The New Yorker:

America is on the defensive worldwide over the murder of George Floyd and all that the killing implies about race, values, and leadership—not to mention common decency—in the United States. On Sunday, thousands defied a government lockdown in Britain to march through the streets of London—from the famed Trafalgar Square, past the Houses of Parliament, along and across the River Thames, to the U.S. Embassy—to protest the murder of an unarmed black man by white police in Minneapolis, four thousand miles away. The coronavirus pandemic—and its risks—be damned. “The death of George Floyd has rightly ignited fury and anguish not just in the USA but around the world,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted. “No country, city, police force or institution can be complacent about racism and the impact this has.” He also warned about the dangers of infection from COVID-19 at crowded protests. “Lockdown has not been lifted,” he tweeted. “The virus is still out there.” The protest nonetheless went on for hours, including a sit-in in front of the Embassy. Homemade cardboard signs read “White silence is violence” and “Do I matter only after death? #GeorgeFloyd.” Hundreds more turned out in northern Manchester, and more still in the Welsh capital of Cardiff, around its historic castle, to protest racism in America. Three more protests—in a country that is America’s closest ally—are planned over the next week.

At Berlin’s Mauerpark—situated where a section of the Wall separated East and West Germany from 1961 to 1989—a mural of Floyd has been painted on a remnant of the Berlin Wall, alongside the words “I can’t breathe.” Protesters showed up in Berlin both Saturday and Sunday, to denounce death from discrimination in the United States. They marched to the U.S. Embassy near the Brandenburg Gate, another historic symbol of the Cold War era. Their focus was on a different kind of war. “Stop killing us,” one sign pleaded. In normally tranquil Copenhagen, two thousand showed up, on Saturday, at an angry demonstration at the U.S. Embassy. Thousands turned out in Toronto, too, over the weekend, to protest the deaths of Floyd and a black Canadian woman, who fell to her death from a twenty-fourth-floor apartment on Wednesday, while police were on the scene. And those countries are all our allies.

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