by Christopher Cook

I live in Los Angeles, and so the gang-crime issue is of clear and present interest to me. And specifically, I live in the San Fernando Valley, so stories like this affect me even more directly.

But I have a few thoughts on the causes of gang violence, and I think these thoughts may separate me from at least some of my fellow conservatives.

I have been saying for a long time that Palestinian suicide bombers are not born, they're made. It is not in the nature of a child---any child---to spring forth from the womb hating Jews and eager to cut his life short by 60 years just to kill a few of them. That kind of behavior takes SERIOUS inculcation. That same child raised by a nice couple in Adelaide or Tokyo or San Antonio is not going to grow up with those same desires. Nurture isn't everything, but it has major determinative force. It can take whatever nature intended and drastically change it. Context matters.

I recently heard Bruce Hershenson on Dennis Prager's show talking about his new book on Taiwan. He said---and at least one Taiwanese caller confirmed---that Taiwan is very different from China. Free society and free markets have made the country---its government, it's culture, and its people---different from their mainland cousins. Context matters.

When it comes to gang violence---just as with everything else in life---we all must take personal responsibility for our actions. We must, we must. But look folks, let's face it: it takes amazing strength---an innate strength that only some are born with---to overcome one's context. Yes, not every Palestinian becomes a suicide bomber, but lots do, and for those that don't, a shocking number support them or equivocate about the morality of their actions.

Now, let's look at the context of black America, the context in which the gang culture exists and flourishes.

Where did the black American context and culture, to the extent that it is different from mainstream American culture---come from?

It began when people were taken from Africa and brought to a different land to serve as slaves. As slaves, they were robbed of their culture, language, religion, etc. They were often prevented from marrying, and the families they made were often broken up. Over time, this broke them down to almost a cultural tabula rasa, upon which the slaveowners could write. This went on for a couple of centuries.

Now, it is clearly true that it was mostly white people perpetrating this end of the Atlantic slave trade, and that mostly white people were slave owners. But as time went on, and very much after our nation won its independence, it became not white people, but a specific group of white people, who supported, engaged in, and sought the furtherance of slavery.

Democrats.

Those who opposed the Democrats, like the Whigs, often also opposed slavery. The Whigs, however, lacked enough conviction and strength, and they collapsed. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded specifically to condemn, oppose, and bring an end to slavery, and hundreds of thousands subsequently died in a war to do just that. Democrats started that war to divide the union and preserve slavery; Republicans fought to retain the union and end slavery.

Thus, from 1792 until the end of the war in 1865, the context in which the culture of black America began its development was supplied in large measure by white Democrats.

After Republicans and the North brought about Emancipation, the Democrats immediately began attempting to undo or limit blacks' newly won freedoms. They launched the KKK in 1866 to kill Republicans and frighten blacks away from serving in public office. They employed poll taxes and literacy tests to keep blacks from voting. They created the system of segregation and Jim Crow, to keep them from integrating with or participating as equal members of the mainstream society.

In other words, from 1865 to 1964, context in which the culture of black America continued its development was one of segregation, alienation, and constant fear of attack. The people they feared were white Democrats. The people who created this context: white Democrats.

Then, in 1964, the Democrats started "caring" about the plight of blacks. (Excuse the scare-quotes, please. The truth is, most of the rank-and-file did care, but most of their leaders had far less noble motives.) The Democrats in power, with all their "caring," created a new plantation of sorts, only this time it was an economic one, engineered by the neo-socialist policies they espoused... and the results have been disastrous. The emphasis of victimization rather than empowerment produced not only a dependency culture among far more than one should expect, it also allowed blacks' anger to metastasize, rather than slowly being washed away in a tide of achievement and general integration.

And then there's another problem. Integration has advanced more slowly since Desegregation because Democrats have also been targeting today's black Americans with their classic divide-and-conquer technique: using rhetoric and fear to balkanize everyone into separate, competing groups for electoral gain.
(Thus, one might say that Democrats kept blacks segregated from 1865 to 1964, and in a sense, they continue to try to segregate them today, only now for the electoral benefits rather than just out of sheer hatred and bigotry.)

