THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF BLACK LIVES MATTER
MARK GULLICK
1st July 2020
By Socialist Appeal - https://www.flickr.com/photos/135433887@N02/49977691057/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91096777
‘We have made enormous progress in race relations’, Obama conceded. ‘But what is also true is that there are still problems, and communities of colour aren’t just making these problems up’.
Quoted in Heather McDonald, The War on Cops
Ask of each thing, what is it in itself? What is its nature?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In one week in June, Black Lives Matter went from being a street gang to being a brand. The speed of this ongoing transformation is largely being controlled by the media, and they have produced, justified and showcased a revolution in miniature, the storming of the Winter Palace in fun-size, like the chocolate bars you eat when you can’t face a whole one.
So the BLM crazy-train rolls swiftly on and it is best viewed as a media event because that is how we are trained to see it. Reality, as Guy Débord wrote, is reduced to ‘a society of the spectacle’. It is;
‘...the mechanism through which power appropriates not common land but everyday life. The spectacle is the expansion of capitalist relations beyond immediate economic production and into the experience and representation of daily events’. (Débord, The Society of the Spectacle).
And the spectacle we see unfolding looks very much part race war and part occupation. The swiftly escalating unrest is spreading, and isolated outbreaks may soon begin to link arms. And while the MSM are spinning the rioting as protests and the protests as some joyous catharsis, a righteous crusade a long time coming, to pretend it is spontaneous is disingenuous at best and complicit with its handlers at worst.
But as well as the street-level violence and intimidation, there are other dimensions to the phenomenon of BLM. There is the issue of white liberal contrition, which created the power vacuum into which BLM have rushed. There is the question of BLM’s antecedents and ideology, such as is raised by a founder member of BLM openly admiring the Black Panthers. There is the mystery of who is funding BLM, as they are almost certainly being bankrolled by someone. And, finally, there is the question of the future, of whether a form of mutually agreed segregation might be a necessary answer, with a parity of control, each autonomous and unaffected by the other, in both camps.
To begin with white liberal contrition, which has become a virus far more transmissible than COVID-19. We have seen whites kneeling before blacks, washing their feet, contributing vast sums to their cause, creating celebrity videos in which the humbled stars ‘take responsibility’, and essentially speaking when they are spoken to by the new foreman of the works. And dissent is not an option. Observe the outrage at Burnley football ground when a ‘plane flew over with a ‘White lives matter’ banner affixed.
The historical models for BLM range from the Black Panthers to Antonio Gramsci, from Ché Guevara to Saul Alinsky, from the maquis fighters of the French Resistance to Occupy Wall Street, the Soixante-huitards of the Paris riots to the pack behaviour of football hooligans. Not that BLM could ever see or understand those influences, not being much given to reading. All of the worthwhile critical work, in the dissident media of course, has been done by writers on the Right Wing. Don’t waste your time or money on the MSM, they are already co-opted and singing in tune.
The common thread uniting BLM’s ancestors is violence, or at the very least civil disruption. As for any BLM ideology – again, none has been committed to print outside semi-literate cardboard signs, flyers and graffiti – it exists primarily in the emotive and manipulative treatment of certain bullet-proof phrases, what we might call ‘placardism’: ‘White privilege’. ‘Systemic racism’. ‘The legacy of slavery’. ‘400 years’. ‘Silence = violence’. These rules of the new game either don’t exist or have had their meanings mangled. A whole glossary of accusation has been whipped up in the Alt. Left equivalent of a focus group meeting, and the police and the political class accept this jargon without question. And so, apparently, must we. Firings in the workplace for the wrong opinion – white opinion – about BLM are a very real possibility, and you may need to seek employment elsewhere, provided the blot on your copybook does not travel with you.
As for funding and tactical support on the ground, the static is full of clashing conjectures. Is it Soros? The Russians? The Alt. Right? The top three talent agencies in America (this, extraordinarily, pertains to fact)? Just who plays BLM’s sugar daddy to their babymamma? It is likely to be a collaboration between entities but, if there is an éminence grise, a player of games, they are winning, and every move brings an expected counter-move which further weakens the enemy. It was tiresomely predictable – I was saying it on a blog two or three years ago – that the first ones to show effective resistance at street level would be football supporters. Football is also a replacement religion for the disaffected, and it has its Church Militant. It is also, at its dark heart, still genuinely racist enough to be of great use to the overseers, if such there be. But government has always been far more frightened of radicalised pubs than radicalised mosques.
And on the ground it is becoming very dangerous indeed. Deaths have already started, and as with COVID-19, the media are using all their ability to manipulate and direct the violence;
‘I’m not frightened of black mob violence. But I am terrified of the bat shit crazy people in the media and government who ignore it, condone it, encourage it, and even lie about it’. (Colin Flaherty, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry).
And the future? Can blacks and whites live together in the perfect racial harmony of a 1980s television advert? The American adage still holds true, even if it is nowadays muttered sotto voce;
‘A college degree teaches you all about the history of black people, while guaranteeing you a job with an income which will allow you to live far away from them’.
