8 June 2020
Even in the most trying circumstances, a mature adult can gain control over his anger in a matter of days. Children are only learning to control their emotions, and generally have such short attention spans that a child cannot sustain anger for more than a day. Only adults have the mental focus to sustain anger. Hence, demonstrations, protests, rioting, and looting nearly two weeks after the death of George Floyd must be conducted by physical adults who are emotional children.
On any given weekend, two dozen black people are shot and half a dozen killed in the city of Chicago. This has been going on for years. When Rahm Emanuel was mayor, there were over 4,000 murders in Chicago a year. But nobody cares because it was and is black-on-black crime. It would be embarrassing to take notice, since the cities in which black-on-black crime is worst have been run for decades by progressive Democrats.
The Floyd riots occurred because the crime fit a progressive narrative: that whites are racists, and blacks are their victims, and then we had this video showing an apparently lethal use of force by an arresting police officer who was white. It’s easy to get angry watching the video, but the Floyd riots exploited that anger to satisfy a political agenda.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) exist upon the basis of provable lies. But that doesn’t seem to matter, because it is the “larger truth” that their lies seem to speak to. Withal, the foundational principles of these organizations are Marxism, Anarchism, and Nihilism. They don’t have workable solutions to the problems they say exist; on the basis of a Marxist analysis they strive to create anarchy for the purpose of destroying western civilization as we know it. They have nothing to replace it with. It would be like the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. under the assault of the Ostrogoths.
To date, what George Floyd was really like has not been brought into the public consciousness. Floyd was a career criminal who had done a lengthy stretch in a Texas prison for violent crime. After his release he moved to Minnesota. Floyd was arrested for trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. He was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine, and was infected with the Covid-19 virus at the time of his arrest. The video does not show why Floyd was put on the ground and had a knee on his neck, but if Floyd had tried to infect the officers by spitting on them or otherwise resisting arrest, that would explain why he was subdued in the manner he was, and his protestations of “I can’t breathe” not taken seriously by the subduing officer. Regardless, George Floyd was not an innocent angel, and may have contributed to his own misfortune.
Nevertheless, the narrative of white racist guilt and black oppression found an apparent example. The material into which these poisonous deceptions were kneaded was moral narcissism. The crowds were filled with white progressives who wanted to prove to themselves that they weren’t racist. They wanted to show to the world their moral purity, and were willing to play-act an expiation of the guilt of white racism and white privilege by appearing on video kneeling before blacks upon command.
Infecting the crowd like a virus were agitators from Antifa and BLM. They provided the rocks, bricks, bottles, and encouragement to turn a demonstration into a riot, and a riot into looting. Angry blacks and morally narcissistic whites battled police while black criminals looted and burned on a shocking scale. Such demonstrations continued long after the emotional shock of the Floyd arrest video ought to have worn off. For many, it was party time!
A curious fact about Minneapolis and Minnesota in general is that they are among the whitest and most progressive-liberal places in America. How is it possible for a place so progressive to be so full of white racism? In fact, all the cities in which rioting took place had been Democrat controlled for decades and were in states that had both a Democrat governor and a Democrat Attorney-General. How could this be? Aren’t progressives and Democrats supposed to be especially sensitive to matters of race?
In his book, On Guerilla Warfare Mao Tse-tung described guerillas as the fish and the people the sea. A population of white, progressive, moral narcissists who were personally not guilty of the racism attributed to whites together with angry blacks provided the sea in which Antifa and BLM fish could swim. That is why Democrat run cities were pillaged: progressivist propaganda became accepted fact, and the only place riotous emotion could get released was their own cities and neighborhoods. White suburbs offered no such congenial “sea” of people.
Meanwhile, authorities were paralyzed under the fear of being accused of racism.
Things were made worse because correct law-enforcement procedures weren’t followed and the cause of the protesters was taken seriously. The correct attitude of law enforcement is to the effect that they don’t care what the cause of the demonstration is. They don’t care what’s on the signs or the words chanted. So long as the demonstrators remained peaceful and within the physical space allotted to them, they can walk, and wave, and chant all they like. But, if they get violent, start to loot, step outside the boundaries set for them, they will be arrested, and they shouldn’t expect their arrest to be gentle. If authorities had taken that attitude from the beginning, the fire of emotion would quickly have burnt out.
But it wasn’t followed, and each riot and each episode of looting encouraged more, to the point where Antifa and BLM were commanding – and getting - authorities to submit and take a knee as a sign of submission to the cause of George Floyd.
The riots in Washington, D.C. were a special case. This was a case of the Trump résistance and the Trump haters going berserk. What was the point of defacing the Lincoln Memorial or the various other war memorials? Simply nihilism, progressivist nihilism.
The apparent solution to the problem Floyd’s arrest exposed is the defunding or complete abolition of police departments. Some progressive politicians are taking this seriously. Getting rid of police won’t reduce tensions, it will create vigilantism. Millions of AR-15s were bought for the day of WROL: without the rule of law, and abolishing police will simply make the gun-owner supreme. I can almost hear the white supremacists say, “Bring it on!”
Progressivism allowed itself to be taken over by its worst instincts: Antifa, BLM, and the belief that they were not subject to the ramifications of their own ideology. Well, a lot of people suffered under its ramifications and its indulgences. However, I think the younger generation are too far imbued with progressivism to realize what just happened and to rethink their whole outlook.
G.K. Chesterton said that those who don’t believe in God don’t believe in nothing, they become capable of believing in anything. An overriding sense I have of this whole affair is that the participants have rejected God, and hence are lost.
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