Black Lives Matter Movement
While the world’s attention has been centred on the Coronavirus and its impact causing countless infections and deaths, disrupting lives and bankrupting businesses and economies the Black Lives Matter movement represents an even more destructive and insidious infection.
The Irish poet Y. B. Yeats in The Second Coming wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and in the same poem “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
While written in 1919 such are the anarchic and deeply disturbing times we now live in that Yeat’s words have never been more prophetic and apt. Ours is a time when raw emotion and mob rule trump rationality and reason.
Where raw emotion and mob rule
The maxim attributed to Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’ is replaced by ‘I feel therefore I’m right’ and individuals now take it upon themselves to decide what constitutes the truth regardless of the facts.
Across Australia, England, America and Europe countless thousands have taken to the streets, parks and thoroughfares ignoring the deadly and infectious China virus and breaking the law and putting other citizens at risk.
While the overwhelming majority of people have socially isolated often at great cost and under the threat of fines governments and the police do nothing to keep social order while businesses and buildings are robbed, burnt and trashed.
This is best illustrated by the sight of UK police submitting on bended knee to an illegal and rowdy mob of Black Lives Matter activists. Like Alice in Wonderland we have gone down the rabbit hole and long held certainties and absolutes no longer apply.
Police are no longer authority figures entrusted to enforce the law and protect all citizens equally – instead they are now complicit in politically correct virtue signalling and turning a blind eye to wanton illegality and vandalism.
In America, notwithstanding his faults, President Trump is attacked and condemned for daring to state the obvious – there is no room for senseless violence and destruction and the rule of law must prevail in order to protect the common good.
African-American communities
In Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was unjustly killed, Black Lives Matter demonstrators are calling for the police to be defunded on the supposed basis all are racist and guilty of white supremacism. Ignored is that the police are the only ones safeguarding shops and businesses in African-American communites.
Also ignored is that in America the overwhelming incidents of violence and death inflicted on African-Americans is at the hands of other African-Americans. Heather MacDonald in ‘The Myth of Systematic Police Racism’ published in The Wall Street Journal argues it is wrong to suggest American “law enforcement is endemically racist”.
MacDonald writes “a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer”.
The point is also made in 2018 “African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the US and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population”.
Australian Aboriginals
In Australia, as argued by the Aboriginal academic at the ACU Anthony Dillion, the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody is overstated and as a result other more pressing issues are ignored. As examples Dillion cites “homelessness, poor health, violence and unemployment”.
Other issues ignored include the unacceptable high levels of domestic violence, especially against women, where even though Aborigines represent about 3 per cent of the population they represent 23 per cent of intimate-partner homicide victims.
As to why mob hysteria, virtue signalling and cultural-left group think now prevail look no further than the West’s education system. As a result of the late 60s cultural-revolution a rainbow alliance of neo-Marxist inspired critical theories now dominate schools and universities.
Institutions that once brought us together
Western civilisation, especially Christianity, is condemned as Eurocentric, exploitive and guilty of white supremacism. For generations students have been taught what the eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey terms a ‘black armband’ view where Aborigines are always presented as victims being forced to live under oppressive conditions.
The ideal of a liberal education based on the search for truth, objectivity and rationality no longer exists as for years students have been told knowledge is a social construct employed to enforce the hegemony of the ruling, capitalist class.
As a result, as argued by Nick Timothy in the UK’s The Telegraph, “the customs, norms and institutions that once brought us together are no longer venerated, but assaulted as bastions of oppression. And so the bonds between us are destroyed. In place of a cohesive society, with common habits, symbols and traditions, we are reduced to membership of fragmented groups defined by racial and gender identities that inevitably conflict with one another”.
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