• The anti-smacking law lets citizens be agents of state terrorism

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• The following is based on an account given to me by the family concerned.

• “Smacking” here primarily refers to a swat on the rump steak or similar used for the purposes of correction (parental training), although there are situations where greater force is reasonable. See also footnote 3.

• Remember that the anti-smacking law was opposed by at least 83% of the population, therefore making smacking illegal was the will of the state, not of the population. Do you still think that the state serves the people? See my earlier post on that. Click here for full background information on the anti-smacking law.

• Terrorise: 1.to coerce or control by violence, fear, threats, etc. 2.to inspire with dread (Collins English Dictionary).

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Last year my friends’ two year old had a very loud tantrum and the neighbour next door heard this, whereupon he (the neighbour) knocked on the door and asked if the child was alright. A legitimate response to this would have been “Leave my property now and mind your own business, you interfering busybody”, but of course that would have been familial suicide: the state storm troopers (police and CYF, Child Youth & Family) would have been around quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson”, probably snatching the children on a presumption of guilt. At best the family would have been on the state surveillance list forever. So my friend produced the child to show the predatory polecat from next door that the child was unharmed and simply crying. Surely she was inspired with dread.

So, what’s happened here?

1. state propaganda has told this neighbour that smacking children is a bad thing (calling this untermensch a “neighbour” is a misuse of the term – a true neighbour helps – but I’ll use that word here despite this).
2. state evil has made smacking illegal and therefore a so-called crime that has to be investigated. Effectively the state has altered the moral code of the nation, albeit with the assistance of those idiots who think that the government knows best.
3. making smacking a crime legitimised investigation and interference by citizens who suspect that a “crime” has been committed, much as someone might intervene in a mugging (which, unlike smacking, is an actual crime against property and person).
4. The neighbour effectively said “Prove to me that your child is ok or I will call the state authorities who can arrest you and take your children away”. So, now the state laws have allowed one citizen to control the actions of and terrorise another citizen (see the definition above). To put it another way, making smacking illegal allowed those pestilential people who want to control how other people raise their children to do so.
5. the neighbour knocked on the door and effectively became a state thug, a spy, a cop, and an agent of state terrorism. If you don’t believe me consider this: would my friend have responded any differently if the police or CYF had knocked on the door? Of course not, because the neighbour had the overwhelming power of the state behind him, so my friend responded just as she would have responded to state thugs with badges. There was no material difference between having the neighbour knocking on the door and the badged ones knocking on the door. The worst part is that this nasty individual chose to enforce the will of the state: he was not under any compulsion to do so.

Therein is the crux of the matter: state terrorism against parents cannot succeed without the willing co-operation of individual citizens, usually those who love to meddle in other people’s affairs and/or need power to make them feel happy and important. Totalitarian systems rely upon citizen-spies who report to the state, and this country is full of citizen-spies, which is why there was an increase of more than 30% in the quantity of reports made by these quislings to CYF in the year following the introduction of the anti-smacking law¹.

Now, let’s go back in time and have a look at another example of the same thing, which will show you that this type of action by citizen-spies is part of a historical pattern and not confined to the era of the anti-smacking law. We’re going to go to the McCarthy epoch (1947-57), when the state  – the USA – whipped up public hysteria and paranoia regarding communists, much as the state has whipped up hysteria and paranoia regarding smacking today: in both cases gullible individuals willingly swallowed the lies and chose to become agents of the state operating against their fellow citizens (may the fleas of a thousand camels infest them).

Tom Watson was the president of IBM during the McCarthy rampage, and in his autobiography he says

…at that point the country was in a terrible state of paranoia because of the Red scare. Senator Joe McCarthy was holding hearings and claiming to find Communists in every crack in the wall. There was a moment when I truly thought IBM was going to lose its shot at defense work because of the type of window blinds I had in my office. Window blinds in those days were almost all horizontal – ordinary Venetian blinds. But vertical blinds had just been developed, and some had been ordered for me. An IBM engineer was in my office one day for a meeting and he was interested in getting the same kind of blinds for his office, so he drew a little diagram of how they were attached to axles on the floor and the ceiling. He put that little piece of paper in his shirt pocket and forget about it. A few days later the man who did the engineer’s laundry was checking the shirt before putting it in the washer, and he found that little slip of paper – just a diagram with no explanation. McCarthy [Sue Bradford] had so spooked this country that everybody thought everybody else was a Red [child beater]. So the laundry man sent the paper to McCarthy, and pretty soon the Senate investigators came and said to the engineer, “We’ve identified this as the plan for a radar antenna, and we want to hear about it. We want to be perfectly fair [yeah right]. But we know it is a radar antenna  and the shirt it was found in belongs to you.”

The guy said, “Oh for Chrissake, those are the blinds in Watson’s office!”

So they asked to see me. When they came to the office they explained what the engineer had told them and I said, “Well, those blinds are right here.” I showed them how the blinds worked. They looked them over very carefully and them left. I thought that I had contained it, but I wasn’t sure, and I was scared [he was inspired with dread, i.e. terrorised]. We were working on a SAGE [a government defence project worth millions to IBM], and it would have been a hell of a way to lose our security clearance².

Clearly, when the government goes on a witch hunt certain reprehensible people turn into citizen-spies with the might of the government behind them. Examples of this can be found in every totalitarian society including, as we have seen, New Zealand. The anti-smacking law contains many evils, and one of those is that it lets citizens be agents of state terrorism³.

Click here to view an update to this post.

What do you think about those people who interfere when they hear a child staging a tantrum?

Remember that the vast majority – 99% or more is my guess – of screaming and crying that is done by children and seen or heard by the public is either a tantrum or childish distress about something harmless (“I’ve dropped my ice cream”). Most children have learnt that they can get whatever they want if they throw a big enough tantrum, so they turn on all the theatrics and fireworks, which tricks a lot of people into thinking that there is an actual problem. A child screaming in a life threatening situation will make make your blood curdle, whereas as a child screaming in a tantrum is simply annoying. The media delivers the government line about rampant child abuse, but in fact serious child abuse is very rare (unless you consider sending a child to a state school to be serious child abuse 🙂 ).

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Click here to see other examples of citizen-spies (including children) making false reports of smacking to the state authorities.

There’s a referendum regarding the anti-smacking law coming up: click here to learn more and see a list of related posts.

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1. source

2. Father Son & Co. by Thomas J Watson Jr and Peter Petre, p234-5

3. Because the anti-smacking law removed the legal justification (defence) of using reasonable force (usually smacking) for the purposes of correction and defined the permissible uses of force the way is now wide open for the public and state employees to terrorise parents and justify this by claiming that they did so because they suspected that force was used by parents for correction or some other purpose not permitted by the new legislation (click here to view it). You can see this happening in some of these cases.

In military parlance this feature of the law is a force multiplier, i.e. it makes the law more effective from the state’s perspective. The desired effect of the law is of course state control of children, state control of parenting, and state control of the public’s beliefs regarding smacking and parenting in general. State control of families is a goal clearly stated in the Communist Manifesto.

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