The truth is that blacks need whites to survive, not just in fiscal and geographical terms, but as a necessary enemy, the re-emergence of a tribal drive – and all races have a tribal element, this is not an accusation of mere primitivism – and a pure dialectic of malevolent opposition. Unfortunately, and this is a great truth the elites and their media stevedores will protect from inspection just as they will punish those who utter it, the truth of Robert E. Lee’s statement will outlast his statue;
‘I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving’.
To listen to the media, you would think – you had better be thinking – that everything about BLM matters. In fact, very little does. What were their origins? Who cares. What do they want? Not even they know. One of the founders says vague and self-important things about being ‘well versed in ideologies’. But ideologies are like the vulgar false fingernails black women wear. When you get bored with them you just tear them off and get another set, equally trashy and ugly. What are their grievances? Look, the amateur sociologists on the night-time – and day-time – news will be making money for jam on all this, so forget about it. Why does a dog shit in the street? It doesn’t matter, even when you step in it. The fact that it is there is what matters, the fact that it is now all over your shoes. We’ve heard all the buzzwords and now we’ve been issued with our orders, for white eyes only;
‘Many observers, including a number ready to attribute all black difficulties to racism, agree that there is a distinctive black behavioural style… [W]hites find the black style “dysfunctional” and often retreat into silence before it...’ (Mark Levin, Why Race Matters).
As the anonymous ‘Israeli correspondent MC’ who files his or her copy at the much-reviled and therefore extremely relevant website Gates of Vienna writes;
‘Black Lives Matter is an auto-identity crisis. At its core is a violent and irrational scream of frustration and hate’.
Israeli correspondent. Have you noticed the anti-Semitic tang to the strange brew BLM are cooking up? You will. Jews: Just non-white enough for the wrong type of white to hate and just white enough for the wrong type of black to hate in equal measure. Everything changes, everything stays the same.
But, as formless and primal, as meaningless and pathetic as BLM is, the range of its effects is very real. As they used to say on the radio, we’ll be back after a word from BLM’s sponsors:
Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent Central has decreed that if there is any uptick in the COVID-19 infection rate in England after close-quarters BLM rioting, it must not be blamed on the BLM protestors.
A woman called Kennedy Mitchum complained to Merriam-Webster that the definition of the word ‘racism’ in their famous dictionary did not include any mention of the systemic and oppressive nature of the problem. She demanded they change the definition. They have done just that.
Sadiq Khan, Muslim Mayor of London, has announced plans to form a committee looking into the replacement of certain London statues with representations of ‘People of colour, black people, and the achievements of the LGBTQ community’.
Lisa Bender, the President of Minneapolis City Council, has declared that a ‘police-free future is ‘aspirational’. The council voted in agreement.
NPR reports that ‘your bookshelf may be the problem’ if it does not contain enough books written by black authors. (Does that mean my copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus has to go?)
Lego, the famous Danish toy-maker beloved of kids the world over, has withdrawn its police play figures and White House set.
Ths list grows daily. At the moment, they are coming for whiteness. If you think they won’t come for whites, then you need to hide some history books in the attic to read when you are hiding up there.
People used to say, ‘in the final analysis’, and it meant something. In terms of race, however – and for BLM and their co-workers in the white liberal West, everything is cast in terms of race - there is no final analysis. The argument, such as it is, has an unshakeable, illogical premise, and that is the final analysis. You can use all the reason, all the logic, all the sourced documentation and all the level-headed argument you want, the final analysis is carved in stone, and the stone is now being used as a headstone for the white West. As Jared Taylor writes;
‘Many people think that to show that white racism causes black failure, all they must do is to show that blacks fail’ (Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions).
In the more than two decades since that was written, that ‘most people’ has become ‘everyone allowed to voice an opinion on the subject’. Blacks cannot be allowed to fail because of cultural dysfunction. White oppression is the only answer permitted. So, we must assume that what BLM want is redress.
We know that they want reparations. We hear nothing but. However, in a hemisphere about to go broke, that shot is not on the board. What is the indescribably large benefits bill blacks take from in the USA if not reparations? Where do they think they would be without whitey? But let us concentrate on the crumbs from the white man’s table, the things that look as though they are helping reach the impossible goal of equality between the races, but in actual fact will not save a single black body shot to death on a hot Chicago weekend.
More black Oscars.
More blacks on TV.
Fewer blacks in jail.
Whites as reality shoe-shine boys.
Toppled statues.
Repackaged foodstuffs.
New sports team names.
No blackface, now or in the past.
Black privilege.
Black supremacy.
There they are, all the tid-bits, the glittering prizes BLM don’t need but will take because they believe they make a difference.
And, in the end, white people will just walk away. White separatism is not white supremacy, just supreme common sense. Where would you rather live, white man, white woman? Baltimore or Budapest?
And when there are all-black cities, all-black companies, all-black states, all-black nations (how did that work out, Africa?), and all- black culture, what do you think that world will be like? Let’s ask a teacher.
‘One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me; “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”
“We screwed”, a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.’
Christopher Jackson, A White Teacher Speaks Out.
Mark Gullick is a philosophy PhD from London, England, who went on holiday to Costa Rica four years ago and forgot to go home. He now works there as a musician. His debut novel, Cherub Valley, is available as an ebook here'.