In which we scrape the very bottom of the governmental barrel, and dredge up the worst form of misrule.

Table of Contents

Stockholm burns (image)

Police issue parking tickets (image)

To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. Thomas Carlyle

For forms of government let fools contest;

Whate’er is best administered is best. Alexander Pope

In our survey of democracy and the intellectuals (Issue 25), we watched popular government devolving over three centuries into the modern civil service state, from Robespierre and the Articles of Confederation to Van Rompuy and the New Deal (racking up quite a body count along the way), as its philosophical foundations crumbled — Noble Savages running wild, smashing the Blank Slate, howling naked through the halls of the Parliament of Man, and other silly metaphors — and the intellectual class gradually settled into its current role of formulating public policy, exercising global leadership, and arbitrating the bounds of acceptable discourse — not to be confused with running the country, dominating the globe, and controlling what people think.

Which created the mess we’re in now: bureaucracy, that post-democratic “system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives” (Oxford Dictionaries). Second from the left:

You might remember this from last time

“But wait!” You cry. “You’ve placed bureaucracy, which surely means big government, next to anarchy, which means no government.”

Yes I have.

“Why, that’s crazy-sauce!”

Is it, though?

“We believe in fact that it is”

A big government, where power is spread around to lots of people (who are no doubt wasting lots of time and money doing little of any use), is not the same as an effective government, which can get things done. The most effective governments, like the most effective armies, are the most hierarchical, which makes them the smallest: fewer committees, faster decisions, and personal responsibility for the outcome.

In a bureaucracy, which is indeed big government, power (also known as sovereignty, imperium, and “influence”), of which there is a fixed supply (hence the term absolute power), is spread thin, which makes the government ineffective. (“Then how come the government keeps confiscating my treats?” Patience, skeptical stoat.) Conversely, when the government is weak, it is easy to break off little bits of sovereignty, which makes the government larger. In short, big government is the opposite of strong government.

When state power is spread vanishingly thin, leaving us to fend for ourselves against the cannibal biker gangs, we have achieved anarchy — so I place it next to bureaucracy: the worst form of misrule short of no-rule. For what it’s worth, on this point, the anarchists themselves seem committed to proving me right, including that quasi-right-wing branch of “anarcho-capitalists,” better known as libertarians.

The Anarchist Left

Open-borders anarcho-capitalist Bryan Caplan makes himself useful, explaining how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the anarchist National Confederation of Labor (CNT) seized factories in Catalonia and turned them over to the workers — at first:

Practical experience gradually revealed a basic truth of economics for which theoretical reflection would have sufficed: if the workers take over a factory, they will run it to benefit themselves. A worker-run firm is essentially identical to a capitalist firm in which the workers also happen to be the stockholders. Once they came to this realization, however dimly, the Spanish Anarchists had to either embrace capitalism as the corollary of worker control, or else denounce worker control as the corollary of capitalism. For the most part, they chose the latter course.

Hence, according to Bolloten’s Spanish Civil War (1991):

The Anarchosyndicalists, contrary to common belief, were not without their own plans for the nationwide control and rationalization of production. Rootedly opposed to state control or nationalization, they advocated centralization — or socialization, as they called it — under trade-union management of entire branches of production.

“Of course,” Caplan points out, “one could refuse to call a union with such fearsome powers a ‘state,’ but it would need all of the enforcement apparatus and authority of a state to execute its objectives.” True enough — but progressivism has always thrived on contradictions, hypocrisy, and lies (culminating in the “critical theory” and “dialectic” of cultural Marxism, also known as “political correctness”). Don’t expect logic to work on these people. Look, the commies are still prattling on about “a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order” (Wik) — which somehow always ends up looking suspiciously like a (sporadically murderous, bureaucratic mind-control) state.

I grant you the Spanish anarchists had one thing going for them.

So too “libertarian communism” (anarchism), notably in rural Aragon, where CNT support was weaker, and a radical faction called the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) skipped worker control and jumped straight to centralization:

Although no hard and fast rules were observed in establishing libertarian communism, the procedure was more or less the same everywhere. A CNT-FAI committee was set up in each locality where the new regime was instituted. This committee not only exercised legislative and executive powers, but also administered justice. One of its first acts was to abolish private trade and to collectivize the soil of the rich, and often that of the poor, as well as farm buildings, machinery, livestock, and transport. Except in rare cases, barbers, bakers, carpenters, sandalmakers, doctors, dentists, teachers, blacksmiths, and tailors also came under the collective system. Stocks of food and clothing and other necessities were concentrated in a communal depot under the control of the local committee, and the church, if not rendered useless by fire, was converted into a storehouse, dining hall, cafe, workshop, school, garage, or barracks. In many communities money for internal use was abolished.

Spanish anarchists also murdered thousands of people. Others “fled for fear of their lives,” Caplan writes. “Their land was seized almost immediately.” Or, as the preposterous “libertarian communists” at LibCom.org spin it:

It was in the countryside that the Spanish revolution was most far reaching. The anarchist philosophy had been absorbed by large layers of the downtrodden peasants and the outbreak of revolution was the opportunity to put these ideas into practice.

Again, the implementation of this “anarchist philosophy” turns out to involve the “collectivization” (confiscation) of everything from farms and factories to newspapers and breweries, and the “redistribution” of everybody’s wealth — not to mention “scientific” agriculture, to “help the peasants to make better use of the land.”

Above all, Spain showed what ordinary people can do given the right conditions. The next time somebody says workers are stupid and could not take over the running of society, point to Spain. Show them what the workers and peasants (most of whom were illiterate) did. Tell them Anarchism is possible.

The anarchists at Infoshop.org (“kill capitalism before it kills you”) proudly proclaim:

Does revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice? Yes.

And the anarchist anthropology professor David Graeber, a massive hit with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, calls Spain “the glorious exception” to “the decline of anarchism” (and the rise of communism) in the early 20th century. (He ties in the second-worst form of misrule short of no-rule when he says that “the only way to have a genuinely democratic society would also be to abolish capitalism and the state.”)

So now you know what it looks like when “glorious” anarchism is “given the right conditions” and actually “works” (W.H. Auden, Spain 1937):

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Finally, just for our own amusement, over at RevLeft (“Home of the Revolutionary Left”), you can read all about the “sinister phenomenon” of neoreaction (that’s us): “demented,” “appalling,” “backward” “poison,” a “puritanical” “petri dish” of “pseudoscientific” “single celled slime” that “crawls up” from “the abyss,” not to mention “creepier and creepier ways to bed women.” In short, “you guys know who to purge”:

One reason why I am a Marxist-Leninist is because I understand the necessity of repressing these pernicious reactionary sentiments in a socialist political order.

Yes indeed, the three symbols of RevLeft, “one of the world’s largest leftist forum communities,” are the hammer and sickle (in blood red, no less) of communism, which if I recall correctly is the most murderous ideology in the history of the world; and the black flag and circle-A of anarchism, which is perhaps the only thing uglier and stupider than communism. You know, it would be easy to dismiss RevLeft, in its entirety, as a sad collection of humorless duckspeak by dim-witted adolescents. So I will.

“The stoats control the means of production”

The Anarchist “Right”

“But surely not the libertarians!” I’m afraid so. They too confirm the proximity of anarchy to bureaucracy.

Libertarian anarchism is not hard to find. I’m saving one special form of it for later, so for the moment you can take Joseph S. Diedrich, a self-identified libertarian at the Washington Times (2013). All libertarians, he says, eventually come to believe that the state is not only “superfluous,” but “a cancerous tumor that feeds on those unaware of its true malignance” (sic), creating “war, oppression, tyranny, injustice.”

Inside every libertarian, there’s an anarchist waiting to be set free. You’re either a statist or you’re not. There is no in-between.

Oh, I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Diedrich: either a Statist or an Anarchist, with no in-between, for the arrow must point right or left; to Restoration or Revolution; rule or no-rule — but which will it be? Will it be the State, sir?

The Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy; […] Eternal Justice to preside over it, Eternal Justice enforced by Almighty Power! […] The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker’s Law.

Or will it be your precious Anarchy?

Anarchy; the choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men? Slop-shirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper, by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls?

The choice is yours, my astonishing friends:

All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary. You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction: a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for the most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!” And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.

Speaking of insanity, and again just for our own amusement, watch the anarchist “right” — whose stated goal, it is worth emphasizing, is to inflict anarchy on all of us — seize the moral high ground over scary statists like me:

I did not realize there was an actual movement out that seriously wanted to go back to an age of kings and aristocracy, and was using libertarian & ancap terminology and concepts in their intellectual toolbox. […] These people are out there. The thing is, now that I have been made aware of the phenomenon, I see it everywhere, on every forum or website that is set up for the general population of market anarchists.

The horror!

This cannot be allowed to stand. This is like finding out a serial-killing child molester is in charge of your local little league team.

