Vladimir Putin would enthusiastically agree.
Last weekend, just as I finished a live performance in California of Four Questions, the Grammy award-winning jazz collaboration for which I provided spoken words, word reached me about the racist killing of 10 people as they shopped in Buffalo, New York. I try never to be surprised by evil and never paralysed by despair. Instead, my immediate reaction was "here we go again", with the horror, the suffering and then the now familiar routine of rhetorical gestures and superficial posturing.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden described white supremacy as a poison, and he is right, but — as ever — he fails to understand the gravity of his failure to make racial justice a priority; to see this cowardly white supremacy as a threat to American democracy.
The simple truth is that you cannot see this latest neofascist attack in isolation. Think of the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, when a white supremacist terrorist killed nine African Americans during their Bible study in 2015. Think of the attack on the American Asian community in Atlanta last year, when four people were murdered amid assertions from prosecutors that the attack was fuelled by race and gender hatred. Or the attack on Chicanos in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, when 22 people were killed in an allegedly hate-motived shooting; and the murder of 11 Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh the same year by a man who said Jews "were committing a genocide to his people".
