A reader responds to "The New Orleans Nightmare and Racial Reality:"

Awesome piece. The historical significance of this last week just makes my brain explode, I can't begin to grasp it. The failure of all levels of government on the one hand. But th biggest issue, as you say, is the total ripping of the veil away from the truth of black barbarism. And yet there is a concerted effort at the MSM to change the subject to white racism. So the truth having been exposed is now immediately buried again. Looting for electronic goodies is comprehensible if reprehensible--we know why they are doing it--sheer opportunism, hatred of rules of property. But shooting at rescuers, or violence within a shelter, is simply unfathomable. I wonder what refugee camps are like in Africa.

I suspect actual African tribes organize themselves well -- disaster isn't all that different from daily life and they know how to deal with that. But last year's Tropical Storm Jeanne in Haiti unleashed similar mayhem in urban zones.

A friend of mine, an anthropologist who lived for 3.5 years in the bush with hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa and liked it so much he almost gave up his American professorship to become a hunting guide for safaris, said that life was sweet in the villages, poor but harmonious, with that African joie de vivre ... until the first road came to town. Then everything went to hell. The arrival of the outside world shattered the traditional web of beliefs, evolved over thousands of years, in black magic that had kept people in line. Young men stopped believing that if they raped a pretty girl her grandmother would cast a spell that would give them blackwater fever.

But, yes, sniping during rescue operations, as in the 1967 Detroit riot, is a complete calamity since it can send rescuers fleeing. Generally, the amount of actual sniping gets exaggerated while it's happening, but that reflects the terror and revulsion that any sniping at relief workers generates.

Whenever the talking heads on TV and their partners in print notice that they are showing mass evidence of blacks behaving badly, they are inspired into a paroxysm of lying about white racism to prevent the formation of "stereotypes" among viewers inclined to believe their own lying eyes. But as Theodore Dalrymple points out (via The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace):

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

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