For almost a decade, I have been covering “Color Revolutions” in virtually all parts of the world. While making a film for TeleSur, I was facing Egyptian tanks, risking my life under sniper fire, getting roughed-up in the middle of clashes of the supporters of al-Sisi and Morsi.
Journalist and photographer Linda Tirado was standing near a police line in Minneapolis May 29, covering the George Floyd protests engulfing the city. All of a sudden, her face “exploded” in her own words. She had been shot from close range in the eye, permanently blinding her. Her goggles shattered and tear gas entered the wound, causing even more pain. The police had shot her.
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic.
Why is this not an Emmett Till moment?
The quick, simple response is because the Democratic Party is where social movements go to die and this will be absorbed into their own conservative narrative.
A long smoldering and now massive popular response to injustice has been catalyzed by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th. Even Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson concedes, “this was without precedent in the modern era.”
The current uprising against police violence and racism is just beginning. It is rapidly shifting public consciousness on issues of policing, violence against Black people and others, and systemic racism. The movement is deepening and becoming broader as well as putting forward solutions and making demands.
John Steppling “European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro …
Police protecting the down-trodden from violenceby Thomas Neuburger"If there's any job that domestic abuse should disqualify a person from holding, it's the one job that gives you a lethal weapon, trains you to stalk people without their noticing, and relies on your judgment and discretion to protect the abused from abusers."—Conor Friedersdorf
The system based on a combination of police brutality, mass imprisonment, and evictions at gunpoint may be collapsing, but if it’s going to fall in the direction we want it to fall in, we need to push it that way. And if we want to make that happen, we have to organize to stop the impending wave of evictions before it starts.
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It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians.
A video that went viral late last month of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killing a black man, George Floyd, by pressing a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes has triggered a fortnight of mass protests across the US – and beyond.
