Contemplating the riots/demonstrations of the weekend (statues defaced and pulled down, police officers assaulted, social distancing ignored, etc) I ask myself about the extraordinary power of events a thousand-plus miles away in the US to excite supposedly “spontaneous” reactions here in the UK. And yet if, say, French police get all heavy with yellow-jacket protesters, I don’t recall marches of demonstrators in front of the French embassy. Or nor do I see this if or when there are problems in Germany, Italy or Spain (racism is a thing in these countries, after all).
Ironically – and this must drive those of a pro-EU frame of mind nuts – it is still North America, with its rawer culture and politics, its legal similarities to the UK (for good and for ill) that resonates, even in the minds (for want of a better noun) of the sort of folk going on BLM demos. What goes on in France, Germany or Italy tends not to have the same grip on the mind. The Atlantic is wide and the Channel is narrow, but in every other sense, it is the other way around. To that extent, then, the Anglosphere lives, even in the hearts and minds of the far Left.
And even with the lockdowns, there is the same focus in large part on what the US is doing or not doing, rather than say, what our continental European neighbours are up to. One reason for this is that those who want to sacralise the National Health Service face the uncomfortable fact that even in more socialist Europe, healthcare isn’t a state, centrally planned system, but rather more decentralised, particularly in Germany.
We have seen people in UK ostensibly demonstrating against police brutality (clearly this has bugger all to do with that in reality). However, other people are now observing that perhaps we do not have enough police brutality 😆
Meh. In my progressive prosperous metro area, we have the brutality, and had over 260 buildings torched and/or looted, while y’all in your same sort of area without the brutality don’t sound like you had too much actual destruction at all.
I’d stick with the “no brutality” option. Not only do you not get the brutality, your city doesn’t burn.
The current situation is dire, the police in England seem to be hell-bent on appeasing violence, some genuflecting to rioters if reports are to be believed, and the impatient Left know that they can riot at will. The police will however throw their weight around with relish against the general public as we saw earlier in the year. The police are highly partisan, and frankly if they get injured in rioting, they get no sympathy from me. That might at least stop them from ‘patrolling’ social media to check people’s thinking for a while.
The situation is not unlike pre-Communist Russia, where the violence of the Left was indulged and overlooked time and time again, and eventually, the murderous mob took power.
In the USA, the situation seems for more binary, the Democrat areas seem ready for mob rule, but where the First and Second Amendments are respected, there is hope.
The straw in the wind, as far as I was concerned, was the Police conduct during the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ demonstrations. I was walking along the street, the police were ‘personing’ a barrier, ‘Happy clapping’ and singing along with the demonstrator’s chants. They were practically part of the demonstration.
The location they had chosen to hold their demonstration was ten yards from a largish square, which could have accommodated all of them and the Police supporting cast.
But the PTB decided, no, let the demonstration block one of the most important arteries in the city.
The reason they don’t care about yellow-jacketed French protests is because … Leftists are racists and the yellow-jackets were white.
Also Macron is nominally a left wing politicians. Therefore the yellow-jackets were “on the wrong side of history”. Whereas the BLM can be spun as anti-Trump (despite all these majority cities being Democrat run for ~50 years). Therefore, these riots have a political benefit, even in the UK as they are anti-Boris.
It is never about morality or “what is right”. For the Left it is always about power.
It’s almost as if New Labour was a Trotskyist movement that had this in mind all along…
The Blair and Brown New Labour types who failed to foresee they were destroying Labour in Scotland did not have much in their minds “all along”. They thought they were the clever ones, but according to the polls, Blair is despised across an astonishingly wide range of modern UK political attitudes.
While the Anglosphere is certainly a real thing, I do not think that it is the explanation for what JP has observed. I say this because similar echoes of the current unpleasantness may also be found in non-English speaking nations.
Rather, it seems to me that what we are seeing is but an aspect of American Exceptionalism. One which the left, the aspiring totalitarians, the enemies of liberty or whatever you want to call them for once see more clearly than those of us who consider ourselves liberty’s allies.
Even while insisting that American Exceptionalism is not a real thing, those who would make the world a gulag know that they are lying. And they understand the corollary to being the shining beacon on a hill, which is that if we go down, the world goes down.
Of course they are all jumping on the bandwagon. They know that each and every serious threat to the unique experiment in individual liberty that is the USA is, effectively a threat to liberty on a global, not merely a national scale.
We’re playing for all the world’s marbles. It’s always for all the marbles.
It seems to me that France and Germany need to seek sovereignty in all matters, from space access, to public cloud, to looting and rioting. Otherwise they’ll lose all relevance!
Amongst “my lot”, it’s widely (and wryly) held that Blair did more to radicalise us against politicians than anyone previous to him could have hoped to have done.
Betrayal will do that to a person, I think.
😉
I still, even today, occasionally encounter otherwise sensible people pining for the Blair/Brown days.
They are, without exception*, white, middle-class, Epping-dwelling, sports-blazer wearing, Waitrose-shopping, yoga-class-attending, gravel-drive-way’ed, kale-smoothie-drinking, wife-has-a-crush-on-Joe-Wicks, civil servants who still put on “that” Moby CD when they have a dinner party and discuss the plight of the “urban youth” in sympathetic and very condescending tones whilst knowing full well that they cross the road at the first sight of a kid in a hoodie.
