{"id":61567,"date":"2020-09-07T04:25:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T01:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-evil-idiocy-of-in-defense-of-looting\/"},"modified":"2020-09-07T04:25:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T01:25:00","slug":"the-evil-idiocy-of-in-defense-of-looting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-evil-idiocy-of-in-defense-of-looting\/","title":{"rendered":"#The evil idiocy of \u2018In Defense of Looting\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The evil idiocy of \u2018In Defense of Looting\u2019<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Vicky Osterweil, the author of \u201cIn Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action,\u201d is getting her 15 minutes of fame thanks to a segment on NPR in which she said some really mind-bogglingly dumb, indefensibly evil and fascinatingly reactionary things.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll come back to her in a moment.<\/p>\n

One of my weird mental pastimes is to look at the world as if I were a visitor from the past. But rather than think of how a time travel<\/a>er might marvel at the new technology<\/a> and tall buildings, I like to wonder: What would someone from 500 or 1,000 years ago recognize as familiar?<\/p>\n

Some things are obvious: a mother breastfeeding a baby or an old man tending a garden. \u201cWe do that too!\u201d a time traveler might say on first sight.<\/p>\n

But if you were a sophisticated and knowledgeable time traveler, you might recognize some deeper similarities.<\/p>\n

My favorite example is North Korea, which is often called a \u201ccommunist\u201d or \u201cMarxist\u201d regime but would be instantly recognizable to a temporal tourist as an absolutist monarchy, even though the regime doesn\u2019t use the word \u201cking.\u201d\u00a0Divine power is passed down to the male heir of the previous ruler.\u00a0Every de facto monarch is said to be of quasi-supernatural origin and endowed with superhuman abilities and wisdom. North Korea also has a hereditary aristocracy that lives off the hereditary peasant class, which is born into de facto serfdom.<\/p>\n

I bring this up because sometimes we get too hung up on words and lose sight of the things underneath. And that brings me back to Osterweil.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooting is a highly racialized word from its very inception in the English language,\u201d Osterweil said in the NPR interview. \u201cIt\u2019s taken from Hindi,\u00a0l\u00fat<\/em>, which means \u2018goods\u2019 or \u2018spoils.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

How this is relevant, or even evidence that the word is \u201cracialized,\u201d is a mystery, given that maybe two in 10 million people know its etymology. Other words with Hindi origins: pundit, guru, khaki, cashmere and pajamas. The horror.<\/p>\n

This is a good example of confusing words and things. Looting \u2014 mobs grabbing stuff that doesn\u2019t belong to them \u2014 is an ancient practice dating back hundreds of thousands of years, before we even had the concept of dates. Pillaging, ransacking, theft \u2014 call it what you like \u2014 is how tribes acquired stuff before the invention of trade.<\/p>\n

In short: Osterweil thinks she\u2019s making some powerful neo-Marxist argument on the bleeding edge of theory, but what she\u2019s discovered is tribal barbarism and put a fresh coat of paint on it.<\/p>\n

She is fluent in all the latest buzzwords and campus jargon. The \u201cso-called\u201d United States of America, she writes in her book, was founded in \u201ccisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist\u201d violence. (I\u2019m getting my quotes from Graeme Wood\u2019s excellent review in The Atlantic, as I have no desire to saddle Osterweil with the guilt of profiting from her work.)<\/p>\n

Destroying businesses is an \u201cexperience of pleasure, joy and freedom,\u201d she writes. Osterweil also insists it\u2019s a form of \u201cqueer birth,\u201d and that \u201criots are violent, extreme and femme as f \u2013 \u2013 -.\u201d Looting isn\u2019t wrong, she claims, but rather a form of \u201cproletarian shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLooting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police,\u201d Osterweil explained on NPR. \u201cThe very basis of property in the US is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nope. Notions of private property can be found in ancient China, the Islamic world and, well, everywhere.<\/p>\n

Even the Korean grocers targeted by looting have it coming, according to Osterweil, because they\u2019re working in the white man\u2019s system of \u201cownership.\u201d And ownership is \u201cinnately, structurally white supremacist.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Osterweil is really describing is revenge based on collective guilt. A Viking or Gaul from the past would instantly recognize it. So would countless non-white barbarians of yore, because that\u2019s what humans used to believe. \u201cYour ancestors did something to my ancestors, and so you have this coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Books could be written about how wrong \u2014 historically, morally, logically \u2014 Osterweil is. But there is one place where she\u2019s right. Rioting and looting are fun, which is why young people do it from time to time. Mobs are thrilling, which is why they\u2019re so dangerous and evil. (Presumably rapists and murderers feel \u201cjoy\u201d too, that doesn\u2019t make them good; it illuminates their evilness.) That\u2019s why civilized societies try to prevent them. Barbarians come up with clever word salads to defend them.<\/p>\n

Twitter<\/a>: @JonahDispatch<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

\n

If you want to read more Opinion News<\/a> articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#The evil idiocy of \u2018In Defense of Looting\u2019” Vicky Osterweil, the author of \u201cIn Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action,\u201d is getting her 15 minutes of fame thanks to a segment on NPR in which she said some really mind-bogglingly dumb, indefensibly evil and fascinatingly reactionary things. We\u2019ll come back to her…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[65411],"class_list":["post-61567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-the-evil-idiocy-of-in-defense-of-looting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61567","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=61567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}