In this morning’s daf yomi (page of Talmud), I learned there’s a Mishna that when a woman is taken captive during a time that the hand of Israel is strong in the land, she is not presumed to be raped, but if the hand of the idolaters dominates the land, she is presumed to be raped.<\/p>\n
Social norms vary depending upon who holds power. When Christianity is strong in the land, for example, Christian norms dominate public life. When women take over a part of life, female norms of cooperation dominate. <\/p>\n
When America had a dominant majority and when America had lynching (and almost all of it was for horrendous behavior such as rape and murder and most Americans who were lynched were white), there was much less rape and murder and crime than there is today. Once the hand of the majority was weakened, after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, we got an explosion of black crime.<\/p>\n
Similarly, in the 1970s, when homosexual behavior became more accepted, we got AIDS and an explosion of diseases among gays because they could now act on their natural instincts towards promiscuity. <\/p>\n
A healthy society has one dominant culture. America was healthier 60 years ago. It had more social trust and more social cohesion and fewer civil rights and less violent crime. <\/p>\n
Dennis Prager notes that every individual exerts a force field. I’ve seen how when Dennis Prager walks into a room, the room changes. People tend to up their game. They become more polite. They’re intimidated by Prager’s social status. When I had a difference with Prager<\/a>, every single person I knew sided with the top dog.<\/p>\n Groups also exert force fields. In some circumstances, Jews rise to the top and dominate parts of life (such as academia, law, medicine, entertainment, media). Jewish social norms become the group’s social norms. For example, when Jews came to dominate medicine, the Jewish practice of circumcision became the American practice. In Australia, a country with relatively little Jewish influence compared to America, everybody in December says Merry Christmas. In cities with lots of Jews such as Los Angeles and New York, that greeting is not the default. <\/p>\n In some parts of American life, blacks rise to the top and dominate (sports, music, comedy, preaching, politics). Since blacks have come to power in the NFL and the NBA, you have more exuberant celebrations and more left-wing politics. Non-blacks often feel bullied. <\/p>\n Jews and blacks shape American culture, for example, more than Mexicans do. Jews and blacks exert force fields that change how outsiders think, speak and behave. <\/p>\n Why would any group not want to create a strong force field aligned with its best interests? The more cohesive the group, the more powerful it can be. <\/p>\n The opposite of cohesive is diverse. Diversity means we have nothing in common. A diverse community is a weak community. There’s nothing uniting us. Why do people think that is a good thing? <\/p>\n I’ve often heard Islam described as the most powerful religion in the world because so many of its adherents are willing to kill for it. That’s a force field that intimidates critics. <\/p>\n Why would Christians not want to build the strongest force field possible? To the extent that Christianity does not dominate, non-Christianity dominates. Why would Christians want that?<\/p>\n According to a Jewish teaching, God is wherever you let Him in. God is real in the world to the extent that believers in God make him real in the world. <\/p>\n Why would you not want your god, your hero system, to be real in the world? Your hero system is an objective reality to the extent that you make it concrete and force other hero systems to bow to it. <\/p>\n On Dec. 30, 2013, I wrote<\/a>: <\/p>\n On Friday, I posted to FB: “Phil Robertson stood tall for his beliefs [about homosexuality] and A&E caved<\/a>.”<\/p>\n My friend Michael responded: “Phil’s “beliefs” include black people supposedly enjoying living under racist Jim Crow laws<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Michael, Phil didn’t give any “beliefs” as you describe. He said this<\/a>: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I\u2019m with the blacks, because we\u2019re white trash. We\u2019re going across the field…. They\u2019re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, \u2018I tell you what: These doggone white people\u2019\u2014not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” <\/p>\n In this GQ interview excerpt, Phil simply described what he saw. That was his experience. But let’s extrapolate out from what Phil Robertson saw to the general condition of blacks in America under Jim Crow and today. The black family under Jim Crow was in better shape than the white family. As the black economist Walter Williams wrote<\/a>: “In 1960, only 28 percent of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were never married. Today, it’s 56 percent. In 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 percent, in 1960, 22 percent, and today, it’s 70 percent. Some argue that the state of the black family is the result of the legacy of slavery, discrimination and poverty. That has to be nonsense. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families, comprised of two parents and children. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents. In fact, according to Herbert Gutman in “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925,” “Five in six children under the age of 6 lived with both parents.” ” <\/p>\n So, yes, in some ways blacks in America were happier and better off under Jim Crow laws than they are today under rap culture. Do I want America to go back to Jim Crow culture? No.<\/p>\n In many ways, Gays were better off under a repressive America than under today’s permissive America. Just look at AIDS. AIDS exploded after it became socially acceptable to publicly identify as gay. Black crime rates exploded after the 1960s Civil Rights legislation. South Africa’s average life expectancy has plunged<\/a> a decade since the end of apartheid. The average black (and white) in South Africa was better off under apartheid than he is today.<\/p>\n In many ways, Jews in America were better off with a mildly anti-semitic America that did not always allow them into certain hotels and country clubs and limited their admission to Ivy League schools because that segregation promoted group cohesion and discouraged inter-marriage and assimilation.<\/p>\n Freedom and equality of opportunity are not always the greatest values. