The Answer To Race Riots Is Ruthless Coercion. What Is America Waiting For?
08/16/2014
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The Democratic governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, announced late Saturday a state of emergency and a curfew in Ferguson. This obviously is an attempt to repair his disastrous earlier decision to order local and county police to stand down and to put the area under the symbolic overall control of a black highway patrol captain, Ron Johnson, (shown below marching with masked demonstrators), which inevitably emboldened more violence and looting Friday night.

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Some of the people Johnson is marching with are masked, and wearing the colors of the Bloods.

But at the same chaotic press conference, Captain Johnson made clear that Nixon’s mistake is not really being reversed:

Johnson…said law enforcement would not be heavy-handed in enforcing the curfew.

"We won't enforce it with trucks, we won't enforce it with tear gas," he said.

The fragile peace shattered in Ferguson earlier in the day when looters again targeted neighborhood businesses while law enforcement in riot gear largely looked on without intervening.

[Missouri governor imposes curfew in Ferguson, declares emergency, by Ralph Ellis, Jason, Hanna and Shimon Prokupecz, CNN.com, August 16, 2014. Emphasis added].

There has to be a limit to how much there is to steal in a poor community like Ferguson and to how many nights its young men want to spend roaming the streets (especially when it rains, as it began to do on in Ferguson Saturday morning).

So it’s possible Nixon and Johnson may get lucky and things will just calm down.

But they will flare up again—quite possibly if and when the local authorities dare not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer involved—particularly because the Left is obviously gearing up to use this type of discontent as an excuse to launch more social engineering drives to seek out and destroy America’s remaining whitopias. (See Ferguson Is a Microcosm of Our Racially—and Politically—Polarized Country| In the St. Louis suburb, the white ruling class has created de facto apartheid, by Brian Beutler, New Republic, August 16, 2014 [note comment thread!]; Around St. Louis, a Circle of Rage, by Tanzina Vega and John Eligon, New York Times, Aug. 16, 2014)

So here are some pointers to consider when this racial melodrama is replayed—either in Ferguson in the next few days or a similar town disturbingly near you in the future:

  • It’s a scam.

Violence is absolutely endemic in minority America, most of it directed against minorities. Even riots aren’t uncommon—here’s a completely forgotten example in Cincinnati in 2001. Violence only becomes news, as Steve Sailer has documented, (see here and here and here) when it serves the purposes of the increasingly Cultural Marxist Democratic Party and its Main Stream Media auxiliary. Of course, black on white violence, although quantitatively far greater than white on black violence, does not serve that purpose, so it suppressed with amazing chutzpah.

  • The Answer To Rioting Is: RUTHLESS COERCION!

Get that?

Contrary to Jonah Goldberg in his August 16 Ferguson Agonistes in National Review (which seems to be having a particularly bad time with its peasants on this issue), I don’t think “rioting is almost never justified” (my emphasis).

I think it’s never justified.

In other words, what Governor Nixon and Captain Johnson are doing, to the usual MSM applause, is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. They should meet any sign of rioting with ruthless coercion:

The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.

That was the late Eugene Methvin…writing in the pre-purge National Review (June 10, 1991).

Personally, my sympathies, like those of most fair-minded Americans, are entirely with Police Officer Wilson (who is clearly going to be legally lynched like the Rodney King cops and who should probably flee the country).

But his guilt or innocence is completely irrelevant here. There is no right to riot—period.

(I am informed, to my surprise, that current law enforcement doctrine in the wake of the Los Angeles riots is precisely to suppress incipient riots in the way Methvin describes—which the Ferguson police did not. Of course, this is exactly the opposite of the conventional MSM account of what happened there. Surprise!).

  • What about an apology from black community leaders?

Yo (I believe the expression is) Al Sharpton! Jesse Jackson?! Why aren’t you denouncing the destruction of (often, as it happens, black) property that was in no conceivable way related to Michael Brown’s death? (Regardless of his criminal record).

Recently, the black murderers of five young whites in a case that VDARE.com has been tracking—since 2001!—as “The Wichita Horror” had their death penalties overturned on an absurd legalistic technicality.

These murders were infinitely more atrocious than anything that happened to Michael Brown.

Yet there are no riots. (Nor was there even any national MSM coverage.)

Why the contrast?

And this is just one of many black-on-white atrocities. Instapundit noted that a story about the horrific murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom was trending today on the Knoxville News-Sentinel but that no one knew why. One of his commenters asked why that hadn’t produced riots.

For that matter, why don’t they denounce systematic disproportionate black criminality?

  • Where is the GOP?

A friend of VDARE.com writes to say:

“A quick check of Missouri and federal law by anyone with even a 6th grade education would show a huge over-reach by the governor. There is NO basis for his actions and no legal justification for removal of local authority.”

Even on this legal point, I see no sign that anyone in the Missouri GOP (full of lawyers) has protested Governor Nixon’s actions—or, indeed, said anything at all.

In 2012, the useless Mitt Romney carried Missouri 56%-42%, with 65% of the white vote, which comprised 78% of the total. (Source: CNN Exit polls)

The question is: why?

 

Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.

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