Respect agenda

"An armed society is a polite society", said right-wing science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, apparently approving of the idea. Certainly it's a favourite quote of many "libertarians" and gun-nuts. I had a little dig at Boris Johnson on knife crime yesterday, but his combo of dressing up an uninspired observation with a Shakespearean reference, topped off with a non sequitur was music to my ears, compared with the fundamental wrongheadedness of Heinlein's observation.

Maybe it's just personal prejudice, but if I had to choose between people being rude to me and running the risk of them shooting me, I'd choose the option that increased my chances of not being shot. Perhaps our problem in the UK is not enough youths with knives - give 'em all a blade and they'd all stop slouching and start saying "please" and "thank you". Sheer blithering madness.

What's interesting about this particular strand of the libertarian right is the way that two extremes meet - the "hang 'em, flog 'em and shoot housebreakers to kill" brigade and the underclass of knife-wielding gangs who they despise both have fundamentally the same view of respect - it's something accorded to the powerful and the armed by the weak and unarmed. It's respect mafia-style. Do as I say, or I shoot. Libertarians? Where's the liberty? The obsession with enforcing your will by the threat of force is the precise opposite of libertarianism. It's the just sort of authoritarianism which that old gangster and tyrant Josef Stalin used. For some reason these "libertarians" always forget to acknowledge this particular hard man who knew how to enforce respect by the use of violence as one of their own.

Heinlein was in many respects a clever guy and had some interesting things to say, but I still find this, perhaps the most famous of his quotes quite, quite mad.