It’s clear who will man the checkpoints when a demagogue arrives

By Lethbridge Herald on February 4, 2022.

Editor:

During the siege of Sarajevo back in the 1990s, a city bright with music and art and a cosmopolitan melding of cultures – the Paris of the Balkans as it was known – one of many penetrating images stuck in my memory: It was of an ethnic Serb mortar emplacement on a hill high above the city from which a steady fusillade of mortar shells was being rained down indiscriminately on the streets below.

One of the men so determinedly delivering death and chaos onto innocent people was dressed in jeans and a smart-looking sweater. He’d got up that morning and put on his normal casual wear and went out to kill his fellow citizens. 

Similar scenes showed roadblocks manned also by armed men in civilian attire and some in militia garb. They were stopping people and checking I.D. – for murderous reasons, of course, as became apparent.

And so I had to wonder, and have been curious ever since, just which guys in my own society would be the ones to man the checkpoints were the social order ever to come apart?

 You don’t really have to look all that far to see them around. They’re typically about half-smart and have some ready grievance just off the boil under their skin and have some sort of belief that they’re owed something or other and that some or other group is responsible for whatever they reckon to be ‘the problem’. They are also quick to nationalistic fervour and ever ready to drape themselves in ‘the flag’. OK, flash forward – big boys in dump trucks and pick-ups draped in flags demonstrating their passion for ‘freedom’ by blocking the free movement of their fellow citizens and brazenly flouting the very laws which underlie the living matrix of a free and open society. Yeah, think about it – when the actual demagogue arrives, who is he going to send out to man the checkpoints? 

Yes, the half-smart bully-boys who only recognize the value of the law as it pertains to their wants. Certain of your neighbours can turn against you. If you were to want to drive to Coutts today, you would be stopped by boys in flag-draped trucks. 

Think about that.

Phil Burpee

Pincher Creek