That is, according to Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. You can read a lot more at the link.
I actually saw the accusation early on, long before Waters was spouting it. It was inevitable, was it not? Is there nothing the Jews can’t do?
I have to say I was never a Pink Floyd fan. At all.
…or by what a small group of attention-getting radicals want.
In the turmoil we’re now experiencing, many people are afraid. That certainly makes sense – it’s frightening. Just a few short months ago things seemed relatively “normal.” Then COVID came, and now the country seems gripped by riots orchestrated by leftists.
Yesterday I posted a video of black conservative Candace Owens. In it she asks – among other things – what do black people want? I don’t profess to know the answer, and I realize the question is mostly rhetorical. But one thing in particular about the question bothers me: “black people” are not a unitary group just because they are in that racial category. It would be just as misleading to ask “what do white people want?”
My guess, though – and it’s completely a guess – is that the majority of black people want the same things the majority of white people or people of any other race want. That is, they would like to live their lives without violence, support their families, have children whom they love and protect, work at jobs, have a decent place to live, see friends now and then, and a host of other “normal” aspects of life in the US in the 21st Century.
Yes, there is a higher percentage of criminals among black people, and a higher rate of father absence (two things that are not unrelated). But the vast majority of black people are not burning their cities down. For that matter, the vast majority of white people are not antifa thugs. As I wrote yesterday, the majority of people of all races prefer “all lives matter” to the phrase “black lives matter.” That’s pretty amazing, considering the full court press to push the latter phrase to the exclusion of the former, and to even demonize those who would advocate “all lives matter” as racists.
When last I checked, Americans reject socialism as well, at least in polls.
The problem is not what the majority thinks. The problem is the power and dedication of that minority of leftists, black and white, and what they are willing to do and how far they are wiling to go to get their way, as well as the wholehearted cooperation of many institutions of US society in recent years, in particular the MSM, the educational system, and the Democratic Party.
So, just to take one example, the MSM is determined to support the rioters, and to make it seem as though Antifa is either a bunch of do-gooders who only want to stamp out real facism, and/or completely uninvolved in riots in which they are quite obviously involved. And to take another example, the Marxist affliation of BLM is hushed up by the media, and any disagreement with BLM or even criticism of it is now labeled as evidence of racism.
I have long believed that the two most dangerous and powerful institutions in our country are education and the press. They are powerful because they shape minds, and if minds are shaped in a certain way there is no real need for armies or a hot war or even a revolution in the classic sense of bearing arms against the government. If minds are shaped to hate the US and to gravitate towards the left, the left can win at the ballot box or intimidate through mild violence (such as arson, for example, and the destruction of national monuments).
Much of this work has already been accomplished, and the hour is very late. But the forces of sanity still have the majority, although those voices are muted and often frightened, as well as confused. For quite some time I’ve thought the 2020 election would be – as Victor Davis Hanson said recently – an existential one to determine which way the country will turn and whether it will survive in any recognizable way:
It’s an existential question, a Manichean choice between whether you want civilization and you believe that America doesn’t have to be perfect to be good and we are not … going to destroy all that people died for, or [whether] you feel it was inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer.
Well, yes. But even more than that, the election is only a very small part of it. Trump was elected in 2016, but he has spent way too much of his presidency fighting fabricated attacks from his enemies, amplified by MSM coverage wholly dedicated to removing him. Whether he wins or loses in 2020, the struggle between left and right in the US will not end.
It’s going to be up to the right to become more activist in fighting against the MSM and the entire system of educational propaganda in this country, and it won’t be easy. I don’t have many practical suggestions, but I do think that it’s time to speak up rather than be silent with liberal friends and relatives. Choose a few of the more moderate ones to begin with, stay calm, and see what happens. They may even be more in agreement with you than you might expect about certain issues – for example, defunding the police.
This is scary stuff. They’re getting rid of the blasphemers to the BLM religion, and we’ll be left with no one who thinks for him/herself – or is willing to express thoughts that go against the prevailing memes. Of course, that’s probably what the SJWs want [emphasis mine]:
School officials moved to fire Windsor School Principal Tiffany Riley on Friday after she wrote a social media post seen as critical of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The post, written Wednesday on Riley’s personal Facebook page, said she believes “black lives matter” but “I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point.”
