Radley Balko goes full SJW/progressive against Confederate statues

[Matt Collins]

This guy has lost it.... advocating the de-stalinization of all things Confederacy:

We should treat Confederate monuments the way Moscow and Budapest have treated communist statues








By Radley Balko June 26 at 4:17 PM

Memento Park in Budapest. (Radley Balko/The Washington Post)
One of the first cases I reported as a journalist was that of Cory Maye, a black Mississippi man who had been convicted and sentenced to die for killing a white cop during a botched drug raid on Maye’s home. Maye wasn’t a drug dealer, claimed he didn’t know that the raiding cops were police, and said he shot the officer in self-defense. The case was racially charged. When I visited the town of Prentiss, I found that the community split down racial lines. White people overwhelmingly wanted Maye to be executed; black people overwhelmingly thought he was innocent, that he was doing what most Mississippians believed he had every right to do — defend his home and his family from intruders.
The incident took place in Jefferson Davis County, Miss., which is of course named for the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. It’s a part of the country where race was still a suffocating part of everyday life, where black kids and white kids went to separate schools (black kids went to the public school, white kids went to one of the “academies” set up so that white kids didn’t have to go to school with black kids), and where even the police tended to be segregated (the county sheriff and his deputies tended to be black, the town police chief and most of the town police force were white).
When Maye finally got a hearing on his case in 2007, it was in the town of Poplarville in Pearl River County. I went to the hearing. I remember walking to the courthouse for that hearing — one in which a black man stood accused of killing a white police officer in a case rife with racial tension — and being struck that outside that courthouse, there was a monument to Confederate soldiers.






And it isn’t just Jefferson Davis County or Pearl River County. Most counties in Mississippi have Confederate monuments outside or near their courthouses. In Brooksville in Noxubee County, a Confederate soldier stands along the railroad tracks that separate the white part of town from the black, almost as if to guard against integration. I’ve since reported numerous stories about injustices in the South, many of which involved racial bias, and in nearly every instance, the criminal-justice system that adjudicated those cases did so in courtrooms or police departments or district attorney’s offices or city halls that stand in the shadow of taxpayer-funded monuments celebrating the fight to keep black people as slaves.

[Confederate or not, which monuments should stay or go? We asked, you answered.]
Perhaps we’re too accustomed to it to notice the absurdity, but it is unquestionably absurd: Each day, thousands of black, shackled defendants appear before judges in courthouses guarded by memorials to a cause that believed those defendants’ ancestors were little more than livestock. The symbolism is inescapable. If a totalitarian country were to try members of an oppressed minority in a courtroom flanked by monuments to those who did the oppressing, we’d rightly call them show trials. Yet we’ve been doing exactly this in wide swaths of the South for more than a century.
Supporters of keeping Confederate monuments in place argue that they’re not about celebrating slavery or oppression, but about acknowledging heritage and the past. They argue that to remove the monuments is an attempt to rewrite history. But that isn’t quite right. No one is suggesting we remove the Confederate army from the history of Bull Run or Gettysburg. The objection is to the monuments and memorials that celebrate or glorify the Confederacy, or that explicitly honor those most known for fighting to keep black people from obtaining the legal rights of citizens. The Battle of Liberty Place monument that was recently removed from New Orleans amid much controversy is a good example. This was literally a monument to a bloody Reconstruction-era rebellion against the state government staged by a white supremacist group. It wasn’t erected after the Civil War, but in 1891, as Reconstruction ended and Louisiana was actively oppressing, terrorizing and disenfranchising black people. The city added a plaque celebrating white supremacy in 1932, nearly 70 years after the Civil War and nearly 60 years after the battle itself.

In fact, the “history and heritage” argument is a hard sell for a lot of the Confederate monuments and memorials. A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center last year found 109 schools named after Confederate figures, 27 of which have majority black student populations. Of the 109, more than a third — 39 — were built between 1950 and 1970. The SPLC report also found two periods in which there was a spike in the construction of Confederate monuments. The first came in the early 1900s, shortly after Plessy v. Ferguson, right around the founding of the NAACP, and during a national push to outlaw lynching. The other began shortly after Brown v. Board of Education and federal desegregation efforts in the 1960s.
[On Monument Avenue, Richmond will start recognizing its real history]
USA Today reported in May that in North Carolina alone, 35 Confederate monuments have been built since the year 2000. It’s hard to argue that those monuments are about history and heritage. The paper also points out that Kentucky is saturated with Confederate memorials — far more than, say, Union memorials — even though Kentuckians fought for the Union by a 2-1 margin. A recent Phoenix New Times report found that half of the six Confederate memorials in Arizona were built in 1999 or later, the most recent in 2010. The oldest of the six was erected nearly 80 years after the Civil War, during which Arizona wasn’t yet a state.

Perhaps the best example of the fallaciousness of the “erasing history” argument came last year, when Vanderbilt University in Nashville announced it was changing the name of its Confederate Memorial Hall. Defenders of the existing name predictably accused the university of “rewriting history.” But when local journalist Betsy Phillips looked into that history, she found a more complicated story. The confederate name dated not back to the Civil War, but to the early 1900s. At the time, there was a black university on the grounds called Roger Williams University. Here’s Phillips:

Roger Williams students palled around with Vanderbilt students and sat in the bleachers at football games and I read that professor as saying that they sat intermixed with the white students at football games, not just in the same bleachers, but sitting together . . .In 1903, someone shot at the chapel. In 1904, someone shot the college president’s wife through a window of her own home (she was not killed). A month later, at the start of 1905, someone burned down Centennial Hall. In May of that same year, another building on campus burned down. The terrorism has its effect and Roger Williams got the message that it was no longer welcome on that plot of land.

The school disbanded and sold off its buildings. It was only then that the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised money to buy naming rights to the hall, which they named in honor of the Confederacy. The only history being re-written here is that the Confederate-named building existed only because a black university had been terrorized into dissolving.
Certainly many of these monuments were constructed shortly after the Civil War, and for those, there’s more merit to the argument that they’re legitimate war memorials, immoral as that particular side of the war may have been. But the newer monuments have never been about memorializing the war dead. They’re about signaling opposition to the civil rights movement, or just plain intimidating black people.

