It's a Lie that Michael Brown Deserved to Die
People Rose Up and Delivered Their Verdict on This Police Murder
April 1, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the days after Michael Brown was killed, people rose up and delivered their verdict on this foul and totally unjustified murder of an unarmed Black man: it was intolerable and should not be accepted. For the last month and more, the powers-that-be have been trying relentlessly to “reverse that verdict” on the murder of Mike Brown. They are telling people they were wrong to think that he deserved to live, that they were wrong to think that his death should be protested, that they were wrong to think that an unarmed young Black man should not be killed for walking down the middle of the street and then running away when a cop went after him. Because they are pushing this so relentlessly and because this is in fact having an effect on people, even though we have written on this in the past, we are preparing a new article on this for the near future. But right now we can say this:
Rather than have a trial to determine what happened, the DA and then the Department of Justice unilaterally decided and declared that those who said Mike Brown did NOT have his hands up were telling the truth, and that the many people who said that he DID have his hands up (including not only people from Ferguson but also some white construction workers who were captured on video witnessing the murder as it took place) were lying. As many people did in fact make clear, HE DID HAVE HIS HANDS UP, AND "HANDS UP, DON'T SHOOT!" IS INDEED ONE VERY FITTING AND POWERFUL SLOGAN AND SYMBOL FOR THE MASS RESISTANCE THAT NEEDS TO BE BUILT AGAINST THE OUTRAGE OF POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER, AND EVERYTHING BOUND UP WITH IT.
What is represented by the actions of the Justice Department—issuing a criticism of the Ferguson police for its racism, while backing up the pig Darren Wilson and the pig prosecutor who managed and manipulated the grand jury to return no indictment against Wilson—was very calculated to serve definite goals, which are:
Send a message, broadly throughout society, and specifically to the police all over the country, that their brutal and murderous rampages, particularly against Black people and Latinos, will continue to go unpunished... Try to demoralize and demobilize people who have boldly and courageously stood up against this, by "discrediting" what has become a concentration of the mass struggle against this, people standing up and chanting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!” in Ferguson and all over the country... At the same time, make a criticism of the Ferguson police for racist treatment of Black people, but somehow attempt to say that its whole pattern of racist mistreatment of Black people has nothing to do with what happened to Mike Brown!
The Justice Department is after all a major repressive institution of this system and its power structure, and it is doing all this in a way that at one and the same time insults the masses of people who have stood up to express their outrage, and throws a bone to the outraged masses, seeking to direct their struggle into harmless channels and working to "cool it out" and cause it to "fade away"—in the face of the continuing police brutality and murder, with a new outrage happening almost, if not literally, every day!
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