There's quite a lot to unpack and contribute towards in what you've said here.
Initially I was supportive of BLM but then I didn't know it was an actual organization with a political agenda. I simply thought it was about protesting police brutality against black people. Later as I learnt more I realized that this was actually a movement/organization that I can't support. It's Marxist, racist (against white people and Jews) and supports causes that I disagree with (eg "dismantling the nuclear family"). I do think that most people who went to protests in the name of BLM aren't really aware of these agendas.
Or it may be that most people who attended the BLM protests were aware of these agendas, but could easily overlook or minimise it in their own minds by carrying a banner of enlightenment?
In other words, their belief in being enlightened for following BLM's own rhetoric blinded them to political reality. In a nutshell, they were incapable of discerning the crucial difference between political wisdom and political folly.
There is a historical precedence for this that is relevant to the issue here: NICRA aka Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
Indeed, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as fronted by Martin Luther King was a massive influence on NICRA across the Atlantic.
To cut a long story short, NICRA was shaped by Irish Republicanism and their terrorists. It may not surprised you that Marxism was very much part of it.
Here's what their then leader Cathal Goulding wrote in the early days:
"To involve themselves in the every day problems of people; to organise them to demand better houses, better working conditions, better jobs, better pay, better education - to develop agitationary activities along these lines. By doing this weekend felt that we could involved the people, not so much in supporting the republican movement for our political ends, but in supporting agitation so that they themselves would be part of a revolutionary force demanding what the present system just couldn't produce....so, we believed that political power must be our objective, whether we got it through physical force or through the ballot box or by agitation. The means are immaterial. Of course, we believed, as a revolutionary organisation, that the people can't get real power by simply having representatives elected."All of this is essentially BLM today in 2020 - just insert their demands in the first part of it.
Indeed, BLM clearly don't believe the people gain power by having representatives elected as well.
Essentially, there is an anti-democratic element in this which we can observe in the creation of CHAZ or the words of Hawk Newsome of the Greater NYC BLM chapter when he talked about "If U.S. doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it."
Indeed, BLM Global Network claimed he wasn't one of theirs, but Newsome's response is quite revealing:
"It pains me that at a time like this, Black people are not sticking together," he said. "To say that all people who carry that banner have to be sanctioned is preposterous. ... To alienate us at a time like this, when the president is targeting us, is not only counterproductive but it's counterrevolutionary."Clearly, BLM Global Network do not have ownership of the BLM movement itself and they've given rise to other BLM groups in America as well as other places.
For this, we have another example regarding NICRA.....People's Democracy sprang up due to NICRA's existence.
And People's Democracy deliberately set out to provoke violent confrontation with the police.
Back to the point which is neatly summarised by Andrew Charles and Patrick Roche:
"But whatever the motivations of the marchers the outcome of the 'long march' was an intensification of political instability and violence in Northern Ireland."The civil rights movement had been intended to be a TROJAN HORSE to achieve the real central goal of a united Ireland.
Similarly with the BLM movement, we can say that their loose leadership is greatly influenced by Marxist theory, they are mentored by a wanted terrorist and view themselves as a revolutionary organisation/movement.
The BLM movement itself has evolved to be a Trojan Horse intended to overthrow capitalism as well as the police.
Indeed, this isn't the first time the BLM movement evolved into something else entirely.
People forget that BLM evolved due to the George Zimmerman case where he shot Trayvon Martin in 2013.
Later, it evolved into a police brutality issue before once again evolving into being an anti-capitalist and anti-police movement.
It kind of makes sense given how the wanted terrorist Assata Shakur mentors Alicia Garza. Given the testimony of how Shakur murdered a police officer in the head twice, convicted of his murder and went on the run for decades, the anti-police rhetoric from BLM shouldn't be surprising.
Their activists have been known to chant "pigs in blankets" - dead cops in bodybags.
Dangerous rhetoric.
In the United States, we're seeing an intensification of political instability and violence as buildings as well as people are attacked in various ways.
The BLM movement itself is NOT absolved of responsibility for unrest due to their own rhetoric any more than the Irish Republicanmovement was absolved of their own.
Movements DO bear responsibility for the situation too.
And it's NOT as simple or easily dismissed as being down to a few people because it starts at the top.
To end the point, I refer again to Andrew Charles and Patrick Roche:
"The fact that members of the People's Democracy and in particular the leadership saw their task as 'the destruction of the state no matter what the consequences' does not mean that this radical motivation was shared by all the participants.