So? Just teach him the Non-Aggression Principle, guys. It is, after all, “oxymoronic to claim that the initiation of violence” against someone who may in the past have engaged in serial murder and child molestation “is necessary to prevent the initiation of violence” against your little league team (Libertarian News). And let us not forget that “restrictions” on serial-killing child molesters “are a vastly greater crime against markets and liberty than anything” serial-killing child molesters “are likely to manage” (Caplan). This is basic anarcho-capitalist theory, guys! What are you, statists? Geez.

This is not a case of tolerance. This is a case of metaphorical pitch-forks and torches. […] So I need to ask, is neoreactionarism accepted here? Is it a thing, just another fellow traveller for Reddit’s ancaps? Because if so, I don’t think I can be. And if it isn’t, then this, the ‘Neoreaction,’ is a definite threat, and should be faced.

I don’t even think the stoats know what to make of this. Gosh, I’m flattered that you think we’re a “threat” to your anarchy. We might, like, try to impose order on it or something — and there goes the neighbourhood!

“Did you say stoats? I am a stoat”

The author manages to double down on the madness in response to this penetrating question: “If anarcho-capitalism did inevitably result in highly religious, highly segregated, very traditional society, would you still be an anarcho-capitalist? Would you be convinced that capitalism doesn’t work, if the result isn’t politically correct?”

If that is how anarcho-capitalism truly manifested itself, I would go Red in a heartbeat.

In other words, he’s a “libertarian” only to the extent that libertarianism supports communism, which makes him… let me see… ah, yes: a communist. That was easy.

The communist and general big-government tendencies of the libertarian are never more obvious than when he is trying to wriggle his way, stoat-like, out of “racism,” which he must do on a regular basis — free markets, contract rights and small government, like states’ rights before them, having been exposed as “the current in-vogue euphemisms for maintaining white supremacy” — really, just one more way of calling President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama a dirty nigger (Issue 23).

(In other news, communists and libertarians agree: Rand Paul hates black people.)

I’ll make this simple. Libertarians oppose “racism.” “Racism” includes any statistical disparity — social, political, biological or otherwise — that favours white people over anyone else. (For example, calling a university “too white” is an obvious case of “anti-racism,” whereas proving statistically that a university discriminates against white people is “crazy” and a “threat” to “diversity,” so we should start a riot. Calling the NBA “too black” is blatant “racism,” whereas calling an NBA team “too white” is clearly “anti-racism.” And so on.) Therefore, libertarians ask only that the state have enough power turn black into white — and not one iota more. “Limited government”!

A spectacular example is Matt Zwolinski’s ‘Libertarian Case for a Basic Income’ (2013). The young Mr. Zwolinski is a philosophy professor at UC San Diego, co-director of the university’s Institute for Law and Philosophy, and founder of Bleeding Heart Libertarians — clearly the right man to make this curious case.

Mr. Zwolinski has discovered that libertarianism, in the name of “property rights,” requires us to redistribute white people’s property, because — well, something something fake history of slavery–lynching–colonialism:

One of libertarianism’s most distinctive commitments is its belief in the near-inviolability of private property rights. But it does not follow from this commitment that the existing distribution of property rights ought to be regarded as inviolable, because the existing distribution is in many ways the product of past acts of uncompensated theft and violence.

Yes, in a truly hilarious turn, libertarianism turns out to be entirely consistent with — let’s see — mass redistribution of property, racial collectivism, irredentism, revanchism, general identity politics, etc., etc. His argument must be seen to be believed. First of all, elaborate sophistry proves that we should confiscate white people’s stuff:

Culpability is a red herring. It’s easy to try to avoid the problem of historical injustice by pointing out that we weren’t the ones who committed it. So how can libertarianism sanction punishing C for a crime that A committed against B? The answer, of course, is that it cannot sanction punishing C. But it can, at least on some plausible interpretations of libertarian principles, sanction redistributing resources from C to B. If A steals from B and bequeaths the stolen property to C, B clearly has a right against C, even if C has acted entirely innocently. Sometimes, in other words, the point isn’t that we have acted wrongly. It is that we have benefited from injustice in a way that we were not entitled to benefit. Receipt of such benefits could be understood as a kind of strict liability offense.

Furthermore, don’t think too hard about my argument; you’re just being obtuse:

An over-reliance on so-called “methodological individualism” sometimes leads libertarians to be unnecessarily obtuse in thinking about historical injustice. “Only individuals act,” we sometimes like to say. Or even “there are no groups, only individuals.” But there are groups, and they matter. Individuals belong to families that transmit economic, cultural, and other advantages (and disadvantages) from one generation to the next. Individuals have racial, religious, and ethnic identities, and those identities shape the way they are treated by other individuals and institutions both consciously and subconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally. Put these two kinds of identity together and it’s easy enough to see that injustices against an individual in one generation can negatively affect other individuals in later generations. And that systematic injustices against certain groups of individuals can have systematic effects on other members of those groups in later generations.

But Mr. Zwolinski, given that families also transmit genes from one generation to the next, surely racial differences in highly heritable behavioural traits — like intelligence, conscientiousness, and aggression — have some bearing on these “systematic effects.” Oh, wait, never mind: facts are “racist” and therefore off limits (outside the made-up “bounds of acceptable discourse”) if they don’t match up with progressive egalitarian ideology, and the progs will destroy anyone who tries to talk about them.

Finally, don’t talk back, because you’re all white, and whites have lots of money:

Whatever the intrinsic philosophical merit of “the past is complicated so let’s just start fresh” approach, we ought to bear in mind that this sounds awfully convenient when the person who endorses it is one of the people who has emerged at the top of the bloody and murderous mess that is our collective history.

Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann was therefore a little off base when he wrote:

We shouldn’t really be that surprised by either of the Pauls’ connection to far-right racism. That’s because they’re libertarians and libertarianism is the velvet glove over the iron fist of racism. Here’s how it works: when you have an entrenched racial and economic class that has ruled a continent for five centuries, they have well-established levers and levels of power and wealth. They will, generation after generation, do whatever is necessary to hang on to that wealth and power. […] So now comes a political philosophy — libertarianism — that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the way. They say this when the average wealth of a white family [sic] when the median net worth of a white family is $110,729 and that of a black family is $4,955.

But Mr. Hartmann, the average IQ of a white family is 100, and that of a black family is 85. Surely this indisputable, not even remotely debatable scientific fact has some bearing on the observed inequalities — oh, wait: you can’t hear me over the sound of twenty million college communists screaming about “equality.”

Elegant, isn’t it?

“Was this a ‘liberty’? If so, I have already eaten it. NOT SORRY”

Libertarian racial redistribution, as bizarre and hilarious as it is, which is a lot, is not even a new development. From a 1969 issue of Libertarian Forum, edited by Murray Rothbard himself:

Suppose, for example, that A steals B’s horse. Then C comes along and takes the horse from A. Can C be called a thief? Certainly not, for we cannot call a man a criminal for stealing goods from a thief. On the contrary, C is performing a virtuous act of confiscation, for he is depriving thief A of the fruits of his crime of aggression, and he is at least returning the horse to the innocent “private” sector and out of the “criminal” sector. C has done a noble act and should be applauded. Of course, it would be still better if he returned the horse to B, the original victim. But even if he does not, the horse is far more justly in C’s hands than it is in the hands of A, the thief and criminal. Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. […] Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State.

“Libertarianism” achieved! By extortion, robbery and murder. (Again, this is simply communism.)

The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day.

“The hides of their masters.” I refer you to an actual slave (and see Issue 3):

Freedom is all right, but de niggers was better off befo’ surrender, kaze den dey was looked after an’ dey didn’ get in no trouble fightin’ an’ killin’ like dey do dese days. If a nigger cut up an’ got sassy in slavery times, his Ole Marse give him a good whippin’ an’ he went way back an’ set down an’ ’haved hese’f. If he was sick, Marse an’ Mistis looked after him, an’ if he needed store medicine, it was bought an’ give to him; he didn’ have to pay nothin’. Dey didn’ even have to think ’bout clothes nor nothin’ like dat, dey was wove an’ made an’ give to dem. Maybe everybody’s Marse and Mistis wuzn’ good as Marse George and Mis’ Betsy, but dey was de same as a mammy an’ pappy to us niggers.

But it would be a mistake to expect libertarian theory to correspond to the real world. “Liberty,” “slavery,” “history,” “property” — these are just words to a libertarian; little cogs and wheels to be assembled into a static, useless, but delightfully fine-tuned machine. In the end, libertarianism is nothing more than an incomprehension of human nature coupled to a fondness, bordering on fetish, for formulaic reasoning; in other words, applied autism.

(Friedman and Thiel are not libertarians, though they may not know it yet.)

