If you have been paying attention you may have noticed that a once great American city named Detroit has been reduced to the state of a third world nation. Detroit is bankrupt. And more than that; it has collapsed to a condition such that civilized life as most Americans understand it is no longer possible there.
The numbers tell much of the story. The population has dwindled in the last 60 years by a staggering 63 percent. It was at one time the 4th largest city in the country; but no more. The city owes money to over 100,000 creditors. There were once nearly 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the city; today it’s less than 27,000. There are 78,000 abandoned homes in Detroit. Forty percent of the street lights do not work. Only one third of the ambulances are in working condition. Two thirds of the parks are closed. Call the police and it takes them an hour to show up. The mostly black population is also largely illiterate and unemployable. The stats go on and on. None of them are good.
There are a number of reasons why this has come to pass, and these factors have worked together to cause this collapse of civilization.
On Rush’s Show he recently talked about the radical administration of Coleman Young when he was mayor of Detroit. Rush mentioned an author named Zev Chafets and his book “Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit” in which the author describes the hard leftist and anti-White agenda of then mayor Young and how it played a key role in the destruction the city.
After the riots in the 60s, the majority White population abandoned the city. Not a surprise really. Normal people and businesses want stability and peace, without which it is very difficult to prosper. The inner city of Detroit and the black population there had demonstrated that they were unable to govern their instincts and emotions. When blacks engage in mass destruction, looting and violence, it sends a powerful message. The message was to get out, as fast as possible. And so the educated and productive white population pulled up stakes and moved to the surrounding suburbs or in some cases out of the state altogether. Over time this has left a largely underclass, uneducated, unemployable and illiterate population that is unable to maintain the city that was left to them. This is the population that voted Coleman Young into office and the population that inhabits Detroit today.
The policies of Coleman Young were nothing less that a total disaster for Detroit.
So he declared war on what he called the hostile suburbs of Detroit. There were calls after the riots for gun control. He said no way, we’re not having any. I want my people fully armed in this city. So he nixed any gun control on the grounds that it would be dangerous to disarm his people in the face of this white KKK lurking beyond Eight Mile Road. So this ended up discouraging any type of investment in the city, and that investment which did happen had to go through his office. Any investment, growth, whatever, in the city did not happen unless it first went through his office. He turned the police force into his militia. And what he did was set out to create a black city state south of Eight Mile Road. And he called what he was doing the rebellion.
He called the former white administrations occupying powers. The black population of Detroit’s eating this up, folks. Gotta understand, they loved it. They absolutely loved Coleman Young. This was a guy who was at war with the former white leadership of Detroit that had fled the city after the riots and went to the suburbs and he is calling them the KKK lurking beyond Eight Mile occupying powers. He even erected a statue in honor of Joe Louis, which a giant black fist right at the freeway entrance to downtown Detroit.
Anyway, this went on for 20 years. There were 20 years of municipal black nationalism and ideological separatism. And by the time he left, the city was in a shambles. And the book, I mean, this is just a surface report. I didn’t have a chance to read the entire thing. I skimmed it, checked things that looked interesting to me and came up for you with this little book report here, but Detroit’s just the first of many cities that are on this path. They do have things in common: liberalism, control of the city by unions, but the point that this book makes in analyzing what’s wrong with Detroit is that you cannot leave race out of the equation, and in fact it may be the number one reason that Detroit is in the mess that it is in.
When we add to this the problems of overspending on unions and pensions, and the corrupt mismanagement that is typical of Democrats when they are in power, the result is a third world city; a city in a state of collapse. The left will take no credit for Detroit, nor will the people who live there, despite their choices that helped to bring it to its current state. Other cities can avoid the fate of Detroit, but they must be willing to make different choices than those of the motor city.