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n John* emails: <\/p>\n \nThere are a couple of very important points about Jim Crow laws that are usually ignored by people who view segregation as unspeakably evil. Under segregation, there was generally a thriving black business class who catered to blacks. Once segregation was lifted, and blacks could shop anywhere, some did and that cut into the black owners\u2019 business but whites did not start patronizing black owned establishments. So integration had the unintended consequence of eviscerating black stores (excepting undertakers, barbers and hair salons.)<\/p>\n The other problem arose with school segregation. Within the black community, teachers, administrators and principals formed a respected middle and upper class. When the schools were desegregated, many of the teachers lost their positions. They may have been graduates of Negro teacher\u2019s colleges, but those schools were thought of as inferior to their white counterparts. Black principals were not put in charge of an integrated or white faculty. <\/p>\n This also had the unintended consequence of undermining discipline in the schools. If a kid acted up, the principal and\/or teachers knew the family and would speak with the family about the problems with the child. With white teachers and principals, this didn\u2019t apply. They may have held positions of authority, but they didn\u2019t personally know the family or interact in the community in the same way. <\/p>\n On the anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, I read some interviews with prominent blacks who had received education in the segregated south and then were part of the first wave of desegregation. They said that they felt that the education they received from their segregated teachers surpassed what they received in an integrated environment. Some of this may be due to white racism, but at least part of it, is that they could identify more closely with their black teachers and their black teachers understood them better.<\/p>\n If you want to read more about the impact of the Brown case on education, Raymond Wolters<\/a>, a history professor at the University of Delaware, has written a couple of books about it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Steve Sailer wrote January 15, 2007<\/a>: <\/p>\n “In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it\u2019s not just that we don\u2019t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don\u2019t trust people who do look like us.” It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard\u2019s Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery\u2014that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities\u2014was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn\u2019t dared announce it \u201cuntil he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it \u2018would have been irresponsible to publish without that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In a column headlined \u201cHarvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,\u201d Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of \u201ccivic engagement,\u201d a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:<\/p>\n “When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. \u2018They don\u2019t trust the local mayor, they don\u2019t trust the local paper, they don\u2019t trust other people and they don\u2019t trust institutions,\u2019 said Prof Putnam. \u2018The only thing there\u2019s more of is protest marches and TV watching.\u2019”<\/p>\n Lloyd noted, \u201cProf Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, \u2018the most diverse human habitation in human history.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it \u201cby two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media.\u201d To Putnam\u2019s horror, hundreds of \u201cracists and anti-immigrant activists\u201d sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.<\/p>\n Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn\u2019t cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was \u201calmost criminal,\u201d Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam\u2019s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam\u2019s line\u2014\u201cWhat we shouldn\u2019t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us\u201d\u2014sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht\u2019s parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: \u201cWould it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?\u201d<\/p>\n Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled \u201cLove Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.\u201d Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, \u201cThose who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.\u201d<\/p>\n Putnam\u2019s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicago\u2019s Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley\u2019s administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.<\/p>\n This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it\u2019s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don\u2019t speak the same language as you. Then there\u2019s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work\u2014namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?<\/p>\n The high crime rate didn\u2019t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.<\/p>\n Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.<\/p>\n Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn\u2019t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn\u2019t be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.<\/p>\n In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade.<\/p>\n The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history\u2019s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.<\/p>\n Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun\u2019s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia\u2019s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria\u2019s border with the Slavs and Magyars.<\/p>\n Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the \u201clong civic generation\u201d that reached its peak in the 1940s and \u201950s.<\/p>\n Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America\u2019s success to its \u201cforever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types\u2014religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.\u201d<\/p>\n The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but the free-market economists\u2019 prescription of \u201cshock therapy\u201d prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations\u2019 assets.