The industrious Zwolinski, in the meantime, has taken the first principle of civilization — if you want nice stuff, you have to stop the barbarians from scaling the city walls and taking it (Issue 5) — and reduced it to “a bit of extra cash”:

When most people think about helping the poor, they forget about two groups that are largely invisible — poor people in other countries, and poor people who haven’t been born yet. […] I think the last thing anybody with a bleeding heart ought to want to do is to block the poorest of the poor from access to what has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever devised — namely, a policy of relatively open immigration into the relatively free economy of the United States. Especially when one’s justification for doing so is merely to provide a bit of extra cash to people who are already citizens of one of the wealthiest countries on the face of the planet.

Which brings me to that special, suicidal species of libertarian anarchism I alluded to earlier: open borders. This goes right back to Rand — Ayn, not Paul:

AYN RAND INSTITUTE: Can you give a specific example of when she responded angrily to a question? MARY ANN SURES: Someone asked her for her views on immigration, if she thought it was a good thing. And she got indignant immediately at the very idea that anyone might be opposed to immigration, that a country might not let immigrants in. One of the things she said in her answer was, “Where would I be today if America closed its doors to immigrants?” […] And I think she was assuming that immigrants would be like she was — ready and able to make their own way, accepting help if voluntarily given by individuals but not expecting government handouts.

Today, there’s Don Boudreaux:

A few friends whose opinions I hold in the highest regard have challenged me recently to reconsider my support for open immigration. […] Their challenge springs instead from the more plausible concern that immigrants will use their growing political power to vote for government policies that are more interventionist and less respectful of individual freedoms. […] Concern over the likely voting patterns of immigrants is nothing new. Past fears seem, from the perspective of 2013, to have been unjustified.

Paid a visit to California recently, Mr. Boudreaux?

“Over the last two decades, California has become a Democratic stronghold”

This leads Nick Land to wonder: “What would count as evidence of America moving in a direction that was ‘more interventionist and less respectful of individual freedoms’? Would it look anything at all like what we’ve seen — in highly-accelerated mode — since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act?”

However, the actual results of actual colonization by Central America turn out to be irrelevant to Mr. Boudreaux:

But let’s assume for the moment that today’s immigrants — those immigrants recently arrived and those who would arrive under a more liberalized immigration regime — are indeed as likely as my concerned friends fear to vote overwhelmingly to move American economic policy in a much more dirigiste direction. Such a move would, I emphatically and unconditionally agree, be very bad. Very. Bad. Indeed. I still support open immigration. I cannot bring myself to abandon support of my foundational principles just because following those principles might prove fatal.

To himself and all the rest of us.

Our old friend Bryan Caplan is right in the thick of it, reducing the first principle of civilization to an arbitrary partition of a global set of abstract “bliss points,” in true libertarian fashion (which is advantageous for being amenable to calculations, and disadvantageous for having no connection to reality):

Suppose there are two countries with equal populations. The quality of policy ranges from 0–10, 10 being best. In country A, bliss points (people’s first choice for policy) are uniformly distributed from 2–6. In country B, bliss points are uniformly distributed from 4–8. What does democratic competition deliver? When the countries are independent, country A gets a policy quality of 4 (the median of the uniform distribution from 2–6), and country B gets a policy quality of 6 (the median of the uniform distribution from 4–8). Average policy that people live under: 50%*4+50%*6=5. Now suppose you open the borders, and everyone moves to country B (the richer country). The median of the whole distribution is 5. Result: The immigrants live under better policies, the natives live under worse policies. The average (5) remains unchanged.

Land’s definitive appraisal: Caplan is arguing that “any attempt to live under a regime that is anything other than the averaged political idiocy of humanity as a whole is a gross human rights violation.”

Furthermore, Caplan argues, maximizing the ethnic diversity of immigrants will shred whatever tattered threads remain of white America’s social fabric, taking the welfare state with it — as if popular opinion (white popular opinion, no less) still somehow counted for something:

As a rule, people are happy to vote to “take care of their own”; that’s what the welfare state is all about. So when the poor are culturally very similar to the rich, as they are in places like Denmark and Sweden, support for the welfare state tends to be uniformly strong. […] Even though black Americans are unusually supportive of the welfare state, it is entirely possible that the presence of black Americans has on net made our welfare state smaller by eroding white support for it. Immigration is likely to have an even stronger counter-balancing effect on natives’ policy preferences because, as far as most Americans are concerned, immigrants from Latin American are much more of an “out-group” than American blacks. Faced with the choice to either cut social services or give “a bunch of foreigners” equal access, natives will lean in the direction of cuts. In fact, I can’t think of anything more likely to make natives turn against the welfare state than forcing them to choose between (a) helping no one, and (b) helping everyone regardless of national origin.

(Land: “This argument is so freaking Mad Max that I actually quite like it. Burn down the world and you take the welfare state with it. Yeeaaaahhhhh!”)

What will actually happen, by the way, is that the social fabric will indeed get shredded all to hell, while the welfare state will continue to expand. And if you would like to know what Caplan’s “bliss point” redistribution scheme actually looks like, by the way, you might cast a glance at Minnesota, which (among other places) has amassed the “bliss points” of tens of thousands of Somali “refugees,” blessing the state with a veritable rainbow of vibrant diversity — along with an epidemic of assault, murder, more murder, further murder, gang murder, gang warfare, terrorism, more terrorism, racial violence, rape, sex slavery, and more sex slavery, including the 29 diverse vibrancies pictured below. They’re also ruining the school system with their violence and stupidity (I’m sorry, their “autism and learning disabilities”), and disciplining them is, of course, considered racist.

Mr. Caplan considers himself a modern-day “abolitionist.” I’d say he’s a good fit for James Redpath:

I believe in humanity and human rights. I recognize nothing as so sacred on earth. Rather than consent to the infringement of the most insignificant or seemingly unimportant of human rights, let races be swept from the face of the earth — let nations be dismembered — let dynasties be dethroned — let laws and governments, religions and reputations be cast out and trodden under feet of men!

I’ll give the last word on libertarian immigration policy to Tyler Cowen. (Nick Land, truly the reigning expert on suicidal libertarianism, rightly calls this “a candidate for the most insane splinter of sanity in history.”)

Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs.

Yeah, most likely.

“I have already destroyed one stupid bird,

and if I see a stupid goose I shall destroy him too”

No, on second thought, I’ll give the last word to the Roman Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (403 A.D.):

God willed to join the peoples and the realms

Of different languages and hostile cults

Under the same empire and make all men

Accept the bonds of one harmonious rule.

Seven years later, the Visigoths sacked Rome.

On Liberty

“Liberty” (“freedom,” etc.) can mean one of two things: (1) liberty, meaning decent people are able to do reasonable things — to own their own stuff; to read whatever they like; to stroll around the neighbourhood without getting attacked by feral hominids;

to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; the like [Hobbes, Leviathan]

— all of which is (a) obviously good, and (b) a product of civilization, also known as good government (see below); or (2) “political liberty,” meaning democracy, i.e., letting large numbers of idiots vote on stuff, which is not good government.

The most common — and, historically, the most convincing — argument of the Whigs (radicals, communists, “progressives,” etc.) is to switch back and forth between these definitions really really fast, and hope no one notices:

“Liberty is good because, duh, liberty!” (Definition 1a.) “Therefore, democracy is the best, because it gave us liberty!” (Definition 2.)

Since we’re bashing anarcho-capitalists anyway (in clear violation of the Non-Aggression Principle): Ben Domenech, a “conservative” (of what, unclear), and apparently an expert on who is and is not a libertarian, insists that libertarianism is just swell, because it “protects civil society,” promotes “flatter and simpler taxes,” guarantees “civil liberty protections” and “real equal opportunity,” and many other wonderful things. However, his only example of an actually existing “libertarian nation” turns out to be a hereditary monarchy.

This is not a coincidence.

If you’re under the impression that, like, King George III was always coming over to the colonies and pushing people around, taxing them and whatnot, you should probably delve a little deeper (than not at all) into the actual American Rebellion. You might also try Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Menace of the Herd (1943). And Hans-Hermann Hoppe is within striking distance in Democracy: The God That Failed (2001):

In the U.S., less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever expanding list of non-discrimination — “affirmative action” — laws and non-discriminatory — multicultural-egalitarian — immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by forced integration, and accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically. […] Based on and motivated by fundamental theoretical insights from both, political economy and political philosophy (ethics), in the following studies I propose the revision of three central — indeed almost mythical — beliefs and interpretations concerning modern history. In accordance with elementary theoretical insights regarding the nature of private property and ownership vs. “public” property and administration and of firms vs. governments (or states), I propose first a revision of the prevailing view of traditional hereditary monarchies and provide instead an uncharacteristically favorable interpretation of monarchy and the monarchical experience. In short, monarchical government is reconstructed theoretically as privately owned government, which in turn is explained as promoting future-orientedness and a concern for capital values and economic calculation by the government ruler. Secondly, equally unorthodox but by the same theoretical token, democracy and the democratic experience are cast in an untypically unfavorable light. Democratic government is reconstructed as publicly owned government, which is explained as leading to present-orientedness and a disregard or neglect of capital values in government rulers, and the transition from monarchy to democracy is interpreted accordingly as civilizational decline. Still more fundamental and unorthodox is the proposed third revision. Despite the comparatively favorable portrait presented of monarchy, I am not a monarchist and the following is not a defense of monarchy. Instead, the position taken toward monarchy is this: If one must have a state, defined as an agency that exercises a compulsory territorial monopoly of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and of taxation, then it is economically and ethically advantageous to choose monarchy over democracy. But this leaves the question open whether or not a state is necessary, i.e., if there exists an alternative to both, monarchy and democracy. History again cannot provide an answer to this question. By definition, there can be no such thing as an “experience” of counterfactuals and alternatives; and all one finds in modern history, at least insofar as the developed Western world is concerned, is the history of states and statism.