[Protests against removing Confederate monuments are not really about history]
Of course, that too is part of our history, and not one we can or should just wish away. So what to do? It seems unfair and unjust to ask black people to work, play, raise their children and live their lives among statues and memorials that celebrate their historical oppression. But it also seems dishonest and unfair to history to grind those monuments to dust. The Confederacy and the destruction it caused should be remembered, as should the ongoing effort among some to preserve its acrid ideology.
I was recently in Moscow to give a talk, and I think the answer might be to look at how that city and a couple of others have dealt with the legacy of Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union. In Moscow’s Gorky Park, right next to the state art museum, there’s a stretch of green space called Fallen Monument Park. It’s populated with monuments to Stalinism and Leninism erected during the Soviet era. It’s pretty striking.

Muzeon Park, or Fallen Monument Park, in Moscow. (Radley Balko/The Washington Post)
Each monument includes a plaque explaining when it was erected, how it was funded and that it has been preserved and installed in the park not to celebrate Stalin or Lenin or their ideas but because of its historical significance.
One statute of Stalin stands — minus its nose — in front of a harrowing sculpture depicting dozens of human heads stacked behind barbed wire. It’s a monument to the victims of totalitarianism. It isn’t difficult to imagine a similar park where a statute of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or Nathan Bedford Forrest might stand in front of a monument to victims of lynching.

A Stalin statue in Moscow’s Fallen Monument Park. (Radley Balko/The Washington Post)
Moscow isn’t the only city with such a park. Hungary was not only part of the Soviet bloc; Budapest was the scene of a brutal Soviet crackdown on student protests in 1956 that claimed the lives of 2,500 Hungarians. As the uprising began, the students famously tore down a statue of Stalin, leaving only his boots. When communism fell in 1991, the Soviet monuments came down, too.
The Hungarian government later collected those that weren’t destroyed and re-erected them at a spot called Memento Park in Budapest — including a replica statute of Stalin’s boots.
Grūtas Park in Lithuania also features Soviet-area monuments and memorials, along with narratives about the “naked Soviet ideology which for decades suppressed and hurt the spirit of our nation.” There’s also a repository of Soviet icons in Tallinn, Estonia, though it has more the feel of a graveyard than of a formal park.

A replica statue of Stalin’s boots in Budapest’s Memento Park. (Radley Balko/The Washington Post)
There’s a satisfying nexus in looking to how places like Moscow and Budapest have handled Soviet monuments in considering what to do with our own Confederate monuments. The Confederacy fought to preserve the power of white people to own black people. Under Leninism and Stalinism, one’s labor, body, mind and children were the property of the state. Both ideologies represented a rejection of self-ownership and self-determination. Both failed, but only after massive and senseless loss of life. And regrettably, both still have adherents and defenders. That makes it all the more important that these monuments be moved from spaces of veneration, but not destroyed. We shouldn’t try to erase the past, but we should strive to provide it with the proper context.

SOURCE:
hXXps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/06/26/we-should-treat-confederate-monuments-the-way-moscow-and-budapest-have-treated-communist-statutes/?utm_term=.a2d6779d5ac9#comments

[Anti Federalist]

The Confederacy fought to preserve the power of white people to own black people.

The Federal government declared slaves to be not be citizens, essentially property and that the fedgov had no standing to regulate slavery in the new territories in 1857.

The Federal government violated that finding by it's own court.

That it is why the south seceded.

The tyrant Lincoln then unleashed unprecedented acts of war, including wholesale warfare conducted against civilian populations that led to the horrors of the wars of the first half of the 20th century, consolidated never before seen power at the federal level, which has led to unlimited police state powers that harass and jail all people, including "people of color" to this day.

All while being a hypocrite:

From Lincoln's Speech, Sept. 18, 1858.

"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races -- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making VOTERS or jurors of negroes, NOR OF QUALIFYING THEM HOLD OFFICE, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any of her man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

http://www.nytimes.com/1860/12/28/ne...-equality.html

[AuH20]

Radley has some company.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

I think I once interviewed with that guy. They were doing a story about roadblocks (checkpoints) for Reason Magazine. It was a phone interview. He seemed to be reasonable and represented my views accurately in their story. I left with a good impression of him, but maybe this would partly sour me. I've also heard people being critical of Reason and Cato (are they rivals?) for various reasons, but I either don't know why or don't remember the reasons. I don't know if he's a northerner, but they often just don't get. I really think a lot has to do with what they are taught in school. They never dig below the surface and just accept the Yankee narrative.

[Anti Federalist]

And I'll just drop off some Fred Reed, mmmm, kay?

Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures

https://fredoneverything.org/oncomin...h-of-cultures/

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Fred Reed

Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, the horrendous rates of crime, or the parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for God’s sake. For reasons doubtless opaque to the historically ignorant, this annoys me. Why should the least productive, most criminal, most dependent of the population rewrite history that in any event they don’t know? The erasure of the South and the Confederacy by people most of whom couldn’t spell it, of Washington and Jefferson and Lee by grifters, race hustlers, wanton illiterates and the Brownshirts of Black Lives Matter…enough.

How many think this but won’t say it?

Now I find the black mayoress of Baltimore–a city lovely and livable in the time of Mencken before being made a decayed war zone by blacks–threatening monuments in that city. Enough. Too much.

I was not always sick of the misbehavior of blacks. In the now infinitely remote early Sixties, when I was a student in the last all-white class in Virginia’s rural King George High–graduated ‘64–integration was just beginning. To the extent that I thought about race, the question was abstract, a matter of moral principles, of ideals and fairness, unrelated to an actual people with actual characteristics who might not integrate well. Blacks had been mistreated. If given the opportunity they would rise and join American civilization. That they might not occurred only to those with experience, which did not include me.

