What Jack London Had to Say About Looters

The video footage of looting in Houston following Hurricane Harvey is much like the looting we’ve seen in other parts of the country: shattered shop windows, people walking away with flat screen TVs or shoes or whatever, and the police often nowhere to be found. Oh, and infuriating.
Here’s an example:

What’s different about this looting footage is that it follows a natural disaster, not the usual riot looting representing whatever statement is to be made by pillaging and torching a neighborhood store. As Americans, we pride ourselves on coming together during natural disasters. We’ve proven to be a resilient and generous people. Looting strikes at our very core, tearing a hole in our social fabric.

The scenes in Houston reminded me of an excerpt from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912). Well known for The Call of the Wild and White Fang, it may come as a surprise to learn that he also wrote about dystopian futures -- actually, quite a few of them.

In The Scarlet Plague, London writes about a world nearly rid of humanity as the result of a pestilence that caused nearly everyone to die rapid, painful deaths. Naturally, while fleeing the city the protagonist of the story stumbles upon criminals who are raping and pillaging as society succumbs to the “scarlet plague”. London’s description of looters in 1912 powerfully identifies the sense of betrayal members of society feel when we look upon them:

“I went away hastily, down a cross-street, and at the first corner I saw another tragedy. Two men of the working class had caught a man and a woman with two children, and were robbing them. I knew the man by sight though I had never been introduced to him. He was a poet whose verses I had long admired. Yet I did not go to his help, for at the moment I came upon the scene there was a pistol shot, and I saw him sinking to the ground. The woman screamed, and she was felled with a fist-blow by one of the brutes. I cried out threateningly, whereupon they discharged their pistols at me and I ran away around the corner. Here I was blocked by an advancing conflagration. The buildings on both sides were burning, and the street was filled with smoke and flame. From somewhere in that murk came a woman's voice calling shrilly for help. But I did not go to her. A man's heart turned to iron amid such scenes, and one heard all too many appeals for help.

Returning to the corner, I found the two robbers were gone. The poet and his wife lay dead on the pavement. It was a shocking sight. The two children had vanished—whither I could not tell. And I knew, now, why it was that the fleeing persons I encountered slipped along so furtively and with such white faces. In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as well. They inflamed themselves with strong drink and committed a thousand atrocities, quarreling and killing one another in the general madness. One group of workingmen I saw, of the better sort, who. had banded together, and, with their women and children in their midst, the sick and aged in litters and being carried, and with a number of horses pulling a truck-load of provisions, they were fighting their way out of the city. They made a fine spectacle as they came down the street through the drifting smoke, though they nearly shot me when I first appeared in their path. As they went by, one of their leaders shouted out to me in apologetic explanation. He said they were killing the robbers and looters on sight, and that they had thus banded together as the only means by which to escape the prowlers.”

While the Houston flood is nowhere near as catastrophic as London’s “scarlet plague”, his description of looters and robbers in the midst of a natural disaster probably seems quite fitting, harsh though it may be, to a lot of people. Not long ago, looting was considered such a betrayal of our common humanity and our "social contract" that many Americans believed it was justified to shoot looters on sight. Many probably still think so.

That looting wounds us deeply, there can be no doubt. But what of the looters? Many are probably just out for themselves, caught up in the moment. Others, though, may try to justify their actions as a way of striking back at the society they feel betrayed them first. We’ll likely never know the looters’ reasons. If we could find out, should we even care to do so? The people in the video above aren't stealing food or necessities, they're stealing TVs. Is there room to ask what went wrong in a person’s moral and civic upbringing that he would be willing to pillage his neighbor during a time of crisis? Does it reveal a deep divide festering within our society that only needs an excuse to strike out? Or is it merely an opportunistic act of greed? Either way, is there anything meaningful that can actually be done?

This post Houston: What Jack London Had to Say About Looters was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Devin Foley.

Hump Day Hunnies

The Monumental Lie

The following is excerpted from David Kupelian’s culture-war best-seller, “The Marketing of Evil,” a chapter titled “Buying the Big Lie.”

“Get your hands off our God!” shouted one indignant protester.

Others, urging him to stay calm, knelt on the ground and prayed. Still other demonstrators took to chanting, “Put it back! Put it back! Put it back! …”

Prominent national voices wailed in indignation. Dismayed and angered Americans unleashed a fusillade of letters, faxes and e-mails to politicians and newspapers and each other. Evangelical leader Dr. James Dobson, who had urged his 3 million radio listeners to head to Montgomery, Alabama, in a show of support, fervently warned that America was witnessing a campaign “to remove every vestige of faith or reverence for God from the public square.”

