Almost 100 Times Worse than 9/11

At GNXP, Dobeln has an important posting on "The Second American Civil War:" the doubling of the murder rate from 1964 to 1974, and it's continued high level for another couple of dozen years:

The US murder rate hovered around 4.5 per 100 000 during the fifties. Then, in a few short years in the mid-to-late sixties, the rate doubled. What happened? In short: Liberalism happened, and Americans haven’t forgotten yet...

We can determine that all in all, the US had roughly 300 000 more murders between 1964 and 2002 than had been the case if the sixties ‘explosion’ had not happened. The ‘excess murder rate’ causalities during the Vietnam War years of 1965-75 alone number roughly 74 000 people – well above the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam.

Vast amounts of ink have been spent detailing the impact of Vietnam on the American psyche. Some of that ink would probably have been better used in determining just how the great killing spree that lasted from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties changed how Americans view the world.

The exact figure for the Great Murder Wave can be debated, but it was clearly approaching two orders of magnitude bigger than the death toll in 9/11. It had an enormous impact on American life, permanently desolating several great cities like Detroit.

There's an interesting paradox at work here in terms of public vs. elite awareness of this history. The great murder/crime wave that began during the golden age of liberalism of the first years of the LBJ Administration is probably the single most important reason that "liberal" is a dirty word in American election campaigns today. Yet, crime is such a declasse subject in the Establishment press and considered so politically incorrect because it touches inevitably on racial differences in crime rates, that many liberals who take their worldviews more from what they read than what they see about them don't have a clue as to what went wrong that permanently damaged the once-proud name "liberal."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer