Member-only story
A Tale of Two Intentions
The Best and Worst of Violence
On May 25th, 2020, an already subdued defenseless man, after nearly nine minutes of pleading for his life, struggling to breathe, and then calling for his mother, was killed by four Minneapolis police officers. Since his death, residents in every state, and citizens of nations all over the world, participated in peaceful demonstrations in support of George Floyd and the human rights he was denied. In response to the protests in the U.S., supposedly in the spirit of law and order, protesters were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and beaten by police. Indifferent to the torrent of violence unleashed on peaceful protesters, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, using isolated incidents of rioting as justification, called for the deployment of the U.S. military to American streets to restore law and order.
Senator Cotton did his best to forge a picture of widespread insurrection, calling on state governors to “restore order” with “an overwhelming show of force”. Undergirding the ethics of self-advertised pro-law enforcement proponents like Cotton is the notion that law and order can be contrived from the threat of violence and its use. In their eyes, the use of force by the state, regardless of how brutal, is the acceptable form of violence, the variety that can create law and order, the precursors of peace. It begs the question, if violence in a civil society like ours can somehow deliver peace, then why can’t violence from civilians protesting also engender peace?
The glaring asymmetry lays bare the amoral double standard of the pro-law enforcement ethos. No amount of violence can, or would ever, be deemed justifiable on the part of civil protesters; however, in the hands of the state, hands with weapons and imbued with authority to use them, violence becomes readily admissible. The ends justify the means, as long as the means belong to those codified in power by the state. Promoting military intervention for overwhelmingly peaceful protests is more representative of authoritarianism than the democratic values of civil protest in support of human rights. The reasoning for such an extreme promotion is the same used to exonerate police officers for their unwarranted use of lethal force against civilians; the establishment of law and order.