But all the agonized protests were to no avail.

The spectacular 5,300-pound monument of the Ten Commandments, installed in the courthouse’s rotunda by then-Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy O. Moore, was being kicked out.
It took little more than an hour for three workers and a security guard to hoist the washing machine-sized granite cube onto a dolly and scoot it out of sight of television cameras to an undisclosed location – and out of public view.

To top off the spectacle, Moore was then suspended from his position as the state’s top jurist for defying the mandate of U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, who had ordered the monument’s removal.

Exactly why, you ask, did the 10 Commandments – the spiritual basis for America’s laws, and which are carved into the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. – have to be banished from the Alabama Judicial Building?

You see, Judge Thompson had determined that the monument violated the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause,” which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

“Congress shall make no law.” Thompson never did explain how a granite display of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse constituted Congress “making a law.”

But that didn’t matter. Somehow, though the vast majority of Americans are repulsed by it, a virulent and increasingly pervasive legal theory of the First Amendment holds that Christmas manger scenes must be eliminated from public places, commencement exercises conducted without a prayer, and kids must refrain from saying “Merry Christmas” at school.

How far, millions wonder aloud, can this judicial assault on the nation’s religious and traditional values – a jihad waged most prominently and notoriously by the American Civil Liberties Union – possibly go before someone stops it?

The truth is, the notion of “the constitutional separation of church and state” that underlies all of these cases, indeed, that underlies the legal transformation of America into a de facto atheistic, secular state, is a lie.

It is one of the truly outrageous, malignant – and provably false – “Big Lies” of our generation.

Think back. If you attended public school in the last few decades, you probably remember being taught that America was founded by a lively assortment of slave-holding Christians, deists and free-thinkers who insisted on instituting a “constitutional separation of church and state.” Thomas Jefferson, you were reminded, had famously affirmed this “wall of separation” in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.

You could be forgiven for inferring from all this “education” that, back in the good old days at least, government scrupulously kept religion at arm’s length.

But that would be a truly deluded secularist fantasy. In reality, throughout the late 1700s – the era of the Revolutionary War and the subsequent adoption of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment – Christianity permeated America from top to bottom.

• In 1777, with the Revolutionary War threatening the flow of Bibles from England, Congress approved the purchase of 20,000 Bibles from Holland to give to the states.
• No fewer than six of the 13 original states had official, state-supported churches – “establishments of religion”! I’ll bet you didn’t know that. In fact, these states – Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and South Carolina – refused to ratify the new national Constitution unless it included a prohibition of federal meddling with their existing state “establishments of religion.”
• Still other states required those seeking elected office to be Christians.
• The Continental Congress routinely designated days of “fasting and prayer” and other religious observances, appointed government-funded chaplains and appropriated money to pay for Christian missionaries to convert the Indians.

In other words, the original American government under the Constitution would have driven the American Civil Liberties Union stark, raving mad.

Silence U Part 2: What Has Yale Become?

Charles Barkley on Confederate Statues

My fellow blacks, please: Stop wasting time on statues and solve today's problems | Herman Cain

This is insane.

Atlanta’s Bishop Jerome Dukes was quoted widely in the media last week explaining why he thinks we should be spending time protesting statues of people from the Confederacy, and ultimately having them taken down.

He explains that some of our nation’s founders may have seemed like visionaries and trailblazers to some, but to African-Americans all that matters is that they owned hundreds of slaves.

Let’s talk about that.

I am an African-American. I hate the institution of slavery as much as Bishop Dukes does. But I have noticed something he seems to have missed. I am not a slave! And neither is he.

Slavery was an awful historical injustice, and it helped set in motion many of the problems the black community faces today. But it is not the problem we need to solve today. Those problems are poverty, illiteracy, drugs, crime and violence.

Tearing down statues doesn’t solve any of those problems, and solving those problems is what we need to be focused on.

It might create a problem, though. Tearing down statues that represent history is like pretending history didn’t happen. It did. And not everything that results from history is something you will like. We need to remember all of it, even (and perhaps especially) the parts that bother us because this is what we learn from.