Then, you have the effect of the entertainment and media elite reinforcing and rewarding the worst aspects of inner city culture, as when a liberal music industry executive tells a band of nice young black men with beautiful voices that, in order to make it, they need to change their image to nasty, edgy, and gangsta. This is coupled, of course, with the modern liberal notion that every culture and behavior is equivalent because no culture can be seen as better than another, resulting in an ongoing reinforcement of the idea that gang/gansta culture is perfectly legit, reasonable, and in fact, "authentic."

There's more---lots more---but I'm trying to keep this short for now, so I'll just mention one other thing---the least known and, in a way, the most shocking. The genesis of the early gang movement actually started, not with the Democrats, but with a group with which they shared ideological affinities, if not actual goals:

Communists.

Yes, that's right, actual Communists were in large part responsible for the genesis of the early gang movement. They went to the inner city. The showed movies to young black men---movies they had faked---of black women being raped by white men. They told them that whites were coming to rob them, kill them, and take their women (and after 200 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation and lynching, they had every reason to believe it). So, the Communists gave them guns and told them that they needed to band together to defend themselves. It was part of the Communist plan to subvert American civilization.

(This is new and controversial information, and it is something I am only recently becoming aware of. I will have more on this soon.)

The rapes and murders by whites of blacks never came, but the subversion worked. The gang culture metastasized, and is now a blight upon our cities, our nations, and most of all, the communities in which it takes place.

So, what am I trying to say this early morn? Simply this: Everyone is responsible for his or her own behavior, but culture and context play huge roles in setting the stage for behavior and the development of character. HUGE roles. And American blacks, more than any other group, have had much of that context imposed from outside. The imposers were white, for sure, but it has never been all whites. Since 1792, it has specifically, and in almost total measure, been white DEMOCRATS.

From 1792 to 1865...
Democrats were the party of Slavery.

From 1865 to 1964...
Democrats were the party of Segregation, lynching, and opposition to every civil rights bill put forward by the Republicans for 100 years.

From 1964 to today...
Democrats are the party of the economic and electoral plantation; the party that uses relativism to suggest that ANY behavior, no matter how vile, is "authentic"; the party that shared (at least some) ideological goals with the subversive 5th column that helped spawn the gang movement; and much, much more.

During this entire history, the context and fate of black Americans has been linked with Republicans for only 17 years: from Lincoln's election, the war, and Emancipation (for which Republicans should take great and eternal pride) --through Reconstruction -- to the Compromise of 1877 (for which we should atone and feel great shame). After that, Republicans tried for another 88 years to help, but were thwarted in every attempt. (After 1960, when blacks' great electoral move happened, I think Republicans may have genuinely had hurt feelings, and that is, in part, why they stopped reaching out and trying. That is not an excuse, but it may be a reason)

Other than those 17 years, the Democrats have been the primary external force effecting black American culture, and much of the effect has been negative. Whether it is slavery, segregation, or the new balkanization of modern liberal group-think and electoral triangulation, it is my view that blacks are still not completely free. And in order for things to REALLY change---including things like gang violence and rampant illegitimacy---they must be free.

I am admittedly a partisan Republican, but I am not in any way saying that that freedom is to be found in a large scale return of blacks to their post-Emancipation electoral and political home, the Republican Party. No, no, I am not saying that. . .because that would not be freedom, it would just be a political realignment. What am saying is that, once and for all, blacks need to be free of the external force that has, from the founding of this nation, had the predominant effect on their context and culture. Being free of the Democrats, though, does not just mean voting for someone else, it means being free in every way. It is something deep, something spiritual---a breaking of bonds that go back centuries.

A friend and colleague has described it as the relationship of abused to the abuser, a relationship that so often sees the abused repeatedly returning to the abuser, only to continue the cycle. And, just like the abused, true freedom only comes with a complete dissolution of those bonds. Not the exchange of one alignment for another. Just freedom, real freedom.

The cycle must be broken.