Am 03.06.2020 kommentiert die Youtuberin Demirep ein Bild, das während der Krawalle in den USA entstanden ist: "I can think of no better illustration of what's being going on than this picture of a piano. It's been taken out of a Steinway piano shop in Philadelphia – the only Steinway dealership in Philadelphia – and well, just look at the shop windows and just look at this object here lying on the pavement. That's a beautiful craftsman-made object that took many hours of work and hundreds of years of technical development. You know, this is a Steinway! These things aren't stamped out of plastic. Not Steinways! They're made out of wood – and certain types of wood – are treated in certain ways, bent and tempered to a certain resonance to a certain shape. Sometimes they're worked on over months and that's months of care, attention, training, craftsmanship. And then we think what a piano does. It's an object capable of transferring directly to the human mind all that is best in human creativity and uplifting the heart, making you happy, making you sad, making you think, making you celebrate life. And this particular one has not only being dragged out and overturned. Someone sprayed it with graffiti as well. That's more than just casual vandalism. First of all, a piano is much, much heavier than most people realize. In order to remove that piano from the shop and to turn it over would require a team […] - a team determined upon the destruction and then the humiliation of this object. This is a group of people who want to destroy the West. They want to destroy everything we've worked for, everything we care for, the developments we have made, the inventions we have come up, with the communal joys in which we indulge. They not only want to destroy it, they want to make it look ridiculous and ugly. That's what this picture is telling me. […] Anyone who could attack a piano must carry an awful lot of hate, ignorance and barbarism in their hearts, and it's quite obvious that this has absolutely nothing to do with George Floyd."
Und genau an dem Tag, an dem ich mir das Youtube-Video angesehen habe, hatte ich zuvor Theodore Dalrymples Beschreibung einer Szene gelesen, die er in Monrovia kurz nach dem Bürgerkrieg beobachtet hat: "I saw the revolt against civilisation and the restraints and frustrations it entails in many countries, but nowhere more starkly than in Liberia in the midst of the civil war there. I arrived in Monrovia when there was no longer any electricity or running water; no shops, no banks, no telephones, no post office; no schools, no transport, no clinics, no hospitals. Almost every building had been destroyed in whole or in part: and what had not been destroyed had been looted. [...] It was the revenge of barbarians upon civilisation, and of the powerless upon the powerful, or at least upon what they perceived as the source of their power. [...] Could there have been a clearer indication of hatred of the lower for the higher?
In fact there was - and not very far away, in a building called the Centennial Hall, where the inauguration ceremonies of the presidents of Liberia took place. The hall was empty now, except for the busts of former presidents, some of them overturned, around the walls - and a Steinway grand piano, probably the only instrument of its kind in the entire country, two-thirds of the way into the hall. The piano, however, was not intact: its legs had been sawed off (though they were by design removable) and the body of the piano laid on the ground, like a stranded whale. Around it were disposed not only the sawed-off legs, but little piles of human faeces.
I had never seen a more graphic rejection of human refinement. I tried to imagine other possible meanings of the scene but could not. Of course, the piano represented a culture that was not fully Liberia’s own and had not been assimilated fully by everyone in the country: but that the piano represented not just a particular culture but the very idea of civilisation itself was obvious in the very coarseness of the gesture of contempt."
Hoffen wir, dass es bei der erschreckenden Parallele der Bilder bleibt und nicht zur Parallele der Ergebnisse kommt.