<\/p>\n An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyama\u2019s 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.<\/p>\n As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maric\u00f3n lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.<\/p>\n The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans\u2019 beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico\u2019s economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn\u2019t seem to team up well beyond family-scale.<\/p>\n In America, you don\u2019t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, \u201cPublic life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.\u201d Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. \u201cMexicans need few friends,\u201d Riding observed, \u201cbecause they have many relatives.\u201d<\/p>\n Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, \u201cMexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population.\u201d Jorge G. Casta\u00f1eda, Vicente Fox\u2019s first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexico\u2019s disparities in 1995:<\/p>\n “The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians\u2026 These deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnam\u2019s \u201cSocial Capital Community Benchmark Survey,\u201d Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie \u201cCrash.\u201d I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. \u201cWho else can you trust?\u201d he shrugged.<\/p>\n But what primarily drove down L.A.\u2019s rating in Putnam\u2019s 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.\u2019s whites said they trusted other races \u201conly a little or not at all,\u201d 37 percent of L.A.\u2019s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.<\/p>\n Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos\u2019 failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: \u201cIn Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.\u201d<\/p>\n Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angeles\u2019s millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry Bruckheimer\u2019s attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.<\/p>\n In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it\u2019s a journalistic clich\u00e9 to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as \u201cvibrant,\u201d they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n Some of this lack of social capital is class-related\u2014Miami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but it\u2019s anomalous because it attracts Latin America\u2019s affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America\u2019s future because it imports peasants and laborers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become not just more trusting but more trustworthy.<\/p>\n Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. Hispanics in America, in contrast, have a relatively high crime rate\u2014while their imprisonment rate is less than half that of blacks, it is 2.9 times worse than that of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly, the Latino crime rate goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a troubling future. While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the middle class, others descend into the gang-ridden underclass. Further, the illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics (versus 25 percent among whites), and it\u2019s higher among Mexican-Americans born here than among newcomers from Mexico.<\/p>\n The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when they come under attack.<\/p>\n Putnam points out one success story but draws an unsophisticated lesson: \u201cI think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. There was a lot of racial tension around the time of the Vietnam War. Now, polls show that US military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than civilians. If officers were told they wouldn\u2019t make colonel if they were seen to discriminate, they changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Imposing martial law on the rest of America might prove impractical, however. And negative sanctions can hardly account fully for the growth of positive relationships within the military.<\/p>\n One important aspect that Putnam ignores is the military\u2019s relentless use of IQ tests. From 1992-2004, the military accepted almost no applicants for enlistment who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This eliminated within the ranks the majority of the IQ gap that causes so much discord in civilian America. Contra John Kerry, enlistees of all races averaged above the national mean in IQ: white recruits scored 107, Hispanics 103, and blacks 102.<\/p>\n Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, \u201cThe rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army.\u201d And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, \u201cPerhaps the most vivid example of the \u2018blackening\u2019 of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, it\u2019s now common to see college football coaches leading their teams in prayer. Fisher DeBerry, the outstanding coach of the Air Force Academy, who has led players with no hope of making the NFL to a record of 169-108-1, hung a banner in the locker room bearing the Fellowship of Christian Athletes\u2019 Competitor\u2019s Creed, which begins, \u201cI am a Christian first and last.\u201d When the administration found out, he was asked to take it down.<\/p>\n Because policymakers almost certainly won\u2019t do what it would take to alleviate the harms caused by diversity\u2014indeed, they won\u2019t even talk honestly about what would have to be done\u2014it\u2019s crazy to exacerbate the problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic declines\u2014as Putnam\u2019s self-censorship revealed\u2014precisely because of a lack of trust due to the mounting political power of \u201cthe diverse\u201d to punish frank discussion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this morning’s daf yomi (page of Talmud), I learned there’s a Mishna that when a woman is taken captive during a time that the hand of Israel is strong in the land, she is not presumed to be raped, … Continue reading
\n\u2014Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam<\/p>\n
\nCasta\u00f1eda pointed out, “These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is simply a retargeting.””<\/p>\n