The Capitol Rioters Had a Lot in Common With a Lynch Mob
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JVL
JVL Introduction
Robert Meeropol places the Capital riot of 6th January in the context of a long history of White riots, mobs and lynchings in the United States.
He relates the events to those which inspired his father Abel Meeropol, to write the song Strange Fruit, later taken up and popularised by Billie Holliday in the thirties.
And he reminds us that it “was common practice for white people to attend lynchings as though they were as mundane an event as a picnic, and for photographers to turn their images into postcards which were sold in stores.”
This article was originally published by Portside on Fri 5 Mar 2021. Read the original here.
The Capitol Rioters Had a Lot in Common With a Lynch Mob
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The best description of Fascism is “a temporary alliance between the elite and the mob”( Hannah Arendt) > Perfectly describes what is happening ,not just in the US but all over the world. There are many admirers of Eastern European neo fascism within the UK Tory Government as I write.
It should be embarrassing to have to point out that Indiana is not part of the US South – not even of the Upper South. It is solidly within the North, an area long prone to virtue-signalling. Lincoln made his way in Illinois at a time when Black people were effectively prohibited from immigrating into Illinois, and Lincoln himself supported ‘colonisation’ the deportation of Black Americans to Africa – LIberia in particular. I believe that once the colonists arrived in serious numbers,they started oppressing and exploiting the indigenous African people – ring a bell?
Thanks, Robert, for putting the fascist Capitol riot in its true historical context. And for honouring the memory of Abel Meeropol, who wrote the beautiful haunting song Strange Fruit and adopted the children of the Rosenbergs, themselves too the victims of a horrific state lynching. (My own father was prominent in the doomed campaign to save their lives.)
A remarkable and outstanding piece of writing that says it all.