Jonathan Cook reflects on the US, on a knife edge of open revolt
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Cook writes: “The state cultivates in the police and sections of the public a sense that police violence is legitimate by definition when it targets individuals or groups it portrays as threatening or subversive.”
So it has taken massive public protest for Derek Chauvin to become the first white police officer in the state of Minnesota ever to be criminally charged over the death of a black man.
But that, on its own, will change nothing. “The challenge to the protesters,” says Cook, “ … is how to surmount the state’s violence and how to offer a vision of a different, more hopeful future that restores the social contract.”
This article was originally published by jonathan-cook.net on Tue 2 Jun 2020. Read the original here.
As US protests show, the challenge is how to rise above the violence inherent in state power
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Like the Mafia, the Establishment always protect their own, which is one of the reasons for their ‘success’.
In 1974 Lieutenant William Calley was charged and found guilty of Premeditated Murder after the US Army invaded a small village called My Lai in Vietnam, Killing 504 men, women and children.
Calley was given a life sentence…he was paroled in 1974.
Jonathon Cook is absolutely right here. What’s the response of people like Ian Duncan-Smith? ‘Never mind what’s happening in the US – Look at China, look at what they’re doing in Hong Kong’ ……
The violence shown by the police to the protesters reminds me of the UK in 1984/5 during the miners strike. Then, as now, the media and most of the opposition (Kinnock and Hattersley especially) remained blind to the acts of brutality and the draconian powers of the courts used to subjugate legitimate striking union members. Instead they seemed more bothered about speaking out and decrying the strikers actions as irresponsible and indefensible.
It would appear some things never change. No wonder Corbyn and socialism were seen as such a threat to the elitist establishment (including the media – BBC included and the upper echelons of the Labour Party).