October 26, 2023
by Dr. David Fialk, Editor / Publisher
A new friend has been loaning me books. I'm a couple of books into a series of irreverent crime novels by Charles Willeford. I've always wondered about the attraction we have, in books and movies, to the crime genre. I think I've figured it out.
Society is something we lay over our basic nature. It satisfies our need for belonging, giving us rules to play by. Criminals play by other rules. Accounts of crime, fictional or real, fascinate us law-abiding citizens, allowing us to vicariously abandon social norms, to walk on the wild side.
For a while up in Connecticut, I had a close acquaintance, X, who was a correctional officer at the supermax prison. It was a panopticon setting where the guard station was in the center and the cells were radially arranged. He could see into each cell, but they could all see him. In fact, through the window in their doors, he was the only thing that they could see. He told me, "Everyone in prison, the guards and the inmates, is in prison. The guards just get to go home at the end of the day."
Sometime before that stint as a correction officer X had owned Y's, the biggest bar in Hartford. On weekends, Miller used to park refrigerated semis outside the bar to keep it supplied with beer. On Friday afternoons the WFSB traffic helicopter while hovering overhead would report, "Interstate 84 is slow going west. And Route 91 is backed up north and south. But the biggest jam is on the patio at Y's," the announcement eliciting a cheer from the patio.
X told me that leaving the bar at 3am, in excess of $10,000 in a bag under his seat, trailed by an armed escort, he might be pulled over by the cops. They'd come up to his car window and ask for a donation to their Youth Athletic League. When X pointed out that he had only recently made just such a donation, they'd toss a bag of cocaine into his car and ask, "What about now?" He told me, "David, the biggest problem with Hartford is the police."
To a surprising degree, cops and criminals share the same etiquette. They are used to each other. They share the same world. Then, outside of that world, are we, the civilians. War has a similar binary, soldiers and civilians.
Like crime, war suspends social rules. Killing people becomes, if not ok, then necessary. Watching body camera footage of cops shooting people, you wonder, "Why did he have to pull the trigger so many times?" But the comfort of your living room, stopping and replaying the episode, gives you a false perspective. When that adrenaline is flowing, when it's you or them, another, more instinctual brain center takes control.
Ibrahim Ezzat/Anadolu
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By now, we've all heard about Hamas' attack against Israel: the systematic, house to house murder, killing parents in front of their children and vice versa, the rapes and kidnappings, beheading babies, burning children alive... All that was torture enough. But, far less publicized, because they shield us civilians from the complete horror, is the fact that 60-80% of those killed show signs of physical torture.
Hamas is now held up, with their hostages, in tunnels under Gaza City, with its central command located below Shifa Hospital. Israel has demanded that 1 million residents leave Gaza City. Most have. Thousands, though, have chosen to take refuge in Shifa Hospital. One suspects that these are Hamas sympathizers trying to prevent Israel from attacking their fathers and sons down in the tunnels.
Despite their recent security lapse, the Jews are still smart. The Israelis are waiting, delaying their ground offensive. They know that when the generators that power the tunnels' ventilation systems run out of fuel that Hamas members will have to emerge from the tunnels.
The world would be a very different place if the Nazis or the Soviets had won. The Nazis hated Judeo-Christian charity. The Soviets hated capitalism, which has lifted billions of people out of poverty around the world. For all its short-comings, Western culture, with its freedom, tolerance and pluralism, is, so far, the best we have come up with.
Like ISIS before it, Hamas wants to destroy Western culture in favor of their Caliphate. Israel is only their first step; "First the Saturday people and then the Sunday people," and then the secular Muslims.
This accounts for all the support Hamas receives from the woke left: BLM, colleges and universities..., who are also trying to destroy Western culture: there are no men or women, "We're coming for your children," you don't need to know how to read, write or do math to graduate high school, punctuality and competency are oppressive tools of White Supremacy...
Stalin and Mao believed that killing another 10 or 20 millions of their non-believing countrymen would usher in a communist utopia. Radical Islam believes that their butchery facilitates the dawning of heaven on earth, the Caliphate. The Woke believe that getting some old white men out of the way, and using the right pronouns, will transform the world into Unicornia.
I believe that "A man is known by his actions." And their actions are bloody awful.