Riley, who became principal of the K-12 school in 2015, wrote, “I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race.”
“While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement?” Riley added, before saying, “just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I’m a racist.”
Ah, but apparently it does.
More (emphasis mine):
[Riley’s] comments, which were shared widely among Windsor community members this week, led to calls for Riley’s resignation, while a group of recent graduates called the message “insanely tone-deaf.”
Outrage culminated in an emergency meeting of the Mount Ascutney School Board on Friday afternoon, where members voted unanimously to place Riley on paid administrative leave, according to Superintendent David Baker.
Baker said the school district will work in the coming weeks to craft a “mutually agreed upon severance package” with Riley.
“They don’t see any way that she’s going to go forward as the principal of that building given those comments and that statement,” he said during a phone interview Friday afternoon. “It’s clear that the community has lost faith in her ability to lead.”
…Baker said he received about a dozen letters from community members and parents expressing concern over Riley’s post. At first, he assumed her account had been hacked.
“I felt like a post like that, with those kinds of racial overtones and what I define as pretty much outright racist in my values system, she would have never posted that,” Baker said, adding that he later confirmed Riley wrote the post.
Among the letter writers were 12 members of the Class of 2020, who signed a joint letter calling on the district to take action.
“I have seen so much good happening in our community lately in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement and it has filled me with a sense of pride,” Belle Moulton, the class valedictorian, wrote in an email to Baker. “However, to read such a post immediately made me realize how ignorant some people in our community still are.”
“I would like to see Windsor schools take (the) lead in our greater Vermont community and demonstrate dedication towards inclusivity,” she added. “This means having leaders that value every being and bring awareness and respect towards demographics that are less valued as a whole in our country.”
Oops, Ms. Moulton, class valedictorian! Did you just slip and say that “every being” should be valued? Doesn’t that kinda sorta almost mean that All Lives Matter? Your fellow SJWs may forgive you this time, but watch it in the future. No more mistakes for you!
Our very own little Red Guards are out in force in Vermont, I see. I guess Loyalty Oaths are back in as well, only this time the required loyalty is to BLM.
Certainly not to the US:
Iyanna Williams, 2015 Windsor High graduate, also said she was dismissed when bringing concerns and suggestions to district officials.
She initially contacted the school district earlier this month after noticing an American flag spray-painted into the Windsor School lawn.
“I just thought that that was out of character and given the current circumstances and climate of the world right now, I just wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with that,” she said.
Williams expressed those concerns in an email, with officials later telling her they would be open to a similar Black Lives Matter display and that the American flag had been planned before the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota sparked national protests. When no BLM flag was displayed by graduation, she penned another email saying she was “saddened” by the district’s response.
“I am unfortunately not surprised. You chose not to hear me much like America has chosen to hear black and brown people across the nation,” she wrote…
…Baker added that the school district had earlier planned to hand out American flag T-shirts and water bottles on graduation day, but abandoned that effort after Williams reached out.
What’s particularly interesting about this is that it seems to be the work of a small group of SJWs. What the community thinks is unclear, but this being Vermont perhaps they’re all far-left and in agreement with Williams that handing out American flag T-shirts and water bottles would be a racist abomination.
Jonathan Turley weighs in here. In the first sentence of the quote, he mentions something I was wondering about (although it’s not clear to me whether Riley is fighting this or not):
As a public employee, Riley could seek judicial relief rather than a severance package under the First Amendment.
As we have previously discussed (with an Oregon professor and a Rutgers professor), there remains an uncertain line in what language is protected for teachers in their private lives. There were also controversies at the University of California and Boston University, where there have been criticism of such a double standard, even in the face of criminal conduct. There were also such an incident at the University of London involving Bahar Mustafa as well as one involving a University of Pennsylvania professor. Some intolerant statements against students are deemed free speech while others are deemed hate speech or the basis for university action. There is a lack of consistency or uniformity in these actions which turn on the specific groups left aggrieved by out-of-school comments. There is also a tolerance of faculty and students tearing down fliers and stopping the speech of conservatives. Indeed, even faculty who assaulted pro-life advocates was supported by faculty and lionized for her activism.
