American Dissident Voices Broadcast of January 23, 1999

When the Barriers Come Down
by Dr. William Pierce


During the ongoing impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton one of the
things we hear most often from the media is that this is a historic
event. If Clinton is convicted by the Senate and removed from office, it
will be the first time such a thing has happened -- something for the
Guiness Book of Records. This led me to think about other records which
are being set these days.

For example, if Clinton is removed from office and then is tried and
convicted in a Federal court for perjury or obstruction of justice, he
could become a member of a record-breaking U.S. prison population. I
looked at some of the figures provided by the U.S. Census and published
in various almanacs. I don't have the very latest figures, but in 1996
there were 1,185,000 persons confined to state and Federal prisons in
the United States. With a total U.S. population in 1996 of 265 million,
that's just under half a percent of the population in prison, which is a
record. And that's not even counting another half-million inmates
currently in local and county jails.

In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, the total population
of the United States was 123 million people, and 117,000 of those people
were in state and Federal prisons. That works out to less than one-tenth
of one percent of the population. In other words, in the bad, old days
of chain gangs and lynchings and poverty and Al Capone and so on, we had
only one-fifth as many people in prison, on a per capita basis, as we
have today.

Now that is about as stark a demographic statistic as you'll find
anywhere, and it's a very interesting statistic as well. The total
population of the United States slightly more than doubled during the 66
years between 1930 and 1996, while the prison population increased by
more than a factor of ten. Why? How could that have happened in this
kinder and gentler age? Isn't that contradictory to everything we've
been taught about the country becoming more and more enlightened and
with a hundred times as many so-called "entitlement" programs and
job-training programs and rehabilitation programs and Head Start
programs and so forth now as then? How does that square with the
government's recent claims that crime of all sorts is falling these
days? Murders are down, they tell us. Robberies are down. Then why does
the prison population keep increasing?

You know, a lot of scholars have studied this phenomenon and written
books about it, but their aim seems to be to obscure the Politically
Inconvenient facts rather than to get at a real understanding. I mean,
how is an academician trying to write a book about crime and punishment
to explain this amazing statistic in a Politically Correct way? In 1930
the head of the country was that arch-capitalist and enemy of the
workers Herbert Hoover, who believed in locking them up and throwing
away the key. Today it's that fellow who "feels the pain" of every Black
rapist, crack dealer, and welfare thug who votes Democratic. In 1930 we
had mostly White juries, who did not look kindly on criminals of any
sort. Today we have the O.J. Simpson trend in judicial affairs. In 1930
we had racism and apartheid. We didn't believe in coddling criminals. We
made them serve their time. So how could there possibly be more than ten
times as many people behind bars today as then?

Now, I know what some of you're thinking. You're thinking that we have
more Blacks in America now, and they make up most of the prison
population. But you know, Blacks only increased from 9.7 per cent of the
U.S. population in 1930 to 13 per cent today. That by itself can't
account for the 400 per cent per capita increase in the prison
population.

So, I'll explain it for you. There has been an enormous increase in the
percentage of lawbreakers in America primarily because the social
institutions which used to keep antisocial activity in check have been
destroyed: deliberately destroyed. And this has gone hand in hand with
the growth of liberal attitudes and liberal public policies. An example:
In 1930 there was a very strict policy of racial segregation almost
everywhere in the United States, in the North as well as in the South.
Blacks did not live in the same neighborhoods as Whites, they did not
eat in the same restaurants, they did not go to the same schools, and
for the most part they did not work in the same offices and shops as
Whites. Blacks found loitering in White neighborhoods, even in the
daytime, were subject to arrest. Blacks and Whites, in other words, did
not mix socially, and so Blacks did not have much opportunity to commit
crimes against Whites. Furthermore, Blacks understood that if they did
commit crimes against Whites and got caught, there would be no mercy and
no leniency. Punishment would be sure, swift, and severe.

Furthermore, there was no social familiarity between Blacks and Whites.
Blacks of any age customarily addressed Whites as "sir" or "ma'am."
Blacks may not have loved Whites in 1930, and Whites for the most part
made no pretense of loving Blacks, but Blacks did respect Whites, and
Whites expected to be respected by Blacks. The net result was that far
fewer crimes against Whites were committed by Blacks, and so far fewer
Blacks were in prison for offenses against Whites.

Now, the really interesting thing is that under these racially
segregated conditions Blacks also committed far fewer crimes against
other Blacks. Why was that? Well, it was because Blacks had much more of
a Black community, much more of a Black society of their own in America
in 1930 than they do today. They had their own schools, with their own
teachers and principals. They had their own colleges. They were not
flattered or pampered or given all sorts of unrealistic expectations
with the resulting frustrations. They understood their limits, what they
were permitted to do and what they were not permitted to do, what was
expected of them and what was not expected. And they adapted to their
condition moderately well. Individual Blacks didn't compare their
condition to that of Whites and become resentful and frustrated; instead
they compared their condition to that of other Blacks. Their crime rate
still was far higher than the White crime rate, but it was much lower
than it is today.

