Scenes from the US: The State of Hate
The State of Hate
Like nearly all of us, I have been shocked by the scenes in Washington, DC. On January 6, armed protesters wearing pro-Trump gear and many of them carrying the Confederate flag stormed and successfully occupied the capitol.
I grew up in Washington, DC and have been part of mass events there. From about the age of 15, those included protests. Over the years I've protested against environmental devastation, neoliberal austerity policies, the US overthrow of elected governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo and Venezuela, and the rights of political prisoners including former members of the Black Panther Party who are still languishing in US prisons. In all those years and all those protests on Capitol Hill, I've never seen anything like what happened yesterday.
Let's be clear: What happened yesterday was allowed to happen. Police and other authorities felt that they had more to gain by letting armed insurgents into the Capitol than by keeping them on the streets in designated protest zones, which is what they did in every single protest I attended.
At Peace Vigil, this is something we've been warning about for years. It is one thing to have hate groups. At the fringes of a society that values free speech, there will be groups who espouse hate. But that becomes a huge problem when the leader of a country - a President or a Prime Minister - openly signals his support for such groups. President Trump’s social media accounts have for weeks been spreading outright lies and calls to violence; yet it took yesterday’s violence for Twitter to finally ban his account.
There is a story we're told about protest. According to this story there are three actors in a given protest. So to take the example of the Black Lives Matter movement, there are the groups that align themselves with #BLM and against racism. Then there are the (racist) groups who may come out to protest against #BLM. And there is the State, whose job is to remain neutral and create spaces for both racists and anti-racists to protest without becoming involved and treating each side fairly.
This story is a lie. In today's USA the State chose to side with the violent over the non-violent, those who espouse hate over those who espouse peace and those who believe in supremacy over those who believe in equality.
The scenes from the USA are a warning to us all. Do our governments treat some protestors differently than others? Do they turn a blind eye to some forms of violence or even encourage it? And when they do this, how do we react? Are we prepared to fight for what we believe in, to join groups calling an end to laws that don't allow marriages between religions in India, for example?
There is another story that Donald Trump and his ilk have been trying to popularize for years: each side is just as bad as the other. People protesting the murder of Black children are scolded because one protestor smashed a window. One way to create this false equivalence is by demonizing movements, including the anti-fascist movement, sometimes shortened to Antifa.
Today has shown us what fascism looks like. If the sight scares you, you must side with the anti-fascists. There is no neutral ground in this conflict.
Yours in Peace,
Sameer for Peace Vigil.
