosed on for non-payment, your utilities shut off and all your personal property carted away for sale at auction, but that’s not really punishment, it’s just what a cautious society must do to protect itself from terrorism.

This is not even to mention the hardship imposed on a person and his family and social relations by being kidnapped and imprisoned, locked away in the UK’s overflowing dungeons and subject to rape, beating and the random stab wound by actual criminals. But that’s not punishment, it’s caution.

But hey, you know, it’s the modern age. Things are so complicated now, what with computers and emails and the lack of perfect surveillance. This will only be applied to terrorism suspects, of course. The same rationale for denying habeas for longer and longer periods will never be applied, say, to cases of suspected money laundering, drug trafficking, distribution of “obscene” materials or P2P file sharing. Of course the government will restrain itself, recognizing proper limits to its own power. Of course the cops and the courts are there to protect you.

And, of course, the age of worrying about “terrorism” will come to a rapid close as State policies to combat it by progressively destroying civil liberties and claiming greater and greater governmental powers culminates in the perfection of the panopticon, what Alex Jones refers to as a “prison planet”.