Then the liberals, the egalitarians, set about removing all of the
limits, setting aside all of the firm rules, abolishing the barriers
between the Black society and the separate White society. They told the
Blacks that they didn't have to respect or obey Whites any longer, that
they were just as good as Whites, just as capable, and that they could
enter White society and have everything the Whites had. I don't have
time to go into this whole process in detail, but you know much of it
already. The Roosevelt administration really began the process in
earnest in 1933, and then the Second World War gave the liberals a
wonderful opportunity to push it much faster. Blacks were hired by the
millions by defense industries during the war, uprooted from rural areas
and concentrated in cities. And they were put to work in defense plants
right alongside Whites and paid far more money than they ever had seen
before.

There was, of course, White resistance. In February 1942, just a few
weeks after the war began, White residents in Detroit responded to the
government's program of moving thousands of Blacks into the city and
providing special housing for them by organizing a posse of 1,200 armed
men to block the entrance to one of these Black housing projects. In
June 1943 26,000 White workers at Detroit's Packard Motor Plant went on
strike to protest the hiring of Blacks for factory jobs that had
belonged exclusively to Whites. The strike turned into a riot, in which
29 Blacks and 6 Whites were killed. The government sent in Federal
troops to protect the Blacks. And of course, Detroit was not the only
American city where the Roosevelt government's program to break down the
barriers between the Black and White societies met resistance from
Whites.

The problem everywhere was that the Whites had very little effective
leadership. The working-class Whites, who were most immediately
threatened socially and economically by the government's programs to
integrate their neighborhoods and workplaces, were abandoned by the
middle-class and upper-class Whites, conservatives as well as liberals,
because the latter didn't feel immediately threatened. Then as now,
these educated and well-to-do Whites had only contempt for working-class
Whites. Socioeconomic class consciousness was much stronger among them
than race consciousness. It never occurred to them that one day the
government would do to them what it was doing then to White workers.
They were astoundingly short-sighted in this regard.

After the war, under Truman and Eisenhower and Johnson and Kennedy, the
government continued breaking down the barriers, continued forcibly
integrating the Black and White societies. Despite the 14th and 15th
Amendments, Blacks in many parts of the South were not permitted to vote
until after Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the energetic
use of Federal police power to enforce it. This led to a huge increase
in the number of Black elected officials in the South. And of course,
there was the forced racial integration of the public schools
everywhere, often accompanied by bizarre programs such as forced busing
for racial balance. And then there were various forced housing schemes
intended to break up racially segregated neighborhoods. And there was
"equal employment opportunity" -- which in fact, often was racially
biased hiring and promotion in favor of Blacks, under the guise of
"affirmative action." Et cetera. As I said, I don't have time to go into
a detailed record of the way in which the government broke down the
separate Black and White societies and forced them together into a
single multicultural society.

There was intermittent White resistance to this forced integration
program -- rioting in South Boston over forced school integration,
rioting in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962 when the government forced the
University of Mississippi to begin admitting Black students, and so on
-- but remarkably less resistance than might have been expected. Again,
this was due to a lack of White organization, a lack of White
leadership: the affluent and educated Whites, the Whites who might have
provided effective leadership, opted out of the struggle, because they
did not feel threatened by the government's integration program, and
they were intimidated by the very effective Jewish television propaganda
of the day, which tarred any racially conscious White person as "trailer
trash."

Blacks also rioted during the 1960s -- not in opposition to the
government's programs of forced racial mixing, but because their
expectations of equality were not satisfied. The government and the
Jewish media and the liberals had been telling them for decades that
they were just as good and just as capable and just as deserving as
White people, and that they could have everything that Whites had. And
when they found that most Blacks couldn't have everything Whites had,
when they discovered that a White life-style was not automatically
forthcoming for them, they rioted and burned and looted on a huge scale.
They burned Detroit and Newark and Los Angles and Washington and 20
other American cities in the 1960s.

The response of the government, the media, and the liberals to Black
lawlessness was more of the same. The media and the liberals blamed both
the Blacks' frustration and their explosions of rage on "White racism,"
and the government devised still more programs to force Blacks and
Whites together. But the old social constraints on Blacks were gone.
They no longer had to address White people as "sir" or "ma'am." They no
longer feared or respected White people. And, most important, they no
longer compared their own attainments with those of other Blacks but
with those of Whites, and the comparison infuriated them. And so Black
behavior took a drastic downturn, and Blacks began filling up the
prisons.

Another excellent example of the change in Black behavior which results
when the constraints imposed on Blacks by Whites are removed and at the
same time all the barriers between a Black society and a White society
coexisting side by side are taken away, is provided by South Africa. The
two principal differences between South Africa and the United States in
this regard are, first, that in South Africa the Blacks are the majority
race; and second, that the removal of the White constraints and of the
barriers between the two societies occurred much more quickly. The
results, however, have been almost exactly the same. The Black crime
rate in South Africa always was much higher than the White crime rate,
of course, but prior to 1994 the victims of Black criminals were nearly
all Black. The White government simply didn't tolerate Black crime
against Whites, and Blacks who attacked Whites knew that they almost
certainly would be caught and that when caught their punishment would be
swift and very severe.

