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After a day of chaos in Washington, the United States wakes up with the idea that it could perhaps experience political upheaval like any other country.
As armed militias stormed Capitol Hill, the seat of the US legislature, demanding that the certification of the results of the November presidential elections stop, experts wondered if this was really the United States.
President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to take office on January 20, proclaimed on Twitter: “America is much better than what we see today.”
New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg could only understand scenes of chaos on American television based on the notion that everything undemocratic happens outside the US “This is like watching foreign television right now – some unstable foreign government struggling with democracy,” Rutenberg said.
Unsurprisingly, many Americans disagreed.
American singer-songwriter Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe, warned that “This is America” and that experts and politicians should stop “pampering” one another that the deployment was anything but a foreign concept.
In 2018, black artist Donald Glover wrote a song holding a mirror to America. The track’s name, ‘This is America,’ was provocative, but Glover, who is also a vernacular intellectual, stressed that guns and violence are part of the American fabric.
In one of the most important lyrics of the clues, “I don’t catch you slipping now / Look how I’m living now / The police are tripping now / Yes, this is America / Guns in my area / I have the leash / I have to carry them” Glover wants to highlight the racial disparity of trying to earn money and being a black person in America.
That racial disparity was obvious yesterday at the protests when the police force largely permitted the protesters to break the security lines and march towards Capitol Hill. While in another scene a Trump supporter is helped by riot police to go down the stairs of a building they were about to loot.
When activists from Black Lives Matter (BLM) staged a protest last year at the same venue, Trump and his supporters branded them left-wing anarchists. But more importantly, the police and the presence of the national guard was a show of force intended to intimidate the protesters.
The notion that political violence, polarization, and armed militias representing different political factions can only occur in distant places is a narrative that Americans have long told themselves.
A US-based reporter summed up that American mythology by arguing ironically that “American exceptionalism [is] hanging by a thread, ”as armed Trump supporters vowed to take back their country.
The British, Indian and Turkish All governments have issued statements of concern regarding the violence and have called for a peaceful transfer of power. That can be uncomfortable for many Americans who are more used to believing that they are the gold standard of democracy.
Right-wing Republican American politician Marco Rubio framed the protests as something that could only happen in a Third World country. While another liberal journalist He argued that “We are not in Kabul. We are in America. “
American gun violence aimed at overthrowing the government, according to many American commentators from the left and right, is without historical precedent in the country. Only references to East or African countries can clarify the point. However, that is not entirely true.
One of the worst cases of domestic terrorism in the United States was committed by an avowed far-right individual, Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 detonated a bomb that left 168 people and injured more than 680.
McVeigh wanted to spark a revolution that would lead to the overthrow of the federal government. He believed, like the protesters who sacked the legislature in Washington yesterday, that the state was no longer acting or representing the will of the people.
The protesters who stormed Capitol Hill carried Confederate flags, which were used by the southern states of the United States that attempted to secede from the United States during the civil war of 1861.
Those symbols, now considered racist and controversial, continue to resonate deeply with many Americans who have a deep distrust of the government.
Many of the protesters also draw on a uniquely American political tradition that is the right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment to the US constitution.
In the recent past, any attempt to reform gun laws in the US has been portrayed as a government infringement of those rights and actions that would only be taken by a state heading toward tyranny. Arms, therefore, become a symbol of resistance towards the State.
Soon-to-be former President Donald Trump has largely fueled that sense of mistrust. Over the course of several months, Trump has repeated over and over again that the election was rigged and votes stolen. And in 2016, Trump appeared to support the right of “Second Amendment people” to take matters into their own hands in an attempt to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president.
Americans may be waking up to the prospect that their country, like any other, is based on a fragile social contract that cannot be taken for granted.
And while Americans speak of “coups” and “insurrections” against their democratic order, they might think of so many other democratic orders that have been overthrown with the backing of the United States.
Like one observer Put it after the events in the United States: “You are no more free, civilized or above other nations. Recognize your humanity, ability to err. That’s the first step to fixing things, getting up and doing better. “
Source: TRT World
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