However, there was nothing whatsoever in Riley’s quoted statements (at least, those statements I’ve read so far) that is the least bit racist. If she is racist, then Martin Luther King was racist, and Muhammad Ali’s son is racist. To me, what Ali’s son says in that article is just a common sense point of view that would have been standard and completely non-controversial even as recently as a few years ago.
But now it’s heresy.
And everyone should listen:
Here’s a discussion that I think is very informative and well worth a listen. It’s the sort of thing you could send to some friends who vote Democrat and read the MSM, if you’re so inclined:
I had a discussion recently with a friend who is convinced that the police are purposely massacring black people in great numbers. I mentioned that the numbers are very small, and that white people are also often the victims, and offered to send her a single link to a study about it that was done by a black professor. She didn’t want me to send it, and insisted that the numbers didn’t matter because many of these murders are done in secret and are never reported.
I wonder whether that sort of thinking is frequent. The more common it is, the less likely any discussion such as the above would reach the people who believe such a thing and could ever change the listeners’ viewpoints. Just another example of how hard it is to change a mind.
…although to the elites, Democratic politicians, and to the left (is that redundant?), BLM is the new religion and “all lives matter” is unforgivable racist heresy against it. The fact the black lives are included in “all lives” is explained away by the left with various sophistic ploys. But believing all people matter is actually quite the opposite of racism in any sane definition of the word.
Twice as may Americans back the “All Lives Matter” slogan over the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, says a new Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely voters.
Among blacks, a 47 percent plurality picked “All Lives Matter” over the 44 percent who picked “Black Lives Matter.”
The June 15-16 poll asked respondents: “Which statement is closest to your own?”
“Black Lives Matter” was picked by 30 percent of voters, including 35 percent of voters under age 40, and 63 percent of liberals.
“All Lives Matter” was picked by 59 percent of all voters, 58 percent of swing-voters, and 56 percent of “moderate” voters.
“Black Lives Matter” was more favored by wealthier people. It was backed by just 34 percent of people earning less than $30,000 but by 53 percent of people who earn above $200,000. The slogan was picked by just 22 percent of high school graduates but by 41 percent of people with professional degrees.
Even Democrats are fairly evenly split. And even young voters seemed to prefer all lives, as do black voters (more narrowly).
The poll is somewhat comforting, at least as far as I’m concerned. It suggests that Martin Luther King’s message still has more resonance with US voters than that of the BLM would-be replacements. It also, however, indicates something more depressing, a phenomenon that is one of the strange hallmarks of our time – although it’s not just of our time – that so-called “elites” and in particular intellectuals are far more susceptible than other people to propaganda and in particular to leftist propaganda.
I wrote a post twelve years ago (yikes, twelve years!) that’s quite appropriate, and I’m going to quote it here (the “Podhoretz” in the first sentence is Norman, not his son John):
Podhoretz offers some wonderful quotes from Orwell on the subject, and they’ve worn very well over the years. Try this one on for size, from 1937 (appearing in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier):
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker. nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”
Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” is another case in point. There is a fair amount in it with which I disagree, to be sure. But the following is spot on, both then and now. It illustrates the military defeatism of the intellectual Left, its susceptibility to wild conspiracy theories, and the origins of both phenomena in the Left’s hatred of the West [one of Orwell’s most famous remarks on the stupidity of intellectuals occurs here; emphasis mine]:
“The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued “as background” a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also.
Unhinged they are, and unhinged (and pretty much unchanged) they remain.
I said they remain “unchanged,” but I’ll amend that. They’re now worse. Antifa is, among other things, a movement of mostly college-educated youth who think they know better than the stupid populists and are willing to put their fists where their mouths are.
[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]
It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.
Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.
Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.
Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.
There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
One of my favorite ballet dancers of all time, Maya Plisetskaya, with some enticing and energetic cultural appropriation. Circa 1959:
I saw Plisetskaya in person right around the time this was filmed. She tore up the stage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dancer more exciting.
