Tipsheet

NYT Figures Out What India, Nazi Germany and the USA Have in Common in Historically Illiterate Piece

I’m not going to subject you to this lengthy piece from The New York Times because well it’s just wrong. From the start, you know it’s an America-bashing piece because that’s just the default setting for American liberals. They hate this country, its founding, and its principles, mainly because, well, they get in the way of their century-old project of trying to establish a hyper-regulatory progressive state. That’s not to say they’re not succeeding in that effort; just look recent headlines. There are a lot of institutions bending to the will of these clowns. But here we have a lengthy essay about caste systems and somehow the United States is in the top three, along with…Nazi Germany (via NYT):

 We saw a man face down on the pavement, pinned beneath a car, and above him another man, a man in uniform, his skin lighter than the man on the ground, and the lighter man was bearing down on the darker man, his knee boring into the neck of the darker man, the lighter man’s hands at his sides, in his pockets — could it be that his hands were so nonchalantly in his pockets? — such was the ease and casual calm, the confidence of embedded entitlement with which he was able to lord over the darker man.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste.

[…]

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

Wait a minute, didn’t this publication suffer and complete and total meltdown over Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) op-ed about restoring law and order when this nation was engulfed by riots over the death of George Floyd? Didn’t they try to say the piece didn’t meet its standards after woke crybaby reporters at the Times revolted? And didn’t they just make up a new standard for Cotton, notably that parts of his op-ed were inaccurate, to artificially create a reason to bash it to appease the progressive mob that was ready to burn the building down? Yes, to all. and there is nothing more inaccurate than to say that American society is similar to Nazi Germany. What is this? Also, as someone else aptly noted, we’re just going to give Apartheid South Africa a pass. Why? During that brutal system of racial separation, the government was arguably enforcing it through terrorism. Does Vlakplaas ring a bell to anyone at the NYT? Do we still have a way to go regarding race relations? Sure. Are we Nazi Germany in that respect? Hell no. I mean we’re seriously being lumped in with the heinous crimes committed by an Aryan-obsessed totalitarian society. The rule still applies when Nazis are invoked in a debate, the person making the argument or comparison in trying to bash America is usually wrong. And this is no exception. Also, and you know this already, but the Left has no grasp of history and here is exhibit A in that regard. Just wow.