BUT to understand their participation in terms of an extreme form of political innocence is simply absurd."Participation is better explained by viewing themselves as being enlightened which blinds them to reality as well as consequences.
The SAME is true of those who attend BLM protests today.
Yeah, I agree it's not possible to separate the slogan from a wider movement and a specific organisation.
Again, history gives us an excellent example of this in the form of Irish Republicanism. Tiocfaidh ár lá is not merely a Gaelic slogan and certainly cannot be separated from the Irish Republican movement OR any of those organisations.
By the same token, it's not possible to separate the phrase "Black Lives Matter" from the wider BLM movement OR from any specific BLM organisation.
The two clearly and obviously go hand in hand.
I'd also argue it's very naive of people who say that, especially politically. And, yes, BLM is a political movement - very much so even if some try to delude themselves otherwise.
You're referring to the statistics which shows there's been a 70% DECLINE over several decades to the present.
There's also been a significant decline too between 2015 and 2019:
"The number of unarmed Black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began. There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total."www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice-column/3235072001/Most people at BLM protests outside of the United States in places like the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Spain and so on are NOT aware of this.
They would be very much surprised to discover that the 14 unarmed black people killed by police in 2019 accounts for....0.2% of all homicides involving black people.
It's the kind of statistic BLM won't share because it doesn't gel with their premise of an out of control police force.
Indeed, people in the UK who attend BLM protests believe it's more or less a uniform problem across the United States.
It's not. Georgia, for example, has a far lower rate than Oklahoma.
Again, it doesn't gel with the BLM premise.
Media publicising and social media sending videos viral also has a negative effect not often acknowledged.
Namely, the police backed away from policing in places where incidents had been heavily publicised in traditional and social media....and this caused an increase in homicides.
"A reduced police presence in minority neighborhoods will claim more Black lives. When officers back off of proactive policing under accusations of racism, violence shoots up. That was the case in cities recently examined by Harvard economists. After investigations opened up into a media-grabbing instance of police use of deadly force in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ferguson, Missouri, and Riverside, California, there were almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies, their study found."And it went DOWN in places where incidents had NOT been publicised in traditional and social media:
"By contrast, in cities where incidents of police use of deadly force were under investigation, but did not go viral or grab national attention, homicides and total crime went down. Police officers were not afraid to continue policing."It seems to me there is a NEED within the BLM movement to require the police to be out of control.
And if they're not, they're going to portray the police as out of control anyway by influencing traditional press to publicise incidents.
At the same time, they and their activists will do the same on social media platforms.
Often context is lost and the situation is framed for you. Especially if you don't live in the United States of America.
Quite frankly, it is a situation that reminds me very, very much of the same thing that happened with the Northern Ireland Troubles.
Americans of Irish descent, in particular, had ZERO idea of the context of events or what was happening because it was all framed for them. They happily funded the PIRA resulting in more deaths which Bono criticised them for during a concert in the USA. His comments are actually relevant here too:
"I’ve had enough of Irish-Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years, come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home. And the glory of the revolution. And the glory of dying for the revolution. F–k the revolution!”His point was that people who lived thousands of miles away were making things worse by funding terrorism.
The same is true of outsiders to the United States of America making things worse there by staging protests in their own countries or by funding them and, therefore, contributing to political instability in America.
Race relations in America appear to be getting worse. People living outside of the United States are certainly fanning the flames, knowingly or unknowingly the effect is the same.
As I said earlier, it doesn't make sense to suggest those people who engage in wrong behaviour during BLM protests were either not part of the wider movement or were naively innocent of what the movement pushes.
There's four types of movements:
alternative, redemptive, reformative, and revolutionary.
BLM is a revolutionary movement which isn't necessarily a good thing!
But talk of revolutions tends to sound appealing and attractive to people, especially the young.
There's a reason revolutions, including terrorist ones, tend to go for young people. Their brains aren't fully mature until about 25 years old, so they're impressionable. In short, they can't take in all the points and concerns made whilst also seeing highly emotional footage.
And the majority of any movement does tend to be young people.
Does this then absolve young people from carrying out acts of destruction and intimidation during or after protests?
Brings me back to what I said earlier about motivations for most people attending BLM protests.
When it turns violent, and they have, BLM are NOT absolved of responsibility for the situation. They bear it.
The only thing we could then debate would be the degree of responsibility.