Appeasement, doing what a bully says you must do, kow towing to a mob or to the loudest most aggressive voice, rarely if ever works out well for the appeaser. It is a policy that does not work in the school playground and certainly does not work when it comes to politics or administration. We can see this from Britain’s own history where governments followed a policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, letting the Nazis take chunks out of countries like Czechoslovakia, in order to avoid war. About the best one can say about the appeasement policies of the 1930’s is that it bought time for Britain to rearm as we were not ready for the sort of war that eventually came.
The problem with appeasement of bullies and tyrants is that no matter how much one appeases and debases oneself in front of the bully, it is never enough. The bully or the tyrant or the political cause that is making the demands to be appeased will and can always demand more from the appeaser.
Appeasers may, as was the case in the 1930’s with the horrors of ‘the war to end all wars’ so fresh in the minds of politicians and the public, believe that they are doing the correct thing. But all they really do is make themselves appear weak in the face of challenge.
Hertfordshire police are currently following a path of appeasement when it comes to the BLM/Marxists who are dead set on a path of national destruction. According to a post on the Longrider blog, Hertfordshire police will give no backing whatsoever to any officer who refuses to kneel in the face of a BLM/Marxist mob. In effect Hertfordshire police are telling their officers to appease BLM/Marxists in order to avoid inflaming the mob into violence.
Longrider said:
I’ve long since lost any faith in the police, but this is a new low.
A police force has angered officers by warning that they may face consequences if they decline to ‘take the knee’ at anti-racism protests.
Hertfordshire Constabulary said those who chose not to make the solidarity gesture ‘may become the focus of the protesters’ attention’.
The advice was issued during a recent operational briefing and points out that, when officers kneel down – joining in the symbolic stance of the Black Lives Matter movement – it ‘has a very positive reaction on the protest groups’.
Words fail me. The police are supposed to uphold the law without fear or favour. They are not supposed to take sides and yet here they are, cowering before the baying mob of the fascists and bullies of BLM and the brownshirt tribute act of Antifa. This will only lead one way. Once you appease the mob, you will never regain your authority.
Like Longrider, my faith in the UK police to police us with equity and impartiality has long gone. The increasing politicisation of police forces has resulted in police forces that are now seen to have a political ‘side’ to them, something that should never, ever have happened. Although the decision to command its officers to kneel in supplication before fascists and thugs may be welcomed by the mob and by the far Left, it is a decision that excludes everyone else who is not on that particular side.
This decision may feel right to senior officers, replete with what more junior officers used to call ‘Bramshill Bullshit’, after Bramshill the former police senior staff college where senior officer candidates got filled with all manner of trendy and sometimes unworkable ideas. But it is a wrong decision per se. It will not calm down the BLM/Marxist mobs, it will only embolden them. It will also cause the vast majority who are not part of these mobs to view the police with even more distrust and heap ever more opprobrium on them for their bias, than is currently the case.
If Hertfordshire police want to retrieve some semblance of wider public respect, they’d walk back this decision and say that it is wrong and was a mistake. Unfortunately I don’t think that they will. Britain’s police forces are full of senior officers who take the blinkered view that ‘Left is right’ and are openly favouring destructive Leftists whilst dismissing the rest of us as not important. The upper echelons of Britain’s police forces are now thoroughly and completely politicised and it would take concerted and strong action by Government to reverse this, action that I can’t see coming from an alleged ‘conservative’ government that doesn’t seem to have the balls to do this.
All Hertfordshire police’s decision will achieve is create a situation where, to paraphrase George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, we look from uniformed warranted police officer to wannabee Antifa Brownshirt and be damned if we can tell the difference between the two. Britain needs to be policed equitably, anything else is both unacceptable and downright dangerous.
