"It's all such insane rubbish that at some point you have to laugh out loud...." David Samuels, "The Happiest Place on Earth", The Tablet, July 3, 2020.
Except that no one is laughing. The events of the last couple of months in the US are no laughing matter. That rioters claiming to be defending the rights of blacks topple statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, and deface a monument to the black soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War is, indeed, insane rubbish, but it is very dangerous insane rubbish.
It is by now well established that the vandals who perpetrated those atrocities and many others, including the smashing, torching and looting of many stores in multiple cities, some owned by blacks, were organized and backed by two insurrectionary networks: Black Lives Matter and Antifa. They took advantage of the confluence of various factors: the corona virus emergency, greatly increased unemployment, especially of younger people, and the disgusting murder of a black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, to turn peaceful protest marches into an orgy of sadistic destruction.
What should be an iconic picture of the event, a black store owner standing in front of his destroyed and looted business and crying, is symbolic of the monumental hypocrisy of the rioters. Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa are not interested in the promotion of racial equality, they are interested in the destruction of Western Civilization in general and in particular, of the United States, stigmatized as an evil country run since the beginning by evil people who happened to be white.
There is, however, a significant difference between the two networks. BLM is avowedly Marxist, working towards the implantation of a Marxist utopia, which as we have seen over and over again, means in reality, a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship. Antifa, in contrast, is the rebirth of the anarchist movements that proliferated in Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, disseminated by French, Russian and German intellectual propagandists. The anarchist utopia is the diametric opposite of the Marxist utopia--that is, no government at all.
The last time the anarchists and Marxists cooperated was during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, which blended into the beginning of World War II, a fact that should give us pause.
The pusillanimous reaction of the municipal and state authorities to the wave of barbaric destruction bodes ill for the future of the US and the West in general, along with the spread of rioting and monument-damaging into Europe, where BLM should have no resonance whatsoever.
It should be obvious that what happens in the US (and elsewhere) as a result of the resurgence of Marxism and anarchism will be of great significance to Israel. The likelihood of an eventual triumph of the Marxist/anarchist thugs is largely dependent on three factors: the duration and extent of the coronavirus crisis, the trajectory of the economy over the next several months and the result of the November election, which has the potential to empower the lunatic right or the lunatic left, depending on what happens. If Israel can get its own political act together one of its priorities must be to prepare for the possibility of a a significant reduction in the support of the US.
Dr. Norman Bailey is professor of Economic Statecraft at the Galilee International Management Institute, and adjunct professor at the Institute of Worlld Politics, Washington DC. Dr. Bailey was a senior staff member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration and of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 7, 2020
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2020