Words fail me at present. I’m saddened beyond belief. The murder of Chris Lane in beautiful, idyllic Duncan, Oklahoma has bewildered us here in the Sooner State. A handsome young man in the full flower of youth was viciously shot in the back merely because he happened to be white. (And please, spare me the concerns about “rushing to judgment,” it didn’t stop the Left from demolishing the reputation of George Zimmerman in a trice.) We thought this type of pathology was par for the course for Blue-state cities like Chicago, Oakland, and Detroit. Apparently we were wrong. Sadness permeates.
No sooner was this horrific act perpetrated, that Delbert “Shorty” Belton, a cheerful old gaffer in Spokane was beaten to death by two young thugs with flashlights. This man survived the Battle of Okinawa, arguably the most savage battle in the most savage theatre of World War II. For what purpose? Was he a slave trader? A member of the Klan? No, just a genial old man whose days were spent playing pool in the local American Legion post. In another incident, a bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security hosted a website that exhorted genocide against white people. Did I mention that said bureaucrat was responsible for buying ammunition for the federal government? Interesting.
There have been numerous other incidents of vicious black-on-white crime in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict. A poor white man who was savagely beaten and chased onto a highway in Georgia where he was killed by oncoming traffic. A very old couple in Tulsa who were beaten to death by a 19-year old who then raped the woman before he finally killed her. The list is long and depressing. I’m still trying to come to grips with all this. The only answer I can come up with is that our government, our media, our religious institutions, and our culture have seen fit to inflame black young men with a Zeal for Avenging Trayvon Martin. Rather than come to grips with the self-imposed deficits that have plagued the black community, the Left has seen fit to wave them away with the magic wand of racism. That poor George Zimmerman, his brother, and his family will live in mortal fear for the rest of their lives is a mere trifle.
Unfortunately, there will be hell to pay. The reserves of societal guilt are rapidly drying up. I imagine this is the case for many Liberals as well. More on this will be said in a future time by us and by others. But for the moment, let us savor the quietude of the Racial Grievance mongers. And let us see how long it will take our bi-racial president to opine that if he had had married a white woman, his son might very well have looked like Christopher Lane. Let us see if he will unleash his Attorney General on the perpetrators of these horrific crimes. You know, to find out if they were guilty of racism.
All is not lost however. Desperation that the Left is losing the narrative are popping up here and there. In their bid to ramp up the propaganda, the cultural mavens are going into overdrive and looking increasingly desperate in doing so. Law and Order: SVU will shortly put out an episode in which a Paula Deen-like character shoots an unarmed, hoodie-wearing black teen. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.
It’s gonna be a long and bumpy ride down the hill.
Let’s not forget that ‘said bureaucrat is currently on paid administrative leave which means that we’re still paying the salary of this hate filled little person. Theodore Dalyrumple wrote very eloquently about the ability of welfare in the UK to turn functional people into feral trolls. The pathologies are the same – except in the UK, one doesn’t have the libs using the race card to excuse the behaviors away. If we had a media that was honest, instead of heavily invested for decades with leftist nonsense, the social decay resulting from the ‘War On Poverty’ would have exposed the outcome long before this, long before the numbers of destroyed families in the black community reached irreversibly toxic levels.
Never forget the leftist intellectual heavyweights openly discussed the inevitable toxic results of welfare in positive terms, back in the 60’s, as a fine way to ‘break some eggs.’ (Read David Horowitz awakening to this, it’s very sad.) LBJ’s ugly comment on the likely harvest of positive voting results for Democrats from the black community speaks for itself. This stuff is not a bug, it’s a feature.
There is nothing, even the good will of millions of people to step away from racism, that Big Government can’t destroy. But then, we were dumb enough to get kicked out of Paradise….
One of the richest, if not the richest man in the world was the black African chief who controlled the slave trade in Africa. The white American settlers adopted slavery of their own invention in the colonies, and in one generation the practice was socially accepted. Racism is not the cause of slavery, serving yourself, and living for bread alone was. Racism was and is, a pretext to justify economic exploitation.
