THE END OF THE BENIGN DICTATORSHIPS

Will the last insufferable bureaucrat leaving the room please turn out the lights.... The Watts Riots of 1965 "came out of nowhere" and spread to.....um, where exactly?

Well they didn't spread because they were real riots and real riots have no central ideas or direction. When they occurred in 1965 nobody in Los Angeles knew how to deal with them;. Race riots were not unfamiliar in this country as a whole; we had past experiences—in Detroit especially---and knew more or less that they had to be contained by force. We had the usual Black hustlers, movie stars, disc jockeys and ministers getting the usual face time on TV; the shock that paralyzed local politicians was evidenced by their meandering comments on TV; the rest of the population had the feeling that everything was out of control; that the wheels were coming off the system. Everyone was gripped in a vise of fear. Thirty people were killed, more than a thousand wounded, and the property damage was near the billion dollar class. Loss of both life and property had been restricted to Watts; the rest of the economy was shocked but mostly shrugged it off after a week or so; their only remaining feeling was a mistrust of everyone Black. Los Angeles went back to surfing, making movies, airplane and rocket parts, as well as everything else you can think of, always wary of "Them, The Creatures from the Black Ghetto."

Liberals were running things back then and California was turning Left. Race riots had broken out in Harlem a few years earlier, but there was no symbiotic revolution carried out in other cities as is happening in France right now. This was strictly local.

On the white end of things in LA, there was no matrix for “solving” stuff like this. What we had was an incendiary situation that outsiders were more than willing to toss burning matches upon. But there was no unanimity as to what the situation was, exactly.

What was "everybody" saying back in 1962? Who did our liberal media assign as the bad guy?

Believe it or not, at first most blamed a TV station (KTLA-5) for "hovering over Watts in a helicopter and showing everything." Dumb as that may sound, it was the first Liberal broadside that said in effect that white people didn't need to know about things like that and that reporters had a duty not to tell them. The Los Angeles blackout of violent gang events has not only continued to this day, it is worse, as the recent non-reporting of a huge gang fight that took place near an upper upper class neighborhood demonstrates. The blackout extends to Google, because Mickey Kaus hit on it at least twice and Google has zero links to anything. Winds of Change has a long analysis of press censorship in France that bears reading.

In many ways France today is just like the U.S. before 1962. Pre ‘62 LA Blacks were basically left to their own devices as long as they stayed on "their turf," just as Muslims in France are required to do today. Blacks were allowed to rob, rape, and murder to their heart's content within their ghetto so long as it didn't affect the affluent elites in any way. In France, Muslim youths enact honor killings; rapes by the hundreds: robberies of things like parking meters and mail boxes: and last but not least, gang beatings of anyone they don’t like. Pre ‘62 Los Angeles Blacks lived in a geographic area and were “free,” but any time one of them left the ghetto and hit out at whitey, the cops showed up in force, suddenly; and they enforced the law. It is the near unanimous opinion that the LAPD over enforced the law.

One of the major differences between 1962 America then and France now are the numbers of “rioters” involved (as well as the geographic range). Blacks are only ten percent of our population at most, and that includes the old, the infirm, and the well off. Contrast this with France: Muslims comprise at least twenty percent of the national population and because so many are undocumented the figure could be as high as thirty percent. A disproportionate number of them are very young, just the kinds of people that cause trouble. And you cannot find a successful Muslim in any capacity anywhere. A government cannot control the behavior of twenty percent of a population once the shooting starts unless they want to slaughter a few thousand. Think of Watts, Harlem, or Detroit if the armed rioters had been double or triple the numbers. Not so easy.

The rioting Blacks of 1965 had no idea why they were rioting, it was just a mob that went on a rampage on one of the hottest nights LA had seen in years. A local Black radio station had been blaring the slogan, “Burn Baby, Burn” for weeks prior to the riot, and this slogan shouted out by what seemed like thousands of Blacks, seemed to be the only unifying element in the violence. In less than a week the riot was contained within a geographic area (the now notorious South Central) by Military force. Many have observed that the rioters and their entire community had been virtually destroyed; there was no food, fire department, transportation to work, or medical care; no ambulances, mail delivery, or even electrical power in many areas. They had "succeeded" in shutting down a part of the second largest city in America and leaving the population destitute.

The liberal media eventually assigned lack of jobs, opportunity, and basic human services as the "reason" for everything, and to be honest, the lack of access to good jobs played a huge part in the anger. To solve all of it the LA suits invented the Welfare System we now have; forced busing to schools (a miserable failure that chased all affluent whites into private schools). Billions have been tossed into Watts, and people who were "stuck" there in ‘65 are still in the same condition, except that their excuses increasingly fall on deaf ears. Thirty years later, when the riot of 1992 exploded, it again had zero impact outside of Watts. This time because the rest of the Los Angeles population, which included every nationality you can think of, was riot ready, had guns--both semi-automatic and automatic-- and were more than ready to use them. Blacks were no longer the dominant minority group. Once again the rioting was basically contained by military force with the additional factor that affluent Blacks acted to stop it, an intervention that effectively limited the participants to criminal gangs.

France is faced now with three things our country did not have to confront: huge numbers of minorities nationally; a too large foreign born population that has not been assimilated into the culture, a population that hates France and the French; all mixed in a dominant religion that has been violent since 700 AD that governs the attitudes of the discontented. The religion, like skin color in our country, is a crazy glue that cannot be broken once applied; it involves everyone forever.

In America, skin color alone does not mean that Blacks or Hispanics automatically advocate violence in order to "conquer" problems; the dominant religion in 1992 Watts did not advocate violence; nor did the dominant Hip Hop sub-culture, at least in a serious way. In addition, there is plenty of obvious movement by Blacks out of poverty – by sports and music especially--- and a huge population of prosperous middle class Blacks who have "moved on up" in business, skilled labor, and some professions; in fact it is said --- by the Government stats --- that the American Black population is the fifth largest economy in the world, not a population that would start a riot. Any time a Black really challenges a white person on “poor us” they are immediately hit in the face with the CEO of Time Warner; Kenneth Chenault, the president of American Express; Myrtle Potter, the COO of Genentech; Dave Stewart---AKA the eight hundred million dollar man---who is CEO of World Wide Technology Inc., and any one of a hundred Blacks who have “made it.” In other words, Blacks are lying in their teeth if they say there is no access to top jobs. Something the French government cannot tell their isolated youth.

So why did this “happy negro” population” start another f***ing riot in 1992? Most believe it was because the the Black gangs “could” and because the gangs had become isolated from the community in which they dwelled. Every Black I’ve talked with since, and I’ve worked in a few places where I was a minority of one, tells me that it was a case of “Gangs Gone Wild,” and that they had next to no sympathy within the community. The community knew that they would burn down everything the rest of them had built. Once the National Guard showed up the riot stopped immediately.

France is dealing with a “first time it ever happened” situation and they are dealing with it in the worst way you can imagine. France is not even close to a democracy as we understand the name. It is a quasi-socialist country with the government controlling most business; all the media “news” through licencing of all radio, TV, and press; and they finally control all the labor unions because the government owns the means of production. If that weren’t enough, they control the incomes of millions of retirees who don’t dare step out of line for fear of reprisal. Step on the government and you are out of business in every part of the economy. The best you can say for France is that they are a mostly benign dictatorship.

And like all dictatorships everywhere, they only see what they want to see and tell the people what they want the people to know. Eventually France as it is now constructed is going to fall, as are the rest of the benign dictatorships of Europe. The only questions are how, and what kind of government will take their places.