It was like being inside that dire and obscene scene. It was watching him die little by little and that night how many of us couldn’t sleep! Who knows why, he is taken handcuffed to the police car. george floyd it falls and it is seen that the policeman is looking for a “situation”. He puts his weight on one knee on the colored man’s neck, while another crushes his chest. He whines breathlessly, bellows in a piercing snore. We hear you!
Other police officers help or do not object; the public is scandalized and demands. Until the pressure is released, the scene freezes in eight minutes. The body lies defenseless, lifeless.
What was that? Is called “totalitarian temptation”That’s what he called it in my book: The tenacity of hate and the party of life: negotiation and psychoanalysis for a possible coexistence.
Taking advantage of the availability of a power to exercise dominance over the other, in order to denigrate (sic), reduce it to a wreck and manage the suffering and damage inflicted on it. An act of public display of unrestricted power.
George Floyd’s crime: chilling testimonies from the second day of the trial
This has been learned from the concentration camp experiences in the 20th century. Make the other a despicable thing, turn it into a “nothing”. Giorgio Agamben points out (What remains of Auschwitz) that this is the substantial objective of the extermination camp.
That’s a blade that’s always lurking!
The death of George Floyd
The Minneapolis scene is, on a smaller scale, equivalent to what is called harassment, which appears so frequently in schools, organizations and communities. a person is stripped of his status as such, the victim, who becomes despicable to others, their families and above all to himself, breaks as a person and suffers from it for a lifetime. Boy is he painful and hurtful! Not that it’s a boy thing…
The violent leader, the victimizer, bullies and abuse both physically and mentally of one or several victims, which generates sordid perverse satisfactions. You live a pagan god, owner of life and death: yes, we had local torturers like that. The entourage that shares the violence is protected by the “bully”: nothing will happen to them unless they rebel.
Video: this was the brutal arrest of George Floyd that ended in his death
Ah, the rest of the policemen. Finally the observed, silent citizens whose impotence and suffering are dramatic: the destroyed.
How many of us have inhabited that misfortune at school, the club, work or the neighborhood? Knowing that the one who rebels and denounces the outrage becomes the next victim.
Floyd case: looting, riots and protests in the United States against police violence
No one there could do what was due, since attacking a law enforcement officer is a serious crime. You reader, me, would we have that audacity? Not like here: remember the tons – the sixteen tons (Los Plateros) – thrown at the police to Congress and nothing. nothing!
The exit key is in working with the observed. Pay attention to teachers and directors of schools who suffer so much from thiso They must look and see and act: work with all children and teachers and empower them.
There are resources, there are successful programs, there are people who know how to do it. Aren’t we all watched?
Would it have happened with a detainee who was white? In not a few countries today, discrimination and extermination of the population is based on the non-existence of the “other” as a personwhether by religion, race, bodily/psychological difference or foreigner: an alien.
Celebrating non-discrimination
The protest reaction was massive and of all ethnicities and nationalities, in so many cities in the US, accompanied by outrage around the world. That is fortunate, because it is sustained that this should not happen even once, that is, “never again.” So many of us that we understood it, that we recognized ourselves in the “we are all Jorge”.
IS a citizen pronouncement that aspires to fundamental changes in our societies, which we must not give up. Insist on building that future in educational institutions, organizations, companies, unions, security forces and without a doubt in government environments, tending to favor equity, denounce discrimination and exclusionn, the most careful distribution of resources and the reduction of corruption, the care of the population at risk, promoting policies of collaboration at work, generating participative leadership and managing conflictive ones.
But above all take care of childhood and old age. They are different names of education, that is, of the construction of civilization. A task for governments and even more for citizens.
Bullying does not solve itself
But perhaps these ideas are similar to electoral promises because they were reduced to mere slogans: “euphisms” with which they knew how to make political propaganda and social control so well to shape the minds, the Nazis and Stalinism. They are not the only ones!
certainly the balance in our societies between the functions of authority and popular participation however it is unstable. This is also called history. However, “citizen empowerment” implies not letting any event pass that resumes the “totalitarian temptation.”
Is about build civilityover and over again, to be able to breathe.
* Prof. Head of “Psychological Clinic and Adult Psychotherapies” at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, psychoanalyst, writer.
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