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Chapter 65
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A society where love and mutual connection have been killed is not a
beautiful sight. Even the church escapes the social ethics of Christ and
betrays the poor. That many poor then betray the church is no wonder. It is not
uncommon for black robbers to arrive in churches just before the collection
plate is passed round and force the churchgoers at gunpoint to give to the real
needy. A despairing minister in Chicago told me that they were closing his
church because the congregation was plundered every Sunday. |
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No institution in America today is too sacred to avoid the anger
of the ghetto. Teachers are attacked at gunpoint even by first grade pupils. In
some cities there are armed guards or police on every floor of
hotels to protect the guests.
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Trains on the subways of New York and Chicago
carry both uniformed and plainclothes cops, and still people are
being murdered and raped before the eyes of panic-stricken
passengers who dare not try and help. People are murdered on the
street in front of 40 spectators, who watch from their apartments
without any of them calling the police, because they "didn't know
if the attackers were in collusion with the police," they told
Life Magazine. Tourists return to Europe with "American neck" from
continually sending anxious glances back over their shoulders.
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This Nigerian student whom I lived with behind
bars in Philadelphia's ghetto was so
panic-stricken over conditions there that she tried to be sent home "to safety"
before the end of her studies. Her statement would not have surprised me if it
were not for the fact that she had just lived through the civil war in Nigeria. |
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People chain their bicycles to their sixth floor
refrigerators.....and find both bicycle and refrigerator gone when they come
home. The confinement of the ghetto is dehumanizing for all. In five of the homes
I lived in there were armed robberies twice in the period I was there.
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Society spends billions to cure the ill instead of educating us
about the suffering our racism inflicts on ourselves.
A manufacturer I stayed with had made himself rich
producing military equipment for the Vietnam War, but had now rearranged the
entire production line to make burglary alarms and teargas guns as a direct
result of the country's wasting such great resources fighting the Third World
that the "war on poverty" at home had to be given up. |
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Everywhere we entrench ourselves against the
oppressed. In New York, steel bars shot up over
windows at the same speed that steel shrapnel had been spewed at poor
Vietnamese. The more people struggle for a so-called "freedom" without social
justice, the more they cut themselves off from it, and many Americans can today
look at huge army billboards from their own steel barred fortification. |
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Slowly but steadily the iron curtain closed in on
America. Our stores are turned into closed steel cages. The
wealthy can naturally afford more discreet things and invest
billions in invisible electronic fortifications between themselves
and the ghetto. The more electronic rays replace trust, the more
the system closes itself. |
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We arm ourselves to death. Many homes have one, two, three, and
even four pistols and guns with which to "defend themselves against the
niggers" as this family in Michigan said. We know we are digging our own graves, and yet change them to
fortified trenches. I don't know what is most shocking:
that there are Americans so desperately poor that they can kill for a dollar or
that millions of Americans are willing and ready to take a human life just to
defend a TV. 130 years ago the value of a life at least could be said to
be $1,400. |
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As much as I love Americans I could never
reconcile it with the fact that the majority of them are secret
killers at heart. Now when the old communist countries have given
up capital punishment to join the democratic European Union, we
realize that America could never join. It is the only developed
nation that still supports the civilized communal savagery of capital
punishment which is increasingly being widened to include public approval of vigilante
on-the-spot executions of unconvicted criminals. |
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People intuitively know that they are in the
process of digging their own graves, but cannot do anything about
it and therefore try to see them as fortified trenches.
The more cars (for lonesome flight rather than the cozy strolling of streets
as in Europe), the more weapons (rather than communication), the more
fortresses (instead of sharing), the more military build up (instead of sharing
with the Third World through its proposed New Economic World Order, WTO, Kyoto
treaty etc.) ... all the
more does private industry enrich itself on this systematic subversion of
society. |
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The higher the barriers big business constructs between people, the higher
the stocks rise on Wall Street... and in the process people are either made
insensitive to or begin to rationalize sights such as this woman standing
hungry outside the Stock Exchange... Nowhere have I found the art of
rationalizing poverty and racism mastered to such a degree (not least by the
intellectuals) as in America. |
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When people do not fortify justice it becomes necessary to justify force.
The more they try to shoot out a short cut to freedom and security, the more
society's actions are revealed as the escapism and desperation of the ghetto.
