The next crime for consideration is the forgery of coins or creation of false money. The creation of false money is not the most serious of crimes, but in the interests of maintaining an economic system in which the people of the nation have trust, alternative forms of currency must be outlawed. Alternatively, greedy individuals may have the capacity to deceive others by creating great amounts of wealth for themselves in printing or minting false money and therefore depriving others of the right to wealth which they legitimately inherited or earned. The confiscation and destruction of such wealth by the state is absolutely necessary, and perpetrators ought to serve time with a brief suspension of rights as punishment, during which time they ought to be educated in the reasoning behind currency and money, that wealth must be earned by honest means before it can be passed on. In a time when the underpinnings for a cashless society are already being put in place, future governments must consider what can be done in the world of technology to keep track of hackers and internet-based criminals who may create false wealth for themselves by abusing online banking and financial systems.
Crimes against the person derived from wrathful greed or merely wrath, such as robbery, assault and offences against public order, are the next which we shall rank in terms of severity. These crimes are derived from a concern only for the self and harm the integrity of others, both in terms of physicality and property. This is also the first tier of crimes at which we must consider the question of re-offence. It seems quite clear that certain criminals, despite the best efforts of society to re-educate and reintegrate them, are naturally disposed to commit further crime. How many times ought we to allow a criminal to be rehabilitated after he has re-offended, before we give up on him? If a criminal re-offends after extensive rehabilitation, we must assume one of the two following situations are true: either his mental attitude has not changed and rehabilitation has failed, causing the individual to be naturally inclined towards criminal acts; or the individual’s personal economic circumstances are such that crime such as theft was his only means of surviving. The latter is a governmental failure, the former a failure of nature. In the case of the former, we must assume that the criminal is beyond rehabilitation, and his punishment should be more severe than the first offence, with rights removed from him indefinitely as a non-functional member of society. In terms of punishing situational offenders under this system, we may see it as an unfortunate consequence, but a wholly necessary one: examples must be made of criminals under the law, and whilst such situational punishments may urge the government to change their policy to aid their citizens more effectively, it is not right to excuse individuals of criminal behaviour merely due to the fact, say, that they had no money to pay for food.
Fraudulent behaviour must be considered the next most severe, since it is founded on betraying the trust of individuals, which is not merely selfish and harmful, but a threat to the integrity of a whole community, be it local, national or merely financial. Individuals may be affected by fraud, but its implications are societal. Fraud is a form of theft, but far more complex, based around corrupting and exploiting the human capacity for association and support of each other within a community. Defrauding individual out of money by any means is a menace to communitarian values, and by that logic ought to be punished harshly with longer sentences and fines.
Above fraud, we may place murder and crimes of unnatural violence such as rape. Both are violations of the body, but in an even more unnatural sense than an attack upon the corporeal human existence. Removing life is the ultimate sin, and in some cases renders the life of the criminal forfeit; if he is threatening to murder others, a shot to kill may be necessary to save lives. Otherwise life detention should be considered after proper legal conduct has been undertaken. The same applies to rape (under which we include similar immoral acts against minors), since whilst it is not necessarily fatal, the sanctity of sexual union reserved for love has been exploited for the selfish desires of the individual, and indeed some rapes lead to the procreation of children, which can only ever be evil in the context of such criminality, since it forces life into the world outside the context of love, and perhaps outside the capacity of a mother to raise the child. This makes it a crime against life as well, for even if a child is not conceived, the risk is ever-present, and the right to free choice of sexual activity remains paramount.
The most heinous crime, however, we shall set to be treason. Treason is the most heinous fraud and deception, since it is not only a betrayal of the nation to which citizens are obliged to be loyal, but it also has the potential to cause a great deal of loss of life by the betrayal of information or furnishing of means of destruction (which includes service as an enemy solider) to enemies who may hope for an opportunity to destroy the people of the nation. Treason is therefore a threat to the entire national community. Treason is perhaps the only crime for which we might be sympathetic towards the death penalty; however, even the ancient Romans, whose legal system exacted much harsher punishments than we are proposing on criminals, did not always execute traitors. The option of exile is often overlooked or not practiced in modern times, though transportation for guarded accommodation in an outpost of the state, or pure refusal of entry into any territory held by the nation is a viable option for traitors. Exile does not involve having to execute the guilty and thereby remove sacred life from them but is a formal expression that the guilty is no longer a member of, and no longer welcome in, the society which he once belonged to. Having proven himself a dangerous enemy to his own people, the traitor is to be cast out.
