RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-agents-and-instruments-of-decadence/

“Given the academic poison that has permeated and rotted so much in schools and universities in recent years, the waves of protesters parading their ignorance on our streets as hard-core revolutionaries smash windows and defile statues is no surprise. Far more shocking would be the existence of elected officials prepared to cry ‘Enough!'”

Right now, all around the world, people’s lives and livelihoods continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are young and healthy, the Wuhan flu’s impact is generally mild and recovery almost certain, the casualty numbers confirming it is the elderly and those already suffering from other medical conditions for whom it is a deadly threat. It is, however, highly contagious, and it is this characteristic, together with the modern revolution in globe-girdling travel, that has led to its rapid spread around the world — a spread driven first through Chinese deceit abetted by World Health Organisation’s connivance and subsequently boosted by incompetently administered, or non-existent, national border controls.

Recent events have brought to light another contagion, this one let loose by the killing of George Floyd  beneath the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25. It spread rapidly — virally, as they say — around the world, thanks to the internet and revolution in communications.  That the circumstances in Minneapolis don’t necessarily apply elsewhere remains of no account. Facts don’t matter. Floyd’s death has been a pretext, the stated concern largely fraudulent, for blacks murdered by other blacks are of little concern and whites killed by blacks not worth mentioning at all.  The demonstrators believe social distancing rules are for others, not themselves.

Apart from the enjoyment of looting and destruction, what those in the rampaging crowds who actually have a serious social intent are really campaigning for is the destruction of Western civilisation, which they regard as primarily responsible for every evil known to man – racism, oppression, exploitation, misogyny, sexism, slavery, ‘catastrophic’ climate change. The list is endless. They believe that only by destruction  can  a new era of peace and enlightenment come about. Taking their cues from the French and Cambodian revolutions, they seek a societal re-set, starting from a new Year Zero.  Monuments must be destroyed, places and institutions renamed, books burned, films and TV programmes banned, historical figures forever condemned, history itself rewritten, anyone not fully with the programme “de-platformed” and a new power structure implemented.  It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 in which the  all-powerful Party understands that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The rioters are not just ignorant vandals; they are following an ideology, a venomous cult every bit as insane as that promoted by Mao Zedong which led to the trashing of Chinese history and culture by the Red Guards in 1966. In contrast to COVID-19, this contagion most seriously afflicts the young rather than the old and experienced.  It is a virus of the mind.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/20/joe-biden-and-friedrich-nietzsche/

According to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.”

Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in the state were free—Texas being that last state to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the date that the latest Kwanzaa-like manufactured racialist holiday, “Juneteenth,” is intended to celebrate and that Joe’s minders intended to capitalize on by writing “Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America’s Long-Fought Fight For Justice.” 

The institution of slavery, which ended nearly 150 years ago, has no bearing—zero—on the plight of American blacks today. What does affect them, mightily, is the destruction of the black family, a project brought to us by more than five decades of Democratic welfare policy. 

The PR surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program told the world that its aim was to abolish poverty. It’s actual effect was to institutionalize poverty and promulgate an endless agenda of dependency, which all but guaranteed black subservience to the governmental overlord. It also institutionalized the gigantic network of government workers charged with servicing—and, by extension, perpetuating—the welfare state. The metabolism of this establishment was expertly anatomized by Christopher Caldwell in his latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It makes for a mournful story. 

The New Iconoclasm

Also mournful is the spectacle of violence and destructive iconoclasm sweeping the country in the wake of the death of the career criminal George Floyd while in police custody. 

For the last few of weeks, we’ve seen stores looted, police stations and police cars torched, and all manner of public monuments defaced or destroyed. As we know from (in the words of Laplace) expériences nombreuses et funestes, it is one thing to start a revolution, quite another to bring it to an end. Those gleefully riding the tiger at the beginning often wind up inside it before the journey comes to an end. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/on_capitalizing_black_but_not_white.html

As we descend farther into more racial balkanization, it is noteworthy to point out that in 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ushered in a discussion about how to capitalize the words “white” and “black” when referring to groups of people.  Back then, they stated:

Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities.  There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.

To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.

In fact, according to the Newsweek article that the CJR cites, “[w]hat many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality.  Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.  There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics.  Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.  These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest.  Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16134/cocktail-of-grievances

[The United States] is something of an exception in being the only major nation-state to have struggled with and, as time went by, against, racism…. The War of Secession, successive civil rights movements, the fight against segregation and methods such as positive discrimination tell the story of a nation seeking to move away from racism.

Slavery was a routine part of human existence from the start, and in some lands still is. Nor were black Africans the only human beings to become slaves…. In Persian and Ottoman Empires, slaves came from the Caucasus, Scandinavia, and what is now Russia. Again, no black Africans were involved…. Slavery was a common disease that affected every community on earth; a shameful secret of the whole human family.

As the outrage inspired by the death of George Floyd in a botched arrest operation calms down, it may be time to consider what has been achieved by the anger it unleashed in dozens of cities across the world.

Sadly, I fear, not only that much of that anger was wasted but that it may have contributed to deeper communitarian ressentiments.