The Baltimore fire department noose hoax

I’ve read the story in the Baltimore Sun, and derive from it the following set of rules governing race relations in modern America: If a black fireman says that white firemen have left a threatening note and a drawing of a noose for the black fireman, the white firemen have committed a federal civil rights violation and a crime that can send them to jail; it’s also an occasion for the city’s black mayor to declare publicly that the white firemen have engaged in “an act of hatred and intimidation.” But if it turns out that the black fireman forged the note and the drawing in order to level a false accusation of a hate crime against the white firemen that could send the white firemen to jail, such false accusation is not a crime or a federal civil rights violation. It is, at the very most, an “unfortunate act of misconduct” that might (might) cost the black fireman his job.

But that’s not yet the end of it. There are more rules that we need to understand:

… Marvin L. “Doc” Cheatham, president of the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter, said the fact that such an incident could occur shows that pervasive racial problems persist in the department.

“It really saddens us to hear that evidently things have reached a stage that even an African-American does an injustice to himself and his own people as a result of a negative culture in that department,” Cheatham said when asked to respond to the unions.

Got that? The fact that the black fireman made up a false incident of white racism proves that white racism in the department is so bad that the black fireman was driven to make up a false charge of white racism. Furthermore, when he made up that false charge of white racism, he was not doing an injustice to the white firemen. No, he was doing an injustice to himself and his fellow blacks.

This is a level of tribalist morality that is equaled only by Muslims. As Muslims see it, the only wrong that can ever occur between a Muslim and a non-Muslim is a wrong committed by the non-Muslim upon the Muslim. By the very nature of things, it is impossible for a Muslim to do wrong to a non-Muslim. Similiarly, as organized black America sees it, the only racial wrong that can ever occur between a black and a white is a racial wrong committed by the white upon the black. By the very nature of things, it is impossible for a black to do a racial wrong to a white.

I ask anyone to find any basis in this story for doubting my conclusion that organized black America is waging a jihad against white America and ought to be openly regarded as such.

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

There is only one remedy for the racial sickness that is ailing America, and that is racial separation, or at least ideological separation. We the traditionalists must break away from the sick, decadent, dying America in which cowardice, insanity and Orwellian thought control reign supreme and re-establish a sane and healthy society in which white people and like minded minorities can live together in harmony without affirmative action, welfare, and sensitivity training.

Bill J. writes:

You wrote,

“I ask anyone to find any basis in this story for doubting my conclusion that organized black America is waging a jihad against white America and ought to be openly regarded as such.”

In the past, white America has been told to shoulder the burden of guilt on an ongoing basis concerning the historic fact of slavery. The “righteousness” of the black race in America is evaluated through the prism of past enslavement. The black man, as victim of slavery, gets a free pass in the realm of virtue. No matter how many offenses, sins and crimes are committed by the black man, there is always an excuse and an alibi. No ethical charge can be socially laid against the black race by virtue of past slavery without the liberal crying foul.

I have a suggestion and proposal. Now is the time to declare that the black man’s past enslavement is no longer grounds for ethical violation. That the white race will no longer bear any guilt for a historic past because the black man has erased any recourse to a past victimhood on the basis of present behaviour. Let me repeat—the black man no longer has any moral claim against white America on the basis of the past because the black man himself has canceled out all moral claims against America through his contemporary murderous and immoral behavior.

The sins, the murders, the pathologically evil behavior of the black race as a whole in America cancels out any moral claims by the black race against America or its history. Let’s take this from a mathematical standpoint. How many murders have been committed by the black man since emancipation? Has the portion of the white race that enslaved the black man committed that many murders against the black slave? What are the numbers? If the black man’s murders since emancipation outnumber those of the white race’s murders committed against black slaves, then indeed the equation now swings against the black man and condemns him on the basis of the totality HIS sins and evils.

How many illegitimate children has the black man sired and abandoned since emancipation? If that number is more than the number of illicit children born by virtue of the white race’s assault on black womanhood during the period of slavery, then the black man is guilty of more sexual evil and adultery than what was endured in the period of slavery. The numbers have now swung against the black man in the moral universe. The totality of his sins and crimes now witness and militate against him.

