London. Death. Baldwin

Another attack has occurred in London and yet more platitiudes are being piled upon us. And just like the previous attacks in and around Europe, this one is being used to push the “under attack” narrative, the one where, as throughout history, a country with bloody hands and an even shorter memory, looks to act like some surprised victim.

Now, I have neither the temerity nor the vision to evoke the great Malcolm X’s “Chicken’s coming home to roost,” comment but I do understand, more than ever, James Baldwin’s wont to “laugh” at the very odd ability of an entire populace acting out like children and the cries of “terrorism” sounding off without a single thought to any of it.

Once again, here in the States the fight between levels of crazy, the neoliberals and the “salt of the earth” right, is quite infuriating. Newspapers that speak to the neoliberal wing are not here to help us, as the likes of NYTimes have flooded their Front Page and World Page with talk about this attack while “resilient” leaders talk about the West coming under attack. One can see, with this theme already prevelant, why those on the right are preturbed that people won’t swallow their kind of crazy pills and simply scream “civilizational war” or whatever xenophobes & Nazi-derivatives are trying to chant these days.

If you can’t tell, I actually don’t care too much about what exactly they’re chanting — no more than them at any rate — since it’s secondary to their baser impulse of lusting after genocide. Though this worries me, neo-liberals and other proponents of democide worry me too, as they cloak themselves under the cover of “proper” decorum.

But that isn’t the point of this piece. While I was looking through the platitiudes steaming up from this latest event — actions against other innocents across the world ignored, State-terrorism remains invisible — I remembered Malcolm X’s statement on JFK, then Baldwin’s statement, and my mind’s eye moved over to the movie I saw recently “I Am Not Your Negro”.

I’ve already mentioned this movie and how I thought some parts were effussive, obtuse, but now more than ever, I see it as something extremely insightful, something that lasts through the filter of time and speaks to acts of terror and the reaction to them. Once you see the movie, you will understand that it is the perceived innocence of self and complete blindness to history that creates these reactions, these monsters.

I’m not going to completely dive into the reasons and the exact history, but I will say that you should watch this movie; its only weakness is that it doesn’t highlight global hypocrisies. I will say that any peoples this willfully blind are indeed evil or psychopaths—or at least forgiving of those two qualities—even if they see themselves as different.

I suppose I should be glad that so far in this event, no one has said something as asinine as “They have bombs, we have champagne,” a statement that only further muddies history with stupidity. But the world is becoming a dangerous place and chickens will soon be coming home to roost in more ways than one. To combat that we will need clarity and not stupidity. Let’s try, even if it’s hard, to aim for the former and not the easy latter.