The Politics of Tribal Nonsense – Tablet Magazine
The iconic narratives used to prop up the continuing oppression narrative have an odd habit of turning out to be false, and the reaction in U.S. cities to Hamas Oct. 7 massacre is the latest example of the same phenomenon. A curious feature of this process is the interchangeability of both the iconography and the rhetoric of various street-action movements demanding redress for different identity groups. The stock of common slogans, brandished with religious fervor, share a peculiar quality in common: They bear no relation to reality.
Take the use of the word genocide. Over the past month, claims by pro-Palestinian mobs of an Israeli genocide in Gaza mirror long-standing claims of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, for example, that U.S. police are perpetrating a genocide of African Americans. Both forms of sectarian group mobilization in America rely on conspiracism and falsehoods, and on the participation of the media in enforcing a hierarchy of victimhood. Insofar as this sectarian narrative is officially sanctioned, it is presented not only as reflecting the lofty ideals and values of what it means to be American, but also as indisputable empirical truth.
The emblem of the BLM narrative, the May 2020 death of George Floyd, is a case study in why language is important and how lying corrodes public trust and the health of our national discourse. It is useful, then, to revisit the considerable evidence that has emerged recently, which indicates that even the widely accepted account of Floyd s death is possibly false, or at the very least incomplete.
Wilfred Reilly.