The real face of Black Lives Matter

This is the first part of the long interview of documentary film maker Pierre Rehov out of a total of 4 episodes. Thanks to Helene Keller Lindt for the English translation.

Geller Report: Pierre Rehov, you are a documentary filmmaker and reporter who has been living between the USA and Israel for years and has regular media activities in the USA. How do you explain the huge media coverage and support given to the Black Lives Matter movement?

PR. Before evoking this fashionable movement in a climate of global dissatisfaction and concern amplified by the Covid 19 crisis, it is important to explain what exactly Black Lives Matter is. According to the commonly accepted definition, BLM would be a “decentralized movement calling for civil disobedience and peaceful protest against police violence against African-Americans”. This is nothing short of commendable, then, except that the reality is significantly different. 

The organization (because it is not a “movement”) was born in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Latino accused of killing Trayvon Martin, an African American who had infiltrated a residential community and assaulted him while he was guarding the property. The Zimmerman-Martin case would have remained a news story, since it was a case of self-defense, had it not been taken up by politicians such as Elisabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg (Democrats), followed by hysterical left-wing media. 

The group expanded in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner, both killed by white police officers during an arrest. What is noteworthy is that in both cases, the American justice system followed its normal course and exonerated the police officers from charges of murder and denial of civil rights, while politicians and, once again, the media, were making a big deal out of the cases. Let’s not forget that the U.S. justice system uses private citizens, interviewed and retained by both sides, before participating in a grand jury, whose verdict is retained by a professional judge. It is difficult to accuse a grand jury of partisan sentencing. But the ideology of combat is rarely rooted in fact. From then on, the movement spread with the strength and speed of a powder keg across the United States and, soon, the rest of the world, seeking to impose the idea that the United States is a racist country where African-Americans are systematically the target of police violence and discrimination. This was still true in the sixties but is totally false today. 

I’ll give you some interesting figures that are totally opposed to the BLM doxa. For example, in 2018, there were 52 African-Americans elected to Congress, that is to say a 12% representation, equal to the percentage of black Americans. Among the 100 largest U.S. cities, 38 had a black mayor in 2017, while 57.1% of cities with populations over 40,000, without a black majority, were also held by people of color. In 2018, 399 whites, 148 Latinos and 209 Blacks were killed by police officers. According to the FBI, in 2014, 90% of homicides against Blacks were perpetrated by other Blacks. These latest statistics represent the reality of an area in which crime is often higher – as in France too – among minorities, but are far from illustrating a fundamentally racist climate. 

It is the numbers that make the story, not the crowd movements that are used for political purposes. And the figures are clear. You don’t vote for Blacks when you are racist, and you can’t say that the US is globally racist when the country was ruled for 8 years by Obama. 

In reality, as one of its founders, Patriss Culors, confessed, Black Lives Matter stems from a Marxist organization, aiming to replace the American economy by a Soviet or Maoist type system. I can only quote her: “Alicia and I (Alicia Garza, 39, chief strategic advisor) are well-trained Marxists and we are trying to create a movement that could be used by many, many, colored buddies”. So it is no longer a question of defending a minority against a hypothetical form of racism, but of fundamentally changing a system through the instrumentalization of iconic incidents. Curiously enough, it is mostly white people who participate in this movement, certainly driven by the famous “Western complex” that you describe so well in one of your essays. This leads to absurd situations, where black police officers face white rioters claiming to defend the black cause while other Blacks rise up against a movement, they feel does not represent them. There are even testimonies from black police officers explaining that in some BLM demonstrations, there are more Blacks on the police side than on the demonstrators’ side.

