Saturday, 13 June_Trump believes that, and I think this was his quote that “99.9% of the US police are good guys and they obey the law and they serve and protect everybody.” And of course, that's a lot of nonsense.
Police serve and protect privileged interests in the US, in other countries, and in many others besides at the expense of ordinary people that are exploited to serve the privileged class. This is the history of Western civilization going back hundreds of years. This is what police do.
Individuals living in the inner cities in the US or poor people in general, and especially people of color have a lot to fear from the police because the police really are out to do whatever they can to protect them from getting the rights that they deserve. When people protest nonviolently - the way it's been going on since May 25 - the day that George Floyd was killed in the US over two weeks ago.
Most of them, the great majority of people in the streets are doing it nonviolently. And the people who are doing it otherwise, maybe provocateurs, they may be coming from outside the communities, maybe to commit violence, to make it appear as though peaceful protest is responsible to give the police, what I would call unjustifiable justification to use brutal tactics, which is what they've done over the past two and a half weeks or so.
There have been hundreds of complaints about police brutality in the streets. And again, most of the protestors, the great majority are nonviolent.
I've seen the results of violence in Chicago. I have not been on the streets when they were taking place. They happened overnight when I was sleeping so I didn't see it, but I saw the results on the avenue where I live with stores boarded up because the windows were smashed, people went into the stores, and merchandise was looted. This is what the vast majority of protesters would have done.
So protests so police are on the streets to protect the interests of the privileged and the wealthy against ordinary people. Trump has no interest in ordinary people. He's a member of the US privileged class. He supports their beliefs. He wants to give them greater funding. He wants them to use greater force. He talks about force with compassion.
Well, there is no such thing is force with compassion. You can't have one with the other. You either have one or the other. There's a way to enforce the rule of law. And there's a way not to do it.
And when it comes to ordinary people in America, police do it the wrong way, not the right way. There would be a lot less crime, a lot less violence, a lot less people in US prisons, if police obey the law, instead of breaking it.
And when they do break the law and when they commit killings it's rare exceptions that anybody is held accountable because they’re trained to do these things. They’re trained to commit violence.
Why do they have guns? They have them to be able to pull them out and use them. They have bulletproof vents. They’ve militarized equipment supplied by the Pentagon that should only be used in war theaters and only for defense, which is not the way the Pentagon uses them, using them for offence.
But whoever heard of anything like that. Many decades ago when I grew up police were violent but they didn't have militarized equipment I mean they really have it all. They have armored personnel carriers. They have helicopters. They have assault weapons plus usual things that they have. They have technological weapons, and they commit grave harm against people and they’re causing lots of injuries, they are causing deaths, and this has been going on.
The only way to stop this stuff is when people go into the streets and protest nonviolently even if it costs they have to pay because if they don't protest against what's going on, it will continue. It'll probably get worse not better. And the only way justice ever comes, is when people simply won't tolerate injustice anymore. And they go on in the streets, and they protest until it’s changed.
It took a full decade for protests in America to end war in Southeast Asia, a full decade from a bit tacky 60s to the mid 1970s.
A protest for a few weeks or a month or a few months will accomplish nothing in America. That's what happened to Occupy Wall Street. It began in September 2011. It continued into 2012. What does it do? Nothing.
The only way, and this is the perfect time to protest with tens of millions of people unemployed, and many millions of them will not get their jobs back for months, maybe years. Now is the time to go to the streets and protest nonviolently, if you do it violently, you play into the hands of authorities. If you do it nonviolently that is a strategy to use against them, and to stick with it, and sustain it and not quit until justice is achieved.
And if enough people do this, things can be accomplished. It can’t be accomplished in any other way. Power yields nothing without a demand. You got to make that a demand to achieve anything for justice.
Your Comment