Well, good luck with that, Herr Hoppe. The “developed Western world” has already been pretty thoroughly trashed by democracy, which we agree is objectively worse in practice than monarchy, so I really hope you find this (historically unprecedented) alternative to “territorial monopolies” on sovereignty. “Anarcho-capitalism,” you say?

“We are stoats and we like to dance”

I might as well mention that “progress” itself, similarly, can mean one of two things: (1) technological-scientific progress, which is obviously good, as long as you don’t blow up the world; or (2) moral-political “progress,” which, again, just means democracy, and is completely unrelated.

“Progress is good because, duh, medicine and stuff!” (Definition 1.) “Therefore, democracy is the best, because it was progress!” (Definition 2.)

Well, it’s true that men landed on the Moon shortly after the “Civil Rights Movement,” but it was Nazi rocket scientists who put them there, not Rosa Parks. (If my point is still not abundantly clear: while “progressives” — Roundheads, Puritans, Whigs, Patriots, Radicals, Republicans, Bolsheviks, Marxists, Socialists, Communists, Democrats, or whatever they’re calling themselves now — were systematically trashing Western civilization to get just a little more power for themselves, a bunch of highly motivated, highly intelligent white men were inventing lots of useful things to make your life better — things like electricity, medicine, the internal combustion engine, computers, airplanes, everything attributed to black inventors, and so on.)

This is also the great lie of the “Enlightenment.” Sir Isaac Newton was, of course, an incomparable scientific genius — and a fundamentalist-Christian royalist who enjoyed having counterfeiters hanged, drawn and quartered in the name of Her Majesty the Queen. John Locke, on the other hand, was an early political progressive — and his flagrant abuses of deductive logic ultimately led to titanic mass murder in the name of “the People,” not to mention such thoroughly anti-scientific doctrines as the “Blank Slate” and the “Noble Savage” (Issue 25). But I’m supposed to pretend they were both part of the same movement, whereby the unrelated theories of both physics and government “progressed,” and we should all call this movement the “Enlightenment,” and swallow it whole — because “Enlightenment” means good, right? Duh.

You can see the “rationalist” Eliezer Yudkowsky of Less Wrong fall for this exact fallacy in his comment on the TechCrunch attempted hit piece ‘Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries’ (2013):

We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. […] Democracy has many known malfunctions and it may be that some better way for human beings to organize themselves will be discovered. That way, however, shall not be aristocracy, any more than the next theory of gravitation after General Relativity might be Newtonian mechanics. The ratchet of progress turns unpredictably, but it doesn’t turn backward.

The Carlyle Club’s roving editor could not resist dashing off this reply:

I didn’t realize Yudkowsky was so religious: his “Ratchet of Progress,” also known as “Progress,” also known as “Whig history,” is a form of (Christian) Divine Providence. Ah, but he’s dressed it up as Science™ — aristocracy is like Newtonian mechanics, you see, because… because… we proved democracy is better than aristocracy using a controlled experiment? Wait, no, that never happened, because you can’t control for technological advances (which have nothing to do with letting large numbers of idiots cast votes), not to mention a billion other factors… So I guess this is just pseudoscience. How irrational!

(The official facial expression of Radish magazine is, and always will be, the sneer.)

In the Chronicle of Higher Education (2012), science journalist John “Ban Science” Horgan explains how he’s been teaching his students faith in “social progress,” using certain “facts about our surging wealth, health, freedom, and peace.” I omit his tired “facts” (e.g., “since the early 20th century, life spans have more than doubled”; “over the last two centuries, average standards of living have surged”; etc.).

“Freedom,” of course, turns out to mean democracy (“electing representatives”) — only this time, there’s a little extra thrown in: “freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state.” Well, those actually sound pretty great to me — so I invite the reader to really consider where we are and where we are going with respect to these four specific freedoms, in, say, the United States of America: land of political correctness and moral education; disparate impact and anti-racism; social justice and urban youths; endless laws and warrior cops.

I debunk the myth of peace below.

As for wealth and health, Mr. Yudkowsky’s fellow rationalist Robin Hanson is having none of it:

Yes many trends have been positive for a century or so, and yes this suggests they will continue to rise for a century or so. But no this does not mean that students are empirically or morally wrong for thinking it “utopian fantasy” that one could “end poverty, disease, tyranny, and war” by joining a modern-day Kennedy’s political quest. Why? Because positive recent trends in these areas were not much caused by such political movements! They were mostly caused by our getting rich from the industrial revolution, an event that political movements tended, if anything, to try to hold back on average.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker falls for it too, in The Blank Slate (2003). A confession of faith:

For all their flaws, liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far. They provide more comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats.

Gosh, it’s really unbelievable how much good stuff we got just from letting a bunch of idiots elect the idiot politician of their choice. Like “freedom,” which is self-evidently a good thing — though of course we’re not talking about the freedom to walk around in a major city without getting ambushed by barbarians (see below). We gave that up for good when we surrendered to Civil Rights, in exchange for more of this delicious political freedom.

As for “artistic vitality” — why, just compare Kazimir Malevich’s bold Black Square (1915) or Jackson Pollock’s inspired Autumn Rhythm (1950) with… some piece of junk I dug up from way back when:

Or did he mean movies and television? Remarkable technology, that.

I cannot help but notice, Mr. Pinker, having devoted more than zero seconds of thought to the problem, that with regard to comfort, safety, life expectancy, disease control, and famine prevention, at least, our present-day non-modern democracies, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are notably inferior to our modern non-democracies, like Liechtenstein and Singapore. (And the boats tend to agree.) It’s almost as if technological advances, not votes, are what’s improving our quality of life.

The parts of Mr. Pinker’s list that (a) are true, and (b) can plausibly be attributed to popular government in one form or another, are as follows: “freedom.” Meaning, once again, political freedom. In other words, democracy is the best because democracy provides by far the most democracy.

Elegant, isn’t it?

Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Evelyn Waugh (1939)

Probably the best thing to come out of late 20th century American “conservatism” (of what, still unclear) was a journalist by the name of Samuel T. Francis (1947–2005). Even his critics credit him as “a reactionary and a racist.”

Sam Francis was never better than when he was raging against “multiculturalism,” for which he provided the best and most concise definition I’ve seen:

If it’s real multiculturalism you want, give us Arab slave drivers from the Sudan who castrate 12-year-old boys kidnapped to be sold as catamites; give us Ubangi concubines with lip plates like Thanksgiving dinner platters; give us Eskimos who throw their parents out of the igloo when there’s not enough walrus meat left to chew; give us Hindu holy men whose bodily deformities are kissed and fondled by their worshippers; give us Amazonian Indians who mutilate their women and Mexican drug pushers who murder traitors by pushing baseball bats up their rectums or Sikh tribesmen who spend their days sniffing the desert for underground roots to eat. That is what different cultures really are, and that is what a real multiculturalism would really be (and will be, once such colorful characters make it across our borders).

Given what we’ve seen of the anarchist “right,” it should come as no surprise that big-time Beltway libertarian Tom Palmer (of the Atlas Network and the Cato Institute) is not a fan of Sam Francis:

I figured I’d go over to lewrockwell.com to see what else they’re up to. Yep, citations of anti-immigration material (of course!) and enthusiastic links to the columns of one Sam Francis, one of the creepiest and most stomach-churning figures on the American political scene. He’s not “racially insensitive”; he’s a proud and outspoken racist. […] Hats off to Lew Rockwell and his friends, for doing their best to debase libertarian ideas by associating them so closely with some of the the [sic] worst and scariest people ever to scuttle under a rock. (There’s more under the archives labeled “The Fever Swamp.”) Now I’m going to go and wash my hands. The experience of sorting through all the dirt that Lew Rockwell churns out has that effect on me.

How’s that libertarian movement going, Tom? I notice that the “market” for your theories has been very generous to you. Racked up any big successes yet? Abolished any federal agencies? But I digress.

In 1995, Sam Francis had the honor of getting fired from the “conservative” Washington Times, in part for saying this, at a conference hosted by American Renaissance:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in.

Eric Peters was then an editorial writer at the Times:

In typical Beltway Conservative fashion, the WT management fell all over itself to placate the outrage of critics who are the mortal enemies of real conservatism by throwing Sam to the wolves — for daring to speak his piece and (worse) for daring to espouse authentic conservative views, which it was clear were becoming heretical.