When my parents, wiser than I–if it is possible to be wiser than a seventeen-year-old–said that integration would not work. I didn’t believe them.

Time went by, and it didn’t work. Trouble began. Blacks became hostile, .demanding this and demanding that. Neighborhoods became dangerous. Schools, newly mixed, encountered The Gap, intractable and immortal, that is the heart and cause of our racial disaster. The riots arrived. Racial attacks on whites became common, covered up by the media. This censorship possible in the days before the internet.

The country began, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, as n.either did the country, treating blacks as a different category of humanity who could not be expected to obey the laws and rules or the expectations of civility.

For a while my sympathy held. I was very young. Further, I had no experience of a school with a large black population. I justified the behavior of blacks as consequent to former privation. Surely it would change.

It didn’t. Years passed. We saw corrupted schools, lowered standards, white flight, and journalistic dishonesty. More cities burned.

For decades white America made a desperate attempt to raise blacks to the level of the First World. It didn’t work. Instead saw a dragging down of society to the culture of the ghetto. Blacks were behaving as usual as spoiled brats. Anything that upset them, as everything did, any expectation that they behave, led to cries of racism and depredations by such as Black Lives Matter.

As I mentioned, my parents had said that blacks were could not function in the First World. It seemed that they were right. Desegregation had not worked, nor integration, nor quotas nor affirmative action nor Head Start. What didn’t work was turning blacks into members of a European civilization in which they had no interest. It would have worked no better had blacks lived in China, Japan, or Russia.

Nothing worked and nothing is going to work. There is clarity in this realization, a clarity to admitting what is actually happening. It avoids tortured reasoning to show that the dysfunction of blacks is due to anything and everything but blacks themselves. One need not make endless excuses for endless bad behavior, for the crime and dependency, the racial attacks, and the degradation of society.

The culture of the ghetto opposes everything usually believed proper in an advanced society: high academic standards, equality of opportunity, good English, minimal obscenity, equality under the law, low rates of crime, reasonable self-reliance, freedom of speech. Black culture, intensely racist, encourages none of these and opposes most. It is tribal, based on identity, instead of principle.

For many, this is a difficult realization. Decades of unrelenting propaganda have trained us that blacks bear no responsibility for anything. Are they gunning each other down in city after city? It is because of guns, though whites have guns and do not kill each other. Do they perform abysmally in schools that they themselves control? It’s because of slavery, though there hasn’t been a slave in the country for 150 years. Are they irresponsible in their reproductive habits? It’s because of poverty, although they are not poor.

In this they differ from the rest of humanity as I have known it. I have lived in China, Thailand, Mexico, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and have traveled in some fifty other countries. All shared what might be called the core values of civilization. Blacks seem not to. Yes, many exceptions, varied degrees, but as a culture, they were, are, different. Would that it were not true, but it is.

Look at the foundations:

Education is the keystone of any modern civilization. Blacks alone care nothing for it. Exceptions, yes, but again, overall? No. The countless schools entirely controlled by blacks are the worst in America. They do not improve.

Fox News: “6 Baltimore schools, no students proficient in state tests” (of reading and arithmetic.)

Maybe the mayoress of Baltimore should pay more attention to this and less to statues she doesn’t like. She will not. If she were going to, she would have.

Accounts like the foregoing are routine, normal, expected. We have heard them for fifty years. Usually they include boilerplate about terrible obstacles, murdered relatives, addicted mothers, incarcerated youth, etc. These accounts invite pity and try to blame everything on whites. There is mandatory wonderment: What can be the cause of the academic gap? Doubtless white privilege, slavery, invisible discrimination, microaggressions, something, anything but blacks themselves. But whites can’t make black children do their homework, their daughters of thirteen avoid reproduction, their young males refrain from killing each other. Whites are not their mother.

75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards

What is going on here? Learning to read is not difficult. Elsewhere poor people, people of color–I loathe that phrase–and poor people of color do it routinely. According to the CIA Factbook, literacy in Thailand is at 97%; Malaysia 95%; Mexico, 95%; and Colombia, 95%. The possible reasons for not learning in twelve years what white and brown kids do in three are low intelligence and lack of interest. Take your pick. The failure to learn imposes a heavy burden on society. Wild thought: Make welfare dependent on literacy.

Ask yourself, “Now what?”

Whether academic failure is cultural or genetic makes no difference, since neither is subject to change. Instead of requesting more rigorous textbooks and disciplining their children to study, blacks insist that courses be enstupidated for their benefit, that they be admitted to schools and courses for which they cannot qualify, that they get grades they did not earn. This is now normal. Nobody, black or white, liberal or conservative, expects blacks ever to do anything for themselves.

Of course one might ask why blacks would have any interest in most of what has been taught in American schools. Europeans trace their intellectual lineage from the invention of writing in Sumeria in the mid-Fourth Millennium BC through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, their literary heritage from the Gilgamesh Epic through Tolkien. Blacks had no connection with this and did none of these things. It isn’t of their culture.

Cities have been the heart of the intellectual and artistic in all civilizations, as for example Athens, Rome, Florence, Vienna, New York. By contrast, blacks have destroyed city after American city after American city. Trenton, Camden, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Flint, St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee. At one time in all of these one could live, walk at will, send one’s children to the schools. Now, no. Violence, crime, racial attacks,and illiteracy drive the civilized to remote suburbs. This is not my culture and I see no reason to apologize for it.

Manners have been part of all civilizations. Civil societies everywhere impose a degree of control over obscenity. Everyone knows about sex and excretory functions. We leave them out of conversation. We can speak a sentence of three words without saying “motherfucker” five times.

Some perfectly ordinary rap “lyrics”:

“Then you roll your tongue, from the crack back to the front

Then suck it off ’til I shake and cum nigga

Make sure I keep bustin nuts nigga

All over your face and stuff”



This offal is excused because “it is their culture.” Exactly. When you cannot control abominable behavior by one group, you cannot control it for any group. Here is perhaps America’s gravest problem.

