‘I can’t breathe’, say protesters in America

Gp Capt Murli Menon (Retd)
Commentator

As though the horror brought on by the novel coronavirus in the US was not enough of a calamity, we now have the oldest democracy in the world torn asunder by civil unrest across all major cities, from the epicentre Minneapolis to New York, Detroit and California.

The protests are against the murder of an unarmed George Floyd, by a white policeman Derek Chauvin, who strangulated the innocent black person by choking him across the neck with his knee, with three of his colleagues assisting him. A graphic video of the incident taken by a bystander is poignant, with George being stifled by the erring cop for a full nine minutes, whilst calling for his mother to help him and fearing that he would die… and the poor victim pleading to be released from the deathly stranglehold. The errant cop continues to stranglehold poor George for over two minutes after he had stopped breathing. The charge against George Floyd was that he had allegedly passed on a counterfeit $20 bill.

The peaceful protests that started at Minneapolis soon spread to multiple cities all over the country last week, a majority of the protesters being young people of black and white ethnicity. Most of the protesters, giving the go-by to social distancing and the pandemic threat, are flouting curfew norms and taunting the police with irritants such as flinging of water bottles and burning of litter on roadsides. Two Brooklyn lawyers have been charged with attempt to murder by way of throwing Molotov cocktails on a New York Police Department car.

Though the errant policeman has since been charged for manslaughter and arrested, clearly the public at large is not satisfied. They want all the policemen involved in the incident to be charged. The local and federal governments have real issues at hand: getting the agitations under control and ensuring good policing. Unscrupulous elements amongst the protesters have turned rioters at most venues and considerable damage to public and private property has been caused.

President Trump feels that a hardline far left anarchist group, Antifa, is responsible for the rioting. He has threatened to declare the indigenous group a terrorist organisation. Whether he has the authority to do so is as yet unclear and, as with all of his knee-jerk politics, what proof exists of this group’s involvement in the riots is also unclear. No white supremacist groups have been named by the President, who was apparently taken by the Secret Service to the White House’s secret underground bunker (possibly along with his wife Melania and son Barron) for about an hour, indicating the clear sense of panic within the establishment in Washington.

The catchy slogan of ‘Black lives matter’ and the apt hashtag ‘I can’t breathe…’ have marked the themes in the ongoing protests. There are several other slogans too, mainly castigating the police forces in various cities as they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory with their indiscriminate policing.

Of course, the Democrats would not be found to be missing the opportunity to denigrate the Trump dispensation on its handling of the protests. To add fuel to the fire were some insensitive tweets by President Trump, saying that “dogs would be let loose on the rioters” and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, the second phrase being taken from the racist era of the 1960s and attributed to an erstwhile police commissioner, Walter Headley, of Miami in 1967. Trump, of course, claimed not to know the origin of the phrase and this only served to accentuate the sense of disenchantment of the protesting citizens.

The rioting and protests are expected to continue for now and though the National Guard has been called in, they have not been inducted actively. There was a plan to call in military police units too at one stage, but that idea has been shelved for the time being. The general belief is that the situation would get worse before it gets better.

It is ironic that President Trump’s unenviable position after the lousy handling initially of the pandemic, and to some extent, ameliorated by the successful launch on May 30 of Elon Musk's SpaceX satellite, appears to have once again been given a six o’clock vector to his re-election aspirations. Some protesters were clearly heard referring to him as ‘ex-President’, making no bones about what the underlying motives of the protests were.

One thought that street protests and associated rioting were the specialty of countries such as India, but the seriousness of the racial angle to the unrest brings up sentiments of leaders such as the much-revered Martin Luther King and the many black lives that have been lost to police brutality down the annals of American history. Having had a black President in the form of Barack Obama, one would have thought that the US had crossed the Rubicon on ensuring minority rights. But this was something which was feared with a Trump victory in 2016 and it appears to be playing out now.

Trump has always been seen to be divisive and his handling of the George Floyd episode now has established his credentials as the ‘divider-in-chief’. The issue of racism in the world at large is something that needs to be addressed by all nations and entities. Nowhere is the issue starker than in the US, where the enterprising and talented community of colour has been given short shrift for far too long in terms of unequal and unfair civic treatment.