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The bodycam footage of Henry Nowak was released. Mostly peaceful protests ensue.
A summary of the story (most of this info is in the PDF I'm about to link, feel free to skip this section and read it yourself): Henry Nowak had had a few beers (still under the legal limit), saw the Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, pulled out his phone and started recording, and called out to him a few times "Are you a bad man?", with Digwa replying "I am a bad man." The recording ended shortly after Digwa grabbed Nowak's phone. The judge giving the sentencing said that Nowak was not asking this with hostility in his voice (warning, PDF download); he likely was drawn to ask about it upon seeing the larger of the two knives that Digwa carried. Yes, two knives. Digwa was carrying two ceremonial knives that are permitted to him as a religious article, one of them being a kirpan, an 8 inch one, on a sheath over his waistband.
There is no video record of the struggle after the video ended, but Digwa stabbed Nowak 4 times. The stab to the chest was the fatal one, passing through all of Nowak's clothing and penetrating upwards, between the two uppermost ribs, puncturing a lung and penetrating even deeper to cut a vein behind the collarbone, a wound of 8 cm in depth. There was no apparent injury to Digwa himself, though he claimed his eye had been bruised when the police officers arrived. Digwa took some of his own videos of the dying Nowak after stabbing him, telling him he had not been stabbed. His brother, Gurpreet, made the call to 911. Before the officers arrived, Digwa handed his kirpan to his mother and told her to take it away. He also kept Nowak's phone, and didn't tell the officers he had it. Nobody told the officers that Nowak had been stabbed, certainly not Digwa, who might have been the only one present who would know that.
As shown in the bodycam video, the police arrive for Gurpreet's complaint, briefly listen to Digwa's complaint, and quickly determine that Nowak should be arrested, so they drag his limp body into a better position to be handcuffed. Nowak weakly tells them that he's been stabbed, which the arresting officer impassively denies. The other officers investigate this claim a bit more; the female officer can tell that he's in rough shape, and notes that his pupils aren't even reacting to the light. They tried CPR on him after this, presumably; in the judge's remarks, one officer was horrified to learn of the chest wound after having done chest compressions on him.
So, there's rioting. The BBC doesn't frame it quite as sympathetically as they framed the anti-racism rioting from 6 years ago, though. Which brings us to our George Floyd comparison.
George Floyd was accused of using counterfeit bills. He had been arrested many times before. When they arrested him this time, they knelt on his (neck? upper back?) as he slowly died, claiming, as Henry Nowak had when he died, that he couldn't breathe. The public saw it as an execution of Floyd just because he was black, even though Floyd actually died from the fentanyl in his system, and the kneeling was department protocol (inadvised protocol, if the suspect is having trouble breathing).
In this case, the police presumed guilt of the nearly-dead unarmed man, even as his murderer was still upright and telling all kinds of lies. The public broadly sees this as anti-white bias, paralleling the racial claims from Floyd. Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered, and he was murdered with a knife that the white members of the public can't even own or carry for self defense. They can't even carry pepper spray. That Digwa as a racial and religious outsider to Britain is also an enhancing factor.
I will interject a brief defense of the police in this case: I took a concealed carry class recently, and I have also watched a few Paul Harrell videos on the subject. In self-defense situations, you want the police on your side. The way to do this is to call them first, before the real attacker does, and establish that you are the injured party, the complainant, and he is the injurer, even if he's lying in a pool of his own blood. Digwa did these things, and hid information from the police, so it's a little more understandable that they made a mistake. In light of the Pakistani rape scandal, however, I also find it understandable if the public doesn't find it understandable, and really do suspect that the police have an anti-white bias. And of course, it's completely unacceptable that they dismissed his claims of being stabbed, especially since he was on the ground when they found him.
For me, there's a lot more meat to these protests than the 2020 BLM protests. If I lived in the UK, I would probably be protesting too (peacefully!). If liberal societies continue along their outgroup-favoritism path, they might find that the post Civil Rights Movement atmosphere, whose protocol they were acting in accordance with, has completely evaporated, and they must forge a new and uncertain path forward. That's the human condition.
One last comment before I stop talking about this because it's making me too angry and depressed.
Between this, the Southport stabbings and the grooming gangs, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me not to believe that Enoch Powell was the most prescient English politician of the twentieth century. Nearly sixty years later, it's remarkable how little the progressive script has changed when dealing with conservatives voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration:
I have just reread Powell's speech to make sure I don't put words in his mouth, and I'm sorry but I still think it's petty, get-off-my-lawn prejudice disguised as argument, and only looks prescient by accident.
