Paul Craig Roberts
Have you noticed what I have noticed—that of the trillions of words in print and on the air, there are precious few that are not garbage. Among the few commentators I read is The Saker. He sees the US in systemic collapse—https://thesaker.is/the-systemic-collapse-of-the-us-society-has-begun/ .
Other commentators who I read, such as Dmitry Orlov, see the collapse as economic in nature. As my readers know, I have a lot of my own to add to that analysis, principally the offshoring of US jobs and the financialization of the economy stressed by my colleague Michael Hudson. But I see the cause of our society’s collapse as far more fundamental and dangerous. It is a collapse brought on by the teaching of a false history that engenders race hatred in a multicultural society. It is impossible for a multi-racial society to exist on a foundation of racial hatred. But that is what white liberals have made
our foundation. If you are so uninformed as to doubt my statement of undeniable fact, consult the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
The teaching of race hatred is ubiquitous in education, media, and the Democrat Party. The civil rights movement of the 1960s has degenerated into the fomenting of race hatred. White people are alleged to suppress black Americans because of white racial hatred of blacks. As Fred Reed makes clear, this allegation makes no sense, but it is institutionalized as an unchallengable fact in America:
“In truth, America has made the greatest effort ever essayed by one race to uplift another. Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court unanimously ended segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by employers illegal because blacks scored poorly, then found “affirmative action”—racial discrimination against whites—legal (hardly oppression of blacks, this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white President sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has been an enormous flow of charity to blacks: Section Eight Housing, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. We now have free breakfasts for black children, then free lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In aggregate they resemble a distributed guaranteed basic income.” ( https://www.unz.com/freed/a-country-not-salvageable/ )
Americans are taught to regard truthful statements such as Reed’s as apologies for white racism. Reed’s words are taken as proof that he is a racist. If he were not a racist, he would not be defending whites. He would be denouncing them.
Like Marjorie Cohn.
I admire Marjorie Cohn for her lifelong defense of civil liberty. She understands that civil liberty requires accountability of government authorities. She and I often wrote about the same cases of gratuitous police violence against citizens. But over time I noticed that her concerns were limited to police violence against blacks, despite the fact that police shot to death twice as many whites as blacks. I attributed her one-sided interest to the fact that police violence against white people is only reported locally. It doesn’t become a national issue kept alive for days by the media. In contrast, police violence against blacks is instantly a national issue in the news for days. The media intentionally makes it seem that police only kill black people. That makes it racist. If the media reports that police kill white peope at twice the rate, how is that racist? The facts are manipulated in order to serve the propaganda, epitomized in the New York Times’ 1619 Project, that the US is based on white racism.
A racially diverse multicultural society cannot survive if one race is taught hatred of another. If the hated race is inculcated with guilt over its alleged racism, it cannot defend itself and is drained of confidence. The absence of confidence invites attacks and dispossession.
The denunciation of white people by white people has become extreme. Majorie Cohn exemplifies it. She writes that George Floyd was tortured to death in “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. . . . More than 400 years after the first Africans were kidnapped, forcibly brought to this country and enslaved, White supremacy continues to infect our society” ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55269.htm ). This is abject nonsense a hundred times over.
Black slavery originated in the slave wars conducted by the black king of Dahomey. Dahomey became a major center in the Atlantic Slave Trade until 1852 when the white British blockaded black Dahomey to stop the black slave trade. The black king sold his surplus black slaves first to Arabs and then to Europeans who colonized North and South America. Dahomey existed and expanded on the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1600 until 1904 when the French conquered the black kingdom and made it a part of the French colonial empire.
It is dishonest and irresponsible for Cohn to imply that whites kidnapped blacks and brought them to America when the clear fact is that blacks captured one another in slave wars in which Dahomey was the dominant power. Blacks were sold by blacks as slaves to Arabs and Europeans.
It is dishonest and irresponsible for Cohen to attribute George Floyd’s death to police torture and lynching. The coroner’s report shows that Floyd’s blood tests reveal a concentration of Fentanyl, a dangerous opioid, three times the fatal dose. The autopsy report states that “no life-threatening injuries identified” from police restraint. The knee hold is not a choke hold. It is a restraint technique taught in police training. It does not impede breathing. Floyd complained of breathing difficulty prior to being put under restraint. The autopsy report finds no neck injuries: “No areas of subcutaneous hemorrhage, soft tissue contusion, or other occult injury are found in the posterior neck, right and left lateral neck.” https://www.scribd.com/document/464269559/George-Floyd-Autopsy-FULL-REPORT#from_embed?campaign=VigLink&ad_group=xxc1xx&source=hp_affiliate&medium=affiliate
A fatal Fentanyl overdose results in breathing problems and death by cardiopulmonary arrest, which is what the autopsy report says killed Floyd. The word “homicide” is not in the report.