Virulent racial hostility–i.e., racism—is deeply ingrained in black culture. Blacks hate whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Jews. Not all blacks of course, or to the same degree, but it is the centerline of black culture. It is what counts and shapes the future.

Anyone doubting the universal racial hostility of blacks might read White Girl Bleed a Lot, or Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma. She arrived in Oakland with her family, dirt poor, speaking no English. She recounts–as do many white kids in black schools–endless racial abuse, taunting, stealing of food by blacks. (All on her own, incidentally, she worked her way up and ended with a law degree from Stanford. Apparently she found no lack of opportunity.)



One may see the depth of the hostility in the regular practice of making heroes and martyrs of blacks, usually criminals, killed by white police while utterly ignoring the many hundred of blacks killed every year by other blacks. This is a memorial to Freddie Gray of the Baltimore riots.

Headline: “Trayvon Martin’s parents accept posthumous aeronautical science degree”

A measure of the fairyland world of American politics is hat a criminal, killed attempting to beat a security officer to death, should solemnly be awarded a posthumous degree in something he probably could not spell. It is amusing–why not quantum chromodynamics?–but pathetic. The canonization reveals the separation from reality of, apparently, most of an entire race. It is of one cloth with affirmative action and racial quotas. No substance, much pretense.



Parasitism

Dependence on whites is the backbone of black culture. Free breakfast for their children, free lunches, subsidized housing, free housing, AFDC, affirmative action, racial quotas, waivers. Nobody, not blacks, not whites, not the most dewy-eyed liberal expects blacks ever to live without charity from whites. Don’t believe me? Ask an ardent civil-libertarian when he expects blacks to have caught up and not need affirmative action. Never. It is just another entitlement. Whah mah free stuff?

Political correctness ensures that we cannot even talk about the problem. If you suggest that blacks stop shooting each other, you are a racist. If you suggest that they study, you are a racist. If you suggest they get married before reproducing, you are a racist. It will continue until either America slowly deflates or hell breaks loose.

[Anti Federalist]

I think I once interviewed with that guy. They were doing a story about roadblocks (checkpoints) for Reason Magazine. It was a phone interview. He seemed to be reasonable and represented my views accurately in their story. I left with a good impression of him, but maybe this would partly sour me. I've also heard people being critical of Reason and Cato (are they rivals?) for various reasons, but I either don't know why or don't remember the reasons. I don't know if he's a northerner, but they often just don't get. I really think a lot has to do with what they are taught in school. They never dig below the surface and just accept the Yankee narrative.

Balko has done some great work on exposing police corruption, but I've always reckoned he was of a "left libertarian" bent.

[tod evans]

And I'll just drop off some Fred Reed, mmmm, kay?

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Anti Federalist again.

[Brian4Liberty]

Balko has done some great work on exposing police corruption, but I've always reckoned he was of a "left libertarian" bent.

Kind of ironic that if a libertarian of any stripe even hints at national sovereignty and border controls, they are called a raging progressive statist by left libertarians. But when a left libertarian calls for this kind of PC historical cleansing and censorship, not a peep.

[William Tell]

Kind of ironic that if a libertarian of any stripe even hints at national sovereignty and border controls, they are called a raging progressive statist by left libertarians. But when a left libertarian calls for this kind of PC historical cleansing and censorship, not a peep.

Ain't it, though?

[Matt Collins]

I think I once interviewed with that guy. They were doing a story about roadblocks (checkpoints) for Reason Magazine. It was a phone interview. He seemed to be reasonable and represented my views accurately in their story. I left with a good impression of him, but maybe this would partly sour me. I've also heard people being critical of Reason and Cato (are they rivals?) for various reasons, but I either don't know why or don't remember the reasons. I don't know if he's a northerner, but they often just don't get. I really think a lot has to do with what they are taught in school. They never dig below the surface and just accept the Yankee narrative.

Radley has one some really good work but this piece of his exposes his true colors not of that of a civil libertarian, but as a SJW progressive.


It's very disappointing as I used to have a lot of respect for him.

[Danke]

And I'll just drop off some Fred Reed, mmmm, kay?

Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures

https://fredoneverything.org/oncomin...h-of-cultures/

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Fred Reed

Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, the horrendous rates of crime, or the parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for God’s sake. For reasons doubtless opaque to the historically ignorant, this annoys me. Why should the least productive, most criminal, most dependent of the population rewrite history that in any event they don’t know? The erasure of the South and the Confederacy by people most of whom couldn’t spell it, of Washington and Jefferson and Lee by grifters, race hustlers, wanton illiterates and the Brownshirts of Black Lives Matter…enough.

How many think this but won’t say it?

Now I find the black mayoress of Baltimore–a city lovely and livable in the time of Mencken before being made a decayed war zone by blacks–threatening monuments in that city. Enough. Too much.

I was not always sick of the misbehavior of blacks. In the now infinitely remote early Sixties, when I was a student in the last all-white class in Virginia’s rural King George High–graduated ‘64–integration was just beginning. To the extent that I thought about race, the question was abstract, a matter of moral principles, of ideals and fairness, unrelated to an actual people with actual characteristics who might not integrate well. Blacks had been mistreated. If given the opportunity they would rise and join American civilization. That they might not occurred only to those with experience, which did not include me.

When my parents, wiser than I–if it is possible to be wiser than a seventeen-year-old–said that integration would not work. I didn’t believe them.

Time went by, and it didn’t work. Trouble began. Blacks became hostile, .demanding this and demanding that. Neighborhoods became dangerous. Schools, newly mixed, encountered The Gap, intractable and immortal, that is the heart and cause of our racial disaster. The riots arrived. Racial attacks on whites became common, covered up by the media. This censorship possible in the days before the internet.

The country began, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, as n.either did the country, treating blacks as a different category of humanity who could not be expected to obey the laws and rules or the expectations of civility.

For a while my sympathy held. I was very young. Further, I had no experience of a school with a large black population. I justified the behavior of blacks as consequent to former privation. Surely it would change.

