The racial war in Oakland—and America

(Note: in my reply to Kevin, I again relate America’s racial situation to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.)

Kevin V. writes:

I saw your posts on the Oakland atrocity and wanted to let you know what I’m thinking about this, since my experience with Oakland as a young man led to my break with leftism and liberalism.

There is a lot more to this incident than is being reported. This BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cop, Johannes Mehserle, who killed Oscar Grant on New Years Day and gets mentioned every time in the news stories, messed up big time, criminal negligence AT BEST, but the system in Oakland sits there waiting every day for something like that to come along to justify 30 more years of “activism,” excusing the worst criminal behavior, extorting money from public authorities, running street gangs free of police interference.

Given the tens, maybe hundreds, of tense situations between young blacks and police in the area every day—not just Oakland and BART, but Berkeley, Alameda, Contra Costa Sheriffs, Emeryville, the University of California Police—eventually some cop is going to screw up. Usually not as bad as this BART Police yahoo, but someone in authority eventually misjudges a situation and then, BAM, the whole thing starts all over again.

Meanwhile, the army (and that’s what they are, a paramilitary army) of gangsters use this political cover to run the city, up to the very top (the only exception was Jerry Brown, a white guy brought in from the outside only out of desperation due to fear that Oakland’s public funds would cease flowing). What you don’t see on TV is the “lesser” killings like this, like the stuff I witnessed up close and personal: the white thirty something torn apart by a gang of blacks at a gas station because he was there and he was white, while his wife locked in their car watched helplessly; the white college girl taken from the street, raped for two days and tortured and then dropped in Berkeley Marina; the Black Muslims breaking legs and arms of merchants who don’t pay their alcohol selling “tax.”

None of that causes outrage. None of that causes media attention.

There is more than this going on. There is a war. A low intensity war with flare ups.

Why ANY white person agrees to serve as a police officer in Oakland is beyond me. Let them police their own hellhole.

LA replies:

I’m sorry to revert to Atlas Shrugged again, but its central plot line is so central to our time we can’t get away from it. The white police in Oakland are like Ayn Rand’s industrialist heroes, who keep society going, keep society from sinking into a hellhole, and instead of being rewarded and honored for what they do, they are despised and punished for it. They are despised and punished for their “greed,” just as the police are despised and punished for their “racism.” Yet they are willing to keep undergoing this undeserved torture because of their devotion to their jobs, their sense of responsibility. The situation only comes to an end when they finally realize, after great suffering, that it is they themselves, by consenting to this situation, who have provided their torturers with the moral sanction to keep torturing them. At that moment they walk away from their jobs and disappear, allowing society to see what happens to it when the “greedy” industrialists, or the “racist” police, are no longer there to keep it going.

Or, to translate this into terms of traditionalism, it is only when we step outside liberalism, reject the premises of liberalism, that it loses its power over our minds and we can actually oppose it instead of just complaining about its symptoms.

- end of initial entry -

Mark A. writes:

What is interesting about the racial war in America (thank you for calling this what it is), is that Black Amerikka has never realized, and probably will never realize, that virtually all of the food they consume in produced by Whitey in the midwest. The day when the white, competent, civil servants stop “serving” the community of cities like Oakland, these cities will literally implode. They will have no food, no running water, and no law.

On a somewhat related note, David Chappelle, a popular black comedian, recently performed a stand-up comedy special for HBO. The special was filmed in San Francisco. He told the crowd of liberal San Franciscans how impressed he was with race relations in San Francisco. He said, “And I know how you did it too. You put all of the ni**ers on the other side of the bridge!”

John B. writes:

Here, at YouTube, is video of the policeman Mehserle shooting Grant. I personally can’t tell what has happened.

March 25

Phil R. writes:

Regarding Mehserle’s actions: My understanding is that he most likely made an error. He thought he was reaching for his taser, and instead pulled his gun. The tasers used by the OPD have a pistol grip, were introduced relatively recently to the OPD’s arsenal, and (my impression is that) Mehserle wasn’t the best cop to begin with. In the video, he seems shocked when he shoots Grant. Finally, I read somewhere that some police experts who watched the video said that he probably thought he was using a taser, not a pistol, since he was “In a nontraditional fighting stance,” although I don’t know exactly what this entails.

Terry Morris writes:

There are other you tube videos of this incident posted. This one in particular is taken from the opposite angle than the one Kevin posted the link to in his comment, and shows a lot of commotion going on that is out of the view of the other camera angle. There are youngsters in this video making aggressive advances towards the police officers as they are trying to subdue the victim, creating all kinds of confusion and a very stressful situation for the officers I’m sure.

The video is pretty bad throughout, but watch it from the beginning paying attention to the right hand of the first individual that enters the frame. What is that he is holding?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 24, 2009 07:46 PM | Send