Conniving Cowardice

Taking Control

Why We Should All Be Troubled By Europe’s Violent Weekend

A chaotic weekend of mayhem and violence across Europe showed the impotence of European governments and the limits of the progressive model of policing.

Sumantra Maitra
The Federalist

Two revealing falsehoods have been foisted on a taciturn populace. One, that the raging mob violence has really anything to do about George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, or opposition to police brutality. Two, the rioters and looters, largely spearheaded by Antifa, are similar to the heroes who landed on in the beaches of Normandy under a hail of heavy machinegun fire. It’s a stirring version of alternate history. And it may even win Pulitzer Prize one day. But both these arguments were exposed as baseless, however, by the recent days of mayhem and violence across Europe.

What we’re currently witnessing across the West, is a power-grab led by dangerous anarchists.

In Brussels, Belgium, hardly a notorious hub of militarized police, protesters rampaged through the city, trashing and looting in the name of Black Lives Matter. In France, riots took place for an alleged killing from back in 2016. In Scotland, a statue of Sir Robert Peel, the founder of British policing, was defaced by actual communists, who proceed to tag it with “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) in graffiti.

In London, Antifa thugs made a poor attempt to set fire to a British flag on the war memorial Cenotaph. A large number of radical leftists stood under the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in the parliament square chanting “Churchill was a racist”, as leftist historians and socialist journalists encouraged them on Twitter. Later, police cleared away men and women who had come to defend Churchill’s statue, in effect allowing protestors to vandalize it later. And in Bristol, police stood by as a statue of Edward Colston was toppled and thrown into Avon river, stating afterward that not intervening was a “tactical decision” to “prevent further disorder.”

The British state, like its American and European counterparts, now regularly and impotently gives in to criminal blackmail.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Woe Betide That Guy

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So let us talk about the care and feeding of the abnormal, and begin with some poetry. Yeats gave us some of the best lines composed in the 20th century.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The problem is not that we have seen various individuals who needed to be constrained by societal norms — for we have always had people like that — but rather that our entire society needs to be constrained by societal norms. Now what? This is what it looks like when a center cannot hold, and is in the process of ceasing to be a center. We have always had individual norms that collided with societal norms, but usually societal norms were present in order to take the collision.