Every Friday late afternoon there is a protest against police brutality in front of the main police headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. On this particular Friday, before the protest gets started, two young men are unloading placards from a car and setting them up against a statue of a police officer carrying a little boy on his shoulder. The statue is wrapped in cling wrap. It was spray painted a couple of times, explains Jesse, one of the men setting up the placards. They care about their monuments more than they care about the people, he says.
On the placards are the pictures of Kansas City residents shot and killed by Kansas City police officers. Some of the victims don’t look to be much more than a few years older than the boy being carried by the officer depicted in the cling-wrapped statue.
Why are American cops so much more lethal than cops in other countries, I ask Jesse. You know, like in Germany or Japan or someplace. Our cops kill way more people every year than theirs do. Of course, they get killed way more than cops in Germany and Japan, too, but why is there so much killing involved with American policing?
Jesse says he isn’t sure how they do things in other countries. He focuses on the United States. The structure of the police force is rooted in racism, he says. Our police system is directly descended from slave patrols.
Around on the north side of the police headquarters building, sitting between it and the municipal courthouse, is another statue. It is by a Wichita-born sculptor named Terry Allen. The piece is titled “Modern Communication” and depicts a business man standing on his brief case with his fingers in his ears. His tie, eight feet long and wrapped around his head, is a blindfold. His shoe is in his mouth. The statue is jarring.
In an interview with WCUR, the local public radio station, Mr. Allen said he intended the piece as social commentary. He wants those who view his sculpture to think about how we as a society don’t communicate.
But, social commentary succeeds when it says something true about our social condition, and Terry Allen’s sculpture misses the mark. Just since you started reading this article, an ocean of communication was uploaded and made immediately available to anyone anywhere in the world. Aside from eating, if there is one thing “we as a society” do plenty of, it’s communicating. As individuals, however, it is a different story. There is too much too many of us are not allowed to communicate.
At the end of the row of placards Jesse set up was one that didn’t display pictures of shooting victims or the cops who shot them. Instead, it displayed pictures of Kansas City’s Board of Police Commissioners, which is appointed by Missouri’s governor. The police department was put under the control of the governor in the 1930s, Jesse tells me, due to corruption.
This is what I object to, I say, pointing to the picture of Board Commissioner Cathy Dean. A quote bubble depicts her saying, “My fragile white tears.” I tell him I think it is wrong to use someone’s race in a derogatory manner in order to denigrate them.
Oh, I don’t think that’s what the people who made this were trying to do, says Jesse. They were just trying to… His voice trails off.
I point to the other instances on the poster where “white” is used derogatorily and remark that only whites are victims of that kind of open racial denigration. Well, they do have the power, Jesse replies.
I tell him I think Jews have the power.
You kind of lost me there, says Jesse. Jews are… are the victims of marginalization, too.
C’mon, I say, seven out of eight Ivy League presidents are Jews. Jews completely dominate Hollywood. The media. The highest incomes. Half of US billionaires. Ten of fifteen cabinet positions in the current administration. How are Jews marginalized victims?
The Holocaust? Jesse replies pointedly in the manner of a true believer, as if nothing in the world could be more obvious.
Which holocaust? I ask. The Nazi Holocaust that started in 1939 and killed six million Jews? Or the Bolshevik Holocaust that started twenty years earlier and killed 66 million Christians? Jesse makes a noise that sounds like surprise.
How is it Jesse isn’t aware of the gigantic bloodbath that was the Bolshevik Holocaust? The Bolsheviks were worse—far worse—than the Nazis by any reasonable measure, whether you compare the number of people murdered, the number of people tortured to death, the number of people in concentration camps, the number of people in forced labor, the number of intentional famines, the number of minority groups exterminated, the number of populations displaced, the amount of economic damage done, or the amount of private property stolen. The Bolshevik Holocaust started earlier, lasted longer, and dwarfed the Nazis in every category of atrocity.
The Bolsheviks were purposely dysgenic, targeting those, regardless of previous contributions to the revolution, who they believed comprised the most intelligent Russians—university faculty, engineers, doctors, successful businessmen, bankers, lawyers, artists, college students, writers, landowners, and, especially, the Christian clergy. Members of these groups—the so-called intelligents—were deemed “enemies of the people,” and were exterminated en masse often with their wives and children. The Bolsheviks, depraved monsters that they were, sometimes executed the children in front of their parents before killing the parents, and sometimes executed the parents in front of the children before killing the children. One Bolshevik commissar, Mikhail Kedrov, insisted on executing the children himself.
And yet, “Bolshevik” on Google receives no search interest at all compared to “Nazi.”