I just published this long post on how the current riots and statue-toppling represents a war on Western Civilization.
I want to add something here, on a related topic. John Hinderaker of Powerline has written a piece today on much the same theme (although he’s not as wordy as I). It ends this way:
Every four years it is said that the current election is the most important one in our lifetimes. This time, it is actually true. Not a single Democratic Party official, to my knowledge, has condemned the anti-American madness that is sweeping across the nation. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are fully on board with the extremist elements in their party–I am starting to wonder whether there is any Democratic Party apart from the extremist elements–and the Democrats’ presidential nominee is a senile nonentity who, in office, would be controlled by the radicals. It is absolutely essential to our country’s future that Donald Trump be re-elected.
UPDATE: Hans Bader has more, including this quote from Frederick Douglass about Grant:
“To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
But then, liberals hate Douglass, too.
Similar to the point I made at the end of my post, about Martin Luther King.
I well remember a time in the mid-to-late 60s when I became aware of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers and their messages. One of the things I recall happening is the rejection of white allies who had been with them in their fight for liberty and voting rights and an end to segregation. They were kicked out and not wanted anymore, sometimes even insulted and reviled.
This is the same impulse. Not only do the BLM and Antifa movements and the left hate Douglass (and perhaps Martin Luther King, at this point), but they hate any historic white person such as Grant and Lincoln, not just in spite of what such people did to assist black people in their struggle, but because of it. Assistance from any white person, after all, means that one didn’t do it all by oneself. It means that some white people helped.
The desire to reject that aspect of history is the same impulse that led to the otherwise puzzling choice to vandalize the Robert Gould Shaw monument in Boston. This is not random, nor is it an accident or error. This is the left.
Commenter “AesopFan” calls attention to this:
Grant did briefly own one slave he freed years before the war; but as a general he smashed the Confederacy, and as president he crushed the Klan. He presided over the ratification of the 15th Amendment. People going after Grant probably just want to break things. https://t.co/rVtPOcvyAN
— Adam Serwer? (@AdamSerwer) June 20, 2020
I have little doubt that there are some people who “just want to break things.” But no; the mobs are not going after Grant and the others (including Junipero Serra, Cervantes, Francis Scott Key, and some abolitionists) because they “just” are destructive. They are destructive of some very particular things: Western culture as a whole, which they label as “white supremacist.”
They started with Confederate monuments, to which most white people and people in general had no particular attachment. Now it is Western civilization as a whole, and in particular statues of those people with the following characteristics: (1) anyone having owned even one slave, even for a short time (note the seamless segue from Confederates to slaveowners, which can include a far larger group of Americans and even several Founding Fathers) (2) anyone who can be labeled as colonial (Serra would fall into that group) (3) anything that celebrates the US and its history (its history also being irredeemably based on “white supremacy” and slavery, a la the mendacious NY Times 1619 Project, coming soon to a school near you).
This is an international undertaking, too. It’s happening in Britain, for example. And the vandals count on the passivity of authorities, particularly in very blue cities. In that, they have not been disappointed.
I called them “vandals,” but this is not “mere” vandalism as the term is ordinarily used in casual conversation. It has a great deal more resemblance to the historic group who gave the word its name and sacked Rome in 455. The parallel is certainly far from perfect; for one thing, most of the current group are Americans (I suppose there might be some foreigners, but I doubt their numbers are great). From that Wiki page [emphasis mine]:
A cause of significant controversy is the claim that the sack was relatively “clean”, in that there was little murder and violence, and the Vandals did not burn the buildings of the city. This interpretation seems to stem from Prosper’s claim that Pope Leo I managed to persuade Genseric to refrain from violence. However, Victor of Vita records that a number of shiploads of captives arrived in Africa from Rome, with the purpose of being sold into slavery. Similarly, the Byzantine historian Procopius reports that a church was burned down. Some modern historians like John Henry Haaren stated that temples, public buildings, private houses and even the emperor’s palace were sacked. Besides taking many Romans as slaves, the Vandals also committed other depredations like taking immense quantities of gold, silver, jewels and furniture, destroying works of art, and killing a number of citizens.