It didn’t. Years passed. We saw corrupted schools, lowered standards, white flight, and journalistic dishonesty. More cities burned.

For decades white America made a desperate attempt to raise blacks to the level of the First World. It didn’t work. Instead saw a dragging down of society to the culture of the ghetto. Blacks were behaving as usual as spoiled brats. Anything that upset them, as everything did, any expectation that they behave, led to cries of racism and depredations by such as Black Lives Matter.

As I mentioned, my parents had said that blacks were could not function in the First World. It seemed that they were right. Desegregation had not worked, nor integration, nor quotas nor affirmative action nor Head Start. What didn’t work was turning blacks into members of a European civilization in which they had no interest. It would have worked no better had blacks lived in China, Japan, or Russia.

Nothing worked and nothing is going to work. There is clarity in this realization, a clarity to admitting what is actually happening. It avoids tortured reasoning to show that the dysfunction of blacks is due to anything and everything but blacks themselves. One need not make endless excuses for endless bad behavior, for the crime and dependency, the racial attacks, and the degradation of society.

The culture of the ghetto opposes everything usually believed proper in an advanced society: high academic standards, equality of opportunity, good English, minimal obscenity, equality under the law, low rates of crime, reasonable self-reliance, freedom of speech. Black culture, intensely racist, encourages none of these and opposes most. It is tribal, based on identity, instead of principle.

For many, this is a difficult realization. Decades of unrelenting propaganda have trained us that blacks bear no responsibility for anything. Are they gunning each other down in city after city? It is because of guns, though whites have guns and do not kill each other. Do they perform abysmally in schools that they themselves control? It’s because of slavery, though there hasn’t been a slave in the country for 150 years. Are they irresponsible in their reproductive habits? It’s because of poverty, although they are not poor.

In this they differ from the rest of humanity as I have known it. I have lived in China, Thailand, Mexico, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and have traveled in some fifty other countries. All shared what might be called the core values of civilization. Blacks seem not to. Yes, many exceptions, varied degrees, but as a culture, they were, are, different. Would that it were not true, but it is.

Look at the foundations:

Education is the keystone of any modern civilization. Blacks alone care nothing for it. Exceptions, yes, but again, overall? No. The countless schools entirely controlled by blacks are the worst in America. They do not improve.

Fox News: “6 Baltimore schools, no students proficient in state tests” (of reading and arithmetic.)

Maybe the mayoress of Baltimore should pay more attention to this and less to statues she doesn’t like. She will not. If she were going to, she would have.

Accounts like the foregoing are routine, normal, expected. We have heard them for fifty years. Usually they include boilerplate about terrible obstacles, murdered relatives, addicted mothers, incarcerated youth, etc. These accounts invite pity and try to blame everything on whites. There is mandatory wonderment: What can be the cause of the academic gap? Doubtless white privilege, slavery, invisible discrimination, microaggressions, something, anything but blacks themselves. But whites can’t make black children do their homework, their daughters of thirteen avoid reproduction, their young males refrain from killing each other. Whites are not their mother.

75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards

What is going on here? Learning to read is not difficult. Elsewhere poor people, people of color–I loathe that phrase–and poor people of color do it routinely. According to the CIA Factbook, literacy in Thailand is at 97%; Malaysia 95%; Mexico, 95%; and Colombia, 95%. The possible reasons for not learning in twelve years what white and brown kids do in three are low intelligence and lack of interest. Take your pick. The failure to learn imposes a heavy burden on society. Wild thought: Make welfare dependent on literacy.

Ask yourself, “Now what?”

Whether academic failure is cultural or genetic makes no difference, since neither is subject to change. Instead of requesting more rigorous textbooks and disciplining their children to study, blacks insist that courses be enstupidated for their benefit, that they be admitted to schools and courses for which they cannot qualify, that they get grades they did not earn. This is now normal. Nobody, black or white, liberal or conservative, expects blacks ever to do anything for themselves.

Of course one might ask why blacks would have any interest in most of what has been taught in American schools. Europeans trace their intellectual lineage from the invention of writing in Sumeria in the mid-Fourth Millennium BC through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, their literary heritage from the Gilgamesh Epic through Tolkien. Blacks had no connection with this and did none of these things. It isn’t of their culture.

Cities have been the heart of the intellectual and artistic in all civilizations, as for example Athens, Rome, Florence, Vienna, New York. By contrast, blacks have destroyed city after American city after American city. Trenton, Camden, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Flint, St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee. At one time in all of these one could live, walk at will, send one’s children to the schools. Now, no. Violence, crime, racial attacks,and illiteracy drive the civilized to remote suburbs. This is not my culture and I see no reason to apologize for it.

Manners have been part of all civilizations. Civil societies everywhere impose a degree of control over obscenity. Everyone knows about sex and excretory functions. We leave them out of conversation. We can speak a sentence of three words without saying “motherfucker” five times.

Some perfectly ordinary rap “lyrics”:

“Then you roll your tongue, from the crack back to the front

Then suck it off ’til I shake and cum nigga

Make sure I keep bustin nuts nigga

All over your face and stuff”



This offal is excused because “it is their culture.” Exactly. When you cannot control abominable behavior by one group, you cannot control it for any group. Here is perhaps America’s gravest problem.

Virulent racial hostility–i.e., racism—is deeply ingrained in black culture. Blacks hate whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Jews. Not all blacks of course, or to the same degree, but it is the centerline of black culture. It is what counts and shapes the future.

Anyone doubting the universal racial hostility of blacks might read White Girl Bleed a Lot, or Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma. She arrived in Oakland with her family, dirt poor, speaking no English. She recounts–as do many white kids in black schools–endless racial abuse, taunting, stealing of food by blacks. (All on her own, incidentally, she worked her way up and ended with a law degree from Stanford. Apparently she found no lack of opportunity.)



