Like most people, I’ve spent the last two weeks glued to my phone, growing increasingly incensed at the fascistic brutality of the American police.
In the UK, the United States has always been held up as a beaming example for the rest of Western society. But over the last 4 years, with the help of an objectively deranged president, this illusion has finally collapsed.
And most recently, this decline has been fuelled by the shamefully clear footage of George Floyd’s murder. By now, many millions have watched Derek Chauvin and his three co-workers brutalise George Floyd on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 note to buy a pack of cigarettes. And after abusing Floyd during his arrest, the officers decided that the only safe way for them to restrain an already prostrated and handcuffed man was to kneel on the arteries in his neck.
Floyd died after enduring almost 9 minutes of this abject torture, during which Chauvin and his fellow officers wilfully ignored Floyd’s pleas for help. And make no mistake, this was a racist attack. George Floyd died because the life of a black man meant next to nothing to Chauvin and his cowardly colleagues.
After footage of this murder went viral online, showing the sadistic expression on Chauvin’s face, protests flared up around Minneapolis. And after some instances of looting broke out around the area, police across the country have erupted in violence.
This, in turn, has seen protests spread across the country. And in response to this unrest, not to mention Trump’s incessant authoritarian ramblings, the American police have ramped up their brutality to a level more at home in a totalitarian dictatorship than a western democracy.
Whilst everyone seems to agree that Chauvin should be charged for Floyd’s murder (although some more begrudgingly than others), some commentators seem to have taken a stand against anything but non-violent protest.
If this is where the argument stopped, I would be inclined to agree. Violence is one of the most contagious diseases to affect our species, and no society is immune to the destructive forces it can unleash. Even the most loved and inspiring anti-racist militants, whether its Malcom X or Nelson Mandela, eventually recognised this and embraced peaceful resistance as the only reliable path towards change.
But this sudden shift towards pacifism is too often accompanied by condescending and plainly moronic talking points that do nothing but stifle meaningful reform, and pander to an encroaching fascism.
The first such point is the simpleminded argument that protests and riots achieve nothing, and that the only way to honour Floyd’s memory is to vote for gradual, yet meaningful change. To believe this, however, requires a wilful ignorance of the facts.
The simple reality is that gradual reform has have been going on (if we consider this a process starting with the 1968 civil rights movement) for at least 52 years. But over half a century of voting has not been enough to affect any real change. And as a result, people have quite understandably lost faith in the system’s capacity to reform itself.
You’d think that the simple fact that the Obama administration itself – which not only boasted a black president but a black attorney general – failed to make any real dent into the structure of racism and police brutality would be evidence enough. But if not, take Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, as another example. Here there is a democratic governor, a democratic mayor, a city council that is 12-1 democratic (with the 1 being green), and the Chief of Police is a black man who has joined lawsuits accusing his own force of racist behaviour.
The people of Minneapolis essentially can’t vote any more democratic. And with the alternative being a megalomaniac calling for the extrajudicial murder of suspected robbers, what exactly can their vote achieve?
This slow, and reluctant march forward has quite literally cost lives. And after decades of suffering under racism and police brutality, people across the Unites States have rightfully had enough of a status quo that is incapable of delivering any meaningful reform.
To simply tell these people to vote when their voices have already been ignored is to tell them to give up and accept racism and police brutality as an unalterable reality of life in the Unites States. Nobody should accept such a contemptible claim, and nobody should take those who make it remotely seriously.
Even more telling about the state of our political discourse, is how conservative commentators insist on holding crowds of beaten down, frustrated protesters to higher standard than the state-funded police. For some reason, the simpleminded “bad apples” argument works for them when police murder an innocent black man. But when someone sets fire to a department store, protests become synonymous with riots.
If it wasn’t so dangerous, such cognitive dissonance would almost be funny. Any lunatic can join a crowd and set fire to something – but the sociopaths that terrorise peaceful protestors and harass people of colour up and down the country have, quite literally, been selected for the job.
In fact, it is precisely the police’s failure to root out these sociopaths, and to punish them when they reveal their contempt for public safety, that is the very core of the problem. We must never forget, for instance, that Derek Chauvin himself received at least 17 complaints during his time in the police force, of which 16 were dismissed without punishment.
Nor have Breonna Taylor’s killers, who broke into her appartment and shot her eight times, faced any charges – the Black Lives Matter movement is about more than justice for George Floyd.