I won’t even weigh in on the controversy; suffice to say that the current crop have bigger fish to fry than just looting a city. They want to topple the government and they want to rewrite history according to their lights.
Some coverage of the San Francisco event (remarks in brackets mine) in a Bay area paper:
Protesters [note the euphemism] in Golden Gate Park toppled statues of Fr. Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant on Friday night, spurring a national debate [oh, so what they really want is that great supposed goal of liberals and the left: debate and “dialogue”] over the complex legacies of those historical figures amid a broader movement to remove what critics say are monuments to white supremacy [indeed it is a very broad movement that labels the figures of American history and their accomplishments as being examples of white supremacy that therefore must be obliterated and their memory sullied].
A group of roughly 100 people [very few, but enough – if there is no defense mounted against them by authorities] pulled down the monuments displayed in the park’s Music Concourse near the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, an eyewitness said. Police were called to the area just after 8 p.m., and said people in the group threw objects at the officers. The crowd dispersed around 9:30 with no arrests or reports of injuries [no arrests for assaulting officers or destroying public property – and I wonder how many officers were there, and what their orders were, although I can guess the number was small and their orders were to do nothing].
One video posted to Twitter showed the group using a strap to topple the statue of Serra. Photos also showed people vandalized a monument to Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes [his selection was probably either a mistake, or considered an example of Western culture, all of which must be destroyed], the author of “Don Quixote.” And parks officials said the group vandalized several other features in the Music Concourse as well, including sculptures, benches and a fountain [that’s the part that is the more pure destructive impulse, trying to ruin a public space for everyone and put one’s mark on it – which IMHO is the same impulse that leads to a lot of graffiti].
And this sort of response from the mayor is exactly why they do it, and why this will continue in blue cities (remarks in brackets mine):
“Every dollar we spend cleaning up this vandalism takes funding away from actually supporting our community, including our African-American community [about which they could not care less, as evidenced by all the destruction recent rioters have wreaked in black communities in particular],” [Mayor] Breed said. “I say this not to defend any particular statue or what it represents [of course not; can’t do that], but to recognize that when people take action in the name of my community, they should actually involve us [Breed is black, and she was indeed raised in the projects in poverty, so when she says “my community” she means it. She also was by no means one of the most radical of the candidates for mayor when she ran, and my guess is that she is walking a very fine line here because she actually is well aware that this is not going to help the black community].”
Breed continued, “I have asked the Arts Commission, the Human Rights Commission, and the Recreation and Parks Department to work with the community to evaluate our public art and its intersection with our country’s racist history [so in other words, the rioters/vandals win and are going to be rewarded for their behavior].”
Who is doing the vandalizing? It’s obviously a combination of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with a mixture of some of those people who “just want to break things.” But this is organized and this is a serious attack on US history, an attack helped along by the educational system and the MSM, two fronts on which it is already quite well advanced. That is what allows it to flourish.
It wasn’t enough to banish Western Civ from the required courses. Nor was it enough to establish departments of Black Studies or units in elementary schools on Black History and its heroes. The persistence of actual Western Civ and its fruits in science, art, liberty, and the like must be destroyed, and the symbols of US and Western history pulled down and replaced by history as written by the liars at the NY Times and the haters in the academy, as well as the fake historian Howard Zinn.
I wonder – and I am serious here – how long Martin Luther King’s statues can stand. And I do not mean that they will be threatened by white people, although I suppose the few remaining actual white supremacists might stage something. What I mean is that Antifa and Black Lives Matter, as well as progressives everywhere, have roundly rejected King’s message of “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” King’s dream has died – at least for now, and for the foreseeable future – and only the statues remain.
Last night when I awakened several times, thinking, it occurred to me that although the left fights on all fronts, one of them is in the matter of words, in particular the names it gives organizations. For example, Black Lives Matter. Who but the most rabid neo-Nazi could ever object, if the name is taken at face value? Of course black lives matter. The name is one of the reasons that BLM is attractive to so many people and has gained so much support so quickly. Almost no one would disagree with the sentiment.
