Tea Leaves By Twilight

Among the greatest of the curses upon the race of Man is our propensity for "thinking" with our wishes rather than our powers of reasoning -- our willful disregard of what is in favor of what we'd like. It leads us to imagine that we inhabit a world far distant from the one around us, governed by processes wholly at odds with the ones that rule objective reality.

Sometimes we awaken from our fantasies in time to save ourselves from calamity. But not always.

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Several readers have written to ask me why I so greatly fear the outbreak of "a real, full-scale, flying-lead race war." Clearly, such correspondents deem the probability of such a thing well below my own estimate. So it becomes important that I justify my assessment.

War, in the most abstract view, is a condition in which two (or more) organizations struggle for dominance over some contested item. Historically, when nations have made war, it's normally been over territory or population. There have been other casus bellorum, but that's been the most common...until recently.

Today, wars between nation-states tend not to be over the position of a border or who has jurisdiction over some ethno-linguistic group. They address other sorts of slights and more recent sorts of risks. The looming war between Israel and Iran won't be over a territorial dispute, but rather over the existential threat to Israel inherent in Iran's possession of nuclear weapons and a delivery system for them.

A civil war is a struggle over what organization possesses sovereignty over the embroiled nation or a region thereof -- that is, which of two (or more) groups is the "legitimate government," entitled to make and enforce the law. The American Civil War, though the issues that ignited it were fairly limited -- slavery and tariffs -- was exactly such a conflict. The Union maintained that the federal government based in Washington, D.C. retained sovereign jurisdiction over the states of the Confederacy; the Confederacy insisted on its right to secede from the Constitutional compact that the Union states respected. The matter was settled -- de facto if not necessarily de jure -- by the test of arms.

Today, Syria is clearly in a state of civil war. Egypt is teetering on the edge of one, and could fall into the abyss at any time. So also with the United States of America, though the battle lines are of a unique and tragic kind.

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The American conflict is, once again, over what the law shall be...but this time, the disputed "territory" is not real estate but race.

The traditional American view of the rule of law is very simply stated: Legitimate, Constitutionally conformant law stands above all details of identity, locality, and affiliation. No matter who you are, where you are, or with what groups or institutions you're associated, your conduct is subject to the same laws as everyone else. Conversely, a law that embeds matters of identity, locality, or affiliation in its determinations is illegitimate under the rule of law. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in these United States who would dare to differ with that formulation, at least in the abstract.

However, recent events, of which the trial of George Zimmerman was merely the most visible outcropping, have demonstrated that quite a large percentage of our population discards the rule of law when racial differences are involved. Consider: Had Trayvon Martin been white, the Sanford police's decision that the evidence clearly made his death at Zimmerman's hands a case of self-defense would not have been questioned. Similarly, had both participants in the event been black, Zimmerman would never have come to trial. The immense political pressure brought to bear on the state of Florida to try Zimmerman for murder arose entirely because Martin was black and Zimmerman is white.

(Don't quarrel with me about that last. "Hispanic" is an ethnic classification, not a racial one. Zimmerman is racially Caucasian. Away with the objection that he had a black great-grandparent; we don't obey the "one-drop rule" here at Liberty's Torch.)

Though the great majority of American Negroes are decent and law-abiding, a large percentage has internalized the notion that they possess certain exemptions from the law and extra privileges under it. Tragically, among the decent and law-abiding are many -- perhaps a majority thereof -- who are moved to protect the lawbreakers simply because of their shared race. If you ever hear a Negro talk about "The Man," you're in the presence of one such.

A claim of an exemption from the law, or of a privilege that others do not possess, inherently rejects the rule of law and the legal / judicial system based upon it. That puts that group in a state of civil war with the larger society, albeit a "cold" version as long as the conflict remains nonviolent.

From the data in Colin Flaherty's book White Girl Bleed A Lot and from other, corroborating sources, it would appear that an outbreak of mass violence is creeping very close indeed.

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The factor that's most likely to touch off the "flying-lead race war" is the behavior of the federal Department of Justice, which has outrageously aligned itself with those forces determined to lynch George Zimmerman. The satrap of that agency is, of course, Eric "I'm the black attorney-general" Holder, the first openly racist person ever to occupy that position.

Holder has already allowed DoJ personnel to guide and participate in rallies and "protests" designed to bring Zimmerman to trial, and which have more recently railed against his acquittal as "unjust." Today he seeks grounds on which to charge Zimmerman with "civil rights violations," as if self-defense could possibly be viewed so. The agenda Holder and his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, are pursuing has nothing to do with justice or any interest therein; they seek political advantage for themselves and their allies, by fomenting as intense a state of racial animosity as they can contrive. They, and the Democrat Party generally, are aware that retaining the near-unanimous allegiance of black voters is critical to their retention of power. Stirring up hatred of whites is their tactic for reinforcing that allegiance.

It is possible that Obama and Holder are aware of how close to the abyss of outright race warfare the country has drifted. It is possible that they believe they can stretch the cord of civil peace and social tolerance still more tautly without going over the edge. And it is possible that they just don't care.

My sense of the state of things inclines me to believe the last of those possibilities.

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America's racial troubles are a facet in a large mosaic of social, economic, and political turmoil. They are unusual in that they involve violence, both actual and potential, and an implicit yet obvious dispute over the concept of the rule of law. Few other aspects of our ongoing conflicts share those characteristics.

We ought to have learned from our troubles with Muslims that demands for exemptions and privileges under the law must always be rebuffed -- and sternly, at that. Concessions encourage troublemakers to make more trouble; that's fundamental reinforcement psychology, proven on innumerable occasions to operate automatically, even unconsciously, on the persons involved. Yet white Americans continue to make that fundamental mistake in dealing with the demands of blacks.

Steyn's Thesis has never been more visibly in action:

If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there's an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don't attack him head on, don't brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he'll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons. [From Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It]

An exact parallel: There are fellows rampaging / beating passers-by / disrupting traffic / making death threats / holding mass demonstrations because of a jury verdict? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed to reverse that verdict...or to pretend that it could not possibly be legitimate.

However, as those "feeble Eurowimp jurisdictions" have discovered, the terminus of that progression involves bullets, bombs, and great piles of corpses. And unless we learn from both their failures and our accelerating racial turmoil, we will suffer the same.