The evil idiocy of 'In Defense of Looting'

Vicky Osterweil, the author of “In Defense of Looting: A Riotous 
History of Uncivil Action,” is getting her 15 minutes of fame 
thanks to a segment on NPR in which she said some really mind-
bogglingly dumb, indefensibly evil and fascinatingly reactionary 
things.

We’ll come back to her in a moment.

One of my weird mental pastimes is to look at the world as if I 
were a visitor from the past. But rather than think of how a 
time traveler might marvel at the new technology and tall 
buildings, I like to wonder: What would someone from 500 or 
1,000 years ago recognize as familiar?

Some things are obvious: a mother breastfeeding a baby or an old 
man tending a garden. “We do that too!” a time traveler might 
say on first sight.

But if you were a sophisticated and knowledgeable time traveler, 
you might recognize some deeper similarities.

My favorite example is North Korea, which is often called a 
“communist” or “Marxist” regime but would be instantly 
recognizable to a temporal tourist as an absolutist monarchy, 
even though the regime doesn’t use the word “king.” Divine power 
is passed down to the male heir of the previous ruler. Every de 
facto monarch is said to be of quasi-supernatural origin and 
endowed with superhuman abilities and wisdom. North Korea also 
has a hereditary aristocracy that lives off the hereditary 
peasant class, which is born into de facto serfdom.

I bring this up because sometimes we get too hung up on words 
and lose sight of the things underneath. And that brings me back 
to Osterweil.

“Looting is a highly racialized word from its very inception in 
the English language,” Osterweil said in the NPR interview. 
“It’s taken from Hindi, lút, which means ‘goods’ or ‘spoils.’ ”

How this is relevant, or even evidence that the word is 
“racialized,” is a mystery, given that maybe two in 10 million 
people know its etymology. Other words with Hindi origins: 
pundit, guru, khaki, cashmere and pajamas. The horror.

This is a good example of confusing words and things. Looting — 
mobs grabbing stuff that doesn’t belong to them — is an ancient 
practice dating back hundreds of thousands of years, before we 
even had the concept of dates. Pillaging, ransacking, theft — 
call it what you like — is how tribes acquired stuff before the 
invention of trade.

In short: Osterweil thinks she’s making some powerful neo-
Marxist argument on the bleeding edge of theory, but what she’s 
discovered is tribal barbarism and put a fresh coat of paint on 
it.

She is fluent in all the latest buzzwords and campus jargon. The 
“so-called” United States of America, she writes in her book, 
was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” 
violence. (I’m getting my quotes from Graeme Wood’s excellent 
review in The Atlantic, as I have no desire to saddle Osterweil 
with the guilt of profiting from her work.)

Destroying businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy and 
freedom,” she writes. Osterweil also insists it’s a form of 
“queer birth,” and that “riots are violent, extreme and femme as 
f – – -.” Looting isn’t wrong, she claims, but rather a form of 
“proletarian shopping.”

“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of 
the police,” Osterweil explained on NPR. “The very basis of 
property in the US is derived through whiteness and through 
Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler 
domination of the country.”

Nope. Notions of private property can be found in ancient China, 
the Islamic world and, well, everywhere.

Even the Korean grocers targeted by looting have it coming, 
according to Osterweil, because they’re working in the white 
man’s system of “ownership.” And ownership is “innately, 
structurally white supremacist.”

What Osterweil is really describing is revenge based on 
collective guilt. A Viking or Gaul from the past would instantly 
recognize it. So would countless non-white barbarians of yore, 
because that’s what humans used to believe. “Your ancestors did 
something to my ancestors, and so you have this coming.”

Books could be written about how wrong — historically, morally, 
logically — Osterweil is. But there is one place where she’s 
right. Rioting and looting are fun, which is why young people do 
it from time to time. Mobs are thrilling, which is why they’re 
so dangerous and evil. (Presumably rapists and murderers feel 
“joy” too, that doesn’t make them good; it illuminates their 
evilness.) That’s why civilized societies try to prevent them. 
Barbarians come up with clever word salads to defend them.

Twitter: @JonahDispatch

https://nypost.com/2020/09/06/the-evil-idiocy-of-in-defense-of-
looting/