Like other cities run by Democrats, Los Angeles is going through an epidemic of violent crime.
The fascination with crime and criminals that was widespread in the 19th and 18th centuries, and the focus on some injustice as the cause of their crimes, were a staple of popular culture like the "Penny dreadful" pamphlets and later in the century, "Dime novels." More respectable novels like Dickens' Oliver Twist or Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, whose main character Jean Valjean is imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family, featured this same theme of good people forced into crime by a callous and brutal society and justice system.
A year later, after Joaquín's brief crime spree ended in a bloody shootout, his story was turned into a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, written by a half-Cherokee journalist and poet, John Rollin Ridge.
Hobsbawm's thesis found support in the wide-spread idea already entrenched in the social sciences, that crime was not a moral issue, the product of choices people make, or their lack of virtue, but a matter of external forces like poverty and oppression that drive people to become criminals.
Finally, Hobsbawm's theory combined Marxism with these broader ideas about crime.
As expected, the BLM activists also indulged the trite "Poverty made me do it" excuse: "I will support the looters 'til the end of the day. If that's what they need to do in order to eat, then that's what you've got to do to eat." Obviously, it's hard to see how attacking a Ronald McDonald House, which supports the families of seriously ill children, helps to advance "Social justice." And for those who perfume crime as "Resistance" against the oppressor, the police are fair game.
These leftist shibboleths about crime and its causes ultimately have their roots in cultural ideas and myths, not real science.
Saturday, January 29, 2022
Soros-Funded DA George Gascón Rationalizes Crime-Wave Epidemic
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