The balance of good and evil has now swung against the black man and this moral balance NOW condemns the black race. The moral accusation of slavery is no longer The Ethical Fulcrum of racial evaluation. The black man now stands ethically and morally condemned. Since God is no respecter of persons, the moral guilt of the black man and the black race is now open to divine judgment and in the eyes of all men.

One no longer has to cede the moral ground to the liberal on the basis of the past. The black man is judged and condemned morally; history is now no help to his cause (whatever that is) because the black man has existentially condemned himself.

LA replies:

Some may feel that Bill J. has gone over the line in the above comment. But in essence his argument throws back at liberals and blacks what they have been throwing at whites these many years: if whites up to this time have been adjudged guilty as a race, then we can also speak of blacks being guilty as a race.

Mark A. writes:

For heaven’s sake. When will you learn? I learned in my high school civics class (back in I think 1991) that the only racism that was possible to occur in America was from whites against blacks as whites hold all of the power in society. Are you suggesting that my teacher, an employee of the state of New Jersey trusted to educate me, was lying to me? That is absurd! You need to attend sensitivity training. And please support your local teachers.

Terry Morris writes:

You wrote:

“I ask anyone to find any basis in this story for doubting my conclusion that organized black America is waging a jihad against white America and ought to be openly regarded as such.”

If you consider organized black America as part of a larger whole—organized liberal America—fighting its battles on its own front, but as part of a larger conflict with conservative America, then, yes, I think you’re right to conclude that organized black America is waging a jihad against white America. I personally do not believe that black America is potent enough in and of itself to effect and sustain its own organization, much less wage an effective black jihad against white America without the aid of liberalism, which would include a large segment of white America.

In the larger conflict I think your rules apply as well. By the very nature of things it is impossible for a liberal to wrong a non-liberal because, by the very nature of things, liberalism is right and conservatism is wrong. If ever a liberal “wrongs” a conservative (which is incorrect language to start with), it is, as in this case, because of some larger wrong long perpetrated by conservatives against liberals or minorities.

Karen writes:

The Third World jihad being waged against the white West is aided and abetted all the way by white liberals. With regard to blacks, they are not organised enough to do it alone. In their natural state in Africa, blacks look up to whites and treat them respectfully and expect to be led by whites. It is white liberals who have motivated and organised the blacks against whites and trained and encouraged them to go on the rampage against whites.

Dan D. writes:

I find Bill J.’s argument in the “Baltimore Fire Noose Department Hoax” very persuasive. He argues that the black man has existentially condemned himself and that history is no help to his cause any longer (i.e. reliance on the past as victim of slavery). This is totally consistent with the moral argument that every man stands on his own before the judgment of God. History cannot absolve guilt. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have argued that man existentially faces himself unevasively as a responsible moral unit. The black man cannot evade this by hiding in the shadows of the history of slavery as an “eternal victim.” It used to be said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel, ie. men evade their immoral behavior by appeals to nationality. The black man does something similar in hiding his evils behind the screen of history. But evil is evil; murder is murder regardless of circumstances.

To absolve the black race of the murders by black men that have been committed since emancipation is to argue that morality is relative and related to the environmental situation. Funny that the black race adheres to this situational ethics (absolution through historical excuse for themselves but not for the white man). If morality is relative, then slavery could be seen as ethical in the eyes of the beholder. BUT if morality is absolute, then the black man has to account for his immorality independently of history or the environment.

Jesus said that whatever measure people use to judge others with will rebound on themselves. If the black race uses a certain moral yardstick with which to judge the white man, this same yardstick can and will be used against it. How many murders have been committed by members of the black race since emancipation? Bill J. poses a valid question! If the black race has behaved immorally since emancipation, how can it stand on the grounds of morality to judge others? What standing does a criminal have in a court of law to judge a lawyer, a judge, a jury and the witnesses? How does immoral man judge others? If the black race’s morality is low (given the pathological evil exhibited by it), then on what moral grounds does it have to issue moral judgments against others—their country or their history? Bill J. is quite right that their current immorality has disqualified them from using history as a moral complaint!

Let them remove the timber from their own eye before they attempt to remove the speck from ours … I believe Jesus said that. That means they have to become a moral force for good in their own right and that remains to be seen!

