Are You the Biggest Victim

 

By Daniel Greenfield
SulstanKnish.com

At the end of Animal Farm, the revolution ended in tyranny when "All Animals are Equal" was rewritten with the addendum "But Some Animals are More Equal than Others." A revolution that began with the promise of equality reverted to inequality in the name of the equality revolution.

America's civil rights revolution began with, "All Americans are Equal" and ended up with, "All Americans are Equal... But Some Americans are More Equal than Others."

The left declared itself the protector of minorities against a racist system and vowed to replace that racist system with an equally racist, anti-racist system. But then black and white became a rainbow and a goulash of gender, transgender, gay and disabled. Everyone was a victim and everyone demanded special privileges.

The elite in America were the administrators of special privileges overseeing the mass ranks of privileged victims demanding special college admissions, workplace quotas, community funding, special payments, immunity from the law and immunity from ever being offended by another human being.

It was clear that any official victim was more equal than a white heterosexual male that wasn't suffering from delusions that he was a woman and wasn't survivor of anything. But that still left a growing army of victims from groups that got along poorly with each other. How were the new rulers to determine which of the unequal groups had more unequal privileges?

It's not a new question.

Black men got the vote before women did which led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass' words, "This is the Negro's hour."

To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass brought out the Victim Value Index.

"When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts... then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own," Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but his real point was, "My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your rights."

I'm more unequal than you are therefore I should have more privileges than you do.

Suffering is the central component of the rhetoric in competitive victimization. "He Who Suffers Most Wins." But suffering, as in the Douglass debate, is relative. Ego means that people feel their own pain first. Their personal pain and those of their group. And even when they feel an outsider's pain more than that of their own group, this is a calculated rejection their own group for egotistical reasons. (It's somewhat mistakenly known as self-hatred when it's actually self-love.)

In our wonderful multi-everything society, there are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame, but that still leaves the matter of dividing up the spoils of the system and all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system doesn't work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated.

Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can be confusing. It's particularly confusing for conservatives and libertarians who don't understand the system and dismiss it as insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there is a method to the madness.

The dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index is that while loud assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant. History is myth. Outrage counts for more than fact. The angrier you are (unless you're a while male) the more you must have suffered.

Anger always trumps fact in the Victim Value Index. The VVI isn't really about the past. Or even the present. It's about how forceful your activism is in the present. The VVI isn't really about equality. It's a series of tryouts for leftist activism. It doesn't matter if your people are enslaved dwarves living in a coal mine run by capitalist cannibals. If they can't show up at rallies and vote three times on election day, they're not much good to the left. They'll get their own PBS documentary and that's it.

If historical justice were the barometer, American Indians would be at the head of the line. While conceptually they are, in practice they are somewhere near the back end of the middle. The group currently at the head of the line, Muslims, have the least claim on historical justice, but are at the center of modern civil rights activism.

Actual suffering doesn't matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.

The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line. This can be mistaken for a "Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" phenomenon, and occasionally in the micro it is, but in the macro it goes to the question of why progressives value minorities and for what purpose.

To be a progressive is to be committed to perpetual reform in the name of perpetual grievance for perpetual power. Grievance is to their government feudalism what the Divine Right of Kings was to feudal rulers. It justifies their right to agitate and undermine, to seize power by any means necessary and to implement their programs legally or extra-legally.

Reformers need their bleeding sores, their cries of outrage and their muck to rake. Those who give them that go to the head of the line acting as their secular clergy, blessing their rule and anointing them as the protectors of their faith in hope and change.

Having little in the way of religion, the left derives its spiritual power from the suffering of others. Its activists are victimization vampires feeding off the pain of others for an outrage high. They get drunk on the stories of suffering like winos guzzling Night Train. Their obsession with the spiritual power of black clergy conflates religion with suffering. Their spirituality is the martyrdom of others.

But there's a practical side to this emotional vampirism. 