Similarly, Patrick J. Buchanan, probably the second best thing to come out of late 20th century American conservatism, in State of Emergency (2006):

Had Francis said this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievements of the West for Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bounds of tolerance. He was summarily fired.

The year after Sam Francis died, a nameless Beltway cockroach crept from the dessicated husk of the Washington Times and chittered bravely to the hot wind howling over the radioactive ruins of the American Empire, pronouncing State of Emergency “stunningly logical,” “remorseless,” “unimpeachable”:

Americans, from what ever nation or ethnicity we originated, have formed a common culture worth preserving, and a common history worth continuing.

The winds blew on.

Chernobyl, 1991:

Just kidding: Detroit, present day (images). “City on the move!”

It was in this context of vibrant diversity, cultural consciousness, and civilizational survival that Sam Francis developed one of his most important ideas: anarcho-tyranny.

In Europe, if not in the United States, some people are beginning to grasp that just maybe they made a mistake when they decided to welcome millions of immigrants over the last several decades. The most recent European to get it is former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who has been making noises about the damage he and his colleagues have inflicted on their own societies. Interviewed in a Hamburg newspaper last month, Mr. Schmidt confessed, “The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society” and that importing thousands of Turkish “gastarbeiter,” or foreign guest workers, into Germany over the last several decades was a bit of a boo-boo. As the London Daily Telegraph reported the story, Mr. Schmidt, Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, “said that the problems resulting from the influx of mostly Turkish Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, had been neglected in Germany and the rest of Europe. They could be overcome only by authoritarian governments, he added, naming Singapore as an example.” He’s hardly the first to see this, although admittedly, at the age of 85, he’s just a wee bit behind the curve. As long ago as 1990, I wrote, in an article in Chronicles magazine, “The late Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the dominions of the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs, among others, all presided over a kind of rainbow coalition of nations and peoples, who for the most part managed to live happily because their secret compulsions to spill each other’s blood was restrained by the overwhelming power of the despots and dynasties who ruled them. “Political freedom relies on a shared political culture as much as on the oppositions and balances that social differentiation creates, and when the common culture disintegrates under the impact of mass migrations, only institutionalized force can hold the regime together.” That’s a bit of a mouthful, but I gather it’s what Mr. Schmidt was driving at. To have freedom on a stable political basis, you have to have a homogeneous culture and society, composed of people who share the same values and beliefs. If they don’t share them, you can hold them together only by force. […] We see the drift in this country, with the Patriot Act and its spawn at airports and in random searches of law-abiding citizens — all because our own overclass will not enforce standing laws against illegal immigration and does nothing to halt the transformation of American society by millions of aliens. Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding. This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as “anarcho-tyranny” — we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).

For a look at anarcho-tyranny in the United States, try Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘A Vandalized Valley’ (2011).

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455.

You might also enjoy Hanson’s ‘Metaphysics of Contemporary Theft’ (2011) and ‘Life with the Vandals’ (2012).

For a European perspective, consult Theodore Dalrymple’s ‘I Have Seen the Future, and It Is Idiocy’ (2013).

In London I once parked outside a hotel where I proposed to stay. Parking was forbidden outside, but I stopped only to take my baggage inside. I received a parking ticket within sixty seconds, a miracle of efficiency (I genuinely admired it in a way), though it was perfectly obvious from my car’s open doors that I did not propose to stay long and was only taking my luggage into the hotel. But on another occasion when my wife telephoned the police to inform them that youths were committing arson in our front garden before her very eyes, they had no time to attend to it. A more senior officer, however, did find the time a quarter of an hour later to complain to my wife that she had wasted police time by complaining in the first place.

You should also check out Dalrymple’s ‘It’s This Bad’ (2006).

(And do consult the recommended reading list for more classic Sam Francis.)

Multiculturalism

What is the solution? How do we fix anarcho-tyranny? Sam Francis had an answer: a “shared political culture,” combined with “oppositions and balances,” would create “political freedom.”

But here is where we must respectfully part ways with the great conservative: great though he was, he was still a conservative, and we are reactionaries. As I have already explained, we reject “political freedom,” and appeal to the “overwhelming power” of the State. (I am obliged to note that this does not describe, e.g., the democratic tyrants of the 20th century, who depended on popular support for their continued survival. Compare the careers of Frederick the Great, who commanded the personal loyalty of the Prussian military; with Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s short-lived successor. One of these men had absolute power; the other one was a tyrant.)

As Francis himself put it:

The late Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the dominions of the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs, among others, all presided over a kind of rainbow coalition of nations and peoples, who for the most part managed to live happily because their secret compulsions to spill each other’s blood was restrained by the overwhelming power of the despots and dynasties who ruled them.

When Sam Francis thought of authoritarian government in a multicultural state, he pictured the late (post-Republic) Roman Empire; whereas we picture the Belgian Congo (Time, 1955):

In the Belgian Congo last week massed tom-tom drummers practiced a welcome tattoo. Prosperous Negro shopkeepers climbed up wooden ladders and draped the Congolese flag (a golden star on a blue field) from lampposts and triumphal arches set up along Boulevard Albert I, the spanking concrete highway that bisects the capital city of Léopoldville. In far-off mission churches, encircled by the rain forest that stretches through Belgian territory from the Atlantic to the Mountains of the Moon, choirs of Bantu children rehearsed the Te Deum. African regiments drilled, jazz bands blared in the bush, and on the great brown river that drains the middle of the continent Negro captains tooted the raucous steam whistles on their swiftly gliding paddle boats. […] The Belgians like to feel that they have devised “a middle way,” making possible black-white partnership. Their program is: full speed ahead in economics and education, dead slow in politics. So far, the evidence is that the Belgian way is working. The Congo, under hard-working capitalism, has become a tropical cornucopia in the heart of a poverty-stricken continent.

Here are some before and after pictures from a Belgian encyclopedia showing technological and societal progress in the Congo under Belgian rule.

(A) Housing. (B) Construction of Leopoldville. (C) Home life.

Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say: “technological” and “societal” ““progress”” under racist imperialist Nazi-like Belgian oppression.

(D) Braiding methods. (E) Shipping. (F) Dentistry.

(G) Women’s dress. (H) Music. (I) Play.

Nowhere in Africa is the Bantu so well fed and housed, so productive and so content as he is in the Belgian Congo. In little more than a generation of intense economic effort, the Belgians have injected 20 centuries of Western mechanical progress into a Stone Age wilderness. The results are staggering: in forests, where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of cannibals now mine the raw materials of the Atomic Age. Belgian brains and Bantu muscle have thrust back the forest and checked the dread diseases (yaws, sleeping sickness, malaria) which sapped the Bantu’s strength. In some areas, the Congo’s infant-mortality rate is down to 60 per 1,000 — better than Italy’s figure. More than 1,000,000 children attend primary and secondary schools — 40% of the school-age population (compared with less than 10% in the French empire). The Belgians taught the Bantu to run bulldozers, looms and furnaces, to rivet ships, drive taxis and trucks. Girls with grotesque tribal markings etched into their ebony foreheads sell in shops, teach in schools, nurse in hospitals. Already thousands of natives in the Congo’s bustling cities earn $100–$150 a month — more than most workers in Europe, and small fortunes by African standards. They buy sewing machines, phonographs and bicycles in such profusion that Sears, Roebuck has recently put out a special Congo catalogue. […] A government helicopter sprays the town with DDT to keep away mosquitoes, but many of the Negroes put far more faith in “charms.” There are swimming pools, tennis courts and night schools, but many of those who use them still believe in witchcraft. The Belgian attitude is that these things will only change slowly. It is an attitude that is shared by the three big institutions which run Congo life: the state, which is absolute (no one has a vote in the Congo); the big corporations, which control one-third of the land area and at least half the Negro workers; and the Roman Catholic Church, which maintains the Congo’s schools and most of its hospitals. The state is Governor General Léo Pétillon, 52, a diminutive Belgian barrister who stands but 5 ft. 3 in. in his epauleted white uniform. Known as the “Little Lion” to the 5,000 Belgian civil servants who govern the Congo on his orders, Pétillon has an actor’s mobile face, slow limpid speech, and graceful white hands which more often than not gesticulate with a lighted Camel to emphasize a point. An old Africa hand, he is guided by a motto like that of his predecessors: Dominer pour Servir — dominate to serve. Pétillon stands for “paternalisme,” the policy which the Belgians openly proclaim as the secret of their success in the Congo. “The African understands paternalism,” says the Governor with conviction. “It was he who invented it.” In the Congo, paternalism means bread but no votes, good government but no opposition; the best Negro housing in Africa but no real freedom of movement. “The emphasis is on economics,” says Governor Pétillon. “The fascination of becoming a skilled worker handling precision machinery drives out of the Negro’s mind the need for politics.” The Congo has excellent roads because the rural population is compelled to labor on them; it is developing scientific agriculture by forcing peasant farmers to grow minimum quotas of cotton, and jailing them for failure to deliver. Each Negro city dweller is fingerprinted and must carry a plastic identity card attached to his tax receipt. Yet the Congo is one of the few places in Africa where there is practically no racial tension. “This is black man’s country,” says Governor Pétillon. Before a white man may buy Congo land, he must prove to the government that no native is using it, and that it will not be needed for native settlement. […] All told, five big companies control about 90% of the Congo’s capital investment. They treat their Bantu workers with the same assiduous paternalism shown by the Congo state. For its 63,000 black dependents, the Union Minière furnishes attractive brick bungalows and good schools, prenatal care and milk for mothers and children, medals for the men who excel at their work in the mines. “This is capitalism as it works in the Congo,” said one industrialist proudly.