Kristor writes:

Both Bill J. and the liberals he indicts have fallen prey to the fallacy of composition. Neither the black race nor the white race can do anything. They exercise no agency, and therefore cannot sin, or bear guilt. Only individuals can do things. So it is simply inapposite to tote up the number of killings committed and suffered by blacks or whites and try to net them against each other, to arrive at some sort of conclusion about the moral scorecard of a race. Likewise it is silly to hold the white race responsible for slavery, as liberals do; or to exact reparations to blacks from whites (via taxes, or affirmative action, or anything at all). Indeed, since all races have practiced slavery, while it was nations of the white race that ended it—at enormous cost to themselves—it would make more sense to credit the white race for ending slavery. But even that makes no sense. It wasn’t the white race that ended slavery, but individual men and women who gave their money and efforts, and (in the case of the Civil War), their lives and limbs, to get the job done, making their sacrifices either directly, or indirectly as members of their nations, in whose general economic welfare their own personal welfare was completely involved.

It could be argued that the United States of America is corporately culpable for slavery; but since the United States spent 600,000 lives and untold wealth to free the American slaves, it could equally be argued that the United States has thus satisfied, and more than satisfied, its moral debt to them. In ascribing culpability to nations, we just barely avoid the fallacy of composition, because nations have legal existence. Nations can write checks, whereas no race can write checks. Germans are not guilty of the Holocaust as a people (e.g., the Pennsylvania Dutch had nothing to do with it), but rather, on the one hand, as particular individuals who themselves effectually willed the particular acts that went to make up the Holocaust—who intended an evil, and then actually accomplished it—and on the other, as a particular nation whose legitimate organs of state organized and carried out the Holocaust through the instrumentality of individual German bodies.

But because in the final analysis all corporate acts are exhaustively constituted of particular individual acts, then in the real world the moral debt or credit of any corporate act is exhaustively accounted for by the moral debt or credit attaching to those individual acts. That is to say, on the one hand, that there is for the individual person not one bit of escape from his full share of the moral consequences of his acts, regardless of their corporate character. God and the universe know to the last jot and tittle, to the last quantum of knowledge, exactly what each of us has done; for if the universe failed to take full and accurate causal account of all that had happened, it could not cohere from one moment to the next. This is why Jesus said He had not come to change a single iota of the Law (being Himself the Law, His doing so would have made Him something other than who He was, would have compromised the immaculate Divine fidelity to the Divine nature). It is also to say, on the other, that there is in fact no moral “extra,” no debt or credit left over from whatever is accounted to the individual people who have carried out a corporate act, that can attach to the corporate entity. So, no one is at all morally exculpated by virtue of the fact that his misdeeds were legal; thus at Nuremberg no defendant found refuge in the argument that he had merely followed orders. Neither is there any excuse for wickedness to be found in ancient injuries, or in circumstantial inherited disadvantage of some kind—as if the real world were not always, where or whensoever, disparate in its impact upon us!

That said, nations exist as a means of pooling the efficacy of individuals. To the extent that nations are less than perfectly efficient at accounting for the costs to the general corporate welfare of individual acts, and then in extracting from those individuals full and exact recompense, the moral debts of those individuals remain “on the books” of the corporate entity. Because the cost to governments of exact information about all the moral and economic consequences of all the particular acts of each of their subjects is so high (this being, together with the relatively low cost of that information to individuals, the primary argument for the decentralization of political power), moral inefficiency—i.e., injustice—is necessarily endemic in politics. Thus it can make sense for nations to compensate them whom they have injured, as Germany did after WWI. But what does not at all make sense is for such compensation to be everlasting. For that would involve the eventual extinction of a culpable nation and of its constituent people, through exhaustion of its goods—all of which are, in the final analysis, either property accidental to, or properties characteristic of, individual people, almost none of whom are much guilty of any corporate wrongs. No wrong of any finite creature can be infinitely costly to his fellows; neither then should be his penalty, or each injustice would be quickly compounded to a total and general chaos.

Interestingly, extinction of the nation, and of its constituent people, is exactly where we see liberalism pushing us. Unchecked, the liberal/progressive drive to make all things perfect, through a human agency that cannot but err, must end by destroying them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2007 08:49 PM | Send