When George Orwell said that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them, he failed to notice a more dangerous truth: they also have the capacity to sell it. In last one month, intellectuals have thrown up two such ideas—one in India and the other in America. The one in our country, that all property be nationalized, has proved to be a non-starter, but the same cannot be said about the American one, that police be disbanded.

An earlier article (<a href="https://indianarrative.com/opinion/leftist-intellectuals-want-to-destroy-india-2329.html">https://indianarrative.com/opinion/leftist-intellectuals-want-to-destroy-india-2329.html</a>) on the nationalization of all property said, “We are lucky that we have a government that treats these pinkish intellectuals with the contempt they deserve.”

The Donald Trump administration too treats the defund-police idea with contempt, but it seems powerless against the growing popularity of this ideas along with the surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a cynical, racist movement; its leaders, most of them from the radical Left, are trying to derive political and ideological mileage from the death of David Floyd.

BLM’s raison d’etre is vacuous. It complains of rampant, systemic racism—which does not exist. As we showed in another article (<a href="https://indianarrative.com/opinion/anti-trump-bigots-fuel-riots-in-us-raise-bugbear-of-racism-2709.html">https://indianarrative.com/opinion/anti-trump-bigots-fuel-riots-in-us-raise-bugbear-of-racism-2709.html</a>), “There would have been substance to the charge of systemic racism if the cop accused of [Floyds’] murder had been retained citing attenuating circumstances; this hasn’t happened. He is facing trial, charged with serious offences. There would have been systemic racism had he received any support from any Republican or conservative leader; he hasn’t.”

Further, we wrote, “Data also show lack of systemic bias against blacks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal, created a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015. Its conclusion gave the lie to the propaganda that has been going on for decades: ‘We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers’.”

Yet, BLM’s sway is phenomenal; a large section of academics, most opinion makers, and the mainstream media support it. This despite the fact that the protests organized by BLM have regularly turned violent, vandalized national monuments, burnt churches and the national flag, looted property, hurt and killed people and cops. Even some Republicans have lent support to this violent movement, the most prominent of them being Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 2012 election.

The city council of Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, pledged on Sunday to disband the police department, replacing it with “a new system of public safety in a city where law enforcement has long been accused of racism,” the New York Times reported. “The calls for change have left people uncertain of what those changes would really mean and how cities would contend with crime. Much remains uncertain and the proposals vary between cities, but here are answers to some questions about the issue.”

Till a few weeks ago, living without police was unthinkable; it was a weird idea, popular among fringe, anarchist, pinkish groups; now it is mainstream. It is indeed in the process of being implemented—in various degrees in various places.

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the BLM movement, was quoted by the CNN website as saying that defunding the police means reallocating those funds to support people and services in marginalized communities. Defunding law enforcement “means that we are reducing the ability for law enforcement to have resources that harm our communities,” Cullors said. “It’s about reinvesting those dollars into black communities, communities that have been deeply divested from.”

Actually, it means transferring that money into the hands of BLM-type activists. The money will be used for more guilt-mongering, more anti-white propaganda, more lies about history, more social disharmony, more violence, and more victimhood peddling.

A grotesque idea is taking a concrete shape.

Similarly, till a few months ago, who would have thought that a bunch public health scaremongers masquerading as experts would have stopped the motor of the world? Of course, they are the very antitheses of Ayn Rand’s John Galt, but they did just what Galt promised to do and did in Atlas Shrugged.

Who knows what the future has in store for us? Maybe the cranky idea of nationalizing all property gains currency. Leftist germs are becoming dangerous by the day..