It’s On: No Longer Just My Mad Notion

Think ol’ Curmudgeon Emeritus Fran has gone a bit overboard about the race war he considers to be in motion? Well, have you considered the opinions of this state senator? Have you asked for the sentiments of the Bosnian-Americans of St. Louis, Missouri? And what about this charming fellow:

Do his opinions carry any weight?

I don’t think it’s safe to laugh all of that off, Gentle Reader. Do you?

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We approach a critical mass.

You cannot repeatedly dispense the most inflammatory, divisive imaginable rhetoric at a demographic without inflaming that group to violence. Indeed, the relentless exhortations to hatred of whites by blacks has reached such an intensity – now reinforced and amplified by subtle encouragements from the White House itself! – that the greatest wonder of the current situation is that white neighborhoods nationwide are not yet under open, armed attack by mobs of angry blacks.

Wait a moment. Let me check that. They’re not, are they? I mean, given the propensity of the Main Stream Media for reflexively suppressing such news... but no. Surely I would have heard about it some other way. The sound of gunfire travels very well.

American whites approach their own, far less well publicized critical mass. Many, especially in racially mixed regions of the country, are making ready: stuffing their pantries to bursting, checking the guns and laying in stocks of ammunition, and quietly conferring with their neighbors to ensure that their communities are prepared to react effectively should the chaos come their way. But should that occur, don’t bet on whites simply defending their homes and neighborhoods from the assault and then going back to their peaceable ways.

Will these critical masses form? They can still be headed off. Whether the steps necessary to avert calamity will be taken is uncertain. Indications to this point suggest that they won’t be:

• No public figure has yet demanded a stern response to the disorder.
• The National Guard has been deployed only after-the-fact, and to trivial effect.
• Firm suppressive measures (e.g., water cannons) have not been employed against embryonic riots.
• Police have actually tried to disperse – even arrest – armed private-citizen guardians of potential targets.
• The racial patterns in “knockout game” attacks, recent events such as the murder of Zemir Begic, and violent crime generally continue to be suppressed.

A plague of civil disorder can only be quelled by harsh measures. Indeed, they must be so harsh that even a slight possibility of being subjected to one will outweigh the pleasures of violence and the potential gains from looting. If such measures are not undertaken and applied remorselessly, the violence and looting will continue and increase, in obedience to their own internal dynamic. Race riots are not an exception to this rule.

Draw your own conclusions.

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We met on the beach amid rumours of war
Your head in your hand, what you saw you won't say
As the newspapers flew in the wind.
I can see you're one of that kind
Who carry around a time bomb in their mind, no one knows
When you'll slip the pin.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

I see that your dress is torn at the edge
You are lost, intense, like a man on a ledge, waiting to jump
As the waves break over the shore.
You say there's a storm that can't be delayed
And lately it seems to be coming this way, you can hear it break
Like the slam of a door.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

You tell me, just look all around
At the past and the present, the cross and the crescent
The signs and the planets are lining up like before.
There are souls on fire in the day and the night
On the left and the right, in the black and the white
You can see it burn in the eyes of the rich and the poor.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

[Alasdair Ian Stewart]

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Justice is not postponed...Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

If you’ve never seen me mention the vigilance committees of the latter Nineteenth-Century West, here’s your chance to acquaint yourself with them. They formed in response to public perceptions that the “authorities” were unable to do their proper jobs or were uninterested in doing them. Though they’ve been given a bad rap by sententious historians eager to ingratiate themselves with political power, they appear to have functioned at least as well as any “public” system of justice has ever functioned.

The vigilance committees were usually stimulated by breakdowns in the public peace far milder than an epidemic of race riots. Granted that I speak here of the pre-statehood West, whose population tended to be far more individualistic and assertive than the contemporary American populace; all the same, there is a tipping point somewhere. We might not determine its location without passing through it, after which all the theoretical questions will once again be matters for the historians.

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It’s an unfortunate but irrefutable fact that the sole generally satisfactory agency for maintaining order within a cohesive demographic, whether the unifying factor is race or anything else, is that demographic’s own, internalized set of morals and ethics. If the demographic fails to enforce those morals and ethics upon those who flout them, there will be a corrective response from outside the demographic. If the demographic goes further, by not merely refusing to discipline its lawbreakers but affirmatively shielding them from correction, a violent us-versus-them confrontation becomes inevitable.

Of one thing we may be sure: every debt is paid. The social debt currently accruing, owing to blacks’ unwillingness to silence the racialist hucksters inciting violence and to discipline their own unruly elements (or to have others discipline them), will be paid. The sole questions are who will pay it, and when.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

Verbum sat sapienti.

(Cross-posted at League Of Outlaw Bloggers.)