Race riots
The supposed Toledo race riot was pretty heinous. But check this out. Actual headline:
White Supremacists Riot in Toledo, Ohio
But what really happened:
Protesters at a white supremacists’ march threw rocks at police, vandalized vehicles and stores and cursed the mayor for allowing the event.
Mayor Jack Ford said when he and a local minister tried to calm the rioters Saturday, they were cursed and a masked gang member threatened to shoot him. At one point, the crowd reached 600 people, officials said.
[snip]
Ford blamed the rioting on gangs taking advantage of a volatile situation. He declared a state of emergency, set an 8 p.m. curfew through the weekend and asked the Highway Patrol for help.
Doesn’t sound to me like the white supremacists were the ones rioting. It seems the white supremacists got what they wanted. Malkin has a round up.
October 17th, 2005 at 10:47 am
I heard on glenn beck that the nazies (is that correct spelling) were gone when the police asked them to leave because they could not protect them anymore.
October 17th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
I wish I could find the blog where I saw it…but I read somewhere that there were also a significant number of the “anarchist communist “(or is it communist anarchist? And shouldn’t those guys heads explode from cognitive dissonance?) types present at the riots as well. You know these folks-the types at the WTO riots in Seattle a few years back.
Funny how there’s a trend of them being around when these things happen, and how the MSM never seems to notice.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
I’m sure it was just a simple typo…
“White Supremacists Riot in Toledo, Ohio”
should have been:
“White Supremacist’s Riot in Toledo, Ohio”
See, they just left off the apostrophe. They meant “riot” to be a noun, not a verb. It was just bad editing, no bias here. Nothing to see, move along.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
HL: There was quite a history of leftist-anarchism, from the early 1800’s until at least the 1930’s. I think one of the fundamentals of 19th century leftism, including anarchism, was that they held to a medieval misunderstanding of property. In Medieval Europe, nearly all significant wealth was real estate, it mostly belonged to noblemen, and they or their ancestors had usually acquired it by murdering the previous owners rather than by productive effort. Of that kind of property, it wasn’t too far out to say, “property is theft”. But the reason men could say that in many parts of 19th Century Europe and not be killed by the nearest privileged nobleman was that this concept of property was becoming obsolete as wealth in manufactured goods increased, and the landed nobilities’ power was draining away. Most Americans got the new concept that ordinary people could acquire property rights in the stuff they made, invented, and swapped their labor for. Those that failed to see that the new property rights were *earned* and *universal* became defenders of the Ancien Regime, Communists/Socialists, and Anarchists.
Along with this, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution brought such a visible increase in wealth that it was hard for some to see how people would use all the stuff factories could turn out. Maybe a few hours of work a week could earn what a medieval peasant would consider a comfortable living (two or even three whole suits of clothes per person, a heated hut with a roof that didn’t leak, hardly anyone dying of starvation…). For instance, a wealthy American factory-owner named Owens proposed a society that lived off child labor, and then everyone would retire by 25. How you persuaded the kiddies to work hard and give you the fruit of their labor was unspecified, and the communes Owens founded died from too little work and too much freeloading. It turned out that only religious fanatics like the Shakers could make a commune survive without having some strong man using medieval methods to encourage the “peasants” to do their work. (Of course, the Shaker’s aversion to reproduction eventually led to the end of their communes, but they did last a lifetime rather than falling apart in months.) Besides that, quel surprise, it turned out that most people wanted to work more and live above a basic subsistence level.
Others identified most human problems as arising from men having power over other men. Anarchists were the ones who thought they could avoid that somehow. Unfortunately, they got stuck in the “property is theft” paradigm or the idea that not only governments and gangs (when there’s a difference) wield excess power, but also that employers have too much power over employees (maybe true if you’re so poor you can’t survive long enough to find another job). So they wanted to abolish private property as well as the government that protected it. They split into many different groups over what came next, and in every case demonstrated the remarkable human ability to handle cognitive dissonance.
One branch was Guild Syndicalism; Ursula LeGuin described such a society in The Left Hand of Darkness. The main idea here seems to be that by deriving your government from labor unions and not calling it “government”, it’s no longer a government. But it’s still a huge societal organ that tries to maintain a monopoly of force, tells you where you can work, and grabs your stuff and gives it to other people whenever it seems convenient to the people in charge.
Then there were pure anarchists, who really did want to get rid of all rules and everything resembling a government. Their theory seemed to be that without property, rules, and the other trappings of civilized government, people would grow up naturally nice and ready to help each other voluntarily. Obviously, they never baby-sat a two year old.
October 17th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
The Shakers were very much a part of that tradition. Celibacy was the biggest, most immediate reason for their collapse, but it wasn’t their only bad idea.
The Shakers didn’t believe in individual property. When you joined you gave up your personal property, and couldn’t amass any personal wealth.
They also didn’t believe in family. The Shaker “brothers” and “sisters” were relatives only in the eyes of God. When a family joined the Shakers they were no longer considered family. Husbands and wives and parents and children no longer had a special relationship to one another. Everyone was supposed to be equal to one another, and family ties would have disrupted that.