From local/state level to federal level, they banded together and strung him up.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      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