One may see the depth of the hostility in the regular practice of making heroes and martyrs of blacks, usually criminals, killed by white police while utterly ignoring the many hundred of blacks killed every year by other blacks. This is a memorial to Freddie Gray of the Baltimore riots.

Headline: “Trayvon Martin’s parents accept posthumous aeronautical science degree”

A measure of the fairyland world of American politics is hat a criminal, killed attempting to beat a security officer to death, should solemnly be awarded a posthumous degree in something he probably could not spell. It is amusing–why not quantum chromodynamics?–but pathetic. The canonization reveals the separation from reality of, apparently, most of an entire race. It is of one cloth with affirmative action and racial quotas. No substance, much pretense.



Parasitism

Dependence on whites is the backbone of black culture. Free breakfast for their children, free lunches, subsidized housing, free housing, AFDC, affirmative action, racial quotas, waivers. Nobody, not blacks, not whites, not the most dewy-eyed liberal expects blacks ever to live without charity from whites. Don’t believe me? Ask an ardent civil-libertarian when he expects blacks to have caught up and not need affirmative action. Never. It is just another entitlement. Whah mah free stuff?

Political correctness ensures that we cannot even talk about the problem. If you suggest that blacks stop shooting each other, you are a racist. If you suggest that they study, you are a racist. If you suggest they get married before reproducing, you are a racist. It will continue until either America slowly deflates or hell breaks loose.

But weren't black families strong and self reliant before FDR and LBJ? And aren't white families falling apart now too into the culture of dependency?

[oyarde]

You cannot erase history because you do not like statues . You also cannot improve it by erecting them .

[r3volution 3.0]

Him first



Note the bundles of rods Abe's gripping. Those are fasces, symbols of state power in ancient Rome, from which the term fascism derives.

Very apt

[Danke]

Him first



Note the bundles of rods Abe's gripping. Those are fasces, symbols of state power in ancient Rome, from which the term fascism derives.

Very apt

Interesting.

[Origanalist]

Ugh, the comments are sickening.

[oyarde]

Interesting.

Also the reverse of the US dime 1917 - 1945 , and very similar to old Spanish silver dollars which were the currency of choice in colonial america .

[BSWPaulsen]

Double post.

[BSWPaulsen]

But weren't black families strong and self reliant before FDR and LBJ? And aren't white families falling apart now too into the culture of dependency?

Families, in general, were better in the past before things like no-fault divorce, marital courts (child support and alimony), and welfare got out of hand. The secularization of marriage has been another mortal blow to the family unit, in my estimation (a depressing statement to make as an atheist, but failing to see the benefits of religion on families and communities is blatantly foolish).

The ongoing glorification of black urban "culture" in the media is certainly not helping anything. White (American) culture is definitely suffering from decadence and significant apathy among those that would have it otherwise.

[r3volution 3.0]

Interesting.

From elsewhere on the monument





The fasces had a different meaning pre-Mussolini, so you can't take just any fasces as having that meaning (e.g. the 18th century sculpture of Washington in the capitol has a fasces), but these particular fasces were designed in 1920, just when Mussolini was gaining popularity; the monument was actually unveiled the year Mussolini marched on Rome. The designer had spent considerable time in Italy, co-founding the American Academy in Rome and receiving various awards from Italian institutions. The carvers were themselves Italians. Looking back at Lincoln's policies, the fascists of the 20s liked what they saw, I'd wager. Our modern fascists certainly do.

[axiomata]

It's ok, we've got Lenin statues in the hip part of Seattle.

[AngryCanadian]

Are the leftists going to demand for Rome to remove all of its history to? i truly hate these kind of frogheads.

[AngryCanadian]

It seems Radle Balko has never visited Moscow has he now?

[Occam's Banana]

[snip ample and substantive content, and not just a bare hyperlink]

All right - who hijacked Matt's account and posted this under his name?

Fess up, now ...

[Anti Federalist]

All right - who hijacked Matt's account and posted this under his name?

Fess up, now ...

Hahahah, nice catch, I hadn't noticed.

[phill4paul]

No one is suggesting we remove the Confederate army from the history of Bull Run or Gettysburg.

Not yet, Balko. But, they are already tearing down any symbol at smaller battlefields and forcing them to close.

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...ags&styleid=32

[Anti Federalist]

No one is suggesting we remove the Confederate army from the history of Bull Run or Gettysburg.

Sez you...

Gettysburg’s name is inextricably linked to the Civil War and U.S. history, and its battle reenactments — the lifeblood of the town’s crucial tourism sector — are hard to carry out without displaying the flag. But at least one group is doing so. The Lutheran Seminary, a theological center that runs a reenactment on Seminary Ridge, a major point in the battle, has banned the display of the flag from its reenactment this year.

“We are forced by more recent history and current events to declare a total ban on display of confederate symbols and flags used by supremacist organizations, and that unfortunately includes the Confederate Navy Jack (another name for the battle flag) and the St. Andrew cross in two of the official flags of the Confederacy," said John Spang ler, a spokesman for the seminary, in a statement posted on the organization’s website.

http://america.aljazeera.com/article...ag-police.html


ETA - WTF would "spang ler" be banned???

[Matt Collins]

All right - who hijacked Matt's account and posted this under his name?

Fess up, now ...

I didn't want to give that turd of an op-ed any traffic.

[The Northbreather]

And I'll just drop off some Fred Reed, mmmm, kay?

Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures

https://fredoneverything.org/oncomin...h-of-cultures/

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Fred Reed

Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, the horrendous rates of crime, or the parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for God’s sake. For reasons doubtless opaque to the historically ignorant, this annoys me. Why should the least productive, most criminal, most dependent of the population rewrite history that in any event they don’t know? The erasure of the South and the Confederacy by people most of whom couldn’t spell it, of Washington and Jefferson and Lee by grifters, race hustlers, wanton illiterates and the Brownshirts of Black Lives Matter…enough.

How many think this but won’t say it?

Now I find the black mayoress of Baltimore–a city lovely and livable in the time of Mencken before being made a decayed war zone by blacks–threatening monuments in that city. Enough. Too much.