The political, economic, educational, health care,religious, systems( excepting authentic Christianity), all exist essentially, to live for bread alone. The military, corporate, banking systems are instruments of collective self service created for the faring sumptuously every day, of a few elites, at the expense of the hapless masses.
If you serve yourself, you enter into the great whore, if you live for bread alone, you build the beast. The freemasons provide an example, but not the only one, of people seeking occult/dragon power to strengthen their power to successful self seeking. These tempt God.
The coming certainty of this great whore riding this beast into perdition is predicted in scripture and is affirmed by the understanding of the quadrillions of unplayable fiat debt, and the peak oil crunch we are now already experiencing.
The young blackman who senselessly killed is a sorrowful thing. But, all he has seen is near half his generation slaughtered in abortion by his own kind. drug war in the local community, dumbing down educational systems, This is an environment that molds the youth to become a dark wandering star.
The young white man murdered is part of the continued collateral damage of a whole generation raised to be evil, both black and white.Ye shall be sorrowful, indeed
Love God and serve Him alone, live by His Word & not bread alone, do not tempt God, this is the Way of Peace, and is the Vision given so the people do not perish. This is the only this that will work, nothing else will save man, physically or Eternally.
The reaping of what has already been sown is expressed in the scripture, where were it not for the sake of the elect, no live would be spared. I thank God that neither the young white man or young black man was not killed in abortion.
Before black slaves in America, there were white slaves and the practice continued for many years.
There were also blacks who owned slaves up until the Civil War. Some Native Americans like the Cherokees also owned black slaves.
More venomous bigotry in the name of God, something that sadly, we have come to expect from Monomakhos.
Your accusation only holds up if there is not a problem of violence amongst young black men. If there is a problem (and only the proverbial ostrich could deny it) then bigotry can only be attributed to those who see nothing wrong, not those like George who points to the problem and says it is being exacerbated by the true race baiters whose income comes from continuing racial tensions. Nicolae, seriously, there is a problem. Do you have positive suggestions or do you just want to be another troll feeling better about scoring points against a blogger?
Mr Soare, pointing and sputtering at somebody because you don’t like what they said is not an argument. I’m not a racist, anybody who knows me knows that I’m not. I am however alarmed by the ethno-tribalism/racism that we are descending into. If I were a racist I wouldn’t care about the black-on-black criminality that is slowly destroying the African-American community. Nor would I be against abortion on demand (which overwhelmingly claims disproportionately more black babies in utero than all other races.
George, Planned Parenthood marketing targets Black communities. Most of their abortuaries are located near inner-city, poor, neighborhoods. It’s a cynical enterprise. The people who pushed the policies that undermined the Black family are the same that profit from its demise.
The legacy of Progressive Boomers: abort half of their posterity, saddle the other half with the debt from their profligate spending, and make money doing it.
Exactly, Father. It’s awful. And it’s not racist to discern the toxic hate engulfing those areas. It’s actually a form of self-deception to pretend that a thug is really Bambi and excuse the behavior. Not to hate a violent feral person, is very, very, difficult. So much easier to pretend they’re something else. Then one doesn’t have to make the effort to actually forgive them, and not harbor hate in one’s heart. This deception also avoids the pesky problem of having to admit that the policies metastasizing the problem were wrongheaded. And then there’s the lovely entertainment media to consider that’s also at work here.
snarky
Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood was a supporter of eugenics. Eugenics, which was based on Darwinism, was a movement to prevent those considered genetically inferior from reproducing. It was quite fashionable among the intellectual elite at the beginning of the 20th century. She favored birth control to prevent those she considered genetically inferior from reproducing which included African Americans and others she considered to belong to inferior races. Eugenics helped lay the ideological foundations for Nazism and the death camps.
Please keep Fr. Volodymyr Khanas and parishioners of Pokrova (Protection of the Birth-Giver of God) Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Philadelphia, PA in your prayers as their church was engulfed in a major fire.
http://uocofusa.org/news_130825_1.html
The “White Slaves of America” is a little-known chapter of history, all right!
It’s a crying shame they don’t teach “Uncle Randolph’s Cottage” in the public schools anymore. I remember the wonderful scene with the silver skates on the ice! Or wait, was that a different book…….?
