"Summer of rage" = Civil War v 2.0? - NOT a new idea!

This morning's headlines... 

1 dead, 5 critically wounded after shooting at church in gun-controlled California 

2 killed, 3 injured after shooting at busy Houston flea market 

33 Shot During Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot's Chicago

Biden: Buffalo shooting "racially motivated act of white supremacy and violent extremism"

And so it begins... No. That should be: And so it continues.

President Brandon, and all the other liberal loonies acting like this weekend's mass murder in  Buffalo is something new (and obviously the fault of President Trump!) seem to have forgotten about "race riots" (as they were called in more innocent times) in:

Detroit - June 1943 - President FDR (Democrat)

Watts - August 1965 - President LBJ (Democrat), the great champion of equal rights and "freedom now"

Newark - July 1967 - President LBJ (again)

Detroit - July 1967 - aka the 12th Street Riot, aka the Detroit Rebellion - President LBJ (yet again) 

I don't remember the 1943 event very well, but the Detroit Rebellion is clear in my mind. You could see the smoke from across the river in Canada, which is where sensible Americans went to wait it out. And of course there was the TV news. Images of mobs of black people (they weren't "Black", back then) in the streets, protesting discrimination and racism, demanding equality and justice...

...and maybe doing a bit of "reparations shopping". Of course it wasn't called that, in those more innocent days. It was called "looting", `cause that's what it was! Martin Luther King would be horrified, I think, to see what's being done nowadays, in his name and in the name of "justice".

"No justice, no peace!" That's what they're yelling now. In the long hot summer of 1967, it was "Burn, baby, burn!" The point of yesterday's  post was to predict another long hot summer, a "summer of rage". Lifetime pct .991. 

I think now that I should have added "and riots" to that phrase. But the message was clear enough for our sponsor to call to let us know that a civil war between blacks and "others" was predicted in  the January 1980 "Fantasy Issue" of National Lampoon, "the Humor Magazine for Adults". Check this out!

This excellent piece of satire, written by John Hughes and superbly drawn by George Evans, could never be published today. The editors would probably report the creators to the Department of Homeland Security's new "Disinformation Governance Board", so they could be re-educated in a pleasant summer camp somewhere in Alaska.

Fortunately, the DHSDGB has not yet been able to destroy the archives of National Lampoon and other politically incorrect publication. Our sponsor has made a .pdf file of this prescient piece, which you can buy for only $2.00. Hard copy is also available. Tell `em Walt sent ya!

History repeats itself

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's monumental work The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin 2006), and, in the Epilogue, came across the following passage.

On January 20, 1969, it was becoming hard for Americans to feel optimistic.... American society itself seemed to be fragmenting. There were race riots in the inner cities and demonstrations in the universities; young fought old, black fought white, redneck fought hippy, student fought cop. Race was one of the main bones of contention.

What's the significance of 20 January 1969? That was the date of Richard Nixon's inauguration.

Footnote: In the very last paragraph of The War of the World, Niall Ferguson wrote (in 2006, remember): [H.G. Wells's] The War of the Worlds remains science fiction. The War of the World is, however, historical fact. Perhaps, like Well's story, ours will be ended abruptly by the intervention of microscopic organisms like the avian influenza virus, which could yet produce a worse mutation and pandemic than that of 1918. Until that happens, however, we remain our own worst enemies.

"I didn't see this coming!": Marx

On July 18th, I wrote about "The new oppressed minority", and introduced to you the British neologism "chavs", standing (possibly) for "Council Housed And Violent". I was looking for an example and came up with just one picture. Since this weekend, though, you've been able to see hundreds of pictures and videos of chavs in action, in the riots that have spread from a largely black area of London to several English cities.

Who are the chavs -- the hooded hooligans we see burning, looting and pillaging their own neighbourhoods? Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? In "More about chavs", I tried to show how Britain's welfare statism -- relentless even during the government of Margaret Thatcher -- has produced a large and growing underclass of uneducated, unemployed and generally useless young people, parasites sucking on the tits of the British taxpayers. It is that scummy underclass -- on this side of the water we would call them "white trash" -- who are revolting. And no, I'm not making a cheap joke.

Karl Marx saw class warfare as inevitable. He predicted a revolution of the proletariat -- meaning workers and peasants -- who would rise against the upper classes, the landlords, capitalists and gentry who (he claimed) held the lower classes in poverty and servitude.

Marx had the general idea, but he never imagined that the upper classes would create and nurture the drunken mob which roams the streets of British cities even as I write.

For the hoodlums you see kicking in windows and robbing the wounded are not workers, peasants or students. They are NEETs -- another new word for you -- Not in Employment, Education or Training. In other words, they are idlers and layabouts, who would be starving and homeless but for the largesse of the nanny state which provides them with public housing ("council houses"), free healthcare, and "allowances" for being unemployed or unemployable.

Marx would doubtless approve of all these socialistic -- OK, communist! -- programmes. However, it was the British electorate which voted for one government after another -- not excepting that of Margaret Thatcher -- which instituted these "measures for the assistance of the less fortunate and disadvantaged". "Progressive" thinking, "progressive" thinkers and "progressive" politicians have sowed the wind. And now Britain reaps the whirlwind.

But before we say it can't happen in America, let us remember the so-called race riots of the `60s and `70s: Detroit, Harlem, and of course Watts. While there were racial overtones to those riots, they were just as much about class as about race. In the USA, "progressive" civil rights, welfare and criminal justice policies have spawned a huge underclass which just happens to be comprised largely of brown and black people. Those are the ones who take to the streets and steal TVs to get even for "police brutality" and other real or imaginary injustices.

Marx, it seems, was colour-blind. Perhaps it was because most of the citizens of his native Prussia and of Britain, where he did most of his thinking and writing, were white. The UK had not yet been inundated by wave after wave of South Asian, Caribbean and African immigrants.

And in the 19th century, when Marx wrote, Britain had not yet tried putting his theories into practice. It's a pity Marx didn't live to see how his vision of Utopia played out. What happened to the Great Britain of the Victorian era? "Progressive" policies turned it into the mongrelized anti-society that is collapsing tonight.