America Has Always Been at War with America

I've been dithering on whether to write about the protests of the murder of George Floyd and the retaliatory police riots spreading across the country.  There's a lot of information flooding the media, corporate and otherwise, and I can't keep up with it.

On one hand I've been seeing white hipsters cheering on the People's Violence from a safe distance.  I think they've been playing too many dystopian video games, among other fictional media: one usually sensible guy on Twitter wanted to compare real life to V for Vendetta. I like the graphic novel, but it's not reality.  I suggested that the guy look at real-life parallels, such as the successful history of protest and resistance in South Korea; and I went back to reread my own coverage of the candlelight vigils there from 2008 onward.  (Which reminded me that I was unable to interest leftish bloggers and independent media in those events at the time.  Not as exciting as V for Vendetta, I guess.)

"Let's You and Him Fight" is one of the creepiest things I see on the white left, especially when it buys into the Right's narrative that the protests are predominantly violent.  It's hard to say for sure, but it appears to be the other way around. No one has access to the opinions of all African-Americans, but I see indications that the community is not united behind burning it all down.  I'd be surprised if it were. Those whites calling for more destruction are doing so, not because they stand with black people, but because they enjoy fantasizing about it.

The mutual aid and support, the caring for each other that is turning up everywhere - sometimes looted by the police -- are to my mind much more newsworthy than the violence, wholly justified though it is, and the mutual aid is not going to get the same amount of coverage by the corporate media.  There's also the near-certainty that a lot of the violence is being incited and committed by police agents provocateurs, just as we've seen in the past.  But you can't eat violence, you can't live on bricks, and nobody on the ground or in the streets wants a permanent diet of tear gas and pepper spray.

Except the police, of course.  Even the corporate media are recognizing that, as they are targeted for harassment and violence by the police.  The spectacle of heavily armed gangs of racist goons prowling the streets, assaulting bystanders and driving their SUVs into crowds, is going to get harder and harder to frame as keeping the peace.  So now the police are unlawfully ordering reporters to stay off the streets, to hide their criminality.  I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

Only in America?

Another fun tweet today, reacting to the spate of anti-shutdown protests around the US: "Are other countries seeing these types of protests or are Americans being exceptional again?"

A self-styled clown replied: "No, because other countries understand fucking nuance. Demanding people stay at home as much as possible & avoid gatherings during a pandemic where the virus can be infectious & asymptomatic for half a month ≠ tyranny."

This, uh, person is confusing "countries" with people.  I agree that shutdowns for public health reasons do not equal tyranny, but that's not the point.  Does he think that people only protest rationally, with nuance?  I began by recalling pro-Trump rallies in South Korea, by religious nuts every bit as loony as our native wackos.  I wrote about a rally I observed in Seoul in 2017, on the eve of Trump's first visit there, but I see I didn't include any of the photos I took there.  Here's one.

Not only did they believe that Trump would remove Moon Jae-in from office with his bare hands and restore impeached and disgraced Park Geun-hye to the Blue House, they begged him to nuke North Korea.  Luckily, their petitions never came to Trump's attention.

By my next visit a year later, there were weekly marches in Seoul on the same theme, which I wrote about here, with plenty of photographs.  Here's one:

The mixture of US and ROK flags (plus at least one marcher, whom you can see in the post, who carried US, ROK, and Israeli flags) exemplifies the shared sensibility of the Korean and US far right.  There are plenty of contacts between the US and the South Korean far right.  The clown disagreed, saying that these protests had nothing to do with COVID-19 shutdowns, but I was more concerned with the fascist mindset that produced the anti-shutdown protests here.  And I'd really just gotten started.

Another person tried to correct me: "Not true. No other country has people protesting against these stay-at-home orders. Some may not like it, but they aren’t protesting. Outside of the US, healthcare is universal so paid for with tax dollars. People aren’t selfish enough to further risk the lives of frontline staff."

However, there have been protests in South Korea against the shutdowns there, by churches that refused to observe them -- not anymore, though, because all protests have been forbidden there. So no, you won't see religious fanatics marching in the streets, but you will find them fighting with police sent to observe and enforce social-distancing in their services:

A video uploaded by a purported member of the church on YouTube showed a woman lying on the ground while another was heard shouting “Why are you doing this? Is this North Korea?”

South Korea is even more connected to the Internet than the US, and broadcasting or netcasting worship services is no less common.  Korea also has universal health care.