I was not always sick of the misbehavior of blacks. In the now infinitely remote early Sixties, when I was a student in the last all-white class in Virginia’s rural King George High–graduated ‘64–integration was just beginning. To the extent that I thought about race, the question was abstract, a matter of moral principles, of ideals and fairness, unrelated to an actual people with actual characteristics who might not integrate well. Blacks had been mistreated. If given the opportunity they would rise and join American civilization. That they might not occurred only to those with experience, which did not include me.

When my parents, wiser than I–if it is possible to be wiser than a seventeen-year-old–said that integration would not work. I didn’t believe them.

Time went by, and it didn’t work. Trouble began. Blacks became hostile, .demanding this and demanding that. Neighborhoods became dangerous. Schools, newly mixed, encountered The Gap, intractable and immortal, that is the heart and cause of our racial disaster. The riots arrived. Racial attacks on whites became common, covered up by the media. This censorship possible in the days before the internet.

The country began, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, as n.either did the country, treating blacks as a different category of humanity who could not be expected to obey the laws and rules or the expectations of civility.

For a while my sympathy held. I was very young. Further, I had no experience of a school with a large black population. I justified the behavior of blacks as consequent to former privation. Surely it would change.

It didn’t. Years passed. We saw corrupted schools, lowered standards, white flight, and journalistic dishonesty. More cities burned.

For decades white America made a desperate attempt to raise blacks to the level of the First World. It didn’t work. Instead saw a dragging down of society to the culture of the ghetto. Blacks were behaving as usual as spoiled brats. Anything that upset them, as everything did, any expectation that they behave, led to cries of racism and depredations by such as Black Lives Matter.

As I mentioned, my parents had said that blacks were could not function in the First World. It seemed that they were right. Desegregation had not worked, nor integration, nor quotas nor affirmative action nor Head Start. What didn’t work was turning blacks into members of a European civilization in which they had no interest. It would have worked no better had blacks lived in China, Japan, or Russia.

Nothing worked and nothing is going to work. There is clarity in this realization, a clarity to admitting what is actually happening. It avoids tortured reasoning to show that the dysfunction of blacks is due to anything and everything but blacks themselves. One need not make endless excuses for endless bad behavior, for the crime and dependency, the racial attacks, and the degradation of society.

The culture of the ghetto opposes everything usually believed proper in an advanced society: high academic standards, equality of opportunity, good English, minimal obscenity, equality under the law, low rates of crime, reasonable self-reliance, freedom of speech. Black culture, intensely racist, encourages none of these and opposes most. It is tribal, based on identity, instead of principle.

For many, this is a difficult realization. Decades of unrelenting propaganda have trained us that blacks bear no responsibility for anything. Are they gunning each other down in city after city? It is because of guns, though whites have guns and do not kill each other. Do they perform abysmally in schools that they themselves control? It’s because of slavery, though there hasn’t been a slave in the country for 150 years. Are they irresponsible in their reproductive habits? It’s because of poverty, although they are not poor.

In this they differ from the rest of humanity as I have known it. I have lived in China, Thailand, Mexico, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and have traveled in some fifty other countries. All shared what might be called the core values of civilization. Blacks seem not to. Yes, many exceptions, varied degrees, but as a culture, they were, are, different. Would that it were not true, but it is.

Look at the foundations:

Education is the keystone of any modern civilization. Blacks alone care nothing for it. Exceptions, yes, but again, overall? No. The countless schools entirely controlled by blacks are the worst in America. They do not improve.

Fox News: “6 Baltimore schools, no students proficient in state tests” (of reading and arithmetic.)

Maybe the mayoress of Baltimore should pay more attention to this and less to statues she doesn’t like. She will not. If she were going to, she would have.

Accounts like the foregoing are routine, normal, expected. We have heard them for fifty years. Usually they include boilerplate about terrible obstacles, murdered relatives, addicted mothers, incarcerated youth, etc. These accounts invite pity and try to blame everything on whites. There is mandatory wonderment: What can be the cause of the academic gap? Doubtless white privilege, slavery, invisible discrimination, microaggressions, something, anything but blacks themselves. But whites can’t make black children do their homework, their daughters of thirteen avoid reproduction, their young males refrain from killing each other. Whites are not their mother.

75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards

What is going on here? Learning to read is not difficult. Elsewhere poor people, people of color–I loathe that phrase–and poor people of color do it routinely. According to the CIA Factbook, literacy in Thailand is at 97%; Malaysia 95%; Mexico, 95%; and Colombia, 95%. The possible reasons for not learning in twelve years what white and brown kids do in three are low intelligence and lack of interest. Take your pick. The failure to learn imposes a heavy burden on society. Wild thought: Make welfare dependent on literacy.

Ask yourself, “Now what?”

Whether academic failure is cultural or genetic makes no difference, since neither is subject to change. Instead of requesting more rigorous textbooks and disciplining their children to study, blacks insist that courses be enstupidated for their benefit, that they be admitted to schools and courses for which they cannot qualify, that they get grades they did not earn. This is now normal. Nobody, black or white, liberal or conservative, expects blacks ever to do anything for themselves.

Of course one might ask why blacks would have any interest in most of what has been taught in American schools. Europeans trace their intellectual lineage from the invention of writing in Sumeria in the mid-Fourth Millennium BC through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, their literary heritage from the Gilgamesh Epic through Tolkien. Blacks had no connection with this and did none of these things. It isn’t of their culture.

Cities have been the heart of the intellectual and artistic in all civilizations, as for example Athens, Rome, Florence, Vienna, New York. By contrast, blacks have destroyed city after American city after American city. Trenton, Camden, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Flint, St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee. At one time in all of these one could live, walk at will, send one’s children to the schools. Now, no. Violence, crime, racial attacks,and illiteracy drive the civilized to remote suburbs. This is not my culture and I see no reason to apologize for it.

