Alan Keyes is out with a column today suggesting that President Obama, his opponent in the 2004 U.S. Senate election in Illinois, is using the riots in Baltimore to begin “consolidating dictatorial power” in order to impose “totalitarian central control” over the nation.
“Though many refuse to admit it, the American people are already into the first courses of a new civil war,” Keyes writes, claiming that the nation is divided between those who call “upon the Creator, God” and Obama and the demonstrators in Baltimore who believe in “raw, material power, where justice is the good of the stronger.”
He then compares the current Baltimore protesters to the Confederate sympathizers and Lincoln opponents who rioted in the city in 1861 against the Civil War: “Baltimore is ablaze with riotous violence, as it was in early courses of the last Civil War. This time, too, that violence may come, on demand, from those who hate the premises of America’s Declaration of right, rights and justly delimited government.”
Or worse still for the elitist faction propagandists, they might react by raising such issues in racial terms. They might wonder aloud whether it is merely coincidence that, under the leadership of the man elected as “the first Black American President” the nation has declined in economic terms and in terms of social cohesion and international respect.
They might wonder aloud whether it is merely coincidence that episodes of supposedly race-based unrest fit the paradigm of creatively destructive crises celebrated in Obama’s socialist background as ideal opportunities for consolidating dictatorial power.
They might question the wisdom, and suspect the motivation of people who insist on defining issues that involve respect for fundamental and unalienable human rights and dignity in terms that instead offer excuses for replacing state and local self-government with increasingly totalitarian central control.
The question of what happened to Freddie Gray is first and foremost an issue of justice for an individual human being. In addition to legal and political processes and contacts, non-violent public demonstrations may be needed to make sure that issue is addressed. But riotous acts supersede and distract from it. They make it more difficult and unlikely that simple justice will be served. The individual’s death becomes fodder in a struggle for power in which demands for justice are simply ammunition.
This is, of course, exactly how socialist ideologues look upon individual human beings. Socialism is about impersonal “forces of history”, not God-endowed, uniquely created human persons. Individualism dissolves into the wave of history, only taking distinctive shape again in the dictatorial personalities who signify its leading edge.
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Though many refuse to admit it, the American people are already into the first courses of a new civil war. This time it is not about the wound inflicted by an injustice that defies our ground of unity. It about whether we shall continue to stand upon that ground, which is an understanding of justice that transcends human will and power. In this war, one side calls upon the Creator, God. The other evokes no god but History: i.e., the heartless progression of events determined in the end by raw, material power, where justice is the good of the stronger, and no injustice is acknowledged but in the complaints of those too weak and powerless to impose their will.
Baltimore is ablaze with riotous violence, as it was in early courses of the last Civil War. This time, too, that violence may come, on demand, from those who hate the premises of America’s Declaration of right, rights and justly delimited government. Others will twist Baltimore’s present smoldering this way and that to serve their stupid, selfish ambitions. But the true diagnosis of its plight lies beyond political parties, or factional ambition and racial manipulation.