So does Israel, where ultraorthodox Israelis ignored shutdown orders, holding public funerals without masks or social distancing,

In Mea Shearim, video from Israel police showed officers showered with cries of "Nazis" and "murderers" as they made their way down the labyrinthine alleys of the insular Jerusalem neighborhood. A medical team from Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's emergency response service, was pelted with rocks in the same neighborhood while trying to carry out a coronavirus test, a spokesman from MDA said.

(You may remember a previous occasion when the ultraorthodox protested against "Nazi" repression of their right to spit on eight-year-old girls and call them whores.)  Thousands rallied to protest against the shutdown from the left, and Netanyahu's government has relaxed restrictions somewhat.   And as in Korea and the US, the devout have found that their god doesn't protect them from the virus.

Some Islamists have also ignored warnings and congregated in large numbers, in Pakistan for example.  As of March 12 this year:

Pakistan has so far recorded 20 positive cases with zero fatalities while two people have recovered from the disease. But with its poor health infrastructure, the country has tested fewer people despite bordering China and Iran, where more than 90,000 cases were reported.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Super League, a nationwide cricket contest, is attracting tens of thousands of spectators to stadiums across the country of 210 million people.

Now, none of this has been obscure.  The connection between reactionary Korean Christianity and COVID-19 has been well-reported here, or so I thought.  CNN reported on the ultraorthodox rebellion too.  Why, then, were these fine, smart people so sure that only Americans were stupid enough to flout warnings and attack their government for trying to protect their health?  I suppose that in part they don't see themselves as belonging to the same America as the protesters here, a sentiment that's mutual.  But it takes self-imposed tunnel vision as disabling as the Right's to ignore well-known examples of jingoistic petulance outside the US, simply in order to preserve their own smug certainties and feelings of superiority.

Come Over to the Stupid Side

So someone linked to this piece from the Washington Post this morning, a citizen Op-ed by a woman who got up and yelled "Black lives matter!" at a Donald Trump rally.  It was the same rally where another black woman was sucker-punched by a white supremacist, but the writer of this piece wasn't punched or hit or even arrested, just escorted out "to meet the rest of the protesters and keep demonstrating outside the rally."

"This is what happened next," the headline reads.  Actually, nothing happened next.  She stood up in a crowd, yelled "Black lives matter!", was removed to the parking lot, and wrote this piece.  What did she think she was doing?  "I couldn’t just sit and watch someone who is trying to be our president incite violence." How is yelling something at a Trump rally going to stop Trump from doing anything? As protests go, it seems especially pointless to me. For that matter, every president incites violence. Has she ever protested against Obama's gleeful use of violence, against his cooperation with the Prison-Industrial Complex, against his contempt for ordinary black people? How about Hillary Clinton's "We came, we saw, he died," and her fondness for the idea that someone might kill Ralph Nader? Will she protest against the wars that will be started by Obama's successor whoever that turns out to be, or do only Americans' lives matter?

"What kinds of lessons would children learn from a president who says it’s okay to kill the families of alleged terrorists and to ban people from the country because of their religion?" Like I said -- she has no idea, or prefers not to know, what the president we already have is doing. Did Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki's life matter? What kinds of lessons have children learned from a president who jokes about killing some male pop singers with predator drones if they come sniffing around his daughters? What kinds of lessons do children learn from the Bush-Obama endless War on terrror? 

"But I had to do something" is the rallying cry of every misconceived, destructive action I've heard of in the past 20 years and more. Bill Clinton killed thousands of people in Kosovo, more than the bad guys there killed, with no good result. "But we had to do something!" was used to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq against effective criticism, and many liberals and progressives fell into line. "We've got to do something!" The 2008 bailout. "We've got to do something!" Whenever someone utters those magic words, I know they've abandoned all good sense and gone over to the Stupid side.

Think of all the links on Facebook to liberal online media where this or that celebrity liberal "shut down" Trump or "destroyed" him, or "shut him up." All those claims are lies: Trump is still at large, winning primary after primary. Liberals and leftists are at one with the Republican establishment right now: they don't care about anything but Stopping Trump, but they don't know how and they really have nothing positive to offer in his place. I'm really starting to worry that he'll win the Presidency this fall. Not because Sanders fans stay home rather than vote for Clinton, either, but because people thought that feel-good symbolic gestures were activism.