In academia, too, there is the same disparity of interest between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. A search of the course offerings at Harvard for “Nazi” yields eight hits on things like “Jews and Christians: The Holocaust and the Christian World”, which is taught by Kevin Madigan and described:
This course will focus on the relationship of the Christian churches to the Holocaust. After a brief historical overview of the Holocaust, the course will focus on the following themes: the evolution of classical Christian Jew-hatred to modern antisemitism…
But a search of the course offerings at Harvard for “Bolshevik” yields nothing despite the fact that during the Bolshevik Holocaust, thousands of churches were razed or used as livestock enclosures[1] while the synagogues were left untouched[2], even receiving state funding to run Yiddish-language schools.[3]
Powerful interests can and do manipulate public opinion by deciding what information we receive and what is hidden from us. On July 27, 2020, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, probably the dominant player in the process through which “we as a society” communicate, told Congress under oath that Google’s search engine is politically neutral, that Google “does not put its thumb on the scales.” His sworn testimony turns out not to be true. Not even close. Google jumps on the scales with both feet as proven at the website, unGoogle.us
To test Sundar Pichai’s claim, unGoogle took “a few random words from a few random articles by a few random writers” and then ran searches on those words on five different search engines: Google, Yippy, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo. They noted the position of the original article in the results and compared Google’s results to the results of the other search engines.
For left-wing writers, Google’s search results place the original article in line with the other search engines or higher. Articles by conservative writers, however, that ranked in the first or second position on all the other search engines didn’t show up at all on Google! This censorship of conservative writers and non-censorship of liberal writers held true without a single exception. The data are fully documented on the unGoogle.us website.
Jesse, I’m guessing, is in his 20s. We are failing him. The history he has learned is not just inadequate, it is dangerously distorted. The public discourse in which he grew up was sanitized for him; he has only ever encountered viewpoints approved by the ruling class and taught to him by its sycophants in the schools he attended. His entire cultural milieu is a Potemkin village and he sincerely believes the lies necessary to support it.
Jesse is the product of censorship, and while his faith is sincere, his view of our social condition does not conform to reality. Thus, to the extent his social activism is determined by this distorted view of the world around him, it is irrational, proportionally less beneficial to society, and more capable of great evil.
In contrast to the censors, those whose motives are unassailable and who are on the side of truth never seek to silence dissenting voices. Rather, the good guys seek debate. The aims of Sacha Baron Cohen, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and others who actively work in the cause of censorship are noxious to the greater good. They are guilty of an unforgivable betrayal of Jesse and the millions of his generation.
On Sunday, June 6, late in the evening, I could hear faintly from my apartment building the sound of distant music, drumming, and someone on a loudspeaker. I got in my car and drove toward the sound but found my way blocked by police. I pulled into a gas station parking lot, parked, got out, and walked over to where two 20-something white cops alone held the intersection. What’s going on, I asked.
Multiple gunshots, the blond cop responded. Did they know anything more? That’s it. We’re from North Kansas City. They just told us to come down here and block this intersection.
There were many cars in the parking lot and the cops stood with their weapons displayed and ready. As I walked back to my car I noticed other cars pulling in, a steady stream, every driver discernible through the tinted glass was black. I backed out of my parking space and it was immediately filled by another car. By now there was only one pathway in or out of the parking lot, but the steady stream of cars coming in made it impossible to exit. Every empty space in the parking lot was being filled in. At the very last moment before I would have been blocked from leaving, there was a slight break in the stream just enough for me to zip out, the next car coming in having to brake to avoid hitting me.
The seemingly coordinated occupation of that parking lot by black drivers, many, in this violent city, undoubtedly armed, just steps from the two white cops was, in my experience, unique, unexpected, and ominous. I imagined the fear those two North Kansas City cops must have felt, and thought to myself they needed more cops there. A lot more.
Blood? Let there be blood, said Vladimir I. Lenin, the man at the root of the Bolshevist horror, and Russian civilization was swallowed up in a sea of it. In 1902, fifteen years before he took power in Russia, Lenin advised his fellow Marxist revolutionaries, already including arch-criminals, Stalin and Trotsky,
Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses.[4]
In other words, to achieve your blood-drenched utopia, demonize the police at every opportunity.
As someone who has experienced jail on three continents—in China, Venezuela, and the US, I know I can convince Jesse cops are pretty much the same everywhere and he should drop the absurd and poisonous blood libel that the Kansas City police force is “descended” from slave patrols. But, I can convince him only if I am allowed to talk to him.
“Vito Klein,” a resident of Kansas City, Missouri and unwavering opponent of political censorship, believes the continued detention of courageous journalist Julian Assange at the behest of the US government bathes the country in shame. theklein@protonmail.com
Notes
[1] A collection of reports on Bolshevism in Russia : Great Britain. Foreign Office., April 1919
[2] American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12
[3] Peter Drucker, reviewing Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk by Elissa Bemporad
[4] V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done (1902) 35