Ilana Mercer: ‘Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence

For a short while, the thing called “gun violence” was uppermost in the minds of the blabbering class. Two lovely young people, Alison Parker (news reporter) and Adam Ward (photojournalist), of Roanoke, Virginia, were gunned-down on live TV, is a scene reminiscent of the film “15 Minutes,” in which an anchor’s drive for ratings and a murderer’s quest for his 15 Minutes of Fame result in … gun, fist, and other gratuitous, on-air violence.

A week on, CNN’s Poppy Harlow was using the language of George Orwell’s Oceania to describe the entity, “gun violence,” that “took” the life of poor Deputy Darren Goforth, of Harris County, TX. Shortly thereafter, the same inchoate culprit claimed Lt. Joe Gliniewicz of Fox Lake, Illinois.

Ambush assaults on police are, indubitably, up. And so is Orwellian newsspeak.

In Roanoke and Harris County, black men were implicated in directing the guns at Parker, Ward and Goforth. The killers acted on a tip from their mentors in media. That’s right: Do not be so hard on the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The movement is in its infancy. Most people are unfamiliar with it. “Black Lives Matter,” moreover, is not nearly as innervating and enervating as the meme disseminated, year-in and year-out, by media, academia, by the pedagogy and the politicians; over the airwaves, on the teli, in classrooms, in the halls of power; in textbooks, film, music and in every other cultural outlet and product.

For decades has this “Racial-Industrial Complex” been schooling Americans in the fiction of systemic black oppression by white America. The threshold for oppression is remarkably low. To be white is to oppress The Other; to be black is to be oppressed.

Concomitantly, there has been an epidemic of citizen fatalities at the hands of police officers. Combine the latter with the ritualistic, imbecilic, systemic and baseless drumbeat about oppression of blacks by whites—and you have your catalysts (not causes) for why so many blacks imagine they’ve been wronged, and how some individuals are encouraged, inadvertently, to act on their anger.

As to the former catalyst: In 2014 alone, attests activist William B. Scott, police “gun-violence” dispatched 1,100 people, an average of three every day of the year. Scott’s son, Erik, a decorated ex-Army officer, West-Point graduate, and Duke Univ. MBA, was shot to death by a slob of a cop in Las Vegas. Erik’s BlackBerry was mistaken for a firearm. (Excellence runs in this family. Senior is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.)

One can’t help but wonder at the incongruous specter of black leaders and advocates (media, pols, pedagogues) complaining when those they consider incorrigibly racist—cops—make themselves scarce in black neighborhoods. The “Racial Industrial Complex” conflates higher arrest and incarceration rates among blacks (rather than lawbreaking and too many laws), with “scientific” proof of systemic racism. Surely, then, police presence in black communities will only increase arrests and bolster these “racist” statistics. Surely a lack of police presence in black communities is to be celebrated.

Go figure!

As kids, we knew our local policeman by name. He patrolled our neighborhoods regularly and joshed around with us. He lived among us. Community policing, however, is a thing of the past. Former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson—notorious for shooting Michael Brown—gave a clue as to why. Wilson told The New Yorker that while he didn’t want to work in a white area, liked the black community and had fun there—he had experienced “culture shock.” Wilson described venturing into a “different culture”: a “pre-gang culture where you’re just running in the streets, not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” For his candor about an alien culture, Wilson was called racist by CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Kate Bolduan.

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” said Edmund Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Darren Wilson’s words suggest a variation on Burke’s theme: To make cops love the communities they police, the communities they police ought to be lovely.

Burke further reminded us in 1790 that, “To love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” But what happens when those little platoons are not so little and not so lovely?

A country that is without a modicum of cultural cohesion and is, by D.C. design, comprised of ever-accreting, competing factions—this kind of country cannot be lovely in the Burkean sense. In fairness to law-enforcement, communities in America must be damn difficult to police.

Ultimately, thinking logically about crime and the criminals who commit it is likelier to lead to solutions than irrational thinking.

Repeat after me: It was not an inanimate object or an abstraction—“gun violence”—that murdered innocent cops and cub reporters, but malevolent men with murder on their minds and weapons in their hands.

Columnist Jack Kerwick’s reductio ad absurdum illustrates the absurdity of “gun violence” speak:

Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about ‘gas chamber violence,’ or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of ‘machete violence.’ Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to ‘rope violence.’ None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described—the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.

Let us speak, then, of “goon violence.” For to grasp the distinction between goons with moral agency, on the one hand, and inanimate guns with no such thing, on the other, is to come to grips with reality. (Of course, it would help a lot if stupid liberals quit their litany of lies about eternal, never-ending black oppression.)

We’ve covered the catalysts. Let us address the causes:

Guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay.

Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.

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Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.

From the pages of Orwell and 1984

By Wayne Madsen.

«Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible». These are the words from «1984», George Orwell’s fictional novel and eerily correct prognostication of future events from geopolitics to the loss of privacy and the rise of the surveillance state. Oceania fictionally represented the British Isles, North and South America, southern Africa, and Australasia. In Orwell’s world, Eurasia was comprised of Russia and Europe while another power, Eastasia, included China, Korea, and Japan.

Today, a modified form of the dystopian future world map of Orwell is becoming reality as Russia and China increasingly cooperate economically, politically, and militarily to ensure that the forces of Oceania – centered in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris – do not overrun Eurasia.

