This article was originally published in Myśl Polska.

Protests in the United States cause extreme emotions in Poland. One could say that it is natural: the inhabitants of the protectorate are interested in the situation in the metropolis. However, this interest is more and more often characterized by emotional commitment and support for specific forces across the ocean, although these forces will never even hear about this support from Polish journalists and circles.

Meanwhile, we need a cool-minded view of events devoid of sentiment and resentment. To say that the United States is the epicenter of global neoliberalism, infecting all the rest of the world with its social Darwinism is trivial. According to the American Census Bureau, in 2019 social inequalities reached the highest level in 50 years. The tendency for their radical growth was launched together with the so-called Reaganomics, or the socioeconomic policy pursued by the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Later it was only worse, although it must be objectively stated that the dynamics of inequality growth slowed down slightly during the years of Barack Obama’s presidency. However, it began to increase again since the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, and especially after the adoption of the proposed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which radically reduced the taxation of the wealthiest and corporations.

The processes of social exclusion of millions of Americans were accelerated by coronavirus. Probably no one would notice the problem, except statistics and scientists, were it not for the liquidation of tens of millions of jobs in a dozen or so weeks. This, and not the death of George Floyd , is the actual cause of the current wave of protests. Floyd was just an igniter, a factor that mobilized black Americans and further brutalized protest. The riots on the streets of American cities were initially about class, not racial, which we see when we look at the skin color of their participants.

Reducing them to a racial problem is part of the defensive response of the system. They took advantage of the fact that black people in the United States have felt cheated since the end of the American Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln promised them “40 acres and a mule”, which Washington never provided. To this day, these acres and mule did not arrive, but one has tried to compensate them with symbolic actions, embarrassing performances of kissing their shoes by whites, apologies on the knees and other staged performances. These substitute actions will neither improve the truly disastrous social condition of black people nor help whites. However, they are able to channel the protest, transform it into a racial conflict. Such reduction will be extremely convenient for the System.

Instead of the problem of anti-human neoliberalism and corporate dictate, people will discuss the overthrowing of monuments of Confederate generals, symbolic violence against minorities, and the necessity of repentance. With such a militia created by whites, the white inhabitants of the so-called Rust Belt, who live in conditions no better than their black fellow citizens, will not join the ranks of the protesters. The system will survive. The world, eating popcorn and sipping Coca-Cola, will watch scenes of quarrel between supporters of political correctness and its opponents played for decades. The Americans, thrilled by this symbolic dimension, will not have time to look into their own refrigerators, which will become increasingly empty. And this is what the spectacle is about to the elites in power in the United States, with the deep state pulling the strings among both Republicans and Democrats.

However, if someone in Poland is overwhelmed by a sense of solidarity with the white majority overseas, let us remind you that – as the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola wrote years ago – the American civilization created by the so-called WASPs (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) really has little to do with the civilization of continental Europe. American civilization is completely foreign to us, based on the pragmatism of William James, different even from the English utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. In the cultural, civilizational and mental sense, we have nothing to do with them. The burden of Anglo-Saxons is not our burden. Their problems should excite us as they excite us, that is not at all. Even if a civil war breaks out, it won’t be ours. Geopolitically their weakening will open a great opportunity for us and the whole of Europe, but this is the subject of separate considerations.

Mateusz Piskorski
Myśl Polska, no. 25-26 (21-28.06.2020)

The views expressed in this article are of the author only.