The rapid spread of protests across the West under the Black Lives Matter banner has left a political breathlessness from Baltimore to Berlin.
Those in positions of authority are scrambling to show they are addressing endemic racism, and in the commercial sphere, not ending up on the wrong side of the debate and risking Twitter storms and boycotts. In a world where nothing is exempt from moral judgment, being on trend means signing up to radical political movements.
That is what Black Lives Matter is. Don’t take my word for it. Take theirs. The form of words that appears on most online posts connected to the group riffs on ‘the black radical tradition’ which counts among its past contributors the Black Panther Movement and Malcom X. BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.
Alexandra Phillips – The Telegraph – June 12, 2020.
