Sultan Knish
Riots are the exclusive domain of those who view themselves as outside the
law. Whether they are outside the law because they are above or below it is a
matter of perspective. The rioters may see themselves as the oppressed
who are below the law while their victims tend to think of them as above the
law, with the power to rob and kill, without paying any significant price for
it. All that is true whether we are talking about Russian peasants killing
Jews, Indonesians killing ethnic Chinese or African-Americans killing whites.
The riot is usually directed at the authorities or some vulnerable group,
sometimes both, but invariably one of them takes precedence. The authorities
prefer that the rioters direct their rage at a conveniently vulnerable group
and afterward the vulnerable group takes the blame for the violence directed at
them. The rioters treat those few of their number who were killed in the
looting spree as martyrs, while the rioted-upon pick up the broken glass and
try to reopen their stores again.
Minorities rarely riot against majorities for the practical reason that
rioters are cowards and they want to have the numbers on their side. A riot is
less often a symptom of injustice and more often a sign that they have the
numbers and that all they need is a pretext to go out for a fine day of looting
and maiming. A riot isn't a response to injustice, it's a power play by people
who believe that they are above the law and that their victims are outnumbered.
It's a rather odd development that white people in America took on the role
of the Chinese in Indonesia or the Jews in Russia, long before they became a
demographic minority, but not entirely so. Race riots have mostly happened in
cities where white people had become or were on the way to becoming a minority.
And all three groups share the vital characteristic of being hard-working types
whose success is overestimated by the looters looking for a taste of that
success without having to go out and work for it.
The hated groups are not satisfied with their lot in life, instead they go
out and strive for more possessed of the peculiar belief that they can rise
above their station in life through hard work and ingenuity. Their neighbors
rarely appreciate this attitude. In their world someone who has more than they
do probably stole it from them. And when they booze up and riot, they're only
getting back what's rightfully theirs.
In the mythology of the looters, they are the persecuted ones, and when the
government sympathizes with the looters, that is the message it sends out. The
mythology of a white grip on power driven by bone deep racism and privilege has
its echoes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a conspiracy theory that
justifies every act of violence against them.
But if riots were really triggered by a black and white racial disparity,
then Asians wouldn't be the victims of African-American riot rage from New York
to Los Angeles. If anyone can be exempted from charges of shipping slaves or
conspiring to employ their privilege to keep people of color down, it would be Chinese
and Korean immigrants. But it isn't really race that's the issue, it's being a
successful minority.
Chinese, Jewish and white storeowners in America are targeted by rioters for the same reason
that Chinese storeowners in Indonesia are. Because they are members of an
outside group who are working hard and getting ahead and that is the worst
imaginable crime to people who believe that success through honest work is
impossible. That anyone who succeeds has taken advantage of a rigged system and
is exploiting them to get ahead.
That mindset is no longer confined to a few ghettoes; it finds open
expression in city government, in state government and even in the White House
and the Justice Department. The ugly resentment, the selfish greed by those who
have never worked for a living, is dressed up with American flags and the
looting is described as wealth redistribution, but it's still the same thing.
Except now the government functionaries do the looting.
The American city was once the heart of an industrial machine manned by
workers who believed that they could get ahead in life. And then the worker
became a minority in cities dominated by the indolent, by municipal unions, by
social workers, community organizers and bleeding heart college graduates who
squeezed him out. When the looters came for the American worker, he fled to the
suburbs, the city declined, and the rioters unleashed their rage on the Chinese
who came to take his place.
Working Americans are becoming a minority in a country where fifty percent
don't pay taxes, but do profit from the taxes of others. Where wealth
redistribution is the goal, but no matter how much wealth is redistributed,
it's never enough for the perpetually dissatisfied and the permanently angry
who always have license to take to the streets in pursuit of some ephemeral
justice that can only be gained with bullhorns and broken windows.
Magical thinking rejects the discipline of labor, instead it believes that
individual or group success derives from their 'specialness' and that a
failure to achieve that merited success is due to being obstructed or conspired
against by the underhanded people who cunningly go out and work for a living
instead of wallowing in the warm tub of their own specialness.
This cultural dysfunction is commonplace in the Middle East and some
of the more viciously backward parts of the world whose concepts of fairness
and law are completely subjective and completely alien to a law abiding society.
Its carriers are far more intolerant and xenophobic because they cannot see any
perspective other than that of the self. It has also become commonplace
in the Western world and the rioters and looters are drawn from the preening
and posturing ranks of its would be superstars, who if they don't make it
always have the five-fingered discount to fall back on.
Once a society embraces magical thinking and comes to believe that it can
grow its economy through unlimited spending on a welfare state and cargo cult
infrastructure investments, it needs scapegoats to throw to the mob when things
don't go well. The scapegoats are invariably the members of the hated groups
who continue to persevere, who are outsiders and who aren't satisfied to sink
down with the rest of the culture.
White people in America have come to occupy a similar place to the one
held by minority groups such as Jews and Asians. There is a bizarre and vulgar
obsession with their success, entire schools of thought dedicated to proving
that their success is unjustified and has only come about as a result of a vast
conspiracy, clannish privilege and underhanded tactics. There is an equally
strong obsession with punishing them for their success.
21st Century America is as obsessed with white power as 19th Century Europe
was with Jewish power. The latter obsession played a sizable role in the
destruction of Europe, the former obsession now seems set to do the same thing
to America. Even the old tropes of collective guilt and atonement have been brought
back in the service of the same drive to destroy those who succeed in the name
of those who think that it is more moral to fail.
But the ugly truth that can be seen in the wake of a riot is that destroying
those who succeed does not spread their success around, it destroys the
destroyers. A community in the wake of a riot is not better for having driven
away the storeowners. It is poorer, more miserable and more deprived. It has
injected itself with another dose in the cycle of violence, looting the ever-diminishing
remains of a local economy until nothing is left but empty storefronts and a
few food stamp bodegas sheathed in bulletproof glass.
These communities have not been deprived, they are self-deprived. They are
not oppressed, they are oppressing themselves. The disparity in power has long
ago shifted their way, if they have all too often chosen to use that power in a
destructive way, the fault is their own. It cannot be healed with more
affirmative action, more apologies and more power shifts. The last three years
have made that painfully clear.
If the rioters were once below the law, they have become above the law. Or
perhaps they have become the law. Race rioter extraordinaire Al Sharpton is a
frequent visitor to the White House and a fixture on liberal cable television.
Twenty years since mobs ran down the streets of Crown Heights chanting
"Kill the Jews", the agitator behind the whole thing is praised by
the Attorney General.
Ownership is the difference between the looter and the owner. Both the
looter and the owner have power, but only the owner has chosen to take
ownership of that power and responsibility for that power. The looter treats
his power as a force beyond his control, a hair trigger that can go off if he's
provoked or if he has nothing to do. He exercises it carelessly and then
complains when things don't go his way.
Law is responsibility. To riot is to proclaim that the law does not apply to
you. That you are beyond, below and above the law. It is a rejection of
ownership for individual behavior and the larger society. That attitude can be
seen in an administration which conspicuously loots and wastes money because it
does not think of the money or the country as belonging to it. It can be seen
in the street level rioters for the same reason.
Refusing to take ownership makes life easier by eliminating
responsibility. Those who dabble in magical thinking never take responsibility
for anything. Not even their own actions. They have abandoned their stake in
the society while constantly demanding their share of what they insist is
coming to them. And if the rioters succeed in destroying the ownership society
and replacing it with the looter society, in which no one owns anything and no
one, except their scapegoats, are responsible for anything, then civilization
dies beneath their flames and slogans.
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