From local/state level to federal level, they banded together and strung him up.
Part of the gut punch of this is the grassroots efforts to stop it that were basically ignored. Don’t let anyone tell you the US is anything remotely resembling a system “by/for the people.” One of the fakest slogans in modern history. The US is “by/for white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism,” and they have clung to that general makeup through the will of a violent and organized power elite—along with the weaponization of a racist class of “white people” under that—throughout the entire country’s history. On paper, being post woman’s suffrage movement, post civil rights movement, it is perhaps as democratic a system as it has ever been in the country’s history, which in practice is saying… almost nothing, considering outcomes like this. The US seems clearly to be a country that runs on the aesthetics of democracy over any actual democratic process. I find it’s the same way liberals tend to think about fascism in the US, as some kind of aesthetic that you will “know when you see it.” But the substance of fascism is already there (IIRC, George Jackson talks about this in Blood in My Eye, though I don’t remember the specifics atm).
What is a vote worth if it ignores the will of the people? This is the reality liberal “democracy” shows over and over (another notable example recently, what happened with the French “elections”). “What can we do to give the illusion of choice without actual people power that could challenge the hegemonic goal of imperial expansion, and global domination and humiliation of entire peoples?” The answers to that question brought into being by the organized colonizers is what we’re dealing with in places like the US. Honestly, even using words like “domination” doesn’t feel strong enough. The degree of systematic violence that colonialism does is obsessed with torture, maiming, and inflicting terror, not just in control alone. It is not enough for them to kill a person; they want the victim and anyone who supports them to feel helpless and dispirited too. To be broken by it, until you are numb.
Under any other circumstance, I might say I’m being dramatic, but this is a graphically violent system of power we’re talking about, colonialism, with a hundreds of years legacy to it. It can shock the system to internalize how grotesque and systematized it is, in its violence.
I was following this story closely over the past week and it made me so fucking sad and furious when I read the news yesterday. Nobody wanted him killed, not the family of the victim, not the judges, not even the fucking prosecution. But that shitty district attorney went and forced the issue.
Putting aside whether he did it or not, why did he have to DIE? Just because it is an election year and it looks better for their shitty DA to say he’s “tough on crime?”. I will never understand people who defend the death penalty, even if he absolutely did do it beyond a reasonable doubt (WHICH HAS NOT BEEN PROVED) how does that make it ok for the government to kill him?
I don’t understand the angle of “Punishment” because anyone who fucking says that has never spent a single day in jail. If you have, then you’ll know that spending an entire lifetime there is more than enough to punish you for whatever tf you did.
Nobody should be murdered by the government in any sane, normal country. ESPECIALLY if they don’t know for sure if he deserves it.
Rest in peace. I hope that shitty Justice system faces real justice one day.
I don’t understand the angle of “Punishment” because anyone who fucking says that has never spent a single day in jail. If you have, then you’ll know that spending an entire lifetime there is more than enough to punish you for whatever tf you did.
In this case the judicial angle isn’t punishment, but completion. They can now “close the case”. If he were released, then the case would still remain open (and unsolved), which looks bad on their record/statistics. Now they (the DA/police) got +1 solved/closed cases.
Another possibility is that the actual perpetrator is well-connected or known to the DA, so they threw this guy under the bus.
If you want to think “wtf?” for an hour and a half watch the documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988). The subject of the documentary was actually exonerated after the documentary came out (but received 0 dollars as compensation).
In this case the judicial angle isn’t punishment, but completion
That’s the crazy part, the bare minimum appeal was to change his sentence to life in prison. That would still be an end to the case with a definite ruling. They chose to kill him. A lot of the opposition to his execution wasn’t even asking to release him, but to just change the sentence, they couldn’t even do the bare minimum to spare a (potentially innocent) life. Sheer barbarism.
What i dont get is why ppl so armed as you are never revolt. Americans see crime after crime after crime to the point of a genocide and nobody does shit. Democrats made the world unstable to the point of nuclear war being on the menu and theres people defending klansmala herpes
People tried to, to an extent, in 2020. Against police brutality. And they were brutalized for it and cop cities started getting built. Called rioters when most of them were nothing more than civil disobedience and police were the ones primarily rioting, being violent against them for daring to express any opposition to the state’s wanton violence.
Mind you, I don’t say this to be reductionist or dismissive with the “why” which is an important question to contend with. But the point is, it’s not as though everyone is sitting around doing nothing. And revolutions, as we know from history, do not happen (or maybe, more precisely, do not succeed) from spontaneous anger alone, but from organized, disciplined force and intention. Stuff like cointelpro and the vilification and violence against the Black Panther Party, or going further back than that, the imprisonment of Eugene Debs or the Battle of Blair Mountain, shows that there are elements of the US who do fight back and face state violence every time. Or a more recent example, the student protests against genocide; maybe that doesn’t qualify as “revolting” to you, but it is a kind of resistance against imperialism and carries with it risk of violence from the state as a consequence.
Why it’s not more than that, is maybe a more important question to ask. And some of the answer to that, I think is found in the systematized racial hierarchy. To a racist enough person, the systemic violence against black people, for example, is virtually invisible to them as an issue, if they would even deem it as one in the first place. Then there are those liberals who view themselves as anti-racist, but obviously aren’t in substantive action, and that’s a whole can of worms in itself.
Thats very interesting. It makes me think that even for someone who reads in english outside the USA, theres a lot of news that we dont get. At some point people will have to respond to police violence in an equivalent way, or be subjugated into fascism
Because this is the most propagandized country on the planet
I’m not in the US, how am I supposed to revolt? If I was, I would have been out protesting this, but as a foreigner wtf can I do but look on in horror?
Im sorry mate, the way you spoke made me think you lived there, the anger is quite vivid.
I think anyone would be, you don’t need to be from the US, just human.
Indeed
To call this anything other than a lynching is to neither understand the system nor the concept of lynching.
I noticed this story pass by several times this week, it’s a shameful display of the “justice system”. May he rest in peace.
.عظم الله أجركم
I’m 99.999 percent sure that there is no afterlife, but I wish there was, especially for people like this man. Rest in power. You will be avenged in the coming years and decades.
