Many were stunned by the news this week that Daniel Havili, who killed Fau Vake with a coward’s punch in Auckland, was sentenced to a mere 33 months’ imprisonment. Havili will, in all likelihood, be released after serving a little over a year. Considering the historical severity of sentences for killing people, this is very close to getting away scot free.
This incredibly light touch comes in the wake of other soft sentences for violent assaults. In one notorious recent case, Mongrel Mob chapter president Terry Berryman was sentenced to 23 months’ imprisonment for an 18-man gang home invasion that stomped on a man’s head in front of his children. Most of the gang members involved were not prosecuted.
This has prompted many to ask: why such light sentences for such barbaric crimes?
These sentences seem incongruous with the fact that cannabis growers such as Harley Brown get a similar amount of time in prison for growing medicinal cannabis. Brown was sentenced to 27 months’ imprisonment for a piddling amonut of cannabis – at most $100,000 worth. This is for an “offence” that not even 51% of the New Zealand population believes should be an offence.
Other working-class whites, like Philip Arps, don’t even have to grow cannabis. Arps was sentenced to 21 months’ imprisonment for sharing the Christchurch mosque shooting video.
So why do violent criminals almost get a free ride from the courts, when peaceful people get smashed? Why would sharing a video attract a similar sentence to a gang leader doing a home invasion in which children are subjected to the sight of their father getting his head stomped?
The answer lies in understanding the motivations, intentions and aspirations of the ruling class.
Everyone who knows anything about psychology knows that violent criminals cheer at such weak sentences as the ones listed above. For professional criminals, arrests and prison time are just part of the cost of doing business. The lighter the sentencing, the lower the expenses. Therefore, the lighter the sentencing, the more crime pays.
These weak sentences mean that criminals can freely intimidate other people with threats of violence, knowing that the judicial consequences will be minimal. When sentences are as weak as they are in the West today, violent criminals get to reign in terror over the vulnerable (usually working-class) communities in which they reside. Even if the Police deal to them, they’ll be out again soon enough, and in most cases barely inconvenienced.
This end result – widespread terror – is not accidental. It is, in fact, the entire goal of having a justice system in which violent criminals are left to run rampant. In a state of terror, both individuals and populations are unusually willing to forfeit their rights, needs and desires. As such, it’s easier to rule over a terrorised population than a free one.
The Government allows violent criminals to run rampant in New Zealand for one simple reason: to terrorise the rest of us into submission.
VJM Publishing wrote in a previous article why the Government lets in terrorists like the New Lynn supermarket stabber Ahamed Samsudeen. The reason is the same. They let violent criminals run loose for the same reason that they let terrorists run loose: to maximise the degree of fear the average person feels.
Widespread fear makes the population submissive, and is necessary for any authoritarian government to maintain control. Without the fear, the population would rise up against authoritarianism and overthrow it. The fear beats them down and makes them suspicious of their neighbours and workmates, so that no-one organises any resistance.
The control system has many ways of spreading fear through the populace – the foremost of which is the mainstream media – but violent criminals serve this purpose as well as terrorists do.
The surge of adrenaline people get from seeing a patched gang member in public, and the adrenaline fatigue that inevitably follows it, primes people’s minds to submit. Engendering this submission, as George Orwell showed us, is the end goal of all political action and is the ultimate aspiration of the control system.
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