Some may object to such punishment on the grounds of human rights, but as we have previously discovered, each nation has the right to set its own punishment. Banishment like this allows a guilty party the full right to further life, simply not in the confines of the national community that was betrayed. It is therefore an effective method of protecting a community from its enemies, in the same way that an enemy to a local community, such as an assailant, is exiled to a prison where he may not harm that community. The only difference is that it is not safe or trustworthy to try and rehabilitate a traitor.
Such is the hierarchy of crime and punishment.
Chapter V
The Path to Anarchy
There are many things in the world which the human race takes a natural dislike to. It is only right that certain things disgust us, lest we lead ourselves hopelessly into disease, unnecessary warfare and general destruction. The definition of criminality is one of the things which has arisen out of the human tendency to be disgusted. One need only look at the punishments offered to criminals and sinners in the past to see these levels of human disgust. What many of us now fear as ‘barbaric’ was once seen as justice: the burning of heretics alive, the hanging of traitors and removing them just on the brink of death, before removing their entrails and dismembering their body in front of a public audience. The very idea of witnessing such spectacles, once used to demonstrate the importance of justice and obedience before the community, disgusts many of us today. By no means should these sorts of punishments be brought back, but criminal justice, this history can teach us, relies as much on social attitude as it does on the enforcement of the law itself. We have mentioned before that if a community-based vision of law enforcement is to be realised within societies, then the commonwealth, the universal good of the community, must be recognised within the minds of individuals.
In the modern age, we have seen communities, particularly European communities of indigenous heritage, become disgusted at one another. When we discussed the practicality of constitutions and political justice within a broader national political system, we concluded that the ‘spirit of the nation’, embodied in certain values and inalienable rights, must be represented by the government of the nation, whilst being not only respected by the population, but being founded in deep-seated national belief. With the onslaught of multiculturalism and attempts to create a nation of ‘humanity’ as a whole rather than nations of distinct c
ulture, conflicts have arisen, and the vision of constitutional government founded on common values is dying. The loss of our values and the readiness of Western European citizens to turn on each other and become disgusted by each other’s perceived ‘intolerance’ or ‘self-hatred’, respectively, have a powerful impact on law enforcement. If we become unaccustomed to be disgusted at criminal activity, then humankind will become disgusted by the punishment of criminal activity.
First, it was deemed disgusting to punish with fire, and so nations ceased to burn at the stake. Then it was deemed disgusting to behead criminals, so we hung them. Then it was disgusting to do so publicly, so executions took place in specially designated areas. Then it was disgusting to hang people, so we decided to only lock them up in jail. Now it is becoming disgusting to lock people up, so we are reducing the sentences of criminals. It is also becoming disgusting to deny criminals their rights as punishment for their crimes, so some nations are considering handing them the vote, and many continental European countries already allow criminals participation in the franchise. We see a trend here, where humanity increasingly seems to feel the need to find something to be outraged at, something to dislike about the treatment of other human beings. Rather than being disgusted by the criminal activity that damages our communities and nations, we are becoming disgusted by our own treatment of those who do not deserve as much respect as we seem to afford them.
If we look at African nations, harsh punishment for crime remains very high. In the Orient too: India, China and Japan all retain the death penalty and harsh sentences for criminal behaviour. If we value the sanctity of life, then the death penalty ought to be avoided (the author himself cannot bring himself to condone it) but its absence marks a distinct line between the Western World and the other nations of Earth. The peoples of Europe have had life a lot easier than say, Africans have in the past 60 years or so. Economically the peoples of Europe have flourished and have suffered from relatively little corruption in comparison to other continents. It is perhaps not surprising then that Europeans and Americans are more willing to turn on one another, since life has become so easy that there is no need for them to unite. If they were to realise, however, that this division within their own culture was paving the path to the downfall of Western civilisation, then perhaps they would see a reason to unite behind their historical values once again.
