A week has passed since a mob of colourful buffoons invaded the US Capitol (what would be referred to as ‘the parliament building’ in a civilized country) and everyone down there and, occasionally, here, is still yakking about it. While I didn’t really plan on talking about it because it tends to reinforce the idea that the US should be above these things, I decided to, in the end, because I think people are surprised, and outraged, at the wrong things.
People, both in the US and in civilized countries, feign, or feel, surprise at the fact that a mob, incited by a losing presidential candidate, decided to invade the parliament. In reality, losing ex-presidents are disgruntled pretty much everywhere, and mobs try to invade parliaments regularly in all but the most advanced democracies. Just in 2020, it happened in Serbia in July and in Kyrgyzstan and Thailand in October. And mind that, due to The Virus, rioting wasn’t quite as popular in 2020, and that these three are only the ones I could think of quickly. What makes the US riots special is:
- It worked. A mob armed only with rudimentary melee weapons successfully broke into a building defended by a special corp of 1700+ agents.
- Several of said agents actually sympathized with the mob and did absolutely nothing to stop them.
People keep watching the Hollywood propaganda, and get the idea that American police is competent, well-trained, loyal and brave. It is none of these things: it is treacherous, incompetent, prejudiced, sadistic and cravenly. Faced with a like-minded but slightly-less-cravenly mob, it just melts.
However, the morbid incompetence of its supposed defenders is not, by any length, the most fucked-up thing about the American parliament (or, as those lunatics keep calling it, ‘the congress and senate’). The most fucked-up thing is this.
Let me TL;DR it for you: Democrats are actually scared that Republicans sympathizing with the mob will finish the job and actually murder them on the floor of the parliament. To prevent this, the Capitol Police (that’d be those 1700+ morons we were talking about above) started checking MPs (lunatics call them ‘representatives’) with metal detectors. Instead of denying their murderous intentions, said Republicans threw a tantrum about having their firearms removed. This happens nowhere else: parliament shootings have happened (a famous one in Armenia in 1999), but they were carried out by external agents. MPs punching each other and, occasionally, bashing each other with chairs are common throughout Europe; but nowhere outside of the US, not even at the heights of political violence in Jamaica, has a party faction been unashamedly planning mass shootings of its political opponents live on a public affairs network and bitched about being inconvenienced in this pursuit.
My message to those who still hold the US as a shining beacon of democracy for everyone is: you, Ladies and Gentlemen, are a bunch of idiots.