Slavery in America grew out of the practice of indentured servitude which began with white indentured servants. The difference was that once an indentured servant served his or her time, he was freed, while African indenture servants remained indentured, thereby producing slavery. Europeans did not go to Africa and capture people and make them slaves. They bought the slaves at slavery markets that existed for centuries before the coming of the Europeans. Therefore if African Americans should blame anyone for slavery, they should blame the Africans who sold other Africans into slavery. A few years ago there was a movie about a slave revolt on a Spanish ship, their capture by the U.S. Coast Guard and trial before an American court called Amisted. What the movie does not tell us is that Cinque, their leader,went back to Africa where he became a slaver trader.
Fr. Bless,
For what it is worth the first black “slaves” in the colonies served as indentured servants as well, and at the end of their tenure went free. It so happened that one of the first group brought over in 1619 after he went free started farming for himself and purchased the labor of a number of new boat loads of blacks brought into the colony. Among those whose service he purchase was one who turned out to be an exceptional farmer and manager and he was making his master very wealthy so that when the time of this man’s indenture was done, the first man…who took the last name Johnston, I believe (could be wrong), did not want to let him go so he sued in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He argued that English culture permitted only a relatively few years of servitude, but that in his native culture in Africa slavery was perpetual, not just for a season. Since blacks in bondage were of his people it was reasonable that their customs of servitude should prevail rather than the English custom. He won and so the precedent of perpetual bondage for black slaves (unless manumitted by their masters) was established. Over the next couple of generations this practice grew and spread among other planters until it had become the custom and expectation.
One reason this practice was adopted so rapidly is strongly related to the practice of Irish slavery. Half the population of Ireland was sent to the colonies both in North America and in the Caribbean, at least 600 thousand, of which only about half survived the voyage or first few years of bondage, which was quite hard. These too were bound by English rules of limited terms of indenture, however not all masters were equally scrupulous, and at the end of terms, tacked on extra expenses to work off, changed records, etc so that an effective condition of perpetual servitude existed for a body of white “slaves” as well. Unlike black indentureds if an Irish slave fled his master and could get far enough away, he could blend in the local free population and be free again. Such run aways were rarely found…but when found were at times visibly branded and badly beaten or otherwise punished. Still the odds were in the favor of the white slave who ran from a harsh or unjust master (I am a descendant of one such runaway indentured servant of Irish extraction). The same was not true for a run away black indentured servant. No matter where they went they stood out, and refinding them and returning them to servitude was generally easier for their masters. The high visibility of a black person in white society of any strata fueled the movement towards a functional if not legally established reservation of perpetual servitude to blacks.
This did not mean Irish slavery went away overnight or with the revolution. There are accounts of dock operations from the port of New Orleans where boats where boats were being loaded with grain that spoke of how the black slaves were considered too valuable to endanger with being sent to labor in the dust choked holds. That was reserved for the Irish. That particular New Orleans accent doesn’t sound so much like the Brooklyn/Bronx, Bowery Boys “boid, choip” accent for nothing…same roots. Since there was more than a little intermarriage between blacks and Irish indentured servants in colonial days there were a substantial subpopulation of people who looked white but were legally considered black and thus slaves.
It was concern for these slaves and the dangers their existence posed in free states bordering slave states that drove a good bit of the early abolitionist movement. That was because, these sorts, like their white forbearers found it easier to run away and blend in elsewhere. They ran to free states and hid out often among the poor whites. The trouble was when slave hunters came north looking for contraband “white” slaves, they were not often particular which of the poor free whites they put in shackles and reduced to slavery when sent back down to the plantation. A few managed to sue and regain their freedom, but not all by a long shot and so the fears of being mistaken…or just taken as a matter of convenience for an escaped slave made folk in the border towns nervous and very supportive of the efforts of the growing abolitionist movement.
Well that’s a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to enlarge a little on the nature of colonial indentured servitude for both whites and blacks as it related to the development of the “particular institution”.
Unfortunately Mr. Soare was not specific enough in his comment for someone to interact with it to any effect, but I have to say that I imagine I MAY be in agreement with him.
