Bolshevik, as in BLM

BLM has scored its triumph: Derek Chauvin will spend years, possibly decades, in prison.

Was the verdict just? Since I haven’t seen any trial transcripts, and newspaper reports tend to be biased one way or the other (usually the other), I can’t answer that question purely on legal grounds.

Instead I can ask another one: What would have happened had the jury found Chauvin not guilty? You don’t need me to tell you.

The riots that came in the slipstream of George Floyd’s death would have looked like a quiet picnic in the park by comparison. Every state in the Union, along with all other Western countries, would have seen mayhem as bad as anything that happened in the ‘60s or perhaps even worse.

Cities would have been paralysed; bars, restaurants and shops would have been torched and looted; white people would have been randomly assaulted, possibly killed en masse; civil order would have disintegrated and, at best, would have taken weeks to restore.

You know this, I know this, and everyone taking part in the trial knew it. Prosecutors, defence attorneys, judge, jury – they all knew that any other than a guilty verdict would have turned the country into a bloody, fiery mess. Even closer to home, their own safety would have been severely compromised in eternity.

They wouldn’t be human if such considerations hadn’t entered their minds during the trial. It’s on this basis that I regard the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial as unsafe.

That doesn’t mean it’s undeserved – only that the impartiality of judge and jury was under such undue pressure that it couldn’t be taken for granted. This failed to satisfy a conditio sine qua non of jury trial, rendering the proceedings suspect.

Conservative, which is these days to say marginal, papers point out that George Floyd’s death is no great loss to mankind. A life-long criminal, he once held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman hostage, which my conservative brethren don’t think is a nice thing to do. Floyd was also a drug pusher and taker, and in fact was under the influence during the fatal incident. Police were called to the scene because he tried to pass a counterfeit banknote at a shop, and Floyd fought the arrest with all the gusto of a muscular drugged-up man accustomed to violence.

All that is true. It’s also irrelevant. The law doesn’t just protect Sunday school teachers. It must protect all people, good or bad. If no one is above the law, then no one is beneath it. A human life must not be taken arbitrarily even if, by all secular criteria, it’s a worthless life. If Chauvin had indeed treated Floyd with excessive, murderous cruelty, he deserves all he gets.

Yet the use of the conditional mood in the previous sentence is justified, for reasons I’ve outlined earlier. This raises another question: Why would a failure to convict Chauvin have resulted in a Walpurgisnacht, or Kristallnacht if you’d rather?

This brings us to BLM, an openly Marxist, which is to say subversive, organisation. All these modifiers leave no doubt that Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s hypothetical acquittal would only have served as a pretext, not the reason, for riots.

BLM was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, who describe themselves as “trained Marxists”. The adjective makes one wonder who trained them, but it’s the noun that’s even more telling.

Trained, professional Marxists have only one cause in their lives: replacing traditional Western governments with communist dictatorships. The slogans they hoist on their flagpoles are as varied as they are irrelevant. Whatever they are, they are but a means to the end.

The desired end is always the same whatever the current slogan. It could be redistribution of wealth, global warming, feminism, LGBT rights, racial equality, nuclear disarmament or any combination thereof – any such slogan is a tissue of lies trying to conceal the underlying subversive intent.

The source of BLM financing is as opaque as the identity of the Marxist instructors who trained its founders. Its money is known to be handled by a shadowy organisation called Thousand Currents, fronted by Susan Rosenberg.

Miss Rosenberg boasts a colourful CV. As a member of the terrorist ‘May 19 Communist Organisation’, she was in the mid-80s sentenced to 58 years in prison on a weapons and explosives charge. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pardon, she only served 16 years of that term, which brings into question the very notion of presidential pardons.

She now handles BLM financing, thereby continuing a fine Bolshevik tradition. In the olden days, whoever was in charge of the Bolsheviks’ money was also involved in hands-on terrorism. (You can Google names like Krasin, Litvinov, Semashko and, for that matter, Stalin for details.) However, before money is handled, it has to be there.

So where do BLM’s millions, almost 100 of them last year, come from? I don’t know, but I could venture a guess.

The size of BLM funding suggests a state, rather than a consortium of private individuals. As a rule, rich people don’t like bankrolling organisations that are committed to dispossessing rich people, or worse. Though that rule has been broken at times (some Russian millionaires, such as Savva Morozov, gave money to Lenin), this isn’t the way to bet.

Much more likely is that BLM is supported by a state with a vested interest in unsettling and destabilising Western countries, especially the US. Off the top I can think of only two countries with an established record of funding, training and arming extremist groups, mostly though not exclusively communist: Russia and China.

Russia is the more probable suspect, considering her recent, and not so recent, behavioural patterns. But either way, while I’m not sure I regret Chauvin’s conviction, I definitely regret the use to which enemies of the West will put it.

BLM will become stronger and the West weaker. This is a zero sum game – whatever one side loses, the other side gains. And make no mistake about it: we and BLM are on opposite sides.