By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, June 11, 2020
The ancient Greeks created new words like “paradox” and
“irony” to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and
what they actually do and suffer.
Remember the blind prophet Teiresias of ancient drama. In
the carnage of Athenian tragedy, he alone usually ends up foreseeing danger
better than did those with keen eyesight.
After a catastrophic plague and endless war, ancient
democratic Athens was stripped of its majestic pretensions. Soon it was
conducting mass executions — on majority votes of the people.
Throughout history, revolutions often do not end up as
their initial architects planned. The idealists who ended the French monarchy
in 1789 thought they could replace it with a constitutional republic.
Instead, they sparked a reign of terror, the guillotine,
and mass frenzy. Yet the radicals who hijacked the original revolution and
began beheading their enemies soon were themselves guillotined.
It was not democracy but rather the dictator Napoleon who
put an end to French domestic unrest.
He assumed more powers than had the executed Bourbon king
Louis XVI, who had set off the revolution in first place.
The COVID-19 epidemic, the nationwide mass quarantine,
and the massive protests, looting, rioting, and arson that all followed the
police killing of George Floyd have resulted in similar paradoxes.
Social distancing and mandated lockdowns for months have
been the source of endless fighting between the people and their governments.
Red and blue states often adopted diametrically opposite policies.
But the massive demonstrations and rioting saw hundreds
of thousands of protesters jammed together and often without masks. That mass
disobedience to quarantining will teach us, better than any university
modeling, whether the virus spikes or is indifferent to thousands who
congregate in the streets.
The lockdowns were politically weaponized during this
election year. Blue states thought the sinking economy would hurt President
Trump’s reelection bid. Red states wanted to open up as quickly as possible to
get the economy back and running before November.
Yet the mass progressive protests and violence forced an
unplanned end to mass quarantining — and thereby inadvertently helped jumpstart
the country back to business. Those who despise Trump may have done the most to
help him.
Blue states pride themselves for their liberal governors,
big-city mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general. But progressive
urban bastions like Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia are
also the ground zero sites of arson, violence, and looting, where racial
relations are the worst.
As violence spiked, there were public and private calls
to disband or vastly curtail police forces throughout California, Illinois, and
New York. But these were the very states where security and safety were the
most unsure.
If blue city councils do manage to defund and/or
dismantle their police forces, as a veto-proof majority of councilors has
pledged to do in Minneapolis, they will teach Americans whether social
problems, crime, and urban decay are made better by the absence of their own
police.
Our recent protests started out idealistically by calling
attention to the racism that had allowed four Minneapolis policemen to kill
George Floyd while in police custody. But that tragic killing sadly became
overshadowed by protests and violence where cruel irony abounded.
White Antifa arsonists occasionally helped torch
black-owned small businesses — in the name of Black Lives Matter.
Liberal New York Times senior editors were damned
as sell-outs and racists for allowing free expression on their editorial pages
— by their own younger woke staffers who claimed to be more ethical.
Videos appeared of children screaming in cruel fashion
that their own parents were racists. Professionals took a knee to own up to
their supposed racist sins — in Maoist-like mass confessionals. NPR asked
listeners to decolonialize their bookshelves.
The NFL now confesses it was wrong to have asked players
to stand for the National Anthem. But those very protests once sank their
television ratings, turned off fans, and slashed attendance.
Quarterback Drew Brees one day declares that he is
disturbed when the American flag is sullied. On the next, he is shamed into
apologizing for his patriotism — as if he was reprogrammed in a reeducation
camp.
Zero-bail policies have released violent protesters hours
after they were arrested — often to allow them to repeat the violence that got
them arrested in the first place.
No matter — oblivious, the revolution only steamrolls
ahead.
Women shave their heads to curb their “whiteness,” by
clipping off their “straight” hair, as if in some fairy tale their
self-confessed white privilege disappears with their bangs.
Demands rise that colleges must spend more for racial
administrators and programs as they face insolvency and faculty layoffs.
Mayors who did not protect supermarkets and discount
warehouse stores from burning and looting now demand that such terrified chains
do not abandon their inner cities.
As these natural and mandate catastrophes continue, we see raw human nature stripped of its pretenses. The result is tragically ironic and often not a pretty sight.
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