To put it in simple terms for progressive readers: we in the Carlyle Club believe it is possible to have a peaceful and prosperous multicultural and multiracial society (“Good, good…”), even though there are innate racial differences in behavioural traits like intelligence and aggression (“Wait, what?!”), because the history of colonialism — the actual history, that is (Issue 12) — shows that even “the sons of cannibals” can be civilized if governed properly; i.e., not democratically.

To choose merely the most obvious example: that blacks in general are incapable of behaving like civilized human beings under popular government should be seen not as a point against blacks, but as a point against popular government: it is not only bad in general, but also extra-bad for blacks, which makes it racist, which is of course the worst thing in the entire world. Has your head exploded yet? Good.

We have seen what a 99 percent black state with a tiny, vulnerable white minority and a mean IQ south of 70 looks like when it is governed properly. It looks like a “tropical cornucopia.” It looks like the Belgian Congo. Few places on Earth are so well-governed today. So why, again, was it necessary to send them our vintage revolutionary terror?

Democracy plus diversity equals disaster. But democracy minus diversity equals disaster, too — then you get diversity anyway (that’s part of the disaster). The solution is obvious: kill democracy (and its unholy spawn, bureaucracy). The colonial histories of Egypt and India prove that, in the absence of democracy, it is possible to maintain civilization in the face of all sorts of diversity — which, you may have noticed, we are currently short of effective methods of dealing with.

Without King Mob, no Knockout King; no 9/11; no Congo Massacre. Huzzah!

There is a right way of doing statistics (Thomas Carlyle, 1839):

Tables are like cobwebs, like the sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but which will hold no conclusion. Tables are abstractions, and the object a most concrete one, so difficult to read the essence of. There are innumerable circumstances; and one circumstance left out may be the vital one on which all turned. Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

There is a wrong way of doing statistics (About Psychology, 2013):

Statistics allows us to make sense of and interpret a great deal of information. Consider the sheer volume of data you encounter in a given day. How many hours did you sleep? How many students in your class ate breakfast this morning? How many people live within a one mile radius of your home? By using statistics, we can organize and interpret all of this information in a meaningful way.

A very wrong way (Nature, 2012):

In a survey of more than 2,000 psychologists, Leslie John, a consumer psychologist from Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, showed that more than 50% had waited to decide whether to collect more data until they had checked the significance of their results, thereby allowing them to hold out until positive results materialize. More than 40% had selectively reported studies that “worked.”

People who (for whatever reason) would like you to believe that moral-political “progress” isn’t destroying civilization are likely to appeal to crime statistics. The 20th century may look like a rising tide of violence and chaos, they tell us, but that is all in your head.

I will now explain why this is not so.

Crime? What Crime?

American cities “have become vastly safer,” declares the Economist (2013), “and the rest of the developed world has followed. From Japan to Estonia, property and people are now safer than at almost any time since the 1970s.” Furthermore, “most of what remains of the crime problem is really a recidivism issue,” meaning repeat offenders; so we should scrap “harsh punishments, and in particular long mandatory sentences,” to get them back on the street as quickly as possible. Then we could retrain police to “focus on new crimes,” like “tax evasion”: in this “era of austerity,” the middle class might be refusing to pay its fair share of criminal “rehabilitation.”

Have I mentioned anarcho-tyranny yet?

NPR’s Gene Demby appeals to Christopher J. Ferguson, a psychology professor at a private university who, we are assured, “specializes in youth and violence” — from a safe distance, obviously (2013):

Ferguson told us that violent crime, and violent crime by young folks in particular, is down. Way down. The rate of violent crime among young people has fallen by nearly two-thirds over the past two decades. […] “Youth today are about as well-behaved as we have on record,” he says.

“We do know,” Mr. Demby affirms, “that violent attacks committed by strangers is [sic] also in steep decline. According to the Department of Justice, the rate of violent victimization committed by strangers has been plummeting since the early 1990s.”

Well, maybe. According to the same Department of Justice, violent crime went up 17 percent in 2011 (property crime 11 percent), and it went up another 15 percent in 2012 (property crime 12 percent), “signals that the nation may be seeing the last of the substantial declines in crime of the past 20 years.”

Still, we had those “substantial declines,” didn’t we?

A Little Perspective

You may have noticed that crime experts would like us to believe that recorded history started either in the 1970s (i.e., just after the 1960s) or in the 1990s (i.e., just after the 1980s). There is a reason for this.

If you cut off the graph before 1970, you can pretend that the Civil Rights Movement, everyone’s favourite example of “progress,” did not cause a staggering crime wave from which we still have not recovered:

People in all classes lived in fear. “Mugging was nothing unusual. Everybody got mugged.”

If you cut it off before 1990, you can pretend that the crack cocaine epidemic did not also cause a staggering crime wave from which we still have not recovered — and, if you believe the latest figures, never will. And I say “recovered,” but fleeing crime is not the same as reducing it (not to a reactionary, at least), and “white flight” is by far the kindest term for ethnic cleansing. (“City on the move” indeed.)

The native population of St. Louis flees from racial violence (image)

Victor Davis Hanson is not nearly so myopic:

I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s.

But “progress” has been wrecking the world for a lot longer than that.

England Then and Now

Let’s back it up to 1876 (A History of Crime in England):

Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities, some quarters of evil repute in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is perhaps to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.

Whereas in 2013, after almost 150 more years of unbridled “progress” — well, I hesitate to give examples. I really don’t want to give you the impression that these crimes are somehow unusual. This is just everyday England.

A 16-year-old “pleaded for his life as a gang armed with knives and swords chased and fatally stabbed him in the street” on a Sunday evening in Pimlico, a “well-heeled” neighbourhood. A white man in Leicester was critically injured after he somehow “became involved in an altercation with one of a number of black youths” in the city center on a Wednesday afternoon. A 51-year-old woman with cerebral palsy “was attacked by three masked youths in broad daylight.” Two men who “stabbed and robbed a man in broad daylight” after “a brief conversation” were convicted of “conspiracy to rob” and jailed for seven years. A Royal Military Police reservist was jailed for stalking and raping a 12-year-old girl. A 20-year-old man hacked a girl’s head off, “the second beheading involving a British Muslim in a little over two weeks.” And so on.

The year before, we learned that “police turned a blind eye to allegations of sexual abuse of white girls by gangs of largely Pakistani men for more than a decade,” because “council officials were desperate to cover up any racial link to the abuse of young girls.” Choosing just one example:

Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively.

When the police — “trained in ‘cultural sensitivity,’” and therefore “terrified of being accused of racism” — finally act, Allison Pearson explains, “leaders of the Pakistani Muslim community — essentially a Victorian society that has landed like Doctor Who’s Tardis on a liberal, permissive planet it despises — are at pains to deny that the grooming gang’s behaviour has anything to do with ethnic origin or contemptible attitudes towards women.”

Well… not quite Victorian, are they? Because none of those things happened in Victorian England, according to someone who was actually there at the time.

On Fear

This might give the reader a new perspective on statements like this one (fairly typical), by Dr. Abigail Wills of Oxford University, apparently an expert on juvenile crime — or at least an expert apologist for it (2009):

Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented “crisis” in youth behaviour is taking place. We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.

We are supposed to conclude that all fear, past and present, of rising crime is baseless; that each successive age is afraid for no good reason. It seems to me that a simpler explanation, and one that is more consistent with the Swords of Pimlico, is that successive ages really did see a significant rise in crime, culminating in our current situation, which is why everyone has so consistently and “ardently” believed it to be so.

In fact, when you look at the actual, specific reasons why our predecessors worried about rising crime, instead of dismissing it all as generic “fear,” we get more evidence that crime has risen:

On 17 July 1862, Hugh Pilkington MP was accosted after leaving the House of Commons. He was choked, struck on the head and relieved of his watch. In the parlance of the times, he was ‘garotted.’ The press immediately began to fan the flames of panic.

In Victorian England, one single solitary violent stranger crime — a mugging, nonfatal, with theft of a watch — was enough to set off the great London garroting panic of 1862.

