The View From 1776

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Protesters demanding clemency for Tookie Williams were engaging in the only form of public worship offered by their secular religion, a sort of mellowed Weatherman violence for elderly Boomers and callow youth.  Their certainty that society is rigged to enslave “the people” and that Tookie was the victim of racism and injustice is sufficient justification, in their minds, to overturn a thousand years of English and American jurisprudence by extra-legal means.  Public policy, in their minds, should be determined by volatile opinion manipulated by the liberal media, hence the well-publicized protest rallies.

Among other absurdities, liberal-Progressives have recommended that the Nobel Peace Prize be awarded to Mr. Williams, who probably has a good chance to join Yasser Arafat, another criminal found worthy of honor by the Norwegian Peace Prize board.

No evidence was offered to prove that Tookie’s trial was tainted.  Protests were strictly a political move aimed at eliminating the death penalty.  Tookie, or any handy poster-child, will do nicely as a prop for the anarchistic impulses required to remove impediments along the road to socialism. 

No one among the mobs denouncing the State of California’s legitimate authority appears to have given much thought to the rights of Tookie’s victims and their families.  No one appears to have considered the fact that crimes are destructive to the social framework that protects everyone of us.  No one appears to have cared that seeing a brutal criminal literally get away with murder encourages other criminals to ignore the law, knowing that they have little to fear from it.  No one seems to have registered the fact that crime across the nation has declined in ratio to the increase in meaningful punishment given to convicted criminals.

Liberal-Progressives recognize traditions of law and order on a highly selective basis.  We’ve seen this mentality repeatedly in judicial activism, when liberal judges decide cases, not on statute or case law, but on the basis of the results required by their conceptions of secular social justice.  This comes from socialism’s theory that there is no independent standard of right or wrong, just the materialistic, evolutionary law of the jungle, survival of the fittest.  If liberal-Progressives are in the saddle, then the law is whatever they declare it to be, because they are, by their definition, the “fittest.”

Hollywood leftists and other liberal-Progressives believe that Tookie Williams was just the unfortunate victim of a capitalist society that permits unequal ownership of private property.  Presumably Tookie was a scape-goat for Halliburton.  They willingly blind themselves to the fact that the crime rate went through the roof after President Johnson’s Great Society massively redistributed income and property with its welfare entitlements that empowered designated social classes to live comfortably without the need ever to work for a living.

Another facet of liberal-Progressive’s logic comes from Sigmund Freud, who fabricated theories bolstering the doctrine that morality is just a construct of primitive ignorance.  Dr. Freud proclaimed at the beginning of the 20th century that the source of social order resides in our genitals, the materialistic effects of which produce our sexual impulses.  Perceiving himself to be the new Moses bringing modern rules of social conduct to replace the Ten Commandments, Freud enthralled Greenwich Village intellectuals after World War I with the theory that society’s ills are no more than guilt arising from emotional conflicts between our true sexual nature and ignorant concepts of personal morality.  Following the Mosaic pattern, Dr. Freud offered mankind a new covenant in his magical powers to cure society’s ills via restructuring human minds and personalities. 

No wonder that TV shows like “Sex in the City” and “Desperate Housewives” are so popular.  Their attraction evidently is not prurience, but a wholesome quest for mental health.

Couple Freud and judicial activism, and Tookie had a bullet-proof defense in the domain of Progressivism.  First, there is no “morality” beyond men’s desires to engage in sexual congress with their mothers and sisters, so murder isn’t really wrong, especially if the perpetrator is a member of a favored social, racial, or ethnic class.  Second, prison shrinks purportedly had reshaped Tookie’s mind and personality, so that he was the modern analog of Lenin’s New Soviet Man, dedicated to serving the greater good of gangdom.

Finally, this process of imposing liberal-Progressive justice through the mechanism of mass demonstrations of placard-waving protesters, often engaging in destructive violence to private property, is precisely the methodology of the French Revolution.  That catastrophic event undercut more than 5,000 years of social and political order upon which was founded all of Western civilization. 

As the French Encyclopedists recognized, the new fountainhead of political legitimacy was to be simply public opinion.  Without regard to established law or to fundamental principles of right or wrong, mobs called into the streets by propagandists were to be the index of permissible government action.  In France of 1789 what the mobs decreed was the Reign of Terror in which more than 70,000 innocent men, women, and small children were murdered on the guillotine for the amusement of the “citizens” who were demanding their “rights.”

Some final observations on this outpouring of mental befuddlement and cynicism:

First, in our Tookie extravaganza of liberal-Progressive propaganda, we had the usual news photos of protesters demanding a pardon for him and carrying signs declaring “Thou shall not kill.” The Ten Commandments tell us not to murder; there is no prohibition against duly adjudicated executions for capital crimes. 

Second, there is an odd contradiction between liberal-Progressives’ focus on a single person like Tookie Williams as emblematic of materialistic social justice, contrasted with their propensity otherwise to deal only with masses and classes, upon whom their intellectual councillors may inflict any degree of regulatory rigor in the name of perfecting society, including mass murders in France, Soviet Russia, and National Socialist Germany. 

Cut away all the Hollywood posturing and one can see that Tookie Williams as an individual wasn’t the real issue.  Hardly any protesters in the street mobs, here or overseas, had personal knowledge of him.  He was just a manufactured slogan, an impersonal symbol to be manipulated by liberal-Progressive propagandists for political purposes.

Finally, these same tender-hearted liberal-Progressives, shedding tears for a convicted perpetrator of four murders, have no compunctions about permitting any woman, without the slightest gesture in the direction of judicial process, to murder her own children.

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