Above all else, I remain baffled that of all the sob stories he could have quoted to make his point - and I do not doubt that legitimately sympathetic stories existed - he chooses one about an old lady who courts destitution by stubbornly refusing to rent rooms to non-white customers, and then has the nerve to complain that she is denounced as a "racialist" because of it. That he expected his audience to parse her as a sympathetic rather than pathetically self-destructive figure speaks volumes.
And in much the same way what sticks in my craw about the main, demographics-based thrust of the speech is that he isn't "voicing uncomfortable truths". In fact, he's leaving key parts of the argument unspoken, either because even he couldn't bring himself to say them out loud, or because he somehow considered them literally self-evident. To wit, he leaves the statistics about immigrant demographics to speak for themselves; he writes as if the mere prospect of there being more brown than white people in England is self-evidently repulsive. He is not making an argument that if this process is allowed to happen then nice Polish young men are going to be stabbed in the street by crazy Sikhs and the police will turn a blind eye. Either he is assuming that everyone already understands browns to be violent savages by definition but doesn't want to say it out loud, or else, as near as I can tell, the whole of his argument must come down to "there are soon going to be more brown than white people in England, and then the browns will be in a position to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of white business owners, which would be illiberal; it is the God-given right of racist old ladies to refuse service to Negroes if they want".
From a 21st century vantage point, this is just… such a deeply parochial argument. It's so quaint. It somehow manages to simultaneously be almost unthinkably bigoted in its basic assumptions, and comically optimistic about the kind of problems that runaway immigration would actually cause. Religious extremism is not a twinkle in this man's eye. Rape gangs do not follow from anything in this speech. Spurious, witch-hunty accusations of racism are not even what he's talking about, and God help us, he's not even discernibly talking about HBD. He literally just thinks that if there's too many brown people the brown people will "oppress" your basest, most vulgar, I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist by outlawing that kind of racism, and that this would be a great blow against freedom in England.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing (though it's a testament to his sheer skill as a writer that the flow of his prose almost disguises the underlying vapid stupidity of the argument).
That's the racism that prevents cops from taking the brown people's side when they attack you.
'First they came for the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist...'
The funeral pyre is burning for Nowak, 'you' and you's family are next.
Okay, but the thing is, I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists. I dislike them intensely. They disgust and appall me in much the same way that blacks disgust and appall them. I and people of similar political and moral principles to mine would be liable to "come for them", in the sense of wanting to outlaw racially discriminatory refusal-of-service on their part, even if the racial minority they discriminated against made up an irrelevant 0.01% of the population and had no electoral weight of their own. The "first they came for the XYZ, but I did not speak out" rhyme breaks down when the XYZ are not merely a group to which I don't belong, but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.
Of course, you can have a maximally libertarian setup, where the old lady is allowed to refuse to rent to Negroes because she thinks they're icky, and I'm allowed to call her names for being a bigot because I think bigots are icky. But Powell seems to think we should be shedding tears for the old lady because children follow her around calling her a "racialist" (which I stress again, she objectively proudly is), so permit to doubt his principled commitment to freedom.
Again, I do not think there is any sensible reading of the speech which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites. His "funeral pyre" is a purely demographic/cultural one, his doomsaying prophecy is that one day there'll be so many brown people about that white racists will be ostracized. He puts forth no evidence - no argument - that the new brown majority will treat the white minority unkindly, except specifically in the form of cracking down on white bigots.
Mark: I am not saying that no such argument can be made - Nowak's murder alone is an argument written in blood - I am saying Powell does not make any such argument. He is not talking about the same thing you are. The thing he's talking about is rather more stupid, and infinitely less serious.
Uhh... no it doesn't? This is the entire principle behind defending scoundrels. Just because X is currently oppressing group Y (a group you consider your enemies), doesn't mean they won't eventually turn on your in-group too.
The author of the "first they came" poem was literally an anti-communist priest who hated Jews, and yet two groups listed in the poem are communists and Jews. Your claim that the logic breaks down when the group is a group you consider your enemy is literally the exact reverse of the intended meaning of the poem.
Thank you, however, for giving me a presumably unintended insight into your worldview. The message you took from that poem was not "you must defend the civil rights even of people you consider your outgroup, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights". The message you took from it was "you must defend the civil rights of groups you feel no animosity towards, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights. However, if someone wants to trample on your outgroup's civil rights, that's 100% A-OK and not at all a cause for concern."
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud.
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