I think George’s comments about the reserves of social guilt drying up is probably rather correct. Society has been treated to decades of god-less statist diagnosis of the black underclass issue and glowing announcements of one failed (sure some of the band-aids make some aspects of the problems ooze less pus for a while) secularist initiative after another. As the world economy has tightened up and America has less borrowed capital from mortgaging the future to spend on the maintenance of the world’s “highest” standards of living (and creation-squandering exploitation of the earth’s resources) there is less $ to throw at government-centered, so-called solutions to what is falsely termed “social” problems, solutions that on any sort of close examination do not actually work much. .
Social guilt does not help. As St. Paul observes in Galatians, nothing works – circumcision or uncircumcision or whatever – except a new creation.
New creation starts where John the Baptist did, with a baptism of repentance, not guilt-expiating tax $ “investment.” I find George’s comments irksome and misdirected because he does not seem to come to grips with the fact that our society for two centuries was originally built on the illegitimate enslavement of an entire race, and for the first 80-100 years or so after their official emancipation on their treatment across much of the social landscape as separate but unequal. Or that i have inherited and benefit in my old age from my share of the ill-gotten gains of that system
There is no arguing with the fact that young black men are individually responsible for their acts, and sadly large percentages of them make terrible choices of what to do with their sexual powers and their muscles and guns. (I spent an entire summer long ago flogging Chicago Transit Authority buses up and down S. State St., 43rd St., and Stoney Island, and was scared for my life more than once)
There is also no denying that as a society our ancestors sowed the wind of kidnap, enslavement, ignorance, the destruction of the family, and other destructive policies) and glowing American exceptionalist fantasizing notwithstanding, we are doomed to reap the whirlwind of those SINS which have never been repented of or corrected. Loving our neighbor as ourselves, living out Matthew 25 mano a mano and taking the risks of so doing, as the young Australian’s murder reminds us, is potentially a very costly commitment to make. But can we say that we are changed by the Gospel and actually living it so long as we ignore those realities and the Lord’s challenges to self-sacrifice …in favor of vapid, egotistical discussions about personalities, the length of beards, or the niceties of this ethnic service tradition compared to that one?
Racialized and politicized scapegoating of Zimmerman was never an answer. Neither is a racialized condemnation of the Oklahoma killers that fails, as George’s piece did, to acknowledge the roots of these young men’s beastly behavior in the still-metastasizing sins of our ancestors …or the failure of our government’s secularized, money-throwing social policies to solve that which our Faith tells us only the power of divine love and God’s Spirit can address. What are we doing about THAT? Bandying words on the internet?
sincerely,
Fr. George
Father, half a million Civil War dead shed their blood to address that sin of enslavement. Africans are still enslaving people – Christians mostly. This sin is nothing new in this world, or especially egregious in the American version, when compared to the historical record. When American slave holders in this country had a job too dangerous in mind to risk their ‘property’ on, they hired my Irish ancestors to get the job done. Enough with this already.
Truly, the day’s troubles are enough on their own to address with prayer and repentance.
Very eloquent Fr. However you lost me in your penultimate paragraph. You write about “…sins which have never been repented or corrected”? I thought the mythology of the so-called Civil War was that it was fought to “free the slaves.” Does not the death of almost 1,000,000 men in battle not qualify as “repentance”? Does not the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Great Society’s transfer of trillions of dollars not qualify as “correction”?
What we are seeing now is something very pernicious. The cover of the most recen tEbony magazine shows three black males dressed in hoodies. The caption reads “We Are all Trayvon Martin.” This is what I am talking about when I write that blacks are being enthused with a new cult of Righteous Racial Wrath, one that justifies criminality and violence against defenseless whites (like Shorty Belton).
Where is the Church in this matter? Have the black churches stopped preaching individual sin? The beastliness of the slave trade is over and accounted for. The Religion of Victimology must stop. Now. Or else those who preach it will indeed “reap the whirlwind.”
I agree with George on this one. I believe we paid as a nation in the Civil War for the sin of slavery, and in other ways for Jim Crow. The other problems now are of a different order and source. “Expiation” is not the issue, nor the solution, in any way.
