A police officer kneels outside Los Angeles Police Department headquarters on Tuesday during a protest after the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Washington Post: The next front in the culture war: Police kneeling
President Trump on Wednesday retweeted a claim that New York City police were being asked to “bend a knee to terrorists”
The scene was one of many hectic ones this week in Washington, D.C.: A police officer is being urged to kneel by protesters, and he obliges, before he’s quickly brought to his feet by fellow officers. Then he kneels again, this time before being pulled back by his colleagues and losing his balance. He resumes standing in front of the line of protesters.
Other footage of the same scene shows another officer briefly kneeling next to him (warning: some explicit language in that link).
As unrest rages across the country, scenes like this are becoming part of the culture war over policing and the protests. To some supporters of the protests, they are a show of good faith by police officers over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. To others, they’re empty gestures or even sinister allusions to how Floyd was killed. And to some critics of how the police are handling the unrest, they demonstrate capitulation in the face of the mob.
President Trump waded into this on Wednesday morning for the first time, retweeting a message that included attacking New York City police for being “tasked to bully Orthodox Jews and bend a knee to terrorists.”
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Throughout history bending the knee has always been used by conquerors, dictators, and authoritarian governments to extract fealty and cooperation from those who have been vanquished, conquered, and suppressed. It is also a form of humiliation .... to degrade those who are not part of your country/class/race/or movement. The Nazis used this tactic during the Second World War before executing their prisoners. Mao used this during the cultural revolution to humiliate his perceived enemies. But I have recently learned that American blacks have a different history when it comes to bending the knee. I am sure they had to give the knee to their slave masters centuries ago, but the Civil rights movement in the sixties used bending the knee as a means to protest .... The Rise of the Black Activists (Saturday Evening Post). Colin Kaepernick is not the first to bend the knee, but he is the first that I know of to do it against the US flag and anthem. So I am curious. Would you kneel in today's environment? Would you kneel to show solidarity to American blacks that some are now demanding?
Update: I would not kneel because the Nazis did this. My history (which is Russian) is different. Correction. Very different.
