For whom is the US burning? "The revenge of those whose breath was cut off cannot be escaped"

On the seventh anniversary of the Gezi uprising in Türkiye and of the Tamarod movement in Egypt that led to the coup, the upheavals that one would expect in Türkiye or in any peaceful region of the Islamic world have emerged on the streets of the ABD. Protest movements that spread across the entire ABD in just one week and turned the ABD into a scene of conflagration grew, spreading with each passing day, and finally reached the gates of the White House. The protest movements have increasingly gone beyond a peaceful demand for rights and justice and turned into a revolt.

The revolt has also revealed how much powerful potential for conflict, how many fault lines and how much accumulated anger exist within the ABD, which looks like a stable country.

With this event it has once again come to light just how fragile the Pax Americana, that is, the ABD together with all its cosmopolitan diversity, actually is. Indeed, what was the glue that held this Pax Americana, the great American political body, together? While the ABD was stirring up, dividing, tearing apart and bombing every corner of the world, rushing into massacres, coups and savage exploitation, relying on what political bodily integrity and strength was it doing all this?

Generally the answer to this question is clear, in fact. The empires that pursue these things in world politics actually receive the greatest blow from within themselves, from neglecting the health of their own bodies. And the most important thing that ensures the health of the political body is nothing other than the "justice" they achieve among the elements that make up society. It seems that this issue has been the ABD's greatest weakness from the very beginning. Perhaps temporary victories and superiorities serve to cover up this weakness for a while, and temporary successes provide certain immunities against attacks or social fevers, but sooner or later, in a period when the body has become relatively weakened, the slightest impact causes the whole disease to engulf the body, wear it out and exhaust it.

The event that triggered all this revolt in the ABD was the death, in the state of Minneapolis, of a Black citizen suspected of a crime, as a result of the ruthless and disproportionate violence applied by the police. In fact this event is the most ordinary behavior of the ABD police. Those who know the ABD know that hundreds of people already lose their lives every year as a result of such police behavior. But the impact of most of them does not even reach news value. Yet the fact that this incident was recorded in all its details, while still hot, by a citizen by chance and put on social media revealed its effect of arousing public outrage. This effect brought out the anger accumulated from the sum of all the past cases about which people had remained silent until now.

Meanwhile we can also say that the words "I can't breathe," which were the last to come out of the mouth of the Black victim George Floyd before he died, have a cursed effect. There were also those who drew this parallel, but let us repeat it. We remember these words as the last words of Jamal Khashoggi as well, when he was killed by suffocation a year and a half ago in the Saudi Arabian consulate general in Istanbul. Those who turned a deaf ear to these words could not escape, and cannot escape, the demand for justice that later spread in waves with those words. As long as the requirements of justice are not fulfilled, these words never fall away from their collar. The revenge of those whose breath was wrongfully cut off cannot be escaped.

The protection the Trump administration provided to the suspects, ignoring the demands for justice for Khashoggi, who was killed by having his breath cut off and whose body was later dismembered and destroyed, now seems, by recalling this incident, to have left the order and stability of the ABD unprotected. The words "I can't breathe" have now become one of the most important slogans of all the demonstrations.

Let it not be misunderstood: what is happening in the ABD is not a subject to be approached with a revanchist mind or feeling, neither in the Khashoggi affair nor on account of its activities in other countries. All these protests, demonstrations and actions are of course an expression of deep discontents within the ABD, but the violence, looting and vandalism in the events cannot be glorified.

The matter has now gone beyond a democratic demand for rights and justice, and what a significant portion of those taking part in the events care about is neither justice for Floyd, nor the violence applied every year against hundreds of Black or Hispanic citizens, nor the ABD becoming more just in general. From the moment mass movements get out of control, it becomes unknown who wants what, and they turn into opportunities in which other injustices, wrongs, looting and vandalism run rampant, so that broader masses, instead of turning and listening to the voice of the demonstrators, come to demand a harsh order or intervention, even a coup, to make up for the instability the demonstrators have caused. Let us not forget how the demonstrations in France in 2005 paved the way for Sarkozy.

In the ABD too, the demonstrations that have gotten out of hand are right now preparing the ground for Trump's interventions, in which he would bring the federal army into play and sideline the state administrations.

Perhaps everyone is expecting the opposite right now, but it may be that all of this is precisely sowing the seeds of his success in the approaching elections at the end of this process.

Then we ask again: For whom is America burning?