Just as in America the liberals blamed Black criminality in South Africa
on White racism. It was the effect of apartheid on Blacks which
frustrated them and made them strike out at their fellow Blacks, the
liberals explained. It was the White man holding the Black man down; it
was the White man forcing the Black man to live in crowded, dirty, and
violent slums; it was the White man refusing to share his schools and
his neighborhoods and his White women with the Black man which made the
Black man behave in a criminal way. Take your foot off the Black man's
neck and treat him like a fellow human being, the liberals said to the
White South Africans, and his behavior will improve greatly.

Well, White people are nothing if not gullible, and White South Africans
are if anything even more gullible than White Americans. They listened
to the liberals. They said to themselves, yes, we're being terrible to
the Blacks by making them have their own, separate society and by
policing them so strictly and by not letting them go to school with us
or marry our women. They felt guilty about apartheid. And so in 1994
they turned their country over to the Black majority in South Africa.
They let the Blacks elect a Black government for the country. There no
longer were any restrictions on where the Blacks could live. They could
go to White schools and marry White women. They had Black judges and
Black police officials. Apartheid was history. The White man's foot was
off the Black man's neck.

And the Black man's behavior suddenly became much worse than it had been
before. Not only did he begin raping, robbing, and murdering Whites on
an unprecedented scale, but he also began committing more crimes against
his fellow Blacks than ever before. Life in the Black townships has
become much more violent and dangerous than it was prior to Black rule.
And Blacks in rural areas are being burned and stoned to death by their
fellow Blacks on charges of witchcraft and sorcery. When the Whites were
in charge they didn't tolerate that sort of thing. But now the Blacks
are in charge, and many of them are wishing the Whites were running the
country again. Crime is so bad that they long for apartheid again, when
they felt much safer. And they're actually saying this in public.
They're telling this to White television reporters.

You see, the same two things changed suddenly for Blacks in South Africa
in 1994 as changed for Blacks in America over a period of several
decades. White control was relaxed, and Black society lost its
boundaries as it was told to merge with White society. And the results
were very similar: an explosion of Black criminal behavior. The
liberals, of course, have an explanation for Black behavior in South
Africa just as they do in the United States. It's payback time, they
say. The Blacks are still angry about having their human rights violated
under apartheid, and that's why they're murdering White farmers and
raping White women and stealing cars from White men, the liberals
explain. It's a little more difficult for them to explain why the Blacks
also are killing and robbing and raping more of their own people now.

But we know the explanation, don't we? First, without the White man's
foot on his neck, the Black man will behave in his accustomed way.
Without the White man forcibly restraining him and making him fear the
consequences, the Black man will do what comes naturally to him. And
second, the Black man's society, as squalid as it may seem to us, does
at least serve the purpose of providing a frame of reference for Blacks.
Take that frame of reference away, and there will be trouble. When
Blacks are able to compare their condition, their attainments, their
status with those of other Blacks, they can deal with it. When they
begin comparing themselves with Whites, the result is frustration,
resentment, anger, and criminal behavior.

And I also should mention that the government's attempt to force a
multicultural society in America has resulted in an increase in criminal
behavior on the part of Whites also. At the same time that the Black
incarceration rate has been rising, so has the White rate. I don't have
a racial breakdown for 1930, but in the decade between 1985 and 1995 the
percentage of White Americans in state and Federal prisons rose from
0.12 to .23: that is from about an eighth of a per cent to a little
under a quarter of a per cent. In the same decade the percentage of
Blacks incarcerated increased from .74 to 1.5: from three-quarters of a
per cent to one and one-half per cent. Although the percentage of Blacks
in prison increased slightly faster, both the White and Black
imprisonment rates nearly doubled during that one decade, with Blacks
somewhat more than six times as likely as Whites to be in prison.

And I also should point out that most of the five-fold increase since
1930 in the percentage of Americans in prison has taken place since the
great social and racial revolution of the 1960s which the liberals
remember so fondly: the decade of pot smoking and freedom marches and
sit-ins and draft card burning and trashing the dean's office. The rise
in the rate of incarceration was quite moderate between 1930 and 1970.
It was in 1972 that the percentage of the American population in prison
really began to skyrocket.

Today there are far more Americans in prison per capita than in any
other industrialized country except Russia, and we're neck and neck with
Russia. We have nearly 11 times the incarceration rate of the
Netherlands, for example.

The lesson of all this is that liberal theories about the wonders of
multiculturalism and racial diversity and the horrors of segregation are
one thing, but the hard, cold reality of the prison statistics is
something quite different. You can force the races to mix only if you're
prepared to lock them up at more than five times the rate for separate,
racially homogeneous societies.
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For further reading:

The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1933 (New York World-Telegram,
1933)

The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1998 (World Almanac Books, 1997)
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