Urban myths are insidious enough when they are false. But when they assume universality in the broader culture — while reflecting negatively on that culture — then they can cause people to lose faith in themselves. This is one way in which civilizations begin to decline.
For the last 60 years, one such myth is that of Kitty Genovese.
Thanks to the New York Times reporting of her grisly 1964 murder in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens — during which 38 people supposedly watched and did nothing while she was stabbed to death — her name has become synonymous with bystander apathy.
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16 comments
Excellent work. It’s hardly surprising to any of us that her killer was black. You’re right. It’s always kept out of the story. It was only after I woke up that I did a little research to find out the killers race. He was a budding young serial killer. Are there any unsolved murders in and around that time? I wonder if the police ever looked into it? Doubtful.
Great review.
I remember watching The Witness on Netflix with my wife years ago. We were both shocked to learn that the story we had been told all these years was not only wrong, but was the opposite of what had happened. Of course, in retrospect we shouldn’t be shocked at all given how many Jewish lies have been exposed over the years.
“Did you know that? I didn’t.”.
Was that a joke? I didn’t know about this story, but somehow I knew THAT….
If this crime had taken place in the “bad old days” of the 1920s rather than the progressive 1960s, the murderer wouldn’t have lived on for another 52 years. Instead, he wouldn’t have lived on for another 52 hours.
A fine piece of analysis and writing.
I was a NY teenager then and we all took the story exactly as the NYT told it.
Misdirection indeed. The entire pitch and meaning of the narrative was a condemnation of the neighbors. The actually murderer escaped notice. It was almost as if a ghost had done it. Not til now did I know he was another Subsaharan savage. And we all felt guilt for what he did.
As the proverb goes, We grow too soon old and too late smart. But then again, we have been lied to all our lives.
There was a movie that I remember shown several times on TV in the 70s. The Woman Who Cried Murder, or She Cried Murder. I remember the beginning, I was pretty young, but that was my introduction to NYC as a place where “people got killed when they walked down the street”, or some other such urban myth that I my mom believed. I seem to remember the scumbag negroid murderer being portrayed as white, but I can’t be sure.
Great article, does well in deconstructing the Jew propaganda, but I am left shaken with the uneasy feeling that this story is emblematic of something much more insidious. I think you’ve barely scratched the surface of the vile Jew lies.
I’m glad the truth came out about this story, and I could not be less shocked about the guilty players. It is, however, unfortunately true that plenty of people would rather look the other way than help.
In 1985 I was a senior in high school and my mom and I went to visit Washington DC. As we walked up to the gates of the White House about 4:00 pm a massive black man grabbed me by the wrist and stared saying “I want some pu$$y!” He was clearly on drugs or drunk, but he was strong as an ox. While I was trying to wrench free and my tiny mother was hitting him and screaming, I looked up and saw at least 40 mostly white tourists just standing there, staring at us, and not one of them made a move to help. Half of them were grown men. That’s when rage entered me and I got free, grabbed my mother, and screamed “shame on you” at all of them.
How in that situation you come away being mad a White people for not intervening is just another form of anti-Whiteness. Where’s your sympathy for White people who have to choose between having their lives destroyed for helping or helping White strangers who might just turn on them?
1985 is not different than now. Look at what happened to the McMichaels for intervening.
Whites have a long way to go before we can control our destiny.
Don’t expect an army to come out of the woodwork. It takes time.
1985 was plenty different than today. Today I wouldn’t go to DC without a significant financial reward for doing so. And I did not expect all of them to help, but possibly one out of forty would have been more heartening than none. Even at age 17 I expected my own people to protect me. Telling the negro to be ashamed would have been the equivalent of scolding a hamster.
Why did you expect White strangers to protect you in a situation fraught with ‘racial overtones’? What would cause you to hold this belief? DC is full of tourists but it is not your typical ‘tourist town’ where the locals care about the visitors. DC has be supermajority negro for a long, long time and, as you well know, negros hate White people. So, DC is probably the only ‘tourist town’ that hates tourists more than Paris.
However, dispensing invective about White people in the middle of a race war is just giving aid and comfort to our enemies. If you don’t have anything nice to say about White people in these trying and difficult circumstances for White people, then I would suggest not saying anything at all.
So we shouldn’t discuss white liberal women? Because they are pretty problematic. How about Biden? He’s white as all hell. How about those pesky honkies in Antifa? Is everyone white off limits? Or just those in an anecdote that bugs you?
What an article, SJQ.
1964…”Come on, Whitey, quit being apathetic and help your fellow man, whatever color he may be.”
Civil Rights Act, Hart-Celler, shift the blame from blackie…your theory sounds plausible to me.
This is a great article and Spencer hits all the right points ─ including the demographic of the perpetrator, which anyone with half a brain could have guessed, but (almost) nobody dares mention.
The narrative that some girl was brutally murdered in 1964 while crowds of bystanders just watched or shut their blinds was of course nonsense and yellow journalism. This case is well-known as a result, but not so much the actual details.
I did not major in psychology, but I have taken a few psychology courses, and the mainstream view on this famous case is not that bystanders watched or willfully did nothing but that they did not realize that anything was really wrong, nor that their own actions were needed to help.
The course work did not provide any real details of the Kitty G. case, but the didactic conclusion justified by the example was that for bystanders to take action, they somehow have to be convinced of two things:
1) that there really is an ongoing threat, and
2) that they personally have to be the one to meet an exigency somehow, like calling the police.