But nothing is just face value for the left. For example, implicit in the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as a rallying cry by the left is the idea that there is some vast array of people (not just the minuscule number of actual real live neo-Nazis) who think that Black Lives Don’t Matter. After all, Black Lives Matter the organization (which I’ll henceforth abbreviate in this post as BLM) has to be set in opposition to something order to make sense as the name of a protest movement.
So BLM is implying some version of these things: black lives don’t matter to police, black lives don’t matter to the right, black lives don’t matter to white people, black lives have never mattered in America, and perhaps also the all-important if you don’t agree with what BLM is doing and saying, then you think that black lives don’t matter and you want black people to suffer and to die. Oh – and also, if you don’t display our sign, then you might just be a racist who doesn’t think black lives matter.
There’s quite a lot packed in there, isn’t there, in what appears at first to be a straightforward slogan with which almost everyone can easily agree? BLM has become much more than the name of a protest movement. It’s become a sacred phrase. Any disagreement with any aspect of it, or of the program being pushed under its name, is equivalent to blasphemy and/or heresy. In that respect, BLM is a quasi-religion. A strict one, at that, in which one can question neither the tenets nor the clergy.
Why else would saying “All Lives Matter” get people fired from their jobs, unfriended on Facebook, and in some cases raked over the coals until they commit an act of penitence? Consider that “all” actually includes “black” rather than excluding it, so it is not a contradiction to the BLM message. Unsuspecting and naive people, who take the BLM slogan at its word, have made the error of assuming that an inclusive “All Lives Matter” message does not conflict with BLM, and have uttered the “all” word without realizing that they are calling down the wrath of the BLM faithful on themselves by speaking heresy rather than agreement.
Is the corollary of BLM – with its rejection of even the possibility of saying with inclusive goodwill that all lives matter – the idea that white lives matter less (or not at all)? You’re not allowed to even ask the question. Nor are you allowed to point out the indisputable fact that black-on-black crime is a huge problem causing great suffering in the black community. Such crime is re-defined by the left as the fault of white racism as well, and mentioning it is a racist deflection from the problem of blacks being killed by white police officers, which matters even more because the black lives that matter most are the ones killed by white people.
This was first written in 2006. But it’s a very timely piece.
Unfortunately, I fear that taking a look at Robespierre will always be timely [comments in brackets mine]:
Robespierre’s constituency outside the Convention was the mob, roaming the streets of Paris, the center of the Revolution…The mob in Paris consisted largely of destitute sans-culottes (“without knee breeches”), who maintained themselves by a mixture of crime, prostitution, begging, and odd jobs. Robespierre and his followers incited them to action whenever political expediency called for it. But even when unincited, having nothing better to do, they formed the crowd that watched the public executions, jeered and abused those about to die, rejoiced at the severed heads, adulated the leaders temporarily in power, and cursed them after they fell…
What Robespierre had unloosed were the most depraved urges of society’s dregs. The resulting anarchy temporarily served his purpose, much as the Kristallnacht served Hitler’s, the purges Stalin’s, and the cultural revolution Mao’s. Each perpetrated the terror to frighten opponents into abject submission and establish himself more firmly in power…
These atrocities were not unfortunate excesses unintended by Robespierre and his henchmen but the predictable consequences of the ideology that divided the world into “friends” and less-than-human “enemies.” The ideology was the repository of the true and the good, the key to the welfare of humanity. Its enemies had to be exterminated without mercy because they stood in the way. As the ideologues saw it, the future of mankind was a high enough stake to justify any deed that served their purpose. As Loomis puts it, “[A]ll who played a role in the drama . . . believed themselves motivated by patriotic and altruistic impulses. All . . . were able to value their good intentions more highly than human life. . . . There is no crime, no murder, no massacre that cannot be justified, provided it be committed in the name of an Ideal.”
