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.