Self-declared sovereign citizens, who believe Australia’s laws do not apply to them, are having a serious impact on the family court, experts say
Kind of odd to me becase even if you do believe this, the judicial institutions have armed police and jails on their side and you have your thumbprint, (unkess your name is Train I guess, which was a whole other thing) seems a losing battle from the get go? Whats the upside ?
I obviously can’t speak for all the sovcits, but I get the impression that they typically haven’t seen the tough side of the system until a legal dispute like custody in a divorce, which pushes them into the movement. Some other people are well-exprienced with the contradictions between the legal system and state violence, but those sovcits are used to law being the highest power and see what they’re doing as legal and therefore righteous and protected, they have faith in legal loopholes. They’re not criminals! They don’t get beaten and tasered and jailed! Not sure what they think of all the cops ripping down car windows in the US… clearly power prevails over ideals when you challenge the status quo.
Compare and contrast with, say, the anarchist movement who are more than familiar with guns, jails, tasers and beatings.
Yeah, it makes them very conflicted figures to me. They’re often quite antisocial (not in the shy sense, in the parasitically harm society sense) and self-oriented. Something in the law comes up and it defies their will and they melt down. At the same time, they’re closer to understanding the contradictions in our society than many of the people who never noticed how bullshit the justification for a lot of our laws are.
Like it really rarely comes up that someone is trying to use sovcit arguments to make the state feed school kids, or house homeless people. It’s almost always someone that wants to park like an arsehole or avoid paying childsupport.
Complex feelings, I do wonder if there are people teetering on the edge of their bullshit that might he sympathetic to a more hollistic and pro-social critque of the justice system.
In a way, they’re closer, but in another way they’re further - they are so trusting in the law that it’s their chosen weapon of resisting laws they consider unjust. It’s an individualist ultraliberalism, doubling down on the delusion when they notice contradictions, but perhaps it provides a potential moment of radicalization when their faith in the law is shaken by bad experiences with police. And I hope (blindly) that ends up driving some of them towards the left than towards neo-Nazism, who have intentionally targeted the anti-vaxx movement for recruitment with very mixed results.