RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/20/joe-biden-and-friedrich-nietzsche/

According to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.”

Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in the state were free—Texas being that last state to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the date that the latest Kwanzaa-like manufactured racialist holiday, “Juneteenth,” is intended to celebrate and that Joe’s minders intended to capitalize on by writing “Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America’s Long-Fought Fight For Justice.” 

The institution of slavery, which ended nearly 150 years ago, has no bearing—zero—on the plight of American blacks today. What does affect them, mightily, is the destruction of the black family, a project brought to us by more than five decades of Democratic welfare policy. 

The PR surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program told the world that its aim was to abolish poverty. It’s actual effect was to institutionalize poverty and promulgate an endless agenda of dependency, which all but guaranteed black subservience to the governmental overlord. It also institutionalized the gigantic network of government workers charged with servicing—and, by extension, perpetuating—the welfare state. The metabolism of this establishment was expertly anatomized by Christopher Caldwell in his latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It makes for a mournful story. 

The New Iconoclasm

Also mournful is the spectacle of violence and destructive iconoclasm sweeping the country in the wake of the death of the career criminal George Floyd while in police custody. 

For the last few of weeks, we’ve seen stores looted, police stations and police cars torched, and all manner of public monuments defaced or destroyed. As we know from (in the words of Laplace) expériences nombreuses et funestes, it is one thing to start a revolution, quite another to bring it to an end. Those gleefully riding the tiger at the beginning often wind up inside it before the journey comes to an end. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/on_capitalizing_black_but_not_white.html

As we descend farther into more racial balkanization, it is noteworthy to point out that in 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ushered in a discussion about how to capitalize the words “white” and “black” when referring to groups of people.  Back then, they stated:

Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities.  There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.

To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.

In fact, according to the Newsweek article that the CJR cites, “[w]hat many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality.  Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.  There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics.  Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.  These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest.  Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16134/cocktail-of-grievances

[The United States] is something of an exception in being the only major nation-state to have struggled with and, as time went by, against, racism…. The War of Secession, successive civil rights movements, the fight against segregation and methods such as positive discrimination tell the story of a nation seeking to move away from racism.

Slavery was a routine part of human existence from the start, and in some lands still is. Nor were black Africans the only human beings to become slaves…. In Persian and Ottoman Empires, slaves came from the Caucasus, Scandinavia, and what is now Russia. Again, no black Africans were involved…. Slavery was a common disease that affected every community on earth; a shameful secret of the whole human family.

As the outrage inspired by the death of George Floyd in a botched arrest operation calms down, it may be time to consider what has been achieved by the anger it unleashed in dozens of cities across the world.

Sadly, I fear, not only that much of that anger was wasted but that it may have contributed to deeper communitarian ressentiments.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16118/western-history-culture-stand-up

“We are afraid that anything we do is colonial. There’s plenty of countries willing to step into that global governance gap: China, Iran, Russia, Turkey”. — Bruce Gilley, The Times, May 10, 2018.

British post-colonial guilt is, however, having repercussions far larger than statues. There is, for instance, still total silence about persecuted Christians, according to a UK bishop leading a government review into their suffering.

Western history is seemingly being remade to portray all of Western civilization as just one big apartheid. It is as if we should not only pull down statues but also pull down ourselves. A successful democracy, however, cannot be built on just erasing the past.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”. — George Orwell, 1984.

What is this macabre ideological game aimed at accomplishing?… It is a power-grab to create a cultural revolution, to prevent anyone from saying that cultures are not all the same; to put Europe’s past on trial; to instill perennial remorse into consciences, and to spread intellectual terror to advance multiculturalism.

“Antiracism is no longer the defense of the equal dignity of people, but an ideology, a vision of the world,” said the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, son of Holocaust survivors.

“Antiracism has been transformed… At the time of the great migration, it is no longer a question of welcoming newcomers by integrating them into European civilization, but exposing the faults of this civilization”.

He referred to “self-racism” as “the most dismaying and grotesque pathology of our time”.

Its capital is London.

“Topple the racists” consists of a map with 60 statues in 30 British cities. The removal of the statues is being requested to support a movement born in the United States after a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, killed a black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/an_uncivil_war.html

Left-wing thinking effectively blanks out the real distinctions between representative government and totalitarian dictatorship.

–       Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

There is a growing consensus among conservative writers and many individual citizens that America has descended into a condition of virtual civil war. It is not, or not yet, characterized by military confrontations on a national scale, as in 1861-65, but the facts on the ground strongly suggest a breakdown of civil order:

·       the irreconcilable conflict between the political left and right;

·       the belligerence and vituperation that passes for a national “conversation”;

·       sporadic acts of violence, flash mobs and organized riots erupting in every corner of the country;

·       the dismal lack of local and state leadership;

·       Orwellian Ministries of Truth, otherwise known as digital platforms, controlling and censoring information;

·       a rabid feminist network intent on destabilizing cultural traditions and mores;

·       a president betrayed by his own generals and party senators;

·       a rogue enclave set up by malcontents and domestic terrorists in the middle of an American city;

·       and racial mayhem fomented and exploited by a class of partisan criminals.

Whether or not we call this situation the preliminary stages of civil war or simply massive social unrest and cutthroat politics may be only a matter of terminology.