Another American murdered by an illegal alien

Must reading from Michelle Malkin on the murder of actress Adrienne Shelly in New York City last week by an illegal alien who was here, as George W. Bush would have it, doing a job Americans didn’t want to do. Further down in the same blog entry, Malkin exposes the open-borders camp’s woeful misrepresentation of the meaning of the defeat of pro-borders control Republican candidates as a rejection of border control. In fact, each of the defeated pro-border control Republicans was beaten by a Democrat who was even more outspoken for border control than the Republican.

There’s a significant detail on the Shelly murder that Malkin doesn’t bring out, but that was mentioned in Wednesday’s or Thursday’s New York Post. Prior to Shelly’s slapping the illegal alien in the face and then calling him a “son of a bitch” (an insult that Latin American men take literally as an unendurable insult to their mother and themselves), which set off his murderous rage, he had furiously pounded a hammer in response to her polite request that he make less noise. So, confronting a Hispanic man who had just shown himself to be dangerously violent, she called him a “son of a bitch,” and that got her killed. There was another recent murder of a woman in New York who said tauntingly to a mugger, “What are you going to do, kill me?” And then he killed her.

I think this is feminism at work. Contemporary American women are so full of themselves that they lack the instinct that tells them to shut up, even when confronting a violent black or Hispanic. Because they get away with dissing their own feminized husbands and boyfriends, they think they can do the same with minority criminals.

[Note: A couple of readers have pointed out that we apparently only know from the suspect that Shelly slapped his face and called him a son of a bitch. Also, since he does not speak English, would he know what the expression meant? More information is needed.]

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Stephen T. writes:

The fatal mistake committed by Adrienne Shelly was one that no Hispanic woman would make. Neither would a female Anglo teacher in the LAUSD. I used to rent a house from a former LAUSD teacher. She once told me that, at the school where she had taught, all incoming female Anglo teachers were warned about reprimanding or in any way speaking in a commanding tone to misbehaving male Mestizo students, especially in the presence of their peer group of other Mestizo males.

When reprimanded by a woman, their instinct for face-saving—a paramount impulse above almost all others in their primitive culture—is so strong, and overwhelms whatever weak civilizing inhibitions they may have absorbed from Anglos, that the female teachers were informed that they were literally endangering their own safety if they should offend one of them.

I fully expect that, given the increasing normalization (indeed, glorification) of such “Hispanic values,” we will soon hear attorneys offering this as a valid courtroom defense in cases of murder, assault, etc, committed by Indo-Hispanics. It will be known as the “Wounded Macho Pride” defense, or something similar.

Leonard K. writes:

’Pillco, who is from Ecuador and speaks only Spanish…’ ‘…she dared to call him a “son of a bitch”…’ ‘…he took that insult literally…’ Am I the only one who sees this apparent contradiction?

Gintas writes:

This Latin “machismo” is part of their culture’s honor-shame dynamic. It’s like that in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It’s called “face” in Asia. It seems to be a normal part of most cultures with wildly varying degrees of problem resolution—remember dueling in the old South? Gunfights in the old West? Maintaining the honor of a woman? If a society has no shame, there is no honor, and Westerners are a pretty shameless people.

I’m not trying to rationalize what this guy did, for some reason it set me off on something our culture has lost. No doubt this alien culture is a problem.

Do you think liberals will ever ask themselves, “what are we doing letting these barbarians into our country?” For them, traditionalist white males _are_ the barbarians. There has to be serious cognitive dissonance going on. I expect it will be resolved not in honest discussion but in a renewed attack on the Western tradition.

LA replies:

Yes, that will be the case, so long as liberalism remains the ruling belief system in people’s minds.

Which raises an interesting question. People sometimes have very firm, seemingly unshakable beliefs, which they nevertheless do give up when the beliefs are decisively discredited. Many Marxists gave up their theological belief in the command economy as a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Many Bush supporters have actually given up their belief in the viability of Iraqi democracy as the result of what’s been happening in Iraq. So what would make people give up their belief in modern liberalism, with its idea that discrimination is the ultimate evil and equality the ultimate good, and its corrolary that our culture is an evil oppressor and that third-world cultures are gods? The question answers itself. When our culture loses its superior position and actually comes under the power of the Third-World peoples we have been welcoming and worshipping, when white Western people, to quote the Koran, are subdued and feel themselves subdued, then liberalism will come to an end. Marxists only gave up their belief in Soviet Communism after the Soviet Union died. By the same token, it stands to reason that liberals will only give up their belief in liberalism after liberal society dies. Therefore, if we traditionalists are to be truly serious, our primary task is not only to criticize the liberal order, as I for example am always doing, since even the most astute criticism will not wean liberals from their liberalism, but to build up the understandings and the institutions that can replace the liberal order after it has come to an end and has thus been decisively discredited—discredited in the eyes of the liberals themselves.

The problem of course is that by that point in my scenario, we won’t have just liberalism to contend with, but the ascendant power of Third-Worlders and their white leftist facilitators. Perhaps our descendants’ destiny will be something like that of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, which held out for centuries against the Moslem conquerers and rulers of Spain and eventually won their country back, but only at terrible cost.

Dimitri K. writes:

I’ve been long thinking about the mystery of liberals who embrace violent foreigners, who clearly state that they want to kill them. Those homosexuals and lesbians making common statements with CAIR. In Soviet history, one well known and puzzling episode is when Stalin sentenced his comrades communists to death with clearly absurd accusations. Those men, who had proven to be tough in other situations, could not resist and only praised their murderer. The more I think about it the more I come to a conclusion, that it can be rationalized only in a very general term of ‘evil’. Those who are possessed by evil, cannot resist to a larger and more brutal evil, and always finish praising that bigger evil. That’s it.

LA replies:

This is an amazing statement, because what you are doing is connecting Arthur Koestler’s analysis of the suicidal Communist psyche in Darkness at Noon with our present Western suicide psychology. I never thought of this before. Why does the protagonist of Darkness at Noon, a loyal Bolshevik who has been arrested for treason to the Communist state, finally accept and embrace his own execution? His loyalty to the cause and to the Leader trumps all other considerations,, including the fact of his personal innocence. In your words, “Those who are possessed by evil, cannot resist to a larger and more brutal evil, and always finish praising that bigger evil.”

And this also could be seen as describing the psychology of Western liberals who are willing to let themselves be destroyed by Islam and the Third-Worldization generally. They may be personally innocent from a leftist point of view, but the destructive evil to which they have given their minds and hearts demands their destruction, and, in the end, because of their loyalty to that evil, it is a price they are glad to pay.

I haven’t thought through this analysis enough to embrace it completely, but it does feel correct.

Tom S. writes:

“Those who are possessed by evil, cannot resist a larger and more brutal evil, and always finish praising that bigger evil.” This is a thought worthy of Solzhenitsyn in his heyday. As you pointed out, this requires thinking about, but there is certainly something to it.

That’s why I hit this site every day. You almost always find something that makes you think.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 10, 2006 01:39 PM | Send