It is important that people know that you can’t just assume that somebody else already reported an incident.
As a last resort, bystanders may need to take direct action themselves ─ if they can do so without getting stabbed or shot. Cellular phones, cameras, and lawful concealed weapons in the hand of citizens does help.
One thing is that if you are being accosted in a public place such as subway, it is useful to point at the most respectable and reliable-looking person reading the newspaper or diddling on their Smartphone and not wanting to get involved in somebody’s tawdry domestic disturbance and just say “help ─ you, quickly, get the police!”
Then the crowd can quickly change from confused gawkers to a raised hue-and-cry of pitchforks and torches.
It also helped after a nerdy Jewish electronics engineer who had gotten mugged so many times by Yoofs on the New York subway that he started to carry a .38 Smith in his pocket ─ so around Christmastime in 1984 when four Teens attacked him with improvised weapons, he laid out all four, apparently missing once and so expending all five rounds.
Everyone survived but one was crippled and he was the only aspiring rapper who did not go on to an illustrious post-shooting felony career.
Bernie Goetz was acquitted by a jury in the People’s Republic of New York for the shooting of the four Negroes ─ to the dismay of the Morgenthau DA (yes, one of those Morgenthaus) but he was nailed for carrying a concealed weapon without a rarely-issued permit.
Goetz also lost a civil case when the crippled former delinquent sued him for damages and was awarded 43 million dollars.
Anyway, this case was instrumental in a long legal trend where most states now allow the public to carry weapons concealed. In 1990, we were still fighting for this in Idaho, where Democrat Sheriffs had on principle refused to issue permits.
Citizen Carry is a huge deterrent to Diversity Crime, assuming that some kind of Civil Rights crap does not come into it if the perpetrators are indeed the usual suspects when they get shot in the course of their crimes.
Some places don’t allow an armed citizenry ─ but ask yourself how well the police or security forces are in those areas. If it is subpar, like the NY subways in the 1980s, then avoid going there at all. There will not be any no-go crime zones in the Ethnostate, but we are very far from there.
I try to avoid living in places where Amazon can’t leave a package on the porch and have it still be there when you get off work and come home. And I try not to visit bad neighborhoods at all if I can avoid it. My Grandmother used to live in the Maryvale neighborhood of Phoenix. Not the worst by far, but there was once even a Wikipedia article on the outlandish crime in that area, although that now seems to have been taken down for unknown reasons.
In the day, after the war, the Maryvale neighborhood was White and middle class, and a reasonable commute to Downtown for professionals. But today it has become increasingly melanated and non-Anglicized. There have been efforts to gentrify the neighborhood with gated communities for modest White retirees on a budget, but I am not sure how well this has worked.
My point is, from personal observation, people hearing grunts and high-pitched squawks from the street late at night are likely to hear the same things EVERY night.
Occasionally there will be a drug-related murder or stabbing outside Grandma’s window, and then out comes the crime scene tape. I have been there often enough. That is life in an urban environment.
So is that strange sound in the night the flutter of an immodest domestic quarrel, the bars letting out, or somebody actually being raped and murdered?
When you call the police, what do you really know to tell them? Most of the time it is nothing at all. Sometimes you hear shooting but even if you call the police, the Yoofs will have scampered off. Odd how quiet it gets when the Black & White patrol cars come rolling up.
People need to get into the habit of observing and reporting. Maybe if there really are a lot of shootings, minority horseplay or otherwise, the authorities will increase patrols.
I can say that I have been challenged by a lot of guys claiming to be Neighborhood Watch. Some were complete AHs. Normally you can identify yourself and the “George Zimmerman” guy thanks you and then leaves you alone. You never have to jump out of the bushes and try to beat that creepy-ass Cracker down in the parking lot for eyeballing you ─ and if you did, it would not be unreasonable to risk getting shot like poor dindu nuffin’ Trayvon Martin.
One time I got off work later in the evening and went out to the mailbox. It was very dark but well before 9 PM. I found a youthful and tall (if a bit overweight) White security guard who was wearing some kind of uniform and carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Dude literally soiled his Depends when I walked up out of the night holding my mailbox key.
I immediately did my best to calm Deputy Donuts down and jokingly reassure his embarassment ─ and I even showed him my driver’s license for identification without being asked. The security guard (probably too dumb to be an off-duty cop but who knows?) surely thought that he was aware of his surroundings. But I could have taught him a thing or two about doing guard and sentry duty and maintaining a better presence in a “war zone.” That and how to shoot and maintain your rifle are the first two things that a solider learns.
No, you can’t bring your guns into DC ─ sometimes also called the “murder capital.” Looking at the demographics, it ain’t my kind of place. I wonder if carrying bear spray would get you thrown into jail there if the usual suspects tried to mug you. I’m guessing probably so, and that underscores the real problem here. Citizens are not the threat. Criminals are.
Yeah, I am going to reiterate my longstanding opinion that sending fewer perps to prison is NOT making things safer for White people. The opposite is the case.
🙂
A great article, and I remember reaching many of these same conclusions when I watched it almost a decade ago.
Lügenpresse is an apt description of the matter. Incidentally, A.M. Rosenthal was a big opponent of German unification after the Berlin Wall came down and after Germany did unify was a player in making sure the Germans groveled even more, calling for Germany to follow after the example of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C..
Excellent essay.
“the New York Times story which broke the story was filled with lies — lies that reporter Martin Gansburg and Times editor Abe Rosenthal wished to propagate to sell newspapers and further their careers”
every.single.time.
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