The Seattle Commune is no more.
Declared three weeks ago by radical leftists as CHAZ, the
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, rechristened CHOP, the Capitol Hill
Occupation Protest, the six-block enclave inside Seattle ceased to
exist July 1. The cops shut it down.
As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as
farce.
If the Paris Commune of 1871 is the archetype, that mass
uprising and swift slaughter of the communards who rose against the
regime, what happened in Seattle is the farce.
Police Chief Carmen Best, who opposed Mayor Jenny Durkan’s
surrender of one of her precinct stations to the mob, explained in
exasperation why her cops finally acted:
“Enough is enough. The CHOP (had) become lawless and brutal.
Four shootings – two fatal – robberies, assaults, violence and
countless property crimes have occurred in this several block
area.”
The shooting death of a 16-year-old and critical wounding of a
14-year-old on Monday finally forced the mayor’s hand.
Some journalists touring the CHOP had burbled on like Lincoln
Steffens on his first trip to Lenin’s Russia, “I have been over
into the future, and it works!”
They wrote of “peaceful” meetings, “documentary screenings” and
“concerts.” Best was more hardheaded about what she found after
recapturing the CHOP: “After walking through the area I was stunned
by the amount of graffiti, garbage and property destruction.”
Apparently, however, Mayor Durkan does not want posterity to
forget the glory days of what she had predicted would be a “summer
of love.”
Writes The Washington Post:
“Durkan called for charges to be dismissed against those who
were arrested for alleged misdemeanor.s … The mayor also said
that Seattle arts and parks departments would preserve a community
garden and artwork and murals that protesters created within the
zone.”
Hard to believe. Statues of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson,
Lincoln, Grant and Theodore Roosevelt are dragged down, while the
murals and graffiti of misfits who trashed downtown Seattle are to
be preserved.
This raises a larger question.
Have the six weeks of protests since the death of George Floyd
– weeks featuring riots, looting and trashing of city centers,
desecration of monuments from Columbus to the Founding Fathers,
presidents and Confederate generals, proven to be a cultural and
political victory for the radical left?
More precisely, is the mob winning?
The case can be made that the mob has won already. People have
gotten away with massive demonstrations blocking roads, highways
and parks. Shopping areas in elite and working-class sections of
scores of cities have been torched and looted. Police have been
insulted, taunted and showered with debris.
Result: Mob demands to “Defund the Police” have been met by
political concessions and capitulations. Minneapolis is moving to
abolish its police force. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has slashed
$1 billion from the NYPD budget. Protesters camping out at city
hall are demanding more.
Joe Biden, who began his campaign by telling us how well he had
gotten on with the old segregationist senators like Jim Eastland
and Strom Thurmond, has been scrambling as swiftly as he can in
that basement.
Said Biden this week:
“(W)ith regard to those statues and monuments, like the
Jefferson Memorial, there’s an obligation that the government
protect those monuments because they’re different. That’s a
remembrance, it’s not dealing with revering somebody who had that
view. … They may have had things in their past that were now and
then distasteful, but that’s a judgment.”
This mush comes from a senator who probably cannot remember how
many Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners he has attended and
addressed.
Consider what else the radicals and rioters have
accomplished.
They have made mass civil disobedience an acceptable and even
praiseworthy form of protest, if you are justifiably outraged. They
have won near-immunity for burning and looting stores. Blanket
amnesties at the state and city level appear to be in the
cards.
With the collaboration of an allied and indulgent media, the
radicals have turned public opinion against the cops. They have
forced the issue of defunding the police onto the national agenda.
They have pulled the center of gravity of politics sharply to the
left.
Contrast how our establishment has been panicked into headlong
retreat, with how Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party handled its
year of protests in Hong Kong – protests aimed at attaining the
democratic rights that the American protesters are abusing.
The Chinese made a calculated decision: They would not use the
methods they had employed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But bottom
line, they would also not lose Hong Kong to the democratic
camp.
Beijing has now taken over Hong Kong, stifled the protests and
begun a roundup of those who initiated and led the disorders.
And the West has done nothing.
As the world observes how the world’s greatest democracy handles
disorders arising from left-wing radicals, and how China is
handling an anti-Communist uprising in its city of Hong Kong, which
appears to be more in command and control of its nation’s
destiny?
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Are uncivil protests and mob violence winning? appeared first
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