Robert Cohen of St Louis Post Despatch posted this image of Ferguson last night, it looks like a dystopian computer game, the sort that will be flying off the shelves in parts of the western world in tomorrow’s ‘Black Friday’ – but not in places like this.
Sadly it’s real, it’s not a cut-scene, and you will see more of this as the result of not indicting Officer Darren Wilson explodes across America.
You can see more in the gallery, great shots but for sad reasons, and amazing that a first-world country could get like this?
And more liberal hand-wringing, and blaming the victims, but when you see the last words of those who have died, like Kenneth Chamberlain, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Kendrec McDade, Jonathan Ferrell – the list goes on, and in black and white hits hard. And don’t forget the black women, who tend to get forgotten in these times, sure the fear of the black man and gang culture means that black men are killed more often, but sadly like with the case of Aiyana Jones or Yvette Smith a police response or search for others can be deadly.
This is Cherie Groce territory, and must stop – recently flash bang grenades were used in another SWAT raid on a family home, and a baby was hurt. Military tactics and SWAT teams should not be used near children, whatever the crimes of the person who they are looking for – they usually come willingly anyway.
And then you find that the boys in blue in almost all of these cases never were prosecuted – at the most lost their jobs, but never faced jail time. So they are 100% perfect then? I don’t think so. The millions in wrongful death suits put paid to that.
To put it in a wider context, bigger than the United States, this is all part of an attack on the working class, the poor. Be you transgender, female, sexworker, black, white or just in the wrong place – the 1% rich are scared of you, that you might take their trinkets away. So the police in the West are militarising, realising that when the shit hits the fan, and people realise how much the bankers and bureaucrats have sold them and their pensions down the river, they can resist in force.
That’s not to downplay racism, because that’s an extra evil in this, as with homophobia it makes the little soldier drones happy in what they’re doing, it confirms their own fascist biases, makes them happy to hold open the door of the gas oven and stuff you inside. It’s easier to treat people like shit if they are dispossessed, poor, immigrants, or of a race or gender or sexuality that they or society at large don’t like. So sadly some groups get the double whammy of attacked by the police, and then told you deserved it by the community at large.
But mark my words – those 1% don’t care about anyone, be they police, army, camp commandants, liberals, right-wingers or middle managers…you are all one step away from Ferguson. ‘They do not care about black people’ is just as much ‘They don’t care about poor people’. And poor to them is those who aren’t millionaires. It’s genocide.
The soundtrack to this for me is Run The Jewels 2’s Early, which I played on the podcast last night, which details Killer Mike’s fears of being arrested in front of his kids and partner:
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