And they all have a favourite fucking cheese, for some utterly bizarre reason.
*I may be exaggerating for comedic effect…
@bobby b: No one is suggesting that the French and German police get more brutal. Just that they have more looting and rioting. It’s no fun falling behind the U.S.A.!
Demonstrations which can be pinned on Trump are enthusiastically reported, encouraged and emulated.
Demonstrations against EU governments are not.
Ok there’s more to it than that but as a starting point it makes sense to me. If there was a democrat president I’m fairly confident the usual suspects would be out and about in support of the yellow jackets etc.
I doubt that it drives many of them nuts. Despite their pretensions, many British soi disant Europhiles have at best a cosmopolitanism that is largely superficial. The vast majority are as provincial as the caricature Brexiteer. Only they’re usually able to use their education and verbal fluency to pretend otherwise. Generally speaking their knowledge of European history, especially pre-1900, is poor. If they were more genuinely curious about the rest of Europe they’d be forced to confront that Europe is not the monolithic progressive monoculture that the EU’s humanist rhetoric tries to lead you into believing. I think these people would much rather just take their lead from American rioters, much easier to maintain a simple manichean view of the world where they get to feel righteous while being able to bully poorer white people.
Although I am sympathetic to Americans trying to resist this imbecility, I wish in Britain we’d import more Hungarian-Polish political ideas right now than American ones. More Viktor Orbans please, less American leftist garbage thank you.
Anyone else noticed how quiet #MeToo has been since Biden clinched the Democratic nomination? It’s not that they’ve nothing to say, perhaps, more that if he wins, they can sniff that they’d be within a hair’s breadth of equality.
Mr. Ed
#MeToo has gone silent, for the time being, because those who championed that philosophy have endorsed a man both credibly accused of sexual assault, and a long public record of fondling young girls. The immediate screams of “HYPOCRITE” are too much even for the woke to explain away.
Mr Ed June 8, 2020 at 10:03 am
The UK Police. Soft on hard targets, hard on soft targets and so far left that they make Lenin look like Margaret Thatcher.
The Colston statue must be re-installed. Com’era dov’era. Anything else tells the rioters that there will be a lot of tut-tutting from appeasers, but their violence will be allowed to win. And the cost of the re-installation must be paid by the police who allowed it to be destroyed.
I agree about appeasement of rioters. Has this ever worked, anywhere? Of course things will get worse until the state puts a stop to this.
I’ve no idea about the Germans, but the French CRS riot police are historically notoriously brutal. It would be hard for them to be more brutal without actually shooting people.
“The Colston statue must be re-installed.”
Nah. It should be replaced by a modern artwork entitled: “Ghanima: The Prophet Muhammad and All His Slaves”, decorated with notable Haddith and verses from the Koran discussing slavery, and the authentic history (according to Tarikh al-Tabari) of slave-taking in all the various battles and invasions of the Empire’s expansion. It should be described as a lesson in the Cultural Imperialism of applying our own anachronistic modern standards to erase other cultures’ pasts (featuring in particular Muhammad smashing the shrines of the pagan Gods at Mecca to symbolise The Spirit of Tolerance), and celebration of the meteoric rise and globe-spanning achievements of a successful black slave-owner.
They won’t. But they should.
I’d willingly contribute to the cost of restoring and re-erecting Colson.
It’s already worse. The PTB are having a review of statues of anyone else who these protesters might disapprove of, and street names as well.
It’s gone beyond Coulson: the rioters vandalised Churchill’s statue.
Although Churchill was (very!) anti-nazi, and although, when he ruled the Admiralty, he did state “There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour” in the Royal Navy, persons of any race “if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet”, he made it perfectly clear that he expected “not too many” such admirals, and thought the over-vigorous pursuit of them could produce “inconvenience”.
I doubt the rioters are so well informed of Churchill’s career as to know this, but I feel sure that if they ever learned of it they’d find it ‘unacceptable’ that he treated the smooth running of the Royal Navy in the war against Hitler as more important than increasing its diversity.
Sadly under Chancellor Merkel Germany has been moving away from freedom – including in health. But it is still a less centralised and bureaucratic nation that the United Kingdom – this has been true since World War II. Before 1945 Germany was a much MORE state controlled society than the United Kingdom.
As for the threat to the English speaking countries – the same threat as the rest of the West faces.
Frankfurt School of Marxism pushing “race”, “gender” and all the rest of it.
They do NOT care about George Floyd – any more than they care about David Dorn and other black people murdered by Social Justice Looters.
What a time to be a libertarian!
@neonsnake: but is Eric a libertarian? And is it necessary to be against having a State at all to be a libertarian?? I’m quite sure the non-anarcho-libertarian wing of the libertarian world would consider that the State does have a role in stopping violence.
Nope.
Also nope. Against “government”, yes, against “state”, no. A fine distinction, I’m aware, but an important one, particularly for anarcho-libertarians.
I wish them well, and my door is always open to them.
You say that, but at least some of the people donning gilets were apparently protesting about the death of black chap suffocated by the police…