Today, I stumbled over a very good (English-language) guest commentary on the Capitol storming in a German newspaper, written by Bari Weiss, the former NYT writer whose reisgnation letter made big waves last summer.
The key sections of her op-ed are the best articulation of my thoughts on the "big picture" behind Wednesday's events that I could find so far:
Quote
How we got to the vile events of January 6, 2021, will be a subject for historians. Surely a central figure in those stories will be our malignant, maniacal president. Mitt Romney’s speech from the Senate floor on Wednesday presents as accurate a picture as any: “We gather due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of supporters who we had deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning.” The president‘s disgraceful enablers, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, will also have a prominent place in the sordid story.
But the 45th American president and his henchmen did not single-handedly normalize political violence of the kind we witnessed on Wednesday. That was the collective work of many hands. [...] try, if you can, to reach back to the events of this summer.
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, protests broke out in cities and towns across the country. But peaceful protests were not the summer‘s only activity: the collective riot damage, at more than $1 billion, is the most expensive in insurance history. Statutes of George Washington and Frederick Douglass were torn down by ecstatic crowds. Businesses were destroyed. Lawmakers were harassed by mobs. In the dead of night, protestors marched down residential streets and singled out homes for the sin of having an American flag. In June, the Seattle police abandoned a precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and for the next month anarchists set up an autonomous zone ruled by American warlords. Two unarmed black teenagers were killed before the government finally did anything. In July, a courthouse in Portland was firebombed.
The lunatic notion of „abolishing the police“ was debated in our most storied newspapers. A book called “In Defense of Looting” was published by Hachette, a prestigious publishing house, in which the author argues that Jews and Koreans are the face of capital and that looting is mostly victimless crime. “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” declared a Pulitzer Prize winner. And in one of the most emblematic images of the surreal gap between reality and The Narrative, a CNN reporter stood in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in front of roaring flames while the chyron beneath his image declared: “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.“
Such were the moral and linguistic contortions. We were supposed to acquiesce to the insidious idea that such nihilism was the “language of the unheard.” Speech was violence, our intellectual betters declared, but violence, when carried out by the right people with the right politics against the right targets, was something closer to virtue.
This isn’t whataboutism. It is the crucial context for the inexcusable events on Wednesday. The norms had already been broken. We were already living in unreality.
Here’s what I know: The liberal order that I grew up in, held up by Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, is falling apart. That was the order that insisted that all people were created in the image of God and therefore were entitled to equality under the law; that prized the sacredness of the individual over the group; that insisted on judging a person based on their deed and not based on their lineage; that upheld due process and the presumption of innocence; that rejected mob justice; that celebrated pluralism, tolerance and difference as sources of our strength; that saw liberty of thought, faith, and speech as the bedrocks of democracy; that held that true fairness demanded equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome. That liberal consensus is dying because of ideologues on the left and the right who hate the other side more than they love the country, who worship their own power more than they venerate the common good, our common story, and our common identity as Americans.
And just to make this clear: Trump is the worst offender of them all in this regard. No key player put his own power and self-interest above the country and the common good to a larger degree than him. I am a cynic at heart, and therefore was (and still am) willing to tolerate that as long as Trump's self-interest resulted in my preferred policies and ideologies being furthered, or in the policies and ideologies I detest being blocked from power. Perhaps this means that people like me, the (semi-)silent supporters and enablers, are just as guilty for the faltering of society's order and norms. Anyway, now that Trump has entered a nihilistic burn-it-down phase which serves no one but his own wounded ego, he has become a burden and it is time for him to go. He has outlived his usefulness, and even the movement that he created will be better off without him.
Source:
https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article224025750/Bari-Weiss-America-s-sacred-inheritance-is-under-attack.htmlThis post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 9 2021 09:16pm