After years of anti-cop rhetoric, violence is out of control in America’s cities. Smash and grabs, sidewalk attacks and old ladies being mugged in broad daylight — all just factored into the cost of living a metropolitan lifestyle. But these are not simply passive inevitabilities that somehow come to pass. They are active policy choices of a revolutionary left, firmly in control of every major city, that sees violence as a tool toward its political aims. In fact, there is only one type of violence the left will not condone — and the key to understanding it lies in these political aims.
The radical left may talk often of high-minded goals, but their ultimate goal is to eradicate hierarchy — the central push of the “equity” agenda. All must be made equal in order for all to be equally free. For classical liberals, this meant equal treatment under the law, unaffected by circumstances of birth. Yet for the radical outgrowth, this now means leveling all aspects of genuine human diversity. However, they do not truly seek egalitarian reforms, but merely to rejigger any form of traditional hierarchy (much of which had already been dismantled by their liberal forebears) and instead place themselves at the top. So the attack on hierarchy really becomes a spiteful, resentful attack on any form of tradition. This is the true nature of the radical left.
Traditional morality posits that the criminal is the “oppressor” of the “victim,” whom he victimizes with his crime. This has been the basis of virtually every legal system throughout human history. Yet radical left morality flips this notion on its head. The new “victim” becomes the criminal himself, victimized by the injustices of a hierarchical society that drives him to desperation: the thief stealing to feed his family or violence as the “language of the unheard.” The person on the receiving end becomes merely a casualty in the putsch to upend traditional morality, while the priests of the new morality consolidate their right to rule.
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Yet there is one realm where the radical left will never condone violence: self-defense.
Why is that a hardworking bodega clerk was charged with murder and sent to Rikers Island after he defended himself against an alleged unprovoked attack from a black man in his store? Why were the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns as BLM protesters raided their gated community, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law? At the same time, why is it that the illegal immigrants who recently allegedly attacked police officers in New York got off scot-free? The reflexive answer simply suggests identity politics, or a political hypocrisy that brazenly rewards allies as it hurts enemies. But the tradition goes all the way back to Soviet criminal law, well before BLM was chanting in the streets. (RELATED: ‘I Love DC’: Woman Crawls Home After Being Beaten, Maced And Robbed)
In Volume 2 of “The Gulag Archipelago”, Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (p. 431) wrote:
In the Criminal Code of 1926 there was a most stupid Article 139 – “on the limits of necessary self-defense” —according to which you had the right to unsheath your knife only after the criminal’s knife was hovering over you. And you could stab him only after he had stabbed you. And otherwise you would be the one put on trial. (And there was no article in our legislation saying that the greater criminal was the one who attacked someone weaker than himself.) This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense leads to total spinelessness as a national characteristic. A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army man Aleksandr Zakharov outside a club. Zakharov took out a folding penknife and killed the hoodlum. And for this he got….ten years for plain murder! “And what was I supposed to do?” he asked, astonished. Prosecutor Artsishevsky replied: “You should have fled!” So tell me, who creates hoodlums?
So what’s the common strain between radicals of our day and of centuries passed? An aversion to traditional morality.
When the criminal is really a victim, those he abuses have no right to defend themselves. Self-defense codes enshrine into law that the criminal deserves to suffer at the hands of those around him in society, adding to the hierarchy of injustice that oppresses him. It perpetuates the so-called “cycle of oppression” the left aims to dismantle. In other words, cracking down on self-defense serves the same function as going easy on crime: building a new morality of the oppressed, with a new aristocracy at the top.
Lawless criminal steals from Apple Store.
Time and time again it’s been showing that when you have woke, progressive DAs crime goes up.
So here is a preview of what is coming to a Massachusetts Apple Store near you. pic.twitter.com/t5gxY85DzM
— Bostonians Against Mayor Wu (@AntiWuCoalition) February 7, 2024
Beyond the politically prudent, there’s a psychological and ideological aspect to this phenomenon that also needs to be addressed: why does self-defense give them a feeling of traditional morality? (RELATED: Video Appears To Show Illegal Migrant Gang Members Dragging Woman From Moped: REPORT)
Because it centers the individual and his inherent human dignity — the foundation of traditional morality. In the Bible, this concept is rooted in the idea that humans are created in the image of God: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). For this reason, each life has inherent worth, which carries over to American founding principles that men are endowed by God with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Self-defense is a natural right that predates government; man has a right to defend that which is bestowed by God with inherent worth. One cannot be expected to give up his life in the name of a higher “social” justice; to expect one to do so would be categorically unjust.
So in rejecting this worldview in its entirety, the left has a visceral reaction to self-defense. The left, of course, believes that no rights pre-exist government — that what we think of as rights are really privileges and benefits doled out through government largesse; that individuals are mere disposable cogs to further the utopian aims of the state. This shows us just how far the radical left has fallen from the tree of liberalism. They have no rightful claim to the mantle of freedom, justice or brotherly love. They despise humanity, and the timeless justice to which we are disposed.