The parallels to “Lord of the Flies” were obvious as I watched America’s cities reenact the paranoia and tribalism that infected the novel’s disparate group of British school boys who found themselves stranded without parental supervision on an island following a plane crash. Their initial attempts to establish order eventually gave way to score-settling and a realization that power is not necessarily a function of righteousness.
“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”
That’s what happened in America last week when mob violence replaced police as the standard of authority. When you saw white people taking a knee to prostrate themselves before looters and to renounce their “white privilege,” you also saw parallels to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
The Cultural Revolution began with an attack on the old order, the old “privilege” represented by shop owners and college professors. To avoid the mob’s rage, the victims were forced to humiliate themselves publicly and to utter self-denunciations, to confess their “crimes” against the mob’s ideology. But there was no escaping the demented wrath of the self-anointed protectors of virtue. Eventually millions of those intellectuals and entrepreneurs were put to death — sometimes buried up to their necks so that they could continue to abase themselves until their final breath.
ConservativeChick
Article URL : https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/08/the_week_america_lost_its_way_143395.html