“No Justice, No Peace” (Foreign Correspondent, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 June 2020)
Remarkable for what it fails to say and do, this episode purports to investigate how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has galvanised people across the United States to protest institutional police violence across the nation in the wake of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. With voice-over narration by Sally Sara, the program flits across scenes of demonstrations, aided and abetted by a music soundtrack consisting mostly of soul music, and of interviews with black activists of whom only one, Tamika Mallory, is a BLM leader. All scenes make for good viewing, the music is fine (though hiphop and reggae are conspicuously lacking, even though George Floyd himself was once a rapper known as Big Floyd back in the late 1990s), and the interviewees are angry and passionate, but after all is said and done, and the credits start to roll, the viewer realises how very little new information the program relays that the viewer doesn’t already know.
Very little is said about how far BLM has grown and developed since Foreign Correspondent last covered the movement a few years ago, how many followers it now counts, what its current agenda is and what program for social, economic and political reform and for educating people on racism and the history of racism in the US it may have. There is nothing about Mallory herself, what her stance on various issues affecting black people in the US is and what controversies (such as her past association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan) she has been embroiled in. One thing Mallory could have told Foreign Correspondent is the extent to which police violence in the US is encouraged by both the US and Israeli governments through police training programs conducted by Israeli security organisations of US police officers in Israel itself and in the US. A recent report by UK online newspaper Morning Star found that back in 2012, 100 police officers from Minnesota state attended a police training workshop in Chicago that was sponsored by the Israeli consulate there. The chokehold that Chauvin used on Floyd (and which suffocated Floyd) is one used by Israeli soldiers and paramilitary on Palestinian people.
That Foreign Correspondent omits to say anything about how police violence might be more than just a reflection of historical racism and a legacy of slavery in the US, and how a culture of police violence has grown and spread throughout the country as (among other things) a result of numerous wars the US has waged against countless other nations over the last one hundred years and more to seize their land and natural wealth, in the process exposing generations of US youth to violence, brutality and trauma, and turning some of those youth into traumatised people or sociopaths who either stress easily and resort to violence too quickly or are so inured to committing brutal and sadistic acts that sadism becomes part of their identity as human beings. The Israeli government and its agencies find profit in offering training on humiliating, torturing and even killing people to US police officers, teaching those officers to view people on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder as sub-human and worthless. All too often, those people on those bottom rungs tend to be black Americans or people from poor Latin American countries – and often those Latin American countries that have suffered instability and high levels of drug-related crime as a result of continuous US interference in their politics and economies.
Neither does Foreign Correspondent ask why the murder of George Floyd should have suddenly inflamed and motivated people across the US and other parts of the world to demonstrate against their governments and to pull down statues of past historical figures known to have benefited from the exploitation of Third World nations and peoples as slave traders or colonial administrators. The impoverishment of people across First World nations, and the speed with which that impoverishment has increased since the First World entered lock-down after the appearance of COVID-19 and the panic and hysteria the disease generated, apparently was missed by the program producers and reporters. For many years since neoliberal economics became the dominant political, social and economic ideology under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s leadership of the Anglosphere in the 1980s, people’s living standards and quality of life have steadily eroded, social inequalities have increased, the forces of law and order have become more militarised and antagonistic towards the general public, news and information have turned into propaganda, and old problems once thought to be dying out, such as bigotry and racism, are rearing their heads again.
Identity politics, dividing people on the basis of what identifies them instead of uniting them, is used by elites to weaken popular movements by setting people against one another. By presenting George Floyd’s murder as yet one more example of police racism and violence, and not considering the wider context in which US police violence against black Americans (and other underprivileged folk) occurs, Foreign Correspondent shows itself as a propaganda mouthpiece for the elites controlling governments in the Anglosphere and beyond.