All Lives Matter: from Ferguson to Palestine

Heike Schotten argues that All Lives Matter: from Ferguson to Palestine.

Each of these “arguments” purports to justify state violence. In the first, Palestinians and African Americans deserve death because of their terrorist and/or criminal natures. Killing happens because the nature of the murdered invites it. In the second, Palestinians and African Americans are actually the ones doing the killing, not cops or Israel, so there’s not really a problem with state violence at all. Killing happens because the murdered are killing themselves.

It doesn’t matter that these arguments are inconsistent with one another, much less which one of them is, uh, “true.” Like a racist shell game, the only thing that matters is the one thing that is consistent between them: the reversal whereby the victim is portrayed as the aggressor and the aggressor, the victim.

For Giuliani, David Brooks, Darren Wilson, and the likes of FOX News, it is white people in general and white police officers in particular who are the victims of demonic, terrifying, criminal black people. For Netanyahu, Charles Krauthammer, and the rest of the Zionist lineup, it is Israel who is the victim of evil, terroristic, life-denying, Muslim/Arab Palestinians.

In another place, I have described arguments like these as a form of slave morality. They are reactionary attempts to portray oneself as a victim of forces beyond one's control and a moralizing justification of extracting compensatory revenge against them.

The thing is, when it comes to American cops and Israeli soldiers, they are not the weaker power. They are avatars of the state — two of the most powerful and heavily armed states in the world at that. Their victims are the subordinated, segregated, and formerly enslaved, on the one hand, and dispossessed, indigenous refugees on the other. To drop the white hankie and play victim is fundamentally to obscure the unequal relations of power that characterize white supremacy in America and Zionist supremacy in Palestine.

Emphasis Mine

Here we have the ideological superstructure of the mass media and opinion disguising the horrific violence that is daily perpetrated against the oppressed throughout the world. Racism is blatantly being used to justify this state violence, and to divide the working class against itself.

By having white people separate themselves from the non-whites, the state is able to demonstrate violence without fear of a backlash from the whites. This lack of solidarity also sows mistrust between whites and non-whites thereby sabotaging any chance of unified action.

White privilege includes relative safety from state violence.