Some years ago when I was writing a novel, I was struck by a passage in Plato’s “Republic.” The philosopher tells the story of a god who is condemned to suffer for his crimes by devouring his own children. In the unfinished novel, I thought that Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were all versions of that myth because children were hypnotized by the force of these totalitarian men who devoured them through misleading the innocent into committing loyal but coldly horrible acts.

As far as that misleading goes, I found it chilling when looking at a Cambodian woman who said on C-SPAN that she had been totally brainwashed in a frightening way. To what extent? The woman said that what she had been taught as a pre-adolescent made her ready to kill any person declared an enemy of the state — relative, neighbor or stranger. She was, however, too young to be given a firearm, which were passed out at 14. Her family got her out of the country before she grew old enough to become a murderer for the regime.

Those who seek to prevent the destruction of children have a hard way to go in our country, especially if and when they confront the problems faced by so-called minority children and their communities. Kids and adults exist as red meat for neighborhood criminals who are our urban totalitarians: people ready to murder, rape, rob and kill whenever they can because they are much more dangerous in our time than white racism was at any of its high tides, before the civil-rights movement led to legislation against bigoted laws, or the idea that “boys will just be boys,” or “they were only blowing off steam.”

Interestingly, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans see this as an important issue of public health, justice, economics and social comprehension. Neither party actually understands how important the black and Latino street gangs are to the killing fields of lower-class communities.

That is why Mayors Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Cory Booker of Newark, N.J., are so important. Both black men, both relentless in pursuit of safer streets, they realize that the pox on the nonwhite communities are the young men and women who have embraced the vision of street gangs, which means murder, drug dealing and anarchic violence. By the way, the thugs never represent even 10 percent of the community, a decided minority within a minority.

Said Nutter last week when rolling out a nine-point plan to fight crime in his troubled city: “I’ve got a message to every punk, every criminal, every person carrying an illegal weapon in the city of Philadelphia — got a gun, go to jail.”

In nearby Newark, Booker has made amazing progress against violent crime — but it’s a fight he must wage anew every year, because the gangs and the guns aren’t going away.

And the gory body count, from babies to the elderly, lets us know one thing for sure: These are not things that can be dismissed as “boys being boys” or “blowing off steam.” Latino and black mothers deeply hate this heartless violence, as do the vast majority of those who try to live civilized lives in those communities.

But left-wing black academics and the supposed members of the civil-rights leadership still do not understand any of this, or they would not submit to cliches about the so-called prison-industrial complex, in which racism and profit have supposedly become a variation on the old slave plantation system.

This is an old con that goes back to the Black Panther Party, which had a program demanding that every black person in prison be released because, the story went, the prisoners had never gotten a fair trial. While there were sincere Panthers, most were bullying, inarticulate and uneducated thugs and political gang members, beginning with founder Huey P. Newton. What a good number actually wanted was sexual access to the sort of black middle-class women who had been taught by their parents to avoid thugs, drugs and knuckleheads, but, suffering from guilt, gave into those “real men.”

Our lower-class communities need to be liberated from oppression by criminals and street gangs. When those in positions of leadership learn what Booker and Nutter know, only then can gang and drug violence be dramatically reduced. At that point, our nation can begin preparing the children in those communities to help our country become as important internationally as General Motors became when it was saved from economic oblivion.

GM’s jobs were saved, and the company thrives, even though conservatives did not believe it was possible. If we turn around these oppressed communities, we would shock the world with our level of international competition. I’m sure of that.

— Stanley Crouch can be reached by email at crouch.stanley@gmail.com.