How liberals lessen the meaning of savage crime, or simply ignore savage crime, even at their own mortal risk

In the entry about the hold-up at machete point of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, his wife, and two friends as they played bridge in the Breyer vacation residence on the Caribbean island of Nevis, I linked several older entries about the murder and maiming of whites in similar circumstances. Among them was an August 2009 entry, “Another savage attack on whites in Caribbean island paradise.” I didn’t look closely at it when I re-linked it, but now, because it was quoted by a blogger, I have.

There is a lot going on in that entry, on several topics. The whole thing is worth reading. But here are three excerpts by me. The first is a summary of the black murders of whites in the Caribbean that white vacationers have ignored:

Retired British businessman Peter Green and his wife Murium have a vacation home in Tobago, a small island (116 square miles, with a population of 54,000, primarily of African descent) that is part of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Apparently the Greens were not put on their guard by the double murder last July of fellow Britons Ben and Catherine Mullany who were shot dead on their honeymoon while staying in a hotel cabin in the Caribbean island of Antigua. Nor were they warned by the double murder last October of Swedish couple Anna Sundsval and Oke Olsoon who were chopped to death in their vacation home on Tobago, within a few miles of the Greens’ home. Nor did the sexual assault at knife point on two British women ten days later at a Tobago guest house make the Greens think they might need more security when staying on the island. Nor did alarm bells go off when the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago was dubbed the “the murder capital of the Caribbean,” this past year, surpassing Jamaica, both because of a 38 percent overall increase in murder, mostly gang related, and because of the incidents mentioned above. Nor did the Greens rethink their vacation plans when the U.S. and the UK issued travel advisories warning about increasing violence on Tobago and the failure of police to apprehend the perpetrators. “You should be aware that there are high levels of violent crime, especially shootings and kidnappings,” announced the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in October 2008. “British nationals have been victims of violent attacks, particularly in Tobago where law enforcement is weak.” And, finally, it goes without saying, the Greens did not read the gripping discussion at this website last July in which Karen from England and Mark Jaws explained that white people should not visit a black-run country unless they are staying in a five star hotel run by an outside corporation, or paying for their own security detail, or carrying their own weapons.

The second excerpt is about why police in their public statements about a violent crime consistently place the main emphasis on a criminal’s “motive,” even though, in a criminal trial, a jury does not need to determine the defendant’s motive in order to reach to a guilty verdict, but only his intention to commit the criminal act:

The automatic, obligatory search by police for some motive, even in crimes that obviously transcend any possible rational purpose, demonstrates the liberal mind in action. If the liberal mind, including the liberal mind of police authorities, can assert some motive on the part of the criminal, no matter how absurd it may be (“they wanted to rob the couple, but the situation got out of hand and they chopped them to pieces instead”), then the liberal mind feels that it has done its essential job of denying the existence of evil. It has erected, in the place of an objective moral order, the liberal order of relativism. Everyone has his desires, his values, his motives. If a criminal has a conscious, rational motive for what he is doing, then he is defined by that rational motive, and since reason is good, and since making choices is the essence of what makes us human, he is not all bad. The totality of his actual criminal behavior gets insensibly reduced down to what he consciously chose. If a criminal chose a robbery, and the robbery got botched and the victims ended up dismembered and dead, the criminal is not really evil, because his motive was to commit a robbery. Of course, none of this is explicitly stated by police and reporters, because it would be indefensible. Rather, it is built into their verbiage and operates insidiously on the public mind without being countered.

Then this:

… as we see over and over, every time there is some savage violent crime, the police chiefs and police spokesmen are all over themselves wondering what the perpetrator’s “motive” was, making the discovery of the inner workings of some savage’s mind the most important aspect of the case, the sine qua non of understanding the nature of the crime, almost as though, without that metaphysical knowledge, it hasn’t really been established that there was a crime.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2012 05:06 PM | Send