Why Stereotypes Beat Out Critical Debate

The mainstream media peddles oversimplified symbols and rhetoric to present the important issues of the day.

In one of his lesser-known sayings, John F. Kennedy remarked that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Though Kennedy’s policies would fall far short of this conviction, his phrase was taken up by Martin Luther King Jr. in his own lesser-known “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, exactly one year before his assassination.

It is of no small consequence that this particular narrative, where King declared the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” is rarely discussed, while his more famous “I Have A Dream” speech has become a staple of American mythology. It would seem here that popular history has followed Albert Camus’s observation that “martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood – never!”

What King sought to demonstrate in his anti-war speech was that this seemingly obvious statement about the nature of revolutions applies to not only the most brutal dictatorships of “official enemies,” but also to significant social problems in our own backyard.

While the so-called “violent” protests at the recent G20 summit in Toronto have come and gone, it is not clear that much has been learned from these regrettable and unprecedented events. Whatever motivated a hundred or so activists to engage in the targeted destruction of property (an act which is different from “violence”), it is rarely discussed in the mainstream press as a symptom of a larger problem – that is, of an increasingly undemocratic system that marginalizes voices of dissent to the point where the destruction of property is seen by some as the only way to call attention to this growing imbalance and to make their voices heard. Needless to say, how we respond to such an event is of the utmost importance.

The suggestion that property destruction was carried out by “anarchists,” “hooligans,” and “criminals,” who came from “outside” the city – as Chief of Police Bill Blair and Mayor David Miller were so quick to characterize those who used “black bloc” tactics – is, among other things, a rhetorical strategy with a very long history, if one cares about such trivial things. While not on the level of “eating babies,” a well-worn slander that has been used to malign various indigenous groups, Jews, and even Germans by the Woodrow Wilson administration in order to gain support for America’s participation in the First World War, it is nonetheless part and parcel of a style of argumentation that uses loaded terms and symbols as a way to create fear and radical opposition to the idea or group in question.

During the G20 protests in Toronto, this narrative of “hooligans” and “criminals” was accompanied by a strong and repetitive dose of images of smashed windows and burning police cars being played over and over again like virtual hypnosis. Though “alternative” perspectives were presented, even within the mainstream press, the dominant narrative remained trapped in rhetorical language, painting an almost mystified scenario where the good citizens of Toronto were caught up in a “violent” attack by “outside forces” for reasons that are not clear.

In this way, rather than engaging in a critical debate over the history, meaning, and use of such things as black bloc tactics as a form of social protest, we find a discourse that relies mainly on symbolic language and shocking images that are deprived of all context and meaning. This has a significant and even dangerous effect on the nature of public debate.