The other day, parts of London and other major cities were paralysed by mobs expressing solidarity with the plight of American blacks who, according to the rabble rousers, are being wantonly slaughtered by trigger-happy white cops.
Heathrow airport was cut off by riotous crowds organised by the Socialist Workers Party, which is what the Communist Party calls itself these days. Communists in general have a most touching concern for human lives, except those 150 million or so they themselves have taken in different parts of the world.
In this case, they are half-right: blacks are indeed being wantonly slaughtered – but not by white cops. True enough, white US policemen kill on average about 200 blacks a year. In most cases this is self-defence, for stubborn facts show that a white policemen is 18.5 times less likely to kill a black man than to be killed by him.
And yes, some of the killings, very few, are unjustified, as they’re bound to be in a country where blacks account for 85 per cent of all violent crimes. Many of those are committed with guns, and a policeman would have to be inhuman not to have his finger tight on the trigger when approaching a black suspect. Sometimes tight fingers twitch too fast or at a wrong time, and a tragedy occurs.
Now communists aren’t good at putting things in perspective, but we must be. And the perspective shows that blacks are indeed being slaughtered in America – by other blacks. Over the past 35 years, an estimated 324,000 blacks have been killed in the US by people of the same skin pigmentation.
One doesn’t see too many protesters with placards saying ‘Blacks, stop killing one another’. Black lives matter, but not that much. Actually, not at all.
Nor did black lives matter during the genocides in Burundi and Rwanda, when close to 1.5 million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus and vice versa. Typologically the same mob was then too busy protesting against black South Africans not having quite the same rights as the whites. It’s that perspective thing again.
The rioters favour melodramatic gestures, such as chaining themselves together and blocking approach roads to Heathrow and Birmingham airports, or lying across tram tracks in the centre of Nottingham. They know in advance that no one will drive a car or a tram over them – at times one is sorry we’re too civilised for our own good.
Some of the road blocks prevented ambulances from getting patients to hospitals, but the statistical probability is that most of those patients were white. Their lives don’t matter to the crazed leftie mob. Neither do black lives or those any other colour. Theirs is the kind of action that is the aim in itself.
Just as the only real purpose of mass murder is the murder of masses, the only real purpose of such disruptive action is to act disruptively. These people cherish every opportunity to thumb their noses at society, ideally hurt it, bring it to a standstill or, as in this case, prevent normal people from going on holiday or to work.
They never really defend a cause, especially when the cause is as clearly indefensible as this one. They’re venting their pent-up resentment against society and hatred of, well, everything.
Some just come for the ride: an opportunity to create mayhem is too good to miss. Some come because of peer pressure, but then they themselves have chosen their peer group. None of them really cares about the declared cause or has thought it through. The slogan on their placards is a pretext, not the reason.
They detest everything they describe as the establishment, refusing to accept that they themselves are it. Iconoclasm lives on long after all icons have been smashed.
No, my enraged friends, black lives don’t matter, not as such. Human lives matter, whatever the colour of the bodies within which they unfold. And it’s the likes of you who are responsible for making our lives at best unpleasant and at worst endangered.
A few of the demonstrators were arrested, and I wonder what the charge will be, if they’re indeed charged. Probably public disturbance, one would think. I’d charge them with the more serious crime: unlawful arrest and kidnapping. They did, after all, hold hundreds of thousands to ransom.