It was this way once and it may have to be again.
This is Walter Huston, “Beast of the City”, a 1932 gangland film, one of the early talkies, pre-censorship, and probably a scene which never really occurred in the real cops vs gang wars of those days.
But it was clearly a theme the people of America wholly endorsed.
Let it sink in.
(Oh, that platinum blonde that was shot peeping over the rails was Jean Harlow, for those of you who don’t know.)
There were no-go zones then, too. There have always been no-go zones, almost everywhere.
When I worked for a brief while for the State of Montana and was sent to Missoula to visit a strip mine, I spent the night but was advised “Don’t go to Minnesota Street”. It was as if the city fathers had zoned Minnesota Street as Missoula’s “rowdy town”.
I later came to find out, after a few years in Arizona and wandering throughout the West that almost every western town had a no-go street, ever since the Earps were in Tombstone; honkytonk bars with brawling, gambling, fast women, and probably, since it was 1971, a fair smattering of drugs and other illicit transactions. I’m certain I could fence most any stolen item through a choice of contacts on Minnesota Street.
It wasn’t a certainty that you’d be mugged, but in all no-go zones, if you’re from out of the zone, certain rules apply.
And Minnesota Street’s rules were more or less guaranteed by the business proprietors there, just as the rest of Missoula had its own. A sort of truce existed. And as long as the dealers and rowdies didn’t try to expand their territory, and the Ladies Church League was content, the heavy hand of the law never encroached until someone was killed or seriously wounded.
I’ve been all over the world, in great cities, but was never afraid to walk the streets, except in Mexico. No one went down dark alleys. Hong Kong, Taipei, Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, Sofia, Kharkov (Ukraine), Moscow, Gorkiy, they all had no-go zones, only I never tested them after dark. And I walked everywhere.
So it came as no surprise to me to learn that French and Belgian cities, and now Scandinavian cities, have no-go zones, for these are the places where sharia is the ruling law. How the French dealt with “Muslim” acts that were 100% contrary to their western values, such as murder, rape, child marriage, I can’t speak to, but “no-go zone” standing alone didn’t offend me.
But think of Harlem, in New York, who wanted and needed white business. Places such as the Apollo Theater needed the white after-hours crowd to come “slumming” from at the 1920’s on. Like Missoula, the businesses there kept the thugs at bay.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it?…some sort of reciprocity with the broader community at large.
In the 1960s, with the Great Society, LBJ’s plan was to literally bottle all the urban black folk up, and give them free room and board, in a manner of speaking, and all the Pepsi’s, chips, and lottery tickets they could buy, on the tacit understand they would stay in their neighborhood. A system of passes and visas developed as to who could come out, and who couldn’t. The likes of Michelle Obama never interacted with any of her brothers and sisters on the Southside. Trust me. Michelle was raised pretty much the same as Hillary, just a different Chicago neighborhood. (They would never have been friends.)
Americans from sea-to-shining sea have paid billions to keep that system running, so now, in all the crime-ridden neighborhoods we have no-go zones of a different type in America, where there is no reason for anyone to want to come there to spend money, so no reason for business to want to “keep the lights on” at night.
For that matter there’s no reason to educate their children, or get them out of those hell holes, especially since the ward heelers rake off most of the money dedicated to education them anyway. The middle men take as much as half of the federal money spent to room, board and educate them, so very few in the rest of Chicago and Illinois aren’t really all that unnerved or saddened that 65 was shot last week, or 45 the week before, or 700 homicides in 2016.
Yes, the occasional child gets shot in a drive-by, collateral damage, and the city weeps, Channel 6 gives a 2-minute memorial, and if it gets really, really bad, which in the summer heat it often does, a few civic groups and prominent African-Americans will march, arms interlocked, only not in Southside, but along Michigan Avenue. This has happened dozens of times around America in the past 50 years.
(This my favorite map, and almost perfect overlay of the part of the United States that vote solid Democrat and the parts where crime is king.)
Chicago is now in its third generation now, a cycle that seems we are politically unable to break.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, (after the film above made) it would be another decade before the streets were safe in the Italian and Irish neighborhoods.
It’s only natural for people today to ask, WHEN and HOW will this mindless killing end?
But wait, it now seems at the other end of the educational and economic spectrum it may actually be ramping up, for some really stupid college kids have been putting on masks and wielding sticks, isolating members of prayer groups and freedom-of-speech advocates, beating them up a bit, while their fans can take pics for the class reunion album…and now think they can graduate to guns. a,d pretty much go after people they don’t like.
They love storm-trooper thug tactics, but apparently never saw “the Night of the Long Knives” fate those storm troopers ultimately suffered.
By 1932 police looked back to when Prohibition was first passed in 1919 and considered all the things they could’ve done then to keep the gangs from becoming strong and powerful, but didn’t.
Now no cop ever walks into a ballroom, standing eight abreast and five deep, pistols drawn, and starts moving on a band of mobsters at the other end of the ballroom, also eight abreast and five deep, and keep shooting until the last man is down and the bodies stacked up like cordwood. That was just fiction.
But after the popular television series by that name, for many years police used dragnet-methods of raiding entire areas of a crime territories, with great shock-effect, giving city fathers and law enforcement a chance to do a little cleaning up. Then LBJ built brand new self-contained slums which remain today.
But those college-kids?
I can’t help but smile when I think of them standing in line, acting tough, and a phalanx of cops walk toward them, pistols already drawn, daring them to play chicken. Lay that card on the table, make a few arrests, and 90% of the Antifa movement should evaporate into thin air.
Break out the billy clubs sooner than later. Don’t carry them to the paddy wagon kicking and screaming. Cuff ’em, then carry them off limp. Politicians may not have the stomach for this, but it’s not politicians being assassinated. They have declared war, both in the ghettos and in the colleges. one bloody nose or mouthful of Ivory Soap will likely fix that.
(It took two to make me stop.)
