The Face That Burned a Thousand Homes

Well, maybe not a thousand, more like a couple dozen, but it got some people murdered, too. So I guess it somehow adds up.

That face belonged to one Fannie Taylor, who was afraid to admit to her husband that she had a lover. So when that lover beat her up, she blamed a fictitious black trespasser. The upshot: The predominantly black hamlet of Rosewood was burned to the ground by a white mob, which murdered several black people in the process.

Today everybody's favorite joke of an encyclopedia features an article on the Rosewood massacre. Well, I have to admit that that "encyclopedia" is good reading, despite its subjective, collectivist standards of truth.

(They hold that as an encyclopedia, they are bound to exclude "original research." Yet, they apply that rule even to trivial and obvious facts, and to conclusions that logically follow therefrom. I.e., everyone can see that grass is green — or maybe yellow or brown sometimes. But if there were no books that say so, but only a book that says grass is striped pink and blue, Wikipedia would write that grass is striped pink and blue.)

Anyway, this article is definitely required reading. Obama would call it a teachable moment.

We learn that:

(A) Jealousy is indeed, as the word itself proclaims, lousy.

(B) Lying can have unintended consequences (unless you hold that Fannie was aware her lie would get local blacks into trouble, but didn't care shit).

(C) We're barely out of the Dark Ages: This happened in the US four score and seven years ago, not in medieval Europe.

(D) Man is nothing but a sub-animal if he doesn't think. If he doesn't think, his scheming mind and his ability to use tools make him even more dangerous than the worst animal monster.

'Tis dangerous to wake the lion,
Destructive is the tiger's tooth,
But far more fierce, and far more fiendish,
Deluded man bereft of ruth.
Woe to them who lend the sightless
The heavenly torch to light the way!
It guides them not, it can but kindle,
And towns and lands in ashes lay.

— Friedrich Schiller

In context…

The master, with judicious training,
Knows when 'tis best to break the mold;
But woe! when streams of ore, all glowing,
Rush unchecked from out their hold!
Blind raging, like the thunder's crashing,
It bursts its fractured bed of earth,
As if from out hell's jaws, fierce flashing,
It spewed its flaming ruin forth.

Where forces rude are madly reigning,
There can no perfect form be framing;
When nations would themselves be freeing,
The common weal will soon be fleeing.

Woe, when in the heart of cities
The smoldering embers heaped-up lie,
When the people, fetters bursting,
Help themselves with savage cry!
Rebellion, at the bell's strong cable,
Sendeth out a howling sound;
Though consecrate to peace and quiet,
The tocsin rings the signal round.

"Equal'ty and Freedom!" men are shrilling,
To arms the peaceful burghers fly,
The streets and halls with crowds are filling,
And murd'rous bands around there hie.
Then women, to hyenas turning,
'Mid horrors mock and jeer and jest,
And tear, with panther's frenzy burning,
The heart from every hostile breast.
There's naught that's sacred more, for breaking
Are all the bonds of pious fear?
The bad the good one's place is taking,
Vice knows no law in its career.
'Tis dangerous to wake the lion,
Destructive is the tiger's tooth,
But far more fierce, and far more fiendish,
Deluded man bereft of ruth.
Woe to them who lend the sightless
The heavenly torch to light the way!
It guides them not, it can but kindle,
And towns and lands in ashes lay.

…this, like the Wikipedia article's harping on the "extra-legal" nature of the crimes, would imply that "the rule of law" and submission to "legitimate authority" are any better than "extra-legal" action.

So we finally learn that:

(E) Nothing could be farther from the truth. Often, legal action is at least as bad as extra-legal action. Whether an innocent black man is lynched for "raping" a white woman or whether he is sentenced by an all-white jury to be murdered, he's just as dead.

Likewise, sometimes extra-legal action is superior to the rule of law. Look, once again, at Bernie Goetz.

The law demanded that Bernie do nothing while he got assaulted and mugged, and maybe raped and murdered, and the law did nothing to protect him, but everything to protect hoodlums. When Bernie fought back, it was the only possible moral action.

(This is, ironically, from a racial point of view, the diametrical opposite of the Rosewood massacre: an innocent white man attacked by black hoodlums. Goes to prove that neither of the races is superior.)

Likewise, if an innocent black man is on death row, about to be murdered by the government, and there is no appeal left, what other moral action can there be but to break him out of jail?