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The Carnegie Library in Washington is an impressive 'Beaux Arts' style building built in 1903 that stands in the center of Mount Vernon Square, in the center of the United States capital. It is surrounded by avenues. There is absolutely no store nearby. Actually, the only store is the Library. In 2016, after 12 years closed, the consumer electronics giant Apple took over the management of the huge building, which has a useful area of ​​4,738 square meters, that is, almost as much as a soccer field.

Apple spent 30 million dollars (27 million euros) to rehabilitate it. Johny Ive, the designer of the iPhone and iPad, led the work, in collaboration with the Norman Foster architecture studio and the non-profit organization Patronage for the Preservation of Historic Heritage. The building not only sells electronic products. It also has an auditorium, houses the headquarters of the Washington Historical Society, and has a permanent photographic exhibition about the capital of the United States. All this is what Apple calls 'main squares': a combination of shops and cultural spaces dedicated to the cities in which they are located.

But it was not the culture that was pursued by the dozens of looters who attacked the Library at dawn yesterday, broke the reinforced windows of the door, and damaged the building. What they were looking for were iPhones. His attack on the Apple store was not accidental. Virtually no one lives in that area of ​​Washington. Several hundred meters away is the so-called City Center, a commercial area that was a black and Asian ghetto until a decade and a half ago, and in which the Spanish chef José Andrés ran his first restaurant, Jaleo, in the 1990s . There was also looting there. Just like in Georgetown, one of the posiest neighborhoods in the city. The Apple store in that area, on Wisconsin Avenue, was saved from the looting because its employees placed wooden squares to reinforce the windows.

The looting of the Apple store at the Carnegie Bookstore is an example of what Douglas Brinkley, the most popular historian in the United States and supervisor, among other works, of the publication of Ronald Reagan's notebooks, has described as "the greatest riots we have seen since the assassination of Martin Luther King, " the historic black rights leader who was assassinated in 1968. In at least 39 cities and counties in the United States, including Washington itself and the second and third largest cities in the country, Los Angeles and Chicago, there is a curfew starting at nine at night. Deployment of the National Guard - that is, a part of the Army similar, but not identical, to the Reserve - has been authorized in at least 12 states to contain the violence, and the 82nd Airborne Division is quartered at its base in Fort Bragg , in North Carolina, in case it is necessary to send it to a city.

The '82', as it is known colloquially, is a unit designed to be deployed anywhere in the world in a maximum of 18 hours, so the fact that it is on alert indicates the seriousness of the situation. The last time the regular Army was deployed to contain a violent situation was in 2005, due to the looting triggered in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. To go back to the deployment of soldiers to contain racial tensions you have to go to 1992, during the so-called Los Angeles race riots, which were actually a pogrom that African-Americans carried out against Asians and Latinos, and in which they died 63 people.

Violence thus takes over every night in the great American cities. And each night goes to more. The explosion of racial hatred triggered by the murder of African American George Floyd by white policeman Dereck Chauvin last Monday in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been rising, until it became little more than a general revolt on Saturday night. Sunday, in which, according to unconfirmed information, four people died, all of them at the hands of the protesters. At the moment, there are at least 1,700 detainees, a quarter of them in Los Angeles . In Minnesota, entire apples have been burned. Non-black luxury shops and businesses have become looters' favorite targets.

The police have shown absolute incompetence to control the protests. Although most of the protests have been peaceful, law enforcement has moved between outright aggressiveness and provocation - in many cases targeting journalists - and the most extreme passivity. This is how in Los Angeles and New York police cars have charged against people protesting in the streets , and police in that last city have been filmed making the gesture of white supremacists, while in Minneapolis whole blocks - and even a police station- have burned.

The explosion of violence has caught a changed foot of the American political elite. The Democratic Party, which at first supported the protesters, is now silent in the face of their growing aggressiveness. Minnesota political leaders - all Democrats - and from other regions have tried to blame the looting on "provocateurs", people from other states, pro-Trump infiltrators, and even Vladimir Putin's Russia.

They are very meritorious efforts that do not convince anyone. The truth is that, apart from peaceful protests, there have been violent demonstrations and acts that are purely and simply vandalism. Donald Trump was, on Sunday, unusually quiet, after a night of brutal riots in front of the White House that threatened to set fire to the Hay Adams hotel, another historic building in the city, and to the headquarters of the Hollywood lobby in Washington - paradoxically , another group that tends to sympathize with the protesters.

Meanwhile, Mount Vernon Square was quiet this afternoon, with groups of people - white, black, Asian and Hispanic - lying on the grass, keeping the required distance of 1.8 meters to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Inside the store, a group of employees examined the damage. They were, for the most part, African-American. If the looters had managed to harm someone, it had been people of the same race.

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