The view from ground zero

From the protest at the Minnesota Governor’s Residence in Saint Paul, 2 June 2020

First: the good news from Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd have now been charged and are in custody, and the charge against Derek Chauvin has been upgraded to second-degree murder. Governor Tim Walz has also asked AG Keith Ellison to take over the prosecution from Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman. The State of Minnesota has also filed a discrimination lawsuit against the MPD for its treatment of black suspects over the past ten years, and two more class-action suits have been filed against the MPD and the state police for their actions against journalists and against peaceful protesters. These are all unqualified wins as far as those of us involved in the protests are concerned. Perhaps some measure of justice will be served after all – though the movement for justice for George Floyd needs to remain vigilant and watchful, and continue placing public pressure on our public institutions to deliver.

On the other hand, the nightly curfews here are continuing indefinitely by order of the same governor. This is in response to a backdrop of growing civil unrest that has spread way beyond the Twin Cities over the past week. Protests against police brutality have now occurred in all fifty states. Unfortunately, these protests have also brought with them accelerationist and nihilist elements, which seem more interested in blind venting rather than organised struggle. And they have also brought with them a police backlash. People are being killed in this civil violence, which begins to look less and less like a coordinated or a substantive demand for justice. George Floyd’s brother, who has the most right among the living to speak on behalf of his departed kinsman, has called for an end to accelerationist violence and rioting in his cause.

(For a point of clarity: all of the canonical Orthodox Christian bodies in the United States – especially OCA and the Greeks – have supported the peaceful protests calling for justice for George Floyd. They have, however, drawn the line firmly against promoting or committing violence against people or communities in that cause.)

Unfortunately, we seem to be careening toward an apocalyptic ‘moment’ in our history in which the frustration with the government’s coronavirus lockdown – which has turned out to be both ineffective and draconian – combined with the ineffectuality of the same government to deliver any sort of meaningful reform or relief to a populace that is suffering but instead hands hundreds of billions over to the already opulent, has begun boiling over into an irrational and directionless anger, which begins expressing itself with a force of its own. And the government is responding in kind, with the President and several Congressional Republicans promising a military response to the protests. This is not a development to be welcomed, on either side. Historical experience shows that in moments like this, when accelerationism meets backlash, it’s generally the backlash that wins – in Pyrrhic fashion, at the cost of their own legitimacy.

Even if the accelerationists were to win, there is no guarantee that the result would be anything for the black community – or most other people, for that matter – to celebrate. The politically-idiosyncratic religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, for example, had precious little use for the prevailing status quo ante in Europe. He even notably said it was a shabby misuse of Christianity to defend a bourgeois status quo. But: he had even less patience for the accelerationists and nihilists of his own day: anarchist dreamers of Utopia with little else in view but their own dissatisfaction. As I have said before, repeatedly, the collapse of even an unjust order is nothing to celebrate when it is replaced by an unjust disorder. That is no less true here than it was in Iraq, or Libya, or Syria.

In a time like this, I feel that it is incumbent on me personally – and see no contradiction in doing so – not only to march to a slogan of ‘no justice, no peace’, but to also pray for both justice and peace, which can only come when delivered together. A false peace, one given without justice for the oppressed, will not last.