Just as those imprisoned in the ghetto look for quick escapes into
awe-inspiring SUVs and violence, so the greater society escapes from its
problems by the use of even more awe-inspiring tanks and military violence
against the ghetto instead of changing the system creating the ghetto. Such a
banana-republic mentality leaves deaths after even the smallest riots (while
police in England were not even allowed to use rubber pellets in the riot in
1982). |
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It is hard to glimpse the Statue of Liberty behind the huge
pile-up of military ordnance - directly stolen from the needy, as Eisenhower
forewarned. The more we try to shoot out a short cut to freedom and
security, the more we resemble the escapism and desperation of the ghetto.
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How really free are we in God's own
country when it has become necessary for thousands of people to
watch the Statue of Liberty from behind barred and grated windows?
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Her watchful gaze - which always looked the other way from the
enslavement of blacks - is increasingly being replaced by Big Brother's
ever-present eye. |
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In every building you walk into, every elevator, every store...
everywhere you are watched. Under the pretext of fighting crime
(or "terrorism"), again
and again the anxiety-ridden and alienated population seems to fight the
constitution itself. |
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In one respect America is dangerously close to totalitarianism.
Everywhere it is swarming with secret police. Nobody, absolutely
nobody, except those like me who have hitchhiked around in big and
small American towns, have any idea how many of these plainclothes
cops there really are. |
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They were constantly stopping me. Even in small
sleepy towns in the South I could, on occasion, discover up to
twenty in a single night. |
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The more the system closes, the more trust and hope in the
actions and values of the whole of society are disappearing. Fear is superseding reason and stifling our concern and
compassion for fellow citizens. The criminal escape acts are spreading in society, as we are
corrupted by our violence against the ghetto. |
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Los Angeles two days after the riots in 1992 |
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A ghetto cannot be eliminated
from the inside; it is created and perpetuated by outside forces. Paralyzed by fear and violence, the entire society begins to
resemble a ghetto as we increasingly feel that we are operating in a closed
system in which we have lost our imagined freedom. |
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A
system which (on fundamental racial issues) cannot he changed from the inside
because for generations it has deformed and molded people to such a degree that
they cannot imagine alternatives... nor would they (in the short run) he able
to live with them if they could. |
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A little background information on this chapter which
was written in 1984 as a warning to Europeans not to go down
the same path. Unfortunately Europeans went ahead and started
a similar ghettoization of it's Muslim immigrants with the
same resulting anger and crime from the victims:
And so
the entire society becomes a closed system in the same way the South was before
1865 and before 1954 - a system which in spite of its liberals and activists
was unable to change from within. It was not least Gunnar Myrdal's theory of
the vicious circle that in 1954 helped convince the Supreme Court to rule
against school segregation which had the well-known snowball effect giving
proof to the theory: White prejudice and discrimination keep the blacks low in
standards of living, health, and education. This, in its turn, gives support to
white prejudice. White prejudice and the resulting black standards thus
"mutually" support or reinforce each other. If things remain as they are, this
means that the two happen to balance each other. If some outside forces could
cause discrimination to be decreased, this would cause a betterment of the
black situation, which might decrease white prejudice still more, which would
again allow the black situation to improve, and so on. If instead
discrimination increases, the vicious circle will spiral downward. Northern
outside interference in the Southern closed system did not break the circle. It
only found a new, higher level of balance, raising the median black income in
the South from 45% to 55% of white income. In the final analysis the great
progress of the 60's may have come about as a result of the international
decolonization efforts and the worldwide economic boom after World War II. In
1972 new outside forces interfered. OPEC tried to break out of' the Third World
ghetto by charging more realistic prices for oil. The industrial countries
built up on exploited cheap energy were therefore thrust into prolonged
recession which made the vicious circle for American blacks start spiraling
downward. White Americans have been conditioned to think that things can only
move forward. However, for blacks there is no reason for such optimism. Twice
before they have seen their few gains taken away from them. In 1691 and in 1877
after reconstruction they were thrust into long periods of downward spiraling.
In the 1970's their perception of' America as a closed system for them was once
again cemented and without outside influence it could very well remain so for
the next hundred years. Whites hold the power to eliminate the ghettos, but
as long as they are trapped in the enslaving pattern of well-coordinated
infernalism and paternalism I see no reason why this would happen. We don't
understand the underclass monster they continuously create - therefore turn
their backs to it and destroy their own society in the process. |
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