Another claim banded around by police apologists, is that the police crackdown unfolding across the United States is justified as a defence of private property. Ben Shapiro, for example, recently argued on Twitter that Trump was not declaring war on American citizens, but the rioters and looters targeting them. But again, to believe this requires us to purposefully ignore an overwhelming body of evidence highlighting the police effort to stifle dissent, and terrorise peaceful protestors.
Mr. Shapiro is apparently unaware of the shocking footage showing, among other things, police officers ramming their cars into crowds of protesters, shooting at people merely standing on their porch, pepper-spraying children, shooting the supposedly free press for the crime of reporting, and just generally assaulting peaceful protesters and pedestrians.
I struggle to believe that people propagandising on behalf of the police haven’t seen this evidence. And of course, for every video I have exposing police brutality these police apologists likely have their own evidence “exposing” violent protesters. But again, we don’t always know who is instigating mob violence in those videos, and there is simply no reason to hold random groups of protestors to a higher standard that the recognised police force.
Rather, this narrative has a whiff of racism about it, and I suspect its adherents simply don’t believe that police reform is needed, or even desired. One reason I have come to suspect this is that many of this new wave of pacifists hold a quasi-religious attachment to the second amendment that is so beloved by the American right.
I mention this only because the most persuasive argument in favour of gun-rights has always been the necessity of resistance against a tyrannical government. But whilst many of these commentators supported the right of armed, anti-lockdown protestors to resist the tyranny of the face mask, these gun-toting pacifists are apparently oblivious to the very real and blatant tyranny that is currently unfolding across the United States.
You do not even have to believe in systemic racism to be outraged at the police response. If watching a militarised police force attack reporters, beat peaceful protesters, and murder American citizens doesn’t qualify as a tyrannical government, nothing will.
George Floyd protests in Washington DC – From Wikipedia Commons
This brings me to my final point, which is that these public “intellectuals” are not really anti-violence. Rather, they are either in denial about the true extent of racism and police brutality, or they simply don’t care.
This reality was self-evident when Colin Kaepernick protested police brutality by taking a knee during the national anthem. More often than not, these conservative pacifists spoke out against Kaepernick’s peaceful protest, precisely because they don’t believe in the issues these movements are protesting.
Imagine, for a moment, that Bernie Sanders was the president of the Unites States, and that these protests were not geared against racism and police brutality, but a new wealth tax being levied on US citizens. Imagine that the streets were filled with the white working class, farmers, and small business owners, and that Sanders had deployed a militaristic police force to quash any dissent against the state ideology. I have very little doubt that such a state of affairs would draw the pacifist out of Trump’s most avid apologists.
My point here is simply to reveal the pointlessness of listening to these commentators. Anyone deluded enough to see such authoritarianism as a necessary step to protect local businesses, or to think that property damage (the majority of it directed at multi-million dollar corporations to which such damage has literally no measurable impact) is worse for human wellbeing that the abject crimes of the police is either lying, or pandering to the incels that pay their mortgage.
Let me be clear – violent conflict must be resisted. But it is counterproductive to belittle the BLM movement on the grounds that violence is unjustified. Rather, violence seems like the simplest and most easily understood response. In fact, it is remarkable that the protests haven’t been more violent – given the brazen brutality of the police.
If I can offer another thought experiment; Imagine for a moment that Trump was not the president, but that he was ordering privately funded militias to crack down on protests in exactly the same way as they are now – would anyone be asking for non-violent resistance?
In fact, the only difference between this imagined scene and our current reality is that Trump’s militias are funded by the very people they are being sent to brutalise. And as it appears to me, this should only enflame us more.
This is not to say that violence is the way forward. Rather, if we are to suggest peaceful protest as an alternative to more violent conflict, we must be honest about the situation we find ourselves in. And the simple fact of the matter is that, as understandable as violence may be, it is an extraordinarily dangerous tactic.
When the state starts abusing its citizens so plainly in the hopes of stifling public dissent, to retreat is to give in to fascism. But to turn violently on state authorities is to accelerate the transition. Violence and hate have always spread like a fire. And if the conditions are right, they can quite easily burn society to the ground.
Saying this, its important that protesters are not held hostage to Trump and his fascist threats. But if the president and his police goons are determined to continue down this increasingly fascistic route, I simply don’t know how you fight state fascism if not with violence. Perhaps a nationwide general strike is the only alternative, and this tactic likely deserves more support than it currently receives. But in a country where the police seem to do little more than terrorize the citizens they are sworn to protect, we should not be criticizing violent protestors, but worshiping the peaceful ones.
The Bail Project
The ActBlue website
https://www.change.org/p/andy-beshear-justice-for-breonna-taylor