Cæsar's Loaded Dice

"Cæsar these days plays with a loaded dice," spoke a certain German political prisoner in a recent Canadian Court. This gentleman, in the last thirty-seven months, has been held captive in three democratic jurisdictions – and now thinks he will die in custody.

His crime? Well, he hasn't actually committed one. Not even technically a thought-crime – unless one concludes that thought crosses borders at the speed of light, and can set the ends of the earth ablaze. That is right, although that alarms even the broadest notion of Anglo-Saxon law and justice.

The satirist Auberon Waugh was interviewed by Kim Hill ten years ago on New Zealand National Radio. He came out with notions that set my ears buzzing. Curiously, the talk did not cause a stir in any media space. Kim's interview with the cad Jeffrey Archer at about the same time became a legend. Jeffrey and Kim together put the rich and successful white male right in the public poo.

Auberon made me see England and her dominions in a fresh light – not right not left but maybe the bull's eye. He said in England there is now a third force. It is not the respectable class. It is not the criminals. It is the public security people. Until the recent decades they represented and enforced the mores of the respectable. The middle-class family man lived in a moral universe that shielded him from the roughs, the criminals and the stirrers. But now the public security actually sympathise or even identify with them and go after him.

Auberon brought up the drink-driving laws that he said have destroyed the country pubs as the police blitz the middle-class drivers. Meanwhile the really dangerous drivers hog the road unmolested by their fellow modern highway men, the traffic police.

With cold English logic, Auberon tossed off –

…drunken traffic accidents in the English countryside only kill a few thousand a year.
…that loss-of-life was a sacrifice, worth preserving the rural English way of life for.

I don't endorse that logic. But I recall twenty years ago my parents taking a strong pro-police stand on drunken-driving. One nice evening they took the binoculars to a police drunken-driving blitz. To their consternation, they saw the bitter truth. Young Maori men holding up the public highway and making frightened little middle-class pakehas breathe into their issue bags. The Maoris were the ones wearing the State uniforms.

In my lifetime there has been a profound historic shift in the relationship between the citizens and authority. Since the mid-nineteenth century the English institutions of public order made themselves a byword for incorruptibility. In New Zealand we have no other history of the corrupt Beadle and the self serving bibulous justice of the peace.

Our trust in our institutions was total – almost angelic. In the same time period enunciated by Auberon there has been a complete reversal. Surprisingly, about half of New Zealanders still, in recent surveys, say they have complete trust in the police. I can only assume they are the sheep. The police admit to a new working environment of public mistrust and disingenuously blame its source in the 1981 Springbok tour. In that unfortunate time, the police got a lot of accusations of brutality but no accusations of corruption. The intial public mistrust has its source in hapless Arthur Thomas. He was the first victim of what in New Zealand has grown to be a gallery of public shame and disquiet.

The law may be as unyielding and pitiless as steel. The traditional English police have been its human face. Now we instinctively feel they will use the words of the law to rail-road us. That we are the pawns of a sadistic, even corrupt, legal game devised for their profit.

Some talk about replacing the English adversarial system with the French inquisitorial system. An implementation of that would actually be as unpopular as French nuclear testing. French justice goes with the territory of French logic. The adversarial system was entrenched with Anglo-Saxon hearty common sense. But now in the third force we have every reason to suspect they are biased against our manners. They possess the "forensic science" and the crucial police plant or two to weigh the dice to take us down.

update: 2010

The German political prisoner curiously survived five years in a German prisoner. He is now released and has retired to the Black Forest.