To answer your question more directly, we live in an era of global communication, where social networks have largely replaced official information flow. Today, people participate in information more than they receive it, and everyone hopes to get their 15 minutes of fame, which leads to an escalation in the interpretation of the facts. Marxism, which in my opinion is the outlet of mediocrity leading to failure in a system based on merit – with the exception, of course, of a few vengeful or utopian intellectuals – can only function, as its founder expressed it, after a phase of dictatorship, that of the proletariat. In times of great anxiety and social frustration, human beings tend to prefer the security of a pseudo-equalitarian dictatorial system to the individual responsibility that comes with freedom. This reflex is the source of all fascism. Original capitalism, as invented by Adam Smith, aimed to create shareable wealth by multiplying opportunities. I would tend to say that the world of finance has perverted it by creating stagnant money instead of creating wealth, but that’s another debate. Conversely, the Marxist utopia surfs on individual disempowerment in favor of collective responsibility, starting from the attractive but unrealistic concept of “to each according to his needs” replacing “to each according to his merits”. The idea is to put coal in the wagons to heat them, instead of putting it in the locomotive to keep the train moving… and to heat the wagons. 

It is on this wave of discontent, fear for the future, utopia of change, that BLM is surfing, using the label of anti-racism to advance its real agenda. This comes at a time when the Democrats, who were certain of Hillary Clinton’s victory, have not recovered from their defeat and have used all the means put in place by Obama (the famous Deep State, denounced by President Trump) to overturn the results of a democratic election. The explanation for BLM’s success becomes simple when one knows the strategies bordering on the limits of legality aimed at preventing a new victory for the Republicans. As the Republicans’ economic, security and societal gains under Trump’s rule were spectacular, while the systematic defamation by the Democrats and their attempts at impeachment, which were supported by almost all the media, were not successful, all that was left was to slow down the economy by every possible means in order to increase the number of disgruntled voters. The famous “growth slowdown” also supported by environmentalists. Covid19 and the BLM riots were perfectly instrumentalized for this purpose. BLM thus enjoyed the unfailing support of the Democratic machine and the media that were blindly committed to it, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Its success has therefore nothing mysterious about it. 

Is there really a risk of civil war in the United States or is it a delusion of plotters and alarmists? 

This is a subject on which we must tread carefully. On the one hand, all means seem to have been used to achieve a situation of fracture in which the self-proclaimed “side of  good” arrogates to itself all the rights to humiliate, insult, denounce, even use violence against any individual who does not participate in what looks more and more like a revolution. On the other hand, the middle classes, the workers, roughly the silent majority, do not seem to recognize themselves in this movement as soon as it becomes violent. Yet, contrary to what the partisan media would have us believe, BLM and its quasi-sibling Antifa, are violent organizations, promoting peaceful civil insurrection only until the time their objective is not achieved. This is what the New York leader of BLM, Hawk Newsome, said in an interview with Martha MacCallum during a demonstration in support of George Floyd: “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will destroy and replace the system. “Are Americans prepared to kill each other as they did during the Civil War? At the time, the goal was to abolish slavery (supported by Democrats against Republicans led by Abraham Lincoln), which led to a fundamental economic change that was taken pretty hard in the Southern states. Today, the debate revolves around one-time racist acts that affect the USA not more, if not less, than most European countries and often goes both ways, even if anti-white racism is not recognized as such. BLM sells illusion. Antifa acts as a fascist organization. The values have been reversed and nothing is really clearer. You don’t fight for a vague cause, nor do you resist it, except in cases of self-defense. One side is bluntly questioning the 1786 constitution, the foundation of American identity, and would like to rewrite history, with a form of self-flagellation that borders on infamy. Americans have never fought for self-destruction, and even if the universities produce progressives and socialists among the heirs of the privileged classes, their discourse remains marginal in a country that may have to be ashamed of its origins but not of its development. 

Finally, there is the “cancel culture” which is the upper echelon of political correctness: a recent poll shows that the majority of Americans are now afraid to express their opinions, whether Democrats or Republicans – except for the far left – but bending their backs and hiding in the shadows does not fit the American mentality. One can assume that, regardless of who gets elected, but perhaps more so if it is Biden, Americans will end up revolting against this oppression just as they revolted against political correctness. It will be a “cultural civil war”.

So I don’t believe in a classic civil war, but the presidential elections in November could provide the spark that would ignite the powder keg.