A long way from Minneapolis

My neighbours across the road have a large sign on their door: "Justice for George Floyd". Which prompts me to wonder: what's going on? [And no, they're not black.] Why should the killing of Floyd have aroused such universal interest and universal condemnation? The man was killed in another country. We're a long way from Minneapolis. We don't normally take such an passionate interest in events in other countries....except America, that is. If the police killed a black man in Paris, or Rome, or Rio, or Sydney, there'd be concern, no doubt, but however brutal the murder there's no way my neighbours would be proclaiming their views - hardly controversial - to passers-by and the community in such a public fashion. 

I'm sure some of it is the old left hatred of America - fount of all modern evil, and obviously an easy target with its freedom of information and its faults exposed right there for all to see. That kind of gut anti-Americanism is certainly behind much of the undisguised glee on display elsewhere, from the Middle East to China, at this latest US tragedy. But there's more going on. What it shows, surely, is that America is still in many ways at the centre of our world, as it has been, really, since the end of World War 2.

A huge proportion of our popular culture - TV, movies, music - comes if not directly from America, then indirectly. It started in force when the US boomed in the Fifties while the rest of the west, certainly in Europe, was struggling to keep its head above water. And though we like to think things have changed, to a remarkable degree they haven't. In the Sixties the civil rights movement was our movement too. We followed it as though Selma, Alabama, was just south of Basingstoke. Now it's Black Lives Matter - though the echoes here now are greater than they were back then. Back in the Sixties the main issue for the left was Vietnam. The 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American embassy was a key moment in the left's development here in the UK. But we weren't even in Vietnam. Harold Wilson, in his wisdom, didn't want the UK to get involved. It didn't matter - we were still out there in force on the street to make our voices heard. And we followed every twist and turn of the anti-war movement in the States - along with everything else over there, from the Black Panthers to Charles Manson to Watergate. It was where the action was. And to an extraordinary extent, for us, it still is.

Historian Tom Holland at UnHerd has been having similar thoughts:

Why has the death of a man across the Atlantic, at the hands of a police force equipped with immeasurably more guns than our own, in a country with a very different history of race relations, become a topic of such consuming interest in Britain? It is not as though the United States is the only superpower in which terrible things are currently happening.

Why, if people in Britain feel that they have a moral responsibility to march against Donald Trump, are they not also breaking the lockdown to protest the crushing of liberty in Hong Kong — a city that was, unlike America, a British colony as recently as 1997? Why, when the death of a black man in Minneapolis can provoke such anguish among minorities here, has the detention of a million Muslims in Xinjiang — and a systematic attempt by the Chinese government at cultural genocide — failed to provoke a matching storm? [...]

Britain has been in hock now to American narratives for at least a century. Sharing as we do a common language with Hollywood, we have always been readier than other nations to be seduced by its mythologies. Today, in an era of computer games and box sets, these mythologies have become more potent, more influential than ever.

But he takes it further, seeing this as a continuation of that great story of America as our promised land - trying again, and failing again, to live up to its destiny as the "City on a Hill":

As minorities mass on the banks of the Jordan to attempt yet again to ford the river, white liberals — often literally kneeling and raising their hands in prayer as they do so — confess their sins and beg for absolution. Only through repentance, their conveners preach, is there any prospect of obtaining salvation. The activists, however, are not merely addressing those gathered before them. Their gaze, as the gaze of preachers in America has always been, right from the very first voyages of the Puritans across the Atlantic to New England, is fixed on the world beyond. Their summons is to sinners everywhere — in London as in New York, in Amsterdam as in Los Angeles. Their ambition is to serve as a city on a hill.

Comments

[NT]

It is also remarkable that there is so little empathy for the pregnant women who had a gun held to her stomach.