Pure Marxist insanity, but well written and clearly the product of an intelligent mind. Too bad his worldview is totally bananas.
It reminds me of Thomas Sowell’s book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. He makes the point that there’s conventional justice which is limited in scope but achievable through human institutions. Then there’s cosmic justice which seeks recompense for the world’s cosmic wrongs. It is not achievable through human institutions, and causes suffering when pursued through force of government. But what is most insidious about cosmic justice is that it requires the violation of conventional justice in order to be realized. This is the kind of justice the left prefers.
This looting thing is a good example. It is sensible to have a rule that stealing is wrong and against the law and that it’s right to use the police power of the state to stop it. This is something that can reasonably be achieved in most cases even by our limited, imperfect human institutions. It does not require a supernatural level of wisdom to be applied fairly, nor does it require us to violate some other tenet of conventional justice.
But to seek justice for the world-historical fact of slavery and its unfortunate consequences? Simply too big and too complex of a task. Undertaking it would mean turning everything upside down and inside out. It would be doomed to fail and would leave a wake of suffering. This is in large part because it would require us to turn a basic part of conventional justice — that is, that it’s wrong to steal — on its head and to see a vice as a virtue, which is precisely what the writer of this piece is making the case for.
Our author invokes a sense of history that simply is not in the heads of anyone involved, and if he doubts that, he need only ask them. Dude - they were after free TVs. And they didn't mind if they took them from black merchants. The Hate The White People narrative is nothing but window dressing.
Let us free ourselves from this "Africa was looted" meme - the people doing the rioting are citizens of the greatest, freest country in history, are dressed better than medieval royalty, have never known starvation, disease, and misery, and are safely nurtured by the very society they're doing their best to curse, burn, and loot. They are scum. There is no excuse in righteous anger against oppression because in any honest historical perspective, they are not oppressed.