It is true that the legacy of slavery and segregation helped create the problems of black America. However, the people responsible for these injustices are dead or soon will be. To continue to blame whites for their problems does not help solve them. Unfortunately there will be no solution until the African Americans realize that their sub-culture is dysfunctional. When over 70% of the black babies are born out of wed lock and grow up without a father in the house the result is the disaster that we now have. When young girls get pregnant so that they can go on welfare, young black men drop out of high school and do not get an education, and there are more black young men in the criminal justice system than in college the African American sub-culture is totally dysfunctional. The only that it can be fixed is if the African American themselves make the needed changes in their own sub-culture. That means wait until you are married to have sex and produce babies, stay in school and get an education and find a job and work for a living. Unfortunately people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and black politicians keep the dysfunction going by blaming the whites for their problems instead of telling blacks to grow up and stop blaming others and solve their problems themselves.
Father, I am sure you know that slavery has built every civilization known to man. It is endemic to the fallen state. That does not give us the right to continue doing it nor does it give the ancestors of slaves the right to continually whine about it.
I think you need to have a nice long talk with Fr. Moses Berry.
No, Michael, you’re wrong there! Slavery has built nothing, let alone “every civilization” known to man. Civilizations were all ‘built” by their members, high and low, but not by any individuals or single groups.
Take a course in cultural anthropology and learn how men build things like “civilizations.” St. Paul did not seem to find slavery to have any special relation to our fallen state at all.
Please explain how we may hear “the ancestors of slaves” whining about ANYTHING, ok?
Your Grace, you bring up an important distinction but one which does not militate against Mr Bauman’s point which is, that all civilizations had slavery. Even in the more “advanced” Western civilizations of Greece and Rome, it is estimated that at least 1/3 of the population were slaves. If we include all types of servitude, the number is more like one slave for every one free man.
That’s one reason I believe the Industrial Revolution didn’t begin in late Antiquity when the first internal combustion engine was created. What would have happened with the excess population if automation had made chariots move on their own? What would have happened to the four slaves who carried the wealthy in sedans who would have been unemployed? Multiply that by a factor of a thousand in any given city. Etc.
Your Grace, I was using the word as Fr. George used it when he claimed our society was ‘built’ on slavery. That does, of course, come quite close to a “class warfare; economic determinism” model of culture. A model which is contra-indicated by any serious understanding of culture. Perhaps you should criticize him as well?
You are right, though, I should have been more clear. Slavery is a burden on any society which employs it because it is intrinsically inhumane and unproductive as well as fostering all kinds of additional sins.
That does not mean that we have to be saying ‘mea culpa’ into eternity for the sins of our ancestors, nor does it mean that people who are descended from those sinned against should have permanent victim status and therefore free to be irresponsible, violent thugs. The evil of the day is sufficient artificially linking it to the past makes it intractable.
Such activity merely perpetuates the old sin and binds folks (black and white) to it. Rev. Martin Luther King saw clearly that the divide between the races was a sin that effect blacks and whites equally in different ways and binds us together unhealthily Repentance/forgiveness is necessary to heal that sin.
It seems to me that most modern day commentators focus not on repentance or forgiveness but rather on ‘making things right’ with political and economic benefits. If those benefits are not given right away or are deemed insufficient, force the booty from their greedy white hands.
It is unlikely that any genuine repentance will occur in such an atmosphere, just reversal of the victimization. Where is the call for forgiveness? Where is the call for a change of heart that we all need?
I have always been taught that one key to the Orthodox way of living is not to engage in remembrance of wrongs What good is it to constantly live in such remembrance when it comes to the racial wounds in this country?
When I walk into Father Moses Berry’s museum in Ash Grove, MO I am crushed by the poverty of my own soul not because my sinfulness is thrown in my face, but because the actuality of the suffering of slavery is combined with an atmosphere of forgiveness that emphasizes the common humanity we share and the love that is possible because of that.
