{"id":280,"date":"2020-06-01T01:58:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T22:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/only-an-intellectual-could-justify-these-riots-opinionnews\/"},"modified":"2020-06-01T01:58:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T22:58:00","slug":"only-an-intellectual-could-justify-these-riots-opinionnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/only-an-intellectual-could-justify-these-riots-opinionnews\/","title":{"rendered":"#Only an intellectual could \u2018justify\u2019 these riots #OpinionNews"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Only an intellectual could \u2018justify\u2019 these riots<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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May 31, 2020 |<\/span> 6:58pm <\/p>\n

\n Enlarge Image<\/p>\n

\"A<\/img>
\n A protester carries a US flag upside down, a sign of distress, next to a burning building in Minneapolis. <\/span>
\n AP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\n George Orwell\u2019s timeless admonition, \u201cSome ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them,\u201d has been given new life by the desperate efforts of pundits, scholars and Twitter<\/a> blue-checks to defend the violence, looting, disorder and general<\/a> monstrousness that have overtaken America\u2019s cities.<\/p>\n

The glorification of mob violence and petty criminality that was one of the disgraceful hallmarks of bien-pensant thinking throughout the 20th century resonates through every tweet, \u00adevery deep TV observation and every piece of writing that casts the coast-to-coast destruction and anarchy in a positive light.<\/p>\n

A Northwestern University journalism professor named Steven Thrasher took to Slate to offer this analysis: \u201cThe destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable \u00adresponse to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we\u2019ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory. Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party.\u2009.\u2009. .\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure, that\u2019s why \u201cprotesters\u201d in New York City set NYPD vans on fire. It\u2019s why a \u201cprotester\u201d in Seattle was seen carrying a strawberry cheesecake from a Cheesecake Factory \u2014 as she sported a mask to protect herself from contagion.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s why Somali immigrants who spent their life savings opening restaurants in Minneapolis lost everything in a single night \u2014 and even as they began to clean up the debris from a business that will likely never reopen, told Minnesota Public Radio that they, too, felt grief and anger at the killing of \u00adGeorge Floyd.<\/p>\n

Thrasher\u2019s effort to turn an act of wanton arson and wholesale destruction into an episode of \u201cSchoolhouse Police State Rock\u201d follows directly in the path of Norman Mailer\u2019s groundbreaking 1957 essay \u201cThe White \u00adNegro,\u201d whose purpose was to infuse rank inner-city delinquency with social significance:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong 18-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper . . . Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man, but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and \u00adintroduces a dangerous element into one\u2019s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference between the hoodlums of Mailer\u2019s day and the antifa \u201cinsurgents\u201d of Thrasher\u2019s and our time is that our insurgents are fully aware there is a phalanx of media and academic apologists at the ready, who will not only excuse their behavior but laud it. This both provides them internal psychological cover for the unleashing of the evils inside them and a vocabulary to explain away the evils they release.<\/p>\n

\"Business<\/img>
Business owners from Mercado Central, a cooperative of largely Latino-owned businesses on Lake Street, nail pieces of white cloth onto the boarded-up building as a symbol of peace and a possible deterrent against rioting, in Minneapolis.<\/span>AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Making excuses for rampant violence has been a reflexive habit among the cognoscenti in the United States since the 1960s, from the Leonard Bernsteins hosting the Black Panthers at the elegant party \u00adimmortalized by Tom Wolfe in his essay \u201cRadical Chic\u201d to the aftermath of the 1977 New York City blackout, when the looting of entire neighborhoods causing more than $1 billion in damage ($4.5 billion in today\u2019s dollars) was justified in the op-ed columns of The New York Times as a consequence of (wait for it) a cutback in city-provided teenage summer employment.<\/p>\n

Ideological partisans of all strip<\/a>es face this temptation every day \u2014 the temptation to believe that those who seem to be making the same argument you make but then add violence to the mix only do so out of an excess of zeal. In other words, the violent people may be wrong in their tactics, but their passionate loathing of injustice simply got the best of their good intentions.<\/p>\n

Perhaps they feel it necessary to do so because they don\u2019t want the bad behavior to discredit their beliefs, or because they can\u2019t bear to examine their \u00adbeliefs in light of the violence and wonder if they are a part of what made the violence happ<\/a>en.<\/p>\n

Or they double down and come to think that the violence is a mark of virtue \u2014 that the \u00adviolent are even more committed than the cowardly couch potatoes who sit on the sidelines bemoaning injustice but refuse to put it all on the line. That was also the story with the cop-killing and bank-robbing terrorism by the Weathermen and others that erupted from the anti-Vietnam-War student protests.<\/p>\n

The perpetrators were romanticized rather than vilified. That was half a century ago. And the spiritual virus that provided such rancid moral \u201cimmunity\u201d has surged anew with a recurrence of the evil.<\/p>\n

jpodhoretz@gmail.com<\/em>\n <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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“Only an intellectual could \u2018justify\u2019 these riots” May 31, 2020 | 6:58pm Enlarge Image A protester carries a US flag upside down, a sign of distress, next to a burning building in Minneapolis. AP George Orwell\u2019s timeless admonition, \u201cSome ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them,\u201d has been given new life by the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}