The title of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office Autopsy Report— “Cardiopulmonary Arrest Complicating Law Enforcement Subdual, Restraint, and Neck Compession” — has been used by dishonest media to claim that Floyd’s death was a homicide caused by neck compression. If the medical examiner had been aware of the emotional situation, he might have taken more care in titling his report. What the report says, and what the string of words tries to convey, is that Floyd’s arrest and restraint was complicated by Floyd’s cardiopulmonary failure due to fatal drug overdose. The examination of Floyd’s neck finds no damage from the knee restraint. A link to the report is provided above. You can read it for yourself, something that the white media and Marjorie Cohn should have done before they went on their uninformed emotional rants.
The disinformation about Floyd’s death has been so widely planted by the white media into the minds of all peoples worldwide that it will be impossible for the truth to come out. Floyd’s alleged family and the hired opportunistic attorneys and private “medical authorities,” see the opportunity for a multi-million dollar civil suit settlement and put out a report attributing Floyd’s death to homicide.
USA Today bought it hook, line, and sinker, and ran this headline: “Medical examiner and family-commissioned autopsy agree: George Floyd’s death was a homicide.” That is not what the medical examiner’s report said, and in the body of the USA Today report the false headline is contradicted: “That autopsy [Hennepin County Medical Examiner Autopsy Report] found “no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation,” according to the document, which suggests Floyd’s existing health conditions – coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease – combined with being restrained by police and any “potential intoxicants in his system” contributed to his death.” ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55269.htm ) The USA Today reporters who wrote this report refer to the official toxicology report that found massive amounts of drugs in Floyd’s blood as “potential intoxicants” that might have contributed to Floyd’s death! And the presstitutes misrepresent the medical examiner’s report by claiming that police restraint contributed to his death. No such information is in the medical examiner’s report.
After admitting the fact of the presence of opioids, the USA Today reporters gloss over it as a “potential” contributor to Floyd’s death and proceed with their function as advocates for the attorneys chasing the money. One wonders how much they were paid for the story that was planted on them. Such is the sorry state of journalism in the US today. American journalism is totally devoid of integrity. Nothing the media reports can be trusted.
The total irresponsibility of the media, white liberal elites, Democrat Party, and Marjorie Cohn among numerous other uninformed and emotional commentators have given us multi-city rioting, looting, and destruction of private property and public monuments, amounting to an extremely high cost in dollars and in relations between the races. More black Americans than ever are now convinced that White Supremacist America means to do them in, and the entirety of white liberal elite America agrees with them. Asians with businesses in black areas and ordinary white Americans, not the effete liberal elites, concerned about their demonization and declining economic opportunities have been convinced that black Americans are lawless savages from whom the greater the distance kept the better.
The police officer, Derek Chauvin, will not get a fair trial. He has already been convicted in the media. There is no one to serve on his jury who isn’t already convinced that he murdered George Floyd. Even if the medical examiner is brave enough to stick with the autopsy report in the courtroom, knowing that he will be demonized in the media as a racist covering up a police murder of a black, and even if the jury is able to understand that Floyd died from opioid overdose, not from police restraint, no jury will be willing to take the abuse heaped on its members if they find Chauvin not guilty. Even Chavin’s wife has left him and is changing her name to protect herself. No “stand by your man” here.
The autopsy report provides no basis for charges against Chauvin. Chauvin’s only hope is that on the basis of the evidence in the report cooler heads will prevail, and the murder charge against him will be dropped. But that can’t happen either. The state governor and attorney general have promised “to bring to bear all the resources necessary to achieve justice in this case.” Justice means Chauvin’s conviction. Politically, the politicians can’t back down from this despite the evidence. Activists are pressuring the county attorney to indict the other police officers on the scene as accessories to the crime. In other words, it is taken for granted that the police committed a crime.
Art students are painting a mural that elevates George Floyd, a five-time felon, drug addict, and misogynist abuser of women to the status of Martin Luther King. One of the art students says that “we can now say for a fact that officer Chauvin’s actions asphyxiating (Floyd) killed him” (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-findings-released-monday/5307185002/ ).
That is not a fact. It is a lie, and Chauvin will be its victim along with race relations in America.
The United States is paying the price for the use of denunciation as the means of achieving reforms. Denunciation was the tool used for every reform—working conditions, child labor laws, women’s rights, civil rights, environmental protection. An enemy was identified and demonized until opposition to the reform faded. It was through denunciation that the white liberal progressives “reformed” society, the South, and the workplace.
Denunciation was also the tool of revolutionaries. Marx and Lenin well understood the power of denunciation and used it extravagently. Marx wrote that “criticism is a weapon. Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy. Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential task, denunciation.”
Lenin saw it the same way. He wrote that his choice of words was “calculated to evoke in the reader hatred, aversion, and contempt, calculated not to convince but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth. Against such political enemies I then conducted a fight of extermination” (Paul Craig Roberts and Matthew A. Stephenson, Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis,1973, p. 84). Sounds like CNN, MSNBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post and the rest of the presstitutes.
The reliance of both reformers and revolutionaries on denunciation instead of on good will builds cracks into society’s foundation that eventually results in societal collapse. It is precisely such a collapse that the United States is currently undergoing.
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