NOTE: This is a retrospective on my 2021 article about Jon Schaffer, the founder of Iced Earth who was involved in the Capitol Riots. You can read that entire article here.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
The point of this exchange (from Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” ) was to highlight Thomas More’s support for the rule of law, and to warn against the dangers of abandoning those principles for temporary gains. A similar sentiment appeared in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, as he warned those who fight monsters not to become monsters themselves for, as he explained, “if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you”.
Whenever we witness governmental excesses committed in the name of “national security”, these passages make an appearance. We always find a Devil against whom everything is acceptable, and who we deem unworthy of any kind of protection. The targets might differ, but the rationale is always the same: This threat is different.
This has been the justification for actions as varied as the imprisonment of Julian Assange, the exile of Edward Snowden, the murder and torture of Muslims suspected of terrorism, and the censorship of ideas disliked by the establishment. The enemy poses such an existential threat, they argue, that sacrificing any value is justified in the mission to defeat them.
Over 22 years ago, just a few days after 9/11, Vice-President Dick Cheney stated on Meet the Press:
“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies—if we are going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal to achieve our objectives.”
In plain English: “Look the other way while we do whatever we want against those we consider our enemies.”
For years Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, the barely-literate president he served under, were (accurately) portrayed as war criminals. After all, it was under their command that an archipelago of CIA black sites was established around the world, and a regime of torture, repression, and disappearances was put in place. As Jane Mayer documented in her 2008 book “The Dark Side” (as well as in several articles), in their zeal to fight their War on Terror, the US had committed the kind of atrocities for which they used to hang other nations’ soldiers. The threats of “terrorism” was such that everything was justified.
Despite this bloody track record (and for which, to his eternal shame, Barack Obama expressly rejected prosecuting any of those responsible) nowadays both W. Bush and Cheney have, to some extent, been rehabilitated. Their (tepid) opposition to Trump’s incompetent buffoonery transformed them into “the good kind” of Republican.
This broad moral pardoning of war criminals and authoritarians has gone beyond just these two, of course. As long as a person or an institution is openly against Trump and the pathetic January 6 riots (ideally portraying them as something along the lines of a putsch) mainstream media and the establishment have been happy to lionize them. “And so, bizarrely”, wrote Dan Kovalik, an adjunct law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, “liberals have decided that the CIA and FBI – despite their well-known history of suppressing civil liberties and civil rights in this country and abroad – are now noble institutions which should be believed and respected. This is because the CIA and FBI have largely taken an oppositional stance towards Trump.”
This is what explains that, after January 6, the same people who had referred to the “relative peace” of protests where courthouses were burned and the police attacked, and which had defended the pathetic and dangerous “autonomous zones” created by far-left activists, now pretended that only the most dangerous and deranged fascists would ever dare to fight against the police.
This about-face regarding respect for law and order and hatred for violent protesters (with its stench of “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”) has not been for naught. Together with the inflated claims about what actually happened on January 6, they created a push for authoritarian measures. Just like 9/11 was used as a pretext for passing the civil-liberties nightmare known as the Patriot Act, similar measures have been sought by those who see the rioters as an existential threats to the country.
None of this is to say that January 6 was nothing, that Trump’s actions were OK, or that the rioters themselves had good motives. It’s also not a suggestion that this kind of 180º turn is exclusive to those who’d like to see the rioters hanging from their necks. Many of the people who clashed with the police on the Capitol are the same who would have demanded a firing squad against any BLM or Antifa outfit that had tried to pull the same stunt.
Back in 2021, when I set out to write my story about Jon Schaffer’s radicalization and the pathetic end of his rebellion, I spoke about how it was a mistake to think that only those people can fall under the spell of a demagogue. That anybody (myself included) can, quite literally, be scared senseless and accept any measure that eliminates the source of that fear. Whether our enemies are from the right or the left, fascists or stalinists, and everything in between, the will to power of those in control will always make them exploit our fears and expand their authority.
The lesson that we should take from the January 6 riots and the people involved in them is not that this was (as was recently argued in a debate) “like the civil war” or that American democracy almost died. It’s something else, something much more important, and which transcends America and its borders. It’s about the risks of giving up on our critical thinking and letting fear take control of our lives.
There will always be an enemy. There will always be a Devil against whom those in power will say anything is justified. But these are siren calls. The real threat to democracy is the willingness to sacrifice it out of fear.