Commentary
Last week, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the corporation behind the Black Lives Matter movement, issued a rather interesting statement. The corporation’s members stood in solidarity with the people of Cuba. The “U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatments of Cubans” was unacceptable. Not finished there, BLM appealed to the Biden administration to lift the embargo, as it only serves to undermine the “Cubans’ right to choose their own government.”
Where some saw a passionate statement of solidarity, others saw opportunists looking to exploit a situation and steal some of the spotlight.
The author Jorge Felipe Gonzalez appears to fall into the latter category. In a piece for The Atlantic, aptly titled, “Black Lives Matter Misses the Point About Cuba,“ Gonzalez writes, ”Cuba is not an empty canvas“ onto which calculating, cynical actors ”can project their political ideas.“ Furthermore, it’s ”not a utopian vehicle to advance some fantasy of socialist equality,“ nor is ”it a pawn for opportunistic political debates.” The BLM movement, whose members have also voiced support for the Cuban regime, would do well to keep Gonzalez’s words in mind.
With the BLM statement, as well as Gonzalez’s comments, I was reminded of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) many statements on the recent condo collapse in Miami, Florida. “Few countries,” according to the journalists Rebecca Tan, Lyric Li, and Alicia Chen, “have followed” the condo collapse “as closely as China." The trio document the ways in which “state-run news agencies have provided wall-to-wall coverage of the collapse halfway across the world, with daily updates on the death toll and multiple editorials deriding the U.S. government’s “‘sluggish’ response.” Ironically, as the CCP’s various mouthpieces were busy mocking the tragedy in Miami, a catastrophic hotel collapse occurred in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. Irony, however, is not something that the CCP appears to be familiar with. The same is true of the BLM movement, whose tone-deaf messaging is as ironic as it is farcical: we will defeat racism by being explicitly racist; black lives matter, but only the lives of those black people that agree with everything the movement stands for. I could go on, but you get the message.
A waste receptacle was moved into the intersection of SW 3rd and Main and its contents set on fire as protesters gathered in downtown Portland on July 10, 2020. Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP
The similarities between the CCP and the BLM movement don’t end there. Both promote absolutist ideologies. To disagree is to open oneself up to a world of violence and pain. In the case of the CCP, just ask Jack Ma. In the case of BLM, just ask anyone living in Portland, a city that has been absolutely decimated by the so-called “peaceful movement.” With the CCP and BLM, the threat of violence is used as a weapon of coercion, and if the threats fail to work, then actual violence is used.
Last year, at a “peaceful protest” in Kenosha, an elderly man who had the audacity to protect his home from an angry BLM mob had his jaw broken.
Furthermore, both the BLM movement and the CCP (rather obviously) fetishize the idea of communism. BLM’s fetishization of communism is particularly amusing, especially when one realizes that the group’s co-founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, is the owner of multiple million dollar homes. Communism has never looked so lavish. Oh, to add, these homes are situated in predominantly white neighborhoods. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Another similarity includes the desire to rewrite history. Take the 1619 project, for example, a fact-free initiative with intimate links to BLM. The heavily criticized project is the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who has attempted to “reframe the country’s history.” One needn’t possess a Ph.D. in formal semantics to understand what is meant by the word “reframe.”
Meanwhile, in Beijing, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have, for many years, actively attempted to “reframe” history. In 2014, for example, Xi repeatedly urged historians to explore the CCP’s role in WW2, with a specific emphasis on the ways in which Chinese forces helped defeat the Japanese. In other words, the CCP asked the country’s people to quite literally suspend disbelief and agree to the altering of reality.
A copy of George Orwell’s novel “1984” sits on a table in New York on Feb. 26, 2021. Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times
Control Language and You Control the Masses
The revision of history is intimately linked with language. Both the BLM movement and the CCP excel at dictating who gets to say what. In 2018, as Vox reported, a matter of days after announcing “that presidential term limits could be abolished, opening the door for President Xi Jinping to continue his rule indefinitely,” the Chinese regime introduced “an extensive list of newly banned words.” These included terms like “my emperor” and “lifelong control.” References to George Orwell’s dystopian novels “Animal Farm” and “1984” were also banned. The same year, the CCP banned the “Winnie the Pooh” movie after comparisons were made between the character and Xi, a dictator for life. Meanwhile, BLM has its own list of acceptable language. From “microaggression” to “intersectionality,” “colorism” to “performative activism,” the movement, in many ways, has become a master of self-parody. Its members demand to be taken seriously yet they employ gobbledygook as a means of communicating with the masses. Nevertheless, there is nothing funny about brutal bullies and sinister agendas. The CCP and the BLM movement, more alike than one might imagine, are jam-packed with both.John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published by the likes of the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, The American Conservative, National Review, The Public Discourse, and other respectable outlets. He is also a columnist at Cointelegraph.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
