Justice, ‘liberal’ style

What’s a proper reaction to a white cop killing a black suspect in America? Why, looting shops in Manhattan and Beverly Hills (such as Alexander McQueen’s) of course.

Following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, America is aflame. Whole neighbourhoods are being set on fire, along with shops, restaurants and police cars (some with policemen still in them).

The whole country is densely covered with rioting mobs waving Black Lives Matter posters, looting, burning, screaming and fighting the police. Lives have already been lost, to say nothing of property. Also lost is any sense of perspective.

Floyd’s friends and family are interviewed non-stop on every TV network, and all of them unfailingly describe him as a “gentle giant”. This is par for the course: a violent thug, especially black, always undergoes a miraculous transfiguration if killed by a policeman, especially white.

Well, a giant Mr Floyd definitely was, but I wonder how gentle he appeared to the Texan woman he robbed at gun point and then pistol-whipped in 2007. He certainly didn’t seem very bright, considering that he and his accomplices then escaped in his own car whose number was noted by neighbours.

In the subsequent trial, Floyd’s sentence was plea-bargained down to five years for “aggravated assault stemming from a robbery”. That wasn’t his first brush with the law, nor his first stint in prison.

Floyd’s CV featured at least 10 convictions, five of them resulting in custodial sentences. The charges involved theft, possession of controlled substances with intent to deliver and so forth.

Then, according to his friends, Floyd moved from Houston to Minneapolis and turned over a new leaf. He even got a real, non-robbing and non-pushing, job.

One could get the impression that the gentle giant was employed as milkman or social worker. In fact, his leaf-turning job was that of a bouncer, a position in which propensity for violence is a non-negotiable qualification.

In any case, the leaf wasn’t turned all the way, considering that the fatal incident resulted from Floyd trying to pass a counterfeit $20 note at a local shop. The police duly answered the call and managed to handcuff Floyd.

Yet the gentle giant put up a mighty fight even with his hands cuffed behind his back. He wouldn’t let the officers put him into the squad car, screaming that he was claustrophobic. Yet that condition evidently didn’t hamper his ability to drive a get-away car in his earlier life.

This in no way vindicates what Officer Derek Chauvin did. Kneeling on the prone man’s neck for almost nine minutes until he died was unnecessary, brutal and probably criminal.

I say ‘probably’ only because Chauvin, though charged with third-degree murder, hasn’t yet been convicted, and I still harbour some nostalgic feelings about the presumption of innocence. However, if he is as guilty as the videos suggest, I hope he gets 25 years, the maximum sentence for that crime in Minnesota.

No decent person can fail to condemn Chauvin’s action; yet no sensible person can fail to understand it. For a beat cop faces death every time he steps out into American streets, which must tighten his nerves to snapping point.

Studies show that a white policemen is 18.5 times less likely to kill a black man than to be killed by him. And yes, twice as many blacks as whites are killed by US policemen.

This is indeed a glaring disproportion – considering that blacks account for 85 per cent of all violent crimes. Yet one doesn’t see many rallies, never mind riots, protesting against those heinous crimes.

Nor does anyone mourn too vociferously the 324,000 blacks killed over the past 35 years by people of the same pigmentation. Black lives do matter – though evidently not so much to other blacks.

But then surely none of us thinks that the killing of George Floyd is the real reason, as opposed to pretext, behind the riots? If justice is what the rioters want, then the US has plenty of proper mechanisms for administering it.

One of those mechanisms has been activated in this case, with Officer Chauvin facing a quarter-century in prison. That’s how justice is served by civilised people in civilised societies.

It’s not justice the rioting mob wants, but mayhem. The riots are a way of venting pent-up hatred, expertly if subtly whipped up by the ‘liberal’ media and the whole ‘liberal’ Zeitgeist.

There it’s taken as Gospel truth that all whites, other than those avidly mouthing ‘liberal’ shibboleths, are racists committed to keeping the blacks in conditions of virtual slavery and violent oppression.

Those awful whites are described as ‘the establishment’ and every means is deemed acceptable in resisting its encroachments on the liberal Zeitgeist. Hence the compassionate, acquiescent, if not downright encouraging, tone of commentary on the on-going pandemonium.

Yes, those poor people might have gone too far in their pursuit of justice (and also, by the looks of it, of Alexander McQueen clothes). But what do you expect? After all, we all know they are striking out against unjust oppression.

Not only they, I dare say. We all suffer from oppression, that imposed by ‘liberal’ modernity run riot. Literally, in this case.