Now we’re hearing that it’s not enough to tear down statues of Confederate soldiers, because having fought for the slave-owning Confederacy is not the only sin that needs to be erased from history. Now some want to tear down memorials to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson too, because they also owned slaves.

Tell you what: Why don’t you erase from history every reference to a person who had a serious character flaw? Do that and you’ll have very short history books. You’ll be able to get through a semester in a day or two. There’d be almost nothing you would be able to teach.

Or we could just tell the whole story. Yes, these men had an amazing vision and used it to create the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Yes, they gave us a political system that has protected freedom and prosperity like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Also, they were participants in an institution that was evil, if very common for wealthy men of their day. They might have been better men if they had rid the world of that institution, and they did not do that. But they did create the political system through which it would be eliminated less than a century later. That is not nothing.

So how do you regard them? As heroes or as villains? It’s the wrong question. The right question is how to ensure that people know the full story. Maybe one of the things we can learn from this is that history has offered us very few people who had no character flaws at all. I can think of only one, probably the same one you’re thinking of.

But flawed men and women have given us quite a world, and we should know as much about it as we can. Maybe the lessons they teach can even help us solve the problems we face today.

Or we can waste our time tearing down statues, which solves nothing, nor does it make history go away. It just makes us ignorant of it.

Get your copy of Herman Cain’s new book, The Right Problems Solutions, here!


My fellow blacks, please: Stop wasting time on statues and solve today's problems | Herman Cain

Friday Funnies

Hump Day Hunnies

Orwell Was Never More Correct

By James Longstreet

 

As George Orwell put it in 1984, "those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future." 

And who controls the "present"?  It is the media, and less apparent, those who control high school history books and university history departments.  Thus, the past may be purposely contorted, especially the history of the United States of America.  Editing via omission is the subliminal tack.  Sadly, it doesn't take long to misinform an entire generation.  But why would there be those who would delight in that venture, the venture of "controlling the past"?

The Founding Fathers have been characterized as slaveholding racists rather than brilliant minds schooled in the world history of governments and the creators of the greatest experiment in self-governance the world has ever known.  The War between the States was "only about slavery," we are told, despite many other complications, regional issues, constitutional considerations, and official resolutions by Congress to the contrary.

The use of concocted historical misrepresentations to create the current frictions between those misinformed and the facts of history becomes inevitable.  We are at that point.  And what could be more inflammatory than past racial injustices?

Read more:
Blog: Orwell was never more correct

The Ever Expanding Definitions of Racism

Armando Simon wrote an article published at American Thinker discussing the continuing expansion of things that are being labeled as racist. You can read the entire article here. The following is the list of things cited in the piece with links. Check them out and hope your head doesn't explode.

• Museums are now racist, according to Professors Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, from Texas A&M University – the same university that has a racist professor who called for the killing of white people.  
• The seeking of objective truth and facts is now...racist.
• Using one's hands while speaking is now racist.  
• Mathematics is now racist.
• The OK sign is racist   
• Park benches are now racist.  
• White cooks selling burritos is now racist.  (It remains to be seen whether whites eating Mexican food at Mexican restaurants will also be considered racist.)
• University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond has declared that white marble, used in sculpture, is racist.
• Using mathematics in art, such as the Fibonacci ratio, is racist, and used by Nazis.  
• Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental College in California (again), called for the banning of fraternities having white members but retaining black fraternities.  
• According to the U.K.'s Oxford University's Equality and Diversity Unit, not making eye contact is racism and can cause "mental ill-health."
• Truth is racism.  
• The painting of a black person by a white artist is now racist.  
• Certain hairstyles are now racist.   
• Green frogs are now racist.  
• Plastic wrap is either racist or sexist (not sure which).
• Since incidents of racism in college are practically nonexistent, leftist students or professors fake them in order to get sympathy for their Cause.  Just look here and here.  
• Asao B. Inoue, who teaches writing at University of Washington, Tacoma, has declared grammar racist.
• Psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University has likewise condemned the use of grammar as oppressively racist.
• Homeschooling is now racist.

Friday Funnies

Tucker Carlson Reacts To Trump’s Press Conference

Hump Day Hunnies

How Many Americans Know Where North Korea Is?

Is This Ad Racist?

Is this ad racist or is it merely deepening the racial divide?

Quiz Show (Bible Contradictions)

Donald Trump Interview On North Korea (1999)

Friday Funnies