Ayn Rand described racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”. However, she wouldn’t and neither would most people with any measure of morality would describe a verbal expression of racism as being worse than murdering another.
A radical comedy today might parody modern “anti-racism” to a ridiculous absurdity, defending people from claims of racism over defending people from murder.
Reality is not funny though.
British journalist Ed West wrote a few weeks ago on his Substack an article called “Moloch must be Fed”.
He recalls the following instances…
Salman Abedi
“One evening in May 2017 a security guard in Manchester was alerted to something that didn’t look right: a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a rucksack was seen by a member of the public approaching a pop concert filled with teenage girls. The man looked ‘dodgy’, in the words of the 18-year-old guard, who later recalled his moment of agonising: ‘I felt unsure about what to do. It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race. Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.”
Valdo Calocane
“had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university”
Axel Rudakubana
“At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread.”.. about him, as he “had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’.”
Rudakubana went on to murder three girls, aged nine, seven and six at a dance workshop for girls aged six to eleven in Southport.
The story about Henry Nowak is giving cause for concern among many in the UK about the priorities of policing. The criminal justice system’s first priority should be to protect the public from violence. The Daily Telegraph has published the sentencing notes for Nowak's murderer and the background to the case.
Nowak called out to Vikrum Digwa, and asked if he was a “bad man”, and filmed Digwa on his phone. Digwa, a Sikh, alleges his turban was knocked off by Nowak. Digwa stabbed Nowak four times and his face was slashed. One of the stabbings proved fatal. Digwa and his brother filmed Nowak escaping, scaling a fence before landing on a car and falling to the ground, where he bled to death. By then the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary had arrived. Digwa’s father was helping keep Nowak upright, but Digwa had told the police that Nowak had racially abused him.
The teenager is then heard shouting in a hoarse voice “I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance”.
Officers can then be heard asking Digwa for his version of events, before dragging Henry across the gravel while saying: “Let’s get you out of there, shall we?”
When the university student again told them he had been stabbed, the officer responded: “I don’t think you have, mate.”
Henry is then placed in handcuffs while repeatedly telling officers: “I can’t breathe.”
With the teenager in handcuffs, a female officer asks Henry, “where do you think you’ve been stabbed?” before saying to her colleague, “we have to check, don’t we”.
The near-three-minute footage ends with the arresting officer asking for Henry’s name, before reading him his rights.
At this point, the female officer seems to realise his deteriorating condition and calls an ambulance, noting that “his pupils aren’t even reacting”.
Nowak bled to death in handcuffs, because police were more concerned about Digwa’s claim of racism, than Nowak actually having been stabbed.
Nowak calling “I can’t breathe” has shades of another event we all know, although there are multiple differences in the contexts, the primary point remained – the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary prioritised “anti-racism” over a murder.
Of course, the police were, in fact racist. It prioritised the feelings of one man who was hardly scratched over another bleeding to death, because of racism.
Many on the left in particular wonder why politicians they deem “far right” are getting popular appeal. I can’t imagine how blind they might be when these instances are happening, time and time again. The people who want to protect others, like the security guard, the teacher and most police, mean to do well. They are undermined by a philosophy, which is advanced by academia, accepted by much of the media, absorbed by gateway professional associations and implemented by “professionals” and it is all facilitated by politicians.
It’s a repeat story that could be a parody of a lunatic political philosophy if put into practice, if it weren’t a parody and hadn’t been put into practice. It is the application of today’s melding of various post-modernist philosophical movements into politics and into law and social/cultural practice. It combines Constructivism (which posits that there is no such thing as “objective truth” but rather reality is constructed by people as part of social processes, interests and beliefs), Structuralism (which posits that human behaviour can be understood through structures and systems within which they operate, rather than the specific behaviour itself and Critical Theory (which posits that injustice exists in current power structures which exist primarily to benefit and sustain those with power, who are deemed to be members of groups that created or succeed the most in those structures).
As with most philosophical movements, there is some truth in all of them in different contexts. However, the culmination of all of this applied consistently is that identical behaviour by two separate people is interpreted differently according to each person’s background and deemed level of privilege or disadvantage within the “system” they are living. Critical theory has little time for Common Law justice systems which treat individuals as free agents (unless proven otherwise) who, if they act to infringe upon the basic rights of other free agents, should be subject to judgment and punishment according to what they did and the harm they caused. For example, while there may be mitigating circumstances in specific situations (e.g. self-defence), murder is murder.
Objectivists, rationalists, classical liberals and other modernists regard racism as a pre-modernist view of humanity. The idea that human beings should be judged based on their inherited characteristics rather than their behaviour, is a legacy of pre-modernity. Race or ethnicity is not determinative of unjust behaviour, and especially not determinative of justifying injustice against that person. Awareness of this grew enormously in the aftermath of World War Two, the Holocaust, the legacy of Japanese militarism and subsequently decolonisation of much of the world, and the Civil Rights movement in the USA have made people aware of the need to treat people as they are, not for what they are.
In almost all societies deliberately killing another person, especially a child, is seen as the most morally depraved and injust act that can be committed. Yet in the UK today, there is a growing number of incidents whereby people, when judging whether to act to protect others from murder, have chosen to act based on another concern – is my action going to be seen as racist?