Eyes are often rolled when conservatives complain about the downfall of Western civilisation and the threat of anarchy that seems set to replace it. Some even embrace the prospect of an anarchic future. What do we mean when we talk about a loss of identity and the loss of the rule of law that follows? When identity is lost, common conceptions of morality are lost with it. Given the differences between cultures, what is considered right and wrong between each culture also differs. We have already spent parts of this work criticising certain cultural practices surrounding Islam, but for many people who live in Islamic countries these laws and customs make perfect sense. By mixing these peoples together with non-Islamic ones, struggles are sure to emerge. It has proved hard enough trying to mix the European peoples together in a federalised state represented by the European Union, with a European Parliament completely failing to achieve the goals of accountability and representation which it claims to. It has been proposed by some, and it is a movement gathering support gradually, to create a United Nations Parliament, and this has been supported by various trans-national associations and Supreme Court judges over the years.43
The coalescence of different human cultures in a single utopian government is simply incompatible with the human tendency to enforce individual cultural worldviews within their own demarcated territory. When we imagine a future where world government is a very real possibility, with free movement across the world between cultures and nations, anarchy is the only conceivable result. This is not the anarchy that Godwin and Marx promised would allow humankind to flourish. Unlike what the radical thinkers of the past and present believe, the natural state of man is not and has never been equality. Humankind living together with cultural or national boundaries will not be the harmonious rational community of co-existence that is promised. Humankind is suspicious of itself, and for good reason — for the survival of its civilisations. Western civilisation has offered the world a great deal in terms of science, philosophy and civil rights; to argue otherwise is to misrepresent the facts. I know of no books to have come out of sub-Saharan Africa before colonisation. Europe is already starting to see the results of cultural miscegenation in the name of diversity: In Germany, police forces are deployed to support women only after they have been raped, not to stop rapes themselves, and cases of large amounts of abuses from supposed ‘refugees’ are not reported on the national media for being too ‘localised’ — such as the case of Maria Ladenburger, the 19-year-old daughter of an EU official and refugee activist who was raped and murdered by the very people she was trying to help. In Italy, property is being confiscated by the state without the owners’ consent, in order to be used as accommodation for migrants — such as the case of Luigi Fogli from Veneto, Northern Italy, whose hotel was confiscated by the local government against his will after he refused to host migrants voluntarily. Every pillar of our society — the right to protection under the law, liberty and property — is being torn down in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’.
As these rights and laws are eliminated to accommodate a destructive agenda, so too do the societies which are supposed to be protected by the forces of criminal justice break down. Anarchy does not rely upon intellectual improvement and the harmonious individual will to cooperate. Cooperation relies on cultural coherence, shared values and history. Anarchy relies solely on the destruction of rights, the destruction of the rule of law and ultimately the destruction of civilisation itself. Whether or not they believed they were doing so, this is what Godwin, Marx and their interpreters on the far left who have infiltrated so many parts of modern life, have advocated, and are continuing to implement in our societies today. If we want to think seriously about the maintenance of criminal justice in our societies, we must stop being disgusted by our own people and begin rebuilding the rights which our ancestors procured for us. If this does not take place, then modern Western civilisation, like the other civilisations which came before it, will crumble into the dust to be studied by future students of history, rather than being the shaper of that future itself.
The path to anarchy is laid before us, but there is still the option to choose a different path.
Chapter VI
Evidence
In the concluding chapters of this division we shall briefly consider the practice of law itself, criminal trials and the actions of the judicial post-trial. The practice of law itself is an empirical one, for it shares many of its practical tenets with science. Conviction relies upon scientific evidence conducted by experts, supported by witnesses who provide reports of the crime committed. In Godwin’s text, he dismisses the idea of using evidence to justify coercion of individuals into obedience of the state’s laws, but in a modern context, Godwin’s criticism of evidence can point us towards a much more pressing problem of the modern age.
It is precisely because witnesses are not always the most reliable source of evidence that physical and empirical evidence has been increasingly adopted today. However, for the political left, in order that they might continue their criticism of evidence and legal logic, a new form of discourse has arisen: that of emotions. Facts and reason serve no purpose, neither in political discourse nor in legal discourse, in the face of the left’s obsession with ‘feelings’. It is the disdain for instinctive feelings that has allowed the law and rational human preconceptions of justice to stand for so long in the past — mob rule has always been considered unsavoury, because the anger of a few hundred people who feel wronged does not necessarily mean that what they feel wronged about is inherently wrong. The left uses these tactics increasingly in order to attack their poli
tical opponents. A judge in Providence, Rhode Island achieved internet fame for dismissing a parking fine after a woman wept before him that she was having ‘a really tough time’.44 Meanwhile on University campuses, conservative speakers are refused a platform by students for creating ‘harmful environments’ and making students feel ‘unsafe’.45
Crocodile tears can never be believed, and the facts must be accessed before any judge, be it an independent citizen exercising political judgement or perhaps more importantly a judge of the law who makes a decision on any case. As irrationality and appeals to emotion begin to overtake reason, criminal justice, and therefore the integrity of the national community, is starting to come under threat. Previously, such tactics were only reserved for the political sphere, but as they enter the judicial one, the importance of empirical practice and the quest for the truth by legal evidence is more important than ever.
Emotions exist for a reason, to indicate to others our feelings and to allow for sympathy and comfort, but they can also be exploited for malicious ends, and in the prosecution of crime where individuals may have an interest in exploiting the emotions of the judge or jury, this must not be forgotten. Emotion has no place in the courtroom — only reason.
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