Scott Alexander, in his tedious ‘Anti-Reactionary FAQ’ (2013), and for reasons not entirely clear to me, cites the 1862 panic as evidence that Victorian England was riddled with crime, rather than generally free from crime. Indeed, Mr. Alexander’s piece is a testament to how we’ve grown accustomed — or perhaps been conditioned — to the clearest and most brutal consequences of moral-political “progress.”

A Statistic

For what it’s worth, statistics seem to confirm the theory/obvious fact of rising crime: England’s official crime rate in 1997 was about 50 times higher than it was in 1900.

Confronted with a 5000 percent bump in crime, Mr. Alexander suddenly discovers subtleties in statistical methodology; for example, what do we really mean by “indictable offenses”? “This very broad term introduces no fewer than three dangerous biases,” he points out, including “definition bias in what is or isn’t a crime.” Why, yes, it does (Peter Hitchens, A Brief History of Crime, 2003):

Before showing that something enormous and damaging has happened to English society since the Second World War, it is worth quoting an astonishing footnote from Jose Harris’s social history of Britain before the First World War, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914: A very high proportion of Edwardian convicts were in prison for offences that would have been much more lightly treated or wholly disregarded by law enforcers in the late twentieth century. In 1912–13, for example, one quarter of males aged 16 to 21 who were imprisoned in the metropolitan area of London were serving seven-day sentences for offences which included drunkenness, ‘playing games in the street,’ riding a bicycle without lights, gaming, obscene language and sleeping rough. If late twentieth-century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, the prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s then most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol. As it happens, 1913 was a fairly bad year by the standards of the time, with 98,000 serious offences recorded. This level would not be surpassed again until 1920 when the total rose to 101,000 after a wartime truce during which annual crime tallies sank to as low as 78,000 in 1915. Even convicts were reported to be showing patriotic zeal as they broke their rocks. Measure this against the figure of 2,521,000 recorded in 1980 and, even when you grant that the population had risen from 36 million to 49 million, the figures could be from different planets as well as from different eras.

(I pictured putting all the progs on a rocket and sending them to Neptune.)

Murder

To correct for these subtleties, Mr. Alexander chooses to restrict his attention to homicide, which in England rose only 50 percent between 1900 and 1997. Astonishing! Except for one thing:

‘Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate’ (British Medical Journal, 2002)

‘In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence’ (Wall Street Journal, 2012)

etc.

(Again, note that medicine did not advance through voting.)

Mr. Alexander also presents data on homicide in the United States:

“We see ups and downs but no general pattern.” Uh, you sure about that? Because it seems to me that violence exploded at the turn of the century, the height of the original (so-called) “progressive” movement; and again from Civil Rights, another episode of glorious “progress.” Shouldn’t it have plummeted?

Ah, but we are now almost back to the level of the 1950s! Right, the notoriously progressive 1950s — what part of medical advances didn’t you understand? When homicides should be decreasing monotonically, assuming a constant crime rate, but are instead fluctuating, never quite getting back to where they were before, with a huge overall increase since 1900 — what does this tell you?

Mr. Alexander has a counterargument: “And lest someone bring up that medical technology has advanced enough to turn many would-be murders into attempted murders — which is true — aggravated assaults, the category of crime that would encompass attempted murders, are less than half of what they were twenty years ago.” (Again, history began in the 1990s.) This brings me to an interesting and relevant fact about crime statistics:

The Police Manipulate Crime Statistics

They manipulate them in New York City, Denver, Milwaukee, Orlando, Buffalo, Chicago, Nassau County, and Washington D.C., and all over the United Kingdom, and they probably manipulate them everywhere else too.

For example, in New York City in 2005, a guitarist had his eye bashed in and his face crushed with a baseball bat in what police called a (black-on-white) “misdemeanor assault.” It’s a good thing we’ve got advanced-life-support ambulances, cervical collars, head immobilizers, oxygen masks, intravenous painkillers, metal plates to hold together bones, and titanium mesh for facial reconstruction — to turn this potential homicide into a not-at-all-aggravated assault. “Less than half”!

In 2002, the practice of “downgrading” rapes to misdemeanor trespassing “allowed a man to commit six sexual assaults in a Washington Heights neighborhood.” An investigation by the NYPD in 2010 found that a single precinct had “improperly reported” the following: “a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.” In 2011, the New York Times found over a hundred felonies that had been downgraded to misdemeanors or simply ignored, including an attempted rape, a double shooting of teenage girls in the Bronx, the theft of an iPhone and an iPad, a nearly fatal choking, and a razor-wielding robber. In 2013, “police paperwork for lost property ‘described a complainant who “lost property” following an assault by multiple individuals.’”

In short, “assault becomes harassment, robbery becomes grand larceny, grand larceny becomes petit larceny, burglary becomes criminal trespass” — and the mayor’s approval rating goes up. Meanwhile, “the number of assault victims taken to emergency rooms nearly doubled” from 1999 to 2006. “Less than half”!

Take it away, Mr. Carlyle:

With what serene conclusiveness a member of some Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth with a figure of arithmetic! To him it seems he has there extracted the elixir of the matter, on which now nothing more can be said. It is needful that you look into his said extracted elixir; and ascertain, alas, too probably, not without a sigh, that it is wash and vapidity, good only for the gutters.

Ancient History

“Let’s go really long-term,” Mr. Alexander suggests: just look at these numbers! No, don’t think, just look:

“The trend is clear” (Tabarrok). “The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present” (Pinker).

You may have noticed that crime experts would like us to believe that recorded history started, if not in the 1970s or 1990s, then either in the High Middle Ages or in the Late Middle Ages. There is, of course, a reason for this.

Similarly, the risible Gene Expression piece ‘What does the decline in homicide rates look like?’ (2009):

Just because there were recurring crime waves and abatements of crime waves during the 19th and 20th centuries […] should not distract us from the clear downward trend going only a few centuries farther back. Any account of rises or declines must deal with all of these patterns, making it impossible to generalize the narrow hypotheses for the 1990s decline in crime — there were no cell phones before then, the trend since 1500 has been toward less corporal punishment and harsh sentencing rather than more, and so on. What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other — say, “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police” — and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend.

The reader with little experience in mathematical modeling should take my word for it when I say: Holy hell, that is one mind-bogglingly stupid idea that will teach you nothing about anything.

I think Mencius Moldbug can handle this scientism:

Hari Seldon rides again! What I would do is to write down a sentence in English. This sentence would say: Europe became generally more orderly from 1500 to 1900, and generally less orderly from 1900 to 2000, especially after 1950. If you wanted to know why, I would say: because order is a product of coherent state authority, and coherent state authority generally strengthened from 1500 to 1900 and generally weakened after 1900, especially after 1950. And if you wanted to know why this happened, I would say: read some history. It’s a story, not a spreadsheet.

A Sheltered Life

Mr. Alexander, presumably in desperation, counters with a 2011 Gallup poll: 89 percent of American men say they “feel safe walking alone at night” in the city or area where they live.

I live less than two miles outside Detroit city limits, and I’ve never been the victim of a single crime in my life or even felt particularly threatened. Some people just live sheltered existences.

You know, I’m reminded a little of New York University “urban studies” major John Broderick Hehman, who in 2005 wrote Smart Travel Magazine:

Yes, I’ve spent plenty of time in Harlem and have never been mugged, shot, raped, or had my car stolen; its reputation as a crime-ridden place is SO 1980s.

Sadly, John was killed the following year, at the age of 20 (New York Post, 2006):

The NYPD hate-crimes unit is probing a report that a white NYU student killed by a car in Harlem was fleeing a gang of black teenagers screaming “Get whitey!” sources said yesterday.

Don’t worry, though: this wasn’t some sort of “bias crime.” It was just another “robbery gone awry.”

The sources said Hehman might have been targeted as a soft mark for robbers after the teenage gang spotted the caring urban-studies major handing pocket change to a wheelchair-bound man near the corner of 125th Street and Park Avenue Saturday night. The gang of youths, some of them as young as 11, had been smoking pot inside a nearby Popeye’s fast-food eatery at 8:30 p.m. when they spotted Hehman walking by and then stopping to help the handicapped man.

Not that I expect one of these gaggles of playful scamps (clearly in need of a federally funded after-school program to help boost their slavery-crippled self esteem, and prepare them for an urban-studies major at New York University) to attack Mr. Alexander for being white in Detroit, or anything. I’m just free-associating here.

Danger Zone

Meanwhile, foreign governments warn travelers to avoid certain areas of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., and much of Chicago; to avoid downtown Atlanta, certain areas of Boston, and Harlem, the Bronx and Central Park at night; to be vigilant in parts of Houston; that all of Baltimore except the downtown area is to be considered dangerous; that Union Station in D.C. is dangerous by night, and Anacostia at all times; that no one should visit Richmond on foot, or stick around in Detroit’s city center after business hours; and to beware of violence along the Mexican border when visiting El Paso.