Manners have been part of all civilizations. Civil societies everywhere impose a degree of control over obscenity. Everyone knows about sex and excretory functions. We leave them out of conversation. We can speak a sentence of three words without saying “motherfucker” five times.

Some perfectly ordinary rap “lyrics”:

“Then you roll your tongue, from the crack back to the front

Then suck it off ’til I shake and cum nigga

Make sure I keep bustin nuts nigga

All over your face and stuff”



This offal is excused because “it is their culture.” Exactly. When you cannot control abominable behavior by one group, you cannot control it for any group. Here is perhaps America’s gravest problem.

Virulent racial hostility–i.e., racism—is deeply ingrained in black culture. Blacks hate whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Jews. Not all blacks of course, or to the same degree, but it is the centerline of black culture. It is what counts and shapes the future.

Anyone doubting the universal racial hostility of blacks might read White Girl Bleed a Lot, or Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma. She arrived in Oakland with her family, dirt poor, speaking no English. She recounts–as do many white kids in black schools–endless racial abuse, taunting, stealing of food by blacks. (All on her own, incidentally, she worked her way up and ended with a law degree from Stanford. Apparently she found no lack of opportunity.)



One may see the depth of the hostility in the regular practice of making heroes and martyrs of blacks, usually criminals, killed by white police while utterly ignoring the many hundred of blacks killed every year by other blacks. This is a memorial to Freddie Gray of the Baltimore riots.

Headline: “Trayvon Martin’s parents accept posthumous aeronautical science degree”

A measure of the fairyland world of American politics is hat a criminal, killed attempting to beat a security officer to death, should solemnly be awarded a posthumous degree in something he probably could not spell. It is amusing–why not quantum chromodynamics?–but pathetic. The canonization reveals the separation from reality of, apparently, most of an entire race. It is of one cloth with affirmative action and racial quotas. No substance, much pretense.



Parasitism

Dependence on whites is the backbone of black culture. Free breakfast for their children, free lunches, subsidized housing, free housing, AFDC, affirmative action, racial quotas, waivers. Nobody, not blacks, not whites, not the most dewy-eyed liberal expects blacks ever to live without charity from whites. Don’t believe me? Ask an ardent civil-libertarian when he expects blacks to have caught up and not need affirmative action. Never. It is just another entitlement. Whah mah free stuff?

Political correctness ensures that we cannot even talk about the problem. If you suggest that blacks stop shooting each other, you are a racist. If you suggest that they study, you are a racist. If you suggest they get married before reproducing, you are a racist. It will continue until either America slowly deflates or hell breaks loose.

Well that was unexpectedly anti-individual

[Anti Federalist]

No one is suggesting we remove the Confederate army from the history of Bull Run or Gettysburg.

You were saying, Radley...

Leftists Promising to ‘Desecrate Graves’ and Protest During 154th Anniversary of Battle of Gettysburg

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...of-gettysburg/

by Warner Todd Huston27 Jun 2017Gettysburg, PA2,176

During the first days of July, 154 years ago, a great battle was fought in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during our Civil War.

Today, as the anniversary approaches, members of the so-called “Antifa” movement are promising to “desecrate” the graves of those who fell in that fight and to mount protests as Americans gather to memorialize the battle.

Gettysburg has become a great attraction for Americans, many of whom troop there annually to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a conflagration that is often termed the “high tide” of the civil war for turning the war in favor of the federal armies vying to end slavery and save the union.

But as the 154th-anniversary celebration gears up for the coming month, leftists are making plans for a battle of their own. Only they plan to fight against the country, to “desecrate” history, and to disrupt the thousands of Americans and foreign visitors who intend to honor our past.

Gettysburg town officials, as well as the federal battlefield park officials, have acknowledged warnings that several protest groups are targeting the annual celebration this year, according to Philly.com.

Several legitimate and long-existing groups have attained permits to gather, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. But others are planning protests without attaining permits, the paper reports.

According to Harrisbirg 100, at least one “Antifa” group began informing supporters that they intended to burn Confederate and American flags in the town. The site cited an EventBu page advertising the protest. The event listing, though, was soon deleted.

A civil war enthusiast page also found two Facebook pages advertising protests to be held at Gettysburg. After being discovered, though, those pages were also quickly deleted.

One of the warnings read:

There is an event set up on Facebook that calls for the desecration of Confederate cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Day. Specifically, on Saturday, May 13, 3-6 PM, this group intends to target Old Marietta Confederate Cemetery. They intend to burn CBFs and/or urinate on graves. They also have an event scheduled for July 1, 3-6 PM, at Gettysburg National Memorial Park Cemetery… The group urges their followers to “find their local Confederate graves” to desecrate.

Park officials say that while they are all for our First Amendment rights, they are prepared for disruptions.

“Our goal is to ensure that public safety and visitor safety is number one and that park resources are preserved,” said Katie Lawhon, a spokeswoman for Gettysburg National Military Park.

Gettysburg remains the largest battle ever held on American soil with more than 160,000 troops fighting over a three-day period that resulted in up to 51,000 casualties. It is also one of America’s first battlefield parks and contains some 1,328 monuments, markers, and memorials in both the cemetery and on the battlefield to commemorate the Union and Confederate troops who fought and died there.

Gettysburg is also being targeted by liberal groups that have been on a crusade to eliminate any vestige of the Confederacy from American history. Liberals have already successfully whitewashed history by removing Confederate memorials in New Orleans, and St. Louis, and they are beginning the same process in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Should members of the “Antifa” movement carry out their plan to desecrate the graves of soldiers who fell at Gettysburg, they will join the Taliban, ISIS, and Turkish Islamists who have launched a campaign to destroy historic sites and desecrate graves of their enemies.

Islamists have desecrated graves in Pakistan, damaged the Tomb of Joseph in Palestinian controlled Nablus, destroyed a monument to the sacrifices made by troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli, Turkey during the First World War, dynamited the Bymian statues in Afghanistan, and laid waste to the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq.

[Anti Federalist]

Blimp