The Shootings

     I didn’t want to write this piece. I had a cheerful, fiction-oriented theme to pursue today, and the obligation I feel to address this subject instead has me seething.

     Quite a few members of the DextroSphere Commentariat have been casting about for reasons to believe that things aren’t all that bad...that there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon, and that we can reach it if we can just stir enough good people into getting off their asses. As my Gentle Readers will already know, I’ve been taking the negative in such discussions. I feel that any unjustified optimism will work against us, in both the near and the far terms.

     Yet even I had no idea just how bad things have become. That might still be the case.

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     I’ve argued that there’s a race war in progress. The linked piece is nearly three years old. Over the time since then, many persons have strained to the utmost to pour oil on our troubled racial waters...and have seen that oil burst into flames. Yet they don’t do the logical thing: they don’t identify the persons or groups doing the igniting. They’re reluctant to allocate and apportion the responsibility for our situation.

     Is it fear of personal reprisals? Perhaps, on the parts of some. But in the great majority of cases it’s simply an unwillingness to admit that there are villains among us. Villains, once identified, must be dealt with, as harshly as necessary:

     “How do you think [Louis would] feel about this, Chris?”
     She sighted along the blade of the K-Bar, saw no burrs or chips, and sheathed it carefully in her boot.
     “I don’t know, Malcolm. Probably, he’d hate it. For all that he could whip a whole regiment with nothing but a handful of pine needles, he didn’t like himself better for it. He said he let Tiny live to send a message to the rest of them. I always figured it was just as much because he didn’t have the heart to kill him, once the bastard was down and helpless.”
     The old warrior nodded. “He was a good man.”
     “Oh, the best. There’ll never be a better one, take it from me. But he let Tiny live, and now I have to do this. I figured something out today, Malcolm. Want to hear it?”
     Loughlin’s head came up, and she looked him in the eyes.
     “Once you know a man deserves to die, you have to kill him. If you don’t, you’re committing a crime against everyone who doesn’t deserve to die. If you get him down but can’t bring yourself to do it, and he gets up off the mat and kills you instead, you’re only getting what you deserve yourself.”

     ...and few of us are willing to accept the moral obligation or the responsibility for the consequences.

     Therein lies the rub. There are no exemptions from natural law. It operates regardless of how we feel about it, and one of its imperative clauses is that villains must be dealt with. It’s not a job one can delegate...at least, not in full.

     So instead Americans gawk in horror at the casualties of this open, flying-lead shooting war, shake their heads, and say “It must be mere happenstance. No one could possibly want a race war. After all, who would profit?”

     Which is, indeed, the heart of the matter.

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     Paul Kersey often refers to “BRA:” Black Run America. His interpretation of the term differs slightly from what you might expect. It’s not about Obama, at least not entirely. It’s more about the system of differential privilege that’s been erected in law and social custom: a two-tier system wherein dark skinned persons, particularly the sort called “African-American,” are entitled to flout laws and social norms to which light skinned persons must conform.

     The existence of such a scheme automatically creates a class structure. A privileged class is a ruling class: an aristocracy. Such aristocracies have never been shy about exploiting their privileges to the hilt.

     The most important aspect of this state of affairs is the ability of black racialist mouthpieces to incite racial hatred yet exculpate themselves from the consequences. They and the organizers of groups such as Black Lives Matter – and don’t kid yourself; this is a top-down undertaking structured as carefully as any military organization – are able to fan the flames of black racism toward whites yet remain untouched when that racism blossoms into a raging inferno. They succeed at this merely by not being among the rioters, the looters of defenseless retail stores, or the trigger-pullers. They whip their allegiants into a frenzy that demands expression in violent action. Then they hide behind their cannon fodder.

     You know their names. We all do. Whether the metric is money, power, or prestige, have they suffered or profited from the violence they’ve ignited?

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     Behavior that produces a profit will be emulated by those who seek such profits for themselves. The profits accruing to black racialists are considerable. They don’t emanate solely from their black followers.

     They must be delegitimized.

     At this time it can’t be done through the law. The law is capable only of pursuing those who break it, and the racialist standard-bearers have been careful not to do so in a prosecutable fashion. It can only be done culturally: by limiting their access to the media megaphones, and by giving their operations the public denunciations they deserve.

     The most important part of this effort must be carried out by decent American blacks. It stands to reason: black tribalism is far stronger than white tribalism, which implies that exhortations and denunciations of the sort I advocate here will receive far more respect from blacks if emitted by black speakers and opinion makers. For every Ta-Nehisi Coates there must be two or more Thomas Sowells – and the Sowells’ condemnations of the Coates’s must be unsparing and widely disseminated.

     Whites can be most effective in another venue. Far too many whites react to black vitriol – even to black violence – by excusing it. Such persons are collaborators with the enemy. They must be shouted down, condemned as foes of civil society who are passively collaborating in its destruction. This is imperative. Excusing villainy makes one an accomplice to the villain.

     In this connection, the idiotic notion that black hatred and violence is the justifiable response to past racial injustices must be a principal target. First, even before the Civil War, very few persons owned slaves. Second, those slaves contributed solely to a narrow slice of the agrarian South; they did not “build America.” Third, the overwhelming majority of Americans alive today are descended from immigrants who never had anything to do with the institution of slavery. Fourth and last, residual racism among whites dropped to a record low level in the Sixties; virtually no black alive in America today has ever been legally or socially disadvantaged by white racism...which is part of the reason for mushrooming white resentment toward ever-escalating black demands for special privileges and “reparations.”

     No one of any race is exempt from the moral obligation to play his part, whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.

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     I harbor no illusions; the years have burned them out of me. There will be more black violence against whites. There will be more black agitation, disturbances, and demands. There will be some pushback from decent Americans – black and white – but it will be insufficient, at least in the near term.

     Massing an opposing force adequate to stem the tide will take time. It will encounter resistance. For a while, at least, it will appear a hopeless effort in a cause already lost. But there is no alternative.

     “Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.” -- Atlas Shrugged