It is not theoretical as Fr. Moses reveals the pain and the joys of his own family and his own pains and joys as well. Forgiveness overrides all. The pain is revealed as a human pain not a ‘black’ pain as are the joys. An attitude which I find sadly lacking in Fr. George.
The Church would do far better, as Fr. Moses brought to the attention of the OCA, to reach out to Afro-Americans so that we can heal together in the Church in the manner that only the Church can bring, a healing that has a foundation in the Orthodox Church found nowhere else.
.
Mr. “Mortiss” introduces the concept of expiation into the discussion. He didn’t borrow it from me.
My comments had to do with the concept of correcting an error. Civil War certainly didn’t correct anything …except in the grossest sense of re-establishing the Union and outlawing slavery. The divine image in one’s neighbor, even one’s enemy, is to be treasured, loved as one’s self …and the de jure removal of the breach of enslavement, as history has shown us, did little to promote love and respect and self-sacrifice in its place.
George’s comment about the Civil War costs being repentance is completely incomprehensible or wrong-headed, I am not sure which. Scripture assures us the wages of sin is death, but death and other forms of suffering only prod people toward repentance, they aren’t repentance in and of themselves.
Doesn’t Zacchaeus Sunday teach anything about what real repentance is: give a huge chunk of what you’ve been blessed with to the needy, and restore in multiples that which you’ve stolen. War simply wastes much of the accumulated treasure and institutionalizes the machinery of coercion and resistance that has got us little healing and only an uneasy semblance of peace.
But was enslavement ever corrected? Certainly not by Reconstruction. Southern resentment over defeat …and Northern illusions associated with “victory” didn’t correct, and even largely fostered, the creation of a permanent racial underclass that is with us today.
Expiation, guilt, atonement, victimhood are all terms that cloud the issue and manipulate others. The question is “Do we still have a big open sore in our society, and if so what does authentic Orthodox Christianity from its connection to the font of divine love prompt us to do to help correct it?”
The question is NOT “Who is or was guilty of causing it?” or “Whose racialized excusing or blaming is best?”
In fact George’s reply message seemed to me to be the embodiment of myopia if not actual blindness. He can see and (correctly) condemn the version Righteous Racial Wrath on the cover of Ebony magazine, but seems oblivious to the opposite version of RRW in his own bathroom mirror (and his writings on this blog citing the wrongs recently done to Shorty Belton and the Australian student). The Religion of Victimology always worships a false God (me and my tribe) whether it is Al Sharpton or George M preaching it.
sincerely,
Fr. George
Fr, I don’t know which of my writings gave you the impression that it’s “my way/race/tribe/whatever or the highway.” I’ve always tried to live by the simple words of Dr Martin Luther King, that we should judge people by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin.” My gripe is that nobody really believes this.
Hi George:
It’s time to get a little outdoor exercise, but a brief reply first.
Your most recent message mischaracterizes my criticism of your position. I do not believe you have ever said it is “your way/race/tribe/whatever or the highway” and I have certainly not accused you of so saying.
What I *have* accused you of is employing a double standard, seeing the folly and counterproductivity of Righteous Racial Wrath when practiced by blacks while giving yourself permission to do the Righteous Racial Wrath thing in reverse over the killings of Shorty Belton and Chris Lane by young black men.
As to which of your writings I am basing this claim on, please see your above message of Aug. 29, 2013 at 10:08 am, para 2, sentence 4, in context.
And now for a little sweat!
Fr. George
Surely Fr, you can’t possibly equate the unfortunate slaying of Trayvon Martin (who lest we forget was in the process of beating the crap out of George Zimmerman) with the barbaric beating of a 90-year-old geezer to death to be morally equivalent?
No moral equivalence argument from me on those two, George. If you read back over my last several posts you will see me say the Belton and Lane killings were evil; my posts earlier in the summer said I thought that GZ was not **criminally** liable. Neither of those is the point here.
Read back over your lead editorial for this thread and follow up messages and you will see the Righteous Racial Wrath thing that you condemned in others is what you were doing yourself. “Moral equivalence” or the “my tribe or the highway” mischaracterization of my criticisms the other day are just red herrings that serve to avoid what you refuse to interact with me about.
love,
Fr. George