Jun 25, 2017

NYT Video Shows Police Execution of Philando Castile—Watch, Bear Witness, then Summer Fun

Four-year-old girl tried to calm her distraught mother,
Diamond Reynolds, after killer cop, Jeronimo Yanez,
gunned down Philando Castile in 2016 in Minnesota, (CNN).
Yanez was acquitted in June 2017.

Why victims of American police state don't take to local paper or social media and complain: Fear of the police


Update
: Madison, Wisconsin police officer, Angela Kamoske, reacts in Minnesota paper.
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There is embedded in our political culture a fascistic character of the American citizenry.

This unthinking tendency manifests post-911 as the cult of the police—an evangelical, ideological deference to law enforcement that is so powerful, police can execute a citizen in cold blood on video and the majority of the white populace will applaud or look away.

But this cult is of the most insidious strain, mutated into unacknowledged fear of the police and a pathological aversion to thinking.

I joined a small, local Facebook group in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, curious to see how this liberal segregated community of 25,000 would respond to an image of the police killing of Philando Castile from Minnesota in the days following the acquittal of the killer cop, Jeronimo Yanez.

The Castile image is of the man's blood staining a white t-shirt, presumably exit wounds sustained after bullets pierced Castile's heart.

Facebook comments ranged from an admonishing complaint that the Castile image is "distasteful" to a demand, (subsequently granted), that the image of Philando Castile be taken down.

Distasteful. No comments were posted criticizing this murder, the killer cop, acclaiming the humanity of Castile or expressing sympathy for the Castile family.

This is roughly what I expected.

This Summer Americans will witness 100s of new police killings of the citizenry, most of which will meet with the overwhelming approval of white America, cheered on by the Trump administration, (Cop Block, Killed by Police).

Ever wonder why victims of the American police state do not take to the local paper or social media and complain? The answer is fear of the police in the land of the free and home of the brave, a well-founded fear.

Consider. Would anyone after being terrorized or witnessing terror inflicted by the police complain to the local Fusion Center that police are terrorizing innocents? How about a young, black woman profiled, harassed, demeaned, arrested and traumatized by police? Now, consider a complaint to the Fusion Center: Hey, the police are terrorizing me, what can you do about it?

Is this really the only possible society attainable? Orwell would puke were he alive.

Today is June 25, Sunday. Over the weekend four more people were killed by cops, (Killed by Police).

One hopes the American people live life happy and have a great Summer. It's truly beautiful outside.

But please first bare witness and view Yousur Al-hlou's narrative video in the New York Times of the police execution of Philando Castile, then rock out the Summer.

Consider as well, reading two of the great anti-fascist works of the 20th century: They Thought They Were FreeThe Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, (University of Chicago Press. ©1955), Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish World-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (Harper and Row, 1967), by Norman Cohn.

From Milton Mayer:

'What no one seemed to notice,' said a colleague of mine, a philologist, 'was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

'What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

'This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.'

Consider as well Glenn Greenwald's  No Place to Hide, Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

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