Category Archives: Viva!

The black lives matter backlash is generating its own fake culture war | Chaminda Jayanetti

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A panicked right spurs controversy where there is none in order to discredit a perfectly reasonable set of demands

Pity the poor culture warrior, their mental gymnastics burning far more calories than pre-corona gym sessions ever could.

A statue was torn down, and they demanded people follow the proper channels. Statues were taken down via the “proper channels”, and they decried the panicked response. Reviews were announced to avoid a panicked response, and they raged against the reviews. When all else fails, they just conjure controversy out of thin air.

Take the Telegraph. Last week it claimed that the future of a 22-year-old statue of the Roman emperor Constantine outside York Minster was being “looked at”, after church officials “received complaints that the Roman emperor supported slavery”. The story was then picked up by the Daily Mail.

There was one problem. York Minster swiftly clarified it had not received a single complaint about the statue, and ruled out removing it.

This is part of a pattern. Shortly after Edward Colston’s statue was torn down in Bristol, Boris Johnson played up the threat to the Westminster statue of Winston Churchill. Hardly anyone was calling for its removal, but Johnson made it the centre of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests, and the Telegraph duly plastered it across the front page.

Write-ups of the Churchill statue also focused on the role of London mayor Sadiq Khan, a go-to hate figure on the nationalist right. This tactic was repeated recently, when newspapers roped Meghan Markle into their coverage of Prince Harry’s “support for a ban” (actually a review that almost certainly won’t lead to a ban) of the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by the Rugby Football Union.

The drivers of this dynamic are not hard to identify. Black Lives Matter is a movement, larger and broader than the organisations that bear its name. It challenges the privileges of the majority who do not experience racism, and the image that majority has of Britain and its history. And some of that majority take at least some of the movement’s arguments on board – while others lash out against it.

Those who lash out are less numerous than you might imagine. Polling conducted days after Colston’s statue was removed found most respondents agreed with the stated aims of the Black Lives Matter movement. Only 15% disagreed – around one in seven. Respondents were more evenly divided on the removal of slavery-related statues, and displayed outright hostility to removing Westminster’s Churchill statue.

But the one in seven who oppose even Black Lives Matter’s broad aims are overrepresented in the rightwing press, on talk radio and the broader network of rage merchants on social media. The organisations they work for claim to represent the unheard British majority, but they do not. They are aghast at the concept of structural racism, which implicates people and institutions far beyond their comfort zone of condemning neo-Nazis and football thugs.

Their interests are not served by tackling racialised economic inequality. The notion that unequal outcomes have structural causes affronts their smug certainty that it’s all about “personal responsibility”. And, of course, their bottom lines are not harmed by whipping up rage.

The problem is that they cannot win fighting against the basic principles of this movement because the public are broadly in favour of them. So their answer is to focus on what people are against, find examples of that, no matter how tenuous, and use them to discredit an entire political project.

The irony is that these critics of Black Lives Matter call it divisive. Given that the campaign challenges Britain’s self-image, its understanding of its history, and structural discrimination against a minority, what is notable is how little division it has provoked – contrast the support for BLM in both the US and the UK to the widespread antipathy towards Martin Luther King in the United States of the 1960s. It makes angry people very angry, but they are in the minority.

Instead, it is supporters of the populist right who are desperate to stoke division by reducing issues of fundamental importance to ephemeral noise and fake news. Their careers, and their ideology, depend on it.

• Chaminda Jayanetti is a journalist who covers politics and public services

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Confederate Flag and Monuments

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

When I was a little girl, I only saw the confederate flag on television programs or in movies.  It caused me to think that maybe the North and the South sat down at a negotiating table and decided on conditions to end the Civil War.  Why else would there be a flag flown in addition to the stars and stripes, right?  Why else would a nation have statutes of generals that fought for the South, right?

Through grammar, high school and college, nothing was taught regarding why the United States honors people and a flag that lost America’s Civil War.

In the following video, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffrey Robinson addresses the history of the monuments that the current U.S. President does not want removed. It’s informative and a real eye-opener. 

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Militias flock to Gettysburg to foil supposed flag burning | The Seattle Times – Someone “played” them big time.

ROTFLMAO – They got played

An online threat from the supposed leader of antifa called for the burning of American flags on the grounds of the Gettysburg National Military Park where militias and other white nationalists assembled to protect the historic grounds. (Photo by Andrew Mangum for The Washington Post).

“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”

As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.

On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds – heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.

Source: Militias flock to Gettysburg to foil supposed flag burning | The Seattle Times

Florida coronavirus: 200,000 cases, 3,731 deaths – Orlando Sentinel

From Sunday to Sunday, Florida reported 59,036 new coronavirus cases, the highest amount in a one-week period since the pandemic began. 312 deaths were reported this week, ending a seven-week period during which the state saw under 300 fatalities reported.

Source: Florida coronavirus: 200,000 cases, 3,731 deaths – Orlando Sentinel

India reports record daily cases in coronavirus battle

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NEW DELHI (AFP) – India added a record number of coronavirus cases on Sunday (July 5), as the world’s fourth worst-hit nation opened a huge treatment centre with 10,000 beds in the capital to fight the epidemic.

The Health Ministry reported just under 25,000 cases and 613 deaths in 24 hours – the biggest daily spike since the first case was detected in late January.

The surge took India’s total tally to more than 673,000 cases and 19,268 deaths.

It came as the capital New Delhi started treating patients at a spiritual centre converted into a sprawling isolation facility and hospital with 10,000 beds, many made of cardboard and chemically coated to make them waterproof.

About the size of 20 football fields, the facility on the outskirts of the city will treat mild symptomatic and asymptomatic cases.

State government officials fear Delhi, home to 25 million people, could record more than half-a-million cases by the end of the month.

The city has repurposed some hotels to provide hospital care. It is also converting wedding halls and has several hundred modified railway coaches standing by.

A strict lockdown in place since late March has gradually been lifted, allowing most activities as the economy nose-dived amid the shutdown.

But the number of cases across the vast nation of 1.3 billion people has climbed steeply and is now close to surpassing badly-hit Russia.

Schools, metro trains in cities, cinemas, gyms and swimming pools remain closed and international flights are still grounded.

Authorities have made wearing masks mandatory in public places, while large gatherings are banned and shops and other public establishments are required to implement social distancing.

The western state of Maharashtra, the worst-hit state and home to financial hub Mumbai, recorded over 7,000 new cases, while Southern Tamil Nadu state and Delhi recorded more than 4,200 and 2,500 fresh cases respectively.

Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, Tamil Nadu’s capital, are the worst-affected cities.

The national government says it has tackled the virus well, but critics allege India is conducting very few tests, leaving the true scale of the pandemic unknown.

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