The ideal, however, was simply what Robespierre said it was. And the law was what Robespierre and his followers willed it to be…The justification of monstrous actions by appealing to a passionately held ideal, elevated as the standard of reason and morality, is a characteristic feature of political ideologies in power… The shared feature is that the ideal, according to its true believers, is immune from rational or moral criticism, because it determines what is reasonable and moral…
…All the current political choices, consequently, were choices between good and evil, allowing Robespierre to demonize his opponents…
This piece of sophistry was then new, but to those who look back on the twentieth century [or forward into the 21st] it is depressingly familiar from the use that many murderous regimes have made of it. They all claimed that their aim was human well-being, but that incorrigibly wicked enemies, who have disguised their true nature and conspired against the noblest of aims, threatened its achievement. The supposed threat was so serious, and the aim so important, as to warrant extreme, albeit temporary, measures—to identify enemies, unmask their conspiracies, and exterminate them. To a handful of clear-sighted and courageous heroes of the revolution—like the KGB, the SS, and the Red Guard—falls the duty of performing these necessary tasks. They must harden their hearts and do what needs to be done in the interest of the greater good. The grave threat averted, the extreme measures will no longer be necessary, and then human well-being will be within everyone’s reach.
That’s why process and the rule of law are so important.
But the Robespierres of the world would be nothing without their followers and/or collaborators. Why would people follow or at least not oppose such a person?
Many followed because [Robespierre] let them act on their worst urges, which they had to suppress when law and order prevailed.
Others—overwhelmed by the political changes, by the widespread chaos and uncertainty, by the blood that had already been shed—yearned to understand what was going on, what justified it, and what its aim was. Many people accepted Robespierre’s explanation, bombast and implausibility notwithstanding, because any explanation of what they were living through was better than no explanation.
But the chief reason that people followed him was fear. No one was safe, and people hastened to testify by words and deeds that they were loyal, enthusiastic supporters. Robespierre wielded his power over life and death as arbitrarily as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did. Arbitrariness is the key to terror: if there are no rules, justifications, or reasons, then everyone is at risk. People can try to minimize the risk only by outdoing others in toeing the line. Dictators understand that, and it explains much of the “spontaneous demonstrations” and public adulation that they extract from the duped and terrified people at their mercy.
Here’s another excellent article by Andrew C. McCarthy.
Also, here’s a comment I found in the thread there. This is the question I’ve been wondering about, too: why would any sane person want to be a police officer, at this point?:
Who would sign up for a job where you’ll be hated by those you serve, not allowed to protect your own life or health, and assumed guilty in any instance where your interactions with criminals go badly for the criminals?
And although so far this police-are-evil phenomenon seems to mostly affect blue cities, I fear that police around the country will begin to feel a generalized disillusionment and betrayal, and recruiting good police officers will be that much harder everywhere in the US.
Not to mention crime going up. That seems inevitable, too. The number of violent confrontations with police may go up, too, not only because of the rise in crime but also because of the spread of the idea that cops are your automatic enemies. And if a black person thinks a white police officer is by definition out to kill him, that could be a motivation to resist arrest. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here’s what Burke County, Ga., Sheriff Alfonzo Williams (who is black) has to say about Officer Rolph and Rayshard Brooks:
“Five seconds; 1,001, 1,002, 1,003, 1,004, 1,005. That’s five whole seconds. If an officer is hit with that Taser that he, all of his muscles will be locked up and he’ll have the inability to move and to respond. And yet he is still responsible for every weapon on his belt.
“So, if that officer had been hit, he still has a firearm on his side and the likelihood of him being stomped in the head or having his firearm taken and used against him was a probability. And so he did what he needed to do. And this was a completely justified shooting,” Williams said…
“We’re sending the wrong message to our black youth. We’re telling them that it’s OK, that they can run from the police, that they can take a weapon from the police, they can fight with the police, and point their weapon at the police, and expect nothing to happen. That is the wrong message to send to black youth.”
I think many of the people sending this message know they are sending this message and that it will lead to more killings of black men and more murder arrests of white officers, as well as more hatred against police and between the races. That is their goal, I believe, bread and butter for those who gain fame and money from stirring up such feelings. For some, it’s a matter of fame and fortune. For others it’s a matter of aiding the leftist revolution they so desire. The two motives are not mutually exclusive, either. They can easily co-exist in one person.