Whereas Nick Land writes:

There is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned. Whilst this might not be quite sufficient to define a civilized society, it comes extremely close. It is certainly necessary to any such definition. The contrary case is barbarism.

But I digress: we were talking about the 89 percent of American men who say they “feel safe walking alone at night” in the city or area where they live. The figure for women, Mr. Alexander does not mention, is 62 percent. So: in the present time, in the richest, most powerful country on Earth, one out of every ten men and four out of every ten women admit they feel threatened near their own homes; whereas in 1876, in the richest, most powerful country on Earth, equipped only with Victorian technology and Victorian government, “any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him.” Is this evidence that crime has not risen?

I notice that the figures are 81 percent for men and 79 percent for women in Somaliland, where rape and murder reportedly “surged” in 2010, and overall crime “soared” by 30 percent in 2012. Is Somaliland really 27 percent safer for women than America, as Mr. Alexander’s poll would have us believe — or is it true, as Carlyle said, that “conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows”?

I notice also that the figures are 89 percent for men and 81 percent for women in Tajikistan, where, according to the US State Department, “the inability of law enforcement entities to provide adequate and immediate assistance” is “of significant concern,” but the media “do not provide the average citizen with current and accurate information to make informed decisions about safety,” and “government statistics are typically inaccurate because many crimes are not reported to law enforcement organizations.” We have discovered that people can be misled. They can be misled by the press (we’ll see a lot of that going forward); they can be misled by statistics (yes, even official government statistics); and they can be misled by Scott Alexander.

Feeling Fine

Mr. Alexander concludes:

This is a time when everything is pretty much okay. […] Crime is very nearly a non-issue.

That’s encouraging. Everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. I wonder, though: just how nearly a non-issue is crime? Ross Douthat has been checking the stats (New York Times, 2013):

Crime is common enough that it’s quite likely to happen to the average person at some point in time. […] Over a span of years, your odds of experiencing at least an attempted robbery or an attempted assault are pretty good. How good? Well, that depends on the crime rate over time. In the 1980s, the Bureau of Justice Statistics tried to quantify the “lifetime likelihood of victimization,” by assuming that the American crime rate over that hypothetical lifetime averaged what it averaged from 1975 to 1984. […] The study calculated that at those rates, 83 percent of Americans could expect to be victims of an attempted robbery, rape or assault at least once as an adult; 40 percent could expect to be injured in a robbery or assault; 72 percent of households could expect to be burglarized and 20 percent could expect to have a car stolen, and 99 percent of the population (that is, everybody) could expect to experience some kind of personal theft.

Steve Sailer points out (see also here) that Mr. Douthat’s methodology understates the problem:

While, as Ross says, 87% of the public could be expected to be a victim of violent crime (completed or attempted) at least once in their lifetimes, Table 1 reports that only 30% would only be victimized once. Another 27% would be victimized twice in a lifetime, and 25% three or more times. So, the average American would suffer at least 1.59 violent crimes in a lifetime, and almost certainly more (depending on the exact number of incidents befalling the 25% suffering “3 or more” crimes).

Profiling

Mr. Douthat continues:

And part of what makes the endless debates over profiling so vexed, I think, is that it’s hard to assess what constitutes a reasonable response to this reality. Is crime a low-probability danger? Well, yes in the everyday sense, but no in the sense that you could very easily be victimized at some point, which isn’t true of, say, lightning strikes and terrorist attacks and other truly low-probability threats. Clearly it isn’t a threat that should make you a shut-in; clearly it isn’t so non-threatening that urbanites should relax and leave their cars and houses unlocked overnight. But most of what counts as everyday profiling, whether by attire or attitude or age or race or by all those variables at once, falls into a much blurrier area, where the rational thing to do — cross the street to avoid a group of kids or not? keep a closer eye on customer X than customer Y in your store? call the cops to report suspicious-seeming behavior or not? — isn’t slam-dunk obvious given the variables and risks involved.

Sure, that makes sense. Still, “one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime” (Center for American Progress, 2012), which means roughly one in three black men are criminals, since, well…

So I’m wondering if what this “area” really needs is even more of the media’s blurring (KGET, 2009):

The woman had just left the Babies R Us store on when she noticed a man in a tattered military coat lurking in the parking lot, she told police. The woman told detectives she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn’t want to seem racist. She had just purchased a princess hat for her daughter’s first birthday pictures when the man stepped up behind her and pulled a gun from under his coat. […] The woman offered to give the man several hundred dollars she had in her car, and drove him to the bank to withdraw another $500. The man then demanded she drive to Fruitvale Junior High, where he raped the woman at gunpoint in front of her daughter.

It is indeed important not to notice hate-facts. You wouldn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings (AJC, 2009):

After the tour, a security guard called [Eugenia] Calle and said that [Shamal] Thompson was in the lobby. “Would you like for me to escort him up?” the guard asked Calle, according to Meadows. “No, it’ll be fine,” Calle responded. “I don’t want him to think that we don’t trust him.” […] Calle’s body was discovered about nine hours later, around 11 p.m. Tuesday, by her fiance, an Atlanta tax attorney whose name has not been released.

Compare and contrast, as my old grade school teacher used to say:

In 2006, Thompson was arrested by DeKalb police on burglary charges. He was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison, with six months to serve. He was credited with about two months’ time served and the sentence was reduced to time served, court records show.

(Hahahahaha, “10 years.”) Whereas:

A renowned epidemiologist, Calle retired last month from her post as vice president of the epidemiology department at the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society. Her research in epidemiology, which is the study of disease, helped establish the link between cancer and obesity, and cancer and diet.

Knockout Game

Let’s turn to another primary source: in Specimen Days (1882), the American poet Walt Whitman tells us about his travels by train through several US states in the fall and winter of 1879. He visits St. Louis, and writes:

Of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all sorts of talk, some pretty severe — but I should have no fear myself of getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians.

Mr. Whitman had high hopes for the future (Democratic Vistas, 1871):

And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, which isolates. There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all.

How far has democracy taken St. Louis toward this noble goal? (I’m going to skip the usual boring stuff, like two quintuple shootings in a single night, one of them with an AK-47; etc.)

In April*, June, August and October of 2011 (and three more times, according to police), February*, March, again in March, April, May and August of 2012, and January, July and November of 2013 (and 10 times in 2010, but good luck finding them in the papers), there were documented cases of black mobs ambushing pedestrians or bicyclists, mostly white, and beating them unconscious, *sometimes to death, as part of a fun game we’re all supposed to pretend doesn’t exist. They generally didn’t try to rob them, because they just wanted to hurt them.

Obviously this isn’t a race thing. Oh, wait:

A white man said he was beaten by a group of African-American youths who used racially derogatory terms during the assault.

This has been going on since at least 2008, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a series of mob attacks at Metro stations, some involving as many as “about 100” attackers, and the latest against a (white) family of five “by a group of at least 20.” Of course, the Post-Dispatch won’t actually tell us that the attackers are black; for that you need to check with an independent journalist, or look up mugshots. You know, it’s difficult to document a pattern when the newspapers won’t report basic facts — and obviously “the FBI does not keep records.”

You can do this for other American (and European) cities, if you like, or you can read Colin Flaherty’s book on the subject. Or not. None so blind as those that will not see, and all that.

On Trends

The mainstream media covered up black mob violence for years, until November 2013, when some Jews in New York City got beat up. That got their attention (New York Times):

Dread about being singled out for attacks has taken root in Jewish communities in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Borough Park and Midwood, according to Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman. […] “It’s sick, it’s scary,” said Mr. Hikind, who gathered with other Jewish community leaders last week to discuss the attacks. “It’s like nothing I’ve experienced in my 31 years in office.”

However, the Times is not yet prepared to admit that the problem is more than an “urban myth.”

The attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred.

Well, they haven’t always occurred. What’s really interesting, though, is that the New York Times has no problem spotting a trend when two sort of similar crimes — well, one crime and one likely crime — happen 150 miles apart, as long as the story involves “drilling rigs in rural towns” (Dec. 2013).

While the raw numbers of murders and rapes remain low, every few months seem to bring an act of violence that flares like a gas flame on the dark prairie, shaking a community and underscoring how much life here is changing.

On Games

NPR, justifiably afraid of losing control of the narrative, leapt into action with Gene Demby’s propaganda piece on our “well-behaved youth”:

Framing it as a game gives it a hook for the news media, but we already have a name for this type of thing: It’s a random street assault, a terrible phenomenon, but not a new one. And the language that kids and the news media have latched onto makes it sound both sinister and casual. It dramatizes the behavior, perversely elevating it above the senseless street violence that happens every day and has happened for decades. […] “A kid arrested for assault may tell authorities it was a game because he doesn’t want to tell anyone what the fight was really about,” one St. Louis city official told the Riverfront Times.

Gosh, it’s a good thing this isn’t a game…

“‘They weren’t really interested in robbing me. It just seemed like they wanted to beat me up,” says Ramirez.’”

“Some could be heard laughing. ‘I think they were just out to pound o