The progressive movement is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it's violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo are the ones who go to the head of the line. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out "moderate" versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.

Anyone who is shocked that the left would make common cause with Islamists has forgotten the Black Panthers. From the left's point of view they are doing the same thing by bringing on board a group with some revolutionary energy and a willingness to overthrow the system. Associating with them gives the left some revolutionary cred and the supposed ability to turn the violence on and off.

If you think that's farfetched, what do you think happened in 2008 when a completely inept hack blew through Hillary Clinton and John McCain on a pledge to end the wars and repair our relations with the Muslim world? Why exactly do you think the Democrats chose a man with no experience except a few books about growing up in a Muslim country and Hussein as his middle name? Why was that man then awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for no discernible accomplishment?

September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a place somewhere in the back.

Before Muslims began prominently blowing things up in the United States, the left paid no attention to them. Afterward they suddenly outweighed every minority group in the country because killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.

The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at the back.

The status of groups within the Index can change with their behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians and Indians as semi-successful immigrant entrepreneurs. 9/11 upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are aren't rioting or blowing things up.

African-Americans are still near the head of the Victim Value Index even if they're now only second in line. Latinos are growing in number, but they don't have much political status except when they are being used to push amnesty. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back. Trannies have become the persecuted group of the moment, but once they shove their way into every women's bathroom, their novelty will wear off.

Unless 19 men in dresses blow up the Freedom Tower in the name of a Tranny Caliphate, they'll end up having to sit somewhere in the back of the LGBT caucus no matter how many Die Cis Scum (normal people) hashtags they come up with. Tranny activists know this so they'll piling on the manufactured anger and grievance while they have their 15 minutes of liberal media attention.

The practical value of the Victim Value Index is that it mediates internal conflicts. For example, a bias attack by a member of a high-value group on a member of a low-value group is much less likely to be treated as a hate crime. However, an ordinary attack by a member of a low-value group on a member of a high-value group is more likely to be treated as a bias attack even when it isn't.

High VVI status carries with it the caste privilege of assumed persecution. A high-status VVI can blame a great many things on persecution. This is more difficult to do for a lower-status VVI. A claim of discrimination by a low-status VVI is more likely to be mocked than a similar claim by a high-status VVI, and is less likely to lead to politically correct reprisals. Jokes relying on bias and stereotypes can be made with greater freedom about low-status VVI's than about high-status VVI's.

White men have the lowest VVI status imaginable, and are fair game for racist jokes and bias attacks, but Asians, who have a fairly low VVI status, are also fair game. VVI status is group based but can be forfeited by an individual who engages in counterrevolutionary behavior, thereby forfeiting a status awarded to his group for its revolutionary disruptiveness. Any minority group member who aligns with conservatives is immediately assigned the same VVI status as a white male. A low-status VVI who offends a high-status VVI group may be treated the same way.

Speech codes are an easy way to determine VVI status. As a black man, Juan Williams was a high-status VVI, allowing him to make otherwise politically incorrect observations. He was only purged for offending Muslims, a group with a higher status VVI.  But black sportscasters who make jokes about Asian men are rarely reprimanded because Asians have a lower VVI status.

Jokes and politically incorrect remarks about lower-status VVI's such as Asians, Jews or women are permitted within liberal circles. Making those same remarks about middle-status VVI's is dangerous and generally frowned on. High-status VVI's are completely off limits to anyone who is not a member of that same group.

This is more than just a guide on how to safely be politically incorrect, it's a map of the caste system under which we live. The caste system determines what jobs we get, what things we can say and what is expected of us in everything from job performance to conspicuous displays of social justice. It is how we live now, and it is vitally important to understand that it really is this way in every place that falls under the shadow of government mandates and the progressive Kulturkampf against equality.

In the grip of the left, we have become a culture that rewards destruction and disruption, that feeds the worst behaviors and then blames them on society's failings.

We can be a country where all Americans are equal or we can be a VVI country where all Americans are equal... but some Americans are more equal than others.