At last month’s third annual International Security Conference in Moscow, a conclave sponsored by the Russian Defense Ministry, Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov stated that Western-financed and organized «color revolutions», such as those employed twice in Ukraine and once in Georgia, represent a form of irregular warfare against Eurasia. Gerasimov’s statement about North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, which resemble Orwell’s Oceania, launching irregular warfare against Eurasia could have been torn from the pages of «1984». Gerasimov cited information warfare, economic sanctions, and support for «proxy criminal organizations» and extremist groups as part of the West’s irregular warfare construct directed against Eurasia.

Gerasimov also said that color revolutions were part and parcel of Western military strategy against Eurasia since the non-military tactics employed were often followed by military force to bring about regime change. This is now the case with the Ukrainian government’s NATO-supported military offensive against federalists in eastern Ukraine, as well as in NATO support for Islamist rebels battling against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Military intervention, including air attacks, was also employed by NATO after the Islamist uprising in eastern Libya that eventually forced Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from power.

Gerasimov’s comments about color revolutions was supported by none other than Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a non-profit think tank that often reflects the views of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department. Cordesman said color revolutions sponsored by the West were a new form of warfare against Russia and China.

Belarusian Defense Minister Yury Zhadobin cited the «godfather» of George Soros- and CIA-financed themed uprisings and revolutions, Gene Sharp, the director of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston as the prime motivator of the uprisings witnessed in Europe and the Middle East. The armed forces of Russia, China, and Belarus now consider the West’s support for regime change through color revolutions as being part of the military doctrines of the United States and NATO. The military planners in Moscow, Beijing, and Minsk also view Western private military contractors – mercenaries — such as the former Blackwater, now Academi, as being part of the West’s regime change scenario after the outbreak of color revolutions.

The reasons for the West’s color revolution and regime change project for Eurasia are clear. With Russia and China at the forefront of developing new Eurasian energy schemes involving natural gas and new transportation routes evoking memories of the old Silk Road, the West feels threatened by the emergence in Eurasia of a dynamic new market that could not only rival but eclipse the European Union and Washington’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The emergence of a new Eurasian identity has alarmed the political leaders of de facto Oceania. Eurasia places economic development and respect for traditions over what many in Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and other countries of the region see as a Western «culture» that emphasizes pop culture, homosexuality, destruction of social safety nets, disrespect for religion, destruction of the traditional family unit, and unbridled vulture capitalism that promotes draconian austerity.

The Moscow security conference met at about the same time that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) held in Shanghai. There, Xi emphasized that Asia has entered the 21st century at that the Cold War mentality should be abandoned. Observers from Japan and the United States looked on as Asian delegates roundly rejected President Barack Obama’s Cold War military «pivot to Asia» and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s revanchist imperial military buildup in east Asia. In many respects, the United States Pacific forces and Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea represent the militaristic «Eastasia» of «1984», an entity that was allied for a period of time with Oceania.

Not only was the «Power of Siberia» natural gas pipeline, which will begin pumping natural gas from Siberia to China in 2018, agreed upon in Shanghai but there are plans to restore the old Silk Road as a major trans-Eurasian highway that will link China to Europe via the trans-Siberian highway and Europe’s E-30 highway. Eventually, an A-class motor highway will link Amsterdam with Beijing via the Asian Highway Network. This network of modern highways will restore the ancient Silk Road of Asia and move goods and passengers throughout Eurasia and, in the process, build new infrastructures in the remotest parts of the Eurasian heartland. This prospect has the banking houses of Europe and America concerned since they will be locked out of the financial sweepstakes.

Eurasia’s leaders, from Putin and Xi, to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are well aware that the color revolutions that have wracked Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have been financed by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Foundation and that Soros’s hedge fund empire is nothing more than a front for the international House of Rothschild banking cartel. NATO and the Obama administration, which represent the interests of Soros and the Rothschilds, will stop at nothing to destroy the Eurasian initiative. The «Euromaidan» overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected a union with the European Union and appeared ready to forge ties with Eurasia, was part of the West’s (or «Oceania’s) first indirect military aggression against Eurasia.

Some Eurasian leaders are aware that the West is trying to derail the developing Eurasian Union. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed transforming CICA into a new Organization for Security and Development in Asia (OSDA), which would be the closest thing to a Eurasian counterpart to NATO. Stressing Eurasia’s rejection of Western «values», Nazarbayev stressed that OSDA would be built upon Asian «tradition and values». Nazarbayev appeared to be speaking for a number of Eurasian leaders in rejecting the lewd permissiveness of Western culture as witnessed by «Pussy Riot’s» and FEMEN’s displays of vulgarity and gratuitous nudity in places of religious worship in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries.

There is a new competitor to America’s version of Oceania now emerging in Orwell’s Eurasia. Halford John Mackinder’s «Heartland Theory», which was espoused in his book «The Geographical Pivot of History», postulated that the power that controlled Eurasia’s heartland between the Volga and Yangtze and the Arctic Sea and Himalayas would control the destiny of the world. If the Eurasian Union becomes a successful political and economic union, the United States, Britain, Western Europe, and Japan will be confined to a economically anemic and socially decadent coastal «Rimland» where the few remaining assets will be fought over by the hungry jackals of the banking houses of Wall Street, City of London, and Frankfurt. The outbreak of wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq are but the first shots of the impending war between «Oceania» and «Eurasia».