Much has been said in the past week or so in the media about the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri in which unarmed black man Michael Brown was shot multiple times and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. This terribly tragic event has led to protests by the African-American community ever since, which brought into question the caution taken by police officers around the United States when it comes to using potentially lethal weapons. In fact just two days later in Los Angeles, Ezell Ford, another unarmed black man was shot dead by the police. The issue of excessive force by police and policing figures is an issue that has surfaced here in this country too, with a 15-year-old girl being dropped brutally on her head by a Flinders Street station on July 31, 2013. Here was a defenceless girl being attacked rugby-style over what apparently was just a ticketing violation.
My take on this is that these are all examples of the same problem: people in highly ranked, powerful positions attacking the vulnerable and less well off. The African American community in the United States knows this all too well with the recent high profile case of George Zimmerman fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager whose case bears striking resemblances to Brown’s. Of course, even this example pales with the list of times that well-off, generally white people have taken to killing African Americans, which includes such events as the transatlantic slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan and the court systems which many a time have conspired to sentence a black man to death. In this country we too had a genocide, one in which Aboriginals were killed, treated as flora and fauna and as a community, had their land taken on the basis that no one had been living there. These are major atrocities against people who were living good and decent lives until foreigners from imperialist countries came to impose their tyrannical regime on the country they were invading.
The whole idea of all powerful, imperialist government is that it seeks to expand its power, expand its wealth and destroy systems in which less well off people get helped. This is the definition of fascism, an ideology with which capitalism and imperialism fit in nicely with. Socialists need to understand this and spread this message, because many people just think it is the particular people in power who commit these atrocities. It isn’t, instead it is the blood-thirsty system that we call imperialism that fosters criminals to take power and inflict pain and suffering on so many people. No person is perfect, that is certain, but if the idea of government was inclusion, like it is under real socialism, then maybe the leaders among us would not evil, maybe they would be a friend and someone that, if you were in need would give you a helping hand.
The Paddy File 