Among the monuments dishonored by “Black Lives Matter” mobs are those of Miguel de Cervantes, himself a slave for several years as well as a Spanish literary master, often said to be the inventor of the novel; John Greenleaf Whittier, America’s abolitionist poet; and Ulysses S. Grant, the general who ended the Civil War and thus materially ushered in the abolition of slavery.

That mobs are mad is a truism; that its participants are willfully stupid, obvious. But support for same among bystanders is worse than mad and stupid.

I’ll let you guess the word I think most apt here.

When, at the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Socialist hegemony, the statuary of Stalin and Lenin were pulled down, I was jubilant, too. A tyranny and its iconography were being smashed. Great!

But a tyranny had fallen. The Soviet Union had not been a real republic. It was, indeed, an “evil empire.” In America, there are surely elements of evil in our empire, but it is not on the same order. And the empire has not fallen. The icons going down are being taken down by unruly mobs who bypass the rule of law to express their own feckless hegemony on our state and our culture. The empire is letting this happen. Why? Because it shows, I suspect, how secure it is to have all the ancient iconography pulled down yet it remain, barely shaken.

The current iconoclasm is probably best seen as an attack upon the idea of the republic, a rejection of its goodness and virtue and justice. While I am sympathetic with that general critique, the specific critique is insane, since you cannot claim that the bourgeois freedom of American society is evil “because of slavery” when slavery is obviously (and was recognized as) at odds with freedom.

Black Lives Matter is not subversive of The State. It is subversive of Liberty. The leftist idea is to use the mere existence of past slavery as a rationale to set up a completely different kind of socio-political order. Since most of these ninnies are promoting some form of socialism, those of us who identify socialism with slavery must express some alarm.

To get caught up in the peculiar arguments about “systemic racism” is irrelevant. For insurrection is no way to fight that.

For example, while I am more than willing to defend black lives from the depredations of the state, once the movement goes socialist, or engages in some vast doublethink Orwellianism of destroying ancient monuments, all I itch to do, then, is simply destroy the mobs. Bring in the guns and start shooting. Let the blood run at the wreckage of the statuary.

Is that the best way to handle the mobs? Probably not. Especially since what we are really dealing with is a ginned-up race war by the corporate media and the Democratic Party. Violence should probably be avoided.

The real problem is not the intransigent minority of African-American “protesters.” The real problem is the sick, cowardly, intellectually flabby support of same — and the rioters who follow so closely at their heels — by white “liberals.” Who are not of course liberal.

It is they who deserve the fate the mobs have directed merely towards the statuary.

I hope they do not get what they deserve, if for no other reason than I know these asshats, and I would likely be caught as collateral damage. But they might. For who knows where this will end?

If we are lucky, it will peter out as it becomes apparent that it was all fake and nonsense from the beginning.

twv